The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

And here I already saw clearly that they were one band and aimed to deal wrongly and dishonestly with me, and, abandoning the icon to them, I left with my eyes full of tears, thanking God that my Levonty, whose faith was in agony, had not seen it. But I was just drawing near our house, and I saw there was no light in the window of the room we rented, and yet a high, delicate singing was coming from it. I recognized at once that it was Levonty’s pleasant voice singing, and singing with such feeling as if he were bathing each word in tears. I came in quietly, so that he wouldn’t hear me, stood by the door, and listened to how he intoned Joseph’s lament:²¹

To whom will I tell my sorrow,

Who will share in my weeping?

This chant, if you happen to know it, is so pitiful to begin with that it’s impossible to listen to it calmly, but Levonty himself also wept and sobbed as he sang:

My brothers they have sold me!

And he weeps and weeps, singing about seeing his mother’s coffin and calling upon the earth to cry out for his brothers’ sin! …

These words can always stir a man, and especially me at that moment, as I came running from the brother-baiting. They moved me so much that I began to snivel myself, and Levonty, hearing it, stopped singing and called to me:

“Uncle! Hey, uncle!”

“What,” I say, “my good lad?”

“Do you know,” he says, “who this mother of ours is, the one that’s sung about here?”

“Rachel,” I reply.

“No,” he says, “in ancient times it was Rachel, but now it should be understood mysteriously.”

“What do you mean, mysteriously?” I ask.

“I mean,” he replies, “that this word signifies something else.”

“Beware, child,” I say. “Aren’t you reasoning dangerously?”

“No,” he replies, “I feel in my heart that Christ is being crucified for us, because we don’t seek him with one mouth and one heart.”²²

I was frightened still more by what he was aiming at and said:

“You know what, Levontiushka? Let’s get out of this Moscow quickly and go to the country around Nizhny Novgorod, to seek out the icon painter Sevastian. I hear he’s going about there now.”

“Well, let’s go then,” he replies. “Here in Moscow some sort of needy spirit irks me painfully, but there there are forests, the air is cleaner, and I’ve heard there’s an elder named Pamva, a hermit totally envyless and wrathless. I would like to see him.”

“The elder Pamva,” I reply sternly, “is a servant of the ruling Church. Why should we go looking at him?”

“Where’s the harm in it?” he says. “I’d like to see him, in order to comprehend the grace of the ruling Church.”

I chided him, saying, “What sort of grace could there be?”—yet I felt he was more right than I was, because he wished to test things out, while I rejected what I didn’t know, but I insisted on my rejection and talked complete nonsense to him.

“Church people,” I say, “look at the sky not with faith, but through the gates of Aristotle, and determine their way in the sea by the star of the pagan god Remphan, and you want to have the same view as theirs?”²³

But Levonty replies:

“You’re inventing fables, uncle: there was no such god as Remphan, and everything was created by one wisdom.”

That made me feel even more stupid and I said:

“Church people drink coffee!”

“Where’s the harm in that?” Levonty replies. “The coffee bean was brought to King David as a gift.”

“How do you know all that?” I ask.

“I’ve read it in books,” he says.

“Well, know then that not everything is written in books.”

“And what isn’t written in them?” he says.

“What? What isn’t written in them?” I myself have no idea what to say, and blurt out to him:

“Church people eat hare, and hare is unclean.”

“Don’t call God’s creature unclean,” he says. “It’s a sin.”

“How can I not call hare unclean,” I say, “when it is unclean, when it has an ass’s constitution and a male-female nature and generates thick and melancholy blood in man?”

But Levonty laughs and says:

“Sleep, uncle, you’re saying ignorant things!”

I admit to you that at the time I had not yet discerned clearly what was going on in the soul of this blessed young man, but I was very glad that he did not want to talk anymore, for I myself understood that in my anger I say God knows what, and so I fell silent and only lay there thinking:

“No, such doubts in him come from anguish, but tomorrow we’ll get up and go, and it will all disperse in him.” But just in case, I decided in my mind that I would walk silently with him for some time, in order to make a show of being very angry with him.