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!”
II
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
