The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

I turned around. Oh, Lord! True enough, I was rowing in the wrong direction: it seemed I kept steering across the current, as I ought to, but our settlement wasn’t there—it was because there was such snow and wind, it was awful, and it blinded your eyes, and all around there was roaring and heaving, and the surface of the river seemed to breathe ice.

Well, anyway, by God’s mercy we made it, jumped out of the boat, and ran. The icon painter was ready: he acted coolly, but firmly. He took the icon in his hands, and once the people had fallen down and venerated it, he let them all cross themselves before the sealed face, while he looked at it and at his forgery and said:

“Fine work! Only it has to be toned down a bit with dirt and saffron!” And then he clamped the icon by the edges, tuned up his saw, which he had put into the tight bow, and … the saw went into a flutter. We all stood there seeing if he’d damage it! Awful, sirs! Can you picture him to yourselves, with his enormous hands, sawing a layer from the board no thicker than a sheet of the finest writing paper? … It’s a short step to sin: if the saw goes off by a hair, it will tear through the image and come out the other side! But the icon painter Sevastian performed the whole action with such coolness and artistry that, looking at him, we felt more at peace in our souls every minute. And indeed, he sawed off the image on its paper-thin layer, then in one minute he cut the image out, leaving a border, and glued the border back onto the same board. Then he took his copy and crumpled it, crumpled it in his fists, scraped it on the edge of the table, and rubbed it between his palms, tearing at it as if he wanted to destroy it, and finally held it up to the light, and the whole of this new copy was full of cracks like a sieve … Then Sevastian took it at once and glued it onto the old board inside the border, filled his palm with some sort of dark pigment, he knew which, added old varnish and saffron, mixed it with his fingers into a sort of paste, and rubbed it hard into the crumpled copy … He did it all very briskly, and the newly painted icon became quite old and looked just like the real one. In a moment, this copy was varnished, and our people were putting the casing on it, while the icon painter put the real icon he had sawed out onto the prepared board and quickly demanded a scrap of an old felt hat.

This was the beginning of the most difficult action—the unsealing.

They gave the icon painter a hat, he immediately tore it in half on his knee and, covering the sealed icon with it, shouted:

“Give me the hot iron!”

On the stove, at his orders, a heavy tailor’s iron had been heated burning hot.

Mikhailitsa picked it up with tongs and gave it to him, and Sevastian wrapped the handle with a cloth, spat on the iron, and passed it quickly over the scrap of hat! … An evil stench arose from the felt at once, and the icon painter did it again, and pressed, and snatched it away. His hand flew like lightning, and a column of smoke already rose from the felt, but Sevastian went on scorching: with one hand he turned the felt a little, with the other he worked the iron, and each time more slowly and pressing harder, and suddenly he set both the iron and the felt aside and held the icon up to the light, and it was as if the seal had never been: the strong Stroganov varnish had held out, and the sealing wax was all gone, only a sort of fiery red dew was left on the image, but the whole brightly divine face was visible …

Here some of us prayed, some wept, some tried to kiss the painter’s hands, but Luka Kirilovich did not forget what he was about and, treasuring every minute, handed the painter his forged icon and said:

“Well, finish quickly!”

The man replies:

“My action is finished, I’ve done everything I promised.”

“What about placing the seal?”

“Where?”

“Why, here on the face of this new angel, like on the other one.”

Sevastian shook his head and replied:

“Oh, no, I’m no official, I wouldn’t dare do such a thing.”

“Then what are we to do now?”

“That I don’t know,” he says. “You ought to have had an official or some German on hand, but since you failed to supply them, you’ll have to do it yourselves.”

Luka says:

“What? We wouldn’t dare do that!”

And the icon painter replies:

“I don’t dare either.”

And in those brief moments of great turmoil, Yakov Yakovlevich’s wife suddenly comes flying into the cottage, all pale as death, and says:

“Aren’t you ready yet?”

“Ready and not ready,” we say. “The most important thing is done, but the paltry one we can’t do.”

And she babbles in her language:

“What are you waiting for? Don’t you hear what’s going on outside?”

We listened and turned paler than she was: amidst our cares, we had paid no attention to the weather, but now we heard the noise: the ice was moving!

I sprang outside and saw it had already covered the whole river—block heaving upon block like rabid beasts, whirling into each other, and crashing, and breaking up.