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 sing-song 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 sing-song 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 sa............