The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (reading an ebook TXT) 📗

Chapter 3

Peasant Women Who Have Faith

 

NEAR the wooden portico below, built on to the outer wall of the

precinct, there was a crowd of about twenty peasant women. They had

been told that the elder was at last coming out, and they had gathered

together in anticipation. Two ladies, Madame Hohlakov and her

daughter, had also come out into the portico to wait for the elder,

but in a separate part of it set aside for women of rank.

 

Madame Hohlakov was a wealthy lady, still young and attractive,

and always dressed with taste. She was rather pale, and had lively

black eyes. She was not more than thirty-three, and had been five

years a widow. Her daughter, a girl of fourteen, was partially

paralysed. The poor child had not been able to walk for the last six

months, and was wheeled about in a long reclining chair. She had a

charming little face, rather thin from illness, but full of gaiety.

There was a gleam of mischief in her big dark eyes with their long

lashes. Her mother had been intending to take her abroad ever since

the spring, but they had been detained all the summer by business

connected with their estate. They had been staying a week in our town,

where they had come more for purposes of business than devotion, but

had visited Father Zossima once already, three days before. Though

they knew that the elder scarcely saw anyone, they had now suddenly

turned up again, and urgently entreated “the happiness of looking once

again on the great healer.”

 

The mother was sitting on a chair by the side of her daughter’s

invalid carriage, and two paces from her stood an old monk, not one of

our monastery, but a visitor from an obscure religious house in the

far north. He too sought the elder’s blessing.

 

But Father Zossima, on entering the portico, went first straight

to the peasants who were crowded at the foot of the three steps that

led up into the portico. Father Zossima stood on the top step, put

on his stole, and began blessing the women who thronged about him. One

crazy woman was led up to him. As soon as she caught sight of the

elder she began shrieking and writhing as though in the pains of

childbirth. Laying the stole on her forehead, he read a short prayer

over her, and she was at once soothed and quieted.

 

I do not know how it may be now, but in my childhood I often

happened to see and hear these “possessed” women in the villages and

monasteries. They used to be brought to mass; they would squeal and

bark like a dog so that they were heard all over the church. But

when the sacrament was carried in and they were led up to it, at

once the “possession” ceased, and the sick women were always soothed

for a time. I was greatly impressed and amazed at this as a child; but

then I heard from country neighbours and from my town teachers that

the whole illness was simulated to avoid work, and that it could

always be cured by suitable severity; various anecdotes were told to

confirm this. But later on I learnt with astonishment from medical

specialists that there is no pretence about it, that it is a

terrible illness to which women are subject, especially prevalent

among us in Russia, and that it is due to the hard lot of the

peasant women. It is a disease, I was told, arising from exhausting

toil too soon after hard, abnormal and unassisted labour in

childbirth, and from the hopeless misery, from beatings, and so on,

which some women were not able to endure like others. The strange

and instant healing of the frantic and struggling woman as soon as she

was led up to the holy sacrament, which had been explained to me as

due to malingering and the trickery of the “clericals,” arose probably

in the most natural manner. Both the women who supported her and the

invalid herself fully believed as a truth beyond question that the

evil spirit in possession of her could not hold if the sick woman were

brought to the sacrament and made to bow down before it. And so,

with a nervous and psychically deranged woman, a sort of convulsion of

the whole organism always took place, and was bound to take place,

at the moment of bowing down to the sacrament, aroused by the

expectation of the miracle of healing and the implicit belief that

it would come to pass; and it did come to pass, though only for a

moment. It was exactly the same now as soon as the elder touched the

sick woman with the stole.

 

Many of the women in the crowd were moved to tears of ecstasy by

the effect of the moment: some strove to kiss the hem of his

garment, others cried out in singsong voices.

 

He blessed them all and talked with some of them. The

“possessed” woman he knew already. She came from a village only six

versts from the monastery, and had been brought to him before.

 

“But here is one from afar.” He pointed to a woman by no means old

but very thin and wasted, with a face not merely sunburnt but almost

blackened by exposure. She was kneeling and gazing with a fixed

stare at the elder; there was something almost frenzied in her eyes.

 

“From afar off, Father, from afar off! From two hundred miles from

here. From afar off, Father, from afar off!” the woman began in a

singsong voice as though she were chanting a dirge, swaying her

head from side to side with her cheek resting in her hand.

 

There is silent and long-suffering sorrow to be met with among the

peasantry. It withdraws into itself and is still. But there is a grief

that breaks out, and from that minute it bursts into tears and finds

vent in wailing. This is particularly common with women. But it is

no lighter a grief than the silent. Lamentations comfort only by

lacerating the heart still more. Such grief does not desire

consolation. It feeds on the sense of its hopelessness. Lamentations

spring only from the constant craving to re-open the wound.

 

“You are of the tradesman class?” said Father Zossima, looking

curiously at her.

 

“Townfolk we are, Father, townfolk. Yet we are peasants though

we live in the town. I have come to see you, O Father! We heard of

you, Father, we heard of you. I have buried my little son, and I

have come on a pilgrimage. I have been in three monasteries, but

they told me, ‘Go, Nastasya, go to them’- that is to you. I have come;

I was yesterday at the service, and to-day I have come to you.”

 

“What are you weeping for?”

 

“It’s my little son I’m grieving for, Father. he was three years

old-three years all but three months. For my little boy, Father,

I’m in anguish, for my little boy. He was the last one left. We had

four, my Nikita and I, and now we’ve no children, our dear ones have

all gone I buried the first three without grieving overmuch, and now I

have buried the last I can’t forget him. He seems always standing

before me. He never leaves me. He has withered my heart. I look at his

little clothes, his little shirt, his little boots, and I wail. I

lay out all that is left of him, all his little things. I look at them

and wail. I say to Nikita, my husband, ‘let me go on a pilgrimage,

master.’ He is a driver. We’re not poor people, Father, not poor; he

drives our own horse. It’s all our own, the horse and the carriage.

And what good is it all to us now? My Nikita has begun drinking

while I am away. He’s sure to. It used to be so before. As soon as I

turn my back he gives way to it. But now I don’t think about him. It’s

three months since I left home. I’ve forgotten him. I’ve forgotten

everything. I don’t want to remember. And what would our life be now

together? I’ve done with him, I’ve done. I’ve done with them all. I

don’t care to look upon my house and my goods. I don’t care to see

anything at all!”

 

“Listen, mother,” said the elder. “Once in olden times a holy

saint saw in the Temple a mother like you weeping for her little

one, her only one, whom God had taken. ‘Knowest thou not,’ said the

saint to her, ‘how bold these little ones are before the throne of

God? Verily there are none bolder than they in the Kingdom of

Heaven. “Thou didst give us life, O Lord,” they say, “and scarcely had

we looked upon it when Thou didst take it back again.” And so boldly

they ask and ask again that God gives them at once the rank of angels.

Therefore,’ said the saint, ‘thou, too, O Mother, rejoice and weep

not, for thy little son is with the Lord in the fellowship of the

angels.’ That’s what the saint said to the weeping mother of old. He

was a great saint and he could not have spoken falsely. Therefore

you too, mother, know that your little one is surely before the throne

of God, is rejoicing and happy, and praying to God for you, and

therefore weep, but rejoice.”

 

The woman listened to him, looking down with her cheek in her

hand. She sighed deeply.

 

“My Nikita tried to comfort me with the same words as you.

‘Foolish one,’ he said, ‘why weep? Our son is no doubt singing with

the angels before God.’ He says that to me, but he weeps himself. I

see that he cries like me. ‘I know, Nikita,’ said I. ‘Where could he

be if not with the Lord God? Only, here with us now he is not as he

used to sit beside us before.’ And if only I could look upon him one

little time, if only I could peep at him one little time, without

going up to him, without speaking, if I could be hidden in a corner

and only see him for one little minute, hear him playing in the

yard, calling in his little voice, ‘Mammy, where are you?’ If only I

could hear him pattering with his little feet about the room just

once, only once; for so often, so often I remember how he used to

run to me and shout and laugh, if only I could hear his little feet

I should know him! But he’s gone, Father, he’s gone, and I shall never

hear him again. Here’s his little sash, but him I shall never see or

hear now.”

 

She drew out of her bosom her boy’s little embroidered sash, and

as soon as she looked at it she began shaking with sobs, hiding her

eyes with her fingers through which the tears flowed in a sudden

stream.

 

“It is Rachel of old,” said the elder, “weeping for her

children, and will not be comforted because they are not. Such is

the lot set on earth for you mothers. Be not comforted. Consolation is

not what you need. Weep and be not consoled, but weep. Only every time

that you weep be sure to remember that your little son is one of the

angels of God, that he looks down from there at you and sees you,

and rejoices at your tears, and points at them to