The bishop crossed himself and turned over on the other side, in order to sleep and not think anymore.
“My mother has come …” he remembered and laughed.
The moon looked in the window, the floor was lit up, and shadows lay on it. A cricket called. In the next room, on the other side of the wall, Father Sisoy snored, and something lonely, orphaned, even vagrant could be heard in his old man’s snoring. Sisoy had once been the steward of the diocesan bishop, and now he was called “the former father steward”; he was seventy years old, lived in the monastery ten miles from town, also lived in town, or wherever he happened to be. Three days ago he had come to St. Pankraty’s Monastery, and the bishop had let him stay with him, in order to talk with him somehow in leisure moments about various things, local ways …
At half past one the bell rang for matins. He heard Father Sisoy cough, grumble something in a displeased voice, then get up and walk barefoot through the rooms.
“Father Sisoy!” the bishop called.
Sisoy went to his room and shortly afterwards appeared, wearing boots now and holding a candle; over his underclothes he had a cassock, on his head an old, faded skullcap.
“I can’t sleep,” said the bishop, sitting up. “I must be unwell. And what it is, I don’t know. A fever!”
“You must’ve caught cold, Your Grace. You should be rubbed with tallow.”
Sisoy stood for a while and yawned: “O Lord, forgive me, a sinner.”
“At Yerakin’s today they burned electricity,” he said. “I doan like it!”
Father Sisoy was old, lean, bent, always displeased with something, and his eyes were angry, protruding, like a crayfish’s.
“Doan like it!” he said, going out. “Doan like it, God help ‘em all!”
II
The next day, Palm Sunday, the bishop served the liturgy in the town cathedral, then visited the diocesan bishop, visited a certain very sick old general’s widow, and finally went home. Between one and two o’clock he had dinner with two dear guests: his old mother and his niece Katya, a girl of about eight. All through dinner the spring sun looked through the window from outside, shining merrily on the white tablecloth and in Katya’s red hair. Through the double windows one could hear the noise of rooks in the garden and the singing of starlings.
“It’s nine years since we saw each other,” the old woman said, “but yesterday in the convent, when I looked at you—Lord! You haven’t changed a bit, only you’ve lost weight, and your beard has grown longer. Ah, Queen of Heaven, Holy Mother! And yesterday during the vigil, nobody could help themselves, everybody wept. Looking at you, I suddenly wept, too—though why, I don’t know. It’s God’s holy will!”
And, in spite of the tenderness with which she said it, she was clearly embarrassed, as if she did not know whether to address him formally or informally, to laugh or not, and seemed to feel more like a deacon’s widow than his mother. But Katya gazed without blinking at her uncle, the bishop, as if trying to figure out what sort of man he was. Her hair rose from under the comb and velvet ribbon and stood out like a halo, her nose was turned up, her eyes were sly. Before sitting down to dinner she had broken a tea glass, and now her grandmother, as she talked, kept moving glasses and cups away from her. The bishop listened to his mother and remembered how, many years ago, she used to take him and his brothers and sisters to visit relatives whom she considered wealthy; she was solicitous for her children then, and for her grandchildren now, and so she had brought Katya …
“Your sister Varenka has four children,” she told him. “Katya here is the oldest, and, God knows what was the cause of it, but my son-in-law, Father Ivan, took sick and died three days before the Dormition.5 And my Varenka is now fit to go begging through the world.”
“And how is Nikanor?” the bishop asked about his oldest brother.
“All right, thank God. He’s all right, and able to get by, Lord be blessed. Only there’s one thing: his son Nikolasha, my grandson, didn’t want to follow the clerical line, but went to the university to become a doctor. He thinks it’s better, but who knows! It’s God’s holy will.”
“Nikolasha cuts up dead people,” said Katya, and she spilled water in her lap.
“Sit still, child,” the grandmother remarked calmly and took the glass from her. “Pray when you eat.”
“We haven’t seen each other for so long!” the bishop said and tenderly stroked his mother’s shoulder and arm. “I missed you when I was abroad, mama, I missed you terribly.”
“I thank you.”
“I used to sit by the open window in the evening, alone as could be, they’d start playing music, and homesickness would suddenly come over me, and I thought I’d give anything to go home, to see you…”
His mother smiled, brightened up, but at once made a serious face and said:
“I thank you.”
His mood changed somehow suddenly He looked at his mother and could not understand where she got that timid, deferential expression in her face and voice, or why it was there, and he did not recognize her. He felt sad, vexed. Besides, his head ached just as yesterday, he had bad pain in his legs, the fish seemed insipid, tasteless, and he was thirsty all the time …
After dinner two rich ladies, landowners, came and spent an hour and a half sitting silently with long faces; the archimandrite,6taciturn 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 was 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 …