22

The first thing Yuri withdrew from the satchel was an ink drawing of a young woman. He had never seen her before in person, but he knew who it was from photographs and a large oil portrait he had seen hanging at Prince Viktor’s Crimean estate. Yuri handed it to his mother.

Anna looked at the drawing and gasped with surprised pleasure. “How wonderful! It’s Princess Katrina.”

Daniel leaned forward to have a look. “She was beautiful, wasn’t she? And so like Mariana.”

Anna felt a paper attached to the back of the drawing and turned it over to find a letter. “‘The original oil is locked in my vault,’” Anna read out loud, “‘but I thought you might like this little sketch I made from the oil better than a mere photograph. However, I have also enclosed several family photographs for you.’”

Just then Yuri took a packet of about a dozen photographs from the satchel and passed them to Anna. She quickly looked at each photo, then handed them one by one to Daniel. Yuri looked over Daniel’s shoulder. There was a formal photograph of Viktor and his first wife, Natalia, and one of them and their children at about ages ten and fourteen. Another was of Sergei alone in his army uniform, just as Anna remembered him when he went to fight in the Balkan war. There were also more recent ones, of weddings, babies, and one Anna had never seen of Andrei standing next to one of his paintings at his one and only gallery showing. Anna tarried over this one a moment longer than the others and ran a finger gently over the face of her youngest son.

Sighing heavily, she said, “How kind of Prince Viktor to send these.” Her voice was shaky.

“Mama—” Yuri began.

“Yuri,” Daniel interrupted, “what else is in the satchel?”

Yuri glanced at his brother-in-law and received a silent but cautionary look. He knew they had firmly agreed not to tell Anna about Talia’s encounter. He reminded himself how awful it would be for his mother to have her hopes raised only to discover Andrei was lost to them again. Yuri was devastated himself, and he could only imagine how his mother might react.

He said no more and took another envelope from the satchel. Opening this, he found a thick bundle of rubles—easily several thousand. Another envelope contained a three-page letter written in Viktor’s precise hand. This he gave to Anna, who set it aside to be read later.

The final item was quite large. Actually, there were four books bound together by a cord. On closer inspection Yuri saw that three were bound diaries, and the fourth was a ledgerlike book. Opening this, he saw that inside were written diarylike entries. The handwriting was very familiar. He glanced up at his mother as he handed them to her.

“Your papa’s diaries,” she said. “I feel so bad that I lost track of these. You and . . . your brother should have had them long ago. Viktor took your father’s death so hard—you know, it came just as they had renewed and deepened their relationship. I thought these might help him through the difficult time. Then I forgot about them and I suppose he did, too. Ah, well, they are back where they belong now.” She gave them to Yuri. “These are yours, son. Your father always intended that when you were older he’d share them with you and Andrei. This must surely be the appropriate time.”

Yuri lay the books in his lap. He wanted to open them right then but wanted to be alone when he did so. Yet he didn’t want to be rude to his mother and Daniel. Anna must have sensed his dilemma.

“It is late,” she said. “Tomorrow’s visits to the khvosts will start early.” She rose and kissed her son and her son-in-law each on the cheek before departing.

Daniel also rose. “What about you, Yuri? You must be beat.”

“I’ll be along in a few moments. I just . . . need to be alone a minute.”

“Okay, see you in the morning.”

Alone in the parlor, Yuri opened the books and arranged them in order by the dates written on the inside covers. The earliest one was the ledger. The opening date was January 10, 1882. The entry read:

I have been feeling a great need lately to set my experiences to paper. Writing has always helped me to put my emotions and ideas into better perspective. And now more than ever, I have many emotions I must sort through. I asked Robbie for some paper, and he found for me instead this old, blank ledger. He said, laughing in that infectious way of his, “We never have money in this mission, so we have no need of this ledger.”

Ah, Robbie . . . meeting this man will surely change my life, but before I speak of him, I will write about my experiences before he came along. I will write about Siberia. In a way, I would like to forget that terrible time in my life, yet to do so would make it impossible to fully explain the progression of the changes that are beginning to take place within me . . .

For the next several pages Yuri read not only about his father’s imprisonment in the hard labor camp at the Kara Mines, but also about the preceding months. Sergei wrote about the crime he had committed—killing his commanding officer in order to prevent the execution of supposed enemy prisoners—including old men, several women, and even a child.

I do not justify my deed. I was crazed at the time, completely unhinged by the stench of death and battle. Yet, I must say that faced with the same choice, I might well have still pulled that trigger even had I been in my right mind. I don’t know. I’ll never know. All I know is that I killed a man, and that act has forever changed my life, not only the direction of my life, but the state of my heart and soul. Even in receiving absolution from God for my deed, I still must carry with me the awful knowledge that I am capable of such a deed. I suppose the image of what I did will always dwell within me at some level.

Yuri nodded and his chest tightened. He understood painfully well what his father was saying. And if Sergei’s crime sent him to the prison of Siberia, Yuri’s had sent him to a prison just as well, not of snow and ice, but of despair. He forced himself to read on and found himself weeping as he read of his father’s despair, accompanied also by such physical hardships Yuri could hardly imagine them. Yuri, of course, knew of his father’s experiences, but Sergei never dwelt upon them. He never said to his children, “You’re complaining about walking to school? I had to walk practically all the way across Siberia.” Or, “You will not eat these vegetables? I had to eat insects and roots when I was in Siberia, and I was grateful for them.”

No, Sergei would instead get a faraway look in his eyes and a slight smile on his lips. Once when Yuri was complaining about some silly thing, he recalled his father saying, “Ah, Yuri, my dear boy, I am so thankful we are here together, and I can listen to you, even if you are not exactly happy. I once thought I would never be so blessed as to hear the voice of my own son. And I cherish it. I cherish you.”

The stories of Siberia, though they were few indeed, were always more like a soldier’s old war stories. Sergei stripped away the terror and utter desolation. He always tried to find the good of it. But the diary was not written with a child’s sensibilities in mind. Sergei must have felt the need to “pull no punches.” He even wrote that he hoped in writing it all down it would purify his heart a little of the experience.

Yuri exhaled a relieved sigh when he came to the part about when Sergei came to the mission in China.

I came to China as completely broken as a man could be. Even escape from Kara did not instill hope because I felt I had sunk so low that I could never be restored to my former life, not to mention my dear Anna. I had not exactly become an atheist, but rather I believed that if some Father in heaven existed to whom one might go for succor, what would it matter? The harsh realities of what my life had become would not change one iota. If there were some heavenly Savior, He would do better to expend His saving energies elsewhere. I felt that I was not only beyond saving, but that I did not deserve it. If only I were an atheist it would have been so much better, because then I would not know what I was losing. But it shows my state of mind that I forgot, or would not let myself remember, the simple truths of faith that I heard often from Anna and Yevno and others like them. I considered myself a man without a scrap of manhood left within me. I was less than nothing. I had failed in everything—with my family, with my father, with the only woman I ever loved. I failed my country, my career . . . everything!

But now, after nearly two months at the mission, my eyes are at last being opened. In Robbie I have met a man whose own life could have sent him to the depths of despair. He lost a woman he loved to another man. Then, in running from his heartache, he found his escape to be fraught with hardships and betrayal. He came upon the mission just as I have done, a man filled with bitterness and frustration. There he met and fell in love with the daughter of the head of the mission. The bitter walls around him began to be softened by her sweet spirit and her strong faith. Then danger struck, and in a battle for this woman’s life, Robbie lost an arm. Robbie admits that he had always been a man whose estimation of his worth had been wrapped up in his physical self. Thus the loss of an arm and the accompanying sense of dependency was a terrible blow for him. It was then that he could have truly abandoned hope, as I had done. If not then, he could have done so after the woman he loved and married died of a terminal illness.

Instead, by the example of the woman he loved and her wise father, Robbie began to see what it really meant to be a man. I see now that Robbie and I trod very similar paths, although I do not think I linked my manhood as much to the physical as he did. Rather, for me, it was bound up with honor and success (my limited concept of these things) and how others saw me. I had always viewed myself as a rebel of sorts, at least against the ways of my father. However, I see now that it still mattered very much to me how he and others perceived me. That I was essentially a failure even at my rebellion was an irony, to say the least.

At any rate, as with Robbie, my path led me to confront my manhood. And to do this it seemed only natural to look—as Robbie had done—to the prime example of manhood, Jesus Christ. Coming from a religious background that so emphasized the suffering Christ, the idea of Jesus as a man was quite a leap. But in a way, Christ’s suffering was also the essence of his manhood. Here is a man who laid down everything usually associated with manhood. He became reviled, mocked, and suffered the most ignominious manner of death known in his time.

Yet Christ’s response to all of this was not bitter rancor, but rather forgiveness. And surrender. To many men these are not the most manly of responses. Wholeness found in forgiveness? Strength found in surrender? It is so upside-down from what you would think. And I would doubt its validity if I was not faced daily with the results of such unusual thinking in the person of Robbie Taggart.

I spent much of my time at the mission studying this man Jesus, and also two of his sons—Robbie and his father-in-law, the head of the mission—whom I greatly respect. As I write this today, I am growing closer than ever to truly understanding these things. But I have never been a man of impulse. If I am to accept the things I am learning at the mission, and model my life after them, I will do so after much deep consideration.

Yuri read on until he came to the entry for March 5, 1882.

The official celebration of Epiphany was three months ago, but it was today, a mere hour ago, that I celebrated my personal epiphany—the day my Lord Jesus Christ was revealed to me in a personal way. Today my search, begun at a mission in China, came to a glorious culmination. I left the mission a couple of months ago after I found a berth as a seaman on a ship headed west. I could not sleep this evening, so I went up to the deck, as has often become my habit, just to think and enjoy the night sky. We were sailing along the west coast of Africa under full canvas. The sky was cloudy, so the reflection of the moon was dulled a bit. But suddenly other far more important things became crystal clear to me. My bitterness toward my father, my resentments toward God, and, most sadly, my own self-denigration.

I fell on my knees there on the deck at the bow of the ship, where, oddly enough, I was completely alone, as if God himself had arranged this precise moment. I heard myself cry, “I don’t want to live like this anymore! Please take away the anger and bitterness and unforgiveness in my heart. I have not been the man I should have been—not to my family, my country . . . not even to myself. But I want to be, God. I want to be a MAN! I want to be whole—”

But Yuri could read no more. His eyes had become so full of tears the words on the page had blurred. How could his father have known? For it was as if the words his father had cried thirty-five years ago were identical to the words Yuri himself had cried so often in the last year.

“I don’t want to live like this anymore!”

But now, through his father’s words and experiences, Yuri knew the answer to that cry. Forgiveness and surrender. And like his father had in this Robbie Taggart, Yuri also had an example to follow—his own father. That day on the ship Sergei finally was able to forgive not only those he thought had hurt him, but also the God he believed had forsaken him. And he had also forgiven his worst enemy—himself.

All at once the journal slipped from Yuri’s hands, and he found himself kneeling in front of the chair on which he had been sitting. Yuri decided then and there he was going to do only one thing differently from his father. He was not going to ponder this thing any longer. He was ready. There was no need for him to suffer a moment longer. He could be the man he longed to be, right now.

“Oh, God, forgive me for being so dense and so dull. Help me to cease this wallowing in self-pity. Help me to become a real man, a man my father would be proud of. I surrender to you, for it is so very apparent I am incapable of success on my own.”

Fifteen minutes later, a soft voice floated to Yuri’s ears as he still knelt in the parlor.

“Yuri, are you alright?” It was Katya.

He glanced up and smiled, beckoning her to come to him.

“Yes, I believe I am,” he said. “I believe I finally am.”

“I haven’t seen you smile like that in such a long time.” She came close and lay a hand on his shoulder.

“Let me tell you about it, Katya.”

And although it was the early hours of the morning and he had had no sleep since the previous morning, Yuri felt oddly revived. He and Katya talked until the first rays of the sun pierced the sky. By the time the first family member rose from bed, Katya had knelt down next to her husband and prayed a prayer similar to his. For even as Sergei had used the words “manhood,” it was clear this was really a place a woman must find also. Surrender and forgiveness and wholeness, of course, transcended gender. And Katya had long been seeking these things, and especially so since the terrible debacle with the Monk. Now it seemed so very right that she should find them with her husband.

They rose when they heard some clattering in the kitchen. Anna was there preparing the morning meal. She took one look at the couple and dropped the spoon she was using to stir the kasha. She ran to them and embraced them both. It amazed Yuri that his mother could tell. Was it really so apparent in their faces? Or had she been expecting, hoping, this would be the result of reading Sergei’s journal? Perhaps a bit of both. Nevertheless, Yuri did feel as if the new light in his heart must be positively glowing.