He tried to cheer me up.
“Well, maybe you were traveling? Or you were eating dinner in the house of a pagan?”
“No,” I replied firmly, “I was at home.”
“Well, maybe you were ill?”
“No, I wasn’t ill,” I said dejectedly. “I was in good health.”
“Well, then, what happened? Did you crave some cheese? Some cottage cheese? Or … some meat?” he asked sympathetically.
“I ate some gingerbread.”
“Gingerbread? But that’s Lenten!” the priest joyfully cried out. “It’s allowed, that’s not a sin!”
“Only the Komsomol kind. You can eat the Komsomol kind,” I said knowingly. “But I ate the non-Komsomol gingerbread, that’s the problem!” The priest looked at me in amazement.
“Wh-what did you say? The non-Komsomol gingerbread?”
“Well yes, the non-Komsomol gingerbread. The not-Lenten kind. It has egg powder in it!”
I even felt my eyes fill up with tears of contrition.
The priest sighed heavily.
“So that’s what it is … egg powder, eh?”
“Egg powder,” I repeated in a subdued tone.
“Oh, the devil!” the priest cried out. “How he manipulates people! So we’re straining out gnats, are we? And what about camels? The camel of hypocrisy, it turns out we swallow it! The camel of despondency we swallow!”2
I came home just in time to receive a phone call from Monk Leonid.
“I just read about zefir and marshmallows …”
“Fr Leonid,” I said in a steely tone of voice. “I am obliged to take back those textbooks with the recipes. The owner needs them back immediately.”
“But I haven’t studied everything yet … It turns out that marmalade …”
“He said immediately! I will come and pick them up right now.”
I came and took them away. And as a gift I brought him the three remaining boxes of our gifted Tula gingerbread. I knew that he was always grateful for any offering, repeating the words “every … gift is from above.”3
This time also he cocked his head and said, taking the boxes from me: “May the Lord save you!”
But then again, this was exactly how a humble monk was supposed to act.
At Blessed Xenia’s
Along time ago, in 1985, I took my little children to St Petersburg, which was still called Leningrad at the time. We really wanted to visit the grave of Blessed Xenia, and with that aim took the tram to Smolensky Cemetery.
My friend, with whom we were staying, said to us a little strangely:
“Xenia herself will help you find her there!”
It was bitter winter, December, and the metal tram had frozen so much that it seemed to squeal and whimper from the frost.
The cemetery was deserted and dark, and even the church was closed. I helplessly looked around at the snowy drifts covering the graves, and realized that I would never find that precious grave on my own.
And suddenly, a wretched-looking old woman in a shabby coat appeared out of nowhere—all crooked, with a grotesque-looking face: instead of an eye socket, she had a bump the size of an eyeball, and the eye itself was perched on the edge of this protrusion, this bump; but nevertheless her eyes looked gentle and innocent. And strangely, though she should have been hideous because of all this, the old lady was not at all grotesque, but seemed charming and nice, like someone from a fairy tale.
“Well, dear people, is it Blessed Xenia you are looking for?” she asked. “Are you wondering how to get to her?”
“Yes,” I said, “and we don’t know where her grave is. And it’s cold, and getting dark.”
She nodded; shivering from the cold and looking at me with her strange eye, she offered:
“I will take you to her right away. But you can’t see her actual grave—the chapel where she’s buried is surrounded by a high fence. You can only stand next to it and from there you can venerate her and pray to her. Everyone does it that way!” she explained, leading us through the graves. “I can even show you the grave of martyred priests. They were buried in the ground still living, and the earth groaned above them and shook all night. By morning the cemetery guard saw beams of light rising from that frozen earth up to the heavens. And he understood that the Lord was taking their souls to Him, and that their martyrs’ crowns were shining in their flight. I can also take you to the shot-up icon of the Saviour. The Bolsheviks fired a round at it and just left it like that. And now, miraculous healings take place there for those who ask with faith.”
We walked up to the mosaic icon of the Saviour—His face was indeed riddled with bullet holes, His eyes damaged—the shooters had taken their best shot.
“They probably all died terrible deaths,” I said.
“They all died in different ways,” the old woman replied. “The Lord Himself prayed from the Cross for those who knew not what they did …”1
We stood by this icon, prayed, sang the troparion to the martyrs on the spot where the priests had been buried alive, and finally approached the chapel surrounded by the fence, on which were many, many signs and notes: “Blessed Xenia, return my husband to me!” “Blessed Xenia, heal my beloved daughter!” “Dear Xenia, my son is fighting in Afghanistan—save and protect him.”
According to tradition, if you stare at the high window under the dome of the chapel for a long time, you can see Blessed Xenia herself looking down on those who come to her. We gazed at this window, bowed, quietly prayed, and I also wrote several notes to Blessed Xenia and stuck them onto the nails in the fence.
We started to walk back until we found ourselves next to the church. It was open, and people were hurrying inside for the evening service. We looked around—our old woman was nowhere to be found! Not a trace of her. She was there, and then she vanished.
“There now,” I said, “we didn’t even have a chance to give her any money! That old woman was sick and poor …”
Inside the church I asked the woman behind the candle stand:
“Who’s the woman who leads people here to the grave of Blessed Xenia? The one with the strange-looking eye?”
She shrugged her shoulders, perplexed:
“I don’t know of any such woman …”
My friend, who was a priest, later explained to me:
“There is a belief that to those who are visiting her for the first time, Blessed Xenia herself comes out and escorts them to her grave. So you can decide for yourself who led you around Smolensky Cemetery.”
When we sat down in the tram with the children to return home, I asked them:
“Well, are you completely frozen?”
“No,” they said. And as proof they took off their mittens and touched my cheek with their warm hands.
There is a story about the chapel of Blessed Xenia, that the Bolsheviks had wanted to conceal it from the eyes of the faithful behind a fence. They say that inside they completely defaced it and put a sculptor there who fulfilled government orders for tombstones. He also specialized in busts of Lenin. And so he sat there and sculpted these heads, and then he would take them to different towns, villages, and organizations, where they would be placed on stands. But the Lord evidently took away his gift of judging proportions correctly—how else can one explain the fact that the sculptor suddenly became obsessed with gigantomania, and decided to carve a bust of Lenin of enormous dimensions, the likes of which had never before been seen anywhere, by anyone? But a client was found for that bust, too.
And so the sculptor sat for many months and worked on this bust. Finally, it was done, and the client came with some men to take it away.
But no matter how hard they tried to take it out of the chapel—through the door, through the window—it was all useless: the bust didn’t fit. They would have to destroy the chapel in order to get it out. But Blessed Xenia didn’t allow that to happen. And so the bust lay there for several years, taking up the entire space of the chapel, until finally the sculptor in his fru
stration took a hammer and shattered it to pieces and, bit by bit, took it out to the garbage dump.
The Hunger Striker
I knew the grave and dignified acolyte Vasilii when he was just Vaska and had the nickname the “Hunger Striker.” This was how he got his nickname.
In the Brezhnev era, he married an American girl. They had a civil ceremony, but he wasn’t allowed to emigrate to the United States, as he was an engineer for some company that worked under a level of secrecy. Soon the young wife’s visa expired, and she was forced to return to America.
And so Vasia, who had been released from his job as soon as he married a citizen of an ‘unfriendly nation,’ dedicated himself to fighting for permission to join his wife. He wrote letters, appeals, proclamations—to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to the American Embassy, to the Political Bureau, even to Brezhnev himself. He gave interviews to enemy radio stations, and gathered round himself a group of people like him, “those who weren’t being released,” who were also married to citizens of foreign nations.
He organized a whole political movement “for the reunion of the family”: they would stand with signs near the statue of Yuri Dolgorukiy, hold press conferences, and even declare long-lasting hunger strikes.
Of course, not everyone was capable of doing this. There was among them a young lady from Vladimir who had married an Italian. And when all those people who were separated from their “other halves” had gathered at a Moscow apartment and, under supervision of French doctors, had begun their hunger strike, which had already been announced for several days on the “hostile” radio station Golosa, she began to whimper pathetically after only half a day: “Oh, how I want a pirozhok!”1 and by four o’clock she was giving in completely: “I’m going to die without some soup!” She began to cry, naming all her favorite dishes. And so she left the protest.
But the others courageously held on—for two or even three weeks. Our Hunger Striker proved to be the most steadfast and unbending. One of his hunger strikes lasted exactly forty days. So if you considered each of those days as a year, you could say that he, like the new Moses, led his fellow fasters for forty years out from the Egyptian yoke.
Well, of course, if he had undergone such hunger strikes on his own, without supervision, he would have died. But the experienced French doctors kept him alive, giving him glucose and vitamins, allowing him to refresh himself with a sip of water, while photographers memorialized his tortured but noble face that appeared on the pages of the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Paris Match under the bold headline, “Another victim of the bloody regime.”
“All we want is to be reunited with our families! It is our right!” Vasia would repeat with a fading smile.
In the end, meetings were organized in support of the Hunger Striker and heads of state became involved. President Reagan even gave Brezhnev an ultimatum: if he didn’t release the hunger striker to his wife, America would impose an embargo. Brezhnev didn’t release him, and the embargo came into force
In short, Vasia was slowly becoming a significant political figure. He was a desired guest at all the embassies and a friend to all the Western correspondents. He was very busy. Nevertheless, he managed to stop by and see us once. A month had passed since his last hunger strike, but he looked striking—slender and fit. His former belly fat, previously gathering in rolls on his sides, was gone, his complexion was smooth, he looked younger and his gaze clearer. All in all, he was in total euphoria.
I had a friend over at the time, who was very careful of her figure, and who for one day per week, in order to cleanse her system, tried to eat nothing at all. But hearing about the forty-day hunger strikes and examining the radiant face of the hunger striker, she was tempted: maybe she should also try it?
“Tell me, when you are on a hunger strike, do you … er … experience a lot of movement?” she asked, trying to understand all the conditions accompanying such an extreme hunger strike.
“Of course!” he readily responded and took a pile of papers out of his briefcase. “Here, I’ve written three petitions, I gave a long interview to the Voice of America, I hold press conferences …”
“No, I don’t mean that, I …” Here she looked at him very meaningfully. “I mean … movement … Do you go a lot?”
“Absolutely. That’s the only way I go, there’s no time for anything else. Look—I was at a reception held by the French ambassador, I had tea with the American ambassador, I wrote a letter to President Reagan …”
“That’s not what I mean,” she raised her hands in exasperation. Finally, she resolved to be more direct:
“Do you at least go to the bathroom?” And she even demonstrated for her oblivious companion how one sits on the toilet.
Truth be told, we treated this whole affair of Vasia’s leaving, his family drama, his languishing for his beloved wife, with a dose of irony, because we knew that Vasia had mostly married to emigrate, and that his wife soon found a boyfriend in America. After all, if our Natasha Rostova couldn’t wait one year to be happily married to Prince Andrei, then why, really, would an American stay faithful to Vasia in a separation of many years? More to the point, however, the fact that a Soviet man was obliged to play so many tricks in order to leave the country was very indicative of the nature of the regime: throughout the whole world people went where they willed; only we sat chained to our places, shaking our fetters.
Meanwhile, Vasia began his next hunger strike. And we finally said to him:
“You know, this is not the Christian way. What if you die from this? It would be suicide! You’d better go and ask a priest for a blessing to do this hunger strike.”
We convinced him and went to the Lavra all together. He went to confession to Archimandrite Zosima—an old man who had survived many years of Stalin’s concentration camps. They talked, the priest covered him with his epitrachelion, and Vasia, pleased with himself, announced to us:
“Well, that’s it! He gave me his blessing!”
“What do you mean, he gave you his blessing? Did you tell him everything?”
“Of course. I said, ‘My wife is in America, and they’re not letting us be together.’ And he said, ‘The Soviet powers are unlimited in their evil doings. Something must be done!’ Then I said: ‘Well, we are fighting—I write petitions, protests, I just wrote to the American president …’ And he said, ‘That’s right! Fight! Go on, expose them, pressure them whenever you can. I suffered from those godless powers myself. At the hospital the nurse tried to take my blood for analysis, but the blood didn’t come. The Bolsheviks drank it all. They came close to taking my eyes out.’ Then I said, ‘Well, Father, I am going on a hunger strike.’ He said, ‘Good work! It’s the Dormition Fast right now, so may the Lord bless you.’”
In the end, they finally let our Vasia go. He came to America, but found he wasn’t really needed there. In the beginning, a lecture tour was organized for him at various universities, where he would invariably tell his story and describe the bloody regime back in the USSR, behind the Iron Curtain. But then, this story became weedy and overgrown and stopped being of interest to anyone. His furious activity suddenly ceased, and it turned out that he had nothing to do; his wife divorced him, and he grew depressed.
He became attached to a family of émigrés and for a while even attended church with them on Sundays, but then he decided to move to another city. They gave him a farewell gift of an icon of the Holy Royal Martyrs: in the Church Abroad, they had already been canonized, but not in the Russian Church—that time was still far away.
The icon was in very poor condition—it was obvious that its former owners had wandered significantly throughout the world with it: the paint was peeling off in some places, and in others it was dirty, the faces were darkened, and the wooden frame was falling apart. But the hunger striker put it in a place of honor in his new haven, lit a lamp in front of it …
And, the icon began to slowly restore itself and to stream myrrh. One face grew lighter, t
hen another’s features came to light, then the clothing grew vivid with color and the patterns on it became clear. In short, this was no ordinary icon! And it began to restore itself not anywhere, but at the home of our Vaska the hunger striker!
Then he began to take this icon to the churches of the Church Abroad—first in America, then in Europe. He even went to Mt Athos. Granted, there are no churches there belonging to the Church Abroad, but there have always been venerators of the Royal Martyrs in the bosom of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Finally, a new era arrived, and Vasia came with his miraculous icon to Moscow. All this time it had continued to slowly restore itself and to stream myrrh—the faces shone with an unearthly light, the clothing was saturated with purple and emerald, every lock of the New Martyrs’ hair seemed to have been meticulously redone, and an otherworldly fragrance emanated from the icon. Vasia himself was somehow restored.
Before me stood a man who was no longer young, but who was still youthful and trim, with a noble manner and streaks of grey hair. Nowhere in his features, his manner of speaking, or his movements could one trace the former agitation and unrest: everything about him was even, deliberate, and dignified. At his apartment he received anyone who, having heard of the miraculous icon, desired to venerate it and offer their prayers to the Tsar-Martyr and his family. Priests would also visit him and would serve memorial services before the icon—sometimes there were several in one day, both priests and memorial services. Vasilii was very busy in connection to all of this. And when the Church in Russia did canonize the Royal Passionbearers, he gave the icon to a church for general veneration, and he began to serve in that church as an acolyte.
Evil tongues gossiped about him that just as he had thrown himself into the fight for the reunion of families, so did he now completely dedicate himself to the service of this icon. Those same tongues continued to say that comparably, former Communists, who before stubbornly worshiped Lenin, now vehemently cross themselves.
But in reality it was all completely explainable. The Apostle Paul, also, at first passionately persecuted Christians, until the Lord Himself appeared to him on the road to Damascus. And then he used that same passion and dedication—even up to his martyr’s death—to preach the Word of Christ.
Ordinary Wonders Page 4
