The Archangel Gabriel. PrayerАрхангел Гавриил. Молитва

Once the archangel Gabriel heard from paradise the voice of God — God was blessing some man. The angel said: “Surely this is an important servant of the Most High; surely some holy hermit, a sage.” The angel came down to earth to find this man, but he could not find him either in heaven or on earth. Then he turned to God and said: “O Lord! Show me the way to this object of your love.” God answered: “Go to the village, and there, in a certain little temple, you will see a fire.” The angel came down to the temple, and there he saw the man praying before an idol. The angel returned to God and said: “O Lord, can it be that you look with love upon an idolater?” God said: “I do not look at his wrong understanding of me. No one among men can understand me as I truly am. And the very greatest sage among men is as far from a true understanding of what I am as this man is. I look not at the mind but at the heart. And this man’s heart seeks me, and therefore it is near to me.”

“No, no, and no! It can’t be… Doctor! Is there really nothing to be done? Why are you all silent?!”

So said the young mother as she came out with long, resolute strides from the nursery, where her first and only boy, a child of three, was dying of dropsy of the brain.

The husband and the doctor, who had been talking quietly together, fell silent. The husband went up to her timidly, tenderly touched her disheveled head with his hand, and sighed heavily. The doctor stood with his head bowed, showing by his silence and stillness that the case was hopeless.

“What can we do!” said the husband. “What can we do, my dear…”

“Oh, don’t say it, don’t say it!” she cried out, as though in anger, reproachfully, and, turning quickly, went back to the nursery.

The husband wanted to hold her back.

“Katya! Don’t go…”

Without answering, she looked at him with large, tired eyes and returned to the nursery.

The boy lay on the nurse’s arm, with a white pillow placed under his head. His eyes were open, but he was not looking with them.

Foam bubbled from his clenched little mouth. The nurse, with a stern, solemn face, was looking somewhere past his face and did not stir when the mother came in. When the mother came right up to her and slipped her arm under the pillow to take the child from the nurse, the nurse said softly: “He’s passing!” — and drew back from the mother. But the mother did not heed her and, with a deft, practiced movement, took the boy into her own arms. The boy’s long, curly hair was tangled. She smoothed it and looked into his face.

“No, I can’t,” she whispered, and with a quick but careful movement she gave him back to the nurse and left the room.

The child was in the second week of his illness. All through the illness the mother had passed several times a day from despair to hope. In all that time she had slept barely an hour and a half a day. All that time, never stopping, several times a day, she had gone off to her bedroom, stood before a large icon of the Savior in a gold riza, and prayed to God that he would save her boy. The dark-faced Savior held in his small dark hand a gilded book, on which was lettered in niello: “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” Standing before this icon, she prayed, putting all the strength of her soul into her prayer. And although in the depths of her soul, even as she prayed, she felt that she would not move mountains, and that God would do it his own way, not hers, she prayed all the same, saying the well-known prayers and her own, which she composed and spoke aloud with a peculiar intensity.

Now, when she understood that he was dead, she felt that something had happened in her head, as if something had broken loose and begun to spin; and, coming into her bedroom, she looked around at all her things in surprise, as if she did not recognize the place. Then she lay down on the bed, and her head fell not on the pillow but on her husband’s folded dressing gown, and she lost consciousness.

And now in her sleep she sees her Kostya, healthy and merry, with his curly hair and thin white little neck, sitting in a little armchair, swinging his little legs, plump in the calves, and, pushing out his lips, carefully seating a boy doll on a cardboard horse that has one leg missing and a hole poked in its back.

“How good that he is alive,” she thinks. “And how cruel that he died. Why? Could God, to whom I prayed so, really allow him to die? What does God need it for? Was he in anyone’s way? Doesn’t God know that my whole life is in him, that I cannot live without him? And suddenly to go and torment this unhappy, dear, innocent creature, and shatter my life, and answer all my entreaties with this: that his eyes should stop, that he should stretch out, grow cold, grow stiff.”

And again she sees. Here he comes. So little, he walks in at such tall doors, swinging his little arms the way grown-ups walk. And he looks, and smiles… “Darling! And this is the one God meant to torment and do to death! Why pray to him, then, if he can do such horrors?”

And suddenly the girl Matryosha, the nurse’s helper, begins to say something very strange. The mother knows that this is Matryosha, and yet at the same time she is both Matryosha and an angel. “But if she is an angel, why hasn’t she any wings on her back?” the mother thinks. However, she remembers that someone — she does not remember who, but someone worthy of trust — told her that nowadays there are angels without wings too. And the angel Matryosha says: “You’ve no call to take offense at God, madam. He can’t possibly listen to everybody. They often ask for the kind of thing where, do it for one, and you wrong another. Right now, all over Russia, they’re praying, and what people too! The very highest bishops, monks in the cathedrals, in the churches over the relics, they’re all praying for God to give victories over the Japanese. And is that a good thing, now? It isn’t right to pray for that, and besides, he can’t oblige anybody. The Japanese are praying too, that they may win. And he’s the one father we’ve all got, after all. So what is he to do?”

“What is he to do, ma’am?” says Matryosha.

“Yes, that’s so. That’s an old story. Voltaire said that long ago. Everyone knows it and everyone says it. That’s not what I mean. But why can’t he grant a request, when I ask not for something harmful but only that he not do my darling boy to death? I can’t live without him, you know,” says the mother, and she feels him put his plump little arms around her neck, and with her body she feels his warm little body. “It’s good that it didn’t happen,” she thinks.

“But it isn’t only that, ma’am,” Matryosha keeps on, as muddle-headed as ever, “it isn’t only that. Sometimes there’s just the one asking, and even so there’s no way at all to do for him what he wants. We know all about that. I should know, you see, because I’m the one who reports,” says Matryosha the angel, in exactly the voice in which yesterday, when the mistress sent her to the master, she said to the nurse: “I should know the master’s at home, because I was the one who reported.”

“How many times I’ve had to report,” says Matryosha, “that here’s a good man — one of the young ones, mostly — asking to be helped not to do bad deeds, not to drink, not to lead a loose life; asking for the vice to be taken out of him like a splinter.”

“How well Matryosha talks, though,” thinks the mistress.

“But he can’t possibly do that, because each one has to try for himself. Only trying does any good. You yourself, ma’am, gave me the tale of the black hen to read. It tells how the black hen gave a boy a magic hempseed for saving her from death, such a seed that, as long as it lay in his trouser pocket, he knew all his lessons without studying; and how, because of that very seed, he stopped studying altogether and lost his memory. It won’t do for him, our father, to take the evil out of people. And what they need isn’t to ask for that, but to pull it out, wash it out, wrench it out of themselves on their own.”

“Where did she learn these words?” thinks the mistress, and says:

“All the same, Matryosha, you aren’t answering my question.”

“Give me time, I’ll tell you everything,” says Matryosha. “And then sometimes it’s like this: I report that a family has been ruined through no fault of its own; they’re all crying, instead of nice rooms they’re living in a corner, they haven’t even got tea, they’re asking to be helped somehow, anyhow. And here too there’s no way he can do it their way, because he knows it’s for their own good. They don’t see it, but he, our father, knows that if they lived in plenty, they’d be spoiled rotten.”

“That is true,” thinks the mistress. “But why does she speak of God so vulgarly? ‘Rotten’… that is not nice at all. I must be sure to tell her when I get the chance”…

“But that isn’t what I’m asking about,” the mother repeats once more. “I’m asking: why, and for what, did this God of yours want to take my boy from me?” And the mother sees her Kostya before her, alive, and listens to his laugh, ringing like a little bell, a child’s laugh, his own special, darling laugh. “Why did they take him from me? If God could do this, then he is a wicked, bad God, and there is no need of him at all, and I don’t want to know him.”

And what is this: Matryosha is no longer Matryosha at all, but some quite different, new, strange, indistinct being, and this being speaks not aloud with its lips, but in some special way, straight into the mother’s heart.

“You pitiful, blind and insolent, presumptuous creature,” says this being. “You see your Kostya as he was a week ago, with his sturdy, springy little limbs and his long curly hair, and his innocent, affectionate, sensible talk. But was he always like that? There was a time when you were glad that he could say ‘mama’ and ‘baba’ and understood who was who; and before that you were delighted that he stood up on his feet and, swaying, ran softly on his little legs to a chair, and before that you were all delighted that he crawled about the drawing room like a little animal, and before that you were glad that he recognized people, that he held up his hairless little head with its pulsing soft spot, and before that you were delighted that he took the nipple and pressed it with his toothless gums. And before that you were glad that he, all red and not yet separated from you, cried pitifully, trying out his new lungs. And before that, a year before, where was he, when he did not exist at all? You all think that you stand still, and that you and those you love ought always to be just as they are now. But you do not stand still for a single minute; you all flow like a river, all fall like a stone, downward, toward death, which sooner or later awaits you all. How is it you do not understand that if out of nothing he became what he was, then he would not have stopped, and would not have stayed for a single minute as he was when he died; but as out of nothing he became a suckling, and from a suckling became a child, so from a child he would have become a schoolboy, a youth, a young man, a grown man, an aging man, an old man. You do not know, after all, what he would have been if he had lived. But I know.”

And now the mother sees, in a private room of a restaurant brightly lit by electricity (her husband once took her to such a restaurant), at a table with the remains of a supper, she sees a puffy, wrinkled old man with an upturned mustache, repulsive, got up to look young. He sits sunk deep in a soft sofa, and with drunken eyes greedily looks over a depraved, painted woman with a bare, white, fat neck, and with a drunken tongue shouts out an indecent joke, repeating it several times, evidently pleased by the approving laughter of another couple of the same sort as he.

“It isn’t true, that isn’t him, that isn’t my Kostya!” cries the mother, looking with horror at the vile old man, who is horrible precisely because there is something in his look, in his lips, that recalls what was Kostya’s very own. “How good that this is a dream,” she thinks. “The real Kostya — here he is.” And she sees Kostya, white and naked, with his plump little chest, sitting in the bath, laughing and kicking his little legs; she not only sees but feels how he suddenly catches hold of her arm, bare to the elbow, and kisses it, kisses it, and at last bites it, not knowing what more he could do with this arm so dear to him.

“Yes, this is Kostya, and not that horrible old man,” she says to herself. And on these words she wakes, and with horror recognizes the reality from which there is nowhere left to wake.

She goes into the nursery. The nurse has already washed Kostya and laid him out. With his waxen, pinched little nose, with little hollows at the nostrils, and his fine hair smoothed back from his forehead, he lies on a sort of raised platform. Candles burn around him, and on a little table at his head stand white, lilac, and pink hyacinths. The nurse rises from her chair and, raising her eyebrows and pursing her lips, looks at the upturned, stone-still little face. Through another door, coming toward the mother, enters Matryosha, with her simple, good-natured face and eyes red from crying.

“How is it she told me one mustn’t grieve, and yet she has been crying herself?” thinks the mother. And she turns her eyes to the dead boy. For the first moment she is struck and repelled by the dreadful likeness of the dead little face to the face of the old man she saw in her dream, but she drives the thought away and, crossing herself, touches her warm lips to the cold, waxen little forehead, then kisses the folded, chilled little hands, and suddenly the scent of the hyacinths seems to tell her something new: that he is gone and will never be again; and sobs choke her, and she kisses him on the forehead once more, and for the first time she weeps. She weeps, but weeps not hopeless tears but resigned and tender ones. It hurts her, but she no longer rebels, no longer complains; she knows that what was had to be, and therefore was good.

“It’s a sin to cry, my dear,” says the nurse, and, going up to the little dead boy, she wipes away with a folded handkerchief the mother’s tears left on Kostya’s waxen forehead. “Tears will lie heavy on his little soul. It’s well with him now. A sinless little angel. And if he had lived, who knows what might have been.”

“Yes, yes, and still it hurts, it hurts!” says the mother.