Chapter 3: Women of Faith
Below, crowding near the wooden porch built onto the outside wall, there were only women this time, about twenty of them. They had been informed that the elder would come out at last, and had gathered in anticipation. The Khokhlakov ladies, who were also waiting for the elder, but in quarters set aside for gentlewomen, had come out to the porch as well. There were two of them, mother and daughter. Madame Khokhlakov, the mother, a wealthy woman, always tastefully dressed, was still fairly young and quite attractive, slightly pale, with very lively and almost completely black eyes. She was not more than thirty-three years old and had been a widow for about five years. Her fourteen-year-old daughter suffered from paralysis of the legs. The poor girl had been unable to walk for about half a year already, and was wheeled around in a long, comfortable chair. Hers was a lovely little face, a bit thin from illness, but cheerful. Something mischievous shone in her big, dark eyes with their long lashes. Her mother had been intending to take her abroad since spring, but was detained through the summer by the management of her estate. They had already spent about a week in our town, more for business than on pilgrimage, but had already visited the elder once, three days before. Now they suddenly came again, though they knew that the elder was almost unable to receive anyone at all, and, pleading insistently, begged once again for “the happiness of beholding the great healer.” While awaiting the elder’s appearance, the mama sat on a seat next to her daughter’s chair, and two steps away from her stood an old monk, not from our monastery, but a visitor from a little-known cloister in the far north. He, too, wanted to receive the elder’s blessing. But when the elder appeared on the porch, he first went directly to the people. The crowd started pressing towards the three steps that connected the low porch with the field. The elder stood on the top step, put on his stole, and began to bless the women who crowded towards him. A “shrieker” was pulled up to him by both hands. She no sooner saw the elder than she suddenly began somehow absurdly screeching, hiccuping, and shaking all over as if in convulsions. The elder, having covered her head with the stole, read a short prayer over her, and she at once became quiet and calmed down. I do not know how it is now, but in my childhood I often used to see and hear these “shriekers” in villages and monasteries. Taken to the Sunday liturgy, they would screech or bark like dogs so that the whole church could hear, but when the chalice was brought out, and they were led up to the chalice, the “demonic possession” would immediately cease and the sick ones would always calm down for a time. As a child, I was greatly struck and astonished by this. And it was then that I heard from some landowners and especially from my town teachers, in answer to my questions, that it was all a pretense in order to avoid work, and that it could always be eradicated by the proper severity, which they confirmed by telling various stories. But later on I was surprised to learn from medical experts that there is no pretense in it, that it is a terrible woman’s disease that seems to occur predominantly in our Russia, that it is a testimony to the hard lot of our peasant women, caused by exhausting work too soon after difficult, improper birth-giving without any medical help, and, besides that, by desperate grief, beatings, and so on, which the nature of many women, after all, as the general examples show, cannot endure. This strange and instant healing of the frenzied and struggling woman the moment she was brought to the chalice, which used to be explained to me as shamming and, moreover, almost as a trick arranged by the “clericals” themselves—this healing occurred, probably, also in a very natural way: both the women who brought her to the chalice and, above all, the sick woman herself, fully believed, as an unquestionable truth, that the unclean spirit that possessed the sick woman could not possibly endure if she, the sick woman, were brought to the chalice and made to bow before it. And therefore, in a nervous and certainly also mentally ill woman, there always occurred (and had to occur), at the moment of her bowing before the chalice, an inevitable shock, as it were, to her whole body, a shock provoked by expectation of the inevitable miracle of healing and by the most complete faith that it would occur. And it would occur, even if only for a moment. That is just what happened now, as soon as the elder covered the woman with his stole.
Many of the women who pressed towards him were shedding tears of tenderness and rapture, called up by the effect of the moment; others strained to kiss at least the hem of his clothes, and some were murmuring to themselves. He gave blessings to everyone and spoke with several. The “shrieker” he knew already; she came not from far away but from a village only four miles from the monastery, and had been brought to him before.
“But she comes from far away!” He pointed to a woman who was not at all old yet but very thin and haggard, with a face not tanned but, as it were, blackened. She was kneeling and stared at the elder with a fixed gaze. There was something frenzied, as it were, in her eyes.
“From far away, dear father, far away, two hundred miles from here. Far away, father, far away,” the woman spoke in a singsong voice, rocking her head gently from side to side with her cheek resting in her hand. She spoke as though she were lamenting. There is among the people a silent, long-suffering grief; it withdraws into itself and is silent. But there is also a grief that is strained; a moment comes when it breaks through with tears, and from that moment on it pours itself out in lamentations. Especially with women. But it is no easier to bear than the silent grief. Lamentations ease the heart only by straining and exacerbating it more and more. Such grief does not even want consolation; it is nourished by the sense of its unquenchableness. Lamentations are simply the need to constantly irritate the wound.
“You must be tradespeople,” the elder continued, studying her with curiosity.
“We’re townspeople, father, townspeople, we’re peasants but we live in town. I’ve come to see you, father. We heard about you, dear father, we heard about you. I buried my baby son, and went on a pilgrimage. I’ve been in three monasteries, and then they told me: ‘Go to them, too, Nastasia’—meaning to you, my dear, to you. So I came; yesterday I was at vespers, and today I’ve come to you.”
“What are you weeping for?”
“I pity my little son, dear father, he was three years old, just three months short of three years old.[39]I grieve for my little son, father, for my little son. He was the last little son left to us, we had four, Nikitushka and I, but our children didn’t stay with us, they didn’t stay. When I buried the first three, I wasn’t too sorry about them, but this last one I buried and I can’t forget him. As if he’s just standing right in front of me and won’t go away. My soul is wasted over him. I look at his clothes, at his little shirt or his little boots, and start howling. I lay out all that he left behind, all his things, and look at them and howl. Then I say to Nikitushka, that’s my husband, let me go on a pilgrimage, master. He’s a coachman, we’re not poor, father, not poor, we run our own business, everything belongs to us, the horses and the carriages. But who needs all that now? Without me, he’s taken to drinking, my Nikitushka, I’m sure he has, even before I left he’d give in to it, the minute I turned my back. And now I don’t even think about him. It’s three months since I left home. I’ve forgotten, I’ve forgotten everything, and I don’t want to remember, what can I do with him now? I’m through with him, through, I’m through with everybody. And I don’t even want to see my house now, and my things, I don’t want to see anything at all!”