Fifty-Two Stories

Having let his guest drink a cup of tea and accompanied him to the front hall, Kunin lay down on the sofa and surrendered himself entirely to the unpleasant feeling evoked in him by Father Yakov’s visit.

“What a strange, uncouth man!” he thought. “Dirty, slovenly, coarse, stupid, and probably a drunkard…My God, and this is a priest, a spiritual father! A teacher of the people! I can imagine how much irony there must be in the deacon’s voice as he intones before every liturgy: ‘Bless, master!’ A fine master! A master who doesn’t have a drop of dignity, ill-bred, hiding cookies in his pocket like a schoolboy…Ugh! Good Lord, where was the bishop looking when he ordained this man? What do they think of the people, if they give them such teachers? What’s needed here is people who…”

And Kunin began to think about what Russian priests should be like…

“If I, for instance, were a priest…A well-educated priest who loves what he does can achieve a great deal…I’d have opened a school long ago. And sermons? If a priest is sincere and inspired by love for his work, what wonderful, fiery sermons he could give!”

Kunin closed his eyes and began mentally composing a sermon. A little later he was sitting at his desk and quickly writing it down.

“I’ll give it to that redhead, let him read it in church…,” he thought.

The next Sunday, in the morning, Kunin was riding to Sinkovo to finish with the question of the school and incidentally become acquainted with the church, where he was considered a parishioner. In spite of the muddy season, the morning was glorious. The sun shone brightly, and its rays cut into the sheets of residual snow showing white here and there. The snow, bidding farewell to the earth, shimmered with such diamonds that it was painful to look at, and next to it the young winter rye was hurriedly turning green. Rooks sedately circled over the earth. A rook flies, then descends to the ground and, before coming to a standstill, hops several times…

The wooden church that Kunin rode up to was dilapidated and gray; the little columns on the porch, once painted white, had peeled and were now completely bare and resembled two ugly shafts. The icon over the door looked like a single dark spot. But this poverty touched and moved Kunin. Modestly lowering his eyes, he entered the church and stopped by the door. The service had just begun. An old, crook-backed sexton was reading the hours in a hollow, indistinct tenor. Father Yakov, who served without a deacon, went around censing the church. If it had not been for the humility Kunin felt on entering the beggarly church, the sight of Father Yakov would certainly have made him smile. The undersized priest was wearing a wrinkled and much-too-long vestment of some shabby yellow fabric. The lower edge of the vestment dragged on the ground.

The church was not full. Glancing at the parishioners, Kunin was struck at first by a strange circumstance: he saw only old people and children…Where were those of working age? Where were youth and manhood? But, having stood there longer and looked more attentively at the old people’s faces, Kunin saw that he had mistaken the young ones for old. However, he ascribed no special significance to this small optical illusion.

The inside of the church was as dilapidated and gray as the outside. On the iconostasis and on the brown walls there was not a single spot that had not been blackened and scratched by time. There were many windows, but the general coloration was gray, and therefore it was dusky in the church.

“For the pure in soul, it’s good to pray here…,” thought Kunin. “As in St. Peter’s in Rome one is struck by the grandeur, so here one is touched by this humility and simplicity.”

But his prayerful mood scattered like smoke when Father Yakov entered the altar and began the liturgy. A young man, ordained to the priesthood straight from the seminary, Father Yakov had had no time to adopt a definite manner of serving. While reciting, it was as if he were choosing what sort of voice to use—a high tenor or a flimsy bass; he bowed clumsily, walked quickly, opened and closed the Royal Doors abruptly…³ The old sexton, obviously sick and deaf, heard his exclamations poorly, which did not fail to result in minor misunderstandings. He would start to sing his part before Father Yakov had finished his, or else Father Yakov would have finished long ago and the old man would still be trying to hear him and would be silent until he was pulled by the cassock. The old man had a hollow, sickly voice, short-winded, trembling and lisping…To crown the unseemliness, the sexton was joined by a very young boy, whose head was barely visible over the rail of the choir loft. The boy sang in a high, shrill soprano and as if deliberately out of tune. Kunin stood for a while listening, then stepped outside to smoke…He was already disappointed and looked at the gray church almost with hostility.