The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

You look at Our Lady, how the inanimate trees bow down before her purity, and your heart melts and trembles; you look at the angel … joy! This angel was truly something indescribable. His face—I can see it now—is most brightly divine and so swiftly succoring; his gaze is tender; his hair is tied with a fine ribbon, its ends curling around his ears, a sign of his hearing everything from everywhere; his robe is shining, all spangled with gold; his armor is feathery, his shoulders are girded; on his chest the face of the infant Emmanuel; in his right hand a cross, in his left a flaming sword. Wondrous! Wondrous! … The hair on his head is wavy and blond, curly from the ears down, and traced hair by hair with a needle. His wings are vast and white as snow, but azure underneath, done feather by feather, and on each shaft barb by barb. You look at those wings, and where has all your fear gone to? You pray, “Overshadow me,” and you grow all quiet at once, and there’s peace in your soul. That’s what kind of icon it was! And for us these two icons were like the holy of holies for the Jews, adorned by the wonderful artistry of Bezaleel.⁸ All the icons I mentioned earlier were transported by horse in special trunks, but these two we didn’t even put in the cart, but carried: Luka Kirilovich’s wife, Mikhailitsa, always carried Our Lady, and Luka himself kept the image of the angel on his breast. He had a brocade pouch made for this icon, lined with dark homespun, and with a button, and on the front side there was a scarlet cross made from real damask, and there was a thick green silk cord to hang it round the neck. And so this icon that was always kept on Luka’s breast preceded us wherever we went, as if the angel himself were going before us. We used to go from place to place for new work over the steppe, Luka Kirilovich ahead of us all, waving his notched measuring stick instead of a staff, Mikhailitsa behind him in the cart with the icon of the Mother of God, and behind them the whole crew of us marching, and there in the field there’s grass, meadow flowers, herds pasturing here and there, a shepherd playing his reed … a sheer delight for heart and mind! Everything went beautifully for us, and wondrous was our success in all things: we always found good work; there was concord among us; peaceful news kept coming to us from our folks at home; and for all that we blessed the angel who went before us, and it seemed to us it would be harder to part with his most wonderful icon than with our own lives.

And could we have thought that somehow, by some chance or other, we would be deprived of our most precious and holy thing? And yet that grief awaited us, and was arranged for us, as we perceived only later, not through people’s perfidy, but through the providence of our guide himself. He himself wished to be insulted, in order to grant us the holy ordeal of sorrow, and through it to show us the true path, before which all the paths we had trodden were like a dark and trackless wilderness. But allow me to inquire whether my story is interesting and I am not troubling your attention for nothing?

“Not at all, not at all: be so kind as to continue!” we exclaimed, having become interested in what he was telling.

“Very well, sirs, I obey, and will begin, as best I can, to set forth the wondrous wonders that came to us from our angel.”

III

We came to do big work near a big city on a big stream of water, the Dniepr River, to build there a big and now highly famous stone bridge.⁹ The city stands on the steep right bank, and we settled on the low left bank covered with meadows, and a beautiful peosage opened before us: old churches, holy monasteries with the relics of many saints; lush gardens and trees such as are pictured in the frontispieces of old books, that is, sharp-pointed poplars. You look at it all and it’s as if somebody’s plucking at your heart—it’s so beautiful! You know, of course, we’re simple people, but all the same we do feel the all-graciousness of God-created nature.