Holy fool Foma closed his eyes and died after he had made sure everything had been written down. Then he opened his eyes for a moment and added:
Postscriptum. Arseny should keep in mind that Abba Kirill’s monastery is expecting him. That’s all.
After saying that, holy fool Foma died forever.
Arseny grew pensive after reading Foma’s missive. For seven days and seven nights, he had not left the annex of Mayor Gavriil’s house that had been given to him as lodging. He might have stayed even longer, but news of the pestilence began spreading through Pskov on his eighth day of sitting around. When the mayor came to Arseny, he said:
What Foma has spake is coming true. We trust in God’s mercy and, O Arseny, in your great gifte.
Arseny was genuflecting, with his face to the icons and his back to Mayor Gavriil. He was praying and it was unclear if he heard what the mayor had said. The mayor stood a little longer but did not bother repeating his words, for he guessed Arseny already knew everything anyway. Mayor Gavriil left carefully, so as not to squeak the floorboards. After Arseny finished his prayers the next day, he left, too.
A crowd awaited him by the front steps. He glanced at the crowd and said nothing. The crowd was silent, too, understanding that there was no need to say anything here. Remembering Foma’s prediction, the crowd knew that Arseny was the only person capable of helping during the coming misfortune. Arseny knew his abilities were limited and the crowd knew of his knowledge, and the crowd’s knowledge was transferred to Arseny. They looked at each other until the crowd had no more unjustified expectations and Arseny lost his fear of betraying their expectations. After all this took place, Arseny walked down the steps and went off to the pestilence.
He made the rounds of home after home, examining the sick. He treated their buboes and gave them ground sulfur in egg yolk, cleansed their bodies of vomit, and filled their residences with smoke from juniper twigs. Even the doomed did not want to let him leave: as long as he was with them, they did not feel so pained and hopeless. They clung to Arseny’s hand and he could not find the strength within to break free of their hands and so he sat up with them for nights on end, until their very deaths.
It seems, Arseny told Ustina, that I have gone back many years in time. The very same festering bodies are in my hands and, can you believe this, my love, they are almost the very same people I treated at one time. Did time go backwards or—let us phrase the question differently—am I myself returning to some starting point? If that is so, perhaps I will meet you in this journey.
Arseny’s hands quickly remembered their forgotten work and now they treated the pestilent sores on their own. As he watched the deft motions of his own hands, Arseny began to fear their actions would become routine and frighten off the astonishing power that flowed through them into the patients but had no direct relation to the art of medicine. Arseny noticed ever more frequently when he was healing people that their recoveries came from that power, not from the ground sulfur and egg yolk. The sulfur and egg yolk did no harm but (or so it now seemed to Arseny) they did not substantially help. It was Arseny’s inner work that was important: his ability to concentrate on prayer while simultaneously dissolving himself within the patient. And if the patient recovered, it was Arseny’s recovery.
If the patient died, though, Arseny died with him. And when he sensed he was alive, he would shed tears and feel ashamed the patient was dead and he was alive. Arseny came to the understanding that blame for a death lay not in the power of the illness but in the weakness of his prayer. He began considering himself a direct culprit in those deaths that occurred and he went to Confession daily, lest the weight of blame become overwhelming for him. And he came to each next patient as if that person were his first, as if he had not examined hundreds of people before this one. So his astonishing power came to the ill as if untouched, for that was all that gave hope for recovery.
Arseny battled human fear as well as illness. He walked around the city and prevailed on people not to fear. As he advised them to take precautions, Arseny warned against panic, which is ruinous. He reminded them that not one hair would fall from a person’s head without God’s will, and called on people not to lock themselves away in their homes and forget about helping those nearby. Many had forgotten.
During the first weeks of the pestilence, Arseny thought he was not up to the task. He was ready to drop from fatigue. He often lacked the strength to get home and so would stay and nap at a patient’s. A while later, Arseny would notice, surprised, that he felt a little better.
I am apparently growing accustomed to what one cannot grow accustomed to, he told Ustina. This proves yet again, my love, that, although there is cowardice, there is no shortage of strength.
Arseny slept for two or three hours each day but could not free himself from the sorrow around him, even when he slept. He saw swollen patients in his colorful dreams and they asked him for cures but he could not help them at all because he knew they had already died. There were no more fantasies in his dreams: these were true dreams, dreams about what had been. Time truly was going backwards. It did not accommodate the events designated for him—those events were too grand and raucous. Time was coming apart at the seams, like a wayfarer’s traveling bag, and it was showing its contents to the wayfarer, who contemplated them as if for the first time.
Here I am, O Lord, and here is the life I have already been able to live before coming to see you, Arseny had said at the Empty Tomb. And also that part of my life that, by Your ineffable kindness, I may still live. After all, I had not even thought I would be here, for I was robbed and slashed by a sword near the very city of Jerusalem and I consider it Your great favor that I stand before You. My unforgettable friend Ambrogio and I were bringing You an icon lamp in memory of the Pskov mayor’s daughter, Anna, who drowned in the ryver. My hands are now empty and I do not have the icon lamp nor do I have my friend Ambrogio or a number of others I met along the way but lost, also due to my sins. Here I remembre the guardian Vlasy, who laid down his lyfe for his frendes. I promised Vlasy I would confess his sins before You, for he himself is lying in Polish soil, awaiting the universal resurrection. Give repose with the Just, O our Savior, unto Thy servants. Establish them in Thy courts, as it is written. Disregard their transgressions, both voluntary and involuntary, committed in knowledge or in ignorance, for Thou art good and lovest mankind. I appeal to You also with the primary entreaty of my life, regarding Your servant Ustina. I ask You not through my right as her husband, for I am not her husband, though I could have been him, had I not fallen into the clutches of the prince of this world. I ask through my right as her murderer since my crime has bound us together for this lifetime and the coming times. By destroying Ustina, I deprived her of the possibility of discovering what You placed within her, of developing that, and compelling a Divine light to shine. I wanted to give up my life for her, or rather to give my life to her for the life I took from her. And I could only have done that through mortal sin, but who would need a life like that? So I decided to give that life to her using the only means available to me. I attempted, as best I could, to serve as a substitute for Ustina and perform, in her name, good deeds that I could never have done in my own name. I understood that every person is irreplaceable so I had no grand illusions, but how else, do tell me, could I give form to my own repentance? The only trouble is that the fruits of my labors turned out to be so small and ridiculous that I have experienced nothing but shame. The only reason I did not give up is that I would have been even worse at anything else. I am not certain of my path and that makes it ever more difficult for me to progress further. One can walk an unknown road for a long time—a very long time—but one cannot walk it eternally. Is this redemptive for Ustina? If I could have just any sign, just any sort of hope… You know, I do talk with Ustina constantly, I tell her about what’s happening in the world and about my impressions of things, so she can always be, as they say, in the loop about what’s going on. She does not answer me. This is not the silence of unforgiveness; I know her kindheartedness and she would never torment me for all these years. Most likely she has no means to answer me or perhaps she is simply sparing me the bad news for, I say in all sincerity, could I count on good news? I have faith that I can save her in the afterlife with my love, but I need at least some grain of knowledge about this along with that faith. And so, O Savior, give me at least some sign that I may know my path has not veered into madness, so I may, with that knowledge, walk the most difficult road, walk as long as need be and no longer feel weariness.