They were swept and cleaned, and no one else was permitted to use them, not even on the eve of the feasts themselves.

‘Aleksandra Vasilyevna’s coming,’ the Father Almoner would say to anyone who happened to turn up. ‘I can’t let you have her rooms.’

And, unfailingly, my grandmother would arrive.

On one occasion she was for some reason very late in arriving, and a large number of people had come to the hospice for the feast. Late in the night, just before matins, a general arrived, and demanded that he be given the best rooms available. The Father Almoner found himself in a difficult position. It was the first time that my grandmother had ever missed the tutelary feast at the hermitage chapel. ‘The old woman must have died,’ he reflected; but, taking a look at his pocket watch and observing that there were still two hours to go before matins commenced, he refused none the less to let the general have the rooms, and calmly repaired to his cell in order to recite his ‘midnight vespers’. The great monastery bell tolled three times; in the chapel a taper glimmered, and by its light a lay brother could be seen fussing about in front of the iconostasis as he lit the candles. The common people, yawning a bit and making the sign of the cross over their mouths, were thronging inside, and my dear old grandmother, attired in a dapper grey dress and a snow-white cap of the type that was fashionable in Moscow during the year 1812, was already on her way in through the north door, piously crossing herself and whispering: ‘Towards morning hear my voice, O my King and my Saviour.’ By the time the hierodeacon started to intone his solemn ‘Arise!’, my grandmother had installed herself in a dark corner and was bowing to the ground in supplication for the souls of the departed. As he admitted the pilgrims to the crucifix at the end of the service in order to allow them to kiss it, the Father Almoner was not in the least surprised to see the old woman and, as he gave her the blessed bread from under his cassock, he said very calmly: ‘Good evening, Mother Aleksandra!’ In the hermitages it was only the young novices who called my grandmother ‘Aleksandra Vasilyevna’; the older monks always addressed her as ‘Mother Aleksandra’. At no time in her life, however, had our devout old lady been a hypocrite, and she never posed as a nun. Her fifty years notwithstanding, she unfailingly dressed as neatly as a heron. Her spotless grey or green cotton dress, her tall lace cap with its grey ribbons and her reticule with a dog embroidered on it – everything the good-natured old lady wore was fresh and guilelessly winsome. She trundled around the hermitages in a country-style springless hooded cart, drawn by a pair of old chestnut fillies of the very finest lineage. One of these – the mother – was called ‘Fine Lady’, and the other (the daughter) bore the name ‘Surprise’. The latter had acquired her name from the circumstance of having arrived unexpectedly in the world. Both of these small horses of grandmother’s were unusually docile, swift-legged and well-behaved, and to travel with the officious old lady and her most good-natured old companion the coachman Ilya Vasilyevich was one of the most intense delights of all my childhood years.

I had been one of the old lady’s aides-de-camp from a very early age. When I was only six, I set off with her and her chestnut fillies, on the first such trip I had made, to visit the L— hermitage, and subsequently accompanied her on each of her excursions, until at the age of ten I was sent to attend classes at the local gymnasium. Those trips around the monasteries contained much that was very attractive to me. The old lady was able to impart an unusual degree of poetic awareness to her friends. We used to travel at a jog-trot. Everything around us was so lovely: the scent-laden air, the jackdaws hiding in the greenery, the people we encountered on the way, who would bow to us, and to whom we would bow back in return. When we came to woods, we would dismount and go through them on foot. My grandmother would tell me about the year 1812, about the gentry of Mozhaisk, about her flight from Moscow, about the arrogant manner in which the French conducted their advance, and about how they were subsequently driven out into the frosts without mercy and defeated. And then suddenly there would be an inn, innkeepers who knew us, women with fat bellies wearing aprons tied above their breasts, spacious common pastures where we could run about – all this used to captivate me, and possessed for me a fascinating charm. In her room my grandmother would begin to see to her toilet, and I would set off under the cool, shady canopy of trees to see Ilya Vasilyevich, lie down beside him on a bundle of hay and listen to the story of how Ilya had once driven the Emperor of All the Russias about the streets of Oryol. I would learn what a dangerous task this had been, how many carriages it had involved, and to what risks the Emperor’s own coach had been exposed, when during his descent towards the River Orlik2 the reins had snapped in the hands of the coachman and how thereupon he, Ilya Vasilyevich, had by his own quick thinking saved the life of the Emperor, who had been on the point of leaping from the conveyance. The Ithacans did not listen to Odysseus with half the attention I paid to Ilya Vasilyevich the coachman. In the hermitages themselves, I had friends. Two old men in particular were fond of me: the Father Superior of the P— hermitage, and the Father Almoner at the L— hermitage. The former was a tall, pale old man with a kind but stern face –he did not, however, enjoy my affection; the Father Almoner, on the other hand, I loved with all the ardour of my young heart.