Father Grigory was hunched over the wheel of his rusty old orange Lada Zhiguli; Edward was sitting beside him in the passenger seat, chatting away. I was in the back, rotten and filthy as a corpse in a ditch, struggling to wake up.
It had been a rough night. I was obliged to make my bed on a tiny two-seater sofa in the living room, and what sleep I managed to grab was spent being devoured from the inside by a threshing mess of parasites that had entered my system through the milk fresh from the cow’s teat I had consumed just before bedtime. I had never drunk ‘natural’ milk before and doubted my system was up to processing chemicals the way God manufactured them. I am a creature of the industrial world: my organs prefer to interact with strings of molecules that have been abused by men in white coats. I drank it anyway.
Then, just as the parasites finished gnawing their way through my stomach lining, exploding onto the floor in a rush of blood, I felt a pain in my cheek and woke up to the sensation of a mosquito draining my life’s fluid through the sharp proboscis it had inserted into my cheek. I tried to swat it away, but the pathways in my brain were slow to engage and I couldn’t transmit a message to the appropriate limb. By the time I succeeded the creature was already engorged, and the first thing I saw that morning was the mosquito, its gut big as a golf ball, flying away, dizzy – drunk with my blood. Slowly the world crystallised around me, the unfamiliar surroundings became familiar and I remembered where I was. One word formed in my skull, like a fungus in a Petri dish:
Fuck.
Now I was staring at the back of the exorcist’s head, trying to make sense of its place in this world: for Father Grigory was not only too big for the vehicle, but the whole reality it represented. The Zhiguli had trundled off a production line in Tolyatti in the 1980s, back when the Soviet Union was in its final, most toothless stage. It was a car for middle-class Soviet families, for mid-ranking Communist Party members, for managers at big factories producing substandard goods that were both ugly and uncomfortable. No one had ever intended it to carry a huge, bearded, pig farmer in black robes, who had fourteen kids and drove out evil spirits on Wednesday afternoons. And yet it was doing the job perfectly. We drove past the Death Factory, diabolical in the morning sun, and then entered Komsomolsk, where Father Grigory’s church was located.
A POSTCARD FROM UKRAINE
The Komsomolsk real-estate explosion
Komsomolsk consists mainly of dirt, dust and decaying concrete, though some flesh has been incorporated into the mix also. Throughout the day humans can be seen standing around in abandoned yards and by the side of the road, willing their own brains to explode. The earth around them is crowned with fine white crystals: salt is choking the soil, killing off anything stupid enough to try and grow there. And yet even here, in such unpromising conditions, a mini real-estate boom is under way. A two-room apartment in an old Soviet block now costs $12,000 – a fortune by local standards. But who is buying? Those who have jobs work mostly at the Death Factory; and it would take a lot of labour at the lathe to amass that sort of money. Years would pass. The day you moved in, your body, aged and brittle, would be just strong enough to manoeuvre itself to the window, direct its eyes at the sorrowing world beyond the glass, suck a little poisoned air into cracked-leather lungs, and expire.
Many Russian Orthodox priests are relative newcomers to their own religion, having followed radically different career paths in their communist youth. I had met one priest who was a former (Jewish) professor of microbiology and another who had enjoyed a brief career as rock star during perestroika. Father Grigory’s shift had been larger than most, meanwhile: he wasn’t just a priest, but one that did battle with demons. Whatever he had been in his old life, this was a colossal leap. I asked Edward if he knew any details about Father Grigory’s earlier incarnation.
‘What do you mean?’
I thought the question was obvious enough.
‘What did he do before he was a priest?’
‘How would I know?’ He laughed and turned away.
He wasn’t even curious. And yet this was precisely the kind of detail I wanted to know, and had come in search of. It’s what I would have included if I were making a documentary on exorcism: how the priest had entered this world of demons, and the psychological impact on an individual of waging war against the forces of Lucifer. It would provide people with a way into the story. It would draw them closer; enable them to identify, even, with the bearded, remote figures they saw on-screen. But then Edward didn’t want you to identify with the humanity of the exorcists. Perhaps it was even wrong to think of them in that way, as men, outside their divinely ordained role.
His film was going to be a collection of testimonies from the possessed and priests on the effectiveness of exorcism as a tool for dealing with the demonic. It was almost utilitarian. He wanted to make you believe in devils, and then in Christ. It was a propaganda film intended to produce converts. The personal details of priests were trivial in Edward’s eyes.
Well, that was his film, not mine. I persevered: ‘Will you ask him?’
Edward had been discussing the occult. The sudden change in theme led Father Grigory to grow animated. He had been an electrician working in the Death Factory at Komsomolsk. In late perestroika he felt the calling to enter the Church, and had studied for several years in the early 1990s, including a stint in the seminary in Moscow. Then he returned to his home region to take charge of the cathedral.
‘But why did you get involved in exorcism?’ I asked.
But at that point his mobile rang. The ring tone was a Russian pop jingle, a track by a collective of oligarchs’ girlfriends who usually performed in their underwear. He fished it out from under his robes. By the time he had taken the call the church was coming into view and the question was gone, a seed that had fallen on salinated soil.
Nothing would grow there.
The St Nicholas Cathedral, dazzling in the sun, stood on a hill across a stream that divided it from the industrial ruin of Komsomolsk. It was blue and white, set amid trees and, according to Edward, displayed clear signs of the influence of Polish baroque.* The church looked magical, as though the water separated not just two sides of the town but a whole other set of dichotomies besides – the material and the spiritual, the ugly and the beautiful, the sacred and the profane, the miraculous and the banal.
The car pulled up in front of the church gates. A crowd was waiting for Father Grigory; they greeted him with warmth. He wound down his window. A big lad, built like a butcher, with a shaven head called out: ‘Hey, Father Grigory, when are you going to get a haircut?’
Father Grigory laughed. ‘Never! I trimmed my beard once but I was scared of my own reflection.’ He paused. ‘Is Tatiana here?’ He asked.
‘She’s over there.’ The big lad indicated a frail woman in her thirties. I could make out a headscarf, narrow shoulders: that was all.
Father Grigory turned round.
‘Watch this!’ he said, grinning. He leaned out the window, cupped his hand to his mouth and started shouting: ‘Tatiana! Tatiana!’
Suddenly the woman’s legs gave way under her and she collapsed. Father Grigory turned back to me, his eyes gleaming.
‘She’s really badly tormented by her demon. It used to be that when I said her name she’d dance uncontrollably. Now she faints.’ He laughed.
‘She comes every day.’
Father Grigory went ahead into the cathedral while Edward and I stayed in the courtyard with the congregation. After about ten minutes a door in the back of the cathedral opened and the crowd began to shuffle up some steps that led to a dark, narrow corridor. I saw Father Grigory through grimy glass, standing tall and strong between the bare walls of an office that contained only a wooden table and one or two chairs. It was dark, dingy and cavernous in there. But it looked positively sunny compared to the atmosphere in the corridor. A queue was already forming in front of the door, a line of wailing women, all of them wearing different expressions of agony on their faces: so much suffering, and yet the day had only just begun.
I followed Edward up some narrow stairs, tumbling forward at the top through a small door into the main hall of the cathedral. There was room enough for a few hundred faithful in there, and the floor was split up so different services could take place simultaneously in different parts of the building. There were no chairs, of course, and the walls were decorated with murals, frescoes and icons full of meanings I didn’t understand. But that was normal. There was, however, something murky and obscure about the cathedral’s interior. The windows were small and had been placed way up on high, close to the ceiling. And what light that did manage to slip through the grubby glass stayed up there, as if reluctant to touch the soiled ground. The few stray rays that did approach served only to illuminate the dust, spinning in the air around us.
Slowly, slowly this barn of God began to fill up with multiple bodies, belonging to the lame and the halt, the sinful and the righteous, the pious and the unctuous – all the citizens of Komsomolsk who were troubled enough by the state of their immortal souls to attend church on a Wednesday afternoon. I found a space at the back where I felt relatively invisible and stood there holding Edward’s camera tripod (though Father Grigory had given Edward a nema as far as filming the service was concerned, he was still hoping to get an interview on the church grounds later). Some of the parishioners would glance at me, but they didn’t stare: they had seen me arriving in the car with Father Grigory so I was OK. I saw Viktor, nodded. He smiled and nodded back. I was still on good terms with Father Grigory’s right-hand man. That helped me to relax.
A monk, pale and emaciated, was drifting about the cathedral, sliding from pillar to pillar, clinging to its darkest spaces. He was wearing long black robes, and had a wispy beard. His face was inscribed with the haunted look that comes from a life of excessive solitude and silence, as though he had stared into his own inner darkness several times too often. He was pale, gaunt, conspiratorial. Was he a spy, sent by the bishop to observe Father Grigory’s exorcism, to see if anything untoward was taking place? No one else seemed to have noticed him, only me. I thought about warning Viktor, or at least asking him if he knew who the monk was.
In the end, I didn’t. It was just too enjoyable, feeling my own paranoia bleeding into Edward’s and Father Grigory’s and Viktor’s. I felt less isolated in the landscape: I had a stake in it now. And meanwhile the monk drifted, drifted, eyes darting to the left, then to the right. Speaking to no one, seen by no one: but studying all.
Suddenly Father Grigory entered the hall. He stood facing the iconostasis, his back to the congregation. A crowd formed around him. Then, without any explanation or a word of introduction, he started intoning a prayer.
Edward, who had been lighting a candle in front of an icon, walked up to me. ‘This is the moleben, the prayer for the sick. It’s not a prayer for deliverance. We’re not going to see anything interesting here. It will last about ninety minutes. What do you want to do?’
I wanted to leave, but I didn’t want it to look as though I was here strictly for the supernatural fireworks. That would have been crass. I shrugged. Fortunately Edward felt the same way as me, but was less bothered with questions of etiquette.
‘Let’s go outside,’ he said.
A POSTCARD FROM UKRAINE
The beer kiosk
We crossed the bridge in search of nutrients, hoping that we might find some over on the other side. But there was no food there: only kiosks selling beer, beer snacks, and Shok chocolate bars.
The girl behind the counter of the first kiosk was beautiful, conscious of the power her beauty gave her over men, that ability to attract their admiring gazes and turn them into drooling idiots. It was hard not to stare, and she knew that, and yet gave no reaction to the eyes that roamed across her curves. But the gleam in her eye would soon be snuffed out, for I had been in many Komsomolsks before, and knew it was a grim hole that sucked the nutrients out of its people, transforming them into the salt that lay along the road, killing everything green. And so to admire her beauty was depressing. It was wasted, as she sold sweeties and bottles of beer to the assorted alcoholics and vagrants that made up her clientele.
In the kiosk next door, a woman about fifteen years older wore a drab blue overall that hung around her neck like her own life. There were various objects on sale in her shop but the main product was despair. I found a piece of bread. She charged me in roubles, though this was not so much an act of defiance against Ukrainian nationalism as a shrug of the shoulders, a denial that the changes wrought since 1991 had made any difference to the facts of her life.
Outside I bit into the stale bread. There was something hard in it: cherry stones. We sat by the bridge and stared at ants for about an hour, the blind eye of the sun burning a hole in the top of my head, baking my brain in its own useless juices.
Father Grigory was already at prayer when we re-entered the cathedral. It was a typical scene in an Orthodox church. He was facing an altar in front of the iconostasis, chanting in a high-pitched voice, reading from the Bible, surrounded by a small crowd of supplicants for God’s mercy. Is this it? I thought. Edward had told me outside that Father Grigory carried out exorcisms twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays, but that Wednesday was the special day, when the strongest manifestations occurred. This was a Wednesday. But it was hard to imagine that anything very terrifying could erupt out of this very normal scene.
And yet the air crackled electric with anticipation. I could feel it; I had walked into something, something that hadn’t been there earlier in the day. And no sooner had we stepped inside than Edward left me and started roaming on the edge of the crowd, a small video camera under his arm, concealed in the folds of his jacket. Though he had been denied permission to film, he still wanted to be ready to record any strange phenomena that might occur. Nobody would be able to tell where it had been filmed, so Father Grigory would not be harmed.
Meanwhile Father Grigory went on chanting, for five minutes, six minutes, seven minutes. Eight minutes. I was hungry, bored, lightheaded from the sun and heat. It was now five months since Edward had called me, almost seven since I had first met him in the Digger’s kitchen. There had been so many trap doors and dead ends in that time it didn’t feel as though I was looking for anything any more. I was running around in a labyrinth, seeking a Minotaur that had long since vacated the place: only a vague whiff of its shanks remained to remind me why I had entered. It was difficult to place myself inside the quest psychologically, to believe it was real, that anything was ever going to happen. The seeking had become an end in itself: there was no object any more.
And then I heard it: the wail, rising out of the woman’s throat, uncoiling itself from deep, deep within her gut. And it came out from her, snaking outwards and upwards towards the top of the cathedral, towards the vaulted ceiling and the dim light trapped up there. And it just kept coming. And there was something to the tone, and the force, and the way that it just kept rising and rising and rising, uncoiling ever outwards, that was unutterably strange and chilling. There was no quavering; the voice did not grow weary or strained. It was unlike anything I had ever heard. The roots of my hair tingled; a bolt of cold, electrical fear burrowed from the nape of my neck to the base of my spine. I looked around and saw that the howl was coming from Tatiana, the woman from outside the church, the one Father Grigory had made faint.
It was the most anguished sound I had ever heard.
The people in the cathedral froze, transfixed by the howl. Some stared into space, others at each other. Still others craned their necks to try and see the creature that was producing this unearthly noise. Most of them were not used to this, I could tell. How many, I wondered, had come as tourists, simply to listen, to see? Did they feel the fear? Were they breaking into a sweat, like me?
Two full minutes passed, and then the wail stopped. Edward came hurtling towards me, a dark gleam in his eyes.
‘Did you hear that?’ he asked, excitedly.
‘I did.’
‘Go over there. Something is happening. You have to see it.’
I got up and walked towards the crowd, all gathered in a tight circle around Father Grigory, huddling close, for comfort, security, or simply to get a better view. There were a few voyeurs in there, stretching their necks like spectators at a car crash – but hoping for what? Green vomit? A spinning head? A torrent of obscenities through cracked white lips?
It was a bit like being at a rock concert. Taller people, bigger heads kept getting in my way. Father Grigory was still chanting, with his back to the congregation. Wailing Tatiana was standing close to him. And then I realised that he was reading from a list of names, and that was what his chant was: the names of the possessed, of the sick, of the damned. When he reached the end of the list he would dip a cloth into a basin of holy water, then turn round and splash it over the people standing behind him. When he did this the crowd rushed forward, thirsting to receive more of the blessed H2O.
Tatiana, the most tormented, received extra holy water. Father Grigory smacked her on the face with the cloth, positively drenching her in the stuff. The lads who had greeted him at the gate were helping him, holding the basin. They chortled merrily as he pelted her: they were really enjoying the spectacle. Even Father Grigory’s eyes were sparkling with a wry humour.
This note of levity was startling. Where was the fear, the dark, grim fascination I saw in the wild, staring eyes of Edward?
I didn’t think Father Grigory was mocking this woman. Rather, for him, performing an exorcism was a part of life that was integrated into his everyday experience, like working in the fields, disciplining his kids, or mucking out the sty. It all belonged in the same reality. His world was an earthy place, and he approached the business of expelling a demon in the same way: robustly, without great drama. Father Grigory had a keen sense of humour that lit up the world and made it lighter, but without making things trivial.
And so it went on. Father Grigory kept reciting names, and then periodically turning round to douse the people with holy water. But after that initial tormented wail, very little else happened. Slowly the electricity ebbed out of the crowd. The people around me grew listless. Formerly enthusiastic spectators drifted off to the outer regions of the mob. Some were beginning to look a bit bored, even.
I kept standing there, waiting, waiting for another wail, for someone to curse, to start smoking from their eyeballs. But: nothing. Father Grigory kept on chanting. The crowd occasionally pressed closer to him, then fell away again. Edward was nearby and I could see that he was talking to a woman. She was wearing a headscarf. He was earnestly debating with her under his breath …
At the forty-minute mark there was another outburst. An old woman in front of me cursed once or twice, danced on the spot, then collapsed. Someone caught her, picked her up, and Father Grigory splashed her with the holy water. After that, she was calm. Of course, I kept my eye on her, in the hope that something might happen again, but one splash was all she needed. And the same was true for Tatiana. She was standing by Father Grigory, her stare fixed at her feet. Whatever demon had been tormenting her, for now it was cowed, subdued. Father Grigory drew the sermon to an end and then the congregation formed a long queue in front of a metal tank of holy water at the side of the church.
Everyone in the building joined the line, except for me and the ghostly monk I had seen earlier. All this time I had been watching him, as he hovered on the outskirts of the crowd, somehow unseen by all the others. And although I was watching him, he was indifferent to my gaze: he didn’t see me.
He took one final look round, drew up his skirts and headed for the door, vanishing as quickly as he could into the brilliant blue sky, the vast green earth, the white crystals of sand atop the dirt, the crumbling concrete.
After the monk disappeared I waited a minute and then stepped out of the gloom into the sunlight myself. It was a beautiful day on the top of the cathedral steps, and bright. So bright the light felt like needles inserted into my retinas. I was a subterranean creature that had surfaced too early, emerging into the late afternoon when it needed night and the moon and the cold darkness. I had to close my eyes and shut out the world the sunlight exposed: the towers of Komsomolsk, the vibrant blue sky, the lush, verdant green of the trees. The sudden change was jarring. It was hard to accept that this luminous reality had anything to do with the anguish and grief that had been unleashed within the walls of the cathedral: the rituals and prayers taking place in there could only be completely alien to it.
It was past three in the afternoon; we had been hanging about near the church for six hours. I hadn’t eaten properly; I hadn’t slept. I had been on my feet most of that time. I walked over to the wall enclosing the church garden to sit down and think for a few minutes, before Edward emerged from inside the cathedral. Slowly it dawned on me that I had just seen the very thing Edward had been preparing me for over a period of nearly six months. I had just witnessed an exorcism.
Hm.
I sat there for a few minutes trying to get some handle on it all. What did I feel? Was that really the end? Was that the climax of all these meetings and discussions, all that wandering in the labyrinth?
Yep.
What now? Where to next? What should I do? What should I think?
Suddenly I was overwhelmed by a dark, dark feeling. It’s difficult to describe: I felt simultaneously hollow and yet heavy, empty and yet filled with a solid, dense darkness. My body ached, my thoughts were sluggish. But slowly they started to come, and to take on definite shape … forming into a question that can neatly be summarised as follows:
Is that it?
I’d come all this way to see the fully mustered might of the powers of darkness and the best they could manage was a sad woman wailing, and an old biddy doing a funny dance. If they hadn’t been demons I’d have asked for my money back. The ones Edward had shown me on tape were much better, much more powerful. They made their victims lash out violently, curse, foam at the mouth.
But then I caught myself: what was I thinking? Did I actually want humans to be tormented by grinning devils, to see black hooks tearing scorched flesh apart in a lake of fire? No, I didn’t, no more than travellers attracted to India or Africa ‘want’ poverty to persist in lands they would rapidly lose interest in if they were full of retail parks and office blocks. I was in search of something else: the same dark, surreal world Sergei had evoked for me the first time he had mentioned the Diggers, eight years earlier.
I recognised the strange, heavy yet empty feeling in my chest. It was a damp, bad feeling of hopelessness and futility. I kept believing the tall tales of cracked visionaries from a desire to see amazing things, and yet I always ended up disappointed. This was worse than the anticlimax of the Digger’s tour through a sewer. I had never asked myself the question What if nothing happens? though it was always there, staring me in the face. But I couldn’t ask it, because it’s impossible to stay inside a reality if you start to question it. You undermine its foundations that way. But by losing myself in it, I was colluding in my own defeat. Was it a Catch 22? Or the Sword of Damocles? I didn’t much care. I was too busy feeling empty and useless.
Edward stepped out of the church. He looked around for a few seconds and then spotted me sitting on the wall. As he walked over I saw that his eyes were dim, and his tread was heavy. He looked solemn. He wasn’t feeling too excited about what we had just seen either.
‘Did you see that woman talking to me in the church?’
‘Yes.’
‘She was a tourist. She had heard about Father Grigory’s exorcisms and had come to see one for herself.’
‘What did she think?’
‘She thought it was hysteria.’
‘I see.’ It didn’t seem unreasonable. Regardless of what ‘hysteria’ means, I knew what the woman was getting at. Sitting there, I knew that I was losing my grip on Edward’s world – that it would soon be difficult if not impossible to remain there, to see things his way. In fact, Edward had raised the woman’s doubts precisely because he feared that I was no longer viewing the war against demons through his eyes, but rather saw a sad, dismal manifestation of poverty and mental illness. He rushed to dispel that interpretation. ‘But it’s not hysteria! I asked her: did you hear how long that woman wailed for? Minutes! And without a break! That voice was not human … All the same,’ he said, ‘on a scale of one to ten, I mean measuring in terms of phenomena connected to the presence of the demonic …’
He raised the index and middle finger of his right hand. They stood together like sentries on duty, his thumb folded in on his palm.
‘I’d give that a score of two.’
An hour passed. We were still outside the church. Father Grigory was still providing spiritual succour to his parishioners. My depression was gradually lifting, though that had little to do with Edward’s imitations of accents of the British Isles. He had been doing them for some time now, and he was particularly proud of his cockney. ‘Olroit mite’ he said. ‘Owz it goin’?’ I smiled weakly, hoping he would stop. He didn’t. Then he tried a new accent that I didn’t recognise. It turned out that it was mine. He was picking himself up again, reanimating his soul, recovering from the disappointment of what we had seen in Father Grigory’s church and preparing himself to set forth again with his hunting equipment, to trap a greater demon. Edward was resilient that way.
‘Did I ever tell you about the time I was in Krasnoyarsk, in Siberia?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘I had heard there was a very powerful exorcist connected to a monastery there. So I travelled out to visit the priest. But when the chief monk of the monastery discovered what I was looking for, he locked me out.’
‘What?’
‘He didn’t want me to talk to one of his monks. Of course the fact that it was thirty-six below and I was freezing to death out there in the snow didn’t bother him. Mind you, he was a very scandalous fellow. A week before, he had got drunk at a wedding party and shot a gas gun at the guests.’
‘What? The chief monk?’
‘Yes. He’d had a bit too much to drink.’
‘Did anything happen to him?’
‘Oh no. He had friends in high places. Some members of the church hierarchy protected him.’
‘Did you ever get to meet the exorcist?’
‘No, not that time.’
A middle-aged woman, dressed head to toe in green, was standing nearby, listening to us speak English. Her face was puffy and red and the look in her eye was expressive of a life rich in suffering. She was trying to figure out who we were, and what we were doing in Komsomolsk. Eventually she summoned the nerve to approach us directly.
‘Where are you from?’ she asked.
‘Moscow,’ said Edward, pointing at himself. ‘Scotland.’ He indicated me.
The woman was startled. She was from some village located deep in the great void of deprivation and hopelessness. She hadn’t expected to meet such interesting characters on the steps of a village church.
‘Why are you here?’ she asked.
Edward explained. Her eyes widened further. ‘My … but that’s very interesting.’ Edward smiled, and then turned the attention towards her. ‘And why are you here to see Father Grigory?’ he asked.
She started to explain, now looking at Edward, now looking away. She had heard of Father Grigory, and knew that he was a man of God with experience of casting out evil spirits.
She was cursed.
The words rushed out of her, in a mix of Russian and Ukrainian. It was difficult to follow what she was saying, and Edward was not interpreting, but rather urging her to open up and tell him as much as possible. I remember a string of unfortunate incidents: one husband had left her, and another had appeared to take his place. But perhaps this new one had beaten her; one of them certainly had. There had also been a miscarriage. She had brought her daughter, a teenager, with her: the girl was newly married, but finding it difficult to conceive. There was too much bad luck in her life to believe it was simply accidental. Something was going on; something was not right in the fabric of reality.
Edward was leaning forward, giving her his full attention. She wasn’t used to having people listen to her so closely. Emboldened, she continued. ‘And then it started …’
‘What?’ said Edward.
‘After the miscarriage I began building a new house in my village. But it didn’t go well. Strange things happened …’ She hesitated.
‘Please,’ said Edward. ‘I’m listening. Don’t worry. I believe you.’
‘One morning I was inspecting the house. We were building a wall. And there, between the bricks, were cracked eggs.’
‘What?’
‘Eggs, all cracked, with the yolk and the white dripping down …’
‘Strange,’ said Edward.
‘Yes, but that’s not all. The next day I went out and the bricks had been rearranged. They were piled on top of each other, like a … like a pyramid. And then a few days later I found clumps of human hair between the bricks.’
This is what I thought:
Somebody is fucking with this poor woman.
But that wasn’t what Edward was thinking. He looked back at me, raised his eyebrows, and continued probing for more details.
‘Tell me,’ he asked her. ‘Do you ever feel a strange sensation in your spine?’
The woman looked startled. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Do you ever get a strange sensation in your back, right between the shoulder blades …?’
No Edward, I thought, No, don’t do this …
‘Well, I’m not sure …’ she said, but I could see that she was thinking, Actually, maybe yes …
Edward turned to me, eyes wide open, nostrils flaring. Proof! ‘Do you ever hear a noise like a mosquito, and then feel a chill? You see the demon, it takes a form of ether and then enters through the spine.’
If she hadn’t felt it before, she was about to realise she had.
‘I’m not sure, well … now that you mention it … Oh please won’t you get Father Grigory to pray for me? He told me to come back on Saturday, that he’s just too busy today! Can you talk to him, please? I travelled three hours to get here …’
But at that moment a nun came over and invited us to join Father Grigory for lunch. Edward told the woman he would talk to Father Grigory and see what he could do.
The nun led us to the refectory building off to the side of the church. A little doorway opened onto a set of stairs that took us to a small underground complex of rooms and narrow tunnels. It looked like the sort of place the Bolsheviks might have shot someone in. Lined up in the corridor were yet more women with expressions of misery and woe, women whose bodies and souls were mere sacks of suffering. They were everywhere, stuffed into every available nook and cranny of the cathedral complex. There had been men in the church, but most of those who suffered from possession were women. Where were the men? I suspected:
(1) At work
or
(2) Dead
or
(3) Dead drunk.
Edward and I were ushered into a small kitchen dominated by a table set for three. It was heaped high with food and drink: pelmeni, potatoes, salad, strawberries, pickles and conserves. Father Grigory sat down, said grace and then instructed us to tuck in.
Ministering to so many suffering women had given him an appetite. He wolfed down his repast while his eyes, alert and canny as always, sparkled with humour and mischief.
‘Hey, foreigner,’ he said. ‘Why aren’t you touching the fruit? Eat a strawberry.’
‘All right,’ I said.
‘What do you reckon?’
It wasn’t quite the size of my fist, but it was pretty tasty. ‘Good,’ I said.
‘You’re right. It’s very good. Now try the pelmeni.’
Pelmeni are balls of soggy dough containing gristle and fragments of bone, a cocktail usually described on the package as ‘meat’. I had eaten a lot of pelmeni in my time as I could usually boil up a bowl in ten minutes or so. I never enjoyed them, of course, but if I choked down enough it could kill the hunger long enough for me to get to sleep. These pelmeni, however, were unlike any I had ever eaten before.
‘Notice anything strange?’ asked Father Grigory.
‘They actually taste good,’ I said.
He looked at me for a second, wondering if I meant that the way it sounded or if it was an effect of translation. Then he continued:
‘They contain fish.’
Father Grigory was fasting and so could not eat meat. His cook, however, had invented fish pelmeni as a tasty alternative to the ‘meat’ variety. Edward was impressed. Suddenly he launched into another lyrical flight about how fantastic life in Ukraine was. He wanted me to live here. ‘Twelve thousand dollars,’ he said, ‘that’s not so much. You could buy a flat here, Daniel, then you could visit Komsomolsk as often as you liked.’
‘That would not amount to a great many visits,’ I said.
‘Sorry?’ He looked startled.
‘Nothing.’
Then Edward turned to Father Grigory: ‘I mean, you have corruption here, but it’s not that kind of corruption, not like we have in Russia …’
For the last forty-eight hours Father Grigory had just been listening, nodding his head, patient and quiet. Now, however, he interrupted Edward:
‘There’s a book of priests in the Ukraine. It lists details about every priest: where he’s been, what he’s done. In this book it says that I’m an alcoholic.’ He stared at Edward, who was shocked.
‘But that’s not true,’ said Edward.
‘That’s what it says in the book: that I’m a bad priest. An alcoholic.’
Edward hesitated. This had knocked him off course. ‘But where did the information come from?’
‘Some journalist. He never spoke to me, of course. He just came to the town, asked one or two people. Someone said I’m an alcoholic. And so it went in the book.’
‘But that’s terrible.’
‘That’s not all. Some people in the village think I’m a black wizard.’
‘What? Why?’
‘Because Marilyn follows me through the streets of the village.’
‘The pig?’ Edward laughed.
‘Yes. The fact that she follows me shows that I have a supernatural control over the animal kingdom. I, therefore, am a black wizard.’
‘Father Grigory …’
‘It’s true. And they steal from me.’
‘The villagers steal from you?’
‘Yes. They steal chickens, eggs.’
‘But you’re their priest!’
‘They still steal. One time I waited up all night for the culprits to come. They came creeping over my fence at dawn, just as the sun was rising. There were two or three of them. I shot a flare gun at them. That scared them, I can tell you. They haven’t been back since.’
‘That’s terrible.’
‘Other people in the village have threatened to report me to the authorities, because I deliver my children myself. They say it’s against the law, that I’m endangering the health of my wife and children. I told them: go ahead. Call the State Prosecutor, if you like. I don’t care.’
Edward was reeling. This was not his Ukraine. This was some other place, somewhere nastier. Father Grigory was describing a world inhabited by poor, spiteful, lazy, greedy, envious bastards. That is to say, by the same shining specimens who live everywhere else on our beautiful planet. Edward was finding it difficult to process: ‘But Father Grigory, why?’
‘Envy,’ said Father Grigory simply. ‘I work hard and I have a big house and land. There are people in the village that don’t work at all. They just sit around drinking all day, doing nothing. They are waiting until I improve the land. Then they will call the police and try and take it off me. They don’t want to work: they just want to steal what I have done. That’s why I’m building a tall fence around my farm. I have three people working on it for me, right now, even as we are sitting here, talking: because I can’t trust my neighbours.’
Edward sat in silence for a moment, thinking of what to say. Suddenly he remembered: ‘Listen, Father, I met a woman outside –’
‘I’m too busy. Let her make an appointment.’
‘No, wait – it sounds like a serious attack of the demonic.’ He reiterated the symptoms the woman had described to us.
Father Grigory shrugged. ‘It doesn’t sound like she’s possessed to me.’
Edward blinked. ‘But Father, what about the eggs?’
‘Someone’s messing her about. They bought eggs at the market, and cracked them over the bricks.’
‘But the hair?’
‘Someone pulled his hair out, and put it there.’ He bit off a chunk of bread.
‘But the rearranged bricks?’
‘Someone rearranged the bricks, too,’ he said, spitting crumbs as he chewed on the bread. ‘It’s not hard.’
Edward was shocked. ‘But really, Father!’
Father Grigory gave the earnest young man from Moscow a look.
‘Are you married?’ he asked.
‘Not yet,’ said Edward.
‘How old are you?’
‘Twenty-nine.’
‘Then it’s time you found a wife.’
Edward laughed. Father Grigory did not.
‘Get yourself a hohlushka.* They’re good girls, pretty girls. And then have some children. But not less than four. Four is the minimum.’ He wagged a finger. ‘Now excuse me, I must return to my parishioners.’
Father Grigory got up to leave. But Edward was not to be deflected so easily. I heard them debating in the corridor. Finally, he succeeded in getting Father Grigory to talk to the woman.
Father Grigory still had some work to attend to, so after dinner we went above ground and went for a walk amid the forest behind the church. Edward was moved by the beauty of nature:
‘Look at the birds singing,’ he said, ‘at the flowers growing, at the sunlight spilling through the leafy canopy overhead, casting dappled shade upon the ground. When you see this, then it’s clear that our Creator is kind, and that he has made for us a kind creation. Why then do people rush to see violent movies? Why do they fill their heads and souls with such rubbish? Why?’
He was genuinely puzzled, but then, he lived in another reality in more ways than one. Edward liked folk music and mediaeval chant. He was a reader of the Bible. He was a good, kind man, who struggled to emulate Christ the way Christians are meant to: many times I had seen him empty his pockets and give all his cash to the poor, even if he was left with no bus fare home, or without money to buy food.
I, however, thought of all the microscopic beasts at our feet. At that moment they were either engaged in some form of drudgery or torturing and eating one another. Elsewhere, bigger animals were doing similar things. Meanwhile Edward had recently witnessed a woman howl for forty minutes owing to what he believed was a demonic presence in her soul. If, at that moment, I had wanted to argue for the essential kindness of the Creator, I wouldn’t have looked to nature for proof of it.
I’d come to Ukraine in search of exorcists and the possessed, expecting I’d find people creating and inhabiting private realities, people like the Digger. Now, suddenly, I realised I’d been looking in the wrong place. Father Grigory may have inhabited a world very different from mine, but nevertheless it was grounded in tradition and philosophy and theology, in a set of values and beliefs that were held communally, and that hadn’t been invented by any one individual. His exorcisms took place in an overall worldview that allowed for the existence of the demonic, but also allowed for human folly and weakness. Father Grigory had strong opinions, but he wasn’t credulous or naïve. He didn’t believe in every claim of demonic possession; he applied it to a system he had inherited first, and knew well that many of the people who came to him were sick or suffering from more earthly causes. He believed in the demonic because his faith instructed him to, and because he had seen it at work in its victims, and because he had seen the alleviation that came from his exorcisms.
There was something robust and earthy about what he did, therefore. In fact, in his hands, the rite became shockingly unfantastic, pragmatic, almost practical. Tatiana came every week for some sort of controlled relief from the demon that haunted her. But it could never be cast out once and for all. Demons or no demons, Father Grigory knew that he was relieving pain, and making it easier to live with wretched poverty, with illness, in a place where the people had benefited little from the actions and machinations of the country’s elite. For him, performing an exorcism was part of the world, like healing a sickness, like milking a cow, like delivering a baby. It was natural.
Edward, however, was different. And only now did I see how different he was. Everywhere he looked, he saw demons. In sickness, in depression, in misfortune, he was always ready to jump to the magical answer first. It was an exciting world he inhabited, but a terribly isolating, and dark one.
Did anyone believe in demons as much as Edward? Even the priests cared less. And was it not a small part of the Bible? But he spent all his energy and money on this film, travelling around Russia with his camera, recording these confessions, trying to get the demons on film, believing that if he pinned them down like that he could persuade people, and finally get them to share his view of the world, to commit to its truthfulness and tangible existence.
This was more than just the missionary impulse, the urge to proselytise that comes with any deeply held belief. It was more radical. Because if he was different from the priests, if he was more obsessed, more possessed even by the idea, if even among them he was isolated, then what else could he do but try and persuade other people that he was right? It’s hard to carry a reality around inside you and just keep it there. You want to share it. Why else had the Digger cast around for followers, and invented all his schools of thought and science? Why did he need to take his world, with its creation myth, rituals, art and philosophy, out of his head and make it communal? Because if you don’t share a reality, and get others to agree with you that it exists, then what are you left with? Solipsism, psychosis, alienation, madness.
Edward was not egoistic like the Digger. He didn’t need to be the absolute monarch of a tribe. But now I understood better why he had been so keen to involve me in his travels, even after I had told him I had no useful media contacts. He didn’t want to convert me to Orthodox Christianity, but to something more personal: he wanted to convert me to his reality. Hence the books and films, the long disquisitions, the endless accounts of horrific manifestations over cups of coffee, this tour through Ukraine in pursuit of evil: he wanted someone in there with him, seeing the world the way he saw it, giving aid as he did battle with demons.
Later that evening we returned to Father Grigory’s house. Kids were crawling everywhere. I was more used to them now, and they paid less attention to me, as if we had come to some sort of accommodation of each other’s existence. Rosa was holding one of them, the original chunk of boy that had been pawing my ankles on my first night in the village. Too young to realise I was no longer of any significance and about to exit his reality entirely, he stumbled towards me in search of more food, but fell just before he reached his target, and whacked his skull off the table leg. He didn’t cry though. He just screwed up his eyes, rubbed his forehead, and then got up. This kid was indestructible.
Matushka stomped in.
‘So you saw the otchitka?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Did you like it?’
I didn’t know what to say to that.