The city warmed as soon as the ice on the lake had melted. The plague began abating with the onset of hot days. The residents’ unease gradually dissipated as Belozersk returned to normal life. Arseny’s great renown, however, did not dissipate: it had already resounded throughout the entire princedom. People appealed to Arseny for all manner of medical reasons, sometimes even appealing without any reason. The city dwellers sensed obvious grace from God when speaking with him. Arseny spoke little but his very attention, smile, and touch filled people with joy and strength.
Prince Mikhail invited him to dinner from time to time. He again asked Arseny to live in his chambers but Arseny gently refused several times. The prince wanted to build him a large home beside his chambers but Arseny rejected that, too. Arseny would have refused the dinners as well but the prince would have taken that as a personal offense.
The prince was an intelligent person and was not zealous in his attempts to draw Arseny closer to himself. When Prince Mikhail grasped that Arseny needed a particular variety of independence, he did not consider imposing his company on him. The prince understood that this particular variety of independence was an independence whose boundaries he, the prince, could set himself. Letting Arseny live in the city as Arseny saw fit, the prince limited him in only one way: by denying him the right to leave. He politely but firmly made that plain.
Dinners with the prince were not the only complications Arseny faced. Dinners at Kseniya’s turned out to be more frequent and torturous for his soul. Silvester came for him nearly every day and pulled him to his mother’s house. It was even harder to refuse those dinners than the prince’s. It especially troubled Arseny that he did not want to refuse them.
He would come to Kseniya’s and see how she set the table. He delighted in her calm and precise motions. He and Kseniya barely spoke. Silence was not heavy with her and Arseny liked that, too. Sometimes Silvester spoke but more often he tried to leave them by themselves. After dinner, he would see Arseny home. That was pleasant for Arseny, too. Sometimes he thought Silvester feared he would turn and go into some other house.
Ustina cannot be your wife, said Silvester one day as he was seeing Arseny home.
Why? Arseny asked.
Because she does not live on this earth.
I answer for her everywhere, O Silvester.
Arseny placed his hand on Silvester’s shoulder but Silvester turned away.
Silvester was not alone in his unhappiness. Arseny was beside himself, too. He could not avoid visiting Kseniya because there were no apparent reasons to do so. Beyond that, he had started noticing that he awaited those visits as if they were holidays, and so he began experiencing shame. Arseny was also ashamed that he could not hide from his renown in Belozersk. But he was not allowed to quit the city.
The people of Belozersk now came to him on their own. He treated them for the same afflictions as he had treated residents of Rukina Quarter. He never asked anyone to pay for treatment but few were willing to be treated for free. Unlike the residents of the quarter, the city dwellers rarely paid in kind, preferring money. And they paid far more. Sometimes Prince Mikhail made generous gifts, too.
Arseny used the money to buy several small books that he chanced upon: they described the healing properties of herbs and stones. One of them was a doctor book from abroad, and Arseny paid the merchant Afanasy Flea, who had visited German lands, for a translation. Flea’s translation was extremely approximate, which limited opportunities for using the book. Arseny employed the book’s prescriptions only when they coincided with what he knew from Christofer.
By following along as the merchant read the unfamiliar symbols and translated the words they composed, Arseny grew interested in the correlations between languages. Thanks to the story of the confusion of tongues, Arseny knew of the existence of seventy-two world languages, but he had yet, in his whole life, to hear a single one of them beyond Russian. His lips moving, he repeated the unaccustomed combinations of sounds and words to himself, after Flea. When he learned their meanings, it surprised him that familiar things could be expressed in such an unusual and—this was the main thing—awkward way. At the same time, the multitude of opportunities for expression entranced and attracted Arseny. He tried to memorize correlations between Russian and German words, along with Flea’s pronunciation, which probably did not correspond to authentic German pronunciation.
The enterprising Flea quickly noticed Arseny’s interest and offered to give him German lessons. Arseny readily agreed. Essentially, these new lessons were nothing like the usual notions of teaching, because Afanasy Flea was unable to say anything intelligible about language in general. He had never thought about its structure and certainly did not know its rules. At first the lessons consisted of nothing more than the merchant reading more of the doctor book aloud and translating it. These language lessons differed from their previous translation sessions only because at the end of each section, Flea asked Arseny:
Got that?
This allowed the merchant to charge Arseny a double fee: for translation and for lessons. Arseny did not begrudge the money so he did not grumble. He valued Afanasy Flea as the only person in Belozersk familiar to any degree with speech from abroad. Understanding that he would achieve little by merely reading the doctor book, Arseny decided to make use of one of his instructor’s undeniable merits: Flea possessed a good ear and a tenacious memory.
During his time spent on lengthy trips in the land of Germany, Flea had mastered phrases to be uttered in various situations and could repeat those words when asked probing questions. Arseny described these situations for Flea and asked what to say in those cases. The merchant (this is so easy!) waved his hands around, surprised, and reported all the versions he had heard. Arseny wrote down what Flea said. When he was alone, he put his notes in order. He extracted the unfamiliar words from the expressions he heard from Flea and registered them in a special little dictionary.
One time Arseny bought a German chronicle when a foreign merchant’s items were sold off after he died while on the road. It was a thick and fairly tattered manuscript. Arseny and Flea could not tear themselves away when they opened it at random.
They read about people called satyrs that cannot be overtaken when they run. They go around naked, live with wild animals, and their bodies are covered with fur. Satyrs do not speak, they only shout shouts. Arseny and Flea read about athanasias who live in the northern part of the Great Ocean. Their ears are so large they can easily cover their entire bodies. They read of shchirits who, on the other hand, have no ears, only holes. They read of manticores who live in Indian lands: they have three rows of teeth, human heads, and the body of a lion.
The world is so varied, thought Arseny, remembering similar descriptions in the Alexander Romance and asking himself about the place of all these listed phenomena in the overall scheme of things. After all, their existence could not, could it (he asked himself), be an irrationality in a world that is constructed rationally?
The greater part of the money Arseny earned went, however, not toward books or even lessons. Arseny primarily bought roots, herbs, and minerals he needed to make remedies. He gave out expensive remedies to those who had no opportunity to buy them. The most expensive were medicinal remedies brought in from other countries. Among them were items Arseny had only heard about from Christofer or read about in the German doctor book. Now an opportunity had arisen for Arseny to try them out, too, thanks to the generosity of the citizens of Belozersk.