The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

In the camp, I can hear, it’s like everything has died. It was impossible, of course, for anybody not to hear such a cannonade, but it meant they were all frightened and lying under their sheepskins. You can only hear the earth tremble, start shaking, and stop again. That, you could figure, was the horses shying and huddling close together, and you could also hear those Khivians or Indians running somewhere, and all at once fire again shot over the steppe like a snake … The horses got terrified and bolted … The Tartars forgot their fear and all came jumping out, shaking their heads, howling “Allah! Allah!”—and set off in pursuit, but the Khivians vanished without a trace, just leaving one of their boxes behind as a souvenir … Now, when all our fighting men had gone in pursuit of the herd, and only women and old men were left in the camp, I took a look at that box: what’s in there? I see there are various powders, and mixtures, and paper tubes: I started examining one of the tubes close to the fire, and it burst, almost burned my eyes out, and flew upwards, and there—bang!—scattered in little stars … “Aha,” I thought, “so it’s not a god, it’s just fiverworks like they set off in our public garden.” I went bang with another tube, and saw that the Tartars, the old ones who had stayed here, had already fallen down and were lying on their faces where they fell, and only jerking their legs … At first I was scared myself, but when I saw them jerking like that, I suddenly acquired a completely different attitude, and for the first time since I fell into captivity, I gnashed my teeth and started uttering random, unfamiliar words at them. I shouted as loud as I could:

“Parley-bien-cumsa-shiray-mir-ferfluchter-min-adiew-moussiew!”

Then I sent up a spinning tube … Well, this time, seeing how the fire went spinning, they all nearly died … The fire went out, and they were all lying there, and only one of them raised his head every once in a while, and then put it mug-down again, while beckoning to me with his finger. I go up to him and say:

“Well, so? Confess what you want, curse you: death or life?”—because I can see they’re terribly afraid of me.

“Forgive us, Ivan,” they say, “don’t give us death, give us life.”

And the others also beckon to me from their places in the same way, and ask for forgiveness and life.

I see my case has taken a good turn: I must have suffered enough for all my sins, and I prayed:

“Mother of us, most holy Lady, St. Nicholas, my swans, my little doves, help me, my benefactors!”

And I myself sternly ask the Tartars:

“For what and to what end should I forgive you and grant you life?”

“Forgive us,” they say, “for not believing in your God.”

“Aha,” I think, “see how I’ve frightened them,” and I say: “Ah, no, brothers, that’s rubbish, I’m not going to forgive you for your opposition to relidgin!” And I gnashed my teeth again and unsealed one more tube.

This one turned out to have a rawcket … Terrible fire and crackling.

I shout at the Tartars:

“So, one more minute, and I’ll destroy you all, if you don’t want to believe in my God.”

“Don’t destroy us,” they reply, “we all agree to go under your God.”

Then I stopped setting off fiverworks and baptized them all in the river.

“You baptized them right then and there?”

“That same minute, sirs. Why put it off for long? It had to be so they couldn’t think it over. I wetted their heads with water from a hole in the ice, recited ‘in the name of the Father and the Son,’ and hung those little crosses left from the missaneries on their necks, and told them to consider that murdered missanery a martyr and pray for him, and I showed them his grave.”

“And did they pray?”

“That they did, sir.”

“But I don’t suppose they knew any Christian prayers, or did you teach them?”

“No, I had no chance to teach them, because I saw the time had come for me to flee, but I told them: ‘Pray like you always prayed, the old way, only don’t you dare call on Allah, but instead of him name Jesus Christ.’ So they adopted that confession.”

“Well, but all the same, how did you escape from these new Christians then with your crippled feet, and how did you cure yourself?”

“Then I found some caustic earth in those fiverworks; as soon as you apply it to your body, it starts burning terribly. I applied it and pretended to be sick, and meanwhile, lying under the rug, I kept irritating my heels with this caustic stuff, and in two weeks I irritated them so much that the flesh on my heels festered and all the bristles the Tartars had sewn in ten years earlier came out with the pus. I got better as soon as I could, but gave no signs of it, and pretended that I was getting worse, and I ordered the women and old men to pray for me as zealously as they could, because I was dying. And I imposed a penitential fast on them and told them not to leave their yurts for three days, and to intimidate them even more I shot off the biggest fiverwork and left …”

“And they didn’t catch you?”