“Did Nikolai publish his akathists?” I asked Ieronym.
“Where could he publish them?” he sighed. “And it would be strange to publish them. What for? In our monastery nobody’s interested in them. They don’t like it. They knew Nikolai wrote them, but they paid no attention. Nowadays, sir, nobody respects new writings!”
“Are they prejudiced against them?”
“Exactly so. If Nikolai had been an elder, the brothers might have been curious, but he wasn’t even forty years old. There were some who laughed and even considered his writings a sin.”
“Then why did he write?”
“More for his own delight. Of all the brothers, I was the only one who read his akathists. I used to come to him on the quiet, so that the others wouldn’t see, and he was glad I was interested. He embraced me, stroked my head, called me tender words as if I were a little child. He would close the door, sit me down next to him, and start reading …”
Ieronym left the cable and came over to me.
“We were like friends, he and I,” he whispered, looking at me with shining eyes. “Wherever he went, I went, too. He missed me when I wasn’t there. And he loved me more than the others, and all because I wept from his akathists. It moves me to remember it! Now I’m like an orphan or a widow. You know, in our monastery the people are all good, kind, pious, but … there’s no softness and delicacy in any of them, they’re all like low-class people. They talk loudly, stamp their feet when they walk, make noise, cough, but Nikolai always spoke quietly, gently, and if he noticed that anyone was asleep or praying, he would pass by like a gnat or a mosquito. His face was tender, pitiful …”
Ieronym sighed deeply and took hold of the cable. We were nearing the bank. Out of the darkness and silence of the river we gradually floated into an enchanted kingdom, filled with suffocating smoke, sputtering lamps, and tumult. People could be seen clearly moving about the pitch barrels. The flashing of the fire lent their red faces and figures a strange, almost fantastic expression. Occasionally, among the heads and faces, horses’ muzzles appeared, motionless, as if cast in red copper.
“They’re about to start the Easter canon …” said Ieronym, “and Nikolai isn’t here, there’s no one to grasp it … For him there was no writing sweeter than this canon. He used to grasp every word of it! You’ll be there, sir, try to grasp what they sing: it will take your breath away!”
“And you won’t be in church?”
“I can’t be, sir … I have to take people across.”
“But won’t they relieve you?”
“I don’t know … I should have been relieved between eight and nine, but as you see, I haven’t been! … And, to tell the truth, I’d like to be in church …”
“Are you a monk?”
“Yes, sir … that is, I’m a novice.”
The ferry ran into the bank and stopped. I gave Ieronym a five-kopeck piece for the ride and jumped onto dry land. At once a cart with a boy and a sleeping woman drove creaking onto the ferry. Ieronym, faintly colored by the lights, leaned on the cable, curved his body, and pushed the ferry off…
I took a few steps through the mud, but further on I had to follow a soft, freshly trampled path. This path led to the dark, cave-like gates of the monastery, through clouds of smoke, through a disorderly crowd of people, unharnessed horses, carts, britzkas. It was all creaking, snorting, laughing, and over it all flashed crimson light and wavy shadows of smoke … A veritable chaos! And in this turmoil they still found room to load the little cannon and sell gingerbreads!
There was no less bustle on the other side of the wall, in the churchyard, but there was more ceremoniousness and order to be observed. Here there was a smell of juniper and incense. There was loud talk, but no laughter or snorting. People with kulichi7 and bundles huddled together among the tombstones and crosses. Obviously many of them had come a long way to have their kulichi blessed and were now tired. Over the cast-iron slabs that lay in a strip from the gates to the church door, busy young novices ran, loudly stamping their boots. In the bell tower there was also scurrying and shouting.
“What a restless night!” I thought. “How good!”
One would have liked to see this restlessness and sleeplessness in all of nature, beginning with the night’s darkness and ending with the slabs, the graveyard crosses, and the trees, under which people bustled about. But nowhere did the excitement and restlessness tell so strongly as in the church. At the entrance an irrepressible struggle went on between ebb and flow. Some went in, others came out and soon went back again, to stand for a little while and then move again. People shuttle from place to place, loiter, and seem to be looking for something. The wave starts at the entrance and passes through the whole church, even disturbing the front rows where the solid and weighty people stand. To concentrate on prayer is out of the question. There are no prayers, but there is a sort of massive, childishly instinctive joy that is only seeking an excuse to burst and pour itself out in some sort of movement, be it only an unabashed swaying and jostling.
The same extraordinary mobility strikes one’s eye in the paschal service itself. The royal doors8 in all the chapels are wide open, dense clouds of incense smoke float in the air around the big candle stand; everywhere one looks there are lights, brilliance, the sputtering of candles … There are no readings in this service; the busy and joyful singing goes on till the very end; after every ode of the canon the clergy change vestments and come out to cense the church, and this is repeated every ten minutes.
I had just managed to take my place when a wave surged from the front and threw me back. Before me passed a tall, sturdy deacon with a long red candle; behind him the gray-haired archimandrite in a golden mitre hurried with a censer. When they disappeared from view, the crowd pushed me back to my former place. But ten minutes had not gone by before a new wave surged and the deacon appeared again. This time he was followed by the father vicar, the one who, according to Ieronym, was writing a history of the monastery.
As I merged with the crowd and became infected with the general joyful excitement, I felt unbearably pained for Ieronym. Why did they not relieve him? Why did someone less sensitive and impressionable not go to the ferry?
“Cast thine eyes about thee, O Zion, and behold …” sang the choir, “for lo! from the West and from the North, and from the sea, and from the East, as to a light by God illumined, have thy children assembled unto thee …”9
I looked at the faces. They all bore lively, festive expressions; but not one person listened to or tried to grasp what was being sung, and no one had their “breath taken away.” Why did they not relieve Ieronym? I could picture this Ieronym to myself, humbly standing somewhere near the wall, bending forward and eagerly seizing upon the beauty of the holy phrase. All that was now slipping past the hearing of the people standing about me, he would be eagerly drinking in with his sensitive soul, he would get drunk to the point of ecstasy, of breathlessness, and there would be no happier man in the whole church. But now he was going back and forth across the dark river and pining for his dead brother and friend.
A wave surged from behind. A stout, smiling monk, playing with his beads and glancing over his shoulder, squeezed past me sideways, making way for some lady in a hat and velvet coat. In the lady’s wake came a monastery server, holding a chair up over our heads.
I left the church. I wanted to look at the dead Nikolai, the unknown writer of akathists. I strolled near the churchyard fence where a row of monks’ cells stretched along the wall, peered through several windows and, seeing nothing, went back. Now I do not regret not having seen Nikolai; God knows, perhaps if I had seen him I would have lost the image my imagination now paints for me. This sympathetic, poetic man, who came at night to call out to Ieronym and who strewed his akathists with flowers, stars, and rays of sunlight, lonely and not understood, I picture to myself as timid, pale, with gentle, meek, and sad features. In his eyes, alongside intelligence, tenderness should shine, and that barely restrained, childlike exaltation I could hear in Ieronym’s voice when he quoted the akathists to me.