II. The Old Buffoon

They entered the room almost at the same moment as the elder, who came out of his little bedroom as soon as they appeared. Two hieromonks of the hermitage had been waiting in the cell before them for the elder to come out, one of them the Father Librarian and the other Father Paisy, a sick man, though not old, but, as was said of him, very learned. Besides them there was waiting, standing in the corner (and he remained standing the whole time afterward), a young fellow who looked about twenty-two, in a civilian frock coat, a seminarian and future theologian, for some reason under the patronage of the monastery and the brethren. He was rather tall, with a fresh face, broad cheekbones, and clever, attentive, narrow brown eyes. His face expressed complete deference, but a decent deference, without visible fawning. He did not even greet the entering guests with a bow, as a person not their equal, but, on the contrary, subordinate and dependent.

The elder Zosima came out accompanied by a novice and Alyosha. The hieromonks rose and greeted him with the deepest of bows, touching the ground with their fingers, and then, having received his blessing, kissed his hand. Having blessed them, the elder answered each of them with an equally deep bow, touching the ground with his fingers, and asked a blessing from each of them for himself. The whole ceremony took place very seriously, not at all like some everyday ritual, but almost with a kind of feeling. To Miusov, however, it seemed that everything was being done with a deliberate intent to impress. He stood in front of all the companions who had come in with him. He ought to have—and he had even thought it over the evening before—regardless of any ideas, purely out of simple politeness (since such were the customs here), gone up and received the elder’s blessing, at least received his blessing, if not kissed his hand. But now, seeing all these bows and kisses of the hieromonks, he changed his decision in a second: gravely and seriously he made a rather deep bow, in the worldly manner, and withdrew to a chair. Fyodor Pavlovich did exactly the same, this time mimicking Miusov perfectly, like a monkey. Ivan Fyodorovich bowed very gravely and politely, but he too kept his arms at his sides, and Kalganov was so flustered that he did not bow at all. The elder lowered the hand he had raised for a blessing and, bowing to them a second time, asked them all to be seated. The blood rushed to Alyosha’s cheeks; he felt ashamed. His bad forebodings were coming true.

The elder sat down on a small leather sofa of mahogany, of very old-fashioned make, and placed his guests, except for the two hieromonks, along the opposite wall, all four in a row, on four mahogany chairs upholstered in black leather that was badly worn. The hieromonks sat at the sides, one by the door, the other by the window. The seminarian, Alyosha, and the novice remained standing. The whole cell was very small and had a sort of faded look. The things and the furniture were coarse, poor, and only the most necessary. Two pots of flowers in the window, and in the corner a great many icons, one of them of the Mother of God, of huge size and painted probably long before the Schism. A lamp glimmered before it. Beside it were two other icons in shining covers, then next to them some carved little cherubs, china eggs, a Catholic ivory crucifix with a Mater dolorosa clasping it, and several foreign prints after the great Italian masters of past centuries. Next to these elegant and costly engraved pictures were displayed several sheets of the crudest Russian popular lithographs of saints, martyrs, prelates, and so on, of the kind sold for kopecks at every fair. There were several lithographed portraits of Russian bishops, present and past, but on other walls. Miusov ran his eye quickly over all this “regulation clutter” and fixed an intent gaze on the elder. He respected his own gaze; he had this weakness, a forgivable one in him in any case, considering that he was already fifty, an age at which a clever, worldly, and well-off man always grows more respectful toward himself, sometimes even against his will.

From the first instant he did not like the elder. Indeed, there was something in the elder’s face that many people besides Miusov would not have liked. He was a short, stooped little man with very weak legs, only sixty-five years old, but looking much older because of his illness, by at least ten years. His whole face, though very withered, was covered with small wrinkles, and there were especially many around his eyes. His eyes were small, light-colored, quick, and shining, like two shining points. Gray wisps of hair remained only at his temples, his little beard was tiny and sparse, pointed, and his lips, which often smiled, were thin, like two bits of string. His nose was not so much long as sharp, like a little bird’s.

“By every sign a spiteful, petty, arrogant little soul,” flew through Miusov’s head. In general he was very displeased with himself.

The striking of a clock helped begin the conversation. A cheap little hanging clock with weights struck exactly twelve in quick strokes.

“The very hour, to the minute,” cried Fyodor Pavlovich, “and my son Dmitri Fyodorovich is still not here. I apologize for him, sacred elder!” (Alyosha gave a start all over at “sacred elder.”) “I myself am always punctual, to the minute, remembering that punctuality is the courtesy of kings…”

“But at least you are not a king,” muttered Miusov, unable to restrain himself at once.

“Yes, that’s so, I’m not a king. And imagine, Pyotr Alexandrovich, I knew that myself, by God I did! And there I go again, always saying the wrong thing! Your Reverence!” he exclaimed with a sort of sudden pathos. “You see before you a buffoon, a buffoon in very truth! That’s how I introduce myself. An old habit, alas! And if I sometimes tell lies at the wrong moment, I even do it on purpose, on purpose to make people laugh and be agreeable. One has to be agreeable, isn’t that so? Seven years ago I arrive in a little town, I had a little business there, and I’d gone into a little partnership with some little merchants. We go to the ispravnik, the district police chief, because we needed to ask him for something and invite him to dinner. Out comes the ispravnik, a tall, fat, fair, and sullen man—the most dangerous type in such cases: it’s the liver, the liver. I go straight up to him, and you know, with the ease of a man of the world: ‘Mr. Ispravnik,’ I say, ‘be our, so to speak, Napravnik!’ ‘What do you mean,’ he says, ‘Napravnik?’ I could see from the first half second that it hadn’t come off, he stood there grave and dug in his heels. ‘I wished to make a joke,’ I say, ‘for general merriment, since Mr. Napravnik is our well-known Russian conductor, and what we need for the harmony of our enterprise is precisely a sort of conductor too…’¹ And I explained it and made the comparison reasonably, didn’t I? ‘Excuse me,’ he says, ‘I am an ispravnik, and I will not allow puns to be made out of my title.’ He turns around and walks off. I run after him and shout: ‘Yes, yes, you’re an ispravnik, not a Napravnik!’ ‘No,’ says he, ‘once it’s been said, that means I am a Napravnik.’ And imagine, our deal fell through! And I’m always like that, always like that. I’m bound to do myself harm with my own amiability! Once, many years ago now, I say to a certain even influential person: ‘Your wife is a ticklish woman, sir,’ in the sense of honor, that is, of moral qualities, so to speak, and he suddenly answers me: ‘And have you tickled her?’ I couldn’t resist; let me, I thought, be amiable. ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘I have tickled her, sir.’ Well, then he gave me a tickling. Only that happened long ago, so I’m no longer ashamed to tell it; I’m forever doing myself harm like that!”

“You are doing it now,” Miusov muttered with disgust.

The elder silently studied the one and the other.

“Really! Imagine, I knew that too, Pyotr Alexandrovich, and even, you know, I had a feeling that I was doing it as soon as I began to talk, and even, you know, I had a feeling that you would be the first to remark on it. At those moments when I see that my joke isn’t coming off, Your Reverence, both my cheeks begin to stick to my lower gums, it’s almost like a cramp; I’ve had it since my youth, when I was a hanger-on with the gentry and earned my bread by hanging on. I’m a born buffoon, from birth, Your Reverence, it’s the same as a holy fool; I don’t dispute that an unclean spirit may live in me too, though a small-caliber one; a more important one would have chosen other lodgings, only not yours, Pyotr Alexandrovich, you’re not important lodgings either. But on the other hand I believe, I believe in God. It’s only lately that I’ve come to doubt, but on the other hand now I sit and wait for great words. I, Your Reverence, am like the philosopher Diderot. Do you know, most holy father, how Diderot the philosopher came to the Metropolitan Platon in the time of the Empress Catherine? He walks in and straight off: ‘There is no God.’ To which the great prelate raises his finger and answers: ‘The fool has said in his heart, There is no God!’ And he, just as he was, falls at his feet: ‘I believe,’ he cries, ‘and I will be baptized.’ And so they baptized him right then and there. Princess Dashkova was his godmother and Potemkin his godfather…”

“Fyodor Pavlovich, this is intolerable! You know yourself that you are lying and that this stupid anecdote is untrue; why are you putting on this act?” Miusov said in a trembling voice, no longer restraining himself at all.

“All my life I had a feeling it was untrue!” Fyodor Pavlovich exclaimed with enthusiasm. “But I’ll tell you all the truth, gentlemen: great elder! pardon me, that last bit, about Diderot’s baptism, I made up myself just now, this very minute, while I was telling it, it had never entered my head before. I made it up for piquancy. That’s why I put on this act, Pyotr Alexandrovich, to be more endearing. Though sometimes I don’t know myself why I do it. As for Diderot, I heard that ‘the fool has said’ some twenty times from the landowners around here back in my young days, when I lived with them; I heard it, among others, from your aunt too, Pyotr Alexandrovich, Mavra Fominishna. They are all convinced to this day that the godless Diderot came to the Metropolitan Platon to argue about God…”

Miusov stood up, not only having lost patience but even as if forgetting himself. He was in a fury and was aware that this made him ridiculous himself. Indeed, something quite impossible was taking place in the cell. In this very cell, for perhaps forty or fifty years now, in the time of the former elders too, visitors had gathered, but always with the deepest reverence, never otherwise. Almost all who were admitted understood, as they entered the cell, that a great favor was being shown them. Many fell on their knees and did not rise from their knees the whole time of their visit. Many persons even of the “highest” rank, and even among the most learned, and what is more, some freethinking persons even, who came either out of curiosity or for some other reason, entering the cell with everyone else or being granted a private meeting, made it their first duty, every one of them, to show the deepest deference and delicacy throughout the meeting, all the more since no money was involved here, but only love and mercy on the one side, and on the other repentance and a thirst to resolve some difficult question of the soul or some difficult moment in the life of their own heart. So that such buffoonery as Fyodor Pavlovich suddenly displayed, disrespectful to the place in which he found himself, produced bewilderment and astonishment in the witnesses, at least in some of them. The hieromonks, who did not change their expressions in the least, watched with grave attention to see what the elder would say, but it seems they were already preparing to stand up, like Miusov. Alyosha was ready to cry and stood with his head bowed. What seemed strangest of all to him was that his brother Ivan Fyodorovich, the only one he had been counting on, and the only one who had such influence on their father that he could have stopped him, was now sitting quite motionless on his chair, his eyes lowered, and apparently waiting with a sort of inquisitive curiosity, even, to see how it would all end, as though he himself were a complete outsider here. At Rakitin (the seminarian), whom Alyosha also knew very well and was almost close to, Alyosha could not even look: he knew his thoughts (though Alyosha alone in the whole monastery knew them).

“Forgive me…” Miusov began, addressing the elder, “if I too seem to you, perhaps, a participant in this unworthy joke. My mistake was that I believed that even such a man as Fyodor Pavlovich, when visiting so venerable a person, would wish to understand his obligations… I did not realize that I would have to apologize precisely for coming in with him…”

Pyotr Alexandrovich did not finish and, quite flustered, was about to leave the room.

“Do not trouble yourself, I beg you,” said the elder, suddenly rising from his place on his feeble legs, and taking Pyotr Alexandrovich by both hands, he seated him in the armchair again. “Be at peace, I beg you. I especially ask you to be my guest.” And with a bow he turned and sat down again on his little sofa.

“Great elder, pronounce: do I offend you with my liveliness or not?” Fyodor Pavlovich cried suddenly, seizing the arms of his chair with both hands as if preparing to jump out of it according to the answer.

“I urge you, too, not to trouble yourself and not to be ill at ease,” the elder said to him impressively… “Do not be ill at ease, be completely at home. And above all, do not be so ashamed of yourself, for that alone is where it all comes from.”

“Completely at home? That is, in my natural state? Oh, that’s much, too much, but I accept it with tender emotion! You know, blessed father, don’t call me out to my natural state, don’t risk it… I won’t go as far as my natural state myself. I’m warning you to protect you. Well, sir, and all the rest is still subject to the darkness of the unknown, though some would like to paint a picture of me. I say that for your benefit, Pyotr Alexandrovich, and to you, most holy being, here is what I say to you: I pour out my rapture!” He half rose and, lifting up his hands, declared: “Blessed is the womb that bore you, and the breasts that nursed you—the breasts especially! With your remark just now, ‘Do not be so ashamed of yourself, for that alone is where it all comes from,’ with that remark you as good as pierced me through and read me inside. That’s exactly how it always seems to me when I go in among people, that I am the basest of all and that everyone takes me for a buffoon, and so, ‘come on, then, I really will play the buffoon, I’m not afraid of your opinions, because every last one of you is baser than me!’ That’s why I’m a buffoon, a buffoon out of shame, great elder, out of shame. It’s only from suspiciousness that I make a row. Why, if I were only sure, when I come in, that everyone would take me at once for the most delightful and the cleverest of men, Lord! what a kind man I would be then! Teacher!” he suddenly fell on his knees, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Even now it was hard to decide: was he joking, or was he really so moved?

The elder raised his eyes to him and said with a smile:

“You have long known yourself what must be done, you have intelligence enough: do not give yourself up to drunkenness and incontinence of speech, do not give yourself up to sensuality, and especially not to the worship of money, and close your drinking houses, if you cannot close all of them, then at least two or three. And above all, above all, do not lie.”

“You mean about Diderot, is that it?”

“No, not exactly about Diderot. Above all, do not lie to yourself. Whoever lies to himself and listens to his own lie arrives at the point where he no longer discerns any truth either in himself or around him, and so falls into disrespect both for himself and for others. Respecting no one, he ceases to love, and in order, having no love, to occupy and amuse himself, he gives himself up to passions and coarse pleasures and comes to utter bestiality in his vices, and all from continual lying to people and to himself. A man who lies to himself is also the first to take offense. For it is sometimes very pleasant to take offense, is it not? And a man knows, you see, that no one has offended him, that he himself has invented the offense and lied about it for the sake of effect, has exaggerated it himself to make a picture, has seized on a word and made a mountain out of a pea; he knows it himself, and yet he is the very first to take offense, takes offense to the point of pleasure, to the point of feeling a great satisfaction, and thereby comes even to real enmity… But do get up, sit down, I beg you, all this too is false gestures…”

“Blessed man! Let me kiss your little hand,” Fyodor Pavlovich leaped up and quickly smacked a kiss on the elder’s thin hand. “Exactly, exactly, it’s pleasant to take offense. You put it so well, I’ve never heard it before. Exactly, exactly, all my life I’ve been taking offense to the point of pleasure, taking offense for the aesthetics of it, for it is not only pleasant but sometimes beautiful to be offended; that’s what you forgot, great elder: beautiful! I’ll write that in my notebook! And I have lied, I have lied, decidedly all my life, every day and every hour. Truly I am a lie and the father of lies! Though it seems it isn’t the father of lies, I keep getting my texts mixed up, well, the son of lies, then, that will be enough. Only… my angel… about Diderot it’s all right sometimes! Diderot won’t do any harm, but some other little word will. Great elder, by the way, I nearly forgot, and yet I had resolved, two years ago already, to make inquiries here, precisely to come here and earnestly find out and ask: only don’t let Pyotr Alexandrovich interrupt. Here is what I’ll ask: is it true, great father, what is told somewhere in the Lives of the Saints about some holy wonder-worker who was tortured for the faith, and when at last they cut off his head, he stood up, picked up his head, and ‘lovingly kissed it,’ and walked a long way carrying it in his hands, and ‘lovingly kissed it.’ Is that true or not, honorable fathers?”

“No, it is not true,” said the elder.

“There is nothing of the kind in the whole Lives of the Saints. About which saint, you say, is this written?” asked the hieromonk, the Father Librarian.

“I don’t know myself which one. I don’t know and have no idea. I was led astray, they told me. I heard it, and do you know who told it? Why, Pyotr Alexandrovich Miusov here, who got angry about Diderot just now, he’s the one who told it.”

“I never told you that, I never talk to you at all.”

“True, you didn’t tell it to me; but you told it in company where I happened to be, it was three years ago. I mentioned it because with that mocking story you shook my faith, Pyotr Alexandrovich. You didn’t know it, you had no idea, but I went home with my faith shaken, and ever since I’ve been shaking more and more. Yes, Pyotr Alexandrovich, you were the cause of a great fall! That’s no Diderot, sir!”

Fyodor Pavlovich had grown pathetically heated, though it was already perfectly clear to everyone that he was putting on an act again. But Miusov was painfully stung all the same.

“What nonsense, it’s all nonsense,” he muttered. “I may really have said it once… only not to you. It was told to me. I heard it in Paris from some Frenchman, that supposedly here in Russia they read this from the Lives of the Saints at the liturgy… He is a very learned man who has made a special study of Russian statistics… he lived in Russia a long time… I have not read the Lives of the Saints myself… and I don’t intend to… All sorts of things get said over dinner!… We were having dinner then…”

“Yes, you were having dinner then, and I lost my faith!” Fyodor Pavlovich teased.

“What do I care about your faith!” Miusov started to shout, but suddenly checked himself and said with contempt: “You literally defile everything you touch.”

The elder suddenly rose from his seat:

“Forgive me, gentlemen, for leaving you for only a few minutes,” he said, addressing all the visitors, “but people who arrived even before you are waiting for me. And all the same, do not lie,” he added, turning to Fyodor Pavlovich with a cheerful face.

He went out of the cell; Alyosha and the novice rushed to help him down the steps. Alyosha could hardly breathe; he was glad to escape, and glad as well that the elder had taken no offense and was cheerful. The elder went toward the gallery to bless those who were waiting for him. But Fyodor Pavlovich stopped him all the same in the doorway of the cell.

“Most blessed man!” he cried with feeling. “Allow me to kiss your little hand once more! No, one can still talk with you, one can live with you! Do you think I always lie like this and play the buffoon? Know, then, that I was putting on an act on purpose the whole time, to test you. I was sounding you out the whole time: can one live with you? Is there room for my humility beside your pride? I award you a certificate of merit: one can live with you! And now I’ll be quiet, I’ll fall silent for the rest of the time. I’ll sit in my chair and be quiet. Now it’s your turn to talk, Pyotr Alexandrovich, you’re left the most important man now, for ten minutes.”

Notes

1. 1. The pun: ispravnik sounds like the name of Eduard Nápravník, conductor of the Imperial Opera in Petersburg, which in turn suggests the Russian verb napravlyat, “to direct.”