IV

The next day, after his early and lonely lunch, Fr. Ignaty went to the cemetery, for the first time since his daughter’s death. It was hot, deserted, and quiet, as though the summer day was just a lighted night, and yet, out of habit, Fr. Ignaty would straighten his back with diligence, throwing harsh glances, thinking he was still the same as before; he noticed neither the new, tremendous weakness in his legs, nor the fact that his long beard was now completely white, as though a cruel frost had struck it. The road to the cemetery followed a long straight street that climbed slightly upward, with the arch of the cemetery gate gleaming white at the end of it, looking like a black, ever-open mouth edged with shiny teeth.

Vera's grave was in the back of the cemetery where the sandy paths ended, and Fr. Ignaty had to wander through the narrow trails that followed a broken line between the green mounds all forgotten and all abandoned. Some crooked monuments came up here and there, green with old age, along with some broken fences and heavy big tombstones grown into the ground, pushing it with a sullen, senile anger. Squeezing up to one of these stones, there was Vera’s grave. New sod on it turned yellow, but everything around it was in green. A rowan hugged a maple, and a wide-spread hazel stretched its pliant, bushy-leaved branches over the grave. Fr. Ignaty sat on the neighboring mound, taking a break. He looked around after a while and glanced at the sky, clear and deserted, the torrid hot disc hanging absolutely still; only then did he realize the deep, incomparable quiet that is essential to a graveyard, when there is no wind to rustle with dead leaves. Once again Fr. Ignaty thought that it was no quiet, but silence. It spread all the way down to the brick walls of the cemetery, crawled heavily over, and flooded the city to stop in a single possible place—the tenaciously, stubbornly silent gray eyes.

Fr. Ignaty shrugged, his shoulders getting cold, and he put his eyes down, on Vera’s grave. Staring at the short yellow stalks of grass uprooted somewhere out of a vast and windy field, yet to get used to the alien soil, he couldn’t imagine Vera lying down there, beneath that grass, two arshins below him. Her being that close seemed unfathomable, bringing confusion and strange anxiety to his soul. She, who disappeared forever in the dark deep of infinity as Fr. Ignaty used to think, was here, nearby... making it impossible to grasp that yet she’s not here and never would be. It seemed to Fr. Ignaty that saying some word his lips almost sensed or moving someway would make Vera rise from the grave, tall and beautiful as she had been. And not only Vera would rise but all the dead people, so frightfully palpable in their solemnly cold silence.

Fr. Ignaty took off his wide-brimmed black hat, tidied his wavy hair, and whispered: “Vera!”

Embarrassed that a random stranger could hear him, Fr. Ignaty stood up at the mound and looked over crosses. No one was around, and he said again, louder this time: “Vera!”

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It was his old voice, cold and demanding, and strange it was that a demand so strong would go unanswered.

“Vera!”

The call was loud and persistent, and each time it faded, there was a minute when Fr. Ignaty thought he could hear a faint answer from down below. After looking around once again, Fr. Ignaty removed his hair out the way and pressed his ear to the sod’s bristles.

“Vera, tell me!”

The next horrific moment Father Ignaty sensed something grave and cold pouring into his ear and freezing his brain; he felt Vera’s talking, and her talk was that same long silence. It becomes more and more anxious and terrifying, and when Fr. Ignaty tears his dead-pale head off the ground, the air seems to shudder and tremble with booming silence, as if a wild storm has broken at this horrendous sea. Silence is choking him; it rolls its icy waves over his head and moves his hair; it crashes against his chest groaning under the blows. Whole body shaking, eyes casting glances sharply and aimlessly, Fr. Ignaty slowly gets up and makes a lasting, agonizing effort to straighten his back and to pull down his shoulders. He pulls it off. Lingering by intention, Fr. Ignaty dusts off his knees, puts on his hat, triply crosses the grave, and walks steadily until he stops recognizing the familiar cemetery and loses his way.

“Lost!” chuckles Fr. Ignaty, stopping where the path forks.

But he wastes just a second, and then takes a left, for standing and waiting is out of the question. Silence is haunting him. Exuded by green graves, breathed out by gray crosses, in suffocating wisps it comes out of the pores of the earth, fertile with corpses. Fr. Ignaty walks faster and faster. Stunned, he circles around the same paths, jumping over the graves, bumping into the bars, his hands getting caught in the scratchy tin wreaths, soft fabric tearing to shreds. The only thought of escape remains in his head. He dashes from side to side and, finally, runs soundlessly, tall and terrific, his cassock flying and hair streaming in the air. Even a corpse risen from the grave would have been less scary than this wild figure of a man was, running and jumping, his arms swinging, his face mad and distorted, the muffled wheezing coming out of his open mouth.

At full speed Fr. Ignaty popped up at the open space, the small cemetery church gleaming white on the edge of it. On the bench by the narthex, a little old man sat dozing, a pilgrim apparently; two beggar women quarreled beside him, pouncing at each other and cursing.

When Fr. Ignaty came up to the house, it was getting dark, and he saw the light in Olga Stepanovna’s window. Dusty and ragged, boots and hat on, Fr. Ignaty went straight to her room and fell on his knees.

“Mother... Olya... Take pity on me!” he sobbed. “I’m losing my mind.”

Banging his head on the edge of the table, he sobbed violently, bitterly, like a man who never cried. Then he looked up, believing a miracle would happen, and his wife would speak and pity him.

“Darling!”

With all of his big body he reached for his wife; the look of gray eyes met him. It bore no regret or anger. She may have forgiven and pitied him, but there was no pity or forgiveness in her eyes. They were mute and silent.

The entire dark and empty house was silent too.

May 1–5, 1900