“Who is responsible for this, who could draw and think all this up?” she said in disbelief. “No, how am I supposed to dress my sisters in such ragged, old-ladyish, slovenly uncouthness? I think that even the clothes that nuns wear should be tidy and, if possible, in good taste. The appearance of the monastic is also a homily. It would be wrong if someone should turn away from a nun in disgust at seeing her dreadful appearance. We have a long way to go until we can become holy fools! We shouldn’t try to imitate them—they have achieved spiritual heights that are beyond us—we would only make the demons laugh at us! No, what is a nun? She is the bride of Christ! What, is it proper to offer to Christ the worst, the mostly slovenly and dowdy things? Well, no! Of course, we should never take pride in anything—especially in our clothing or external appearance—but a proud person, no matter how you clothe them, be it in rags, be it in shabby, torn trousers, will still find an object to be proud of—they will take pride in their torn socks, in their dirty collar … so humility—that is an entirely different matter.”
At last, we got lucky—we found a plain blue cotton print with small white polka dots, and the abbess summoned the seamstress to choose designs.
“The thinner girls should have one style, the plump ones something a little different …”
She sat there, kind, elderly, nervously looking through the patterns as if she was planning to clothe her own daughters. I had in the same manner gone shopping when I traveled abroad, worriedly buying clothes for my daughters: for the elder, Aleksandrina—slender, brown eyed, with chestnut hair—one style; and for the younger, Anastasia—strong, blue eyed, blond—exactly that, something a little different.
This choosing of fabric and designs by the abbess for the monastery sisters’ dresses touched me so much that when we got into the car, I exclaimed from an overflow of emotion:
“How happy, Mother, must your nuns be under your wing!”
And then she suddenly told me something, ever so quietly and carefully, in her so pleasantly low voice:
“Well, what about you? Maybe you can join me too, eh? We would serve to the glory of God together! Monasticism—it is, after all, an angelic rank!”
And she looked and looked me as at “one of her own” …
There was always a running theme in the abbess’s reflections:
“Well, the Lord placed me at eighty years old as the abbess of a once enormous monastery. But who am I? What will I tell him at the Final Judgment—‘Lord, I’m old, I’m sick, I’m infirm; the novices that I was given are incapable, disobedient, the monastery is in ruins, there is no money, and so I didn’t do anything!’ Is that what I’m supposed to say to Him? No, since He determined that I should be here, I must, though I should die here, restore the monastery.”
She would repeat this constantly—both when some hope would begin to glimmer from the side and when the matter seemed hopeless: and then, on top of everything, Great Lent began—the time of profound temptations and sorrows.
Finally, the time came for the transfer to the monastery metochion. The metochion was located close to Domodedovo: you had to drive on Kashirskii Highway, and then, before reaching the airport, turn right toward the city of Zukovskii, and after that go left, and drive another ten kilometers, then turn right again and drive on a concrete road for approximately three kilometers.
We arrived there with the abbess and three novices—that’s all that we could fit in the car. The priest who had served in that church, but was now being transferred to another parish, gave us the keys and a blueprint of the property; with that, he left.
So the abbess, having explored her new holdings, stood for a long time in the middle of the field that was soon to be cultivated by the inexperienced city novices. The icy Lenten March wind blew at her blueprint and was seemingly ready to carry off into the distance her small, dry, completely aged figure—there, to the darkened forest—but the abbess continued to stand her ground, tearfully looking over the place where she, an eighty-year-old abbess, chosen by God, was supposed to facilitate the manifestation of the glory of God.
From that moment on, I would drive to the metochion almost every day—sometimes even twice a day, when I had to drive all the novices there for a church service. I also drove all kinds of household goods there, as well as provisions, and even a sheep and goose that had been donated to the monastery: I placed them in my backseat in a basket, where they bleated and gabbled. I also drove a hieromonk who was supposed to serve there and become the monastery’s spiritual father. He was an intelligent and charming man, and we didn’t become friends so much as conversed and understood each other. And so, once we were driving from the convent after the Liturgy; it was March, the snow was beginning to melt, the rooks had arrived, the birds had begun to sing, criss-crossing sunbeams pierced through the car—it was like we were sitting in a shining jewelry box. He said:
“It’s difficult to decide to enter into monasticism, isn’t it? But it would be so good, so good!”
I thought that he was speaking in general terms.
“Yes, yes,” I said, “yes—yes!”
We drove a little bit more, and he began to counsel me confidingly:
“You just have to do it, that’s all! But we don’t have any humility, any patience, any obedience, so we must fight! Why do we hold on so hard to this earthly life?”
He began to frown, all golden in the rays of the spring sun.
I nodded, but stayed silent.
When we were already approaching Novodevichy, he couldn’t help it and exclaimed:
“Monasticism would suit you so much! It’s all joy, it’s such beauty, freedom from the world! Just think, the Lord Himself would be your Groom!”
Here I looked at him with growing suspicion. Something stirred and scraped in my soul; I began to feel like a kolobok.8 When this hieromonk was hearing confessions at the metochion the next time, I didn’t go to him.
And so, one time, since I was also required to drive monastery guests, I was supposed to drive home a veteran bell-ringer. Long ago, he had rung the bells at the monastery for Paschal matins; this was still during the time of Emperor Nicholas Aleksandrovich. Now he was an ancient and dried-up little man. His friends had driven him to the monastery, and it fell to me to drive him back. I asked him:
“Where should I go? What’s the address?”
He replied:
“I don’t remember the address, but I do remember everything by sight. You drive, and I will show you the way.”
He sat in the front and began to direct me: straight, to the right, to the left. We passed Liusinovskaia, and somewhere near Tulskaia metro station he suddenly exclaimed:
“Quickly, turn left, over here, under the bridge, right after the tram.”
“Is there a road here?” I asked him with doubt, as I had never seen cars turning into here.
“Of course, don’t worry, I always take the tram here. I recognize the place.”
What else could I do—I turned where he told me to and drove along the tram rails. But something was wrong—there were no cars, the concrete ended, though two clear lines of the track shone in the sun. Finally, we began to encounter more and more trams. They were placed in a strange order, like seals on icebergs—here and there people crowded around them, whose faces grew long with amazement as soon as they looked in our direction. I began to get a very real sense that we had driven into some sort of tram yard, but I shook it off as a pointless thought—in other words, at this point, it didn’t matter: we still had to find our way out somehow. I continued to slowly and stubbornly move along the tracks in the direction indicated to me by the ancient bell-ringer. We turned once more, and here the old man joyfully announced:
“It’s here, here, I recognize this place, now drive out into the street!”
And just as he said, there was a street ahead, an extremely wide and bustling one. What was the street? I had lost all sense of direction, which, to put it nicely, even in familiar conditions is not very good; you
could say that, on the contrary, I suffer from a certain “topographical idiocy.” Now it was doubled by our adventure through the tram yard. In short, we drove onto an unfamiliar street, and here I saw on the opposite side a very long, almost a kilometer-long, concrete house. This house began approximately where we had driven under that tramway archway (or “bridge,” as the bell-ringer had called it), and here, after all our trials, we emerged again near this endless house, but in the wrong direction of traffic.
“Oh, I think that we’re driving in the right direction, but on the wrong side of the street,” said the old man.
This experience with the veteran bell-ringer helped me to understand that I must slowly bring to an end my service as the abbess’s professional driver: I myself was also moving forward, although under obedience, the right way in theory, but practically speaking in the wrong direction! As Abbess Seraphima’s late husband would say, according to her, everyone sees signs tailor-made for them in the developments of their life. So it was time for me to recognize my worth, to bow out, say “thank you,” and quietly take my leave.
But it was Great Lent, the busy season at the convent, and half the sisters were lying ill at home; they needed medicine, documents needed to be delivered to the Patriarchate, and humanitarian aid for the sisters picked up from the Danilov Monastery. I was to drive straight through the front gate: “Abbess Seraphima’s car!” “Abbess Seraphima? Drive on.”
The abbess herself had to be taken to the hospital clinic. And so she and I got stuck in such a hopeless traffic jam that our trip was beginning to lose purpose—not only would we not make it on time, but standing in one spot, pressed in by cars on all sides, we were already thirty minutes late.
At first, the abbess was nervous and kept rushing me, though we drove directly up against the car standing in front of us, but then she resigned herself and began to look around the street.
“What’s that little restaurant there?” she asked me, pointing in the direction of an enormous window. That wasn’t there before. My late husband would often take me out to dine, so I know.”
“It’s a Chinese restaurant,” I replied. “It’s good, but very expensive. An American Slavicist once invited us out to eat there.”
“Expensive?” the abbess said in surprise. “Strange. I went to a Chinese restaurant in Italy with my late husband, and it was very cheap. Chinese restaurants are usually cheap.”
“They are very cheap in Paris and America, there’s a lot of them there, and a lot of competition.” I said. “But that hasn’t reached us yet: that restaurant is for now the only one of its kind in Moscow.”
“Yes,” the abbess agreed. “In Italy, of course, they wouldn’t survive if they ripped off their customers. They have their own wonderful ethnic restaurants, as well as French ones and whatever else. My late husband and I ate out quite often both when I traveled abroad for conferences and here at home in Moscow … sometimes it was only in those places that the ‘Soviet’ flavor would disappear.”
I tried to imagine how someone standing aside and listening to this conversation between the abbess and her driver would react, and smiled.
“Why are you smiling?” she asked me strictly.
“I’m smiling because I am beginning to understand that you are a very fortunate person!”
“What made you come to that conclusion?”
“You are the granddaughter of a martyr,” I began, “you had a wonderful, loving husband, the Lord blessed you in your work, you made extremely important scientific discoveries that are very useful to people, and even in your venerable old age the Lord has bestowed upon you His trust and has chosen you to be the abbess of a beautiful monastery in the very center of Russia!”
“You’re talking as if you’re saying the eulogy at my funeral,” she laughed, dismayed. “Can it be that you’re thinking of leaving me?”
“Yes, Mother, I am,” I admitted.
“Why? Something doesn’t suit you?” she said with concern.
“Everything suits me very well. But I have a husband, children, work that I love … The monastery has a car now, and I will find you a driver. As for me—you can see for yourself, I’m no driver! If we get a flat tire somewhere on the highway at night in the rain, what would we do? Stand there, cry for help, get wet, look for some men, rely on solidarity among drivers on the road …”
“Well, all right,” she said dryly. “I understand that it’s not working out with you and monasticism. Then please at least find me a driver, a churchgoing one. As my late husband would say, there is no greater madness than to trust a deceitful man. A driver should have your trust. He’s the person with whom you share your initial reactions when you sit down in his car.”
I found her one. This was my handyman, Sasha, a chemist by education who fixed my car. At the time, he had just begun to come to the Church, and he liked the idea of driving Abbess Seraphima.
The hieromonk who had become the spiritual father of her convent was soon transferred to another place, where he at first became rector and then bishop. I met him recently in the courtyard of the Patriarchate on Chistii Pereulok. He recognized me and was very happy to see me:
“Well, how are you? Listen, I have a little convent starting in my diocese. It’s hard to find words to describe the place: it’s paradise! Imagine: the cleanest little river, with water like a holy spring, reflecting the sky, clouds, stars, and moon. Pure poetry! And over the river there is a sloping hill onto which several birch trees ran up and froze, admiring the view. And that’s where the convent is, right by the birch trees. What do you think?”
“It sounds wonderful, Vladyka, I also have no words!”
“Well, your children have already grown up, right? What’s stopping you now from coming and joining me as the abbess? I would give you your own car! You could drive just like you used to.”
I was so shocked that I lost the gift of speech for several minutes. But I somehow managed to say:
“But I have a husband! What about him?”
“What about your husband? What about him? We’ll take him, too. We’ll find a place for him, too. It’s a large diocese. We’ll tonsure him, too. You’ll be in one monastery, he in another. Just like Peter and Fevronia!”9
He stood there, radiating from inside, happy that he had thought of everything so well. I didn’t want to disappoint him. I just said to him, sighing:
“As the late husband of Abbess Seraphima used to say, stand where you are, do what is appropriate, and what will be, will be!”
The Angel
That winter, my life was very difficult—first of all, I was very tired: it was almost ten years since my husband had become a priest and we had moved to Peredelkino. I had worked as his driver practically from morning till night and would drive him before the crack of dawn to Moscow and back at an hour when all normal people had already dined, soaked in the bathtub, and were now sitting and peacefully watching television. Second of all, for some reason, I was chronically frozen: it was so cold outside that the rooms in our decrepit Peredelkino house didn’t heat to higher than fifty-three degrees and the pipes constantly froze. For this reason, we always had to be on the watch—place plastic water bottles full of hot water around the pipes, keep the heated oven open, keep a thin stream of water running, watch the switched-on lights and make sure that they were on only one at a time, not all at once. In the worst case, what would happen is the electrical fuses wouldn’t be able to handle it and our house would be cast into total darkness. And as we know, there is already more than enough darkness in December. Then there was the Christmas Fast on top of everything …
In short, I was completely worn out and awaited Christmas with impatience: after that, there would be more daylight, then there would be Christmastide, then it wouldn’t be long before Cheesefare Week, and then Pascha would come with the sun, warm breezes, and birds.
So, lamenting and struggling, I suddenly understood what it was that I wanted and what would be a true comfort to me: to se
e my guardian angel. After all, I mused, he had been given to me at baptism and has been with me all this time; he stays near me in my room, is secretly present in my car, but I don’t feel him, or see him, or hear him.
This wish of mine became quite a temptation! Even people who have the least understanding of spiritual life know that if a sinner begins to see bodiless spirits, it only speaks of his completely darkened state. And if my wish were suddenly granted and I saw my angel, it would mean one thing—goodness gracious, it was time for me to seek treatment. But still, I wanted it so much, so much, as if he was my very favorite being, as if I was languishing in estrangement from him and awaited an impending reunion with him.
It was terrible—I couldn’t pray for the Lord to reveal him to me, neither could I free myself from this insane wish. In short, it became an obsession.
Soon Christmas Eve would come. I thought, “I’ll go to communion on Christmas Eve morning during the Liturgy of St Basil the Great, and then I will ask the priest’s blessing to commune on Christmas Day as well.” I felt depressed and was falling apart.
So that’s what I did. I went to communion on Christmas Eve and also received permission for holy communion on Christmas Day. I immediately felt better. Music began to play in my soul, my internal candle was relit—I felt its warmth.
It was just too bad that on Christmas my husband was scheduled to serve not in his own Church of the Holy Martyr Tatiana, which my children and grandchildren attended on great holidays, but in the Church of Christ the Saviour. The little children would definitely not last through the night service there: there was nowhere for them to sit or curl up. Fine. Let my husband serve with the Patriarch; I would go where my children would be, both young and old. Then after the service, I would pick my husband up and take him home to Peredelkino.
I drove him to the Church of Christ the Saviour and returned to Peredelkino to take my daughter and granddaughter to the Church of the Holy Martyr Tatiana. I turned onto the highway, drove along the deserted road; the trees were all covered in frost, the drifting snow blew along the ground, I was in no rush and looked around in admiration. And here was the place where I had to slow down, turn on my left-hand turn signal, and press on the brakes, because I had to turn left and enter through the gates. As soon as I made the ninety-degree turn, I suddenly saw a solid black car that had just crossed the solid line and was aiming straight for me at a frightening speed; it was making directly for my driver-side door, and in those precious seconds, I understood that this was the end. This was it! But on the other hand, I had such peace in my soul, and I heard a voice—also very calm and articulate—distinctly say to me:
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