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the noiseless silence stepped a priest carrying a lit taper and the censer. With the holy flame he made the sign of the cross over the bowed congregation and proclaimed: “Wisdom, O believers! The light of Christ illumineth all.” My friend Vit’ka [Vitalii] came up and whispered barely audibly: “Kol’ka [Nikolai] is going to sing now . . . listen, it will be terrific.”
Kol’ka lives in our court-yard. He’s only nine but he already sings in the choir. Everyone praises him, and we kids envy him but treat him with respect. Now three boys came on to the
Kol’ka’s voice soars higher and higher like a bird and may drop at any moment, like a spring icicle, to shatter into minuscule crystals. I listen and think: “I ought to join the choir myself. They’ll put a dressy robe on me as well and have me sing . . . I’ll walk out into the center of the church and the priest will cense in my direction and everyone will look and say to themselves: ‘Way to go, Vasia! What a great kid!’” And father and mother will be glad that they have such a clever son.
They sing; the priest first censes the altar, then the table of oblation; the whole church in the smoke of the censer seems to be amidst the clouds.
Even Vit’ka, the foremost rowdy in our yard, has grown quiet. With mouth wide-open he is staring at the sky-blue boys, and his hair is lit by a ray of light.
“You have golden hair,” I tell him. He didn’t hear me right and said:
“Yes, my voice isn’t bad, but it’s a little husky, otherwise I’d be singing.” [In Russian the words for “voice” and “hair” are similar, “golos” and “vo-los.”] An old woman came up to us and said, “Quiet, you rowdies.”
During the [procession called the] Great Entrance, instead of the usual “Cherubic Hymn” the choir sang: “Now the powers of heaven with us invisibly do minister. For lo! The King of Glory entereth now. Behold the mystical sacrifice, all accomplished, is ushered in.”
Very, very quietly, in the most soundless silence, the priest carried the Sacred Gifts from the table of oblation to the altar table while everyone stood on bent knee with heads bowed, even the choir.
And when the Sacred Gifts had been brought over, the choir movingly sang: “Let us with faith and love draw near, that we may become partakers of life everlasting.”
The royal doors were then closed and the sanctuary curtain was drawn only half way which struck Vit’ka and myself as especially odd.
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Vit’ka whispered to me: “Go tell the sexton that the curtain isn’t drawn right.”
I obeyed Vit’ka and went up to the sexton who was removing candle-ends from candlesticks. “Uncle Maxim,” I said, “the curtain’s all wrong.”
The sexton looked at me from beneath his shaggy brows and snapped angrily, “You’re the one person they should have asked! It’s supposed to be that way.”
After the liturgy was over, Vit’ka cajoled me into going to the grove. “There’s snowdrops there, millions of them,” he said in a high voice.
The grove was outside of town, near the river. We went through the perfumed early spring air, through glistening puddles and sun-gilded mud and sang off key but at full blast the prayer which had just echoed in church: “Let my prayer arise . . .” and almost had a fight over whose voice was better.
But then in the grove, which hummed in a special spring-like manner, we discovered the quiet, pale blue baubles of snowdrops, and for some unknown reason embraced each other, and then the whole grove resounded with our shouting and laughter. What it was we shouted and why we shouted we didn’t know.
After that we walked home with little bouquets of snowdrops dreaming how good it would be to join the church choir, to don a sky-blue robe and sing, “Let my prayer arise.”
The song from the day’s liturgy was ebbing: “All human flesh is silenced as it awaits with fear and trembling.”
The evening land was growing quiet. At home the glass doors of the icon cases were being opened. I asked father: “What is that for?”
“It is a sign. It signifies that at Easter the gates of heaven are opened.”
Father and I wanted to get some sleep before the midnight service but couldn’t. We lay side by side on the bed as he told me how once as a boy he happened to celebrate Easter in Moscow.
“A Moscow Easter, my boy, is a mighty event. Who has seen it once shall remember it to his grave. The huge bell from Ivan the Great [the name of a belfry] gives its first thunderclap at midnight and it seems that heaven with all its stars falls to the earth. And the bell, my boy, was six thousand
Father rose up in bed and talked of Moscow in a trembling voice: “Yes . . . the Spasskii Tower clock . . . It would strike twelve and immediately a rocket
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would soar toward the heavens . . . and then the firing of the old cannons on Tainitskii Tower would commence: a hundred and one rounds.
“The ringing from Ivan the Great would spread like a sea over Moscow and the other forty-forties2 would do second part harmony, like so many rivers in spring flood. Such a powerful force would flow over the ancient city that you weren’t walking but bobbing on the waves like a small chip of wood. A mighty night it was, resembling God’s thunder. Oh, my son, words can’t describe Moscow at Easter.”
Father grew quiet and closed his eyes.
“Are you asleep?”
“No. I’m looking at Moscow.”
“Where is it?”
“Right here before my eyes. As if alive.”
“Tell me something else about Easter.”
“I also had the chance to celebrate Easter in a monastery. In its simplicity and sacred beauty it was even better than Moscow. The monastery itself was extraordinary, surrounded by a virgin forest with only the paths of various beasts, and by the monastery gates, the splashing of a small river. The trees of the taiga forest peered into it. The church was built of stout logs redolent of pitch. A great multitude of the faithful from surrounding villages would gather there for the radiant celebration. A most rare tradition was practiced there. After the service, maidens
