Ordinary Wonders

by Oloesia Nikolaeva

  I also once felt an overpowering desire to give the Mother of God a golden cross on a chain in a burst of gratitude. To this day, it hangs on the Kazan Mother of God in the Moscow metochion of the Lavra. Here is the reason I donated my little cross to the icon of the Kazan Mother of God: My son Nika was going to be ordained a deacon and in preparation was collecting all the necessary documents. This proved to be a fairly labor-intensive matter. He had to present a document from the institute from which he graduated, from the military recruiting center, from the church where he served as an altar boy, from the Housing and Utility Management, from the psychological health center verifying that he is not a registered sex offender, from the narcotics unit stating that he is not a drug addict, and on top of all that, many other medical documents, down to blood and urine analyses.

  It took him almost half a year to assemble all this—in part because he had lost his military service card and was forced to get it reissued in a torturous and dangerous manner: the military commissar, who had a shortage of recruits, went out of his way to seize my dear son, shave off his already deacon-length hair, and send him somewhere far away to march to songs on some training ground.

  But finally he gathered all the necessary documents: he had stood in line for the analyses, he had spoken to the psychiatrist, he had even walked away from the military commissar in victory. My husband had already given him money both for his deacon’s apparel, which cost a pretty penny, and for his life expenses in general—around three hundred dollars (a fair sum in those days). He packed all this away into his briefcase and set off for the Patriarchate. There he found that the bishop to whom he had to give all the documents was absent. It was his day off—a church feast day. So he took his little briefcase and went off with it on his own affairs—to church for the service, and then to sing at an event. He was at the time the conductor of a church choir, and his singers would often earn a little money by singing at events hosted by rich people. There he was paid one hundred dollars, fed, and released into the night. He put the money with the rest—into that briefcase—and stepped out onto the dark street, into a blizzard and blinding snowstorm. In his joy, he decided to take a taxi home. At that moment, a taxi drove up. Nika sat in the front and put the briefcase between himself and the driver. They drove off. Then the taxi driver said:

  “Money first.”

  What was going on? He’d never heard that before.

  Then the tax driver slammed on the breaks, bent over him, opened the door, and shoved Nika out right into the snowbank. The briefcase he held onto and kept in the car. He slammed the door and roared off.

  So Nika remained without his documents, with no money, no certificates, no military card, not even his passport. A day passed, then another. The bishop asked my husband:

  “Why isn’t your son bringing me his documents? Did he change his mind?”

  Nika, meanwhile, was at a total loss: his passport, fine, he could renew it, but his military card … that military commissar would lose his mind: he had just issued a new card for him a few days ago, and he just went off and lost it again. No, the bird wouldn’t escape that cage a second time, the fish wouldn’t evade those nets, the commissar wouldn’t let him go again … and what about the medical tests! The psychiatrist! The Housing and Utility Office!

  To be honest, all this just killed me: I knew that Nika wouldn’t be able to get back what was stolen from him for a while. He would put it off, procrastinate, give in to all-too-typical temptation instead of overcoming it and showing his resolve; perhaps this was the Lord’s way of testing his will to become a deacon? He might irritate the bishop with his delay—and they might refuse to ordain him at the Patriarchate. It sometimes happens that God offers a person something only once. Their life will lead them ELSEWHERE.

  I walked around all gloomy and depressed, visiting all the Moscow churches, praying, asking on behalf of my son. In the meantime, two weeks had passed and the third had begun. It was already a hopeless matter. I came to the church of the metochion of the Lavra to the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God—a small icon hangs there to the side, a little lower than eye level, you must kneel before it and raise your head to look at it. I began to beseech Her and suddenly felt such consolation coming from Her, such love: She was alive, and heard me, and was responding.

  I didn’t even have a chance to unlock the door when I heard the telephone ringing long and insistently.

  “Was it you who lost your documents? Are you interested?” asked the creaky voice of an old woman. “My son found them. He will call you.”

  And she hung up the phone.

  Her son began to call me from pay phones to set up a meeting. He promised to return the briefcase for a hundred dollars. But each time that I was ready to rush off to our appointed place of meeting, he would call and change the address, as if he was afraid of someone. Finally, we agreed to meet at the Manege.2 I jumped out of the car without gloves and began to run across the snow. Fifteen minutes later, a huge meathead appeared and knocked me on my shoulder:

  “Come with me, don’t turn around. If I notice someone tailing us, you can look for your briefcase in the dumpster.”

  “But where’s the briefcase?” I asked.

  His hands were empty.

  “Like I said, walk.”

  I scampered off after him. He led me in silence—now and again slyly turning around and casting his gaze all around him with evil little eyes—along Bolshaya Nikitskaya Street, and then we turned the corner onto Nezhdanovaya Street (there is a church there with an icon of St Spyridon with a little piece of his relics), walked across a garden, and turned back. At Gazetny Pereulok, he stopped:

  “It doesn’t look like we have a tail. Money first. A hundred bucks.”

  “Only in exchange for the briefcase,” I insisted. My naked hands had frozen in the cold air, my lips wouldn’t move.

  “I make the conditions here. I always did it that way and everyone was willing. If you don’t give me the money—I’ll leave and you can find your briefcase yourself.”

  I handed him the bill with shaking, disobedient hands. He put it in his pocket.

  “Go to Aleksandrovsky Garden.3 There a person will approach you and give you the briefcase.”

  “What person? Where is my guarantee that he’ll give it to me?”

  “I told you: everyone was always happy with my way. Well, as you like, I’m going,” and he began to walk in the direction of Tverskaya.

  I rushed off to Aleksandrovsky Garden, greedily looking into people’s faces. In twenty minutes, a woman with the pleasant face of a schoolteacher came up to me and handed me a bag in which lay the briefcase.

  “I have to make sure that everything is there,” I muttered. “It could be empty.”

  She shrugged her shoulders and headed for the metro.

  “Wait,” I said.

  But she ran away, and I didn’t chase her.

  Inside the briefcase, I found all the documents—the passport, the military card, the urine analysis. The only thing missing was the money for the deacon’s equipment, for living expenses, and what my singer-son had earned that terrible night.

  A month and a half later, he stood on the solea with an orarion, waving his hand lightly in the air and singing the Creed along with the choir.

  That was when I offered the Mother of God that little golden cross.

  Some wonderful, intelligent Russian people, having earned their living not through scheming, but through skill and righteous labor, had built a wonderful house on a mountaintop here in Corfu, twenty-five kilometers from Kerkyra, in a place called Agios Stefanos; they invited my husband and me to stay there.

  Whenever I leave my house and set out on some travels to distant shores, I always feel a certain discomfort, as if I were leaving my loved ones to fight alone on the front lines under fire and shrapnel, while I, leaving behind the battle lines, run away and lie low in a deep bunker—so chaotic, anxious, and difficult is ordinary Moscow life. At first, having escaped f
rom its strong hold, I feel lost and look back with considerable guilt: I didn’t finish doing this, I promised to do that, but didn’t do it—I have so many personal and professional (literary) debts. Like Gulliver, I feel ensnared by thousands of invisible Lilliputian threads tied to stakes beaten into the ground: any movement is difficult. And yet, the idleness of the traveler almost seems criminal to me.

  Then I begin to convince myself, as if I was defending myself in front of someone, that a person should, after all, extract themselves from the turbulent current of everyday existence, to estrange themselves from it, shifting his perspective; for the eye, seeing the “usual,” glazes over, and stops distinguishing the primary from the secondary, the vital from the unnecessary. And in general, in order to understand your own, you need to discover the foreign. On some turns of their earthly path, a person must absolutely stop and catch their breath. Maybe they must even finish taking in everything that they have experienced in their haste, think through everything that they have accomplished thoughtlessly and meaninglessly—on impulse and instinct—and thoroughly examine the whirlwind of events that had burst upon them and had as yet remained unrecognized and unnamed, stuck in the depth of their subconscious. Maybe they must even reach their internal and true self, swimming their way through that flurry of indistinct images, that sea teeming with creatures, and emerge at the last, having reached their firm shore. So traveling is also a labor, I try to assure myself, as if I was defending myself from someone’s rebukes. Moreover, I have an editing commission from the Journal—to write twelve short stories about love. So I am, after all, not idle but working. Isn’t it work to draw out short stories from the dull current of the days? It’s not simple to expostulate about love, is it?

  Then, examining the surroundings from my high mountaintop, I suddenly stop hearing that scolding internal assailant as well as his co-interrogator, both of whom are capable of poisoning your life with such reflections. I simply say, “Hallelujah! Rejoice, my soul, enjoy, thank the Creator!” And I slowly begin to feel my interior becoming like my exterior—like Corfu, with its shining sky and glistening sea—I feel my exterior, that irresistible beauty of God’s world, taking over and defeating the fragmented and damaged landscape inside.

  It seems obvious to me that many issues within our national character can be explained by the terrain and climate. For seven months of the year, it’s a low, leaden sky, which is never even visible in big cities, depressingly bitter cold, unpredictable torrents of rain, poor weather, nightfall, darkness, gloom. And then, we have those endless expanses: fields, meadows, woodlands, steppes. Nothing to rest your eyes on. You shrink internally and curl up, trying to preserve any warmth, exerting yourself until the point of exhaustion, like the children in the painting of the Peredvizhnik painter Perov (one of The Wanderers), dragging their terrible load behind them in the snow. Everything is achieved through heroic effort, labor, and struggle. There comes a point when the Russian soul becomes torn; it aches and is metaphysically fatigued. You just want to sit in a corner, focus on one immovable thought and drink something hot in order to warm up and soften your soul, hardened by trials.

  The island is in itself a symbol: a certain reserved expanse, cut off from the rest of the world and open to the sky, a microcosm, like a human soul fitting the entire world within itself.

  Here, on Corfu, you have everything: mountains grown over with olive trees and ravines, heights and abysses, rivers and little lakes, sand and rock, exotic birds and hedgehogs, poisonous snakes, greedy wasps, magnificent bougainvillea blooming everywhere, and rhododendrons. It’s just like the soul, with its chasms and heights, dark underground rivers and daybreaks, its creeping creatures and its glorious blooms.

  How amazing: I read somewhere that all this olive grandeur is manmade. Supposedly, this was all naked cliffs, but the Greeks put up terracing and planted forests of olive trees.

  But that is difficult to believe: first of all, there is no visible terracing, though there are trees. Second of all, they are everywhere—in almost every corner of the island, even the unpopulated ones, and even on the inaccessible cliffs. Third of all, there are four million trees here, and only a hundred thousand residents.

  Corfu is not large in size: sixty kilometers in length and twenty-five in width, and even that is at the widest point in the north. To the south it narrows, eventually jutting sharply into the sea. But its roads all weave in and out of the mountains, forming a multifaceted serpentine pattern; sometimes they clamber upward, sometimes they descend to the very sea, so you can drive on them slowly and for a very long time—sometimes it’s difficult to pass an oncoming bus or impossible to pass a car ahead of you crawling at a snail’s pace, so you’re forced to plod along behind it at the speed of a horse pulling a cart, but it is exactly that slow pace that allows even me, sitting at the wheel, to examine the scenes swimming past me to my heart’s content.

  Look on, soul, look on, dear, be curious, get your fill of joy, respond with love, become a pure “hallelujah!”

  Not only did St Spyridon save Corfu from non-Christian adversaries, but he also twice stopped an epidemic of the plague, saved the residents from earthquakes, droughts, and hunger, cured mortal diseases, and even—this, too, happened—resurrected people from the dead. Perhaps the miracle of the four million olive trees also occurred not without his participation? Over in that direction, the Albanians under Enver Hoxha tried to build terraces on their cliffs and plant vineyards;4 they even invited the Chinese as advisers. But nothing came of it: the vineyards dried up, and nothing was left but the hideously dug-up cliffs.

  Or perhaps that happened in Albania because it was there, when it was still called Illyria,5 that the wicked Arius was sent into exile after the condemnation of his heresy at the Council? Arius was there, and here we have Spyridon.

  The day after visiting St Spyridon in Kerkyra, we went to examine the coast. It’s all carved into coves, each one different from the last. At the foot of the hill on which we were staying, it’s rocky, but if you drive farther south of the island and then turn to the east, there are sandy beaches. The Ionian Sea is there, completely calm. But if you drive a little farther and curve around the jutting end of the island, you will reach the tempestuous Adriatic Sea. The waves are such that you can’t get into the water—they curve round, knocking you off your feet, and drag you out to sea. But if you continue your travels and cross over the northern part from east to west, and then turn to the south, you will again find the Ionian Sea, without any waves. I don’t understand how this can be. My husband laid the map out onto his lap and guided me along every fork in the road, and I drove, trying to remember the magical names of the towns and villages—Kassiopi, Kalamaki, Perithia, Acharavi, Agios Spyridonos, Roda, Sidari, Peroulades. There—we’ve just covered the entire north.

  Everything was as it should be—my husband showed me the way, and I obediently drove the car. A nice woman who had married relatively late, but very happily, recently told me:

  “We are so happy in our family because you told me a secret and I took your advice.”

  “What secret?” I said, interested. “I don’t even remember what I told you.”

  “When I was getting married, you told me that the most important secret to marital happiness is preserving the cult of the husband. I’ve been following your advice religiously, and see how good everything is between us!”

  Some bird was constantly rapping the reflective window of the villa where we were staying: knock-knock-knock. We would open the door and look out: who’s that knocking? We would even ask, who’s there? And that bird would just keep tapping—knock-knock-knock—from the morning on. One time, having difficulty distinguishing between truth and reflective reality, it crashed into the glass and bounced back, then it sat immobile for a long time on the ground, not understanding anything, not realizing … and only when my husband touched it in order to pick it up and put it onto the grass did it awkwardly flap its wings and crookedly fly off several steps
away.

  There are so many possibilities for symbolic interpretation and edification here! Aren’t we the same with our neurotic psychological projections? We fly at our own reflections in others and crash, bouncing back …

  When the bird was trying to get into our house, pecking with its beak, I always thought: why does folk tradition state that a bird flying into the house is a sign of death? And I would carefully close the glass door to stop it from finding its way in after all.

  To this day, there are legends about St Spyridon as if he were actually present in his church, turning his head in the direction of the holy altar during the Liturgy, and that he walks at night: during the frequent changing of his vestments, the soles of his slippers are discovered to be worn through. In addition, there are many personal testimonies of how he healed the incurably ill, notifying them of the impending miracle with his appearance.

  And so, the villa where we were allowed to live for a while is located on the crest of a forested mountain, from which you can see the unbelievably and seemingly unnaturally blue sea, and in the distance—Albania with its bald cliffs. We observed its shores through a telescope and saw nothing but deserted, naked shores by day and total darkness by night. It was as if external darkness reigned there, while here, on Corfu, dwelt God’s world: clear, powerful stars of enormous size, a blinding moon, a silvery sea, and the living greenery of the olive groves.

  Time and again on Russian estates you come across the German manager, the English housemaid, and the Greek gardener, and I like that. Why not? The German here is named Werner. He is seventy years old. He arrived in Corfu as a student, rented a house from a Greek family, where a little girl was growing up, and he waited for her to become an adult. Finally he reached that day, married her, spent his entire life there, and now checks the plumbing, pool water, and air conditioning for the Russians; his free time he spends walking around Kassiopi with his wife, now an older woman, standing on the pier, squinting at the sun, sitting on a bench at the shore near the Three Brothers tavern, and watching the fishermen carry nets from ship to shore filled with various fish and sea monsters. Werner’s face is stamped with total bliss and goodwill toward life.