Forty Stories (42 page)

“Did you know, Your Eminence, that your mother came here while you were away?” A lay brother spoke to the Bishop as he entered his room.

“My mother? When did she come?”

“Before vespers. She first asked where you were, and then drove to the convent.”

“Then I must have seen her in the church. Dear Lord!”

And the Bishop laughed with joy.

“She bade me tell Your Eminence,” the lay brother went on, “that she will be coming back tomorrow. There was a little girl with her, I suppose a granddaughter. They are staying at Ovsyabnikov’s inn for the night.”

“What time is it?”

“A little after eleven.”

“Oh, what a shame!”

The Bishop sat for a while in his living room, pondering. He could scarcely bring himself to believe it was so late. His legs and arms were stiff, the back of his neck ached. He felt hot and uncomfortable. After resting a few moments he went into his bedroom, and there too he sat down and gave himself up to thoughts of his mother. He heard the lay brother walking away and Father Sisoi coughing in the next room. The monastery clock chimed the quarter.

The Bishop undressed and recited the prayers before going to sleep. He uttered those old and long-familiar words with scrupulous
attention, and yet all the time he was thinking about his mother. She had nine children, and perhaps forty grandchildren. She had spent most of her life in a poor village with her husband, who was a deacon; she had lived there for a very long time, from the age of seventeen to the age of sixty. The Bishop had memories of her going back to his earliest childhood, almost from the age of three. How he had loved her! Dear, precious, unforgettable childhood! Why was it that those far-off days, which would never return, seemed brighter, gayer, and richer than they really were! How gentle and good his mother had been to him when he fell ill during childhood, and in his youth! And now his prayers mingled with memories which shone ever more luminously like a flame, and they did not hinder him from thinking of his mother.

After his prayers the Bishop finished undressing and lay down, and as soon as he became aware of being in darkness there rose before him the image of his dead father, his mother, and his native village, which was called Lyesopolye. Wheels creaking, sheep bleating, church bells on clear summer mornings, gypsies beneath the window—how sweet to dream of such things! He remembered Father Simeon, the priest at Lyesopolye, a decent, gentle, good-natured man, small and lean, with a son studying for the priesthood—the son was a huge strapping fellow with a ferocious bass voice. Once the young seminarian flew into a rage at the cook and thundered: “Jehu’s ass—that’s what you are!” And Father Simeon heard him and said nothing, ashamed because he could no longer remember where the existence of such an ass was recorded in holy scripture. The priest who followed Father Simeon at Lyesopolye was called Father Demian. Because he drank heavily and sometimes saw green snakes, this priest was sometimes called “Demian the Snake Seer.” The schoolmaster at Lyesopolye was called Matvey Nikolaich. He, too, had been a divinity student. Though kindly and intelligent, he was a drunkard. He never beat his students, but for some reason or other he always kept a bundle of birch
twigs hanging on the wall, and underneath it there was the wholly unintelligible inscription:
Betula kinderbalsamica secuta
. He also had a shaggy black dog who went by the name of Syntax.

The Bishop laughed. Some five miles from Lyesopolye lay the village of Obnino with its wonder-working icon. In summer they would take the icon in procession, leaving Obnino to make the rounds of the neighboring villages, so that the church bells rang all day, now in one place, now in another, and to the Bishop it seemed as though the air itself had trembled with joy as he followed behind the icon, barefoot and hatless, with a simple smile on his lips and a simple faith in his heart. He had been immeasurably happy in those days, when he was known as Little Paul. Now he remembered that there were always crowds of people in Obnino, and in those days the priest, Father Alexey, in order to allow time for the offertory, made his deaf nephew read out the names of those for whom special prayers were asked “for the peace of their souls” or “for the health of their bodies.” Ilarion would read out the list of names, receiving an occasional five- or ten-kopeck coin for his services, and it was only when he had grown gray and bald, and was close to death, that he suddenly noticed on one of the slips of paper the words: “What a fool you are, Ilarion!” Until the age of fifteen Little Paul showed few signs of promise, and his schoolwork was so bad that his parents thought of removing him from the ecclesiastical school and putting him to work in a store. One day, calling at the Obnino post office for letters, he stared for a long time at the clerks and said: “Excuse me, how are you paid, every month or every day?”

The Bishop crossed himself and turned over on the other side, hoping to put his thoughts to rest, hoping to sleep.

“My mother has come,” he remembered, and laughed.

The moon glittered through the window, the floor shone white with moonlight, and the shadows lay over him. A cricket chirped. Through the wall came the sound of Father Sisoi snoring
in the next room, and the old man’s snores somehow suggested loneliness, forlornness, a strange wandering. Once Father Sisoi had been the housekeeper of the diocesan bishop, and so they called him “the former Father Housekeeper.” He was seventy years old, and sometimes he lived in the monastery twelve miles out of town, and sometimes he remained in the town. Just three days before he had turned up at the Pankratievsky Monastery, and the Bishop was keeping him there to discuss some affairs and business with him at his leisure.

The bell for matins rang at half past one. Father Sisoi coughed, muttered something in a disgruntled voice, and then got up and went wandering barefoot through the rooms.

“Father Sisoi,” the Bishop called.

Father Sisoi returned to his room and a little later reappeared, wearing boots and carrying a candle, with a cassock over his underclothes and an old, small, faded skullcap on his head.

“I can’t sleep,” the Bishop said, sitting up. “I must be ill. I don’t know what it is. Fever!”

“You may have caught cold, Your Eminence. You should get yourself rubbed with tallow.”

Father Sisoi stood there for a while and yawned: “O Lord, forgive me, a poor sinner …”

“I saw the electric lamps in Yerakin’s store,” the Bishop went on. “I don’t like them at all.”

Father Sisoi was old, lean, bent, always dissatisfied with something or other, and his eyes were angry and prominent like a crab’s.

“I don’t like it either,” he said, going away. “I don’t like it at all. O Lord, what a mess!”

On the following day, Palm Sunday, the Bishop took the service in the cathedral in the town. Afterward he paid a visit to the archbishop, called upon the widow of a general who was very
ill, and then drove home. Around two o’clock he entertained two beloved guests for lunch—his aged mother and his niece Katya, who was eight years old. All through lunch the spring sunshine streamed through the windows from the courtyard, shining sweetly on the white tablecloth and on Katya’s red hair. Through the double windowpanes there could be heard the cawing of rooks and the singing of starlings in the garden.

“It’s all of nine years since we saw one another,” the old woman was saying, “but when I caught sight of you at the convent yesterday, dear Lord, you hadn’t changed even a little bit, though maybe you’re a bit thinner and your beard is longer! Oh, Holy Mother, Queen of Heaven! Why, yesterday at the evening service there wasn’t anybody who could hold back his tears—they all wept, and as soon as I saw you, I wept too, though God knows what I was weeping for. It’s God’s holy will!”

Yet in spite of the affectionate tone in which she spoke to him, it was clear that she was not at her ease, did not know whether to address him with the familiar “thou” or the more formal “you,” or whether she should laugh or not, and she seemed to feel more like the widow of a deacon than his mother, while Katya sat there with her eyes glued on her uncle the Bishop, as though trying to make out what manner of man he was. Her hair had escaped from the comb and the velvet ribbon, and stood around her head like a halo; she had a turned-up nose, and her eyes were shifty, a little sly. Before they sat down to dinner she had broken a wineglass, and while talking her grandmother kept moving glasses and tumblers away from her. The Bishop listened to his mother, remembering how many, many years before, she had taken him and his brothers and sisters to visit relatives who were reputed to be rich. In those days she was busy with her own children, and now she was busy with her grandchildren, and she had brought Katya to see him.…

“Your sister Varenka has four children now,” she was saying. “Katya is the oldest. Your brother-in-law, Father Ivan, fell ill—God knows why these things happen—and he died three days
before the Feast of the Assumption, and so my poor Varenka was thrown out into a cold world …”

“How is Nikanor?” The Bishop asked about his oldest brother.

“Pretty well, thank God. Well enough, praise the Lord, to have some breath in his body. There’s one thing though: his son Nikolasha—that’s my grandson—didn’t want to enter the Church and he’s gone to the university instead to study medicine. He thinks it’s the best thing, but who really knows? It’s all God’s holy will!”

“Nikolasha cuts up dead people,” Katya said, spilling water over her lap.

“Sit still, child,” her grandmother said gently, and she removed the glass from the child’s hand. “Say a prayer, and eat!”

“It’s such a long time since we met!” the Bishop said, tenderly stroking his mother’s hand and shoulder. “I missed you when I was abroad, Mother. I missed you dreadfully.”

“Thank you.”

“In the evenings I used to sit by the open window, and I was terribly alone, and the band was playing, and suddenly I would be overcome with homesickness, and I would have given everything in the world to be home again, and seeing you.…”

His mother smiled and beamed, and then her face assumed a serious expression, and she said: “Thank you.”

Abruptly the Bishop’s mood changed. He gazed at his mother and could not understand how she had come by that timid, deferential expression of face and voice, and he could not understand what lay behind it, and he did not recognize her. He felt sad and hurt. He was still suffering from the headache of the day before, and his legs were aching horribly, and the fish he was eating seemed stale and insipid, and all the time he was very thirsty.

After dinner two rich ladies, landowners, came and sat for an hour and a half, pulling long faces, never uttering a word. Then the archimandrite, a gloomy, taciturn man, came on
business. Then they rang the bells for vespers, and the sun set behind the woods, and the day was over. Returning from church, the Bishop said his prayers hurriedly, went to bed, and drew up the covers to keep as warm as possible.

It disturbed him to remember the fish he had eaten at dinner. The moonlight too disturbed him, and the sound of voices came to his ears. In a nearby room, probably the guest room, Father Sisoi was talking politics.

“They’re fighting in Japan now,” he was saying. “The Japanese are just like the Montenegrins, you know, they’re the same race. They were both under the Turkish yoke, don’t you know?”

And then came the voice of Maria Timofeyevna: “We said our prayers and had a cup of tea, and then we went off to see Father Yegor at Novokhatnoye, and then we …”

She kept saying: “We had a cup of tea” or “We drank tea,” until it seemed that her whole life was devoted to tea drinking. Slowly, drowsily, the Bishop found himself surrendering to recollections of the seminary where he had studied. For three years he had taught Greek in the seminary, until he could no longer read without glasses; he became a monk, and later was made school inspector. Then he took the examination for a degree. At thirty-two he became rector of a seminary and was consecrated archimandrite. In those days his life flowed so peacefully and pleasantly, and seemed to stretch far into the future with no end in sight. Then his health began to fail, he became very thin and nearly blind, and his doctors advised him to give up everything and live abroad.

“And what did you do then?” Father Sisoi was saying in the next room.

“Then we had a cup of tea,” Maria Timofeyevna answered.

“Oh, Father, look, your beard is green!” Katya exclaimed suddenly in surprise, and she burst out laughing.

The Bishop remembered that old gray-haired Father Sisoi’s beard really did have a touch of green, and he, too, laughed.

“God have mercy on us, what a nuisance the girl is!” Father
Sisoi shouted in an angry voice. “You’re a spoiled brat! Sit still, will you?”

New recollections came to the Bishop—he remembered the white church, all perfectly new, in which he held services when he went abroad, and the roaring of the warm sea. His apartment there contained five lofty rooms, well lit, with a brand-new writing table in his study and a whole library of books. He read a great deal and wrote a lot. He remembered how homesick he had been for his native land, and he remembered a blind beggar woman playing on a guitar underneath his window and singing about love, and whenever he listened to her, he always found himself for some reason meditating on the past. Eight years slipped away before he was recalled to Russia, and now he was a suffragan bishop, and the past was already fading into the far-off mists, as though it were a dream.

Father Sisoi came into the bedroom with a candle in his hand.

“Well, well,” he said, surprised. “So you went to sleep early, Your Eminence.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s still very early, only ten o’clock! I bought a candle this evening. I want to rub you with tallow!”

“I have a fever,” the Bishop said, sitting up. “I really should do something about it. My head feels queer.…”

Father Sisoi removed the Bishop’s shirt and began rubbing his chest and back with tallow.

“There … there,” he said. “Oh, Lord Jesus Christ! There! I went to the town today and met—what’s his name?—yes, Archpresbyter Sidonsky. I had a cup of tea with him. I don’t like him. Oh, Lord Jesus Christ! There! I don’t like him one little bit!”