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Chapter 14
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Chapter 14 Mrs. Prepotenskaya, the wafer baker, was a little old lady with a tiny face, kindly eyes that expressed eternal amazement, and eyebrows shaped like apostrophes. She apologized to Daryanov for not having heard his prolonged knocking and then immediately leaned toward him across the table and asked in a whisper: “Did you see my Varnasha?” He replied that he had. “He’s forever driving me to despair, Valeryan Nikolaich,” the old woman lamented. “Oh, don’t worry about him. Why are you upset? He’s still young— when he’s older, he’ll get married and change.” “Change… No, my dear, how can he possibly get married? That’s impossible . He’s already ruined, now and forever. He doesn’t believe in the Lord God. He’s forever drinking milk and eating meat on all the fast days, even during Holy Week. He’s forever bringing home dead bones, and to tell you the truth, my dear, in the evening hours I’m forever afraid of them, forever uneasy about them…” The black apostrophes above the tiny, timid old woman’s little eyes twitched and, giving a shudder, she began to speak faster: “And besides that, my dear, I’m forever having such terrible dreams that as soon as I wake up I immediately whisper, ‘Saint Simeon, interpret my dream.’ I could stand it if only I had somebody in the house to talk to, but just think, I’m always alone and always with dead people. My dear young friends, I’m not afraid of the deceased if they’ve had a proper funeral, but Varnasha won’t allow it.” “Well, don’t be mad at him—he’s a good boy, after all.” “Yes, of course he’s good. I don’t want to give the wrong impression about him, that he’s bad. I was once happy to be his mother, and he used to be forever good to me, until his sixth year at the seminary school, when he started studying philosophy. He’d go to church when he came home for vacations, and I’d take him to see Father Savely, and Father Savely was forever kind to him and even helped him out with some small matters, but then suddenly … I have no idea what got into him: he started philosophizing all the time. And ever since then it got worse and worse every time he came home from school, and finally he even became so set against everything good that at Father Zacharias’s christening party he flew into a rage at the father archpriest himself. Oh, it’s so hard 112 PART I on me, my dears!” continued the old woman, wincing in pain. “And now he’s done it again—the day before yesterday I found out that he and that tax collector’s wife, Mrs. Bizyukina, have been eating frogs in gravy! Lordy! Lordy! How can a mother stand it? Do they do this because they’re starving or something? He’s all messed up. Think what you like, but I’m convinced that he’s all messed up. Father Zacharias purposely read me a story from a Domestic Chat72 about some nobleman’s son who became possessed and ten men couldn’t hold him back. That’s just like Varnava! Nobody can hold him back. He’s terribly shy. Why, only recently , less than a year ago, I myself went with him in the evenings wherever he had to go. But once he gets furious, he shouts, ‘I won’t turn in my comrades! No, I won’t!’ And he waves his arm like this and keeps saying, ‘No, slit their throats! Slit them all!’ And so I live with the constant vision of him being taken down to the police station and thrown in gaol.” The wafer baker darted into the kitchen, wiped away her tears with a hanky, and, returning again, said: “I confess that every day I give him magic water to drink. He doesn’t know about it or notice it, of course, but I give it to him anyway, only it doesn’t help—and it’s a sin, too. Father Savely has only one thing to say: it would be worth it to send him away to some place like Tashkent. ‘Why,’ I asked him, ‘shouldn’t I keep trying kindness?’ ‘Because,’ he said, ‘kindness won’t work with him. He seems to have no natural feelings whatsoever.’ But even if...