The Railway (17 page)

In reply Muzayana would point wearily at Vamek's shoes (if she was speaking to a man) or at her own gown (if she was speaking to a woman), and the visitors would beg to be allowed to exchange their three, one or five roubles for shoes that had trodden far-away paths, for garments that had circled the world on shoulders they loved and revered. Soon not a single item of foreign clothing remained on either the Moroccan prince or the young descendant of the Prophet. Vamek was now wearing a Kirghiz felt cap from the Selpo
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and traditional (though factory-made) Kirghiz trousers with legs of different colours; Muzayana, for her part, was dressed a little better, having gone to the village bazaar and bought clothes that local widows had made in their homes. But when the young couple had nothing left at all, when they had spent their last kopeks on a lollipop for a newborn baby (named Muzmek in their honour) – then, I am sad to say, the gossip and backbiting began.

In defence of my people, I must say that this gossip and backbiting did not begin entirely spontaneously. Osman-Anon may appear to have been sleeping, but he had in fact conducted no fewer than thirty-seven secret meetings with shepherds, postmen and bank clerks; he had even met one-armed Uncle Seryozha, who had a small newspaper kiosk and whose only secret was a single copy of the weekly
Football
that he had hidden away for some boy or other. Yes, zealous as ever, Osman-Anon had organised an entire secret network of agents that would have stayed secret for ever had not old Symyrbay-Moonshine got drunk every evening by the old mill where cockfights were held and, with a sob of shame in his voice, divulged the names of those who had signed up that day to collaborate with this anonymous spy of a stranger.

The campaign of gossip had been instigated by Osman-Anon. His profession barred him from receiving gifts from Muzayana and Vamek, and there was, in any case, no other course of action open to him. Even if he had expropriated the foreigners – as he had dreamed of doing night and day– he would have secured only a Selpo gown and some socks from the Djalalabad factory.

And so, as I have said, the gifts ran out and tongues began to wag. But Osman had underestimated Muzayana; she excused her lack of gifts by giving brief talks about unemployment, the ruthless exploitation of labour and the general difficulty of life in America. After she had explained such matters not only to the adults but also to whole classes of children – brought to her by Mustafa Djemalovich, a Kurd who taught the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union – she went on to demonstrate to the devout Muslim women of Mookat how sexual intercourse is practised in America. “No, no, come on now!” she would begin. “How many kids have you got? Twelve? Fourteen? And do you know why? Because you don't use condoms! What? C-o-n-d-o-m-s! Yes, like this one! No, it's not a May Day balloon. It fits over a male member. What's a male member? It's what makes a child. No, I don't mean a husband, I mean the member of a husband – how do you say it in Uzbek? In English it's called a…” At this point the women would hide behind their veils, but they would go on listening. And watching. And reporting all they had heard and seen to Osman-Anon.

“And then she wriggled about like this!” they would say, awkwardly imitating the movements of the godless young American. “Like this!”

And Osman's feelings of fraternal and patriotic respect were only just enough to prevent him from exploiting these honest agricultural labourers then and there, in his room in the collective-farm guest house.

“Like this!” the women repeated. “Like this!”

“Don't worry!” Osman attempted to calm them. “We won't let her wriggle out of this one!”

“Yes, that's just what she did – she wriggled about like this! Like this!”

So carried away were these wives of shepherds and horseherds that they left their precious veils behind and hurried back to their homes to search for their foolish and ignorant husbands.

In the meantime, the Moroccan prince took to drinking spirits distilled from millet with Symyrbay-Moonshine – the only man in Mookat who appeared to have any time for him. As for Muzayana, she had not only given up all her clothes but had also worn out the last of her threadbare dreams. She sat there mutely, as if carved from stone, while visitors came and went, and came and went, kissing her feet, kissing the hem of her dress, kissing her numb palms. Childless women ran their hands over her breasts.

It was not long before pilgrims on their way to Mount Suleiman were, as a matter of course, making a small detour to visit the holy girl whose silent touch had cured fifteen men and women of hair-loss – not to mention seven cases of Parkinson's, six alcoholics, four cases of eczema and even one case of haemorrhoids. Muzayana for her part gazed at them blankly, seeing not faces but bright blurs and no longer even trying to find out who her visitors were or why they had come.

In the end it was not the young couple who were arrested, but Osman-Anon. After her guests went missing, Oppok-Lovely had alerted the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the various other security services. Sub-Lieutenant Osman-Anon was duly tracked down; not only had he deserted his post but he had also failed to equip himself with his customary new passport. It is said that three Chekists, seven plain-clothes policemen and a platoon of soldiers from some special unit stormed the collective-farm guest house and found Osman-Anon in his room, reading the copy of
Football
that one-eyed Uncle Seryozha had hidden under the table for some boy. We, of course, know the truth, but Osman-Anon's explanations were in vain; his colleagues punched him in the belly, gagged him and dragged him away.

As for Muzayana, exhausted by her relatives, she waited out the term of her visa, thanked God that her father had chosen to slip over the mountains to China – and made her own getaway by air to America, together with her princely husband. And that is all I know.

Gogolushko, however, knew everything. The only thing he did not know about was the Apostolic Cathedral of Saint Thomas. But then no one in Gilas knew about it except Father Ioann, whom everyone called Ivan – or even just plain Vanka – and thought of simply as the crazy caretaker of the Russian cemetery. In the middle of this cemetery there had once stood a rather monstrous edifice popularly thought of as a collective-farm hydroelectric station
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from before the Revolution. And this building had been quietly covered by a mound of graves, until nothing was left of it except a somehow still rather monstrous bump. Nothing more.

The young boys of the town, admittedly, sometimes said that it was not a hydroelectric station at all, that it went deep down into the earth and that the interior was faced throughout with red-brown granite – of which there was only one other slab in the whole of Gilas: on the top step, just below the pedestal that supported their limestone Lenin.

The Cathedral of the Apostle Thomas, founded according to legend by the doubting apostle himself, did indeed descend deep into the earth – or rather the earth had for centuries climbed up around the Cathedral – and its interior, which had been cleaned by Father Ioann during long years of devout service, was indeed magnificent. Dense, resonant granite – similar to that of Saint Isaac's Cathedral in Petersburg, where Father Ioann had first served as a dean – rose up in columns towards a simple cupola with an opening into the dusty Asiatic sky. What made the interior so magnificent, however, was not the circle of columns – most of them polished to a slippery brilliance – but the spiralling steps, the curve after curve of tapering granite steps. Some of these steps and columns, however, were covered by petrified moss, and it was hard to remove this marvellous moss and its green patterns without damaging the stone itself.

Here were no icons, images, crosses or icon-lamps, nothing to distract the spirit from its aspiration heavenwards. And after making for himself a kind of cradle that hung from the opening in the cupola, Father Ioann had removed nearly everything that had obscured the sumptuous granite; he used to work at dawn, when none of the Orthodox would think of dying – and if they did, then the wake and its attendant downing of vodka would come to an end only on the third day and only that evening would some Anti-Christ like Mefody come to inform Father Ioann of yet another man who had passed on from the kingdom of Satan. Father Ioann was, fortunately, able to make use of these deceased, raising up from this progeny of the devil a kind of impregnable mound around his immaculate Cathedral.

Where there had been windows, there were now niches which opened only into the earth itself and that gave off a putrefactive damp. Father Ioann put black tarred roofing paper over them and sometimes, when the noon sun fell slantwise through the opening in the cupola, the niches would shine with a blue light, and a marvellous sensation of eternal twilight amid the noonday world would fill Father Ioann's heart with the cool of tranquillity. Only one passion consumed Father Ioann during these long years of service in the desert – he hungered to restore the Cathedral to its former magnificence. This passion enabled him to survive on the offerings brought by a few old Baptist women – in particular by poor Marfyona Mosha, whose heart was torn between hope and fear: hope that Father Ioann, the only man in holy orders for many miles, would administer the last rites to her, and fear that he might pronounce a final curse on her for being of the seed of heretics. During his many years of zeal Father Ioann had grown unused to eating regularly; Easter cakes gave him wind, while eggs made his skin, accustomed as it was to a cold darkness, feel as if it were on fire. His favourite foods were nuts, which he gathered on the border of his dominion, and raisins; he picked the grapes from forbidden collective-farm vines and then dried them in honour of the congealed blood of our Lord.

One passion, as I have said, consumed Father Ioann – and this passion somehow led him to keep a record of the acts of the inhabitants of Gilas: that lost and ill-assorted tribe of the debauched and depraved. True, his annals were incomplete; there was no mention of any event from the many years when Father Ioann was in exile first in Solovky
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(it was in fact, after being released from Solovky that Father Ioann had first come to Gilas), then in Kolyma,
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and lastly, not far away at all, in Uchkuduk. No especially subtle reasons had been advanced for his various sentences: Father Ioann had been exiled in order to comply with quotas imposed from above – as a class enemy of the people, as a stateless Nationalist-Cosmopolitan, and then as a recidivist parasite. Father Ioann had never been submissive in spirit and his only fear during his last two sentences – in Kolyma and Uchkuduk – was that the authorities might undertake to improve the Russian cemetery and thus discover the Cathedral he had left buried beneath a burial mound. Before being sent to Kolyma, he had protected it with a slogan picked out in white pebbles, “Let Village Life be our Focus!” (which he hoped would prevent the impious from focusing their attention on the Cathedral) and with a portrait of the Anti-Christ with a moustache (which he hoped would frighten off any other potential busybodies). He had found it harder, however, to decide what to do before leaving for Uchkuduk: if he were to write some new slogan over the burial mound, then Musayev-Slogans – the very same Kara-Musayev who had sent him into exile but who had now been deprived of his official position and even of his first name – would come to the cemetery in search of enlightenment; if he were to sow the burial ground with the maize so dear to Khrushchev's heart, then Vera-Virgo would bring her clients there. Yes, this question tormented Father Ioann all through the last night before his departure for Uchkuduk until finally – may the Lord forgive him! – he moved his toilet to the top of the mound. His judgment proved correct – no adult ever thought of answering a call of nature in the middle of a cemetery, while the children, for their part, never thought of entering the cabin at all, fouling it instead from every side.

During the absences of Father Ioann, the Orthodox were buried by Mefody; some gave him a three-rouble note, others, more straightforwardly, presented him with a bottle of vodka. But neither his periods of exile, nor the burial services he conducted in between them, were what really mattered to Father Ioann, even though they took up most of his life. What mattered to him was the Cathedral. His entire life was devoted to its restoration; and yet, as less and less of it remained to be cleaned and polished, so Father Ioann grew increasingly uneasy. This was no idle unease about being sent off again in order to fulfil some quota, perhaps this time in the capacity of a Gilas dissident; both his body and soul had grown accustomed to such things, and anyway the Lord always punished his persecutors afterwards. No, what troubled Father Ioann was the question of the destiny of the Cathedral. For many years the work of cleaning it had occupied him entirely, and his only thought had been to restore it to its primordial glory. But now, as the moment of the final scraping and polishing drew ever nearer, Father Ioann's heart tightened and shrank like the decreasing areas of encrustation on the granite columns: what was he to do next? What indeed? Should he display this magnificence to the depraved rabble? “To what avail is this glory,” he asked the Lord, “if thick-snouted swine are to come running into it as if into a field of acorns? Why have you tested me all my life,” he asked, “why have you called upon me to perform such a labour, if now you mean to cast this pearl before the swine that make up the human race? To whom will you entrust your Cathedral? To those who will turn it on the first day into an ethnological museum, on the second day into a goods shed, and on the third to a depot for that capitalistic Belyalov to fill with rotten bast and stinking potatoes?” No, Father Ioann could not reconcile himself to this.

He tried to admonish his pride, understanding that a Cathedral with no people was no Cathedral at all, but who – O Lord! – were these people? Why was the Lord's faith so perfect that the world now wallowed in faithlessness? And if people should trample on this faith, and on a life devoted to the restoration of this Cathedral, would that truly represent a humbling of his pride? Father Ioann was troubled in spirit, and he kept putting off the hour when the Cathedral would once again shine forth in its power and perfection, as it had in the days of the Apostle Thomas.

Yes, it was hard for Father Ioann to believe that the completion of the Cathedral under the earth would complete the restoration of the heavenly Cathedral; it was hard indeed. It was as if the spirit of Doubting Thomas himself hovered over Father Ioann, deepening his doubts.

Even during his days as a dean at Saint Isaac's, when Father Ioann was a young man and Russian philosophy and theology were blossoming, he had begun to realise with chilling horror, as he meditated on the nature of faith, that another's experience of faith counts for nothing, that faith is a sensation, something experienced deep in the heart and impossible to communicate – and that this is why a faith can be built only from words, this is why Christ had needed apostles – imperfect, tormented betrayers as they were – in order to establish his teachings. Yes, Socrates had needed Plato, Christ had needed apostles and evangelists, and Muhammad had needed caliphs. And then, as Father Ioann became more interested in the history of the apostles than in that of Christ himself, the apostle he chose to study was not Judas, that open traitor and Anti-Christ, nor Peter, the beloved disciple who came to deny Christ just as Christ had predicted, nor even the eloquent and exalted John, whose name was the same as Ioann's – no, the acts of these three were all entirely predictable, dictated as they were by Christ's life and death. The apostle whom Father Ioann chose for his most searching study was Doubting Thomas, whom people call the Twin; this doubter of all that was obvious, this believer whose belief never ran ahead of his experience, did indeed seem to Father Ioann like a twin.

In the journal
Theological Notebooks
Father Ioann published two articles, based on the apocrypha and life of Saint Thomas, who had set out after the Resurrection to Georgia and India. The unusual cast of mind revealed by these articles did not escape notice; it was in fact Father Ioann's unorthodox scepticism that led him to be exiled to Solovky, even if the official pretext for his exile was his Orthodoxy.
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In Solovky he shared a cell with a certain Mahmud-Hodja – not a theologian but simply an educated Muslim – and discovered, to his astonishment, that Islam too has its versions of the lives of the Prophets. There he listened to stories about Noah's Ark, about how the dog intended to couple with the bitch and multiply – and how Noah, warned by the cat, prevented them from sending the Ark to the bottom of the waters with the weight of their progeny. “And that is the reason both for the never-ceasing enmity between cats and dogs, and for the look of shame in the latters' eyes,” Mahmud-Hodja concluded gravely. All these stories were so remarkable that Father Ioann went on to question Mahmud-Hodja about the Christian apostles. It was then that Mahmud-Hodja, citing some ancient Uighur literature he had once read,
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told him the story of the Apostle Thamus, who had travelled as far as the Oxus and the Jaxartes
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and had even built a Cathedral of his own faith there.

It was this that decided Ioann's fate. At night, by the light of a creaking camp lantern – kept, like everything and everyone there, inside an iron cage – Father Ioann mastered the flourishes of the ancient Arabic and Uighur scripts, as described to him by Mahmud-Hodja. Both the harpoon-like needle of the letter “I,” and the letter “Ash” – a spring with a backwards-bent tail – would remain for ever in Father Ioann's memory. Mahmud-Hodja had introduced him to the world of an extraordinary people, a people who believed devoutly in all religions from Shamanism to Buddhism and who had translated into Uighur the
Diamond Sutra
, Manichean penitential prayers and the Christian Gospels. When they were both released from Solovky, Mahmud-Hodja had taken Father Ioann to Gilas; soon after this, Mahmud-Hodja had given up the ghost in his hometown of Balasagun. The orphaned Father Ioann had taken to buying up all the ancient manuscripts in the region, especially those with letters that resembled harpoons and springs. It is said that it was he who first introduced to Gilas the contagion of searching for manuscripts, a disease that would go on to afflict blind old Hoomer, Gogolushko the Party Secretary, Oppok-Lovely the passport officer, and the drunken Mefody.

But we have digressed from the agonies of Father Ioann. The day of the very last scraping, the very last polishing, was drawing nearer. What then? Father Ioann was like a mountaineer approaching the very summit of the world, where earth comes to an end and heaven begins; he understood the intoxication that awaited him in that blue, faceted air, with snowy peaks arrayed on all sides; yes, he could sense that dizzying minute, or two minutes, or five minutes. But what then? What then – if his heart did not burst in that never-ending moment? Mountains were simpler, Father Ioann decided; you simply climbed back down again. But how could Father Ioann climb back down again? From the peak of a spiritual feat that had taken up his whole life. And where was he to climb down to? And to what? Was he once again to bury his Cathedral in dirt?

The Lord himself once went up into a mountain and spoke the words: “It hath been said, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour and hate thine enemy.' But I say unto you, ‘Love your enemies.'” But who would place the follower of a different creed above a true believer? Father Ioann questioned the Lord – and searched for an answer inside himself. Deacons, bishops and metropolitans, a Patriarch or a Pope – would even the pillars of Christianity go to this extreme? He searched for an answer inside himself – and felt that he was being tempted to do neither more nor less than to renounce his faith.