The Cathedral Clergy: A Chronicle

Chapter 3

Chapter 3 “What, then,” the agitated Achilles said through his tears, “what, naturally , was the right thing for me to do back then? I should’ve fallen at the feet of the father archpriest and told him, ‘Father Archpriest, I didn’t say all that out of meanness or spite, but only just to prove to Father Zacharias that even though I’m not great at logic, I’m no dumber than he is.’ But arrogance seized hold of me and wouldn’t let me go. It annoyed me that he’d locked up my walking stick in his armoire, and then, to top it off, that schoolteacher, Varnavka Prepotensky, had to come along and wreck everything.… Oh, I tell you, no matter how mad I am at myself, I’m twice as mad at that teacher, Varnavka! May my name no longer be Achilles if I die without beating Varnavka, that son of a baker, to a pulp!” “You don’t dare do that either,” Father Zacharias interrupted Achilles. “Who says I don’t dare? Not even for atheism? I beg your pardon!” “You don’t dare lay a hand on him even for atheism, and in any case you don’t dare pick a fight with him because Varnava used to be just the son of a widow who bakes communion bread, but now he’s an official— he’s a teacher.” “So what if he’s a teacher? Why, I’ll give anybody in the world a good thrashing for spouting atheism. That, Father, is not something to be taken lightly—it’s the law. Yes, sir, it would be very easy to put an end to this: I’d get a firm grip on his untonsured locks, give him a good shaking, and turn him loose. ‘Go and complain,’ I’d say, ‘that you were roughed up by a man of the cloth on account of your atheism.…’ He’ll never get away with it, no siree! But Lord Almighty! Whenever I start thinking about this, I wonder what came over me then: why did I ever listen to that good-for-nothing Varnavka and why haven’t I put him in his place even to this day?! I really have no idea where this weakness of mine comes from. Why, when Sergey, the sexton, was trying to explain thunder that time, I thrashed him on the spot. And when that low-class Commissar Danilka was eating eggs on the street last Lent, once again I didn’t fail to give his ears a very decent boxing in public. And yet to this day I’ve let that son of a baker go scot-free, even though that Varnavka has wounded me more than anybody else! If it weren’t for him, this whole quarrel would never have started. The father archpriest would’ve gotten mad at me for my conversation with Father Zacharias, but it 18 PART I wouldn’t have lasted very long. But that son of a baker Varnavka, as you can see for yourselves today, that math teacher here at our school, he egged me on at a time when I was bitter and wounded: “‘That inscription of Tuberozov’s,’ he says, ‘is, among other things, just plain stupid.’ “Being wounded myself, you know, I was just dying to find some way of wounding Father Savely, and I ask him: “‘How is it stupid?’ “And that Varnavka says: “‘It’s stupid because even the very fact it proclaims is unauthentic, and not only unauthentic, but also highly improbable. Who ever saw with his own eyes that the rod of Aaron brought forth buds? Dead wood can’t produce buds now, can it? “I was about to stop him right there and say, ‘Please don’t say that, Varnava Vasilyich, because the Lord goeth where He listeth and the natural order of things is overcome.’ But since this whole dialogue of ours took place over at Mrs. Bizyukina’s, at the tax collector’s house, where there were all sorts of different libations and all this good wine—nothing but ho-ho: haut sauterne and haut margaux—I … may I rot in hell, I got completely shnockered. I got carried away from the wine, you understand , and that Varnavka, he sets a trap for me in his own way, you know, in a learned way: “‘At that time, as you know,’ he says, ‘the words MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN were mysteriously written on...