You can imagine how much that idea appealed to me. “Oh well,” I thought, “I’m not going to let this defeat me. So I joined a household.”

‘You?’

‘Who else?’

‘You got married?’

‘I took a girl, and so – yes, I suppose I must have got married.’

I was dumbfounded with astonishment, and could not help asking:

‘Well, and what came of that?’

‘A lot of nonsense,’ Musk-Ox said, his face displaying both animosity and vexation.

‘What’s the trouble – are you unhappy with your wife?’

‘Do you think a wife is capable of affecting my happiness or unhappiness? No, I was deluding myself. I thought I’d find a pot of gold, but instead I found a stone.’

‘Didn’t the dissenters want to let you into their secrets?’

‘They didn’t have any to let me into!’ Musk-Ox cried indignantly. ‘Yet it was for the sake of their secrets that I’d gone and got mixed up with them in the first place! You know that phrase from the fairy tale: “Open Sesame!” Well, it didn’t apply there. I know all their secrets, and they none of them merit anything but contempt. They gather together and you think they’re going to resolve some weighty problem, but instead it’s the devil only knows what – “our blessed honour and our blessed faith”. They don’t get any further than the blessed faith, and the blessed honour goes to the one who occupies the seat of honour. Nonsense and pedantry, leather whips and the cat-o’-nine-tails. If you’re not of their creed, they don’t want to have anything to do with you. And if you are one of them, you’ll never get far, you’ll just end up in the almshouse if you’re old or infirm, and live in the kitchen on charity. The world will become a prison for you. They’re forever commiserating, the confounded turkey-cocks: “There’s not enough fear in the world. Fear’s on the way out,” they say. And here we’ve pinned all our hopes on them! … the idiot sluggards, all they do is pull our legs with their secrecy.’

Vasily Petrovich spat indignantly.

‘So do you consider our simple local muzhiks any better, then?’

Vasily Petrovich thought for a moment, then spat again and replied calmly:

‘Better by far.’

‘In what way, exactly?’

‘Because they don’t know what they want. Those dissenters reason this way, and that way, while the muzhiks only know one way of reasoning. They twist everything around their fingers. Take a simple bit of land, for example – or go and dig up an old weir. So what if it has been built by their hands? If there’s brushwood in it – brushwood is what you’ll find. And when you’ve pulled the brushwood out, there’s just earth left, and earth that’s been stirred up by fools, at that. So judge for yourself – which are better?’

‘How did you manage to get away from them?’

‘I just left. I saw there was nothing for me there, and I left.’

‘What about your wife?’

‘Why are you interested in her?’

‘You didn’t just leave her there, did you?’

‘What would I have done with her?’

‘Why, taken her with you and lived with her.’

‘A fat lot of good that would have done me.’

‘Vasily Petrovich – why, that’s cruel! What if she was in love with you?’

‘Stuff and nonsense! What kind of love is that: she reads a few lines out of the prayer-book and hey presto – she’s my wife. But the very next day she gets a “dispensation” and goes to sleep in someone else’s kitchen. And anyway, what business have I with a woman, what business have I with love? What business have I with all the women in the world?’

‘But she’s a human being,’ I said. ‘You ought at least to feel sorry for her.’

‘I’ll tell you in what sense you should pity a woman! … It’s a very important matter, whose kitchen she crawls into. As if there were the time to spend moping over trifles of that sort! “Open Sesame, Open Sesame” – it’s the one who knows the secret of “Open Sesame” we need!’ Musk-Ox concluded, beating his breast. ‘The man, give us the man whom passion has not enslaved, and for him alone shall we reserve the holiest recesses of our souls.’

The rest of my conversation with Vasily Petrovich did not go well. After taking dinner with the old monks, I drove him back to the monastery, took my leave of the Father Almoner and went home.

8

Some ten days after my parting with Vasily Petrovich, I was sitting with my mother and sister in the porch of our small house. It was beginning to get dark. All the servants had gone off to have supper, and there was no one about apart from ourselves.