The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

This was a new passenger, who had come on board at Konevets without any of us noticing him. He had been silent until then, and no one had paid any attention to him, but now everyone turned to look at him, and everyone probably wondered how he could have gone unnoticed until then. He was a man of enormous stature, with an open and swarthy face and thick, wavy hair of a leaden color: so strangely was it streaked with gray. He was wearing a novice’s cassock, with a wide monastic leather belt and a tall, black broadcloth cap. Whether he was a novice or a tonsured monk it was impossible to tell, because the monks of the Ladoga islands do not always wear monastic headgear, not only when traveling, but even on their own islands, and in country simplicity limit themselves to caps. This new companion of ours, who later turned out to be an extremely interesting man, looked as if he might be a little over fifty; but he was a mighty man in the fullest sense of the word, and a typical, artless, kind Russian mighty man at that, reminiscent of old Ilya Muromets in the beautiful painting by Vereshchagin and in the poem by Count A. K. Tolstoy.² It seemed that he should not be going around in a cassock, but riding through the forest in huge bast shoes, mounted on his “dapple gray,” and lazily scenting “how the dark thicket smells of resin and wild strawberry.”

But for all this kindly artlessness, it did not take much keenness of observation to see in him a man who had seen much and, as they say, “had been around.” He behaved boldly, self-assuredly, though without unpleasant casualness, and he began speaking with accustomed ease in a pleasant bass voice.

“That all means nothing,” he began, lazily and softly letting out word after word from under his thick gray mustaches, twirled upwards Hussar fashion. “What you say concerning the other world for suicides, that they will supposedly never be forgiven, I don’t accept. And that there’s supposedly no one to pray for them—that, too, is nonsense, because there is a man who can quite simply mend the situation for them all in the easiest way.”

He was asked who this man was who can deal with and amend things for suicides after their death.

“Here’s who, sir,” replied the black-cassocked mighty man. “There is in the Moscow diocese a certain little village priest—a most hardened drunkard, who had been all but defrocked—it’s he who handles them.”

“How do you know that?”

“Good heavens, sir, I’m not the only one who knows, everybody in the Moscow region knows it, because it went through his grace the metropolitan Filaret himself.”³

There was a brief pause, then someone said it was all rather dubious.

The black-cassocked man was not offended in the least by this observation and replied:

“Yes, sir, at first glance it looks that way—dubious, sir. And what’s surprising about it seeming dubious to us, when even his grace himself didn’t believe it for a long time, but then, receiving sure proofs of it, saw that it was impossible not to believe it, and finally believed it?”

The passengers badgered the monk with requests that he tell them this wondrous story, and he did not refuse them and began as follows:

The story goes that a certain archpriest supposedly wrote once to his grace the bishop that, thus and so, there’s this little priest, a terrible drunkard—he drinks vodka and is no good in his parish. And it, this report, was essentially correct. The bishop ordered the priest to be sent to him in Moscow. He looked him over and saw that the priest was indeed a boozy fellow, and decided to remove him from his post. The priest was upset and even stopped drinking, and kept grieving and weeping: “What have I brought myself to,” he thinks, “and what else can I do but lay hands on myself? That’s all that’s left to me,” he says. “Then at least the bishop will take pity on my unfortunate family and give my daughter a husband, so that he can replace me and feed my family.”⁴ So far so good. He firmly resolved to do away with himself and set a day for it, but since he had a good soul, he thought: “Very well, suppose I die, but I’m not a brute, I’m not without a soul—where will my soul go after that?” And from then on he began to grieve still more. Well, so he grieves and grieves, but the bishop decided to remove him from his post on account of his drunkenness, and he lay down with a book once to rest after a meal and fell asleep. Well, so he fell asleep or else just dozed off, when suddenly he seemed to see the door of his cell opening. He called out “Who’s there?” because he thought the attendant had come to announce someone; but no—instead of the attendant, he saw a most kindly old man come in, and the bishop recognized him at once—it was St. Sergius.⁵

The bishop says:

“Is that you, most holy Father Sergius?”

And the holy man replies:

“It is I, servant of God Filaret.”

The bishop asks:

“What does your purity want of my unworthiness?”

And St. Sergius replies:

“I want mercy.”

“Upon whom do you want it shown?”