"But I am staying another fortnight."

"But I thought it was not the rule to stay for so long here?" I
said.

"Yes, that's true: if anyone stays too long, sponging on the monks,
he is asked to go. Judge for yourself, if the proletariat were
allowed to stay on here as long as they liked there would never be
a room vacant, and they would eat up the whole monastery. That's
true. But the monks make an exception for me, and I hope they won't
turn me out for some time. You know I am a convert."

"You mean?"

"I am a Jew baptized. . . . Only lately I have embraced orthodoxy."

Now I understood what I had before been utterly unable to understand
from his face: his thick lips, and his way of twitching up the right
corner of his mouth and his right eyebrow, when he was talking, and
that peculiar oily brilliance of his eyes which is only found in
Jews. I understood, too, his phraseology. . . . From further
conversation I learned that his name was Alexandr Ivanitch, and had
in the past been Isaac, that he was a native of the Mogilev province,
and that he had come to the Holy Mountains from Novotcherkassk,
where he had adopted the orthodox faith.

Having finished his sausage, Alexandr Ivanitch got up, and, raising
his right eyebrow, said his prayer before the ikon. The eyebrow
remained up when he sat down again on the little sofa and began
giving me a brief account of his long biography.