“Nick, I must apologize.” Again she was direct, though this time she was scanning the room to see if anyone was watching them.
They stood behind the drip irrigation display. He wanted to reach out and hold her. Instead, he let his hand haphazardly swing out and brush her. Anyone would have thought that he had simply bumped into her.
“What was it?” His tone was demanding, but conciliatory. “Why did you run away?”
“I was afraid. I'll explain, but we can't talk here.” She became nervous. “Can we meet tonight?”
“Olga, why? Why were you so frightened?” If only she could give him a sensible answer.
She looked into his eyes. “There's much I have to tell you. For now all I can say is that I shouldn't have been in church.”
“I don't get it.” He wanted to understand.
“I'll tell you more later.” She saw, however, that she needed to divulge more. “It would not have been good for me to have been seen in church with an American.”
He shook his head. “Damnit, is everything all right now?”
“Yes, it is,” she said, stressing each word. “Just tell me, can we meet tonight?”
“Sure, but…”—he felt as if he were betraying her—“… but I'll have to bring another guide with me.”
Her deep eyes became narrow. “Must you?”
“Well…” He wanted most of all to talk intimately and be alone with her again. Recalling Masha's advice, he asked, “What will we do? I'd like to meet some of your friends or…”
“Yes,” she said, seizing the chance. “My aunt. I want you to meet her.”
He sighed with relief. “Your aunt?”
“Yes. She's very nice. Don't worry.”
“Wonderful. Same time?”
“No.” She glanced about the room, looking at everyone but him. “Nick, it would be better if you didn't return to your hotel. You have a special bus that takes you back, right?”
“Yes.” He became hesitant again.
“Ask the driver to let you off in front of the farmers’ market. Just tell him you want to buy some vegetables or something.” She did not want to frighten him by telling him that he would pick up his tail if he returned to the hotel. “I just want to save time, that's all,” she said. “I'll be waiting for you by the main doors and that way we can spend the whole evening together… with my aunt, too, of course.”
“All right.” He could not hide his concern. “There isn't any problem is there?”
She faced him directly. Smiling, softly she said, “No. Not any more.”
Olga leaned over and quickly kissed him on the cheek. Then, without a further word, she melted into the crowd and was gone.
Nick watched her go. His eyes clung to her until she disappeared around the corner and into the dairy display. Thinking, hoping, that she might return, he kept staring at the spot. She did not come back, however, and Nick resigned himself to waiting a few more hours before finding out. Only if Olga could explain everything logically and clearly would he agree to take the letter to her uncle in New York.
XX
From the bench where Yezhov sat waiting, he saw her cotton print dress and blond hair as she emerged from FARMING U.S.A. Passing through and around the many groups of people scattered beneath the trees, she bore a serious, pensive expression and pulled her hair back behind her head with one hand. Yezhov was quite certain, however, that she was unaware that he had seen her enter the exhibit and seek out Miller.
Yezhov played with his East German glasses as she approached. To obscure his face further as she neared, he bent over and reached for his briefcase, which rested near his feet. He admired her rather shapely legs when she walked by only several meters from him, and when the blond woman had gone another ten meters, Yezhov calmly got up and started after her.
She was easy to follow. She did not check behind her once as she led the way past the Hall of Soviet Women's Art and the Hall of Soviet Ukrainian Educational Achievements. Keeping an eye on her and those around, Yezhov noted several of his colleagues. One posed as a retired man sitting on a bench and admiring the day; he noted those Russians who met with the guides during their lunch break. Another, a woman with a gift for remembering faces, served piroshki—meat pies—from a blue pushcart; she noted those who came repeatedly to the exhibit.
The blonde entered the central portion of the grounds of the VDNX. More than a dozen low, severely neoclassical Stalinesque buildings—inscribed with Lenin's sayings and surmounted by workers bearing sheaths of wheat and hammers and sickles—faced onto a rose garden and circular fountain. From there the woman walked around a small pond and toward the park's gates.
Yezhov was pleased that, to his knowledge, none of his colleagues were following the blond woman. That left her all to himself. Shifting his briefcase to his other hand—with his gun inside, on occasion he did find it heavy—he even managed a small grin.
While Mayakovsky had ordered him to stay away from Miller, the colonel had said nothing about this woman.
XXI
She was Sister Elizaveta of the Church of the Catacombs. And in her subterranean stone chapel, a handful of tapers and oil lamps burning before icons, she stood proudly dressed in her profuse black habit of nineteenth-century design. From a pointed crown of material on her head, the rich, black cloth flowed in a broad conical form all the way to the ground; stretched at its base, the gown measured a full two meters in width. The majority of her face concealed, all that was left exposed was an oval shape of weathered flesh from above her brow, around her eyes, to just below her mouth. Hanging from a chain on her chest rested a large, solid gold Russian Orthodox cross, which had belonged to her father, the priest.
Elizaveta kissed the cross, struggled to lift up the gown, and sunk to her knees. At once she started to paw at the earth flooring of her chapel with her bent, stubby fingers. She took her air in swallowed clumps, held it, and let it wheeze out of her weary body. Digging compulsively, her frantic pace slackened only when her splintered fingernails scraped the lid of the steel case. Full of reservation, Elizaveta dusted away the remaining dirt and pebbles before slipping her fingers underneath the lid. She was surprised by her own trepidation; at such a victorious time she hadn't expected anything less than joy.
As if she were tearing an adhesive gauze from her skin, she crudely forced open the lid of the steel case. There it was. The tin box which had held her life hostage for nearly forty years and which now held the hope of the Church of the Catacombs.
“No,” she said, putting a dirty finger to her mouth. “It holds all the hope for all the religions in all the Russias.” Leaving splotches of dirt where she touched herself, Elizaveta crossed herself once, twice, three times. “Xristos Voskreseniye.” Christ has risen, she muttered.
She regained her breath, reached down, and took the box in her hands. Lovingly brushing away the last of the dirt, the old woman closed her eyes and strained to recall the day her father had presented the box to her. It had been a birthday present and had contained the very finest chocolates from the Abrikosova factory in Moscow. Through her worn fingers she felt the raised double-headed Imperial tsarist eagle on the lid and the emblazoned Russian lettering: MOCKBA. Moscow.
Elizaveta giggled and sat back on the ground, her nun's habit in billowing piles around her. She couldn't quite recall receiving the gift from her father, but now, over sixty years later, she could clearly remember going to her room and eating all of the chocolates in a single sitting. Then she had saved the tin box and used it as a special place for special things. An odd history, indeed, she thought. First it had contained fine chocolates fit for the Tsar, then notes and buttons and rings—even a love letter from a merchant's son (she strained her memory. Hadn't he fled to Paris after the Revolution?)—and for the last forty years it had been buried away with documents folded and tucked neatly inside. She raised the candy box to her ear and shook it. Yes, she could hear the telegrams rattling inside.
Elizaveta found the a
nxiety of success wearing and sighed. She had waited so long for this moment that it was practically anticlimactic. Under the weight and warmth of her heavy clothing, she moaned as she stood. Then, with her torn, black shoe, she kicked shut the top of the steel case which had held the tin box. She heard a noise.
The habit covering her ear, she cupped her hand to the side of her head. “Yoo-hoo, Bishop Tikhon?” she called.
Perhaps he was coming after all. Maybe Olga had changed her mind and asked the bishop to come. How wonderful it would be if he were there when she presented the documents to Nick.
“Bishop Tikhon!”
A bat fluttered into the chapel but was repulsed by the smoke from the icon lamps.
“Oi,” she said, dismissing it with a wave of her hand. “Just another one of you.”
Elizaveta frowned. So it wasn't the bishop. Well, perhaps Olga was right. She had said that too many new people might put Nick on edge, that it would be better if it were just the three of them. Nice and small, nice and simple. As Olga had insisted, Elizaveta hadn't mentioned it to Bishop Tikhon and she wouldn't until it was all over, either. The old woman only hoped that the bishop would not be offended at not having been included.
Elizaveta had spent the last hour cleaning and straightening her underground chamber. She had not, however, cleaned the monks’ coffins tucked into the arches of the chapel and for the first time she admitted that she would die before she ever got around to cleaning them. Now her chapel glittered and glowed with polished brass, silver, and gold. She searched the drawn, somber faces of the icons. It was time to leave for the Church of Saint George.
“Bozhe moi!” My God, she exclaimed.
This was it. The end at last. Elizaveta couldn't tell whether she was happy or sad.
Next to Seraphim the Monk's coffin were several torches, their rag-wrapped tips soaking in fuel. Elizaveta took one by its heavy wooden handle, shook off the excess liquid, and held it over a candle. It burst into an oily flame and black smoke rose and stuck to the catacomb's stone ceiling. Torch in one hand, in the other she held the tin box. With two fingers, she raised the front of her long black habit. She had a good distance to go to reach Saint George's and with such precious merchandise she had no intention of traveling above ground.
“Heavens!” she said. “Anything could happen up there.” She looked down at her garb. “Besides, what could be more conspicuous than a nun on the streets of Kiev?”
No, she would stay underground, in the world of the holiest martyrs, and the world she knew best. There was no need to risk exposure on the surface. The Monks’ Tunnel led all the way from the nunnery near her house to the Monastery of the Catacombs, a passage that had once served as the perfect link for those monks and nuns who could not resist one another.
Elizaveta had to backtrack toward her house to get to the Monks’ Tunnel. Following the labyrinthine passages that led from her sequestered chapel, Elizaveta went as far as the Great Hall. There, instead of traveling along the left side of the lake—the last waters of a once great underground tributary—she shuffled along the craggy path on the right bank, her habit dragging behind her. The cavernous Great Hall, soaring overhead, was faintly illuminated by her crackling and snapping torch, and Elizaveta was but a gloomy reflection in the lake's clear waters. A clump of bats hung in a niche above and, annoyed by the disturbance, flew away in a crying mass.
Elizaveta went directly toward an alcove hollowed out in the distant wall of the Great Hall. Once there, she made for the yawning fissure in the alcove's corner. From behind, she felt the air rush past her as she approached the opening and the flame of her torch hissed. The next moment the breeze came from the other direction, then shifted again, and so on, as if the caves were inhaling and exhaling. Her father had called it God's Breath.
Elizaveta shielded her torch from the wind as she passed through the fissure. She stepped into the broad Monks’ Tunnel on the other side and paused. A millennium ago a rambling tributary swung wide of the Dneiper River and into the hills of Kiev, burrowing its way along and leaving in its place this smooth, gracefully arching tunnel. To her left the passage, which had once led to the cellars of the nunnery, was blocked. Elizaveta couldn't quite remember when that exit had been buried… whether it had been during the Revolution, the Civil War, in the midst of Stalin's purges, or… or… No, she was sure it had been closed for many years before the Fascist Occupation of Kiev.
She plodded onward to the right, toward Saint George's, which was located just off the Monastery of the Catacombs. Like a great subterranean road, the tunnel had a gravel flooring and was free of debris and blockage. Elizaveta traversed this passage rather mindlessly, clutching the tin box with its dear contents snugly against her bosom. It was damp, and all sounds to be heard were those of her crackling torch, her laborious steps, and her heavy wheezing as she breathed in and out.
“The Germans!” exclaimed Elizaveta, recalling the history of the documents. “I was so sure they were our liberators.”
After the Revolution the documents had been hidden away, first by the Bolsheviks, then by the tsarist generals. Yet for their own self-serving reasons, neither organization told the world that the Tsar was dead; the first group did not want to claim responsibility, the second did not want to admit defeat. Then, after the Civil War, terror reigned and a clear route to Western Europe could not be found. Hidden in the Urals, the telegrams became all but forgotten as millions perished during Stalin's purges.
In the initial hope that the Fascists were their liberators, the Church of the Catacombs brought the telegrams to Kiev. The plan was to turn the documents over to the Germans so that the whole world would know what Lenin and the Bolsheviks had done.
“But the Fascists were worse than the Bolsheviks!” said Elizaveta, simply. “They said they believed in God, but they killed just as many as the Communists.”
That's when Elizaveta had hidden them away in her catacomb chapel, undetectable by either the Germans or the Soviets. She could not risk their falling into the wrong hands, and the safest place to put them was underground.
“But now the time has come.”
They were going to send the documents to the West and show the world that real religion—not this official, Soviet-sanctioned church that had kowtowed to the Politburo—was still alive and struggling. It was important, too, that somehow, somewhere, there be a written record of the Church of the Catacombs so that, if ever found out and terminated, at least the world would know they had once existed.
“We must give hope to the future generations, for without hope…” Elizaveta's voice trailed off.
And, as Bishop Tikhon had flatly stated, the documents had to be publicly presented in the West because, while he felt atheism was one issue, there was another far more disturbing: the deification of Lenin. Something, anything, the bishop had said, must be done to discredit this man who was worshiped as mankind's saviour throughout the U.S.S.R.
Lost in thought, Elizaveta trod on. But then she became aware of a noise behind her. Steps in the gravel.
She spun around, her habit billowing out. “Who is it that follows me?” she demanded.
She held the torch high and peered into the black. Nothing. She clutched the tin box into the folds of her gown.
“I know there is someone there, now…”
Her words were cut off by a growl, low and deep. It was an inhuman noise that grew with each moment.
“Oh, dear Lord!” gasped Elizaveta, stepping backward.
Into the very edge of the faint light hobbled the mad dog. The same dog she had come across before, it bore little recognition to any earthly creature. Rabid saliva bubbled like puss from its mouth and a broken front leg hung mangled. While one eye bulged forward out of the head, what remained of the other was nothing more than a mound of thick, black, scabby blood.
Elizaveta trembled and for the first time in her life wished she had a gun. She held the torch toward the creature, but it was only momentarily fazed
by the light. Undaunted, it struggled forward on its three good legs. It was then that Elizaveta saw the rest of its mangled body.
“Ahhh!” cried Elizaveta.
The dog had found no rodents to dine on. But they had found the dog. And whatever it was—rats perhaps—that had feasted on the mongrel had torn strips of flesh like jerky from the dog's legs. White bones poked out at random through raw muscles that seethed with blood.
Elizaveta crossed herself. She had prepared herself for any type of human interference, but not for anything like this.
“Dear Lord, I pray that the devil be kept at bay for only a few more hours! Please, Lord, I beg you!”
The creature's lips shriveled aside, exposing deathly fangs, and it began a slow, awkward march toward Elizaveta.
She ran. Elizaveta scooped up her habit, turned and ran as if the dog were on her very heels. The torch whistled and flapped in the breeze, and she did not look back once. Hundreds of droplets of sweat emerged on her forehead and her lungs heaved and strained for air.
Finally, some ten minutes later, she reached the turnoff. Leaning on a large boulder, she struggled to regain her breath and stared into the black tunnel behind her. A chill of relief rushed through her when she realized that the mad dog, hampered by its smashed front leg, had not been able to keep up with her.
“Some… someone must… must,” she gasped, “kill the dog before it…it kills.”
She mopped her brow and stiffly raised her habit to her knees. With difficulty, she clambered over a small pile of rocks.
“Oh!”
She tripped and fell against a wall. Not wasting any time, she righted herself and made her way out of the Monks’ Tunnel. She scrambled into a narrow shaft—its walls and flooring jagged—and continued through a series of mazelike passages into a damp grotto. She paused and listened. When she was sure that the dog was not behind her, she followed a path that rose and fell, made her way between two large boulders, and traversed another corridor until it deposited her at the very edge of a precipice. Quite sure of the way, Elizaveta never hesitated, having taken this route thousands of times in the last half-century.
The Cross and The Sickle Page 18