The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

Whether Golovan was aware or not that popular rumor attributed such deeds to him—I don’t know. However, I think he was, because people very often turned to him with requests and questions such as one would only turn to a good magician with. And to many such questions he gave “helpful advice,” and generally he did not frown at any requests. In the country roundabout he would be now a cow doctor, now a human doctor, or an engineer, or an astrologer, or a pharmacist. He knew how to get rid of mange and scabs, once again with some sort of “Ermolov ointment,” the cost of which was one copper kopeck for three people; he removed fever from the head with pickled cucumber; he knew that herbs should be gathered from St. John’s to St. Peter-and-Paul’s, and was excellent at “dowsing,” that is, at showing where a well should be dug. But he couldn’t do that all the time, but only from the beginning of June till St. Theodore of the Wells, when “you could hear how the water goes through the joints of the earth.”¹⁹

Golovan could also do everything else a man needs, but he had given God a pledge against the rest for stopping the pestilence. He had sealed it then with his blood, and he held firm to it. God loved him for that and had mercy on him, and the people, delicate in their feelings, never asked anything of Golovan that ought not to be asked. According to the people’s etiquette—that’s how it’s done with us.

Golovan, however, was so little burdened by the mystical cloud that popular fama

shrouded him in, that he made no effort to undo the image people had formed of him. He knew it would be useless.

When I eagerly leafed through Victor Hugo’s novel Toilers of the Sea

and there met Gilliatt, with his brilliantly outlined severity towards himself and indulgence towards others, which reached the point of utter selflessness, I was struck not only by the grandeur of the figure and the power of its portrayal, but also by the similarity of the Guernsey hero to the living person I had known under the name of Golovan. In them lived the same spirit and in both a like heart beat selflessly. They did not differ much in their fates: all their lives some sort of mystery thickened around them, precisely because they were all too pure and clear, and to the lot of the one as of the other there fell not a single drop of personal happiness.

VII

Golovan, like Gilliat, seemed to be “of dubious faith.”