We were travelling platskartny, in one of the open carriages that Edward favoured so much for their ‘economical’ prices. I wasn’t suffering too much, however. Though it was hot and hard to breathe, and the guy in the bunk across from mine was torturing a Soviet rock song on a cardboard guitar, and I had no hope of sleeping, I had noticed at least one great benefit of this style of carriage: its very openness made it much easier to be unsociable. When I travelled in a closed carriage with three other passengers it always took a certain degree of psychological effort not to talk to them. We were too close together; silence was unnatural. In a big open carriage there was no such pressure, and it was very easy to ignore everyone.
Everyone except Edward, that is: all six foot six of his intimidating frame was bouncing up and down on his bunk with the enthusiasm of a ten-year-old boy on the way to the fairground. He showed me his press card, discussed previous trips, and talked admiringly about his mythical England, the one that was ruled by morally elevated enlightened rationalists. My inclination was to keep quiet; we were on a strange mission after all, and I didn’t think it wise to draw attention to ourselves. Edward, on the other hand, was dying to show someone his press card and start talking about his film. He especially wanted to flash the card at the Ukrainian border guards, the very last people I would have shown it to. Edward would have made an excellent missionary: he was without a sense of embarrassment or awkwardness when it came to talking about his faith. He knew that what he believed in was startling to most people, but that was all to the good. That led to more questions, more opportunities to explain his worldview.
I myself was slightly nervous about two things:
(1) I had never spent more than five or six hours in Edward’s company, but that was usually enough to leave me exhausted. I wasn’t sure what state I’d be in by the end of the week, but expected to feel like a smear of greasy human pulp.
(2) The new visa regulations. I didn’t think many EU citizens were entering Ukraine by train from Russia. Most would come by plane, or if they were entering by train they would do so from the west, passing through Slovakia. I wasn’t confident the border guards would know the rules had changed. Neither was Edward.
At around 2 a.m. the Russian border guards entered the train. They were cold, unfriendly – the way border officials usually are. Following that we spent two hours trundling through darkness before the train stopped at the Ukrainian border. I would have liked to sleep, but couldn’t. And so I knew I was not dreaming that great distance between the borders: but where had we been travelling all that time? Some other place, some non-country, some no-man’s land?
The Ukrainian border guards put an end to my sense of nebulous mystery. They were chubby, friendly, and spoke Russian. In the east of Ukraine, most people do: better than they speak Ukrainian, even.
I handed over my passport. The guard seemed satisfied, but then suddenly exclaimed: ‘Hey, wait a minute, doesn’t he need a visa?’
Shit, I thought. Here it comes.
‘Dunno,’ said his colleague. ‘Yeah. I think he does.’
‘Got a visa?’ he asked me.
‘Wait, lads,’ said Edward. ‘He doesn’t need one. Don’t you remember? Your president changed the law.’
‘Did he?’
‘Yes. For citizens of the EU.’
‘Is that right?’ asked the one holding my passport.
‘Could be,’ said his colleague. ‘Actually, yeah. I think he’s right.’
‘It’s for Eurovision,’ said Edward.
‘Oh yeah.’ The guard gave me my passport back, and smiled:
‘Welcome to Ukraine!’
After that it was a simple matter of not sleeping for a further three hours, until the train pulled into the accumulation of buildings half-completed, abandoned and rotting, the industrial rubbish, and the rusting tanks of benzin that marked the entrance to Kiev.
It was a damp, chilly morning and the sky above was grey and dismal. God had clearly forgotten the people of Ukraine were living in the glorious spring of revolution.
We merged with the crowd shuffling towards the entrance vestibule of the metro when suddenly Edward realised he had forgotten to pay the ticket inspector for the tea we had drunk on the train the night before. He panicked: ‘It is not good to start a journey in debt to someone else.’
‘It’s just a few pennies,’ I said. ‘Forget about it.’
Edward looked at me again, startled. Surely I was joking. His ethical system would not permit it: what I was suggesting was tantamount to stealing.
‘Stay here,’ he said. ‘I am going to find him.’
He turned and pushed into the crowd, until eventually I lost sight of him. I studied my new surroundings. They contained many objects familiar from similar contexts in Russia:
Old ladies selling cabbage pies.
Crusty-bearded bomzhi rooting around in bins at six in the morning. Pasty-faced wannabe gangsters with bad haircuts and leather jackets from the provinces.
Cheap Chinese clothes.
A general air of sadness.
But then, just as I was losing hope of finding some new image to add to my store, I spotted something I hadn’t seen before: a young man was sitting on a wooden chair by the entrance to the metro with a mobile phone tied to his wrist. The cardboard sign round his neck stated that in exchange for money you could borrow his mobile and make a call.
Presumably this was because the public phones were no longer working and many citizens of Ukraine were too poor to buy their own mobiles. I was impressed by his entrepreneurial spirit.
Eventually Edward returned. The ticket inspector hadn’t remembered him. Not only that, he had refused to take any money for the tea. It was just pennies, after all.
We took the metro north, travelling through tunnels and subterranean stations that were eerily familiar, like parallel-universe versions of the ones in Moscow, albeit smaller, darker and slightly shabbier. It was strange too, considering the train was identical to those I rode every day in Moscow, to find Ukrainian-language signs everywhere, in the ads for glue, for mobile phones, and in the rules of the metro.
If people had been speaking Ukrainian it would have been easier to make the transition; but nobody was. The language spoken around us was Russian; the magazines and the cheap thrillers commuters were reading were in Russian. The government clearly wanted to change that. In fact, although Russian is spoken as a first language by around a third of the population and fluently by most of it, it does not have official status in Ukraine, and Yuschenko’s government was busy forcing Russian-language schools, even in Russian majority areas like the Crimea, to switch to educating their pupils in Ukrainian.
I imagined returning to Scotland to find that everyone still spoke English but all the signs and billboards were now written in Gaelic because the Scottish parliament wanted to foster a sense of separateness from England. It wouldn’t be so strange in some of the islands, but anywhere else such a policy would be absurd. So I couldn’t help wondering what the attitude of all those seemingly dormant commuters was to the absence of signs in the language most of them spoke. But they all had their noses buried in Russian publications, so I couldn’t study their responses.
Ours was the penultimate stop on the line. We followed the steps to the surface and found ourselves in one of the lunar settlements that exist on the outskirts of every city in the former Soviet Union. A vast alley lined with Soviet-era tower blocks stretched to the horizon, but because Kiev was the capital and thus had a bit of money, some futuristic buildings had been built for the new rich: semi-skyscrapers that stuck out amid the aging Soviet infrastructure like gold implants in a mouthful of rotting teeth.
Edward informed me that this was a famous neighbourhood, home to a popular type of beer. It was hammering down with rain though, so I wasn’t able to fully absorb the beauty. We were going to see his Auntie Lyuda, who was providing us with accommodation for the duration of our stay. I hoped Auntie Lyuda lived in one of the new buildings: after all, Edward came from a well-connected diplomatic family. His address in Moscow was prestigious and I was curious to see what constituted luxury in Ukraine.
After twenty minutes of racing through the downpour and wading through small lakes in the sunken concrete, however, I realised that we had passed all the futuristic towers and were heading towards one of the classical Brezhnev constructions on Heroes of Stalingrad Street. (It also had a new, Ukrainian name, but out here, far beyond the centre, the old Soviet-era Russian street signs were still up, and not only Edward but also his relatives used the old name.)
We passed a dead restaurant, and then a lorry with British licence plates, a giant ad for Yorkie bars on its side. Auntie Lyuda’s rotten tooth was standing right behind it.
The rest of the day was spent embroiled in various catastrophes. Edward called up a priest who had forgotten who Edward was; we went out to see him; the priest had vanished by the time we got there; no one knew when he would be back; certainly not for several days, anyway; and who did you say you were again?
Etc.
But I was accustomed to Edward’s unique ‘methodology’ by now, and as I had been fully conscious for almost forty-eight hours I was even half-relieved. I would need a good night’s sleep if I was going to sit in on an exorcism; that sort of thing shouldn’t be done half-awake. More than that, I knew the priests would be suspicious of me, and if I wasn’t able to think and analyse the situation clearly I could find myself in some very awkward situations.
I was drawing closer to dark knowledge, to the fulfilment of my satanic education, this I knew. It was becoming real, if it wasn’t quite real yet.
In a shiny McDonald’s decorated with abstract expressionist prints by Mark Rothko, Edward outlined a change of strategy. We were going to travel to Kremenchug instead, where he was on very good terms with a powerful priest.
‘Where’s Kremenchug?’
‘It’s in Poltava region, the legendary black soil country, the breadbasket of Ukraine, here they grow strawberries the size of your fist … and it’s also the birthplace of Nikolai Gogol – do you know Gogol? Have you read Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka? Or Viy, the story of the demon whose eyelids were so heavy he needed other demons to lift them open for him? Tomorrow, I promise, you will see something that will shock you to your core!’
A POSTCARD FROM UKRAINE
Eternal Venice
The minibus next to ours had Venetsiya written on it. Venetsiya: Venice. The Ukrainian Venice, that is. And what could that be? Gondolas drifting down canals of mud? Crumbling factories in place of decaying palaces and mansions? I wanted to see this Ukrainain Venice. I wanted to see the men and women wearing masks for the carnival, I wanted to see their colourful costumes against the backdrop of smokestacks and industrial decay. And somewhere in the parade, between the fire-breathers and the stilt walkers, a real, live rhino.
The bus was state of the art: it had a TV, a DVD player and a surround-sound speaker system. I had not expected entertainment on the way to Kremenchug. Maybe it was just there to tease us, to torment us, like the TVs they used to put on the Edinburgh–London bus. I never saw one of those in use, much the same way I never felt the air conditioning operating during those long night odysseys spent in the company of backpackers, skag heads and weirdo forty-something loners venturing south on mysterious business. But no, the driver started the engine and slipped in a disc before we had even left the station. I felt curiously excited. What were we going to see?
It was a Russian film, produced by a major Russian studio. But the credits were in Ukrainian. My heart sank: had they dubbed it? Was I going to be subjected to something totally impenetrable? But as soon as the credits had finished rolling, the actors started speaking in Russian.
I knew that somewhere out there the tortured logic for putting Ukrainian credits on Russian-made films that were shown in the Russian language to people who spoke Russian fluently had been formalised and written down. I knew even that there was probably at least one government cubicle where I could meet the official authorised to enforce this law, and that he would justify it to me. He would be either a bureaucratic automaton, a petty nationalist or very, very cynical.
The film, a Die Hard knock-off, was a replay of the Nord Ost hostage crisis, except for two crucial differences: (1) here a circus and not theatre audience was being held captive by a squad of murderous Chechen terrorists, and (2) the film had a happy ending. A lone Russian special forces operative (with the help of a good Chechen*) saved all the hostages, and killed all the terrorists. He also managed to blow up an Osama Bin Laden lookalike hiding out in a Middle Eastern desert and save Rome from destruction, though I couldn’t figure out how that last bit was connected.
Being a regular attendee at the Old Circus in Moscow I recognised many of the extras: there was the Armenian guy whose racially sensitive act consisted of dressing a monkey like a rabbi,† the Tin Man who juggled pointy hats, the two brothers who pretended they were statues, and the woman who cycled around with lots of poodles on a specially adapted bike. High art, I’m sure you’ll agree.
But these were just performers I had seen from a seat in the auditorium. The actor playing the chief of the American newsroom reporting on the crisis I actually knew personally, and it was a real shock to see him on-screen. He was an obese, oleaginous guy with the face of a walrus; we had worked for the same company when I first arrived in Moscow. He never talked to anyone who wasn’t young, pretty and equipped with a vagina, and he spent much of his time scouring Russian dating sites for potential brides while exhaling heavily through his nose. I also had an enduring memory of him leafing through a gossip magazine and repeating to himself in his nasally voice:
‘Nicole Kidman: yum … yum … yum.’
His wife had left him to bring up their five-year-old daughter alone. Usually he brought her with him when he came to use the work computers to trawl the impoverished Russian provinces for a wife. I remember her, playing with her raggedy doll in the office, bored out of her skull as Daddy went sharking for a provincial piece of ass. Legend had it that he’d been abandoned by his first Russian wife, who had somehow made it to the States, leaving him in Moscow with the kid: a startling reversal of the cosmic order. I hadn’t thought about him in years, and now here he was, acting in a movie, on a TV in a bus I was riding en route to watching some exorcisms.
It was jarring, seeing him again like this. Something was wrong. A border had been crossed. He didn’t belong in this reality. I felt confused, bewildered, almost offended. What was that fat bastard doing on my TV in Ukraine?
I turned to Edward: ‘See that enormous sweaty guy up there on the screen? I know him.’
‘Oh,’ said Edward, not giving a fuck. This manifestation had no connection to the world of the demonic after all.
I needed a better reaction than that. But there was no one else to tell.
The bus stopped at the Kafe Sofia, a roadside shack with coffee and dry sandwiches for sale. The yard in front of the entrance was decorated with little plastic ducklings and a gnome holding a spanner; but this was just a small concrete and corrugated-iron oasis in what was a vast oceanic spread of green fields. Surrounded by so much of God’s bounty, Edward started to wax lyrical.
‘Do you see how high the crops grow? The soil here is of such high quality that you just need to drop a seed in it and the goodness will burst forth!’
And yet in the 1930s there had been a terrible famine here, orchestrated by Stalin. Family members ate each other; millions died. And today, though nobody was starving, this rich soil could not lift the people who lived on it out of poverty. I didn’t talk about that, however. I had a simpler conundrum on my mind.
‘Edward,’ I asked, ‘where are the men?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Look at the fields: they’re full of women.’
He looked around. It was true: there wasn’t one man at work amid the crops; only hefty middle-aged women in headscarves wielding scythes and sickles.
‘Hm. Interesting point. I don’t know.’
There was a table in front of the Kafe Sofia, heaped high with food and wreaths, and women in headscarves were busying themselves with preparations. Edward explained that this was for a wake. Someone had died under the blue Poltavan sky; perhaps that body was already adding its nutrients to that astonishing soil, bringing forth yet more giant strawberries that farmers would harvest for pennies.
Unless they had burnt it, in which case it wouldn’t be bringing forth anything at all.
A POSTCARD FROM UKRAINE
Kremenchug
Long alleys of low-rise blocks of flats; rows of trees; old women selling vegetables by the roadside; mobile-phone shops; old buses; dust; rain. There was nothing apocalyptic here, and nothing interesting either. In fact, my final impression was essentially just that: nothing. I moved through Kremenchug in a daze, which is how outsiders usually experience the town. It is a transit zone, a place people pass through en route to where they actually need to be. For us it was no different. Edward’s priest did not live in Kremenchug, but rather in a village called Salivki, that was itself located outside Komsomolsk, a town twenty kilometres from Kremenchug.
And so only the locals would ever know what happened at the local Palace of Culture the following Saturday, when, according to a poster, a ‘magic healer’ was going to cure the citizenry’s physical ailments and solve all their psychological problems, or so he claimed.
Call it a wild hunch, but something told me he’d have his work cut out for him.
The rain was so heavy it was hard to see through the windows of the taxi. The vibrant greens and blues of Edward’s beloved Poltava were now a memory only, supplanted by a dismal mush of brown and grey.
I wiped the window with my sleeve and saw a grandiose Soviet industrial monster looming ahead of us. The complex was enormous; it just went on and on and on, a sprawl of ladders and vats and pipes and wire, rusting metal and spilt grease. Fat funnels spewed poisons up into the air; tuberous pipes shat poisons into the earth. At one point it reached over our heads with a metallic arm to claw at the mud flat across the road.
It was a Shrine of Decline, a vast Temple of Death. The green Poltavan fields had been OK, but this was more my sort of landscape, scarred and bleak and sinister as it was. There had to be some good stories here – some secret, terrible beauty. I wanted to get out and walk around, or take a few pictures at least – but I knew my request would have been incomprehensible to Edward.
And anyway, the factory was already behind us, receding into the past.
‘Where are you guys from?’ asked the driver.
‘Moscow,’ said Edward. ‘I’m a journalist and filmmaker.’
I was stunned. We hadn’t agreed a price at the beginning, which was foolish enough, but now Edward had notified the driver that we were rich bastards from the hated metropolis and it was his patriotic duty to fleece us. Clearly this had not occurred to Edward, who, sitting in the passenger seat, was excitedly chatting away to the driver. But then, he enjoyed provoking the curiosity of others: it gave him an opportunity to proselytise.
‘What are you making a film about, then?’
‘Otchitka.’
‘What?’
Otchitka was the Russian word for exorcism. After picking it up from Edward I had used it myself in conversations with friends in Moscow. It drew a blank every time.
Edward explained: ‘The casting out of demons.’
‘Oh, right,’ said the guy, uneasy. ‘What are you making a film about that for, then?’
‘It’s important. People need to know of the dangerous occult forces surrounding them. I am interviewing a lot of priests and also people possessed by demons. There is a powerful exorcist in Salivki, Father Grigory, do you know him?’
‘Er … no,’ said the driver.
After that, there was no more talking, only the din of rain battering off the roof of the car. I listened to that for a minute or so. Then the driver switched on his radio. Russian pop filled the void where the silence had been.
‘You don’t mind if I play music, do you?’
At last the rain stopped, just as a settlement of little wooden hovels and a single enormous stone house with a satellite dish on its roof came into view. The stone house dominated the scene; behind it was an area of fields.
I wasn’t happy. In a few minutes I was going to have to get out and interact with people. It wasn’t that Father Grigory was an exorcist; I was ready for that now. He wasn’t the first person with strange and unsettling beliefs I had spoken to, after all. No, it was the village. I don’t like villages. Some people idealise that sort of life, spent close to the soil, rooted deep in traditional beliefs, believing it is somehow more ‘authentic’ than a life spent in the city. I don’t. To me village life seems impoverished, backbreaking, boring and claustrophobic. I don’t want to know my neighbour and I don’t want to marry my cousin. I am happy to drink my milk from a carton and not from a cow’s teat. I like the asphalt and glass and concrete and sharp edges of cities. I like anonymity. I like alienation. I like the dark alleyway full of shadows and garbage, stinking of piss, containing a serial killer and his victim. Villages, though, with all those cows and tractors and plants … villages make me nervous.
Edward felt differently. His eyes were gleaming again. We were deep in his world, deep in the territory he had mapped out, that only he fully understood. Although the driver had been down this road many times before, he had never been down this road. He did not know that we were tracing a route marked on an invisible map, one that existed only in Edward’s head, linking together all the exorcists he knew across Russia and Ukraine and even abroad, in America and Britain. It was marked with little flags and monuments and arrows that only he saw, the significance of which only he understood. We were following a secret, magical route now, one that linked together demons and priests and salvation.
This was where he belonged.
Suddenly Edward turned to me. ‘Have you seen The Passion of the Christ?’
‘No.’
He was startled. ‘You didn’t watch it?’
‘I already knew the ending.’
‘Father Grigory really looks like Jim Caviezel, the actor who played Christ.’
‘I see.’
‘Just wait until you see him. By the way, did I mention that Father Grigory has fourteen children?’
‘Fourteen?’
‘Well, he may have fifteen by now. It’s been a year since I last saw him.’
Immediately I knew a catastrophe was looming ahead, one perhaps greater than anything Edward had managed to embroil us in up to that point. Because if he didn’t think that Father Grigory’s fourteen children was a fact worth mentioning until the very last minute, if it only occurred to him as an afterthought just as we were about to step across the threshold of his house, well … what else had he missed out?
That was the problem: Edward was so deep inside his own world that he was constantly forgetting about the other, bigger one that existed outside his head. But a lot of people were moving around in it, and they had their own plans and ideas. And though I respected him for his dedication to the cause, sometimes I wished he’d pay just a bit more attention to everything else. It would have made life easier for him, never mind me.
We pulled up in front of the big stone house. ‘This is where Father Grigory lives,’ said Edward. I immediately thought of an anti-clerical painting in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, where a bloated priest dripping in gold jewellery drank tea from a bone china cup as filthy peasants pleaded with him for prayers. The house was too big. It didn’t look good. But then I remembered that Father Grigory had fourteen kids, and suddenly its size seemed quite reasonable.
A man dressed in black with long black hair and a thick greying beard was standing in some mud next to the front door.
Edward turned to the taxi driver. ‘Wait here a minute.’ Then he climbed out. ‘Father Grigory!’
Father Grigory peered towards us.
‘Remember me?’
Father Grigory looked Edward up and down very slowly. I could see his eyes – beady and cunning, narrowing as he took in the young man in front of him. Edward looked like a young lawyer from the big city. I heard him talking about his film. Then, slowly, Father Grigory started nodding. Yes, he remembered.
I didn’t see any close resemblance between Father Grigory and Jim Caviezel. Instead he reminded me of another painting I’d seen in the Tretyakov, this one of Tolstoy during his prophet phase, when the world famous author of War and Peace had turned vegetarian pacifist and decided to live a life of self-denial close to the people and the land. In the picture the bearded writer had hitched himself to a plough and was dragging it through a field on his own.*
‘Is that the exorcist?’ asked the taxi driver.
I nodded. I didn’t want him to hear my accent and raise the price on us still higher than he was already going to. We had a limited supply of hryvna and I was already worried.
As I sat there watching Edward talk to Father Grigory I realised the priest had not known we were coming. I couldn’t believe it: Edward had just turned up on his doorstep. My presentiment was correct; a catastrophe was brewing. Suddenly Edward indicated me, sitting in the cab. I climbed out of the car and smiled sheepishly. ‘And I’ve brought Daniel, my friend from Scotland. You do have a spare room or a guest house for us, don’t you?’
Father Grigory looked shocked, bewildered at this sudden ambush. In fact there was no guest house, nor was there a spare room. With fourteen kids, space was at a premium. Edward looked alarmed. But Father Grigory knew we had come a long way, and there was nowhere else to stay in the village. He invited us in.
Edward went back to get his bags and pay the taxi driver, who duly raped us.
Father Grigory rushed through a dark hallway and led us into a spacious dining room. Two tables had been put together, forming a big T that was pushed up against the back wall. Father Grigory sat in the centre of the T, facing the doorway. Up close I saw that he was enormous, with massive fists, huge shoulders and thick black hair that sprouted from a solid skull. A great blunt nose hung over a sprawling wiry grey beard. Like Father Miron, the priest in Pskov I had seen in Edward’s film, Father Grigory looked as though he could pound me into fertiliser, and I suspected that, unlike some priests, he might just do so, given the right amount of provocation. Belying this impression of brute force, however, were his eyes, which were clever and nimble. They darted back and forth, alighting now on me, now on Edward. However startled he had been by our sudden arrival at his house, he was rapidly assessing the situation, analysing everything.
Edward planted himself next to him and started chatting away merrily. I sat off to the side, struggling to gather myself together. Father Grigory’s obvious surprise at our sudden appearance in his world had left me feeling like a trespasser; worse than that – an exposed one.
‘Did you get the video I sent you, Father?’ asked Edward eagerly.
Father Grigory put his hand to his chin and nodded. Edward waited eagerly for more, but the priest said nothing. He was staring at me.
‘Was it interesting?’ Edward prompted.
Father Grigory nodded, and stared at me. I knew he hadn’t watched the film at all, or that if he had, his recollection of it was vague. He wasn’t very interested in it right now, anyway, because he was thinking about something else. I knew what it was. He was thinking:
Who the fuck is this foreigner and what is he doing in my house?
I wasn’t sure myself. We had agreed in Moscow that for the purposes of this trip I was either Edward’s ‘assistant’ or a ‘researcher into Russian Orthodoxy’, both of which were sufficiently lacking in precision to be true in this context, but Edward hadn’t introduced me that way. In fact, he hadn’t introduced me at all, except for the few brief words in the mud outside describing me as ‘a friend’. Edward had said many times that exorcists preferred to operate undercover, that they shunned attention. That being the case, I doubted Father Grigory was keen on ‘friends’ of people he knew vaguely just turning up at his house to hang out. Edward might as well have said: Hi this is Daniel, he’s come to stare at you freaks.
No, I needed a better cover story than that; we needed to phrase what I was doing very carefully so Father Grigory would relax and trust me. But it was too late now: the priest was confused and suspicious. At that moment I was the strangest phenomenon in his world, demons or no demons. Edward really hadn’t planned this well. In fact, he hadn’t planned it at all. Worse, as I listened in to their conversation I realised I couldn’t understand anything Father Grigory said: he was speaking Russian with a strong accent.
I needed to become invisible, to melt into the background and observe proceedings in silence. But how? I decided to make a mental inventory of everything around me, as if by thinking about the furniture I would somehow be able to transform myself into something as banal as a chair in Father Grigory’s eyes. Yes, I thought, I will enter into a spirit of oneness with the wallpaper. Unlikely, I know, but it was a start, at least.
There wasn’t much in the room though, only:
(1) A large wooden wardrobe.
(2) A big, boxy TV.
(3) A page from an illuminated manuscript hanging on the wall behind Father Grigory. Decoding a few words, I realised it was the Lord’s Prayer in Ukrainian.
(4) A black and white photograph of a beautiful yet mournful young woman.
(5) A long strip of dark brown flypaper, dangling over the centre of the table. It swung back and forth like a pendulum, heavy with the carcasses of bloated black flies. Hordes of still-living flies were buzzing around it, circling the corpses of their brothers and sisters.
It wasn’t working. I still stuck out like a Thai ladyboy in a crowd of Ayatollahs, I still couldn’t understand the priest, I still hadn’t thought of a good reason for being in his house, and he was still staring at me. I heard Edward speaking: ‘Father, we have a big problem with the occult in Moscow. The kids are getting more and more involved with satanic music and culture. We need people like you to speak out against it …’
‘Uh-huh,’ said Father Grigory, still staring at me. Edward could see Father Grigory wasn’t paying any attention to him, but didn’t know why.
‘I mean, really, Father! What is to be done? What?’
Suddenly, a flash of understanding in Edward’s eyes: he had realised the source of the exorcist’s distractedness.
‘Ha-ha!’ he said. ‘You are staring at my friend. I know why! Don’t you think Daniel looks like an Orthodox priest, Father? He’s often mistaken for one!’
Eh?
‘Oh really?’ He looked unimpressed.
I’m in the shit, now, I thought. It was true, but I had never been mistaken for a priest by a priest, and somehow I didn’t think a real priest would find the idea either amusing or convincing. But this was my chance to shift into this reality, and I leapt at it. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Just two days before I was supposed to come here a man came up to me on the metro platform at Kuznetsky Most and asked for directions to a church. He thought I worked there. It’s the black clothes and the beard. When he realised I was a foreigner, he was very surprised … the strange thing is, though, he wasn’t Russian, but a Kazakh and Kazakhs are Muslims …’
Father Grigory said nothing. It was obvious to him that I wasn’t a priest, so if someone mistook me for one he was plainly an idiot. The detail about the Muslim, meanwhile, revealed just how preposterous the idea was. I should have skipped that part.
I ran out of words, I forgot how to speak Russian. It was a crap story, anyway, and I would never have told it if Edward hadn’t pushed me to. It made me even more of an impostor, claiming a resemblance to the shepherds of a faith that wasn’t mine. Edward should have used a better strategy. I looked up at the flypaper. There certainly were a lot of dead flies on it.
Edward, however, seemed satisfied that he had resolved the tension in the room; or perhaps he thought I had fumbled the ball so badly it was necessary to divert attention back to him. ‘So Father,’ he said, ‘how are we to counteract the spreading influence of occultists in Moscow? What can we do?’
Suddenly Father Grigory stood up. ‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘I must leave now. We will discuss everything later. In the meantime, please relax. We have a television.’ He walked over to the TV, switching it on. Gwen Stefani appeared on-screen, singing ‘Hollaback Girl’. Father Grigory walked out of the room.
Edward and I sat there watching the video. It was shit, and the song was shit. Finally, Edward got up and switched over to a Russian news programme. Bad things were happening, all over the world.
Edward returned to the table. ‘So,’ he said, ‘don’t you think Father Grigory looks like Jim Caviezel?’
A POSTCARD FROM UKRAINE
The bathroom door
There’s a picture of a girl kneeling, completely naked, in an inflatable paddling pool, tacked to the bathroom door. She is laughing as she pours water from a red plastic watering can over her small breasts. The style is American soft porn of the 1970s: the camera lens is suffused with light, and the girl has a flicked hairstyle ê la Farrah Fawcett in Charlie’s Angels. But this is hardly a house for porn. And this nude is not an erotic image so much as an image of freedom, of everlasting summer sunshine, of the West in the days of the Iron Curtain. I have been in bathrooms like this before, seen these pictures before, so full of sad, sweet longing. An idea for a scholarly monograph: the meaning of photos of naked Western girls in Soviet bathrooms in the 1980s.
I am not against children as a concept, but the noise and chaos they generate bothers me. Now I was in a home where there were fourteen units of human youth and no sooner had Father Grigory left than they started to appear, over by the doorway. One, two, three, four … boys, girls, another whose gender I couldn’t determine … each of them bigger than the last one, as if they had all popped out of the same matrioshka doll.
They were just a few metres away, studying me, waiting for something. I eyed them uneasily. Any minute now, I thought, they’ll nail me to a board, poke my eyes out and then run around in the yard outside holding me aloft, before shitting in my mouth and stoning me to death … For as anyone who reads the papers knows, children these days do that sort of thing. And who could hope to contain the life force of so many kids? With Father Grigory gone, I was pretty sure the scenario was going to degenerate rapidly into a Lord of the Flies style affair, and I had a bad feeling I was Piggy.
A toddler was the first to break the invisible barrier and charge forward. He was a little man with a head like a brick, and he was wearing a grubby one-piece romper suit with some dirt on it. He stopped his forward momentum by whacking his solid skull against my shin. He didn’t cry, however: he was made of sterner stuff than that. He steadied himself by gripping my trouser leg, extended his other claw upwards, opened his mouth wide and said:
‘Auhhh … auuahahahhhh!!!’
i.e.
‘Fooood … fooood …’
I knew how he felt. I hadn’t eaten for hours and I was getting pretty hungry myself. But whereas I could eat and be satisfied, I had a feeling from the sight of this solid little chunk of humanity that he could eat and eat and eat and never be full. After him came another toddler, a girl this time, with a head of thick black curls. She started crying for no reason. Some boys followed, dirty, grubby little urchins, who looked like they belonged in Fagin’s gang, then a girl of about eleven, meek and retiring, yet curious. Finally there were seven or eight children circling around me, staring. The violence was about to start.
Edward tried to make conversation, but the kids ignored him. They were transfixed, hypnotised by the strange shadowy foreign manifestation occurring in the dining room. I was a phenomenon. My chances of merging into the furniture and attaining invisibility were slimmer than ever.
Suddenly, however, Father Grigory’s wife limped into the room. Matushka (‘little mother’) was heavily pregnant. Clearly she and Father Grigory had got cracking on number fifteen almost immediately after the solid chunk of boy clutching at my trouser leg had entered the world. The current balance was seven boys and seven girls: soon that harmony would be disrupted.
It was hard for Matushka to heave that body forward. Her ankles were thick; angry-looking veins throbbed in her calves. Her eyes bulged slightly too, as if a pressure from within was pushing them outward, the new life growing within her bursting to escape. She addressed her children:
‘Get the fuck oot ae it, ya wee shites, and stop bothering your faither’s guests.’
Well, not quite, but you get the idea. The kids melted away towards the door and then vanished completely. Matushka was obviously not someone you disobeyed.
‘Sorry about that,’ she said.
Suddenly two young adults entered the room. Matushka directed them as they set out cups for Edward and me, and poured tea. Then she withdrew, leaving us with Rosa and Roma, whom I presumed were the oldest members of the brood.*
Rosa had just left school. She had pale eyes and rosy cheeks, and was built like a buxom collective farm girl in a Soviet mosaic. Rosa could have provoked sinful thoughts in a rock, but she wasn’t aware of this. Edward liked her, but she didn’t pick up on that either. Roma meanwhile had a shaved, square head, and muscles like wire wrapped around iron. Both of them looked like they could easily pop out another fourteen kids each, and without breaking too much of a sweat about it, either.
‘So,’ said Roma, ‘what do you think of Ukraine?’
‘Er … it’s very beautiful,’ I said.
‘No, it isn’t,’ he said, wagging his finger at me. ‘Let me tell you something – Ukraine is the most corrupt country in world.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’
‘More corrupt than Russia?’
He shrugged. He hadn’t thought about that. It didn’t matter anyway; the corruption in Ukraine was what he had to live with.
‘Even since Yuschenko? Nothing’s changed?’ asked Edward.
Roma waved dismissively. ‘Yulia, Viktor, the Orange Revolution … who cares? What does it mean? Nothing has changed. Nothing will change. Politicians are politicians. They’re all crooked, they’re all out for themselves. They don’t care about the people.’
‘I voted for Yanukovych,’ added Rosa with a giggle.
The conversation died, and we sat in awkward silence for a moment. I thought about something Dmitri the photographer had said to me on the steps outside the Digger’s flat as he regaled me with tales of his travels around Russia. ‘When you go to a village,’ he said, ‘you are a messenger from the outside world. You must bring stories, for that is what they are waiting for. Give them interesting information, things they do not know. They are hungry for it. If you do that, then you will make friends and all will be well.’
Yes, I thought, that made sense. That’s what I need to do here … Give these kids some stories. They were children of a village priest. I had travelled, they had not. If I told some good stories I would be accepted, and they’d stop staring at me. I’d be closer to becoming invisible, to becoming the observer, rather than the observed.
‘Where are you from?’ asked Roma.
‘Scotland,’ I said. ‘But I live in Russia.’
Roma nodded. ‘I went to Russia once. The trees are so big there! I couldn’t believe my eyes.’
‘The trees are bigger here!’ said Edward.
‘Eh?’
‘Your black soil, it’s much better than the soil in Moscow! It makes the trees bigger!’
Roma shrugged. ‘I don’t know. The trees I saw in Russia were pretty big. Bigger than the ones around here.’
Rosa shook her head. ‘I thought the trees in Moscow were smaller than ours.’
‘Do you think so?’ said Roma.
Rosa nodded.
‘Yes,’ said Edward. ‘Rosa – it’s Rosa, isn’t it? Rosa’s right. It’s your black soil. There are no apples greener than the apples that grow in Ukraine! And your Poltavan strawberries, why they’re the size of a human fist! God has really blessed this land!’
Roma sat there nodding, but this wasn’t what he wanted to discuss. He had started with a question about Scotland and now he was listening to a lecture from a foreigner on the beauty of Ukraine. I understood how he felt. I don’t like it when foreigners who have visited Edinburgh castle and perhaps climbed a hill north of Perth wax lyrical to me about Scotland. They know nothing, and seek to know nothing, of pre-teens overdosing on heroin in Glasgow, of the grinding boredom of life in dreary scab-holes such as my native Dunfermline, or of the irritation you feel when you’re a teenager and a Gaelic-language cookery show takes the place of the film with tits in it that’s being shown in the rest of the UK. Good for them: they are under no obligation to investigate that side of Scottish life. But there are few things harder to stomach than a tourist explaining your own home to you: other than cancer, rape, murder, genocide and anything else that actually matters, of course.
Roma waited for Edward to stop, then tried again:
‘What religion are people in Scotland?’
I wanted to tell him that people didn’t believe in anything much, but I knew he wouldn’t accept the answer. He wanted a creed.
‘Christian,’ I said.
‘Really? I heard they were … Protestant.’
The word escaped into the air like a puff of the gas used to kill the Nord Ost hostage takers. This was what Edward feared. Roma might as well have suggested I was a paedophile from a nation of paedophiles and he was about to reach for his pitchfork. Edward had to step in before the fact that there was an undesirable in the living room reached the ears of the exorcist: ‘Yes, well,’ he said nervously, ‘the Scots are Protestants, but there are different sorts of Protestants don’t you know… there are some Protestants who are practically Orthodox – take Daniel, for example, doesn’t he look like an Orthodox priest? He’s often mistaken for one you know …’
Edward kept going, tangling Roma up in definitions and redefinitions. Roma was irritated: he knew this was smoke and mirrors but was too polite to say so. The tone of the question had not been hostile, just curious. Edward’s protestations to the contrary were too much, however, and now Father Grigory’s son knew that something was amiss. He dropped out of the conversation altogether. Rosa stepped in with a question for me, but all I could catch in the mix of Russian and Ukrainian was this:
‘You don’t understand me, do you?’
I shrugged. I tried to say it was her accent, but I couldn’t even find the words for that. My Russian, far from perfect at the best of times, had abandoned me completely. My opportunity to bring news from the outside world had passed.
I was completely isolated now, and entirely dependent on Edward. That was not reassuring. He was too deep in his own reality for it to occur to him that I might need help with translations in another one, or that he really ought to explain what we were doing in this family’s house. He hadn’t done that yet. I knew he was here to get more footage for his film, but no one else seemed to. So I was left on the outside looking in, watching as he interacted with Roma and Rosa.
From where I sat, he looked like some know-it-all from the metropolis: well meaning, but at once way too clever and way too naïve. An expert on the demonic he might have been, but I didn’t think he understood life in a Ukrainian village at all, and Roma and Rosa knew it. I couldn’t imagine how he was going to earn the trust of these people.
He may have understood all their words, but he was on the outside, too. He just didn’t know it.
It was time for dinner. Father Grigory returned, said grace and then took his place in the centre of the T, with Matushka on one side and Edward on the other. Roma and Rosa stayed at the table, but none of the other children were permitted to sit with us. I was still out on the edge, next to a little bald guy who introduced himself as Viktor. He sounded and looked like Peter Lorre, the child murderer in Fritz Lang’s M. He wasn’t a member of the family, but some sort of assistant to Father Grigory.
The food was piled high in front of us, leading Edward to launch into another paean to Ukraine’s black soil. Father Grigory wasn’t saying much. Every now and then he’d grunt, and take another bite out of a piece of bread. Matushka had an ironic glint in her eye, as though she was enjoying Edward’s performance and her husband’s responses as some sort of weird spectacle. As for me, I didn’t have much of an appetite. The world was swimming around me; I still hadn’t found my place in it.
My eyes returned to the portrait of the mournful girl on the dresser. She had such smooth skin, and such sad, thoughtful eyes: she really was beautiful. I even felt I recognised her, though that was impossible. The picture was a sepia-tinted relic of a different epoch, the girl, perhaps, a pre-revolutionary progenitor of Father Grigory. But then, suddenly, I realised that the subject of the portrait was in fact Matushka before fourteen kids had clawed their way out of her body. I was stunned.
And then Viktor, who had been studying me out of the corner of his eye, started talking. He spoke Russian without a Ukrainian accent. I understood him perfectly. But that was the problem: I felt that he was somehow dangerous, that he wanted to grill me, to get to the bottom of what Edward and I were doing in the Father’s house. He was not constrained by rules of hospitality, and nor was Edward there to deflect intrusive questions.
‘Eat the chicken, it is good,’ he said. I picked up a chicken leg from the plate, bit off a chunk, and chewed slowly. It was good. But I knew he was just breaking the ice, that he was working his way towards an interrogation. Viktor watched me eat. Once I had swallowed, he continued:
‘Eat the soup, it is good.’
I slurped a little soup. Viktor nodded, approving. Then: ‘Suck on the hard boiled sweets, they are most delicious.’
And now, having encouraged me to eat and thus established himself as a kind soul with my best interests at heart, he seized his moment. He leaned close, and asked very quietly:
‘What are you doing here?’
Not: What do you do?
Or: Who are you?
But: What are you doing here?
I had known the answer; now I didn’t. We weren’t filming exorcisms or conducting interviews. We were just squatting in a village priest’s house, eating his food, abusing his hospitality. Later we might get round to stealing some golden candlesticks and outraging his daughter, if we felt like it. I had no idea how to reply. And so, although I understood him perfectly, I said:
‘Sorry, I don’t speak Russian.’
He tried again, rephrasing the question, but I remained resolutely dense. Sometimes it’s handy, being able to play the dumb foreigner like that. After a few more stabs at interrogating the pale-faced sphinx sitting next to him, Viktor eventually gave up in frustration.
Father Grigory stood up; this signified that the meal was over. Everyone left their plates and followed as he walked to the back of the room, turning to face the crucifix hanging on the wall. He closed his eyes and began intoning a prayer in a high-pitched sing-song voice, crossing himself as he did so. Everyone in the room followed suit.
Everyone except me, that is. I had gone through the motions during the pre-dinner grace, but I just didn’t feel like doing it this time. What was this after-dinner prayer? I’d never heard of the likes. And suddenly, just like that, I decided I’d had enough. I wasn’t Orthodox, and I wasn’t going to play along with Edward’s mystifications. They weren’t helping me, and I thought he was doing harm to himself and his film with them. If I was going to get anywhere with these people I would have to be honest: I was an alien, interested in ways of living and seeing that were unlike mine. That was all there was to it, and put like that, it didn’t sound so bad. If they didn’t like it, then I’d find a driver in the village to take me back to Kremenchug and I’d stay in a hotel there. Maybe I’d go and see the magic man who was going to cure all the sick people in town at the Palace of Culture. That would be interesting. As for the post-dinner grace, surely it was more respectful not to mimic an act that others held sacred, than to do it insincerely, in some feeble effort at leading them to believe I was ‘one of them’.
Well, just in case you ever find yourself in a similar position in an exorcist’s house, let me tell you that the answer to that one is in fact a resounding no. The prayer finished and when I looked up from my shoes I saw that everyone was staring at me, eyelids peeled back as far as they would go, jaws hanging down at their ankles. Even Edward looked shocked, as though I had suddenly yelped out a HAIL SATAN, Rosemary’s Baby style. For the first time since I had met him he was lost for words. I knew he wasn’t going to jump in there and conceal my crime under his customary fog of eloquence. And as for Father Grigory … well, that was anger I saw in his eyes. I had finally crossed ‘the line’.
The air in the room felt dangerously unstable. Any minute now Father Grigory was going to grab me by the collar and throw me out into the plentiful supply of Ukrainian mud that surrounded his house. I had to think of some way to redeem myself, and fast. I searched through my vocabulary for some eloquent explanation, but I still couldn’t speak Russian. All I could muster were single words: Yes … no … potato … trousers … penis … no, none of those were going to suffice. I needed a phrase, I needed something grammatical. Hm. Maybe: Izvinitye – ya mudak.* No, that wasn’t going to cut it. Come on, damn it, I needed something fast.
‘Er … I’m tired,’ I said.
Nobody spoke. Father Grigory continued to stare, though the anger in his eyes dimmed a little, and instead there was just that confusion again, that complete bafflement, that Who the hell are you and why are you in my house? he had been fixing on me ever since our arrival.
Then suddenly he grinned. He pointed at his arm. There was a white patch on his black robes, where his sweat had crystallised.
‘See this salt?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘It’s to preserve my meat.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘It’s to preserve my meat! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!’
Father Grigory may have been an exorcist, but he was a man also, and more than that, he was a man who understood people. He could see the weariness in my eyes, and understood that I wasn’t there to ridicule him or insult his beliefs. So he had reached out to me with a joke; and once he started laughing, everyone else laughed. Viktor laughed. Matushka laughed. Edward laughed. Rosa and Roma laughed. Yes, everything was all right now. I wasn’t a wicked heathen after all. Well, a heathen maybe, but not wicked …
‘Come on,’ said Father Grigory, taking me by the arm. ‘I’ll introduce you to my pet pig.’
Father Grigory led me outside, to the kitchen garden behind his house. Twilight was setting in, and great black flies were buzzing about in the approaching darkness. These were Ukrainian flies, and had sprouted from the rich waste that fed the black, black soil of their motherland: they feared no human. They didn’t even try to fly out of my way as I walked forward. Walk into them and they bounced right back at you, buzz, buzz. The mud underfoot meanwhile was thick enough to suck your shoe off, and the stench of manure hung in the air. Somewhere in a marsh not too far off a squad of frogs were belching: it was a real symphony of the senses out there. Ah, nature, my lovely, my sweet …
‘Here’s the pig!’ said Father Grigory.
I peered into the small concrete enclosure and saw a fat, blotchy, black and pink sow, standing in profile and doing what pigs do: snuffling away amid a pile of mud and straw.
‘Her name is Marilyn,’ he said.
Marilyn’s black eye peeped nervously back at me, then looked away, then looked back at me again – before she finally dug her snout into the straw and concentrated on the mud. I think she was worried we had come to kill her and believed that if she just looked away and acted dumb, then we wouldn’t notice her. I gazed at Marilyn’s firm haunches for a few seconds, meanwhile swatting away the enormous black flies dive-bombing my face. Then Father Grigory said something that set Edward laughing.
‘Did you understand?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘Sometimes the Father takes Marilyn for a walk through the streets of the village!’
Father Grigory was staring at me, nodding, beaming from ear to ear. An eccentricity like that was worthy of some response and he knew it. I tried to think of a follow-up question, but my mind was still functioning poorly. ‘Good …’ I said. ‘Good.’ He was hoping for more, but eventually gave up and started guiding me around the garden, showing me various green things sprouting out of the dirt, and some chickens. Father Grigory explained that all this was to feed his family, but now that he had fourteen kids and another one due any moment, he needed more land. There was a stretch of mud behind his enclosure that reached to the foggy horizon; he intended to annex that to his garden. It wasn’t going to be easy, however, because the neighbours were jealous of his big house, his animals, and his crops, and so he expected opposition. Not all the villagers were religious; not all respected his clerical position. That hint at turmoil and dissension within his community hung in the air for a moment, but then he moved on, striding through the mud, his black robes billowing out behind him. At no point did he dip them in the filth at his feet.
The final point on our tour was another enclosure, but this one had a door, which was closed. Father Grigory pulled it open and I saw a pair of calves with beautiful, soulful, black eyes, standing in the cold, waiting patiently to become meat. The startling thing, though, was that there was a grubby, skinny boy of about nine or ten in there with them, perched on a wooden beam set above a pile of dung, clinging to the neck of one of the young cows as though it was his baby sister. He was the most ragged of all Father Grigory’s urchins so far. There was fear, and an almost feral look in his eye.
Father Grigory registered the presence of his son in the shed, but immediately looked away. Strangely, he acted as though he hadn’t seen the boy. ‘So these are the cows …’ he said. I stared at them for a few seconds, trapped in their dark little hovel. The boy caressed the neck of the one he was holding. ‘Hello,’ said Edward, cheerily. The boy did not respond. Then, realising there was nothing else to say about two calves slated for the executioner’s knife, Father Grigory closed the door of the enclosure again, leaving the boy in the dark with them.
The tour was over.
A small crowd of men and women were standing in the driveway of the house in the gathering twilight. Father Grigory greeted them warmly and then disappeared indoors. Edward told me they had come for a preliminary exorcism before the main one tomorrow.
‘So what should I do?’
‘Attend. Why not?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t belong here. I don’t mind going to Father Grigory’s church … I can stand at the back and be discreet, but this really feels like I’m intruding.’
‘Come, come …’ Edward laughed; he thought I was being ridiculous.
‘I’m serious.’
‘Tell you what, let me talk to Father Grigory and see what he says. Besides, I need to ask about the possibility of conducting an interview with him after the prayers. I should probably raise the issue and let him think about it before it gets too late, what do you think?’
‘That’s a good idea.’
And with that, Edward disappeared indoors, leaving me alone amid the gathering crowd.
Slowly, one by one, more villagers arrived. The men were big, big guys, champion eaters of pig fat (a delicacy in Ukraine), with shaved, square heads and black leather jackets; their women wore headscarves and long coats. They all knew each other, and were shaking hands, and laughing. It was a strangely convivial atmosphere for a pre-exorcism ceremony. I stuck close to the wall, staring into space, trying hard not to get involved in a conversation.
Never before had I felt like such a useless soft-palmed weakling. Standing there, I tried to remember the last time I had earned an honest day’s wage from my labour. The best I could come up with was five days in 1993 when I creosoted a fence in Dalgety Bay, a suburb of Dunfermline, for fifty quid a day. I hadn’t done a very good job of it though, splashing the creosote on some fancy white tiles the homeowner had installed just days before. Also, because I was a painfully slow worker, the job took me five days instead of the expected three. I got paid the extra, but I wasn’t invited back when the fence was redone two years later.
In fact, I thought, what use am I really? If civilisation were to collapse tomorrow, these people would survive. They would still know how to grow crops and how to preserve them. They would know how to build houses out of wood, and how to purify river water. They could start a fire using sticks. They could kill invaders from neighbouring villages using boulders, and hang them from trees and stick forks up their arses. They’d be fine. In fact, they had already lived through the collapse of the USSR, the bankruptcy of their nation, and more hardship than most people in the West could even imagine: they had proven their resilience. But what about me? What would I do?
I gazed deep into my soul, looking for some kind of useful, elementary human skill I had picked up in my life up to this point:
Hm.
Maybe I’d missed it. I looked again.
Nope. Nothing there.
Eventually I decided that I could be a wandering bard, as in days of old, earning food and board with my song. But I was reaching: I’m not much of a singer and I can’t play the lute either. And looking at these villagers, I doubted if they’d appreciate my style. They’d probably lob rocks at me.
There was one positive development, though. I had been in the village long enough to grow attuned to its atmosphere. I could feel its dirt on me, under my fingernails, on my skin and in my beard. This dirt was good. It helped me re-establish contact with my powers of invisibility. My face too had relaxed into its customary blank, unfriendly, unreadable expression. Nobody was taking any special notice of me. In fact, one guy came up, explained that he was new at these meetings and asked me something about Father Grigory. I shrugged; he said something else, obviously a joke, and I laughed. We shook hands and he walked off.
So: in a post-apocalyptic world ruled by talking apes I’d be worse than useless. But nobody here knew that. I had ‘em fooled. I was on the inside now. The challenge was to stay there.
By the time Edward returned Father Grigory had already begun the evening ritual, so my participation was now a foregone conclusion. The exorcist was standing in the middle of the crowd of villagers, chanting the prayer in his high, sing-song voice. I bowed my head, but not too low, because I needed to see what was going on. No one noticed that I was taking my cues from my neighbour and crossing myself a second after he did, because almost all the villagers were doing the same, in a game of gesticulatory Chinese whispers that led back ultimately to the swift arm and hand movements of Father Grigory.
At first I thought that this rampant copying was down to the fact that the people in Salivki were strangers to their ancestral religion, still relearning its customs and habits after years of Soviet oppression. But fifteen years is quite long enough to pick up a few hand manoeuvres and chants, so perhaps the copying I saw has always been a feature of prayers in the Russian Church. There are thousands of pages in the Orthodox creed, after all – who has time to read all that? Better to just copy the priest, do what he says, and hope for the best. The language of the prayer, Old Slavonic, was almost as alien to them as it was to me. And so we were all, foreigner and local alike, united in our incomprehension of the sacred mysteries, our ignorance of the rite. Only two stood outside this communion of half-understanding: Viktor, Father Grigory’s assistant, who had his eyes closed, but knew exactly when to echo his priest and when to cross himself; and Edward, who was standing next to me, fluidly following the ritual with a minimum of hesitation.
I waited for some of the strange phenomena from Edward’s footage to begin. But nothing was happening. There were no sudden spastic movements; there was no cursing, no man with smoke pouring from his body. In fact, the atmosphere was very peaceful. The woman next to me – a peroxide blonde in her thirties – was weeping, but hers was ordinary pain – illness, or perhaps her husband was a drunkard, or maybe she had problems with her children. I wondered if Edward, in his hunger to see demons everywhere, had misunderstood Father Grigory’s explanation of the prayer.
Once it was concluded, Father Grigory anointed the congregation with holy water. He had adapted a lip salve for the purpose, replacing the balm in the tube with water. This was more efficient: he didn’t need to bother with splashing it on people, or repeatedly dip his finger in some kind of chalice. One by one he went through the crowd, drawing the shape of the cross on their heads with the lip salve. Finally he came to me, and hesitated. I stepped back to indicate that it wasn’t necessary. I wasn’t baptised in his church; I knew I was not entitled to these ministrations. But Father Grigory laughed, shrugged as if to say Why not? And then leaned forward, drawing the sign of the cross on my forehead.
I was anointed.
Once the prayer was over, Father Grigory devoted his attention to individual members of the crowd. Some were laughing and joking with him; others were tearful and seeking reassurance. Patiently and with good humour he ministered to them all, even though it was darkening rapidly. The rising moon had brought with it a nocturnal chill that cut to the bone with wintry violence. I couldn’t see anything clearly any more, and became conscious again of the chorus of frogs, and the mad flight of the fat black flies, crashing against me. Suddenly Viktor emerged silently out of the gloom to stand by my side: ‘Was that interesting for you?’ he asked.
‘Very,’ I said.
‘Father Grigory is a good man, he is a good priest.’
‘I can see that,’ I said. ‘The people really respect him.’ If he had noticed the miraculous appearance of Russian language skills when earlier I’d claimed to have none, he made no comment.
‘He gives everything to them,’ said Viktor. ‘He does not hold back, or stand aloof.’
I nodded. We stood there for a few moments, watching Father Grigory’s massive silhouette in the dusk. He was leaning down to listen to the complaints of the woman who had been weeping next to me during the prayer.
‘Where are you from?’ I asked.
‘Do you know Krasnodar? It is in the south of Russia, a warm place. That is where I was born. But I moved to Kiev many, many years ago. Decades ago, in fact. I forget that I am now old.’ He laughed. ‘I had many jobs during the Soviet time. First I was a journalist working for newspapers, then I worked in TV. I did it for many years, but I grew tired of that life. Who needs it? What does it mean, “a career”? What is the point of that nonsense? And so I came out here. Now I am studying in the seminary and I assist Father Grigory.’
I liked the simplicity and directness with which he dismissed all that striving after graven idols: as if upon waking up one day he had realised his life was dedicated to bullshit, and had stepped out of the race, just like that. But this was not some grating bourgeois tosh about leaving a career in the city and nipping off to Provence in search of vintage wine to drink, quaintly truculent peasants to condescend towards and juicy, dark-eyed farm girls to grope. No: this was hard-core. Viktor was abandoning his ego, his position in society, and dedicating himself to a life of discipleship and helping the weak.
I find living a bit of a pain in the arse myself at times, and so his words were poetry to me. Who is not tempted to turn his back on all that striving and aspiring and struggling and just vanish? I was jealous. But of course, what Viktor had vanished to was a life of unremitting toil, hardship and poverty, spent in harsh conditions. I didn’t think I had it in me. And I didn’t have his ascetic, mediaeval faith to help me endure it either. When I looked at the land I saw mud, flies, dirt, tedium. When he looked at it he saw the same stuff, but he knew also that it was part of a cosmic order, and that it was part of a larger, sacred soil that had produced Orthodox saints and holy men. I could never share in that.
Suddenly Edward appeared, towering over us: ‘Yes, you made the right decision, Viktor. It’s great out here. So beautiful.’
There it was again; Edward’s postcard Ukraine, his rural idyll. But that wasn’t what Viktor had been talking about at all. He shrugged. ‘It’s beautiful everywhere.’
‘Yes, but … it’s so green here.’
‘It’s green everywhere.’
Edward laughed, confused. He didn’t know what to say. Viktor looked at me, smiling enigmatically. He knew that I understood.
After about twenty minutes the crowd dispersed. Viktor was the last to leave, going home to his wife. As soon as he was gone, Edward stopped Father Grigory on the step of the house and asked if there was time for an interview –
It was the one Ukrainian word I managed to learn during my stay in Poltava. Later I learned that it means ‘there isn’t’ or ‘there aren’t’. But in the house it seemed to function well as a general negative. I heard it frequently, as Matushka addressed the children, or as Father Grigory responded to one of Edward’s proposals. For example, later that evening we discovered that Rosa, the eldest daughter, had a bad cough, a consequence, she thought, of the fumes spewing from the death factory we had passed on the way into the village. Edward offered to put her up at his dacha, which he described as an astonishingly clean ecological paradise in the north of Russia. As Rosa put it: Thank you, but there’s no way my father would let me stay on my own with a member of the male sex. And sure enough, Father Grigory had replied with one word: Nema. Well, actually first he stared at Edward in total disbelief, as though he’d just been asked if it would be OK for Edward to sell Rosa to some Chinese pimps who’d cut her arms and legs off, lock her in a box and rent her out to enthusiasts for stumpy women. Edward, unfazed, responded by suggesting it again, and then tossing in another request for an interview. Nema, came the response to both questions.
Written in English nema is amen spelt backwards. And so for me, at least, it gave Father Grigory’s negatives an even stronger force. As in: absolutely never, young man.
Edward, however, was not troubled by any such association. And this was no doubt a good thing, if he was ever to get his film made.