And Kolka Zhogin, a big fan of spoon bait, requested some cold-water spoon bait from Munich, along with Japanese fishing line.
Igumnov stepped on the gas.
He had almost made it to the paved road – about two miles from the asphalt – when his Zaporozhets sank into mud. Neither digging nor beech branches jammed under the wheels could extract the little car. After wearing himself out and getting dirty up to his ears, Igumnov relaxed. In about three hours, the co-op’s Kirovets tractor would pass by on its milk delivery run. All he had to do was wait.
Igumnov unfolded his seat, lay back and took a nap. Right before he fell asleep, it occurred to him that the four-wheel-drive Niva would get through the mud no problem, and the thought made him happy.
He dreamt of a large supermarket shelf filled with little plastic lemons containing real lemon juice, for cooking.
He woke up to the drone of the Kirovets.
The big yellow tractor easily pulled the Zaporozhets onto the asphalt. The driver was a bit drunk, and unfamiliar – a wrinkle-faced little man from the neighboring village. Igumnov had no vodka to pay him with, so he promised to settle up next time.
“All right, America,” the driver waved, “I see you don’t know me, must be too proud now, or something. I’m Pashka Bokov, we were in the same class in school.”
Igumnov gasped, mentally, and quickly started a sociable conversation. They talked for half an hour.
“All right America, Godspeed, I have to take this milk places,” said the former classmate as he climbed back behind the wheel.
From there, over the growl of the Kirovets’ engine, Igumnov heard a giggle and the excessively-upbeat, “And don’t forget, when you come back, bring sausage for me, too!”
Igumnov returned to Moscow in dark and rotten spirits. He avoided his friends for a while, but it was not characteristic of him to hide out for long. Things returned to their well-oiled tracks and rolled along. Even with a kind of newly-emboldened abandon.
He still planned to go to Munich, although he changed the theme of his research to the poetics of Gogol’s Mirgorod, which had been his focus before he took up Eurasianism. He bought Piontkovsky’s Niva and sold his Zaporozhets for a good price. He surprised his friends with his new interest in videos. In his free time, he visited his neighbor, and together they watched detective and sci-fi movies.
On those occasions when his colleagues began talking about America, he cut them short with a single, inappropriate question, “Have you heard? They say a joint-venture factory in Saratov has obtained permission to manufacture wind-up polyurethane cocks.”
The colleagues would exchange giddy glances, drop the painful topic and immediately start discussing women.
24. Sophia Palaiologina: Grand Duchess of Moscow, was a niece of the last Byzantine emperor Constantine XI and second wife of Ivan III of Russia. She was also the grandmother of Ivan the Terrible.
2010
A Change of Consciousness
Lent just ended. Sociologists from Moscow’s Levada Center agency asserted that 79 percent of Russians had no intention of fasting or otherwise observing Lent. Two local hot-heads shot off fireworks during the church procession – I’ll never forget how ashamed the boys looked when they were caught; they just wanted to make it better.
The Church continues to teach: prayer and repentance are the most important thing during Lent. The word “repentance” comes into Russian from the Greek “matanoia” meaning a change of consciousness and even the broadening of consciousness beyond the individual intelligence, sense. It implies a special spiritual procedure that can transport a believer’s consciousness from one level of being to another. But then I also read in The Stargorod Herald: “Repentance is an identifying feature of our national character.” I read that and didn’t want to keep reading. It reminded me of a story.
In the late ‘80s I found some part-time work with a restoration team at the Old Believers’ Pokrovsky Cathedral in the Rogozhsky neighborhood of Stargorod. The Old Believers were banned from building temples that looked like Orthodox churches, so when seen from the street, architect Kozakov’s creation resembled a large box with a few domes on top. Inside, however, it was indistinguishable from, say, the Novgorod Sofia. A sweep of a ceiling. Stern icons in the ancient style. Monumental murals. Dusk, wax candles in massive silver candelabras. The smell of incense mixes with strangely Oriental, ancient harmonies, music that sounds mysterious and difficult to the modern ear, trained in Baroque polyphonies. At the entrance, an old lady vigilantly guarded this world against strangers.
Every morning for three weeks we climbed the scaffolding and washed the frescoed walls with a special concoction made with boiled soap, and for three weeks Maria Lukinichna, the door-woman, watched us with unconcealed disgust. Smoking on the temple grounds was strictly verboten, so when it was time for a break, we took our buckets of boiled-soap into the keeper’s cottage, put them on the stove to heat, and went to the park next door. There, we smoked. When we came back, the gas under the buckets was almost invariably turned off. The old lady would come in to boil some tea and turn our stuff off just to spite us – we always left her a burner. When caught red-handed, she would not negotiate. She’d squeeze her lips into a disdainful line and stare at the floor. She observed her boycott as if it were a monastic vow. From the scaffolding, we could watch her: she spent her free time polishing the church’s silver and scrubbing the floors, or else she prayed, bending again and again to the ground in countless bows. Once we heard her upbraiding a drunken reader:
“All you know is how to fill your gut! Watch my word – the Green Viper will get you!” she raged, and the poor little man could only mumble every so often, “I do repent, Mother…”
“I do repent, Father,” Lukinichna would thunder back, bow, and pick up right where she left off, with fresh ire.
Then, a holy day of great significance was upon us. The Metropolitan himself was to come from Moscow. For two days before his scheduled arrival the old ladies scoured the church with zeal undreamt of by generals on the eve of a Marshal’s inspection. On the day itself, the service went on forever – the Old Believers don’t believe in hurrying their prayers. A few of our crew decided to wait the mass out on the scaffolding; myself and another guy, having finished what we had planned for the day, descended from the exulted heights, tip-toed around the faithful, and went outside. Not far from the church we found a shashlyk place where we had some kebabs with fries, washing it all down with the 777 port that at the time was served in “bombs” of 0.8 liters each. We ate and drank, then drank some more, bought more still to take with us, and then felt compelled, for reasons passing understanding, to go back to work.
Back in the church, we climbed the scaffolding to the top platform where I promptly slipped on a wet board and knocked down a bucket of dirty water. Its flight down to the bottom of the church remains branded into my memory to this day. It hit the floor and exploded, dousing the solemn gathering. But the Metropolitan did not shudder or make a noise out of order, and neither did the other priests – they only wiped their brows with the embroidered sleeves of their garments. The congregation did not stumble in its responses either, but carried on with the mass as if there had been no exploding bucket whatsoever. We took a nap up there on the scaffolds and retreated home when the coast cleared.
The next morning I came back to work; I was ashamed and scared. I prayed for the old door-lady to fall ill, to disappear, to vanish inexplicably from my life. Of course, that was not to be! A pair of burning eyes pinned me at the entrance to the church, alive and terrifying like the eyes of an Old Testament prophet in the icon above her. My legs folded of their own volition, I fell to my knees and blurted loudly, “Lukinichna, forgive this fool, I got drunk yesterday. I was the one who dropped the bucket.”