And if he doesn’t throttle me I might get lumbered with looking after him. But how can I help a naked man? I couldn’t let him have the last shirt off my back.
‘Please God, help me!’
[Matryona’s] heart seemed to melt and she felt that she wanted to banish all those spiteful feelings and to find out who that man really was.
‘We’re always giving, but why does nobody ever give us anything?’
Mikhail kept staring until suddenly he smiled and his whole face lit up.
‘What are you grinning at, idiot?’ the gentleman asked. ‘You’d better see to it that the boots are ready on time!’
Matryona went over to watch Mikhail working and was amazed to see what he was doing.
“I was young, strong and well-nourished and God gave me so much milk that it filled my breasts to overflowing. Sometimes I’d feed two at one time, with the third waiting, and when one had had its fill, I’d put the third to my breast. But it was God’s will that I should nurse these little girls and bury my own child before he was two years old.”
“‘Children cannot live without a father or mother,’ she pleaded. So I did not take that woman’s soul.”
“And I could hear this man wondering how to protect his body from the winter cold and feed his wife and children. And I thought, ‘I am perishing with cold and hunger, but here is someone whose only thought is how to find a warm coat for himself and his wife, and food for his family.’”
‘I came to understand that God does not wish men to live apart and that is why He does not reveal to each man what he needs for himself alone.’
