There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby

by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

  Baptisms and burials—those were sacred, sure. But no one was about to knock their foreheads against the cold floor and wave their arms about—with the exception of a dozen deaf old ladies and a few God-fearing women who apparently had nothing better to do. Once in a while the monastery would also receive visitors who were in mourning—but mourning is something that passes; one day you look and the person is fine again.

  But the monks themselves prayed. They prayed for the entire population of the surrounding villages, prayed that they be forgiven for their sins.

  The monks lived peacefully and happily, in silence, and the head monk, old Trifon, was sad only that his days were coming to an end and that there was no one to replace him. None of the other monks really wanted to be in charge—they all considered themselves unworthy, and in fact condemned the very thought of having authority over others.

  Old Trifon talked to God constantly, without interruption; there was no one to distract him from this task, except during holidays.

  The local population adored holidays. They’d all get together, bring wine and snacks, and come to the forest for a big party. The monks always spent a long time afterward cleaning up.

  Weddings and funerals and baptisms were also traditionally held at the monastery.

  But no one liked dragging themselves all the way out there, so for a long time now everyone had been talking about opening a branch of the monastery in the central village, so they could hold their wakes and marriages and baptisms at a more convenient location. They could just build a chapel, really, and that would be that.

  Unfortunately, such an undertaking would require money, and spending money, especially collectively, was something the local people didn’t especially like. Whenever money was collected for such projects, it would be stolen before it could be spent. So sometimes they called old Trifon into town, and he would bury someone, and baptize someone else, and then go around the village to raise a little money for the monastery.

  People gave money to the old monk grudgingly, suspecting him of trying to grow rich off the work of others, as they themselves would try.

  It couldn’t be said that the people of the valley were doing badly. There hadn’t been any wars recently, or fires, or floods, droughts, famines. The livestock multiplied, their little plots gave plentiful harvests, and their wine barrels were never empty. You might even say that prosperity had reached the valley.

  On the other hand, it couldn’t be said that all was well with the ways of the people. For example, they didn’t like the sick, and considered them parasites. This was especially the case if the sick person was not one of their own—if it was a neighbor, say, or a distant cousin.

  If the sick person was part of the family, he’d be tolerated. But medicine cost money, and the doctor also wanted to be paid . . . so for the most part they treated the sick with the ancient folk methods, drawing some blood, then off to the steam room for a good steaming. Either that or they’d just take them into the forest and leave them there. It was thought that whoever died in the forest would go straight to heaven.

  The monks would visit these dying people in the forest and bring them back to the monastery if they could. But what could the monks do for them there? They’d give them some hot water with dried berries and a teaspoon of honey.

  The people down below, in the villages, didn’t approve of this. It was difficult for a healthy peasant to imagine that someday he too would have to lie down on the moss in the woods and wait for death.

  The old monk wandered tirelessly down the roads, in the heat and cold, visiting the villages, the towns, himself small and dried out, whispering his prayer—and people would throw a bit of change into his little box.

  Incidentally, beggars weren’t tolerated in those parts. Instead of being given spare change, they’d be confronted with nasty questions and some useful life lessons.

  But the old monk answered all the questions put to him—was he really a monk? what sort of glue did he use to keep his long beard attached? wasn’t he just a gypsy in disguise? and won’t he just take the money, earned with someone else’s sweat and tears, to the nearest bar for a drink?—indirectly, with a prayer, or a saying, or a joke.

  The local wits even followed him just to hear him answer, laughing with particular pleasure when they heard his prayer, as if this were a particularly clever way of dodging a question, and thinking maybe they should use it themselves.

  The monk would sleep right there in the street, wherever he’d been collecting alms, like a homeless dog. He would stay in town a few days, and toward evening there would always be some bleeding-heart woman (there are some people you just can’t do anything about) who would sneak out and hand him a little scrap of bread, or some vegetables, or even a bowl of hot porridge.

  Some of them, seeing him sleeping there at night, would cover him up with a sack or some other warm thing, especially if it was raining.

  Some would stay with him a while, talk about life, say a prayer.

  One time his trip down to the town ended unhappily. Trifon barely received any donations in his box, and then during the night he was robbed. Two men pushed him to the ground, searched him roughly, and, when he said “God be with you,” merely gave him a knock to the head. Then they left, taking his cash box.

  Trifon was very sorry about the box. It had been crafted many years before by the previous head of the monastery, the saintly old Antony, just before his death.

  Lying in the ditch with his head bleeding, the monk heard the two robbers turn the corner, get into an argument about who should open the box, then finally open it. The change inside spilled out, and they used a lighter to see how much there was. When they saw how little money their robbery had earned them, they came back to the monk to get at his real riches, since clearly he’d hidden them somewhere. They ripped off his robe, searched him again, and again found nothing. So then they started beating him in earnest, this time with their boots.

  They didn’t beat him to death, but when Trifon regained consciousness the next morning, he found that his robe was ripped to tatters and his donations box was crushed. The old monk got up, gathered the coins that even the robbers hadn’t deigned to pick up, tied them in a bundle with what was left of his robe, used another strip for loincloth, and, looking that way, bloody and filthy, began walking down to the stream to clean out his wounds.

  He was recognized there by the women doing their wash. They were horrified to see his wounds and took him to a kind old woman who treated him, quickly sewed him a new robe out of old sack, and told him to leave town—there was no protection for him here.

  The two robbers were known all over town. They had been going around at night for a long time, robbing and killing, and no one stopped them, because one of them had a father who was a judge.

  The judge had thrown his son out of the house for stealing from the family, at which point the son decided to embarrass his father by landing himself in jail, in which case the judge might well have lost his job.

  But the judge didn’t want to lose such a comfortable post, so he gave an order that his son’s antics be ignored. It was decided that the police would not respond to the provocations—that’s all they were—of this clown.

  Where there’s no judge, death will stalk the earth. And death had taken up residence in the town. Those who were beaten to death, whether in the street or in the famous forest, were left to die without any investigations or arrests. Everyone was afraid to search for the truth, so no one reported the robberies and beatings. In fact anyone who reported these things would himself be arrested immediately and taken off somewhere outside town.

  The monk learned a great deal, lying there on the mound of straw in the kindly old woman’s house. He even learned that next door there lived an inconsolable young widow whose husband had been killed one night while taking their sick baby to a doctor in the next village. The mother had been lying in bed, herself ill with fever, when apparently the husband met the frightful pair—Red a
nd Blondie, they were called—on the road.

  The sick little boy cried and screamed all night beside his father’s body. He was finally found by his mother, who’d somehow managed to get up and set off for the next town herself, also to see the doctor.

  Now this woman, having buried her husband, was left without any resources, and the little boy had never quite recovered, so now every day the woman sat in front of the courthouse, begging, but everyone was afraid to give her any money.

  As soon as he was able to walk, the monk got up and went to the courthouse and gave this woman his tiny little bundle of coins. And in doing so he said: “Tomorrow morning the both of you are to get up and head for the monastery in the hills, following the path above the stream. I will meet you at the big rock—I will be lying on my back next to a young spruce tree. At first two young men—Red and Blondie—will be with me, and I’ll be lying with a knife when you arrive. You have to stay with me for thirty days. After that your little boy will get better.”

  The young pauper pressed the little bundle of change to her heart and kissed the hem of the monk’s coat.

  For his part the monk began to wander around and finally found what he was looking for: a bar on the edge of town.

  The two young criminals, Red and Blondie, were inside, in garish cowboy outfits, with gold chains everywhere they could fit them. All around them hovered the shadows of the people they had killed—though no one saw them except the old monk.

  The shadows hovered sadly and quietly: little children, young girls in their white burial robes, with wreaths on their heads, and stooped old people—there were lots of those.

  Two restless shadows of bloodied men also flitted about—they hadn’t been buried yet, apparently.

  The two robbers were unhappy, their faces filled with loneliness and anger: no one went out after sunset anymore, or if they did go out they traveled in groups, in entire bands practically, armed with rifles. The people around here weren’t stupid. Last time the robbers went out they managed to kill only two people—a man and the doctor he was leading to his house because his wife was giving birth. When the baby was born in the morning, he was already fatherless.

  The trouble was that neither the doctor nor the expectant father had any money on them, and so today the two entrepreneurs didn’t have a kopek between them.

  They sat and drank—they’d been served a large jug of wine.

  But they knew that in daylight the people wouldn’t let them leave the bar without paying—they’d start yelling, bring a crowd, beat them up if they were lucky, maybe even take all their gold chains and rings.

  By the time the police arrived, it would all be over for the two cowboys.

  The tension in the bar grew.

  Already the bartender was surrounded by a small crowd—an enormous cook, a rude waiter holding, for some reason, an ax in his hand, and the local idiot, an unshaved kid with small eyes, big fists, and a wide smile on his face.

  The local people didn’t like the judge’s son very much.

  The monk approached the two gloomy customers and sat down at the next table.

  He ordered a glass of wine and said loudly to the waiter: “Do you have change for a gold coin? I’m going to the monastery tonight with happy tidings—a parishioner has bequeathed us a pile of gold!”

  The waiter wasn’t a fool. He knew monks were crooks just like everyone else. They were always complaining about how poor they were, how impoverished, and yet they lived. And so the question was: what did they live on, eh?

  The waiter gave the monk a glass of wine and a crooked smile and said: “No, no change. The customers haven’t settled up yet.”

  This conversation was heard very clearly, of course, at the next table, where four ears pricked up—professionally, so to speak—and ten fingers tensed.

  When the monk got up, without having touched his wine, and limped toward the door, the waiter didn’t follow him—that was done by the two who’d just drunk a free jug of wine.

  “We’ll pay you double tomorrow,” they told the waiter.

  The waiter shrugged and said: “I haven’t lost my mind just yet. Leave some collateral, then you can go.”

  It was light out, and people were still about, and there were cars and wagons on the road. The monk was a very well-known personage in the town. People said hello to him on the street, and he’d bless people’s backs as they walked by—but of course no one had time to talk about holy things with old Trifon. The whole town saw how the monk walked out, and the whole town knew that he was carrying a sackful of gold, and that it wasn’t even his gold—they knew that, too. They also knew the monk was drunk, having polished off a whole jug of free wine.

  And no one so much as blinked, seeing the two following the monk in broad daylight, brazenly, just ten steps behind.

  Those two walked angrily, which was understandable: a waiter, swinging a butcher’s ax for emphasis, had just taken a gold watch and chain from them.

  The whole town also knew that those two would be back at the bar as soon as it grew dark. Whereas the monk would return to his monastery without any gold, and humiliated, with a black eye—and it was just what he deserved, too, as the town was perfectly well aware.

  But things turned out differently.

  Early in the morning a young woman left town with her little child on her back.

  She walked ahead with determination and did not make way when she spotted two figures in cowboy outfits covered in blood.

  For some reason the woman remained alive, whereas the police station soon received a visitor—the judge’s son—who confessed to the murder of old Trifon the monk, and said that his friend had had nothing to do with it.

  As always, no one listened to him. They grew bored and returned to their offices.

  No one knew that on the road outside town the following conversation had taken place between the woman and the two killers.

  Blocking her way, they’d said: “Where’s a pretty young thing like you off to?”

  “I’m going to meet Trifon the monk,” said the woman, growing pale.

  “The monk?” said the two, looking at each other.

  “Yes, Monk Trifon—he’s waiting for me.”

  “He’s not waiting for you,” said the first, laughing a little and then putting his hand, with blood caked under its fingernails, on her breast.

  “He’s waiting for me,” repeated the woman, moving back and taking her child off her shoulders. “He’s waiting for me on the high road above the stream, under a young spruce—he’s lying there with a knife, under a big rock.”

  “How do you know that?” asked the first, his voice suddenly grown hollow.

  “He told me that you two—Red and Blondie—would meet him by the big rock. And . . . he’d be lying there with a knife.”

  She suddenly realized what had happened, and continued confidently: “You were going to kill him, Trifon said, and leave the knife in his chest.”

  “That’s exactly what he said?” the red-haired one asked, laughing nervously.

  “Yes! And he told me to sit with him for thirty days, at the end of which my boy would walk again.”

  She placed the boy on the ground, but his legs gave way under him. He couldn’t stand.

  “Good-bye,” said the woman, picking up her child and going on her way.

  The two cowboys exchanged a glance and then went into the town without looking at each other.

  Their confessions at the police station were so stubborn and determined this time that finally the detectives went up into the hills to gather evidence. But when they arrived at the scene, there was nothing there.

  The only thing under the young spruce near the big rock was a small mound of dry earth, with a thin candle atop it. Three monks sat there praying alongside a woman as pale as death, holding a child. Next to them some mushrooms in a tin can cooked over a fire.

  Still the two young men insisted they be put to death—they kept naming the time and place of the murde
r and showing their nails, which were still stained with blood.

  Moreover, they named one hundred twenty-three other crimes they had committed and even took the police to the man who’d bought all their stolen goods, though he claimed not to know them. And yet he gladly invited everyone to drink a bottle from the wine cellar of his brand new home.

  The two outlaws were told to go away, and they slunk out of town.

  But the murders and robberies stopped.

  A month later, two people entered the town: a woman, and a small boy who held her by the hand. He was walking slowly, uncertainly, but nonetheless walking on his own.

  The mother and her child walked through the town—and the women of the town, seeing them pass, would turn their heads toward them, like sunflowers, and remain watching like that for some time.

  “He’s walking,” they’d say quietly.

  Immediately the mothers, wives, and daughters of the sick—and there turned out to be more in the town than anyone knew—learned about the miracle that had taken place, and all of them came to see the widow, who told them all the same thing: She’d lived for a month next to the grave of the holy monk Trifon, and at the end of it she’d hung her boy’s shirt on a branch of the spruce to dry, and he’d immediately stood up on his little feet.

  A month before, she said, she’d taken the path above the stream to the big rock and found the monk lying there, dying, with a knife in his chest—he was holding it with his hand. He blessed her and the boy and asked her to bring his friends from the monastery, and he bid farewell to them all and asked them to bury him right there by the rock where he lay.

  He didn’t say anything to the woman, but she remembered his testament, that she should live a month beside him. She was frightened that the two bandits would return, and she kept a fire going every night, for exactly one month, and then it was summer, and it was very hot, and she’d hung her boy’s shirt on the spruce branch—and he’d stood up and walked.