Stargorod: A Novel in Many Voices

2010

A Change of Consciousness

Lent just ended. Sociologists from Moscow’s Levada Center agency asserted that 79 percent of Russians had no intention of fasting or otherwise observing Lent. Two local hot-heads shot off fireworks during the church procession – I’ll never forget how ashamed the boys looked when they were caught; they just wanted to make it better.

The Church continues to teach: prayer and repentance are the most important thing during Lent. The word “repentance” comes into Russian from the Greek “matanoia” meaning a change of consciousness and even the broadening of consciousness beyond the individual intelligence, sense. It implies a special spiritual procedure that can transport a believer’s consciousness from one level of being to another. But then I also read in The Stargorod Herald: “Repentance is an identifying feature of our national character.” I read that and didn’t want to keep reading. It reminded me of a story.

In the late ‘80s I found some part-time work with a restoration team at the Old Believers’ Pokrovsky Cathedral in the Rogozhsky neighborhood of Stargorod. The Old Believers were banned from building temples that looked like Orthodox churches, so when seen from the street, architect Kozakov’s creation resembled a large box with a few domes on top. Inside, however, it was indistinguishable from, say, the Novgorod Sofia. A sweep of a ceiling. Stern icons in the ancient style. Monumental murals. Dusk, wax candles in massive silver candelabras. The smell of incense mixes with strangely Oriental, ancient harmonies, music that sounds mysterious and difficult to the modern ear, trained in Baroque polyphonies. At the entrance, an old lady vigilantly guarded this world against strangers.

Every morning for three weeks we climbed the scaffolding and washed the frescoed walls with a special concoction made with boiled soap, and for three weeks Maria Lukinichna, the door-woman, watched us with unconcealed disgust. Smoking on the temple grounds was strictly verboten, so when it was time for a break, we took our buckets of boiled-soap into the keeper’s cottage, put them on the stove to heat, and went to the park next door. There, we smoked. When we came back, the gas under the buckets was almost invariably turned off. The old lady would come in to boil some tea and turn our stuff off just to spite us – we always left her a burner. When caught red-handed, she would not negotiate. She’d squeeze her lips into a disdainful line and stare at the floor. She observed her boycott as if it were a monastic vow. From the scaffolding, we could watch her: she spent her free time polishing the church’s silver and scrubbing the floors, or else she prayed, bending again and again to the ground in countless bows. Once we heard her upbraiding a drunken reader:

“All you know is how to fill your gut! Watch my word – the Green Viper will get you!” she raged, and the poor little man could only mumble every so often, “I do repent, Mother…”

“I do repent, Father,” Lukinichna would thunder back, bow, and pick up right where she left off, with fresh ire.

Then, a holy day of great significance was upon us. The Metropolitan himself was to come from Moscow. For two days before his scheduled arrival the old ladies scoured the church with zeal undreamt of by generals on the eve of a Marshal’s inspection. On the day itself, the service went on forever – the Old Believers don’t believe in hurrying their prayers. A few of our crew decided to wait the mass out on the scaffolding; myself and another guy, having finished what we had planned for the day, descended from the exulted heights, tip-toed around the faithful, and went outside. Not far from the church we found a shashlyk place where we had some kebabs with fries, washing it all down with the 777 port that at the time was served in “bombs” of 0.8 liters each. We ate and drank, then drank some more, bought more still to take with us, and then felt compelled, for reasons passing understanding, to go back to work.

Back in the church, we climbed the scaffolding to the top platform where I promptly slipped on a wet board and knocked down a bucket of dirty water. Its flight down to the bottom of the church remains branded into my memory to this day. It hit the floor and exploded, dousing the solemn gathering. But the Metropolitan did not shudder or make a noise out of order, and neither did the other priests – they only wiped their brows with the embroidered sleeves of their garments. The congregation did not stumble in its responses either, but carried on with the mass as if there had been no exploding bucket whatsoever. We took a nap up there on the scaffolds and retreated home when the coast cleared.

The next morning I came back to work; I was ashamed and scared. I prayed for the old door-lady to fall ill, to disappear, to vanish inexplicably from my life. Of course, that was not to be! A pair of burning eyes pinned me at the entrance to the church, alive and terrifying like the eyes of an Old Testament prophet in the icon above her. My legs folded of their own volition, I fell to my knees and blurted loudly, “Lukinichna, forgive this fool, I got drunk yesterday. I was the one who dropped the bucket.”

Instantly, she dropped on the ground next to me – the way an axe falls on a log – and slammed her forehead against the floor. The sound of bone making contact with stone echoed through the church. Then she rose, and dropped her head again, and couldn’t stop after that – she bowed and bowed, hitting her head against the very clean floor, sobbing, and saying, “You forgive me, brother! I thought you a godless pest, forgive me!”

I was shaking all over; I could feel no strength in my legs, no way to get up.

The old lady helped me up to a chair. She assessed my condition with one look, and said, “Go home, have a drink, take a nap.”

I shook my head and went to climb the scaffolding.

No one ever turned off gas under our boiled soap again. Instead, Lukinichna now served us tea in the kitchen and chastised us gently for siding with Patriarch Nikon in the schism¹. I don’t drink port any more either, even the most expensive kind.

1. Patriarch Nikon’s reforms of 1653, aimed to establish uniformity between the Greek and Russian church practices, caused a schism between the official church and the Old Believers movement.