The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

“Well, that’s it: the stupid old man has gone crazy, and I’m done for.” Then he looks, and Maroy and Luka are already embracing.

Old Maroy muttered:

“I watched the way you walked along the chain with those lanterns.”

And Uncle Luka says:

“I didn’t have any lanterns.”

“Then where did the light come from?”

Luka replies:

“I don’t know, I didn’t see any light, I just made a run for it and don’t know how I didn’t fall as I ran … it was as if somebody held me up under both arms.”

Maroy says:

“It was angels—I saw them, and for that I’ll now die before noon today.”

But Luka had no time to talk much. He didn’t reply to the old man, but quickly gave the Englishman both icons through the window. He took them and handed them back.

“What’s this?” he says. “There’s no seal?”

Luka says:

“There isn’t?”

“No, there isn’t.”

Well, here Luka crossed himself and said:

“That’s it! Now there’s no time to fix it. The Church angel performed this miracle, and I know why.”

And Luka rushed to the church at once, pushed his way to the sanctuary, where the bishop was being divested, fell at his feet, and said:

“Thus and so, I’ve blasphemed, here’s what I’ve just done: order me put in chains and taken to jail.”

But the bishop, more honor to him, listened to it all and replied:

“That should bring home to you now where the true faith is at work: you took the seal off your angel by deceit, but ours took it off himself and brought you here.”

Luka says:

“I see, Your Grace, and I tremble. Order me to be handed over quickly for punishment.”

But the bishop replies with an absolving word:

“By the power granted me by God, I forgive and absolve you, child. Prepare yourself to receive the most pure body of Christ tomorrow morning.”³¹

Well, gentlemen, I think there’s nothing further to tell you: Luka Kirilovich and Maroy came back in the morning and said:

“Fathers and brothers, we have seen the glory of the angel of the ruling Church and all the divine Providence of it in the goodness of its hierarch, and we have been anointed unto it with holy chrism, and today at the liturgy we partook of the body and blood of our Savior.”

And I, who for a long time, ever since I was the elder Pamva’s guest, had been drawn to become one in spirit with all of Russia, exclaimed for us all:

“And we shall follow you, Uncle Luka!” And so all of us gathered together in one flock, with one shepherd, like lambs, and only then did we realize where and to what our sealed angel had brought us, first bending his steps away and then unsealing himself for the sake of the love of people for people, manifested on that terrible night.

XVI

The storyteller had finished. The listeners remained silent, but one of them finally cleared his throat and observed that everything in the story was explicable—Mikhailitsa’s dreams, and the vision she had imagined half awake, and the fall of the angel, whom a dog or a cat running in had knocked to the floor, and the death of Levonty, who had been ill even before meeting Pamva. Explicable, too, were all the chance coincidences in the words spoken by Pamva in some sort of riddles.

“And it’s understandable,” the listener added, “that Luka crossed on the chain with an oar: masons are known to be good at walking and climbing anywhere, and the oar was for balance; it’s also understandable, I think, that Maroy could see a light around Luka, which he took for angels. Under great strain, a badly chilled man can start seeing all kinds of things. I’d even find it understandable if, for example, Maroy had died before noon, as he predicted …”

“He did die, sir,” Mark put in.

“Splendid! There’s nothing astonishing in an eighty-year-old man dying after such agitation and cold. But here’s what I really find totally inexplicable: how could the seal disappear from the new angel that the Englishwoman had sealed?”

“Well, that’s the simplest thing of all,” Mark replied cheerfully, and he told how, soon after that, they had found the seal between the icon and the casing.

“How could it happen?”

“Like this: the Englishwoman also didn’t dare spoil the angel’s face, so she made a seal on a piece of paper and tucked it under the edges of the casing … It was done very cleverly and skillfully, but when Luka carried the icons in his bosom, they shifted on him, and that made the seal fall off.”

“Well, now, that means the whole affair was simple and natural.”