The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

“The very first thing,” I say, “if it’s a matter of knowing a horse and what goes on inside it, is that you’ve got to have a good position for examining it and never depart from it. From the first glance you have to look intelligently at the head and then at the whole horse down to the tail, and not paw it all over the way officers do. They touch it on the withers, the forelock, the nose bridge, the chest artery, the breastbone, or whatever they land on, and all senselessly. Horse dealers love cavalry officers terribly for this pawing. When a horse dealer spots such a military pawer, he immediately starts twisting and twirling the horse, turning it in all directions, and whichever part he doesn’t want to show, he won’t show for anything, and it’s there that the flaw lies, and there’s no end to these flaws. Say a horse is lop-eared—they cut away a strip of skin on the crown, pull the edges together, sew them up, and paint the seam over. The horse’s ears perk up, but not for long: the skin stretches and the ears droop again. If the ears are too big, they cut them, and to make them stand up, they put little props in them. If somebody’s looking for a match for his horse, and if, for instance, his horse has a star on its forehead, the dealers make sure to fix him up with another that has the same star: they rub the hide with pumice, or apply a hot baked turnip to the right spot, so that white hair will grow, and it does at once, only if you bother to look closely, hair that’s been grown that way is always slightly longer than normal, and it frizzes up like a little tuft. Horse dealers offend against the public even more over eyes: some horses have little hollows above their eyes, and it’s not pretty, but the dealer punctures the skin with a pin and then puts his lips to the place and blows, and the skin inflates, and the eye looks more fresh and pretty. That’s easy to do, because a horse likes the feel of warm breath on its eyes, and it stands there without moving, but then the air leaks out and there are hollows above the eyes again. There’s one remedy for that: to feel around the bone and see whether air is coming out. But it’s still funnier when they sell blind horses. That’s a real comedy. Some little officer, for instance, is stealing up to the horse’s eye with a straw, to test whether the horse can see the straw, but he himself doesn’t see that, just when the horse should shake its head, the dealer punches it in the belly or the side with his fist. Or another is stroking the horse quietly, but has a little nail in his glove, and while he seems to be stroking it, he pricks it.” And I explained this to the remount officer ten times more than I’ve been telling you now, but none of it proved any use to him: the next day I see he’s bought such horses that one nag’s worse than the other, and then he calls me over to look and says:

“Come, brother, look at my expert knowledge of horses.”

I glanced, laughed, and replied that there was nothing to look at:

“This one’s got fleshy shoulders—it’ll catch its hooves in the dirt; this one tucks its hoof under its belly when it lies down—in a year at most it’ll work itself up a hernia; and this one, when it eats oats, stamps its foreleg and knocks its knee against the trough”—and I criticized his whole purchase away like that, and it came out that I was right.

The next day the prince says:

“No, Ivan, I really can’t understand your gift. You’d better work for me as a conosoor and do the choosing, and I’ll just pay out the money.”

I agreed and lived excellently for a whole three years, not like a hired servant, but more like a friend and helper, and if these outings hadn’t got the better of me, I might even have saved up some capital for myself, because, in remounting practice, whenever a breeder comes to make the acquaintance of a remount officer, he sends a trusty man to the conosoor, so as to cajole him as much as possible, because breeders know that the real power is not with the remount officer, but in his having a real conosoor with him. And I was, as I told you, a natural conosoor and fulfilled that natural duty conscientiously: not for anything would I deceive the man I worked for. And my prince felt that and had great respect for me, and we lived together with full openness in everything. If he happened to lose at cards somewhere during the night, he would get up in the morning and come to me in the stable, still in his robe, and say:

“Well, now, my almost half-esteemed Ivan Severyanych! How are things with you?” He always joked that way, calling me “almost half-esteemed,” though, as you’ll see, he esteemed me fully.

I knew what it signified when he came with such a joke, and I’d reply:

“Not bad. Things are fine with me, thank God, but I wonder about Your Serenity—how are your circumstances?”

“Mine,” he says, “are so vile, you couldn’t even ask for worse.”

“What you mean to say, I suppose, is that you blew it all again yesterday, like the other time?”