Arseny sat by the stove, hugging his knees and staring incessantly at Ustina. He no longer even got up for water. Sometimes he heard knocking at the door and experienced quiet joy that he had managed to latch the door before his transition into motionlessness. He did not answer the shouts or pay attention to footsteps in the yard. When they stopped, Arseny again submerged himself into tranquility. A feeling of repose seized him ever more intensely and fully. And from somewhere at the very depths of that repose there sprouted, like a meek flower growing out from under the snow, the hope of seeing Ustina soon.
One day he noticed movement by the window. The bull’s-bladder that was stretched across the frame tore with a pop and then a hand with a knife came into view. Behind it was a face. But the hand covered the nose right away and the face itself disappeared. Arseny sensed movement of air and heard screams. They were addressed at him. He turned to Ustina again and stopped looking at the window. A short time later there came the sound of banging on the door. Arseny saw the door shake. He regretted that he had not managed to die before that knock.
The top of the door gave way and crashed over the high threshold. Those who had broken it down did not rush in. They were obviously terrified and were really in no hurry to come in. Arseny recognized the two in front. They were Nikola Weaver and Demid Hay, people from the quarter who had come to him for treatment more than once. They stood on the fallen door and spoke quietly amongst themselves. They covered their mouths and noses with the collars of their heavy, rough woolen coats.
When Demid headed toward Ustina, Arseny said:
Do not touch.
Arseny gathered his strength and stood. He wanted to impede Demid from approaching Ustina but Demid lightly pushed him in the chest with the palm of his hand. Arseny fell and did not move. Nikola poured some water from the wooden bucket on him. Arseny opened his eyes.
He is alive, said Nikola.
He took Arseny under the arms, lifted him a bit, and propped him against the stove. Arseny’s head slipped onto his shoulder but his eyes remained open. Demid said the bodies they had found needed to be brought to the potter’s field. Nikola said they should get a wagon from the quarter for that. They sent some third person, who had not uttered a word, for the cart.
The potter’s field was a mournful place. Somehow, even the cemetery whose fence Arseny and Christofer lived beside seemed more comforting. The potter’s field was located on a hill two versts from Christofer’s house. There lay the plague dead, pilgrims, the strangled, unchristened babies, and suicides. Those drowned by waters, and taken by battle, and kylled by kyllers, and stricken by fyre. Suddenly surprised, those who had fallen from lightning, were deade from frost and every sort of wounde. The lives of these unfortunates were varied and it was not life that united them: their resemblance to one another consisted of death. It was death without Confession.
Those who died such deaths were given no funeral service and were not buried in ordinary cemeteries. They were brought to the potter’s field. There the bodies were lowered to the bottom of a deep pit and heaped with pine branches. These deceased thus became the “heaped.” They lay in a common pit, languishing from their own restlessness and having no place in this world. Every now and again their gray faces, sprinkled with sand, peered out from under the branches. It was an especially sad sight in the spring when the melting snow moved the branches out of place. Then the heaped deceased—deprived of eyes and noses—appeared in their least attractive condition, their arms and legs slipping onto neighboring bodies as if they were embracing one another.
Even their lot, though, was not hopeless, thanks to the boundless mercy of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. A priest came from the Kirillo-Belozersky monastery on the Thursday of the seventh week after Easter and gave a service for the heaped deceased. This day was known as Semik. They filled the pit and dug a new one. And the new pit remained open until the next Semik.
Difficulties did not always end for the heaped deceased even after the service, though. They were remembered in days of poor harvests. It is no secret for those who honor tradition that more often than not it was the heaped deceased who became the reason for calamities. There was a superstition that those whose lives were cut short did not die immediately. Damp Mother Earth did not accept them and pushed them out, forcing them to find some use for themselves on the surface.
It was as if these dead people lived out, in their other existence, the time taken away from them, but they did so while inflicting losses on those around them. They destroyed harvests and created summer droughts in their search for ways to expend their unspent strength. People well versed in such matters explained the dryness, saying the deceased (particularly those who died from boozing) were experiencing an inhuman thirst and were sucking moisture from the earth.
In difficult times those heaped deceased who had already been buried were sometimes exhumed and dragged away to thickets and swamps, despite protests from the clergy. Of course sometimes they were left in place but only after having been exhumed and turned face down. Needless to say, this might seem like a half-measure to some, but even this was considered a lesser evil than blatant inaction.
When it came right down to it, the position of the living was not so simple, either. When they buried those who had not made their Confessions, they aroused the wrath of Damp Mother Earth and she answered with spring frosts. When they did not bury them, they aroused the wrath of the deceased themselves, who ruthlessly destroyed the harvest in the summertime. In a complex situation such as this, Semik was, essentially, a judgment worthy of Solomon. If they did not commit the dead to the earth before the end of spring, those who cultivated the earth got through the period of light frosts without losses. By concluding the burial service and funeral during the seventh week after Easter, they could hope the vindictive deceased would not destroy their mature harvest.
Now Ustina had to end up among these deceased. They intended to toss her—Arseny’s eternally beloved Ustina—into the potter’s field. Along with a son who had not even received a name. Demid and Nikola wound their hands in rags, carried Ustina out of the house, and placed her on the cart that had driven up. A minute later, Nikola carried out the half-decomposed baby in his outstretched hands. Residents of the quarter slowly came behind the cart and gathered. They did not enter the house but stood, silent, in the road.
Arseny, who had been sitting vacantly on the floor until then, stood and took a knife off the stove and went outside. He was moving slowly but steadily, as if he had not spent all those hours in a daze. The sound of bare feet slapping at the earth became audible in the quiet. His eyes were dry. The crowd standing by the cart recoiled, for they sensed that his power was far above any human power.
He laid his hands on the cart:
Do not touch.
He shouted:
Do not touch!
The horse snorted.
He shouted:
Leave them with me and go back to where you came from. They are my wife and my son, and your families are in the quarter, so go on back to your families.
The visitors did not dare come closer. They saw his marble-like fingers on the knife handle. They saw the wind blow at the fluff on his cheeks. They were afraid of Arseny himself, not the knife. They did not recognize him.
That is a sharp object, give it to me, please.
Elder Nikandr appeared from the very depths of the crowd. He walked, holding his hand out to Arseny and dragging his foot. The crowd parted before him as the waves of the sea parted before Moses. The monk accompanying him followed.