The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

The three of us spent whole days that way, and for me it was the best thing against boredom, because, I repeat again, the boredom was terrible, and that spring especially, when I started burying the girl in the sand and sleeping over the estuary, all sorts of confused dreams came to me. I’d fall asleep, and the estuary is murmuring, and with the warm wind from the steppe fanning me, it’s as if some kind of sorcery flows over me, and I’m beset by terrible fantasies. I see a wide steppe, horses, and somebody seems to be calling me, luring me somewhere. I even hear my name shouted: “Ivan! Ivan! Come, brother Ivan!” I rouse myself, give a shake, and spit: “Pah, hell’s too good for you, what are you calling me for?” I look around: dreariness. The goat has wandered far off, grazing in the grass, and the baby sits covered with sand, and nothing more … Ohh, how boring! The emptiness, the sun, the estuary, and again I fall asleep, and this current of wafting wind gets into my soul and shouts: “Ivan, let’s go, brother Ivan!” I even curse and say: “Show yourself, deuce take you, who are you to call me like that?” And once I got bitterly angry and was sitting half asleep, looking across the estuary, and a light cloud rose up from there and came floating straight at me. I thought: “Whoa! Not this way, my good one, you’ll get me all wet!” Then suddenly I see: it’s that monk with the womanish face standing over me, the one I killed with my whip long ago when I was a postillion. I say: “Whoa there! Away with you!” And he chimes out so tenderly: “Let’s go, Ivan, let’s go, brother! You still have much to endure, but then you’ll attain.” I cursed him in my sleep and said: “As if I had anywhere to go with you or anything to attain.” And suddenly he turned back into a cloud and through himself showed me I don’t know what: the steppe, some wild people, Saracens, like in the tales of Eruslan and Prince Bova,²⁰ in big, shaggy hats and with bows and arrows, on terrifying wild horses. And along with seeing that, I heard hooting, and neighing, and wild laughter, and then suddenly a whirlwind … a cloud of sand rose up, and there is nothing, only a thin bell softly ringing somewhere, and a great white monastery all bathed in the scarlet dawn appears on a height, and winged angels with golden lances are walking on its walls, all surrounded by the sea, and whenever an angel strikes his shield with his lance, the sea around the monastery heaves and splashes, and from the deep terrible voices cry: “Holy!”

“Well,” I think, “it’s this monkhood getting at me again!” and from vexation I wake up and am astonished to see that someone of the gentlest appearance is kneeling in the sand over my little mistress and pouring out floods of tears.

I watched this for a long time, because I kept thinking it was my vision going on, but then I saw that it didn’t vanish, and I got up and went closer: I see the lady has dug my little girl out of the sand, and has picked her up in her arms, and is kissing her and weeping.

I ask her:

“What do you want?”

She rushes at me, pressing the baby to her breast and whispering:

“This is my baby, this is my daughter, my daughter!”

I say:

“Well, what of it?”

“Give her to me,” she says.

“Where did you get the idea,” I say, “that I’d give her to you?”

“Don’t you feel sorry for her?” she weeps. “See how she clings to me.”

“She clings because she’s a silly baby—she also clings to me, but as for giving her to you, I’m not going to do that.”

“Why?”

“Because,” I say, “she’s been entrusted to my keeping—and that goat there walks with us, and I must bring the baby back to her father.”

The lady began to weep and wring her hands.

“Well, all right,” she says, “so you don’t want to give me the baby, but at least don’t tell my husband, your master, that you saw me,” she says, “and come here to this same place again tomorrow with the baby, so that I can fondle her more.”

“That,” I say, “is a different matter. I promise and I’ll do it.”

And just so, I said nothing about it to my master, but the next morning I took the goat and the child and went back to the estuary, and the lady was there waiting. She was sitting in a little hollow, and when she saw us, she jumped out and came running, and wept, and laughed, and gave the baby toys in each hand, and even hung a little bell on a red ribbon around our goat’s neck, and for me there was a pipe, and a pouch of tobacco, and a comb.

“Kindly smoke the pipe,” she says, “and I’ll mind the baby.”