Yura crept into the workshop the next morning at five, starting the potter’s wheel on which he moulded wet clay into cups. He wasn’t concerned about letting us sleep, and as he worked he listened to the radio. A voice from some faraway studio was mumbling about Paris, where a series of riots were entering their second week. The youth in the banlieues were setting fire to cars, smashing windows and attacking the police, and the excitement of this destructive rage was too much to contain: the voice on the radio informed us that the fires and violence had now spread to Italy and Belgium.
The riots had started while I was still in Moscow, exposing to the world another France, one far removed from the images propagated in art films or holiday brochures. For decades grim suburbs had been forming on the edge of Paris and other cities, holding French citizens descended from North African immigrants who were less assimilated than their parents had been. A film about this world, La Haine, had made a splash in the early 1990s, but after that – nothing; nobody, as far as I was aware, had ever bothered to report on this shadow France.
I was fascinated by the unfolding revelations, but now realised that I literally hadn’t thought about the riots from the moment I had arrived in Petropavlovka. And there was something slightly alarming about the ease with which I had forgotten the world beyond, and not only that, but the ease with which I had forgotten I had forgotten. Had anything else slipped my mind? Unless it was also reported on the radio, how was I to know? Did I have children I didn’t know about? Was there perhaps an unremembered diagnosis of an incurable disease, a fat, greasy tapeworm swelling in my belly? No, no … I didn’t think so. The amnesia wasn’t that bad. But I was impressed: Vissarionites came here to disconnect from the world and build a new one. It was working on me too.
Yura switched to the weather forecast. Why should he listen? The radio transmissions might as well have been describing events on a different planet. And besides, there was nothing shocking for him in these riots taking place in rich, civilised France. He knew the end was on its way; that it was already here, in fact.
Whatever was going on in Paris was just another sign, one among many.
Meanwhile, the children of the world to come, those who would one day cast off their bodies and colonise the planets, were gathering in the centre of the Abode of Dawn, on the perimeter of the circle, around the sculpture of the angels. They stood facing up towards Vissarion’s house. I added my flesh to the mass, but kept my distance, standing on the opposite side of the statue with my back to the Messiah.
I recognised some of the faces in the crowd: Antonina was there, along with Bjorn Borg, Alim and a man called Adrian, at whose house I had eaten dinner the day before. Alim and Yura called him ‘Castro’. He was an astrophysicist from Cuba, a balding, mild-mannered man with multiple degrees from prestigious universities, fluent in Spanish, Swedish and Russian, and competent in English besides. Remarkable, certainly, but I was accustomed now to the extraordinary CVs to be found among the Vissarionites. In his new life he was the headmaster of the school on the mountain. He wouldn’t tell me whether Vissarion’s children had any brains or not. His silence, of course, spoke volumes.
Alim nodded to me. Hanging back from the main crowd, his eyes darting left and right, he looked like a bouncer at a nightclub, waiting for trouble. Suddenly a man in a hooded green cape appeared at his side; Alim brought him over to me: ‘This is Sanya,’ he said, ‘our village chronicler. He knows everything about our history. He will explain the mysteries of our new rite to you … And by the way, you owe me four hundred roubles.’
‘Eh?’
‘Food and lodging, man, food and lodging.’
It was a bit jarring to be hit up for cash in such a holy place, just before the start of so sacred a ceremony, but at the same time the sum was very small so I didn’t think Alim was under the tutelage of aliens, as the driver had been. I paid him and he returned to his place on the outskirts.
Sanya was a little man with sharp, shrewd eyes and a pointy red beard. His cape made him look like a character from The Hobbit. ‘In the world’ he had been a sculptor, working in all media. He wondered if I knew his work.
Eight years earlier I had toured the Yusupov Palace in St Petersburg where Rasputin was murdered. In the basement there was a bizarre display of wax dummies, representing the mad monk and the various aristocratic conspirators who had shot, poisoned, stabbed and drowned him in their efforts to stop him causing the downfall of the monarchy. They didn’t look human at all, but rather like a group of alien body snatchers that had hatched out of their pods before they were ready, with bulbous fingers and noses, crude straw hair and glass eyes that shone with dementia, frozen for ever in pointless acts of savagery.
Sanya was the artist responsible for this glittering tableau of cruelty.
Alim and Yura had both spoken of the liturgy as if it would be the climax of my experience in the community, even more so than my interview with Vissarion himself. I would hear beautiful new songs and prayers, witness the ritual, see the wonderful temple at the peak of the mountain and then be present for the villagers’ weekly meeting with Vissarion (assuming he turned up, that is, for, as Alim had said, he could not always be relied on to manifest himself). Then I would listen as the Teacher responded to the questions that had been burning in the souls of his disciples, answering them definitively for inclusion in the Last Testament, so that future generations would know exactly how to deal with these situations, and there need never be any ambiguity and doubt on earth ever again.
At last, the priest arrived, and the choir with him, entering the circle and walking up to the angels. They were all dressed in white; my ghost-guide from the day before was among them. The priest walked up to the statue and pulled a cord, ringing the bells suspended from their wings. The chimes drifted out into the cold morning air, over the trees, towards the mountain, killing, so the Teacher said, all harmful organisms in the air. The vibrations slowly diminished and then silence returned, rushing in to fill the space around the statue, the trees, the assembled fleshly bodies of the congregation, hovering around us, an almost tangible presence. The whole village held its breath. And then another bell, from way up on the mountain, responded. The choir burst into song. The villagers stepped into the circle and dropped to their knees. The liturgy had begun.
The priest moved among the kneeling worshippers with a bucket of warm water, and they washed their faces and hands. ‘They are not washing away sin,’ said Sanya as Antonina purified herself, ‘but rather cleansing themselves symbolically of negative feelings.’ The liturgy was celebrated twice a week, on Wednesday evenings and on Sunday mornings, but it was only on Sundays that the full ceremony was performed. It took several hours as the community ascended the mountain, starting in the centre of the village and slowly making their way up to the peak, stopping fourteen times along the way to sing the praises of the Father God. ‘Fourteen is a significant number for us,’ said Sanya. ‘The fourteen stops mirror the fourteen points of the Star of Bethlehem that you see above the angels; and our village also has fourteen streets.’
‘Why fourteen?’ I asked, though it was certainly in keeping with Vissarion’s curious penchant for numbers without any strong symbolic resonance.
‘Because the teacher was born on the 14th of January!’ said Sanya. So in fact, there was symbolism; it was simply lost on anyone who was not a believer.
‘For a guy who claims to have absolutely no ego, he’s got a nice personality cult going here … his picture’s everywhere, they started counting time again from his birth, his birthday is a holiday, and now fourteen points on the star because he was born on the 14th?’
Be quiet, Lucifer.
Cleansed of their negative feelings, the gathered worshippers began singing one of the community’s oldest hymns, based on a prayer written by Vissarion himself. Musically it sounded very close to traditional Orthodox chant. This was not strange: every new revelation must start raw, and base itself on established forms, only slowly developing its own styles as it matures and grows in confidence. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I was amazed that there were no anthropologists in the Abode of Dawn, because here was an opportunity to study the formation of a religion as it happened. The Vissarionites were open; I didn’t think they would turn away someone who came in a spirit of enquiry. If anything, they would like the attention.
The song finished, the assembled villagers rose from their knees and started trudging through the snow towards the Holy Mountain.
The first stage was over.
Slowly, very slowly, we climbed towards the peak. This time, however, I didn’t grow tired, as the pace of the congregation was slow and the stops came frequently, each one lasting several minutes while the Vissarionites prayed and praised, singing slow, sacred and ethereal paeans to God, light and Mother Earth.
Semyon, Sanya and I lurked in the trees, shivering in the cold like the unclean excluded from the temple. I had chosen to stand there because I wanted to respect the privacy of the believers, although in truth nobody would have cared if I had been two miles away or breathing over their shoulders. Just like the night before, when I had stood by the statue of the angel and the Vissarionites had emerged from the taiga, glances passed straight through us, or registered us as part of the scenery only. To the assembled villagers, secure in the omniscience of the Teacher, we didn’t really exist.
Meanwhile Sanya talked about the liturgy, stressing openness and flexibility as its central virtues. Although two hundred people lived in the village, only half were present. Attendance was not compulsory, though it was, of course, better to attend; but Yura, who was the brother-in-law of the Son of God, had decided not to bother, and was spending the morning working on his clay cups. As for the content of the liturgy, Sanya said it was a creative process, and it was always changing, unlike the hymns and rituals of more established religions, and thus superior. Every year they added something new. ‘We don’t sing the same songs. For the Teacher says that a fixed canon stops development, and that dogma is the beginning of death. Life is movement,’ he said, smiling.
The villagers finished a hymn and moved upwards. The gradient became steeper; remembering my struggle the day before, I thought of the older members of the community. This climb had to be difficult for them.
‘Yes,’ said Sanya. ‘Some people do ask, “Why do we have to climb? Why is the liturgy so long. Why does the Teacher make it so hard for us?”‘ But Sanya brushed these objections aside: ‘As we climb the mountain and pass from stage to stage we clean ourselves of our negative emotions, and we become spiritually renewed. We regain our inner harmony, as we move away from civilisation and closer to God …’
‘Sounds like a lame excuse to me,’ said Semyon.
Sanya was a good storyteller, easy to listen to. There was nothing rigid or incoherent about the way he spoke, and he didn’t just repeat the facts I already knew, but embellished them as we moved upwards. No one had died in the Abode of Dawn yet, for example, and only a few had succumbed to bodily decay in the greater community. The believers were still young and strong, and growing in number all the time. As a result they had not yet developed any fixed funeral traditions, though death was considered a cause for celebration. Vissarion condemned grief as a sin. It was an expression of egoism, a pity for the self, not the deceased, whose soul had been released to continue its growth and ascent upwards. Not only humans grieve of course; elephants and apes do too. No matter: this was another part of nature that had to be overcome if we were to successfully reorder the constellations.
He spoke about the Old Believers too, though in more positive terms than Sergei. If the ones in Petropavlovka had waged war with the first believers, in the taiga they had actually helped the constructors of Vissarion’s Holy City, showing the strange tribe of displaced metropolitans the paths through the forest and which nuts and berries were edible and which were not. Without their help the early settlers would not have survived; but now the Vissarionites were inheriting the forest from them: ‘They are fading away,’ said Sanya. ‘They drink wine and marry outside their community, and so become assimilated to mainstream society.’ He said this with sadness; he respected the dissidents who had preserved their faith for centuries in the wilderness.
Then we reached the Heavenly Abode. A wooden cross I hadn’t seen the day before marked the point where the really sacred territory of the mountain began. Sanya explained that from here to the peak, everything was considered ‘the temple’. There were three levels, the first of which contained Vissarion’s house and those of the families that served him. Beyond that was the area where the villagers had their meetings with the Teacher after the liturgy. And then finally there was the actual temple building, located on the peak, one kilometre above sea level. Somewhere in that area there was also a small house to which Vissarion withdrew when he needed to be alone. That was where he had written the Last Testament.
The other inhabitants of the mountain were: the gatekeeper, who with his dog kept a watchful eye over the home of the Holiest Man on Earth; a gardener; a housekeeper; and, of course, Vadim, his amanuensis, who lived in the smaller house beneath the Teacher’s. Sanya explained how Vadim had got the job of disciple #1 and gospel writer. It was a very prosaic tale:
‘Er … in the early days, the Teacher held “auditions” for the post. A bunch of different guys followed him around and tried to write a chronicle of his actions. Vadim’s was the best. He got the job.’
The first villagers reached the gate and the dog ran out barking and snarling, threatening to liberate their souls from their bodies. The Vissarionites laughed at this fierce display, and waited for the gatekeeper to call off his hound. I looked up at Vissarion’s house, where I had been less than twelve hours earlier, and wondered what he did while his closest and most devoted followers were camped outside, waiting eagerly to commune with him. Were there any special rites that he performed to prepare himself for this moment? Did he pray, or read from holy texts other than his own? Or was he busy chasing Sofia round the bedroom, hoping to get a swift one in before he had to step out into the cold?
No, no, I thought, resist. That’s the bad voice, the evil voice again. It will eject you from this reality. Don’t listen to it. Stay inside, just a little while longer. You will be free soon enough.
Sanya indicated a tree that split into four equally thick branches. Like the soul and body of the Teacher, it had been prepared especially, by God or nature, or both: ‘When the Teacher first saw this, he realised it marked this mountain out as a special place, for it is a symbol of the world’s four great religions …’
Then we turned around to gaze at the mountains in the distance. I could see much farther than I had the night before, and in the daylight the landscape was even more stunning, the kind of view that in an easier world you might be content to spend a lifetime gazing into.
So long as you didn’t look down, that is, because the paths and houses of the village sprawling on the plateau beneath were ugly in the daylight, like weird, jagged patterns shaved into someone’s scalp as a drunken prank at a party. Sanya, of course, saw only beauty: ‘Journalists lie,’ he said, ‘and claim that we call this the City of God. That is not true. When it is finished it will be in the shape of a star, with only fourteen streets, radiating outwards from the centre. And because of that it is called the City of the Shining Star.’
That was news to me: I thought it was called the Abode of Dawn. But then it had had many names; like the liturgy, the process of identifying the village was also fluid.
The gatekeeper called off the slobbering hound. It was now safe to go up.
The atmosphere was almost festive as the Vissarionites passed through the ‘temple zone’. We reached the stone steps laid down by Ali the Dwarf, and the ascent became easier. Sanya said that one day they would reach all the way to the village, and everyone, young and old alike, would be able to reach the top without too much struggle.
It was here, where Vissarion’s Christhood was most established, that I suddenly remembered the enigma of Sergei Torop, the lost dreamer, and decided to push for more details. Sanya had been here from the very beginning; perhaps he remembered a Vissarion less sure of himself, more of a Torop and less of a Christ. I couldn’t be too aggressive, however. He trusted me now, but it would still have been very easy to alienate him if I didn’t phrase my enquiries very carefully.
‘I heard that the Teacher’s mother lives in Petropavlovka …’ I said. Natasha had pointed out her house to me two nights earlier, on our walk to the artisans’ workshops.
‘That is correct,’ said Sanya, instantly tense. I was getting away from the message, straying into shadowy territory where it was unsafe.
‘What about his father?’
‘He lives in Krasnodar, where the Teacher was born. His parents divorced when he was young. His mother raised him here in Minussinsk.’
‘Are they followers? It must have been strange for them, to live their entire lives in the Soviet Union and then discover their son was the Son of God.’
Sanya hesitated. Then, phrasing his words with obvious care, he said, ‘His parents are trying to understand what happened.’
I wasn’t going to get any further. For a Vissarionite this was not relevant, or perhaps even worse – it was dangerous. As if to contemplate Sergei Torop after all was to somehow deny Vissarion, to move away from hagiography to the dangerous and murky reality of biography. Sanya was silent for a while as we continued walking upwards. We passed a boulder sheltered under a red umbrella: this was where Vissarion sat when he met with the villagers after the liturgy. The congregation stopped to sing again.
‘What about the Teacher’s wife?’ I asked. ‘She must have been shocked when she discovered she was married to the Christ.’
‘Yes …’ said Sanya.
‘But she followed him? She believes?’
‘She came, but not immediately. She followed about three years after his announcement.’
‘It must have been difficult for her.’
‘It was.’
‘What about his children? Were they born before or after he was Christ?’
‘Two of them, Roma and Elisei, were born before. Slava was born during, Svetogor and Dasha came after … and recently he adopted a baby daughter, Nastia.’
I knew more about Nastia than Sanya was telling. Yura had told me the night before that she was the daughter of a mentally disturbed girl who had ‘caused a lot of problems’ before eventually leaving the community, abandoning her own child on the way out. Vissarion had adopted her legally, filing all the papers with the authorities.
And then I had an idea: was she the cause of the savage dog, planted at the entrance to the Heavenly Abode to keep out ‘crazy people’? Had she perhaps burned down the temple? Was that why the Vissarionites were so reluctant to talk about it? After all, an accident was an accident. It was nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to conceal. But if a member of the chosen people had flipped, and lashed out in rage in a community that abhorred violence, burning down their most sacred building – well, that was something you might not want to talk about. It might lead to questions, about nigh-on impossible pressures, and the difficulty of reordering the constellations
There was no way I could talk to Sanya about this, however. I knew I wouldn’t be able to get much further with my current line of questioning as it was: if I kept going out there, the ice beneath me would collapse, tipping me into freezing waters. But there was one burning urge left, a topic I just had to raise. I really wanted to watch Sanya react to a question about Sofia. Sergei had panicked in Petropavlovka; the ghost-guide had lapsed into silence; Yura had been matter of fact but very brief. The Messiah’s second bride made believers exceedingly uneasy. And so I guided Sanya towards her slowly, by a winding path.
‘Sanya,’ I said, sounding terribly naïve, ‘you know the Teacher’s private house on the top of the mountain, where he withdrew to write the Last Testament?’
‘Yes?’
‘Is he always alone there?’
Sanya gave me a quizzical look. ‘I mean are other people allowed to join him? Like his wife, for example?’
‘Yes, sometimes Lyuba comes.’
‘And his children?’
‘Yes.’
And now I had stepped right through his ear into his skull and was curled up next to his brain, like a devil, listening to his innermost thoughts: He knows! He knows! But Sanya immediately pushed me out and I was back on the mountain again, standing in the cold, beneath trees that were ready to tip wet snow onto me. ‘Yes, sometimes Sofia comes also.’
And that was that. But this was a fascinating area in the Vissarionite consciousness: because Vissarion could never be wrong. And yet they understood that the second wife was something that needed to be concealed. Was this just an awareness of how it seemed to outsiders? I didn’t think so. The obvious panic, the way the Vissarionites seized up when I prodded at this tender spot was something visceral and involuntary, as if they were wrestling to justify it to themselves, and didn’t like to be reminded of it.
The bell rang fourteen times. We were at the top now. A stone lay by the side of the path. ‘Look!’ said Sanya, steering me back onto safe ground. ‘It has a cross on it! The symbol is natural, it was found here …’ Another sign, like Vissarion’s beard and hair, like the tree divided in four – this site was sacred, it had ‘been prepared’. Prepared or not, it was nothing compared to the beautiful gate that the Vissarionites planned to erect at this point in the future, and the cross-stone was but a marker, a sign to believers to create grandeur in their heads.
When the Vissarionites passed through this invisible entryway they not only crossed themselves but drew an invisible circle in the air afterwards, uniting the points of the four world religions. I had seen the sign before, in Petropavlovka, but now that everyone was doing it, the gesture looked like a parody. Nobody was laughing, however. On the contrary, the atmosphere was extremely solemn: the next phase of the liturgy was about to begin.
The ‘temple’ was a frail wooden structure, little more than an altar under an onion dome, crowned by the Vissarionite cross. Inscribed on the side of the dome was the legend ‘Glory to the Living God’ and the date of construction, year 38 of the Era of Dawn. Like the sculpture in the village below, like Ali the Dwarf’s stone steps, and like the stone marking the notional gateway, it was just a sketch towards a future construction that would be so much grander, in this case a cathedral that would be made not of cedar but of granite, and which would stand here, so close to the sky, for centuries, throughout the golden days that would follow once the wicked kingdoms of man had finally fallen.
Sanya decoded the shrine for me. It stood on another mystical stone, this one symbolising harmony between heaven and earth, and its four sides represented the four major religions. There was a set of bells under the dome, and beneath them, five wooden cherubs circled the fourteen-pointed ‘Star of Bethlehem’. The cherubs, however, were not just cherubs but rather represented the ‘five origins of universe’, which according to Vissarion were the Absolute Creator, the Material Spirit, the Heavenly Father, the Holy Spirit and maybe Mother Earth, I can’t remember. Fatigued by the excess of symbolism, the almost decadent lust for appropriating all signs and then reinterpreting them to suit the needs of the new Messiah, I had tuned out.
And so as Sanya babbled on I watched the priest, a former astronomer in an observatory in Kazakhstan, take the cords of the bells in his white-gloved hands and tug gently. The bells chimed, softly, tunefully, sending out invisible sonic pulses to the heaven he had once gazed at through a telescope in the steppe. Now he could communicate directly with that world which, when viewed through a contraption of metal and glass had seemed so dark and cold and empty, but which he now knew to be bright and brimming with love.
He was a lucky man.
The Vissarionites had lifted the format of the ceremony from Russian Orthodox ritual. The priest faced away from the huddled believers, chanting, and periodically he would stop and break into song, at which moment the villagers would join in. But where Orthodox believers always stand in the presence of God, many of the villagers were on their knees. There were no strict rules, Sanya explained, invoking once more the great virtue of the liturgy – its flexibility. Anything else meant dogma and dogma, of course, was death. ‘However,’ he added, ‘most choose to kneel.’
Thus liberated from rules, each worshipper responded as his spirit prompted him. One man might close his eyes, while the woman next to him kept hers wide open, but turned upwards, towards the sky, her gaze burning through the clouds into another, higher reality. One man might lift his arms up and stretch out his palms towards the sky, while another might let his lie by his sides and rest his hands on his knees. One woman smiled blissfully; her neighbour had his face set in solemn concentration. And even up here, at this most intimate moment, in this most sacred spot, I did not exist. It was the light and warmth of God the Father that was real. Me? I was just a phantasm, an illusion, part of a reality that was soon to pass into oblivion.
‘We are now nine hundred and sixty-five metres above sea level …’ said Sanya. He had run out of symbols to interpret and was moving on to geographical features. Nobody exercised the flexibility of the ritual more than him. He hadn’t crossed himself once, and felt no need to pay even lip service to the ritual. ‘And three kilometres from our settlement …’
He pointed me in the direction of Lake Tiburkul, the Sayan mountains, the Altai, Mongolia, and China. ‘You could fit several Europes in here ’
I stepped away from Sanya and listened to the words of the hymn the Vissarionites were singing. The themes had not changed noticeably since the start of the ascent: ‘Holy Father, your warmth, your spirit, your breath …’ they sang. All around me I saw expressions of bliss, of tranced-out ecstasy, of drugged joy. Truly, they were loved up. A lot of the women wore the same semi-glacial Hare Krishna smiles I had seen months earlier in the photos the community had posted online, and beamed with that same alien joy it was difficult not to be suspicious of. Antonina’s expression was like this, only more so: eyes turned upwards, and hands outstretched, she looked as though she was having an orgasm, but a supernatural one, where the ecstasy was caught, suspended, strung out in time.
You mean she’s getting fucked by the Holy Mountain, Satan whispered, utilising once more the invisible channels through which thoughts and feelings flow in and out of human heads.
No, I thought, that’s the bad voice again. Resist it. Resist!
I went behind the altar, and turned my back on the ceremony. In the distance, beyond the dense taiga, I could see the grey smear of Lake Tiburkul. It didn’t look very inviting, though I had heard that the fish there did not fear humans and in the spring would swim alongside the believers. Then I turned back to the Vissarionites, and noticed that in the midst of this joyous communion there was one who seemed excluded. A middle-aged man with a black beard, an engineer I had met the day before, was rocking back and forth, but not in ecstasy. He was casting around nervously, totally out of sync with the other worshippers, looking this way and that way, unable to concentrate. I couldn’t understand what he was doing there; how you could reach this point and not be totally inside Vissarion’s world. He looked ridiculous on his knees.
‘Father God,’ sang the priest, ‘happiness and love are Your creation, and the light on Earth is Your creation, our Father, O Father God we sing to you.’
And then the priest led the Vissarionites in a final prayer, this time to Mother Earth, and Adrian, the Cuban astrophysicist at whose house I had had such a pleasant meal the day before, and who had struck me as an exceptionally thoughtful and generous individual, and whose wife and two little boys were so beautiful, and charming, leaned forward, as if he were about to kiss the ground –
Oh fuck, no. That’s just embarrassing, said the Devil.
I turned away.
Now it was time for the sliyaniye, the ‘merging’ with the Teacher. Eyes were closed, palms raised to the skies, and souls troubled and blissful alike reached out to the shining, radiant warmth of the man-god they all hoped was waiting on the lower stage of the mountain. It looked like meditation, which Vissarion, of course, had said he was opposed to.
‘No,’ said Sanya. ‘Meditation is about leaving life, whereas the Teacher stands for living life, the right way. He says that if you meditate, certainly you will feel the breath of the universe – but you shall not develop spiritually … Here, in the sliyaniye, our souls communicate with the Teacher Himself!’
Sanya continued, but the explanation became very involved so I left it at that, where I just about understood him. The sliyaniye lasted a full minute, then the kneeling Vissarionites got up, shook the snow off their legs and boots and crossed and circled themselves. ‘You can cross yourself any way you like,’ said Sanya, ‘from right to left, left to right, up, down, whatever. We have no canon, no dogma …’
‘“Life is movement,”‘ I said, finishing his thought for him.
‘Exactly!’ He beamed.
‘But Vissarion hasn’t been crucified.’
‘And?’
‘So why the cross?’
‘The cross is an ancient symbol,’ said Sanya. ‘It pre-dates Christianity. Long before Jesus came it represented positive energy …’
‘So what is it for followers of Vissarion? Symbol of Christ’s death and resurrection or positive energy?’
‘Er …’
‘Christ or pre-Christ?’
‘Ah ̷’
Sanya looked flummoxed. For the first time I’d hit him with a question he didn’t have a ready answer for. I decided to help him out. After listening to all his talk of tolerance and flexibility and freedom from dogma, it wasn’t difficult. The solution was simple: ‘Or is it both?’
‘Yes!’ he said, smiling. ‘Both, both.’
And that’s how I made my contribution to the rich iconography of the Vissarionites.
The Vissarionites had all descended, leaving only Semyon and me, neither of whom really existed anyway, standing at the altar alongside two more substantial inhabitants of Vissarion’s reality. One of them was Sanya; the other was a man still kneeling in the snow, gloved hands resting on his knees, head tossed back, an ecstatic grin glowing in the centre of a sprawling beard. But he was only partially present. His soul, set free by the sliyaniye, was elsewhere, drifting deep, deep in the warm light of his Messiah, lost to itself in a state of pure bliss. For some reason, though, the sight of him made me feel depressed. Perhaps I was wrong to feel that way; but I took a photograph, and over a year later, nothing has changed. Something in that smile still strikes me as tragic when I look at it today.
We descended back towards the second level of the ‘temple zone’, where the Teacher met with his followers. I had just about managed to shut off the channels through which Satan whispered to me, but it was a struggle. I was bothered by the relentlessly ethereal, positive tone of the Vissarionite liturgy. Every song was about love, warmth and light. There was no reference to struggle or hardship or sacrifice, of which there was a great abundance on the mountain or in the community at large, not to mention the world beyond it. Aesthetically it was as ephemeral as a double CD of dolphin song marketed to office workers in need of an aid to chilling out, man.
It needed more. It needed pain. It needed awe. I thought about the Old Testament and the psalm that, after praising God for his gifts, his beneficence and wisdom, nevertheless cautioned the worshipper to beware, for ‘Fear of the Lord is the beginning of all wisdom’. I put this to Sanya, just to see how he would respond. He laughed.
‘The Teacher says that only a fool or a child would fear God. The Old Testament is talking about the first God, God the Creator, not God the Father. Our God’s nature is pure love. What is there to fear?’
Of course: I’d forgotten Vissarion’s great revelation, that there is not one God but two, and that it’s the second one who loves us. It was a neat solution to the theological ‘problem of evil’, dumping everything dark and confusing on the shoulders of a demiurge, leaving the second God free of all responsibility for the violence and chaos of creation. He had come along later, like a medic at a pile-up on the motorway, surveying the twisted mess of metal and protruding limbs, the soup of blood and organs seeping outwards, the chorus of shrieks and howls, and now he was working on a plan to extricate as many survivors as he could from the carnage. This God was as innocent of our suffering as a baby, and the Vissarionites responded to him with a corresponding innocence. It was the one great, simple, pure idea of their otherwise exceedingly complex cosmogony.
It was also utterly conventional Gnosticism, an idea nearly as old as Christianity. And yet Sanya was starry eyed at the contemplation of this Truth; and suddenly I remembered the similarly enraptured Tatiana Sr discussing the uncommon wisdom of ‘love the good in the bad man’; Sergei’s remark that the pastiche of science fiction clichés in The Matrix was a valid representation of spiritual reality; and everybody’s lack of concern at the demotion of Hinduism and Judaism to positions much lower than the religions they had given birth to.
Vissarion thought that the obliteration of Russia’s religious culture had been a good thing, that it had cleared away ‘dogma’ and made people more ready to receive his ideas. It had seemed a bit sweeping at the time, but now it really did look as though he was right. At the very least, it had cleared away any framework of comparison, and left his followers like innocents gazing upon a garden for the first time, believing that the flowers they saw grew here and nowhere else.
Below us, the villagers had all dropped to their knees and total silence had descended. It could mean one thing only: Vissarion had come.
Sanya motioned to me to stop. ‘We can’t go any further,’ he said. ‘Unbelievers are not permitted near this sliyaniye, but you may stand among us at the next one. For the next nine minutes we must be silent, while the people commune with the Teacher.’
This sudden prohibition came as a relief. All the ostentatious tolerance and openness had been getting on my nerves, and I could hear Satan pounding at the wall I had erected. I ignored him; but every time Sanya mentioned freedom from dogma I remembered seven fat volumes with thick red spines that dictated in astonishing detail exactly how to live your life, including how to wipe your shoes in the way that God recommended. Maybe that was considered ‘teaching’ and not ‘dogma’, but for me the line was blurred. So I was glad that the Vissarionites were finally openly excluding me and reserving a privilege for the believers, like every other belief system in the world, religious or otherwise. After the haze and confusion of altars where any rite could be performed, it gave me something solid to hang on to, to orient myself by. Now I knew where I stood, and it was firmly outside, among the unbelievers, the damned. And thus defined, I was at last seen; I did indeed exist.
And so I stood there, in the snow, in the cold, shivering as, down below, Antonina, Bjorn Borg, Alim and all the others closed their eyes and sent their quivering souls out towards the warm pulsating light of the Teacher. There was no wind, there were no birds. I didn’t have any new thoughts. I was a waiting organic thing only, and the longer this thing stood still, the more the cold infiltrated its outer garments. Periodically I would shift my feet and crush some snow, or listen to my own intake of breath, or watch my breath drifting away in white clouds …
And then, just as the cold was beginning to kill the feeling in my toes, the sliyaniye finished. Through the trees I saw an arm drop, a head turn. The man at the foot of the slope waved us on. We resumed stumbling downwards, digging our heels into the snow so as not to slip. It wouldn’t have been any good to arrive at this most sacred moment sliding on my arse.
‘Now the people will have an opportunity to ask the Teacher for advice regarding the situations and problems in their lives,’ said Sanya. ‘But we must formulate our questions very precisely before asking, as if we are describing our symptoms to a doctor. For the wrong question will lead to the wrong answer. As Vissarion says, in learning how to ask the right question we learn how to live.’
I stored the formulation away in my memory banks, as a saying to be used in the future, forever prefaced with ‘As Vissarion says …’ Then Sanya notified me of a second prohibition:
‘The people will pass the microphone among themselves and ask their questions,’ he said. ‘And all the Teacher’s replies will be recorded and edited for inclusion in our book. That is why we must forbid you from recording what you hear today. For there cannot be two versions of the Teacher’s wisdom in existence. We must be very precise, and ensure that there is only one official Word of God. There must be no schisms, no debates, as there have been in other religions. There must only be clarity …’
The following account of the meeting therefore is not based on verbatim recordings, but was put together twenty-four hours later, using Semyon’s memories and mine. I have done my best to capture the essence of the petitioners’ questions and Vissarion’s replies, but what follows is of course incomplete, unreliable and absolutely non-canonical, as mere human memory cannot hold all the intricacies of Vissarion’s wisdom, which is rarely expressed with anything even remotely approximating brevity. Anyone looking for an authoritative account of the Teacher’s answers to these profound moral problems should therefore track down a copy of the relevant volume of the complete and unabridged Last Testament, taking a few years to learn Russian first if necessary (so no nuances are missed), and then consult it directly.
Vissarion was sitting on the boulder at the foot of a wall of solid rock. He looked very regal in his long red robe, although the woolly gloves and the tea cosy on his head detracted from the effect somewhat. A red velvet cushion protected his semi-divine rear from the boulder’s roughness, and a bright crimson umbrella shielded his head from any conspiracies the clouds might have been involved in, as if the slightest upset might cause the Teacher’s bones to shatter and internal haemorrhaging to begin. But then he had said in the Last Testament that he intended to stay on the planet for a long time, to teach his children all they needed to learn. The Vissarionites weren’t taking any chances.
The believers were also separated from their Messiah by thirty metres of untouched, sparkling white crystals. Was this for added safety, in case there was a maniac in their number, like the mother of Vissarion’s adopted daughter? The Teacher would have time to make a break for it if anyone came lunging at him, after all. Or was it simply to intensify the sense of numinous ‘otherness’? It was a far cry from the first Christ walking amid lepers and washing the feet of his disciples, that was for sure. The tableau shrieked: Do not come close, do not touch, stay there, in the distance, and gaze in wonder!
Most of his followers were on their knees, and rightly so, because he was the absolute monarch of both the physical and spiritual realms, the bringer of laws, the arbiter of truth and knowledge, the representative of God on earth – Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, Zarathustra rolled into one. He was the fulfilment of all their dreams. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the man I had been chatting with less than twenty-four hours earlier – the guru with an eye for young girls, a knack for gags and a pet parrot that could repeat its own name and mimic the sound of the telephone.
It seemed obscene, kneeling before this man. There was no denial of the ego here, but rather a monumental inflation of it. I felt an urge to rush forward, to sully that expanse of white snow that separated the divine from the human and grab the hem of his garment – not to be healed though, but rather to stain it with my unbeliever’s touch. Would he retain his divine calm? And what about the Vissarionites? Would they remain committed to non-violence if they thought the Messiah was threatened? Alim was lurking in the trees near the boulder and once again he looked to me like a security guard or a bouncer, ready to deal with trouble.
But then I calmed down. I was here to watch, to listen, to record, not judge: I was not off the mountain yet. For now I had to let the Teacher unveil his truth, to allow even, that he really might have access to the uncommon wisdom Tatiana had spoken of, or at least that there might still be one or two good ideas up his robe. The Last Testament was being written in front of me. Perhaps, even at this late moment, I would discover some secret, final element that had been eluding me, and I would understand why so many intelligent people, who were far more accomplished than Sergei Torop the traffic policeman had ever been, believed this man to be their saviour. And then I might also dream a little of the dream that had devoured him and so many others.
I had forgotten the sound of Vissarion’s voice, those soft and soothing, sing-song tones that made every utterance sound like a lullaby, and which mirrored the dreamy, otherworldly look in his eyes. Yet at the same time, there was weariness in there, as if being the Christ really was the great and heavy burden he said it was. But the weariness too was hypnotic; so hypnotic in fact that I forgot to listen to the content of his speech, and let the whispered vowel sounds, the hushed, softened consonants soothe and seduce me …
Semyon stepped forward. ‘Do you know what he’s saying?’
‘No,’ I replied. ‘I’ve just been listening to the sound of his voice.’ ‘He’s pretty angry.’
The first question had come from a man kneeling in the front row. He wanted to know whether the Messiah thought it was acceptable for his wife to leave the mountain so she could take a job and earn money to pay for vital dental work. Her teeth were causing her a lot of pain.
Vissarion saw the question as an opportunity to address another, larger issue: ‘In the past,’ he said, ‘many women have left the mountain to earn money. This causes problems for the husbands left behind, who have to keep house and work. But it’s worse when men leave, while our town is still under construction. That amounts to criminal negligence.
‘Until now, I have given you a lot of freedom in letting you come and go. You did not appreciate how free you have been. You abused it. But from now on I want to stop it. I am going to be much stricter. And when I am strict, you are not to ask why, only to accept it.’
The crowd was silent, accepting this admonition, some with heads bowed, others looking forward. The Teacher had spoken, and to disagree would be to question the rightness of God. The questioner took the microphone in hand again, and asked, ‘Will the committee decide who can leave, or will it be you?’
‘In the first days of our life on the mountain it was I who decided. Then I delegated to the committee. Now I shall be the one to decide again. In some cases, such as emergency dental work, I shall make exceptions. But too many people are leaving the town. This must stop.’
Things were about to change in the Abode of Dawn. The free and easy days were over.
A woman in the third row took the microphone. It sounded like Antonina, but I wasn’t sure: the microphone distorted the voices, making them loud and abrasive.
‘Teacher, if someone tells me an offensive joke, should I tell them that they have offended me?’
Vissarion answered calmly and decisively. ‘No. If you take offence at a joke, it’s egoism. Confronting the joker will only create antagonism. You should look for the good in the joke.’
That sounded reasonable; but the questioner’s voice rose in pitch. She wasn’t satisfied.
‘But Teacher, what if it’s really dirty! I mean –’
Vissarion cut her off: ‘Then you are to go away, and think carefully, and look for the good in the joke, even if it’s difficult.’
‘But it was filthy!’
Vissarion then entered into a lengthy, universalising discourse about jokes, something to guide both those inclined to be funny and those who would laugh. I lost the middle of it but heard the conclusion clearly:
‘We must be careful what we joke about. But you are not to confront the joker.’
So far the questions had been fairly straightforward, and it was strange that they needed to be resolved here, by the Teacher, and not collectively at one of the meetings, or through consulting the book, or even through the application of common sense. The reasons for the stupendous length of the Last Testament were becoming clearer than ever, however. But then, just as I was wondering if all the questions were going to be so mundane, a woman in the second row took the microphone.
‘Teacher,’ she said. ‘My four-year-old son asked if he could play with my breasts. I let him, for about fifteen minutes. Then he asked if he could play with them for another twenty minutes. Should I let him?’
Yes! I thought, That’s more like it! This was the kind of thing I’d been hoping for when I first arrived in Petropavlovka, my ear pressed to the walls of the wooden cultural centre where clandestine whispers and hissed admonitions travelled so easily. But I’d stopped myself then, knowing that if I sought out the bizarre and dubious I would find it. Now perhaps, it had come to me …
‘How old did you say the boy was?’
‘Four.’
‘Let him play. There’s a difference between four and thirty-four, after all.’
Vissarion chuckled; his kneeling followers chuckled too. There was nothing strange in this advice for them. As for me, it was the first time he had stepped over the boundaries of common sense into dubious territory.
I wanted more.
Suddenly Semyon stepped up to me. ‘I think we should stop this.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s blasphemy.’
Semyon had been my friend for five years; in all that time I had never heard him express a single religious thought. I thought he was joking. But then he continued, and I could see in his eyes that he was serious. ‘I’m worried. Like, maybe we’re gonna go to hell if we don’t do something.’
‘There’s nothing you can do,’ I said.
‘I could run in there, make a lot of noise,’ he said. ‘Fuck their shit up.’
‘They’d just jump on you and beat you,’ I said.
‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘But at least I’d have done something.’
‘What? It wouldn’t work. They’re used to being rejected by the world. They’d just see you as another heathen, someone misguided, who has failed to grasp the importance of the new belief. If anything, you’d entrench them in their belief. They’d know they were right because they had provoked such a strong reaction in you. You would confirm for them their status as righteous outsiders.’
‘Hm.’
He wasn’t convinced. But the moment of violence had passed. He stepped back again. I had missed a question, however. Now I listened to the next one, to find out what burning issue was awaiting resolution in the soul of another of Vissarion’s most righteous men. It was the most bizarre one thus far.
‘Teacher, if I ask my hostess for extra helpings at dinner, but she says, “No, won’t you explode?” And then I say, “In that case, stand back!” – will I get the food?’
This was a reference to a popular Russian TV ad in which a little girl gulped down buckets of fruit juice: a boy walks up to her and asks, ‘Won’t you explode?’ To which the little girl replies, ‘In that case, stand back!’
Vissarion thought, perhaps communed with the Godhead, and then answered.
‘Yes.’
And that was that.
The believers were not exactly testing their Teacher. Next the bearded engineer who had looked so out of place at the sliyaniye took the microphone: Lyuba, Vissarion’s wife, had been at a meeting in town the night before, and according to her a certain brand of washing powder, hitherto banned, was now acceptable to God. ‘Is this true?’
‘I never said that,’ said Vissarion. ‘It is not OK to use that washing powder. You are lying to me.’
The engineer shrank back, nodding vigorously, eager to receive his chastisement, so that it would end all the sooner. Vissarion, however, still sounded half-hypnotised: a non-Russian speaker would have had no idea at the anger implied by his words.
But the issue of which detergent was pleasing to God remained unresolved, and now a woman risked provoking Vissarion’s wrath further by picking up the theme. She asked if it was permitted to use cleaning products that contained chlorine.
‘Yes,’ said Vissarion.
‘But I seem to recall that in 1995 or 1996 you said it wasn’t …’
And that was a mistake, because how could she challenge the originator of the Last Testament over what was in its pages? What a sinful display of the ego! And Vissarion was indeed agitated, and answered in a voice different from before, with more animation and less languor.
‘I did not say that. Categorically, I state that I never said that. You may use products with chlorine, but you should always study the chemical constituents of the powder, and be mindful that whatever you pour out you will eventually drink again!’
If doubts still remained over which washing powders were acceptable, no one now dared to raise them. Instead a woman, sitting not far from the one who had asked the consanguineous breast-fondling question earlier, took the microphone.
‘Teacher, my fourteen-year-old daughter is dating an older man. They say they love each other and are ready to be married. They are becoming more intimate. They have already kissed with tongues. Is this acceptable?’
Now that was interesting: following his advice on the son/mother + breast issue earlier, was he going to stray into yet more unorthodox territory? He had two wives, after all, and I had wondered if he was preparing to cross more new boundaries: but the answer was no.
‘This is not good,’ said Vissarion. ‘She’s too young to make these decisions. They may meet, and talk, but they must not touch or kiss. How old is this man?’
‘Twenty-seven.’
‘He should be spanked in public.’
The crowd laughed. And of course, they all knew who she was talking about. There were only two hundred people in the village, and they all shared their problems at meetings throughout the week, and lived in transparent houses, bathed in light. Perhaps this 27-year-old was even present; or perhaps he was hiding in the village below, working in the forests, hoping his actions would remain unseen, though of course, the Teacher knew and saw all …
A man in the middle of the kneeling audience took the microphone.
‘Teacher, if I eat only once a day, will this act of self-denial help me to forget the taste of something I used to enjoy in my old life, but am no longer permitted by our community’s rules to eat?’
‘You eat only once a day?’
‘Yes, but I eat a lot.’
‘Won’t you explode?’ said Vissarion. The villagers laughed. Vissarion laughed too; then he continued. ‘No, this is not right. You shouldn’t try to forget the taste of something you once liked. It was a positive experience and it’s imprinted on your soul, so be grateful for it. Also, unless there’s something wrong with you and you have to force yourself to eat and once a day is the most you can manage, then you shouldn’t live like this. You should eat more often. It’s bad for your health otherwise.’
And then after this specimen of perfectly reasonable, humane advice, a woman, kneeling right in front of me took the microphone.
‘Teacher, if I let my neighbour keep her horses and goats in my barn, and then when she takes them out again, there’s shit on the ground from her animals, can I use it to fertilise my field? Or should I give the shit to her? Is it my shit or is it her shit? Can I use the shit?’
Vissarion shrugged.
‘Use it.’
The meeting had lasted about an hour, and now it was over. Vissarion was blessing his children, rising from the boulder, and waving as he walked away, towards the pines, where some men were waiting for him. He reached them, and then the whole group followed the Messiah into the trees. And just like that, the whole procession vanished. The Divine Light was gone, not to shine again for another week.
The kneeling Vissarionites got to their feet, brushed the snow off their clothes and started the descent back towards the settlement, chatting about the sliyaniye, repeating Vissarion’s jokes and his comments on washing powder, as though they were walking home after watching a good play at the theatre.
‘What did you think?’ asked Semyon.
‘If I’d been on the boulder I’d have said the same things … except for the one about the four-year-old boy fondling his mother’s tits. That was very questionable. What about you?’
‘What do I think about fondling my mother’s tits?’
‘No, about his advice.’
Semyon shrugged. ‘Nothing special.’
And it was precisely that ‘nothing special’ quality about Vissarion’s moral advice that had me fascinated.* Never mind Tatiana’s ‘uncommon wisdom’; never mind lifting freely from Gnostics and Buddhists and Christians and communists – this was nothing, nothing at all. And that was good, I supposed, because he couldn’t do much harm if all he pronounced were obvious truisms.
But now I was more confused than ever. I was on the edge of something; there was something misshapen and ugly lying under the surface of this apparent nothingness, and it was something disturbing I couldn’t quite grasp or articulate fully, except as a question that kept coming back to me: if these people were all intelligent and earnest and had dedicated themselves to leading a good life, if they read the Last Testament every day and worked hard to perfect themselves morally, why then did they even need to ask Vissarion such simple questions?