The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

“Your muzhiks,” he says, “don’t know themselves what they want: first they asked for the casing, said you only had to take the dimensions and outline, and now they’re howling that that’s not what they need; but I can’t do any more for you, because the bishop won’t give me the icon. Imitate the icon quickly, we’ll put the casing on it and give it back, and my secretary will steal me the old one.”

But the icon painter Sevastian, as a reasonable man, tried to charm him with gentle speech and made answer:

“No, Your Honor, our muzhiks know their business, and we really must have the original icon first. It’s been thought up only in offense to us,” he says, “that we copy icons as if by stencils. What we have is rules about the originals, but in executing the icon, there is room for free artistry. According to the original, for example, we must depict St. Zosima or Gerasim with a lion, but there’s no restriction on the painter’s fantasy in how he paints the lion. The rule is to paint St. Neophytus with a dove, Konon the Gardener with a flower, Timothy with a coffer, George and Sabbas Stratilatos with spears, Photius with his jerkin, and Kondraty with clouds, for he taught the clouds, but every icon painter is free to portray them as his artistic fantasy permits, and therefore again I cannot know how the angel that is to be replaced was painted.”

The Englishman listened to all that and chased Sevastian out, as he had us, and there were no further decisions from him, and so, my dear sirs, we sat over the river like crows on a ruin, and didn’t know whether to be in total despair, or to expect something more, but we no longer dared go to the Englishman; moreover, the weather was again of like character to us: a terrible thaw set in, and it poured rain, the sky at midday was like a smokehouse, and the nights were so dark that even Hesperus, which never leaves the heavenly firmament in December, hid and refused to come out … A prison for the soul, that’s what! And so Christmas came, and right on the eve there was thunder, a downpour, and it poured and poured without stopping for two or three days: the snow was all washed away into the river, and the ice on the river began to turn blue and swell, and suddenly, two days before the New Year, it burst and was carried away … Block upon block shot up and hurtled over the turbid waves, clogging the whole river around our constructions: mountains of ice arose chunk upon chunk, and whirled and crashed, God forgive me, like demons. How the constructions stood and endured such inconceivable pressure was even astonishing. Frightful millions might have been destroyed, but we were past worrying, because our icon painter Sevastian, seeing that there was nothing for him to do, rose up—he started packing his bags and wanted to go to other parts, and there was no way we could hold him back.

The Englishman was also past worrying, because something happened to him during this foul weather, so that he nearly went out of his mind. He kept going about, they say, asking everybody: “What am I to do? What am I going to do?” And then he suddenly mastered himself, called Luka, and said:

“You know what, my muzhik? Why don’t we go and steal your angel?”

“Agreed,” says Luka.

Luka’s observation was that the Englishman apparently wished to experience danger and had decided to go the next day to the bishop in the monastery, to take the icon painter with him in the guise of a goldsmith, and ask to be shown the icon of the angel, so that he could make a detailed outline of it, as if for a casing; and meanwhile the man would examine it the best he could and paint an imitation of it at home. Then, when the real goldsmith had the casing ready for us, he would bring it to us across the river, and Yakov Yakovlevich would go to the monastery again and say that he wanted to see the festal episcopal service, and would go into the sanctuary and stand in his overcoat in the darkness by the altar, where our icon was kept on the windowsill, and would hide it under the skirt of his coat, and, giving the coat to his servant, as if from the heat, would take it away. And in the yard behind the church, our man would at once take the icon out of the overcoat and fly to our side with it, and there, during the time that the vigil lasted, the icon painter would have to remove the old icon from its old board, replace it with the copy, cover it with the casing, and send it back, so that Yakov Yakovlevich could return it to the windowsill as if nothing had happened.

“Why not, sir?” we say. “We agree to everything!”

“Only watch out,” he says. “Remember that I’ll be standing there in the role of the thief, and I want to have faith in you, that you won’t give me away.”

Luka Kirilovich says:

“We’re not the sort of people who deceive their benefactors, Yakov Yakovlevich. I’ll take the icon and bring both back to you, the real one and the copy.”

“Well, and if something prevents you?”

“What can prevent me?”

“Well, if you suddenly die or drown?”