Winter Palace (18 page)

The old couple were moving about in the room where he had slept. While Ivona and Yussef dressed, Jeffrey seated himself at the table and took out his pocket New Testament. Though he did not like reading it in public, and though he had no great desire to read at all that morning, he knew he needed to. Holding to the discipline of daily Bible time was a link to who he was, and who he had grown to be over the past few years. Within minutes of seating himself, Jeffrey was lifted away from all the poverty, all the trauma, all the difficulty, all the discomfort. He read and he spoke a silent prayer and he found a touch of home in an alien world, a taste of peace in a time of upheaval, a time of healing in this wounded land.

He felt eyes upon him and looked up to see Yussef staring. The rail-thin young man bore a look of confusion that bordered on pain. Yussef started to speak, but Ivona chose that moment to step from the bathroom. He cocked his head toward the front door. Time to go.

They drove only a few kilometers before Yussef stopped as close as he could come to a filling station. The line for gasoline was very long.

His eyes on the car in front of them, Yussef spoke in surprisingly hesitant tones. Ivona translated, “I wish to ask you something.”

Jeffrey stretched as far as the car's cramped confines would allow. “Fire away.”

Yussef spoke again. When Ivona did not interpret, Jeffrey turned around to find her staring at Yussef, a look of bafflement on her features. Yussef spoke to her again, but without his normal brusqueness. Still she did not reply. Quietly Yussef urged her.

Her eyes still on her nephew, she asked, “Are you a devout man?”

For the first time since passing the border, Jeffrey found himself able to ignore the heat. “I think only God can know a man's heart,” he replied. “So it is for the Father to say how true to His word a man is. But I try. That much I can say. I have accepted Christ as my Savior, and I try to live by God's Word.”

Something in what Jeffrey said agitated Ivona very much. Her voice seemed to tremble slightly as she translated. Yussef then asked through her, “You were reading the Bible this morning at the table?”

“The New Testament. Yes.”

“You do this every day?”

“I try to. It is my time with my Lord,” he replied simply.

“For this you need no church?”

“A quiet place and some privacy would be nice,” Jeffrey replied. “But no, nothing special is required except a prayerful heart.”

Yussef said through a very subdued Ivona, “I watched you. I think I could see this prayerful heart on your face.”

“I would be happy to read with you some morning,” Jeffrey offered.

“You would do this?”

“Of course.”

Yussef rubbed a hand down the stubble on his cheek. “I thank you for the invitation. I will think on it.”

When they finally arrived at the pumps, Yussef motioned for them to stay inside. He climbed from the car and spoke long and hard with the attendant. Money was exchanged at intervals after pleading arguments. Gasoline was doled out in twenty-liter lots. When the extra canisters in the trunk were finally revealed, the attendant replied with frantic hand waving and head shaking. Yussef made certain no other car could see and revealed American dollars. The atmosphere magically changed. The tank was topped off, the canisters filled, and the attendant saw them off with a wave.

Once they were again underway, Jeffrey said quietly, “I sure would love a cup of coffee.” And a bath, he added to himself. And a bed with clean sheets. And food that doesn't have me crunching on grit. But he would settle for a coffee. “Or tea.”

“Coffee is hard to find outside the big cities' black markets,” Ivona replied. “Tea is a different story. The former Soviet Union grew quite a good tea in the Muslim states and imported more from China and Vietnam. But the new states are desperate for hard currency and refuse to accept the ruble in payment. Now we receive only what we can barter for, and as our industrial base falters, it becomes increasingly difficult to find things they wish to buy.”

They pulled into a dusty square left breathless by the heat. There was not the first hint of breeze. A pair of trees stood with leaves glued to an empty sky. Jeffrey eased from the car, his shirt welded to his skin with a coating of dried sweat. It was nine o'clock in the morning.

Their destination was an apartment in an older building which, before the Communists chopped it up, had been a village manor. Their hostess was a small, swarthy woman who kept the night's coolness trapped within closed windows and drawn curtains. A beautiful teenaged girl ignored the visitors as well as her mother's repeated screams, sulking off to whichever room they were not using. But when the woman
brought out her parcel and unwrapped the multiple layers, the teenager was immediately forgotten.

The snuffbox was dated 1782 and stamped with the royal crest of Catherine the Great. Catherine ruled all of Russia for thirty-four years, after deposing her own husband in 1762. She was a ruthless libertine who plotted her husband's assassination with a favorite lover—one of over two dozen. She was also an extremely efficient ruler who founded universities and museums with the same free-wheeling verve she applied to her private life. And Catherine loved her snuff. She was known for keeping jeweled snuffboxes in every chamber of her vast palaces and for passing them out to favorite subjects as the fancy took her. It was her habit to dip only with her left hand, so that the right would always be clean for her visitors to kiss.

This particular snuffbox depicted her predecessor, Peter the Great, mounted on a proud war horse. The box was wrought of enameled silver, the emperor and his horse were gold, standing on a boulder of mother of pearl. Thirty matched diamonds encircled the scene.

From a queen's palace to a dusty backwater village. With a silent sigh Jeffrey handed back the parcel, began the lengthy purchasing discussions, and wished that the box could tell its tale.

Thus was the pattern for their days established—up at dawn, a quick breakfast, a hasty wash, a brief time of prayer and study for Jeffrey. Then they would be under way, driving through scalding heat toward another gray-washed village.

Several times Jeffrey invited Yussef to read and pray with him. Yussef always responded with the same reply: he was not yet ready. And yet he continued with his hesitant questions. Ivona translated, although their discussions clearly disturbed her.

Katya's absence was a wound inflamed by every motion, every experience. Each breath of feeling that drifted through
his heart was accompanied by the thought that he was incomplete without her. Life was not as it should be unless she was by his side.

Yussef had done his work well. There were very few unimportant items, very few wasted visits. He had also succeeded in reducing the number of icons offered to just one. This was a relief to Jeffrey; by now, most London antique shops had sprouted walls of ancient holy images. Russians fleeing to the West had brought them in droves, and the flood of merchandise had dropped the price to one twentieth of what it had been before glasnost.

Their icon appeared on the fourth day. It was an
Elevsa
, the form that showed Mary embracing the Christ-child, usually with their cheeks touching. The other major form, known as a
Hodigitria
, depicted Mary and the Child separate; usually the baby was painted in the act of blessing the viewer, sometimes holding the holy Book in his left hand. This particular icon was encased in three overlapping silver frames. Enameled into the silver, to either side of the central figures, were paintings of two Russian saints, their names etched in Cyrillic above their heads. The item probably dated back to the late sixteenth century and was clearly of value to a collector.

Yet another item found that fourth day would have brightened the eyes of Jeffrey's friend Pavel Rokovski, an official of the Ministry of Culture in Poland. It was a silver casket, about ten inches square and eight inches high, whose entire exterior was decorated with gold wire woven into an intricate Oriental motif. It clearly dated from the late sixteenth century, when this part of present-day Ukraine was Polish soil. The styles of that era were largely drawn from Persia, which at the time bordered the empire's southern reaches. Floral patterns twined their way about hexagonal shapes, in keeping with the Koran's prohibition against depicting the human form. Along the front, golden pillars supported a domed and sweeping roof, as found upon Persian palaces
of that day. The casket was supported by four balled feet of gold-studded lapis lazuli.

After each visit, as they returned to the car and the heat and the drive, Ivona continued with her endless instruction. As the hours and days dragged on, Jeffrey found it increasingly difficult to feign an interest in her lessons. But still she continued. She hammered at him with soft-spoken chisel strokes of her tongue, pressing and pressing and pressing him to learn.

By the sixth and final day, however, Jeffrey found it almost impossible to listen to Ivona's droning lessons. He was exhausted by the heat, the constant stop-and-go driving, the unpalatable food. He was tired of wearing dirty clothes, tired of trying to do business in a foreign tongue. He missed Katya fiercely. And on top of these irritants, the barrage of bounces in a car utterly lacking in shocks had brought on a recurrence of his nagging neck pain.

That afternoon they were cruising along at a modest speed when the car dive-bombed off the end of the pavement. The road went on; the pavement simply ceased. No warning, no markings, just a razor-cut across the road and a ten-inch drop from asphalt to gravel. Jeffrey felt the jar right down to his toenails. His neck and back began complaining in the strongest possible terms.

By evening his patience was worn thin as tissue paper. They were staying in a faceless apartment block, their dinner punctuated by a continual racket from the hallways and other apartments—music blaring, babies crying, adults screaming, children shouting and playing tag up and down the stairs. No one else paid the slightest attention to the babble. The middle-aged couple who were hosting them looked too bowed down by their own internal troubles to pay anyone or anything much mind. And throughout the meal, Ivona continued her endless recital of facts and data.

Finally he had had enough. Too much, in fact. Jeffrey set
down his fork and demanded, “Why are you telling me all this?”

His was the one question she did not expect, and it stopped her cold. “I—What?”

“All this information. Why are you telling me?”

“I—” She stopped again, blue eyes blinking hugely behind heavy frames. “To help you.”

“To help me what? Buy antiques? That's what I'm here for, isn't it?” His neck's throbbing pain felt as though it hacked at his brain. “How does it help, can you tell me that?”

“You don't want to know?”

“Of course I want to know. But this—” He waved his arm to take it all in and winced as the movement sent a lance through his back. “You're going to all this trouble, force-feeding me information all the time, nonstop, for what reason?”

Ivona faltered visibly, and her English slipped a notch. “Is not good information?”

“Of course it's good. It's great. It's incredible. I've been given a six-day university course. But why? For Yussef, sure, it's fine, he's your nephew, you teach him. But why me? You don't know me, you may never see me again, and yet you never let up teaching me. I can see you're absolutely exhausted. We all are, yet still you go on. Why?”

She did not reply. Jeffrey watched her face and decided he'd insulted her so badly she would depart right then and leave him to fend for himself in a foreign tongue. He searched for an apology, but could not think past the pain. He stood and left the silent room for bed.

****

“What did he ask you?” Yussef demanded.

Ivona replied, her habitual lilt muted by shock.

“Naive, you called him,” Yussef scoffed. “A mere boy in a man's body. A Westerner who sees nothing but gain.”

“How could an American be so suspicious?” Ivona asked.

“I'll tell you how.” Yussef rose to his feet. “By being twice the man you give him credit for. Ten times.”

“I was so sure you were wrong,” she said.

Yussef barked a short laugh. “Go. Go and speak to your bishop. Tell him I have found the man who will help us.”

Chapter 19

Once they were under way the next morning, Ivona announced, “There has been a change of plans.”

“Fine,” Jeffrey said. “Listen, I need—”

“There is someone we wish for you to meet. His name is Bishop Michael Denisov. He is one of the leaders of the Ukrainian Rites Church.”

“Sounds great,” Jeffrey replied. “But I'd just like to apologize—”

“There is something I must first tell you, however,” Ivona continued in her softly warbled drone, unwilling to hear what he had to say. “You need to know a bit of the background to what we face here.”

“Fine.” Jeffrey leaned back in defeat. “Let's hear it.”

“During the Communist era,” Ivona explained, “the Russian Orthodox Church was the only church recognized by the Soviet state. The Ukrainian Rites Catholic Church was outlawed in 1946. Stalin saw the Ukrainian church as too patriotic. Nationalism to anything but the Soviet state was in Stalin's times one of the gravest crimes one could commit. Stalin needed the Ukrainians' assistance in fighting the Germans, so he did nothing until the end of the war. But in 1946 he convened a synod of all Ukrainian bishops. He gave them two choices. Either they would disband the church and instruct all believers to become Orthodox, or Stalin promised to exterminate every Ukrainian Catholic—man, woman, and child.”

“The Orthodox church was under Stalin's control?” Jeffrey asked, and swiped at his forehead. Only eight o'clock in the morning and already the breeze through the car's open windows was hot as a blow dryer. Outside, the landscape crawled by in unrelenting sameness.