The Brothers Karamazov (9 page)

“Blessed man, allow me to kiss your hand!” Karamazov exclaimed, leaping to his feet, snatching the elder’s wizened hand, and hurriedly planting a loud kiss on it. “You’re right, so very right! It is very pleasant to feel wronged! I’ve never heard it put so well before. I have, indeed, been taking offense all my life because I enjoyed it and felt it was beautiful. It is not only pleasurable, it is also esthetically satisfying to feel offended. Yes, that is something you left out, great elder—the beauty of it. I must make a note of it! It is a fact that I have lied all my life, every day and every hour. In truth, I am a living lie, the father of lies . . . No, wait a minute, not the father of lies—I always get my quotations mixed up—well, let’s say the son, and that’s good enough. But don’t you think, angelic man, one can tell lies like the one about Diderot now and then? Diderot can do no harm, but sometimes a word can cause a lot of trouble . . . Ah, I almost forgot, great elder—for two years I’ve been determined to come here to consult you about something special . . . But first, perhaps you’d better warn Mr. Miusov not to interrupt me. Here’s what I wanted to ask you: is it true, Holy Father, as it says somewhere in the 
Lives of the Saints
, that one holy miracle worker who suffered martyrdom for his faith stood up, after they had beheaded him, picked up his head, ‘kissed it affectionately,’ and walked for a long time, carrying it in his hands and ‘kissing it affectionately.’ Is that story true? I’m addressing the question to all of you, reverend fathers!”

“No, it isn’t true,” the elder said.

“There’s nothing of the sort in the 
Lives of the Saints
,” said the Father Librarian. “About which saint is it supposed to be written?”

“I don’t know myself. Haven’t the slightest idea. I was just told the story, misled. And shall I tell you who told me? All right—it was Mr. Miusov here, who just now was so furious about Diderot. It was he who told it to me.”

“I never told you anything of the sort. To begin with, I never speak to you at all.”

“Right, you didn’t tell it to me, but you did tell it to others in my presence, about three years ago. I bring it up now because, by telling that ridiculous story, you undermined my faith. Although you didn’t know it, Mr. Miusov, I returned home that day with my faith shaken, and it has been getting shakier and shakier ever since. Yes, Mr. Miusov, you were the cause of my terrible fall. And that’s much worse than my telling the Diderot story.”

Karamazov’s tone was brimming with pathos, although it was perfectly clear to everyone that he was acting again. Yet Miusov was still stung to the quick:

“Nonsense, utter nonsense . . .” he muttered angrily. “I may have said something of the sort, but I didn’t tell it to you, I’m sure of that. I was also told the story. When I was in Paris, a Frenchman told me it was from the 
Lives of the Saints
 and that they read it in Russia in the mass . . . He was a very learned man who was making a statistical study of Russia. He had spent a long time in this country. As for me, I’ve never read the 
Lives of the Saints
, nor do I intend to . . . Anyway, one says all sorts of things at a dinner party and it was at one that I told the story.”

“So you ate your dinner and, as a result, I lost my faith that day,” Karamazov said, still taunting him.

“Much I care about your faith!” Miusov was ready to shout at him but then, containing himself, he said scornfully: “You defile everything you touch.”

The elder rose abruptly from his sofa:

“I hope you will excuse me, gentlemen, if I leave you—just for a few minutes,” he said, addressing everyone present. “Some people who were here even before you arrived are waiting for me. And you,” he said, looking cheerfully at Karamazov, “see if you can manage without lying.”

As he started out of the cell, Alyosha and the novice hurried over to help him down the steps. Alyosha, who had been standing holding his breath, was very glad to be out of there, but he was also relieved that the elder didn’t seem at all offended and was cheerful as usual. The elder was about to leave the cell to bless those who were waiting for him, but Karamazov stopped him in the doorway:

“Blessed man!” he cried out emotionally. “Allow me to kiss your hand once more! I see I can talk to you, I can get along with you. Perhaps you think I always lie like this and play the clown? Well, I want you to know that I was deliberately testing you—I wanted to find out if it was possible to get along with you, whether there was room for my humility next to your pride. So let me give you a certificate of good character: it is indeed possible to get along with you! And now I’ll remain silent the rest of the time. I’ll sit in my chair and I won’t say one word. It’s your turn to have the floor now, Mr. Miusov. You will be the most important person here for the next ten minutes . . .”

Chapter 3: Women Of Great Faith

A  SCORE OF visitors, this time all peasant women, were waiting below by the gallery built outside the hermitage wall. They had been told that the elder would eventually come out and so had gathered there. Mrs. Khokhlakov and her daughter had also come out into the gallery to wait for the elder, but in the part reserved for ladies. Mrs. Khokhlakov, a wealthy woman, always tastefully dressed, was still young and very pretty; she was rather pale, with very lively, almost black eyes. She was no more than thirty-three and had been a widow for five years. Her fourteen-year-old daughter, whose legs were paralyzed, had been unable to walk for six months and had to be pushed around in a wheel-chair. She had a charming face, a little emaciated by sickness, but cheerful. There was a mischievous sparkle in the big dark eyes behind her long lashes. Her mother had planned to take her abroad in the spring, but they had been detained throughout the summer by urgent business on the estate. They had been in our town for a week already, having come on business rather than for devotions. Nevertheless, they had already been to see Zosima three days before. And now, although they knew that the elder could receive hardly any visitors, they had come back, begging for one more chance to see “the great healer.”

The mother sat in a chair next to her daughter’s wheelchair and near her stood an old monk. He came from a little-known monastery somewhere in the far North and was also a visitor. He also sought the elder’s blessing.

But when the elder appeared in the gallery, he didn’t stop but went straight down to the peasant women crowded around the three steps by the entrance. The elder stood on the top step, put on his stole, and began blessing the women as they pressed close to him. A crazy village girl was dragged toward him by both hands. As soon as she saw the elder, she let out strange shrieks, was seized by violent hiccoughs, and shook as if in convulsions. Zosima, placing the stole on her head, said a brief prayer, and the girl immediately quieted down.

I do not know what it is like now, but when I was a boy I often saw and heard such crazy, wailing women, in the villages or at monasteries. When they were brought to mass, they shrieked, or barked like dogs, their cries filling the church. But as soon as the Host was elevated and they were led up to it, their “devilry” stopped and they calmed down for a while. As a child, I was greatly surprised by this. But then the neighboring gentry and especially my teachers, who came from town, told me the women were malingering to avoid work, and that proper firmness would cure them once and for all. They told me a number of stories to prove the point. Later, however, specialists told me that it was not a sham at all, that it was a terrible female disease, particularly widespread in Russia (which shows what a hard life Russian peasant women have), a sickness resulting from exhausting work following too soon upon a difficult, abnormal labor without medical help, and from an intensely unhappy life, full of brutality and ill-treatment, which, although common enough, is beyond the powers of endurance of some women. The strange and immediate healing effect of the Host on these crazy women, which was dismissed as shamming or even as a trick of the “clerics,” can probably be explained quite simply by the fact that the women who lead such a woman forward, and above all the sick woman herself, are absolutely convinced that the evil spirit that has entered her will have to leave her body when she is led to the Host and made to bow down before it. And so the overwrought and mentally sick woman always experiences (and cannot help experiencing) a violent shock throughout her entire body at the moment when she bends over the Host, a shock produced by her complete faith in the forthcoming miraculous cure. And the miraculous cure is certain to occur, even if it lasts for only a moment. That is what happened now, as soon as the elder covered the hysterical girl with his stole.

Many of the women standing near him wept in ecstasy and exultation, some pressed forward to kiss the hem of his robe, others intoned prayers. He blessed each one of them, speaking to some. He already knew the sick girl—she came from a village only five miles from the monastery and had been brought to him on several previous occasions.

“Here’s one from far away!” he said, indicating a woman who, though still young, was thin and haggard, and whose face seemed more blackened than suntanned. She was kneeling, her eyes fixed on Zosima. There was something frenzied in her look.

“From far away, Holy Father, from far away,” she answered in a sing-song, her head swaying rhythmically from side to side, her face in her hands. “Five hundred miles away, Holy Father, far, far away . . .”

It sounded like an incantation. There is among peasants a dumb and long-suffering grief that is bottled up inside them and stifled. But there is also a grief that bursts out, first in sobs, then in wailing—fits of wailing. This happens mostly to women. But it is no easier to bear than the silent grief. The wailing only assuages by further lacerating and exasperating the heart. Such grief does not seek consolation but feeds on an awareness of its hopelessness. The wailing simply satisfies the constant need to irritate the wound.

“You come from tradespeople, don’t you?” the elder asked, looking at her curiously.

“We live in town now, Father. We used to live on the land, but we moved to town . . . I came to see you, Father, because we’d heard so much about you, so much. I buried my baby son and then I set out—to pray for him. I went to three monasteries and they told me, ‘Go there too, Nastya, go and pray there too,’ meaning this monastery, that is. I arrived yesterday and I went to church, and today I’ve come to see you.”

“And why, exactly, are you weeping?”

“I’m sad about my little boy, Father . . . He would have been three in two months. I miss my little son, my sweet baby, my last. We had four, Nikita and I, but we can’t seem to keep them, our little ones, they just won’t stay, dear Father, they just won’t . . . When I buried the three older ones, I didn’t grieve too much for them, but this last one—I can’t get him out of my head. It’s just like he’s standing here, right in front of my eyes, and never leaves me. My heart has shriveled up. Just looking at his little shirt or his tiny shoes starts me wailing. I put out his things that are left, all of them, and I look at them and wail. So I say to my husband: ‘Let me go, Nikita, let me go on a pilgrimage to pray, to God.’ He is a coachman, my Nikita, and we aren’t poor, Father, we own the carriage and the horses ourselves. But what’s the good of it all now? And I’m sure my Nikita has taken to drink without me. I know he has, because even before he’d indulge whenever I turned my back. But I can’t even think about him now. I’ve been away from home more than two months. I’ve forgotten everything. I don’t want to remember, for how will I be able to live with my Nikita now? No, I’m through with him, through with everybody. I don’t want to set eyes on our house anymore or on our things, I don’t want to see any of it again . . .”

“Let me tell you something, mother,” the elder said. “Once, in ancient times, in a church, a great saint saw a woman just like you, weeping for her baby, her only one, whom God had also taken. ‘Don’t you know,’ the saint said to the woman, ‘how bold these little ones are before the throne of the Lord? No one in the kingdom of heaven is bolder than they are. “You gave us the gift of life,” they say to the Lord, “but as soon as we beheld it You took it back from us.” And they ask and demand so boldly that the Lord at once gives them the rank of angel. And so,’ the saint told the woman, ‘you must rejoice instead of weeping, mother, because your little one is now with the Lord among the angels.’ That’s what the saint told the weeping woman, long, long ago. And he was a great saint and cannot have told her an untruth. So you too must know that your child stands before the throne of the Lord, rejoicing and happy, and prays to God for you. And so you, too, weep but rejoice.”

The woman listened to him, her eyes cast down, one cheek resting on her hand. She sighed deeply.

“That’s just what my Nikita tried to tell me—word for word what you have said, Father: ‘Why are you crying, you fool? Our little boy must be with the Lord now, singing with the angels.’ But as he says it, I see he’s crying himself. ‘I know that, Nikita,’ I say to him. ‘Where else would he be, if not with the Lord? But then he’s not here with us anymore. He’s not by my side as he used to be.’ If only I could see him just once more! I wouldn’t even go up to him, or say a word to him. I’d just stay quiet in my corner. If only I could see him and hear him playing, just for a minute, outside in the yard—and then come into the house as he used to and call out in his little voice: ‘Ma! Where are you, ma?’ If only I could hear his little feet walking across the room, if only once more, his tiny, tiny steps—pitter patter, pitter patter. Ah, I remember how often he used to run up to me, squealing and laughing—if only I could hear his little footsteps, I’d recognize them right away! But he’s gone, Father, I’ll never hear his steps again. Here’s his little belt, but he isn’t here, and I’ll never see him or hear him again.”

She pulled out of her bosom a small embroidered belt, looked at it, and at once began shaking with sobs, the tears flowing from her eyes, which she covered with her fingers.