The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

A great personal calamity is a poor teacher of mercy. At least it has no good effect on people of ordinary, mediocre morality, which doesn’t rise above the level of mere compassion. It dulls the sensitivity of the heart, which suffers painfully itself and is filled with the sense of its own torment. Instead, in such woeful moments of general calamity, the people’s milieu brings forth of itself heroes of magnanimity, fearless and selfless. In ordinary times they are not conspicuous and often are in no way distinguishable from the masses: but let “carbuncle” fall upon the people, and the people produce a chosen one for themselves, and he works wonders, which make of him a mythical, legendary, deathless

person. Golovan was one of these, and during the very first plague he surpassed and eclipsed in people’s minds another remarkable local man, the merchant Ivan Ivanovich Androsov. Androsov was an honorable old man, respected and loved for his kindness and fairness, for he was “ready helpful” in all the people’s calamities. He also helped during the “plague,” because he had a written “treatment,” and he “recopied it all in multiples.” These copies of his were taken and read in various places, but nobody understood them or “knew how to go about it.” It was written: “Should a sore appear on the head or another place above the waist, let much blood from the median; should it appear on the brow, quickly let blood from under the tongue; should it appear by the ears or under the chin, let blood from the cephalic vein, but should it appear under one of the breasts, it means the heart is affected, and then the median should be opened on that side.” For each place “where a burden is felt,” it was written which vein to open: the “saphena,” or “the one opposite the thumb, or the spatic artery, the pulmatic, or the basical,” with the recommendation to “let the blood flow, till such time as it turns green and changes aspect.” And to treat also “with remedies of athelaea, sealed earth or Armenian earth, Malvasian wine, bugloss vodka, Venetian virian, mithridate, and Manus-Christi sugar.”

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And those who entered the sickroom were advised “to hold Angelica root in their mouths, wormwood in their hands, have their nostrils wetted with wild rose vinegar, and sniff a vinegar-soaked sponge.” No one could make anything of it, as in official decrees, which have been written and rewritten, this way and that, and “in foursome thereforesomes.” The veins couldn’t be found, nor the Malvasian wine, nor the Armenian earth, nor the bugloss vodka, and people read good old Androsov’s copies more only so as to “quench my sorrows.” All they could apply were the concluding words: “And where there be plague, it behooves you not to go to those places, but to go away.” That was what most people followed, and Ivan Ivanovich himself adhered to the same rule and sat in his warm cottage and dispensed his medical prescriptions through a little slot, holding his breath and keeping angelica root in his mouth. The only ones who could enter a sickroom safely were those who had deer’s tears or a bezoar-stone;¹² but Ivan Ivanovich had neither deer’s tears nor a bezoar-stone, and while a bezoar-stone might have been found in the pharmacies on Bolkhovskaya Street, the pharmacists were one a Pole, the other a German, and they had no proper pity for Russian people and saved the bezoar-stones for themselves. This was fully trustworthy, because when one of the Orel pharmacists lost his bezoar, his ears began to turn yellow right there in the street, one eye grew smaller than the other, he started trembling, and though he wanted to sweat and for that asked them at home to put hot bricks to his soles, all the same he didn’t sweat, but died in a dry shirt. A great many people searched for the pharmacist’s lost bezoar, and somebody did find it, only not Ivan Ivanovich, because he also died.