Stories (54 page)

After dinner two rich ladies, landowners, came and spent an hour and a half sitting silently with long faces; the archimandrite,
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taciturn 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 w
as 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!”

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 total
ly immersed in trifles, had forgotten everything, and did not think of God. The bishop must have grown un
accustomed 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 hi
s 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 all his life and had outlived eleven of them. And th
at was why he felt at ease with him, though he was unquestionably a difficult, fussy man.

On Tuesday after the liturgy the bishop was at the diocesan bishop’s house and received petitioners there, became upset, angry, then went home. He was still unwell and felt like going to bed; but he had no sooner come home than he was informed that Yerakin, a
young merchant, a donor, had come on very important business. He had to be received. Yerakin stayed for about an hour, talked very loudly, almost shouted, and it was difficult to understand what he said.

“God grant that!” he said, going out. “Most unfailingly! Depending on the circumstances, Your Episcopal Grace! I wish that!”

After him came an abbess from a distant convent. And when she left, the bells rang for vespers, and he had to go to church.

In the evening the monks sang harmoniously, inspiredly, the office was celebrated by a young hieromonk with a black beard; and the bishop, listening to the verses about the Bridegroom who cometh at midnight and about the chamber that is adorned,
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felt, not repentance for his sins, not sorrow, but inner peace, silence, and was carried in his thoughts into the distant past, into his childhood and youth, when they had also sung about the Bridegroom and the chamber, and now that past appeared alive, beautiful, joyful, as it probably never had been. And perhaps in the other world, in the other life, w
e shall remember the distant past, our life here, with the same feeling. Who knows! The bishop sat in the sanctuary, it was dark there. Tears flowed down his face. He was thinking that here he had achieved everything possible for a man in his position, he had faith, and yet not everything was clear, something was still lacking, he did not want to die; and it still seemed that there was some most important thing which he did not have, of which he had once vaguely dreamed, and in the present he was stirred by the same hope for the future that he had had in childhood, and in the acade
my, and abroad.

“They’re singing so well today!” he thought, listening to the choir. “So well!”

On Thursday he served the liturgy in the cathedral, and there was the washing of feet.
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When the church service ended and people were going home, it was sunny, warm, cheerful, the water ran noisily in the ditches, and from the fields outside town came the ceaseless singing of larks, tender, calling all to peace. The trees were awake and smiled amiably, and over them, God knows how far, went the fathomless, boundless blue sky.

On coming home, Bishop Pyotr had tea, then changed his clothes, went to bed, and told his cell attendant to close the window blinds. The bedroom became dark. What weariness, though, what pain in his legs and back, a heavy, cold pain, and what a ringing in his ears! He lay without sleeping for a long time, as it now seemed to him, for a very long time, and it was some trifle that kept him from sleeping, that flickered in his brain as soon as his eyes closed. As on the previous day, voices, the clink of glasses and teaspoons came through the wall from neighboring rooms … Marya Timofeevna, merry and
bantering, was telling Father Sisoy something, and he responded sullenly, in a displeased voice: “Oh, them! Hah! What else!” And again the bishop felt vexed and then hurt that the old woman behaved in an ordinary and simple way with strangers, but with him, her son, was timid, spoke rarely, and did not say what she wanted to say, and even, as it had seemed to him all those days, kept looking for an excuse to stand up, because she was embarrassed to sit in his presence. And his father? If he were alive, he would probably be unable to utter a single word before him …

Something fell on the floor in the next room and smashed; it must have been Katya dropping a cup or a saucer, because Father Sisoy suddenly spat and said angrily:

“The girl’s a sheer punishment, Lord, forgive me, a sinner! There’s never enough with her!”

Then it became quiet, only sounds from outside reached him. And when the bishop opened his eyes, he saw Katya in his room, standing motionless and looking at him. Her red hair, as usual, rose from behind her comb like a halo.

“It’s you, Katya?” he asked. “Who keeps opening and closing the door downstairs?”

“I don’t hear it,” Katya said and listened.

“There, somebody just passed by.”

“It’s in your stomach, uncle!”

He laughed and patted her head.

“So you say cousin Nikolasha cuts up dead people?” he asked after a pause.

“Yes. He’s studying.”

“Is he kind?”

“Kind enough. Only he drinks a lot of vodka.”

“And what illness did your father die of?”

“Papa was weak and very, very thin, and suddenly—in his throat. I got sick then and so did my brother Fedya, all in the throat. Papa died, and we got well.”

Her chin trembled and tears welled up in her eyes and rolled slowly down her cheeks.

“Your Grace,” she said in a high little voice, now crying bitterly, “mama and all of us were left in such misery … Give us a little money … Be so kind … dear uncle! …”

He, too, became tearful and for a long time was too upset to utter a word, then he patted her head, touched her shoulder, and said:

“Very well, very well, child. The bright resurrection of Christ will come, and then we’ll talk … I’ll help you … I will …”

Quietly, timidly, his mother came in and crossed herself before the icons. Noticing that he was not asleep, she asked:

“Would you like some soup?”

“No, thank you …” he replied. “I don’t want any.”

“You don’t look well … seems to me. But then how could you not get sick! On your feet the whole day, the whole day—my God, it’s painful even to look at you. Well, Easter’s not far off, God grant you’ll be able to rest, then we can talk, and I won’t bother you with my talk now. Let’s go, Katechka, let His Grace sleep.”

And he remembered how, a long, long time ago, when he was still a boy, she had spoken with a rural dean in just the same jokingly deferential tone … Only by her extraordinarily kind eyes and the timid, worried glance she cast at him as she left the room, could one see that she was his mother. He closed his eyes and it seemed he slept, but twice he heard the clock strike and Father Sisoy cough on the other side of the wall. His mother came in once more and gazed at him timidly for a moment. Someone drove up to the porch in a coach or a carriage, judging by the sound. Suddenly there came a knock, t
he bang of a door: the attendant came into his bedroom.

“Your Grace!” he called.

“What?”

“The horses are ready, it’s time to go to the Lord’s Passion.”
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“What time is it?”

“A quarter past seven.”

He dressed and drove to the cathedral. He had to stand motionless in the middle of the church through all twelve Gospel readings, and the first Gospel, the longest, the most beautiful, he read himself. A vigorous, healthy mood came over him. The first Gospel—
“Now is the Son of Man glorified”
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—he knew by heart; and as he read, he raised his eyes from time to time and saw on both sides a whole sea of lights, heard the sizzle of candles, but, as in previous years, he was unable to see the people, and it seemed to him that they were the same people as in his childhood and youth,
that they would be the same every year, but for how long—God only knew.

His father had been a deacon, his grandfather a priest, his great-grandfather a deacon, and all his ancestry, perhaps since the time when Russia embraced Christianity,
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had belonged to the clergy, and the love for church services, the clergy, the ringing of bells, was innate in him, deep, ineradicable; in church, especially when he celebrated the office himself, he felt active, vigorous, happy And so he did now. Only when the eighth Gospel had been read, he felt that his voice had weakened, even his coughing had become inaudible, his head ached badly, and he was troubled by a fear
that he was about to fall down. And indeed his legs had gone quite numb, so that he gradually ceased to feel them, and it was incomprehensible to him how and on what he was standing, and why he did not fall down …

When the service ended, it was a quarter to twelve. Returning home, the bishop undressed at once and lay down, without even saying his prayers. He was unable to speak, and it seemed to him that he would now be unable to stand. As he pulled the blanket over him, he suddenly had a longing to be abroad, an unbearable longing! He thought he would give his life only not to see those pathetic, cheap blinds, the low ceilings, not to breathe that oppressive monastery smell. If there had been just one person to whom he could talk, unburden his soul!