November 1916 Read online

Yet in the little dugout something had been missing. And here the gap was filled. Ordinary, simple, unshaming human activity. Open-hearted, meditative communion with the darkness, with the rain, with all nature. Your whole body welcoming the world about you.

  Sanya just stood there. Getting used to the darkness. Letting the rain fall on him. Letting it pepper his cape.

  He took a couple of steps on the slippery ground. A few gleams of light from deep-set dugout windows met his eye.

  A flare soared up. A dark red one. The Germans. Because the opposing trenches were so close they often put up flares at night. The Russians didn’t. They were being economical.

  The flare soared upward, opened out in a claret-colored light (somehow the nastiest of reds), and carved out a sinister red segment in God’s invisible but unchanging heaven. The segment moved across the sky, spreading its light over the Russian lines and three versts beyond, and revealing trees, shattered, mangled, but still standing.

  The flare faltered, shuddered, fell. And was extinguished.

  But the redness and the silhouettes of trees lingered on the retina.

  Sanya remained standing there, his face upturned to the steady rain.

  He was almost at peace.

  A man walking in a forest can be heard a long way off. Squelching footsteps. Twigs snapping as the walker brushed against bushes.

  Somebody was coming. But was slow in coming.

  One man. Nearer now.

  “Who goes there?” Sanya asked, not like a sentry challenging—there was one standing a little way off by a cannon—but firmly. (“Let’s have no nonsense!”)

  “Friend. Father Severyan,” a familiar voice said.

  “Father Severyan?” Sanya was delighted. “This is a surprise. And a very pleasant one. This is Lazhenitsyn. Hello.”

  “Hello, Lazhenitsyn,” the brigade chaplain said cordially.

  “Have you lost your way?”

  “I think I have.”

  “Come over here. Move toward my voice.”

  Splashing and squelching, the chaplain came up close.

  “Where are you going so late, Father Severyan?”

  “I’m trying to get back to HQ.”

  “But where are you going right now? You’ll tumble into a ditch. Or land in a puddle up to your knee. Why don’t you spend the night with us.”

  “I have to take a service tomorrow morning.”

  “Once it’s light everything will be fine. But right now one of the sentries could easily take a shot at you. There’s a spare place in our dugout.”

  “Is it really spare?” An unmilitary voice, this. None of the inflections we’ve all acquired. A weary voice too.

  “Yes, really. Ustimovich is on duty. Give me your hand.”

  It was a cold, wet hand.

  “All right, let’s go. Have you come far?”

  “From No. 2 Battery.”

  “Ah, ye-es.” Sanya remembered. He hadn’t made the connection … “They’ve had casualties?”

  The priest caught his foot on something. “One man has died.”

  “Not Cheverdin?”

  “Did you know him?”

  [5]

  Father Severyan had on a round cloth cap and a shapeless gray overcoat—both of a sort never worn in civilian life, but generally adopted by priests on active service—and knee boots. He was carrying a cane and a small grip containing the requisites of his office, which went everywhere with him.

  Seeing the broad back and the bullet head of the sleeper on the upper bunk, he lowered his voice. “Is it all right? We might wake him up.”

  “Chernega? He won’t wake up if a shell falls on the dugout.”

  The priest protested once again that he could easily get home. But when he saw that Sanya’s urgings were not mere politeness, he took his cap off—it was soaked through—and his thick, wavy, black hair fell into place. His beard was just as thick, but clipped short.

  He had his cap off, but before he surrendered it looked around the walls, the upper part of the dugout, in the corners. As is often the case in officers’ dugouts, there were so many things hanging up he could not immediately find what he was looking for. Then he saw it: a little crucifix, the sort that would fit into the pocket of a tunic, hanging in a dark place on a corner post.

  It was Sanya who had hung it there. He had found it lying on the ground in Poland during the retreat. Otherwise there might not have been one. That would have been rather embarrassing.

  The priest crossed himself before the Catholic crucifix, then turned to Sanya and handed over his overcoat too. It was wet through and clung to his cassock. It cost Sanya an effort to pull it off.

  “Oh dear, your cassock’s wet too. Why don’t you get in bed right away. I expect your legs are wet as well. I’ll start the stove up, and it’ll dry out in no time.”

  “Won’t it be a nuisance?”

  “Why should it be? We sleep twelve hours at a stretch in winter—just in case. That’s your bed shelf—the one-and-a-halfer.”

  Father Severyan stopped standing on ceremony and admitted that he would like to lie down right away. It was obvious that he was not just tired but dejected and near the end of his tether.

  The big pectoral cross on a metal chain weighed heavily on his strengthless hands as he laid it carefully on the table. He also took the little leather bag containing the elements of the host from around his neck. Sanya opened out the overcoat and cassock and hung them on pegs knocked into the lath wall.

  Against his very white undershirt Father Severyan’s black beard and hair looked still blacker, and his black eyes still deeper.

  He lay down immediately, with his head high on the pillows, and half covered himself. But he did not close his eyes.

  Sanya happily started lighting the stove. Thanks to Tsyzh it was not much trouble: he had left ready separate heaps of kindling, thin sticks, thicker sticks, dry wood, damper wood. And there was a stool for the stoker near the stove placed so that the flap would be on a level with his chest. The poker was in its place. And the ash from the last time the stove was lit had been raked out and carried away, so that there need be no dust. All that was necessary was to take a few pine splinters, set fire to them, place them so that the fire would travel upward along their rough surface, then carefully lean dry sticks against them, one after another. There was a crackling noise. The wood was catching.

  In his present mood Sanya could not have had a more welcome guest.

  Only the guest’s mind was not on Sanya. His folded hands lay motionless on the blanket. His lips were slack: his eyes were not moving.

  But even his silent presence had made a change. Somehow the ache was eased. The emptiness was less painful.

  The wood crackled. Rain falling on the earth above cannot be heard through the roof of a dugout, even one with a window.

  There was no gunfire.

  Without rising from the stool Sanya removed the lid from the pail, ladled water into the burnished copper kettle, using a tin mug, moved aside the ring on top of the stove with the poker, and put the kettle over the open fire.

  He put in more wood. The fire took hold boldly, cheeringly. The light through the stove door was brighter now than that from the kerosene lamp. A merry, youthful light. Chernega up above gave a sudden loud snore. Had he woken up? Should they invite him to join them? No, he just wrestled his chunky body onto the other side, and went on snoring just as resoundingly now that there was heat in the dugout as he had before.

  The stove was well alight now, and beginning to roar.

  Father Severyan gave a deep sigh. Another. And another. Finding relief in his sighs.

  Sanya kept his eyes to himself, but he felt the priest’s oblique gaze resting on him.

  Yes, a gap had been filled. Solitude weakens a man. All it takes to brace him is another living soul at his side.

  Father Severyan had been in the brigade less than a year. Though they had seen each other occasionally and exchanged a few words, they didn’t reall
y know each other. But Sanya was attracted by the priest’s liveliness, his tirelessness, his dogged determination—he even insisted on learning to ride a horse—his eagerness to fit in with the brigade.

  The priest sighed again, this time a sigh not of weariness but of suffering.

  “It’s hard,” he said. “Trying to give the last rites to someone who doesn’t need you. When the dying man answers, ‘What last words of comfort can you give me when you yourself are without grace?’ ”

  Sensing that to look around would be an intrusion, Sanya kept his eyes on the stove. It was hard, all right, the priestly office in an age of unbelief; forcing yourself on someone who perhaps didn’t want to know you, to hear his confession and remit his sins. Trying to find appropriate words without lowering the dignity of the rite. And if you were rebuffed you would have to return to the charge, begin your exhortations all over again, as earnestly as before.

  “Cheverdin was an Old Believer.”

  “Ah, so that was it.” That explained a lot. He immediately saw Cheverdin in his mind’s eye, a tall man with a dark red beard, and understood the look of complete self-sufficiency in his eyes: he was one of those peasants who knew. Sanya could easily imagine how those eyes would repulse the priest.

  “He refused to confess or take communion. Said I was in his way …”

  As bad as that.

  What, though, was a priest to do? Give up? He had no right to. Compromise? A priest must always be superior to other people or where would he find strength?

  The priest continued in a desolate voice. “To Muslims we send a mullah. But to our own Old Believers, the most Russian of Russians, we send nobody, they must do without. The popovtsy do have one priest—one for the whole Western Army Group. We lay claim to their bodies, through the recruiting officer, to defend Russia. When it comes to that we take them to our bosom. But their souls we treat differently.”

  Scarlet light flickered from the half-closed door of the stove. Sanya stared into the leaping flames and could not take his eyes away. If they refuse communion—burn them: that was Sofia’s decree. If they take communion under protest—burn them afterward. Lower jaws were wrenched open and the “true” host stuffed down throats. For fear of weakening, of accepting the sacrilegious element, they had sometimes set fire to themselves. We shoved what had been our own church books into the fire with them—how could they help thinking that we were servants of Antichrist? How can we wriggle out of this situation? Who can mend it with words?

  Sanya glanced at the priest. His eyes were shut. Even his strength had its limits. It was lucky that he had stumbled into a bed for the night.

  Sanya put more wood on, and leaned back from the stove.

  When he had lived in Moscow he had visited the Old Believers’ cathedral. Crossing the road to get to the church, you were struck by the prosperous and important look of the heavily bearded men, by the stern brows of the women, and by the seriousness of the adolescents. They looked as they would have three centuries ago, their staidness belonged to an earlier age, but with it went an openheartedness, a welcoming warmth. On Whitsunday the cathedral was a sea of white, as though it was full of angels: the women stood apart, and all together, wearing identical smooth white dresses with an unusual silvery sheen. The iconostasis had no incrustations, no rizas, no scrollwork, it was all of a piece, austere and brown, you were meant only to pray and humble yourself before your Saviour’s brilliant eye. As for the singing, you couldn’t say that it was as beautiful as in a reformed Orthodox church—but when the bearded men in kaftans boomed, it touched you to the quick. Two immense chandeliers, one with lamps, the other with candles, hung from the vaulted ceiling, and suddenly an enormously tall ladder moved from one side of the crowd as though to besiege a fortress, and a church servant in a black cassock climbed heavenward carrying a candle. Up in the heights he crossed himself and began lighting candles one by one, hovering almost horizontally over some of them, stretching upward to reach others with difficulty. Then slowly, slowly, he set the cumbersome chandelier turning. When the service ended he would climb up again and snuff the candles one after another. No instantaneous blaze of electric lighting for them. But throughout the cathedral three thousand people would cross themselves or bow to the ground at one and the same moment. Making you feel that “we are transient—they will not pass away.”

  The stove was purring, glowing cherry red, filling the dugout with a cozy warmth. What more could they ask for than that space shut off by beams and laths? The wet clothes along the walls were beginning to dry out. The guest had no need to pull the blanket over his chest and his shoulders. The black growth framing his head stood out against his very white undershirt. Lying on his back, he looked like a sick man, if not a dying man, himself.

  “I’ve been among them,” Sanya said. “Talked to them.”

  Imagine how they felt: what they saw yawning before them was not an abyss, not a bottomless pit, but a narrow, crooked, dark crack in the ground with heaps of corpses down below and an unclimbable broken cliff above. Their faith had been their whole life—and suddenly the faith was changed. At one time the sign of the cross with three fingers was anathema, now only the three-fingered sign was correct and the two-fingered anathema. Wasn’t it a matter of simple addition: the millennium plus 666, the number of Antichrist, gives 1667—and the Council that anathematized them met in the 1667th summer from Christ’s birth. Then the Orthodox Tsar, Alexis the Meek, bribed the Mohammedan Sultan to reinstate the deposed and nomad patriarchs, and so made doubly sure that one group of Orthodox Christians would trample others underfoot. And did he who with Mordvin savagery laid hands on the icons in the Kremlin cathedral and smashed them—did he yet remain Patriarch of Russia? The indifferent and the mercenary could endure it all without pain—reverse the curse tomorrow if you like. But those whose hearts ached for truth—they would not consent, they sought refuge in the forest, they were marked for destruction. It was not just promiscuous slaughter—the blow was aimed at the best of the people. And as if this were not enough—Peter’s crushing weight fell upon them. It is not hard to understand them: “Cut off our heads, but don’t touch our beards!”

  “They believe what they were taught to believe when Russia was first baptized—how then can they be called schismatics? Suddenly they are told the beliefs held by your grandfathers and your fathers and you yourselves till now are incorrect. We shall change them.”

  The priest raised his eyelids. He said, using as little voice as he could, “Nobody tried to change the faith. They changed the rite. That is subject to change. Stubbornness in matters of detail is obscurantist.”

  The second lieutenant, though not very sure of himself, said, “Yes, but reformist tinkering with details is small-minded. There is much virtue in rigidity. In our age, when so much is changing, so much being turned upside down, stubbornness seems to me a precious quality.”

  Surely, spelling the name of Jesus (“Iisus”) with one i (“Isus”), saying two “Alleluias” instead of three, and walking around the lectern from the “wrong” side did not threaten Orthodoxy with collapse. Was it for this that so much of what was best, strongest, and most vital in Russia had been driven into the fire, into the underground, or into exile? While informers were paid with the proceeds from the sale of confiscated estates and shops? A closer eye should have been kept on earlier translators and copyists and if, even so, a few errors crept in—well, let them.

  The quiet second lieutenant, with his light brown hair dangling over his brow, was as agitated as if it had all happened that very day, and in their brigade.

  “My God, how could we trample the finest of our race into the ground? How could we ourselves pray and be at peace with God after we had torn down their chapels? And cut out their tongues and cut off their ears! And we refuse to this day to acknowledge our guilt! Don’t you think, Father Severyan, that until we ask forgiveness of the Old Believers and are reunited with them Russia can expect nothing good?”

  He was
as deeply troubled as though destruction was imminent, wafting through the night like a wave of choking, greenish gas.

  “My own belief is that there was no schism. Maybe there will be no reunion in our lifetime, but in my heart it is as if all were united. If they will let me approach without cursing me, I will enter their church with the same feelings as I enter my own. What sort of Christians are we if we are divided against one another? Where Christians are divided, no one is a Christian. It makes no sense.”

  They heard the rumble of several explosions at a distance, but so heavy that the shock waves reached them through the ground. Further confirmation that it was too late, that Christians were already tearing each other to pieces.

  Raised up on his pillows (Ustimovich had a stack of them), the priest turned his head and looked sadly at Sanya.

  “Is there any country in which religion has not broken down? It has in all of them, in one way or another. In the last four centuries especially, mankind has moved steadily away from God. Every nation in its own way—but the trend is the same everywhere. For centuries past, the infernal power has writhed like an insidious fog over Christendom. That is why Christians are divided against one another.”

  At that point the kettle started singing, and steam billowed from it. Tsyzh’s brew was ready. The teapot had been washed out. Everything was at hand. The mug was earthenware—not too hot to drink from. And there was cherry essence from the brigade shop.

  “No, no, don’t get up whatever you do, Father Severyan. I’ll bring it to you!”

  The priest, half reclining on his side, took the tea from a stool moved up to his bedside and began sipping. His strength seemed to return to him almost with the first gulp.

  “Yes, I’ve let things get me down a bit today.”

  Sanya had moved his own stool closer to the priest’s bed, he could have reached out and touched him. He spoke down at him.

  “In a general way, Father Severyan, I think that the laws of individual lives and those of large foundations are similar. An individual cannot escape paying for a grave sin, sometimes in his own lifetime, and still less can a society, or a people—they will pay in time. Everything that has happened to the church since … from Peter to Rasputin … Maybe it’s a punishment for our treatment of the Old Believers?”