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.
“They complain about the decline of religious feeling among people…,” he sighed. “What else! Why don’t they stick us with more priests like this one!”
Kunin went into the church three more times after that, and each time was strongly drawn back out into the open air. Having waited for the end of the service, he went off to Father Yakov’s. The priest’s house from the outside was no different from the peasant cottages, only the thatching on the roof was more evenly laid and there were white curtains in the windows. Father Yakov led Kunin into a small, bright room with a clay floor and walls hung with cheap wallpaper. Despite some attempts at luxury, like framed photographs and a clock with scissors tied to its weights, the setting was striking in its penury. Looking at the furniture, you might think that Father Yakov had gone around the courtyards and collected it piecemeal. In one place they gave him a round table on three legs, in another a stool, in a third a chair with a back sharply tilted backwards, in a fourth a chair with a straight back but a sagging seat, and in a fifth they generously gave him some semblance of a divan with a flat back and a latticework seat. This semblance had been painted a dark red and smelled strongly of the paint. Kunin first wanted to sit on one of the chairs, but thought better of it and sat on the stool.
“Is this the first time you’ve been to our church?” Father Yakov asked, hanging his hat on a big, ugly nail.
“Yes, the first. I tell you what, Father…Before we get down to business, give me some tea, my soul is completely dry.”
Father Yakov blinked, grunted, and went behind the partition. There was some whispering…
“Must be with his wife…,” Kunin thought. “I’d be interested to see what sort of wife the redhead’s got…”
A little later Father Yakov came from behind the partition, red-faced, sweaty, and, forcing a smile, sat facing Kunin on the edge of the divan.
“The samovar will be started presently,” he said, without looking at his guest.
“My God, they haven’t started the samovar yet!” Kunin was inwardly horrified. “I must kindly wait now!”
“I’ve brought you the draft of the letter I’ve written to the bishop,” he said. “I’ll read it after tea…Maybe you’ll find something to add…”
“Very well, sir.”
Silence ensued. Father Yakov cast a frightened glance at the partition, smoothed his hair, and blew his nose.
“Wonderful weather, sir…,” he said.
“Yes. Incidentally, I read something interesting yesterday…The district council of Volsk has decreed the handing over of all the schools to the care of the clergy. That’s just like them.”
Kunin got up, started pacing the clay floor and voicing his reflections.
“That doesn’t matter,” he said, “if only the clergy is up to its calling and clearly understands its responsibilities. To my misfortune, I know priests who in their development and moral qualities aren’t fit to be army clerks, to say nothing of priests. You must agree that a bad teacher does much less harm to a school than a bad priest.”
Kunin glanced at Father Yakov. He sat hunched over, thinking hard about something, and was apparently not listening to his guest.
“Yasha, come here!” A woman’s voice was heard from behind the partition.
Father Yakov roused himself and went behind the partition. There was more whispering.
Kunin longed desperately for tea.
“No, I won’t get any tea here!” he thought, glancing at his watch. “It seems I’m not entirely a welcome guest. The host hasn’t deigned to say a single word to me, he just sits and blinks.”
Kunin took his hat, waited for Father Yakov, and said goodbye to him.
“I just wasted the whole morning!” he fumed on the way back. “A blockhead! A dolt! He’s as interested in the school as I am in last year’s snow. No, I can’t get anywhere with him! Nothing will come of it! If the marshal knew what sort of priest we’ve got here, he’d be in no hurry to bother with a school. First we have to see about a good priest, and then about the school!”
Kunin almost hated Father Yakov now. The man, his pathetic caricature of a figure in its long, wrinkled vestment, his peasant woman’s face, his manner of serving, his style of life and clerkish, timid deference offended that small bit of religious feeling that still remained in Kunin’s breast and quietly flickered there along with other old wives’ tales. And it was hard for his vanity to bear the coldness and inattention with which the priest met Kunin’s sincere, fervent concern for his own cause…