The dreadful occurrence became known only the day after the funeral, early in the morning when Hilda came to the church. Fyodor was still sitting on his heels by the wall. Hilda called the police and the men in white coats. As a disciplined Westerner, she did not touch anything until the police arrived. “The Jerusalem syndrome,” she thought. Yusuf was buried next to Daniel.
The only thing she did move was the icon, which she took to her car. It was a marvelous depiction of “Praise the Lord the Highest Heavens.” On the icon the sprightly hand of Mother Ioanna had represented Adam with a beard and moustache and Eve with a long pigtail, hares, squirrels, birds, and serpents, and all of creation which had formed a long queue to embark on Noah’s Ark and was now leaping and rejoicing and praising the Lord. The flowers and the leaves gleamed, palms and willows waved their branches. A child’s train crawled along the earth and childish smoke spiraled joyfully from the funnel. A plane flew in the sky, leaving a slender white vapor trail behind it. The old lady had been a genius. She had envisaged all creation praising the Lord: rocks, plants, animals, and even the iron creations of man.
July 2006, Moscow
L
ETTER FROM
L
UDMILA
U
LITSKAYA TO
E
LENA
K
OSTIOUKOVITCH
Dear Lyalya,
I had a strange, wide-ranging, and protracted dream last night. It lasted for an immense time, longer than a night and, as often happens, I didn’t manage to retain everything and bring it back to the light of day. A lot was left unrehearsed and unarticulated.
There was a system of rooms, not an enfilade but a far more complex pattern, with an internal logic which I simply could not crack. There were no people there, but many nonhuman beings, small, attractive, their nature indescribable, like hybrids of angels and animals. Each was the bearer of a word or idea or principle (I am already struggling for words). Among this host of beings and rooms I was looking for one in particular, the only one which could give the answer to my question. Alas, I could not formulate what my question was. I was afraid of missing the one being I so needed in the throng of all the other, similar beings. Two unfamiliar ones compelled me to wander from room to room in a fruitless search.
The rooms were sketchy but their purpose was clear. I gradually realized as I wondered about that they were not for eating, or meeting, or religious purposes. They were for study. Study of what? Study of everything. The world of knowledge. That sounds funny, like the name of a bookshop. In Russia we have shops called World of Footwear, World of Leather, even World of Doors.
We have become used to treating knowledge and the process of acquiring it as something not subject to moral law. Knowledge and morality are seen as coordinates of separate systems, but here this was not the case. These little bearers of knowledge of objects, ideas, and phenomena bore a moral charge. That’s not quite right. Again I can’t convey the thought perfectly. Not moral so much as creative. Creativity, though, correlates with positive morality.
Forgive me, my dear, for writing so opaquely. I cannot put it more clearly because I am myself groping here, falling back on intuition and a kind of internal navigator. To oversimplify disgracefully, the old-fashioned antithesis of science and religion is balderdash. In this place, in my dream, there is no doubt that science and religion grow from the same root.
Anyway, I was wandering through these halls looking for I don’t know whom, but looking very conscientiously. I needed him at all costs. And he came, nuzzled me like a dog, and I immediately knew it was he! A small, compact, soft being suddenly expanded, unfolded, and turned into something vast so that that room and all the others vanished and he himself was larger than any of them. He held a whole world within himself, and I myself was within it. The essence of the world was victory, but in the present continuous tense. It would be better to say, “being victorious.”
At this point I guessed what the question was which had been tormenting me so and why I was looking for this conquering angel. My dear Daniel seemed to have been vanquished, to the extent that in his specific mission (“reestablishment of the Church of St. James in the Holy Land”) he had failed. There had been no such church when he arrived and now again there was no such church. It had lasted the few years he lived there, working as a priest, praising Yeshua in his own language, preaching christianity with a small c, a personal religion of the mercy and love of God and of one’s neighbor, and not the religion of dogmas and authority, power and totalitarianism.
When he died it became evident that his living body had been the sole bridge between Judaism and Christianity. When he died the bridge was gone, something I experienced as a sad defeat.
In my dream, the creature which expanded into a whole world had a sword, and eyes, and a flame, but it also incorporated all of Daniel, not swallowed like Jonah in the whale, but embodied within the substance of that world. I very clearly detected Daniel’s smile, even some semblance of his outward appearance, his little chin, the childlike upward glance, surprised and asking simple questions like, “How is it going, Lyusya?”
As soon as I understood that he had departed unvanquished, I woke up. It was already fairly late in the morning and I was separated from the previous evening not by eight hours of sleep but by the vast temporal expanse of this knowledge which had so undeservedly come to me and which I cannot precisely formulate. I now know something about the nature of victory and defeat which I didn’t know before, about their relativeness, their temporary nature, their mutability, about our complete incompetence to decide such an elementary question as, “Who won?”
Then I dug through the notes from my last trip to Israel. I was taken around by my friends Lika Nutkevich and Seryozha Ruzer. We drove around the Sea of Galilee, through the kibbutz at HaOn where they breed ostriches. On both sides of the road, the poppies and bittercress, which Lika calls wild mustard, were in flower. We passed through Gergesa, the Arab Kursi. In Capernaum we found a monastery with a single monk. The priest comes to officiate every second Saturday. This is the place of the miraculous healing of the man with the palsy. Here, too, Jesus came after the feeding of the 5,000.
We stumbled on the Church of the Apostles. Something is being rebuilt and the jetty is being repaired. The workers were a Greek and a Yugoslav. That church was locked but a Greek monk came, opened it, and talked to us about life. He spoke Russian fairly fluently. They conduct the liturgy in Russian because many Russians come from Tiberias. He does not like Hebrew and other languages being used together in a single service, as is generally accepted now. He is sure the next generation will conduct services entirely in Hebrew because the children will grow up and forget Russian.
Lika and Seryozha and I exchanged glances. Here it was, the Church of St. James. Here, in Israel, Orthodox and Catholic Christians will talk to God in Hebrew. But will there be Jews among them? Is it really what Daniel envisaged? Perhaps it doesn’t matter.
Then the monk said that Israel would do better to christianize the Arabs, because Christian Arabs are easier to deal with than Muslim Arabs. “They don’t understand that,” the monk said ruefully. Altogether the state gives Christians a hard time with visas, duration of stay, naturalization, and insurance. He said the Jews do not want peace, but admittedly the Arabs want it even less.
Then the conversation moved on to the selling of church lands, a complicated matter. I stopped listening because one person’s head cannot take in as much as I have learned recently.
That’s it.
Love from
Lyusya