Afterwards, the priest went back to the house, put on clean robes, and left for the church where he officiated the service, as was his duty. And the miracle came – Our Savior, who had been put to death by Pontius Pilate and died on the cross for our sins, rose and lived again, and the people’s joy knew no end. And later, when it was time for everyone to depart after Mass, the father fell prostrate on the ambon and confessed his cruel sins to his congregation, and begged forgiveness for the jenny, and for the nanny-goat, and for the jenny again, to the count of three. And he was given the people’s forgiveness, and his Christian brethren came and kissed him and praised Christ thrice.
And at that moment there came a fearsome sight: horrific copper-beaked birds of prey came from everywhere, flocking onto the church’s roof. Their beaks and claws were sharper than a barber’s blade, and in place of feathers they were bedecked of hard-cast arrows. The creatures flew in the skies, barking hideously, instilling fear in people’s hearts, and not letting anyone go home.
Seeing this frightful sight, the priest’s wife approached him, and helped him up from the ambon, kissed him thrice and led him to the door. Out they went into the yard, and the birds flew lower and lower, in circles smaller and smaller, until they dove all as one at the wife and tore her to little pieces. All that remained was her copper cross.
But this is an ancient myth, from bygone days. Our mission, however, is to chronicle recent history, and we believe the present-day version of the story gives us a no-less edifying plot than this doubtful tale, this Decameron-esque fare, this anti-clerical contrivance of some Firentsuolus who loses his mind after contracting the French disease. Stargorod is no place for vague eroticism – everything here is touchable and visible. Take, for instance, the story of Ox and Mother Love.
Exactly what brand of Christians the people in this story are – of that we cannot be sure: maybe they are Anabaptists, or Baptists, or maybe some sort of Adventists, but certainly not Khlysts. The folks who have lived for as long as anyone can remember on the Right Bank, behind the Rodina Hotel, have never done harm to anyone. In fact, no one has ever seen anything but aid and goodwill from them, and if they get together in one big house to read the Bible and sing their songs – who could complain about that? Come to think of it, they must be some sort of Old Believers, because Baptists don’t sing like that – longingly, sweetly and melodically, so that the song pulls at your heartstrings, even though you don’t understand a word of it – it’s like the priest’s chant at High Mass during Easter, when it’s time to praise the Savior in Greek. But they don’t have priests; that’s a fact. Their old men all wear prayer beads wrapped around their wrists and those long cassocks, down to the ground, with upright collars. They bow so much when they pray that everyone has a little personal pillow – we think it’s so they don’t bludgeon their foreheads into mush, or maybe to keep their knees from callusing over.
What we don’t know, we don’t know, and there’s plenty of that, because most of our information comes from our neighbors who, although good Christians all, can’t always tell the difference between an akathist and an analogion, so we can’t blame them for their less than perfect grasp of confessional differences.
When it’s evening, the Right Bank community gathers in their prayer house. Lyubov Mikhailovna always arrives first, although she is almost always there anyway – cleaning, polishing, scrubbing. And when Serafim Danilovich comes (he’s their holy man and Lyubov’s husband), she bows to him, leaves the church and sits on a little bench outside, by the window. The congregation gathers. They often stop and visit with her, calling her kindly “Mother Love,” because that’s what her name means, and when done chatting, they bow to each other and part: folks go on to church and she stays on her bench. The bench sits on a wooden platform, and that’s where she listens to the service, winter or summer. When it gets too hot, they open the windows, and she can hear everything, and even when it’s all closed up, she still stays there, singing and bowing. All of the folks learn the Mass as kids, before their multiplication tables.
Tall cottonwoods and the fence around the prayer house hide her from strangers’ eyes; in the winter, when it grows dark early, you can barely spot her from the top floor of the five-story apartment building next door: there she is, bowing, praying, always at her post.
Mother Love is small, but not hunched-over like many of the Right Bank women, and, in fact, not all that old. She must be about sixty, and one can still see the good Lord didn’t deny her the gift of beauty when she was younger, and her eyes – enormous, deeper than the Lake – glow with a strange, utterly un-ascetic, exuberantly plucky fire. In a word, she is a spell of an old woman – once you’ve seen her, you don’t forget her. However, we must give her husband his due, as well. Serafim Danilovich – he is tall and almost sickly thin, with a wispy little beard and a halting falsetto voice, but his eyes… His eyes compensate for the feebleness of his body – they are filled with glowing molten steel, with strength, and faith, and a truly prophetic certainty. Catch his eye in a crowd, and you won’t feel blessed exactly, but you won’t forget the man, either, because you’ll glimpse the sort of strength that can turn rock into sand, the type of restless intellect that is always at work. But for his eyes and his fingers, which are always compelled by some internal impulse to work his well-worn antique amber prayer beads, like a weaver’s shuttle through the shed, the man’s whole figure would seem subdued and ethereal. He’s got his spells, or so, at least, say the old retired ladies one to another – those women who are always shelling sunflower seed on benches before apartment buildings, keeping track of everyone else’s business, 365 days a year, except, of course, during leap years.
Serafim Danilovich must be over 80, and he’s always lived on the Right Bank, near Kopanka, close to their sect’s cemetery, with its roofed wooden crosses and chapel of red coquina stone from beyond the Lake. He’s always lived here, as did his parents, and his grandparents before that. He only left once – to go to war. Among our truly Orthodox folk, only Anastasia Petrovna Terentieva remembers him as a boy – they went to school together, before the war, that same war, of course.
“He was always so sickly,” grandma Nastya remembers, “girls had no use for him, although he hadn’t mangled himself yet, back then. But even then, it seems, he was an Ox.”
Who knows what truth there is in her words, or where we might find it? What we know for sure is that when he came back from the war, they married him to Mother Love. She must’ve been very young, a girl, hardly fifteen then.
“She was one little daredevil. Eyes like dinner plates, not like now, but wily, crafty. Yet she went to the altar without a peep – her father ordered it so, and they have it strict, you know, not like we sinners,” Grandma Nastya told us. “So, by and by, they lived together for about five years, didn’t bear any children, but lived quietly, at peace, went to church, and during the day Serafim Danilovich worked as a barber in Banya No. 1 over the bridge. He was good too, the men respected him; sometimes they’d line up in the street to wait their turn – he shaved without cuts or pain, and didn’t skimp on warm compresses. In a word, he was an expert.”
And it would have gone on like that, but you know what times those were. After the war, in the nighttime, a man’s life wasn’t worth a kopek. And we had our share of those amnestied, or escaped ex-cons and bandits, hell knows where they came from. So, one time these two toughs stayed at Matryona Timofeyevna’s place, this divorced lady we had. People rumored the two were on the run, but if anyone knew it for sure, they didn’t tell. The men kept to themselves, Matryona brought them vodka and liver and innards from the sausage plant – that was where she worked. If she pleased one of them at night, we don’t know which one it was, the old one or the young one. One was about 40 – he’s the one we called “old” – and the other still wet behind the ears, but rotten already: foxy, beady, angry little eyes, mustache like a thread, stylish pants, and his whole body taut like a string – a viper about to bite. In the evenings, the old one would take a stool outside, sit on it and roll himself a cigarette; he’d sit there and smoke and watch the street, and his sidekick, like a pup, would be right there, just in case. Sometimes, the young one played cards with the boys, or pulled out his knife, just making threats, but the old one was always quiet, never messed with anyone’s business, just watched silently and went inside by nightfall.