Ordinary Wonders

by Oloesia Nikolaeva

  Oh, if he hadn’t been so rude, maybe I would have considered it. Maybe I would have arranged something with my neighbors, who were in Moscow that evening but kept the keys to their dacha with me, but my fear and amazement instantly turned into determination, and I asked:

  “What is your name and where are you from?”

  “My name is Grisha. I’m from Kaluga.”

  “Here’s the deal, Grisha. You can take your backpack and go straight to the train station. There you can buy yourself a ticket to Kaluga and go with God! You’ll be home in two hours or so.”

  “What about the blessing?” he frowned. “Where is your Christian obedience? Where is your humility? It could be that Christ Himself came to you in my image and that you are driving Him away (Heb 13:2)!”

  Truth be told, something inside tugged at me. I almost gave in; but then, taking advantage of the pause, he made a fatal error. He dug into a pocket and took out a pile of papers:

  “Here, you haven’t even read all of my poems yet!”

  And he thrust his talentless compositions into my hands.

  Then I realized who was standing before me. I understood everything. It was, of course, the devil himself. A dark angel. A tempter. A total lack of talent. The seducer had tried to take on the image of an angel of light: “I was a stranger and you took me in” (Mt 25:35)! The Lord simply cannot appear in the image of an impertinent graphomaniac!

  I thrust his papers back into the backpack and said:

  “I only read other people’s poems during my office hours at the Literature Institute. It’s time for you to go.”

  “Should I really go? Shall I leave my backpack with you?”

  “Why would I need your backpack?”

  “So that I don’t have to drag it around right now! I’ll come by sometime later to pick it up.”

  “No,” I cut him off. “You don’t need to come by later. You don’t need to throw your blessings at me. You don’t need to come here without an invitation.”

  And I locked the gate after him with relief.

  But there were times when I myself was guilty of cowardly deceit … I would rapidly mumble the shameful sin and stretch out and exaggerate the small sin. Of course, this happens almost without your knowledge, and the realization of this tendency comes only in hindsight.

  And so, it was Great Lent. I had a blessing from my spiritual father to commune at every Liturgy, but I had to prepare. In other words, I had to attend the evening services on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, read the communion rule each time, confess, and receive absolution from the priest. I was forbidden to partake of communion without having observed these rules.

  My spiritual father decided that such an experience during one Great Lent would be extremely beneficial for me. And he took responsibility for this blessing—at that time it wasn’t the custom to commune more than once every three weeks or every month.

  That is why I had to confess to a different priest each time. But since I was confessing practically every day, and spending my time either in church or at prayer, the range of my repeated sins was relatively narrow. That’s where I caught myself. Self-justification! The deceitful belittling of my heavy sins! Here, for example: at home, I would take a few potatoes, a carrot, or an onion from my sister-in-law, my brother’s wife—we lived together at the time—in secret. And not only would I not ask her permission, I wouldn’t say anything to her about it later. It’s a good thing that I admit this to the priest, repenting of taking something without permission. Why didn’t I confess it by its proper name? “I stole!”

  So with a heavy heart, I went to the church. I met a priest in the church courtyard, and told him:

  “Dear Father, forgive me! I stole something!”

  He staggered back.

  “And what did you steal?” he asked me strictly.

  “I stole an onion,” I cowardly told him half the truth. Then, casting off any self-justification, half dead from shame, I sighed: “Produce!”

  “Come to me after the service,” was all he said.

  I stood through the vigil and awaited the priest with a sinking heart—he’s going to give me a penance, I thought, and rightly so! That’s what you get for stealing, thief!

  After a while, the priest came out of the altar and walked straight toward me. I shrank back instinctively …

  In the meantime, his eyes had lost their former strictness and were now radiating only goodwill.

  I stretched my hands forward for a blessing.

  “You don’t by any chance work at the produce market, do you?” he asked, compassionately looking me in the eyes.

  “No,” I answered.

  Poor Father! These were such difficult times of half-starvation, when you couldn’t buy anything in the stores—you could only be given it. So he thought: why couldn’t this repentant sinner who stole produce now help a priest by getting from her retail network at least some rare buckwheat groats, some long-grain rice, maybe some Dutch cheese with which to break the fast. It wasn’t Lent for the Orthodox year round!

  Oh, if only I wept like that over my real sins! The deceit in my onion, the hypocrisy in my carrot, the self-righteousness in my potatoes, all beginning to sprout!

  How I Lost My Voice

  In general, my voice is rather mediocre and not very well suited to singing. But in kindergarten, I sang my heart out, danced, and performed at concerts, then studied piano during my school years and as a young adult. All this continued until our apartment, located on the upper floor, was inundated by a tropical-like torrent of rain from the burst attic pipes, which all but drowned us and ruined my favorite piano. It was restored several times afterwards by piano tuners: the felt on the hammers was replaced, new strings were attached, the pegs were fixed and retuned, but it would fall out of tune once again almost as soon as they left. All this interrupted my musical activities.

  But I was still obligated to sing sometimes. Once in 1983, for example, my husband, our little children, and I spent the summer at a country parish in Vladimir Diocese, where a young hieromonk who was a former resident of the Lavra served. The church was a sad sight: services could only be held in one of its side altars, since the rest was in deplorable condition, and no one bothered to restore it—the Soviet authorities weren’t interested, the countryside residents were too poor, and attendance in general wasn’t very high: Saturday night vigil and Sunday Liturgy barely attracted twenty old ladies.

  The priest served alone, and there was no one to sing and read on the kliros, so he assigned me there as reader and singer.

  Then, after moving to Peredelkino, I started to attend the local Church of the Transfiguration. Since my husband and I were on good terms with the rector, I asked for his blessing to read and sing on weekdays with the old ladies. Soon, I became a full-fledged member of the discordant old women’s choir. I even gained some recognition among the parishioners there. In any case, several pious old ladies would come up to me and say:

  “You read so well! So clearly, so articulately, we can hear every word. May the Lord save you!”

  At other times, my acquaintances at the church commented:

  “It turns out you can sing so well! What a voice you have!”

  I began to be entrusted with reading the commemorations, and someone even asked me to read the Psalter for his departed loved ones and slipped in a donation with his list of names.

  In short, I was very happy in my newly discovered career. For it was very pleasant that “in the midway of this [my] mortal life, I found me in a gloomy wood,”1 but still I was able to take on an entirely new activity. I had similarly attempted drawing, and even bought some paints, brushes, and a canvas stretcher when my husband was on a business trip. I devoted myself to drawing day and night without any boundaries, simply as God moved me, for I knew no rules and had not the least experience or even the slightest talent: nothing but pure inspiration.

  But on his return, my husband didn’t even want to look at my drawings
.

  “When a woman in her forties abandons all her work and begins to draw, not knowing how to even draw a rabbit or a house with a chimney, that is the first sign of schizophrenia.”

  Just like that.

  For this reason, I was extremely happy with my success as a singer and reader, even if it was in such an intimate, modest, and limited circle.

  Moreover, my voice seemed to grow stronger, louder, and more confident from the time that it began to resound within the church walls, and when I read my poetry aloud at that time, many told me that my voice sounded melodious and resonant.

  Even Veronica Losskaia, expert on the work of Marina Tsvetaeva and the wife of Fr Nikolai Losskii, admitted to me:

  “The way you read poetry is remarkable! It’s like you’re making music …”

  But where is this all leading? In the early nineties, the monasteries began to be reopened in Moscow. My friend, an abbot from the Lavra whom I had known for a long time and whom I often visited there, was assigned to one of the reopened monasteries not far from my house. What’s more, another old acquaintance of mine from the Literature Institute, a married priest, was also assigned there. Finally, the Father Superior of that monastery held such prayerful, poignant, and moving services there, with such angelic singing, thorough confessions, and deep sermons full of wisdom, that I began to attend services there exclusively.

  In the meantime, Pascha approached, and my friend, the abbot, together with his friend, the married priest, meeting me after a Paschal service, suggested that we come together the following evening to celebrate this wonderful feast. Our house was being remodeled at the time, so my husband, the priest; my son, who had been just been ordained a deacon; and I came to the monastery and settled into a cell to partake of food and drink that “maketh a man’s heart glad” (Ps 103:15).

  Word after word, parable after parable, homily after homily, story after story, we sat together until late; finally my friend, the married priest, sat down at an old organ that stood in the abbot’s cell. Then we came to the most important part of the evening.

  We began to sing the song about the Samaritan woman:

  “I am a Sa-ma-ri-tan!”

  Then followed a Cossack song with many verses, with a florid embellishment, a repetition of “this is not for me, this is not for me.”

  “They offered hi-i-im, they offered hi-i-im, they offered hi-i-im A sword so sha-a-a-arp!”

  In short, our voices grew stronger, louder, richer, with wider vibrato; we sang joyfully and with abandon, splitting into thirds, holding a countermelody, and every fiber of our souls felt the words come to life: “What is so good, or what is so fine, but for brethren to dwell in unity” (Ps 132:1)!

  Finally, our repertoire of spiritual and folk songs ran out—well, there are some Soviet songs that aren’t so bad. My friend from the Literature Institute, now a priest, played his heart out without even looking down at the keys, his fingers flying with a life of their own. On he played, spirited and lively, tapping the beat with his left foot, while my friend the abbot soundly clapped in time.

  Our souls burst open at that continued sung “a-a-a-a!” or better yet, the stressed vowels “eh-a! eh-a!”; out of our souls sprang the bird of joy, which began to flutter about the monastic cell:

  “I came out into the garden

  A gypsy maiden was there

  Geh-athering grapes!”

  Suddenly, the door of the cell quietly cracked open, and the head of the Father Superior appeared.

  We didn’t even notice him at first:

  “I blush, I pale …”

  And then everything grew still.

  “Now, now,” he said, “do you at least know what time it is? It’s after one in the morning! The walls in our monastery are this thin—they are shaking from your singing. The brothers can’t sleep. The folks from the neighboring houses are leaning out of their windows wondering what sort of a nightclub the monastery’s turned into!”

  In short, our celebration came to an end. Leaving in disgrace, we said to the abbot:

  “Forgive us! Forgive us!”

  And hanging our heads in shame, we went home.

  A few days later, I stood before the cross and Gospel, confessing to the Father Superior, whom I loved and respected very much.

  “You didn’t forget anything?” he asked after I had listed all my sins.

  “I don’t think so.”

  He covered my head with the epitrachelion, read the prayer of absolution over me, and I reached both my hands to him for a blessing …

  “You also love coming to a men’s monastery at night, drinking wine, and belting out songs as loud as you can, isn’t that right?” he couldn’t resist adding.

  “Forgive me,” I stammered.

  And that was it. Since then, I’ve lost my voice—it’s gone. I can’t sing a thing. At Liturgy, I can’t even finish singing the Creed to the end … something inside me closes up and only a shaking, rasping sound comes out …

  And rightly so! That’s what I get for going to the men’s monastery at night, for drinking wine with the monks, and for singing delightful and wonderful songs there!

  Money for Sabaoth

  When my husband became a priest in the mid-nineties, the people were still religiously unenlightened—in a way, many were simply savage. People began asking Fr Vladimir, and consequently me, as representatives of “the whole Orthodox Church” for the entire period of its existence: why did the Church persecute Protopope1 Avvakum, why did it participate in Sergianism, why didn’t it distribute one ruble per homeless person out of the Christ the Saviour Cathedral building fund, etc. As if that wasn’t enough, our area of responsibility grew to include our brother Catholics: Why don’t they have processions with the cross? Why did they burn down Galilee? What about Joan of Arc!?

  The average awareness of the former Soviet person did not distinguish between Orthodox and Catholic, like two Chinese people who seem alike at first glance.

  Once, my husband and I went to someone’s house, where one very intelligent lady, an art historian, said, word for word:

  “No, I won’t set foot into an Orthodox church now! Once, my friend and I were walking by a church. We thought, let’s go inside. As soon as we entered, a priest began to walk straight toward us, swinging a smoking censor right at us, as if to say, get out of here! Let me at you! What a racket! So we shrank back and ran out of there! Why did he kick us out like that?”

  “He was simply censing at the image of God that is within you,” my husband explained.

  “Not quite at the image of God! He was swinging right at us! He wanted to hit us! He was kicking us out!”

  My husband had many such trials, misunderstandings, and simply amusing cases, especially in the beginning.

  Once, a young man with a ponytail came to talk to my husband—he was obviously a monk “mimic”—not a professional, but an amateur, one could say—a self-proclaimed novice.

  “Father, how is it that the Masons no longer work in stealth but leave their marks everywhere now? Even the icon of the Transfiguration in the Cathedral of the Annunciation in the Moscow Kremlin has an inverted pentagram on it. And the cathedral in Suzdal has five-pointed stars on it … and the Cathedral in Arkhangelsk has one on its central dome … they’re everywhere, everywhere!”

  “Oh,” sighed my husband. “You shouldn’t interpret things that way. Cut an apple open and you’ll see the same kind of star …”

  “There you go,” the young man livened up, “that’s what I’m trying to say—they’re everywhere, they’ve even made their way into apples! Interesting, how did they manage that one?”

  Another time, an interesting character came to him and announced:

  “I don’t have any sins.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just that! No sins. I’m a teacher.”

  My husband was at a loss as to what to say. He had often been dismayed by the fact that certain women came to him for confession, already in
the prime of life, having spent many years in Soviet atheist conditions of life, well acquainted with, let’s say, the ups and downs of emotion, who only repented that they lacked “purity of prayer.” Such admissions seemed to him to be the height of pride and vanity: in other words, the penitent considered herself perfect in every way and in no way lacking: she had meekness, humility, patience, love for others, self-sacrifice, charity, and everything else, except purity of prayer.

  But this was the first time that he had seen anything like the case of the teacher.

  “Even the saints had sins,” he began. “Even they had things to repent of and lament over! The only sinless one is the Lord God!”

  “Maybe the saints had sins, but I don’t,” announced the teacher.

  “Really? Well, maybe you really are a saint.” My husband hoped that such an absurd conclusion would bring the “penitent” to his senses.

  But he simply nodded, unfazed:

  “Maybe. I already thought of that myself.”

  My husband coughed and almost choked, then thought that this teacher must be joking, or must be in spiritual delusion—perhaps he was testing him; so he went farther down the same dangerous path, guided by the logic of the absurd:

  “Well, if you are a saint, maybe we are going to pray to you someday? Bring me your photograph, we’ll place it on the iconostasis. We’ll serve a moleben to you! Light candles! Bow to you!”

  The complete idiocy of such a statement, he thought, should put everything back in its place. The teacher must have guessed by this time that the priest was on to him, and that the priest had hoped to finally bring him to an adequately repentant state of mind for confession …

  But he only stood in front of him and unflappably nodded his head, mumbling something under his breath.

  “Since you have nothing to repent of, we have no need of confession or absolution,” said the priest. “You must be some sort of unique model of a human being. No one like you has ever been born on this earth!”

  But—oh the horror! Even this absurd statement the teacher took literally!