–10. Archangel Gabriel / Prayer

I. Archangel Gabriel

Once the archangel Gabriel heard from paradise the voice of God—God was blessing some man. The angel said: “Surely this is an important servant of the Most High, surely some holy hermit or sage.” The angel descended to earth to find this man but could not find him either in heaven or on earth. Then he turned to God and said: “O Lord! Show me the way to this object of your love.” God answered: “Go to the village, and there in a small temple you will see a fire.”

The angel descended to the temple and there saw a man praying before an idol. The angel returned to God and said: “O Lord, can it be that you look with love upon an idol-worshipper?” God said: “I do not look at the fact that he understands me incorrectly. To understand me as I truly am, no man can. Even the greatest sage among men is just as far from truly understanding what I am as this man is. I look not at the mind, but at the heart. And this man’s heart is seeking me and therefore is close to me.”

—Persian (Attar)

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II. Prayer

…your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him… —Matthew 6:8

“No, no, no! This cannot be… Doctor! Can nothing be done? Why are you all silent?!”

So spoke the young mother, walking with large, determined steps out of the nursery where her first and only three-year-old boy was dying of hydrocephalus.

The husband and doctor, who had been talking quietly together, fell silent. The husband timidly approached her, gently touched her disheveled head, and sighed heavily. The doctor stood with his head bowed, his silence and stillness showing the hopelessness of the situation.

“What can be done!” said the husband. “What can be done, my dear…”

“Ah, don’t speak, don’t speak!” she cried out as if in anger, reproachfully, and quickly turning, went back into the nursery.

The husband wanted to hold her back.

“Katya! Don’t go…”

Without answering, she glanced at him with large, weary eyes and returned to the nursery.

The boy lay on the nurse’s arm with a white pillow placed under his head. His eyes were open, but he was not looking with them. Foam was bubbling from his clenched little mouth. The nurse, with a stern, solemn face, was looking somewhere past his face and did not stir when the mother entered. When the mother came close and slipped her hand under the pillow to take the child from the nurse, the nurse said quietly: “He is passing!” and drew back from the mother. But the mother did not listen to her and with a deft, practiced movement took the boy into her arms. His long, curly hair had become tangled. She smoothed it and looked into his face.

“No, I cannot,” she whispered and with a quick but careful movement gave him back to the nurse and left the room.

The child had been ill for the second week. Throughout the illness the mother had gone several times a day from despair to hope. All this time she had slept barely an hour and a half a day. All this time she had not ceased, several times a day, to go to her bedroom, stand before a large icon of the Savior in a gold riza, and pray to God to save her boy. The dark-faced Savior held in his small dark hand a gilded book on which was written in black: “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” Standing before this icon, she prayed, putting all the strength of her soul into her prayer. And although in the depths of her soul, even during prayer, she felt that she would not move mountains and that God would do not as she wished but as He wished, she still prayed, reciting known prayers and her own, which she composed and spoke aloud with particular intensity.

Now, when she understood that he was dead, she felt that something happened in her head, as if something had broken loose and begun to spin, and coming into her bedroom, she looked around at all her things with surprise, as if not recognizing the place. Then she lay down on the bed and put her head not on the pillow but on her husband’s folded dressing gown, and lost consciousness.

And now in a dream she sees her Kostya, healthy and merry, sitting with his curly hair and thin white neck on a little chair, swinging his plump calves and, pursing his lips, carefully seating a boy-doll on a cardboard horse missing one leg with a punctured back.

“How good that he is alive,” she thinks. “And how cruel that he died. Why? Could God, to whom I prayed so much, allow him to die? Why does God need this? Did he harm anyone? Does God not know that my whole life is in him, that I cannot live without him? And suddenly to take and torment this poor, dear, innocent creature and shatter my life, and to all my pleas respond by having his eyes stop, by having him stretch out, grow cold, stiffen.”

And she sees again. There he goes. So small, through such tall doors he walks, swinging his little arms like adults walk. And he looks and smiles… “Dear one! And God wanted to torment and kill him! Why then pray to Him, if He can do such horrors?”

And suddenly Matriosha the girl, the nurse’s helper, begins to say something very strange. The mother knows this is Matriosha, yet at the same time she is both Matriosha and an angel. “And if she is an angel, why doesn’t she have wings behind her back?” the mother thinks. However, she remembers that someone—she doesn’t remember who, but someone trustworthy—told her that angels nowadays sometimes appear without wings. And the angel-Matriosha says: “It’s useless, ma’am, to be angry with God. He simply cannot listen to everyone. They often ask for things such that if you do it for one, you offend another. Right now throughout all Russia they are praying, and what people! The highest bishops, monks in cathedrals, in churches over relics, all praying that God grant victory over the Japanese. But is that a good thing? It’s not even proper to pray for such a thing, and besides, He cannot please anyone. The Japanese are also praying for victory. But He is one Father for all of us. What is He to do?”

“What is He to do, ma’am?” says Matriosha.

“Yes, that’s so. That’s old. Voltaire already said that. Everyone knows it and everyone says it. I’m not talking about that. But why can’t He fulfill a request when I ask for nothing harmful, but only that He not kill my dear boy? I cannot live without him,” says the mother and feels how he embraces her neck with his plump little arms, and with her body she feels his warm little body. “It’s good that this didn’t happen,” she thinks.

“But it’s not just that, ma’am,” Matriosha insists just as foolishly as always, “it’s not just that. Sometimes even one person asks, but it’s quite impossible to do what he wants. We know all about it. I know because I deliver the petitions,” says the angel-Matriosha in exactly the voice she used yesterday when the mistress sent her to the master, saying to the nurse: “I know that the master is home because I delivered the message.”

“How many times I’ve had to report,” says Matriosha, “that here’s a good person—one of the young ones, keeps asking for help so he won’t do bad deeds, won’t drink, won’t carouse, asks to have the vice pulled out of him like a splinter.”

“How well Matriosha speaks, though,” the mistress thinks.

“But it’s quite impossible for Him to do that, because everyone must try for themselves. Only from trying does good come. You yourself, ma’am, gave me to read the fairy tale about the black hen. It tells how a boy was given by a black hen, because he saved her from death, a magic hemp seed, such that while it lay in his pocket in his trousers, he knew all his lessons without studying, and how from this very seed he completely stopped studying and lost his memory. It’s impossible for the Father to pull evil out of people. And they shouldn’t ask Him for this, but pull, wash, wrench it out of themselves.”

“Where does she know these words from,” the mistress thinks, and says:

“Still, Matriosha, you don’t answer my question.”

“Give me time, I’ll tell you everything,” says Matriosha. “And it also happens: I report that a family has been ruined through no fault of their own, everyone is crying, instead of good rooms they live in a corner, there isn’t even tea, they ask for at least some help. And He also can’t do as they want, because He knows it’s for their own good. They don’t see, but He, the Father, knows that if they lived in comfort, they’d be completely spoiled.”

“That’s true,” the mistress thinks. “But why does she express herself so vulgarly about God? ‘Completely’… that’s quite improper. I must tell her when I have a chance”…

“But I’m not asking about that,” the mother repeats again. “I ask: why, for what reason, did your God want to take my boy from me?” And the mother sees before her her Kostya alive and hears his bell-like, ringing, childish, his special, dear laugh. “Why did they take him from me? If God could do this, then He is an evil, bad God and I don’t need to know Him at all and don’t want to know Him.”

And what is this: Matriosha is no longer Matriosha at all, but some completely different, new, strange, unclear being, and this being speaks not aloud with lips, but by some special means, directly into the mother’s heart.

“Pitiful, blind, and insolent, self-important creature,” says this being. “You see your Kostya as he was a week ago with his sturdy, resilient limbs and long curly hair and with his naive, affectionate, and meaningful speech. But was he always like that? There was a time when you rejoiced that he said ‘mama’ and ‘baba’ and understood who was who; and even earlier you were delighted that he stood on tiptoe and, swaying, pattered softly to a chair on his soft little legs, and even earlier you all were delighted that, like a little animal, he crawled across the hall, and even earlier you rejoiced that he recognized, that he held up his hairless little head with its breathing fontanel, and even earlier you were delighted that he took the nipple and pressed it with his toothless gums. And even earlier you rejoiced that he, all red and not yet separated from you, cried pitifully, renewing his lungs. And even earlier, a year before, where was he, when he didn’t exist at all? You all think that you stand still and that you and those you love should always be as they are now. But you don’t stand still for a minute; you all flow like a river, you all fly like a stone downward, toward death, which sooner or later awaits all of you. How do you not understand that if he became from nothing what he was, he would not have stopped and would not have remained for a minute such as he was when he died; but as he became from nothing a suckling, from a suckling became a child, so from a child he would have become a schoolboy, a youth, a young man, an adult, aging, old. You don’t know what he would have been if he had lived. But I know.”

And now the mother sees, in a separate, brightly electrically lit cabinet of a restaurant (once her husband took her to such a restaurant), before a table with the remains of supper, a puffy, wrinkled, with upturned waxed mustache, repulsive, aging-but-trying-to-look-young old man. He sits, having sunk deeply into the soft sofa, and with drunken eyes greedily looks at a debauched, painted woman with a bared white thick neck and with a drunken tongue cries out, repeating several times an indecent joke, evidently pleased with the approving laughter of another such pair.

“It’s not true, that’s not him, that’s not my Kostya!” the mother cries out, looking with horror at the disgusting old man who is terrible precisely because there is something in his gaze, in his lips, that reminds her of Kostya’s special features. “It’s good that this is a dream,” she thinks. “The real Kostya is here.” And she sees the white, naked, with plump little breasts Kostya, as he sits in the bathtub and, laughing, splashes his little legs, not only sees but feels how suddenly he embraces her arm bared to the elbow and kisses, kisses and finally bites it, not knowing what else to do with this arm dear to him.

“Yes, that’s Kostya, not that horrible old man,” she says to herself. And at these words she wakes and with horror recognizes the reality from which there is nowhere to awaken.

She goes to the nursery. The nurse has already washed and dressed Kostya. With his waxen, thinned little nose, with dimples at the nostrils and smoothed hair from the forehead, he lies on some sort of elevation. Around him candles burn and on a small table at the head stand white, purple, and pink hyacinths. The nurse rises from her chair and, raising her eyebrows and stretching out her lips, looks at the upturned, stone-still little face. Through another door, toward the mother, enters Matriosha with her simple, good-natured face and tear-stained eyes.

“How could she have told me not to grieve when she herself was crying,” the mother thinks. And she transfers her gaze to the deceased. At first the terrible resemblance of the dead little face to the face of the old man she saw in her dream strikes and repels her, but she drives away this thought and, crossing herself, touches with her warm lips the cold, waxen little forehead, then kisses the folded, cooling little hands, and suddenly the smell of hyacinths seems to say something new to her about the fact that he is not and never will be again, and sobs choke her, and she kisses him on the forehead once more and for the first time she weeps. She weeps, but not with hopeless but with submissive, tender tears. It hurts, but she no longer rebels, does not complain, but knows that what happened had to happen, and therefore was good.

“It is a sin, mother, to weep,” says the nurse and, approaching the little deceased, wipes with a folded handkerchief the mother’s tears remaining on Kostya’s waxen forehead. “His little soul will feel heavy from tears. He is well now. A sinless little angel. And had he lived, who knows what would have been.”

“Yes, yes, but still it hurts, it hurts!” says the mother.

—Lev Tolstoy

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Translator’s Notes:

• Attar (Farid ud-Din Attar, c. 1145-1221) was a Persian Sufi poet and mystic. His tale expresses a core Sufi idea: the heart’s sincere seeking matters more than correct theology.
• The epigraph “Your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him” is from Matthew 6:8 (KJV).
• “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden” is from Matthew 11:28 (KJV).
• The story references the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), with both Russians and Japanese praying for victory.
• The “black hen” references the Russian fairy tale by Antony Pogorelsky (1829) about a boy given magical powers who loses them through moral failure.
• Tolstoy’s central theological point: God cannot grant contradictory prayers, cannot remove human struggle from moral development, and cannot prevent the natural flow of life toward death. True submission comes from accepting that what happens is ultimately good.
• “Riza” is the decorative metal covering on Russian Orthodox icons.