Early on in the planning stages, Jeffrey had learned he had very little control when it came to preparations for the wedding. Over the years, Katya had built up a very definite idea of how she wanted her wedding to be. Jeffrey had learned to look at it as her day, and to allow her a free rein in making her dream come true.
Katya searched his face, said quietly, “You are right, Jeffrey.”
“About what?”
“I think I have known it since I first walked into the shop and heard you were at the hospital with Alexander. I just haven’t wanted to face the truth.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You know exactly,” she said. “You’ve known all along.”
“Known what?”
“Ten days,” Katya repeated. “I can’t imagine Alexander not being there.”
Jeffrey showed the remarkable good sense of not replying.
“With your family coming from the States, we can’t put it off.” Katya focused on nothing. “You know he will want to be there, but it would be risking his health for him to try and move across town.”
“We can’t take that responsibility,” he agreed.
“But he has to be a part of this. He’s supposed to be your best man.” Katya focused on him. “The Bible says we need a faith that can move mountains. Why not a faith that can move weddings? If Alexander can’t join us, then we’ll have to join him.”
“What are you saying?” He waved his arm about as far as he could. “Hold the wedding in the hospital?”
“There has to be a chapel here somewhere. Every hospital does, right?”
Jeffrey blinked. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Not after the past few months, when an entirely new side to Katya’s personality had appeared. Seeing her so happy had granted Jeffrey the patience to withstand an almost hourly barrage of wedding details. But he had wondered about it, wondered how such a practical woman, worldly wise far beyond her years, could become so totally caught up in recreating a fantasy moment dreamed up in her childhood.
And now this.
“I’m sure the chapel isn’t anything fancy, but we’ll just have to make do,” Katya told him firmly. “At least this way Alexander could be with us.”
This same woman who was now offering to move their wedding to a hospital had taken a swatch of her wedding-dress fabric to a bakery on the other side of London to make sure that the marzipan frosting was tinted just a shade darker ivory than her gown; she did not want her wedding dress to look dingy by comparison. She had then tracked down the calligrapher for the royal family to ensure that the invitations would be perfectly hand-lettered.
“Don’t you think that would be better than not having him share the day with us?”
She had absolutely insisted on Peruvian lilies for her bridal bouquet. Undaunted by the fact that they were months out of season, she had persuaded the director of the Chelsea flower show to have several sprigs shipped by air from Ruritonga, a tropical island somewhere in the Pacific, the day before her wedding. She had also gone to the hairdresser twice for “rehearsals” of her bridal hairdo.
“I would so much rather have it here than have it without Alexander,” Katya told him.
She had convinced the Grosvenor House banqueting manager to allow her to attend three receptions, uninvited, so that she could personally sample and then decide upon which selection of hors d’oeuvres to serve; despite the fact that there would only be eighteen guests at their reception.
Katya grasped his hand with both of hers. “I know you’re disappointed. I am too, in a way. But could we please do it here?”
She had persuaded the Anglican minister at the Grosvenor Chapel to reschedule two christenings so that the church would be available for their early evening vows. After all, she had said, it was so much more romantic to be married by candlelight, and in a church designed by Sir Christopher Wren.
“Please, Jeffrey? For me?”
The preparations for their wedding had been a genuine test of Katya’s ingenuity and Jeffrey’s patience. Now this same woman was telling him she would be quite content to be married in a hospital chapel. He imagined a small room at sub-basement level, somewhere near the boiler works, painted a shade of off-off-green.
He could not help but love her.
“Whatever you want is fine,” Jeffrey said, sweeping her up in a fierce embrace. He released her and started for the main lobby. “Now I have to try to get Cracow on the phone.”
Chapter 6
Ivona Aristonova glanced at her watch for the hundredth time that morning, counted the people ahead of her in the bread line, and decided she could still make it back to the bishop’s tiny apartment in time to prepare his midday meal.
These days she was shopping for two households, both her own and Bishop Michael’s. With his assistant studying in the West, there was no one else to make sure the man ate. And unless someone did the cooking and then stood over him, the man would simply forget. He gave little care to the things of this earth, especially to his own well-being. It was one of his traits that left Ivona both a little awed and a little frightened of the man. That and his ability to see much deeper than she preferred.
She took another step in line, maintaining bodily contact with the hefty woman in front. Line breakers hovered like vultures, seeking to swoop down and save themselves the wait. Beyond them rose the cries of beggars, old and young, pleading for the chance to feed themselves another day. The beggars were a recent phenomenon. The line breakers had been with them always.
For a citizen of the former Soviet empire, the everyday components of life were not to be recalled with great fondness. Standing in line for hours and hours was a daily millstone, waiting so long that the back of the man or woman in front became memorized down to the slightest flaw in the weave, the lint on a scarf, the dandruff dusting a collar like miniature snow. Feeling the breath of the person behind was the worst for some; for others, it was breathing the smell of the one before.
Statistics grudgingly released by Izvestia showed that half of Russia’s population had fallen below the official poverty level. Helpless to put brakes on the decline, the Russian parliament had reacted by lowering the official level of what it meant to be poor.
Under the Communists, capitalism had been a crime punishable by imprisonment, a stay in Siberia, or treatment at an asylum. Now it was supposed to be the answer to all their nation’s ills. But the state foundered in a Communist-made dilemma. Competition remained dampened, if not stifled, for the sake of full employment. People standing in endless lines did not need a degree in business to know that something was not working. Ivona waited alongside her countrymen and felt more than mounting impatience drawing nerves to the breaking point.
After buying bread, Ivona hastened back to the bishop’s apartment behind the church and let herself in. She was busy preparing soup when she heard a knock at the door. Before she could set down her work and dry her hands, the bishop answered the call himself.
“Why, my dear brother, what a pleasant surprise,” she heard his gentle voice say. “Come in, come in.”
The Orthodox priest followed the bishop down the hall and into his cubbyhole of a study with the fearful demeanor of one approaching the gates of hell. She recognized the young man as one of the few Orthodox priests who sought to live in peace with the Ukrainian church. He was an outcast in the eyes of many of his own brethren, but his eyes burned with the fire of abiding faith. Ivona drew back into the shadows so she could see, yet not be seen, certain that if she was spotted she would be sent away.
The young man had a bear’s girth and a martyr’s open-hearted gaze as he faced the bishop. “I had to come.”
“You are safe here, brother. There is no need to whisper.”
“I am safe nowhere,” the priest replied. “But still I had to come.”
The bishop sighed. He was by nature a hopeful man, but there were days when the never-ending acrimony between the various factions of Christ’s church dragged dow
n his spirit like a lead weight.
Bishop Michael had been a fresh-faced acolyte when he fled the Ukraine directly after Stalin’s synod. He had trained for the priesthood in Rome and from there had traveled to serve exiled Ukrainian populations in France, in Switzerland, and finally in New Jersey. He had ministered in lands where religious freedom was a fact, rather than the basis of propaganda. And then, with the declaration of Ukrainian independence in 1991, Bishop Michael had asked to be sent home.
He had arrived to find utter chaos.
More than half the church buildings had been destroyed, often to make way for apartment blocks or office buildings or plazas dedicated to the great Communist uprising. Others had been used as gas and oil storage depots, warehouses, stables, vegetable bins and compost dumps for communal farms, or prisons for the criminally insane. Many had not been touched in any way since the Communists barred their doors seventy years ago. Few remained in any condition to be used as churches.
But now Communist Party members were being tried for crimes against the people, the Soviet Union was facing gradual dismemberment, and the Ukrainian church was once more becoming active. They wanted their churches back. They demanded them back.
The government had responded with a paper transfer of the churches that remained. And because they had no interest in tracing the original owners, they had simply given all the properties, six thousand ruined churches, to the only church that had officially existed for the past forty-six years: the Russian Orthodox.
Yet the Russian Orthodox Church could not respond to the Ukrainian church’s demands for these properties because they in truth never received anything except a letter. The legislature in Moscow and elsewhere might have acted, but the old Party officials still controlled the local bureaucracies, even within the newly formed Ukrainian republic. These officials still harbored the same old resentment for anything stinking of church and faith.
Bishop Michael understood all this, and in understanding he was granted patience. Yet he could also understand the feelings of his brother Ukrainian bishops, the ones who had served in persecuted secrecy and who had suffered all their lives under the hands of the Soviet overlords.
These men saw the Russian Orthodox Church as part of the official power structure, the same system that had convicted them of anti-Soviet crimes, imprisoned them, tortured them, chained them into gangs of mine workers, declared them insane, loaded them with drugs for months on end, and murdered fellow believers out of hand. For those who survived the years of fear and persecution and horror, it was very hard to muster patience for anyone, most especially for an institution they viewed as a conspirator to their own oppression.
The bishop led the young priest toward the office’s most sturdy chair. “Who threatens you, brother?”
“All who refuse to call you brother in return,” the priest replied, his gaze scattered about the room. “All who use their eyes to watch, but not to see.”
“Are we not free from such spying times?”
“You, perhaps,” he replied, “but not I. Not here. Not ever.”
“No, it is my heart’s yearning which spoke so, and not truth,” the bishop replied sadly. “And yet you came.”
“I had no choice,” the priest replied. “I saw them.”
The bishop stilled in watchful intensity. “The thieves?”
“I was praying a vigil in the side alcove,” the other said, his voice lowering to a hoarse moan. “They wore the robes of my order, but they were not of Christ’s body.”
“I have seen the torn robe and the cross upon the broken chain which someone left lying by the open crypt,” the bishop replied. “And now you are telling me that the thieves were Orthodox priests?”
“They wore the robes. And yet, and yet, I saw their eyes. I heard their voices. Their talk was of gain and of death. Their actions were of . . .” He dropped his face to his hands. “What is happening to us?”
“What did they say, brother?” the bishop urged.
“Saint Petersburg,” the young priest moaned through his hands. “They have taken your treasures there.”
Chapter 7
When Alexander’s cousin Gregor passed through the gates at Heathrow Airport, most of the waiting crowd saw only a frail old Polish gentleman with a halting, arthritic walk. Jeffrey saw a treasured friend, a business partner, a spiritual teacher. With Gregor’s warm embrace he felt the tight knot of anxiety in his chest begin to ease.
Once settled in the taxi into London, Gregor listened carefully to the latest reports on Alexander’s condition. He advised gravely, “It is time for you to be strong, my dear young friend.”
“I’m trying.”
“You will more than try,” Gregor replied firmly. “You will do. For Alexander. For Katya. And for me. We all require what we know you have.”
A distant smudge gradually solidified into the London skyline. Gregor greeted it with a very quiet, “I can scarcely believe I am here once again.”
“Forty years is a long time,” Jeffrey told him. “The city has changed.”
“Of that I have no doubt,” Gregor replied.
* * *
“You look much better this morning,” Jeffrey said to Alexander as they entered his room. A thoughtful nurse had combed his hair and helped him into his robe before elevating his bed to a seated position. The brilliant red dressing gown added to Alexander’s natural dignity and lent a bit of color to his pale cheeks.
“Thank you,” he said weakly, and focused on Gregor. “Hello, cousin. Welcome.”
Gregor leaned over the bed, exchanged the double kiss of greeting, said, “You must be feeling better, if you are able to act the host while in a hospital bed.”
Alexander watched his crippled cousin settle carefully into the hard-backed hospital chair. “I confess to a great need for your wisdom, Gregor.”
“The Lord is the One to whom you should turn at such times,” Gregor said gently, reaching forward and grasping one of Alexander’s waxlike hands. “Not another mere mortal.”
“I would if I could,” Alexander replied.
Jeffrey rose to his feet. “I’ll be waiting outside if you need anything.”
“Stay,” Alexander said in his coarsened whisper. “Please.”
Gregor’s attention remained fastened upon Alexander as Jeffrey seated himself. He asked his cousin, “You are having difficulty making this approach to your Lord?”
“Never have I felt more alone,” Alexander confessed weakly, “or my God more distant. At a time when I need Him most, He is not there. I can no longer find Him.”
Jeffrey would often think back to that moment and wonder, not at what he saw, but at what remained unseen. He looked upon Gregor, a man crippled and bent and in pain, his body twisted back and to one side so that the chair took every possible ounce of weight from his disabled frame. Yet that was not what Jeffrey saw.
Gregor did not answer directly. Instead, he paused and withdrew to a place Jeffrey could not fathom. He watched a man who lived in perpetual discomfort close his eyes and know a peace so total it shone from his face.
Gregor’s creases of pain and sleeplessness and bone-weariness smoothed away in a moment of silent miracle, one so calm and natural that Jeffrey could identify it only by the ache of utter yearning that suddenly filled his own heart.
Gregor opened his eyes, and immediately his features returned to their earthly set. “The sixty-third Psalm was written after David was anointed by the prophet Samuel and proclaimed as Israel’s future king,” Gregor said in his gently searching manner. “Yet after this promise from the Lord, David was still forced to wait. Wait and suffer and yearn and doubt, straining some forty years before his inheritance could be claimed.
“I have seen you in the sanctuary, David said to the Lord. I beheld you there. He was speaking in the past tense, do you see? It was once so, and now is no more. He saw, he beheld, then again he walked along desert ways. For David, his promised divine inheritance contained vast stretches of i
solation and loneliness and want.”
Gregor carefully shifted his weight forward, his gray eyes intense with understanding. “My dear cousin, I understand your pain. I too have traveled through lonely, empty stretches. Such an experience is common among believers. It is also common to misunderstand the reason for these periods and to miss the blessings that God bestows in such times.
“You must understand that what is happening to you is not punishment. Yes, you face difficulties which you have not brought upon yourself. Yes, you are burdened. Yes, God seems distant. But if you see this as punishment, you set yourself up for assault. Doubts will assail you, and fears, and desires to complain of how you have been unfairly treated by life. Nights are given over to anxiety, when fears chase you back and forth across the floor.”
He smiled gently at Alexander’s nod of recognition. “At such times, it is most important not to doubt in the dark what you have learned in the light. On the bad days, you must live by the lessons gained in the good times. Remain confident and solid upon the rock.
“The desert, my cousin, is a time of testing. In the eighth chapter of Deuteronomy, the Lord says we are taken into the desert to test our faith and to humble our hearts. He offends the mind in order to reveal the unseen. Your sense of order and balance and symmetry is shaken. You are thrown to your knees. The winds of change blast down from the heavens while darkness blankets your vision, and you know your strength alone is not enough.
“In such times, Alexander, you must cling to the rock and cry aloud to the unseen One for strength to cover your naked weakness. And once you return from this testing, you are called to do one thing further: to remember. Learn, and then hold on to this gift of learning for all your days.”
He touched Alexander’s hand. “A fruit tree that remains constantly in the light will never bear fruit. It is the tree that experiences the normal cycle of light and darkness that fulfills its divine purpose. Remember that in your trials, my dear cousin. And stay with God.”
Winter Palace Page 4
