The Monastery, page 18
Artiom decided not to tell anyone about that for now, but instead to take it easy for as long as he could.
Having hid under his blanket, he quietly stretched and sorted through all of his tangled, half-sleeping thoughts to find all the beautiful, fragrant and delicious things that he managed to eat recently.
Dried fruit, a bar of chocolate and horsemeat sausage were all in his mother’s package… The chocolate smelled of horsemeat, but that didn’t ruin it at all. The dried fruits from the second package, according to Vasilii Petrovich’s advice, he soaked in hot water, and they drank it together, sweet sweat pouring down their faces.
Then the pig lard, the sour cream with onion — oh, what bliss that ended up being.
If not for Burtsev… Burtsev was there. To the leshy with Burtsev.
There was also the boiled egg.
But where was it? No, it wasn’t anywhere; he had dreamt it up once, three days ago. Oh, what an egg it was in his dream! From such an egg, a golden cockerel would have probably hatched.
Yesterday’s vinaigrette…
For the third time, they measured his temperature and again they wrote down in the notebook: 39.2.
For breakfast, they brought two roach, fried in seal fat and a baked potato — true, only one. But once again — joy, enchantment and ecstatic head-spinning.
“You would have never eaten this at home. You would have thrown the roach out the window,” he tried to remonstrate with himself, at the same time trying not to believe himself.
Having gotten settled, Artiom started to study his closest neighbors and the general situation.
Along the length of an entire wall of the general ward was a fresco that hadn’t been painted over; unlike most other rooms in the monastery.
The fresco depicted the sick — but among them was, it seems, Christ. He was holding up one of the sick — a white-bearded old man.
Artiom wasn’t well-versed in Biblical stories and didn’t know this one.
For a minute, he admired the fresco, then was distracted by the people.
Other than the fool for Christ Philip and the beggar-priest, who kept on walking amongst the monastic couches, almost all of the other sick inmates seemed to look alike, like dried fish.
He remembered that yesterday, yes, some thug had come up to him asking for tobacco, but, as he looked around the ward now, Artiom couldn’t recognize him. Or rather, looking at every person, he was ready to think that any one of them could have been he.
Carefully lifting himself up by his hands — his ribs did hurt, after all — Artiom sat up, trying not to stoop and looked to see what was on the other side of his tall headboard.
There was a similar couch standing there, and the priest John sat there — the same Vladychka, who had given Vasilii Petrovich the sour cream and onion.
The priest was sewing up a robe.
Their eyes met.
“Good morning, Vladychka,” said Artiom a bit unexpectedly for himself.
“How’s your health, my dear?” asked Vladychka simply and gently. “I see they’ve sewn you up as well!”
Artiom didn’t find the words that he thought might be appropriate, so he only smiled, shrugging his shoulders: yes, everything was basically OK, yes, they’ve sewn me up.
“You really don’t need to find special words to talk to a priest,” said John, biting off a thread. “Whatever’s in your heart — the ones on the very top — those will do. Special words are often from the evil one.” Vladychka smiled.
“So that’s how it is…” thought Artiom with amazement and touched the stitches on his temple.
For some reason, this was almost pleasant.
“Well, what about poems?” he asked. “Poems are always special words.”
“Do you think so, my dear?” asked the priest. “Well, I think that the best poems happen when the words are taken exactly from the top of the heart. But when special words are chosen — then the poems are futile.”
Artiom scratched his barely itching cheek with nails that hadn’t been trimmed for a long time. He glanced at his fingers and saw a bloody scab under his nails: he had scratched off some of yesterday’s blood.
“What words are lying on the very top for you right now?” Artiom asked. For some reason, he wanted to speak to Vladychka.
“That our pathetic look isn’t worth our sorrow,” said Vladychka, smiling. “That since we’ve gathered here, then that’s truly the will of God. After all, it’s not just the innocent who have gathered here, isn’t that true? Everyone thinks to himself that he is truly innocent and not everyone can admit to himself with what faults he has come here. One is guilty of blasphemous words, another of thieving nonsense, a third of some great and significant error. So why should we complain, we inhabitants of Solovki? They brought us here against our will, but grandfather Savvatii — the founder of this monastery — floated here himself. And he was no young man! What do you think, my dear, was it easy for Savvatii? An old grandfather appeared on this empty island. He lived here for six years and he could grow nothing except for turnips. No one fed him, he had no roof over his head, no one warmed his old hut for him, there was no infrastructure at all. But he lived, labored! And what about us? There’s only offence and disturbance of the heart, instead of repentance — if not for those sins that our foolish judges ascribed to us, then for others.”
Artiom touched his head and found, under his hair, a slightly wet bump. He touched it, squinting sometimes, but still continued to listen to Vladychka.
“For man, it’s as though there is no sin if no one saw that sin!” said Father John. “But is that so, my dear? If he’s not caught — he’s no thief. But God is One, who knows every thief, and He had His own Solovki for all unrepentant sinners, and they are one hundred thousand times worse.”
“Then why is there an earthly Solovki if they’re being prepared up there as well?” asked Artiom. Naturally, he didn’t believe a word that Vladychka said; however, he received spiritual pleasure from his quiet, gentle speech.
“I was saying, dear one, God’s Solovki are for the unrepentant. That means it’s better to repent in time, and the earthly Solovki are not the worst place for that. Here, for almost five hundred years, people lived lives just as difficult as we. Do you know how the Paterikon of Solovki describes this life? ‘We labored in fasting and prayer and handiwork… sometimes we worked the earth… sometimes we prepared lumber for the monastery’s buildings or carried water from the sea… among the other labors, we caught fish… and so from our sweat and our food we fed ourselves.’ What has changed? Are there many differences from our days? The hardships are the same. The path is also to the same place.”
Here Vladychka — Artiom even started from surprise — winked. But at the same moment, he returned to his quiet, though smiling, decorum.
“And here’s another thing I remember,” said Vladychka, “I read yesterday about Archimandrite Varfolomei of Solovki: ‘A sweet fragrance rises from his body.’ But at that time, he had been dead eleven weeks! What can we say, my dear? We smell worse than some dead men! Yes, they do wash us rarely, they feed us meagerly, the louse lives on us and there is illness in us. But the worst smell, my dear, comes from our unrepented sin! It’s hardest of all to wash it off!”
The other priest who constantly made circles in the ward, asking for bread, tried not to approach Vladychka’s couch. But, having noticed that the path of the beggar wended its way not far from him, almost within reach, if not of a hand, then of a shoe-toss, Vladychka John took off his shoe from his foot and manifested a sharp and obvious intention of throwing it. The beggar-priest, covering himself with his hand, ran away a few steps and stood at a distance, only extending his neck, which made him look like a frightened bird, until the moment when Vladychka dropped his shoe down to the floor by his foot.
“I’m gonna get you!” Vladychka threatened the beggar.
Artiom held back his laughter with difficulty, but by then he noticed that the freckled hand of Vladychka, while he threatened, didn’t ball into a fist, but more familiarly, into a three-finger pinch,12 and he shook it as though he were quickly salting himself.
The after-lunch temperature check again showed 39.2.
“What, you’re not going to wash at all?” the middle-aged nurse asked, gently poking at Artiom’s cheek. “Go wash yourself or the doctor will curse at you.”
Just that light touch and something inside his soul rocked fiercely, the rocking continued to increase. Artiom had a toy in his earliest childhood, something like a small set of scales. If you rocked them, they tried to find their balance for a long time. You could watch that for a long time until your head started to spin.
Artiom even put a hand to his cheek so that the touch wouldn’t disappear so fast.
“But she’s probably also an inmate, no?” thought Artiom. “She was also convicted. Must she also repent for something, as Vladychka says? That’s just silly!”
“Only don’t take a shower,” said the middle-aged nurse. “You can’t pour water on your head. Especially with such a high temperature.”
“There’s a shower here?” Artiom started.
But he didn’t go wash himself. He kept lazing about and stretching — it was such a pleasure not to go anywhere, just to lie there.
Lying about wasn’t boring at all. Lying about was fun.
“It’s strange that in my childhood I preferred to play, not lie around,” Artiom thought stupidly. “I should have just lied about. I had a whole life ahead of me in which to get my fill of play…”
The doctor came. His appearance alone seemed to elicit a slight shake and a movement of air.
He was an Eastern type — very handsome, with a full beard and intelligent, dark, cherry-like eyes that reminded Artiom of a dog’s. His mother was probably Russian, but his father — of southern bloodlines. Or the other way around.
The doctor moved among the monastery’s couches quickly, dressed in white, like a sailboat.
“Like a sailboat with cherry eyes…” Artiom habitually imitated Afanasiev.
Behind the doctor his assistants and the nurses followed respectfully.
There were about one hundred people in the infirmary. With some, the doctor spoke for a long time, but others he didn’t even approach. However, everyone expected him, even the dying tried to raise themselves onto their elbows, to cry out something — a request, a complaint…
“Doctor Ali,” they called sometimes from one side, then from the other. The doctor didn’t answer.
Judging by the fragmentary answers of the doctor and his entourage, Artiom figured out that the larger half of those lying here had tuberculosis, syphilis and scurvy. The other half were the beaten ones and those damaged by the guards, the foremen and the commandants. It turned out Artiom was not alone. There were also a few self-inflicted wounded like Philip and a few who were knifed, but not finished off, by the gangsters.
“You don’t happen to have some bread, do you, doctor?” asked the beggar-priest.
The priest had an awful, puss-filled rash over his whole chest that he showed not without pride — his Solovetsian rewards.
“I have no bread,” answered the doctor seriously. “I do have an enema. Would you like an enema?”
It grated a little on Artiom.
“Communism-áh, just an enem-áh,” answered the priest unhappily and mockingly, inserting the unnecessary ending for the sake of the rhyme, which only increased the mockery.
“If its bread you need, then God will intercede,” Ali answered him in kind, which, he had to admit, immediately made Artiom like him again. Every phrase, of course, was given especial enchantment by his soft Eastern accent.
“Oh-oh-oh,” Vladychka John said to himself, listening to this intelligent conversation.
Artiom’s turn came.
“Does it hurt here? Here?” Doctor Ali asked quickly. “It seems there’s nothing. Nausea? Show me your pupil?”
“How can I show it to you?” Artiom laughed, though the doctor had already taken him by the chin. “Look.”
“What temperature does he have?” Ali asked the middle-aged nurse who walked behind him with an open notebook.
His fingers were strong and hot. “If I’ve got 39.2, what does he have? Forty-two?”
“Why isn’t he washed?” asked the doctor not really of Artiom, but of all who stood behind him. “And he probably had lice. With such pediculosis, typhoid fever can begin, even in the infirmary! What a shame that would be!”
It was understood that Doctor Ali spoke not so much for his entourage, but for the sake of some general importance of his position.
No sooner had the doctor walked away then the middle-aged nurse waved the notebook at Artiom: go get washed up, right now!
“Where’s the shower, then?” Artiom asked one of the monks who was working in the infirmary. The former monks wore their headgear askew — that was the easiest way of distinguishing them from the priests who had been exiled here, whom, for the record, the monks did not like.
The monk gestured “over there”.
“Don’t pour the water!” he called after him with a strong, but raspy voice.
There was no one in the shower. Medical rounds.
The shower was a metal vat filled with water, from which hung a metal chain. Evidently, it gave freedom to the water.
Artiom quickly undressed, pulled firmly on the chain and some sort of turbid, but warm and pleasant, water poured down in crooked streams.
Turning his head sideways, lest he get the decorative sewing on his temple wet, he stood quickly under those streams, quietly chuckling and caressing himself on his chest.
Dark water ran all over his body.
“I’m so dirty!” Artiom thought, for some reason with pleasure. “Or is it the water?”
He looked about for the soap, didn’t find any, and began to furiously rub himself with his hands — everywhere except his painful ribs.
As he was thrashing around under the water, he at first decided that he imagined female laughter… he stopped moving and immediately realized that no, he hadn’t imagined it. On the next story up, women were laughing — young and naked. They were washing up there too.
“Naked and white,” thought Artiom, listening in to their laughter and voices with all his strength. He even opened his mouth. The shower’s spray got into his mouth.
White and naked.
“You with the iodine in your mouth,” Artiom uttered aloud the strange and incomprehensible oath. “Iodine. In the mouth.”
He touched himself once, twice, three times. All he had stored up for a long time exploded into his hand to the laughter of the women.
Artiom walked back light, wet and filled with energy.
On the way back, he once again met the monk and thought that he would curse him for pouring out the water, but the monk only nodded — go that way. And he pointed with a crooked finger at a cubicle.
Inside the cubicle, on a bench, sat Vasilii Petrovich.
Next to the bench were thrown some bloody and ragged stretchers, a few buckets — one filled with old bandages, the other with some other medical garbage.
“In vain, Artiom, do you look so little like a sick man,” said Vasilii Petrovich with kind strictness. “In your place, I would try to look the part more. But as I see, it’s all water off the duck’s back for you.” He even extended his hand to touch the hair of his young companion, but of course he didn’t touch it.
Artiom smiled.
“They almost killed you in there, by the way,” said Vasilii Petrovich. “Do you remember?”
He didn’t really want to remember it and Artiom made an ambiguous face. While he had such a high temperature and stitches in his head, they wouldn’t drive him back into the brigade. As for later, let the chips fall where they will.
Judging by everything, they would eventually do him in, Artiom understood that. But he couldn’t fear that for very long; he could just about handle a few hours’ worth of fear.
“What’s the news over there?”
Now Vasilii Petrovich remained quiet, pausing and not answering. Judging by everything, he was preparing for a different conversation.
“How’s Burtsev?” asked Artiom, faking iron indifference, not so much for Vasilii Petrovich as for himself.
“Burtsev?” asked Vasilii Petrovich in turn, in clear aggravation. “Mstislav. Yes, he’s befuddled me. At first, when it happened with the Chinese man, I thought that… That he did it to the Chinese man because there were too many Chinese in the Red Army. Burtsev is from Kolchak’s army — they had especial trouble with them. But now you as well…”
Artiom snorted.
“But, you know, you shouldn’t have called him ‘lieutenant’.” Vasilii Petrovich continued with a bit more animation, as though up to this point he was having difficulty understanding Burtsev. “He was upset at the ‘lieutenant’.”
“In other words, if I had called him a colonel, he wouldn’t have been upset?” asked Artiom, smiling.
Vasilii Petrovich didn’t answer, pursing his lips: Artiom was right.
“They just beat up Lazhechnikov,” said Vasilii Petrovich. “I was walking to you, and they carried him into the brigade. He was lying behind the wood pile… all black and blue. Not sure who beat him up. Not the authorities, I don’t think.”
“I think I know who it was,” said Artiom, remembering the conversation at the cemetery between Khasaev and the Cossack.
Vasilii Petrovich for some reason didn’t ask who Artiom had in mind.
“Everyone is slowly going wild here,” said Vasilii Petrovich after a short silence. “It’s frightening. They have souls, after all.”
Artiom thought and answered very firmly, “I don’t give a damn. It’s just a state of mind.”
With that, they started to say goodbye.
Vasilii Petrovich brought some berries to share with Artiom.
“Thank you,” said Artiom sincerely, weighing the baggy in his hand with pleasure. “You probably had to give some to the monk at the entrance?”
