Рождество на Кузнецком мосту. Christmas on Kuznetsky bridge. Премия им. Н.В. Гоголя / N.V. Gogol award (Билингва: Rus/Eng) - страница 9

After a small breakfast of scrambled eggs, taking with him a couple of cheese and sausage sandwiches, and only by chance remembering to take also the Gospel and the cross, the parish priest, Father Alexey, slowly went to confess a certain parishioner Pelageya, who was dying of a terminal illness. Father Alexey didn’t know her, as he had served in that church for a week only.

Entering a shabby little room, he saw a woman about forty. She seemed to no longer react to the surrounding sounds, and her gaze was fixed on the window overlooking the garden, where the birds were singing joyfully, and the cheerful wind was rustling. Father Alexey came closer to Pelageya. Her features seemed too familiar to the priest, but in vain he tried to remember where he might have crossed paths with the dying woman, so, sitting down on a chair by her bed, as usual in such cases, he asked,

«I was told that you want to confess…»

«Yes,» the dying woman replied in a weak voice.

«Then tell me your sins and transgressions,» the priest made the sign of the cross and prepared to listen attentively.

Pelageya started her life story from the very beginning: as a child she had broken her mother’s favorite vase, too often she had quarreled with her sister and friends, and she hadn’t believed in God. However, left without a livelihood at the age of fifteen, Pelageya went to play the flute in the streets to get money for food, and by the will of the Almighty, for the first time she found herself in a church, where a completely different world opened up for her.

What the dying woman had told him up to that point was not of particular interest to the priest, he even snored a little, and, waking up, only shook his head periodically. Sometimes it seemed to Father Alexey that he had already heard something similar before, but during his life the priest managed to serve in so many churches that thousands of stories confessed to him by parishioners had long been mixed up in his head and safely forgotten, and new ones were not remembered at all.

«Then I met him,» the eyes of the dying woman suddenly sparkled, and she smiled. «He was kind and caring, he courted me as a princess, but said almost nothing about himself, only that he loved me and we would get married after Easter. Once I found out by accident that my groom was a student at the Theological Seminary, however, the prospect of becoming the wife of a priest didn’t frighten me at all! On the contrary, I was even delighted, since I already believed in God! But soon, when I told him we were going to have a baby, he forbade me to give birth to our son.»

«Son?» Father Alexey furrowed his brow and fiddled with the Gospel.

«Yes, thank God, I didn’t take at least that sin upon my soul! After all, we never got married. My groom got scared, exchanged me for the daughter of a rich and influential official. And my son outwardly is a copy of his father, and I named him Alexey as well.»

«How old is the boy?»

«Seventeen.»

«Did you tell him about his father?»

«No, Father. My son sings in a church choir, he is going to the Seminary. I didn’t want him to change his attitude towards God because of such a father. All he knows is that they are too similar in appearance.»

Father Alexey shook his head and touched Pelageya’s hand. He was silent for a while, but then, sharply withdrawing his hand, said menacingly,