Ordinary Wonders

by Oloesia Nikolaeva

  “Yes, yes, of course, you! What did you dream about?” they asked again. “What were your desires?”

  I remembered how many years ago—twenty? twenty-five?—my spiritual father had asked me the same question.

  I had answered him then, grimacing from the impudence and improbability of my desires:

  “I would like to live among the pines, somewhere in Peredelkino,1 write poems, and listen to classical music!”

  “So you want to find yourself in heaven on earth!” he laughed. And his eyes became clouded over with doubt: he knew—here, on earth, man is doomed to experience many trials … Where is there room for classical music among the pines?

  “Well, at least tell us—did your dreams come true?” my companions now demanded.

  “Well, yes, yes!”

  For some reason, I was too ashamed to admit to them about the pines, the classical music, and Peredelkino.

  My husband had recently bought a magical computer unit on which we could listen to music from all over the world. And now Mozart, Bach, Schubert, Handel, Vivaldi fill the surrounding air, sometimes competing with the birds singing, sometimes joining voices with the wind rocking the old, creaking pines, and my liberated heart sings along with them.

  At the same time, I always approach any “dreams come true” situation with a certain suspicion. After all, you should ask with reflection and care, for you never know what cross you are taking on yourself. As the holy fathers say, the cross for which you asked is the heaviest to bear.

  For example, my mother always dreamed that she wouldn’t have to wash dishes and clean the house.

  My friend Liulia, an actress and singer, dreamed of emigrating (“If only I could escape this cursed country!”).

  My acquaintance Lenia Zolotarevskii wished to become immensely rich.

  The beautiful Iren dreamed of learning to drive a car and buying herself something like an Alfa Romeo.

  And so, my mother had a stroke, and in the last ten years of her life, she didn’t wash dishes or clean her house, but simply lay in bed.

  Liulia left for Israel and settled in a kibbutz; every day she—an actress, singer, ballerina—would earn her bread by going to remove trash from the forest and pick up branches. The artistic career abroad that she dreamed of boiled down to simple amateur performances: at parties she would sing at the table and artistically and expressively tell stories.

  Lenia Zolotarevskii became impossibly rich, but someone kidnapped his child and demanded a ransom. After he paid the ransom in exchange for his son, the latter developed a heavy stammer, and Lenia himself soon died of leukemia. The doctors said it was a result of stress.

  The beautiful Iren learned to drive a car, but since she didn’t have any money, she sold her three-bedroom apartment in a new building and bought an Alfa Romeo with that money, renting a two-bedroom apartment in the city center. Then the landlord suddenly and unexpectedly raised the rent. Iren became nervous and got into an accident, and as a result was forced to move in with her former husband. He lived with his young wife and two small sons, who were born a year apart. Iren lived in their storage closet for half a year, and then disappeared somewhere.

  I honestly sometimes think: “Glory to You, O Lord, that You didn’t grant some of my crazy desires!”

  Vladyka Anthony of Sourozh remembered with a touch of irony how in his childhood, when he saw his uncle’s dentures that he took out at night and put into a glass of water, he would passionately dream of having the same.

  As for me, in my childhood, when I was visiting my grandmother, I saw an old woman who had spent time in one of Stalin’s concentration camps as a political prisoner. When I watched her cavalierly smoking a Belomorkanal cigarette and rather expressively describing her ill-adventures in a pleasant bass, I passionately desired to be like her—to suffer, to live out my years in innocence, to be measured on God’s scales and be deemed significant in this life.

  As a young adult, I listened to my fill of the stories of my mother’s friend, the director Inna Tumanian, relating how she was forced to fight for her movie that had been shelved by the State Cinema Committee, and I also dreamed of being a director and fighting for my work in the same manner. Inna Surenovna had a boyish haircut, so in the ninth grade I also cut my hair like a boy. Inna Surenovna had a gloriously low voice for a woman, so I also began to speak in a low voice. And when I wrote a directorial analysis of Neznakomka as my term paper for an introductory course on the basics of cinematography at the Literature Institute, a course taught by the famous L. Trauberg (The Youth of Maxim), and he asked me to stay behind after class since he had thought my paper to be excellent, I was not at all surprised, and simply considered it a logical turn of events.

  Everyone left the class, and we two remained in the empty auditorium.

  “You have talent,” said the maestro.

  Flattered, I nodded with modest dignity.

  “You have true directorial vision. Do you at least understand that?”

  I sniffed in embarrassment and anxiously scratched my nose.

  “Talent should not be buried!” He even stomped his foot a little, as if suspecting that I already had a shovel hidden and a hole dug out, into which I would jump at any moment …

  “It’s my dream,” I earnestly admitted. “I dream of being a film director! To attend the All-Russian State Institute of Cinematography …”

  “Well, that is where I teach! Let me seek to assist you. But for now, you will study with me,” he firmly took my hand, “individually.”

  And he looked meaningfully into my eyes.

  Here I was taken aback at the suggestion in his eyes. The maestro was old, very old, even decrepit. He was so old that, honestly speaking, when he went up to the second floor of the auditorium, dust would fall from him little by little. He was falling apart! But it was exactly for this reason that he remained above any suspicion of immoral behavior.

  “But,” he continued, releasing my hand, “nobody can know about this! Not one living soul! As they say, save your breath to cool your porridge.”

  And again he looked up at me with meaning, for on top of everything he was short in stature—he barely reached my chin.

  “Right now we are going to leave,” he said, handing me a piece of paper with his telephone number, “but you must pretend that you don’t know me at all. I’ll go first. And then—in three minutes—you go. Do you understand? Shh!!”

  I counted exactly three minutes after he left the auditorium and rushed home. But I hadn’t even reached the front entrance when I overtook him: he was barely shuffling along. What’s more, it was slippery, and his legs were constantly sliding in opposite directions. Suddenly, he faltered and waved his arms, trying to keep his balance.

  “Can I help you?” I asked him compassionately, skipping up to him, just like a young Girl Scout would ask an old woman who was planning to cross the street.

  He understood my tone correctly. Looking up at me with hurt and anger, he firmly started forward, slipped, and fell.

  After that he never invited me anywhere—not into the All-Russian State Institute of Cinematography, not to study with him individually, not into the world of film in any way.

  So my film career was over before it had even begun …

  Another instance … My mother had a friend called Lucy—a wonderful loon, a lady of the secular world, the wife of an old writer. She wore fabulous costumes—wide-brim hats and long scarves—she drank champagne, and was wont to appear at my mother’s at any moment—even at three o’clock in the morning, with heaps of fanciful stories, announcing from the threshold: “What? You’re already sleeping? How can you sleep?” In a word, she was a very inspired and extravagant lady, and very attractive. She would continually “issue a challenge to this world” and would find herself in considerably complex, passionate, and tense relations with it. For this reason she loved to say: “Children? Mercy, I cannot reproduce in captivity!” And I must admit that I liked this very much at the ti
me. I also planned to “not reproduce in captivity” and to “issue challenges to this world.” There was a time when I simply dreamed of being like Lucy!

  However, my fate unfolded otherwise and led me down a different path. Soon I got married, and had two children in two years. Lucy looked down at me with condescending haughtiness and lost any interest in me. So does a magnificent bird fly by itself in the sky, not desiring to know anything about the provident little hamsters or badgers toiling near their burrows …

  The years passed, during which Lucy continued to issue challenges to the world, and in the end, she remained completely alone. I recently heard from my acquaintances that they often saw her—old, tipsy, and shabby-looking—in a deli near their house. And later, the news came that Lucy had died. She had fallen asleep, the poor thing, on a bench at the end of October and had frozen to death.

  All in all, I had many such occasions for daydreaming, desiring to imitate many people such as these, but thanks be to God that He chose not to hear me at times, nor to respond to all my wishes.

  It is truthfully written in the Great Canon the Work of St Andrew of Crete: “Skillfully hast thou planned to build a tower, O my soul, and to establish a stronghold for thy lusts; but the Creator confounded thy designs and dashed thy devices to the ground.” 2

  Glory to Him Who holds us back from the abyss, glory to Him Who overthrows our wicked plans!

  And the music rising above the roof of my house, above the crowns of the pines, proclaimed this truth aloud.

  You, O soul, would contrive to erect

  an entire column of your passions

  and lusts, if the Creator did not

  stop your plans and did not

  overturn your undertakings.

  More Than Enough or Nothing Extra

  My godmother Tatiana, who was the wife of my friend the children’s author Gennadii Snegirev, was remarkably generous. And yet you couldn’t say that they were people of means. It’s always like that with writers—feast today and fast tomorrow. But Tatiana, whether it was a time of feast or famine, always tried to give something to her guests, so that they wouldn’t leave empty-handed. One person would depart with a packet of dried apricots, another with books by Snegirev, another with a piece of chocolate, and yet another, like the Georgian archimandrite, Fr Georgii, with a lynx fur! “It is better to give than to receive,” Gennadii Iakovlevich liked to say.

  It was no wonder that sometimes, even often, the reserves of that house were completely depleted, and Tatiana would ask us for a loan on more than one occasion, in order to survive until her husband’s next paycheck. Thankfully we lived in the same house—either the Snegirevs would borrow money from us or we from them. And very often Tatiana would sigh dreamily:

  “If only the Lord would send us some money, Genka and I would go on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, or buy a house next to the monastery!”

  To this Snegirev would reply severely:

  “God is no bursar! ‘Give her this, give her that!’ And no accountant!” he would add in an edifying tone. “And in general—even if you had a million dollars in the desert, you would somehow manage to spend it all immediately, even there!”

  Then Tatiana began to formulate her request in a more spiritual setting:

  “Lord, tempt me with money!”

  This reached the ears of our friend Fr D., a Lavra hieromonk who later became a bishop.

  “The Lord Himself disposes of money,” he said. “He sends to each person exactly what their spiritual nature demands.”

  But Tatiana decided that her spiritual nature was such that she would have enough strength to overcome just such a temptation: she would give so much money to the sick and poor, so much she would use to feed others, so much she would donate to God’s churches! And she would only leave a little for herself and Genka—for good deeds.

  Since their house was in the backwoods, it was constantly being robbed: the oven was broken, the stovetop stolen, the pots and dishes carried off, all in spite of the fact that Tatiana locked the door. Finally, even the front door was stolen, together with the lock. In short, they lost the house. And now she wanted to buy a dwelling place in a more inhabited area, ideally in a small town next to a monastery.

  But as soon as they broached this topic, Snegirev would again cut her off:

  “God is no bursar for you!”

  One time a famous Moscow conductor named Sergei was visiting them—I dare to add that he was one of the best choir conductors—and he said to them:

  “How are we to look at this, Gennadii Iakovlevich? If we look at it from the point of view that the Lord gives us all that we need, then in the metaphysical sense that’s how it is! In any case, I present as proof that the Lord sent me fifty rubles in a dire moment, and this money saved me and turned my whole life around. Would you like to hear the story?”

  “Yes, we would, tell us!” everyone expressed interest.

  “With pleasure. I used to be the very worst kind of punk, so low did I sink—I would get drunk with my girlfriends, paint the town. One time we were so drunk that we robbed Durov’s Animal Theater. Broke inside and stole—”

  “—a guinea pig?” one of us attempted a joke.

  “Well, no, we lifted a radio, traded it in for drink … By the way, I already had a wife and two small children at this point. And so my wife told me:

  “‘I don’t have any more strength to put up with you; if only I had never set eyes on you! Your children are starving here, we need to feed them, and all you do is drink from morning to night. Go away and don’t come back without money!’

  “Then she kicked me out.

  “I wandered the streets for a long time, because I had nowhere to go, no way to get any money; I just floated around like a dry leaf in the wind. Suddenly, I saw a little old woman with a cane, barely moving her legs trying to cross the street, while the cars continued on in an endless stream, making it impossible for her to cross. I came up to her: ‘Here, granny, let me help you.’ ‘Do, dear boy,’ she said, ‘or I’ll never make it to church.’ I led her across the street, placed her right next to the church, and she thanked me: ‘May the Lord save you, may He give you health! But why are you so sad? It seems like something is troubling you?’ ‘Well,’ I answered, ‘my wife kicked me out and told me not to come back without money, but I don’t have a job or anyone to ask for help.’ ‘Yes,’ the old woman sighed, ‘this is trouble indeed. What is your name?’ I told her. She nodded happily in return: ‘Then you must go to St Sergius right away in the Lavra. Turn to him—he will help you!’

  “I parted ways with the old lady and thought, maybe it was worth going to St Sergius after all, especially since I didn’t have anyone else. I reached the train station—ugh! I didn’t even have enough money for the ticket! So I decided to sneak on without paying. I arrived, and it turned out I would still have to walk a long way. Here I became filled with doubt—why did I listen to that old biddy? What had I done! I was not happy.

  “But still to the Lavra I went—since I had come this far, what was the point of turning around? I learned where the relics lay, parked myself next to them, and stood there, mentally crying out to the saint.

  “Soon, however, it was time to go home: the church was being locked up, the people were going their ways, and I turned homeward. I somehow reached my house, thinking—what if my wife kicks me out again? I still wasn’t bringing her back any money! Well, what was I expecting, really, when I went to the Lavra? I came up to the entrance and suddenly saw there an old friend whom I hadn’t seen in a long time pacing back and forth.

  “‘What are you doing here?’

  “‘Well, I came to see you, but your wife kicked me out. So I’ve been waiting for you here at the entrance. I brought you some money. Here. Fifty rubles. I borrowed it from you at one point and wasn’t able to pay you back, but now I came into some money. Here you are.’

  “And he handed me the fifty rubles. I couldn’t even remember that he had ever borrowed the
m from me!

  “I took the money, brought it to my wife, and we made up. The next day I was asked to sing in a small church choir. And so my life began to straighten out more and more … All this thanks to the venerable Sergius! Fifty rubles!”

  “Well,” I said, “I also have a story about exactly fifty rubles. But it involves St Nicholas the Wonderworker, not St Sergius.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” said the conductor. “I am Sergei, after all, and your last name is Nikolaeva. So go ahead.”

  “The children and I really wanted to visit our spiritual father in the Pskov Caves Monastery. It was summertime by then, and the children were just sitting around in humid Moscow—I needed to take them away somewhere, but the problem was that we didn’t have enough money. More to the point, we weren’t expecting to get any in the near future. So it was impossible to even borrow it from anyone.

  “At the time, we were attending the Church of the Mother of God of the Sign, which had many miracle-working icons. One of them—St Nicholas the Wonderworker—hung in the portico. Two priests who served in that church, Fr Vladimir Rozkhov and Fr Vladimir Rigin, had told me of its power to work miracles—‘Go to our icon of St Nicholas the Wonderworker there, he will help you.’ And so it was. He had helped me before in a difficult moment.

  “So I turned to him once again. I stood before him, lit a candle, and told him everything: this and that, my little ones were suffering in the city, our spiritual father was inviting us, my soul was longing to go there, but there was no money. Help, us please!

  “And my heart felt so light, as if I had just spoken to a close and beloved friend—he would definitely help us!