Stories

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 Latin 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 naive faith, with a naive 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;⁴ 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!”

II

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 and 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.”