The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

“Will you be so kind as to tell us what you endured after that with Agashimola?”

“If you like.”

VII

“As soon as Agashimola’s Tartars brought me to their camp, they hied themselves off to another one, in a new place, and wouldn’t let me leave.

“ ‘Why should you live with Emgurchey’s people, Ivan?’ they say. ‘Emgurchey’s a thief. Live with us, we’ll gladly respect you and give you nice Natashas. There you had two Natashas in all, but we’ll give you more.’

“I refused.

“ ‘Why should I have more?’ I say. ‘I don’t need more.’

“ ‘No,’ they say, ‘you don’t understand, more Natashas are better: they’ll bear you more Kolkas, they’ll all call you daddy.’

“ ‘Well,’ I say, ‘I have no need to bring up little Tartars. If they could be baptized and take communion, that would be a different matter, but now what: as many of them as I multiply, they’ll all be yours, not Orthodox, and they’ll cheat Russian peasants when they grow up.’ So again I took two wives, and wouldn’t have more, because when there’s a lot of women, even if they’re Tartars, the foul things will get to quarreling, and you have to discipline them all the time.”

“Well, sir, and did you love these new wives of yours?”

“What’s that?”

“These new wives of yours—did you love them?”

“Love? … Ah, so that’s what you mean? Yes, one that I had from Agashimola was very obliging to me, so I just … took pity on her.”

“And that girl, the young one who had been married to you before—most likely she pleased you more?”

“She was all right. I took pity on her, too.”

“And you probably missed her when you were stolen by one horde from the other?”

“No, I didn’t miss her.”

“But still, you most likely had children there, from your first wives?”

“Of course I did: Savakirey’s wife bore two Kolkas and a Natasha, and the young one gave birth to six in five years, because once she had two Kolkas at the same time.”

“Allow us to ask you, though: why do you keep calling them ‘Kolkas’ and ‘Natashas’?”

“That’s the Tartar way. For them, if it’s a grown Russian man—it’s Ivan, if it’s a woman—it’s Natasha, and boys they call Kolka, and so my wives, though they were Tartars, were counted as Natashas because of me, and the boys were Kolkas. Though all this, naturally, was only superficial, because they had no Church sacraments, and I didn’t consider them my children.”

“So you didn’t consider them yours? Why was that?”

“How could I, when they weren’t baptized or anointed with oil?”

“And your parental feelings?”

“What’s that, sir?”

“Can it be that you didn’t love these children at all and never caressed them?”

“Why should I caress them? Naturally, if I happened to be sitting alone and one of them came running up, well, I’d just pat him on the head and tell him: ‘Go to your mother’—only that rarely happened, because I couldn’t be bothered with them.”

“Why couldn’t you be bothered: did you have so much to do?”

“No, sir, I had nothing to do, but I was pining away: I wanted very much to go home to Russia.”

“So in ten years you still didn’t get used to the steppe?”

“No, sir, I wanted to go home … I pined for it. Especially in the evenings, or even at midday, when it was fair weather, hot, the camp was quiet, the Tartars had all dropped off to sleep in their tents from the scorching heat, and I raise the flap of my tent and look at the steppe … to this side and to that—it’s all the same … Scorching hot, a cruel sight; the expanse boundless; a riot of grass; feather-grass white, fluffy, billowing like a silver sea; and a smell borne on the breeze, the smell of sheep, and the sun beats down, burning hot, and the steppe, like a burdensome life, has no foreseeable end, and there’s no bottom to the depths of your anguish … You gaze off somewhere, and suddenly out of the blue a monastery or a church appears, and you remember your baptized land and start to weep.”

Ivan Severyanych paused, sighed deeply at his memories, and went on: