by Alina Simone
“Believe or don’t believe,” she intoned darkly, “have it your way, but two blows await you when you return home.” And with that the Gypsy turned and swept off down the platform.
“Don’t worry,” my grandfather assured Babushka. “She’s just trying to spoil our good mood.”
But when they arrived back in Kharkov they found, in a Kafkaesque twist, that their apartment had been occupied by another couple. They waited out the night in the cramped living room of a friend, and the next morning the second blow was dealt: their best friends, a couple they loved like family, were giving up on the Soviet Union and returning home to Romania.
“See?” Babushka would say. “She didn’t say ten blows, did she? No! She said two blows. And that’s exactly what we got—one on the first day and the second on the next. It is proof there really are people who can see into the future. That Gypsy—she was like Nostradamus or our famous psychic Juna, who treated Brezhnev himself!”
I recall a similar discussion with my parents over a paper on the Russian Revolution I was writing for my high school European history class. My father and I were sitting in our usual positions at the kitchen table while the news blared on the television. Mama was at the counter making a salad. I had just returned from the Copley library and had some exciting news to report regarding Tsar Nicholas II.
“I can’t believe Tsar Nicholas refused the Duma’s request to grant a constitution!”
My parents nodded sympathetically. This was something they’d evidently heard about before.
“He fired Grand Duke Nicholas and then totally mismanaged the war!”
My parents agreed: it was true, the last tsar had run the country into the ground.
“And what about Rasputin? The Romanovs, like, believed everything he said. They actually thought that guy had magic powers!”
At this Mama stopped, her knife frozen over the glistening half dome of a tomato. My father turned his eyes away from Peter Jennings, whose voice seemed to recede to a murmur.
“Well,” Papa began, a bit reproachfully, “Rasputin did have powers. That much we know is true.”
“Absolutely!” Mama seconded. “He used his powers to cure the tsarevich’s hemophilia.” And with that, the realist who assured me that nothing more than a rotting grave awaits us in death calmly went back to quartering her tomato.
“Seriously, guys—” I began, nervously. But Papa, sensing where I was heading, cut me off.
“Look, some people are really good at math, right? And some people are great violin players, right? Well, then there are people with different talents. Like they are good at healing people with their hands. Understand?”
Then Papa turned back to Peter Jennings in a way that invited no further discussion, and I was left holding the bag again, the irrational pragmatist stubbornly denying things that were obviously true.
The same magical thinking extended to the realm of health. My mother rejected the idea of doctors. She didn’t believe in them. Fevers raged, heavy things fell on her, whatever—Mama kept plowing forward in her crusade against the dubious accuracy of double-blind, randomized, controlled trials with the dedication of a hard-core Christian Scientist. Meanwhile, Papa, the world-renowned physicist, preferred alternative medicine—although I daresay that the “healers” he visited might, with the help of an Oxford English Dictionary, be more accurately defined as “witches” or “warlocks.” They ranged from acupuncturists and homeopaths, at the respectable end of things, to people he absolutely refused to discuss with me no matter how much I pleaded or promised not to make fun of him. And then there was Babushka, with her weird Russian folk remedies and assortment of scarily pungent tinctures lining the shelves of the linen closet. Not long ago she called me, complaining of an infected cut, and when I suggested, with the dumbness of a rubber mallet, that she go see a doctor, she replied, “Don’t worry, Lastochka, I taped half an onion to my arm and it feels much better now.”
I still remember my first visit to a Russian Orthodox church. It took place during a trip to Chita, a breathtakingly cold, rugged, and isolated swath of eastern Siberia bordering China and Mongolia to the south and permafrost and more ice to the north. In my mid-twenties, I took a job with an obscure nonprofit organization that recruited volunteer English teachers and sent them to work in high schools and universities in the distant Russian province. The organization was not without a sense of humor regarding its mission and even sold stickers that read, “Do you know where Chita is? I do!” When I got the job, I gave one to Papa, and he gleefully stuck it to the back of his Honda, where it stayed for years until Mama finally made him steam it off.
An English teacher at the state university offered to take me to Sunday services. The prospect of waking up in the cold blue morning and trudging over streets of broken asphalt where the manhole covers often liked to go missing did not elicit the same enthusiasm as, say, the offer of a spiked hot cider would have, but it was clearly the polite thing to do. I remember that when we reached the church, a modest wooden building painted a cheery light blue, I did what everyone else did, stopping at the threshold to cross myself vigorously with the wrong hand. Inside, the air was thick with the smell of burning beeswax and incense.
I was surprised to find the church packed and the crowd a decidedly unfrumpy one. There were men in muscle shirts wearing oversized gold crosses on chains thick as lasso rope, and women who had dressed with all the concern for warmth or modesty of a person making a journey from the shower to the bedroom. Stepping forward to shield my gaze from the exposed midriff of the woman in front of me, my guide felt compelled to apologize.
“Some of these people care nothing about God, of course, for them this is all just a”—she motioned at the crowd—“a fashion statement.”
I looked around again and saw that, among the crowd, there were also those easily identified as “true believers,” mostly elderly men and stocky women with their heads covered and a small cache of sober young people who were similarly unadorned. All in all, I felt comfortable enough; the congregation really looked no different from the passengers on a typical Q express train.
Russian Orthodox services often last more than three hours, during which you have to stand. There are no pews. The service is also conducted entirely in Church Slavonic, a language that fell out of literary use in Russia more than two hundred years ago. I couldn’t understand anything, and because I am barely five feet tall, I could hardly see anything either. In the distance, there seemed to be a man with a long beard wearing a boxy golden dress, waving a candle sword—three long tapers stuck into an ornate hilt. Yet I could still hear the choir. I could smell the incense and feast my eyes on icons that seemed to glisten and weep in the candlelight. Quite simply: it was beautiful. But after only half an hour my guide was tugging at my coat. Apparently she had a busy day of sightseeing planned for us. We were already behind schedule, and I didn’t want to miss out on a visit to the Memorial of War and Labor Glory of the Transbaikaliana during the Great Patriotic War, did I?
When I returned home from Russia, I told Papa about my visit to the church, how I’d enjoyed it.
“I’m going to tell you a little story that I never shared with you before,” Papa said, taking an orange from the bowl on the kitchen table. “Do you remember when you were in third grade and we sent you to that Christian summer camp?”
I did. The camp was called Meadow Breeze and it was run by an evangelical Christian school not far from where we lived.
“You used to come home from camp and beg me and Mama to just let Jesus into our hearts. You’d get so worked up about it.” He stopped, chuckling at the memory. “We used to laugh at you.”
“Right,” I said, not a little impatiently. “So?”
“Well, not long after you finished camp, I went to Italy for a physics conference and I happened to get very sick. Something like the flu. And I had a fever that kept getting worse. I remember thinking to myself: A person could easily die this way, I could die this
very night, far away from my family in a foreign country with no one to turn to for help … I don’t know, maybe I was just delirious.”
“Wow. So, what did you do?”
“Well, I remembered what you said.”
“What did I say?”
“You said to let Jesus into my heart.” Papa looked down, peeling his orange. “So I decided to try it. I said to myself, ‘Okay, Jesus, please heal me. I am totally and sincerely opening my heart to you.’ Then I kind of spread my arms open just like this on the bedspread.” Papa held his arms out like he was getting a pat-down at the airport.
“Holy shit, so then what happened?” I dropped a piece of orange on the floor, managing to wipe it against my jeans before sticking it in my mouth.
“I was healed.”
“What?”
“I was healed. Within an hour my fever was gone. That was it.”
The kitchen was quiet. Papa set the orange on the table, then popped the peel into his mouth. I didn’t really know what to say. What was he trying to tell me? That he was a believer now? That I had the right idea back when I was a brainwashed child with a heart full of Jesus? It was the first time we’d talked about religion since that long-ago discussion about alien theology. Recently, a statue of Buddha had appeared on Papa’s desk. I took that as a hopeful sign that he was coming to terms with life on a mediocre planet and our limited menu of gods. But when it came to what my father thought, I conceded that I could easily be wrong about everything. For all I knew, he was building a spaceship in the garage.
“I don’t even know why I’m telling you this,” Papa said, chewing his orange peel.
Because I couldn’t just drive around the country singing and losing money every day, I also worked a part-time job at a small consulting company with clients in Russia. One day, after I’d been corresponding with the Punk Monk for about six months, my boss asked if I would be willing to spend a month in Siberia to help evaluate a project. I wrote to the Punk Monk right away. I had family in St. Petersburg and figured I could stop by for a visit on the way home. But the Punk Monk surprised me by suggesting we meet in Novosibirsk instead, the city where Yanka was born, and where she was also buried.
“We can visit Yanka’s grave together and I will perform the Panikhída,” the Punk Monk wrote.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Orthodox funerary rite.”
The Punk Monk flew out to Novosibirsk every year to perform the rites at Yanka’s grave on May 9, the anniversary of her death. This year he would make an extra trip. We set a date: October 13, my birthday.
The night before our visit to the cemetery, I waited for the Punk Monk at my hotel, the Golden Valley in Akademgorodok. He’d asked me to meet him here, at the bar on the eighth floor, and so I sat at a plain wooden table, nervously waiting, chewing on some stale pistachios. Two guys at a neighboring table called over, offering to buy me a drink. I shook my head.
“It doesn’t matter.” One of the men laughed, watching me switch my wedding ring to my right hand, as is customary in Russia. “Your husband’s not here anyway.” He had a rough face and a neck that flowed over his shirt collar, pale and white as champagne foam.
“Yes, he is,” I shot back. “In fact, he’s on his way.” Now I’d done it, ensnared myself in a web of sacrilegious lies. The pistachios were too salty. I thought of Jesus and felt slightly ill.
When the Punk Monk arrived a moment later, I noticed he looked like neither a punk nor a monk. He looked a bit like a dad. A dad who seemed to be engaged in some sort of exotic beard-off, but nonetheless. The Punk Monk greeted me warmly. I wanted to give him a hug, but didn’t dare, even though he was supposed to be my husband. I didn’t know what to do with myself. The waitress came by, and the Punk Monk ordered a beer.
“Are you allowed to drink beer?” I asked. I had assumed monks weren’t allowed to do anything.
“Beer, yes. But not vodka. I like it too much,” the Punk Monk said. “It almost killed me once.”
As I struggled to absorb this new piece of information I ordered a beer for myself as well, even though I disliked beer and, in fact, disliked Russian beer even more than the American beer I already made a point of not drinking. The waitress left and I opened my mouth to ask the Punk Monk to tell me about the time vodka almost killed him.
“So where do you live?” I asked instead.
“I live with my mother.”
“Oh,” I said. “Isn’t that a little … inconvenient?”
“Not really,” the Punk Monk replied, serenely. “Why would it be?”
“I don’t know.” I said, taking a sip of hateful beer. Only, of course, I did know.
Then the Punk Monk drained his glass and announced he was heading to bed. The flight from St. Petersburg had been tiring.
I stood up as well, wondering whether the men at the neighboring table were still watching, and if I should find some pretext to follow the Punk Monk to his room—our room—but when I turned around, the men were already gone.
Arriving downstairs in the morning, I found the Punk Monk already waiting for me by the front door. There was snow on the ground, the air raw and stinging. I was wearing long underwear. A heavy sweater under my full-length coat. Hat and gloves. The Punk Monk let his jacket flap open, indifferent to the cold. We traveled by bus and by car, for nearly an hour, past the artificial sea and the belching factories and the husks of unfinished buildings. Blocks of concrete bled into the colorless sky, one pale wash. Eventually, the buildings gave way to fir trees, the snow grew cleaner. When we arrived at the gates of the Zaeltsovsky Cemetery, the Punk Monk asked me to wait outside the tiny chapel. A moment later, he emerged with a little paper bag.
“A present,” he said. “For you.” He held the bag out to me.
Inside was a wooden Russian Orthodox cross and a Bible. I opened the Bible. It was written in Church Slavonic.
“I can’t read this.”
“True,” the Punk Monk said.
Then he walked through the cemetery gates and I followed. The central lane was lined with the graves of gangsters. Lifelike portraits of paunchy men in tracksuits, holding bottles of Georgian wine or dangling the keys to a Mercedes, grinned down at us from towering slabs of granite. They did not look like drug dealers and murderers; they looked like people enjoying a barbecue on the Jersey Shore. We walked along, giggling and pointing, until the paths grew narrower. Then the asphalt ended and there was nothing to do but follow the handmade signs left by fans, a telltale ribbon, an arrow carved into a tree trunk. The Punk Monk left the path and cut through the graves, his feet crunching over the snow-covered mounds. I jogged to keep up. This part of the cemetery had long been left untended; the ground was bumpy and uneven, trees grew at odd angles. Then, suddenly, the Punk Monk stopped. There it was—a little fencedin plot with Yanka’s grave, her stepbrother’s alongside it. The marker was plain. A gray slab with her black-and-white photograph inside a white oval. Some dead flowers. A few weeks ago, back in the States, I’d thought about this moment and cried. Standing here now, I only felt cold.
The Punk Monk sat himself at a nearby bench. He removed a long black robe from his bag and slipped it over his head. Then he pulled out a giant chain with a heavy Orthodox cross and draped it around his neck. He set some black pucks of charcoal on the bench in front of him.
“I just need to light the censer and we can get started.”
The Punk Monk reached into his backpack to pull out the censer. He fumbled around inside the bag for a moment, then held up his hand, indicating: wait.
“Damn,” he said, holding the censer up for me to see. “The chains are tangled.”
The censer looked as though the Punk Monk had dropped it into a blender, punched the “ice crush” button, and gone to brush his teeth.
We bent our heads together and went to work. Twenty minutes later, when my fingers were blue and numb, I dropped my end of the chain and stood up to stretch. I walked over to Yanka’s grave, rubbing my
hands together, trying to warm them. From there I saw the Punk Monk bent over the censer, his face a mask of concentration as he struggled with the knots. After a moment, he sensed me staring and looked up.
“I’m sorry about this.” The Punk Monk gestured at the hopeless mess of chain. Then he laughed, loudly and happily, as though we weren’t surrounded by acres of dead people, freezing our asses off in the middle of a Siberian forest.
“I wish I could say it’s the first time this has ever happened to me.”
“Punk Monk?”
“Yes?”
The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them. “Would you baptize me?”
The Punk Monk eyed me suspiciously before he spoke.
“I don’t do sprinkling,” he said. “Only full immersion.”
“Okay,” I said, and rejoined him at the bench, where I took up my end of the censer once more. Then without another word, we bent our heads and got back to work.
I decided not to tell anyone. The signposts that marked the way to my conversion—Yanka, the acoustics underwater, the goodness of salt, a disorganized priest—all aligned perfectly in my head, but I knew other people would find ways to poke holes in my airtight logic. In particular, I feared Josh would unravel me with a few pointed questions. And I worried the dormant Jew in him might get upset. Would he still want to play Jew or Not Jew together? Better to convert now and ask questions later. I already had enough trouble for today.
The church turned out to be an easy place to hide. It still has no official address. To get there by cab, the Punk Monk had to give the driver directions to the medical center across the street. Redbricked and onion-domed, it sat tucked behind a nondescript kiosk selling flowers. Inside, the walls were each painted a different fruit-colored hue. They had been painted by hand, the Punk Monk told me, by parishioners. The icons covering the walls were also a potluck of styles—some Greek, some English, some Russian—most of them donated. The floor was covered with a buckling sheet of vinyl made to look like wooden parquet. It was a homemade kind of place. Another DIY venue, not so different from the converted churches I often played on tour.
