Ordinary Wonders

by Oloesia Nikolaeva

  As for his friend, the other iconographer, for whose sake he had also implored the elder—that is another story. His stomach wouldn’t turn at all; on the contrary, his soul was very inclined to drink. But only after a few sips, he would break out into a terrible allergic reaction. It was so bad that he had to be taken to emergency to pump the alcohol out, which would bring him back to life.

  So my friends, the monk-iconographers, no longer drink. Fifteen years have passed, that elder has already passed away, and they keep sipping away at nothing but their green tea or herbal infusions.

  “Well, fine,” I once asked them, “but why didn’t it work on our third monastic friend? He pays it no heed, it’s like a drop in the bucket to him. Or is it like the Gospel says: ‘One will be taken and the other left’ (Mt 24:40)?”

  “You know what?” they said to me. “Let’s not do that! The judgment of God is a mystery. All we have to do here is be still, stand on tiptoe with bated breath, and put a finger on our lips. ‘Whatsoever the Lord pleased, that hath He done!’(Ps 134:6). Also, in the life of St Anthony, it was said to him from the very heavens in answer to his curiosity: ‘Anthony! Keep your attention on yourself!’”

  The Late Husband of Mother Seraphima

  Monasticism is a deeply voluntary matter. It is not in vain that a moment exists in the monastic tonsure when the tonsuring abbot (elder) asks the one being tonsured:

  “Why do you come brother/sister falling down before the Holy Table?” “Do you come to the Lord voluntarily and of your own mind?”

  And he or she replies:

  “Yes, Reverend Father.”

  But I know of cases that took place in our time, after the Babylonian captivity,1 when inexperienced neophytes were either lured into the monastery or tonsured almost by force. This can be explained first of all by the fact that neophytes are sometimes characteristically ignorant, imbalanced, and prone to spiritual misalignment. Either they fast until they are half dead, or they begin to arrogantly insist that fasting is an outdated and obsolete institution. They either take the priest’s word as truth to the farthest extreme, or they don’t follow any spiritual instruction under any circumstances. Second of all, when new monasteries began to open, monks were in immediate demand. That is why such immature types were taken and tonsured, those who weren’t ready to be novices or who had neophyte complexes.

  I heard one such story myself from a monk from a distant northern monastery. He once came to an elder in order to ask his blessing to successfully defend his thesis at his university. The elder, thinking for a long time, said to him:

  “Actually, you need to become a monk.”

  He was led away by the spiritual children of the elder and taken to the monastery. Before he had a chance to come to his senses, he was tonsured at lightning speed. So began his trials and wanderings from one monastery to another.

  “But why didn’t you just tell the elder that you didn’t want to follow the monastic path or at least that you weren’t ready?” I asked him.

  “I didn’t even know that I could say that,” he admitted. “I thought—the elder has spoken, so now I must follow his instruction, though the earth should crumble beneath my feet. I was afraid that the Lord would punish me for disobedience. And the elder’s spiritual children also insisted: the elder said so, now you don’t have anywhere to hide! It’s decided.”

  But there were also more subtle methods of persuading someone to enter the monastery. Even I was almost caught once—in any case, my heart began to go pitter-patter and turn in that direction against all odds, and I began to struggle with it. This is how it happened.

  In 1995, my husband was ordained to the diaconate of the Russian Orthodox Church, and at the time he served at Sretensky Monastery. For some reason, I fell under the temptation of thinking that since he was now a clergyman, he could also be tonsured into monasticism. What about it? They could say: “Fr Vladimir, go ahead and do it ‘for obedience’s sake.’” But what would I do? I didn’t want to part with him under any circumstances! This fear was completely unfounded and was simply suggested to me by an evil spirit, ever striving to dismay the Christian heart.

  And so, Mother Seraphima, who had just recently become the abbess of Novodevichy Convent, having heard from someone that a certain deacon’s wife had for a long time driven a car, took a great interest in me: Metropolitan Iuvenalii was ready to donate his black Volga to her convent, but would wait until the abbess could find a driver. So she turned to me with the request to become her driver; that way the convent would have its own car, and later one of her novices could learn to drive, and she would release me with gratitude.

  The abbess was very much to my liking: she came from an old noble family that had served the Church, the Tsar, and the Fatherland for a long time. The New Martyr Seraphim Chichagov was her grandfather; he had in his time fought for the canonization of St Seraphim of Sarov, whom we considered our family patron saint, since he had saved my father from certain death during World War II. Her great-grandfather had served as Minister of the Imperial Navy during the reign of Nicholas I, and her great-great-grandfather, Admiral Chichagov, had been celebrated for defeating the Swedish fleet near Revel.

  As for Mother Seraphima herself (Varvara Vasilievna), in addition to never being a Party member—about which she loved to repeat: “The Lord was merciful to me and allowed me to escape membership in the godless Party”—she was a professor, a doctor of chemical sciences, a respected member of many academies around the world, a USSR State Prize laureate, a recipient of two orders—the Order of the Red Banner of Labor and the Order of the October Revolution. She was responsible for some important discoveries in the rubber industry—among other things, she invented the suit in which Yuri Gagarin flew into space. All in all, she presented what they call a “one-of-a-kind” human being.

  After discussing with the abbess the possibility of releasing me from my duties for the Art of Literature seminars that I was leading at the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute, I agreed.

  Metropolitan Iuvenalii’s people immediately made the papers for his Volga car out to the convent. I was designated as the authorized driver, and my life began to course through the streets of the newly opened Novodevichy Convent. I must say that at the time the monastery only owned the church with its candle shop and three rooms located within the church itself: in the farthest room was the reception area of the abbess, where mostly unfortunate women broken by grief came to see her. (One of them had been kicked out of her one-room apartment by her son, who had brought in his young wife; another by her drunk and abusive husband; a third—a very young person—was sent by some monk-spiritual father of hers who had forbidden her to marry her beloved: “If you marry him, you may stop coming to see me!” So she had chosen her spiritual father over her groom.) In the middle room was the kitchen with the dining area, and in the third, a separate room, some needed things were stored by the convent. In theory, the monastery had also inherited some half-decayed buildings that would in time become the sisters’ cells, but this would only take place in the unknown future, as there were no funds for their restoration. For now, the potential nuns had nowhere to lay their heads.

  They lived each in their own place and came to the monastery from the world “for their obediences.” Even the abbess continued to live in her Moscow apartment on Vosstaniya Square, where I would pick her up every morning at eight thirty in my car, drive her to the monastery, deftly turn in through the gates, which were invariably flung open with hurried willingness by an elderly guard, and only then would I exchange my car for the black Volga.

  It would be parked next to the church itself. The Pobeda make car of Metropolitan Iuvenalii’s young hiearodeacon, which he kept in immaculate shape, was also parked there, and in the mornings, inspired by the example of the untiring owner of the Pobeda working nearby, I would polish the Volga and shake out the rugs, which I almost never did with my own car, thinking—possibly without reason—that “it would be safer that way”
(a year before that, my perfectly clean and brilliantly polished Semerka had been stolen under my very nose).

  Later on, when the car would be ready for the abbess’s departure, she and I would visit “the sponsors,” i.e., various authorities and charities that could possibly fund the monastery’s restoration. But not only did no one hurry to provide the money, it seemed to me that they were not planning to give any at all, in spite of the fact that the abbess’s visits would be preceded by inspiring letters and convincing arguments in defense of such a use of their resources. We were completely unable to direct the current of finances in the direction of the decaying convent. They just looked at us with a considerably suspicious and wily smirk (as if to say, we can’t be deceived, we’re no fools!), almost as if we were asking them at the very least to change the course of the northern rivers …

  I even tried to take advantage of my membership in the Russian PEN Center2 for this purpose. After getting the phone number of the press secretary Khakamada, who was at the time a deputy of the State Duma, I introduced myself as a writer (probably in order to raise the status of my request in her eyes) and recited to her on the phone a rather “charismatic” speech on the countless spiritual, aesthetic, as well as practical benefits that Irina Mutsuovna could receive in exchange for her sponsorship …

  The press secretary strictly asked what I meant exactly by “aesthetic benefits?” I answered that the restoration of such a magnificent convent would bring aesthetic pleasure and recall the beautiful image of the Grand Duchess Elizabeth Fyodorovna3 founding her convent … that I meant it in the sense that this would be a “beautiful gesture.” In addition, its abbess was an aristocrat, the granddaughter of a martyr, who was herself an academic and had never been a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

  I even hinted, not without poetical expression, that Irina Mutsuovna could, by doing this, boost her own—stammering a little, I still managed to say it—image, as well as that of her forthcoming pre-election campaign, and what’s more, even enter history in the most worthy way.

  It seemed to me that I pontificated so convincingly that I almost saw before my very own eyes the image of Irina Mutsuovna entering the course of history: in white clothing, with an elegant wreath of lilies—that was how Irina Mutsuovna appeared to me in my mind, and thus for a moment, history seemed to me not unlike the heavenly kingdom … such a wondrous moment did I have … such a fleeting apparition … 4

  But it ended, as it should have, with the troubles of life’s vanity, throes of hopeless grief, and raging, gusty storms.5

  My fellow conversationalist, having consulted with her supervisor, harshly responded that Irina Mutsuovna doesn’t see why she should really help namely the Orthodox people, and not Jews or Muslims or someone else. It was clear (as was to be expected) that neither the image of the Grand Duchess, nor that of the abbess-academic, had in any way inspired (at least aesthetically) the former Communist activist and teacher of Marxist-Leninist political economics. And now I sadly glanced over the featureless, imported, low-quality product in which Irina Mutsuovna loomed on the television screen …

  But the abbess also had difficulty with her novices. She had under her direction only one real nun who was already experienced in the monastic life. She had been promoted by the abbess and now sold candles. But there were problems with her, too—it was her previous monastic experience that got in her way: she would constantly announce to the abbess:

  “We didn’t do it that way in our convent … our abbess always said …”

  The abbess would grumble at her:

  “Let her go back and sit there in her old convent, why did she want to come to us so much?”

  This nun also started a quarrel with me. She believed that I was taking the monastery car and driving away to do “my own errands” and that I filled my own car with monastery-intended gasoline, which I would receive at the gas station with state-issued tokens. She even shared her suspicions with the abbess, who simply asked me: “How do you buy gas for your car—with tokens or with money?” I answered, “With money,” and she believed me. But surprisingly enough, the nun didn’t stop at that, and learning who my spiritual father was by roundabout ways, contacted him to complain about me.

  He asked me at confession:

  “Have you ever filled up your car with the monastery’s gasoline?”

  Then I understood how the enemy of mankind rages against and torments the brides of Christ!6 I felt sorry for the nun, and the thought that I had abandoned my husband and children, my writing, having rushed to help the abbess and await “godly adventures” just for the sake of stealing the monastery’s gasoline seemed so silly to me.

  It was not much simpler with the rest of the novices. I think that many of them hadn’t gotten the chance to even become regular churchgoing people: when we all read the communion rule aloud together, they did it as if they were seeing the prayers for the first time and with strained amazement attacked the words syllable by syllable: O-the-good-ness-of-God …

  Moreover, it turned out that the abbess had no ability whatsoever to lead, i.e., to give orders, insist, or make reprimands. This seemed especially strange in view of the fact that when she worked in the world, she directed entire laboratories and divisions. But she had such highly developed, even excessive, respect for human freedom, that the abbess treated her novices almost as if she was giving them total freedom of choice—and perhaps this was her way of expressing a sort of opposition to the Soviet authorities, which ever strove to repress the individual.

  This created definite disadvantages in her relations with the willful and still spiritually imbalanced novices, who continued to think that even in the monastery they were “in their own right.” Her low-toned, endearing voice always sounded intelligent, respectful, and gentle. Conversations with the novices went approximately like this:

  “Valentina, wouldn’t you like to wash the floor in the church today?”

  “Oh, Mother, I’m not really in the mood, there’s something wrong with my back.”

  “Tatiana, how are you feeling, would you be against it?”

  “No, Mother, I’m not really feeling up to it today.”

  “And you, Natalia, how do you feel about it—wouldn’t you like to work a little for the glory of God?”

  “I have heartburn today for some reason. No, let Larisa over there wash it.”

  “Larisa, what do you say to my proposition—will you wash the floor?”

  “Mother, I get all sweaty, I’d rather read the Lives of the Saints aloud at lunch …”

  I felt sorry for the abbess, looking with confusion at her newly appointed and capricious novices, and said:

  “Mother, if we don’t need to go anywhere, let me wash the floor.”

  “To the glory of God!” the abbess happily replied.

  This usually had a great educational effect: in ten minutes, all present novices were crawling on the floor and scraping off the wax and dirt.

  “As my late husband would say,” said the abbess when we got into the car afterwards, “the Soviet regime has spoiled people: everyone has begun to think that he must do as he wishes.” The most surprising thing is that she didn’t have any solutions for this: no solutions, and her conviction still lives on.

  Generally, and especially in times of serious difficulties and trials, the abbess would very often refer to the authority of her late husband: “As my late husband would say …” Coming from the lips of the abbess, this would sound peculiar but touching. It was obvious that they had spent many years together and had lived in complete harmony.

  In truth, they didn’t read the Lives of the Saints at mealtimes, but the book Olkhovksy Convent, about an ideal and peaceful women’s monastery. It was a completely fictional place that never existed. For monasteries are places of blood, pain, suffering, and sweat. But there, everything seemed to be peaceful, smooth, and full of God’s grace, which really just made it saccharine and sugary sweet. Our novices would sigh langui
dly: “If only our convent was like that …” Finally, I couldn’t take it any more and said to them: “So go ahead and create one like that yourselves.” They just shrugged their shoulders: “But how, how?” I said: “You can start by obeying your abbess!” But the next day, everything would start all over again:

  “Elena, would you be so kind as to peel some potatoes for the sisters?”

  “Oh, Mother, how can you say that, I’ve had ringing in my ear since morning! And then my hands always look so terrible after I peel potatoes! Such dirt underneath my fingernails!”

  In spite of the abbess’s initial assurances that I wouldn’t have a lot of work (“You would just have to pick me up from my apartment and take me to the monastery, then home from the monastery in the evening, and take me here or there in the city, nowhere far, steps away!”), I ended up driving from morning till night. But the abbess herself, I think, couldn’t imagine what a whirlpool the Lord would place her in.

  I dropped the abbess off at the monastery at eight thirty, and drove her back at nine o’clock at night, or even ten sometimes, or even eleven. And in the interim, I had to go about on monastery affairs practically the whole day.

  So, we drove with the abbess to some textile factories and chose the material from which the novices’ monastic habits and summer dresses would be sewn: the monastery was being given a little metochion7 with a church, a yard, vegetable gardens, and fields, so that it could be self-sustaining. It was assumed that the novices would take on the spring sowing as soon as the snow melted from the fields, and that they would spend all summer until the beginning of fall in the countryside. So they needed light, but monastically modest, dresses for their work in the fields.

  However, the abbess categorically disliked the fabrics being offered to her at the factory. At first, they were all too faded and acutely unattractive, as if a genuine ill-wisher had laid his hand on them: they had either cucumbers on a dirty-blue background, or purple flowers on a yellowish-green background, or orange houses on a purple background …