The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

Half a mile beyond that fork was a fine oak forest, and by the forest a most wretched inn, completely exposed and half fallen down, in which they said nobody ever stayed. That was easy to believe, because the inn offered no comforts for a stay, and because it was too close to the town of Kromy, where, even in those half-savage times, one could hope to find a warm room, a samovar, and second-rate white rolls. It was in this terrible inn, where nobody ever stayed, that the “empty innkeeper” Selivan lived, a terrible man whom nobody was glad to meet.

III

The story of the “empty innkeeper” Selivan, in Grandpa Ilya’s words, was the following. Selivan was of Kromy tradesman stock; his parents died early, and he lived as an errand boy at the baker’s and sold white rolls at a tavern outside the Orel gate. He was a good, kind, and obedient boy, but people kept telling the baker that he ought to be careful with Selivan, because he had a fiery red mark on his face—and that was never put there for nothing. There were such people as knew a special proverb for it: “Beware of him whom God hath marked.” The baker praised Selivan highly for his zeal and trustworthiness, but everybody else, as his sincere well-wishers, said that all the same real prudence called for wariness and warned against trusting him too much—because “God hath marked” him. If a mark had been put on his face, it was precisely so that all overly trusting people would be wary of him. The baker didn’t want to lag behind intelligent people, but Selivan was a very good worker. He sold his rolls assiduously and each evening conscientiously poured out for his master from a big leather purse all the ten- and five-kopeck pieces he had earned from passing muzhiks. However, the mark was not on him for nothing, but waiting for a certain occasion (it’s always like that). A “retired executioner” named Borka came to Kromy from Orel, and they said to him: “An executioner, Borka, so you was, and now you’ll have a bitter life with us,” and everybody tried the best they could to make these words come true for the man. When the executioner Borka came from Orel to Kromy, he had with him a daughter of about fifteen who had been born in jail—though many thought it would have been better for her not to have been born at all.

They came to live in Kromy by assignment. It’s incomprehensible now, but the practice then was to assign retired executioners to some town, and it was done just like that, without asking anyone’s wishes or consent. So it happened with Borka: some governor ordered that this old executioner be assigned to Kromy—and so he was, and he came there to live and brought his daughter with him. Naturally, the executioner was not a desirable guest for anybody in Kromy. On the contrary, being spotless themselves, they all scorned him, and decidedly nobody wanted to have either him or his daughter around. And the weather was already very cold when they came.

The executioner asked to be taken into one house, then another, and then stopped bothering people. He could see that he aroused no compassion in anybody, and he knew that he fully deserved it.

“But the child!” he thought. “The child’s not to blame for my sins—somebody will take pity on the child.”

And Borka again went knocking from house to house, asking them to take not him, but only the girl … He swore that he would never even come to visit his daughter.

But that plea was also in vain.

Who wants to have anything to do with an executioner?

And so, having gone around the little town, these ill-fated visitors asked to be taken to jail. There they could at least warm up from the autumnal wetness and cold. But the jail did not take them either, because they had already served their term and were now free people. They were free to die by any fence or in any ditch they liked.

Occasionally people gave the executioner and his daughter alms, not for their own sake, but for Christ’s, of course, but no one let them in. The old man and his daughter had no shelter and spent their nights in clay pits under the riverbank or in empty watchmen’s huts by the kitchen gardens along the valley. Their hard lot was shared by a skinny dog who had come with them from Orel.

He was a big, shaggy dog, whose fur was all matted. What he ate, having beggarly owners, no one knew, but they finally figured out that he had no need to eat, because he was “gutless,” that is, he was only skin and bones and yellow, suffering eyes, but “in the middle” he had nothing and therefore required no food at all.