Ordinary Wonders

by Oloesia Nikolaeva

  And so? My husband had managed to forget about this strange penitent, when after a while the latter unexpectedly appeared with a large folder in his hands.

  “Here,” he said, presenting the folder.

  “What is this?” my husband said in surprise.

  “My photographs, enlarged, just like you asked, for the iconostasis. To pray to …”

  He was met with silence.

  My husband spent some of his workdays at the Media Office of the Moscow Patriarchate on Chistii Pereulok. He was on his way there one day, when he saw that the entire area in front of the Patriarchate gates was filled with people: it looked like a protest or vigil.

  They saw him, dressed in his cassock and cross, and began to beg him:

  “Father, take us to the Patriarch, the police won’t let us through.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “We have signed petitions and appeals.”

  “But what do you want? What are you appealing about?”

  “We’re fighting for the immediate canonization of Grigorii Grobovoi by the Patriarchate. He resurrected the dead, and now he’s under criminal prosecution, but he’s a saint! So we came to demand his immediate canonization.”

  My husband remembered that this Grobovoi was either a sort of cult leader or simply a con man, or both: he had promised the grief-stricken mothers that he would resurrect their children murdered by the Beslan terrorists2 and had taken enormous sums of money from them ahead of time. But looking at these die-hard followers of Grobovoi, who were ready to raze the Patriarchate to the ground, my husband understood that any arguments against their guru would fall on deaf ears and only serve to inflame their passions the more. So he said:

  “What, did Grobovoi die?”

  “Of course not!” They answered, dismayed. “He’s alive!”

  “Then he can’t be canonized!” My husband replied, happy that he so readily escaped any further conversations. “Canonizations only take place after death.”

  “They never take place during life?”

  “It’s impossible! It’s not done that way,” he said strictly. “Come back as soon as he dies.”

  “Well maybe he will never die! Maybe he’s immortal!” one of the women proclaimed in awe-stricken reverence.

  “We-e-ll! Then he can never be canonized,” concluded my husband.

  And strangely enough, as loud and up-in-arms as they had been a minute ago, so suddenly did they quiet down and scatter in confusion—they had to weigh the matter hurriedly and digest this information in order to come up with the most proper conclusion for their guru, in order to answer the question: what would be better for him—canonization or immortality?

  Soon afterwards, a bald old man came to see my husband in that same place on Chistii Pereulok and placed his business card on his desk. On it was written: “The Lord Sabaoth.”

  “Well, hello,” said my husband. “How can I help you?”

  “We need to save the world,” the visitor sighed heavily. “The world is perishing!”

  “Then you must take the proper measures,” advised my husband. “Who better than you?”

  “Well, that’s what we have to figure out,” the newcomer confided. “I’m planning to go to Jerusalem, otherwise the world will perish!”

  My husband shook his head sympathetically.

  “But there are issues!” his guest threw up his hands.

  “What issues? Your issues?”

  “Well, yes. I need to get to Jerusalem somehow!”

  “I don’t think this poses a problem for you …”

  “If there is enough money for the ticket,” his guest said confidingly. “But what if there isn’t? And the world is perishing! So what—just let it perish?”

  My husband stayed silent.

  “I feel sorry for the world! I created it with such love! I just want to say to them: what have you done, oh, you scoundrels, you scoundrels!” And he even held up his dried-up little fist in the air and shook it at the scoundrels.

  My husband felt a little sick to his stomach.

  “So I’ve come to the Patriarchate,” the guest got down to business. “Surely you don’t want the world to perish, do you?”

  “Well, no,” agreed my husband.

  “So stop beating around the bush, give me money for my ticket to Jerusalem! Where is your accounting office?”

  My husband showed him the way with relief.

  A little while ago, when I was cleaning up his office and putting business cards away into a box, I read the words “The Lord Sabaoth” on one of them. “Creator” was written in cursive underneath. The address was written in the lower left corner, briefly and to the point: “Jerusalem, Mt Zion.”

  Kalliping

  All these stories would seem improbable to me, had I not heard them from the horse’s mouth. But if you look around and observe, even the grotesque has become accepted and claims to be the norm.

  Take, for example, the driver who, seeking revenge on a highway patrolman for giving him a ticket, bit off his thumb—bit it off and spat it out. Or the cannibal who posted online an invitation to anyone who would like to be eaten by him. A man who responded to the invitation and visited the cannibal was really eaten—fried, cooked, and made into a meat jelly. “One cannibal invites another cannibal to lunch.”1 Or the young girl who gave birth to two children from her own grandfather … These truly hellish pictures have become part of everyday life. You know, a touch of the exotic.

  My spiritual father, who studied the problem of evil, explained to me why the evil one needs man, so much so that he never—until the very day he dies—leaves him alone.

  “Man,” he said, “originally had something that the father of lies does not—an essence and the ability to create. Therefore, the adversary needs man to feed on his essence parasitically and to use his creative gift to invent ever new kinds of evils.”

  When he was telling me this, I remembered a friend from my youth, Lenia, who came up with a new genre of painting and even took it to the Paris galleries. He called it “Kalliping” (a play on the words “calligraphy” and “painting”)—a kind of counterpart to painting. In other words, this new form of art was intended to sound like “beautiful writing in painting.” So there! After all, “kallos” in Greek means everything beautiful, wonderful, elaborate, honorable, noble, glorious, brave, attempted with honor, successful, joyful, fair, complete, good, excellent, superlative! But that’s in the Greek.

  With Lenia, it was in Russian, from the word “kal” (that is, fecal matter).

  He painted on toilet paper with brown paint of different hues, then crumpled up the paper and either pasted it onto a panel or made special exhibits where he would just toss it into wastebaskets. This was then displayed in rooms with dark lighting, where even the walls were covered in handprints of reddish-brown sludge …

  They say that the exhibit was well received and had good press, gathering him some admirers and even followers and students. And if not for a convoluted family situation that uprooted Lenia and sent him spinning like a top—who knows?—maybe he would be famous now the world over. But at least a certain writer appeared in his stead who gleefully advertised fecal matter on television as healthy foodstuff …

  Is it really possible that the evil one couldn’t even come up with this on his own, without the help of man?

  Good Material for a Television Series

  A parishioner of my husband’s church once overhead the following conversation. Some women who had come to the church to pray said amongst each other:

  “Fr Vladimir—which one is he?”

  “He’s the really tall monk whose wife is a poet.”

  “What, she writes poetry?”

  “Yes, she does.”

  So this same parishioner recently and most logically noted to me: “When you write about Fr Vladimir, do you always call him “my husband” in the text? That seems a little disconcerting and … indelicate.”

  I agreed with her. So fr
om now on, I will call him “Fr Vladimir,” as is proper.

  When he began to serve in church in the mid-nineties, there was an enormous number of con men who played the role of Orthodox people who were in some sort of trouble and needed the priest’s help. Others imitated monks and walked the streets with church mugs, claiming to collect money for the church building fund, but they were soon found out. Before putting in their contribution, people would ask them to recite, at the very least, “Our Father.”

  So I was approached by one such man, disheveled, red-faced, reeking of alcohol, but dressed in a cassock. I was stuck in traffic on Tsvetnoi Boulevard, and he was walking among the cars.

  Seeing my prayer rope hanging from my rearview mirror and my icon of St Nicholas the Wonderworker on my dashboard, he rolled back his eyes:

  “Money to restore a church!”

  “Do you know ‘Our Father?’ Go on, recite it!”

  He straightened up like a student who had been called up to his desk by his teacher, looked up with effort, and pronounced:

  “Our Father, who art in heaven, hell oh be …”

  He faltered.

  “Don’t worry,” I encouraged him, “that’s OK, try again.”

  “Our Father,” he announced fairly clearly.

  I nodded.

  “Hell oh be … thy …” he mumbled, and quickly ran off.

  These swindlers constantly crossed paths with Fr Vladimir. They would come during his assigned time in the church and tell him such stories that it was simply impossible not to give them money. I think he was even sorry that he gave them so little and not everything that he had: he did have to leave something for his family. What else could he have done? They would come to him pathetic, frozen to the bone: “Je ne mange pas six jours.”1

  One unfortunate foreigner, who claimed to be a piano tuner, said: “Do you need your piano tuned? I haven’t eaten in three days. I have no money to go back to my hometown.”

  As it happened, our piano was in terrible need of a tuning after a flood.

  Fr Vladimir brought him home:

  “There you go, get to work.”

  As it turned out, he was not alone but had with him a six-year-old son. They were both hungry. They spent the entire day at our house, had some food, but had nowhere to spend the night, so they spent it with us.

  Then it turned out that this was not his only son. There was another one, a younger one. Their papa worked and the boys hung around nearby, playing. I asked, did they need to eat something? The little one could spend the night together with the six-year-old.

  Then it came to light that his wife, the mother of the children, was also nearby—in the room for mothers and children at the train station. She was there with her nursing babe. We threw them in for good measure. So while the dad worked, pulling the felt lining onto the little piano hammers, the mother cooed over the baby and the sons played war. Starving as they were, there were used to eating like all normal people—three times a day, at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. But we had a different rule at home. We had coffee for breakfast, a sandwich for lunch, and a real meal only for dinner.

  So the nursing mother made a comment:

  “You don’t seem to eat so well … no calorie intake. We eat your food and then just get hungry again.”

  Fine. They lived with us like this for several days. The hammers lay all over the house, and the look of the dissected piano gave rise to a suspicion in our hearts: what if this talented master had decided to create a surprise and turn the piano into a harp? So I said to him:

  “Will you finish soon?”

  He said to me:

  “If I were to do it the real way, it would take me half a year, but I’ll manage in a few months.”

  Meanwhile, the baby was screaming, the boys were playing tag, the young mother decided to have a laundry day, and all of us with our own children and other members of the household felt completely out of place, like we were in their way.

  So I told the piano tuner:

  “Thank you very much. Let me pay you for all the work you’ve done, and we can part ways. Whatever you have left, just leave it. We didn’t have any plans to play the piano right now anyway.”

  And he answered:

  “Oh no. I’m not going to leave until I finish the job! The conscience of a master doesn’t allow such a thing.”

  The whole affair ended dramatically. We paid the money, moved the family to the church, where they were allowed to spend the night in the church house. The next morning nothing prevented them from buying tickets to their hometown and going home. But I still ended up the guilty party who had done them wrong: I had kicked out parents with children! There was a baby who was still nursing! I hadn’t fed them well enough! Oh and by the way, their sleeping quarters had been too cramped for their taste. So in the end, they didn’t get anything good out of their time with us.

  And even then they didn’t leave. They invaded another family in the same manner, took apart the piano, broke the lid … then vanished without a trace.

  In general, though, the stories told by those who came to the church for help were all typical stories, and it was impossible to distinguish truth from pure falsehood. Everyone was poor, wandering, hungry, unable to buy medicine, and without a place to lay their head.

  One day a woman came to see Fr Vladimir—completely miserable, overweight to the point of obesity. She sat down and broke into tears. She just sat there and the tears poured down her face. Finally, she managed to quell her sobs enough to say:

  “I came to Moscow with my little boy. We were robbed on the road, and my son got sick—fever, chills—and I have no money to buy his medicine. And our relatives whom we came to see say that maybe he’s contagious, and they won’t take us in. I’ve already sold the clothes off my back to buy him medicine and go home, and in the meantime, we’re living at the station. We haven’t eaten in three days.”

  All my husband had was a 500-ruble bill, which he gave to her and requested:

  “Please, take this and break it in our bookstore, take half for yourself and give me back the other half.”

  She took it, left his cell, and was out the door and on the street in a flash. They barely saw her leave. Even her weight, it turned out, was not a hindrance. And so what—was she lying or did she really run off to treat her ill child?

  But there were other stories that were more elaborate, custom-made for the situation. A man came to Fr Vladimir with the face of a criminal. He said:

  “Father, I’m a mafia boss called Viper. I served time in a concentration camp and was recently released. There, in the camp, we were visited by a priest. He directed me toward Christ. But the other convicts—the really bad ones—didn’t take to him. They said that ‘pop’ is just going to hear our confessions then give us up to the cops. So they condemned him to be stabbed to death. I found out about this and spoke out against it, but I could see that they would still do him in. So I warned him to get away and not come back. He never showed his face again.

  “In the meantime, I was set free. The first thing I did was go to Fr John Krestiankin in Pechory, and told him everything. ‘I believe and I confess.’ I’ve been monk material from my mother’s womb, as I am physically incapacitated. Bless me to go to the monastery, if only because my former partners from the penal colony have already sent out a letter saying that Viper’s not longer a mafia boss but has turned into a stool pigeon. Now they’re summoning me to a meeting of mafia bosses. What do I do?

  “So, Fr John Krestiankin says to me—I don’t bless you to go to the meeting. Go to the convent in Ussuriisk Region. You’re not a threat to the nuns since you’re a eunuch, and you definitely won’t be found there. He gave me some money, but only enough to get as far as Moscow. Also, Fr John told me go to the Church of the Holy Martyr Tatiana in Moscow and that the priest there would give me the rest of the money to reach Ussuriisk Region.”

  What was to be done? My husband, of course, didn’t have enough money to take him al
l the way to Ussuriisk, but what he had, he gave to Viper. Then he sent him to Fr Tikhon Shevkunov, the abbot of Sretensky Monastery, because Fr Tikhon really respected Elder John Krestiankin, and his monastery was not poor—in any case, not in comparison to our family.

  But Fr Tikhon, as an experienced spiritual father, immediately saw through this Viper. In the end, it all came down to the fact that my husband had simply paid him for good material for my book, which he immediately delivered to me.

  Here is another one, also with a certain creative flair and imagination.

  One time, in the evening, when Fr Vladimir’s hours at the church were coming to an end, a middle-aged man flew into his cell, all out of breath, by all appearances someone respectable who had recently let himself go a little. In other words, he was dressed in a good suit, but it was wrinkled and dirty; a good shirt, but the cuffs and collar were soiled; and finally, he reeked of alcohol and urine.

  “Father, here on this check is my bank account number—it’s made out to the bearer, and the bank is right here on Romanov Pereulok. All the money in the account I give to your church, the Church of the Holy Martyr Tatiana. My white Volvo is parked in the courtyard of the Central Telegraph Office—all my documents are inside and the key is under the carpet. Take it and use it for the church. I don’t want it to go to waste! All I ask of you is your prayers! … I am going to a meeting right now that might not end well for me. But I place my hope in your holy prayers.”

  “But what has happened?” asked Fr Vladimir.

  “I have a wife, Tatiana. I funded the construction of a church in Iceland for her and sent her there because my former partners are after me here. They claim that I owe them money, they want to take my business and have already set the clock ticking on my head. I wanted to come to an agreement with them, but they kidnapped me and tortured me for a whole week in a cellar in the forest, chaining me to the radiator. In the end I agreed to get them everything they asked. But I said that giving away a business is a complicated matter: I needed to draw up the paperwork, and this would take several days.