Ordinary Wonders

by Oloesia Nikolaeva

  Here, in the decision of man’s free will, in his individual choice, lies the cornerstone of Christianity. Nothing and no one can be saved automatically. Even among the twelve closest disciples of Christ, a betrayer was found. A man has no real guarantee of salvation until the very final moments of his life. Until his last breath, he remains with the fateful question of his willful dispensation, the chance to confess Christ or reject him. A man is not given to know until his final hour whether or not he will be accepted—such as he is, with all his merits or without any at all—by Christ. The only thing that can alleviate his fear of being turned away is his love. His love for Christ, which “never fails,” which “bears all things” and believes in the loving mercy of its Beloved: “… believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Cor 13:7).

  In the evening, taking the advice of our hosts, we went to a taverna called At Peter’s in a nearby cove. Its tables stood out on a small pier, so we were surrounded on three sides by the sea, and the ducks swam around us; they greedily snatched the bread that the diners offered them. A married English couple sat at the neighboring table. The English have favored Corfu as a vacation spot since the time that it was their colony. They come and settle everywhere here—the English language is much more noticeable here than the Greek language. They sit in the tavernas, drive on the curving roads in rented cars, inspiring the rightful aggravation of drivers from other countries because they drive too slowly—apparently because in addition to the curves and “narrowness” of the local roads, they have to get used to driving on the left side and to the cars driving in the opposite direction of where they should be.

  And so, the English man looked at me with sly curiosity and suddenly exclaimed:

  “Are you an actress? I saw you in a movie.”

  “No,” I said.

  “But you look like an actress. I work in the movie industry. I’m a script writer.”

  So we slowly began to talk and moved our tables closer together. They introduced themselves as George and Helen.

  “There on the mountain is the villa of the Rothschilds, and there lives the owner of Ferrari,” George enlightened us.

  We talked about this and that, even English literature. After all, the famous Durrell brothers had been born here on Corfu.12 One of them, Gerald Durrell, wrote wonderful books about animals—I had read him in my childhood. The other, who appears in these books as the vicious and considerably unpleasant brother Larry, even became a Nobel Prize laureate for his postmodern novels.13 The house where they lived has stayed in one piece and was recently purchased by a Ukrainian woman. As a side note, she turned out to be a zealous admirer of both brothers, and freely lets inside anyone wishing to see their home.

  We also touched on Shakespeare, Dickens, Thackeray, and Byron in our conversation. Then the conversation lagged a little until it unexpectedly turned to the fall in the pound that was at the time affecting all of England.

  “Yes,” said George, “the entire banking system is completely unreliable. Especially when you get a loan from one bank to buy an apartment, then another bank buys that loan at lower interest rates, and often ends up bankrupt. Oh, everyone over there lives in fear and mistrust: everyone is afraid of a collapse. They don’t know which direction the blow will come from. That’s why young people don’t want to get married.

  “All these draconian marriage contracts and obligations, and yet you don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow: what if your job contract doesn’t get renewed, or the bank raises the interest rate on your mortgage? That’s the quiet panic in people’s minds right now. And yet the financial system, the exchange, it’s all so interesting. We knew a broker who worked for the exchange. Once he understood the system, he got immensely rich, but this didn’t bring him happiness. His wife became an alcoholic and set fire to one of their estates, which was filled to the brim with all sorts of treasures—paintings, antiques. His son crashed his own jet. In the end, still a multimillionaire, he shot himself. Nothing was interesting for him anymore. Why isn’t there anything in literature about this power of money, this thrill of the chase?”

  “Why do you say that?” I objected. “What about Dostoevsky, who concerned himself so much with the topic of money? What about Balzac?”

  “Yes, yes, but I mean now, right now! It awakens such passions, it uncovers such deep layers in a person!”

  “Well, why don’t you write it yourself? You’re a script writer!”

  “I wrote comedies of manners for television. That kind of thing is very popular, there will always be a demand for it. As for tragedies, you know, you have to build it up, find producers. It’s just not my cup of tea.”

  The poet-decadent and author of À la Pasternak, whom I met at my future husband’s house when I came to visit him that first inglorious time, followed through on his promise and invited us to his literary dacha. Our mutual friend, Andrei Vitte, who also wrote poetry back then, borrowed his father’s Volga especially for the occasion, and we, like so many golden young things, drove off to Zhukovka. I sat in front with the driver, and my future husband sat in the back. So I constantly turned around to face him, happily babbling on. I didn’t even notice how, after crossing my legs, I had stuck my knee into the cigarette lighter, and when it dutifully tried to pop out to give a light, my knee blocked its way. So instead, it set fire to something inside the car with that unused heat. As soon as we turned onto Rublevka, a black smoke started to spew out of the radio slot; we smelled something burning, and Vitte, slamming on the brakes, shouted: “Get out! Get on the ground! She’s going to blow!”

  We jumped out, ran off, fell down onto our stomachs right into a snowdrift, and covered our heads with the palms of our hands.

  A minute passed, then another, then another. The car didn’t explode, but we continued to lie flat. Finally Andriusha couldn’t wait any longer: he dashed off to the car, opened the hood, and, taking off his jacket, started to beat the smoking wires with it. We ran up to him, and also threw off our jackets, despite the fact that it could still explode, but he said with relief:

  “It’s out!”

  And we kept driving, feeling closer to each other after lying together in the snow under the bush in expectation of an explosion, in the face of death itself. As a result, we drank the poet-decadent’s fine red wine with special relish, and ate plums stuffed with almonds and topped with whipped cream, while the fabulous Vadim Kozin sang to us: “Meetings only happen once in life, the thread is only cut by fate once …” Then the promised son of the by-then-famous Sakharov, Mitenka, dropped by for a minute. I don’t know, by now he is probably a solid, mature, and attractive man, but back then he was a fifteen-year-old stripling with a skinny neck and thin face covered all over with red teenage acne. He immediately decided to join the ranks of the adult nineteen-year-olds: he threw back half a glass of whisky, ignored the aesthetically pleasing plum appetizer, and, planting himself next to me, clearly expressed his desire to “make a pass” at me.

  “Do you like to hunt foxes?” he asked my future husband.

  The latter chuckled. And then Mitenka, rubbing his hands together and drooling slightly, nonchalantly said to me: “How I love to hunt foxes for my lovers!”

  At the beginning of perestroika, that same Slava L. came up with a brilliant financial scheme. He called all the Moscow poets—not only the famous ones, but also the ones who were languishing in quiet failure in literary unions, and offered to publish a booklet with their poems for free; what’s more, with translations of the verses in four European languages. He claimed that the translators were locked and ready, but the project had been dropped.

  “Imagine what good advertising this would be for you, not only here, among our people, but in Europe, maybe even America? Poetry without boundaries! Are you in?” he would ask each one.

  Of course, everyone was in, and they all rushed to submit their poems.

  “But the only thing is,” he would suddenly add, as if remembering an insignificant
detail, “we will need your portrait for the cover. Since this is a series, it needs to be in a specific format. But don’t worry, I have a special photographer who can take your picture according to the format, touch it up, and everything will be OK, but you have to pay for this. But other than that, not a penny will be taken from you.”

  “Why so much?” the poor poets would say in chorus.

  “Simpletons! He is a professional photo artist! For an all-European publication! And you’re counting pennies. Go ahead, stay in your thrifty obscurity!”

  What could they do? The poets scraped together the money, borrowing it blindly and obediently bringing it to him. I would have too, if it wasn’t for my husband. He worked for the journal Ogonek at the time, and had professional photographers around him for a dime a dozen, all excellent.

  “Just call Slava,” he said to me, “ask him what this portrait is supposed to look like, find out the parameters, and our photographers will do it all for you for free.”

  But Slava said:

  “No. We have special technology here, and other people’s photographs won’t work, so come here and get it done. And bring the three hundred rubles.”

  That’s when my husband sniffed him out.

  “Count how many poets live in just Moscow, and multiply that by three hundred—how much money do you get? Then Slava will say: well, guys, it didn’t work, it all fell through! The publishing company backed out of printing at the last minute.”

  And sure enough, Slava L. suddenly disappeared somewhere. He had sat and sat in the Central House of Writers café, and then he suddenly vanished without a trace.

  A few years later, when I was visiting Andrei Sinyavsky, I suddenly saw on his desk a book of poems published, I think, in Munich. The name “Sviatoslav L.” flashed on the cover. Inside was an inscription, something to the effect of: “To the dear martyr of conscience, Andrei Donatovich, from another martyr of conscience, Slava L.”

  “How do you know this martyr of conscience?” I asked Sinyavsky.

  “I was in Germany, and this dear man came up to me at one of my literary evenings and gave me his book. He said that he had also suffered much at the hand of the Soviet regime, suffered from the lack of freedom, and escaped by the skin of his teeth.”

  I easily imagined the crowd of enraged and disillusioned poets demanding their booklets in five languages from Slava, and thought that yes, he must have experienced tremendous relief when he finally got on the plane to beautiful Munich.

  There are several stories about St Spyridon and his immediate help with money. Once, after a bad flood, a ruined peasant came to him and told him of his grief: he had gone to a well-off acquaintance and had asked to borrow seeds to plant with the aim of returning them with interest after the harvest, but he demanded a security deposit, which the poor man didn’t have.

  Then St Spyridon gave him a marvelous ornament to use for the deposit—a golden snake. The owner of the granaries couldn’t resist such a precious offer and gave the peasant some seed. The latter planted it and soon produced a tremendous harvest. Recovering good money through this harvest, the peasant happily rushed off to the rich landowner to pay back his debt, but by that point, the rich man didn’t want to part ways with the precious object—so much so, that he lied to him: he had never received any such golden snake, never laid eyes on it, and so wouldn’t return anything to the peasant.

  The peasant related this story to St Spyridon, and the saint assured him that the rogue would soon be punished. In the meantime, the rich man decided to admire his craftily secured treasure and climbed into the chest where it was kept. Imagine his terror when instead of the golden image he discovered a live snake there! He slammed the chest shut, found the peasant, and, pretending that he had just remembered the whole story with the security deposit, offered to return the treasure in exchange for the repayment of the debt.

  The peasant brought him the money, and the rich man led him to the chest and invited him to take what was kept inside. The peasant opened the chest and took out the molten gold, glistening snake.

  When the peasant returned the treasured item to St Spyridon, the latter invited him to go out to the vegetable garden together, where he placed the treasure on the ground. After that, he called out to the Lord with prayers of gratitude, and the snake, having fulfilled its duty in the form of a golden object, turned into a living, slippery creature and immediately crawled away on its snaky affairs. Then, the astonished peasant understood that St Spyridon, so desiring to help him but not having anything of his own to give as a deposit, had begged the Lord to turn that reptile into a precious object. For “Whatsoever the Lord pleased, that hath He done, in heaven, and in earth, and in the seas and in all deep places” (Ps 134:6). But what boldness on the part of the saint, and what power in his prayer!

  For this is also a parable about the transience of the value of earthly things. How much is a piece of bread worth in times of hunger? Or a glass of water in the desert? A gasp of air in a gas chamber? Or even mittens in a terrible frost? How much is vision worth? The ability to walk? To speak? To hear? To sleep? How much does it cost to make someone love you? Or how much to love at least one other person? What can you buy with a million pounds for a dying man? What good can money bring a multimillionaire who is so sick of living that he would rather shoot his brains out? Does he see that same snake crawling away before sticking the gun into his eye socket?

  The Slavonic translation of the Gospel, in comparison to the Russian and English, uses the exceedingly specific word “отщетить” for “render useless”: “For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses [renders useless] his own soul?” (Mk 8:36). And truly: “Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?” (Mk 8:37).

  I say this because I recently heard the following question discussed on the radio: can everything be bought? The debaters came to the conclusion that everything can be bought for the right price. Interesting—how do they plan on buying intelligence or talent for themselves? And will they have purchased friends, purchased wives, purchased mothers?

  I knew of one marriage that was secured with money, but it all ended very badly. This was a marriage between the beautiful Nana, who had a mentally handicapped daughter, and a Georgian millionaire. He was old, bloated, and had a large birthmark on his face, but most importantly, he was rude and of low breeding. However, Nana settled into a luxurious apartment in the best neighborhood of Tbilisi, luckily not having to earn her keep, and instead stayed with her ill daughter, taking her to the best doctors for treatment. Thus she sacrificed herself because she loved her ill daughter so much, but her millionaire was so repulsive to her that she poisoned him by mixing acid into his liquor. Then she bribed the proper people in court and was either acquitted or the case was simply dismissed. Then the war began in Georgia. The heating wasn’t working in Tbilisi, and she lit a fire in the fireplace. A spark fell onto the floor, which smoldered through the night and then set the house on fire. Nana and her daughter couldn’t get out, because raging flames stood between them and the metal door, and the windows all had screens.

  But as far as marriages of love are concerned, I know quite a few instances among my friends in which at least one of the future spouses received a firm internal confirmation that the other person involved would become his or her partner in life. This happened to my friend, the writer S., when he saw Tatiana and immediately understood that she would be his wife. The same with my brother’s wife: they used to attend the same kindergarten and sat on potties right next to each other. She insists that even then, she knew that he was her future husband. The same also happened to my friends Petia and Sonia—they were classmates but only married when they were twenty-three years old: Petia had spent that entire time proving to her that they were destined to be together. All these are not fateful romances but marriages forged in heaven, love to the grave and beyond. Just love.

  You can never guess who will fall in love with whom, and you will never achieve
mutual love if it’s not destined. I remember when my friend Liubanya fell passionately in love with the young and unmarried prose writer P., with whom I had a good, friendly relationship. And so she constantly asked and begged me to somehow take her to visit him, and to start a conversation between them, so that later, having been introduced to him, she could continue meeting him on her own. She pestered me with this request so much that I agreed, despite the fact that my husband scolded me for it very much and even called it “playing around with their hearts.” But I understood that it was no game; it was just that when a person is in love, they are anxious. They can’t put two words together to make a sentence. And anyway, they were casual acquaintances already and not through me. It was just that she honestly couldn’t bring herself to make normal human contact with him. And after all, I, too, had asked a friend to accompany me in a very similar situation …

  In short, I learned that P. was staying in Peredelkino at some writer’s dacha: it was winter, his hosts were in Moscow, and he was more or less keeping watch over the house; and that he was sick. So I said: I want to come and visit the poor patient. He said: come on over. I said: I’m going to bring a friend. He said: OK.

  We bought some aspirin, Tylenol, that same ill-fated combination of wine and fruit, and went to visit the sick man. He already had cutlets, mashed potatoes, borscht, fruit compote, and cognac.

  While he set the plates on the table, Liubanya said to me suspiciously:

  “Someone’s already been here! I can see an interested woman’s touch!”

  She sat down and ate everything in sight, removed all traces of that someone else; then she began to consume the cognac as well. But since she was, as a rule, a virtuous girl who didn’t drink, after such an abundant dinner, and the cognac, and in the cold weather, she got very sleepy. So when the young and obliging P., whom we had from the very beginning asked to read us something from his latest work, began to recite his story with zeal, carefully intoning the words, chuckling here and there, and even wiping away a renegade tear or two, Liubanya began to nod and hold her left eye open with two fingers to prevent it from closing completely. But her heroic efforts proved in vain: all her strength had been claimed by her gastrointestinal tract. By the time P., the prose writer, had finished reading, fully convinced that his story had been a success, Liubanya, head thrown back, was sweetly snoring in her armchair.