The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

That was the question the neighboring peasants puzzled over, though not for very long. Soon they all realized that Selivan kept company with the unclean powers … These unclean powers set up all sorts of profitable deals for him, which for ordinary people were even impossible.

It’s a known thing that the devil and his helpers have a great eagerness to do people all sorts of evil; but they especially like taking people’s souls out of them unexpectedly, so that they have no time to purify themselves by repentance. If some human being helps them in their schemes, all the unclean powers—that is, all the wood demons, water demons, and kikimoras—willingly do him various favors, though on very stiff conditions. A man who helps demons must follow them to hell himself—sooner or later, but inevitably. Selivan found himself precisely in that fatal situation. In order to live somehow in his ruined little house, he had long since sold his soul to several devils at once, and after that they had begun to use the strongest measures to drive travelers to his inn. No one ever came out of Selivan’s again. It was done in such a way that the wood demons, in collusion with the kikimoras, would suddenly raise a storm or blizzard towards evening, so that the man on the road would get confused and hurry to hide wherever he could from the raging elements. Selivan would at once pull a clever trick: he would put a light in his window, and by that light would draw in merchants with fat moneybags, noblemen with secret strongboxes, and priests in fur hats all lined with banknotes. It was a trap. Of those who went through Selivan’s gates, not one ever came back out. What Selivan did with them nobody knew.

Grandpa Ilya, having come to that point, would just move his hand through the air and say imposingly:

“The owl flies, the hawk glides … nothing to be seen: storm, blizzard, and … mother night—all’s out of sight.”

Not to lower myself in Grandpa Ilya’s opinion, I pretended to understand what the words “The owl flies and the hawk glides” meant, but I understood only one thing, that Selivan was some sort of all-around spook, whom it was extremely dangerous to meet … God forbid it should happen to anybody.

I tried, nevertheless, to verify the terrible stories about Selivan with other people, but they all said the same thing word for word. They all looked upon Selivan as a fearful spook, and, like Grandpa Ilya, they all sternly warned me “not to tell anybody about Selivan at home.” Following the miller’s advice, I observed this muzhik commandment until one especially frightening occasion when I myself fell into Selivan’s clutches.

VI

In winter, when the storm windows were put up, I couldn’t see Grandpa Ilya and the other muzhiks as often as before. I was protected from the frosts, while they were all left to work in the cold, during which one of them got into an unpleasant episode that brought Selivan onstage again.

At the very beginning of winter, Ilya’s nephew, the muzhik Nikolai, went to celebrate his name day in Kromy and didn’t come back, and two weeks later he was found at the edge of Selivan’s forest. Nikolai was sitting on a stump, his chin propped on his stick, and, by the look of it, resting after such great fatigue that he didn’t notice how a blizzard had buried him up to the knees in snow and foxes had taken bites from his nose and cheeks.

Nikolai had obviously lost his way, gotten tired, and frozen to death; but everybody knew it had happened with some hidden purpose and Selivan was behind it. I learned of it from the maids, of whom there were many in our house, almost all of them named Annushka. There was big Annushka, little Annushka, pockmarked Annushka, round Annushka, and also another Annushka nicknamed “Snappy.” This last one was a sort of journalist and reporter among us. She received her pert nickname for her lively and playful character.

There were only two maids who weren’t called Annushka—Neonila and Nastya, whose position was somewhat special, because they were specially educated in Madame Morozova’s fashion shop in Orel; and there were also three errand girls in the house—Oska, Moska, and Roska. The baptismal name of one was Matrena, of another Raïssa, and what Oska’s real name was I don’t know. Moska, Oska, and Roska were still in their nonage and were therefore treated scornfully by everybody. They ran around barefoot and had no right to sit on chairs, but sat low down, on footstools. Their duties included various humiliating tasks, such as cleaning basins, taking out wash-tubs, walking the lapdogs, and running errands for the kitchen staff and to the village. Nowadays there is no such superfluous servantry in country households, but back then it seemed necessary.