About Love and Other Stories

by Chekhov, Anton; Bartlett, Leverhulme Research Fellow in Russian Cultural History Rosamund ;

  Andrey Khrisanfych stood up straight to attention and said loudly:

  ‘The Charcot * shower-bath, your excellency!’

  THE BISHOP

  I

  Vespers were being held on the eve of Palm Sunday in the Staro-Petrovsky Convent. When they started to hand out the branches of pussy-willow* it was already getting on for ten o’clock, the candles were growing dim, their wicks burned right down, and everything seemed to be in a fog. The crowd was heaving like the sea in the shadows of the church, and it seemed to Bishop Pyotr, who had been unwell for the last three days or so, that their faces—old, young, male, female—all looked identical, and that every person who came up for a branch of pussy-willow had the same expression in their eyes. The doors could not be seen through the fog, the crowd kept moving all the time, and it seemed that there would never be an end to it. There was a women’s choir singing and a nun was reading the canon.

  It was so stuffy, and so hot! Vespers had been going on for such a long time now! Bishop Pyotr was tired. His breathing was heavy and rapid, his mouth was dry, his shoulders ached with tiredness, and his legs were shaking. And the holy fool crying out occasionally from the gallery jarred his nerves. But then suddenly, as if in a dream or a delirium, it seemed to the bishop that his own mother Mariya Timofeyevna, whom he had not seen for nine years now, or an old woman who looked like his mother, had come up to him in the crowd, taken a branch of pussy-willow from him, and then walked away, still beaming at him with a warm, joyful smile until she merged back into the crowd again. For some reason, tears started pouring down his face. He was at peace in his heart, everything was fine, but his gaze was fixed on the left choir-stall where the reading was taking place, and where you could no longer make anyone out in the evening darkness, and he was crying. Tears glistened on his face and on his beard. Then someone near to him started crying, and another person further away as well, then more and more people started crying, until the whole church was full of quiet weeping. But after a little while, about five minutes later, the convent choir was singing, people had stopped crying, and everything was as it had been before.

  Soon the service finished too. When the bishop got into his carriage in order to go home, the moonlit garden was flooded with the beautiful, festive pealing of precious, heavy bells. The white walls, the white crosses on the graves, the white birch trees, the black shadows, and the distant moon in the sky standing right above the convent all seemed to be living their own special life, which was incomprehensible but somehow strangely familiar. It was the beginning of April, and after a warm spring day it had become cool, with a touch of frost; but in the soft, cold air you could definitely feel the breath of spring. The road from the convent into the city went over sand, so they had to travel at a walking pace, and on either side of the carriage there were pilgrims trudging through the sand in the serene, bright moonlight. Everyone had become lost in thought and was silent, while everything all around—the trees, the sky, and even the moon—looked so young, friendly, and so close that it made you wish it would always be like this.

  The carriage had finally entered the city and was going down the main street. The shops were already locked up, and only Erakin the merchant millionaire was experimenting with electric light, but it kept going on and off and a crowd of onlookers had gathered. Then came wide, dark streets, one after the other, all deserted, then the highway beyond the town, then fields and the smell of pine trees. A white indented wall loomed suddenly before his eyes, and behind it a tall belfry, all lit up; next to it were five large, shining gold cupolas— this was the Pankratiev Monastery where Bishop Pyotr lived. And the quiet, pensive moon was standing just as high above the monastery here too. The carriage drove in through the gates, making a crunching sound in the gravel; there were monks in black darting about in the moonlight, and footsteps could be heard on the flagstones…

  ‘Your Mama turned up here while you were gone, your Reverence,’ the lay brother reported when the bishop entered his rooms.

  ‘My Mama? When did she arrive?’

  ‘Before Vespers. First she asked where you were and then she went over to the convent.’

  ‘So I really did see her in church just now! Oh Lord!’

  And the bishop laughed with happiness.

  ‘She asked me to let you know, your Reverence,’ the lay brother continued, ‘that she would come tomorrow. There is a girl with her, a grandchild, I suppose. They are staying at Ovsyannikov’s Inn.’

  ‘What time is it now?’

  ‘Just after eleven.’

  ‘Oh, what a shame!’

  The bishop sat pondering for a while in his drawing room, not quite believing that it was already so late. His arms and legs ached and the back of his head hurt. He felt hot and uncomfortable. After a little rest, he went into his bedroom and sat down there for a while too, still thinking about his mother. He could hear the lay brother going out and Father Sisoy the monk coughing behind the wall. The monastery clock struck four.

  The bishop changed and started reading his night-time prayers. He read the familiar old prayers carefully, thinking about his mother at the same time. She had nine children and about forty grandchildren. There was a time when she had lived with her husband, a deacon, in a poor village; she had lived there for a very long time, from when she was seventeen to when she was sixty. The bishop remembered her from when he was a small child, right from the age of about three, and how he had loved her! Dear, beloved, unforgettable childhood! Why did this irretrievable time, this time which had gone for ever, seem brighter, merrier, and more vibrant than it had ever really been? His mother had been so caring and attentive whenever he had been ill as a child! The prayers were now getting mixed up with his memories which were beginning to burn like flames, ever brighter, but the prayers did not stop him thinking about his mother.

  When he had finished praying he got undressed and lay down, and as soon as it became dark all around him, his late father, his mother, and Lesopolye, the village he came from, immediately arose in his mind… The squeak of wheels, the bleating of sheep, church bells on clear summer mornings, gypsies under the window—oh, how sweet it was to think about it all! He remembered the Lesopolye priest, Father Simeon, who was gentle, meek, and good-natured; he was small and thin, but his son, a seminarist, was huge, and he spoke in a thundering bass voice. One day the priest’s son got cross with the cook and yelled ‘You ass of Jehudiel!’ at her, and when Father Simeon heard this he did not utter a word, and was just ashamed that he could not remember where in the Holy Scriptures that particular ass was mentioned. After him the priest in Lesopolye had been Father Demyan, who drank a lot, sometimes to the point of seeing the green dragon, and he even had a nickname: Demyan the Dragon-seer. The teacher in Lesopolye was Matvey Nikolayevich, who came from the seminary, and was a kind and intelligent man, but he too was a drunkard; he never hit his pupils, but for some reason there was always a bundle of birch rods hanging on the wall, and underneath them was a notice in Latin which was completely meaningless: betula kinderbalsamica secuta. He had a shaggy black dog which he called Syntax.

  And the bishop started to laugh. Five miles from Lesopolye was the village of Obnino which had a wonder-working icon. In the summer they carried the icon in a procession from Obnino around the neighbouring villages and the bells were rung all day, first in one village and then in the next, and back then it had seemed to the bishop (he was called Pavlusha then) that the air was vibrating with joy, and he used to walk barefoot behind the icon without a hat, with naive faith and a naive smile, eternally happy. There were always a lot of people in Obnino, he remembered now, and the priest there, Father Alexey, used to make his deaf nephew Ilarion read the notes and pleas on the communion loaves ‘for health’ or ‘for eternal rest’ in order to save time during mass. Ilarion complied, occasionally receiving five or ten kopecks for a service, and only when he was grey and bald, when his life was over, did he suddenly come across ‘You’re a fool Ilarion!’ written on a bi
t of paper. Up until the age of fifteen at least Pavlusha was a late developer and did badly at his studies, to the point that they had wanted to take him out of the ecclesiastical school and send him to work in a shop; once when he came to Obnino to collect the post, he had looked for a long time at the clerks and asked: ‘Would you be so kind as to tell me whether you receive your wages monthly or daily?’

  The bishop crossed himself and turned over onto his other side in order to stop thinking and go to sleep.

  ‘My mother has come…’ he remembered with a chuckle.

  The moon looked in through the window, lighting up the floor and casting shadows on it. A cricket chirped. Behind the wall in the next door room Father Sisoy was snoring gently, and there was something lonely, forlorn, and even vagrant-like in his senile breathing. Sisoy had once been the steward for the diocesan bishop, and now he was called ‘the former Reverend steward’; he was seventy years old, he lived in a monastery ten miles out of the city, but he also lived in the city when necessary. Three days earlier he had stopped by the Pankratiev Monastery and the bishop had put him up in his rooms, so that he could have time to talk to him about things, and discuss monastery matters…

  At half-past one the bells were rung for early matins. Father Sisoy could be heard coughing and grumbling in a discontented voice, then getting up and walking through the rooms barefoot.

  ‘Father Sisoy!’ the bishop called out.

  Sisoy went back to his room and a little later appeared wearing boots and holding a candle; he was wearing a white cassock over his underclothes and a faded old skullcap on his head.

  ‘I can’t sleep,’ said the bishop as he sat down. ‘I think I must be ill. But I don’t know what it is. I feel so hot!’

  ‘You have probably caught a chill, your Reverence. We ought to rub you down with some tallow.’

  Sisoy stood there for a moment and said with a yawn: ‘Oh Lord, have mercy on me, sinner that I am!’

  ‘They turned on the electricity at Erakin’s today,’ he added. ‘Oh, I don’t like it!’

  Father Sisoy was old and scrawny and his back was hunched; he was always dissatisfied with something, and his eyes were angry and bulging, like a lobster’s.

  ‘I don’t like it!’ he repeated as he left. ‘I just don’t like it at all! Well, let him do as he likes, I don’t care!’

  II

  On Palm Sunday, the next day, the bishop celebrated the morning service in the city’s cathedral, then he went to see the diocesan bishop, then to the very sick elderly wife of a general, and then finally he went home. He had some special guests to lunch at two o’clock: his old mother and his niece Katya, a girl of about eight. During lunch the spring sun poured in continuously through the windows from the courtyard outside, shining merrily on the white tablecloth and in Katya’s red hair. Through the double window frames you could hear rooks cawing and starlings singing in the garden.

  ‘It’s nine years since we saw each other,’ said the old lady, ‘but yesterday in the convent, when I looked at you—good heavens! You haven’t changed a bit; well, maybe you’ve lost a bit of weight and your beard is longer, but that’s all. Holy Mother of God, Queen of the Heavens! And yesterday during Vespers everyone was crying, they couldn’t help it. When I saw you I suddenly started crying too, but I couldn’t tell you why. It was His holy will!’

  Despite the tenderness with which she spoke these words, it was noticeable that she felt awkward, as if she did not know whether to address him formally or informally, and whether she should laugh or not, and it was if she felt more like a deacon’s wife than a mother. Katya meanwhile stared at her uncle the bishop without blinking, as if trying to work out what kind of a person he was. Her hair had escaped from her comb and velvet ribbon and was standing up like a halo; she had a snub nose and crafty eyes. Before they had sat down to lunch she had broken a glass, and her grandmother was now moving tumblers and wine glasses away from her while she was talking. As the bishop listened to his mother he remembered that once, many, many years ago, she had taken him and his brothers and sisters to visit relatives whom she had regarded as wealthy; she had been busy with her children back then, and now it was grandchildren she was looking after, and she had brought Katya along…

  ‘Your sister Varenka has four children,’ she said. ‘Katya here is the eldest, and Lord only knows why, her father, my son-in-law Ivan, took ill, and passed away three days before the feast of the Assumption. And now my poor Varenka has been left penniless.’

  ‘And how is Nikanor?’ the bishop enquired after his eldest brother.

  ‘Oh he’s making ends meet, thanks be to God. The only thing is, his son Nikolasha, my grandson, didn’t want to go into the church, and he’s gone to the university to become a doctor. He thinks that’s better, but who knows! It’s God’s heavenly will.’

  ‘Nikolasha cuts up dead bodies,’ said Katya and then went and spilt water onto her lap.

  ‘Sit still, child,’ said her grandmother calmly, taking the glass from her hand. ‘Say a prayer when you eat.’

  ‘It’s been such a long time since we saw each other!’ said the bishop as he tenderly stroked his mother’s shoulder and arm. ‘I missed you while I was abroad, Mama, I missed you a lot.’

  ‘I’m grateful.’

  ‘I’d be sitting by an open window in the evening, you know, all on my own, and music would start playing, and I’d suddenly get so homesick that I think I would have given anything just to go home, and see you…’

  His mother smiled, beaming with pleasure, but then she immediately put on a serious expression and said:

  ‘I’m grateful.’

  At some point his mood suddenly changed. He looked at his mother and could not understand where all the respect and timidity in her voice and in her features came from, what the point of it was; he did not recognize her. He began to feel sad and irritated. And then his head was hurting just like yesterday too, his legs ached, the fish seemed tasteless and unappetizing, and he was thirsty all the time…

  After lunch two wealthy lady landowners came and sat for about an hour-and-a-half with long faces, without saying anything; then came a business visit from the taciturn and somewhat deaf archimandrite. And then the bells rang for Vespers, the sun sank behind the forest, and the day was at an end. After returning from church the bishop hurriedly said his prayers, got into bed, and tucked himself up as warmly as he could.

  It was unpleasant remembering the fish he had eaten at lunch. The moonlight bothered him, and then he heard a conversation. In another room, it must have been the sitting room, Father Sisoy was talking about politics:

  ‘The Japanese have got a war on at the moment. They are fighting. The Japanese are just the same as the Montenegrins, you know, my dear, they’re from the same tribe. They were all under the Turkish yoke.’

  And then Mariya Timofeyevna’s voice could be heard:

  ‘So after we had said a prayer and had a cup of tea, we went off to Father Yegor’s in Novokhatnoe, you know….’

  Every now and then there was an ‘after we had some tea’ or ‘we had just sat down for a cup’, and it seemed that all she had done was drink tea. Dim memories of the seminary and the academy began slowly to return to the bishop. He had been a Greek teacher in the seminary for about three years, and already by that time he could not look at a book without glasses; then he had become a monk and had been made an inspector. Then he had written his dissertation. When he was thirty-two they had appointed him as head of the seminary and made him an archimandrite; life then was so easy and pleasant; it seemed incredibly long, and with no end in sight. But then he became ill, lost a lot of weight, and almost went blind; on the advice of doctors he was forced to give everything up and go abroad.

  ‘And then what?’ asked Sisoy in the next room.

  ‘And then we had tea…’ answered Mariya Timofeyevna.

  ‘Father, you’ve got a green beard!’ Katya suddenly said in amazement and started laughing.

  The
bishop remembered that the grey hairs in Father Sisoy’s beard did have a green tinge and he laughed.

  ‘Good gracious me, that girl should be properly disciplined!’ said Sisoy loudly in an angry voice. ‘How spoilt you are! Sit still!’

  The bishop remembered the brand new white church he had led services in while he lived abroad, and he remembered the sound of the warm sea. His apartment had five bright rooms with high ceilings, and there was a new desk in the study and a library. He had read a great deal and also written a lot. And he remembered how he had been homesick for Russia, how a blind beggar girl had sung about love and played the guitar every day under his window, and how every time he listened to her he had for some reason always thought about the past. And then eight years had gone by, he had been summoned back to Russia, and now he was a bishop, and all his past had disappeared somewhere far away in a fog, as if it was all a dream…

  Father Sisoy came into his room with a candle.

  ‘Goodness me,’ he said in surprise; ‘you in bed already, your Reverence?’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘It’s just that it’s early still, ten o’clock, not even that. I bought a candle today; I wanted to rub you down with some tallow.’

  ‘I’ve got a fever…’ said the bishop, sitting up. ‘It would probably be good to do something though. My head does not feel right…’

  Sisoy took off the bishop’s shirt and started rubbing his chest and back with the tallow from the candle.

  ‘There we are… there we are…’ he said. ‘Lord Jesus… There we are. I walked into town today, and went to see—what’s his name?— Archpriest Sidonsky… I had a cup of tea with him… I don’t like him! Oh Lord Jesus… There we are… Oh, I don’t like him!’

  III

  The diocesan bishop, who was old and very overweight, was suffering from rheumatism or gout, and had not got out of bed for a month now. Bishop Pyotr had been visiting him nearly every day and receiving his petitioners for him. And now that he was unwell, he was amazed by the emptiness and the shallowness of what people were petitioning for and crying over; their backwardness and their diffidence made him angry; the sheer weight of all this triviality and needlessness was oppressive, and he felt he could now understand the diocesan archbishop, who at some point when he was younger had written ‘The Doctrine of Free Will’, but now seemed to have submerged himself in pettiness, had forgotten everything, and did not think about God. Bishop Pyotr must have become unused to Russian life while he had been abroad, as it was not easy for him; the people seemed primitive, the women petitioners were dull and stupid, and the seminary students and their teachers were uneducated, even barbaric at times. And the documents that came in and were sent out ran into the tens of thousands—and what documents! Deans throughout the diocese evaluated the behaviour of priests, both young and old, and even their wives and children, as excellent or good, and sometimes only satisfactory, and then it was necessary to discuss it all, and to study and write serious reports. There was absolutely not one free minute, Bishop Pyotr’s nerves were on edge all day, and he only calmed down when he was in church.