The Story of a Life

5

A Trip to Chenstokhov

My other grandmother, Vikentia Ivanovna, a tall, old Polish woman, lived in Cherkassy on the river Dnieper. She had many daughters, my aunts. One of these aunts, Yevfrosinia Grigorievna, was the headmistress of a girls’ school in Cherkassy. My grandmother lived with this aunt in a large wooden house. Vikentia Ivanovna always went around in mourning and a headdress. She first began to wear mourning clothes after the suppression of the Polish Rebellion of 1863 and from that day on never took them off. We were convinced that during the rebellion Grandmother’s fiancé had been killed. He must have been a proud Polish revolutionary, not at all like Grandmother’s morose husband, our grandfather, a retired notary public in Cherkassy.

I remember my grandfather poorly. He lived on a small mezzanine and rarely came downstairs. Grandmother sent him off to live there away from all the others given his intolerable smoking habit. Once in a while we’d go and visit him in his room, smelly and dense with smoke. On the table were great piles of tobacco that had spilled out of various pouches. Our grandfather, seated in his chair, would roll cigarette after cigarette with his shaking, gnarled hands. He didn’t talk to us but would ruffle the hair on the back of our heads and give us the shiny purple paper off his tobacco pouches.

We often came to visit Vikentia Ivanovna from Kiev. She had one strict habit. Every spring during Lent she undertook a pilgrimage to Catholic holy sites either in Warsaw, Vilnius or Chenstokhov. Sometimes she took it into her head to visit Orthodox shrines and would go to the Holy Trinity Monastery of St Sergius or to Pochaev. Her sons and daughters all laughed at her and said that if she kept this up, Vikentia Ivanovna would start paying visits to Jewish tsaddiks and end her days with a pilgrimage to Mohammed’s tomb in Mecca.

The biggest argument my father ever had with my grandmother was when she used the occasion of his travelling to Vienna for a convention of statisticians to take me with her on one of these religious journeys. I was happy to go and did not understand my father’s indignation. I was eight at the time. I remember the bright spring air in Vilnius and the chapel at the ‘Gate of Dawn’ where grandmother went to Mass. The whole town glistened with the pale green and goldish brilliance of the new leaves. At noon a cannon from the Napoleonic era fired a salute from atop Castle Hill.

Grandmother was an extremely well-read woman, and she was forever explaining things to me. She had a remarkable way of combining her religiosity with progressive ideas. She was infatuated with Herzen and at the same time with Henryk Sienkiewicz.fn1 In her bedroom portraits of Pushkin and Mickiewicz hung side-by-side with an icon of Our Lady of Chenstokhov. During the pogroms of the revolution of 1905, she hid revolutionary students and Jews in her home.

From Vilnius we left for Warsaw. I only recall the Copernicus monument and the cafés where grandmother treated me to ‘upside-down-coffee’ – more milk than coffee. She also treated me to meringues, which melted in my mouth with creamy cool sweetness. We were served by fidgety waitresses in pleated aprons. From Warsaw we travelled on to Chenstokhov and the famous Catholic monastery of Jasna Góra with its ‘miracle-working’ Black Madonna icon. This was my first encounter with religious fanaticism. It shocked and frightened me. Ever since I have been filled with fear and revulsion for fanaticism. For a long time, I could not lose the fear I felt that day.

Our train arrived in Chenstokhov early in the morning. It was far from the station to the monastery, which stood on a large green hill. The pilgrims – Polish peasants, men and women – exited the train, along with some city dwellers, all in sooty bowler hats. A portly old priest and some young deacons in lacy garments were waiting for the pilgrims at the station. The procession of pilgrims gathered on the dusty road in front of the station. The priest blessed them and muttered a prayer. The crowd dropped to its knees and began to crawl towards the monastery, chanting psalms as they went.

The throng crawled all the way to the cathedral. Taking the lead was a grey-haired woman with a white, ecstatic face. In her hand she held a black wooden crucifix. Ahead of them all the priest walked slowly and indifferently. It was hot and dusty, sweat was running down their faces. They panted and wheezed and shot reproachful glances at the pilgrims who were falling behind. I grabbed my grandmother by the hand.

‘Why are they doing this?’ I whispered.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ Grandmother answered in Polish. ‘They’re penitents seeking forgiveness for their sins from Our Lord God.’

‘Let’s leave,’ I said to my grandmother, but she pretended not to hear me.

The monastery at Chenstokhov was a medieval castle. Rusty Swedish cannonballs were embedded in its walls, and mucky green water filled the moats. Large, thick trees rustled on the ramparts. The drawbridges had been lowered on their metal chains. We drove across one of them in a droshky into a tangle of courtyards, back streets and alleyways. A lay brother, a cord around his waist, led us to the monastery hotel. We were shown to a cold room with a vaulted ceiling. The inevitable crucifix hung on the wall. Someone had affixed a garland of paper flowers to the nails on Christ’s brass feet. The monk asked my grandmother whether she didn’t happen to be suffering from any illnesses requiring a cure. Grandmother had always been quite anxious about her health, and she immediately complained to him of heart pains. From the pocket of his brown habit the monk took out a handful of small silver hearts, arms, heads and even tiny babies and poured them in a heap on the table.

‘We have hearts’, he said, ‘for five, ten and twenty roubles. They have already been blessed. All you have to do is say a prayer and hang them on the icon of Our Lady.’

Grandmother bought a small plump heart for ten roubles. She told me that we were going to go to Solemn Mass that night at the monastery church, treated me to tea and stale buns from Warsaw, and then lay down to rest. She quickly fell asleep. I looked out of the small window. A monk in a magnificent but faded habit walked past. Then two Polish peasants sat down in the shadow of the wall, took some plain bread and garlic out of their bundles, and began to eat. They had blue eyes and big, strong teeth.

I got bored, so I quietly went out into the street. My grandmother had instructed me not to speak Russian inside the monastery. This scared me since I only knew a few words of Polish. I got lost and ended up in a narrow passage between two walls. The ground was covered with cracked tiles, out of which grew a single plantain. There were cast-iron lanterns along the walls that had not been lit in a long time – I spied a bird’s nest in one of them. A narrow gate in one of the walls stood half open. I looked inside. An apple orchard, bathed in pools of sunlight, stretched out across the slope of a hill. I hesitated and then went inside. The orchard was shedding its blossoms. Yellowed petals were falling. A faint but melodic ringing came from the church belfry.

A young Polish peasant sat nursing her infant under an old apple tree. The baby wrinkled his face and wheezed. Next to the woman stood a pale, puffy peasant youth in a new felt hat. A blue satin ribbon had been sewn to the hat and a peacock feather stuck into it. The young lad stared down at his feet with big round eyes and did not move. A short, bald-headed monk with gardening shears in his hand sat down on a tree stump across from the woman. He fixed his eyes on me and said, ‘Praised be Our Lord Jesus Christ!’

‘For ever and ever!’ I replied, just as my grandmother had taught me. My heart stopped from fright.

The monk turned around and began listening to the woman. Strands of her blond hair kept falling in her face, and she was brushing them back gently and complaining: ‘When our son was four months old, Michaś shot a stork and brought it into our little house. I cried and said: “What’ve you done, you fool? Don’t you know that for every stork that’s killed, God takes a baby? Why’d you shoot it, Michaś?”’

The youth in the felt hat went on staring at the ground.

‘And since that day,’ she continued, ‘our dear son has gone blue in the face and has trouble breathing. Will Our Lady help him?’

The monk looked away awkwardly and said nothing.

‘Oh, what misery!’ said the woman and began clawing at her throat, ‘Oh, what misery!’ she wailed, pressing the baby to her breast.

The baby wheezed and its eyes bulged. I remembered the toy silver babies that the lay brother had shown Grandmother back at the hotel. I felt sorry for the woman. I wanted to tell her to buy one of those babies for twenty roubles and hang it on the icon of Our Lady of Chenstokhov, but I didn’t know enough Polish to give her this complicated piece of advice. What’s more, I was afraid of the monk, and so I left the orchard. When I got back, Grandmother was still sleeping. I lay down on the hard bed without taking off my clothes and fell fast asleep. Grandmother woke me in the middle of the night. I washed with cold water in a large faience hand-basin. The shock of the water made me shiver. Outside our windows hand-held lanterns floated by, feet shuffled and the bells called.

‘The cardinal is holding Mass tonight,’ Grandmother said. ‘He’s the papal nuncio.’

It was difficult to find our way in the dark, but eventually we reached the church. ‘Hold onto me,’ said Grandmother in the unlit vestibule. We groped our way into the church. I couldn’t see a thing. There wasn’t a single candle, not the faintest glint of light amid the close gloom entombed within the high church walls. In this utter darkness I could hear the breathing of hundreds of people; there was the slightly sweet smell of flowers. I felt the worn iron floor underfoot, took a step, and immediately bumped into something.

‘Be still!’ Grandmother whispered. ‘There are people lying on the floor. You’ll step on them.’ She began to say a prayer, and I stood waiting, holding onto her elbow. I was terrified. The people on the floor lay with their arms stretched out in the shape of the cross and were breathing softly. The air was filled with a doleful rustling.

Suddenly, the organ thundered to life, piercing the heavy darkness and shaking the walls. At that very moment hundreds of candles burst into flame. I screamed, blinded and frightened. The large gold curtain covering the icon of Our Lady of Chenstokhov slowly began to part. Six old priests in lacy vestments knelt before the icon with their backs to the crowd, their arms raised up to the heavens. Only the bony cardinal, in his purple cassock with its wide violet sash drawn up about his thin waist, was standing upright, also with his back to the praying crowd, as if listening to the dying storm of the organ and the sobs of the throng. I have never since witnessed such a theatrical or incomprehensible spectacle.

After the service Grandmother and I left and entered a long vaulted passageway. It began to grow light. People knelt in prayer along the walls. Grandmother also knelt and made me kneel too. I was afraid to ask her what these wild-eyed people were waiting for. Then the cardinal appeared at the end of the corridor. He walked swiftly with light steps in our direction. His cassock billowed as he went, brushing the faces of those kneeling in prayer. They grabbed at the edges of his cassock, kissing it with passion and humility.

‘Kiss his cassock,’ my grandmother hurriedly whispered. But I refused. I blanched and begrudgingly stared the cardinal in the face. There must have been tears in my eyes, for he stopped, touched me briefly on the head with a small, dry hand, and said in Polish: ‘A child’s tears are the best prayer to the Lord.’

I looked at him. Brown skin was stretched tightly over his pointy face, which appeared to be lit by a dim glow. His black eyes narrowed and focused on me expectantly. I remained stubbornly silent. The cardinal turned round sharply and swept on as lightly as before, stirring the air as he went. Grandmother grabbed me by the arm with such force I nearly cried in pain and led me out of the corridor.

‘Just like your father!’ she said once we had reached the courtyard. ‘Just like your father! Oh, dear Mother of God! Whatever is to become of you?’