The last service in the Dormition Cathedral was brief, like a fit of dry, abrupt coughing. Few had come: a handful of monks, a dozen old men from the settlement, two or three women in dark mourning kerchiefs who pressed themselves against the wall as if ashamed of their own presence. Father Hermogen served alone, without a deacon, and his voice, precise and dry, tapped out the words like an accountant drawing up a final, hopeless balance. Each “Lord, have mercy” sounded not as a supplication but as a statement of impossibility. Varnava stood by the wall, in shadow, feeling the cold of the stone seep through his thin cassock into his shoulder blades, into his spine, into his very insides. He was not praying. He was listening.
Listening to the Silence of the cathedral. It was no longer a space filled with meaning. It had become fragile, glassy, ready at any instant to crack from a single careless movement, from a single sigh. In it hung, finding no way out, that same questioning which had been born on the night Father Veniamin was taken away and which since then had only gone on thickening, like black rain that will not fall, like a question without an answer, like silence without consolation.
When Father Hermogen pronounced the final dismissal and put out the one candle on the altar, the church at once went dark and empty, as if the rod had been pulled out of a vast, intricate organism — its soul and its heart. The air settled, grew close and dead.
The cathedral doors — heavy, oaken, bound in iron, doors that had surely known more terrible times than these — were shut with a booming, conclusive, sepulchral thud that rolled away in echoes somewhere in the deep cellars, in the stone wombs of the island. The sound struck the fragile Silence, and in the thin, ringing crack the unspoken question froze — the question which now, it seemed, would never be asked, never be answered. The question had been walled up together with the icons.
The chapter goes on in the book.