‘This is Christ’s Christmas party,’ they answer. ‘On this day Christ always has a Christmas party for those little children who have no Christmas tree of their own . . .’ And he learned that all these boys and girls were children just like him, but some had frozen to death in the baskets in which they had been abandoned on the doorsteps of Petersburg officials, others had perished in the keeping of indifferent nurses in orphans’ homes, still others had died at the dried-up breasts of their mothers during the Samara famine, and yet others had suffocated from the fumes in third-class railway carriages. And now they are all here, all like angels, all with Christ; and He is in their midst, stretching out His hands to them, blessing them and their sinful mothers. And the mothers of the children stand apart, weeping; each one recognizes her son or daughter; and the children fly to their mothers and wipe away their tears with their tiny hands, begging them not to weep because they are so happy here . . .
Down below, the next morning, the porters found the tiny body of the runaway boy who had frozen to death behind the woodpile; they found his mother as well . . . She had died even before him; they met in God’s Heaven.
So why did I make up a story like that, so little in keeping with the usual spirit of a sober-minded diary, and a writer’s diary at that? All the more since I promised stories preeminently about actual events! But that’s just the point: I keep imagining that all this could really have happened – I mean the things that happened in the cellar and behind the woodpile; as for Christ’s Christmas party – well, I really don’t know what to say: could that have happened? That’s just why I’m a novelist – to invent things.
(January 1876)
The End
