What he said was so clear and so right. There was no arguing with it. But it seemed so awful, terrible, so dreadful – like a deep black pit…
The woman brought her some more tea. And added some sugar. Very sweet, hot tea… It eased her throat… Somewhere as a very small child she’d once had very sweet tea, drunk with a cube of sugar between her teeth too in the old-fashioned way – as much as she’d wanted. A terrifying black animal had chased her along the muddy village road – a dog or a pig — and then there’d been women round her, not her mother, just some of the village women… Just like this woman and Kiira were now…
“There, there!” the woman repeated her husband’s words. “You’d be doing us a great service! I can probably be back at it in three months. It’s just that Vova doesn’t like to lose clients – and they’re all respectable clients, they’re not weird, and you don’t touch them – there’s a condom between you…”
“No, I just couldn’t,” she told Kiira on the way home. “Why on earth did you put me up for the job? And why didn’t you take it yourself? Why did you offer it to me, if you won’t even do it yourself?”
“Because you’re in dire straits,” said Kiira, offended, “and of course I’d take it, if I had a child to feed and rent to pay and no hint of a choice – think of the money, just weekday shifts, in the evenings… Why wouldn’t I take it, of course I would…” Then she began to giggle, “But they wouldn’t have me – they wouldn’t have me. They’re after a curvy woman, pretty and quiet, the type of woman the punters are used to. I’m as skinny as a rake and I’ve got wrinkles a prune would be proud of. Not to mention argumentative… Their clients – they treat their clients with kid gloves; they wouldn’t offer someone like me to any client of theirs or he’d be out the door pronto…”
Kiira promised to carry on looking for a job for Natalya – a respectable, decent job, she’d only have to stick it out until she found one. What’s more, she’d be helping other people in trouble as well as herself and Sofia.
After this Natalya Filippovna did a great deal of thinking – the man, this Vova, was right, as was Kiira. Everything was safe, secure, and what’s more would do nothing but a bit of good all round. It would help everyone, whereas refusing would be bad for everyone, especially Sofia! Yet this was a sin. That’s what she felt, though many years, perhaps decades, had passed since she had really pondered what sin was – until now. It was all so confusing, so impossible to understand. Was Sofia really the product of sin? How could she be when she was so beautiful, so sweet and so full of her own life? What did she have to do with the sin that led to her being born?
Natalya Filippovna went to the church on the Sunday morning when Sofia was still soundly asleep. She didn’t eat before she went – just like before a blood test – because she wanted to do things properly, go to confession and take communion. She hadn’t done this for years. She was a very lax churchgoer. She did go, but only once a year for the blessing of the water. She always kept some holy water in a cupboard at home just in case, as a cure for Sofia, like in the old days when she was little and her mother and grandmother had kept a flask of holy water so they could dab some on her eyes or give her some to drink when her eyes were shining suspiciously bright and they weren’t sure whether she was ill or not… You should always have some holy water on hand. But she neither had the heart to drag Sofia out of the house on Sunday mornings nor the heart to rouse her. Anyway the child couldn’t have abided the long service. These days you could watch the church on the telly at home at Christmas and Easter. One definitely good thing about the collapse of the Union was that the church was no longer treated with hostility… So she would always go for some holy water. You could get the water at other times too, not only on the day of Jesus’s baptism. It was in the font in the corner of the church, but it never felt quite like the genuine article – it was as if the effect was always subtly different if you took some immediately, as soon as the priest had consecrated it.
It had been so long since Natalya Filippovna had been to confession or communion that she had completely forgotten how the whole thing worked. But it wasn’t complicated: she had to stand in a long queue for confession and wait until the priest placed his hands on her, and then stand in a queue at the communion table and wait. Waiting in the queue for communion meant she could see what happened when someone stood in front of the priest… But what she had to do before the priest went completely out of Natalya Filippovna’s head… She looked straight at him although she had no need to. She looked straight at him and noticed that he had a wonderful, bushy, black beard and gentle, pale eyes. And then she noticed that the deacon standing next to him was hissing quietly over and again, “Say your name… Say your name.”
“Natalya,” she said.
“Natalya,” repeated the priest – he had a gentle, soft voice – “what seems to be the trouble?” He did not say “Be penitent”, he did not ask “What sin have you committed?” – he merely asked, quite simply, like a doctor, “What seems to be the trouble?” And Natalya Filippovna felt everything whirling into confusion: what she’d intended to say was just that she sought forgiveness for her sins and wanted to take communion. She just couldn’t talk about what she was planning, or say that she was intending to do something dreadful and would like to fool him into blessing her for the appalling deeds she was about to do.
“Sometimes I don’t believe,” she said to herself unexpectedly, “sometimes I can’t believe that there is a God, when there’s no way out and there’s no work anywhere…”
Suddenly she felt that that was exactly what she had wanted to say, that that was why she had in fact come into the church, and all at once she burst into tears as she wasn’t biting her lip firmly enough.
“Just pray,” said the priest, “don’t pray for a particular thing, just pray ‘Lord, have mercy, Lord, have mercy…’ That will make it easier… God tests those whom he loves, those whom he trusts. He tests them harshly… Have patience and don’t worry…”
The priest spoke like this at length, wholly against the convention, and Natalya felt his voice chiming out and everything around him glowing and shining with happiness as if there were no cares in the world. The happiness cast light throughout the church and accompanied Natalya to the end of the service, still in the queue for communion. She saw how the dappling sun reflected off the icon of the Madonna, directly off the Virgin’s brow… What was it the priest had said? That God tests those he trusts? Had the Virgin had troubles too? Wasn’t it true that the Virgin had sinned too? She’d had an honourable man in Joseph, but just think, she’d got pregnant by the Almighty himself. So wasn’t that a sin? Why did it have to be a sin? Did God himself help in the commission of a sin? Why couldn’t the Lord descend directly from heaven, seeing as he’d ascended directly back there? Why did he need the Virgin at all? Why had Natalya’s honourable job been taken from her?
The glow vanished. Or perhaps the sun was just obscured behind a cloud and was no longer reflecting off the icons. Wasn’t it still shining through the windows? Had the priest given her some guidance? He had said to be patient and not worry. Did that mean that if God didn’t provide her with any other option, then she shouldn’t worry?
“Lord, have mercy, Lord, have mercy, Lord, have mercy…” She tried her best to repeat the phrase but it was as if Kiira’s voice kept butting in with words of solace: “Don’t worry, there’s no touching, there’s a condom between you.” As if that were really a fact of great importance…