The Victory of Old Widows

On Sundays, the old widows used to come to the church at dawn and stay till evening. They either hunched in the church pews next to one another, or knelt on the hassocks with their heads resting on clasped hands; I had a suspicion that they dozed, while pretending to be immersed in their prayers. In winter, their shabby overcoats, adorned with balding fur collars, smelled of old mothballs. This unbearable aroma mixed with the sweetish odor of stale urine competed with the stuffy smell of the church incense. In summer, it mixed with the smell of flowers, rotting in vases set on the altars.

On Sundays, the nine o’clock Mass was intended solely for children. They came to the church all dressed up: the girls, in addition to their colorful Sunday clothes, had their hair neatly braided in pigtails, while the boys wore jackets, white shirts and squeaky-clean shoes. Children came to the church on empty stomachs in order to be able to receive Holy Communion, and at least one girl fainted at every Mass. It did not interrupt the celebration however, causing only a minor commotion which lasted only until someone took the girl outside to revive her there.

Before the nine o’clock Mass, while the church was slowly filling up with children, the priest always appealed to the people occupying the pews to leave the church and wait in the yard or at least give up their seats to the kids, standing  to the side. Perhaps then the girls would not faint. But the repeated requests seemed to sink in the dense and smelly air of the church, and never reached the ears of the praying old women. Sometimes the priest would walk down the center aisle, shouting his appeal just above the heads of the hunched widows, but to no avail. Then he decided to use more drastic methods: one Sunday, he brought the church custodian with him, and the two of them tried forcibly to pull the old women from the pews. It was a truly Dantesque scene: the widows, plucked from a nap, not understanding the intentions of the priest and the church custodian, desperately clung with their bony fingers to the pew-tops, resisting with their feet, squealing. So fiercely did they defend themselves against this attempted eviction from the church pews that the priest had to give up. And although, Sunday after Sunday, he kept asking the older people to give their seats up to the children, his voice sounded resigned and sad – he had evidently lost faith in the success of these appeals. Thus girls continued to faint, and everybody seemed to accept it as something normal and inevitable.