VIII
Now kindly remember that, while Mikhailitsa and I were talking on the porch, old Maroy was praying in the room, and the gentlemen officials and their sbirri found him there. He told us later that, as soon as they came in, they bolted the door and threw themselves straight at the icons. Some were putting out the lamps, others were tearing the icons from the walls and piling them on the floor, shouting to him: “Are you the priest?” He says: “No, I’m not.” They say: “Who is your priest, then?” He replies: “We have no priest.” And they say: “What do you mean, no priest! How dare you say you have no priest!” Here Maroy began explaining to them that we don’t have priests, but since he spoke badly, mumblingly, they didn’t try to make out what he meant. “Bind him,” they said, “he’s under arrest!” Maroy let them bind him: it was nothing to him that a common soldier tied his hands with a piece of string, but he stood there and, accepting it all for the sake of the faith, watched for what would follow. And the officials meanwhile lit candles and started placing seals on the icons: some placed the seals, others wrote them down on a list, still others bored holes in the icons and strung them on iron rods like kitchen pots. Maroy looked at all this blasphemous outrage and didn’t even flinch, because, he reasoned, it was probably God’s will to allow such savagery. But just then Uncle Maroy heard one gendarme cry out, and another after him: the door flew open, and our sea dogs, wet as they were, straight from the water, pushed their way into the room. Fortunately, Luka Kirilovich found himself at the head of them. He shouted at once:
“Wait, Christian folk, don’t brazen it out!” And he himself turned to the officials and, pointing to the icons strung on rods, said: “Why, gentlemen superiors, have you damaged the holy images like this? If you have the right to take them from us, we do not resist authority—take them; but why do you damage the rare artwork of our forefathers?”
But that husband of Pimen’s lady acquaintance, who was there at the head of them all, shouted at Uncle Luka:
“Silence, scoundrel! How dare you argue!”
And Luka, though he was a proud man, humbled himself and said softly:
“Permit me, Your Honor, we know the procedure. We have some hundred and fifty icons in this room. Allow us to pay you three roubles per icon, and take them, only don’t damage our ancestral art.”
The gentleman flashed his eyes and shouted loudly:
“Away with you!” But in a whisper he whispered: “Give me a hundred roubles apiece, or else I’ll torch them all.”
Luka could not give or even consider giving such big money, and said:
“In that case, God help you: ruin it all however you like, we don’t have that kind of money.”
But the gentleman started yelling wrathfully:
“Ah, you bearded goat, how dare you talk about money in front of us?”—and here he suddenly started rushing about, and all the divine images he saw, he strung together, and they screwed nuts onto the ends of the rods and sealed them, too, so that it was impossible to take them off and exchange them. And it was all gathered up and ready, they were about to leave for good: the soldiers took the rods strung with icons on their shoulders and carried them to the boat; but Mikhailitsa, who had sneaked into the room with the other folk, had meanwhile quietly stolen the angel’s icon from the lectern and was carrying it to the closet under her shawl, but as her hands were trembling, she dropped it. Saints alive, how the gentleman flew into a temper! He called us thieves and knaves, and said:
“Aha! You knaves wanted to steal it so that it wouldn’t end up on the bolt; well, then it won’t end up there, but here’s what I’m going to do to it!” And heating the stick of sealing wax, he jabbed the boiling resin, still flaming, right into the angel’s face!
My dear sirs, don’t hold it against me if I can’t even try to describe what happened when the gentleman poured the stream of boiling resin onto the face of the angel and, cruel man that he was, raised the icon up, so as to boast of how he’d managed to spite us. All I remember is that the bright, divine face was red and sealed, and the varnish, which had melted slightly under the fiery resin, ran down in two streams, as if it were blood mixed with tears …
We all gasped and, covering our eyes with our hands, fell on our faces and groaned as if we were being tortured. And we went on groaning, so that the dark night found us howling and lamenting over our sealed angel, and it was here, in this darkness and silence, over the devastated holiness of our fathers, that a thought occurred to us: we would keep an eye out for where they put our guardian, and we swore to steal him back, even at the risk of our lives, and unseal him, and to carry out this resolve, they chose me and a young fellow named Levonty. In years this Levonty was still a downright boy, no more than seventeen, but he was big of body, good of heart, God-fearing from childhood, and obedient and well-behaved, just like your ardent white, silver-bridled steed.
A better co-thinker and co-worker couldn’t have been asked for in such a dangerous deed as tracking down and purloining the sealed angel, whose blinded appearance was unbearable for us to the point of illness.
IX
I’m not going to trouble you with the details of how I and my co-thinker and co-worker passed through the eyes of needles, going into all this, but I’ll tell you directly of the grief that came over us when we learned that our icons, drilled through by the officials and strung on rods as they were, had been piled up in the basement of the diocesan office. This was a lost cause, as if they had been buried in the grave, and there was no use thinking about them. The nice thing, however, was that they said the bishop himself did not approve of such savagery of behavior and, on the contrary, said: “Why that?” and even stood up for the old art and said: “It’s ancient, it must be cherished!” But here was the bad thing, that the disaster of irreverence had only just passed, when a new, still greater one arose from his very reverence: this same bishop, it must be supposed, not with bad but precisely with good consideration, took our sealed angel, studied him for a long time, then averted his eyes and said: “Disturbing sight! How terribly they’ve disfigured him! Don’t put this icon in the basement,” he says, “but set it up in the sanctuary, on the windowsill behind the altar.” The bishop’s servants did as he ordered, and I must tell you that such attention on the part of a Church hierarch was, on the one hand, very agreeable to us, but, on the other—we could see that any plan we had of stealing our angel had become impossible. There remained another means: to bribe the bishop’s servants and with their help substitute for the icon an artfully painted likeness of itself. In this our Old Believers had also succeeded more than once, but to do it one first of all needed a skillful and experienced icon painter, who could make a substitute icon with precision, and we did not anticipate finding such an icon painter in those parts. And from then on a redoubled anguish came over us all; it spread through us like dropsy under the skin: in our room where only the praise of God had been heard, only laments began to ring out, and in a short time we had all lamented ourselves sick and our tear-filled eyes couldn’t see the ground under our feet, and owing to that, or not owing to that, an eye disease attacked us and began to spread through all our people. What had never happened before, happened now: there was no end of sick people! Talk went around among all the working people that all this was not for nothing, but on account of the Old Believers’ angeclass="underline" “He was blinded by the sealing,” they said, “and now we’re all going blind.” And at this explanation not only we but all church-going people rose up, and however many doctors the English bosses brought, nobody went to them or took their medicine, but cried out as one: