cutting and it throws handfuls of bright yellow poplar leaves in your face as you walk away from the embankment. Your shoulders stoop under a grey woolen cardigan, and your walk is awkward, unnatural in flat shoes, and you feel as if you keep falling heavily on your heels, the familiar support elevating them above ground missing. Your face feels naked without the makeup.
St. Nicholas’ church is open and empty, the smell of frankincense and whatever church incense they use there tickling your nostrils and yet infusing you with reflexive peace, conditioned like a dog that salivates at the sound of the bell. You buy a thin brown candle and plop it in front an icon, wherever there’s space, and mumble something prayer-like under your breath.
The mass is long over and only black-clad old women are there, rearranging and correcting falling candles, sweeping the heavy stone tiles of the floor. They look at you with their cataracts, blue like skimmed milk, and mumble under their breath. You catch the word “whore” and try not to take it personally—after all, this is what they call every woman who is not them, whether she is mortifying her flesh with woolen tights or not. You try to will your legs to not itch and end up backing behind a column and scratching discreetly.
You are not sure what brought on this religious impulse, except for the boy you miss without having known him. Then you think of the rest of his family, his numerous siblings, always hungry and underdressed, and it resolves in your memory, finally: he was a son of a defrocked priest who was forced into disgrace and living in a common apartment building instead of a parish house, no longer surviving off tithes, but the very modest salary of a night watchman. His wife worked at the meat factory across the street and always brought home bulging sacks dripping with blood, filled with tripe and bones and stomachs, and it was never enough for their brood, which, by your estimate, was somewhere between seven and nine. Poorer and more fecund than real priests, even.
“May I help you?” A soft, stuttering voice startles you from your reverie and you spook upright, your head springing back and almost breaking the nose of the speaker.
The young priest steps back, calm, his hands behind his back. “You look spiritually wrought,” he says, smile bristling his soft beard, light as flax. “You need guidance.”
“I don’t,” you say with unnecessary force, the wraiths of your twelve bosses rearing their heads, the images of people always telling you what you need. “I need information. Why would a priest be defrocked?”
“Depends,” he answers with the same softness, the change of topic barely breaking his cadence. “Are we talking about now, or in the past? Because the synod just defrocked a priest the other day, for marrying two men.”
“No,” you say. “Before—in the seventies or early eighties. A priest in Moscow was defrocked. He had children.”
“Most of us do,” young Father says, musing. “Back then, that would’ve been insubordination, most likely. Failure to respect the hierarchy. Talking badly about the hierarchy. Or possibly a failure to inform—or maybe informing on the wrong people, the wrong things.” He sighs heavily, his grey eyes misting over. “You know, I grew up in the church. I’m not afraid of ever losing my faith—when I was young, I saw one priest beating another up with an icon.”
Normally you would laugh at the image, but his thoughtful sincerity stops you. “I see,” you say.
“Do you know that priest’s name?”
“Father Dmitri,” you say.
“No last name?”
You shake your head and feel stupid.
“Do you know what church he was assigned to before his defrocking?”
“No. I was just thinking about his son… they used to live in the same apartment building as I did.”
“Go visit them, then,” he says flatly. “They were probably too poor to buy another apartment.”
“I don’t… ” You want to tell him that you really don’t want to see anyone from your past, anyone who would recognize you and put together the images of you—then and now, past and present—and find the comparison lacking.
But he is already losing interest, backing away. “You need to get baptized,” he says before turning away, toward the old women who wait for his glance as if it were a blessing.
“How do you know I’m not?” you call after, raising your voice unacceptably.
“You’re tormented,” he calls back, just as loud.
The priest is wrong—your mother had baptized you at birth, even though such things were frowned upon back in the 1970s. She even took you to the Easter and Christmas masses, where you stood on your aching feet for hours, holding a candle that dripped hot wax on your hands. The memory brings only boredom and unease and doesn’t lessen whatever spiritual torment the priest saw in you. He doesn’t know that the church with its battling priests isn’t as calming to you as it is to him— you worry that you will now have comical nightmares of priests in their long black robes and tall hats pummeling each other with icons and candlesticks. You are really not looking for salvation from them, but from that quiet boy in your childhood. No one else had such kind eyes. You sigh, regretful that your young self was so unaware of how rare a treasure this kindness was—and you’re not even sure if such optimism should be commended.
By the time you were twelve, you certainly knew enough of those who were not kind, of the tiny cave under the very first flight of stairs by the apartment building’s entrance, the cave you always had to run past because of those who hid there—boys who would reach out and hold you against the wall and put their hands under your skirt and down your sweater. You never told your mom why you would wait for her to come home from work, when the shadows grew long, and she couldn’t understand that you were not afraid to be home alone—you were afraid of the dash up the flight of stairs, and your two-room apartment could’ve as well been located on the moon.
You do not remember the faces of those boys, just that one who never laid a finger on you; instead, he walked with you sometimes, and watched you get into the elevator, safe. Sometimes the boys under the stairs would beat him, and once they held his face down in the large puddle that manifested in your paved yard every spring and fall—held him until bubbles coming from his silted lips turned into stifled screams and only a chance passerby spooked the hooligans.
When you get home, you unwrap the kerchief and hate it for a while because your hair is now flattened and tangled and you’ll have to wash it again. Then you pick up the phone, since there’s nothing else to do but to hurl yourself toward the past, since the present refuses to surrender any answers or even passable lies.
Your mother sounds older than she did the last time you spoke, and you try not to feel guilty about her unseen decline in some sanatorium that costs you most of your uncertain salary, and of course it would be cheaper to have her live with you, here, over the black river that smells of gasoline and foams white in the wake of leisure boats. You sigh into the phone and try to ignore all of her unvoiced complaints.
“Mom,” you finally say, “do you remember that family that used to live next door, when I was little? The one with seven kids?”
“Vorobyev,” she says, her memory as flawless as always. “The youngest boy, Vasya, was such a sweet kid. Always running around in those girls’ coats from his older sisters.”
That’s right, you now remember, those were plaid, too-short girl coats. No wonder everyone teased him; no wonder his unperturbed demeanor incited them to violence—there was no point in such savage humiliation as a girl’s coat unless its victim would acknowledge it as such.
“Vasya Vorobyev,” she repeats. “Too sad about him.”
“What have you heard?” Your heart seizes up and it’s ridiculous, you haven’t thought about that kid in decades. In forever. “What happened?”
“Anya, his mother, used to call me sometimes,” she says. “He’s dead, in Osetia last year. Now she’s dead too—her heart gave out after that.”
“Too bad.” You are numb now, numb to the tips of your fingers, and they almost drop the receiver. A deep chill settles in at the loss you aren’t sure you’ve suffered. “Do you remember why was his father was defrocked?”
“No. Why would you care about something like that?”
“I don’t,” you whisper, and say goodbye. You spend the rest of the day watching TV and pacing and drinking buttermilk straight out of the bottle that fits so comfortably into one hand, and you keep thinking back to the days when you needed two to hold it.
The boy who defended you sometimes. You’re glad to have a name, but in your mind he’s still that boy—the boy. You’re glad to be dreaming about him the next night—at least there he is alive and little, even as other
