Stories (53 page)

Vavila stopped the horse and only then replied:

“Nine days. My uncle Kyrill died, and his soul lived in our cottage thirteen days after.”

“How do you know?”

“There was a knocking in the stove for thirteen days.”

“Well, all right. Drive on,” said the old man, and it was clear that he did not believe any of it.

Near Kuzmenki the carts turned onto the high road, and Lipa kept on straight. Day was breaking. As she went down into the ravine, the cottages and church of Ukleyevo were hidden in mist. It was cold, and it seemed to her that the same cuckoo was calling.

When Lipa came home, the cattle had not gone to pasture yet: everyone was asleep. She sat on the porch and waited. The old man was the first to come out; he understood at once, from the first glance, what had happened, and for a long time could not say a word, but only smacked his lips.

“Eh, Lipa,” he said, “you didn’t take care of my grandson …”

Varvara was awakened. She clasped her hands and burst into sobs, and they immediately began laying the child out.

“And he was such a pretty little boy …” she kept saying. “Oh, tush, tush … One little boy you had, and you didn’t take care of him, foolish girl…”

They served a panikhida in the morning and in the evening. The next day was the funeral, and after the funeral the guests and clergy ate a great deal and with such greed as if they had not eaten for a long time. Lipa served at the table, and the priest, raising a fork with a pickled mushroom on it, said to her:

“Don’t grieve over the baby. Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.”

And only after everyone left did Lipa realize properly that there was no more Nikifor and never would be, realize it and begin to
weep. And she did not know which room to go to in order to weep, because she felt that, after the boy’s death, there was no place for her in this house, that she had no part in it and was superfluous; and the others felt it, too.

“Well, what are you howling here for?” Aksinya suddenly shouted, appearing in the doorway; for the occasion of the funeral she had put on all new clothes and powdered her face. “Shut up!”

Lipa wanted to stop but could not, and wept still louder.

“Do you hear?” Aksinya shouted and stamped her foot in great wrath. I’m speaking to you! Get out and don’t ever set foot here, you convict’s wife! Out!”

“Well, well, well! …” the old man started fussing. “Aksiuta, calm down, dear … She’s crying, it’s an understandable thing … her wee one’s dead …”

“An understandable thing …” Aksinya mocked him. “Let her stay the night, but tomorrow there better not be a breath of her left here! An understandable thing! …” she mocked once more and, laughing, headed for the shop.

The next day, early in the morning, Lipa went to her mother in Torguyevo.

At the present time the roof and door of the shop have been painted and are shining like new; cheerful geraniums are blooming in the windows as before, and what took place three years ago in the house and yard of the Tsybukins is almost forgotten.

Old Grigory Petrovich is considered the proprietor, as before, but in fact everything has passed into Aksinya’s hands; she sells and buys, and nothing can be done without her consent. The brickworks is going well; owing to the demand for bricks for the railway, the price has gone up to twenty-four roubles a thousand; women and girls cart bricks to the station and load them on the cars, and get twenty-five kopecks a day for it.

Aksinya has gone shares with the Khrymins, and their factory is now called “Khrymin Junior and Co.” They’ve opened a tavern by the station, and now play the expensive accordion not at the factory but in this tavern, and the place is frequented by the postmaster, who has also started some sort of business, and by the stationmaster.
The Khrymin Juniors have presented deaf Stepan with a gold watch, and he is forever taking it out of his pocket and holding it to his ear.

In the village they say of Aksinya that she has acquired great power; and it is true that when she goes to her brickworks in the morning, with her naïve smile, beautiful, happy, and then when she gives orders at the brickworks, great power is felt in her. Everyone fears her at home, and in the village, and in the brickworks. When she comes to the post office, the postmaster jumps to his feet and says to her:

“I humbly beg you to be seated, Xenia Abramovna.”

A certain landowner, a fop in a fine flannel jacket and high patent-leather boots, an elderly man, was once selling her a horse, and got so carried away by his conversation with her that he let the horse go for what she offered. He held her hand for a long time and, looking into her merry, sly, naïve eyes, said:

“For a woman like you, Xenia Abramovna, I’m ready to do any pleasure. Only tell me when we can see each other, so that no one will bother us?”

“Why, whenever you like!”

And since then the elderly fop comes to the shop almost every day to drink beer. The beer is terribly bitter, like wormwood. The landowner wags his head but drinks.

Old Tsybukin no longer mixes in the business. He carries no money on him, because he cannot distinguish real money from false, but he keeps mum and tells no one about this weakness of his. He has become somehow forgetful, and if he is not given anything to eat, he will not ask himself; they are already used to eating without him, and Varvara often says:

“Our man went to bed again last night without eating.”

And she says it indifferently, because she is used to it. For some reason, summer and winter alike, he goes about in a fur coat and only on very hot days does not go out but sits at home. Ordinarily, he puts his coat on and turns up the collar, wraps himself up, and strolls around the village, along the road to the station, or else sits from morning till evening on a bench by the church gate. He sits and does not stir. Passersby bow to him, but he does not respond, because he dislikes peasants as much as ever. When someone asks him something, he replies quite reasonably and politely, but briefly.

The talk going round the village is that his daughter-in-law has
driven him out of his own house and gives him nothing to eat, and that he supposedly lives by begging: some are glad, others are sorry

Varvara has grown still more plump and white and does good deeds as before, and Aksinya does not interfere with her. There is now such a quantity of preserves that there is no time to eat it before the new berries come; it crystallizes, and Varvara all but weeps, not knowing what to do with it.

They have begun to forget about Anisim. A letter came from him once, written in verse, on a big sheet of paper with the look of a petition, in the same magnificent hand. Evidently his friend Samorodov was serving his term together with him. Below the verses, in a poor, barely legible hand, a single line was written: “I’m sick all the time here, it’s hard for me, help me, for Christ’s sake.”

Once—this was on a clear autumn day, before evening—old man Tsybukin was sitting by the church gates, the collar of his coat turned up, so that only his nose and the visor of his cap could be seen. At the other end of the long bench sat the contractor Yelizarov and beside him the school watchman, Yakov, a toothless old man of about seventy. Crutch and the watchman were talking.

“Children must give their old parents food and drink … honor thy father and mother,” Yakov was saying with vexation, “but she, this daughter-in-law, has driven her father-in-law out of his ownest house. The old man’s got nothing to eat, nothing to drink—where’s he to go? It’s the third day he hasn’t eaten.”

“The third day!” Crutch said in surprise.

“He just sits like that, saying nothing. He’s grown weak. And why say nothing? If he goes to court, the court’s not going to praise her for it.”

“What’s the court going to praise?” asked Crutch, who had not heard well.

“Eh?”

“She’s an all-right woman, works hard. In that business you can’t get by without it … sin, I mean …”

“From his ownest house,” Yakov went on in vexation. “Earn yourself a house, then drive people out. Eh, she’s a fine one, she is! A pla-a-ague!”

Tsybukin listened without stirring.

“Your own house or somebody else’s, it makes no difference, so long as it’s warm and the women don’t yell at you …” said Crutch,
and he laughed. “When I was still a young man, I pitied my Nastasya very much. She was a quiet little woman. She used to say: ‘Buy a house, Makarych! Buy a house, Makarych! And buy a horse, Makarych!’ She was dying, and she kept saying: ‘Buy yourself a droshky, Makarych, so as not to go on foot.’ But I only ever bought her gingerbread.”

“Her husband’s deaf and stupid,” Yakov went on, not listening to Crutch, “a fool of fools, the same as a goose. Does he understand anything? Hit a goose on the head with a stick—it still won’t understand.”

Crutch got up to go home to the factory. Yakov also got up, and the two went off together, still talking. When they were fifty paces away, old Tsybukin also got up and trudged after them, stepping uncertainly, as if on slippery ice.

The village was already sunk in evening twilight, and the sun shone only up above, on the road that ran snakelike down the slope. The old women were coming back from the forest, and the children with them; they were carrying baskets of mushrooms. Women and girls were coming in a crowd from the
station, where they had been loading bricks on the cars, and their noses and cheeks under their eyes were covered with red brick dust. They were singing. Ahead of them all went Lipa, and she sang in a high voice, pouring out her song as she looked up at the sky, as if celebrating and rejoicing that the day, thank God, was over and they could rest. Her mother was in the crowd, the day laborer Praskovya, walking with a bundle in her arms and breathing heavily as always.

“Good evening, Makarych!” said Lipa, seeing Crutch. “Good evening, dear heart!”

“Good evening, Lipynka!” said Crutch, delighted. “Dear women, dear girls, love the rich carpenter! Ho, ho! Little ones, my little ones,” Crutch sobbed. “My gentle little hatchets.”

Crutch and Yakov walked on, and could still be heard talking. After them the crowd met with old Tsybukin, and it suddenly became very quiet. Lipa and Praskovya had dropped behind a little, and when the old man came abreast of them, Lipa bowed low and said:

“Good evening, Grigory Petrovich!”

And her mother also bowed. The old man stopped and looked at
the two women without saying anything; his lips trembled and his eyes were filled with tears. Lipa took a piece of kasha pie from her mother’s bundle and gave it to him. He took it and began to eat.

The sun had set completely; its glow had gone out even on the road above. It was growing dark and cool. Lipa and Praskovya walked on and kept crossing themselves for a long time.

J
ANUARY
1900

O
n the eve of Palm Sunday the vigil was going on in the Old Petrovsky Convent. It was almost ten o’clock when they began to hand out the pussywillows,
¹
the lights were dim, the wicks were sooty, everything was as if in a mist. In the twilight of the church, the crowd heaved like the sea, and to Bishop Pyotr, who had been unwell for three days, it seemed that all the faces—old and young, men’s and women’s—were alike, that everyone who came up to get a branch had the same expression in their eyes. The doors could not be seen in the mist, the crowd kept moving, and it looked as if there was an
d would be no end to it. A women’s choir was singing, a nun was reading the canon.

How hot it was, how stifling! How long the vigil was! Bishop Pyotr was tired. His breathing was labored, short, dry, his shoulders ached with fatigue, his legs trembled. And it was unpleasantly disturbing that some holy fool cried out now and then from the gallery. Besides, the bishop suddenly imagined, as if in sleep or delirium, that his own mother, Marya Timofeevna, whom he had not seen for nine years, or else an old woman resembling his mother, came up to him in the crowd, and, receiving a branch from him, stepped away, all the while gazing happily at him, with a kind, joyful s
mile, until she mingled with the crowd again. And for some reason tears poured down his face. His soul was at peace, all was
well, yet he gazed fixedly at the choir on the left, where they were reading, where not a single person could be made out in the evening darkness—and wept. Tears glistened on his face, his beard. Then someone else began to weep near him, then someone else further away, then another and another, and the church was
gradually filled with quiet weeping. But in a short while, some five minutes, the convent choir began to sing, there was no more weeping, everything was as before.

The service was soon over. As the bishop was getting into his carriage to go home, the whole moonlit garden was filled with the merry, beautiful ringing of the expensive, heavy bells. The white walls, the white crosses on the graves, the white birches and black shadows, and the distant moon in the sky, which stood directly over the convent, now seemed to live their own special life, incomprehensible, yet close to mankind. April was just beginning, and after the warm spring day it turned cooler, slightly frosty, and a breath of spring could be felt in the soft, cold air. The road fr
om the convent to town was sandy, they had to go at a walking pace; and on both sides of the carriage, in the bright, still moonlight, pilgrims trudged over the sand. And everyone was silent, deep in thought, everything around was welcoming, young, so near—the trees, the sky, even the moon—and one wanted to think it would always be so.

At last the carriage drove into town and rolled down the main street. The shops were closed, except that of the merchant Yerakin, the millionaire, where they were trying out electric lighting, which was flickering badly, and people crowded around. Then came wide, dark streets, one after another, deserted, then the high road outside town, the fields, the smell of pines. And suddenly there rose up before his eyes a white, crenellated wall, and behind it a tall bell tower, all flooded with light, and beside it five big, shining, golden domes—this was St. Pankraty’s Monastery, where Bishop Pyotr liv
ed. And here, too, high above the monastery hung the quiet, pensive moon. The carriage drove through the gate, creaking over the sand, here and there the black figures of monks flashed in the moonlight, footsteps were heard on the flagstones …

“Your mother came while you were away, Your Grace,” the cell attendant reported, when the bishop came to his quarters.

“Mama? When did she come?”

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

“That means it was her I saw in church! Oh, Lord!”

And the bishop laughed with joy.

“She asked me to tell Your Grace,” the attendant went on, “that she will come tomorrow. There’s a girl with her, probably a granddaughter. They’re staying at Ovsyannikov’s inn.”

“What time is it now?”

“Just after eleven.”

“Ah, how vexing!”

The bishop sat for a while in the drawing room, pondering and as if not believing it was so late. His arms and legs ached, there was a pain in the back of his head. He felt hot and uncomfortable. Having rested, he went to his bedroom and there, too, sat for a while, still thinking about his mother. He heard the attendant leave and Father Sisoy, a hieromonk, cough on the other side of the wall. The monastery clock struck the quarter hour.

The bishop changed his clothes and began to read the prayers before going to sleep. He read these old, long-familiar prayers attentively, and at the same time thought about his mother. She had nine children and around forty grandchildren. Once she had lived with her husband, a deacon, in a poor village, lived there for a long time, from the age of seventeen to the age of sixty. The bishop remembered her from early childhood, almost from when he was three—and how he loved her! Sweet, dear, unforgettable childhood! Why does this forever gone, irretrievable time, why does it seem b
righter, more festive and rich, than it was in reality? When he had been sick as a child or a youth, how
tender and sensitive his mother had been! And now his prayers were mixed with memories that burned ever brighter, like flames, and the prayers did not interfere with his thoughts of his mother.

When he finished praying, he undressed and lay down, and at once, as soon as it was dark around him, he pictured his late father, his mother, his native village Lesopolye … Wheels creaking, sheep bleating, church bells ringing on bright summer mornings, gypsies under the windows—oh, how sweet to think of it! He remembered the priest of Lesopolye, Father Simeon, meek, placid, good-natured; he was skinny and short himself, but his son, a seminarian, was of enormous height and spoke in a furious bass; once he got angry with the cook and yelled at her: “Ah, you Iehudiel’s ass!”
and Father Simeon, who heard it, did not say a word and was only ashamed because he could not remember where in holy scripture
there was mention of such an ass.
²
After him the priest in Lesopolye was Father Demyan, who was a heavy drinker and was sometimes drunk to the point of seeing a green serpent, and he was even nicknamed “Demyan the Serpent-seer.” The schoolmaster in Lesopolye was Matvei Nikolaich, a former seminarian, a kind man, not stupid, but also a drunkard; he never beat his students, but for some reason always had a bundle of birch switches hanging on the wall with a perfectly meaningless La
tin inscription under it—
Betula kinderbalsamica secuta.
³
He had a shaggy black dog that he called Syntax.

And the bishop laughed. Five miles from Lesopolye was the village of Obnino, with its wonder-working icon. In summer the icon was carried in procession to all the neighboring villages, and bells rang the whole day, now in one village, now in another, and to the bishop it had seemed then that the air was vibrant with joy, and he (he was then called Pavlusha) had followed after the icon, hatless, barefoot, with naïve faith, with a naïve smile, infinitely happy. In Obnino, he now recalled, there were always many people, and the priest there, Father Alexei, in order to manage the
proskomedia, made his deaf nephew Ilarion read the lists “for the living” and “for the dead” sent in with the prosphoras;
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Ilarion read them, getting five or ten kopecks every once in a while for a liturgy, and only when he was gray and bald, when life had passed, did he suddenly notice written on one slip: “What a fool you are, Ilarion!” At least till the age of fifteen, Pavlusha remained undeveloped and a poor student, so that they even wanted to take him from theological school and send him to work in a shop; once, when he went to the Obnino post office for letters, he looked at the clerks for a long time and then said: “Allow me to ask, how do you receive your salary—monthly or daily?”

The bishop crossed himself and turned over on the other side, in order to sleep and not think anymore.

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

The moon looked in the window, the floor was lit up, and shadows lay on it. A cricket called. In the next room, on the other side of the wall, Father Sisoy snored, and something lonely, orphaned, even vagrant could be heard in his old man’s snoring. Sisoy had once been the steward of the diocesan bishop, and now he was called “the former father steward”; he was seventy years old, lived in the monastery ten miles from town, also lived in town, or wherever
he happened to be. Three days ago he had come to St. Pankraty’s Monastery, and the bishop had let him stay with him, in order
to talk with him somehow in leisure moments about various things, local ways …

At half past one the bell rang for matins. He heard Father Sisoy cough, grumble something in a displeased voice, then get up and walk barefoot through the rooms.

“Father Sisoy!” the bishop called.

Sisoy went to his room and shortly afterwards appeared, wearing boots now and holding a candle; over his underclothes he had a cassock, on his head an old, faded skullcap.

“I can’t sleep,” said the bishop, sitting up. “I must be unwell. And what it is, I don’t know. A fever!”

“You must’ve caught cold, Your Grace. You should be rubbed with tallow.”

Sisoy stood for a while and yawned: “O Lord, forgive me, a sinner.”

“At Yerakin’s today they burned electricity,” he said. “I doan like it!”

Father Sisoy was old, lean, bent, always displeased with something, and his eyes were angry, protruding, like a crayfish’s.

“Doan like it!” he said, going out. “Doan like it, God help ‘em all!”

The next day, Palm Sunday, the bishop served the liturgy in the town cathedral, then visited the diocesan bishop, visited a certain very sick old general’s widow, and finally went home. Between one and two o’clock he had dinner with two dear guests: his old mother and his niece Katya, a girl of about eight. All through dinner the spring sun looked through the window from outside, shining merrily on the white tablecloth and in Katya’s red hair. Through the double windows one could hear the noise of rooks in the garden and the singing of starlings.

“It’s nine years since we saw each other,” the old woman said, “but yesterday in the convent, when I looked at you—Lord! You haven’t changed a bit, only you’ve lost weight, and your beard has grown longer. Ah, Queen of Heaven, Holy Mother! And yesterday
during the vigil, nobody could help themselves, everybody wept. Looking at you, I suddenly wept, too—though why, I don’t know. It’s God’s holy will!”

And, in spite of the tenderness with which she said it, she was clearly embarrassed, as if she did not know whether to address him formally or informally, to laugh or not, and seemed to feel more like a deacon’s widow than his mother. But Katya gazed without blinking at her uncle, the bishop, as if trying to figure out what sort of man he was. Her hair rose from under the comb and velvet ribbon and stood out like a halo, her nose was turned up, her eyes were sly. Before sitting down to dinner she had broken a tea glass, and now her grandmother, as she talked, kept moving glasses an
d cups away from her. The bishop listened to his mother and remembered how, many years ago, she used to take him and his brothers and sisters to visit relatives whom she considered wealthy; she was solicitous for her children then, and for her grandchildren now, and so she had brought Katya …

“Your sister Varenka has four children,” she told him. “Katya here is the oldest, and, God knows what was the cause of it, but my son-in-law, Father Ivan, took sick and died three days before the Dormition.
⁵
And my Varenka is now fit to go begging through the world.”

“And how is Nikanor?” the bishop asked about his oldest brother.

“All right, thank God. He’s all right, and able to get by, Lord be blessed. Only there’s one thing: his son Nikolasha, my grandson, didn’t want to follow the clerical line, but went to the university to become a doctor. He thinks it’s better, but who knows! It’s God’s holy will.”

“Nikolasha cuts up dead people,” said Katya, and she spilled water in her lap.

“Sit still, child,” the grandmother remarked calmly and took the glass from her. “Pray when you eat.”

“We haven’t seen each other for so long!” the bishop said and tenderly stroked his mother’s shoulder and arm. “I missed you when I was abroad, mama, I missed you terribly.”

“I thank you.”

“I used to sit by the open window in the evening, alone as could be, they’d start playing music, and homesickness would suddenly
come over me, and I thought I’d give anything to go home, to see you…”

His mother smiled, brightened up, but at once made a serious face and said:

“I thank you.”

His mood changed somehow suddenly He looked at his mother and could not understand where she got that timid, deferential expression in her face and voice, or why it was there, and he did not recognize her. He felt sad, vexed. Besides, his head ached just as yesterday, he had bad pain in his legs, the fish seemed insipid, tasteless, and he was thirsty all the time …