Stargorod: A Novel in Many Voices

The Holy Monkey

A true miracle, as everyone knows, requires time to become accepted as such. The bandit Foma,⁴ whom a spell by a Komsi-sorceress turned into a chimpanzee, lived in the garage of his former commander, Anton Bes. The latter dressed the chimpanzee in loafers, slacks, a padded jacket, a fur cap, and dark glasses with white rims, making him look like an unhinged clown. Bes had his fun and quickly forgot about the poor wretch.

Foma ran off to the city and hung about the cemetery church of St. Christopher. He begged for alms at the gates and bit by bit edged his way inside. An elder informed the abbot, Father Artemon, that Foma appeared to be a monkey. On one occasion, Artemon attempted to speak to him. Foma flung himself to his knees, seized his head in his hands, and froze in a repentant pose. The half-blind Father Artemon evaluated such zeal thus: “He’s mute and a fool, but not without Christ; leave him be. St. Christopher also had the face of a beast; there’s a reason he is portrayed with the head of a dog.”

The batushka’s word is law, so Foma began to sweep the churchyard, and was even given a place to stay in the warm storeroom, where he slept in his clothes like a true holy fool. The old women began to say that Foma was a Hindu mute and that he was tormented by some exotic disease.

The church, naturally, had an icon of St. Christopher painted by an ancient hand, from a time when they portrayed the holy warrior with the head of a dog and a large sword. Only a few of these ancient images survive to this day, having evaded the order to paint over the dogs’ heads with human ones. Father Artemon prized the icon and, through all his 57 years of service, he humbly waited for it to perform a miracle.

A graveyard church is a profitable place, so they sent a second priest, Father Pavlin Pridvorov, to assist the abbot. Father Pavlin, having filled his head with street vendors’ books, was consumed by the idea of canonizing Ivan the Terrible and preached that Holy Rus’ could only be revived by a strong hand, which he had the temerity to assert in a letter to the Metropolitan. In reply, Father Pavlin was advised to display his intelligence less prominently.

Father Pavlin craved a cause. Someone related to him a local legend: in the graveyard church Ivan the Terrible had treated the orphan Ivashka to an apple. The boy ate the apple, lit up like an angel, and died. Father Pavlin felt it would be useful for the church to have a locally revered saint. So he issued an appeal and Young Guard activists excavated all over the church grounds, but they turned up no remains that could qualify as holy. Instead, for excavating without permission, they had to pay a fine to the Committee for the Protection of Culture. Father Artemon paid the fine and severely forbade Pridvorov from muddling the minds of parishioners with stories of false miracles. As a result, Father Pavlin bore a grudge against the abbot.

Meanwhile, Foma for some reason wandered back to his former boss and overheard a certain conversation: an order had arrived from Petersburg for the icon of St. Christopher. The boys who usually did the stealing didn’t feel up to breaking into a church, so Bes boastfully declared that he himself would take care of it within twenty-four hours. At night, he slipped into the church. Barely had he pried the icon from the iconostasis when Foma sounded the alarm from the bell tower. The thief ran. Foma flew from the bell tower like an arrow, overtook Bes and ripped the icon from his hands. Bes struck him in the chest with a knife. Townspeople came running and surrounded the thief. The abbot joined them. Foma, not taking his eyes off the icon, died in the abbot’s arms. And it was only at that moment that Father Artemon realized that the savior of the church’s treasure was in fact a chimpanzee.

The police were so fed up with Bes that they gave him the maximum sentence: twelve years of hard labor. Father Artemon prayed long and hard, and then wrote to his superiors about the Holy Monkey. Father Pavlin Pridvorov’s denunciation followed shortly thereafter: it informed the authorities that the chimpanzee had attended liturgies, while, as everyone knows, the only animals allowed into churches are cats, because they alone do not eat their own feces.

As the bishop’s bell ringer told it, the day before the bishop received the letters, the believers attending the Stargorod church, which was not even big enough to hold a service of extreme unction, beat the bishop’s guards until they bled. Reading a letter about miracles of an all but heretical nature, and having grown weary of public unrest, the bishop quietly sent Father Artemon into retirement, then transferred Father Pavlin to the town of Soggy Tundra, to enlighten the pagans. News of the miracle flew through the city, and it was whispered that, before his death, Foma regained human form. The number of worshippers at the church increased. The hero-monkey was buried outside the walls of the church’s graveyard, but pilgrims still beat a path to his grave. The profitable church was assigned to the monks of Boris and Gleb Monastery and Stargorod bandits gifted their Father Superior a new Jaguar, in order that he might pray for them. The people quickly christened the priest Jaguarius. Many take the name at face value…

No matter, it’s a distinguished name, and it suits him well.

4. The Russian equivalent of Thomas.