The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

And so in this terrible time, when the intellectuals wiped themselves with vinegar and did not give up the ghost, the “carbuncle” swept still more fiercely through the poor village huts; people began to die here “wholesale and with no help at all”—and suddenly, there, on the field of death, with astonishing fearlessness, appeared Golovan. He probably knew, or thought he knew, something of medicine, because he put a “Caucasian plaster” of his own making on the sick people’s swellings; but this Caucasian, or Ermolov, plaster of his was of little help. Like Androsov, Golovan did not cure the “carbuncle,” but his service to the sick and the healthy was great in this respect, that he went dauntlessly into the plague-stricken hovels and gave the infected not only fresh water but also the skim milk he had left after removing the cream for the club. In the early morning, before dawn, he crossed the Orlik on a shed gate he had taken off its hinges (there was no boat there), and went from hovel to hovel, his boundless bosom filled with bottles, moistening the dry lips of the dying from a flask, or putting a chalk cross on the door, if the drama of life was already over there and the curtain of death had been drawn on the last of its actors.

From then on the hitherto little-known Golovan became widely known in all the villages, and a great popular attraction to him began. His name, previously familiar to the servants in noble houses, came to be uttered with respect among simple folk; they began to see him as a man who not only could “replace the late Ivan Ivanovich Androsov, but meant even more than he to both God and men.” And they weren’t slow in finding a supernatural explanation for the very fearlessness of Golovan: Golovan obviously knew something, and by virtue of such knowledge he was deathless …

Later it turned out that it was precisely so: the herdsman Panka helped to explain it all, having seen Golovan do something incredible, and it was confirmed by other circumstances.

The pest did not touch Golovan. All the while it raged in the villages, neither he himself nor his Ermolov cow and calf got sick; but that wasn’t all: the most important thing was that he deceived and expelled—or, keeping to local speech, “denihilated”—the pest itself, and he did it not sparing his own warm blood for the peasant folk.

The bezoar-stone lost by the pharmacist was with Golovan. How he got it was not known. It was supposed that Golovan had been taking cream to the pharmacist for “daily unction,” had spotted the stone and secreted it away. Whether such secreting away is held to be honest or dishonest, there was no strong criticism of it, and there shouldn’t have been. If it is no sin to take and secrete away eatables, because God gives eatables to everybody, then still less is it blameworthy to take a healing substance, if it is meant for general salvation. So our people judge, and so say I. Golovan, having secreted away the pharmacist’s stone, acted magnanimously with it, letting it be of general benefit to the whole of Christendom.

All this, as I said above, was discovered by Panka, and the general intelligence of the people cleared it up.

VI

Panka, a muzhik with different-colored eyes and sun-bleached hair, was a herdsman’s helper, and besides his general herding duties, he also drove the rebaptizers’¹³ cows out to the dew

in the morning. Being thus occupied early one morning, he spied out the whole business that raised Golovan to the height of popular greatness.

It was in springtime, doubtless soon after young St. George,¹⁴ bright and brave, rode out to the emerald Russian fields, his arms in red gold to the elbows, his legs in pure silver to the knees, on his brow the sun, on his nape the crescent moon, on all sides the moving stars, and the honest, righteous people of God drove their cattle big and small to meet him. The grass was still so short that the sheep and goats had barely enough, and the thick-lipped cows could take little. But in the shade under the fences and in the ditches, wormwood and nettles were already sprouting, which could be eaten at need with the dew.

Panka drove the rebaptizers’ cows out early, still in darkness, and led them straight along the bank of the Orlik to a clearing beyond the outskirts, just across from the end of Third Dvoryanskaya Street, where on one sloping side lay the old “city” garden, as it was known, and on the left Golovan’s nest clung to its ledge.