The Big Green Tent

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

  And he led her to the bedroom, where Lena was dozing, her kidney infection beginning to subside.

  “Shhh,” he warned.

  Very gingerly, so that it wouldn’t squeak, he opened the door and pointed to the portrait on the wall.

  The old woman took one look at the picture and fell to her knees. “Father! Oh, Father! And how young he was! And so handsome! There in the flesh, with Mama, and with all of his children! And when you think of everything he would have to endure, it takes your breath away. He endured it all, and he saved himself, and he is praying for us, he will save us, too…”

  She half-whispered, half-sang the words, and Kostya began to feel uncomfortable, because it was hard for him to empathize with her—the whole story had always been so garbled and obscure, told in snatches, the interstices filled with silence. Yes, it was true, his grandmother had renounced her own father, a priest, and he had died in the camps—that much was certain. Mama had told him a few things, but nothing else was known for sure.

  In the meantime, the old woman had fumbled for Kostya’s hand, and was covering it with kisses.

  Lena woke up, and propped herself up on the pillows. Vera and Misha were whimpering in their room.

  “This is nonsense, some kind of mad idiocy,” Kostya said, growing irate with himself, and pulling his broad paw out of the clutches of the little red hands.

  The old woman crumpled to her knees again, now right at Kostya’s feet.

  “My boy, please help, you are our only hope. No one will accept our petition. They say only his kinfolk can do it. And we need to rebury him. My house, they’re tearing it down, and with it the honest grave, right below the altar, together with the house. They’ve been talking about tearing it down for many years already. And at the Patriarchate they said he was a heretic, a Catacombian who believed in the Living Church. He was no bishop, they said, but a pretender!”

  Lena looked at the scene playing out before her and wondered whether she had succumbed to some sort of feverish delirium.

  They went back to the kitchen again, and Anna Antonovna set food out on the table. Mother Pasha sat down to a bowl of borscht, expressed her thanks, then said she was full and didn’t need to eat anything else.

  After that they drank tea, and their tea-table conversation lasted until two in the morning. Kostya couldn’t understand everything Pasha told him. He would ask her for clarification, as if she were speaking a foreign tongue: Mother Pasha, say that again, Mother Pasha, I didn’t get that, Mother Pasha, what do you mean? Please explain it to me …

  And she would elaborate, explain, demonstrate, sing, weep. In the doorway, Anna Antonovna stood listening, her eyes wide with wonder.

  Pasha wasn’t good with dates. It was impossible to understand from her narrative when his great-grandfather had been imprisoned, and when he had been released. He was first exiled and lived in the Arkhangelsk region. There he became a widower, after which he returned to where he was born, and was arrested.

  “And when he ended up in Solovki, they chirotonized him,” the old woman said, closing her eyes as a sign of respect.

  “Mother, what did they do to him?” Kostya said.

  “They made him a bishop. In secret, of course,” she said, and smiled at his ignorance of such simple matters.

  “Then His Grace was freed, before the war; but he never made it home before they captured him again. During the war he managed to escape, and ran away and hid for many years in the Murom Forest. He lived as a hermit. That was when Mama took me to him for the first time, and after that I served him until the end of his life. Just as my mother had served him, she ordered me to serve him, too. He allowed us to visit him twice a year. People came to see him from all over Russia, religious and worldly people alike.

  “One time the enemy came upon him—he kept a cat, and the cat led them right to his door. They destroyed the hut, but he wasn’t there. There was another starets who lived there, too, about six miles’ distance, and His Grace had gone to give him communion, since he was in very poor health. Someone warned His Grace, and he didn’t come back. He went still farther into the forest to live. Good people helped me to find him there. That was when my mother died. Sometimes I would stay there by his side and live with him for a time.”

  “What year was this?” Kostya asked. Suddenly, it seemed to him that the story was set in some centuries-old ancient past.

  “I don’t rightly remember. He lived there after the war, many years. But in ’56—this I remember very well, I was there myself—he became very ill. He had a strangulated hernia that gave him great pain, and he started to die. And we all prayed for him—Mama was still alive then, but she couldn’t make it to where he lived. Sister Alevtina was there, and Sister Evdokia, Anna Leonidovna from Nizhny Novgorod, his goddaughter, and me.

  “His Grace said farewell to us and prepared to die, but Anna Leonidovna was very commanding, and she said, ‘I’m going for the doctor. There’s one in Murom.’ And she brought a surgeon to him, a believer. He was a good doctor, may he rest in peace. He died young. He was called Ivan, though he was an Armenian. He cried first, and swore that he couldn’t do anything unless we got him to a hospital.

  “But this was happening in winter, and His Grace’s hut was a dugout in the side of a hill. The way in was just a burrow. There were no windows, it was dark night and day. That’s how he lived, for years. If it was cold outside, it was cold inside. There was a stove, but it had no pipe to the outside; he was afraid it would be seen.

  “How could we get him out of there? No documents, nothing. And it was about twelve miles on foot to the nearest road. Besides, His Grace himself didn’t want an operation. He was worn out from pain, and waited for death. The doctor was about to give up and go, when the hernia burst—it poured out blood and pus. The doctor started to clean the wound, and he worked on it for three hours. At the end, we all thought His Grace would give up the ghost at any moment. He was white as a sheet, white as snow, and the doctor kept feeling his pulse, afraid he would die under his hand.

  “‘Lead me out of here now,’ the doctor says, ‘and have someone come home with me. I’ll give you medicine for him, but you’ll have to give it to him with a needle, in the muscle.’

  “Sister Alevtina went all the way to Murom with him, and in a day and a half she came back. She brought everything with her: the syringe, needles, penicillin. Ivan had sent her back with a chicken and some flour. He sent bread for us, but told us not to give it to Vladyka. He also said that we should return the syringe and needles to him. Maybe, the doctor said, the cold will save him. It was a wonder! God saved him, not the cold. So Sister Alevtina and I stayed with him, and we sent the others away. Then a funny thing happened: a laugh came out of him. We boiled him half a chicken, but a fox stole the other half right out of the burrow—we looked around, and it was gone! You don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  “For three days and nights His Grace’s body was barely warm. And then he opened his eyes, and he said, ‘I was ready to go, but look! Here I am again with you.’ And he got better and better, and finally he got well.

  “In April we took him home with us. He settled in, and he brought the Heavenly Kingdom with him, too. He held services every day. The first year, he left the house a few times—in summer, at night, to look at the sky. After that he locked himself in the side room and came out only to hold services. He used a teeny tiny table for it. And he said, ‘We don’t need an altar cloth with relics of the saints, our entire land is steeped in the blood of the righteous and penitent. Wherever one chooses to pray, it is always on top of the bones of martyrs.’

  “He lived and prayed according to the monastic rules and regulations. He often prayed all night, without going to sleep. In the end his legs began to swell. He couldn’t stand up, and he had to be led by the arm. But how many people came to see him! And we shook with fear, we thought: now they’ll catch him! But he comforted us: ‘Pasha, they won’t catch me. I’m staying with you here for all
eternity.’

  “He lived with us for eight years. In ’64, His Grace passed on.”

  Pasha crossed herself. Her face was aglow, as though she were rejoicing.

  “How old was he?” Kostya asked.

  “Ninety. Maybe ninety-one.”

  * * *

  I was already born then. Grandmother was still alive. He could have lived with us, with our family. Kostya imagined a bishop in a dark cassock, with a cross—and next to him his late grandmother Antonina Naumovna. Fathers and Children. Fathers and Sons … no, it would have been impossible.

  Her story had ended. It was after one in the morning; but it was still unclear why Mother Pasha had come.

  “Kostya, I wouldn’t have come if everyone weren’t saying that they’re going to demolish our street, tear down our houses. They will give everyone apartments. But what about the grave? It’s in our very home! We have to rebury him. And I tell our sisters and brothers—we’ll dig up the remains and take them to the Murom Forest, where he hid. And my sisters and brothers say: he has to be buried according to church law, like a bishop, because the times are such that you can get a piece of paper to allow it. So it doesn’t say he was in prison anymore. Wait, I wrote down the word here…” She dug in the folds of her scarves and took out a fat roll of newsprint, with a piece of paper inside. In an old person’s spidery hand, the word rehabilitation was written.

  * * *

  Finally, Kostya understood what she expected him to do: request the file of his great-grandfather (evidently from the KGB, he thought) and get a certificate about his rehabilitation. He promised that he would try without fail. He would try to find out and would put in a request for rehabilitation.

  Pasha dug around in the newspaper roll again.

  “Here is the only document that he left behind. Our people decided it should go to you. Perhaps they’ll ask you for it.” She pulled out a yellowed, tattered piece of paper: a certificate of graduation from the eparchial college in 1892 for “Derzhavin, Naum Ignatievich.”

  “Mother, who are these ‘sisters and brothers’ of yours? Did he have any other relatives?” Kostya thought to ask at the end of the conversation.

  “What relatives could there be? One son, a priest, was shot. The others, who renounced him, also died. The little ones died as babies. And his daughters—well, you know yourself …

  “Our religious community was a special one. We didn’t acknowledge the patriarch; but after the war, His Grace told us to go pray at the common church, because there wouldn’t be any other. But he continued to be our spiritual guide, he didn’t refuse. And he served until his death. Whoever couldn’t live without him, came to him. And there are still several of those people left alive, people who revere him. These are the ones I call sisters and brothers, our people.”

  The old woman slept on a folding cot, and left early in the morning, leaving behind the smell of sheepskin that Kostya found so surprisingly pleasant.

  He was in his final year of graduate school. It seemed he was about to receive not only his Ph.D., but to make a significant discovery as well. His adviser would wrinkle his eyes and nose, and curb Kostya’s intentions to hurry with his dissertation, saying:

  “Synthesis, synthesis, synthesis! Don’t stop! It may happen that you never get this lucky again! You can defend your thesis this year, or next, it makes no difference; I’ve got a job lined up for you! Come on, come on! Keep going!” his adviser insisted. And Kostya did one experiment after another, and the results were unexpected, and very promising. And, most important, they were able to repeat them with scrupulous precision.

  * * *

  In the midst of all of this, Kostya made inquiries and found out that he didn’t need to go to the KGB, but to the prosecutor’s office. People who knew about these things said that it was most likely already too late—the era of “rehabilitation” had ended in the late ’60s, and the clergy had never been included in the list of victims of political repression, anyway. Only when it was getting on toward spring did Kostya manage to gather and submit all the necessary documents, with a request for rehabilitation of his grandfather. A rotund, pleasant man in the prosecutor’s office named Arkady Ivanovich welcomed him. He promised to try to acquire the archive, then call him back. The phone call came two weeks later.

  Kostya was asked to come by at an appointed time. Arkady Ivanovich greeted him very cordially. On his desk lay a thin folder.

  “Konstantine Vladimirovich! I must say that more than two thousand cases have passed through my hands, and there is not much that surprises me. Your great-grandfather’s case is, however, surprising: it turns out that in the beginning of 1945 he escaped from a camp, and he has been on our official wanted list ever since. This is a special case, unprecedented in my experience. I will speak with some experts on the matter, but I think that his escape, coupled with the fact that the priest Derzhavin, Naum Ignatievich, was never found, might present great obstacles to his rehabilitation. Not to mention that for the time being we are not working with this category of individuals. The case is very interesting to me personally, though, and I’ll try to find out something through my own connections. Nevertheless, the chances are slim.”

  Kostya nodded, indicating that he understood fully, and was secretly glad that he hadn’t told the man what he knew himself: where his great-grandfather had hidden for those twenty years, right up till the time of his death. He knew, but he kept mum!

  When he got home, he found a letter from Mother Pasha waiting for him, as though it had been arranged for it to arrive expressly on that day, at that moment. She asked him to come to her; it was urgent, because the demolition of the house was imminent, and what was she to do about the grave…?

  One week passed, then a second, and Kostya still hadn’t managed to leave; he was up to his ears in work, and he had to move the family to his mother-in-law’s in Opalikha for the summer. Lena was nervous, as always, whenever she had to pack up and move, if only for the briefest stay. She had an inexplicable fear of any sort of journey.

  Only at the beginning of June, after he had taken his family to Opalikha, did Kostya find time to visit Mother Pasha. He traveled to Zagorsk, marveled at the cupola of Sergiev Posad, and continued to the address she had named, on the other side of the railroad tracks.

  It was a village that had long ago been adjoined to a city. The street was called Podvoiskogo, or Voikovskaya. On one side of the street, future five-story apartment buildings, as yet reaching only to the second floor, rose up out of the excavation pits. On the other side of the street, a steam shovel was hard at work. The little houses were so ramshackle that one sharp blow of the huge bucket was enough to send them crashing down. Number 19 was still standing, awaiting its turn. The steam shovel operator and his partner were busy with number 17, and a dump truck carrying off the demolished remains had just left.

  Number 7, which was the return address on Mother Pasha’s letter, no longer existed.

  Kostya sat on the stump of a recently felled tree, right across from the house. In the new neighborhood, they cut down all the trees, so they wouldn’t get in the way of construction.

  I’m too late. Yesterday or the day before, this demolition crew dug into the earth with the steam shovel and snatched up the bones of my great-grandfather. They tossed them into the back of a dump truck, and now they’re scattered around the municipal garbage heap. It’s shameful … and that’s where they’ll be forever. I’ll never forgive myself for this. Why did I wait for so long? Before she died, Mama asked me to scatter her ashes on Ilya’s grave, and I haven’t done that, either. But—where is he, anyway, in Munich? Where is his grave? The love of our fathers’ graves … My great-grandfather’s bones on a garbage heap … What a Russian story … Yes, that’s how we are.

  A dog growling somewhere behind him distracted his attention. He casually turned around to look, since his heart was already weary of this unaccustomed sorrow. Two overgrown puppies, nearly full-size, were capering on the young grass. One
of them was carrying a massive bone almost too big to fit in its jaws, and the other was tugging at the bone and nudging the shoulder of the first one with its snout.

  The bone had long before been picked clean—it was not food, but a toy. He sat on the stump and wept from shame and anger at himself.

  * * *

  When he looked up, he saw two old women standing beside him.

  “There, there now. Don’t cry. You must be the grandson? Pasha dug up all the bones from under the floor and washed them, then wrapped them in a shroud to take them to Murom. She said, ‘I’ll find the hut, and I’ll bury them there.’ Aleksasha Grigoriev went with her, she couldn’t have carried them on her own. And we are from that house way over there, on the very edge. Pasha told us to sit here and wait for you. So we did. We were waiting.”

  ENDE GUT—

  At the beginning of the 1960s, a new breed of foreigner, madly in love with Russia, appeared in our midst. There weren’t hundreds of them—but they certainly numbered in the dozens. They were well known in Moscow and Leningrad.

  The first to come on the scene were the Italian Communists, followed by all manner of Swedes and Americans. They swallowed the hook with the live bait of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Malevich and Khlebnikov—depending on their professional interests. All of them were lured by the enigmatic Slavic soul—tender and courageous, irrational and passionate, with a tinge of madness and sacrificial cruelty.

  Shaking the bourgeois dust off their impeccable Italian footwear, they fell in love with Russian beauties untainted by the curse of feminism, and married them. Overcoming numerous hurdles, they took them away to Rome and to Stockholm, to Paris and to Brussels; then they returned again to Sivtsev Vrazhek and Polyanka, or else to Konkovo-Derevlevo. These foreigners found Russian friends, grew close to their parents and children, brought them books, medicine, pacifiers, furs, cigarettes … In exchange, they received gifts: limited-edition books, with reproductions of Andrei Rublev’s icons or the frescoes of Dionysius; black caviar; and rapturous, but not entirely selfless, love.