Ordinary Wonders

by Oloesia Nikolaeva

  And I again:

  “I won’t!”

  She all but threw herself at me with her fists, trembling, jumping up and down like a possessed person, spitting and sputtering. I even remembered the words of the prophet Habakkuk, something like: man, like chaos, jumps like a goat, inflates like a bubble, rages like a bobcat, seeks to devour like a snake, neighs like a stallion looking on another’s beauty, lies like a demon.

  At this point, another nurse appeared, and saw me suffocating and dying there, while the nurse tortured me, and she finally laid me on a hospital bed.

  That morning I went into labor. Lying in the labor and delivery section for the plague-ridden and infectious, all on my own, I felt my little child coming out almost completely, raring to come into the light of God’s day, fighting her way into existence, and there I was, with no voice to even call someone—no nurse, no doctor, no one to take care of me, and what’s worse, hearing them all next door loudly talking and even laughing about something. This is where my cross saved me. It was large and heavy—a certain hieromonk had brought it back for me from the Holy Land. I took it off my neck, clutched it in my hand, and began to pound my fist against the nightstand with the cross pressed inside it. The noise from my cross echoed throughout the entire delivery ward. The doctors all ran to the alarm:

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  They ran up to me, and my baby fell out right into their hands! Right at noon! All pink, with golden hair, so plump, looking like she was born not from an emaciated mother weighing all of 117 pounds all together with the baby, but from a rosy-cheeked, well-tended child-bearer with legs like marble columns and a neck like an ivory tower.

  “Well, little mother, who did you give birth to? Name the sex of the baby!”

  “A girl! Anastasia! Resurrection!”

  It was Monk Leonid who rejoiced the most. Though he was but a humble monk, he bought her an array of gifts—a satin blanket, all kinds of little jackets, onesies, and swaddling linens.

  “Bring Anastasia to me,” he kept asking me. “Let me just take one look at her.”

  And so I would visit him with her.

  But he would just glance at her demurely—and turn away, so as not to develop any strong feelings for her. He was, after all, a monk, and any strong feeling is dangerous for a monk—even deadly. And so he would just take one more look—so!—and lower his eyes.

  One day Anastasia and I came to see him as usual, when she had already turned eleven months. She sat in my arms and could move around the room holding on tightly to my finger. Fr Leonid, Pelageia, and I sat down to eat. The table was laid with potatoes and sauerkraut … it was the Nativity Fast. We were talking about something, not minding the child at all.

  Suddenly, Anastasia reached for the plate of cabbage, took a handful of it, climbed to the floor, and, releasing my finger, walked steadily toward Fr Leonid all by herself, holding out her cabbage to him.

  “She knows,” nodded Pelageia, “Leniushka prayed for her so much, so much!”

  Two months later, Monk Leonid died. My husband and I, together with Anastasia, went to his funeral, then to the cemetery, and then to Pelageia’s for the funeral banquet.

  There were a lot of people there, all people who loved him and had asked for his prayers, including priests and monks. As soon as everyone sat down at the table and took a sip of their wine, Anastasia, then thirteen months, walked up to the icon corner, which was covered from top to bottom with icons large and small. She crossed herself and began to babble away in her baby talk, making prostrations and praying with intonations from the church services and psalms. And so she continued to get up from her little knees, cross herself, and kneel down once more, leaning her head on the floor …

  Everyone froze, looking at this wonderful sight, this touching scene, which lasted several minutes.

  “Lord, have mercy!” One of the old ladies finally stirred. “Pelageia, this must be that girl for whom Leniushka prayed night and day when she was being born? He prayed so much that it almost killed him, too?”

  “That’s her, that’s her,” confirmed Pelageia.

  And then the old lady told us the story. Pelageia had gone away to a monastery, and had asked this lady to look after Monk Leonid in her stead. This was exactly the time when I was dying, and the hospitals and birthing centers were refusing to admit me, while Fr Leonid unceasingly prayed for my successful delivery. When the ambulance took me away and my husband told him about this, he even began to make full prostrations, which was incredibly difficult for him, since his one side was paralyzed and he would repeatedly fall onto his side, while the old lady had to help him get up. They both wore themselves thin. This continued almost all night and all morning.

  She even began to be alarmed that he would suffer a stroke from such prayerful labors, and kept repeating:

  “They will be the death of you, Fr Leonid!”

  But he didn’t listen to her, and again knelt to his knees, and again couldn’t get up, forcing her to give him her own shoulder for support.

  Finally he collapsed into a chair, leaned back, wiped the sweat from his forehead, and cried out:

  “Phew! She’s given birth.”

  This was at noon.

  And now it was the turn of the child Anastasia to pray for the newly reposed lowly Monk Leonid.

  Another Source

  In spite of his constant battle with the passions, Monk Leonid still had one: he was passionate about booklets. He especially loved those that were forbidden, all kinds of forbidden booklets: simply anti-Soviet ones, spiritually beneficial ones, and ones “in support of the New Martyrs.”

  We were constantly taking him new booklets printed in samizdat.1 In this way, he got his hands on a booklet by Hieromonk Seraphim (Rose), the spiritual son of St John, Archbishop of Shanghai and San Francisco, about the end of days. It was called something like The Future of Russia and the End of the World. It affected him so much that he sent me to the Lavra to ask for a blessing from the elder Archimandrite Kirill to pass it around. And when this blessing was received, he hired a typist to retype four copies of this book, which he proceeded to hand out as required reading to his many pilgrims and visitors. But he didn’t know how to pray for this Hieromonk Seraphim: was he living or reposed?

  No matter how many people he asked, no one could tell him. This depressed Fr Leonid very much—he really wanted to pray for Hieromonk Seraphim. And so he convinced my husband and his novice, the old nun Pelageia, to drive him to the Holy Trinity Lavra of St Sergius to see Elder Kirill.

  They arrived after the service had already begun, and Monk Leonid went to the altar directly to Fr Kirill.

  “Fr Kirill, this Hieromonk Seraphim—is he living or dead? How do I commemorate him?”

  Fr Kirill became silent, lifted his gaze upward for a moment, grew still, and then crossed himself and said sorrowfully:

  “May he rest with the saints.”

  The next day, late in the evening, the radio station BBC, to which our radio was tuned, announced that two days ago, the famous Orthodox writer and missionary, Hieromonk Seraphim Rose, had died after a long illness.

  Elder Kirill had learned of this from another source altogether.

  How I Battled the Gypsies

  One day I came home after visiting the Holy Trinity Lavra of St Sergius, and let slip a few choice words to Monk Leonid about the multitudes of Gypsies walking through the commuter train cars and how those Gypsies pestered everyone.

  “Behind every one of these fortune-telling Gypsies fly a host of demons,” noted Fr Leonid. “You must be careful. Don’t ever start a conversation with them. You know what the holy fathers said: ‘Do not enter into dialogue with evil.’”

  “But I’m not afraid of Gypsies,” I waved my hand nonchalantly. “It is they who are afraid of me.”

  “And what makes you so frightening that they’re afraid of you?” grumbled Fr Leonid, displeased.

  “I just know how to deal with them,” I announced.


  “She knows! And what do you know?” the monk squinted at me suspiciously.

  “I will tell you a story of how I once met a Gypsy who kept insisting on telling my fortune and grabbing my hands. But I just turned away from her. Then she switched to threats: ‘If you don’t grease my palm, this and that will happen to you: I will curse you with my evil eye.’ This got me very angry. I turned around to face her, looked into her black, passionate eyes, squared my shoulders, and said: ‘And shouldn’t you be afraid of my eye of light? Shouldn’t you be afraid that I with my eye of light could completely penetrate you? I will take away all your power; I will take your good fortune for myself!’

  “Oh, that scared her! Her face fell, she turned and fled from my presence! Some experienced people later told me that my threat hit its mark, because Gypsies are superstitious and are themselves afraid of everything. And for them, an eye of light is just as deadly as their evil eye.”

  Fr Leonid didn’t like any of this at all.

  “So what, you began to threaten her with witchcraft of your own? You were inviting the demons to come! Go on and make three prostrations before the Mother of God and repent for what you’ve done, and then I will tell you what to do next.”

  What could I do? I sighed, knelt three times before the icon of the Mother of God, asking Her for forgiveness, and again sat down before the lowly monk.

  “The power of Gypsies is evil: one can only dispel it and chase it away with prayer. So the next time you see Gypsies, you must immediately begin saying the prayer ‘Let God Arise’1 to yourself. And don’t say a word to them. Understand?”

  “Understood.”

  What happened next? Soon I went to the Lavra again, took communion there during the early Liturgy, and then returned to Moscow. I boarded an empty commuter train leaving Zagorsk station and sat down by myself on the bench, when suddenly a crowd of Gypsies came rushing onto the train after me, a whole band of them—all covered in their coin necklaces, earrings, and brightly colored scarves and skirts. They immediately approached me, cornering me in my space between two benches, reaching their hands toward me, almost tearing my scarf from my head, clutching at my hair, crying with many voices:

  “Give me your hand, dear, I will read your palm and tell you your whole future!”

  “Oh no! Government housing is in your future, all your efforts are for nothing, a long road, a king of clubs!”

  There was no one around. It was ten o’clock in the morning on a workday, and evidently no one from Zagorsk needed to go to Moscow.

  Suddenly, I remembered Fr Leonid’s instructions. Submerging myself into my thoughts, I turned off all my external senses and began to pray: “Let God arise!” As soon as I reached “as smoke vanisheth, so let them vanish; as wax melteth before the fire, so let the demons perish …,” I looked around me—and there was nobody there, they had truly vanished. The whole tumultuous band! It was like they had been sucked out by a vacuum. The last one, already halfway through the doors, looked back and began to yell something at me, but I continued out loud, “… from the presence of them that love God and who sign themselves with the sign of the Cross …”2 And finally, I put the sign of the cross over her, so, so, so, and so! She screamed, cringed, and ran, just as the doors slammed shut with a bang.

  I arrived in Moscow, and told the story to Fr Leonid right away.

  “You should have seen me put the sign of the cross over her, and how she shriveled up!”

  “Well, you did it all wrong,” he began again. “No humility, no obedience …”

  “But I did exactly as you taught me!” I said, my feelings hurt.

  “What is it always with your ‘I,’ ‘me,’ ‘I!’ It was the Lord that drove them away—the Lord to Whom you were praying! He raised them up and scattered them! And why did you have to make the sign of the cross over that Gypsy? What are you, a priest?”

  “What’s wrong with that?” I tried to defend myself.

  “You can only put the sign of the cross over yourself like that, that’s what … or your children. But if you imprint anyone else with the cross, let alone a pagan, then the demon inside can jump out of them out of pure fear of the cross and come right inside you!”

  “I didn’t know,” I stammered, “What do I do now, Fr Leonid?”

  “What do I do, what do I do,” he grumbled. “Now you know. For now, go and make three prostrations before the Mother of God, and repent.”

  I did as I was told.

  And since then … strangely enough … many years have passed, and in those years, I met many Gypsies at train stations, city parks, or even right next to Yelokhovo Cathedral, where they would try their best to sell gold or imitation watches and bracelets to the people exiting the church. But nowhere, at any time—not in Moscow, or Crimea, or Paris—did they bother me, or even approach me, sometimes even passing me by completely.

  Although I did once approach them. But these were entirely different Gypsies.

  I was coming out of church once after the early Liturgy—this was on the feast day of the Transfiguration—and I saw set up in the churchyard tables laden with fruits of rare beauty—scarlet watermelon halves, golden pears, crimson and rose-colored apples, blue and purple plums, burgundy pomegranates, pearl-colored melons cut up into pieces, purple and green grapes, orange mandarins, blushing apricots, reddish-yellow peaches … It wasn’t just the abundance of this wonderful fruit of the earth that amazed me, but also how festively they were arranged on enormous platters: every combination of shape and color, like a still life intended for the paintbrushes of the Flemish masters!

  Four ravishing young Gypsy beauties, looking just like Pushkin’s Zemfira,3 were fussing around the table, fixing a disobedient plum that was attempting to roll off the mountain of fruit, and arranging the clusters of grapes so that every individual fruit displayed its best side in the brightly shining August sunlight. Two Gypsy men in white shirts rushed to them carrying large baskets full of more fruit.

  “Are you going to bless those?” I asked stupidly.

  “Well yes, today is the Transfiguration of Our Lord! Does that surprise you?”

  “So does that mean you’re Orthodox?” I asked even more stupidly.

  “Of course. We have an entire band here of Orthodox Gypsies.”

  “And you go to church?”

  “And we go to church,” the Gypsy who had answered me began to put out the basketfuls of fruit onto empty platters. She worked like an artist, creating harmony and choosing for every fruit its best complementary companion.

  The priest came out of the church and generously sprinkled this Gypsy splendor with a prayer.

  I wanted to take my meddlesome questions home with me, but a very young Gypsy girl, seeing a mismatch in one of her fruit towers, offered me an enormous, wet, aquamarine plum.

  “It’s the Transfiguration!” she repeated.

  Non-Komsomol Gingerbread1

  Monk Leonid was a man of great fasting and prayer. He loved to say the following words from the Gospel: “He who is faithful in what is least is faithful also in much; and he who is unjust in what is least is unjust also in much” (Lk 16:10). And in order to be trusted not only with very little, but with the very least, he recruited my help in obtaining some textbooks full of charts that are used by students in the Culinary Institute: these he would peruse and work out the ingredients of products which had previously been considered Lenten. The study of these recipes drew from him many a sorrowful sigh, for it came to light that not all breads that we usually ate without a second thought during the fasts were free of dairy additives. The same discovery applied to certain noodles and pastas, to say nothing of waffle cookies!

  The range of truly Lenten foods was catastrophically shrinking. All that was left of the carbohydrates was gingerbread and grains.

  At that time we received a dear guest from Tula—Mitrofan Dmitrievich, a former colonel who had fought at the front, a servant of God much beloved by Fr Seraphim (Tiapochkin) for his p
urity of heart. Well, what would he bring us from Tula, especially during Great Lent, but the famous Tula gingerbread, of course—round, glazed, wrapped in a festive box. So Mitrofan Dmitrievich brought us three of these boxes at once.

  As soon as he arrived, I received a call from my friend Andriusha—a former classmate and my godson—who said:

  “I’m here not far from your house. Can I stop by?”

  He didn’t want to come empty-handed, so he stepped into a bakery at a hotel near the subway station, then rang our doorbell and handed me a decorative box with Tula gingerbread through the doorway, all nicely glazed and in a festive box.

  My husband, hearing that we had guests, also stopped at the same bakery on his way home from work and arrived just in time for tea with the same gingerbread printed with the word “Tula” in his hands. So there we sat, surrounded on all sides by this gingerbread, which had by now grown in quantity to five boxes, and drank our tea, pleasantly keeping the fast, enjoying good conversation on various spiritual themes. And such conversation! Mitrofan Dmitrievich had at one time been the cell attendant for Elder Seraphim himself, and knew many wonderful stories, while Andriusha, a neophyte, listened to him with bated breath, mouth agape …

  And suddenly we got a phone call from Monk Leonid:

  “I just finished studying the list of ingredients for gingerbread. It turns out that it’s all not Lenten! Yes! There’s egg powder in it. There is only one kind of gingerbread that is Lenten, the so-called Komsomol gingerbread. The darkish kind. That, you can go ahead and eat without concern during all of Lent.”

  After this announcement, he hung up. We had already devoured quite a few of the suspicious Tula gingerbread. We had nothing else to offer! Well, I said nothing so as not to dismay my guests.

  Then I met a priest acquaintance in church:

  “Why are you so sad? You’re not depressed, are you?”

  “And how! I fasted and fasted, and then ate something not Lenten after all! Broke the fast,” I sorrowfully uttered.