Anathema

"Father Deacon, you're wasting the candles," said the deacon's wife. "It's time to get up."

This small, thin, yellow-faced woman treated her husband very harshly. In the school at which she had been educated there had been an opinion that — men were scoundrels, deceivers, and tyrants. But her husband, the deacon, was certainly not a tyrant. He was absolutely in awe of his half-hysterical, half-epileptic, childless wife. The deacon weighed about nine and a half poods of solid flesh; he had a broad chest like the body of a motor-car, an awful voice, and with it all that gentle condescension of manner which often marks the behaviour of extraordinarily strong people in their relations towards the weak.

A pood is 40 Russian lbs., about 36 lbs. English.

It always took the deacon a long time to get his voice in order. This occupation — an unpleasant, long-drawn-out torture — is, of course, well known to all those who have to sing in public: the rubbing with cocaine, the burning with caustic, the gargling with boracic acid. And, still lying upon his bed, Father Olympus began to try his voice.

"Via ... kmm! Via-a-a! Alleluia, alleluia. ... Oba-che ... kmm.... Ma-ma...."

"There's no sound in my voice," he said to himself. "Vla-di-ko bla-go-slo-ve-e-e.... Km...."

Like all famous singers, he was given to be anxious about his voice. It is well known that actors grow pale and cross themselves before they go on to the stage. And Father Olympus suffered from this vice of fear. Yet he was the only man in the town, and possibly in all Russia, who could make his voice resound in the old dark cathedral church, gleaming with ancient gold and mosaic.

He alone could fill all the corners of the old building with his powerful voice, and when he intoned the funeral service every crystal lustre in the candelabras trembled and jingled with the sound.

His prim wife brought him in a glass of weak tea with lemon in it, and, as usual on Sunday mornings, a glass of vodka. Olympus tried his voice once more: "Mi ... mi ... fa.... Mi-ro-no-citsi.... Here, mother," called he to his wife, "give me re on the harmonium."