The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

“Yes, seventy, and he also has no papers and never did have.”

“Never did,” the old man put in again.

“He came to certify that it was precisely so and that he doesn’t claim any rights.”

“I don’t—my forefathers sold it.”

“Yes, but the ones who sold it to your ‘forefathers’—are no more.”

“No, they were sent to the Caucasus for their beliefs.”

“They could be sought out,” I said.

“There’s nothing to seek out, the water there was no good for them—they couldn’t take it and all passed away.”

“Why is it,” I said, “that you acted so strangely?”

“We acted as we could. The government clerk was cruel, small landowners didn’t have enough to pay the taxes, but Ivan Ivanovich had a moatbook, and we wrote in it. And before him—I don’t even remember this—there was the merchant Gapeyev, he kept the moatbook, and after all of them it was given to Golovan, and Golovan got cooked in a foul hole, and all the moatbooks burned up.”

“This Golovan, it turns out, was something like your notary?” asked my uncle (who was not an old-timer in Orel).

The old man smiled and said softly:

“Why moatary! Golovan was a just man.”

“So everybody trusted him?”

“How could we not trust such a man: he cut his flesh off his living bones for the people.”

“There’s a legend for you!” my uncle said softly, but the old man heard him and replied:

“No, sir, Golovan’s not a liegend, but the truth, and he should be remembered with praise.”

“And with befuddlement,” my uncle joked. And he didn’t know how well his joking answered to the whole mass of memories that awakened in me at that time, to which, with my then curiosity, I passionately wanted to find the key.

And the key was waiting for me, kept by my grandmother.

XII

A couple of words about my grandmother. She came from the Moscow merchant family of the Kolobovs and was taken in marriage into a noble family “not for her wealth, but for her beauty.” But her best quality was an inner beauty and lucidity of mind, which always kept its common-folk cast. Having entered the circles of the nobility, she yielded to many of its demands and even allowed herself to be called Alexandra Vassilievna, though her real name was Akilina, but she always thought in a common-folk way and even retained—unintentionally, of course—a certain common-folk quality in her speech. She said “dat” instead of “that,” considered the word “moral” insulting, and couldn’t pronounce the word “registrar.” On the other hand, she never allowed any fashionable pressures to shake her faith in common-folk sense and never departed from that sense herself. She was a good woman and a true Russian lady; she kept house excellently and knew how to receive anyone from the emperor Alexander I to Ivan Ivanovich Androsov. She never read anything except her children’s letters, but she liked the renewal of the mind in conversation and for that “summoned people for talks.” Her interlocutors of this sort were the bailiff Mikhailo Lebedev, the butler Vassily, the head cook Klim, or the housekeeper Malanya. The talk was never idle, but to the point and useful—they discussed why the girl Feklusha had had “morals fall on her” and why the boy Grishka disliked his stepmother. These conversations were followed by talk of how to protect Feklusha’s maidenly honor and what to do so that the boy Grishka would not dislike his stepmother.

For her all this was filled with a living interest perhaps quite incomprehensible to her granddaughters.

When my grandmother came to visit us in Orel, her friendship was enjoyed by the archpriest Father Pyotr, the merchant Androsov, and Golovan, who were “summoned for talks” with her.

It must be supposed that here, too, the talk was not idle, not merely for passing the time, but probably also about some such matters as morals falling on someone or a boy’s dislike of his stepmother.

She therefore might have held the keys to many secrets, petty ones for us, perhaps, but quite significant in their milieu.

Now, in this last meeting of mine with my grandmother, she was already very old, but had preserved in perfect freshness her mind, memory, and eyes. She could still sew.

This time, too, I found her at the same worktable, with an inlaid top portraying a harp held up by two cupids.

Grandmother asked me whether I had visited my father’s grave, which of our relatives I had seen in Orel, and what my uncle was doing these days. I answered all her questions and enlarged upon my uncle, telling her how he dealt with old “liegends.”

Grandmother stopped and pushed her eyeglasses up on her forehead. She liked the word “liegend” very much: she heard in it a naïve alteration in the popular spirit, and laughed:

“That’s wonderful,” she said, “the way the old man said ‘liegend.’ ”

And I answered:

“I’d like very much to know how it happened in reality, not in liegend.”

“What precisely would you like to know?”

“About all that. What sort of man was Golovan? I do remember him a little, and all of it in some sort of liegends, as the old man says, but of course it was a simple matter …”