The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

But worst of all was that, with the usual strict order of our domestic life, this poetic rehearsal thought up by the rhetorician was absolutely impossible. Neither the time, nor the place, nor even all the other conditions favored Neonila’s listening to Apollinary’s verses and being their first appreciator. However, the anarchy that installed itself with my parents’ departure changed all that, and the student decided to take advantage of it. Now, forgetting all difference in our positions, we played cards every evening, and Apollinary even smoked his Nezhin roots around the house and sat in my father’s chair in the dining room, which offended me a little. Besides that, at his insistence, we played blind man’s buff several times, from which my brother and I wound up with bruises. We also played hide-and-seek, and once even organized a formal fête with lots of food. It seems all this was done “on the house,” as many thoughtless carousers reveled in those days, down whose ruinous path we were drawn by the rhetorician. To this day I don’t know who then made the suggestion that we gather a whole sack of the ripest hazelnuts, extracted from the mouse holes (where one usually finds only nuts of the highest quality). Besides the nuts, we had three gray paper bags of yellow sugar lollipops, sunflower seeds, and candied pears. These last really stuck to your hands and were hard to wash off.

Since this last fruit enjoyed special attention, pears were given only as prizes in the game of forfeits. Moska, Oska, and Roska, being essentially insignificant, got no candied fruit at all. The game of forfeits included Annushka, and me, and my tutor Apollinary, who proved to be very clever and inventive. All this took place in the drawing room, where only very honored guests used to sit. And there, in the daze of passionate merriment, some desperate spirit got into Apollinary, and he conceived a still bolder undertaking. He decided to declaim his ode in a grandiose and even terrifying setting, where the strongest nerves would be subjected to the highest tension. He began inciting us all to go together the next Sunday to pick lily of the valley in Selivan’s forest. And in the evening, when he and I were going to bed, he revealed to me that the lily of the valley was only a pretext, while the main goal was to read the verses in that terrible setting.

On one side would be the effect of the fear of Selivan, on the other the fear of the terrible verses … How would it turn out, and could anyone bear it?

And, imagine, we did venture to do it.

In the animation that gripped us all on that memorable spring evening, it seemed to us that we were all brave and could pull off the desperate stunt safely. In fact, there would be a lot of us, and besides I would, naturally, bring along my huge Caucasian dagger.

I admit, I wanted very much for all the others to be armed according to their strength and possibilities, but I didn’t meet with any due attention or readiness for that. Apollinary took only his pipe and guitar, and the girls went with trivets, skillets, a kettle of eggs, and a cast-iron pot. In the pot they intended to boil wheat porridge with lard, and in the skillets to fry eggs, and in that sense they were excellent; but in the sense of defending ourselves in case of possible mischief on Selivan’s part, they meant decidedly nothing.

To tell the truth, however, I was displeased with my companions for something else as well—namely, that I didn’t feel on their part the same consideration for Selivan that I myself was imbued with. They did fear him, but somehow light-mindedly, and even risked some critical bantering about him. One Annushka said she would take a rolling pin and kill him with it, and Snappy laughingly said she could bite him, and with that she bared her extremely white teeth and bit off a piece of wire. All this was somehow unserious; but the rhetorician surpassed them all. He denied the existence of Selivan altogether—said that there had never even been such a person, and that he was simply a figment of the imagination, like the Python, Cerberus, and their ilk.⁶

I saw then for the first time how far a man was capable of being carried away by negation! What was the use, then, of any rhetoric, if it allowed one to put on the same level of probability the mythological Python and Selivan, the reality of whose existence was confirmed by a multitude of manifest events?

I did not yield to that temptation and preserved my belief in Selivan. More than that, I believed that the rhetorician was certain to be punished for his unbelief.

However, if one did not take this philosophizing seriously, then the projected outing in the forest promised much merriment, and no one either wished or was able to make himself prepare for occurrences of another sort. And yet good sense should have made us highly cautious in that cursed forest, where we would be, so to speak, in the very jaws of the beast.