The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

11

VASILISA KNEW EXACTLY WHERE SHE HAD COME FROM and where she was going: from the soil to the soil. Putting it in today’s terms, she had the mindset of someone sent on a business trip to perform some assigned task and then return to her permanent place of employment.

The circumstances of her time on this earth since birth had been such that her own mother had used to say about her daughter, who was born late and unexpected: girl got no luck and no smarts.

Her older brother and the sister who had grown to maturity and not dissolved into the earth at infancy, as had the six or seven—Vasilisa’s mother did not remember the precise number—babies buried at the rural cemetery, had long ago separated from their parents and left. Her older sister Dusya worked as a domestic in Moscow, and her brother Sergei was married in the neighboring administrative district.

The first misfortune to befall Vasilisa occurred very early. She was two years old when the only rooster in her parents’ yard—an unsightly, voiceless creature—jumped up and pecked her in the eye. The little girl yelped, but no one noticed. A white spot began to develop on her eye, and by the time she was seven the eye was entirely clouded over by a white film.

Year by year Vasilisa’s parents grew poorer, fell ill, and when Vasilisa was ten her father died. Her widowed mother knocked about for a year, then moved in with her oldest son, who had a prospering farm near Kozelsk. At her brother’s place mother and daughter were treated like extra mouths to feed, told to live in the bathhouse, and not invited to the table. Vasilisa and her mother worked in the garden and lived off practically the garden alone. Sergei would bring them bread on holidays or when he was in a good mood, after he had drunk wine.

About thirty miles from those parts the renowned Optina Pustyn monastery prospered, although already on its way to decline. Spiritual life by that time had turned partly into a commercial commodity, of particular value to the owners of inns and taverns, not to mention the monastery’s own hotels. People came there on foot from all over Russia, thousands of people of all social castes. One of the roads passed through the village where Vasilisa’s brother lived. But he did not belong to that clever breed who knows how to extract profit from their conveniently located living quarters. Just the opposite—he was constantly annoyed by the poorer pilgrims who asked for lodging for the night, or panhandled, or walked off with anything that was not chained down. The majority of those streaming by on foot were beggars and half-beggars, monks and half-monks, and Vasilisa’s brother hated all of them and considered them rabble and idlers. Sergei himself had never been to the renowned site: he attended services at the village church three times a year, and of all the church’s dictums he observed only one: he never worked on major feast days.

Vasilisa was afraid of her brother: he never talked to her, and she knew only from her mother that when he was young he had sung and danced and been handsome, but that his temperament had changed after a girl he had fallen in love with rejected him. Their mother pitied him, but he took pity on no one—not on his wife, or his children, and even less on deformed little Vasilisa. That winter their mother caught cold and died. Vasilisa remained with the large family, for whom she was only a hindrance.

Soon after her mother’s death a neighbor took Vasilisa to a celebration at the Optina Pustyn. Vasilisa was exhausted before she got there and barely managed to stand through the long monastery service, which brought her neither pleasure nor relief. But on the way back a miracle occurred, although it was almost impossible to describe because it was so small and insignificant, just Vasilisa’s size. Her fellow travelers decided to have a rest, and she lay down about thirty feet from the road, in a dense hazel grove, and fell asleep. She had not slept long when she was awakened by voices beckoning her to move on. While she was asleep, the gloomy overcast day had brightened, and just as she opened her eyes the clouds parted and a wide ray of sunlight as thick—and just about as heavy—as a log broke a hole through the clouds and fell on the field right in front of her, illuminating a circle on the ground . . . Basically, that was the whole miracle. She knew that the circle was Jesus Christ, who was alive and loved her. In addition, she was completely convinced that she had seen this miraculous vision with both her eyes—the picture had been so three-dimensional and unlike anything that she had ever seen in her life.

The entire way back she sobbed softly, and her kindly neighbor decided that the little girl had worn one of her feet ragged. She removed the scarf from her head and told her to wrap her foot with it. Vasilisa did not object, wrapped her foot in the scarf, and limped the rest of the way back, because the headscarf made her bast shoe too tight and squeezed her foot.

Vasilisa somehow survived the winter at her brother’s, and in the spring he sent her to their sister Dusya in Moscow. Dusya wanted to find her some sort of job. She arranged for her to be taken on as an apprentice at a tailoring shop on Malaya Nikitskaya Street owned by a compassionate woman of German origin named Lizelotta Mikhailovna Klotske. As soon as she saw Vasilisa’s white eye, she realized that the little girl would never make a decent seamstress: even with two good eyes twenty years of work weakened the women’s eyesight. But she did not let her go immediately, allowing her to stay on and try to acquire a skill. Although Vasilisa was only fourteen years old, rural life had so coarsened her fingers that they could not hold the small needles and thin threads. When they assigned her to ironing, that too turned out to be not entirely easy. With their little steam irons the other girls pressed pleats stiff and sharp as sword grass—you could cut your finger on them; Vasilisa’s pleats were crooked and uneven, and they’d have to be soaked again and dried . . . Seeing that the newcomer, for all her diligence, had no talent for work with her hands, the kind owner charged her with cleaning the workshop.

Vasilisa herself did not see dirt; everything had to be pointed out to her. But once she saw what needed to be cleaned, she would scrub not just until it shined, but until she dropped . . . She did not know even the simplest things, such as that brooms need to be dampened and the floor sprinkled before sweeping. And how would she know, having lived her whole life on a dirt floor. When they told her, she sprinkled the floor so much that she needed a rag, not a broom, to soak up all the dirty water. At this trade, too, Vasilisa turned out to have “no smarts.”

Lizelotta Mikhailovna Klotske could not keep Vasilisa on at the workshop, but she did not want to put her out on the street, so she decided to consult her old girlfriend from school days, Evgenia Fedorovna Nechaeva. She brought Vasilisa to Evgenia Fedorovna’s place in Trekhprudny Lane. A certain helpless meekness in Vasilisa compelled these old friends to care for her.

Although she was rather tall and had long legs and a fine torso, Vasilisa’s arms were short, and she constantly kept her large, coarse hands folded against her chest. Her face was long and ellipsoidal, her gaze mournful and severe, her nose thin and longish like her face, her skin a swarthy rose color, smooth, like enamel . . . In a word, not a pretty village face, but a Byzantine countenance.

“Not your typical look,” Lizelotta said to Evgenia while the girl was being fed in the kitchen, “and not at all Russian. Interesting. Pity the poor thing has lost an eye . . . Think, Zhenechka, what use can she be put to? She’s a very diligent girl, but entirely unfit for our business. She’s also not suitable as domestic help, I think . . .”

OVER GENTEEL CUPS OF COFFEE THE TWO OLD FRIENDS decided that they would ask a third schoolmate for help—Anechka Tatarinova, who soon after graduation from school had lost her fiancé, entered a monastery, and for a number of years already had been abbess at a small monastery in the N administrative district . . .

Vasilisa remained at Evgenia Fedorovna’s, and a week later transportation was found: a family of acquaintances was traveling to visit the abbess. They asked them to take Vasilisa along. Vasilisa carried a letter to Mother Anatolia, formerly Anechka, written by her old school friends. The letter contained a request to the abbess that she “take part” in deciding the fate of the poor orphan. “Take part” was already in its third iteration, but, amazingly, each of the petitioners was successful in her own way . . .

The family traveled by train and bought Vasilisa an expensive ticket in a car with compartments and sat her down on the velvet seat, which she stroked half the trip, feasting her fingers on the unusually soft feel. Then tea was served, but when they offered her some, she grabbed the glass so awkwardly that it fell out of the glass holder. The hot tea scalded her leg, but the pain of the burn was nothing by comparison with her horror at having broken the glass . . . Her kind traveling companions tried to calm her down, but she was almost paralyzed by grief, as if she had destroyed not a glass but a living creature.

Toward evening they arrived in N, a beautifully snow-covered ancient city where they spent the night in a hotel on the same square as the train station, and poor Vasilisa once again reeled from magnificence she had never known. She was given a place to sleep with another girl, who, while obviously not of the same class as their benefactors, was also no country bumpkin. The beds where they slept had such white linen that Vasilisa feared soiling the pillow . . . All this opulence gave Vasilisa no joy and only frightened her.

Early the next morning they set off in two wooden sleighs. Both the sleighs and the horses were handsome, entirely unlike her brother’s in the village. Riding in the sleighs was more what she was accustomed to and more fun than on the train. The monastery was fifteen miles away, the weather was the best kind of winter weather—just below freezing with a springtime sun that blinded your eyes and tickled your nose . . . It was the eve of Candlemas.

The horses sped gaily down the smooth road as if they too were gladdened by the sun. Vasilisa’s scalded knee hurt a lot, but her embarrassment had been so great that the pain seemed to exist apart from her.

The monastery appeared behind a turn: it stood on a rise, like rice funeral porridge in a bowl, all white with glistening snow, with white walls and golden cupolas and an open bell tower that stood out artfully against the blue, rock-hard sky . . . The sudden beauty of this sight melted Vasilisa’s numbness, and she began to weep. Tears streamed from both her eyes. Her left eye could not see, but it could cry.

The sleighs stopped at the closed gates. The sister on guard came running out, waved her arms, and smiled: they were expected.

“The house has been prepared for you . . . Reverend Mother has been waiting for you since yesterday evening.”

OTHER GUESTS WERE ACCOMMODATED IN THE SMALL monastery hotel, but the abbess received those in her inner circle, this family and several others, relatives, in her small house next to the church.

The family’s little girl, about seven years of age, demanded kissel as soon as she got out of the sleigh. The gatekeeper stroked the fur on her bonnet:

“Go to the refectory, my child. Reverend Mother said to leave some bread and kissel for you . . . Just then a small, lean woman in a tall, stiff black velvet headdress and wool habit came out. Vasilisa understood that this was the abbess . . .

The family that had brought Vasilisa with them lined up in single file along the narrow shoveled path and proceeded to the porch. Vasilisa was last in line. Greeting her distant relations, the abbess sensed an almost physical terror and awe coming from the stooped, poorly dressed little girl whose short arms with coarse red hands were folded across her chest.

They’ve brought their new domestic with them, the abbess decided, and beckoned the little girl to come closer. The little girl’s clear, seeing eye closed from fear and the other one shone white as the abbess removed her fluffy black mittens and extended them to Vasilisa. Vasilisa was unable to take them and dropped them on the snow. The seven-year-old little girl who stood alongside her laughed into her fur collar . . .

And so it came to be that even before she had read the letter of recommendation, the abbess gave her heart’s consent to accept Vasilisa.

Vasilisa began her monastery life at age fourteen: the first two years she was a worker, then she became a novice. Her novitiate was always connected to chores: in the kitchen, the cow barn, and the fields. They tried giving her other work, but she did not have a good enough voice for the choir, or any special womanly talent for gold embroidery. As before, she considered herself an insignificant, unimportant being, not worth the food she consumed. It was precisely this that so touched the abbess, and in the third year of Vasilisa’s life in the monastery the abbess adopted as her own this novice dispossessed of any redeeming qualities in the eyes of the other residents of the monastery.

The abbess began to teach Vasilisa to read, at first Russian, then Church Slavonic. Learning came to Vasilisa with great difficulty. Mother Anatolia, aware all her life of her own lack of patience, practiced humility by teaching this sweet but exceptionally learning-disabled girl. Every day, immediately after morning services, Vasilisa spent an hour in the abbess’s room. She placed her light-blue notebook on the edge of the table and looked at Mother Anatolia with a devoted and fearful gaze. Inclined toward intellectual pursuits—which she herself considered sinful games—and fluent since youth in multiple languages, the abbess marveled at the intricate variation in human abilities. There was no doubt that Vasilisa demonstrated the height of resistance to learning, not to say stupidity. Before Vasilisa the abbess could never have imagined that a person could repeat one and the same error so many times before learning how to write or pronounce a word correctly.

“Vasilisa, what does ‘this day’ mean?” Mother Anatolia would begin Vasilisa’s lessons with this question.

Uncertain, Vasilisa rolled her only serviceable eye to the ceiling and for the fifteenth time replied.

“In the afternoon?”

The abbess shook her head.

“Yesterday?” The embarrassed pupil turned crimson.

“‘This day’ means ‘now, at this time, today’ . . .”

“This day the Maiden gives birth to the Transcendent One . . .” the teacher repeated innumerable times, warding off her irritation with a short prayer.

Vasilisa nodded happily, then, the very next day, she once again painfully searched the low whitewashed ceiling for an answer to the question, “What does ‘this day’ mean?”

Having observed the slowness and torpidity of Vasilisa’s brains, the abbess now and again would conclude that she was dealing with a certain kind of mental retardation. And by this time, having spent nearly twenty years in monasteries, she knew that deficiencies of various sorts—intellectual, physical, or moral—were widespread phenomena and that a healthy person was sooner an exception to the rule of total global illness.

In addition to intellectual torpidity she noted her ward’s insuperable ignorance and predilection for the wildest of superstitions, and guessed that the girl’s rare obstinacy camouflaged a certain kind of preordination—like that of a plant that sends its roots downward and leaves upward and cannot be made to break this habit. But in Vasilisa’s case all of these frustrating peculiarities were wrapped in a rare virtue, which the abbess also discovered in her ward. The soul of this backward girl harbored an inexhaustible well of gratitude, a rare ability to remember every kindness shown her, and a noble amnesia for all insults and injuries. Surprising as it might seem, it was precisely the injuries and various insults directed at her that she accepted as deserved.

Monastic life—the abbess had known for a long time—concealed unseen possibilities for oppression, violence, and sin. These were special, monastic sins of which secular people immersed in their pursuit of daily bread had no concept. Within the walls of a monastery human relations acquired much greater significance, and much more acute forms. Sympathies and antipathies, jealousy, envy, and hatred festered, sealed within the confines of strictly regulated behavior.

The abbess knew perfectly well that Vasilisa was sneered at, insulted, and mistreated, but she never heard a single word of complaint from her doltish little novice, who exuded only incessant gratitude. Having plumbed the girl’s uncomplicated depths with her experienced vision, Mother Anatolia wondered: what sort of miracle was this deformed little girl with neither beauty nor talent, yet so richly blessed with the rare gift of gratitude? “A humble soul,” the abbess decided, and made Vasilisa her cell-keeper . . .

Vasilisa now slept on a narrow bench in the entranceway, at the door to the abbess’s room. At first she would wake up every ten minutes, like a nursing mother who constantly imagines that her child has begun to cry. When she woke up, she would rush to the locked door of the abbess’s room, on the way overturning the slops bucket or knocking over the woodpile—the tiled stove in the abbess’s room was stoked from the entranceway . . . She often woke the abbess, whose sleep since youth had been fragile and easily disrupted. For the longest time the abbess tried to impress on her that if she were awakened by a disturbing thought she should recite the Hail Mary three times before getting up. But Vasilisa emerged from her peasant’s sleep usually only after she was already standing near the door, frightened by the noise she had made and only then remembering the Reverend Mother’s instructions . . .

For all her dimwittedness and clumsiness, Vasilisa learned to sweep away the dust with a multicolored broom called a “chicken-wing” because of its shape, to wash windows to a brilliant shine, and even to steep tea “genteel-style.”

In the fourth year of Vasilisa’s residency the old priest and father confessor who had lived at the monastery for many years died. A new priest arrived, Hieromonk Varsonofy. He was young—barely more than thirty—but looked much older, with turtlelike skin, dry lips, and eyelids that folded over his dark Byzantine eyes . . . His education was decent, and he had been a monk since youth, precisely the type the church hierarchy itself came from.

Father Varsonofy taught church history and liturgics at the administrative district seminary and came to the monastery for brief visits, occasionally missing a week or two if he was having a difficult semester. The abbess treated him respectfully, even deferentially, and though usually reserved and of few words, he would often drink tea and engage in conversation with her. Despite the enormous differences in their backgrounds and upbringing, Mother Anatolia, an enlightened aristocrat, became close with Father Varsonofy, the son of a railroad worker and a peasant. She held the new priest in high regard: it was not often in monastic circles that one met a person who took an interest in life beyond the monastery’s gates.

Mother Anatolia herself had retained her worldly habits: she read secular books, her girlfriends even sent her a literary magazine, and in church circles she had the reputation of a radical, because she admired Patriarch Philaret of Moscow and advocated translation of the Bible into vernacular Russian; that is, in the eyes of some church leaders she was not entirely trustworthy, with a certain disposition toward Lutheranism.

At the time, the young monk held entirely different, stricter views: he entertained no disposition toward Lutheranism, was irreconcilable with Catholicism, and as a meticulous reader of new writing in divinity studies he singled out Vladimir Soloviev, to whose work he strongly objected, as particularly pernicious.

Serving them at the table, Vasilisa was constant witness to their conversations. Removing the tea service, she would sit down on the bench outside the door and thrill at their clever words, and wonder why the Lord had brought her to such an enviable, rich, and divine place . . . She remembered well the backbreaking work of her childhood, the ache in her arms and back, the constant pain in her stomach from which she had suffered until she came to the monastery, the hunger, and most of all, the cold that for so many years had held her in its grip, abating only briefly in the fleeting warmth of July and August.

The last summer before the war Father Varsonofy left them for three months to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. During his stay in Palestine he learned that war had broken out and returned to the motherland on the very last steamship. He returned still very much under the impression of the sacred places, especially the Sea of Galilee, which he had circumambulated, offering prayers at each of the holy sites, which for the most part retained from antiquity only their geographical names . . .

Vasilisa would sit near the door, petrified with astonishment: she was seeing with her own eyes someone who had seen the Sea of Galilee and the ruins of the synagogue at Capernaum, where the Lord himself had been. For her the abstract written word now acquired flesh and smell. The smell that came from the monk himself, though, was still the same—odors of a body rarely bathed mixed with the smell of dampness, the incense that had impregnated his clothes, and the tablets that he chewed to soothe his tormenting toothache. Vasilisa secretly pulled a putrid thread from his long overcoat, scraped the dirt from the soles of the galoshes in which he had made his journey, wrapped them both in silver paper, and preserved them as if they were relics. She even came to regard herself with a certain respect as someone who had seen someone who had seen the Holy Land . . .

And so, over the next two years, sitting at the door like a bewitched mouse, Vasilisa learned of the course of Russian history—about unsuccessful military decisions and the abdication of the tsar . . . There, on her bench, she also learned about preparations for the All-Russian Sobor and the possible election of the patriarch, and about the revolution . . .

In the summer of 1917 Father Varsonofy was summoned to Moscow. But he did not forget the abbess and sent her letters from time to time. At the beginning of 1918 by way of a chance courier he sent the abbess a long letter in which he described autumn events in Moscow and Petersburg, the election of the patriarch, and his own concelebration of the Eucharist with Patriarch-elect Tikhon at the St. Nicholas Cathedral on Nikola-Vorobievsky Lane. He made fleeting mention of his own elevation to bishop the evening before. The abbess shared this last piece of news with Vasilisa.

“Is an apostle higher than a bishop?” Vasilisa asked, petrified by her own impudence.

“An apostle is more than a bishop, my child,” the abbess answered wearily, once again marveling at the childish questions that preoccupied Vasilisa.

Several months later the abbess received from the bishop a large package containing, besides a letter, reports printed on poor-quality paper, with monstrous spelling, of changes brought on by the revolution. Even after studying them closely through her tiny eyeglasses on a black string, the abbess could make no sense of the contradictory nonsense of Soviet speech. In the letter, written with large cursive letters, she read, among other things: “Cruel persecutions have begun. It will come unto us to be witness to it as well. Rejoice!”

The next morning the abbess set out to the archbishop in N for an explanation. From him she learned the latest news—about the separation of church and state, about civil unrest in Petrograd, about the murders of Father Peter Skipetrov and Metropolitan Vladimir . . .

“They’re closing all the monasteries,” the archbishop whispered, blessing the abbess on her way out.

Reverend Mother was terrified and did not entirely believe what she had heard, but on returning to the monastery she began to scale down operations and prepare the monastery for the uncertain and, it went without saying, sorrowful changes she now awaited. But she could not possibly have envisioned the dimensions of the impending disaster. A few things she succeeded in doing: in keeping with the Gospels, she distributed the monastery’s supplies to the peasants, very secretively and very discriminatingly, keeping only the bare minimum; she had a secret compartment constructed under the sanctuary altar and placed an iron-fettered chest containing the holy relics inside; the monastery’s valuable archive was sent by courier to the eparchy library. She had already come to terms with the idea of closing the monastery, but could not imagine closing the ancient church.

She gathered the novices and the nuns and announced that they should think about leaving the monastery before the heinous persecutions commenced. Four novices returned to their parents’ homes. But all the nuns decided to remain. The abbess announced to them that times had changed, that many would suffer for their sins and for the sins of their loved ones, and that the path for the majority of them should be to go out into the secular world and while living in that secular world nonetheless remain sisters to each other and brides of Christ.

That was all Mother Anatolia succeeded in accomplishing. Several days before the monastery was closed, they came for her. She was taken to the prison in N. Vasilisa asked to go with her, and the authorities benevolently agreed. The abbess prepared herself for the worst, but they sentenced her to three years exile in the Vologda administrative district. A week later, Vasilisa, demonstrating unexpected acumen, traveled to the monastery, gathered the vestiges of the abbess’s things—two Gardner porcelain cups, a coffeepot with warmer, some of their mended and remended bedding, and a pillowcase with embroidered initials produced in Lizelotta Mikhailovna Klotske’s workshop in times immemorial. With that they went.

Surprisingly, the trip was even pleasant, in a decent train car with four clerics—two village priests guilty of who knows what before the new regime, the eparchy’s librarian, and the same archbishop who had just recently promised the abbess that the monastery would be closed. Their convoy was one solitary Red Army soldier, a village boy not yet thoroughly inculcated with revolutionary spirit. He treated his criminals with yet to be extirpated respect appropriate to their station . . .

For Vasilisa and the abbess three years turned into eleven. Eleven harsh years of suffering and heroism for the old abbess and of bliss for Vasilisa. Now in rural conditions she was accustomed to, she was for the abbess, who was hardly accustomed to this life, nurturer, protector, and guardian angel. Thrice they moved to new settlements, each time farther north, until they were banished to Kargopol, a nice little wooden town where Mother Anatolia died in the seventy-eighth year of her life.

Several days before her death Mother Anatolia instructed Vasilisa that after the funeral she should not remain there, but should travel to Moscow, to Trekhprudny Lane, to Evgenia Fedorovna Nechaeva. She blessed her and ordered her not to be afraid of anything. Vasilisa did everything her mentor told her: she buried her, waited around to mark the fortieth day, and left. She took with her the red velvet purse with two imperial ten-ruble pieces, her inheritance from Reverend Mother, and her silver piece of paper with the Palestinian relics.

She found her way to Trekhprudny Lane at the end of December. Evgenia Fedorovna took her in. In the housing committee there were people who still remembered old Nechaev, the builder. For the two ten-ruble pieces of gold one of those with a good memory entered one-eyed Vasilisa’s name in the house registration roster. From that time on Vasilisa lived in Evgenia Fedorovna’s household, with Elena, and later Anton Ivanovich. She served them as had become her custom from morning until night, never leaving an ounce of thought, time, or rest for herself: first Evgenia Fedorovna, then Elena, then Tanya, then everyone else she considered her benefactor . . .

She had only one strange habit: twice a year—once usually in spring, right after Easter—she would abandon everything and disappear for a week, sometimes ten days. With no warning or explanation . . .

“Vasilisa’s got the itch for some freedom,” Pavel Alekseevich chuckled.

It was indeed her only luxury—to travel, when her soul beckoned, to the wooden town of Kargopol, to visit the grave of Anna Tatarinova, the abbess Anatolia, to tidy up the grave, paint the fence, and talk to her, her only close relation. All the others were cousins . . .