The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

Grandpa Ilya told me how this could be achieved “in the easiest way.” Take any dog while it’s still a pup and make it drink melted tin or lead, and it will become without guts and have no need to eat. But, naturally, for that you had to know “a special magic word.” And since the executioner obviously knew that word, people of strict morals killed his dog. This had to be done, of course, so as not to give indulgence to sorcery; but it was a great misfortune for the beggars, because the girl slept with the dog, who shared with her some of the warmth he had in his fur. However, there naturally could be no pandering to magic for the sake of such trifles, and everyone was of the opinion that destroying the dog was perfectly right. Sorcerers should not be allowed to fool right-minded people.

IV

After the destruction of the dog, the executioner himself kept the girl warm in the huts, but he was already old and, luckily for him, did not have to keep up this care, which was beyond his strength, for very long. One freezing night, the child felt that her father was colder than she, and she was so frightened that she moved away from him and even fainted from terror. Till morning she remained in the embrace of death. When the sun rose and people on their way to church peeked into the hut out of curiosity, they saw the father and daughter frozen stiff. They somehow managed to warm up the girl, and when she saw her father’s strangely immobile eyes and wildly bared teeth, she realized what it meant and burst into sobs.

The old man was buried outside the cemetery, because he had lived badly and died without repentance, and his girl they more or less forgot about … Not for long, it’s true, just for a month or so, but when they remembered her a month later, she was nowhere to be found.

One might have thought that the orphan girl had run away to some other town or gone begging in the villages. Far more curious was another strange circumstance connected with the girl’s disappearance: even before she turned up missing, it was noticed that the baker’s boy Selivan had vanished without a trace.

He vanished quite unexpectedly, and more heedlessly, besides, than any other runaway before him. Selivan took absolutely nothing from anybody. All the rolls given him to sell even remained on his tray, and all the money for those he had sold was there as well. But he himself did not return home.

These two orphans were regarded as lost for a whole three years.

Suddenly one day a merchant came back from a fair, the man who also owned the long-abandoned inn “at the fork,” and said he had had an accident: he was driving along a log road, misguided his horse, and was nearly crushed under his cart, but an unknown vagabond saved him.

He recognized this vagabond, and it turned out he was none other than Selivan.

The merchant Selivan had saved was not the sort to be insensitive to a service rendered him: to avoid being accused of ingratitude at the Last Judgment, he wished to do the vagabond a good turn.

“I want to be your benefactor,” he said to Selivan. “I have a vacant inn at the fork: go and settle there as the innkeeper, sell oats and hay, and pay me only a hundred roubles a year in rent.”

Selivan knew that four miles from town on an abandoned road was no place for an inn, and whoever kept it could not possibly expect any travelers; but all the same, since this was the first time he had been offered a place of his own, he accepted.

The merchant let him have it.

V

Selivan arrived at the inn with a small, one-wheeled dung cart in which he had placed his belongings, and on top of which a sick woman, dressed in pitiful rags, lay with her head thrown back.

People asked Selivan:

“Who is she?”

He replied: “She’s my wife.”

“What parts is she from?”

Selivan meekly replied:

“God’s parts.”

“What ails her?”

“Her legs hurt.”

“What caused the hurt?”

Frowning, Selivan grunted:

“The cold earth.”

He didn’t say another word, picked up the ailing cripple in his arms, and carried her inside.

There was no talkativeness or general social affability in Selivan; he avoided people and even seemed afraid of them; he never appeared in town, and nobody saw his wife at all after he brought her there in the dung cart. Since then many years had gone by, the young people of that time had already aged, and the inn at the fork had fallen further into decrepitude and ruin; but Selivan and his poor cripple still lived in it and, to the general amazement, paid some rent to the merchant’s heirs.

Where did this strange man earn all that was necessary for his own needs and what he had to pay for the completely ruined inn? Everybody knew that not one traveler had ever stopped at it, that not one driver had fed his horses there, and yet Selivan, while he lived in want, had not yet died of hunger.