Taking my father’s lead, we quaffed vodka. I gasped, coloured for an instant, manfully kept it down. When it came time to seal the toast with a kiss, our faces squirmed till we got traction.
Registry book signed, we exited to Mendelssohn’s Wedding March. My father loaded our suitcases in the Trabant and drove us to Moscow Northern River Port where Alexander Radishchev, a three-hundred-berth behemoth, docked alongside Lev Tolstoy and Fyodor Shalyapin. We were embarking on an anti-clockwise loop, east then north via the Moscow-Volga canal, upstream to the Karelian lakes, on to St Petersburg and homeward along linking canals, nine days all told. Then a week to ourselves at the dacha. We would much rather have put the cruise second, or skip it altogether, but it was the only booking available that worked with our wedding date.
An hour into our honeymoon I wondered – but didn’t dare ask – if Anna also found the cruise a twisted joke, an anti-honeymoon. Forbidding company, porous acoustics and tiny berths. We were the only couple under thirty. Bathroom cubicle at the far end of the corridor. Already we were bored watching canal banks glide by. At two sharp the bell went for lunch. I sensed an oppressive punctuality. We stood behind trade union delegates and their wives for lukewarm pasties, coleslaw and a mandarin. When we returned to our cabin the men began their post-lunch constitutionals, lapping the deck, long strides, chests puffing and elbows flung out.
We sat on either side of the single bed, looked at each other.
‘Do you think they are saving the highlights till last?’ I joked.
‘Well it can only get better from here,’ Anna replied, not turning around.
When everyone disembarked at Uglich, the first sightseeing stop, our guide, sharp-faced Valeriya Filipovna led the group to Chaika Watch Factory via an unmarked back entrance. The front door was locked. Pride of place in the exhibition area belonged to a blown-up photo, dated 1967 of the factory boss accepting a diploma of High Achievement by Industrial Workers in Socialist Competition and Success in Communist Upbringing of the Workers in the Collective, the workers in question looking on. They did not appear thrilled.
‘At its peak in the 1970s,’ Valeriya intoned, ‘we exported watches to fifty-six countries.’
There was a sales counter near the exit. ‘Should we buy one?’ Anna whispered. Sergey had given us souvenir money.
‘I wouldn’t,’ I whispered back. ‘Chaika has seen better days. You’ll lose ten minutes in the first hour, make it up by seven the next.’
‘Stop it.’ She choked off a giggle.
Outside a wan sunset was beginning, elliptical clouds spread horizontal. Valeriya steered us away from Uglich’s many churches. Some resembled red and green tents pitched in a forest, others had spangled domes, gold blotched pink, stars burning like soldering irons. We passed one with a ruined belltower, door open to a dilapidated staircase. Straggling houses sank into their foundations. Malnourished, barefoot children peered through gates off their hinges, parents and grandparents leaned on bare windows. Provincial Russia was a foreign country Anna had fled.
Anna had a brainwave. ‘Act sick,’ she hissed. ‘And hang back.’
She caught up with the guide as the group was about to cross the moat to Uglich’s riverside Kremlin. ‘Valeriya Filipovna, my husband has a delicate stomach and is not feeling well. I should take him back to the boat. Very sorry to miss the rest of your interesting tour.’
Valeriya Filipovna gave a miffed nod.
The door to the bell tower stairs was open far enough to squeeze inside. A sign hanging from the doorknob warned that the stairs past the second floor were in hazardous disrepair. Anna went first. A quick reconnaissance to the first landing. She waved me up. We sat down, waited for noises above us. To be doubly sure, she checked that further access was roped off. Chimes from other churches began, descending harmonies summoning the faithful.
‘I reckon the bells will go on for about fifteen minutes. So now or never.’ She unbuttoned my shirt, jeans, then hers, helped me with her bra. Draped her coat beneath us, turned inside out to absorb tell-tale mess. To avoid tumbling down chipped and broken stairs, we did it doggy style on the stairs, her drawers hula-hooping off her ankles. The whole fumbling encounter lasted precisely the duration of the chimes, and spilled blood. As far as I could tell in dim light we hadn’t desecrated the stairs. It verged on disappointing, for Anna anticlimactic but hurt less than she feared, and she liked it enough to know that next time we would both be much better.
The Church of the Holy Virgin’s Protection has to be this cross-beamed weatherboard on a quiet corner of Argo and Moore streets, cream picket fence. Robust flowering gums tower over sickly birches strangled by heart-leafed creepers. A cupola the size of a prize pumpkin, tarnished grey down its grooves. Vitrine side windows in boxed matrices. Corrugated iron gable in place of a spire exceeds the roofline by an apologetic margin. All in all, too many architectural concessions to the church’s Australian host.
A sad little grille protects the bottom third of the glass from… who? A miniature statue of Saint Nikolai scales the roof. He has the visage of a shifty imp who I fancy has mugged the original saint, tied him up and stolen his clothes and is about to ransack the altar.
Half closed, the caulked door yields to a light shove. No one inside. That’s fine, I need no intercession, just God – should He happen to be in the neighbourhood – and my thoughts. Motes twirl up an air column against the nave window, curl round pot plants resting on its sill. Mazy Australian light bleeds into the space. White enamel surrounds a three-tiered iconostasis with insipid pastel saints. Polished tongue and groove floorboards creak beneath my tread. Russianness, however you define it is interred with the first slat. Though what do aesthetics matter? Hasn’t Anna prayed before a broken cupboard for years?
No – a church is crystallized yearning. It is transcendent or it is nothing. I kneel down. A wave of nausea almost keels me over.
Importune the Virgin.
A second wave – I am at imminent risk of throwing up on the altar. Are people excommunicated for that? So what. I’d fucked in a church for Godsake. Which deity do I think I’m fooling? And – Jesus Christ I’m obtuse, can’t believe I didn’t make the connection before – doesn’t that go a long way towards explaining, inversely correlating, our blighted stop-start-stop love life since? If I’m feeling this guilty now, what must Anna be? The snatch of prayer she endlessly recited during our periods of estrangement, starting with the post-honeymoon months, thereafter aligning with the worst phases of her endometriosis: O Sovereign Lady and Queen, help and defend all of us who are in trouble and trials, in pain and burdened with sins.
Finally the riddle of Anna gels into sense. Endometriosis is her punishment. I get off lightly.
I lean on my heels, nausea settling. Trespasser on my wife’s faith, I stumble out.
★
MOUNT EVELYN
★
In these first numb weeks it helps that others take the news of my father’s death harder. Most days I manage to turn up to work. Enright dissolves into tears and offers me indefinite leave. I thank him but routine alone pulls me through. Judy is even more distraught, confirming my suspicions. To my immense relief none of my students approach to express condolences, testing my brittle composure. Perhaps they don’t know.