“Our dietary is according to the ancient conventual rules. During Lent there are no meals provided for Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. For Tuesday and Thursday we have white bread, stewed fruit with honey, wild berries, or salt cabbage and wholemeal stirabout. On Saturday white cabbage soup, noodles with peas, kasha, all with hemp oil. On weekdays we have dried fish and kasha with the cabbage soup. From Monday till Saturday evening, six whole days in Holy Week, nothing is cooked, and we have only bread and water, and that sparingly; if possible not taking food every day, just the same as is ordered for first week in Lent. On Good Friday nothing is eaten. In the same way on the Saturday we have to fast till three o’clock, and then take a little bread and water and drink a single cup of wine. On Holy Thursday we drink wine and have something cooked without oil or not cooked at all, inasmuch as the Laodicean council lays down for Holy Thursday: ‘It is unseemly by remitting the fast on the Holy Thursday to dishonor the whole of Lent!’ This is how we keep the fast. But what is that compared with you, holy Father,” added the monk, growing more confident, “for all the year round, even at Easter, you take nothing but bread and water, and what we should eat in two days lasts you full seven. It’s truly marvelous—your great abstinence.”
“And mushrooms?” asked Father Ferapont, suddenly.
“Mushrooms?” repeated the surprised monk.
“Yes. I can give up their bread, not needing it at all, and go away into the forest and live there on the mushrooms or the berries, but they can’t give up their bread here, wherefore they are in bondage to the devil. Nowadays the unclean deny that there is need of such fasting. Haughty and unclean is their judgment.”
“Och, true,” sighed the monk.
“And have you seen devils among them?” asked Ferapont.