Ordinary Wonders

by Oloesia Nikolaeva

  “They let me go, but I have to meet them at an appointed place this evening, otherwise they would kill my family. But I don’t want to give them everything, so you take the money from the account for yourself. And the car. Just pray! They have inside contacts in the police, so …”

  My husband looked at him in amazement, at a complete loss for what to do. Should he allow this man to go to the dangerous meeting? Should he confess him?

  But the latter looked at his watch and jumped up—“Oh, I’m late already, well, give me your blessing!”

  He was about to run out of the cell and into the hallway. But, taking several steps, he came to a sudden halt, slapped himself on the forehead, and spun round:

  “Father! I’m running late, but I have no money—not a cent. And my meeting is in Butovo! Give me some money for the taxi, please, or I might not make it!”

  Fr Vladimir said naively:

  “But it’s rush hour, the traffic is so bad right now! You’ll make it so much faster on the metro!”

  The man looked and looked at him, and pierced him right through to the bones with his gaze, as if to say, hey you, I gave you my entire bank account, my white Volvo, and you’re too greedy to give me enough money for a taxi! So my husband gave him the money.

  The paper with the bank information he tossed in the trash. One of our financially aware friends saw it and broke into laughter, it was such nonsense.

  Nevertheless, these con men with their stories had to work hard for their money! Oh yes! They sold their material. For cheap. I recently saw an announcement in the newspaper: “I will sell you the story of my life as subject matter for a novel or material for a television show. For cheap. Only a thousand dollars.”

  We got away with much smaller losses.

  A Blessing to Smuggle

  A priest’s blessing carries enormous power. I had many opportunities to be convinced of this. And even in those cases where I may have retained a trace of doubt—through human weakness but with good reason—any lack of faith was eliminated.

  In the eighties, the rector of the Church of the Mother of God of the Sign on Ryzhskaia Street was Fr Vladimir Rozhkov. Then he was transferred to the Church of St Nicholas in Kuznetsy, but I often went to visit him there as well, first and foremost in order to pray during his reading of the Canon of St Andrew of Crete. I believed that no one possessed such piercingly repentant intonation, no one could so prayerfully and artistically recite and understand that divinely inspired spiritual work. Having once heard it, it was impossible to forget either the magnificent baritone of Fr Vladimir or his naturally clear diction, or his carefully placed accents, or the musical ending of every prayerful phrase.

  But I went to Fr Vladimir in Kuznetsy much less frequently than when he was the rector on Ryzhskaia Street. Back then, I listened to his sermons with a rapidly beating heart, and especially loved when he served the Liturgy: speaking in laymen’s terms, it left a very deep impression on me, moved me to tears, and grabbed hold of my heart. One of his altar servers, who subsequently became a priest himself, confessed that he felt the same way and added that Fr Vladimir himself always prayed with tears of repentance.

  In short, I loved him very much. And he must have sensed the heartfelt attachment of this sheep in his flock, because he also began to treat me with trust and sincerity. Honestly, if there had not been such a gap between us in status and age, I would have considered us friends! In any case, I would sometimes drive him home in my car, visit him at his dacha, or come to his house with my husband. He would call me at times, and we would talk on the phone for a long time; he would give me books to read, tell me about his research and writing plans, and even tried to convince me to be his assistant.

  I continued to attend his church for the Great Canon every Great Lent; then, in the year 1990, he called me up to him after the service:

  “Will you drive me home?”

  “Of course, Father! And you, will you give me your blessing? I’m going to France tomorrow with my children.”

  “To France? Listen, I have an enormous request for you. My favorite old noblewoman lives in Paris. She is the cofounder and patron of the Russian House at Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois.1 I’ll just give you a few things to give to her, OK?”

  We went to his house, and he handed me over an enormous icon and a platter wrapped in a soft rag.

  “This is all part of the historical legacy of the Meschersky family. I looked for these items in antique shops; she will be so happy. The platter even has the Meschersky family coat of arms on it! Give this to her and tell her that I love her very, very much!”

  Fine. He wrote down the telephone number, I took the parcel with the gifts, and came home. I packed it away properly, when my husband, seeing that I was planning to transport all that over the border, cried out in a great voice: what are you, an antiques dealer? They’re going to confiscate it at the border for good, and detain you too!”

  He had a good point! I hadn’t thought about that—I’d never taken anything like this before over the border! I called Fr Vladimir in the middle of the night, woke him up, and shared my misgivings with him.

  “I’ll just pray about it,” he replied in a sleepy voice. “Nobody will check through any of your things!”

  He simply said this and hung up the phone. But I, to be honest, didn’t fall asleep until the very early morning. Since my baptism, I had become painstakingly law-abiding. Before, I had considered it beneath my dignity to: arrive somewhere on time (I was always late), cross the street where I was supposed to, or buy a ticket for public transportation. I had often ridden the train in St Petersburg illegally without a ticket. I had even been kicked off one time in disgrace in Bologoe, but I just waited for the next train and made it to my destination without a ticket anyway.

  But then—I quit cold turkey. I can’t cross the street on a yellow light. I began to show up at events early—at first ten minutes early, then twenty, then, I’m ashamed to say, forty minutes! An hour!

  Basically, I called him early in the morning:

  “Fr Vladimir! They’ll take everything away! What a pity it would be! And they’ll arrest me!”

  “Everything will be fine, don’t think twice about it! I told you, I’ll pray. No one will even take a second look at you. Well, go with God! May the Lord bless you. You’re doing all this out of love! Love conquers all.”

  So I set off with the children to Sheremetevo2 with a heavy heart and our precious cargo. I filled out the customs declaration. Looking around me and wiping the cold sweat from my brow, I wrote a dash through the space for “antiquities” with a trembling hand. The children and I walked toward the first checkpoint, the conveyor belt. I saw customs officers checking people in front of me, opening suitcases, feeling their way through belongings, digging through everything thoroughly, taking things out, while the people stood looking on in tears. How terrible!

  Then it was our turn. They checked my tickets and passport, where my children were written in, they glanced over my customs declaration …

  And at that moment someone called them over to registration.

  They thrust the passport, tickets, and declaration into my hands, closed the gate behind us, and the two or three of them rushed off to where they had been called. So we just took our things and went to check in our suitcases. In order words, just as Fr Vladimir had promised, no one searched any of our things or even paid any attention to us.

  In Paris, I called Princess Antonina Lvovna and told her that I had brought her some gifts from Fr Vladimir Rozhkov. She reacted very strongly:

  “Oh, dear Fr Vladimir! What a dear he is! He is such a dear, such a dear! I love him so much! And you—do you love Fr Vladimir too? Do you understand what an incredible person he is?”

  I answered her sincerely—yes!

  We agreed that we would meet at Alésia Church, next to the church itself. She drove up in a Mercedes and gestured to me to get in quickly.

  “I’m not supposed to pull over there,” sa
id the princess when I had sat down next to her, holding the precious package on my lap. “Let’s go out somewhere—to a restaurant! Do you like restaurants, my dear?” she asked, pressing on the gas pedal.

  I examined her out of the corner of my eye with interest. She was an elegant, elderly lady, thin, with her hair done, and wearing a rather short black velvet pencil skirt and a matching jacket. I later discovered with surprise that she was just under eighty years old then, which meant that back home she would be considered ancient. In the meantime, she deftly turned into a narrow street and came to a sudden stop in front of a fabulous restaurant with a carpet strewn out the front door and a freshly shaven, liveried doorman standing at the entrance.

  Since we would have many such get-togethers with the princess and since they would all begin under the same circumstances, i.e., the meeting time at Alésia Church at eleven o’clock, the Mercedes, the restaurant, etc., and then later, closer to evening, some adventure would arise, I won’t describe these first restaurant outings, but the subsequent ones, when I came with my husband.

  The only important thing that I would like to stress is that we brought and handed over her family heirlooms—the icon and platter with the coat-of-arms—unimpeded, safe and sound.

  “You see, and you were afraid, O you weak of faith,” happily exclaimed Fr Vladimir Rozhkov. As they say: “Do not be unbelieving, but believing” (Jn 20:27).

  Approximately half a year after that, my husband (who, by the way, was not yet a priest) and I were getting ready to travel. At first, we would go to Geneva, where I had been invited to give a lecture at a university and to conduct a literary evening at the Russian Club. Then we would go to France, all the way to Paris, where the publishing house Éditions Gallimard had released a book of my prose.

  Then we received a call from Fr Vladimir—how are you, what are you doing?

  “Are you planning to go to Paris?”

  “Yes, but not right away, not directly—through Switzerland.”

  “Switzerland is a beautiful country, but Paris is better—and you’ll see the princess there!”

  I stayed silent, sensing a trap.

  “I’ll give you some gifts for her,” he continued. “No, this is not like last time. It’s just some silly little things. Will you give them to her?”

  “Well, only if it’s not like last time … of course I will!”

  “Wonderful! My daughter will come by and give it all to you.”

  To be honest, I had already agreed to take some things into Switzerland—an acquaintance of my Swiss friend from the Russian Club had begged me to give her some souvenirs, and I was expecting her at any moment.

  She rang the doorbell and right then and there, in the half-darkness of the entryway, thrust some sort of package into my hands, hurriedly thanked me, bowed, and vanished.

  A little while later, Fr Vladimir’s daughter also arrived, bringing a one-liter bottle of vodka and a small, but considerably heavy, package.

  My husband and I began to pack for the road. We looked inside the package for the princess and saw ten 200-gram tins of black caviar: that was what Fr Vladimir had humbly called “some gifts.”

  I don’t know how it is now, but back then the law allowed for no more than one or two hundred grams. And we had two kilos!

  Despite the lateness of the hour, I started calling Fr Vladimir:

  “Fr Vladimir! It’s in metal tins! They clink! The other time at least nothing clinked so loudly. This time they’ll discover everything and take it all away. It would be such a pity!”

  “So I’ll pray about it!” Fr Vladimir answered, unfazed. “They won’t take anything away! May the Lord bless you! And the princess will be so happy! She loves caviar very much. How else could I make her so happy? I love her so much!”

  “By the way, we’re going to pass through more than one border patrol. There’s Switzerland and then the entry into France!”

  “Nonsense!” Fr Vladimir noted. “I’ll pray about Switzerland, too, and France! No one will so much as glance in your direction. They don’t need anything from you! Oh, what a beauty the princess was in her youth, and so intelligent! She will be so happy.”

  My husband was quite skeptical about the whole thing—some princess, some old noblewoman dressed to the nines, caviar in metal tins, which would, of course, make a loud clinking noise. Then we had to take out the “souvenirs” for our Swiss friend in order to distribute the contents throughout the suitcase. These turned out to be little bits and pieces of semiprecious stones. Commercial quantities of them! If I hadn’t known that Swiss lady well, I would have suspected that she was planning to put them on the market … well, this was the end! The tins would clink. The customs agents would force us to open our suitcases and find inside—all that garnet-agate-carnelian-amber sparkle! Smugglers!

  Approaching Sheremetevo, we felt ill. They were going to gut our suitcase at any moment, and I, blushing, would feign cluelessness—oh, really? Caviar is not allowed? What semiprecious stones? That’s costume jewelry … Oh ho, they would really believe me then …

  We submitted our passports and declaration forms:

  “Why are we traveling without money? Or did you just not declare it?”

  “Because we’re poor,” I said.

  “Yes, we know that type. They’re the ones that will bring back ten tape recorders and fur coats!”

  He waved his hand at us.

  “You’re free to go!”

  He didn’t even notice that we hadn’t yet placed our suitcase on the conveyor belt!

  We arrived in Geneva, delivered the jewelry to my friend, and happily discovered that the vodka hadn’t exploded and the caviar tins hadn’t opened, I gave my lectures, conducted my literary evening, and received payment for both lecture and travel expenses. We were already planning to buy our train tickets to Paris when we discovered that a note had been placed in our passports: entry to France only allowed via Charles de Gaulle Airport. We were trapped—this time the tins would definitely clink! What if Fr Vladimir’s prayers wouldn’t work on the Swiss Calvinists and agnostics? And last but not least—airplane tickets were very expensive here; all our money would go to cover them.

  “Why fly?” said my Swiss friend, parading around in her amber. “We’ll get in my car, cross the border, I’ll drive you until Bellegarde, which has the nearest train station from Geneva on the way to Paris. You’ll buy your tickets there and calmly proceed from there.”

  “What about the border? We told you—we only have permission to enter France by air.”

  “Nonsense,” she waved her hand. “We’ll risk it!”

  We took our vodka and our caviar and went to storm the border. I, of course, appealed to the Lord in my thoughts to save us “by the prayers of Archpriest Vladimir Rozhkov,” and everything went off without a hitch. At that early hour, the Swiss customs agents and border guards were apparently drinking their morning coffee and eating their petit déjeuner, and the French, by all appearances, were recovering from their soirées of the night before, since we didn’t meet a single person on the entire trip to Bellegarde. And there, as we had intended, we bought our tickets for the high-speed train and reached Paris a few hours later.

  There I called the princess and told her that I had come with my husband and that we had brought some gifts from Fr Vladimir. She was ecstatic and exclaimed: “My dear, how I long to see you!” She set our meeting time at eleven o’clock at the Alésia Church and drove up in her Mercedes. My husband and I climbed in, and she drove us to the glamorous By the Angels restaurant, which was still empty at that early hour. We were immediately surrounded by all the waiters with the chef d’hôtel at their head:

  “Princess, how happy we are to see you! You look fabulous!”

  They obviously knew her well there, she was a regular patron …

  “Princess, would you like your usual? The port?”

  “We’ll start with an aperitif,” she suggested. “Yes, we’ll start with the port. Well,
here’s to our meeting!”

  I took a small sip, as, to be honest, I was not used to drinking port on an empty stomach at eleven o’clock in the morning.

  “Olesia,” the princess reacted strongly, “what are you, a nun?”

  “N-no,” I said slowly and uncertainly. “Why do you say that?”

  “Well, you’re not drinking anything!”

  And the princess showed me her empty glass.

  Then they brought out some sort of unusual food—many different dishes. We ate, drank wine, and engaged in lively conversation, joked, and laughed to no end …

  We had Veuve Cliquot, an expensive champagne, for dessert.

  So it was not surprising in the least that we left for the car “with joyful steps.”3

  We had not taken the vodka and caviar with us into the restaurant—the princess had ordered us to put it all in the trunk. So we still hadn’t given her those things. So now I asked her to open the trunk; I took out the package with the vodka and caviar, opened it, and offered the princess to have a look inside.

  “Fr Vladimir asked us to give you ten tins of caviar,” I said, not without pride. “Here it is! And a bottle of vodka.”

  “What a dear he is! I don’t think he’s appreciated enough where he is. I love him so much,” said the princess, taking out one of the tins and turning it around. “Well, all right, now you must come with me to the Russian House! I’ve taken a fancy to you.”

  She placed the tin back into the bag, put the bag onto the back seat, where she also threw her light coat; I also sat down, and my husband took a seat in the front, next to the princess.

  We roared off. To be honest, I hadn’t even thought about it: if we, in our thirties, had walked to the car considerably tipsy, then the eighty-year-old, albeit young-looking and charming, princess had exited the restaurant leaning, or rather hanging on to, the strong arm of the maître d’hôtel. So how could we even think about driving to Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois with such a driver?

  “My son always scolds me,” said the princess, as if she was reading my thoughts, turning around and looking at me in the back seat. “I love to drink a little and have a good time, and then take a drive! But, as ill luck would have it, I once mixed up the roads and drove into a tunnel, and what a nuisance, drove right into the opposite lane! My son took away my car after that! He said: ‘You’re going to get into a car accident someday and be killed!’ But I can’t live as correctly as he does. I get depressed! So he finally gave me back my car.”