Short Fiction, Aleksandr Kuprin [the speed reading book txt] 📗

Russia, who could make the dark, ancient church, with its gilt mosaics, resound to his low notes. He alone could fill every nook and corner of the old building with his mighty voice, and make the cut-glass ornaments on the incense-bowls tinkle in unison.

His wife brought him a glass of weak tea with lemon and, as usual on Sundays, a small glass of vodka. Olympy tested his voice again. “Mi, mi, fa.⁠ ⁠…”

“Strike that D, mother,” said he.

His wife struck a prolonged, melancholy note.

“Hm⁠ ⁠… Pharaoh, driving his chariot.⁠ ⁠… No; doesn’t work. The devil take that writer, what’s his name?”

Father Olympy was a great lover of books. He read them one after another, in any order, never interesting himself much in the writer’s name. His education in the seminary, based mostly on learning things “by heart,” and consisting almost exclusively of memorizing church canons and quotations from the Fathers of the Church, had developed his memory wonderfully. In order to memorize a whole page of the complicated works of such dialecticians as Augustine, Tertullian, Origen, and Basil the Great, all he had to do was to read the lines, and they would become firmly fixed in his memory. Books for reading were supplied by his friend Smirnov, a student at the Academy. The book he had just read was a beautiful story of life in the Caucasus, where soldiers, Cossacks, and Chechens killed each other, drank wine, married, and hunted wild beasts.

The book aroused the archdeacon’s adventurous soul. He read it over three times, and during each reading he cried and laughed with joy, doubled his fists, and turned his huge body from side to side. Of course, it would have been much better if he were a hunter, a fisherman, a horseman; certainly, his place was not in the clergy.

He always came to the church a little later than was necessary; just like the famous barytone at the opera. Approaching the southern gate of the altar, he tested his voice for the last time.

“Hm, hm.⁠ ⁠… Sounds like D, and that rascal of a regent will be sure to strike C-sharp. But I don’t care. I’ll get the choir to sing my tone, anyway.”

The pride of the popular favorite awoke in him. He knew that the whole city adored him, and that even boys in the streets gathered in crowds to gaze at him, as they did upon the gaping mouth of the enormous trumpet in the military orchestra that played in the public square.

The archbishop came in and was solemnly led to his place. His mitre was tilted a little to the left. Two subdeacons were standing on each side, swaying the censers rhythmically. The clergy, in bright holiday vestments, surrounded the archbishop’s seat. Two clergymen brought the images of the Saviour and the Virgin Mary from the altar.

The church was an old one, and, like Catholic churches, it had a little elevated platform in one corner, with a carved-oak railing around it, and a flight of narrow, winding steps leading up to it.

Slowly, feeling each step and carefully supporting himself by the handrail, as he was always afraid to break something through his awkwardness, the archdeacon mounted the platform, coughed, spit over the railing, touched his tuning-fork, went from C to D, and began the service.

“Bless me, your most gracious Eminence!”

“Oh, no, Mr. Regent. You won’t dare to change the pitch as long as the bishop is here,” he thought. He felt with pleasure at that moment that his voice sounded better than ever, went easily from note to note, and made the air of the whole church tremble with its soft, deep sighs.

It was Quadragesima Sunday, in the first week of Lent. At first there was very little work for Father Olympy. The reader monotonously mumbled the psalms; the deacon, an academician and future professor of homiletics, spoke rapidly through his nose.

From time to time the archdeacon roared, “We shall attend,” or, “We shall pray to the Lord.” His huge body, in a surplice embroidered with gold, towered over the crowd. He stood there shaking his black, silvering hair, that was like a lion’s mane, and testing his voice from time to time. The church was filled with old women and gray-bearded little old men who reminded one of fish-traders, or moneylenders.

“It’s funny,” thought Olympy, “that all women’s profiles remind you either of a fish or of a hen’s head!⁠ ⁠… There’s my wife, too.⁠ ⁠…”

But his professional habits compelled him to follow closely the service, which was in accordance with the seventeenth-century mass-book. Finally, the psalm-reader finished his part, concluding it with the words: “The Most High Lord, our Master and Creator, Amen.”

Then began the rite of the affirmation of Orthodoxy.

“Who is more supreme than our Lord? Thou, O Lord, art supreme above all, thou, alone, performest miracles.”

The melody was slow, and not very distinct. The service for Quadragesima Sunday and the rite of anathematization may be varied at will. For example, the Holy Church knows anathemas written for special occasions, e.g., anathemas against Ivashka Mazepa, Stenka Razin, the heretic Arius, the iconoclasts, the Archpriest Habakkuk, etc., etc.

But something peculiar happened to the archdeacon that morning, something that had never happened before. Perhaps it was the whiskey that his wife gave him with his tea.

Somehow his thoughts could not become detached from the story he had read the night before. Simple, beautiful, fascinating pictures rose in his mind with unusual clearness and distinctness. But, through sheer force of habit, he completed this part of the service, pronounced the word “Amen,” and concluded:

“This apostolic faith, this paternal faith, this Orthodox faith, this universal faith, affirm.”

The archbishop was an extreme formalist and pedant. He never permitted any omission in the canons of the most blessed Father Andrew of Crete, or the funeral rites, or any other service. And Father Olympy, making the whole church tremble with his mighty voice, and the glass ornaments on the lustres tinkle in unison with it, cursed, anathematized, and excommunicated the following: all iconoclasts, all heretics,