Winter Palace

by T. Davis Bunn

  “So now that the state persecutions are over,” Jeffrey concluded, “the old feuds are surfacing once more.”

  “And with great ferocity,” Father Anatoli agreed. “You see, under the Communists every person was taught that he or she was an element of a unique social system. Their nation was destined to teach the world not the better way, but rather the right way. The only way. The entire Communist method of education for the young and indoctrination for adults is based upon this principle.” He paused. “Or was, I suppose. If the beast has truly been laid to rest for all time.”

  “You don’t think it is?”

  “I see problems everywhere,” he replied, “with no solutions, only empty promises from our politicians. I hear questions being raised and no answers being offered, only arguments. I do not know how much more my poor nation can take before panic drives them back to the known, to the familiar. At least under the Communist dictatorship they were granted a sense of security.” He spent a moment delving inward in weary resignation, collected himself, and asked, “Where was I?”

  “Conflict among believers,” Jeffrey reminded him.

  “Thank you. The Communists taught people to live in enmity. They taught that progress for the socialist society was possible only if all who were not Communists, all who resisted their doctrine, were eradicated. They pressed the people to live in perpetual suspicion and violent hostility toward ‘the other.’ You know, of course, who this ‘other’ is.”

  “Anybody who does not believe as they do,” Jeffrey offered.

  “Exactly. Such a mind-set does not disappear simply because the government changes. Four generations have been taught since the age of three, when public schooling begins here, to hate anyone who does not conform.

  “Today, the newcomers who fill our churches may indeed be sincere seekers of truth, but many retain vestiges of the old Communist psyche. They see other people going in a different direction with their faith, and the old attitude surfaces: Is the other person correct in their beliefs? Do they worship the true Christ? If not, punish them. Lock them up. Declare them criminals. See them as the enemies they are.”

  Father Anatoli sighed with regret. “Such people insist that every letter of every page of every doctrine be checked and rechecked. Such people have a new name for the incoming Protestant ministers: ‘the wolves from the West.’ Such people fear that this new invasion will tear down what few walls of Russian Christianity the Communists left standing.”

  “But you disagree with this.”

  “I and a number of my fellow priests, although we are a minority and at times find our voices drowned out by the others,” he replied. His gaze evidenced a grim memory of former battles. “With us, the problems are all tangled together like a ball of yarn. For example, there are one hundred and eighty parishes in Russia. Twenty of these, some the size of an American state, have no priest at all. All parishes are short-staffed. We need a minimum of twenty more priests in Saint Petersburg alone. There are not enough priests to staff even half of our churches. Many of the priests we do have should not be priests at all. They have little training; they have less faith. There are only seven seminaries in the entire country. There are only twelve church-run schools.”

  He shook his head. “Problems, problems. We drown in problems. I close my eyes and watch them dance before me in the darkness, and I find no solutions. None.”

  Jeffrey hesitated, then ventured, “You could ask the Protestants to take over ministries that your church can’t staff.”

  The explosion he feared did not come. Instead, the priest sat with head bowed low. “In a perfect world,” he murmured. “In a world that truly followed the teachings of Christ . . .”

  He lifted his head, the gentle light back in his eyes. “You have a gift of simple speech,” he told Jeffrey. “It makes the hardest challenge something I can bear to hear. For this, I thank you.”

  “I haven’t done anything,” Jeffrey replied.

  To his surprise, the father smiled broadly. “No, perhaps not.” He leaned back in his seat. “So what was it you wished to discuss with me?”

  Father Anatoli listened carefully until Jeffrey was finished with his account of the missing Ukrainian church treasures. Then he turned away and sat in utter stillness. Eventually he murmured, “A letter. Such a simple affair. Who could think that it would create such problems.”

  Jeffrey showed confusion. “I don’t—”

  But Father Anatoli was already on his feet. “Come. Let us walk together to the cathedral. I must prepare for Mass. What are your own plans for the next week?”

  “I leave for London the day after tomorrow, Monday afternoon,” Jeffrey replied, rising with him. “I’m not sure exactly when I will be back in Saint Petersburg, but it shouldn’t be too long.”

  “Then I suggest you leave this matter with me until your return. I will see what I can learn.”

  * * *

  The cathedral interior was rich with the cloying flavor of incense, and Jeffrey instantly felt a familiar unease. There were no seats within the vast hall. Icons were everywhere, rising in great gilded frames ten and twelve high upon the walls. They rested upon the central pillars, they stood on huge bronze altars in the many alcoves, they bedecked the screen before the nave. Candles burned before them all. Hundreds of people were deep in prayer—standing, kneeling, laying prostrate upon the worn marble stonework. Each began and ended their petitions with multiple signs of the cross, some resting their foreheads upon the icons’ glass enclosures.

  Jeffrey and Father Anatoli paused together at the high-arched entrance to the central chamber. Eyes turned their way, examining the black-bearded priest standing beside the Westerner. Father Anatoli kept his attention focused upon Jeffrey. “You are uncomfortable with the concept of our icons,” he observed.

  Jeffrey nodded. “It’s something I just don’t understand, I guess. Maybe it’s my Baptist background.”

  “The arguments and the issues and these icons date back almost two thousand years,” Father Anatoli explained, his voice pitched low. “The problems arose when some Christian first painted a picture of Christ in the catacombs and another called the painting an idol. Your word iconoclast came from that time and described one who destroyed icons. They also had a name for those who wished to see no picture of Christ, or even crosses. They were called puritans.”

  He lowered his head so that the black beard fanned out and molded to his cassock. “There was a time in the eighth century when people found with a painting or tapestry depicting the Lord Jesus, or even a cross with a man’s figure carved upon it, were tortured and put to death.”

  “All in the name of love,” Jeffrey said quietly. “The same love that drives this wedge between us today.”

  The light of approval was strong in Father Anatoli’s eyes as he continued, “The Orthodox concentrates upon the mystery of faith. The wonder of the liturgy. Great emphasis is placed upon experiencing union with God. We seek constantly to remind all believers of their responsibility to seek knowledge of the glory that comes through complete and utter surrender to Christ.”

  “Everything I see here seems so alien,” Jeffrey confessed.

  “Icons are not idolatry,” he stated flatly. “They are not the object of veneration, but a reminder. They point the direction only.”

  Jeffrey watched a woman complete her prayers by leaning forward and kissing the jewel-studded icon’s lower frame. “I’m afraid it looks awfully like idol worship to me.”

  Black eyes leaned close and drilled him with their intensity. “Now who is the one who condemns with judgment?”

  Jeffrey tried not to flinch under the man’s gaze. He kept his disquiet hidden until the father nodded and said, “I must go. Come to my chambers immediately upon your return to Saint Petersburg. I should know something by then, if there is indeed anything for me to know.”

  * * *

  Two cultures moved within the church, the tourists and the penitents. Jeffrey felt like a strang
er to both.

  Those who came in prayer remained utterly blind to the others, displaying a single-minded focus that Jeffrey found awesome. They represented every age, every walk of life. The young and successful in suits or fresh new dresses. The old and bowed, clinging to canes and crutches. Mothers with children, husbands with wives, teenagers in groups and alone. And as he watched their coming and going, Jeffrey found a trait utterly lacking in the outside world of Saint Petersburg. Here were gentle smiles and unstrained voices. Eyes held a simple, open quality. Hearts could be seen in many gazes. Not all, but many.

  Jeffrey stood beside a pillar, out of the way of those kneeling in prayer. As he stood and watched, a pair of male voices began a chanted prayer from somewhere above his head. The first, a light tenor, sang a swift chant upon one single note. The second voice was very deep and very rich. His words rose and fell in slow, steady, deliberate tones, like the tolling of an unseen bell.

  Jeffrey found the atmosphere utterly alien, yet comforting, like the making of a new friend who somehow greeted him with the ease of a trusted brother.

  As Jeffrey turned and left the church, it was this feeling of calm acceptance that troubled him most of all.

  Chapter 25

  Peter the Great housed his art collection in one small extension of his winter palace. His successor, Elizabeth, gave little thought to art, and left the collection where it was. The next ruler of Russia, the Empress Catherine the Great, found it necessary to build an entire new palace to contain her acquisitions. Yet she continued the practice started by her great-uncle Peter of allowing only a privileged handful of outsiders to view her collection. Over the years, the halls of art and treasures became known as “The Dwelling Place of the Hermits.” As French became the language of royal culture, the name was translated to L’Ermitage.

  Ivona entered the Hermitage museum and walked down the long Hall of Eighteen-Twelve, lined with over one thousand portraits of officers who had fought in the war of that year. Those who had died in the field and left no record of their faces had empty frames, with their names embossed beneath, to commemorate their sacrifice.

  The hall gave way to the Outer Chamber, where dignitaries had waited—sometimes for weeks, sometimes for years—before being escorted into the smaller Throne Room beyond.

  Ivona then entered the Pavilion Hall, and found her contact awaiting her beneath one of Russia’s few remnants from the rule of the Mongol Khans. Eight centuries before, the Khan had traveled to Poland on a diplomatic mission, fallen in love with a beautiful Polish princess, and made her his fifteenth wife. The first wife, bitterly jealous of the Khan’s evident love for his new bride, had arranged for the girl to be murdered. In her memory, the Khan had designed a pair of matching wall fountains where water trickled down in unending streams, from one onyx half-shell to another, representing the continual cascading tears of his heart.

  Ivona strode toward the slender man who stood beside that weeping fountain. “Ilya, I bring the heartfelt greetings of Bishop Michael, as well as those of your beloved parents.”

  He said nothing, only took her hand and guided her away from the tourist hordes. Twice he paused and scanned the crowd while pretending to point out treasures for her inspection. The third time she asked, “Is there something wrong?”

  “If there is,” he replied, sweeping his hand out in a grand gesture to present a treasure neither of them saw, “you will know of it when I disappear.”

  The Hermitage administrator seated her in an unobtrusive corner and searched the throngs once more with worried eyes. “Tell me why you are here.”

  “Word has come to us of your difficulties. The bishop asks for details.”

  “Word?” He showed real alarm. “What word?”

  “Through your mother,” Ivona soothed. “She told us only after hearing of our own troubles. And only after the bishop gave his solemn word that the information would go no further.”

  The Hermitage administrator subsided. “You, too, have something missing?”

  Ivona nodded slowly. “Tell me. Please.”

  Ilya was quiet for a very long moment, then said, “There are so many treasures on display here that no one thinks of what remains hidden. So much rests in our warehouses, more than you can ever imagine. The authorities just leased to us the former Military College to use as storage space. This is distant and harder to keep secure, but anything is better than the damp confines of our basements. I have six hundred thousand etchings baled together and stored in closets.”

  “And in the process of this transfer,” Ivona guessed, “you have found items missing from your inventory.”

  “Not for certain,” Ilya replied. “Certainly none of the most valuable articles, for which we have records in duplicate. But every day another three or four articles are not to be found—sketches, objets d’art, small paintings, religious artifacts, anything.”

  “You are sure?”

  “I am sure of nothing anymore,” he replied resignedly. “Even within the museum itself, the halls closed to visitors are stacked with boxes. The papers listing their contents are lost. Security is declining as the government allocates us fewer and fewer militia guards. Do you know what we are paid?”

  “I know,” she replied quietly.

  “Twelve dollars per month,” he persisted. “The most qualified museum staff in all Russia, and we can barely feed ourselves and our families. How can you blame those who turn to accepting bribes and looking the other way?”

  “I blame no one,” Ivona replied.

  “There is more. The Golden Treasury has been closed for renovation. We are not sure,” he said, then hesitated.

  “Sure of what?”

  “There are over twenty thousand items in this collection alone,” he continued. “If it were one crown, yes, of course, we would prize it. But with seven hundred? So what if one is lost? Could we not have loaned it to a regional museum? Twice we have almost sounded the alarm for missing items, only to find records that twenty, thirty, forty years ago they were loaned to a provincial museum for some exhibition.”

  “And never returned,” she finished.

  “Why should they be, when we never asked for them back?”

  “But you do think items are missing,” she pressed.

  “Nothing certain, and nothing of first order.”

  “Relatively speaking.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Their value?”

  “In the West?” He pursed his lips. “Who can say? And once again, the museum is not even sure that anything is gone at all.”

  “We speak not of the museum,” Ivona replied. “Official announcements can be kept for the press. I ask for your opinion.”

  “Candelabra,” he relented. “Gold chains, emblems, boxes, a few icons. From the other departments, any number of items. Possibly. I repeat, nothing is certain.”

  She thought in silence, then asked the inevitable. “The same is occurring in other museums?”

  “Rumors,” he replied. “We are feeding on rumors only.”

  “Yet again—”

  “What could they do with so much?” he demanded, his voice rising in painful frustration. “If even a tenth of these rumors are true, we are speaking of thousands of objects.”

  “Perhaps a bit more quietly,” she cautioned.

  “Tons of valuables,” he continued. “Where could they be taking it all?”

  “There is no reason to shout,” she said.

  Ilya sank back. “There are too many rumors for the stories to be smoke alone. There must be a fire. A hundred fires. Yet the government refuses to listen.”

  “They have other problems,” Ivona stated. “Other crises.”

  He nodded. “You realize, of course, that such thefts have occurred before.”

  “Yes.” Such stories had circulated for years.

  “One of the largest collections of Impressionist paintings in the world currently occupies the Hermitage’s former attic servant quarters,” Ilya went on
. “It was collected by two merchants. They presented these treasures to the czar as a bribe for safe passage when they and their families departed westward the year before the October Revolution.”

  “This much I have heard,” Ivona said.

  “When the Communists came to power,” Ilya continued, “the paintings were condemned as degenerate and made to disappear. For decades it was rumored that Party officials had destroyed them all—Matisse, Van Gogh, Degas, Pissaro, Monet, Renoir, Cezanne, Gaugin, three rooms of early Picasso. Then in the late fifties the Party line changed, and Impressionists were declared to be compassionate painters of the common man.” Ilya snorted. “The exhibition then reappeared without fanfare, as though closed only for cleaning. Yet dozens of the paintings, perhaps even hundreds, were not to be found. Investigators were met with unofficial warnings, and the persistent found themselves granted postings to museums in Siberia. Eventually all records of the missing pictures also disappeared.”

  “Who do you think is responsible,” Ivona pressed. “Not for the paintings, that is history. For your current thefts.”

  Ilya shrugged, despondent.

  “Are there stories to be heard on this as well?”

  “Rumors,” he muttered. “Of what worth are they to a custodian of Russia’s treasures?”

  “The Orthodox church,” she demanded. “Could they be involved?”

  “Of this I have heard nothing,” he replied, definite for the first time that day, “although there are rumors of items missing from this quarter as well.”

  “From within the Orthodox churches?”

  Ilya showed wry humor. “You would think they had already lost everything of value, no? Fifty thousand treasures we have here in the Hermitage alone from the churches, all listed as voluntary gifts. Very generous with the new Communist state, these churches were.”