Avoiding the road, he followed an overgrown footpath, weaving between stands of evergreens interspersed with large deciduous trees. He found a stream, washed the grime from his face and neck, drank deeply with cupped hands. He remembered to fill the flask, wiped it on his shirt before returning it to his pants pocket. It would not last them more than the night, with Ilya’s feverish state, but the country was verdant and water was easily found.
More easily than food.
He had no money and nothing to barter but the offer of work. And what could he do? His experience building scenery for the theater group seemed like a lifetime ago; it was of no practical use to him now. Woefully clumsy at repairs, reluctant to get his hands dirty, uneasy around farm animals, he had little to offer in exchange for a meal. Unlike Ilya, who was resourceful, skilled with tools. And humble. Filip had watched him go, cap in hand, approach a farmhouse and come away a short time later with a piece of bread, some cheese, an egg, or a capful of apples. “I nailed up the shutters,” he would say, or, “The henhouse roof had a hole in it,” or, now and then, “Some people are just kind. They wanted nothing done, so I made them a pin with their son’s name. He is still missing.”
Filip had no aptitude for this kind of work. The few times he had tried, stuttering idiotically at the hard-eyed woman who answered the door, he was sent away like the vagrant he was, shamed and angry.
He followed the stream until it disappeared underground, reduced to a burbling trickle. Keeping the sun straight ahead, he found the footpath again, leading him ever westward. His feet ached. He thought about returning to the stream; he could almost feel the cool fresh water soothe away the fatigue of so much hiking, but it was getting late; he had to press on.
The path meandered through green fairy-tale woods. Any thicket could hide a wolf, a bear; entering a clearing ringed with tender saplings and huge old trees, he half-expected to see Baba Yaga’s dilapidated hut on its spindly chicken legs, foul-smelling smoke hanging in the air as witness to her cannibalistic proclivities. Or maybe he would meet Mayne Reid’s headless horseman, his black cloak floating like a curse around his emaciated body, while his severed head scattered drops of blood along the trail. Shunning these horrors, and to divert himself from the gnawing in his gut, he imagined himself as James Fenimore Cooper’s pathfinder, sure-footed and vigilant, or a latter-day Robinson Crusoe, fashioning a new life from the shipwrecked remnants of the past.
He was not entirely alone. Deep in the woods, he heard children’s voices calling and laughing, sounding like all children everywhere. When the path led him closer to the road, he glimpsed a sturdy woman herding a reluctant cow; occasionally, he was aware of the blur of a cyclist, or an ominous speeding automobile. Once, he saw a group of people, two women, a teenaged girl, a small boy, an old man—walking slowly single file along the very edge of the road, turning to talk to one another as they went. What language were they speaking? He strained to make it out, but they were too far away, their voices muted, the words indistinguishable. He soon left them behind.
All of it struck him as familiar, bucolic and unexceptional, yet also inescapably strange. I am a refugee. Bezhenets. The word haunted him, the designation frightening in its paradoxically permanent transience. I am a man with no home.
Abruptly, the woods ended and Filip found himself in a large clearing facing the back of a midsized wooden structure, the sharply gabled roof topped with what looked like a small bell tower. Not surprisingly, there was no bell; all metal would have been melted down for the war effort. The building stood in a pool of gravel, wildflowers and grass reclaiming their place among the finely crushed rocks. He walked around to the front and saw a wide tree-lined alley leading back to the main road.
So this was the church. Ilya had said something about rumors of a refugee community, people who had received temporary residence permits in exchange for work on reconstruction projects. But that was north of here, closer to the cities, he was sure, where the damage was greater and the need for extra hands more urgent. And the old man was in the grip of fever, his words unreliable. He might have misheard, or simply dreamed the whole thing, the idea planted in his mind by the same earnest desire for reunion with his family that gave his life purpose.
Yet here it was, with the Orthodox cross over the doors. “Like a target,” Filip said with a smirk. “Easy for the Soviets to find us, round us up in groups rather than catch us one by one.” No, there must be more to this; something he didn’t know. People on the run did not foolishly expose themselves to risk this way. Or did they? He thought of Sergeant Evans lending him his Bible to practice English, saying, If you want to find your family, start with the churches. It’s where a lot of people go when they’re in trouble. What if it was true?
Filip stood outside the building, noted its small windows and completely unremarkable exterior. It was built atop broad stone stairs leading to wide double doors. How had they managed this? With the nearly total lack of building materials and the refugees’ universally impoverished state, he could not help but be impressed. Where did these people get their determination, their strength?
He mounted the steps, noting how deeply cracked the stones were, pitted and chipped as if they had withstood a battle. Closer to the doors, he saw that the walls looked recently erected, the wood scarred with burn marks, deep gouges in some of the mismatched planks. The doors, while solid, showed traces of bullet holes and heavy wear. He pulled, and found them unlocked.
Inside, the church was dark, lit only with a few candles near the iconostasis at the front, a small glass votive candle—just a wick immersed in fragrant oil—glowing before each icon. Lampada, he told himself, remembering the word from his childhood, before his mother stopped taking him to church in Yalta. He recognized some of the likenesses represented on the icons: Christ on the right, his mother Mary on the left. John the Baptist. How had he known that? When had he paid attention? Two archangels, he didn’t know which ones, but you could tell by the wings and the solid virility of their stance. Michael? Gabriel? Some of the other saints looked vaguely familiar, but he didn’t know their names, or their importance.
Where had these icons come from, and at what cost? Even he knew you couldn’t just paint one; it was an art with specific traditions, strict rules, and rigorous training. Living with Ksenia and Ilya, he had felt some of that passionate spirit, that bullheaded stubbornness that did not admit defeat no matter what the difficulty. But this, this effort was extraordinary. “Miraculous,” he said with a sardonic smile.
His ears caught a sound, no more than the softest swish coming from the depths of the empty interior. A gaunt stick of a man emerged, his pale face and graying beard floating toward Filip as if on air, black robes blending into the surrounding gloom. The man spoke, his voice a gravelly basso profundo, in a language Filip recognized as Slavic but did not understand.
Filip shrugged, shook his head. “Po Russki?”
“Horosho. Very well.” The man smiled, his face creasing into deep folds around his eyes and mouth. “Are you here for vespers? We start at six o’clock, but you may wait there.” He pointed to a row of wooden chairs along the back wall, his Russian confident but lightly accented.
“No. Vespers? No. Is that the evening prayer service? I’m looking for my wife. This tall”—he raised his hand level with his own head—“blonde, with a… a baby.” He stopped, put his hand down. He didn’t know how else to describe the person whose features were so clear in his mind. “She is beautiful.”