“Vasilisa, what does ‘this day’ mean?” Mother Anatolia would begin Vasilisa’s lessons with this question.
Uncertain, Vasilisa rolled her only serviceable eye to the ceiling and for the fifteenth time replied.
“In the afternoon?”
The abbess shook her head.
“Yesterday?” The embarrassed pupil turned crimson.
“‘This day’ means ‘now, at this time, today’ . . .”
“This day the Maiden gives birth to the Transcendent One . . .” the teacher repeated innumerable times, warding off her irritation with a short prayer.
Vasilisa nodded happily, then, the very next day, she once again painfully searched the low whitewashed ceiling for an answer to the question, “What does ‘this day’ mean?”
Having observed the slowness and torpidity of Vasilisa’s brains, the abbess now and again would conclude that she was dealing with a certain kind of mental retardation. And by this time, having spent nearly twenty years in monasteries, she knew that deficiencies of various sorts—intellectual, physical, or moral—were widespread phenomena and that a healthy person was sooner an exception to the rule of total global illness.
In addition to intellectual torpidity she noted her ward’s insuperable ignorance and predilection for the wildest of superstitions, and guessed that the girl’s rare obstinacy camouflaged a certain kind of preordination—like that of a plant that sends its roots downward and leaves upward and cannot be made to break this habit. But in Vasilisa’s case all of these frustrating peculiarities were wrapped in a rare virtue, which the abbess also discovered in her ward. The soul of this backward girl harbored an inexhaustible well of gratitude, a rare ability to remember every kindness shown her, and a noble amnesia for all insults and injuries. Surprising as it might seem, it was precisely the injuries and various insults directed at her that she accepted as deserved.
Monastic life—the abbess had known for a long time—concealed unseen possibilities for oppression, violence, and sin. These were special, monastic sins of which secular people immersed in their pursuit of daily bread had no concept. Within the walls of a monastery human relations acquired much greater significance, and much more acute forms. Sympathies and antipathies, jealousy, envy, and hatred festered, sealed within the confines of strictly regulated behavior.
The abbess knew perfectly well that Vasilisa was sneered at, insulted, and mistreated, but she never heard a single word of complaint from her doltish little novice, who exuded only incessant gratitude. Having plumbed the girl’s uncomplicated depths with her experienced vision, Mother Anatolia wondered: what sort of miracle was this deformed little girl with neither beauty nor talent, yet so richly blessed with the rare gift of gratitude? “A humble soul,” the abbess decided, and made Vasilisa her cell-keeper . . .
Vasilisa now slept on a narrow bench in the entranceway, at the door to the abbess’s room. At first she would wake up every ten minutes, like a nursing mother who constantly imagines that her child has begun to cry. When she woke up, she would rush to the locked door of the abbess’s room, on the way overturning the slops bucket or knocking over the woodpile—the tiled stove in the abbess’s room was stoked from the entranceway . . . She often woke the abbess, whose sleep since youth had been fragile and easily disrupted. For the longest time the abbess tried to impress on her that if she were awakened by a disturbing thought she should recite the Hail Mary three times before getting up. But Vasilisa emerged from her peasant’s sleep usually only after she was already standing near the door, frightened by the noise she had made and only then remembering the Reverend Mother’s instructions . . .
For all her dimwittedness and clumsiness, Vasilisa learned to sweep away the dust with a multicolored broom called a “chicken-wing” because of its shape, to wash windows to a brilliant shine, and even to steep tea “genteel-style.”
In the fourth year of Vasilisa’s residency the old priest and father confessor who had lived at the monastery for many years died. A new priest arrived, Hieromonk Varsonofy. He was young—barely more than thirty—but looked much older, with turtlelike skin, dry lips, and eyelids that folded over his dark Byzantine eyes . . . His education was decent, and he had been a monk since youth, precisely the type the church hierarchy itself came from.
Father Varsonofy taught church history and liturgics at the administrative district seminary and came to the monastery for brief visits, occasionally missing a week or two if he was having a difficult semester. The abbess treated him respectfully, even deferentially, and though usually reserved and of few words, he would often drink tea and engage in conversation with her. Despite the enormous differences in their backgrounds and upbringing, Mother Anatolia, an enlightened aristocrat, became close with Father Varsonofy, the son of a railroad worker and a peasant. She held the new priest in high regard: it was not often in monastic circles that one met a person who took an interest in life beyond the monastery’s gates.
Mother Anatolia herself had retained her worldly habits: she read secular books, her girlfriends even sent her a literary magazine, and in church circles she had the reputation of a radical, because she admired Patriarch Philaret of Moscow and advocated translation of the Bible into vernacular Russian; that is, in the eyes of some church leaders she was not entirely trustworthy, with a certain disposition toward Lutheranism.
At the time, the young monk held entirely different, stricter views: he entertained no disposition toward Lutheranism, was irreconcilable with Catholicism, and as a meticulous reader of new writing in divinity studies he singled out Vladimir Soloviev, to whose work he strongly objected, as particularly pernicious.
Serving them at the table, Vasilisa was constant witness to their conversations. Removing the tea service, she would sit down on the bench outside the door and thrill at their clever words, and wonder why the Lord had brought her to such an enviable, rich, and divine place . . . She remembered well the backbreaking work of her childhood, the ache in her arms and back, the constant pain in her stomach from which she had suffered until she came to the monastery, the hunger, and most of all, the cold that for so many years had held her in its grip, abating only briefly in the fleeting warmth of July and August.
The last summer before the war Father Varsonofy left them for three months to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. During his stay in Palestine he learned that war had broken out and returned to the motherland on the very last steamship. He returned still very much under the impression of the sacred places, especially the Sea of Galilee, which he had circumambulated, offering prayers at each of the holy sites, which for the most part retained from antiquity only their geographical names . . .
Vasilisa would sit near the door, petrified with astonishment: she was seeing with her own eyes someone who had seen the Sea of Galilee and the ruins of the synagogue at Capernaum, where the Lord himself had been. For her the abstract written word now acquired flesh and smell. The smell that came from the monk himself, though, was still the same—odors of a body rarely bathed mixed with the smell of dampness, the incense that had impregnated his clothes, and the tablets that he chewed to soothe his tormenting toothache. Vasilisa secretly pulled a putrid thread from his long overcoat, scraped the dirt from the soles of the galoshes in which he had made his journey, wrapped them both in silver paper, and preserved them as if they were relics. She even came to regard herself with a certain respect as someone who had seen someone who had seen the Holy Land . . .