Forty Stories

The Student

AT first the weather was fine and it was very quiet. Blackbirds sang, and from the neighboring marshes something living could be heard making a pathetic moaning sound like air being blown in an empty bottle. A solitary woodcock flew up, and someone aimed, and a shot rang out vividly and joyfully on the spring air. Then as the woods grew dark a cold and penetrating wind rose unreasonably from the east, and everything was silent. Needles of ice stretched over the pools; darkness, misery, and loneliness hung over the woods. It smelled of winter.

Ivan Velikopolsky, a student in the theological seminary and the son of a sacristan, was making his way home from hunting, barefoot, taking the path through the water-logged meadows. His fingers were numbed, and his face burned by the wind. It seemed to him that the sudden fall of temperature had somehow destroyed the order and harmony of the universe, and the earth herself was in agony, and that was why the evening shadows fell more rapidly than usual. All round him there was only emptiness and a peculiar obscurity. The only light shone from the widows’ gardens near the river; elsewhere, far into the distance and close to him, everything was plunged in the cold evening fog, and the village three miles away was also hidden in the fog. The student remembered that when he left home his mother was sitting on the floor in the doorway cleaning the samovar, while his father lay coughing on the stove; and because it was Good Friday, no cooking had been done in the house and the student was ferociously hungry. Oppressed by the cold, he fell to thinking that just such a wind as this had blown in the time of Rurik and in the days of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, and in those days men suffered from the same terrible poverty and hunger; they had the same thatched roofs filled with holes; there was the same wretchedness, ignorance, and desolation everywhere, the same darkness, the same sense of being oppressed—all these dreadful things had existed, did exist, and would continue to exist, and in a thousand years’ time life would be no better. He did not want to go home.

The widows’ gardens were so called because they were kept by two widows, a mother and daughter. There a wood fire was crackling and blazing, throwing a great circle of light over the plowed earth. The widow Vasilissa, a huge, bloated old woman, was wearing a man’s coat. She stood gazing dreamily at the flames while her daughter Lukerya, a little pock-marked woman with a stupid expression, sat on the ground washing a kettle and some spoons. Apparently they had just finished supper. Men’s voices could be heard; they were the local farm workers watering their horses at the river.

“Well, winter’s back again,” the student said, going up to the fire. “Good day to you!”

Vasilissa gave a start, but she recognized him and smiled at him warmly.

“I did not recognize you at first,” she said. “God bless you! You’ll be rich one day!”

They went on talking. Vasilissa was a woman of experience; she had served the gentry first as a wet nurse and then as a children’s nurse, and she expressed herself with refinement. A grave and gentle smile never left her lips. Her daughter Lukerya was a peasant; the life had been crushed out of her by her husband. She screwed up her eyes at the student and said nothing. She had a strange expression, like that of a deaf-mute.

“On just such a cold night as this St. Peter warmed himself by a fire,” the student said, stretching his hands over the flames. “So it must have been very cold! What a terrible night, eh? Yes, it was an extraordinarily long, sad night!”

Saying this, he gazed at the encircling shadows, gave a little convulsive shake of his head, and went on: “Tell me, have you ever attended a reading of the Twelve Gospels?”

“Yes, I have,” Vasilissa answered.

“Then you’ll remember that at the Last Supper, Peter said to Jesus: ‘I am ready to go with thee down into darkness and death,’ and the Lord answered: ‘I tell thee, Peter, the cock, the bird of dawning, shall not crow this day, before that thou shalt thrice deny that thou knowest me.’ After the supper Jesus suffered the agony in the garden, and prayed, but poor Peter was faint and weary of spirit, and his eyelids were heavy, and he could no longer fight against sleep. So he slept. Then, as you know, Judas came that same night and kissed Jesus and betrayed him to his tormentors. They bound him and took him to the high priest and beat him, while Peter, worn out with fear and anxiety, utterly exhausted, you understand, not yet fully awake, feeling that something terrible was about to happen on earth, followed after him. For he loved Jesus passionately and with all his soul, and he saw from afar off how they were beating him.…”

Lukerya dropped the spoons and looked fixedly in the direction of the student.

“They came to the house of the high priest,” he went on, “and they began to interrogate Jesus, while the workmen lit a fire in the courtyard because it was cold, and they warmed themselves round the fire, and Peter stood close by the fire, and he too warmed himself, just as I am doing now. There was a woman who recognized him and said: ‘This man also was with Jesus,’ meaning that he too should be taken for interrogation. And all the workmen who were standing round the fire must have looked at him searchingly and suspiciously, for he was troubled and said: ‘I do not know him.’ After a while someone recognized him as one of the disciples of Jesus, and said: ‘You were one of them.’ And again Peter denied it. And then for the third time someone turned toward him and said: ’Did I not see thee with him in the garden?” And again Peter denied it, and at that very moment the cock crew, and Peter gazing from afar off at Jesus remembered the words spoken to him earlier in the evening.… He remembered and suddenly recovered his senses and went out from the courtyard and wept bitterly. The Gospels say: ‘He went out and wept bitterly.’ And so I imagine it—the garden was deathly still and very dark, and in the silence there came the sound of muffled sobbing.…”

The student sighed and fell into deep thought. Though her lips still formed a smile, Vasilissa suddenly gave way to weeping, and the heavy tears rolled down her cheeks, and she hid her face in her sleeve as though ashamed of her tears, while Lukerya, still gazing motionlessly at the student, flushed scarlet, and her expression became strained and heavy as though she were suffering great pain.

The farm workers returned from the river, and one who was on horseback came near them, and the light from the fire glittered on him. The student bade good night to the widows and went on his way. Once again the shadows crowded close around him, and his hands froze. A cruel wind was blowing, winter had settled in, and it was hard to believe that Easter was only the day after tomorrow.

The student fell to thinking about Vasilissa. It occurred to him that because she had been weeping, everything that happened to Peter on the night of the Last Supper must have a special meaning for her.…

He looked round him. He could see the solitary fire gleaming peacefully in the dark, but there was no longer anyone near it. Once more the student thought that if Vasilissa gave way to weeping, and her daughter was moved by his words, then it was clear that the story he had been telling them, though it happened nineteen centuries ago, still possessed a meaning for the present time—to both these women, to the desolate village, to himself, and to all people. The old woman wept, not because he was able to tell the story touchingly, but because Peter was close to her and because her whole being was deeply affected by what happened in Peter’s soul.

And suddenly his soul was filled with joy, and for a moment he had to pause to recover his breath. “The past,” he thought, “is linked to the present by an unbroken chain of events all flowing from one to the other.” And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of the chain, and when he touched one end the other trembled.

When he took the raft across the river, and afterward when he was climbing the hill and looking back in the direction of his native village and toward the west, where the cold purple sunset was no more than a thin streak of light, it occurred to him that the same truth and the same beauty which reigned over humankind in the garden and in the courtyard of the high priest had endured uninterruptedly until the present time, and always they were the most important influences working on human life and everything on the earth; and the feeling of youth, health, and vigor—he was only twenty-two—and the inexpressible sweet expectation of happiness, of an unknown and secret happiness, took possession of him little by little, and life suddenly seemed to him ravishing, marvelous, and full of deep meaning.

April 1894