The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

There he tracked down his ungrateful relatives, who had abandoned him in Krutoe, but he did not meet with a family welcome from them. He went around the town begging and telling how the merchant had not gone to the saint for his daughter, but to pray that the price of wheat would go up. Nobody was so precisely informed of that as Fotey.

X

Not long after the appearance in Orel of the known and abandoned Fotey, the merchant Akulov, from the parish of the Archangel Michael, set up “poor tables.” In the courtyard, on boards, stood big, steaming lime-wood bowls of noodles and iron kettles of kasha, and onion tarts and savory pies were handed out from the merchant’s porch. A multitude of guests gathered, each with his own spoon in his boot or on his bosom. The pies were handed out by Golovan. He was often invited to such “tables” as the architricline or chief butler, because he was fair, did not hide anything away for himself, and knew very well who deserved what sort of pie—with peas, with carrots, or with liver.

So he stood now and “endowed” each approaching person with a big pie, and if he knew someone had a sick person in the house, he gave them two or more as a “sick ration.” And among the various approaching people, Fotey also approached Golovan, a new man, who seemed to surprise Golovan. Seeing Fotey, it was as if Golovan remembered something, and he asked:

“Who are you and where do you live?”

Fotey winced and said:

“I’m God’s, that’s all, wrapped in a slave’s pall, living under the wall.”

Others said to Golovan: “The merchants brought him from the saint … He’s the Fotey who got healed.”

Golovan smiled and was starting to say:

“What kind of Fotey is he!” but at that very moment Fotey snatched a pie from him and with the other hand gave him a deafening slap in the face and shouted:

“Don’t shoot your mouth off!” and with that sat down at the table. And Golovan suffered it without saying a word. Everybody understood that it had to be so, that the healed man was obviously playing the holy fool, and Golovan knew that it had to be suffered. Only “by what reckoning did Golovan deserve such treatment?” That was a mystery that lasted for many years and established the opinion that Golovan was concealing something very bad, because he was afraid of Fotey.

And there really was something mysterious here. Fotey, who soon fell so low in the general opinion that they called after him “Stole a tassel from the saint and drank it away in the pot-house,” treated Golovan with extreme impudence.

Meeting Golovan anywhere at all, Fotey would stand in his way and shout: “Pay your debt.” And Golovan, without the least objection, would go to his breast pocket and take out a ten-kopeck piece. If he happened not to have ten kopecks, but had less, Fotey, who was called the Polecat because his rags were so motley, would fling the insufficient money back at Golovan, spit at him, and even beat him, throwing stones, mud, or snow.

I myself remember how once, in the evening, when my father and the priest Pyotr were sitting by the window in the study, and Golovan was standing outside the window, and the three of them were having a conversation, the bedraggled Polecat ran through the gates, which happened to be open, and with the cry “You forgot, scoundrel!” struck Golovan in the face in front of everybody, and he, quietly pushing him away, gave him some copper money from his breast pocket and led him out of the gate.

Such acts were by no means rare, and the explanation that the Polecat knew something about Golovan was, of course, quite natural. Understandably, it also aroused curiosity in many, which, as we shall soon see, had solid grounds.

XI

I was about seven years old when we left Orel and moved to live permanently in the country. I didn’t see Golovan after that. Then it came time for me to go and study, and the original muzhik with the big head dropped from my sight. I heard of him only once, during the “big fire.” Not only did many buildings and belongings perish at that time, but many people were burned up as well—Golovan was mentioned among the latter. They said he had fallen into some hole that couldn’t be seen under the ashes and “got cooked.” I didn’t inquire about his family, who survived him. Soon after that I went to Kiev and revisited my native parts only ten years later. There was a new tsar, a new order was beginning; there was a breath of new freshness—the emancipation of the peasants was expected, and there was even talk of open courts. All was new: hearts were aflame. There were no implacables yet, but the impatient and the temporizing had already appeared.