The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

The movement was so populous that there were no places in the inns or hotels in the towns of Livny and Elets, through which its path lay. It would happen that important and eminent people spent the night in their carriages. Oats, hay, grain—the prices of everything along the high road went up, so that, as noted by my grandmother, whose memoirs I am using, the cost of feeding a man with head cheese, cabbage soup, lamb stew, and kasha at an inn rose from twenty-five kopecks (seven and a half in silver) to fifty-two (fifteen in silver). At the present time, of course, fifteen is still a completely incredible price, but that’s how it was, and the revealing of the relics of the new saint had the same significance for the area, in terms of raising the prices of living supplies, as the recent fire on the Mstinsky Bridge in Petersburg. “The prices soared and stayed there.”

Among other pilgrims setting out from Orel for the revealing was the merchant family S——, very well-known people in their time, “suppliers,” that is, to put it simply, rich kulaks,²⁶ who collected wheat from the peasants’ wagons into big granaries, and then sold their supplies to wholesale dealers in Moscow and Riga. This was a profitable business, which, after the emancipation of the peasants,²⁷

was not scorned even by the nobility; but they liked to sleep late, and soon learned from bitter experience that they weren’t capable even of this stupid kulak business. The merchants S—— were regarded as the foremost suppliers, and their importance went so far that their house was known, not by their name, but by an ennobling nickname. The house, to be sure, was a strictly pious one, where they prayed in the morning, oppressed and robbed people all day, and then prayed again in the evening. And by night, watchdogs on cables clanked their chains, and in all the windows it was “icon lamps and brightness,” loud snoring, and someone’s hot tears.

The ruler of the house, who today would be known as “the founder of the firm,” was then simply called himself. He was a mild little old man, whom, however, everyone feared like fire. It was said of him that he made for a soft bed, but hard sleeping: he fondly called everybody “my dearest,” and then sent them all into the teeth of the devil. A well-known and familiar type, the type of the merchant patriarch.

So this patriarch, too, traveled to the revealing “with full complement”—himself, and his wife, and his daughter, who suffered from “the disease of melancholy” and was to be cured. All the known remedies of folk poetry and creativity had been tried on her: she had been made to drink stimulating elecampane, had had powdered peony root poured all over her for repulsing phantoms, had been given wild garlic to sniff, so as to straighten the brain in her head, but nothing had helped, and now she was being taken to the saint, hurrying to have the first chance, when the very first force is released. Belief in the advantage of the first force is very great, and is rooted in the story of the pool of Siloam, where those were cured first who managed to get in first after the troubling of the water.²⁸

The Orel merchants traveled through Livny and Elets, enduring great hardships, and were completely worn out by the time they reached the saint. But to seize the “first chance” from the saint turned out to be impossible. Such a host of people had gathered that there was no thought of forcing one’s way into the church for the vigil of the “revealing day,” when the “first chance,” properly speaking, would occur—that is, when the greatest force would issue from the new relics.

The merchant and his wife were in despair—the most indifferent of all was the daughter, who didn’t know what she was losing. There was no hope of doing anything about it—there were so many nobility, with such names, while they were simple merchants, who, if they were of some significance in their own place, were totally lost here, in such a concentration of Christian grandeur. And so one day, sitting in grief over tea under their little kibitka²⁹ at the inn, the patriarch complained to his wife that he no longer had any hope of reaching the holy coffin either among the first or among the second, but only perhaps among the last, along with tillers of the soil and fishermen, that is, generally, with simple people. And by then what would be the good of it: the police would be ferocious and the clergy tired—they wouldn’t let you pray your fill, but would just push you by. In general, once so many thousands of people had put their lips to the relics, it wouldn’t be the same. In view of which, they could have come later, but that was not what they had striven for: they had traveled, worn themselves out, left the business at home in the assistants’ hands, and paid three times the price on the road, and suddenly here’s your consolation!