In this same peaceful spirit as I’ve represented to you, we lived nigh onto three years. Everything went swimmingly, successes poured down on us as from Amalthea’s horn,10 when we suddenly perceived that among us there were two vessels chosen by God for our punishment. One such was the blacksmith Maroy, and the other the accountant Pimen Ivanovich. Maroy was quite simple, even illiterate, which is even a rarity among the Old Believers, but he was a peculiar man: of clumsy appearance, like a camel, and stout as a boar—an armful and a half in girth, and his brow all overgrown with a thick mane like an old antlion,11 and in the middle of his head, on top, he used to shear a bare patch. He was dull and incomprehensible of speech, he maundered with his lips, and his mind was slow and inept at everything, so that he couldn’t even learn prayers by heart and used to repeat just some one word, but he could foresee the future and had the gift of prophecy, and could give intimations of what was to come. Pimen, on the other hand, was a foppish man: he liked to behave with great swagger and spoke with such a clever twisting of words that you could only wonder at his speech; but then he was of a light character and easily carried away. Maroy was an elderly man, in his seventies, but Pimen was middle-aged and refined: he had curly hair parted down the middle; bushy eyebrows; a pink-cheeked face—Belial, in a word.12 In these two vessels there was suddenly fermented the vinegar of that bitter draft we were to drink.
IV
The bridge we were building on eight granite piers was already rising high above the water, and in the summer of the fourth year we were starting to put iron chains on those piers. At that point there was a little hitch: as we started sorting out the links and fitting steel rivets to each hole by measure, it turned out that many of the bolts were too long and had to be cut, and each of those bolts—steel rods all made in England—was cast of the strongest steel and thick as a grown man’s arm. To heat up these bolts was impossible, because it softens the steel, and no tool could saw through them: but our blacksmith Maroy suddenly came up with this method: he’d coat the place where it had to be cut with thick axle grease mixed with coarse sand, and then stick the whole thing into the snow, and crumble salt around it, and turn it, spin it; then snatch it out of there all at once, put it on a hot anvil, and give it such a whack with a sledge that it would get cut off like a wax candle with snips. All the Englishmen and Germans came to look at Maroy’s cleverness, stared and stared, then suddenly laughed and started talking among themselves first, and then said in our language:
“So, Russ! You fine fellow; you goot understand physic!”
But what sort of “physic” could Maroy understand? He had no understanding of science at all, and simply did it with the wisdom the Lord gave him. And our Pimen Ivanovich went and started boasting about it. So it went badly on both sides: some ascribed it to science, of which this Maroy of ours had no notion, and others started saying that a visible blessing of God was upon us, working wonders such as had never been seen. And this last thing was worse for us than the first. I’ve already told you that Pimen Ivanovich was a weak man and a sensualist, and I will now explain why we nevertheless kept him in our crew. He went to town after provisions for us, made whatever purchases were necessary; we sent him to the post office to mail passports and money back home, and to retrieve the new passports when they came.13 Generally, it was that sort of thing he took care of, and, to tell the truth, in that sense he was a necessary and even very useful man. A real, solid Old Believer, naturally, always shuns that sort of vanity, and flees from dealings with officials, for we saw nothing but vexation from them, but Pimen was glad of the vanity, and had acquired a most abundant acquaintance across the river in town: merchants and gentlefolk he had to do with on the crew’s business—everybody knew him and considered him the first man among us. We, naturally, chuckled at that, but he was terribly fond of having tea with gentlefolk and showing off his eloquence: they called him our chief, and he only smiled and spread his beard on his chest. In short, an empty fellow! And this Pimen of ours wound up at a certain not unimportant person’s, whose wife was born in our parts, also a wordy one, and she had read herself up on some new books about Old Believers, in which we’ve no notion what’s written about us, and suddenly, I don’t know why, it entered her head that she had a great liking for us. The surprising thing was why she chose to be such a vessel! Well, if she liked us, she liked us, and whenever our Pimen came to her husband for something, she immediately sat him down to tea, and Pimen was glad of it and immediately rolled out his scrolls before her.
She pours out her woman’s vain talk, that you Old Believers are this and that, holy people, righteous, ever-blessed, and our Belial goes cross-eyed with pleasure, head bowed, beard smooth, voice soothing:
“Of course, madam. We observe the law of our forefathers, we’re this and that, we hold to these rules, and keep an eye on each other for the purity of our customs,” and, in a word, he says all sorts of things to her that don’t belong to a conversation with a worldly woman. And yet, just imagine, she’s interested.
“I’ve heard,” she says, “that God’s blessing is manifested visibly to you.”
And the man chimes in at once:
“Of course, my dear lady,” he replies, “it is manifested; it is manifested quite ocularly.”
“Visibly?”
“Visibly,” he replies, “visibly, madam. Just a couple of days ago one of our men snipped off stout steel like a cobweb.”
The little lady just clasped her sweet little hands.
“Ah,” she says, “how interesting! Ah, I love miracles terribly, and I believe in them! Listen,” she says, “please ask your Old Believers to pray that God will give me a daughter. I have two sons, but I absolutely must have a daughter. Is that possible?”
“It is, ma’am,” Pimen replies. “Why not? It’s perfectly possible! Only,” he says, “in such cases you must always have sacrificial oil burning.”