The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

“The Elets merchants will satisfy you …,” he says. “Is there anybody else there in the clink?”

XVII

They brought in the Boris and Gleb innkeeper and Pavel Mironych. Pavel Mironych’s frock coat was in shreds, and so was the innkeeper’s.

“What was the fight about?” asks Tsyganok.

They both lay sweeteners on the desk for him and reply:

“It was nothing, Your Honor. We’re on perfectly good terms again.”

“Well, splendid, if you’re not angry about the beating, that’s your business; but how dared you cause disorder in town? Why did you scatter all the troughs and sleighs and shafts on Poleshskaya Square?”

The innkeeper said it was accidental.

“I wanted to take him to the police last night, and he me; we pulled each other by the arm, but the butcher Agafon supported me; we got lost in the snow, wound up on the square—no way to get through … everything got scattered … We started shouting from fear … The patrol picked us up … a watch got lost …”

“Whose?”

“Mine.”

Pavel Mironych says:

“And mine, too.”

“What proofs have you got?”

“Why proofs? We’re not looking for them.”

“And who put the butcher Agafon under the washtub?”

“That we can’t say,” says the innkeeper. “The tub must have fallen on him and knocked him down, and he, being drunk, fell asleep under it. Let us go, Your Honor, we’re not looking for anything.”

“Very well,” says Tsyganok, “only we’ve got to finish with the others. Bring in the other deacon.”

The swarthy deacon comes in.

Tsyganok says to him:

“Why did you smash up the sentry box last night?”

The deacon replies:

“I was very frightened, Your Honor.”

“What were you frightened of?”

“Some people on the ice started shouting ‘Help’ very loud. I rushed back and asked the sentry to hide me from the priggers, and he chased me away: ‘I can’t stand up, I sent my boot soles to be mended.’ Then I pressed myself against the door in fright, and it broke. It’s my fault—I forced my way into the box and fell asleep there, and in the morning I got up, looked: no watch, no money.”

Tsyganok says:

“So you see, Eletsians? This deacon also suffered through you, and his watch disappeared.”

Pavel Mironych and my uncle replied:

“Well, Your Honor, we’ll have to go home and borrow from acquaintances, we’ve got nothing more on us.”

So we all went out, but the watch stayed there, and soon we were all consoled for that, and there was a lot of joking and laughing, and I drank with them then in the Boris and Gleb Inn till I got drunk for the first time in my life, and I rode down the street in a cab, waving my handkerchief. After that they borrowed money in Orel and left, but they didn’t take the deacon along with them, because he was too afraid of them. Insist as they might—he wouldn’t go.

“I’m very glad,” he says, “that the Lord granted that I get a thousand roubles from you for my offense. I’ll build myself a little house now, and talk the secretary into giving me a good post here. You Eletsians, I can see, are just too brassy.”

For me, however, a terrible trial began. Mama got so ill from her anger at me that she had one foot in the grave. There was dejection all through the house. Doctor Dépiche was not called in: they were afraid he would ask all kinds of questions about her health. They turned to religion. Mother Evnikeya was living in the convent then, and she had a Jordanian sheet, which she had wiped herself with after bathing in the Jordan River. They wrapped mama in this sheet. It didn’t help. They blessed the water with seven crosses in seven churches every day. That didn’t help. There was a layabout peasant, Esafeika—he lay about all the time and never worked. They sent him a hatful of cut-up apples and asked him to pray. That didn’t help either. Only when she and her sister finally went to Finogeich’s bathhouse and had her blood let with leeches, only then did she pull herself together somewhat. She ordered the Jordanian sheet sent back to Evnikeya and started looking for an orphan to raise at home.

This was the matchmaker’s teaching. The matchmaker had many children of her own, but she was also very fond of orphans—she kept taking them in, and so she started saying to my mother:

“Take some poor people’s child into your home. Everything at home will change for you at once: the air will become different. Gentlefolk set out flowers for the air—of course, there’s nothing wrong with that; but the main thing for the air is children. There’s a spirit that breathes from children, and the angels rejoice at it, but Satan gnashes his teeth … There’s a girl now in the Pushkarny quarter: she’s had such a hard time with her baby, she even took her to the Orlik mill to drown her.”

Mama said:

“Tell her not to drown her, but to leave her with me.”

That same day the little girl Mavrutka started squealing in our house and sucking her little fist. Mama busied herself with the girl, and a change came over her. She became caustic with me.

“You don’t need any new clothes for the feast day: now that you’re a drunkard, pot-house rags are enough for you.”