Ordinary Wonders

by Oloesia Nikolaeva

  In the meantime, the uncertainty and anticipation was eating away at Augustine, who became more and more distressed. It increasingly seemed to him that he was being driven into a corner from every side. I expressed my surprise at his uncertainty in reading the Psalter, for example, when his reading of the Six Psalms was as smooth as butter; or when my husband became perplexed that in spite of his spending the first seven years of his life in Moscow, he didn’t remember either any street names or any metro stations. Moreover, we couldn’t understand why he spoke with a Rostov accent. That upset Augustine. But my husband came to his rescue himself:

  “Perhaps your elder spoke with that accent? Was he from the south of Russia originally?”

  “Yes, yes,” the other said happily. “That’s exactly where he was from. And I simply mimicked him. He was from the Rostov area.”

  Then our friend—a hieromonk from the Lavra, a future archbishop, who visited us in order to hear the stories of asceticism—began to share his suspicions with us: what if this Augustine was actually an errand boy sent in an operation by the Secret Service to find out if the Church had any channels for preparing false passports?

  All these vibes filled the air, and even Augustine fell into an agitated, depressed state and hung out on the balcony all day, which he was categorically forbidden to do—he could have been observed in his cassock, then someone could come by and ask: “Who was that? What kind of a priest is he? Your documents, please?” Our house was, after all, under special observation, because across from us lived the political refugee Luis Corvalan, and in our immediate proximity was located the window of a Greek billionaire’s daughter, Christina Onassis, who had married a Soviet citizen.

  Not only did Augustine hang out on the balcony, but he also loudly commented on the passersby. He saw a young woman in white trousers in the neighboring entryway and barked:

  “What a cow!”

  He looked into the unshuttered window of an American millionaire’s daughter and yelled:

  “How shameless! She’s walking around naked!”

  He also noticed a certain love triangle unfolding right underneath our balcony: a bald man would roll up to the entry doors in his car and let a young girl out. They would kiss and he would drive off. As soon as he was out of sight, a young guy would appear on his motorcycle. The same girl would give him a kiss on the cheek, jump onto the motorcycle, and they would disappear in a trail of dust until the middle of the night. Then, the next day, the bald man would again drive up in his car, and the girl, as if nothing was going on, as if there was no such man on the motorcycle, would hop into his car!

  These womanly wiles tormented Augustine! He would wear himself out standing guard on the balcony. He even began to throw clumps of soil from the flowerpots onto the girl so that she would come to her senses. And who knows what our monk, outraged to the core, would have decided to do next had not my husband distracted him from the matter.

  For he decided, while there was still time, to drive Augustine to a pious elder. This would allow him to be spiritually strengthened for the upcoming journey, to pray, confess to him, receive his blessing, and set off for his new life with renewed strength.

  Elder Seraphim (Tiapochkin) had, alas, already passed away, but his spiritual father, also an elder, Schema-Archimandrite Grigorii, lived in that same Belgorod Diocese, in the village of Pokrovka.

  At one time in the past, my husband, then just Volodia, had gone to Pokrovka: our father confessor had painted the frescoes in the church there. My husband had gone to visit him there. But there was nobody in the church, and he walked into the priest’s house—it was empty. Then he went through to the innermost room, assuming that someone might be there. But he didn’t see anyone there either. He was about to turn around to leave, when he heard:

  “Fr Vladimir, what are you doing, walking in like that without saying a prayer?”

  He looked around and suddenly saw a little dried-up old man sitting on the couch. It was Schema-Archimandrite Grigorii. My husband decided that he had called him “Father” in some sort of spiritual delusion, but he was astounded and baffled by the fact that he had called him by his name upon seeing him for the first time …

  So he and Augustine went to this wonderful Elder Grigorii. They arrived, and my husband said:

  “Here, Fr Grigorii, I’ve brought you a monk. He came down from the Caucasus Mountains, where it’s not the custom for them to have Soviet documents. But here a passport is needed everywhere, they won’t even take him into a monastery without it.”

  The elder looked at Augustine and simply waved his hand:

  “He’s no monk!”

  Augustine smiled uneasily and became nervous, but my husband simply assumed that the elder had spoken in that way out of monastic etiquette. Well, in the lives of the saints, for example, this happened to the desert dwellers. Let’s say that a Father of great spiritual stature was dying, and he would say to himself: “I’m no monk! I haven’t even gotten started!”

  So the elder was humbling Augustine in the same manner. He knew better than anyone how best to discipline a young monk.

  Then Fr Grigorii added:

  “He doesn’t observe the monastic oath, he doesn’t keep the monastic rule. He’s an impostor—that’s what! He threw someone else’s cassock onto himself, pulled on someone else’s ryassa—there you have it!”

  My husband nodded knowingly, but Augustine squirmed where he stood.

  “Well, we’re thinking of sending him to the Georgian Patriarch. Give us your blessing to do this!” my husband entreated him.

  “To the Georgian Patriarch?” the elder was amazed. “Why on earth would he give himself up to the Patriarch? It’s useless!”

  “It won’t work?” asked my husband in fear.

  “Useless!” the elder waved his hand again.

  “What are we to do?”

  “Why waste your time, hand him over to the police and have done with it. When you leave Pokrovka for Belgorod, the first policeman you see, go ahead and hand over your monk to him.”

  “Well,” thought my husband, “the elder’s gone mad!”

  “But they’ll throw him in prison!”

  “All the better,” Fr Grigorii nodded his head in approval. “Good riddance!”

  Shocked, my husband did not, of course, hand Augustine over to any policeman, but brought him back safe and sound to our home in Moscow. But he remained deeply concerned.

  In the meantime, the future abbot of Sretensky Monastery, still Gosha at the time, had successfully, if belatedly, filmed the fields of wheat and was now on his way to the airport to fly to Moscow, accompanied by the subdeacon of the Bishop of Omsk. The flight was delayed, and the young subdeacon was noticeably unsure of whether or not to leave the Moscow guest, to whom his bishop had assigned him, on his own. So, walking around the departures area, they came up to a fateful desk on which was written the word “Wanted.” It was accompanied by photographs of criminals.

  “By the way,” the subdeacon suddenly livened up, seizing the opportunity to start a conversation, “there was a con artist here. He set himself up to work as a reader in our church, and then robbed both the church and the priest who had taken him in. He took the Gospel in its cover with precious stones, the censer, money from the church collection box, and the priest’s cassock and documents: his passport, birth certificate, seminary diploma. Recently one of our people saw him in the Lavra itself! He was apparently walking around there in a cassock and passing himself off as Monk Augustine. What wonders!”

  That day, we had gathered together to see Augustine off—Zurab Chavchavadze came, and we were waiting for Gosha, who had just arrived from Omsk. He came, looking very mysterious, and right away took off with my husband to the store:

  “Let’s go buy something, there’s nothing to eat here!”

  “We have everything we need. Why?”

  He led him away. It turned out to be a maneuver: he just wanted to tell him everything that he had discovered
without raising Augustine’s suspicions.

  “We need to take him away from the house under some plausible pretext and search his things: what if he has a gun, you never know!”

  My husband called our friend, a hieromonk from the Lavra, a future archbishop, and asked his help. He had the monastery car and was able to come fairly quickly. He immediately understood his task.

  “I’ve been asked to examine some icons—to check if they’re genuinely old or a forgery. Do you want to come with me?” he asked Augustine, and they left together.

  In the meantime, we dug through the belongings of our monk and, sure enough, found the stolen passport of the Omsk priest, his birth certificate, diploma, cross, Gospel in its valuable cover—in short, the thief had been discovered and caught red-handed.

  When the future archbishop returned, the future abbot of Sretensky Monastery called everyone together in the room, locked the door, and began his speech so intriguingly, with such dramatic flair and masterful presentation of the storyline, that he created a perfect atmosphere for the moment of truth and the promise of exposure and catharsis.

  Augustine sat, tense and red in the face.

  “Well, now it’s your turn to tell us everything, Serezha,” the future bishop turned to him.

  It turned out that he was not a monk and not named Augustine, but was simply called Serezha. He had served in the army and worked in the storage depot, and the military instructor who was his supervisor was a thief. Suddenly an inspection was announced, so Serezha got scared and ran away. He was serving somewhere in the south of Russia. Where could he go? It was clear that he had to go as far away as possible, into the mountains. There he met a pilgrim, and together they reached the elders in the Caucasus, where a young novice was also laboring with them; so he took the latter’s story for himself. The only difference was that the novice was called Daniil, not Augustine.

  I have already mentioned that the book In the Caucasus Mountains had recently come out, in which you could read about both Daniil and his mother, set on fire by the criminals. So the story itself was, I repeat, true. Only Augustine, who had adopted the story for himself, was a fake.

  Serezha lived there with the monks, and grew to love them very much after living with them, but nevertheless they asked him to leave them: he didn’t like to work, talked too much, ate with a healthy appetite, and was, in general, “of another spirit.” In short, he was a burden to them. They gave him a letter to the nuns of the Sukhumi church: they bought him a ticket, and he reached Omsk and immediately went to the church.

  The priest there took him in as his acolyte and gave him a place to live, while the local bishop promised to help him obtain a passport—Serezha had told him that his passport had been stolen. Then he tonsured him a reader.

  But a singer in that church, who developed a passionate attraction to the young acolyte, ruined everything. She would attach herself to him, grab him by the hand, give him presents. Serezha would simply give away her presents—either to the priest or to the other singers. This was discovered and she was terribly offended. She backed him up against a wall—against the church enclosure—when he was shaking out the dust from the carpets there:

  “Are you going to marry me or not?”

  He said:

  “I don’t want to marry—I’m going to be a monk!”

  And she began to wail her heart out.

  At that, the prosphora baker, the gardener, the warden, the priest himself all jumped out.

  And she kept tearing her hair and crying out:

  “He’s ruined and defiled me, he promised to fix everything with an honorable marriage, I’m going to have a child from him now, and he’s hiding in the bushes: I don’t know you, he says, or your child. He’s used me and refused me!”

  The priest was a pure, chaste man, and when he heard these words, his expression darkened; he took Serezha firmly by the elbow and said to him:

  “Marry her! If you don’t, I’ll lay such a heavy penance on you, then chase you out of the church as the shameless person that you are. I’ll tell the bishop not to give you a passport, too!”

  Everyone stood around him and scolded him for all he was worth. The girl kept on screaming like mad.

  Serezha took serious offense. He returned to the cell where he lived in the priest’s house, and decided to punish them. He took his new cassock and ryassa, took the Gospel in its precious cover, took the church censer. Then he realized suddenly—he didn’t have a cent to his name. He worked in the church for free, lived with the priest with all his expenses paid, and ate in the church refectory. How was he supposed to get anywhere? So he came up with an idea: he wouldn’t steal the money, but simply take what he had earned, his hard-earned wages. He entered the church, robbed the collection boxes, left, and that was the last they saw of him.

  Thereby he continued on his way to the Lavra, but he thought better of bringing the priest’s passport into the matter. From the Lavra, as we remember, he was sent to Pechory, and from there to us in Moscow.

  The future abbot of Sretensky Monastery drove the stolen goods to Omsk and returned them to the priest, convincing him to withdraw his report to the police. Before leaving, he came to our house and handed the false Augustine a book:

  “Here, read!”

  The book was Crime and Punishment.

  Then the future archbishop came to our house and confessed the thief and liar. Afterwards, the latter went to surrender himself to the police.

  The only condition that we gave him was the following: he should under no circumstances tell them about his time in the Caucasus Mountains. If they ask him where he had been, he should say—in Omsk, in the Lavra, in Pechory, but that most of his time was spent in Moscow, and we would confirm this.

  Later, we were visited by investigators from the Military Prosecutor’s offices in order to compare findings, but everything matched up: we confirmed that when he had really been hiding in the Caucasus Mountains, he actually spent that time at our house in Moscow. We spoke in his favor. The investigators admitted that during the course of the investigation, he behaved in an exemplary manner and repeated the entire time that he wanted to become a monk. Even his military command wasn’t interested in charging him with desertion; they weren’t after his blood. So he was given a short sentence in a penal colony, from which he was then released early on probation for exemplary conduct.

  He returned to the free world and soon became a monk.

  “When I was serving my sentence, I suffered most from the fact that my cassock had been taken off me,” he admitted. “I felt like Adam and Eve after the fall—naked.”

  In the meantime, Schema-Archimandrite Gavriil, who had unmasked him at first glance, departed for his heavenly dwelling place. A recently released book—an enormous volume—called The Last Russian Elders finished with a chapter dedicated to him.

  The Lord Gave and the Lord Took Away1

  Monk Vlasii labored at Holy Trinity Monastery. No longer young, he was overweight and simultaneously grey and balding: he had long and sparse strands of grey hair around a circular bald spot on the back of his head. In appearance and by expression, he resembled some sort of forest creature or, God forgive me, water troll. He had a potato nose and small, shrewd eyes peering out from under shaggy eyebrows; he was sharp-tongued and sarcastic, and had a fighting spirit. He would give his abbot ten responses to one comment.

  He was actually physically similar to the abbot; like brothers, they resembled each other so much that they were often mistaken for each other. For this reason, the abbot grew to dislike Vlasii very much: he kept constant watch for a chance to be rid of him. And as we know, where the human will is inclined to do evil, all the evil one has to do is give the person an opportunity.

  Soon that opportunity presented itself. There was a murder in the vicinity of the monastery. Witnesses recreated a sketch and came to the monastery with this image for identification. The abbot looked and looked at the blurry image and said:

  �
�Oh, that’s our monk, Vlasii.”

  “Where can we find him?”

  “At the banya. It’s bathing day today.”

  And so the policemen rushed into the banya and took the poor, naked, and steaming Vlasii right off the heated bench where he was luxuriously lashing himself with twigs.2 He barely had a chance to cover his nakedness before they clapped the handcuffs on him and dragged him off to prison like a seasoned criminal in front of the whole monastery.

  Well, of course, soon everything came to light—it was obviously not him in the sketch, the witnesses didn’t recognize him, he had an alibi, and he had never seen the murder victim in his entire life. He was released. He returned to the monastery, but the abbot refused to receive him. He gave the excuse that Vlasii had started a rumor that the abbot gave him up to go to jail because he had recognized his own self in the sketch.

  What could he do? Dejected, Monk Vlasii set off for Moscow, where he had some friends who had taken pilgrimages to Holy Trinity Monastery. He came to us and moved in with us for good—all bent out of shape, tattered, homeless, toothless. He sat with his feathers ruffled for days on end, depressed, reliving his injury.

  I decided to distract him and took him to see my friend, the writer and traveler Gennadii Snegirev. We went over and saw another somber-looking person sitting in his kitchen, also in deep depression, almost in tears. One thing led to another, and soon we got to the bottom of the gloomy man’s deep sadness.

  This happened in the early nineties, when private business was just being developed, and there was much uncertainty in it, many dark and even criminal moments. But so far the business of our gloomy person, named Riurik, had been going well. Then, he took all his money—whatever he had, whatever he had borrowed with high interest from the bank, and whatever he had borrowed from very serious people—and dumped it into an enormous batch of computers. They arrived by train from abroad. In theory, everything was secured and paid for in advance—the railroad workers, the border patrol, and the customs officers. But suddenly, it all fell through: there was an inspection and all the goods were seized. Riurik was ruined.