Ordinary Wonders

by Oloesia Nikolaeva

  And he shrank from his own boldness at saying these words to a dying man.

  Andrei Sinyavsky died on February 25, 1997.

  A very naïve man, upon hearing the story of these five months, exclaimed:

  “But why so little time?”

  In reality, it was neither too little nor too long. It was the exact time that God needed to take him—humble, meek, ready, fully matured, like an exquisite fruit—to His eternal abode.

  Fr Vladimir, also, grew in his faith in the miraculous power of the Church Mysteries, that cured, healed, and gladdened the heart of the suffering man.

  Mysteries beyond the Grave

  In the Gospel parable of the rich man and Lazarus, the possibility of communication between the living and the dead is refered to directly by Abraham himself, who says from his resting place in the “bosom of Abraham”: “Between us and you there is a great gulf fixed, so that those who want to pass from here to you cannot, nor can those from there pass to us” (Lk 16:26).

  And yet miraculous events occur from time to time. Countless incredible stories witnessing to just how fine, even transparent, the line is which divides this world from the next have been collected in the book Eternal Mysteries Beyond the Grave, by Archimandrite Panteleimon.1 Or in the book From the Mysterious Realm, Archpriest Grigorii D’iachenko related to us the multitude of strange reports of the dead giving the living, whom they continued to love, fateful signs. They warn them of danger, or ask help for themselves, or simply send messages of love! Brother has appeared to brother to inform him of his death, son has appeared to mother to warn her of her own impending journey to the next world, and the deceased husband has appeared to his wife to ask for her fervent prayer.

  And what these things were, are, and will be—whether it is the ability to see on the part of the living or the angels bringing comfort to those in mourning—God knows! But these instances also took place with people close to me, people very near to me.

  Maria Vasilievna Rozanova and her husband Andrei Sinyavsky spent almost fifty years together. Of course, Maria Vasilievna thought the whole world of him, so great was her love for him. And then he died …

  His funeral took place, and she buried him in the cemetery at Fontenay-aux-Roses, not far from their house.

  Winter passed and spring came. The snow melted, the rivers swelled, the birds began to sing, the fountains gushed out with golden fish sparkling in their waters, but Maria Vasilievna had no peace at heart, she was disturbed—Sinyavsky was appearing to her in her sleep almost every night looking unwell, uneasy: things were clearly not going well for him and he was in torment, asking something of her.

  Maria Vasilievna couldn’t bear it any longer—she went to the cemetery, taking with her as translator a Russian parishioner who was an old friend.

  They came to the cemetery manager, and Maria Vasilievna began to insist that her husband’s body be exhumed, because she had to make sure that everything was alright.

  But the funeral director simply shrugged his shoulders: this was such a complicated procedure! And what was she expecting to see? Moreover, madame herself had wanted her husband to be buried in the ground instead of in a crypt. It was especially difficult to dig up graves in the spring: if the groundwater rose, it would be impossible to dig through that slush!

  But Maria Vasilievna was adamant:

  “I can feel that Sinyavsky is not doing well down there! Something bad happened to him … He wouldn’t come to me in such agitation for no reason!”

  What could they do? This cemetery manager sighed, sighed some more, shook his head, clicked his tongue, but there was nothing to be done, so he appointed the day of exhumation. The gravediggers crowded together at the grave of the Russian writer, and next to them stood the loyal Maria Vasilievna with her friend.

  “Madame, kindly step back—this sight is not for the faint of heart!” The cemetery manager entreated her. “The gravediggers will see themselves if something is not right. There’s no need for you to look inside.”

  “Well, I like that!” fretted Maria Vasilievna. “Did I spend half a century with my husband only to desert him in a difficult moment! Dig on, please.”

  The gravediggers took to the earth with their shovels, and had already gone far down when Maria Vasilievna heard the exclamation—timid and quiet at first but growing more and more in number and volume: “Police! Police!”

  She glanced down into the dug-up grave and was horrified: the groundwater had washed over the grave so much that the lid was not only moved to the side but had cracked, showing the interior lining …

  “Well, there we have it!” said Maria Vasilievna. “He didn’t come to me in vain! That’s how wretched he was down there!”

  The police came, extracted the coffin, placed the body in a new one, and reburied him, this time in a crypt. After that, Andrei Donatovich stopped appearing to his beloved wife in her dreams. She understood this to mean that he was finally at rest and settled in a dry place, “in a place of light, in a place of green pasture, in a place of repose,” a place “whence all sickness, sorrow, and sighing are fled away.”2

  One wants to repeat again and again in response to this, being filled with the meaning of the words: truly “He is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living!” (Mk 12:27).

  Augustine

  I’ve already written an entire poem about this. And the abbot of Sretensky Monastery, Bishop Tikhon, who was one of the players in this story, wrote about it in his memoirs. Nonetheless, I would like to return to this subject once more and tell it how I witnessed it.

  Once I came to my father confessor in the monastery. He saw me and was dismayed:

  “What, you’re here? I’ve just sent a young monk to see you. He is an ascetic from the Caucasus Mountains. Please help him, he doesn’t have a passport, and without any documents they won’t take him into the monastery. He’s already been to the Lavra, and then wanted to stay here, but there’s no way! Think of some way to make him legal! His name is Augustine. He’s a person with a very developed spiritual life. I myself asked to be remembered in his anchorite prayers.”

  The word of my father confessor was law to me. So I returned home to save this young monk. I arrived to see him already sitting in our kitchen, drinking tea with my children, surrounded by several men in cassocks— priests and hieromonks—awaiting his stories about the ascetics of the Caucasus Mountains.

  This was his story.

  When he was seven years old, he was sent from Moscow with his mother to the Caucasus Mountains, where they began their ascetic journey under the direction of a certain spiritual ascetic elder. This elder tonsured the mother, then tonsured the boy, and they lived under God’s protection, in fervent prayer, and by the work of their hands—they planted a garden, kept bees, had goats, cows, and even cats. When Augustine turned sixteen and it was high time for him to get his passport, the elder didn’t give him his blessing and said that he himself had destroyed his own passport—a document of the antichrist—a long time ago. Then Augustine’s mother also destroyed hers. She just took it and burned it. This was the tradition among the Caucasus ascetics, for they saw in the hammer-and-sickle-inscribed Soviet passport the mark of the antichrist.

  The elder soon peacefully reposed in the Lord, and they remained completely alone, but continued to live as they had in the elder’s presence—by prayers, fasting, and work.

  The problem was that no matter how precipitous were the paths leading to their humble cell, they still came across certain wandering monks, pilgrims, hunters, vagabonds, and criminals there. They were also susceptible to cutthroats—Islamized Greeks who would steal a goat or a jar of honey or take off with all the potatoes.

  And suddenly the following tragic story took place: one of these Greeks was shot, and it was suspected that the murderer was a hunter who at times stopped by the hut of Augustine and his mother. There the other Greeks went in order to catch him and kill him, but he had already gone somewhere else on his own. Augu
stine was fixing a bridge over a ravine, and his mother was alone. They began to torture her to find out where the hunter went and when he would return, and even threatened to rape her if she didn’t tell them. The old nun was so shaken by their threats that she cried out:

  “Better burn me alive than to do that to me!”

  And so one of them poked her with a burning torch, apparently as a warning, because when she suddenly caught on fire, they got scared and tried to extinguish the fire. But as she had many layers wrapped and wound around her—her cassock, ryassa—the fire grew in intensity, and there was no water nearby, so they ran away in terror.

  Augustine sensed that something was wrong—a distinct and nagging thought led him to abandon his unfinished work and return home. He saw from a distance the four criminals hurriedly descending the path leading from the hut and recognized the evildoers. But they also noticed him. He found his mother still alive: she was writhing on the floor near death, but she managed to bless him and order him to flee that place.

  This was a true story—I not only heard it from Augustine in my kitchen, but also read about it in the book In the Caucasus Mountains.

  And so, he buried his mother, came down from the mountains, set off for Sukhumi, and went straight to the church, where some nuns that he knew were laboring. He lived with them for several days, and then they told him:

  “It’s not safe for you to stay here. They’re looking for you. Several severe-looking men have already come here and were studying you and asking about you. Here is some money for you: go to the Holy Trinity Lavra of St Sergius. There are still elders there to this very day.”

  He did as they told him. He arrived at the Lavra, came to Elder Kirill and Elder Naum, and they said to him:

  “They won’t admit you here to the monastery without a passport. The authorities watch us like hawks. Go to the Pskov Caves Monastery, they are more lax there. Maybe they will take you.”

  He did so. He stayed with one of the Pechory elders and with my father confessor, and met some of the other monks. The elder tried to talk to the Father Superior about him—this and that, such a kind novice, no passport. But the Father Superior—at the time it was Archimandrite Gabriel—categorically refused. What could he do? My father confessor felt sorry for him and sent him to Moscow to us: perhaps we could think of something in our capital city.

  And so, when Augustine got settled in our home, a multitude of believers began to throng to him as an ascetic from the Caucasus Mountains. There were among them monks from the Lavra, Moscow priests, and simply zealous laypeople longing for the angelic life.

  The future abbot of the Sretensky Monastery in Moscow, Bishop Tikhon, who was then Gosha Shevkunov, was also in their number. Everyone wanted to hear Augustine’s stories of asceticism, draw near to his holy life, and partake in his grace.

  The humble monk talked to them and told them everything, lifting his pure dovelike eyes to the pious and grateful listeners.

  However, it was time to do something for him in return. The simplest way would be to go straight to the police and explain everything: here was so-and-so, who lived as a monk in the mountainous desert, where no passports are issued, which is why he never got one, so let’s fix the situation. If we have to pay a fee, we’ll pay a fee.

  But this plan was soon nixed. It was still Soviet times, and the authorities hunted for monks who lived without passports in the impassable and inaccessible Caucasus Mountains. You had to know the paths in order to find your way there, and no one had the desire to enlighten the police in this matter. So even if Augustine had gone and surrendered himself, they would have forced him to reveal these secret pathways and show them where all the elders lived.

  Moreover, he was already twenty years old and as such was in danger of criminal charges for breaking passport laws and evading military service, and could even possibly be drafted into the army, but as a monk he could not fulfill his military duty by bearing arms. So that meant going to the police was no longer an option, at least by simply walking in. But perhaps we could try to approach it from another angle, i.e., through a connection.

  The only person in our acquaintance who had a connection with the Ministry of Internal Affairs was the famous mystery novelist Arkadii Vainer—he had worked for Moscow Criminal Intelligence before becoming a writer. He was my neighbor, one entrance over, was friends with my parents, and liked my poetry. I went to see him. He listened to me with obvious interest: he had apparently never dealt with such subjects before—ascetics, hermits, hunters, Islamized Greeks. It was all so exotic! But in the end he firmly said:

  “No, he mustn’t turn himself in under any circumstances. He will be of interest to not only the police but the committee members also. They’re going to reopen all the cold cases from the Caucasus—you know how many unsolved cases they have in connection with that area—and they’ll definitely find something to pin on him. You can try to go the psychiatric route—he lost his memory, his mother died, now he can’t remember who, what, where, or how. They’ll hold on to him for a while, then they’ll release him after fixing his passport. Of course, it would be good to find a psychiatrist among your acquaintances, so that he could oversee the entire matter, otherwise they’ll shoot him up and inject him with all sorts of drugs, and he will lose his memory for sure, along with any reasoning.”

  I did have one such psychiatrist in mind—a beacon of psychiatry who had written his dissertation on the psychological rehabilitation of astronauts. He conducted himself, even looked like, a character from a popular joke—he was constantly scratching himself, spitting, snorting, whistling, grunting, stammering, and even occasionally crossing his eyes. When he heard the story of Augustine and the idea of the famous mystery novelist to claim memory loss, he immediately rejected the plan.

  “They administer such tests there now that he’ll give up all the information whether he wants to or not. Then what? They’ll sink their claws into him like a tasty treat and start tearing him to shreds. Look at it like this: he is a person who grew up in naturally antisocial circumstances, without a whiff of the Soviet regime or school of thought. Like Mowgli,1 let’s say. My colleagues will start examining him, writing dissertations on him, victimizing him to death, and then diagnose him with religious delusion. No, you can’t send him to the psychiatrists under any circumstance.”

  All right. Then, perhaps, some person of high rank and importance could help us out, someone with access to the top. He could write some sort of request: I am asking for an exception to be made, in view of my service to the Fatherland … To whom could I personally appeal with such a request? Alla Pugacheva? Bulat Okudzhava? The astronaut Sevastyanov? The sports commentator Nikolai Ozerov, who lived a floor immediately below us? Hero of the Soviet Union Heinrich Hoffmann? Muslim Magomaev? Or better—Yevtushenko. He had been a patron in the past, always signing any petitions that I brought to him. Let him defend a poor monk this time.

  So I called Yevgeny Aleksandrovich, by some miracle reaching him in Moscow—he had just returned from somewhere and was supposed to leave somewhere else at any moment, and this evening—his only evening here—he had a meeting planned with the renowned English writer, Graham Greene, in the banquet hall of the Central House of Writers. So that’s where I went. I sat down right in between the two of them and began a spontaneous conversation with them. By the way, I had read Graham Greene back in school, and so I felt it in my right to just sit down like that without an invitation next to the renowned English author: I was a reader of his, after all!

  Finally Yevtushenko asked:

  “Well, what do you have that’s so urgent?”

  I told him everything.

  “All right,” he responded. I think he even liked that I had appealed to him on such a daring subject. “But officially, nothing will come out of it: you exaggerate my abilities.”

  “Then let’s try the option with the false passport,” I offered. “It can’t be that you, a National Poet, don’t know the right people.” />
  Flattered, he even blushed a little.

  “Fine,” he said, glancing to the side almost conspiratorially. He covered his mouth with his fingers and mumbled through the cracks: “I’ll put you in touch with my chauffeur—perhaps he’ll come up with something.”

  “Bring me a passport under any man’s name, it doesn’t matter whose, and a photograph of your guy,” nodded the chauffeur. “I’ll give it to the proper parties, they’ll take off the existing photograph and attach the new one, then forge the seal.”

  “And that’s all?

  “That’s all.”

  “And where am I supposed to get this passport under any man’s name?” He shrugged.

  “That’s your business—I don’t know. Steal it from somebody.”

  I began to rack my brains to think whose passport I could steal, and do so with the least possible consequences for the owner, when the plan for Augustine’s salvation changed.

  The future abbot of Sretensky Monastery, Bishop Tikhon—then simply Gosha—was friends with Zurab Chavchavadze, a relative of the Catholicos-Patriarch of All Georgia Ilia. He offered to take Augustine to the Patriarch personally: after all, the Caucasus Mountains were under his canonical jurisdiction, and he could help with issuing a passport for the humble monk without any further questions.

  This plan was unanimously accepted by all persons involved in Augustine’s fate, and Augustine himself was supposed to depart in the near future together with Zurab and Gosha to Tbilisi. Only days remained until the salvation of Augustine would be secured.

  His departure, however, was put off for a while for technical reasons: Gosha, who worked at the time for the Publications Department of the Moscow Patriarchate and stood at the fountainhead of Orthodox cinema, was appropriately shooting a film about Russia and Georgia—Orthodox sister-countries, of which Russia represented bread, and Georgia represented wine—which came together in the mystery of the Eucharist and became the Body and Blood of Christ. He was planning to shoot the section about wine in Georgia, but it was too late to film the Russian bread, i.e., stalks of wheat: the harvest had already been gathered. The only place where the wheat had not yet been harvested was in the Omsk Diocese. It was imperative to go there right away or they would miss that opportunity as well: nothing but a snowy field would be left. So Gosha flew there.