The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

“No, and how could they catch me? With all the fasting and fear I put into them, they were probably only too glad to keep their noses inside their yurts for three days, and when they peeked out later, I was already too far away to go looking for. My feet, once I got all the bristles out, dried up and became so light that, when I started running, I ran across the whole steppe.”

“All on foot?”

“How else, sir? There’s no road there, nobody to meet, and if you do meet somebody, you won’t be glad of what you’ve acquired. On the fourth day, a Chuvash appeared, alone, driving five horses. ‘Mount up,’ he said.

“I felt suspicious and didn’t.”

“Why were you afraid of him?”

“Just so … he somehow didn’t look trustworthy to me, and besides that it was impossible to figure out what his religion was, and without that it’s frightening in the steppe. And the muddlehead shouts:

“ ‘Mount up—it’s merrier with two riding.’

“I say:

“ ‘But who are you? Maybe you’ve got no god?’

“ ‘How, no cod?’ he says. ‘It’s the Tartar has no cod, he eats horse, but I have a cod.’

“ ‘Who is your god?’ I say.

“For me,’ he says, ‘everything is cod: sun is cod, moon is cod, stars are cod … everything is cod. How I have no cod?’

“Everything! … Hm … so everything is god for you,’ I say, ‘which means Jesus Christ is not god for you?’

“ ‘No,’ he says, ‘he is cod, and his mother is cod, and Nikolach is cod …’

“ ‘What Nikolach?’ I ask.

“ ‘Why, the one who lives once in winter, once in summer.’

“I praised him for respecting our Russian saint, Nicholas the Wonderworker.²⁶

“ ‘Always honor him,’ I said, ‘because he’s Russian’—and I was quite ready to approve of his faith and quite willing to ride with him, but, thankfully, he went on babbling and gave himself away.

“ ‘As if I don’t honor Nikolach,’ he says. ‘Maybe I don’t bow to him in winter, but in summer I give him twenty kopecks to take good care of my cows. Yes, and so as not to trust in him alone, I also sacrifice a bullock to the Keremet.’²⁷

“I got angry.

“ ‘How dare you not trust in Nicholas the Wonderworker,’ I say, ‘and give him, a Russian, only twenty kopecks, while you give your foul Mordovian Keremet a whole bullock! Away with you,’ I say, ‘I don’t want … I won’t go with you, if you have such disrespect for Nicholas the Wonderworker.’

“And I didn’t go: I strode on with all my might, and before I realized it, towards evening on the third day, I caught sight of water and people. I lay in the grass out of apprehension and spied out what kind of people they were. Because I was afraid of falling again into a still worse captivity, but I see that these people cook their food … They must be Christians, I thought. I crawled closer: I saw them crossing themselves and drinking vodka—well, that means Russians! … Then I jumped up from the grass and showed myself. They turned out to be a fishing crew out fishing. They received me warmly, as countrymen should, and said:

“ ‘Have some vodka!’

“I reply:

“ ‘From living with the Tartars, brothers, I’m completely unused to it.’

“ ‘Well, never mind,’ they say, ‘here it’s your nation, you’ll get used to it again: drink!’

“I poured myself a glass and thought:

“ ‘Well then, with God’s blessing, here’s to my return!’—and I drank, but the crewmen—nice lads—persisted.

“ ‘Have another!’ they say. ‘Look how scrawny you’ve grown without it.’ ”

I allowed myself one more and became very outspoken: I told them everything, where I’m from and where and how I’d lived. I spent the whole night sitting by the fire, telling it all and drinking vodka, and it was so joyful to me that I was back in Holy Russia, only towards morning, when the fire began to go out and almost all the listeners had fallen asleep, one of the crew members says to me:

“And do you have a passport?”

I say:

“No, I don’t.”

“If you don’t,” he says, “it means jail for you.”

“Well, then,” I say, “I’m not going to leave you. I suppose I can live with you here without a passport.”

And he replies:

“You can live with us without a passport,” he says, “but you can’t die without one.”

I say:

“Why’s that?”

“How’s the priest going to register you,” he says, “if you’ve got no passport?”

“What’ll happen to me in that case?”

“We’ll throw you into the water,” he says, “as fish food.”

“Without a priest?”

“Without a priest.”

Being a little tipsy, I was terribly frightened at that and began weeping and lamenting, but the fisherman laughed.

“I was joking with you,” he says. “Die fearlessly, we’ll bury you in your native soil.”

But I was already very upset and said:

“A fine joke. If you joke with me like that very often, I won’t live to see the next spring.”