by Niles Kovach
Trinity Icon
Niles Kovach
Copyright 2015 Niles Kovach
All rights reserved.
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Cover design by Hadleigh O. Charles
PROLOGUE
Tsaritsa lingered in every breath. Sweet, aristocratic, it was Mara's favorite incense. She closed the church door behind her. Her left arm tingled, aching, warning her of death that day. She ignored it. She did not need that arm to cross herself as she kissed the icon of Saint Sergius. She would not need it for the dusting, or the polishing, or the sweeping. It was a little sore, that was all, and these old bones had known some soreness before.
It took time to find where the Matushka had hidden the supplies. The woman was not very organized. Not that it is easy to be organized with four young children. Easy, no; necessary, yes. Mara offered to do this Monday's cleaning instead of watching those children for the Matushka. It was the least she could do. The very least. The very least she could get away with after seeing the unruly crowd of small bodies in the Matushka's living room.
Mara stood among the saints with a duster in her hand. They gathered around her, smiling at her from their windows to the Kingdom of God. She turned slowly and smiled back at them, at their places on the iconostasis before the altar, on the walls, and on stands around her.
What a life I have had, thought Mara. I would just as soon start over as to finish it. Is that possible, God? She shuffled to the Icon of Christ the Pantocrator, crossed herself in the prescribed manner, and kissed it before dusting it. All things are possible with God, but I doubt that He will let me start over. And because I doubt, He certainly will not.
Mara did not often think deep thoughts. They were dangerous and useless and she had given up all attempts to understand such things long ago, on the death of her third child. Faith was her support and her only weapon, faith in God, distant and unknowable, faith in the Church, a haven, a comfort, a system of salvation, and faith in every mystical possibility ever presented to her. Superstition ruled her reason. It was rare for her to doubt. It was more rare to understand.
Her faith gave her great comfort through the years. It brought her through the purges. It brought her through the Great Patriotic War. It brought her through the searing pain of great loss, year after empty year. It did not, though, improve her discernment of either the finite or the infinite. She had seen enough of the finite to know that she was not particularly interested in seeing it more clearly. But something nagged at the back of her awareness, telling her she was missing the mark in her search for the Almighty.
Missing Him or not, she continued her lifelong struggle to approach. She was as much a part of the Church of Saint Sergius as the icons and candles. She could be seen, at Vespers, during Royal Hours, throughout the Sunday Liturgy, lighting candles or crossing herself quickly, three times to everybody else's one. Straight, coarse streaks of gray hair escaped in thin tufts from under her black shawl and fluttered in the breeze created by her mobile right arm. Her thin lips moved soundlessly with the droning Slavonic chant of the choir, whether it were present or not. Today it was absent. It was Monday and she was alone with the saints.
As she reverently dusted the icons on the north wall, she stopped before the Trinity Icon, where another old woman, Sarah, laughed at the message three angels were giving her husband. She dusted Sarah, and pondered the second coming.
I am becoming quite a thinker. I wonder if my children will be all grown up. If they are, they will be perfect, won't they? Then how will I know them? And how can it be heaven if I have missed their growing up? If they are little, how can I raise them as old as I am, or will I be young again? And Kolya, will he be young or old? How would he have looked in his old age?
She remembered a game they played before the children came. They had only an hour or so every day before his parents came home from work. The apartment was so small and crowded, it was difficult to get around obstacles. But after making love, they would arm themselves with two perfume aerators left to Mara by an ancient babushka who had known an easier time. There was no perfume in their corner of Stalin's Russia, even if they could have afforded it. Instead, they filled the fragile relics with icy water, and, naked and giggling, chased each other around that small space, hiding, seeking the advantage, spraying, and shrieking as the cold mist found its mark. When they had exhausted themselves and their bottles, they would collapse, damp and panting on their narrow bed for a last cuddle before the polite tapping at the door announced that his parents were home.
Mara smiled at the memory. She re-played it in her mind, substituting her own now aged body, and imagining Nickolai as he might have been in his old age: balding like his father, somewhat pot-bellied, but still vital, still laughing. This revised "memory" widened her smile. As her memory extended in time, she succeeded in misting her husband's narrow, hairy behind, and she broke a fifty year silence.
Her cracked, cackling laugh sounded strange in her ears. Stranger still was the answering chuckle from just above her right shoulder.
CHAPTER ONE