The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

And as soon as this last crewman fell asleep, I quickly got up and went away and came to Astrakhan, earned a rouble doing day labor and went on such a drinking binge that I don’t remember how I wound up in another town, and by then I was sitting in jail, and from there they sent me under escort to my own province. I was brought to our town, given a whipping at the police station, and delivered to my village. The countess who had ordered me whipped for the cat’s tail was dead by then, only the count was left, but he had grown very old and pious and didn’t hunt on horseback any more. They reported to him that I had arrived, he remembered me, ordered me to be whipped once again at home, and to go to the priest, Father Ilya, for confession. Well, they gave me a whipping the old-fashioned way, in the village lockup, and I went to Father Ilya, and he heard my confession and forbade me to take communion for three years …

“Why so, Father? I’ve gone … so many years without communion … I’ve been waiting …”

“Well, no matter,” he says. “So you’ve been waiting, but how is it you kept Tartar women around you instead of wives? … Be it known to you,” he says, “that I’m showing mercy in only forbidding you communion, and if you were handled according to the rules of the holy fathers, you’d have all your clothes burnt off you alive. Only don’t be afraid of that,” he says, “because the police laws don’t allow it now.”

“Well, there’s nothing to be done,” I thought, “so I’ll just stay like this, without communion, living at home, resting after my captivity.” But the count didn’t want it. He said:

“I will not tolerate having an excommunicated man near me.”

And he told the steward to whip me once more publicly as an example for everybody and then to release me on quitrent. And so they did: I was flogged in a new way this time, on the porch, before the office, in front of all the people, and then given a passport. I was delighted that, after so many years, I was a completely free man, with legal papers, and I left. I had no definite intentions, but it was my fate that God sent me employment.

“What sort?”

“The same thing again, in the horse line. I started from nothing, without a penny, but soon reached a very well-to-do state, and could have managed even better, if it hadn’t been for a certain matter.”

“What was it, if we may ask?”

“I fell into the great possession of various spirits and passions and yet another unseemly thing.”

“What was this unseemly thing that possessed you?”

“Magnetism, sir.”

“What? Magnetism?!”

“Yes, sir, the magnetic influence of a certain person.”

“How did you feel this influence upon you?”

“A foreign will worked in me, and I fulfilled a foreign destiny.”

“Was it then that your own

ruin came upon you, after which you decided that you ought to fulfill your mother’s promise and go into a monastery?”

“No, sir, that came later, but meanwhile many other adventures of all sorts befell me, before I was granted real conviction.”

“Would you mind telling us those adventures, too?”

“Not at all. It will be a great pleasure for me.”

“Please do, then.”

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