Anna’s section, a secretary pool two hundred metres along a corridor with incongruous opulent quartz flagstones that transmitted a rolling echo, fitted a matrix of nine desks with room to squeeze between. Stacked files and systems, blueprints curling at the edges, sagged from the shelves to the floor in glacial collapse. On the courtyard side a stove, sink, lunch table and refrigerator groaning full. Chickens that couldn’t be crammed inside the refrigerator were trussed to the window left ajar. A computer, popular for solitaire, illuminated the far corner. Alongside was a huge wooden stand with thumb-sized pins for memos and Anna’s lead-pencil illustrations of bolts and other widgets under elaboration, to which she brought her meticulous eye and painstaking millimetre-perfectionism. Some days she went to the testing laboratory that resembled the bowels of an Akula submarine patrolling the Baltic, turbines sweating diesel grease, where they tested parts in conditions simulating underwater pressures.
Anna was the only scientist among the engineers – although qualifications had long since become irrelevant. Three Olgas, two Svetlanas, two Lenas, a Polina, one other Anna – a fair sample of the female population. She single-handedly lowered the average age from forty-four to forty-two, tipped the balance between ex and currently married. A shallow, collegiate intimacy as though they shared the same three-stop journey every day for the past five years.
One broiling July evening Anna put her texts away and wrote ‘Shopping, back at 8.00 pm’ in the Movements Book. Literally true, insofar as shopping was a ceaseless activity, bags ever-present accessories. Canteen lunch consisting of Scotch eggs, coleslaw under avalanches of mayonnaise, two spoons full of grated beetroot with carrot garnish, brown bread, soup indescribable, could still be relied upon, only she usually couldn’t get back in time to enjoy it. Dinners were served in leftover proportions and increasingly failed to materialize altogether.
She set off for Ordynka, the precinct across the river from the Kremlin, passing churches being restored. Her private trail of cool, inviting oases amid abrasive monochrome. As far as she could tell – although she did not dare go too close, and varied her route each time in case she was followed or suspected of passing documents concealed in her bag – none had been closed down.
The Church of St John the Warrior nestled in a bypassed loop of the river in Yakimanka district, a stroll from Leninsky Prospekt where the constant hum of traffic verged on silence. Melting nugget from afar, up close St John was an octagonal planted on a square. Yellow, green and strawberry harlequin down one facet, a bauble-like dome. At the tent café outside she bought a watered-down wheat lemonade, sat at the grimy table near the church entrance and drew her last cigarette from the box of Baltimore. At fourteen kopeks for a twenty-pack they were three times cheaper and nastier than the filtered Pegasus brand she preferred, but a superior appetite suppressant. Cigarettes served two conflicting impulses – to blend in and to set her apart. She claimed scarce open space, filling it with an acrid cloud. She sat on ten a day, with bursts of five, book-ending her study schedule. Towards her fellow smokers, her policy was, never cadge, never refuse.
Like a mole emerging from hibernation, the priest blinked at shadowy predators. Wispy chin, an army reject’s lumpy, disaggregated build, chain gleaming over black cassock. Blond ponytail jiggling between his shoulder blades, he swept away plaster chunks littering the entrance, frayed broom inadequate to the task. He froze as she approached.
‘Can I go inside?’
He looked half-interested, like a shop worker closing for the day just as the last customer turned up. Glancing right-left-right, he motioned her inside. ‘Make the sign of the cross, like this.’ A half bow, index finger chopping the outline. ‘With piety. Don’t hurry. And women must wear headscarves.’ He offered a floral handkerchief from a bag hanging from a hook inside the entrance. She tied it to her nape then put on carpet slippers that left imprints in the plaster dust. Above the altar a five-tier iconostasis, carved and gilded, depicted saints and prophets holding scrolls, crested by a bearded benevolent figure she took to be God. Faces inclined to a cowled Madonna prominent in the middle, her hands out in a supplicating gesture. Anna checked for eye slits à la Kaluga Museum of Atheism. A silk screen enclosed the altar. ‘To separate the congregation from the sanctum,’ he explained. ‘Eternity from the earthly, if you will.’
Jigsaw pieces of plaster were piled in a corner. Crude scaffolding and tape sealed off an area next to a workspace with desk and filing cabinet. He paused for her, smiled, showed small retracting teeth. ‘St John has the distinction of being one of the few churches operating throughout Soviet times. The parishioners repaired and repainted the roof themselves. We think it important to signal that revival is underway and, God willing, we are still open for worship.’
She paused to read Old Slavonic descriptions of milestones in the church’s history. Built to commemorate the victory over the Poles in 1641. Washed away, rebuilt once on higher ground and again after Napoleon’s 1812 incursion set Moscow ablaze.
‘First time inside a church?’
‘No. Well, yes, only then it was an anti-church. The usual school experience.’
‘Mine too. So we are all feeling our way back. Take this in case you return and find the entrance boarded up.’ He looked around as though afraid of being overheard. One other worshipper, a small dark-haired woman in her forties knelt at the rear. He took out from his cabinet a hardback in a battered jacket, bound together with outsize staples lifting off the spine, every other page a photograph, or set of photographs, and a smaller compendium of catechisms. ‘To begin with, you should choose your saint. Someone you can personally identify with, a family namesake perhaps? Saints can be all things to all believers. If you come again I will be happy to guide you through the basics. I am usually here around this time. Now I must prepare tonight’s service.’
He saw her out, and retreated inside.
Anna was startled to read that by the turn of the last century there were four hundred and fifty-five Orthodox saints, most of them men. Some went to extremes. Saint Simeon, for example, perched on a stone pillar for forty-seven years. Most sinned and stumbled in their youth. Thereafter they lived unimpeachable lives, wrought miracles along the way, left behind relics – evidence of bodily incorruptibility, a prerequisite of sainthood. She considered Anna of Kashin, 1280–1368, until reading that her corpse had blackened spots on her cheek and heel, which at once put her in mind of a bad banana and Lenin’s repellent remains. Saints Gury and Varsanovii from Kazan respectively lacked upper lip and skin on the legs, and had the additional disadvantage of being male.
She flicked through to Saint Tatiana. Cast back to Yevgeniy Onegin. Married to Prince Gremin, a doting old man, Tatiana stays faithful to the arranged union at the cost of her happiness.
On returning to the dormitory Anna unlocked the chest under her bed, took out her mother’s icon, and was overjoyed to find that it matched.
The booklet of catechisms was an even more bracing read, enumerating sins she would never have considered as such. Her minor transgressions – plenty of material there: looking down her nose at plodding classmates, neglecting to visit her parents’ graves since moving to the capital, distance a mitigating factor, cigarettes. How could anyone hope to measure up? At best she could catch the outer rays of Tatiana’s virtue.
Over summer, the restoration proceeded. Iconostasis repainted, inscriptions polished, bible stand nailed into place. Bit by bit Father Aleksey walked her through the ritual aspects of liturgy from lighting the candle to folding the right hand over the left when praying and receiving sacraments. Then he would leave her alone to pray. Her mother’s image appeared unbidden, danced on the screen of her closed eyelids, and she cried easily, without distress.