The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

The dairy farming went beautifully: in some three years, Golovan already had two cows and a bull, then three, four cows, and he had made enough money to buy out his mother, then each year he bought out a sister, and brought them all together in his roomy but chilly hovel. In that way, after six or seven years, he had freed his whole family, but the beauty Pavla had flown from him. By the time he was able to buy her out as well, she was already far away. Her husband, the horse-master Khrapon, was a bad man—he had not pleased his master in something, and, as an example to others, had been sent as a soldier without conscription.

In the service, Khrapon landed among the “gallopers,” that is, as a rider in the Moscow fire brigade, and had his wife sent there; but he soon did something bad there as well and ran away, and his abandoned wife, having a quiet and timid character, feared the whirl of life in the capital and returned to Orel. Here she also didn’t find any support in her old place and, driven by need, she went to Golovan. He, naturally, took her in at once and placed her in the same big room where his sisters and mother lived. How Golovan’s mother and sisters looked upon the installing of Pavla, I don’t know for certain, but it didn’t sow any discord in their house. The women all lived in great friendship with each other, and even loved poor Pavlageyushka very much, and Golovan paid equal attention to them all, except for the special respect he showed his mother, who was now so old that in summer he carried her out to the sun in his arms, like a sick child. I remember how she “went off” into terrible coughing fits and kept praying to be “taken.”

All of Golovan’s sisters were old maids, and they all helped their brother on the farm: they mucked out and milked the cows, tended the hens, and spun an extraordinary yarn, from which they then wove extraordinary fabrics such as I’ve never seen since. This yarn went by the very unattractive name of “spittings.” Golovan brought material for it from somewhere in bags, and I saw and remember that material: it consisted of small, twiggy scraps of various colored cotton thread. Each scrap was from two to ten inches long, and on each such scrap there was sure to be a more or less fat knot or snarl. Where Golovan got these scraps I don’t know, but it was obviously factory refuse. That’s also what his sisters told me.

“They spin and weave cotton there, dearest,” they said to me, “and each time they come upon a knot, they tear it off and spit it out

on the floor, because it won’t go through the reed. My brother gathers them up, and we make warm blankets out of them.”

I saw how they patiently sorted these pieces of thread, tied them together, wound the resulting motley, multicolored threads on long spools. Then they spliced them together, spun them into thicker ones stretched along the wall on pegs, sorted those of the same color for stripes, and finally wove these “spittings” through a special reed into “spitting blankets.” These blankets looked like today’s woolen ones, each with the same two stripes, but the fabric was always marbleized. The knots in them were somehow smoothed out from the spinning, and though they were, of course, very noticeable, that did not keep the blankets from being light, warm, and sometimes even rather pretty. Besides, they were sold very cheaply—at less than a rouble apiece.

This cottage industry in Golovan’s family went on nonstop, and he probably had no trouble finding a market for the spitting blankets.

Pavlageyushka also tied and spun the spittings and wove blankets, but, besides that, in her zeal for the family that had given her shelter, she also took on all the heaviest work in the house: went down the steep bank to the Orlik for water, brought in fuel, and so on and so forth.

Firewood in Orel was already very expensive even then, and poor people heated either with buckwheat chaff or with dung, and the latter required big provisions.

All this Pavla did with her slender hands, in eternal silence, looking at God’s world from under her Persian eyebrows. Whether she knew that her name was “sin” I am not aware, but that was her name among the people, who stand firmly by the nicknames they invent. And how else could it be? Where a woman, a loving one, lives in the house of a man who loved her and sought to marry her, there is, of course, sin. And indeed, back in my childhood, when I first saw Pavla, she was unanimously considered “Golovan’s sin,” but Golovan himself did not lose the least bit of general respect on account of it and kept his nickname of “deathless.”

V