A POSTCARD FROM UKRAINE
Magic on the metro
There are TVs on the platforms of the Kiev metro. Sometimes they show pop videos, though you can’t hear any music for the screaming of steel wheels. I was watching a girl pop singer seductively mouthing the words of her song when suddenly the image gave way to one of two feet sticking out from under a blanket, a thin river of blood flowing from in between them. It was a TV show rounding up all the car crashes, fires, corpses they had found that day in Kiev. They have the same programmes in Russia, but they don’t broadcast them on public transport. I stared at the feet for half a minute as trains pulled in and passengers rushed towards the escalator. Without the voiceover, it was as if the director was waiting for something to happen, as if the legs might twitch, and the corpse resurrect itself. It didn’t. The body was just lying there, quite dead. The corpse vanished, replaced by another image, I can’t remember what. Then my train arrived. I stepped on board and left the dead of Kiev behind. Someone else would have to watch over them from now on: I could no longer.
We had spent a couple of days apart. Now we were on the metro, travelling to see Father Roman, the priest Edward had called on our very first morning in Kiev, the one who had invited us to his church but was not there when we arrived. This time Edward had agreed in advance the time of our meeting, and been given confirmation that Father Roman would grant an interview.
Edward wasn’t interested in where I had been or what I had seen. He was busy filming the horoscopes on the TV screen in the carriage. People were staring. I found it embarrassing.
‘Edward,’ I said.
‘Shh!’ he said. ‘I’m filming. Do you see how deeply the occult permeates society? Look: it is here for everyone to read, to influence all their thoughts. And they are all just sitting here, as if it is normal. They don’t even notice what is being done to them, right in front of their eyes.’
I was going to say that horoscopes are derived from the ideas of an ancient people who also believed the world was a flat disc floating through space supported by four elephants standing on the back of a giant turtle. It was better to laugh than treat them as a sinister conspiracy, and needlessly alienate viewers. But Edward’s eyes were gleaming. Once again I collided with absolute faith. He was deep in his world again, where it was very straightforward: the occult was the occult. Evil was on the loose, and the people were being misled, and if he had to scare people into believing, then he would do so.
He kept on filming.
Father Roman’s church was in central Kiev, in an area that resembled an embryo of North London, that bleak hinterland of bingo halls, retail parks and housing estates. There was a car showroom, its window full of sleek Japanese vehicles, way too expensive for most of the city’s residents; and diagonally across from it, a giant crane standing guard over the concrete skeleton of a future office block. The first time we had visited, it had been very jarring to be seeking an exorcist in this landscape. A short walk led to a TGI Friday’s, a statue of Lenin and then downtown. Now, however, it seemed almost commonplace. Perhaps I had been with Edward long enough, and knew that with him I would find the demonic everywhere. He had seen it in the villages, on the train, on the outskirts of town, and now, opposite a car showroom. The demons did not hide in dark corners, but rather, worked their evil in the open. They were granted a great freedom by their invisibility, and the refusal of most people to even countenance their existence.
The church stood on top of a hill. It was new, made of orange-brown brick. This is not uncommon with Orthodox churches built since 1991. They are rarely plastered or painted, giving them a weird, half-finished look.
Edward grabbed a medal hanging round his neck. ‘I have to hide this.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s a St Benedict medal. It provides good protection against evil spirits. But it’s Catholic. Father Roman is a good Russian Orthodox priest. He would not be pleased if he saw it.’
Edward, in his element but still on guard, tucked his medal away, and then we passed through an iron gate to take a set of stone steps to the top.
Next door to the church there was a traditional Russian izba, a two-roomed wooden house with ornate carvings around the windows. But this izba was covered in vivid, naïve paintings of disembodied heads attached to wings, surrounded by emaciated angels that looked like famine victims gone to heaven, wearing feathers and white robes, but still with cavernous cheeks and haunted eyes.
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
‘It’s the church, of course.’
‘Then what’s that?’ I indicated the new brick church.
‘That’s also the church. Before it was built Father Roman held services in the izba. It is consecrated and so functions as a place of worship.’
Father Roman was in a meeting, so we sat on a wall and waited. A nun with a simple, kind expression was sitting beside us, collecting money for the church in a metal tin with an icon taped to the front. She explained that it was a church of healing, staffed by ‘Sisters of Mercy’ who cared for the sick and destitute, those with nowhere to go, and nobody to look after them.
On our first visit the place had been abandoned; today it was busy. Ill, pale people were slowly dragging their fragile carcasses up the hill to the little izba. Women, men, heaving their bodies along with them, forcing those twisted cages of flesh and bone to comply just long enough to reach the doors of the psychedelic God-house, where one of the sisters would receive them and welcome them in. As they passed, the sick would stare at Edward, stare at me. They were moving so slowly they had plenty of time to scrutinise our features, and it was clear that we were total strangers, that we had no place in this world.
Edward pulled his camcorder out of the bag and switched on the little screen. To my surprise I saw Father Varlaam’s church, and there, sitting in front of it, was the exorcist himself. He was an even more imposing figure than Father Grigory: a bald head sat on top of muscular shoulders, heavy and blunt as a boulder. A long snow-white beard flowed across black robes draped over a swollen gut, upon which rested a massive gold crucifix, heavy enough to drown a baby.
‘I went back,’ said Edward, ‘and asked him to give me a message for today’s youth. He did not refuse this time.’
Father Varlaam was speaking about a boy, a scrawny, withdrawn creature, who had retreated completely into himself after playing too many computer games. He had sent the mother away at first. The boy then went to psychologists and psychiatrists, but they couldn’t do anything. By the time he was brought back to Father Varlaam he had acquired superhuman strength and it took four men to hold him down. Father Varlaam was certain some kind of demonic force had entered him. And so he had set about praying for the boy. Weeks had passed. He was getting better, but he was not healed yet …
There was no explanation; there was never any explanation. There was just a reality, described, endured, struggled with. It brought me all the way back to the books Edward had given me to read in the earliest stages of our friendship. I had expected a deep analysis of the demonic, some metaphysical probing. But instead the chapters piled up on each other: repetitive, endless lists of spasms and torments that were meaningless, and overwhelming. No one ever reached any deeper than the surface manifestations. The authors were satisfied to stay there.
Then Father Varlaam spoke about how he had become involved in exorcism. It was an interesting story. Unlike Father Grigory, who had come to the Church after the Soviet Union had fallen, he had been a priest since the mid 1970s. And it was while he was studying in the seminary that he had stumbled upon some prayers relating to demons. He asked the senior priest about them, why they didn’t study this part of God’s word.
‘Forget about it,’ said the priest.
But Father Varlaam didn’t have that kind of mind, able to shut out inconvenient facts for the sake of his career and smooth passage through the world. If God had given this information to us, then there was a purpose in it. So Father Varlaam had made a private study of the prayers and started to incorporate them into his services. He had been doing so since the last days of the Brezhnev regime.
Most people are not like this. They prefer an easy life, and are concerned for their careers and prefer to get on well with superiors. They are good at cancelling out voices. But others – like Edward, like Father Varlaam, follow their logic to the end, regardless of the consequences. They can’t live in violation of their conscience, of what they know to be true. And if it means that they have to change the way they live their lives, then they will change their lives. These people are radically honest, and radically consistent. Some people may label them obsessive, or worse, lunatics: I admire them.
It was a good interview. But there was one thing missing. On our first visit to the father a few days earlier, an old woman had come running out of the church as he refused to be interviewed, waving her arms above her head.
‘Father!’ she cried. ‘Anya said that I drank the communion wine but she’s a lying old pissbag and a cunt! A cunt, I tell you! Cunt! Cunt! Cunt!’
‘Masha!’ barked Father Varlaam. ‘Cross yourself and pray for forgiveness.’
Immediately the old woman whimpered, looked down at the ground and crossed herself. She started praying, moving her lips together and mumbling away to herself.
Edward would have loved to have captured that manifestation on film; but when he visited the second time, Masha was calm.
A POSTCARD FROM UKRAINE
Metro fauna
A blind accordionist is standing at the head of an escalator leading to a metro platform. As the throng surges forward, he strikes up a tune, an old war song – I have heard it before, in an old black and white movie on Russian TV. An old woman scuttles past: half-crippled by back pain, she can no longer stand up straight. She drops some money into his tray, and then steps onto the escalator, which transports her to the depths. Once she is gone, a man with a droopy moustache walks past, then loops around, completing a circle. He has a sign around his neck. It reads: I KILL COCKROACHES. The blind accordionist plays on, his military waltz filling the air. I stand there, listening to the music and watching the endless circling of I KILL COCKROACHES, until suddenly a head appears at my waist. It is a man with no legs, propelling himself forward on a trolley. He zips onto the escalator and is then also carried off into the underworld.
Three songs later, and I KILL COCKROACHES is still touting for business. No one has yet spoken to him. But what’s this? Another man wearing a sign around his neck has appeared, and he goes one better. He is wearing a red and white Ukrainian peasant shirt, and the shaky scrawl on his piece of cardboard proclaims:
I CURE CANCER.
Eventually, Father Roman emerged from a door in the side of the new, brick church. He was a little tree stump of a man, rapidly moving forward under a black hat shaped like a cylindrical drum. He walked straight past us.
Edward leapt up from the wall and dashed over to catch him before he vanished. Father Roman recognised Edward, but he was distracted, agitated, and kept looking sideways around him as Edward explained his mission again.
Unlike Father Grigory or Father Varlaam, he didn’t wear a wild, prophet’s beard, and it was hard to imagine him living on locusts and wild honey. (It was hard to imagine Father Varlaam, with his expansive gut, living on locusts and honey also, but his stupendous beard was still grand and biblical.) Father Roman’s facial hair was neatly manicured, and there was something worldly, almost harried in his eyes. He only had twenty minutes to spare, but he kept to his word: he would grant Edward an interview.
We followed Father Roman round the side of the big cathedral, away from curious eyes. Edward had the camera and microphone ready in about a minute, and then immediately set to conducting the interview. Father Roman checked me out briefly, but there was no suspicion in his eyes. He was much too busy to care who I was; and that was good, because I didn’t care who I was either. I was inside Edward’s world again, a pair of eyes and ears only, disembodied, phantasmal. It was a good feeling. I hovered near the camera, playing the part of technical assistant.
Edward’s interview technique was simple. He didn’t attempt to get the exorcist to talk about himself, or the personalities of the possessed, or what demons actually were. He wanted Father Roman to elaborate on his idea that demons were real, ubiquitous, and a threat to everyone. It worked. Soon Father Roman was in full flow, speaking in a hurried, agitated fashion. However, unlike Father Grigory or Father Varlaam his thoughts were less focused on the problems of individual souls but of a more socio-political nature. He saw the demonic at work on a more ambitious, even global level, possessing the institutions and organisations that moulded society. Here, in the twenty minutes he granted us, is what I learned:
(1) Diabolical forces are active in many levels of Ukrainian society. Politicians and businessmen alike hire black wizards to cast spells on their rivals. Father Roman believed that this was happening at the highest levels of power.
(2) Advertisers also utilise occult forces. For example, hidden frames are placed in advertisements to manipulate minds at the subliminal level.
(3) Sects were at work in Ukraine, and they were free to evangelise and do evil without any interference from the authorities. For example, Evangelical Christians and Jehovah’s Witnesses were very active in seeking converts. These were satanic movements that led people from the true path of salvation. When Evangelicals spoke in tongues, we had to wonder what force moved people to produce these ecstatic utterances. Was it the Holy Spirit? Of course not: though it may well be a spirit, it was certainly not holy …
(4) Lastly, there was a spirit of divisiveness at work in the Church itself. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church had declared itself autonomous from the Moscow patriarchate in the early 1990s, rather as if the Irish had created their own pope and seized control of the biggest cathedral in Dublin, tossing out the Roman cardinal. Edward had told me that the Kiev patriarchate also rejected the use of Church Slavonic in services and addressed their congregations in Ukrainian, something anathema to the traditionally minded Moscow Church. And now, according to Father Roman, it was ‘seizing’ the congregations and property of the Moscow Church in Ukraine. The new nationalist government was in collusion with this strategy. The Ukrainian Church had even tried to grab his building, although it had been constructed and paid for by the Moscow patriarchate. The world was very evil; we were living in trying times. He had even heard that monks in the Kiev patriarchate got married. Married monks! Can you believe that? And the Ukrainian Patriarch Philaret, well, he liked to drive around in a big limousine. He was interested in earthly power, not the Kingdom of God.
The sky was starting to drizzle down on us. Father Roman hitched up a long black sleeve and looked at his watch. ‘That’s twenty minutes,’ he said. ‘Is that enough?’ The question was a courtesy; we knew it had to be. Edward declared himself delighted. ‘Good. God bless you, my son.’ With that Father Roman left us, darting over to the consecrated house.
Edward set about examining the film he had just shot. He needed to check that everything had recorded, that the sound and light levels were good. I stood in the background, thinking about Father Roman’s interview. To me, it didn’t sound exactly like what Edward was after. Father Roman had spoken about political power and issues pertaining to Ukrainian nationalism, not the redemption of individual souls. But perhaps Edward had heard it in his own way. He could edit it later.
After a minute or so he turned to me and, in a very blasé voice, as if it were an afterthought, said: ‘By the way, Father Roman is performing an exorcism now.’
‘Now?’ I said.
‘Yes. Why don’t you go in and watch?’
And suddenly, after I had given up, there it was again: the possibility of dark magic, of surreal mystery. Was it only when I stopped knocking that doors would open?
The church was located in the front room of the izba. It was overwhelming – crammed full of glittering icons and vivid frescoes, silver censers, incense, smoke, candle-light and gold, so much gold. The room was writhing with light and colour and tormented human flesh, flesh that stood elbow to elbow, thigh against thigh, nose pressed up against nape. I made my way through it to the back, where there was a little more space to breathe and move, until I found myself standing next to an icon of the infant Jesus emerging from a goblet of wine. The look on his face was calm and infinitely wise, as though he were staring straight out of the picture and into my soul.
As before, the congregation was mostly female, but up here, at the back, there were a lot of men. They had all made their way back here because they were less familiar with the ritual, and were seeking a place to hide. The man on my left, pale and sweating profusely, pain chiselled on his features, was casting around, looking at the icons and the candles, as if he couldn’t decide whether to stay or not. He decided to stay. The women, meanwhile, were waiting with grave expressions on their faces. They weren’t distracted by any of the gold trappings of the room: they were staring straight ahead, or at their feet, lips pressed together. The light in their eyes was inward. They were preparing themselves for what was to come.
This time there were no voyeurs, no suspicious monks lurking in the dark corners. There were no dark corners. The place was tiny, and there was nowhere to hide. Everyone was pressed together, in sin and sweat and fear. I inhaled the scent of pain and desperation, mingling with the heady stench of the incense. There were eighty of us in there. And yet the room continued to fill up, as more and more women with troubled expressions came through the door …
Father Roman entered. It was hard to see him, as he was smaller than most of the women in the front row. I caught a brief glimpse of him as he passed in front of the open space between two heads. Unlike Father Grigory he did not laugh, or set people at ease. His expression was extremely severe. But then again, he was about to challenge the might of Satan: what else could you expect?
Father Roman’s ritual was very different from Father Grigory’s. He started with his back to the congregation, chanting. When he paused the congregation would cross themselves and respond: Lord Jesus Christ, forgive us our sins. I joined in with them and after a few minutes could predict when the crossing and the chant would come. It was quite calming, as I lost my sense of self and merged with the rhythms and gestures and poetry of the service. My sense of self-annihilation grew, as the lack of air and stench of incense made me light-headed. And then, after about ten minutes of floating in space, I heard something strange, a guttural snarling that shattered the atmosphere of peace and contemplation and drew me back to earth. It was a few seconds before I realised that it was a woman.
‘CUNT PUS FUCK!’ she said. ‘Fucking wanker!’
Her voice was strained and strangled. Words were interspersed with barks. A weird rasping: rats’ feet over broken glass. Ah, I thought. Just like in the movies.
‘Cunt! AAAARGGHHHH! Shit! Shit-eating CUNT!’
A shudder ran through the congregation; but this crowd was prepared for these manifestations, and continued praying. I looked up, above the rows of bowed heads: there she was, writhing, jerking about in front of the iconostasis, lashing out at the priest as he advanced towards her. She had a thick mane of dark curls and was in her early forties. For a brief second I caught a glimpse of her features: twisted, vicious, disfigured by bestial hate.
‘Shit-eating CUNT!’
Father Roman, still praying, remained composed. He turned to face her and placed a huge metal crucifix against her forehead. Then with his other hand he took a bushel of leaves and, still chanting, dipped it in a basin of holy water held by an assistant. He stepped closer and suddenly had the woman trapped in a kind of spiritual wrestling hold: his left arm moved suddenly to place the crucifix directly between her shoulder blades, while with this right he set about thrashing her violently on the face with the dripping bushel.
The woman howled, snarled, spat. Father Roman continued thrashing, chanting: Let God arise and all his enemies flee before him. A handful of people were jostling to get a better view, but most were still, eyes focused on the floor. This was not new for them, this was not shocking. On the contrary, they were steeling themselves for something, staring up at the ceiling, or at an icon. I saw sunken cheeks, and haunted expressions … then, suddenly, the woman fell silent. Father Roman blessed her, and began chanting again. Someone else stepped forward to receive prayer and a thrashing in the face. A woman, flustered, rushed past me to grab a plastic bag that was sitting on the floor next to me. This was the exorcised woman, the one who had been screaming and cursing thirty seconds earlier. I wouldn’t have looked twice at her in the street. Once she was out the door she would melt into the crowds of Kiev easily, slip on a train in the metro and disappear behind a door in a high-rise block of flats somewhere. The city would go about its business, oblivious to what had occurred inside this little house, on the floor of this strange little room. Nobody would know of the struggle between the forces of dark and light taking place in her soul …
And so it continued, with people coming forward for prayer, getting thrashed, and then leaving. Some snarled and tried to wrestle the crucifix from Father Roman’s grip, but most willingly accepted their beating. These were meek devils; they accepted that they deserved their punishment for tormenting mortal souls. A woman next to me, quite young, was nervously jogging about on her feet, and the next thing I knew she was at the front, spewing obscenities. She lashed out at Father Roman, but he was used to these attacks and dodged her blow with ease.
It was so strange in there, surrounded by the heat and the flames and the screams. I felt as though we were sealed off from the world outside, inside some strange glittering spacecraft, hurtling through the cosmos, and that we had left earth and Ukraine far behind. Set the controls for the heart of the sun: we were heading for the Eye of God, and Father Roman was excising the demons because you must be pure before you can gaze on the shining face of the Almighty. And it was at that moment of vertiginous disorientation that I looked down at my feet and realised that I was standing on the same linoleum I had on the floor of my kitchen in Moscow.
Suddenly the whole experience came much closer to me: some kind of invasion was taking place. I felt connected to these people, and not only them. All over the former Soviet Union, people were standing on that creamy yellow and brown linoleum. It stretched from Moscow to Kiev and beyond, into Central Asia, right up to China. What could it mean?
Not much. It was a coincidence, of course. But it was a coincidence like seeing my colleague acting in the film on the bus to Kremenchug, or like Edward phoning me as I walked past the Digger’s flat. It ought to indicate a meaning beyond the rather obvious one: that there weren’t too many linoleum designs in the Soviet Union. But what could that other meaning be? And who could I tell about it? And what did it matter?
Anyway, I quickly stopped worrying about it, because at this point I noticed that Father Roman was exorcising an extraordinary number of people. At first I had thought that they were moving towards him one by one. But as I watched him coming nearer and nearer I realised that this was not the case. In fact, it was he who was moving through the church, making his way slowly through the congregation, towards me.
Suddenly Edward appeared in the doorway. Seeing me, he pushed his way through the crowd, then leaned over and muttered in my ear: ‘Father Roman is exorcising everyone in the church. If you don’t want it, just say no thanks.’
I wasn’t convinced. Father Roman was getting closer and closer, and everyone he passed was getting thrashed in the face. The whole room was caught up in a fever. I thought he might already be giving me a damn good thrashing before I managed to get the ‘no’ out. It was time to get out of there.
I ran: the Sisters in the hall didn’t seem surprised to see me making a dash for it, either.
On the way out, however, I was stopped dead in my tracks by the fresco painted over the door. A woman was flying through the sky, and as she went she was tormented by hundreds of little black demons, swarming in the air around her. This was the sort of religious art I liked – full of hell and torment and anguished cries for mercy. Twenty minutes later, when Edward came out, I asked him what it was.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘That’s St Theodora’s journey through the Aerial Toll-Houses.’
‘The what?’
‘You know, the twenty stations in the sky where demons lie in wait for us. When you die, and you ascend towards heaven, they try to stop you by reading a list of your sins. If you have committed a sin, they get to keep you and torment you until the Second Coming. You don’t know about this?’ He was surprised.
‘No.’
‘Why there’s a toll house for adultery, one for sorcery, one for murder, another for sodomy and so on. St Theodora died and passed through each one and then returned to earth in a vision to tell Gregory the disciple of Holy Basil what she had seen …’
‘Hm.’
‘It’s all right, though,’ Edward said. ‘She made it to heaven in the end.’
I loved the way Edward talked about this. I loved that he did not strain to believe, or persuade. It always caught me off guard, the way these demons were as real and as present for him as the clouds that drifted overhead, as the birds crapping in the trees, and the rain pissing on our heads.
I should mention that Edward’s face was red and wet. Bits of leaf were sticking to it.
‘How do you feel?’ I asked.
‘Good’ he said. ‘Very good. There are some aesthetically pleasing features to Father Roman’s deliverance service.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s very dramatic.’
‘Dramatic! Yes, that’s the word!’
‘Very different from Father Grigory’s …’
‘Don’t discount the efficacy of Father Grigory’s ritual …’
‘I’m not saying it wasn’t effective …’ (But I did wonder what ranking Edward would have given it on his scale of one to ten. Now wasn’t the time to ask, however. Edward was supercharged on God.)
‘I said I’d show you something remarkable!’
And then, immediately, he was striding forward, leading me to the centre of town, seeking the next satanic encounter, as if he had already forgotten this climax.
A POSTCARD FROM UKRAINE
Lost property
We arrived at the central train station to buy tickets back to Moscow. Suddenly Edward vanished, as he often did, without explanation. I was left standing by the stairs to the lost property office. After a few minutes he returned. But he didn’t see me. I am good at disappearing, at becoming the invisible man, lost in the mob. I watched him for a while, towering far above the crowd, looking for me, turning his head this way, and that way, like the revolving beam in a lighthouse seeking ships lost in the night. Eventually I stepped into the line of his vision.
‘Where did you get to?’ he asked.
‘Nowhere,’ I said. ‘I’ve been here all this time.’
‘And I didn’t see you?’ Edward was incredulous.
‘I know how to avoid being noticed. Sometimes I project myself, other times I’m good at sucking in my aura.’
Edward stared at me, alarmed: ‘Never get involved in the occult,’ he said, very, very seriously.