I Am Not Here

;"Do you know yet that Father Dariusz ;ysakowski died yesterday?" These were the words Masha used to greet me on the threshold of the TV studio.
;I drop my fur coat, which I was just about to hang on the hook.
;The thirty-five-year-old Redemptorist priest, ordained in Poland just five years prior, had spent almost all of that time serving in Russia, in the parishes of the Kuzbass region. He eagerly worked with the youth and, as the rector of the Kemerovo parish, spiritually ministered to Catholics in all the surrounding villages. On one of his January trips, he and a female parishioner were in a car accident: a sudden gale-force gust of wind threw his car off course, and it slammed into an intercity bus.
;"I need to urgently pull some segment from the Video Journal—it's better if we insert the one we filmed in Kuzbass back in autumn. We’ll dedicate it to the memory of Father Dariusz," Masha says, rummaging through the cassettes. "And to think, he never even got to watch it..."
;We need to find out the details immediately. I dial the number for the Kemerovo parish. Long rings, then the answering machine picks up—and Father Dariusz’s voice cheerfully pronounces: "Praise be to Jesus Christ, Who is alive and loves you! At this moment, I AM NOT HERE…"
;I slowly lower the receiver.
;To be honest, we didn't take Father Dariusz very seriously. His manner of evangelizing right from the threshold seemed far too strange to us, and the permanent little smile on his handsome face combined with his catchphrase, "Life is beautiful!"—well, it was simply irritating, especially to Masha, who was prone to depression.
;Was that why all of our studio dealings with Father Dariusz turned out so indecently unsuccessful? Either we would lose a cassette he had given us for translation, or we would mix up the film he had selected for a public screening. And recently, a new employee, Lena, confused him with another Father Dariusz from Krasnoyarsk, resulting in him receiving a whole box of completely useless cassettes in the mail.
;"My dear friends! I am very grateful for your care, even though I didn't order anything," a bewildered Father Dariusz wrote back to us in a letter.
;It must be said that he never got angry with us. He never got angry with anyone at all. I remember at a Youth Meeting in Saratov, one of the young delegates dropped Father Dariusz’s camera onto the marble floor of the church while the priest was cheerfully posing with a swarm of boys and girls.
;“Aha, finally he won't be smiling,” I thought maliciously.
But when I ran closer, I saw that Father Dariusz was smiling and already singing along with his guitar.
;Masha slots the cassette with that very segment about Father Dariusz into the monitor. We huddle together in the editing room, as though we are watching this clip for the very first time.
;There is Father Dariusz in his dazzlingly white foreign car, driving into a village that is knee-deep in mud, walking into the log cabin of the very last Catholic babushka in the village. He says to her: "Let us praise the Lord, Baba Anya!"—and she just whines back: "Oh, I’m so sick, so sick." He says: "Let us offer our prayers to the Lord!"—and the old woman responds: "If only I could die sooner." It’s pure comedy.
;Then, large raindrops start falling onto his windshield. Father Dariusz says with enthusiasm: "Thank God, it’s starting to rain."
;"That’s him all over: whether it's rain, or snow, or a forty-degree frost, to him it’s always 'Thank God,'" Masha remarks.
;I distinctly remember the agony of putting this segment together.
;...It was the season of Lent. On that particular day, everything was slipping through my fingers. And on the monitor, this well-dressed, pleased-with-himself priest keeps droning on in his accent about how the Lord loves us.
;"He's certainly not afraid of sounding unoriginal," I smirked.
;I was logging tape after tape filled with views of coal-dusted Kuzbass towns and filthy, impoverished villages. Gray, dismal faces everywhere. In this God-forsaken place, it felt downright indecent to smile...
;When suddenly, an invisible voice loudly and joyfully declares: "Life is beautiful!"
;What?! I gasped and turned around. Nobody there... Was it the ghost of Father Dariusz?
;It took me a moment to realize: Father Dariusz had spoken his signature phrase off-camera. Most likely, during the shoot, he was encouraging our journalist (who happened to be Masha, our depressed one). And the camera accidentally caught his voice while the cameraman nearby was gathering b-roll of the mining town. And here I thought...
;...The illusion didn't stop there. When I went to church the following day, the very first person I ran into was... Father Dariusz! Had he somehow teleported?
;Ah yes, I remembered—he was supposed to come to Novosibirsk just then to conduct spiritual exercises for the youth.
;But when, in the confessional, instead of pastoral guidance I heard the exact same thing from him all over again—that "life is beautiful" and that "the Lord loves us"—I suddenly felt as though I were sitting in the editing room rather than a confessional box. Everything was blurred...
;And twenty minutes later, during his sermon, he repeated the exact same thing to the entire parish. It seemed he was used to solving all of humanity's problems with the exact same words.
;And then, a miracle happened.
;After the Mass, I went up to the large central Crucifix. The entire parish knows that the Jesus on this cross sometimes smiles, and there is nothing unusual about that. But on this morning, Jesus was not just smiling: He looked like an absolute spitting image of Father Dariusz... and His smile was just as sweet! (Forgive me, Lord!)
;I thought I was losing my mind.
;"...No doubt a clever Jesus is letting me know that He Himself is speaking to me through this foreigner! What a smile He gave me!" I made merry with Masha the next day.
;"What are you two laughing about?" Lena asked, walking into the studio pavilion.
;"Oh, Jesus smiled at her yesterday—as Father Dariusz! Ha-ha!" Masha replied.
;";ysakowski?" Lena clarified, just to be sure.
;...Well, how could one not laugh at him! The irrepressible Father Dariusz’s passion for evangelism knew no bounds and occasionally landed him in farcical situations.
;After the closing of the Saratov youth forum, the kids had to kill half a day waiting for their trains in an unfinished church. The empty altar area, covered with blankets, was occupied by exhausted boys and girls.
The sight was a parody of the classic icon The Teacher Surrounded by His Apostles. The reclining young Christians with their eyes closed... Father Dariusz, sitting on a chair in their midst with an inspired face... The sermon, naturally, about how the Lord loves us... But the bizarre twist was that the sermon, in Father Dariusz’s voice, was blasting... from a tape recorder at full volume!
;Father Dariusz turned out to be his own most ardent promoter and the most attentive listener of his own sermon!.. The enigmatic mise-en-sc;ne was completed by the words on the wall: "And the Word became flesh" (the theme of the meeting).
Except in this instance, the "word" was separate, and the "flesh" was separate!
;Well, we simply couldn't resist the temptation—we caught this expressive, farcical composition on camera.
;Right now, I don't find it funny.
;Not even six months have passed, and his flesh has indeed separated from the "word." But the "word" remains.
;"Masha, have you figured out what we're naming the segment?"
;"I know: 'Life Is Beautiful,'" Masha answers.
Her eyes are red from crying.
;They say that after death, a person looks completely different from a photograph. And so it is. In the Cathedral, by the tabernacle, they set up a large photograph of Father Dariusz. The young priest smiles at us from the portrait inside its black frame, calmly and wisely.
;"It’s as if he got smarter after death," someone from our crew remarks.
;But to me, it felt as though only now did Dariusz’s face truly come to resemble the beautiful face of Jesus. Who is alive and loves us.
;"Shall I call Kemerovo?" Masha asks.
;"There's nobody there, I just called."
;"But I don't need anyone there; I just want to hear him tell me one more time that Jesus loves us."