Ordinary Wonders

by Oloesia Nikolaeva

  The housemaid is called Caitlin; she is a tall, beautiful woman with a reddish tan and light blue eyes. She assiduously scrubs the white floor with her mop, and sometimes after her departure, you’re scared to step on it. I also saw her in Kassiopi: she was sitting on the backseat of a motorcycle, gently embracing the elderly Greek sitting in front of her, and had even laid her cheek against his back.

  As for the gardener, I don’t even know his name: he turns the sprinklers on in the garden, mows the grass, trims the roses, and leaving suddenly, throws a sloppy, chewed up cigarette butt onto the road paved with smart-looking, neat stones. My husband thinks that his relationship with the owners isn’t the best: his cigarette butt is an image of terrible dissonance in this place, like a challenge to the world order.

  We count the days on our fingers and realize that today must be, thirteen days before ours, the Greek Church’s celebration of the Birth of the Mother of God: a helicopter with a banner flies overhead: “Alithos Anesti! Truly Christ is Risen!”

  A person with a cold is cold everywhere, but a healthy person loves the wind gusts, the storms, the pouring rain. It is so sweet to stand on the terrace during a thunderstorm—to watch the lightning and listen to the thunder. The olive tree rustles its leaves in the bustling wind, almost murmuring, then oh, how it begins to rhapsodize, a veritable Pythia …

  In my early childhood, when my parents would send me to the children’s camp in Maleevka for the summer, I loved to hear the sounds of the night thunder. I would climb out of bed, come up to the window, and peer into the darkness. I stood in celebratory, mystical terror of the animation of the dark forces of nature. I was a little pagan, looking through the crack at the imbibing of the feasting gods.

  Interesting: how did Werner recognize his future wife in the little Greek girl?

  He watched how she grew—centimeter by centimeter—how she matured, contemplating her blossoming, and then observed her in the medley of people walking on the shore, cared for her on the mountain paths, walked with her among the olive groves.

  Anyway, before our departure for Corfu, I was asked to write twelve short stories about love for the Journal illustrating the words of the Apostle Paul: “Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” (1 Cor 13:4–13:7). Thinking about these stories, I observe Werner circling the house, checking the pipes, and standing over the blue pool for a long time—the swallows fly above him, trying to dip into the water with their wings and not fearing Werner at all.

  If marriages are made in heaven, then the Lord, naturally, gives us hints: there he is, your intended! There she is—your fated bride, your wife.

  I had a premonition like that. My parents also had that knowledge, or rather that foreknowledge.

  The English housemaid, Caitlin, coughs as she mops the floor. Yesterday, like me, she stood on the terrace for a long time during the thunderstorm and watched the lightning split the sky and the waves dash onto the coastal cliffs. The thunder promised something, portended something. In childhood it was clear what: love. In adolescence also, it was love and creative work. In youth, it was creative work and love. And later, in the twilight years? I don’t know, maybe eternal life. The dead stand before you in your thoughts as if they were alive, and there is no proof that they are no longer present. On the contrary, they appear more vividly for some reason, more animated than they were in life …

  The thunderstorm reveals something similar, having the night before overturned the sea, untied all the boats from the piers, and cast an enormous fish out of the sea.

  The Greek gardener arrives in a large red Toyota and immediately turns on the sprinklers distributed throughout the garden by pressing some buttons on the panel with his finger. The sprinklers twist and turn, spouting out water, and it seems as if the entire garden is laughing. The gardener watches, standing right next to the terrace. There the table is already set, and the Russians stand, facing east, reading a prayer before their meal. The Greek understands that they are reading the “Our Father.” He nods in time with the words. In a few days, his son will be married, and there will be a big wedding.

  I picked up his daily cigarette butt from the ground in his sight in admonition, and he suddenly became dismayed and began to talk, as if defending himself. His son was getting married, but his daughter can’t seem to find her match. She’s a good girl, with good qualities, smart. I had seen her—they had come here together the day before the thunderstorm. Her face was correctly proportioned, her eyes big and expressive, but in spite of this, she was unattractive. At first it seems that it’s because of an unflattering hairstyle, poor posture, the wrong clothes. Her relatives think: we’ll just style her hair the right way, put a rose in it, pull back her shoulders, straighten her back, fix her gait, dress her in a red dress that would stand out in the light of day, make her high heels click. We’ll raise up the corners of her mouth to make a smile, we’ll fill her eyes somehow with fire and light. “Elpida, why don’t we make a beauty out of you?” But she just slouches even more and moves her brows together more threateningly …

  The gardener had probably thrown down that cigarette butt out of pure vexation, automatically, remembering his daughter and shaking his head, and there was nothing in that gesture against the owners of the house.

  When I was still a student in the tenth grade, this is what happened to me. I became ill with pneumonia and was sent to get an X-ray at the Literature Foundation’s clinic. It was winter, and I dressed up warmly, wrapped myself up in a scarf, and set out early. In the clinic it was dark and empty. Then, coming out of the X-ray room and walking along the darkened, gloomy corridor to the coatroom, I noticed someone’s silhouette at the end of the hallway. And in that very moment I heard an invisible voice right next to my right ear (or rather: the voice sounded off to my right): “This man will be your husband.” This shocked me so much that I headed straight for that silhouette in order to better examine it, but because I’m nearsighted, I had to come fairly close to him, and I saw a wonderful-looking young man, tall, very, very thin, even frail-looking, with a face that reminded me of a young Pasternak.6 I even called him that in my thoughts: the young Pasternak. But what was I supposed to do next? I couldn’t just walk up to that surprising and wonderful stranger and tell him that he was going to be my husband, or even offer to get acquainted. So I stood and stood near him, waiting to see if perhaps he would strike up a conversation with me himself; then, putting on my coat, I slowly made my way home with the faint hope: maybe he would catch up with me?

  After that, I began to look for him. Since he was being treated at the Literature Foundation, he was either a writer or the son of a writer—that much I realized. So I began to get acquainted with the sons of writers, the adult sons of my father’s friends. It’s amazing that even if I didn’t exactly hit my target, I kept hitting precisely around it; as if while playing Battleship, I would hit all the empty spots on the grid around the ship: these sons, as it later turned out, were acquainted with the mysterious “young Pasternak,” and one of them was even his friend.

  Meanwhile, a year and a half passed, and I was admitted to the Literature Institute. That year, the first of that September was a Saturday, which was already at that time a day off for all the Literature Institute students except the first-years. It was even called “a day for free writing.” So for this reason, the first of September was only attended by first-year students.

  At first, I really didn’t like it there: it was boring, tedious, hopeless somehow—so much so that I wanted to take my documents right then and there and go home. On the third of September, rain came down hard; autumn had arrived, so I didn’t want to go the institute at all. In spite of the rain, all the students, of whom there were now many, crowded into the narrow corridors of
Herzen House and looked for the sheets with their schedules; and here, in the crush and squeeze of the crowd, I suddenly saw HIM, that “young Pasternak”; I recognized him from the back. He was standing with a long umbrella, facing the window. I came up to him and looked into his face. He merely threw his glance over me, as if some unnecessary object was standing before him, not worthy of his attention, but I remembered well what had been said to me in the dark corridor that early winter day.

  And what then? Nothing. Only at the end of the academic year, on the eve of our exams, did I gather the courage to call him and ask him to share his notes for the exam. Then summer came, and everyone went their separate ways for vacation. Then the following year began, but it didn’t bring me anything either from the man who was promised to me as my husband in the corridor of the dark clinic, except a “Hi” or “Hello” in passing.

  At the institute, I studied and worked too hard: first of all, I was part of the translation department; in addition to the other subjects, I was learning French and Hungarian. Second of all, I wrote a lot at night and sometimes, still in the throes of the night’s inspiration, I would get up from my desk and go straight to lecture. In the evenings, I would go to all kinds of poets’ get-togethers, poetry evenings, etc. My parents were very worried about me and decided to send me to Gagra, to a writer’s house that was now vacant due to the winter season. The owners tried to fill it up with coalminers, but even they weren’t too keen to be there. To kill the boredom somehow, they would go to dances in the evenings that were organized right in the dining room. What’s more, the women danced with other women, and the men with other men.

  Once, sitting on my balcony, which looked out onto the sea, and watching the crimson sun slowly bending downwards, I suddenly had a strange feeling—I was completely seized with the decision to immediately, that very moment, call my promised future husband. This expression of will was so irrational that I doubted myself: was it coming from me? What’s more, I didn’t know the phone number by heart—it was written down somewhere back in Moscow, and I had already called him once about the notes. And if this didn’t sound comical enough, I would describe it this way: Some unseen power turned me around and dragged me to the nearest telephone office. But that’s the thing, it all happened exactly that way. I went out into the snow-driven twilight, trying not to think any of it through and not to doubt, but simply to obey. I even forced myself not to think about the fact that I would put in the coins for the phone call (I think it was fifteen kopeks), and then what number would I dial? No, I just went to the phone, picked it up, and allowed my hand to dial the buttons on its own, at random.

  And he answered the phone.

  “Hello,” he said happily. “Where did you disappear? I’m sitting here and waiting for you to call. Come see me tomorrow.”

  “I’ll be there,” I answered just as happily, standing in a phone booth in the telephone office in Gagra.

  In half an hour, all my things were stuffed into my suitcase; in an hour, I was sitting down in the commuter train, the next one leaving for Adler. Two hours later, I was standing in front of the airport supervisor, begging him to give me a seat on the next plane to Moscow.

  The next evening, as agreed, I went to his house, and shaking from nervousness, tried to speak only of beautiful and exalted things—all the more because I had seen a book lying open on my companion’s desk with the cover facing up. On it was written: Schelling. System of Transcendental Idealism. This system was exactly where I was yearning to be.

  There were a few old men and women in church on Sunday in Kassiopi. The young people began to appear with their children toward the end of Liturgy. Two old men and several boys and girls partook of holy communion. By the end of liturgy, the church was full. As it turned out, those people were waiting for a panikhida.7 Then they passed out some food in memoriam to everyone in the churchyard: it all resembled a traditional family event. There was a certain natural reverence, not a result of personal experience, perhaps, not achieved through personal struggle, but rather inherited: “this is our tradition,” with no trace of crisis or battle. You could feel that the churches had never been closed on Corfu, the icons never destroyed, the church property never taken by force, the priests never shot, belief never forbidden, faith never punished by death … and that faith had become interwoven with life, a manner of living, one with the direction of the soul. “God is everywhere.”

  This aspect of the Greek faith, or shall we say this “national expression of Orthodoxy,” is what appeals to the owner of our villa: it’s free of fits and seizures. “You will always recognize our people in a Greek church,” she says. “They’re always frantically crossing themselves and crashing onto their knees before the altar on a Sunday. Even though that’s not allowed on a Sunday, it’s unnecessary. It’s like they want to be more pious than the Church itself, but the Greeks pray naturally, without that neophyte violence of emotion.”

  I stay silent. I really don’t want to fall into judgment here even in the abstract. It’s true that the Greeks come to church as if to their own home: they simply walk onto the solea during Liturgy and venerate the iconostasis, then they sit down on the chairs scattered throughout the church in rows, getting up only during the most important parts of the service. It’s not tedious that way, and your legs don’t hurt … and truly, this does speak of a certain natural manner: our grandfathers prayed that way, our fathers, and now we, it’s our tradition, it’s in our DNA, our religion is hereditary, our faith is national, it’s in our subconscious—what’s the problem? It’s just strange that they don’t partake of holy communion on Sundays, as we do—“with fear and trembling”—and the fear arises somewhere in the depths of your soul that this “natural Christianity” may be interwoven on the inside with the strong threads of paganism, especially when every olive tree rhapsodizes like a sibyl.

  When we leave the house, we don’t lock the door. “It’s absolutely safe here, no one here would steal,” our hostess told us before her departure.

  On principle, my husband also doesn’t want me to lock the car when we leave it somewhere, pointedly leaving the window open: “No one’s going to take anything.”

  There is an answer to every question in holy Scripture, though there may not be an answer to a concrete question: what should I, someone of no particular importance, do right now, at this time? The human free will is boundless, but simultaneously limited by a desire to always follow God’s will, which is often incomprehensible.

  An abbot of my acquaintance once said: “If you don’t know how to act, just say with all your heart: ‘Lord, I love You! Glory to You!’”

  I had a dream about my late father and mother. They were sitting in a room with a glass wall and looking through it into the neighboring room. My husband and I were living there. In other words, they could SEE us.

  When I woke up, I took my notebook and started to—no, not write a poem, but simply—scribble. Old Kirsanov, to whom I would bring my poems at seventeen years old, would say to me: scribble more. So I scribbled.

  It’s a pity,

  I can’t bring my ancestors back to life—

  to dine with me

  under the full moon.

  I can’t move them into a little bast8 house

  over the sea on the mountain

  in a Greek September.

  So do they come to me here in my dreams:

  What isn’t a dream—they

  foretell my days.

  What isn’t a dream—they assure me that the shores will hold,

  the roads, the paths,

  even the darkness, they say, has its bounds:

  Hereto, but further—stop.

  They affirm: hold fast to the heavenly firmament,

  like this somehow.

  They show me how.

  I say: this heavenly firmament is high,

  my hand just slips through.

  There is nothing to hold on to—

  to what can the hands hold fast

/>   the hands that grow out of me?

  When from the plumate expanse—thence—

  in spite of

  all the earthly laws—

  two unseen hands

  will reach forth, holding me suspended high, then—

  you will see how firm is my step.

  I keep thinking about my assignment from the Journal: stories about love. Nothing comes into my head except the story of my parents, even though it goes along other lines and is in itself not at all about love, but about the workings of divine providence.

  In December 1941, my then-sixteen-year-old father was riding on a train from Moscow with his fellow cadets from the Artillery Institute in Tomsk. In the same car, my grandmother was accompanying her daughters after evacuation9 —my eleven-year-old mother and my nine-year-old aunt, Lena. They were cold and frightened, but the young cadets, occupying the same compartment, were drinking, joking around, and smoking. They were speaking about poetry and reciting poems. My mother—an intelligent girl—also recited something. Then she got a note from one of the young men. He had scribbled on a newspaper clipping with a pencil: “When I come back in victory, you will be my wife.” My mother also took a pencil and wrote in block letters: “Fool.” With that, she gave the paper back to the cadet.