The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky; Andrew R. MacAndrew Page B

miraculous cure is certain to occur, even if it lasts for only a moment. That is what happened now, as soon as the elder covered the hysterical girl with his stole.
    Many of the women standing near him wept in ecstasy and exultation, some pressed forward to kiss the hem of his robe, others intoned prayers. He blessed each one of them, speaking to some. He already knew the sick girl—she came from a village only five miles from the monastery and had been brought to him on several previous occasions.
    “Here’s one from far away!” he said, indicating a woman who, though still young, was thin and haggard, and whose face seemed more blackened than suntanned. She was kneeling, her eyes fixed on Zosima. There was something frenzied in her look.
    “From far away, Holy Father, from far away,” she answered in a sing-song, her head swaying rhythmically from side to side, her face in her hands. “Five hundred miles away, Holy Father, far, far away . . .”
    It sounded like an incantation. There is among peasants a dumb and long-suffering grief that is bottled up inside them and stifled. But there is also a grief that bursts out, first in sobs, then in wailing—fits of wailing. This happens mostly to women. But it is no easier to bear than the silent grief. The wailing only assuages by further lacerating and exasperating the heart. Such grief does not seek consolation but feeds on an awareness of its hopelessness. The wailing simply satisfies the constant need to irritate the wound.
    “You come from tradespeople, don’t you?” the elder asked, looking at her curiously.
    “We live in town now, Father. We used to live on the land, but we moved to town . . . I came to see you, Father, because we’d heard so much about you, so much. I buried my baby son and then I set out—to pray for him. I went to three monasteries and they told me, ‘Go there too, Nastya, go and pray there too,’ meaning this monastery, that is. I arrived yesterday and I went to church, and today I’ve come to see you.”
    “And why, exactly, are you weeping?”
    “I’m sad about my little boy, Father . . . He would have been three in two months. I miss my little son, my sweet baby, my last. We had four, Nikita and I, but we can’t seem to keep them, our little ones, they just won’t stay, dear Father, they just won’t . . . When I buried the three older ones, I didn’t grieve too much for them, but this last one—I can’t get him out of my head. It’s just like he’s standing here, right in front of my eyes, and never leaves me. My heart has shriveled up. Just looking at his little shirt or his tiny shoes starts me wailing. I put out his things that are left, all of them, and I look at them and wail. So I say to my husband: ‘Let me go, Nikita, let me go on a pilgrimage to pray, to God.’ He is a coachman, my Nikita, and we aren’t poor, Father, we own the carriage and the horses ourselves. But what’s the good of it all now? And I’m sure my Nikita has taken to drink without me. I know he has, because even before he’d indulge whenever I turned my back. But I can’t even think about him now. I’ve been away from home more than two months. I’ve forgotten everything. I don’t want to remember, for how will I be able to live with my Nikita now? No, I’m through with him, through with everybody. I don’t want to set eyes on our house anymore or on our things, I don’t want to see any of it again . . .”
    “Let me tell you something, mother,” the elder said. “Once, in ancient times, in a church, a great saint saw a woman just like you, weeping for her baby, her only one, whom God had also taken. ‘Don’t you know,’ the saint said to the woman, ‘how bold these little ones are before the throne of the Lord? No one in the kingdom of heaven is bolder than they are. “You gave us the gift of life,” they say to the Lord, “but as soon as we beheld it You took it back from us.” And they ask and demand so boldly that the