Angrily slamming the gate after the last sleigh, carrying two merchants, forced its way in, he locked it with a padlock and, hanging the key in the icon corner, said firmly:

“Well, now whoever wants to can beat his head on the gate—I won’t open.”

But he had barely managed to say that and, having taken off his vast sheepskin coat, to cross himself with a big, old-style cross and prepare to get onto the hot stove, when someone’s timid hand knocked on the windowpane.

“Who’s there?” the innkeeper called in a loud and displeased voice.

“It’s us,” a muffled reply came from outside the window.

“Well, what do you want?”

“Let us in, for Christ’s sake, we’re lost … frozen.”

“Are there many of you?”

“Not many, not many, eighteen in all, just eighteen,” a man, obviously completely frozen, said outside the window, stammering and his teeth chattering.

“There’s no room for you, the whole cottage is packed with people as it is.”

“At least let us warm up a little!”

“What are you?”

“Carters.”

“Empty or loaded?”

“Loaded, dear brother, we’re carrying hides.”

“Hides! You’re carrying hides, and you ask to spend the night in the cottage? What’s become of the Russian people! Get out of here!”

“But what are they to do?” asked a traveler lying under a bearskin coat on an upper bunk.

“Pile up the hides and sleep under them, that’s what,” the innkeeper replied, and, giving the carters another good cursing out, he lay motionless on the stove.

From under his bearskin, the traveler reprimanded the innkeeper for his cruelty in tones of highly energetic protest, but the man did not honor his remarks with the slightest response. Instead of him, a small, red-haired man with a sharp, wedge-shaped little beard called out from a far corner.

“Don’t condemn our host, my dear sir,” he began. “He takes it from experience, and what he says is true—with the hides it’s safe.”

“Oh?” a questioning response came from under the bearskin.

“Perfectly safe, sir, and it’s better for them that he doesn’t let them in.”

“Why is that?”

“Because now they’ll get themselves useful experience from it, and meanwhile if some helpless person or other comes knocking here, there’ll be room for him.”

“Who else would the devil bring here now?” said the fur coat.

“Listen, you,” the innkeeper put in. “Don’t spout empty words. Can the foul fiend bring anybody to where there’s such holy things? Don’t you see the icon of the Savior and the face of the Mother of God here?”

“That’s right,” the red-haired little man seconded. “Every saved person is guided by an angel, not by the dark one.”

“That’s something I’ve never seen, and since I find this a vile place, I don’t want to think my angel brought me here,” replied the garrulous fur coat.

The innkeeper only spat angrily, but the little redhead said good-naturedly that not everybody could behold the angel’s path, and you could only get a notion of it from real experience.

“You speak of it as if you’ve had such experience yourself,” said the fur coat.

“Yes, sir, I have.”

“So you saw an angel, and he led you—is that it?”

“Yes, sir, I saw him, and he guided me.”

“What, are you joking, or making fun?”

“God keep me from joking about such things!”

“So what precisely was it that you saw: how did the angel appear to you?”

“That, my dear sir, is a whole big story.”

“You know, it’s decidedly impossible to fall asleep here, and you’d be doing an excellent thing if you told us that story now.”

“As you wish, sir.”

“Please tell it, then: we’re listening. But why are you kneeling over there? Come here to us, maybe we can make room and all sit together.”

“No, sir, I thank you for that! Why crowd yourselves? And besides, the story I’m going to tell you is more properly told kneeling down, because it’s a highly sacred and even awesome thing.”

“Well, as you wish, only tell us quickly, how could you see an angel and what did he do to you?”

“If you please, sir, I’ll begin.”

II

As you can undoubtedly tell from my looks, I’m a totally insignificant man, nothing more than a muzhik, and the education I received was most village-like, as suited that condition. I’m not from hereabouts, but from far away; by trade I’m a mason, and I was born into the old Russian faith.3 On account of my orphanhood, from a young age I went with my countrymen to do itinerant work and worked in various places, but always with the same crew, under our peasant Luka Kirilovich. This Luka Kirilovich is still alive: he’s our foremost contractor. His business was from old times, established by his forefathers, and he didn’t squander it, but increased it and made himself a big and abundant granary,4 but he was and is a wonderful man and not an offender. And where, where didn’t our crew go with him! Seems we walked all over Russia, and nowhere have I seen a better and steadier master than him. We lived under him in the most peaceful patriarchy, and he was our contractor and our guide in trade and in faith. We followed him to work the way the Jews followed Moses in their wanderings in the desert; we even had our own tabernacle with us and never parted with it: that is, we had our own “God’s blessing” with us. Luka Kirilovich passionately loved holy icons, and, my dear sirs, he owned the most wonderful icons, of the most artful workmanship, ancient, either real Greek, or of the first Novgorod or Stroganov icon painters.5 Icon after icon shone not so much by their casings as by the keenness and fluency of their marvelous artistry. I’ve never seen such loftiness anywhere since!

There were various saints, and Deisises, and the Savior-not-made-by-hands with wet hair,6 and holy monks, and martyrs, and the apostles, and most wondrous were the multifigured icons with different deeds, such as, for instance, the Indictus, the feasts, the Last Judgment, the Saints of the month, the Council of Angels, the Paternity, the Six Days, the Healers, the Seven Days of the Week with praying figures, the Trinity with Abraham bowing down under the oak of Mamre, and, in short, it’s impossible to describe all this beauty, and nowadays such icons aren’t painted anywhere, not in Moscow, not in Petersburg, not in Palekh;7 and there’s even no talking about Greece, because the know-how has long been lost there. We all passionately loved these holy icons of ours, and together we burned lamps before them, and at the crew’s expense we kept a horse and a special cart in which we transported this blessing of God in two big trunks wherever we went. We had two icons in particular, one copied from the Greek by old Moscow court masters: our most holy Lady praying in the garden, with all the cypress and olive trees bowing to the ground before her; and the other a guardian angel, Stroganov work. It’s impossible to express what art there was in these two holy images!

You look at Our Lady, how the inanimate trees bow down before her purity, and your heart melts and trembles; you look at the angel … joy! This angel was truly something indescribable. His face—I can see it now—is most brightly divine and so swiftly succoring; his gaze is tender; his hair is tied with a fine ribbon, its ends curling around his ears, a sign of his hearing everything from everywhere; his robe is shining, all spangled with gold; his armor is feathery, his shoulders are girded; on his chest the face of the infant Emmanuel; in his right hand a cross, in his left a flaming sword. Wondrous! Wondrous! … The hair on his head is wavy and blond, curly from the ears down, and traced hair by hair with a needle. His wings are vast and white as snow, but azure underneath, done feather by feather, and on each shaft barb by barb. You look at those wings, and where has all your fear gone to? You pray, “Overshadow me,” and you grow all quiet at once, and there’s peace in your soul. That’s what kind of icon it was! And for us these two icons were like the holy of holies for the Jews, adorned by the wonderful artistry of Bezaleel.8 All the icons I mentioned earlier were transported by horse in special trunks, but these two we didn’t even put in the cart, but carried: Luka Kirilovich’s wife, Mikhailitsa, always carried Our Lady, and Luka himself kept the image of the angel on his breast. He had a brocade pouch made for this icon, lined with dark homespun, and with a button, and on the front side there was a scarlet cross made from real damask, and there was a thick green silk cord to hang it round the neck. And so this icon that was always kept on Luka’s breast preceded us wherever we went, as if the angel himself were going before us. We used to go from place to place for new work over the steppe, Luka Kirilovich ahead of us all, waving his notched measuring stick instead of a staff, Mikhailitsa behind him in the cart with the icon of the Mother of God, and behind them the whole crew of us marching, and there in the field there’s grass, meadow flowers, herds pasturing here and there, a shepherd playing his reed … a sheer delight for heart and mind! Everything went beautifully for us, and wondrous was our success in all things: we always found good work; there was concord among us; peaceful news kept coming to us from our folks at home; and for all that we blessed the angel who went before us, and it seemed to us it would be harder to part with his most wonderful icon than with our own lives.

And could we have thought that somehow, by some chance or other, we would be deprived of our most precious and holy thing? And yet that grief awaited us, and was arranged for us, as we perceived only later, not through people’s perfidy, but through the providence of our guide himself. He himself wished to be insulted, in order to grant us the holy ordeal of sorrow, and through it to show us the true path, before which all the paths we had trodden were like a dark and trackless wilderness. But allow me to inquire whether my story is interesting and I am not troubling your attention for nothing?

“Not at all, not at all: be so kind as to continue!” we exclaimed, having become interested in what he was telling.

“Very well, sirs, I obey, and will begin, as best I can, to set forth the wondrous wonders that came to us from our angel.”

III

We came to do big work near a big city on a big stream of water, the Dniepr River, to build there a big and now highly famous stone bridge.9 The city stands on the steep right bank, and we settled on the low left bank covered with meadows, and a beautiful peosage opened before us: old churches, holy monasteries with the relics of many saints; lush gardens and trees such as are pictured in the frontispieces of old books, that is, sharp-pointed poplars. You look at it all and it’s as if somebody’s plucking at your heart—it’s so beautiful! You know, of course, we’re simple people, but all the same we do feel the all-graciousness of God-created nature.

And so we fell so cruelly in love with this place that, on the very first day, we started building ourselves a temporary dwelling there. We first drove in long piles, because the place was low-lying, right next to the water, then on those piles we set about constructing a room, with an adjacent storeroom.