Ordinary Wonders

by Oloesia Nikolaeva

  “Right now you will reach Rybinsk very quickly. You won’t have time to freeze, or get tired, or be afraid.”

  And he blessed me with a wide sign of the cross.

  “As for you,” he said to Boria, “come and see again!”

  It was light, sunny, quiet, and frosty. The snow shone in the sun so much that it hurt to lift up our eyes to it. Lightly packed with pirogi from Fr Sergii, we reached the tractor trail, now generously swept over with snow, and went along it.

  However, how we went! Oh, how we went! As if someone picked us up by the armpits, we began to lightly and intently approach the highway, flying over the ground in enormous leaps and bounds. Even the agnostic Boria admitted that something miraculous was taking place.

  “Boria, don’t you feel like something is carrying us? Like we are flying?”

  He gazed around in wonder.

  “Boots of swiftness!” he recalled the fairy tale.

  And he looked around with the wide-open eyes of a child. In them the large pieces of ice had melted and were now replaced with swimming, joyful golden fish.

  As soon as we reached the highway and climbed out of the ditch, a Zaporozhets pulled over.

  “Where are we going, young folks?”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To Rybinsk.”

  And so we drove along in that cozy warm Zaporozhets, not rushing anywhere, simply taking in the surrounding view—the enormous forests of fir trees, the mighty pine forests. And the sun! And everything covered by the newborn snow! The purity! The clean air! The blessed waters! “The earth is the Lord’s, and all its fullness!” (1 Cor 10:26).

  The next day, I was back in Moscow.

  “Well, did you feed our dear Fr Sergii? Did you give him some support?” asked my husband.

  “No,” I replied. “He has everything he needs there! He’s the one who fed and supported me. I simply came and saw.”

  Bring Back My Husband

  My friend Asya’s husband left her, and it happened quite dramatically. Not long before that, they had moved with their two teenagers to Moscow, since with the beginning of perestroika1 there was growing unemployment in their native town, and in any case it would be better for their gifted children to study at a big city university.

  They were renting a small apartment in a Khruschev-era prefab on the edge of Moscow; the husband was trying to start some sort of business, but it wasn’t working out well, and their main concern was now to earn enough to survive. In addition, it came to light that he had taken a lover. You couldn’t say that she was rich, but she was a Muscovite, with an apartment, work, and a good career. She supported herself. And most importantly—she was young.

  There was no end to my friend’s despair. It completely filled her and seemed to spill over the brim, threatening to flood everything and everyone around her—first and foremost, naturally, those who were in her immediate vicinity. When I was around her, I physically sensed that I was being drawn into some sort of depressing, heavy force field. We had to do something about it.

  “I think you should fight it!” I would tell her. “Imagine that you are a maiden warrior, and you are going to battle with a dragon who has bewitched and taken prisoner your Ivan the Fool.”

  “But how do I fight it? How?” she would ask, wiping away a tear. “I only want one thing—to take a stick and hit this young thing several times over the head! We lived so well, we loved each other so much, we have wonderful children, and then she came along … that tramp!”

  So Asya’s dream went no farther than beating up her rival—only the weapon changed—whether it was sticks, stones, or simply fists.

  “That’s a bad plan. It won’t get you anywhere,” I would categorically protest. “First of all, you would be found the guilty party. You would look like a crazy troublemaker, and she would end up the victim. And then, if you attack her, it’s not clear who would come out on top: look how fit she is, she probably knocks down bowling pins every evening at the bowling alley; look at her biceps, calves, strength, height, and finally, age. What if she takes away that stick from you and cudgels you over the head with it?”

  “Well then, how am I supposed to fight her?” sobbed the frightened Asya. “As it is, I’m fighting her with dignity.”

  “That’s good. But it would be even better to fight her on a spiritual level. Pray to the Lord, to the Mother of God, to the saints, go and complain to them: help me with so and so! But you must pray for her too—what a sin she is committing!”

  “No,” Asya firmly shook her head. “I will of course pray and ask God for help, but I will never pray for that adulteress! Let God punish her! Do you happen to know any stories where a husband left his wife and children for a home-wrecker, and then by the prayers of the wife the Lord brought back the husband?”

  “Yes, of course I do. I know a story just like that.”

  “Well, tell me!”

  “I had two classmates, Petya and Masha. Even before kindergarten, they were in the same preschool group, and Masha, as she tells it, sitting on the potty next to Petya, fell in love with him then and decided to become his wife. But she never really managed to get his attention in school, and no romance developed then. After their graduation ball, they went with their former classmates to someone’s dacha, spent the night there, and Masha, as they say, begat in her womb, which she soon announced to the future father.

  “Petya was devastated, but, as an honest man, he promised to marry her. He said as much to his parents:

  “‘I am going to have a child. As an honest man, I am bound to marry.’

  “His parents were, honestly speaking, horrified. The seventeen-year-old Petya—a musician who had just been accepted into the conservatory—what good could come of his getting married? Of course, they immediately began to hate Masha. But what was there to do? They hosted the wedding, Masha gave birth, and their baby died right there in the birthing clinic.

  “And so everything returned to the situation as before: Petya lived with his parents, Masha with her grandmother, living their separate lives. Now and then Masha would visit her young husband and bake pirogi for him.

  “So a year passed, then another. Petya had various friends, girlfriends, his own circle: artists, musicians, no match for that poor Masha. But Masha still came over sometimes, and baked pirogi. And so, at one point, his parents were leaving on vacation, and Petya was also supposed to go on tour, leaving their cat and many plants unattended at home. So they asked Masha as part of the family to stop by from time to time in their absence to feed the cat and water the plants. And Masha did. One evening, she came across Petya, who had just returned from his trip; they drank some tea together, talking about this and that. Well, in short, she conceived again after that. Well, what about it? She was his lawful wife, after all!

  “She gave birth to a daughter nine months later, although she and Petya continued to live in separate places as before. Now she came to his house with their daughter, baked pirogi, and went home.

  “But then Petya fell in love with his classmate, fell so hard! She was such a beauty! Also a musician, a violin player. And he simply radiated with joy. Now this musician hardly ever left his side. Then, Masha and her daughter appeared on the doorstep. What’s more, some fool had advised Masha to shave her daughter’s head, saying that her hair would grow better that way. Her daughter was such a thin, pale, sorry, scared little thing, and now bald on top of it all! And Petya threw them out. He told them not to come again without calling first.

  “I saw them then, since we shared an entryway with Petya. There they stood, God’s little birds, in old clothing, both of them skin and bones, tears in their eyes, lips trembling. I brought them inside. We sat with Masha, talked, she told us everything about herself and I about myself: how I had recently been baptized and baptized my children. Then Masha said:

  “‘Help us to get baptized too! We are also Christians.’

  “I took them to church, where Fr Valeriian Krechetov served, and
he baptized them. Before baptism, Masha looked like a plucked chicken, all slouched over and clumsy, but she emerged from the font a beauty: her eyes shone with heavenly light and purity! Never again did I see such a clear transformation in a person, though I witnessed many people’s baptisms.

  “Masha began to visit me often with her daughter. One time, she ran in, completely in shock, crying. What happened? It turned out that she had run into that musician-girlfriend of Petya’s in the entryway—violin in hand, looking the victor, all in white, radiating happiness, success, freedom, love. While Masha, the wife of sorts, if at all, with a small anxious child, stood before her in mended tights and an old faded skirt. The former said to her:

  “‘If you are coming to see us, then we are leaving!’

  “Masha only said:

  “‘We’re not here to see you!’

  “And she broke into tears on my doorstep.

  “We began to pray together. We went to the Martyr Tryphon, both in tears, and to St Nicholas. We shed tears before several miracle-working icons of the Mother of God.

  “Some time passed. By all accounts, the violinist left Petya —I suddenly stopped seeing her in our entryway. Petya’s father was taken to the emergency unit. His mother suffered a stroke. Petya would rush back and forth between the hospital and his patient lying at home. And then he saw Masha with their daughter in the courtyard …

  “Masha moved in with Petya to look after his mother. They released his father from the hospital—she stayed to cook for them. Suddenly, Petya received a notice to appear for military service—they threatened to take Petya, a musician, with his golden fingers, into the army!

  “What was there to do? Masha successfully gave birth to his second child in nine months. Now with two children, Petya feared no military enlistment office. And while Petya hid from the army in the small hospital, Masha got so settled in his house that she gave birth to a third child.

  “Now they have been married for thirty-five years. Their children have grown up, and they have children of their own. Now it’s difficult to even imagine that this family had been in such chaos and disorder at any time.”

  “Well …” said Asya. “Now I understand how I need to fight!”

  She took down my list of those wonderworking icons through which Masha had received God’s help, and committed herself to feats of prayer, begging God to bring back her husband. I believed that the Lord would help her.

  But then she met an “interesting man” whom she liked and who began to court her; they even spent the night together at his place. Afterwards, they parted ways in bad blood, and her husband never returned to her.

  “You see,” Asya told me recently, “the Lord helped your Masha, sending her trials through which she could prove herself a true wife. That is why she emerged victorious. But I tripped over the first temptation and have remained alone. After that I couldn’t even bring myself to ask God to bring my husband back to me, since I myself had shown him that I didn’t really need him, that there were other options, that maybe there was someone else for me!”

  That was how she understood it.

  The Apple of My Eye

  Since Soviet times, a strange prejudice against priests became rooted in the consciousness of our citizens. I have heard several times from considerably enlightened people that those “pops”1 have “epaulets under their cassocks”2 and that all they do is look for opportunities to give away secrets collected during confession to the appropriate authorities: this man confessed to weakness of faith, this one breaks the fast, prays indifferently, gets annoyed easily, fights with his neighbors, is vainglorious, is guilty of idle talk … then those authorities use this good information, etc., …

  I even found myself in situations where I couldn’t convince believers in dire need of a priest’s help to turn to one of the kind pastors that I knew well.

  I remember when in the 1980s my former classmate at the Literature Institute, Pavel Protsenko, was arrested, and his wife came to Moscow to appeal for his release. I could not convince her to go to see a priest. It was surprising, because Pavel himself was a believer even before I had been baptized. Also, he had been arrested for gathering materials for the canonization of the New Martyrs, who had suffered bloody persecution at the hands of the Soviet atheists, and this wife of his was more or less a church-going person. But to each of my offers to go to this priest, who was completely trustworthy, or that elder, who had been imprisoned in Stalin’s concentration camps for the faith, she firmly shook her head:

  “That one? He sold himself to the authorities a long time ago! As for the other one, you can’t pin him down as one thing or another!”

  Strangely, she placed more hope in Soviet writers and asked them to collectively gather signatures on a petition in defense of Pavel. This letter was signed by Yevtushenko, Bitov, Averintsev, and several others, and soon his release was indeed secured.

  A similar attitude toward the godly priests was also adopted by the recently returned from exile Zoya Krakhmalnikova. She had asked me which priest she could go to for advice, and I named quite a few who had prayed for the “imprisoned Zoya” at Divine Liturgy every day during her confinement, as was the case at the Holy Trinity Lavra of St Sergius, where the deacon read out her name from the solea.

  Yet whomever I named, in her eyes they were all “agents,” “secret informants,” or “former KGB.” Rejecting the candidacy of the holy person and elder Archimandrite Kirill Pavlov (“Olesia, he is a father confessor at the Lavra, how do you think he got that position?”), she rested her choice on Fr Ioann (Krestiankin) (“He did time? Good. He serves in the countryside? Good.”) and wrote him a letter with the request to come and speak with him.

  I delivered this letter to Fr Ioann, and he needed no explanation of who Zoya Krakhmalnikova was.

  “Zoinka! Zoinka wrote me a letter, well, I will write her one back! Here are some holy items for her, and some gifts!”

  And he began to circle around his cell, assembling a package “for our favorite Zoinka.” He gathered a whole packet of little icons, booklets, spiritual sayings of the holy fathers, little bottles with holy oil and holy water, and candles, and wrote her a note “with blessings.” With all this, I departed.

  But “Zoinka,” when I handed her these gifts, was disillusioned. As it turned out, Fr Ioann did not advise her to come to him in the Pskov Caves Monastery. Why not? God knows. He obviously had some spiritual reasons of his own.

  But Zoya Aleksandrovna understood it to mean one thing: the elder was simply afraid to see her. Yes, this was her typical, if not conclusive, disappointment in “churchgoers!” Before that, she had already become disillusioned by Vladyka Anthony, Metropolitan of Sourozh, himself.

  My husband and I were shocked by this confession, as we loved and respected Vladyka very much.

  “What did he do to disappoint you so much?”

  It turned out that those near and dear to Zoya Aleksandrova had asked Vladyka to write a letter of protest after her arrest, and he said that he would write no such letter, but that he would pray for her at the altar table. This was the reason for her disillusionment in him as a pastor and bishop! Zoya Aleksandrovna assumed that he “got scared.”

  Knowing the power of Vladyka’s prayer, my husband and I couldn’t help but simultaneously cry out in protest:

  “Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s! (Mt 22:21). Maybe that’s how perestroika came about, so that you would be released, Zoya Aleksandrovna, by Vladyka’s prayers!”

  But, alas! She did not reach the same conclusions. The whole paradox—and this was to her detriment—was that, having indeed suffered for the sake of God’s word, which she had spread in a godless country by releasing the underground journal Nadezhda3, she still didn’t manage to become a churchgoing person. Having gone through the journey of a martyr and confessor, she was at best a neophyte. Before her arrest, she had by all accounts not had time to partake of the spir
itual life of the church, to perceive it specifically as the mystical Body of Christ. And after her arrest, her Soviet dissident prejudices stood in the way of her spiritual journey: “All those pops have epaulets under their cassocks.”

  This is the only way I can explain her ultimate fate, when first she angrily denounced the Church on the pages of liberal newspapers, and then later completely turned away from it and joined a sect.

  Bulat Shalvovich Okudzhava4 was even afraid of her after she took to aggressively accusing and instructing him. He showed me how he would weakly shrink back into an armchair while she stood in front of him, waving her arms and accusing him like an enraged Fury. By the way, when he and I spoke about Orthodoxy and the Church, he, cringing nervously and remembering Krakhmalnikova, spoke of church aggression, forcefulness, “stylistic Sovietism,” as all being in contrast to, for example, the elegance and intellectual refinement of émigré nuns and aristocrats—by this he was recalling his visit to the Monastery of St Mary Magdalene, Equal-to-the-Apostles, belonging to the (non-Soviet) Church Abroad. I even suggested to him, since he felt that way, that he be baptized by the Church Abroad.

  In short, the opinion of the “outside world” about priests was often very unflattering and derogatory. But I, being personally acquainted with numerous priests—in Moscow, in the countryside, in monasteries, in cities, in villages—want to say that this was very unfair.

  Yes, I, too, had instances when a priest’s behavior proved unworthy of his rank. But either these were isolated instances—“slip-ups” uncharacteristic of that person, even—or as if the Church itself was purging him from its body.

  In addition, a priest as a sinful man is one matter—“He who is without sin among you, let him throw a stone at [him] her first” (Jn 8:7)—but a priest as a celebrant of Mysteries is another matter altogether. There have been times when a person was in his own way rather primitive and flat, but as soon as he put on his epitrachelion and cuffs, and came out, let’s say, for confession or to celebrate a Mystery, he would be transformed and become a beholder of the mysterious and spiritual. The power of God would dawn upon him and prophecies would issue from his lips.