III. Верующие бабы

They had been told that the elder would at last come out, and they had gathered to wait for him.

The Khokhlakov ladies had also come out onto the gallery — they too were waiting for the elder, but in the quarters set aside for gentlewomen visitors.

There were two of them: mother and daughter.

Madame Khokhlakov the mother, a wealthy lady always dressed with taste, was still rather young and a very comely person, somewhat pale, with very lively and almost wholly black eyes.

She was no more than thirty-three, and she had already been a widow for some five years.

Her fourteen-year-old daughter suffered from a paralysis of the legs.

The poor girl had been unable to walk for half a year already, and she was wheeled about in a long, comfortable chair on wheels.

It was a charming little face, a little thin from illness, but cheerful.

Something mischievous shone in her large dark eyes with their long lashes.

Ever since spring the mother had been meaning to take her abroad, but over the summer they had been delayed by the management of the estate.

They had already been living in our town about a week, on business more than for pilgrimage, but they had visited the elder once already, three days before.

Now they had suddenly come again, though they knew the elder could scarcely receive anyone at all any longer, and, pleading insistently, they begged once more for "the happiness of beholding the great healer."

While waiting for the elder to come out, the mama sat on a chair beside her daughter's wheeled chair, and two steps from her stood an old monk, not from the local monastery but a visitor from some distant, little-known hermitage in the north.

He too wished to receive the elder's blessing.

But the elder, when he appeared on the gallery, went first straight to the common people.

The crowd pressed toward the little porch of three steps that joined the low gallery to the open field.

The elder stood on the topmost step, put on his stole, and began to bless the women crowding toward him.

They dragged one shrieking woman, a klikusha, toward him by both arms.

The moment she caught sight of the elder, she suddenly began, with a kind of absurd squealing, to hiccup convulsively, and her whole body shook as if in a fit.

Laying the stole on her head, the elder read a short prayer over her, and she at once fell silent and grew calm.

I do not know how it is now, but in my childhood I often had occasion, in villages and at monasteries, to see and hear these shrieking women.

They would be brought to the liturgy, where they squealed or barked like dogs through the whole church, but when the Holy Gifts were carried out and they were led up to them, the "possession" would cease at once, and the sick women always grew calm for a while.

As a child this struck and amazed me greatly.

But at the time, in answer to my questions, I heard from certain landowners and especially from my town tutors that it was all pretense, a way of getting out of work, and that it could always be rooted out by the proper severity — and various anecdotes were cited to prove it.

Later, however, I learned to my astonishment from medical specialists that there is no pretense in it at all — that it is a terrible women's malady, and one apparently most prevalent here in Russia, bearing witness to the hard lot of our peasant woman; an illness arising from exhausting labor undertaken too soon after a difficult, mishandled childbirth without any medical aid; and besides that, from inescapable grief, from beatings, and so on — things that, by common example, certain women's natures simply cannot bear.

And the strange, instantaneous healing of the possessed and convulsing woman the very moment she was led up to the Holy Gifts — which was explained to me as pretense, and moreover as a trick contrived by the "clericals" themselves — came about, in all likelihood, also in the most natural way: both the women who led her to the Gifts and, above all, the sick woman herself believed utterly, as an established truth, that the unclean spirit that had taken hold of her could never endure it if she, the sick woman, were led up to the Gifts and bowed down before them.

And so there always occurred (and was bound to occur) in a nervous and, of course, also psychically ill woman an inevitable, as it were, convulsion of her whole organism at the moment of prostration before the Gifts — a convulsion provoked by the expectation of the certain miracle of healing and by the fullest faith that it would come to pass.

And come to pass it did, if only for a single minute.

And in just the same way it came to pass now, the moment the elder covered the sick woman with his stole.

Many of the women crowding toward him dissolved into tears of tenderness and rapture, called forth by the effect of the moment; others strained to kiss even the hem of his garment; still others kept up some kind of wailing lament.

He blessed them all, and with some of them he spoke.

The shrieking woman he already knew; she had been brought from no great distance, from a village only some six versts from the monastery, and she had been led to him before, too.

"And here is one from far off!" he said, indicating a woman who was not yet old at all, but very thin and wasted, not so much sunburned as blackened all over in the face.

She was kneeling and gazing with a motionless stare at the elder.

There was something almost frenzied in her gaze.

"From far off, dear father, from far off, three hundred versts from where I live. From far off, father, from far off," the woman said in a singsong voice, swaying her head smoothly from side to side and propping her cheek on her palm.

She spoke as though keening.

There is among the common people a grief that is silent and long-suffering; it withdraws into itself and is mute.

But there is also a grief that has burst its bounds: it breaks out once in tears, and from that moment on it passes into keening.

This is especially so with women.

Yet it is no lighter than silent grief.

The keening soothes here only in that it lacerates and tears at the heart still more.

Such grief desires no consolation; it feeds upon the very sense of its own inconsolability.

The keening is merely the need to keep irritating the wound without cease.

"From the town class, are you?" the elder went on, peering at her with curiosity.

"Townsfolk we are, father, townsfolk; peasants by birth, but townsfolk now, we live in the town. I came to see you, father. We've heard of you, dear father, heard of you. I buried my little boy, my baby, and I set out to pray to God. I've been to three monasteries, and they told me, 'Go to that one too, Nastasyushka — to your folk, that is, dear one, to your folk.' So I came; yesterday I was at the vigil, and today I've come to you."

"What are you weeping about, then?"

"I grieve for my little boy, dear father; he was three years old, just three months short of three. I'm in torment over my little boy, father, over my little boy. He was the last little boy left to me; we had four, Nikitushka and I, but the children don't last for us, they don't last, dear one, they don't last. The first three I buried, and I didn't grieve over them so very much, but this last one I buried and I cannot forget him. It's as though he's standing right here before me, never leaving. He has dried up my soul. I look at his little clothes, at his little shirt or his little boots, and I howl. I lay out everything that's left of him, every little thing of his, and I look and I wail. I say to Nikitushka, my husband: 'Let me go, master, let me go on a pilgrimage.' He's a driver; we're not poor, father, not poor, we run our own carting business, all of it our own, the horses and the carriage too. But what use is our property to us now? He's taken to drinking without me, my Nikitushka — that's surely how it is, and even before this: the moment I turn away, he goes slack. But now I don't even think about him. It's the third month now I've been away from home. I've forgotten, forgotten everything and I don't want to remember; and what would I do with him now anyway? I'm done with him, done, done with everything. And I wouldn't so much as look now at my house and my belongings — I'd just as soon never see a thing again!"

"Listen, mother," said the elder, "once long ago a great saint of old saw in the temple a mother weeping just as you are, and weeping too for her infant, her only one, whom the Lord had likewise called to Himself.

'Do you not know,' the saint said to her, 'how bold these infants are before the throne of God? There is none in the Kingdom of Heaven bolder than they: "Lord, Thou gavest us life," they say to God, "and scarcely had we beheld it than Thou tookest it back from us." And so boldly do they beg and ask that the Lord grants them at once the rank of angels. And therefore,' the saint said, 'rejoice, woman, and do not weep, for your infant now abides with the Lord in the host of His angels.'"

That is what the saint said to the weeping woman in the days of old.

And he was a great saint, and he could not have spoken an untruth to her.

"Therefore know, you too, mother, that your infant surely stands now before the throne of the Lord, rejoicing and making merry, and praying to God for you.

And so weep, you too, but rejoice."