The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

Only then did I come to my senses and get frightened, and my hands lost their grip, and I went flying down and don’t remember anything more. I don’t know how long it was before I came to and saw that I’m in some cottage, and a stalwart muzhik says to me:

“Well, can it be you’re alive, lad?”

I answer:

“Must be I am.”

“And do you remember what happened to you?” he asks.

I began to recall and remembered how the horses had bolted on us and I had thrown myself onto the end of the shaft and was left hanging over the abyss; but what happened next I didn’t know.

The muzhik smiles:

“And where could you know that from,” he says. “Your lead horses didn’t make it to the bottom of that abyss alive, they got all broken up, but it’s like you were saved by some invisible force: you dropped onto a lump of clay and slid down on it like on a sled. We thought you were quite dead, then we see you’re breathing, only the air has stopped your breath. Well,” he says, “now get up if you can, hurry quick to the saint: the count left money to bury you if you died, and to bring you to him in Voronezh if you should live.”

So I went, only I didn’t say anything all the way, but listened to how that muzhik who was taking me kept playing “Mistress Mine” on the concertina.

When we came to Voronezh, the count summoned me to his rooms and said to the countess:

“So, my dear countess,” he says, “we owe this boy our lives.”

The countess only nodded her head, but the count said:

“Ask me whatever you like, Golovan—I’ll do it all for you.”

I say:

“I don’t know what to ask!” And he says:

“Well, what would you like to have?”

I think and think, and then say:

“A concertina.”

The count laughs and says:

“Well, you’re a real fool, but anyhow, it goes without saying, I’ll remember you when the time comes. And,” he says, “buy him a concertina right now.”

A footman went to a shop and brought me a concertina in the stables:

“Here,” he says, “play.”

I took it and started to play, but only saw that I didn’t know how and dropped it at once, and the next day some wanderers¹⁷ stole it on me from where I’d hidden it under the shed.

I ought to have taken advantage of the count’s favor on that occasion and asked to go to a monastery right then, as the monk had advised; but, without knowing why myself, I had asked for a concertina, and had thereby refuted my very first calling, and on account of that went from one suffering to another, enduring more and more, yet didn’t die of any of them, until everything the monk had predicted to me in my vision came true in real life because of my mistrust.

III

I barely had time, after this show of benevolence from my masters, to return home with them on new horses, from which we again put together a six in Voronezh, when the fancy took me to acquire a pair of crested pigeons, a male and a female, which I kept on a shelf in the stables. The male had clay-colored feathers, but the female was white and with such red legs, a real pretty little thing! … I liked them very much: especially when the male cooed in the night, it was so pleasant to listen to, and in the daytime they’d fly among the horses and land in the manger, pecking up food and kissing each other … It was comforting for a young boy to see it all.

And after this kissing children came along; they hatched one pair, and they were growing up, and they went kiss-kissing, and more eggs got laid and hatched … They were such tiny little pigeons, as if all furry, with no feathers, yellow as the little chamomile known as “cat’s communion,” but they had beaks on them worse than on a Circassian prince, big and strong … I started examining them, these pigeon chicks, and so as not to squash them, I picked one up by the beak and looked and looked at it, and got lost in contemplating how tender it was, and the big pigeon kept driving me away. I amused myself with them—kept teasing him with the pigeon chick; but then when I went to put the little bird back in the nest, it wasn’t breathing anymore. What a nuisance! I warmed it in my hands and breathed on it, kept trying to revive it; but no, it was dead, that’s all! I got angry and threw it out the window. Well, never mind; the other one was left in the nest, and the dead one got snatched up and carried off by some white cat that ran past from who knows where. And I made good note of this cat then, that she was all white and had a black spot on her forehead like a little hat. Well, I thought to myself, darn it all, let her eat the dead one. But that night I was asleep, and suddenly I heard the pigeon on the shelf above my bed fighting angrily with someone. I jumped up and looked, and it was a moonlit night, and I saw it was the same white cat carrying off my other pigeon chick, the live one.