There is another story about him that I heard only once. My father and some friends talked it over one night while I was in my bed. I asked my father the next day, and another time or two, but he insisted that I must have heard it wrong, and there was no story. The way the story went, as I heard it that one time, a friend of the traveller arrived some time after the drowning, quite possibly the very friend our visitor was looking for. The friend came with his own sister. He was a carpenter and stayed to build the barn in the traveller’s memory. We got a much better barn for it. The friend and the sister stayed living in our community for some years until typhoid fever took them both. The friend had a fiddle with him, and he got together other people with instruments, and they all played the traveller’s sheet music at the thanksgiving for the barn. Which makes for a heartwarming finish to a melancholy tale, which is why I remembered it even though my father denied it, and even though I can’t put names to its characters. With the exception of one, perhaps.

The barn was called by some older folk ‘Noah’s Ark’. I assumed it was because it was large and wooden and protected our animals in winter, but an old neighbour once told me it was after Noah, the carpenter who built it. I am sure the name was also in my father’s story, but it might be my own memory that has placed it there, working to manufacture an answer when it was unable to find any. I put it to him – the neighbour’s claim about Noah – but he told me some stories were just stories, and I shouldn’t go believing every little thing I heard.

It’s impossible to know the truth of it all. The traveller himself was of no assistance there. When he first took the music out to play it, he apparently told my grandfather he knew Beethoven. Then, with the lead figure in his hand, he told him he knew Napoleon. Then he said he had spoken to them both together, and my grandfather knew him at once for the storyteller he was. ‘What’s next out of that trunk of yours?’ he said to him. ‘George Washington’s teeth?’ That’s what he told me years later.

And what did the young Tsarevitch think of this story?