Stories

“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 …

After dinner two rich ladies, landowners, came and spent an hour and a half sitting silently with long faces; the archimandrite,⁶taciturn and slightly deaf, came on business. Then the bells rang for vespers, the sun set behind the woods, and the day was gone. Returning from church, the bishop hastily said his prayers, went to bed, and covered himself warmly.

The memory of the fish he had eaten at dinner was unpleasant. The moonlight disturbed him, and then he heard talking. In a neighboring room, probably the drawing room, Father Sisoy was discussing politics:

“The Japanese are at war now. They’re fighting. The Japanese, my dear, are the same as the Montenegrins, the same tribe. They were both under the Turkish yoke.”

And then came the voice of Marya Timofeevna:

“So we said our prayers and had tea, and so then we went to see Father Yegor in Novokhatnoe, which is …”

And it was “we had tea” or “we drank a glass” time and again, as if all she ever did in her life was drink tea. The bishop slowly, listlessly remembered the seminary, the theological academy. For three years he had taught Greek at the seminary, by which time he could no longer read without glasses; then he was tonsured a monk and was made a school inspector. Then he defended his thesis. When he was thirty-two, they made him rector of the seminary, he was consecrated archimandrite, and life then was so easy, pleasant, it seemed so very long that he could see no end to it. Then he fell ill, lost weight, nearly went blind, and on his doctors’ advice had to abandon everything and go abroad.

“And what then?” Sisoy asked in the neighboring room.

“And then we had tea …” answered Marya Timofeevna.

“Father, your beard is green!” Katya suddenly said in surprise and laughed.

The bishop recalled that the gray-haired Father Sisoy’s beard did indeed have a green tinge, and he laughed.

“Lord God, what a punishment the girl is!” Sisoy said loudly, getting angry. “Spoiled as they come! Sit still!”

The bishop remembered the white church, perfectly new, in which he served when he lived abroad, remembered the sound of the warm sea. His apartment consisted of five rooms, high-ceilinged and bright, there was a new desk in the study, a library. He read a lot, wrote often. And he remembered how homesick he was, how a blind beggar woman sang of love and played the guitar outside his window every day, and each time he listened to her, for some reason he thought of the past. Eight years passed and he was recalled to Russia, and now he was installed as an auxiliary bishop, and the past had all withdrawn somewhere into the distance, the mist, as if it had been a dream …

Father Sisoy came into his bedroom with a candle.

“Well,” he was surprised, “you’re already asleep, Your Grace?”

“Why not?”

“But it’s early, ten o’clock, or not even that. I bought a candle today, I wanted to rub you with tallow.”

“I have a fever …” said the bishop, and he sat up. “In fact, I do need something. My head doesn’t feel right …”

Sisoy removed his shirt and began to rub his chest and back with candle tallow.

“There … there …” he said. “Lord Jesus Christ … There. Today I went to town, visited—what’s his name?—the archpriest Sidonsky … Had tea with him … I doan like him! Lord Jesus Christ … There … Doan like him at all!”

III

The diocesan bishop, old, very fat, was suffering from rheumatism or gout and had not left his bed for a month. Bishop Pyotr went to see him almost every day and received petitioners in his stead. And now, when he was unwell, he was struck by the emptiness, the pettiness of all that people asked about and wept about; he was angered by their backwardness, their timidity; and the mass of all these petty and unnecessary things oppressed him, and it seemed to him that he now understood the diocesan bishop, who once, when he was young, had written Lessons on Freedom of Will, but now seemed totally immersed in trifles, had forgotten everything, and did not think of God. The bishop must have grown unaccustomed to Russian life while abroad, and it was not easy for him; he found the people coarse, the women petitioners boring and stupid, the seminarians and their teachers uncultivated, sometimes savage. And the papers, incoming and outgoing, numbering in the tens of thousands, and what papers! Rural deans throughout the diocese gave the priests, young and old, and even their wives and children, marks for behavior, A’s and B’s, and sometimes also C’s, and it was necessary to talk, read, and write serious papers about all that. And he decidedly did not have a single free moment, his soul trembled all day, and Bishop Pyotr found peace only when he was in church.

He also could not get used to the fear which, without wishing it, he aroused in people, despite his quiet, modest nature. All the people of the province, when he looked at them, seemed to him small, frightened, guilty. In his presence they all grew timid, even old archpriests, they all “plopped down” at his feet, and recently a woman petitioner, the elderly wife of a village priest, had been unable to utter a single word from fear, and so had gone away with nothing. And he, who in his sermons never dared to speak badly of people, never reproached them, because he felt pity for them, lost his temper with petitioners, became angry, flung their petitions to the floor. In all the time he had been there, not a single person had spoken to him sincerely, simply, humanly; even his old mother seemed not the same, not the same at all! And why, one asked, did she talk incessantly and laugh so much with Sisoy, while with him, her son, she was serious, usually silent, bashful, which did not become her at all? The only person who behaved freely in his presence and said whatever he liked was old Sisoy, who had been around bishops