So nothing came of it between them. You could say that all we ended up doing that night was taking a walk outside the city in the Russian winter, having a good meal, warming up, taking a nap, and coming back home.
And yet she was so lovely to look at, so attentive, with her own apartment in Moscow—cozy and nicely furnished—while P., the prose writer, didn’t even have a registered home address. She also appreciated literature, and even dabbled in writing poetry herself, so she wouldn’t have crushed him with any pettiness. They could have been so good together!
But it was not to be!
I know of another tragic instance when a young hierodeacon, i.e., a monk, who, by the way, led a very ascetic way of life, met a beautiful girl, a medic, in the monastery, and asked for a blessing to go to her for treatment in Moscow. Such a consuming passion sprung up between them that he abandoned his former life and married her. But not even half a year passed before this love turned into such a burning hatred that he began to fear himself, that he would suddenly kill her. So he just ran away from her. He didn’t have the heart to go back to the monastery, so he settled down at his mother’s in a small provincial town, where he drank himself to waste. The most amazing thing is that when he was still in the monastery, he was constantly criticizing the other monks: they didn’t pray enough or correctly, they didn’t read the holy fathers, they ate too much; in general, the monastery rule was much too lax for him. He even asked me to drive him somewhere deep into the forest, from where we walked on foot, or rather blazed our trail through the impassable thicket for three kilometers or so, swatting at the clouds of mosquitoes. Finally he stopped and said:
“Right here. My skete will be right here when I leave the monastery and begin my ascetic labor. I will build a little church and will pray in it day and night.”
After that, I began to act more suspiciously toward monks who complained that their monastery’s rule wasn’t strict enough and began to share their plans to live alone in their own skete.
As for the repulsion that the unhappy hierodeacon began to feel for his chosen one, there is a similar story in the Bible. It is when Amnon blazed with such love for Tamar that he made himself sick, lured her to himself, and forced himself on her. Immediately afterwards, as it is written, “Then Amnon hated her exceedingly, so much so that the intense hatred he bore against her was greater than the love with which he had at first loved her” (2 Kgs 13:15).
After all, love and joy are gifts from God, and He gives them to whom He pleases and takes them away from those He does not wish to have them: God does everything as He pleases. If He wishes, He will harden the heart of Pharaoh, or soften it as He desires. For this reason, beware all you who wish to steal this joy or cheat in order to obtain it. To be honest, I love this reflection on the divine will.
It is surprising how love numbs all other senses. When soon after the feast with the poet-decadent my future husband came to my house for the first time, I tried to receive him as well as I could: I cleaned everything, bought some delicacies, and, when he arrived, I started frying blini, completely consumed by his presence—so much so that when I grabbed the hot pan I didn’t even feel it and just pulled my hand away by instinct. Only after he left the house did I discover with surprise a terrible red burn on my palm and fingers.
I think I can understand how the martyrs, in undergoing inhuman torment and suffering, patiently and meekly endured them. For love numbed their senses and covered their pain: it “… bears all things …” (1 Cor 13:7).
St Spyridon was also tortured and tried. It is written in his life that even before his episcopate, in 305, he was sent to the mines; there, he underwent torture for refusing to deny Christ; his right eye was damaged and his right hand was cut off. Then, during the persecutions of 308–313, he was again arrested. It’s true that in that same life (the Greek version), it is written that his relics show no sign of damage to the eye socket, but his tormentors could have damaged the eye without damaging his eye socket.
But I’m especially amazed that just like my father, he had no right hand. My father lost his right arm at the front when he was nineteen years old. Surprisingly, I never felt that my father was an invalid. Even his friends, or people who simply interacted with him, seemed to forget—stop noticing—that his right sleeve was empty. He would tuck it into his pocket. This happened because of how he carried himself: no helplessness, no special treatment. He drove a car very well with his one left hand, and not a car for disabled people or a specially equipped car tailor-made for his needs—no, he drove a Ford with speed controls on the steering wheel, as was usual for that time. My father, holding the wheel with the palm of his hand, would control the speed with his long and immaculately beautiful fingers. Only his government-issued driver’s license had to be gotten through connections. But the traffic cops that stopped him never even noticed that the driver didn’t have a right arm.
My father wrote beautifully with his left hand; his handwriting was graceful, even if the letters always leaned to the left. He could screw in a light bulb, switch out a power plug, hammer a nail, install a tire, take out a battery and put it back in, all with one hand. How? I don’t know. Only God knows. When his wonderful car got so rusty that the driver’s pedal rotted through, he figured out a way to support it with a dust tray, and continued to drive that way … what of it, it was more interesting that way. He could fight off thugs who attacked him, asking for a light. He was well built, handsome, broad shouldered, elegant, and sharp witted. His colleague at the magazine Friendship of Nations had his left arm amputated when gangrene set in, and he fell into a profound depression, but Papa would comfort him. “Listen,” he would joke, “you don’t have a left hand, I don’t have a right hand—just think of the money we’ll save on gloves alone!”
Even my mother was almost proud that he was not like the rest. His missing arm was his badge of valor, glory, honor. He was like Admiral Nelson and she was like Lady Hamilton!14 I think that this had a retroactive positive effect on my father: he never associated himself with the terrible word “cripple.”
That’s probably how St Spyridon felt, too.
My father survived during the war seemingly by accident, but in reality it was through the miraculous help of St Seraphim of Sarov.
This was near Gdansk (or Danzig), where he, a nineteen-year-old lieutenant in command of an artillery battalion, went to battle against the Nazi tanks, after having stationed his troops in the walls of a half-ruined house that covered his guns from the rear. However, these tanks covered him with such heavy fire that the entire battalion, together with their guns, was devastated and blended with the earth. Papa was killed. The last thing that he remembers was a monstrous explosion, a burst of flame, and then everything was silenced and extinguished, and he blacked out. But suddenly, exactly as it is described by patients who have come back from a clinical death in Moody’s book Life After Death, he discovered himself in a long open wagon rushing at breakneck speed along a tunnel, and suddenly he heard the sound of bells and saw a light ahead of him. Then an old man came out to meet him, blocked the way with his body, stopped the wagon, and said:
“Stop! Where do you think you are going? It’s still early for you. You must go back.”
And Papa came to on the operating table.
At that same moment when the Nazi tanks were obliterating Papa’s battalion, his friend from the Artillery Institute, Pavlik Agarkov, also a nineteen-year-old lieutenant, who had occupied an elevated position several kilometers from the place of battle, anxiously listened to the distant thunder of that fatal battle. As soon as the sounds quieted down and darkness fell, he decided to go there at his own risk and peril to at least bury his friend and then be able to inform his mother later of the place of his grave. When he reached the half-fallen brick wall, he pulled out Papa’s breathless and bloody body and dragged him to the nearest bush in order to dig a hole and commit the remains of his young friend to the earth. And while he dragged him, clumsily and with diffi
culty—he was himself of small stature, 1.6 meters at most, while Papa was tall at 1.82 meters—Papa’s legs suddenly bent at the knees. Pavlik leaned over him, placed a mirror to his lips—he was alive! He dragged him to the nearest Polish village, where something like a medical unit was stationed. The doctor simply glanced at Papa and turned away, allowing Pavlik to understand that he had not survived and was not worth the trouble. But Pavlik put a gun to his head and said: get to work. The doctor began to explain that there was an enormous loss of blood, gangrene, he would have to remove the right arm, the case was hopeless. But Pavlik kept holding the gun in his hand and repeated: take my blood. So the doctor put Papa on the operating table and began to clean his wounds, repeating that the injured had one type of blood and Pavlik another, that it wouldn’t do any good … and then the young Polish nurse, looking at Papa with pity and love, said in her Polish accent:
“So young! So handsome! My blood type matches his, take mine!”
So Papa regained consciousness on the operating table next to her.
Then, many years later, Papa and I were driving to Gdansk, explored the place and its environs, and found that field, that half-ruined red brick wall, and that wonderful woman, Marta Obegla. She had become a very respectable, fine-looking older woman, the owner of a beauty salon in the best neighborhood of Gdansk.
“But who was that old man who came out to meet you and sent you back?” I asked my father.
“I also wondered at first who he was: he seemed very familiar, like family, but I just couldn’t recognize him. Then I understood where I had seen him—on an icon at home in our icon corner. That same icon had cured me of blindness in my childhood.”
“And who was it?”
“St Seraphim of Sarov. My mother and grandmother always prayed to him especially, and considered him to be our family’s patron saint.”
I will also add: my paternal great-uncle—also named Alexander—believed that St Seraphim had also saved his family during the Leningrad blockade.15
My great-uncle thought that they all—his wife, two sons, and he himself—would die of starvation at any moment, just like the wife and children of his brother George, who was away at the front. He sat at night grieving in the kitchen. Then suddenly—and keep in mind that my great-uncle was no mystic, a realist by any definition, even a critical realist, a skeptic—St Seraphim appeared and said to him:
“Don’t despair! I will take you away from here tomorrow.”
The next morning, there was an announcement to immediately evacuate the department where my great-uncle worked as an engineer, and he was allowed to take his family with him.
Papa died in a diabetic coma on October 9, on the day of the apostle of love, St John the Theologian, in the Vidnoe city hospital, where he had been taken by ambulance from his house in Peredelkino. My husband and I (who was already a priest at the time) had literally come two hours before his death to administer holy unction. He lay unconscious on the hospital bed and breathed with difficulty, moving his dry lips as if he was trying to say something. After unction we went out onto the hospital steps. There, while I was still standing on the landing, unable to leave, I suddenly felt Papa’s soul. It was like love itself, and I suddenly began to weep uncontrollably: my face was covered in tears that poured and dripped down.
It was like he was standing before me and telling me—or perhaps he really was there telling me—“Why are you crying? We will always be together now. We will be even closer than before, and nothing will part us,” something like that. In that moment, I understood that he had died.
And now it grieved me that I couldn’t put my mother and father in one car and drive all together along the sea there, in the south, beyond Kerkyra, to the little monastery of the Vlakhernskaya Icon of the Mother of God that was situated on an island: as always, my husband would have opened a map on his lap and directed me while I drove, and my parents would have simply rejoiced and wondered, looking out the window. They had loved to travel so much! In my childhood, we drove through all of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltics, and Crimea in my father’s car. I haven’t shared a tenth of what my parents gave me with my own children.
In Kerkyra, we stopped at the icon shop where I had bought the blank CD claiming to have a recording of the Liturgy. I hoped that they would exchange it, but it was closed. At least the Church of St Spyridon was open. There was no service, but you could venerate the relics of the saint. I wrote down names for commemoration of the living and the dead in Greek and asked the priest to pray for them. Apparently, I had such an imploring expression on my face that he disappeared somewhere and soon brought me back several pieces of fabric in which the holy relics had been wound not long before. I was very happy: I had previously had a similar piece of the saint’s vestments, and I would always lay it to the underside of my clothing before travel, until it fell apart. My friend, who considered that this was a form of paganism, tried to make me ashamed of that “talisman” or “protective charm,” as she called it, but I defended myself by saying that since I loved St Spyridon, any item connected with him was precious to me.
I treasure Papa’s chess set in the same manner, though half the figures are missing and the board is worn down. They are still precious to me because he held them in his hands at one time. As for the piece of fabric from St Spyridon, it was blessed on his relics. In short, I immediately attached it with a safety pin to the inside of my blouse. Because of that I felt more confident when driving back home to Agios Stefanos in the pitch-black darkness along the serpentine road from Kanoni, where the Monastery of the Vlakhernskaya Icon of the Mother of God is located. Wherever you go in Greece, you will find a holy relic, or a miracle-working icon, as in this tiny monastery on the island, or the relics of a saint—from the holy Apostle Andrew to St George the Trophy-Bearer, the Protomartyr Stephen, the holy Martyr and Wonderworker Tryphon, St Nicholas the Wonderworker, St Anastasia the Breaker of Chains, and the holy Martyr Thekla … The entire ground is imbued with blessed currents, life-giving energies, and healthy air. May God grant that we get our fill of them while we’re here, that we breathe them in and partake of them as a natural state of being.
Yes, St Spyridon freely gave of his money to the needy when he had it, and to those who could become rich as a result, he gave it as a loan. Thus he gave money to a certain merchant who promised to return it once he bought the merchandise and had profited from it. And he did return it—the saint asked him to put it in some sort of chest. Then he needed the money again, and again asked St Spyridon. The latter said: take it. So the merchant took it and again returned it, placing it in that same chest. Then again, he asked and came back to return it, but this time he decided to be crafty: why does the saint need money, after all—and he didn’t put the money back into the chest. The saint immediately realized it, but gave no sign of it.
Later, the following befell this same merchant, who by this time had become very successful: during a storm, all of his merchant ships sank, together with the goods they were carrying. He became completely impoverished. He came in his sadness and grief to the saint and asked him for money once again. The saint did not turn him down.
“Take it,” he said, “from the same place where you left it last time.”
The merchant crawled into the chest, which was, of course, empty.
Then he was seized with shame, dismay, and repentance, for it turned out that in deceiving the saint, he had deceived himself.
Well, if you pay attention, you will see that things always turn out that way.
My spiritual father told me that it’s very good when a person immediately gets their comeuppance for their sin: the Lord is especially looking after them.
I immediately get my comeuppance in the most unusual and often even comical ways. Once, I was sorting my closet, and evil thoughts were filling my head. Suddenly the closet doors began to move back and forth, back and forth, and since my face was situated exactly in the middle between them, they ended up slapping me across
the cheeks—to the point of bruising! But what astounded me most of all was when I tried to show my husband how it happened, I understood the physical and practical impossibility of such a unique face beating.
Another time, my son and I were walking one winter when he was a teenager, and he kept falling down because of his slippery shoes. I said to him rather strictly:
“Why do you keep falling? Strange, how is it that I never fall?”
But I didn’t even have a chance to finish that last phrase, because my legs shot upwards higher than my head, and comically throwing up my hands in the air, I crashed down onto the ice with all my weight. My “never” only sounded out as I sat up on the sidewalk, and my son rushed to help me up.
But greed is such a tenacious sin, it brings such harm to the soul! How do you free yourself from it? Here it seems like I’ve been living a blessed life for the past three weeks—living in someone else’s villa, swimming in the ocean, driving around in an expensive car—when suddenly a thought entered my head: wouldn’t it be wonderful—fine, perhaps not this villa, so luxurious with its swimming pool and gardens—if I had my own house, at least a small one overlooking the sea, where I could come at any time … for my children, my grandchildren … at least that one being built next door. Or that other one, all finished and ready to be bought. There was a sign hanging on the fence with “For Sale” written in large letters. Interesting, how much were they asking? How could we scrape together that money? It would be nice if I got a nice inheritance from God knows where. What of it? Some rich and lonely great-uncle would be discovered at the last, only please not in Poland, where my great-grandmother Leokadia Vishnevskaia owned an estate called Schipiorno near Warsaw and where Papa and I had even met old Filippiak, who remembered the young mistress who had married the Russian colonel: they wouldn’t give us anything in Poland anyway. Let’s say somewhere in Germany: my mother’s grandmother was born a baroness, and her last name was von Bishop. And this relative would say: “Dear granddaughter! Let me buy you a beautiful house in Corfu!”
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