The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

My childhood was spent in Orel. We lived in Nemchinov’s house, somewhere not far from the “little cathedral.” Now I can’t make out exactly where this tall wooden house stood, but I remember that from its garden there was an extensive view over the wide and deep ravine with its steep sides crosscut by layers of red clay. Beyond the ravine spread a big field on which the town warehouses stood, and near them soldiers always drilled in the summer. Every day I watched how they drilled and how they were beaten. That was common practice then, but I simply couldn’t get used to it and always wept over them. To keep that from being repeated too often, my nanny, Marina Borisovna, an elderly soldier’s widow from Moscow, took me for walks in the town garden. There we would sit over the shallow Oka and watch little children swimming and playing in it. I envied their freedom very much then.

The main advantage of their unfettered condition, in my eyes, lay in their wearing neither shoes nor shirts, because they took their shirts off and tied the sleeves to the collar. Adapted like that, the shirts turned into little sacks, and by holding them against the current, the boys caught tiny, silvery fish in them. They were so small it was impossible to clean them, and that was considered sufficient grounds for cooking them and eating them uncleaned.

I never had the courage to find out how they tasted, but the fishing performed by those diminutive fishermen seemed to me the height of happiness that freedom could afford a boy of the age I was then.

My nanny, however, knew some good reasons why such freedom would be completely improper for me. Those reasons consisted in my being the child of a noble family and my father being known to everyone in town.

“It would be a different matter,” my nanny said, “if we were in the country.” There, among simple, boorish muzhiks, I too might be allowed to enjoy something of that sort of freedom.

I think it was precisely because of those restrictive arguments that I began to feel an intense yearning for the countryside, and my rapture knew no bounds when my parents bought a small estate in the Kromy district. That same summer we moved from the big house in town to a very cozy but small village house with a balcony and a thatched roof. Woods in the Kromy district were costly and rare even then. This was an area of steppes and grain fields, well irrigated besides by small but clean streams.

II

In the country I at once struck up a wide and interesting acquaintance with the peasants. While my father and mother were intensely occupied with setting up the estate, I lost no time in becoming close friends with the grown-up lads and the little boys who pastured horses on the “kuligas.”^* The strongest of all my attachments, however, was to an old miller, Grandpa Ilya—a completely white-haired old man with huge black mustaches. He was more available for conversation than all the others because he didn’t go away to work, but either strolled about the dam with a dung fork or sat over the trembling sluice-gate, pensively listening to whether the wheels were turning regularly or water was seeping in somewhere under the gate. When he got tired of doing nothing, he fashioned spare maple shafts or spindles for the cogwheel. But in all the situations I’ve described, he easily left off work and entered willingly into conversation, which he conducted in fragments, without any connection, but with his favorite system of allusions, and in the process making fun maybe of himself, maybe of his listeners.

Through his job as a miller, Grandpa Ilya had rather close connections with the water demon who was in charge of our ponds, the upper and the lower, and of two swamps. This demon had his main headquarters under an unused sluice-gate at our mill.

Grandpa Ilya knew everything about him and used to say:

“He likes me. Even when he comes home angry over some disorder, he does me no harm. If anybody else is lying in my place here on the sacks, he pulls at him and throws him off, but he won’t ever touch me.”

All the young people assured me that the relations I’ve described between Grandpa Ilya and the “old water demon” really existed, but that they held out not at all because the water demon liked him, but because Grandpa Ilya, being a real, true miller, knew a real, true miller’s word, which the water demon and all his little devils obeyed as unquestioningly as did the grass snakes and toads that lived under the sluiceways and on the dam.