The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

I’d only blush. I figured out, naturally, that it somehow had to do with me, but I never heard what brides mama and the matchmakers were talking about. One matchmaker or another would come—mama would shut herself up with her in the icon room, they’d sit under the crosses, have the samovar served, and talk all by themselves, and then the matchmaker would come out, pat me on the head, and encourage me:

“Don’t worry, Mishenka, my boy: soon now you won’t sit bored and alone, soon we’ll gladden you up.”

And mama even used to get angry at that and say:

“He needn’t know anything about it; whatever I decide over his head, that’s how it must be for him. It’s like in the scriptures.”

I didn’t worry about it. It was all the same to me: if I’m to marry, I’ll marry, and when it comes to tickling, we’ll see who out-tickles who.

But Aunt Katerina Leontyevna went against mama’s wish and instructed me against her.

“Don’t marry an Orel girl, Misha,” she said, “not for anything. Just you look: the local Orel girls are all haywire—not merchants, not gentry. They marry officers. Ask your mother to take you a wife from Elets, where she and I come from. Among the merchants there, the men are carousers, but the marriageable girls are real maidens: pious, modest—don’t look at officers, but wear kerchiefs when they go to pray and cross themselves in the old Russian way. If you marry one like that, you’ll bring blessings on your house, and start praying with your wife in the old way, and then I’ll leave you all my property, and to her I’ll give my God’s blessing, and my round pearls, and silver, and beads, and brocade jerkins, and warm jackets, and all my Bolkhovo lace.”

And there was quiet displeasure between my mother and my aunt on that score, because by then mama had quit the old faith entirely and read the akathist to the great martyr Barbara by the new Church calendar.⁶ She wanted to take a wife for me from the Orel girls, so as to renew the family.

“At least,” she said, “on the days of forgiveness before Lent, we’ll have somebody to go to with bread for forgiveness, and they’ll also have someone to bring braided loaves to.”

Mama liked to cut these loaves up afterwards for rusks and dunk them in tea with honey during Lent, but for my aunt their ancient faith had to be placed above everything.

They argued and argued, but the whole thing came out differently.

IV

A most unexpected incident suddenly occurred.

Once, during Christmastime, my aunt and I were sitting by the window after dinner, talking about something religious and eating pickled apples, and suddenly we notice a troika of hired horses standing outside in the snow by our gate. We look—a tall man gets out from under the felt flap of the kibitka, dressed in a Kalmyk coat of dark broadcloth lined with fleece, tied with a red belt, a green worsted scarf wrapped around the raised collar, its long ends twisted on his chest and tucked into his bosom, a felt hat on his head, and on his feet calfskin boots with the fur side out.

The man stood up and shook the snow off himself like a poodle, and then, together with the driver, pulled from under the flap of the kibitka another man, in a beaver hat and a wolfskin coat, and held him under the arms so that he could keep his feet, because it was slippery for him in his leather-soled felt boots.

Aunt Katerina Leontyevna was very worried, not knowing who these people were or why they had gotten out by our gate, but when she saw the wolfskin coat, she crossed herself:

“Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on us, amen!” she said. “It’s my brother Ivan Leontych, your uncle, come from Elets. What’s happened to him? He hasn’t been here for three years, not since your father’s funeral, and suddenly he turns up at Christmastime. Quick, fetch the key for the gate, run to meet him.”

I rushed to look for mama, and mama started looking for the key and finally found it in the icon chest, but by the time I ran to the gate, unlocked the lock, and drew the bolt, the troika had already gone, and the man in the Kalmyk coat had gone with the kibitka, and my uncle was standing there alone, holding on to the gate pull, and angry.

“What’s this?” he says. “You lock yourselves up in the daytime like scaredy-cats?”

Mama greeted him and replied:

“Don’t you know, brother, what a situation we have in Orel? There’s constant thievery, and we lock ourselves in day and night from the police.”

My uncle replied that the situation was the same everywhere: Orel and Kromy are thieving cronies, Karachev’s another, and Elets is their father. “We also lock ourselves in from the police,” he says, “but only at night—why in the daytime? I’m displeased that you left me outside the gate in the daytime: my felt boots have leather soles, it’s slippery to walk—and I’ve come on a church necessity, not empty-handed. God forbid some Orelian should snatch it from me and run off, and me unable to catch up with him.”

V