Ordinary Wonders

by Oloesia Nikolaeva

  We were flying down the highway, and from time to time she would glance at my husband, then at me. The other cars swerved away from us and were instantly left far behind. At that moment, I understood her son very well and sympathized with him.

  “I would like to meet Lidia Aleksandrovna Uspenskaia very much,” said my husband. “Doesn’t she live in the Russian House?”

  “Oh,” the princess rolled her eyes and stepped on the gas. “She is so proper, so strict! She is virtue itself. I’m afraid of her. I think she must judge me for my frivolity. So you can go see her if you want while I rest a little in my room.”

  We were already approaching the Russian House.

  The princess left the things in the car, escorted us to Lidia Aleksandrovna’s door, and then disappeared. We knocked.

  Lidia Aleksandrovna, the widow of Uspensky, the author of books about the theology of iconography, turned out to be a very miniature, thin, neat old lady. She was like a little bird, but a strict bird, exact in its bearing, and clean, because there are different kinds of birds. You have the predatory, omnivorous seagulls; the impudent, disheveled crows; the chatterbox magpies; and the wagtails. Then you have the miniature chickadees and the elegant swallows—messengers from another world—and Lidia Aleksandrovna was one of these. It felt as if our conversation was resumed rather than starting from nothing, like we had already had this discussion at some other time, and we had been interrupted at the most interesting part, and were now taking it up again from where we had left off. We spoke about Metropolitan Nikodim, for whom she had worked as a secretary in Paris, and his relationship with the Catholics. We didn’t even notice that two hours had flown by …

  Suddenly, the door opened with a bang and our princess appeared on the threshold: she had thrust the door open with her foot.

  “How long can you hold these wonderful young people up,” the princess exclaimed. “I miss them already! I want to take them to the Russian cemetery!”

  Lidia Aleksandrovna took her in with a strict glance.

  But the princess would not be subdued. “Aren’t you bored? You’re probably discussing something academic, covered over with the dust of time …”

  “It’s terribly interesting!”

  “What is it—some sort of intellectual theology? Something acutely specific? Thrilling indeed! Will you come with us to the cemetery?” she asked Lidia Aleksandrovna.

  “You go ahead. Go in peace. We’ll finish our talk some other time,” Lidia Aleksandrovna released us.

  We got into the princess’s car, though the cemetery was within walking distance.

  Some North African kids were running around with a ball near the cemetery. The last remaining sunlight was warming them. We entered the church, put up some candles, prayed, then walked from one grave to another: from Bunin to Berdyaev, from Fr Sergii Bulgakov to Felix Yusupov.

  “I don’t like cemeteries,” shivered the princess when we moved back toward the car. “I love life!”

  She took out her key, it beeped … Alas! The car was unlocked.

  “I didn’t lock the car!” the princess exclaimed, rushing to the back seat where all our things had lain and from where she still hadn’t taken the bag with the caviar and vodka.

  “They stole it!” was all she said.

  Sure enough, my husband’s fine, orange buffalo leather suitcase that he had brought back from America was gone. It could be folded until it was the size of a man’s purse. It could also be unfolded like a suitcase and fit everything. There had been an enormous amount of ten-frank coins in the side pocket—about forty, which I had placed there in order to buy gifts. But most importantly—the bag with the vodka and caviar was gone. That caviar, all ten 200-gram tins of it, for whose sake and by the prayers of the rector and archpriest Fr Vladimir Rozhkov the Lord had dimmed the eyes of the Moscow customs agents, so that they looked but did not see, and had also taken the Swiss and French border patrol out of the game. All that was left on the back seat was the mink coat of the princess!

  What, the mink coat? You will probably ask. That should have been the first thing they took …

  Oh, no! The thing is that the thin mink lining was unnoticeable from the outside. The exterior was a simple black raincoat, a trench. The integrity of aristocrats is such that they don’t flaunt their wealth in order not to stink of money. They are modest glamour and veiled chic. The plebeians have it all backwards: a golden chain lies on that oak.4

  We looked around. The North African youths were no longer playing ball. All was quiet and dark.

  “Princess, are you very upset?”

  “Yes,” her face fell. “But I myself am to blame. What was I thinking, forgetting to lock the car? I’m so upset about Fr Vladimir’s presents! Ten tins of caviar! My son is going to scold me so much, so much! Just don’t you tell him. Well, what now—back to Paris?”

  We sped back in silence.

  “You really do value Fr Vladimir?” the princess asked once again. “You understand what a dear he is, what an incredible person?”

  “Yes, we understand.”

  “Thank God that we had managed to give the princess that ill-fated caviar and vodka, had shown her all ten tins,” I said after we parted ways with her. How would it have looked if all that had happened before she had seen it with her own eyes! How we would have defended ourselves! She would have been sorely tempted to think that we had eaten it all on our own! How terrible …”

  Happily, the princess called Fr Vladimir and told him herself how she hadn’t taken the precaution of taking his gifts out of the car, and how she had been robbed …

  He was very upset. He couldn’t let it go for a while. He even tried getting upset with me, but as soon as I noticed that, I said to him rather curtly:

  “Fr Vladimir, that’s enough! Your prayers have a limited area of influence. You asked for us to be allowed over the border and they let us through. You asked for us not to even be noticed—we weren’t noticed. You blessed us to hand over the gifts to the princess? We did that. But did you ask for us and the princess not to be robbed after that? No, you didn’t. Did you bless her to lock her car? No, you didn’t. What do you say to that?”

  He had nothing to say.

  Payback

  Our conversation turned to the subject of payback. It all began when the priest Fr Valentin, who served just outside of Moscow, started talking about theft.

  “Priests are the most professional experts on their communities. After hearing the confessions of commercial employees in our little town, I’ve come to understand that we have an epidemic of thievery.”

  “What, do they steal their own products?” said the surprised Irina Lvovna, my neighbor at the dacha, who had come over to “sit out the dark”: in our neighborhood, the electricity was often turned off, but only individual power lines, not altogether. So this time it was the power line of Irina Lvovna’s dacha. Now she sat with us in the light of a large lamp, drinking tea and listening to the priest with great interest.

  “Well yes, they even steal their own products, sometimes, then they cheat by falsely weighing them and miscounting items. It’s even considered the normal thing to do,” sighed Fr Valentin.

  “And what do you do? Do you chastise them for this?” Irina Lvovna asked with interest.

  “It would be useless. They just answer me: how am I supposed to feed my children, or pay rent? So I just … scare them.”

  “What do you mean, scare them?”

  “With the threat of payback. I tell them—you will pay for every stolen ruble tenfold. That scares them.”

  “How do you mean?” Irina Lvovna wouldn’t let up. “Who will they answer tenfold to? The police?”

  “He means that God will put them in such a position that they will be taken advantage of and will lose more than they stole themselves,” I said. “Even my children can do that math almost from their very cradle.”

  “What, did they steal too?” said Irina Lvovna, horrified.

  “No,
they didn’t steal, but sometimes the cashier at the metro or the store would miscalculate their change to their advantage, and they, noticing this, would take the extra money as if nothing was the matter, thinking that well, God sent it their way. Then, in literally two or three days, they would have to pay it back: they would be shortchanged somewhere else at the first opportunity, or they would lose their wallets completely. And this always happened when I gave them a lot of money—either to pay their school for their traveling expenses somewhere, or pay their share for a trip to another city. In short, since they experienced it themselves, they will never take anyone else’s money.”

  “Whatever you want men to do to you, do also to them” (Mt 7:12), cited Fr Valentin.

  “Well yes, in the area of discipline, this is good, of course. But in life it’s not like that at all,” Irina Lvovna waved her hand. “Some people steal and steal and it’s nothing to them …”

  “That means that things are very bad for them,” sighed Fr Valentin. “The first sign that God cares for a person is when their hidden misdeeds overtake them from without. They become their own reality.”

  “How do you mean?” asked Irina Lvovna.

  “You judged someone—and you immediately found yourself in the same position as that person. Or you lied and it became true.”

  “It’s true,” I recalled. “I have a friend who would evade military service by pretending that he had asthma. And as soon as he received the white ticket for exemption from service, he got sick—with asthma. Or sometimes I’ll lie that I’m sick with a cold because I don’t want to leave the house, even though I’m completely well, and I’ll immediately get chills and a stuffy nose.”

  “Or if you laugh at someone, just wait, you’ll find yourself in a similar unfortunate situation,” concluded Fr Valentin. “As our parishioner, who’s a bit of a holy fool, says, whatever you make fun of will become your own misfortune.”

  “No,” Irina Lvovna firmly shook her head. “That never happens to me. You’re all living in a fairy tale …”

  And she went home, as the electricity should have been turned back on by now.

  Now I must say a few words about Irina Lvovna. She was a fifty-year-old widow, but not an unhappy old widow, broken and aged by the loss of her husband. No, she didn’t allow herself to be weakened by grief; on the contrary, she took herself in hand—even took courage from it—and began a new life. What’s more, her words took on a certain finality and her gestures a certain authority. Her clothes fit her curvy figure quite neatly, she dyed her hair in the color “Golden Beach,” and, I assume, wasn’t against meeting a suitable man of her age in order to spend the rest of her life with him. Perhaps she would have done so already, because she did have certain admirers, but her overly inflated sense of self-worth (which she just considered to be a high standard) always got in her way.

  We lived across the street from each other, and had grown closer over the last year or two. In any case, she had begun to drop by, but not without a certain formality: only after a phone call and my invitation, which was always given formally. She would come to consult with me, however guardedly, and sometimes even to speak candidly, but in subtle hints, dropped almost by chance. In short, I began to discern that a real candidate had appeared on the horizon, judging by her inspired manner in describing a certain Spanish translator who had already invited her to a presentation of his book of translations, and was now inviting her to a Christmas reception hosted right at the residency of an ambassador of some Latin American country.

  It seemed to me that she found it pleasant just to say those words aloud—“reception,” “ambassador,” “residency”—but even without that, her ego soared to unprecedented heights.

  Two or three days passed, and suddenly she uncharacteristically appeared on my threshold—without a preliminary call, in an agitated state, and even a little disheveled.

  “Well, Irina Lvovna, did you go to the reception?”

  “Oh, you can’t imagine what it was like! I don’t even know if I should laugh or cry …”

  And she giggled, but a little nervously.

  “At first that Spaniard of mine very subtly proposed to me.”

  “Please accept my congratulations!”

  “Then my fiancé took me to the ambassador’s, where we had a fabulous Christmas dinner. The Christmas tree was all lit up … candles … ladies in cleavage-baring dresses. Our Russian celebrities. Waiters in white tuxedo jackets walked around everywhere serving food and cocktails … the most interesting conversations. Then suddenly, in the very heat of the evening, my intended,” here she again giggled nervously, unable to hold back, “vanished. He was gone for ten minutes, twenty minutes, half an hour, an hour! Suddenly someone from the ambassador’s staff—I don’t know if he was a porter or a footman—came up to me and said: ‘Your friend is asking for you.’ I said: ‘What? How? Where is he?’ And he told me: ‘Come with me.’

  “They led me out of the hall and took me along the corridor. From a distance I heard someone’s shrieks, cries, pounding, a terrible commotion … They told me:

  “‘There. Your friend has been trying to get out for two hours already without success. Talk to him, calm him down while the reception is still going on.’

  “I looked—sure enough, it was the door to the men’s room, and my Spaniard was beating on the door from the inside and yelling:

  “‘Get me out of here!’

  “I said to the footman accompanying me:

  “‘Yes, let him go at once! Why are you keeping him there?’

  “But he only answered me in broken Russian:

  “‘We would love to, but he locked himself in, and now he can’t open the door. We’re not going to break the door down!’

  “‘Break it down!’ I said. ‘He can’t sit there forever. At least break the lock.’

  “‘It’s impossible from the outside,’ he said. ‘We already gave him screwdrivers and knives under the door so that he could try and break it from the inside.’

  “My Spaniard heard me and started to howl:

  “‘Irina, I beg you, don’t leave me! Tell them to let me out!’

  “I said to the footman again:

  “‘Break the door down, what are you waiting for?’

  “‘We’re afraid to, His Excellency the Ambassador would be very unhappy if we broke the door down in his residency. How would the Honorable Ambassador use the bathroom?’

  “And he left.

  “‘Well, how are you doing in there?’ I asked my fiancé.

  “‘Well, not bad, in theory,’ he answered. ‘It could be a lot worse. As it is—it’s clean, there’s somewhere to sit if you put down the lid on the toilet, and there’s a nice soft rug on the floor. If worse comes to worst, I could spend the night on it.’

  “‘I like that! What are you thinking, spending the night on a carpet in the bathroom? How did you get into such a decadent mood? Take courage!’ I tried to lift his spirits. ‘I’ll go and ask the Honorable Ambassador to take personal measures …’

  “Suddenly the same footman reappeared:

  “‘No-no-no, I beg of you. His Excellency the Ambassador doesn’t like to be disturbed during a reception.’

  “So what could I do? I went back to the hall, and there they were already serving the main course—twirling some sort of bird on a spit over an open fire. Everyone was applauding, happy, drunk. Only my quote-unquote ‘fiancé’ sat locked up in the toilet, beating against the wall like a butterfly against glass.

  “I came back to the door, and sure enough, there he was causing an uproar—loudly pounding against the door, trying to beat it down with some sort of battering ram.

  “I asked him:

  “‘What are beating the door with?’

  “‘My shoulder, my own shoulder. These new locks with the flimsy hardware are no good, you know.’

  “His voice, though it came through, sounded somehow distant. The door was evidently thick, and strong.

 
; “‘Why don’t you at least take a bath while you’re in there,’ I told him. ‘Why just sit there?’

  “He answered:

  “‘I would gladly take a bath, but there’s no tub. Just a shower.’

  “Soon, the guests began to part ways—completely drunk, happy. The same footman appeared.

  “‘Come on, now, do something,’ I said to him. ‘Use a chisel or something, at least, or just break the door down.’

  “But he only answered me again—the Honorable Ambassador, he won’t be happy …

  “But I was getting sick of it all—I started to threaten him:

  “‘Look, you be careful, or you’ll have an international incident on your hands. Our citizen was held captive in your bathroom, how would that look? I could say it was an act of provocation!’

  “He finally brought a tool, like a drill bit or a chisel, inserted it where the round handle was, and tried with all his might to unwedge the lock. But it was no use! It was a good, solid door, a strong lock.

  “While we busied ourselves in this way, the ambassador had escorted his guests and headed for his bathroom, to which we were trying to gain entrance with that chisel. We had started to work on the hinges, but all in vain.

  “‘What’s going on here?’ the ambassador asked, frowning.

  “The footman told him:

  “‘Here’s what happened. The guest locked himself in, and the lock caught. We tried to saw out the lock—that didn’t work; break the door down—it won’t budge. And the guest has been in there for three hours already in the most terrible state.’

  “The guest was already screaming at the top of his voice: