The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

We all gasped and, covering our eyes with our hands, fell on our faces and groaned as if we were being tortured. And we went on groaning, so that the dark night found us howling and lamenting over our sealed angel, and it was here, in this darkness and silence, over the devastated holiness of our fathers, that a thought occurred to us: we would keep an eye out for where they put our guardian, and we swore to steal him back, even at the risk of our lives, and unseal him, and to carry out this resolve, they chose me and a young fellow named Levonty. In years this Levonty was still a downright boy, no more than seventeen, but he was big of body, good of heart, God-fearing from childhood, and obedient and well-behaved, just like your ardent white, silver-bridled steed.

A better co-thinker and co-worker couldn’t have been asked for in such a dangerous deed as tracking down and purloining the sealed angel, whose blinded appearance was unbearable for us to the point of illness.

IX

I’m not going to trouble you with the details of how I and my co-thinker and co-worker passed through the eyes of needles, going into all this, but I’ll tell you directly of the grief that came over us when we learned that our icons, drilled through by the officials and strung on rods as they were, had been piled up in the basement of the diocesan office. This was a lost cause, as if they had been buried in the grave, and there was no use thinking about them. The nice thing, however, was that they said the bishop himself did not approve of such savagery of behavior and, on the contrary, said: “Why that?” and even stood up for the old art and said: “It’s ancient, it must be cherished!” But here was the bad thing, that the disaster of irreverence had only just passed, when a new, still greater one arose from his very reverence: this same bishop, it must be supposed, not with bad but precisely with good consideration, took our sealed angel, studied him for a long time, then averted his eyes and said: “Disturbing sight! How terribly they’ve disfigured him! Don’t put this icon in the basement,” he says, “but set it up in the sanctuary, on the windowsill behind the altar.” The bishop’s servants did as he ordered, and I must tell you that such attention on the part of a Church hierarch was, on the one hand, very agreeable to us, but, on the other—we could see that any plan we had of stealing our angel had become impossible. There remained another means: to bribe the bishop’s servants and with their help substitute for the icon an artfully painted likeness of itself. In this our Old Believers had also succeeded more than once, but to do it one first of all needed a skillful and experienced icon painter, who could make a substitute icon with precision, and we did not anticipate finding such an icon painter in those parts. And from then on a redoubled anguish came over us all; it spread through us like dropsy under the skin: in our room where only the praise of God had been heard, only laments began to ring out, and in a short time we had all lamented ourselves sick and our tear-filled eyes couldn’t see the ground under our feet, and owing to that, or not owing to that, an eye disease attacked us and began to spread through all our people. What had never happened before, happened now: there was no end of sick people! Talk went around among all the working people that all this was not for nothing, but on account of the Old Believers’ angel: “He was blinded by the sealing,” they said, “and now we’re all going blind.” And at this explanation not only we but all church-going people rose up, and however many doctors the English bosses brought, nobody went to them or took their medicine, but cried out as one:

“Bring us the sealed angel, we want to pray to him, and he alone will heal us.”

The Englishman Yakov Yakovlevich, having looked into the matter, went to the bishop himself and said:

“Thus and so, Your Grace, faith is a great thing, and to him who has faith, it is given according to his faith: let the sealed angel come to us on the other bank.”

But the bishop did not heed him and said:

“This should not be indulged.”

These words seemed cruel to us then, and we condemned the bishop with much vain talk, but afterwards it was revealed to us that this was all guided not by cruelty, but by divine providence.

Meanwhile the signs seemed unceasing, and the chastising finger sought out on the other bank the chief culprit of the whole thing, Pimen himself, who, after our calamity, fled from us and joined the Church. I met him in town once. He bowed to me, so I bowed to him, and he said:

“I have sinned, brother Mark, by going from you to a different faith.”

And I replied:

“Who is of what faith—that’s God’s business, but that you sold a poor man for a pair of boots, that, naturally, is not good, and, forgive me, but for that, as the prophet Amos ordered,¹⁵ I convict you in brotherly fashion.”

At the name of the prophet, he began to tremble.