The Student
AT first the weather was fine and it was very quiet. Blackbirds
sang, and from the neighboring marshes something living could
5 be heard making a pathetic moaning sound like air being blown
in an empty bottle. A solitary woodcock flew up, and someone
aimed, and a shot rang out vividly and joyfully on the spring air.
Then as the woods grew dark, a cold and penetrating wind rose
unreasonably from the east, and everything was silent. Needles
10 of ice stretched over the pools; darkness, misery, and loneliness
hung over the woods. It smelled of winter. Ivan Velikopolsky, a
student in the theological seminary and the son of a sacristan,
was making his way home from hunting, barefoot, taking the
path through the water-logged meadows. His fingers were
15 numbed, and his face burned by the wind. It seemed to him that
the sudden fall of temperature had somehow destroyed the
order and harmony of the universe, and the earth herself was in
agony, and that was why the evening shadows fell more rapidly
than usual. All round him there was only emptiness and a
20 peculiar obscurity. The only light shone from the widows’
gardens near the river; elsewhere, far into the distance and close
to him, everything was plunged in the cold evening fog, and the
village three miles away was also hidden in the fog. The student
remembered that when he left home his mother was sitting on
25 the floor in the doorway cleaning the samovar, while his father
lay coughing near the stove; and because it was Good Friday, no
cooking had been done in the house and the student was
ferociously hungry. Oppressed by the cold, he fell to thinking
that just such a wind as this had blown in the time of Rurik and in
30 the days of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, and in those
days men suffered from the same terrible poverty and hunger;
they had the same thatched roofs filled with holes; there was the
same wretchedness, ignorance, and desolation everywhere, the
same darkness, the same sense of being oppressed—all these
35 dreadful things had existed, did exist, and would continue to
exist, and in a thousand years’ time life would be no better. He
did not want to go home. The widows’ gardens were so called
because they were kept by two widows, a mother and daughter.
There a wood fire was crackling and blazing, throwing a great
40 circle of light over the plowed earth. The widow Vasilissa, a huge,
bloated old woman, was wearing a man’s coat. She stood gazing
dreamily at the flames while her daughter Lukerya, a little pock-
marked woman with a stupid expression, sat on the ground
washing a kettle and some spoons. Apparently they had just
45 finished supper. Men’s voices could be heard; they were the
local farm workers watering their horses at the river. “Well,
winter’s back again,” the student said, going up to the fire.
“Good day to you!” Vasilissa gave a start, but she recognized him
and smiled at him warmly. “I did not recognize you at first,” she
50 said. “God bless you! You’ll be rich one day!” They went on
talking. Vasilissa was a woman of experience; she had served the
gentry first as a wet nurse and then as a children’s nurse, and she
expressed herself with refinement. A grave and gentle smile
never left her lips. Her daughter Lukerya was a peasant; the life
55 had been crushed out of her by her husband. She screwed up her
eyes at the student and said nothing. She had a strange
expression, like that of a deaf-mute. “On just such a cold night as
this St. Peter warmed himself by a fire,” the student said,
stretching his hands over the flames. “So it must have been very
60 cold! What a terrible night, eh? Yes, it was an extraordinarily
long, sad night!” Saying this, he gazed at the encircling shadows,
gave a little convulsive shake of his head, and went on: “Tell me,
have you ever attended a reading of the Twelve Gospels?” “Yes, I
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have,” Vasilissa answered. “Then you’ll remember that at the
65 Last Supper, Peter said to Jesus: ‘I am ready to go with thee
down into darkness and death,’ and the Lord answered: ‘I tell
thee, Peter, the cock, the bird of dawning, shall not crow this
day, before that thou shalt thrice deny that thou knowest me.’
After the supper Jesus suffered the agony in the garden, and
70 prayed, but poor Peter was faint and weary of spirit, and his
eyelids were heavy, and he could no longer fight against sleep.
So he slept. Then, as you know, Judas came that same night and
kissed Jesus and betrayed him to his tormentors. They bound
him and took him to the high priest and beat him, while Peter,
75 worn out with fear and anxiety, utterly exhausted, you
understand, not yet fully awake, feeling that something terrible
was about to happen on earth, followed after him. For he loved
Jesus passionately and with all his soul, and he saw from afar off
how they were beating him....” Lukerya dropped the spoons and
80 looked fixedly in the direction of the student. “They came to the
house of the high priest,” he went on, “and they began to
interrogate Jesus, while the workmen lit a fire in the courtyard
because it was cold, and they warmed themselves round the fire,
and Peter stood close by the fire, and he too warmed himself,
85 just as I am doing now. There was a woman who recognized him
and said: ‘This man also was with Jesus,’ meaning that he too
should be taken for interrogation. And all the workmen who
were standing round the fire must have looked at him
searchingly and suspiciously, for he was troubled and said: ‘I do
90 not know him.’ After a while someone recognized him as one of
the disciples of Jesus, and said: ‘You were one of them.’ And
again Peter denied it. And then for the third time someone
turned toward him and said: ’Did I not see thee with him in the
garden?” And again Peter denied it, and at that very moment the
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95 cock crew, and Peter gazing from afar off at Jesus remembered
the words spoken to him earlier in the evening.... He
remembered and suddenly recovered his senses and went out
from the courtyard and wept bitterly. The Gospels say: ‘He went
out and wept bitterly.’ And so I imagine it—the garden was
100 deathly still and very dark, and in the silence there came the
sound of muffled sobbing....” The student sighed and fell into
deep thought. Though her lips still formed a smile, Vasilissa
suddenly gave way to weeping, and the heavy tears rolled down
her cheeks, and she hid her face in her sleeve as though
105 ashamed of her tears, while Lukerya, still gazing motionlessly at
the student, flushed scarlet, and her expression became strained
and heavy as though she were suffering great pain. The farm
workers returned from the river, and one who was on horseback
came near them, and the light from the fire glittered on him. The
110 student bade good night to the widows and went on his way.
Once again the shadows crowded close around him, and his
hands froze. A cruel wind was blowing, winter had settled in, and
it was hard to believe that Easter was only the day after
tomorrow. The student fell to thinking about Vasilissa. It
115 occurred to him that because she had been weeping, everything
that happened to Peter on the night of the Last Supper must
have a special meaning for her.... He looked round him. He could
see the solitary fire gleaming peacefully in the dark, but there
was no longer anyone near it. Once more the student thought
120 that if Vasilissa gave way to weeping, and her daughter was
moved by his words, then it was clear that the story he had been
telling them, though it happened nineteen centuries ago, still
possessed a meaning for the present time—to both these
women, to the desolate village, to himself, and to all people. The
125 old woman wept, not because he was able to tell the story
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touchingly, but because Peter was close to her and because her
whole being was deeply affected by what happened in Peter’s
soul. And suddenly his soul was filled with joy, and for a moment
he had to pause to recover his breath. “The past,” he thought, “is
130 linked to the present by an unbroken chain of events all flowing
from one to the other.” And it seemed to him that he had just
seen both ends of the chain, and when he touched one end the
other trembled. When he took the raft across the river, and
afterward when he was climbing the hill and looking back in the
135 direction of his native village and toward the west, where the
cold purple sunset was no more than a thin streak of light, it
occurred to him that the same truth and the same beauty which
reigned over humankind in the garden and in the courtyard of
the high priest had endured uninterruptedly until the present
140 time, and always they were the most important influences
working on human life and everything on the earth; and the
feeling of youth, health, and vigor—he was only twenty-two—
and the inexpressible sweet expectation of happiness, of an
unknown and secret happiness, took possession of him little by
145 little, and life suddenly seemed to him ravishing, marvelous, and
full of deep meaning.
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Lotfi Gasoma:February 23, 2013 at 8:39 pm
