He also used to weave nets, and make peg-tops, bast and wicker baskets and various other similar items. He had a very skilfully carved wooden statuette of some saint or other; but he only showed it to me once, and then only on condition that I told no one else about it. Father Vavila, on the other hand, did no form of work. He was a poet, and ‘loved freedom, laziness and rest’. He was willing to remain looking out over the lake for hours on end in a contemplative position, observing the flight of the wild duck and the wading of the portly heron, which from time to time pulled from the water the frogs who had managed to persuade Zeus to make the heron their king. Immediately in front of the cabin that belonged to the two ‘bookless’ monks stretched a wide, sandy beach, and beyond it the lake. Everything inside the cabin was very clean: two icons stood on the mantelpiece; there were two heavy, wooden beds, painted with green oil paint; a table, covered with a plain cloth; two chairs; and along the walls, plain benches, as in a Russian peasants’ izba. In the corner there was a small cupboard which contained a tea-service, and underneath the cupboard, on a special rest of its own, stood the samovar, which was kept polished as though it were the boiler of the Royal Yacht. Everything was very clean and comfortable. No one else lived in the cell of the ‘bookless’ fathers except for a marmalade cat which was called ‘Captain’, and whose only remarkable feature was that, bearing a masculine name and having been for a long time regarded as a male, he had suddenly, to the great consternation of all concerned, had kittens, and from that day forward had not ceased to multiply his progeny as befitted a proper she-cat.

Father Ignatius was the only member of our convoy who slept in the cabin of the ‘bookless’ fathers. I generally sought to decline this honour, and slept in the company of the novices out in the open, beside the cabin. We hardly really slept at all, however. We would light a fire, bring a pot of water to the boil, pour oatmeal flour into it to make a thin gruel, throw in a few dried carp, and then eat the mixture from a large wooden bowl. By that time it would already be midnight. But no sooner would we have lain ourselves down, than someone would immediately begin to tell a tall story, one which would be sure to be either extremely frightening or extremely shocking. From tall stories we would pass to true stories, and to these each narrator, as was the custom, would always ‘add fables without number’. Frequently the night would pass in this fashion without any of us ever having had a wink of sleep. The subjects of the stories were usually wanderers and brigands. A particularly large repertoire of these stories was commanded by Timofey Nevstruyev, an older lay brother who enjoyed among us the reputation of being invincibly strong, and who was forever preparing to go off and fight in the war for the liberation of the Christians, and thus personally ‘put all the heathens out of action’. He seemed to have traversed the length and breadth of all Russia, had even visited Palestine and Greece, and had observed that ‘it wouldn’t be so hard to cook their goose’. We would lie down on our sacking; the fire would still be smoking; the fat horses, which had been tethered with their oatbags on, would snort as they fed, and someone would start to tell another story. I have now forgotten most of those stories, and recall only the ones I heard on my last night which, thanks to my grandmother’s leniency, I was allowed to spend with the novices on the shore of Lake P—. Timofey Nevstruyev was not really in the mood – he had spent that day standing in prayer in the chapel as a penance for having climbed over the wall of the Father Superior’s orchard during the previous night – and so Yemelyan Vysotsky, a young man of about eighteen, began to tell a story. His family came from Kurland; as a child he had been abandoned in our province and had become a novice. His mother had been a vaudeville actress, and that was the only thing we knew about her; he had been brought up by some merchant’s wife who had taken pity on the nine-year-old boy and placed him in the monastery as a novice. The conversation began when, at the end of one of the stories that had been told, one of the novices gave a deep sigh, and asked:

‘Why aren’t there any good brigands nowadays, Brothers?’

No one ventured any reply, and this question began to torment me – it was one I had long been unable to permit myself. In those days I was very fond of brigands and in my exercise-books I used to draw pictures of them dressed in capes with red feathers in their hats.

‘There are still brigands, even now,’ the Kurlandian novice retorted in a reedy little voice.

‘All right, tell us what they’re like, then,’ said Nevstruyev, covering himself right up to his chin with his calico surplice.

‘Well, when I used to live in Puzanikha,’ the Kurlander began, ‘I once went with Mother Natalya of Borovsk, and Alyona, another wandering pilgrim from Chernigov, on a pilgrimage to the icon of Nicholas the Devout of Amchensk*.’

‘Which Natalya was that? The tall, fair-complexioned one? Was it her?’ Nevstruyev asked, interrupting him.

‘Yes,’ the narrator replied, hastily, and continued:

‘Well, there’s a village you pass through on the way there called Otrada. Twenty-five versts from Oryol. We arrived there towards evening, and asked some peasants if we could spend the night in their house – but they wouldn’t let us; well, so we went to the inn, instead. At the inn we were only charged half a copeck each, but it was terribly overcrowded! All the guests were flaxbeaters.