He had to be cautious in argument with her. She was not very strong, and an uphill walk, hurried movement, or even animated discussion tired her out. The least little thing could upset her.
Nonetheless she found the strength to wander in the forest for days on end. She did not, as city girls out for a walk in the woods traditionally do, take a book with her; it would have interfered with her enjoyment of the forest. She simply wandered around, sitting down occasionally, studying the secrets of the forest. She always skipped descriptions of nature in Turgenev, which she thought superficial. When Anton went with her, he was astonished by her perceptiveness: She noticed how the trunk of a birch had bowed to the ground in memory of a snowfall; she noticed the changing tints of the forest grass in the evening. He never noticed anything of that sort himself; for him the forest was just forest, green trees, good air. . . .
The Forest Rill, Yakonov had called her in the summer of 1927, which they had spent in neighboring dachas. They went everywhere together, and everybody assumed that they were engaged.
But that was very far from being so.
Agnia was neither pretty nor plain. Her expression changed continually: At one moment she wore a winning smile; at the next she looked drawn and unattractive. She was above middle height but slender, fragile, and her step was so light that she seemed scarcely to touch the ground. Anton was quite experienced and liked best a woman with some flesh on her, but he was attracted to Agnia by something else, and when he had become used to her, he told himself that he also liked her as a woman and that she would ripen with time.
She shared the long summer days with him happily enough, walking verst after verst into the green depths, lying beside him in forest clearings, but she was reluctant even to let him stroke her hand.
“Must you?” she would say, trying to free herself.
It wasn’t fear of what people might think, because as they returned to the holiday village she would gratify his amour propre and submit to walking arm in arm.
Having convinced himself that he loved her, Anton fell at her feet in one of those forest clearings and proposed. Agnia was deeply dismayed.
“I’m afraid I’m misleading you. I don’t know what to say. I just don’t feel anything. When I think about it, I just don’t want to live. You are a clever man, a brilliant man, and I ought to be overjoyed; but, instead, it makes me want to die.”
That’s what she had said. But every morning she looked apprehensively for any change in the way he behaved toward her.
She had said that. But she also said, “There are lots of girls in Moscow. When autumn comes, you’ll meet a pretty one and stop loving me.”
She sometimes let him embrace her and even kiss her, but her lips and arms were unresponsive.
“I’m so unhappy,” she said. “I used to believe that love was like a fiery angel descending from heaven. But here we are; you love me, and I’ll never meet anyone better, yet I’m not happy about it; I just don’t want to go on living.”
There was something of the retarded child about her. She was afraid of the intimacies that bind husband and wife and would ask in a faint voice, “Is all that necessary?”
“It certainly isn’t the most important thing,” Anton would answer earnestly. “Most certainly not! It only supplements our spiritual union!”
That was when her lips first slackly responded to his kiss. “Thank you,” she said. “If it weren’t so, life wouldn’t be worth living. I think I am beginning to love you. I shall try as hard as I can to love you.”
That same autumn they were walking around the backstreets near Taganka Square, and Agnia said in the low voice she used in the forest, which was barely audible above the city traffic, “Do you want me to show you one of the loveliest places in Moscow?”
She led him to the railings of a little brick church. It was painted white and red, and its sanctuary abutted on a crooked lane without a name. There was very little room inside the railings, only a narrow path around the church for processionals, with barely room for priest and deacon side by side. The gentle glow of altar candles and colored lamps could be seen through the barred windows. In one corner of the precinct grew a huge old oak. Its yellowed branches overshadowed both the dome and the lane, making the church look tiny beside it.
“This is the Church of Nikita the Martyr,” Agnia said.
“But not the most beautiful place in Moscow.”
“Just wait.”
She took him through the gate. Oak leaves, yellow and orange, lay on the flagstones of the yard. Almost in the shade of the oak stood an ancient campanile with a hipped roof. This, and a little house belonging to the church outside the precinct, obscured the low setting sun. An old beggar woman bowed low before the open double doors on the north side, crossing herself as the golden chant of evensong reached her.
“And that church was of wondrous beauty and radiance,” Agnia quoted, almost in a whisper, her shoulder close to his.
“What century does it belong to?”
“Do you have to have a century? What do you think of it, anyway?”
“It’s pretty, of course, but not all that—”
“Look now, then!” Agnia’s outstretched hand quickly drew Anton farther on, to the portico outside the main door; they emerged from the shadow into the stream of light from the setting sun and sat on the low stone parapet, beside the churchyard gate.
Anton gasped. It was as though they had soared free from the narrow ravine of the city and come out on a steep eminence with an open view far into the distance. The portico swept down through the gap in the parapet to a long course of white stone steps, several flights of them, alternating with little landings and descending down the hillside to the Moscow River. The river was on fire in the light of the setting sun. To their left Zamoskvoreche dazzled them with the yellow brilliance of its windows; straight ahead the black chimneys of the Moscow Power Station poured smoke into the glowing sky; almost directly under them the glittering Yauza flowed into the Moscow, with the orphanage to the right beyond it, and beyond that the fretted contours of the Kremlin; while still farther away the five red-gold domes of the Church of Christ the Savior blazed in the sun.
And in all this golden radiance Agnia sat with a yellow shawl around her shoulders, screwing up her eyes at the sun and looking golden herself.
Anton, carried away, could only say, “Yes! That’s . . . Moscow!”
“How cleverly Russians chose sites for churches and monasteries in ancient times,” Agnia said with a catch in her voice. “I’ve been down the Oka and the Volga, and wherever you go, they’re built in the most imposing places. The architects were God-fearing; the masons were righteous men.”
“Yes . . . Yes . . . That’s . . . Moscow. . . !”
“But it’s going, Anton,” she cried. “Moscow is going!”
“Going? Going where? You’re imagining things.”
“They’re going to demolish this church, Anton,” she insisted.
“How do you know?” he asked angrily. “It’s an architectural monument; they’ll let it stand.”
He looked at the little bell tower and the oak branches peeking through its apertures.
“They’ll pull it down!” Agnia prophesied confidently, still sitting motionless in her yellow shawl in the yellow light.
No one in Agnia’s family had taught her to believe in God. On the contrary. In the days when churchgoing was the rule, Agnia’s grandmother and mother had not gone, not observed fasts, had turned their noses up at priests, and whenever possible ridiculed the religion that had lived so cozily side by side with serfdom. Agnia’s grandmother, mother, and aunts had their own sturdy creed: always to be on the side of those who are harried, hunted, oppressed, persecuted by the powers that be. Her grandmother, it seemed, had been known to all the Moscow members of the People’s Will Party; she gave them shelter and helped them in every way she could. Her daughters had taken over from her and hidden underground Socialist Revolutionaries and Social Demo
crats. Little Agnia always felt for the hare that might be shot and the horse that might be whipped. But as she grew up, her sympathies took a direction that her elders could never have expected: She was for the church because it was persecuted.
She insisted that “in our day and age” it would be base in her to shun the church, and to the horror of her mother and grandmother, she began attending regularly and found herself enjoying the services.
“What makes you say the church is persecuted?” Anton asked in surprise. “Nobody stops them ringing their bells and baking their altar bread and having their processions. Let them carry on, by all means, but they aren’t really wanted in the cities and the schools.”
“Of course it’s persecuted.” Agnia’s voice never rose above a murmur in disagreement. “When people say and print anything they like about the church and never give it a chance to defend itself, when they confiscate the altar furnishings and exile priests, don’t you call that persecution?”
“Have you ever seen a priest banished?”
“It isn’t something you see in the streets.”
Anton pressed harder.
“And what if it is persecuted? Say the church has been persecuted for ten years. For how long did the church do the persecuting? Ten centuries?”
“I wasn’t alive then,” said Agnia, shrugging her narrow shoulders. “I have to live here and now. I see what is happening in my own lifetime.”
“But everybody ought to know a little history! Ignorance is no excuse! Haven’t you ever wondered why our church managed to survive the 250 years of the Tatar yoke?”
“Because its faith was deep? Because Orthodoxy proved spiritually stronger than Mohammedanism?”
It was a question, not an assertion.
Anton smiled indulgently.
“What a dreamer you are! Do you really think that the soul of our country was ever Christian? In the thousand years of its existence, did we ever really forgive our oppressors? Did we ever ‘love them that hate us’? Our church endured because after the Tatar invasion Metropolitan Cyril paid homage to the khan—the first Russian to do so—and begged from him guarantees of safety for the clergy. How did the Russian clergy safeguard its lands, its slaves, and its cult? Why, with the Tatar sword! And, if you like, Metropolitan Cyril was right, a political realist. That’s the way to be. That’s the only way to come out on top.”
Agnia never argued when she was challenged. She looked at her fiancé with wide-eyed bewilderment, as though she saw him for the first time.
“That’s what all those beautiful churches with their cleverly chosen sites were built on!” Anton thundered. “And on schismatics burned at the stake! And on sectarians flogged to death! Persecuted church! Don’t waste your sympathy on it!”
He sat down beside her on the sun-warmed stone of the parapet.
“And anyway, you aren’t fair to the Bolsheviks. You’ve never taken the trouble to read their most important books. They show the greatest respect and concern for world culture. They stand for an end to the tyranny of man over man, for the empire of reason. Above all, they are for equality! Imagine it: universal, total, absolute equality. No one will be more privileged than anyone else. No one will enjoy special advantages, either in income or in position. What could be more attractive than a society like that? Isn’t it worth making sacrifices for?”
(Attractions apart, Anton’s origins had made it necessary to join the right side before it was too late.)
“All these frivolous notions of yours will stand in your way; you’ll never get into an institute. And what’s the use of your protests, anyway? What can you do?”
“What can a woman ever do?” Her thin braids (nobody wore braids anymore; everybody had bobbed hair, but she went on wearing them in the spirit of contradiction, although they did not suit her) had flown apart. One hung down her back; the other lay on her breast. “All that a woman is capable of is deterring a man from great deeds. Even women like Natasha Rostova. I can’t stand her.”
“Why?” Anton was staggered.
“Because she wouldn’t let Pierre join the Decembrists!”* Her weak voice broke again.
She seemed to be made of nothing but surprises.
The transparent yellow shawl had slipped down over her bent elbows and looked like a pair of delicate golden wings.
Anton gently, as though afraid he might break it, clasped his hands around one elbow.
“And you? Would you have let him?”
“Yes.”
Anton, however, saw no heroic feat ahead of him for which he would need to seek release. It was the busiest time of his life, his work was interesting, and his prospects excellent.
Belated worshippers who had climbed from the embankment went past, crossing themselves when they saw the open door of the church. The men took their caps off as they entered the precinct. But there were far fewer men than women, and no young people.
“Aren’t you afraid of being seen near a church?” Agnia had not meant it sarcastically, but that was how it sounded.
It was, indeed, already dangerous, as it would be for many years ahead, to be noticed by a colleague anywhere near a church, and Anton felt too conspicuous for comfort.
He was beginning to get irritated.
“You must be careful, Agnia,” he warned her. “We must know how to recognize the new in good time. Anyone who doesn’t will be hopelessly out of date. You have begun to feel drawn to the church because it sanctifies your aversion to life. Get a grip on yourself! Force yourself to take an interest in something, if it’s only in the process of living.”
Agnia drooped. The hand with Anton’s gold ring hung limply. The girl’s figure looked bonier, thinner than ever.
“Yes, yes,” she said in a sinking voice. “I realize perfectly well at times that living is very difficult for me, that I just don’t want to live. The world has no place for people like me.”
Something snapped inside him. She was doing everything she could to make herself unattractive to him! His resolve to keep his promise and marry Agnia was weakening.
She looked up at him, searching his face, unsmiling.
And she isn’t really pretty, Anton thought.
“You can probably look forward to fame and success and prosperity,” she said sadly. “But will you be happy, Anton? You must take care, too. When we get interested in the process of living, we lose . . . we lose . . . how can I put it?” She rubbed fingers and thumb together, feeling for the word. She looked sick with anxiety.
“Once the bell stops ringing, once the tuneful sounds fade, you can never call them back. But all the music is in them. Do you understand?”
She was still struggling to find words.
“Imagine yourself dying and suddenly asking for an Orthodox funeral. . . .”
Then she insisted on going inside to pray. He couldn’t walk off and leave her there alone. They went in. Under a vaulted ceiling a gallery with windows latticed in the Old Russian style ran around the church.
Through the little windows the setting sun flooded the church with light and spilled shimmering gold on the top of the icon stand and a mosaic of the Lord of Hosts.
There were few worshippers. Agnia set a thin candle on a big copper stand and stood, grave and still, except for a perfunctory sign of the cross, her hands folded over her chest, staring, rapt, before herself. The diffused glow of the sunset and the orange reflections of candlelight had brought life and warmth back to Agnia’s cheeks.
It was two days before the Nativity of the Mother of God, and they were reciting the litany of the day. It was an inexhaustibly eloquent outpouring of praise for the Virgin, and Yakonov felt for the first time the overwhelming poetic power of such prayers. The canon had been written not by a soulless dogmatist but by some great poet immured in a monastery, and he had been moved not by a furious excess of male hunger for a female body but by the pure rapture that a woman can awake in us.
YAKONOV CAME TO HIS SENSES. He was sitting on a pile of sharp
stone fragments from the portico of the Church of Nikita the Martyr, soiling his leather coat.
Yes, they had wantonly destroyed the bell tower with the hipped roof and smashed the stone steps down to the river. It was impossible to believe that the golden evening he had remembered and this December dawn had happened on the same few square meters of Moscow soil. But the view from the hill was as spacious as ever, and the river still wound its way between two (now dimmed) rows of streetlamps. . . .
. . . SHORTLY AFTERWARD HE HAD GONE ABROAD on official business. When he got back, he had been told to write—which meant little more than putting his name to—a newspaper article about the decadence of the West, its social system, its morals, its culture, about the disastrous condition of the Western intelligentsia, and about the impossibility of new scientific discoveries in that part of the world. It wasn’t true, but it was not altogether false. There were facts to support these assertions, but there were other facts, too. The Party Committee sent for him—he was not a Party member—and was very insistent. Hesitation on Yakonov’s part could have aroused suspicion, left a blot on his reputation. And anyway, what harm could such a piece do to anyone? Europe would surely be none the worse for it.
His travel notes were written. Agnia sent his ring back in a postal package, to which she had tied with cotton thread a scrap of paper with the words “To Metropolitan Cyril.”
And he had felt relieved.
HE ROSE, hauled himself up to a latticed window of the gallery, and peered in. From inside there was a smell of damp brickwork, cold, and decay. His eyes dimly discerned more heaps of broken stone and rubbish.
Yakonov drew back from the window. He felt his heartbeat slowing down and leaned against the jamb of a rusty iron door unopened for many years.
Abakumov’s threat welled up in him like an icy wave of fear.
YAKONOV WAS AT THE SUMMIT of what looked like power. He was a high official of a mighty ministry. He was clever and talented, and his cleverness and talent were widely recognized. At home a loving wife and two charming little girls, rosily sleeping, awaited his return. The upper rooms, with balcony, of an old Moscow building constituted his excellent apartment.
In the First Circle Page 24