“Vassya, I am afraid of you! You’re so strange ... Come here, come to the light!”
Father Vassily obediently moved to the table, and the warm glow of the lamp fell upon his face, but failed to evoke a responsive warmth. Yet his face was calm and was free from fear, and this sufficed her. Bringing her lips close to his ear, she whispered:
“Priest, do you hear me, priest? Do you remember Vassya—that other Vassya?”
“Ah!” joyously exclaimed the Popadya. “You don’t? I don’t either. Are you scared, priest? Are you? Scared?”
“Then why do you groan when you sleep? Why do you groan?”
“You? Sick? You—sick?” with her finger she prodded his bony, but broad and solid chest. “Why do you lie?”
Father Vassily was silent. The Popadya looked wrathfully into his cold face, with a beard that had long known no contact with the trimming shear and protruded from his sunken cheeks in transparent clumps, and she shrugged her shoulders with loathing.
“Ugh! What a fright you have become! Hateful, mean, clammy like a frog. Ugh! Am I to blame that he was born like that? Tell me. What are you thinking about? Why are you forever thinking, thinking, thinking?”
Father Vassily maintained silence, and with an attentive, irritating gaze studied the bloodless and distorted features of his wife. And when the last sounds of her incoherent speech died away, gruesome, unbroken stillness gripped her head and breast as though with iron clamps and seemed to squeeze from her occasional hurried and unexpected gasps:
“And I know ... I know ... I know, priest....”
“I know what are you thinking about.” The Popadya paused and shrunk from her husband in terror. “You—don’t believe ... in God. That’s what!”
And having uttered this she realized how dreadful was what she had said, and a pitiful pleading smile parted her lips that were swollen and scarred with biting, burnt with liquor and red as blood. And she looked up gladly, when the priest, with blanching cheeks, sharply and didactically replied:
“That is not true. I believe in God. Think before you speak.”
And silence once more, stillness once more, but now there was in this silence something soothing, something that seemed to envelop her like a wave of warm water. And lowering her eyes, she shyly pleaded: