“Yes, if I could, I would kneel down too,” the crippled man dreamed.

“But in Russia,” I continued after a pause, “many other things also come from God. There is the feeling that everything new is introduced by Him; every article of clothing, every food, every virtue, and even every sin first has to have His approval before it comes into use.” The ailing man looked at me almost in fear. “This is only a fairy tale I’m referring to,” I hastened to calm him down, “a so-called bylina,¹ a ‘bygone’ we could call it. I’ll give you the gist of it in a few words. The title is ‘How Treachery Came to Russia.’”

I leaned against the window frame, and the crippled man closed his eyes, which he liked to do whenever a story began.

The terrible czar Ivan wanted to impose tribute on the neighboring princes and threatened them with a great war unless they sent gold to Moscow, the White City. The princes, after taking counsel, said as one man: “We shall give you three riddles. Come on the day that we indicate to the east, to the white stone, where we shall be assembled, and tell us the three answers. If they are right, we shall immediately give you the twelve casks of gold you demand from us.”

Czar Ivan Vassilievitch set to pondering, but the many bells of his broad white city, Moscow, disturbed him. Then he called his learned men and counselors to him, and one by one he had those who could not answer the questions simply taken out onto the large red square (where just then the church dedicated to Vassily the Naked was being built) and beheaded. With this keeping him busy, the time passed by so quickly for him that he suddenly found himself on the way to the east, to the white stone where the princes were waiting. He had no answer to any of the three questions, but the ride ahead of him was long, and there was still the possibility he might meet a wise man; for in those days there were many wise men on the roads as refugees, since all the kings were in the habit of cutting off their heads whenever they did not seem to be wise enough. As it happened, he failed to encounter such a person. But one morning he saw an old bearded peasant who was building a church. He had already gotten as far as the framework for the roof and was putting the small slats in place on top of it. And it was quite curious to see how the old peasant kept climbing down off the church again and again to fetch the narrow slats one by one from where they were piled up below, instead of taking a bunch of them along all at once in his long caftan. Because of this he was constantly obliged to climb up and down, and it seemed by no means unlikely that he was going to carry each one of the many hundred slats to its place in this manner. This made the czar impatient.