Ordinary Wonders

by Oloesia Nikolaeva

  Throwing open the door to her room, I froze in the doorway: there were piles of books, notebooks, and papers heaped up high everywhere—on the desk, on the bed, on the chair, even on the floor. It was obvious that my daughter had been seriously involved in a fierce quest for knowledge in this room … I began to go through the papers with a trembling hand, bringing them up to my eyes and trying in the thickening dusk of her den to identify the document that was so indispensable to her.

  I dug through everything on the table, on the chair, on the bed, and finally, on the floor, but there was no trace of it! I helplessly lowered myself onto the doorstep with no idea of what to do next. And at that moment I noticed a small icon of Martyr Tryphon on the shelf above the desk. He stood in his full-length red cloak, and his right shoulder was adorned by the lost hawk of Ivan Vasilevich …

  And I began to pray! My husband sat in the hospital waiting for a terrible operation, my daughter stood before the doors to the examination room waiting for her forgotten document, I sat in the dark in her vandalized den, where I had looked through and reexamined everything but in vain, in vain!

  Then I reached for the pile of notebooks, books, brochures, and papers on the table once again—I had just looked through it all, sifting through the pages, laying them to the side one by one, but nonetheless I began again. From my touch, the pile shifted and, losing its balance, crashed onto the floor in total disarray. Textbooks, some sort of theoretical instructions, schedules of exams, tomes of Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy … and suddenly, one piece of paper separated itself from the rest, glided to the top of the pile, and covered all those underneath it. On it was written: Exam Sheet.

  Seizing it, I jumped into the car and in half an hour had handed it off to my daughter, the suffering aspiring graduate, who immediately went to take her exam and was shortly afterwards accepted into the institute.

  There were times, however, that I appealed to the Martyr Tryphon in less dramatic circumstances: the potential loss almost seemed too trivial to bother the saint about it. Nevertheless …

  This happened in the summer while we were at our dacha in Peredelkino. Our daughters had come to visit me and Fr Vladimir with their children, as well as my brother Mitia with his beautiful dog. A friend of our granddaughter, Sonia, also came—the twelve-year-old Verochka, who was our neighbor’s daughter. Verochka’s mother diligently tried to shelter her from all the cruelties of life, and therefore handed her over to us personally, though they lived only one hundred meters from us. She even gave her a cell phone, so that she could call “if anything happened.”

  The children romped around to the fullest: they ran through the forest surrounding the dacha and played with the dog, rushing after it through the nettles, hiding from it under bushes; they only returned home when the thunder started and the rain came down.

  Once inside, Verochka reached for her phone, but it was nowhere to be found. It had apparently fallen out when she was climbing through the bushes and hiding in the ravines. There was nothing to be done but to wait for the rain to die down and all go out—adults and children—in search of Verochka’s cell phone; we armed ourselves with our own cell phones, and scattered in all directions. We took turns dialing her number in various places, hoping that Verochka’s phone would ring and one of us would hear it and follow the sound.

  The rain had stopped, the sun came out, but all we got in answer to our calls to Verochka’s phone were long, plaintive beeps that weren’t managing to break through the nettles and bushes. The meadow was silent, the ravine was mute, the yard was quiet, and the fir grove too.

  Verochka was barely holding back her tears—it was obvious that she would be scolded for losing the cell phone: her mother was strict, temperamental, and willful, while Verochka was quiet and timid. And her family wasn’t wealthy enough to view the loss of a cell phone as an insignificant problem.

  To make a long story short, seeing that it was a hopeless case, we finished our search and returned to the house. The phone battery had probably died already; it had probably gotten wet in the rain, and was now lying mute under a fallen branch …

  “Let’s pray to the Martyr Tryphon,” I suggested just in case. “What if he finds it?”

  We stood up in front of the icon of the saint, sang his troparion, and read a prayer, adding in our own words that we hoped for his help very much. After that, we took to calling the phone again, dispersing throughout our plot of land. But this time, a steely voice told us that the subscriber was unavailable or out of range.

  Suddenly, Fr Vladimir confidently and decisively walked toward the same bushes that we had repeatedly inspected; he knelt down, reached out his hand, and plucked Verochka’s phone out of the thick grass.

  “How? What? How did you know?” we thronged around him with questions.

  He shrugged his shoulders in uncertainty:

  “I just went and picked it up from the ground.”

  From that point on, even our little children knew who was always ready to rush to their aid, wipe away their tears, and bring them comfort surpassing even the grief that had caused their tears in the first place; and they now appreciated the value of an object that had been restored to them.

  Criss-Cross

  Seminarians who do not intend to take the monastic vow and who wish to become priests must enter into marriage before being ordained. But this is very difficult for them to do if they have no childhood friend or neighbor from before they went to live in the seminary who would want to be a priest’s wife. Seminaries are usually located on monastery grounds and the seminarians live behind strong monastery walls. Where can they find a worthy life companion? Among whom do they have to choose?

  In recent times, at least, seminaries have begun to introduce conducting courses in which young girls with a good voice and a good ear may study: this did not exist before. Seminarians, who had already graduated or who were on leave, could only walk the streets and gaze around, wondering if the Lord would send them their intended. No, really—were they supposed to find them at nightclubs? At the karaoke bar Metelitsa?

  As for those young lady parishioners who attended the seminary churches, they would inspire an undignified sense of competition among the future priests. I was once a witness to that drama. A seminarian came up to a modest young girl with a headscarf and a long skirt, and asked her:

  “Are you going to the holy unction service today?”

  And she answered him:

  “I’m going, only with Peter, not you—he asked me first.”

  And that same Peter hurriedly and authoritatively tugged the girl by her sleeve:

  “Let’s go, let’s go. I saved a spot for you in the line for confession.”

  Thus he made his conquest of a potential matushka.

  In addition, those emaciated, closely trimmed and shorn seminarians, in their short little suits, which always seem too small for some reason—narrow in the shoulders, short in the sleeves and trousers—looked like ugly ducklings, so that none of those young girls could even dream that they would soon become majestic swans: once ordained and clothed in a cassock and ryassa,1 they would grow out their thick hair and magnificent beards and become handsome youths—one after the other.

  But their chances were smaller when, while stammering and getting flustered, they tried to get acquainted with young ladies sometimes by just stopping them on the street, and because the seminarians were still in their untransformed, uncomplimentary, and even, frankly speaking, miserable-looking forms, their chances were small.

  When I used to visit the Lavra, I also would be approached several times on the commuter train by young men with the characteristic haircuts and collars of seminarians, who tried to start a conversation with me. Once, when I stayed for a bit after the evening service in the Church of the Mother of God of the Sign in order to venerate the icon of the Martyr Tryphon, I had just stepped away from it when a young man stopped me and straight-out asked me:

  “Forgive me, but you couldn’t possibly marry m
e right away? I’m going to be ordained in a few days …”

  He had obviously come to pray to the Martyr Tryphon, who they say helps people to find a good spouse, and there I was—young and with my blond braids, and by all appearances someone who kept the fasts, knew how to cross herself, prayed, and even stayed to venerate the icons after the service.

  I looked at him and saw that he was almost dying from nervousness—he was all red, nearly driven to tears; but still, he was very nice, with such an exalted expression on his thin and pleasant face. I swear he might have convinced me! Had I not been married already and a mother of two, I might have agreed out of a sheer sense of adventure and the mere extravagance of such a marriage proposal!

  In short, marriage was a big problem for seminarians. Even if you found a girl, who knew what she was really like? It was impossible to tell during those brief acquaintances—what’s more, they always appeared pious and modest in the beginning, but what came after …

  Seminarians would even take the young women to elders. It was said that one elder could immediately tell who would make a good couple and who wouldn’t. Sometimes it even happened that two prospective married couples would come to him at the same time from opposite ends of the country. He would look them over with a critical eye and would shake his head in disapproval, as if to say no, it’s all wrong.

  “How can we make it right?” The couples would ask him, frozen in fear and dismay.

  “Criss-cross,” he would say. “I will only bless it the other way around, not this way.”

  This meant that the potential bride of the first young man must now marry the other young man, and the bride of the other must marry the first.

  Who knows, perhaps some did find marital bliss in this manner, but I was told of one instance when the young people were obedient to this “criss-cross,” and it only ended in divorce, tragedy, and pain.

  There was another scandalous story of a young priest, who while still a seminarian, received a blessing from his spiritual father—who was a bishop, by the way—to marry his fiancée. However, as soon as she was a legally married woman, the modest headscarf that had formerly covered her head immediately went into the garbage, the long grey skirt in which she had gone to see the bishop went to the poor people sitting outside, and she started frequenting the gym, getting manicures and perms, putting on makeup, pulling on miniskirts and cleavage-baring tops, and going to nightclubs.

  “What are you doing?” the young man would exclaim. “You’re a matushka now!”

  “Oh,” she would wave her hand. “You aren’t going to do anything about it—priests aren’t allowed to divorce, and you don’t want to be a monk. So now you must bear it and support me until the end of our days. It’s supposed to be like that for you—humility aplenty, patience through trials and tribulations, but I, for one, will not waste away my youth among pious old women in those grey rags of theirs. It was almost more than I could bear while I was trying to win you over—all those fasts and prostrations, prostrations and fasting. I almost ruined my complexion! And anyway—I like the singer Madonna, that’s who I want to look like!”

  So the desperate priest went off to his spiritual father, the bishop who had blessed him to enter marriage. In a surge of emotion, he rushed right into his office and exclaimed from the doorway:

  “Your Grace! You gave me your blessing, I brought you my bride and showed her to you, you blessed us to marry, and now she goes to nightclubs, she pierced her nose, she has tattoos … Why did you do this to me, Vladyka?3 You sentenced me to a life of ridicule!”

  And this bishop, seeing that he was in a fighting mood, went to the other side of his table just in case, in order to increase the distance and place a barrier between them. But the young priest, out of the fullness of his grieving heart, took a step in the direction of the table and began to walk around it, trying to approach the bishop. The bishop, however, kept stepping in the other direction—who knew what was going to happen? The priest took another step forward, waving his hands and gesticulating, and the bishop took another step back. So they went on circling around the table.

  “Oh, Vladyka, Vladyka, how could you do this to me?” the priest would say reproachfully.

  Finally, the bishop grew weary of backing away; he stopped, held his head up high, shook out his hair, and blurted out:

  “This is not a totalitarian sect! You should have thought better for yourself! You yourself are to blame! Nobody forced you and nobody prevented you either!”

  This exclamation brought the bishop’s cell attendant running in; he knew the priest’s story and blocked the bishop with his body, yelling at the unhappy priest:

  “You knew what you were getting! You chose it, you kneaded it, you cooked it, now you must eat it!”

  The poor priest, fighting back tears, turned on his heels and dashed off without asking the bishop’s blessing.

  “You, yourself,” he repeated to himself, running down the street and beating himself on the chest, “you, you, yourself!”

  The Queen’s Pendants

  When by the holy prayers of the Martyr Tryphon I wasn’t accepted into the writer’s union in 1982, my husband and I with our two little children found ourselves on the brink of poverty: we hardly had enough money for food. Nevertheless, the Lord generously and continually sent us everything we needed and more—He clothed us, shod us, fed us, and arranged holidays for us.

  I had a lovely little white English fur coat given to me by a friend—the English reporter Tony Robinson—and a pair of gorgeous black knee-high leather boots, which a friend had given to me because she didn’t like them for some reason.

  I repeat, the boots were top-notch, warm, with only one fault: they were unbelievably slippery—so slippery that it seemed like they had been designed for clowns. A clown gets up quickly on stage, but his legs slide in opposite directions and he falls down—ha-ha-ha, how funny! So these boots required their owner to have a special talent, I would say, a balancing act with your legs, otherwise you could whimsically throw your feet up in the air and flop onto the ice or sprawl in the snow.

  But that is beside the point, and my story is not about that.

  My spiritual father was at that time an inhabitant of the Holy Trinity-St Sergius Lavra. His Holiness Patriarch Pimen1 had given him an old, valuable cross for restoration and instructed him not to take the cross out of his studio.

  My spiritual father restored the cross; however, being a perfectionist, he wasn’t completely satisfied with the result. The problem was that at one time the cross had been decorated with precious stones, many of which were now lost. So this part of the job would have to be done by a jeweler. Only then would the cross be restored to its former beauty. Patriarch Pimen himself would be happy about that.

  At his own risk, my spiritual father gave the cross for a very short time to a jeweler he knew, a considerably skilled master and a trustworthy person. But because of this, the Patriarch’s instructions were disobeyed, and the cross ended up in Moscow.

  Then, suddenly, my spiritual father was told that Patriarch Pimen was planning on serving Liturgy at the Lavra and might ask for his cross, if not come into the studio for it himself.

  In short, my abba called me that evening and begged me to pick up the cross from the jeweler, then take the first train in the morning and bring it to him, or he would be faced, at the very least, with disgrace.

  I picked up the cross, and around three o’clock in the morning—to catch the first train at 3:40 a.m.—I set out on foot from my house near the metro stop Prospekt Mira to Yaroslavsky railway station.

  In theory, I could have cut across the park, but I was afraid to, and carefully stepping in my slippery boots, keeping my balance with my hands, I headed in the direction of Grokholsky Lane. The streets were cold, blustery, dark, slippery, and empty. There were no cars, either. The patriarchal cross of priceless value lay wrapped in a cloth in my lightweight plastic grocery bag.

  I was dressed in the white English fur
coat. I walked along and prayed.

  Suddenly, a car slammed on its brakes to the left of me and began to drive slowly next to me. The people sitting inside were openly staring at me taking steps that were unsteady at best, wavering and wobbly at worst. I tried to increase my pace, but as a result I immediately let my guard down: my boots began to slip, my feet began to slide apart, and I tottered, almost losing my balance. I made another step—and tottered again.

  “What are you, drunk?” I heard from the car. “Hey, prostitute!”

  Out of the corner of my eye I noticed that it was a cop car, but this didn’t bring me any comfort. I had heard that the police organized raids from time to time near the three railway stations, catching the “nocturnal butterflies,” and began to imagine how they would start asking me for my documents, confirming my identity, testing for sobriety: who was I and why was I wobbling around the streets at night, barely standing? They would drag me to the station, start digging in my bag, remove the cross; I would be late for the train, and my spiritual father would be forced to face the Patriarch as a liar. I froze from fear.

  “Lord, help me!” I cried out, resolving to move steadily, step firmly, look straight ahead, and not react to any catcalls.

  And it seemed to me like the Lord swept me up and carried me, carried me—I simply moved my feet very quickly, taking minuscule steps, while some hidden force carried me further and further without any obstacles; meanwhile, the car continued to drive by my side with me and several pairs of eyes watched to see if I would stumble again.

  So I reached the railway station, climbed onto the commuter train, and immediately forgot about my fantastical flight over the snow and ice, my foot march at breakneck speed, my speeding boots.

  With my first step onto the Zagorsk platform, I slipped and with my second step, I wobbled, trying to maintain my balance. Holding onto the banisters with both hands, I somehow barely scrambled onto the bridge over the railway tracks, crossed it in the same manner, and, stepping onto the ground, understood that I could go no further: my boots had completely begun to ignore all rules of gravity.