The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

The blacksmith passed for a very reasonable man and knew that neither quinine nor any other pharmaceutical medication could do anything against magic. He waited it out, tied a knot in a thick string, and threw it onto the dung heap to rot. That put an end to it all, because as soon as the string and the knot rotted, Selivan’s power was supposed to end. And so it happened. After this incident, Selivan never again turned into a pig, or at least decidedly no one since then ever met him in that slovenly guise.

With Selivan’s pranks in the form of a red rooster things went even more fortunately: the cross-eyed mill hand Savka, a most daring young lad, who acted with great foresight and adroitness, took up arms against him.

Having been sent to town once on the eve of a fair, he went mounted on a very lazy and obstinate horse. Knowing his character, Savka brought along on the sly, just in case, a good birch stick, with which he hoped to imprint a souvenir on the flanks of his melancholy Bucephalus. He had already managed to do something of the sort and had broken the character of his steed enough so that, losing patience, he began to gallop a little.

Selivan, not expecting Savka to be so well armed, jumped out on the eaves as a rooster the moment he arrived and began turning around, rolled his eyes in all directions, and sang “Cock-a-doodle-doo!” Savka wasn’t cowed by the sorcerer, but, on the contrary, said to him: “Eh, brother, never fear—you won’t get near,” and without thinking twice he deftly hurled the stick at him, so that he didn’t even finish his “cock-a-doodle-doo” and fell down dead. Unfortunately, he didn’t fall outside, but into the courtyard, where, once he touched the ground, it cost him nothing to go back to his natural human form. He became Selivan and, running out, took off after Savka brandishing the same stick with which Savka had given him the treatment when he sang as a rooster on the roof.

According to Savka, Selivan was so furious this time that it might have gone badly for him; but Savka was a quick-witted fellow and knew very well one extremely useful trick. He knew that his lazy horse forgot his laziness at once the moment he was turned towards home, to his trough. That was what he did. The moment Selivan rushed at him armed with the stick, Savka turned the horse around and vanished. He came galloping home, his face distorted by fear, and told about the frightful incident that had befallen him only the next day. And thank God he started to speak, because they feared he might be left mute forever.

VII

Instead of the cowed Savka, another braver ambassador was dispatched, who reached Kromy and came back safely. However, this one, too, on completing the trip, said it would have been easier for him to fall through the earth than to go past Selivan’s inn. Other people felt the same: the fear became general; but to make up for it they all combined their efforts to keep an eye on Selivan. Wherever and whatever shape he took, he was always found out, and they strove to cut off his harmful existence in all its guises. Let Selivan appear by his inn as a sheep or a calf—he was recognized and beaten anyway, and he couldn’t manage to hide in any of his guises. Even when he rolled out to the road one time as a new, freshly tarred cart wheel and lay in the sun to dry, his ruse was discovered and smart people smashed the wheel to bits, so that both the hub and the spokes flew in all directions.

Of all these incidents that made up the heroic epopee of my childhood, I promptly received quick and highly trustworthy intelligence. The swiftness of the news was owing in large part to the fact that there was always an excellent itinerant public that came to do their grinding at our mill. While the millstones ground the grain, their mouths with still greater zeal ground out all sorts of drivel, and from there all the interesting stories were brought to the maids’ room by Moska and Roska, and were then conveyed to me in the best possible versions, and I would set to thinking about them all night, creating very amusing situations for myself and Selivan, for whom, despite all I had heard about him, I nursed in the depths of my soul a most heartfelt attraction. I believed irrevocably that the time would come when Selivan and I would meet in some extraordinary way—and would even love each other far more than I loved Grandpa Ilya, in whom I disliked it that one of his eyes, namely the left one, always laughed a little.