The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

Katerina Lvovna did not defend herself: she looked more and more intently into the waves and moved her lips. Through Sergei’s vile talk she heard the rumble and moan from the opening and slamming waves. And suddenly the blue head of Boris Timofeich appears to her out of one breaking wave; her husband, rocking, peers out of another, holding Fedya with a drooping head. Katerina Lvovna wants to remember a prayer, and she moves her lips, but her lips whisper: “What a good time you and I had, sitting together of a long autumn evening, sending people out of this world by a cruel death.”

Katerina Lvovna was trembling. Her roving gaze became fixed and wild. Her arms reached out somewhere into space once or twice and dropped again. Another moment—and she suddenly began to sway all over, not taking her eyes from the dark waves, bent down, seized Sonetka by the legs, and in one sweep threw the girl and herself overboard.

Everyone was petrified with amazement.

Katerina Lvovna appeared at the top of a wave and sank again; another wave tossed up Sonetka.

“A hook! Throw them a hook!” they shouted on the ferry.

A heavy hook on a long rope soared up and fell into the water. Sonetka could no longer be seen. Two seconds later, borne away from the ferry by the swift current, she again flailed her arms; but at the same moment, out of another wave, Katerina Lvovna rose up almost to the waist, threw herself on Sonetka like a strong pike on a soft-finned little roach, and neither of them appeared again.

The Sealed Angel

I

It happened during Christmastime, on the eve of St. Basil’s.¹ The weather was raging most unmercifully. A severe, ground-sweeping blizzard, of the kind for which the winters of the Transvolga steppe are famous, drove a multitude of people into a solitary inn that stood like an old bachelor in the midst of the flat and boundless steppe. Here gentlefolk, merchants, and peasants, Russians, and Mordovians, and Chuvashes, all ended up in one heap. To observe grades and ranks in such night lodgings was impossible: wherever you turned, it was crowded, some drying off, others warming themselves, still others looking for a bit of space to huddle up in; the dark, low cottage, crammed with people, was stuffy and filled with dense steam from the wet clothes. There was no free space to be seen: on the bunks, on the stove,² on the benches, and even on the dirty earth floor—people were lying everywhere. The innkeeper, a stern muzhik, was glad neither of the guests nor of the gains. Angrily slamming the gate after the last sleigh, carrying two merchants, forced its way in, he locked it with a padlock and, hanging the key in the icon corner, said firmly:

“Well, now whoever wants to can beat his head on the gate—I won’t open.”

But he had barely managed to say that and, having taken off his vast sheepskin coat, to cross himself with a big, old-style cross and prepare to get onto the hot stove, when someone’s timid hand knocked on the windowpane.

“Who’s there?” the innkeeper called in a loud and displeased voice.

“It’s us,” a muffled reply came from outside the window.

“Well, what do you want?”

“Let us in, for Christ’s sake, we’re lost … frozen.”

“Are there many of you?”

“Not many, not many, eighteen in all, just eighteen,” a man, obviously completely frozen, said outside the window, stammering and his teeth chattering.

“There’s no room for you, the whole cottage is packed with people as it is.”

“At least let us warm up a little!”

“What are you?”

“Carters.”

“Empty or loaded?”

“Loaded, dear brother, we’re carrying hides.”

“Hides! You’re carrying hides, and you ask to spend the night in the cottage? What’s become of the Russian people! Get out of here!”

“But what are they to do?” asked a traveler lying under a bearskin coat on an upper bunk.

“Pile up the hides and sleep under them, that’s what,” the innkeeper replied, and, giving the carters another good cursing out, he lay motionless on the stove.

From under his bearskin, the traveler reprimanded the innkeeper for his cruelty in tones of highly energetic protest, but the man did not honor his remarks with the slightest response. Instead of him, a small, red-haired man with a sharp, wedge-shaped little beard called out from a far corner.

“Don’t condemn our host, my dear sir,” he began. “He takes it from experience, and what he says is true—with the hides it’s safe.”

“Oh?” a questioning response came from under the bearskin.

“Perfectly safe, sir, and it’s better for them that he doesn’t let them in.”

“Why is that?”

“Because now they’ll get themselves useful experience from it, and meanwhile if some helpless person or other comes knocking here, there’ll be room for him.”

“Who else would the devil bring here now?” said the fur coat.

“Listen, you,” the innkeeper put in. “Don’t spout empty words. Can the foul fiend bring anybody to where there’s such holy things? Don’t you see the icon of the Savior and the face of the Mother of God here?”