by Mary Morris
“Easter,” Tom wrote recently in a letter home, “like everything else here, is a deficit good.” To get into a Moscow church for the midnight Easter service, one often needs a printed invitation from the priest—something which, like every other deficit good, is easy enough for foreigners to obtain (there are, in fact, certain prominent churches to which foreigners are guided) but not easy for the average Russian. Russian friends told us that during the Easter service every church is surrounded by three rows of people: in the inner row stand policemen, checking tickets and intimidating the hesitant; in the second row, druzhiniki (volunteer police), wearing red arm bands, continue the intimidation; and the third row consists of hooligans and thugs ready to push around any churchgoer who happens to cross their path. Besides the physical barriers, distractions are arranged to discourage church attendance and bolster loyalty to the State. As on the eves of Christmas and “Old New Year,” the New Year of the Orthodox calendar, the Party schedules a special television program on the night before Easter, a program aimed at young people, usually featuring a popular rock group like Abba or Boney M. This year, ironically enough, the day before Easter was Lenin’s birthday, and so there were even greater possibilities for distraction from the religious holiday. The city just awakening to springtime was festooned with red, and the day declared a nationwide Communist subotnik, a day on which everyone is expected to work for free for the good of the State.
All day on Saturday, in spite of the red flags and the frantic Radio Moscow harangues about the Great Leader, there was the feeling of a vast and growing secret in the city, a gathering power that had nothing to do with Lenin. On buses and on the sidewalks, shoppers carrying bags filled with preparations for Easter feasts turned their eyes away from one another. I went into the State bread store and found there a line for kulich, the special tall, puffy cakes that crown an Easter dinner; yet, in all the conversations I overheard in the line, there was no mention of the holiday. The sense of some great hidden emotion increased as twilight fell—a damp, purple twilight with some of the sting of winter still in the air. At about nine-thirty Tom and I took a taxi to a small nineteenth-century church near the Sportivnoye metro station; this was a church, we had learned, where you could get in without an invitation if you came early enough. The taxi driver gave us a strange look when we told him the address, but said nothing. When we got out of the taxi, we saw at the church entrance a milling crowd that, sure enough, turned out to be made up mainly of police, druzhiniki, and a number of loutish-looking young men. They saw that we were foreigners, and let us through without comment. Ahead of us, a group of three old Russian women was also allowed to pass. “They know they can’t keep the babushki away,” whispered Tom. But to one side of us, a pair of teenage girls, their heads wrapped in Orenburg shawls, were being harassed by an equally young druzhinik. “What are you doing here, girls?” he said, cocking his cropped head to one side and grabbing one of them by the arm. “This is no place for you! Where are your invitations?”
All this was going on practically in darkness on a narrow, badly paved street, where the only light came from a few bulbs at the church door. Though the crowd of officials and churchgoers was rather large, there was only a fraction of the noise normally made by a group that size. The policemen and druzhiniki seemed instinctively to lower their voices, as if they felt intimidated by an invisible presence. Before we stepped into the church, I turned around to watch a broad old woman with an imperious carriage roundly berating two policemen, who, momentarily abashed, were practically shuffling their feet with embarrassment. “Why aren’t you ashamed to be keeping people out of church?” she demanded in a voice that rang out above the silent crowd. “This is very unattractive behavior!” On the balcony of an apartment across the street, where a party seemed to be going on, two or three young couples stood leaning on the rail, observing the scene below, passing a bottle among them and giving an occasional catcall.
Inside, the little church was already massed with worshippers, who seemed to be made up of about three-quarters old women and a quarter young people; there were only a few people in their forties or fifties. The dim yellow lights lit up the metal covers of icons along the pillars and walls, and the room swirled with the suffocating odor of candle wax mixed with the smell of perspiring human flesh, too tightly packed. This was, in fact, a true Russian crowd, like many of those we’d learned to fight through in the metro, or in a line for food or tickets. After we had shoved our way to a place beside a wall, I felt someone tap me on the shoulder, and turned to find an old woman thrusting thirty kopecks into my hand. “Peredaite, pozhaluista. [Please pass this on to the next person],” she said. Every day, in the crushing crowds on Moscow buses, one is constantly tapped on the shoulder, handed a few kopecks that are on their way to the ticket machine, and told, “Peredaite.” These particular kopecks were for candles being sold at the entrance of the church, and the candles thus purchased were making their way up to the icons in the midst of a busy buzz of directions. “Pass this candle to the Smolensk Icon.” … “Where do you want me to send it?” … “Pass it on to the Kazan Icon.” Fat women in kerchiefs squeezed past us, and I marveled, as I do in every Russian crowd, at the seemingly indefinite capacity of human flesh to compress itself. Through the rippling crowd, I could see the thin brown candles burning, massed like strands of wheat in front of the icons. “There was a fire here last Easter,” I heard a woman behind us say in a barely audible whisper.
“Gospodi! What happened?” came another woman’s voice.
“An old woman fainted, and her kerchief caught on fire. But she wasn’t hurt. We put it out, all of us.”
At that moment a church official—oddly enough, also wearing a red arm band—appeared at the front of the church to announce that no more people would be let through to the altar to kiss the Easter Icon. “The passageway is closed!” he shouted. It was time for the service to begin.
The two hours we spent standing—before midnight brought the climax of the service—were a blur of candlelight, the steadily increasing heat of the airless chamber, and the voices of the crowd singing the hypnotic Old Church Slavonic phrases of the Easter service. Several times, exhausted and faint from lack of air, I felt my legs slowly giving way; each time I was buoyed up by the packed bodies around me. The first and most subtle miracle of Easter had already taken place: the crowd, which before the service had been very much like an assemblage in a marketplace, every mind intent on an individual and petty transaction, had at some point been transformed into a single body, as if the archaic words of adoration and rejoicing were a catalyst as potent as communion wine.
It had all happened as spontaneously and imperceptibly as the coming of spring itself. The priest, a man with a dwarfish body and a large head covered with greasy hair above his brocade robe, chanted in a high tremolo, and periodically turned upon the congregation a face whose rather heavy contours were illuminated by an expression of tender joy. The congregation replied to him in a single voice whose defining note was—as it almost always is in the Russian churches I’ve seen—the quavering treble of old women. I thought how different this serene yet passionate joining of spirits was from any other mass gathering I had seen in the Soviet Union. There was no feeling of compulsion, or of the carefully orchestrated hysteria that culminates in the violent cheers that seem almost torn out of the throats of the crowds gathered to celebrate Komsomol Day or the October Revolution.
Midnight approached. A quiver of activity ran through the crowd as people lit the candles they had saved for the climax of the service and hurriedly wrapped them in paper to protect their fingers. Then two churchmen somehow cleared the passageway through the congregation, and the priest advanced from the altar, surrounded by a procession of acolytes carrying icons, crosses, and candles. The congregation silently fell into line behind the procession, and soon we were outside, moving in a circle around the church. The cold night air roused me instantly from the dreamy stupor that had seized me; I looke
d with newly clarified vision at the moving line of candlelit figures stretching in front and back of me, and felt the keen surge of physical gladness and the sense of endless possibilities that one sometimes feels upon arising very early after a night of deep sleep.
As the procession passed the little square in front of the church, where the police and druzhiniki had been standing, I noticed that the hostile throng had inexplicably vanished, and that now a crowd of about fifty people—many of them young and middle-aged—stood facing the procession with candles of their own. Finally the priest stopped at the church door, and turned to call his message to the gathering: “Khristos Voskres!”—Christ is risen! The traditional reply came back in a glad shout from dozens of throats: “Voistine Voskres!”—He is truly risen! Back and forth, over and over again, went the exchange, while an expression of rapture transformed the faces of the young and old, and the deep yellow glow of candlelight lit up the square. The apartment balconies were thronged with spectators who stood silently looking down at the single mass public observance in Russia that has nothing to do with Communism.
Near the gate to the churchyard stood a group of worshippers who wanted to press forward and come inside. A deacon stood at the door and addressed them. “Pravoslavnye,” he called. “You may come to the door, but only if you come calmly, without making any noise.” Tom and I looked at each other. We had never heard the word “pravoslavnye” uttered in this country, where the crowds of people are normally addressed as “Comrades,” or “Citizens.” Pravoslavnye means all orthodox Christians, all members of the flock. The group passed through the doorway, and for the first time this year I saw a crowd of Russians move without shoving: their faces, like all the faces around us, still wore the same look of rapturous rejoicing. “Khristos Voskres!” … “Voistine Voskres!” Candle wax was dripping on my hand, and I glanced off into the distance, where I could just make out the red stars gleaming on top of the Kremlin towers. I thought of a church I’d seen recently that had been transformed by the State into a storage facility for sinks, pipes, and toilet bowls; of the former monasteries that are now factories or institutions. It was smart of the officials, I thought, to try to stem this passionate tide of belief, for if they didn’t, would there be as many voices to cheer in Red Square?
A little later the crowd began moving back through the doorway of the church to resume the service inside. It was now about one-thirty. We were expected at an Easter supper on the Sadovoye Kol’tso, so we slipped quietly into the square, leaving our candles, as the others had left them, stuck, burning, into the iron railing of the churchyard. As we walked away, I looked back once. Except for a few stragglers, the square and churchyard were almost totally deserted. Only the irregular ring of tiny flames remained as proof of the magical hour when all churches all over Moscow had been ringed with holy fire, and had regained, for the short span of the ceremony of rebirth, their ancient hold over Russian hearts.
We didn’t see any taxis, so we walked for an hour along the boulevard toward the Sadovoye Kol’tso. The night had grown cold and still, a thick layer of clouds reflecting the grayish lights of the city. The trees and bushes we passed were still leafless, but looking closely, I could see the tips of twigs swollen with clustering buds; in this calmest hour of the night, a subtle odor of vegetation—more a phantom than an actual smell—floated lightly in the air. We were silent and elated, walking down the center of the deserted street with a buoyancy to our stride as if we were half flying, infrequently passing other night-walkers who were also returning from Easter services. We crossed Herzen Street and entered a neighborhood of beautiful old mansions, many of them embassies, the gray-uniformed Soviet guards looking out curiously at us from their tiny sentry boxes. We had turned down a side street when we heard shouts, and saw, on the corner across from us, a man and woman circling and aiming blows at each other, while two or three men stood looking on. From their features and language, they all seemed to be Tartars. The woman’s long dark hair was spilling over her shoulders, and her slanted eyes and high cheekbones were clearly visible in the streetlight. She cried out again and again at the man, and in her voice there was something violent yet wailing and mournful that seemed to echo up and down the street. A child of about two stood crying unheeded a few yards away. The sight of this evil little drama gave me a chill; a militsiya car turned the corner and we hurriedly cut through a muddy alleyway. We emerged facing a tree-filled park immortalized in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita as being the site of the Devil’s first appearance in Moscow; here, after encountering Lucifer in the shape of a dapper foreigner, a pompous journalist slips in a pool of sunflower-seed oil and is decapitated by a passing tram.
The first thing that happened when we arrived at Easter dinner at Lidia Borisovna’s apartment is that Lidia herself, wearing a long skirt and a traditionally embroidered Russian blouse (these days, such blouses are almost impossible to obtain outside of the hard-currency stores), came up and gave us each a threefold Easter kiss, and standing back, announced quite dramatically: “Khristos Voskres!” Lidia is a dramatic soul, a tall, gaunt woman in her forties, with a Dutch-boy haircut and a clever, complaining, manipulative manner. She is one of the most important figures in the unofficial art world of Moscow, so flamboyant in her unorthodoxy that she probably has KGB connections; her apartment is always full of foreigners, artists, and paintings. Often she receives guests while reclining on a mattress, complaining of vague back pains and chain-smoking the cigarettes that have yellowed her beautiful hands.
“Voistine Voskres!” we told her dutifully, and hung up our coats. The brightly lit three-room apartment was crowded with guests; I recognized about half of them as the painters, poets, and musicians who haunt parties where foreigners are likely to appear. At the beginning of the year this had all seemed very exciting, but now the prospect of four hours of conversation about “my art—stifled in this country” seemed unbearably wearisome. I was glancing about the room for Rima, who had promised to meet us here, when I felt a small heavy hand on my arm. It was Ludmilla, a very short, fat artist who wears dresses made of long swags of embroidered material, and whose round timorous eyes in a plump pink face make her look constantly like a child about to be smacked.
“Khristos Voskres!” she said in a plaintive voice. “Why do you refuse to visit me? You must not like me. Next week I am giving a party, with lovely cakes. And I have some new creations.” Luda makes strange little quilts and collages from scraps of hides, furs, and feathers; she tries to sell them for dollars, but to my knowledge, no one has ever bought anything.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “We have wanted to come and visit you for a long time. Perhaps we can do it soon.”
“Yes, come next week. I want to do your portrait. Come—I insist on it!” She spoke in the insinuating, nagging way in which some timid people try to exert their wills. Luda was a despised hanger-on in this artistic circle, and she knew it. I looked closely at her and realized that she was wearing a present I had given her as a joke back in the fall: a miniature Coca-Cola can hung on her necklace chain. I had chuckled about this silly present often enough, but now it seemed like a truly wicked thing to have done. I went on talking to her, and thought that my head would split with depression and fatigue. It was about three o’clock in the morning.
Two tables had been pushed together in the main room, covered with white cloths, and spread with a handsome array of zakuski: cold meats and cheeses, radishes and fresh coriander, cucumber and tomato sandwiches. In the middle lay two bowls of hard-boiled eggs that had been decorated with dyes, and between them lay the traditional Easter kulich and the sweetened raisin-filled farmer cheese that is traditionally served with it. I was approaching the table when a painter whom I vaguely knew, a balding man with purplish cheeks and a skewed eye, came up to me and tried in a vigorous whisper to convince me that I should try to smuggle a portfolio of his enormous canvases out to a dealer in New York.
“I’d get caught the same as anyone would,�
� I protested, trying to maneuver out of the corner where he had pulled me.
“Nonsense. You could slip them right in among your luggage. Americans always have a great deal of luggage.… You materialists!” he added, wagging his finger at me in playful admonishment. “Tell me, my beauty,” he went on in the same low voice. “When are we going to meet privately? Foreign women are always drawn to Russian men, with good reason! We’re real men! Once I met a French woman who was a lesbianka—hated men. But I convinced her differently!” He began an interminable smutty story, and I glanced around the room, whose walls were covered every few weeks with an exhibition of works by a different artist. This time there was a really wonderful set of paintings, showing Breughelesque scenes of traditional life in a Russian peasant village. Lidia Borisovna had turned off the harsh overhead light and had lit candles on the table, and the figures in the paintings—short-legged, broad-faced peasants in the marketplace, in the bathhouse, by the frozen river—seemed to take on life in the moving light. It seemed to me that they bore more relationship to the Easter service we’d just attended than did the people in the room around me.
