The Commissariat of Enlightenment (13 page)

NOW
an experienced rider—the civil war had taken him from Karelia to the Caucasus—Astapov descended the hill in an easy canter, Nikitin behind him. They passed the Reds’ positions at the planked bridge, where the soldiers smoked and cleaned their weapons or simply sat against their makeshift packs and stared into the distance. Tired and rattled by the fresh death of their comrade, they paid Astapov little notice. Many of the men still didn’t understand who he was or why he had joined them. Tarass had been speculating, moments before the soundless bullet pierced his chest, why it was that the civilian visitor from Moscow possessed the name of the village not far from the plant where he had once worked as a tanner.

One of the troops called out: “Are you going into battle without us, Pasha?”

Nikitin laughed. “Yes, don’t trouble yourselves.”

Crossing the bridge, Astapov wondered if they were being tracked. He doubted the word of men who declared that they could sense their own surveillance; he didn’t have this facility, even
if his image were framed now in at least several pairs of field glasses.

The path cut through a wheat field criminally left untended, enlisted in the conspiracy to starve the cities. They passed single-room log houses whose roofs were made of mud and straw. No fires burned in their chimneys, but the yards around the houses were kept up, as was typical in this province, and some of the autumn’s greens and cucumbers remained unharvested in their gardens. Astapov’s horse skirted some semimoist cow pats on the side of the path.

Nikitin observed: “Three or four hours’ fresh, I’d say, comrade. They’re hiding their livestock inside the houses.”

Astapov nodded. This was the central threat to the Revolution now: the refusal of the peasants to abide the requisition orders issued by the Commissariat of Supply. Food was the counterrevolutionaries’ most potent weapon. In Moscow today a month’s wages wouldn’t buy even a kilo of cucumbers on the black market, the only place where they might be available. The hungry workers who had made the Revolution were fleeing the cities and turning back into peasants, leaving the Workers’ State defenseless; the population of Petrograd had been more than halved.

In response, Comrade Ilich had demanded that forceful measures be taken in the Volga region, the only grain-producing area still under Red occupation. Grain-procurement levies had been set by province, by town, by village, by household, and by individual. They were based on an estimate of the grain “surplus”; that is, the amount of grain produced beyond what was necessary to the peasants’ survival. This estimate was derived from pre-war production figures, rough appraisals of the land available for cultivation, and suppositions about the land’s optimal yield. The result, a purely and perfectly abstract-theoretical figure, like one of the dimen
sionless physical constants that governed the propagation of radio waves and the motions of the planets, was then augmented by another thirty percent, to account for the amount of grain that the peasants were likely to hide or steal. Astapov knew this inflation was necessary: thirty percent was probably too conservative a guess. Ilich had called for the execution of bandits and kulaks and the confiscation of their families’ properties. The order was to be “carried out strictly and mercilessly.”

Astapov and Nikitin slowed as the monastery drew near. The whitewashed walls weren’t high, but their relative solidity made them appear to loom over the houses. At the end of the road a door in the monastery wall waited for the Reds, evidently un-bolted.

So as not to be taken for indecisive or fearful, Astapov decided against calling out. He made a sign to Nikitin to stand back. Then he brought the horse up against the door and laid a hand on the splintery wood. He pushed the door hard and it swung open silently to reveal a dusty, empty yard. A few carts were parked neatly under the eaves against the inside of the walls. The Reds passed through the yard slowly, circling the horses. Then Astapov stopped and waited a minute. He listened to the breeze. You wouldn’t know the country was at war.

“There’s a sniper in the bell tower,” Nikitin murmured, looking away. “He’s watching through a gap in the stones.”

Astapov dismounted. Nikitin did so too, with a conspicuously imitative nonchalance, and they tied up their horses near the door of the church in the yard’s center. Astapov brushed his pants legs and removed his cap before entering; Nikitin followed suit. Nikitin had been studying the visitor from Moscow ever since his arrival. For nearly two years now, the newspapers and broadsheets had been heralding the creation of the New Soviet Man. Astapov
was the most representative New Soviet Man that Nikitin had ever met.

“Mind your step,” Astapov said.

As at the entrance of all churches, no matter how many candles were lit inside, the passage into the dark was blinding. For a moment Astapov could see nothing at all, not even the candles. He halted at the door so that he wouldn’t stumble and Nikitin brushed against him despite the warning. Astapov was always unsettled upon entering a church. Having opened a door, you entered another world whose glory was expressed not by radiance but through the conjuration of darkness. The mystery was in the unseen. If you stumbled here, even that was at the hand of God.

But he was patient and would allow the interior of the church to reveal itself; that too was part of the plan. Revelation would come, only not at once, not without at least a few moments of anxious anticipation. Incense caressed his nostril hairs; he judged it to be freshly burned and that judgment was met by the awareness, as his pupils opened, that a few dozen candles were lit around the chapel. He couldn’t yet see the candles themselves, but the flames glowed like isolated stars in a particularly vacant corner of the universe. Someday he would suggest that every theater in the country be plunged into darkness before the presentation of its cinema program.

Astapov took another step into the church, which was much larger and more ambitious than the one that had been destroyed in Kamenka. The air in the room was still, weighted by the syrupy beeswax fragrance of the incense, which replaced the obscurity as the bearer of mystery. Now he could see the burning candles. Their slender stems were not yet short. He moved tentatively toward the icon screen, the iconostasis, only a few of its glinting highlights visible.

Nikitin had also noted the length of the candles. He chewed on his lip. Otherwise the soldier seemed undaunted by the depth of the gloom, not unsettled at all. And he had a revolver in his hand. Astapov realized that he hadn’t expressly forbidden arms.

Along the wall approaching the iconostasis hung a picture whose details could not be immediately perceived. It was dominated by a large portrait of a bearded man in a white robe emblazoned with a black cross insignia. His wide-sleeved right arm was outstretched, two fingers extended, and in his left hand he carried a large rectangular object, presumably a book, presumably the Gospels. A deep blue glory, the halo, circled his head and a featureless gray background lay behind him. But what summoned Astapov’s attention was the icon’s border, a series of squares that ran the painting’s perimeter, in which there were more complicated images: men kneeling, women reclining on divans, unbridled horses, and gloried infants being passed from one gloried adult to another. It was some kind of narrative. Astapov was always looking for a narrative.

“Saint Svyetoslav of Gryaz with Scenes of His Life,” said a husky, whispering voice from an unknown direction. The voice was so nearly feminine that for a moment Astapov fancied that it belonged to Yelena.

Astapov turned toward the voice, but couldn’t discern the speaker. With evidently keener eyesight, Nikitin had trained his gun on him.

“Easy,” warned Astapov. As best he knew, dozens of guns swarmed the dark.

“The icon is attributed to Dionysius’s workshop,” said the man, whose intonation was like a badly tuned violin. “Early sixteenth century. In fact, monastery tradition holds that it was
done by Dionysius himself, but this hasn’t yet received official sanction.”

Astapov spoke to the darkness: “I’m Comrade Astapov, assigned to the Second Cavalry, Fourth Division, by the Agitprop Section of the Commissariat of Enlightenment.”

“In that case, perhaps you can authenticate the icon.”

This was a jest, Astapov supposed.

“Note the elongated figures, the lightness of the touch. That’s Dionysius. There’s considerable stylistic resemblance to Dionysius’s portrait of Saint Demetrios in the Therapont frescos.” The old man—Astapov guessed he was old—chuckled. “Well, I’m only an amateur historian, I wouldn’t presume to lecture a visitor from…I’m sorry, where did you say you were from again?”

“The Commissariat of Enlightenment,” Astapov replied sharply. “And I’ve come to discuss matters vital to the safety of everyone in Gryaz.”

“Enlightenment,” the man repeated. The word was so oddly pitched that Astapov couldn’t determine whether the speaker was being ironic or derisive—or whether he was aware of the army nearly at the monastery’s doors. Astapov wondered if he had stumbled on a madman. Mad or not, the man continued, “Please, take note of the images that follow around the icon’s border. Everything you need to know about the Church of Saint Svyetoslav of Gryaz is right here. See, at the far left, Svyetoslav takes the cowl. Svyetoslav is ordained. Svyetoslav dreams of a young unknown girl in a faraway place.”

Astapov had already been drawn to the images, which, he realized now that his vision cleared, were exceedingly well done, indeed comparable to the Therapont frescoes. Coming a century after Andrei Rublev’s masterpieces in Zvenigorod, the work of
Dionysius’s school allowed for more humanlike, even carnal figures. The Gryaz icons were much more animated, their colors more warmly contrasting. The actors in the perimeter squares achieved a kind of weightlessness, their feet lifting from the ground. Astapov frowned. Just as when he had traveled with his father, and several times since then, he was compelled to unbelievingly believe, for a moment at least, in the presence of the unseen. In the space consecrated within these walls, the veil had lifted and God was shown to mankind in human form. Astapov’s own boots felt light. He gazed at the paintings. You prayed with your eyes open, fixed on the icon. It was a mistake for the Party to focus its attention on achieving universal literacy. Everything connected through pictures, not words.

“Sir,” said Astapov gently. “I need to speak with the archpriest, if you please.”

“You’re speaking with him now!” the old man snapped. He was small, almost dwarfish, with a yellowish beard. “Do you think I would leave this to the sexton?”

Astapov looked away, up above their heads into the dome of the church, whose concavity was fully occupied by the face of a stern blue-eyed Savior. Gray light seeped in through windows at the apex.

“Attend what I say, boys, you’ll find it instructive. Here’s Svyetoslav on the road. He carries the Gospels with him; the book is lit by its own radiance. He speaks to the peasants. And here in the next frame the good people of Gryaz offer him land on which to build a monastery. Among them is the Blessed Borislav Petrov, the father of the girl in Svyetoslav’s dream. Here she is grown, the Blessed Agafeya Petrova, a woman of many good works who has gone childless for years. She’s tried every remedy available: sour goat’s milk, melted snow, honey smeared on her abdomen on the
night of the new moon, a pillow stuffed with pine needles, bread thrown over a wall. Here she is with Svyetoslav, who reads the Gospels to her. She miraculously gives birth to a son. That’s why in this province Svyetoslav is called the Woman’s Saint, who restores life to barren wombs. And then Svyetoslav is granted the most astounding of his visions: a premonition of his own death.”

Astapov said, half to himself, “We all live with premonitions of our deaths, every day of our lives.”

Nikitin snorted, the soldier’s affirmation. The lecture Astapov had just received had brought him closer to the painting, allowing him to examine the minuscule figures in the little squares. They were sharply drawn. A white-robed woman faced the future saint, her right hand resting on a book held by the saint. In the following painting she reclined on a divan, a baby in her lap. The painting seemed brighter than the church’s available light should have made possible.

“Svyetoslav restores her womanly health,” the old man explained. “Six children were born of this woman, the Blessed Agafeya Petrova, after her twenty-fifth year, and all lived in service to God. And here, Svyetoslav on his deathbed. In the next-to-last frame, Saint Svyetoslav is laid into his crypt.”

The crypt was made of white stone. In this image, beneath the main portrait, the crypt was open, with its covering slab pulled off about halfway. The saint lay in a relaxed, not fully prone position, his uncovered hands already laced over his heart in presumably pro forma repentance for his sins. He was surrounded by men in robes and others who appeared to be peasants, including the same woman carrying a baby. The final square, in the lower left hand corner, portrayed the crypt completely closed, with no bystanders.

Astapov now became aware of something bubbling beneath their feet; it lay beyond the surface of things. It was a vast human
spirit, a community. Not a word was being spoken, of course, but there were breaths taken in shallow drafts, children’s whimpers muffled, and stomachs in gastric distress. It seethed. The monastery probably had extensive cellars.

“Great men have come to this monastery since Svyetoslav.” The priest pointed to some portraits along the wall. “Ivan Khotyaintsev. Nikolai Gidzenko. Boris Ageyev who made a pilgrimage to Mount Athos. But they were only men, not saints. Svyetoslav was a saint, pure in heart and deed, incorruptible.”

“There are no incorruptible men,” Astapov objected, quite pointlessly. Nikitin showed surprise at the vigor of Astapov’s protest. He was probably wondering why Astapov engaged in conversation with the old cleric at all. Astapov said, “Man carries his own corruption with him in every stride. Only an idea can remain intact and unsullied. That’s why the Revolution will be victorious—because it’s an idea above compromise.”