The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

I simply couldn’t believe for long that Selivan had done all his supernatural wonders with evil intent towards people, and I liked very much to think about him; and usually, as soon as I began to doze off, I dreamed about him—quiet, kind, and even hurt. I had never yet seen him, and was unable to picture his face to myself from the distorted descriptions of the talebearers, but I saw his eyes as soon as I closed my own. They were big eyes, perfectly blue and very kind. And while I slept, Selivan and I were in the most pleasant harmony: we found various secret little burrows in the forest, where we kept a lot of bread and butter and warm children’s coats stashed away, which we would take, run to cottages we knew in the village, place them in a dormer window, knock to get somebody’s attention, and run away.

I think those were the most beautiful dreams of my life, and I always regretted that when I woke up, Selivan turned back into a brigand, against whom every good man had to take every measure of precaution. I admit, I had no wish to lag behind the others, and while I had the warmest friendship with Selivan in my dreams, on waking I considered it not superfluous to protect myself from him even at a distance.

To that end, by way of no little flattery and other humiliations, I talked the housekeeper into giving me my father’s old and very big Caucasian dagger, which she kept in the larder. I tied it to the chinstrap I had taken from my uncle’s hussar shako and cleverly hid this weapon under the mattress at the head of my little bed. If Selivan had appeared at night in our house, I would certainly have confronted him.

Neither my father nor my mother knew of this secret armory, and that was absolutely necessary, otherwise the dagger would, of course, have been taken from me, and then Selivan would have disturbed my peaceful sleep, because I was still terribly afraid of him. And meanwhile he was already making approaches to us, but our pert young girls recognized him at once. Selivan dared to appear in our house as a big red-brown rat. At first he simply made noise in the larder at night, but then he got down into a big tub made from a hollowed linden trunk, at the bottom of which, covered by a sieve, lay sausages and other good things set aside for receiving guests. Here Selivan wanted to cause us serious domestic trouble—probably to pay us back for the troubles he had suffered from our muzhiks. Turning into a red-brown rat, he jumped to the bottom of the tub, pushed aside the stone weight that lay on the sieve, and ate all the sausages. But then there was no way he could jump back out of the high tub. This time, by all appearances, Selivan couldn’t possibly escape the well-deserved punishment that Snappy Annushka, the quickest of the girls, volunteered to mete out to him. For that she appeared with a kettle full of boiling water and an old fork. Annushka’s plan was first to scald the were-rat with the boiling water, and then stab him with the fork and throw the dead body into the weeds, to be eaten by crows. But in carrying out the execution, Round Annushka made a clumsy move: she splashed boiling water on Snappy Annushka’s hand. The girl dropped the fork from pain, and at the same moment the rat bit her finger and, running up her sleeve with remarkable agility, jumped out, and, having put a general fright into all those present, made himself invisible.

My parents, who looked upon this incident with ordinary eyes, ascribed the stupid outcome of the hunt to the clumsiness of our Annushkas; but we, who knew the secret springs of the matter, also knew that it was impossible to do any better here, because it was not a simple rat, but the were-rat Selivan. However, we didn’t dare tell that to the adults. As simple-hearted folk, we feared criticism and the mockery of something we ourselves considered obvious and unquestionable.

Selivan didn’t dare to cross the front doorstep in any of his guises, as it seemed to me, because he knew something about my dagger.

And to me that was both flattering and annoying, because, as a matter of fact, I was tired of nothing but talk and rumors and was burning with a passionate desire to meet Selivan face-to-face.

That finally turned into a languishing in me, in which I spent the whole long winter with its interminable evenings, but when the first spring torrents came down the hills, an event took place that upset the whole order of our life and unleashed the dangerous impulses of unrestrained passions.

VIII

The event was unexpected and sad. At the height of the spring thaw, when, according to a popular expression, “a puddle can drown a bull,” a horseman came galloping from my aunt’s far-off estate with the fateful news of my grandfather’s dangerous illness.