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Vasilisa pressed the girl’s head to her side.

“You silly bird. We don’t have a wood-burning stove. And we don’t wash the floors ourselves; the floor polisher comes and polishes them. But don’t you worry: there’s more than enough to do in this house . . .”

BUSY WITH THE FUNERAL ARRANGEMENTS, ELENA HAD forgotten Vasilisa’s words about leaving. Over the past few days her quarrel with her husband had hardened, as if having grown a scab. They almost never spoke—only about household necessities. The first evening when the Polosukhin children had shown up in their house, before their quarrel, Elena had made her husband’s bed in his study and taken Tanya into the room with her. At that point, it had not signified a quarrel, but was just a household necessity: there was no place for the three children to sleep . . . And so it remained the whole week, until Lizaveta’s funeral.

Who knows: if the necessity had not arisen, might Pavel Alekseevich have found words and gestures to soften the insult, and would his wife, reassured of her husband’s love, have had a good cry on his broad, hairy chest, and would everything have returned to usual . . . ?

The morning after the funeral Elena found Vasilisa Gavrilovna in the kitchen dressed in the new silk headscarf they had given her at Christmas and wearing new shoes . . . She sat up straight in her chair, a small fiberboard suitcase alongside her together with a large bundle with her linen and pillow.

Elena sat down next to her and started to cry. Vasilisa lowered her seeing eye, pursed her lips, pressed her hands to her breast in a cross, as if preparing to take communion. Silence.

“Where are you going to go, Vasenka?” Elena had not expected such resolve from Vasilisa.

“Wherever it was I came from that’s where I’m going back to,” Vasilisa answered sternly. “God be with you, Elena.”

Vasilisa looked straight ahead, one eye white, the other blue. A hideous gaze.

“Does she really not love us at all?” Elena was horrified by the thought. She took from her purse all the money she had and silently handed it to Vasilisa.

Vasilisa bowed, picked up her belongings, and set off . . .

Just like that. As if she had not spent twenty years together with Elena. Disappeared, without saying good-bye to Tanya, or Pavel Alekseevich. Without looking back.

11

VASILISA KNEW EXACTLY WHERE SHE HAD COME FROM and where she was going: from the soil to the soil. Putting it in today’s terms, she had the mindset of someone sent on a business trip to perform some assigned task and then return to her permanent place of employment.

The circumstances of her time on this earth since birth had been such that her own mother had used to say about her daughter, who was born late and unexpected: girl got no luck and no smarts.

Her older brother and the sister who had grown to maturity and not dissolved into the earth at infancy, as had the six or seven—Vasilisa’s mother did not remember the precise number—babies buried at the rural cemetery, had long ago separated from their parents and left. Her older sister Dusya worked as a domestic in Moscow, and her brother Sergei was married in the neighboring administrative district.

The first misfortune to befall Vasilisa occurred very early. She was two years old when the only rooster in her parents’ yard—an unsightly, voiceless creature—jumped up and pecked her in the eye. The little girl yelped, but no one noticed. A white spot began to develop on her eye, and by the time she was seven the eye was entirely clouded over by a white film.

Year by year Vasilisa’s parents grew poorer, fell ill, and when Vasilisa was ten her father died. Her widowed mother knocked about for a year, then moved in with her oldest son, who had a prospering farm near Kozelsk. At her brother’s place mother and daughter were treated like extra mouths to feed, told to live in the bathhouse, and not invited to the table. Vasilisa and her mother worked in the garden and lived off practically the garden alone. Sergei would bring them bread on holidays or when he was in a good mood, after he had drunk wine.

About thirty miles from those parts the renowned Optina Pustyn monastery prospered, although already on its way to decline. Spiritual life by that time had turned partly into a commercial commodity, of particular value to the owners of inns and taverns, not to mention the monastery’s own hotels. People came there on foot from all over Russia, thousands of people of all social castes. One of the roads passed through the village where Vasilisa’s brother lived. But he did not belong to that clever breed who knows how to extract profit from their conveniently located living quarters. Just the opposite—he was constantly annoyed by the poorer pilgrims who asked for lodging for the night, or panhandled, or walked off with anything that was not chained down. The majority of those streaming by on foot were beggars and half-beggars, monks and half-monks, and Vasilisa’s brother hated all of them and considered them rabble and idlers. Sergei himself had never been to the renowned site: he attended services at the village church three times a year, and of all the church’s dictums he observed only one: he never worked on major feast days.

Vasilisa was afraid of her brother: he never talked to her, and she knew only from her mother that when he was young he had sung and danced and been handsome, but that his temperament had changed after a girl he had fallen in love with rejected him. Their mother pitied him, but he took pity on no one—not on his wife, or his children, and even less on deformed little Vasilisa. That winter their mother caught cold and died. Vasilisa remained with the large family, for whom she was only a hindrance.

Soon after her mother’s death a neighbor took Vasilisa to a celebration at the Optina Pustyn. Vasilisa was exhausted before she got there and barely managed to stand through the long monastery service, which brought her neither pleasure nor relief. But on the way back a miracle occurred, although it was almost impossible to describe because it was so small and insignificant, just Vasilisa’s size. Her fellow travelers decided to have a rest, and she lay down about thirty feet from the road, in a dense hazel grove, and fell asleep. She had not slept long when she was awakened by voices beckoning her to move on. While she was asleep, the gloomy overcast day had brightened, and just as she opened her eyes the clouds parted and a wide ray of sunlight as thick—and just about as heavy—as a log broke a hole through the clouds and fell on the field right in front of her, illuminating a circle on the ground . . . Basically, that was the whole miracle. She knew that the circle was Jesus Christ, who was alive and loved her. In addition, she was completely convinced that she had seen this miraculous vision with both her eyes—the picture had been so three-dimensional and unlike anything that she had ever seen in her life.

The entire way back she sobbed softly, and her kindly neighbor decided that the little girl had worn one of her feet ragged. She removed the scarf from her head and told her to wrap her foot with it. Vasilisa did not object, wrapped her foot in the scarf, and limped the rest of the way back, because the headscarf made her bast shoe too tight and squeezed her foot.

Vasilisa somehow survived the winter at her brother’s, and in the spring he sent her to their sister Dusya in Moscow. Dusya wanted to find her some sort of job. She arranged for her to be taken on as an apprentice at a tailoring shop on Malaya Nikitskaya Street owned by a compassionate woman of German origin named Lizelotta Mikhailovna Klotske. As soon as she saw Vasilisa’s white eye, she realized that the little girl would never make a decent seamstress: even with two good eyes twenty years of work weakened the women’s eyesight. But she did not let her go immediately, allowing her to stay on and try to acquire a skill. Although Vasilisa was only fourteen years old, rural life had so coarsened her fingers that they could not hold the small needles and thin threads. When they assigned her to ironing, that too turned out to be not entirely easy. With their little steam irons the other girls pressed pleats stiff and sharp as sword grass—you could cut your finger on them; Vasilisa’s pleats were crooked and uneven, and they’d have to be soaked again and dried . . . Seeing that the newcomer, for all her diligence, had no talent for work with her hands, the kind owner charged her with cleaning the workshop.