After riding for a time, the messenger turned back. The peasant and his church had vanished. And also the heap of slats was no longer there—there was nothing there but empty, level ground. Then the man, shocked and horrified, stormed back to Moscow, stood breathless before the czar, and recounted to him in a scarcely understandable manner what had happened, saying that the supposed peasant could have been none other than God Himself.

“Do you think he was right?” my friend wondered softly, after my story had died away on the air.

“Maybe,” I replied, “but, you know, people are . . . superstitious . . . and on top of that, I have to go now, Ewald.”

“That’s a pity,” said the crippled man in a heartfelt manner. “Will you tell me another story again soon?”

“Gladly, but under one condition,” I said, moving back toward the window.

“And that is?” said Ewald, surprised.

“From time to time, you have to retell them all to the children in the neighborhood,” I requested.

“Oh, the children come and visit me so rarely nowadays.”

“They’ll come,” I consoled him. “Evidently you haven’t wanted to tell them any stories lately, and perhaps you haven’t had any subject matter—or too much subject matter. But when somebody knows a real story, do you really think that can stay hidden? Watch out, the word spreads fast, especially among the children. Goodbye, now.” And with that, I departed.

And the children heard the story the very same day.

1. A bylina (plural, bylini) is a legend or oral epic of Russian literature.—Ed.

How Old Timofei Died Singing

What a joy it is to tell stories to a handicapped person! Healthy people are so flighty; they look at things first from one side and then from another. And if you have been walking with them for an hour with them on your right, they might suddenly respond to you from the left, just because it has occurred to them that this might be more polite or show signs of a better upbringing. With a crippled person, you do not have to fear this. His immobility makes him more like a thing, and in fact he keeps up quite warm relations with things; it makes him, so to speak, into a thing that is quite superior to other things, one that listens not only with its silence but also with its rare, softly spoken words, and with its gentle, reverent feelings.

I like best telling stories to my friend Ewald. And I was very glad when he called to me from his everyday place at the window: “I have to ask you something.”

Immediately I went over to him and gave him my greetings.

“Where does that story you recently told me come from?” he finally asked. “From a book?”

“Yes,” I replied sadly, “the scholars buried it in there when it died; that’s not long ago at all. It was still alive a hundred years ago, surely completely without a care and on many lips. But the words that people use nowadays, these heavy words that can’t be sung, were hostile to it and took one mouth after another away from it, so that at the end it was eking out a very withdrawn and shabby existence on one dried-out pair of lips, like someone on a lowly widow’s pension. That’s where it died too, without leaving any posterity behind, and it was then, as we have already said, buried with all honors in a book, where others of its kin were already at rest.”