V.
Among people, mid their affairs and conversations, Father Vassily was so evidently a man apart, so unfathomably alien to all, that he did not seem human at all, but a moving cerement. He did whatever others did, he talked, he worked, he ate and drank, but it seemed at times as though he merely imitated others, while he personally lived in a different world that was inaccessible to any. And all who saw him asked themselves: what is this man thinking about? so manifest on his every movement was the impress of deep thought. It was seen in his ponderous gait, in the deliberateness of his halting speech, when between two spoken words yawned black chasms of hidden and distant thought; it hung like a heavy film over his eyes, and nebulous was his distant gaze that faintly glowed beneath his shaggy overhanging eyebrows. Sometimes it was necessary to speak to him twice before he heard and responded. And sometimes he neglected to greet others, and because of this some accounted him haughty. Thus once he failed to greet Ivan Porfyritch. The churchwarden was astounded for a moment, then hurried back and overtook the priest who was walking slowly.
“You’ve grown proud, Father! Won’t even greet a man!” he said mockingly. Father Vassily looked up at him in surprise, blushed a little and apologized:
“Pardon me, Ivan Porfyritch, I did not notice you.” The churchwarden attempted to look down upon him, measuring him with a look of censure, but for the first time he realized that the priest was the taller of the two, although the churchwarden was reputed to be the tallest man in the parish. And the churchwarden found something agreeable in this discovery, for unexpectedly to himself he invited the priest to call on him:
“Come and see me some day, Father.”
And several times he glanced back, in order to size up the receding figure of the priest. Even Father Vassily was pleased, but only for a moment. He had hardly taken two steps, when the burden of persistent thought, heavy and hard like a millstone, succeeded in stifling the memory of the churchwarden’s kindly words and crushed the quiet and bashful smile that was on its way to his lips. And he lapsed again into thought—thinking of God and of people and of the mysterious fate of human life.
And it happened during confession; fettered by his immovable thoughts Father Vassily was coldly putting the customary queries to some old woman, when he was suddenly struck by an odd thing which he had never noticed before: there he stood calmly prying into the innermost secret thoughts and feelings of another, and that other looked up to him with awe and told him the truth—that truth which it is not given to anyone else to know. And the wrinkled countenance of the old woman assumed a peculiar expression, it became brightly radiant, as though the darkness of night reigned all around, but the light of day was falling on that face alone. And suddenly he interrupted her and asked:
“Art thou telling the truth, woman?”
But what the old woman answered he heard not. The mist had departed from before his face, with flushing eyes—as though a bandage had fallen from them—he was gazing in amazement upon the face of the woman, and it seemed to him to bear a peculiar expression: clearly outlined upon it was some mysterious truth of God and of life. On the old woman’s head, beneath an openwork kerchief, Father Vassily noticed a parting line, a narrow grey strip of skin running through hair that was carefully combed on either side of it. And this parting line, this absurd care for an ugly, aged head that nobody else had any use for, was likewise a truth: the sorrowful truth of the ever lonely, ever sorrowful human existence. And it was then, for the first time in his life of forty years, that Father Vassily became aware with his eyes and with his hearing and with every one of his senses that beside him there were other creatures on earth—creatures that were like him, having their own lives, their own sorrows, their own fates.
“And hast thou children?” hurriedly he inquired, interrupting the old woman again.
“They’re all dead, Father!”
“All dead?” inquired the priest in surprise.
“All dead,” she repeated and her eyes became bloodshot.
“And how dost thou live?” inquired Father Vassily in amazement.
“How should I live?” cried the woman. “I live by alms.”
Stretching out his neck, Father Vassily from the height of his immense stature riveted his gaze upon the old woman but did not utter a sound. And his long, scraggy face, fringed by his disheveled hair, seemed so strange and terrible to the woman that she was chilled to the tips of the fingers which she was holding clasped before her breast.
“Go now,” sounded a stern voice above her.
Strange days commenced now for Father Vassily, and something unwonted was going on in his mind; hitherto only this had been; there had existed a tiny earth whereon lived only the enormous figure of Father Vassily. Other people did not seem to exist. But now the earth had grown, had become unfathomably big, peopled all over with creatures like Father Vassily. There was a multitude of them, each living an individual existence, suffering individual sufferings, hoping and doubting individually, and among them Father Vassily felt like a lonely tree in a field about which suddenly an immense and trackless forest had grown. Gone was the solitude; and with it the sun and the bright desert distances, and the gloom of the night had grown in intensity.
All the people gave him truth. When he did not hear their truthful utterances, he saw their homes and their faces: and upon homes and faces was engraved the inexorable truth of life. He sensed this truth, but he was unable to grasp and name it and he eagerly sought new faces and new words. Few came to confession during the fast days of Advent, but he kept them in the confessional for hours at a time, examining each one searchingly, insistently, stealing himself into the most intimate nooks of the soul where man himself looks in but rarely and with awe. He did not know what he was searching for and he mercilessly plowed up everything—that the soul rests on and lives by. In his questions he was pitiless and shameless, and each thought which he conceived was a stranger to fear. But it did not take him long to realize that all these people who were telling him the whole truth, as though he were God, were themselves ignorant of the truth of life. Back of their myriads of trifling, severed, hostile truths he dimly saw the shadowy outlines of the one great and all-solving truth. Everyone was conscious of it, everyone longed for it, yet none could define it with a human word—that overwhelming truth of God and of people, and of the mysterious fates of human life.
And Father Vassily himself began to sense it, and he sensed it now a despair and frenzied fear, now as pity, wrath and hope. And as heretofore, he was stern and cold to look upon, while his, mind and his heart were already melting in the fire of unknown truth and a new life was entering his old body.
On the Tuesday of the week preceding Christmas, Father Vassily had returned from the church rather late. In the dark cold vestibule someone’s hand arrested him and a hoarse voice whispered:
“Vassily, don’t go inside.”
By the note of terror in her voice he recognized his wife and stopped.
“I’ve been waiting an hour for you, I’m all frozen,” and her teeth chattered with the cold.
“What has happened? Come.”
“No. No. Listen, Nastya! I came in and found her standing before the mirror, making faces just like him, waving her hands like him.”
“Come.”
By main force he dragged the resisting Popadya into the living room, and there, looking around in fear, she told him more. While on her way into the living room to water the plants she had found Nastya, standing still before the mirror, and in the mirror she had seen the reflection of her face, not as it always looked, but oddly idiotic, with a savagely contorted mouth and squinting eyes. Then, still in silence, Nastya raised up her hands, and curving her fingers convulsively like the idiot, she stretched them out towards her own reflection in the mirror—and everything was so still, and all this was so terrible and unreal that the Popadya screamed and dropped her water pot. And Nastya ran away. And row she did not know whether it had really happened or her own imagination had been playing a trick on her.
“Call Nastya and step out!” ordered the priest.
Nastya came and stopped on the threshold. Her face was long and scraggy like her father’s, and when she was talking she copied his posture: her neck extended, inclined a little to one side, looking sullenly askance from beneath her eyebrows. And she held her hands behind her back just as he was in the habit of doing.
“Nastya, why do you do these things?” firmly, but calmly inquired Father Vassily.
“What things?”
“Mother saw you near the mirror. Why did you do that? He is sick.”
“No, he is not sick, he pulls my hair.”
“Why do you imitate him? Do you like a face like his?”
Nastya stood sullenly with downcast eyes.
“I don’t know,” she answered. And then with a queer look of candor she looked into her father’s eyes and resolutely added: “Yes, I like it.”
Father Vassily looked at her searchingly but did not say a word.
“Don’t you like it?” semi-affirmatively inquired Nastya.
“No.”
“Then why do you keep thinking about him? I would kill him if I were you.”
And it seemed to Father Vassily that even then she was making a face like the idiot: something dull and brutish flitted over her cheeks and drew her eyes together.
“Go!” he sternly commanded. But Nastya did not move and with the same queerly candid expression she kept on gazing straight into her father’s eyes. And her face no longer resembled the repulsive mask of the idiot.
“But you never think of me,” she observed simply, as though expressing an abstract truth.
And then, in the gathering gloom of the wintry dusk, there occurred between these two—who were so like, yet so unlike one another—a brief and curious dialog:
“You are my daughter. Why did I know nothing about it? Do you know?”
“No.”
“Come and kiss me.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Don’t you love me?”
“No, I love nobody.”
“Even as I,” and the priest’s nostrils extended with repressed laughter.
“Don’t you love anybody either? And how about mama? She drinks so much. I’d kill her too.”
“And me?”
“No, not you. You talk to me at least. I feel sorry for you sometimes. It must be very hard, don’t you know, when your son is a silly. He is terribly mean.”
“You don’t begin to know how mean he is. He eats cockroaches alive. I gave him a dozen and he ate them all up.”
Without moving away from the door she sat down on the corner of a chair, cautiously, like a scullery maid, folded her hands on her knees and waited.
“It’s a weary life, Nastya,” pensively said the priest.
Unhurriedly and importantly she agreed with him:
“It certainly is.”
“And do you pray to God?”
“Of course I do. Only at night, in the morning there is too much work, I have no time. I must sweep, make up beds, put things in order, wash the dishes, get tea for Vasska[8], serve it to him, you know yourself how much work that is.”
“Just like a servant maid,” said Father Vassily indefinitely.
“What did you say?” said Nastya uncomprehendingly.
Father Vassily bowed low his head and maintained silence. Immense and black he loomed against the dull white background of the window, and his words seemed to Nastya round and shiny like glass beads. She waited long, but her father was silent and she called out timidly:
“Papa!”
Without raising his head Father Vassily commandingly waived his hand, once, then the second time. Nastya sighed and rose, but hardly had she turned in the doorway when something rustled behind her and two powerful, sinewy arms raised her up in the air and a mocking voice whispered in her very ear:
“Put your arms around my neck. I’ll carry you.”
“Why? I am big.”
“No matter. Hold fast.”
It was hard work breathing in the embrace of two arms that were holding her like hoops of iron, and she had to duck her head in the doorway in order not to knock against the transom; she did not know whether she was pleased or merely surprised. And she did not know whether she merely imagined it or her father had really whispered into her ear:
“You must be sorry for mama.”
But after she had said her prayers and was getting ready for bed, Nastya sat for a long while on her bed, lost in musing. Her slim little back with the pointed shoulder blades and the distinctly marked vertebrae was almost humped; the soiled nightshirt had slipped from the angular shoulder; folding her hands about her knees and rocking back and forth, she resembled a ruffled bird that was overtaken in the field by the frost. She was staring straight ahead with unblinking eyes that were plain and enigmatic like the eyes of a beast. And with pensive obstinacy she whispered:
“And still I’d kill her.”
Late at night, when everyone was asleep, Father Vassily silently stole into the room, and his face was cold and austere. Without casting a glance at Nastya, he set the lamp down on the table and bent over the calmly sleeping idiot. He was lying on his back, his misshapen chest stretched out, his arms spread out; his little shriveled head had fallen back, and its receding chin gleamed white. As he lay sleeping, under the pale reflected light which was falling upon him from the ceiling, his face, with the closed eyelids hiding his witless eyes, did not seem as horrible as in the daytime. It seemed wearied, like the face of an actor exhausted after playing a difficult part, and around his tightly shut enormous mouth lay the shadow of stern grief. It was as though there were in him two souls, and while one was sleeping, the other was wakeful—all-knowing and sorrowful.
Father Vassily straightened up slowly, and maintaining an austere and stolid expression, walked out and proceeded to his room without casting a glance at Nastya. He was walking slowly and calmly, with the ponderous and lifeless stride of profound meditation, and the darkness scattered before him, hiding behind him in deep shadows and cunningly pursuing him at his heels. His face was shining brightly in the light of the lamp and his eyes were gazing fixedly into the distance, far ahead, into the very depths of fathomless space, while his feet slowly and clumsily pursued their automatic march.
It was late at night and the second cocks had crowed.