When Our Teacher Was Seventeen

Disclaimer: the author, along with the translator, holds the publishing rights for this English translation.

Both the paperback and the properly formatted digital version can be found on Amazon.

When Our Teacher
Was Seventeen

by

Boris Grechin

Translated into English by

A Friend from Afar

* * *

ISBN 9798172963650

Second edition

© Boris Grechin, text
© A Friend from Afar, translation
© Yuri Gavrilov, cover photo

 
Table of Contents

Translator’s Preface
A Word about the Translation
Pozdeyev’s Note
At the Gymnasium
Until Pascha
Bright Week
Thomas Week
The Days Before Departure


Translator’s Preface


Some authors try extremely hard to disguise in their books all traces of their nationality, to make them as “universal,” standardised, generally likeable as, say, a hamburger or a new iPhone. This certainly cannot be said about the book the reader is holding in his hands (or screening through on his device). WHEN OUR TEACHER WAS SEVENTEEN comes to the English-speaking reader (though my humble mediation) dressed in the particular garments of its time and place. It is set in a Russian provincial city in the spring of 2009, in an Orthodox girls’ gymnasium; its main character is Daria, a seventeen-year-old girl who is as unashamedly (and ardently) Christian as she is "frighteningly direct”. Nothing about the novel disguises its Russianness. It is permeated by it—by the smells of church wax and wet earth near the tall poplar; by the rhythms of the liturgical year in which an Easter spent in Sergiyev Posad has a special meaning; by the specific post-Soviet traits of school life, with its “reprimands” and even boycotts, addressed at the black sheep of the “collective”; by the very grammar and syntax of living Russian, with its puns, proverbs, colloquialisms, and wordplay, translating all of which has posed a genuine problem (see my special note).
And yet the book is not about Russia, any more than the CONFESSIONS of Augustine are about fourth-century North Africa. Its true subject is something older than nationality and more intimate than culture. It is the story of what happens when a young person, raised in the midst of religious and cultural certainties, begins—suddenly and with great courage—to ask whether those certainties are true. Not whether they are useful or respectable, but whether they are t-r-u-e—that is, whether they serve as genuine steps to salvation or are just a picture of a staircase hanging on the wall. This is a question any reader, in any country, can recognise. It is the question that wakes people up in the middle of the night—and which also sends them into deserts, whether those deserts are made of sand or of silence.
Boris Grechin’s novel is presented as a diary, and it carries all the immediacy of a diary: the false starts, the self-corrections, the moments of unbearable earnestness, the small triumphs and smaller failures, the private jokes that we might find slightly absurd—but, after all, we were not supposed to read them in the first place. Daria writes not to be read but to survive—to think her way through a period of her life in which everything she has inherited is up for re-examination. The form is essential to the book’s meaning. A diary is not a completed narrative; it is a record of a mind in motion. It can change its mind. It can be wrong. It can be noble one day and petty the next. And that is precisely what the novel wants to show: the actual texture of moral and spiritual growth, which is never linear and almost never as smooth as in a textbook for a Sunday school.
What does Daria want? At the simplest level, she wants to know who she is. She is an orphan, a priest’s daughter, a girl of no particular beauty or academic brilliance, living in a small world that has already decided her future for her: she will marry a seminarian, become a matushka, bear children, and keep alive the faith of her fathers. It is a good future, perhaps even a holy one. But it is a future that has been assigned to her, not chosen. And Daria, despite her youth, her naivety, and everything that weighs against her, insists on choosing. This is not rebellion for its own sake, Karamazov-style, but the refusal to accept a life that has not passed through the fire of her own conscience.
Her growth is assisted by someone we the readers are least expecting to be the instrument of her spiritual progress. Alexander Mikhailovich Azurov is a teacher of English in his early forties, a graduate of Leningrad State University, a former military interpreter who has spent years in the Middle East, and a man of wide, eclectic, and imperceptibly heretical sympathies. He is not, in any conventional sense, a hero. He is, at times, too impatient with his pupils and their intellectual cowardice, too wounded, too heterogeneous in his beliefs and, well, simply too human to be one. But then, he is a teacher who believes that education is not about comforting the comfortable, but about waking people up. When he reads Yeats’s “Among School Children” with his class, he asks them to think about what the poet actually believed. When he shows them a newspaper article about homosexuality in British schools, he asks them to think about w-h-y it disturbs them—and we can imagine that it disturbs his Orthodox students in no small way. He is, in the eyes of the school, dangerous. He is dangerous. But he is dangerous in the way that Socrates was dangerous: not because he wants to corrupt the young, but because he wants them to t-h-i-n-k, and thinking is the one activity that all comfortable institutions fear above all others.
Daria’s relationship with Azurov is the heart of the novel, and it is, I think, one of the most delicate and convincing portraits of spiritual friendship in modern fiction. It is not a love affair, though the novel is unafraid to explore why it is not. Neither is it a simple teacher-pupil relationship, although it begins as one and returns to that shape again and again. It is something rarer: a bond of recognition between two people who share, as Daria puts it, “desert blood.” Like the Fox and the Little Prince, they are creatures of what I am tempted to name “wilderness of the heart” who recognise each other across the distances of age and sex and circumstance. When Daria, in one of the most extraordinary scenes in the book, approaches Azurov on his last day at the school and says, “Your Highness! Permit me to be your Fox!”, she is asking for something that the modern world has almost forgotten how to name. She is asking for discipleship: not to be dominated, lectured around, or moulded into a preset intellectual pattern, but to be taught in the true sense of the word—to be taken seriously as a soul in formation, to be helped in her gentle unfolding.
What Azurov teaches her, in the weeks before his departure to the Middle East, is wildly beyond her age or experience—and yet, Daria is learning fast, rising up to the material. Together, they read Ilyin and Kierkegaard, Rilke and Dostoyevsky, Boethius and Plato, Eckhart and—unexpectedly for two Christians—Vivekananda. They listen to Rachmaninoff, Franck, and Stravinsky, even though Daria cannot stand the last one—strangely, it is precisely Stravinsky who brings about the final breaking of her “shell”. They discuss the nature of evil, the mystery of the Crucifixion, the difference between salvation and sanctity, the danger of romantic love, the possibility of a pre-Catholic and pre-Orthodox God. None of this resembles a dogmatic instruction. Azurov is not a priest, and he makes no claim to authority. He is a fellow seeker, more experienced but no less vulnerable, who offers Daria not ready-made answers but the tools with which to ask better questions—and to find her own answers. The novel’s great intellectual drama lies in the way Daria’s faith is stretched, tested, and ultimately deepened by these encounters. She does not lose her Orthodoxy. But she loses something she didn’t know she could go without: her certainty, her “narrowness” that she herself is painfully aware of at the beginning of her study. And in losing that narrowness, she gains the only thing that could ever have made her faith her own—the knowledge that faith, like love, must be freely chosen again and again, in the face of doubt, fear, and all the powers of this world.
This is not a novel of ideas in the abstract. It is a novel of ideas as they are lived—through the body, through grief, through the petty cruelties of school life, through the long and bruising business of growing up. Daria’s diary is full of concrete, physical detail: the grey uniform dress, the rubber boots, the dark closet where she sits and tries to pray, the clay figure of the Prince and the Fox that she models with her own hands. Grechin understands that the spiritual life is not lived above the material world but w-i-t-h-i-n it—in the smell of wet earth, in the taste of a shared meal, or, say, in the weight of a small stone taken from a philosopher’s grave. The novel’s deepest moments are often its quietest: Daria kneeling beside a poplar tree at the edge of a snowy field, touching the thawing ground with her hands; Daria and Azurov standing side by side in a provincial churchyard, talking about nothing more (and less) important than the names of the dead; Daria in her dark closet, feeling the first faint stirrings of something she cannot yet name.
For the British reader, WHEN OUR TEACHER WAS SEVENTEEN may initially seem to belong to a rather exotic world (or perhaps the world of our Victorian past)—after all, Daria’s anxiety about having missed the Vigil, let alone Olga’s wish to expel from the gymnasium a “dangerous sodomite” (she mistakes Azurov for one) would be entirely alien to most Anglophones. Yet, the novel itself bridges this gap—it slowly, persistently translates a distant system of values, an entire worldview. And what it finds on the other side is not exotic but universally human, in the way in which hunger for meaning is human, or fear of wasting one’s life is universal. And what about suspicion that we are meant for something more than the routines of our everyday—does it, in the end, seem too alien?
Daria’s question—“Who am I?”— is not a specifically Russian question. It is, if I am permitted this expression, a human question. Her answer—“I am a desert-dweller, and this is my hermitage”—is not a specifically Russian answer. It is one of the oldest answers in the world a religious mind can give and, at the same time, the one the world of today has almost unlearned to hear.
There is, too, a very specific political and cultural relevance to this book that English-speaking readers may appreciate more keenly than its first Russian audience. Grechin writes about a society in which the language of religious tradition has been, to a large extent, hollowed out. In such a society, the young are expected to inherit not a living relationship with truth but a set of doctrinal certainties. The gymnasium is, in its small way, a microcosm of that world. Its Orthodoxy is real and beautiful in places—Daria’s love for the liturgy, for the desert fathers, for the figure of the “small priest” Father Vadim is entirely sincere. But it is also, in too many places, brittle, defensive, afraid, almost helpless in the face of active ill will. The novel does not attack the Church. It is written, one feels, by a genuine lover of Orthodoxy—and precisely therefore it stubbornly insists that the Church is only ever as true as the people who live inside it, and that the renewal of faith must come from within—from the courage of individuals like Daria or, indeed, Azurov, who love the tradition enough to question it.
And then there is the ending, which is as much as a settling into the new life. Daria does not become a nun. She does not marry. She goes to the dacha, to the apple trees and the juniper and the long grass, and she sits on the earth and touches it with her hand. She has found, not the answer to all her questions, but a place from which to ask them—her small hermitage she won’t leave. The final pages of the diary are full of a peace that has been earned, a peace that knows the sun will set and rise again, that the grass will grow, that there will be joys and griefs and no way of knowing which will come first. And then, in the last lines, the book gives us one of the most quietly moving images in all of literature: Daria, in the next world, seeing a figure with a yellow scarf, and calling out, in her foolish, village voice, “Your Highness!” And then: “Well… Your Fox is here. Did you not expect me?”
It is a question the reader will want to answer. “No,” one wants to say, “we did not expect you. But we are very glad you came.”
 

A Word about the Translation


This book came to me as a gift, and like most real gifts it arrived with a problem hidden inside it: how to carry a voice from one language to another without breaking the voice.
Daria’s diary is written in a Russian that is, by turns, na;ve and startlingly mature, plain and liturgical, rural and bookish. She thinks in proverbs and in Scripture, in village idioms and in the vocabulary of the church. She writes “as she speaks”, and she speaks like a seventeen-year-old girl from a provincial Russian family for whom the old words are not old—they are simply her words. The translator’s task, then, was not only to convey what Daria says, but to preserve the feel of a voice that moves easily between “I’m a silly lamb” and “with God, all are alive”.
A few particular decisions may be worth noting.
The novel contains many phrases in English, spoken by Alexander Mikhailovich Azurov, Daria’s teacher. In the original, these are naturally set off by the surrounding Russian; in this translation, they would disappear into the English text without trace. Italics are used to mark every word or sentence that was English in the original, so that the reader can hear the same slight shift of key that Daria heard. For emphasis inside speech and narration, hyphenated text is used (n-e-v-e-r), rather than italics, so that the two functions are never confused. Dreams and phone messages are set apart by indentation and a smaller type, as if they had been pasted into the diary from another kind of time. Book titles appear in small capitals, a quiet, slightly old-fashioned convention that suits the novel’s atmosphere.
The harder work lay beneath typography.
Some things could not be translated directly and had to be found again. When Daria parodies Azurov’s politeness by writing “I most cordially thank you for the pleasure” in Russian phonetic spelling, the joke relies on the clash between his polished English and her own rough speech. An English reader cannot hear that clash, because every sentence of the novel is already in English. The solution was to exaggerate the register instead of the accent: in this version, Daria mimics him as saying “Pray accept my most cordial thanks for the pleasure of your delightful conversation”—the joke has changed, but its point has survived.
When Daria is accused of carrying a load too heavy for her, Azurov calls her rucksack “Samson’s saddlebag” rather than that of Mikula Selyaninovich, the giant of Russian legend. When Daria reproaches herself for giving in to cowardice, she mutters a little rhyme: “A silly lamb has found a sham”—replacing the Russian “îâöà—îòöà” (a sheep—a false father), which no English rhyme could reproduce.
Some references could not be carried at all. The Soviet film SCARECROW, which Daria mentions at a moment of high emotional tension, is unknown to most British readers; it is kept, but given a single clause of explanation within Daria’s own voice. The Russian word èêîíîìèÿ, the bishop’s pastoral dispensation, becomes “special dispensation”, which is precise and, I hope, transparent. The Orthodox custom of each family plot in a village cemetery being fenced, with its own bench and table, had to be described in one extra phrase, because without it an English reader would see a different churchyard than the one in which Daria and A. M. are sitting.
The final difficulty is the simplest to name and the hardest to solve: Daria’s Orthodoxy. The novel is steeped in a world of prayers, icons, saints, prostrations, lampadas, confession, the Jesus Prayer, the APOPHTHEGMATA PATRUM. I have tried to keep this world visible and intact without turning the translation into a glossary. Where a term is likely to be truly unfamiliar—the Mandylion, for example—I have occasionally chosen a more transparent equivalent, as when Daria lights her lamp before “the Holy Face”. A translator must always decide whether the reader should be brought to the world, or the world to the reader; in this book, I have tried to do both at once, gently.
If anything in this translation has succeeded, it is because Daria herself is a translator. She spends these forty days translating the world she was given into the world she is making: the school into the desert, the teacher into the Prince, the girl into the Fox. Perhaps that is why her diary, so unambiguously Russian, feels at home in another language. It was always trying to speak across a distance.

A Friend from Afar

 
Pozdeyev’s Note


Dorofeya (Daria) Arkadyevna Smirnova, who called herself a simple Russian woman, lived alone on her dacha all year round—like a nun, or, more precisely, like a desert-dweller of the early Church—earned her living making toys, and died of a sudden heart condition at the age of thirty-one. Throughout her short life she firmly refused titles such as “guru”, “spiritual mentor”, “staritsa” (female elder), and the like; even “Matushka Dorofeya” made her smile.
And yet she w-a-s, of course, a true spiritual mentor—both to me and to those fortunate enough to recognise in this remarkable woman a source of living water. I have already told that story in my novel THE GOSPEL OF THE LITTLE PRINCE.
Readers of my first novel will know that the deceased’s personal belongings were distributed among her disciples according to her spoken wishes. Yulia U. received the personal diary that its owner kept during her final year of school.
Quite recently Yulia got in touch with me to say that Daria Arkadyevna—and remember, three years have already passed since her death—had finally given permission for the diary to be published.
This “permission”, supposedly received from beyond the grave, is, of course, simply a way for the manuscript’s present owner (after all, what is any diary if not a manuscript?) to say that she has no objection to its publication. Although… In the end, the diary’s author herself proved while she was alive that almost nothing in the spiritual realm was impossible for her. But to a reader who did not know Daria Arkadyevna personally, that last statement will seem highly far-fetched, so let us leave it aside. Undoubtedly, Yulia had her own reasons for inventing this pious legend.
There are many arguments both against and in favour of publishing this remarkable document, and for us, Dorofeya Arkadyevna’s disciples, the latter outweigh the former. If only because the publication of the Diary finally settles, in a favourable light, the doubts about the nature of the friendship between our teacher and her own mentor—doubts voiced by Olga Nikolaevna Smirnova, the deceased’s cousin. (I’m afraid even this won’t be proof for Olga Nikolaevna: she can, if she wishes, read certain pages exactly as she pleases, or else suspect us of having fabricated the diary ourselves.)
Perhaps I ought to mention that the manuscript has been edited (primarily by Karolina: it was she who deciphered the handwriting). This editing mainly concerned punctuation (very sparse in the diary itself) and, in a few places, spelling. We have also restored all the English phrases that Daria Arkadyevna sometimes wrote down not entirely accurately, and added notes where we felt they were needed. Karolina also handled the stylistic editing: I don’t know how heavy her hand was, but I trust it was done delicately. Naturally, we have arranged the paragraph breaks as we saw fit and divided the text into sections, supplying our own headings.
I sincerely hope the novel will find its readers—however few, but faithful ones. We have titled it WHEN OUR TEACHER WAS SEVENTEEN. As Dorofeya Arkadyevna’s disciples, I don’t think we could have called it anything else.

Oleg Pozdeev 
July 2026
 

Part One 
At the Gymnasium


30 January 2009, Friday

On the occasion of my seventeenth birthday I received three presents today. One from Olya, my cousin: THE SAYINGS OF THE EGYPTIAN FATHERS. A new edition, but the book is very old—written in the third century. Another from Sonya: THE LITTLE PRINCE by Saint-Exup;ry. The third from Ksyusha Pastukhova: this very “Personal Diary” I’m writing in now. Had it not been for this third present, I wouldn’t even have thought of all this word-spinning.
Ksyusha and I aren’t really friends, but she’s rich—it costs her nothing to splash out on such a stylish little thing, with a lock too. The little lock is probably unnecessary: who on earth would even think of prying into the writings of an Orthodox eleventh-grader…
But I shall use it.
And it tempts you: such a tiny lock, yet with a real key—you trust it; you trust that you can write absolutely anything in this notebook, even the most secret things, even the most shameless…
I don’t particularly want to write anything shameless, of course: I’m not some Natasha Yakovleva. (There—I’ve judged my neighbour, and lo, shamelessness has appeared at once.) I’m not her. But at seventeen, surely it’s time to begin answering that question people spend their whole lives answering, and never quite manage.
Who am I?
I am Dorofeya Arkadyevna Smirnova, born 1992, a minor, female, a pupil of the Orthodox Girls’ Gymnasium “with boarding” (meaning dormitories on the third floor). I am an orphan: Mama passed away early; Papa—rector of the Church of the Holy Trinity in the village of Troitskoye—a year ago. It still hurts, but it was also a relief: he was gravely ill for the last two years of his life. (I write what I think—and I usually say what I think, too: I don’t seem to be known for rudeness, but I am “frighteningly direct”, as Olya once told me.) My future is more or less clear: a seminarian’s wife, then a matushka . To be honest, I worry very little about my future (though I should!). If I were to fill in a form or write “literary prose” about myself, God strike me down, I don’t know what else I could say about myself. I am utterly ordinary, a “grey mouse”, as that same Ksyusha Pastukhova once called me (behind my back—I overheard). Ksyusha, of course, took pleasure in bestowing charity on the grey mouse. I had to look up “bestowing” in the dictionary: my academic achievements are very middling, and that’s not false modesty, it’s the truth. And yet, deep inside, I believe that I am clever, cleverer than many (only I can’t seem to show it). And that too isn’t pride—it’s precisely belief, like belief in the fact that our Lord Jesus Christ is and lives from age to age. It’s just that my mind isn’t about school learning, or integrals, or logarithms. In fact, I don’t even know what it’s about, or whether it even exists—after all, believing doesn’t yet mean knowing…
Writing about oneself is terribly hard, a bit like walking through dense thickets of thorny bushes. You burn with shame. But I’ll go on.
All these random, empty things written above say nothing about me; they exhaust one tenth, no, one hundredth, one thousandth of me—the real me. I suspect that’s the case with any person. No, not with any: many people like themselves far too much, and so they live almost entirely their outer self. Even in our class there are such people—and among the teachers too.
I cannot live by my outer self—not because it’s a sin (who am I to talk of sin!)—but because it’s dull, endlessly dull, your jaw aches from the dullness.
All my life, nearly from childhood itself, I have felt—now the big words are coming, I’ll write them at random, without worrying—I have felt the presence of life as a great mystery. How muddled that sounds, how I want to cross it out! I’ll leave it: I have no other words. Who am I to speak of a great mystery? But everyone is allowed to speak of it, and to stop feeling it means to stop being… I wanted to write “being human”, but that isn’t exact. To stop sensing the great mysteriousness of life means to stop being in God’s bosom. Not once, not for a single minute, have I doubted that God exists. And at the same time, I somehow understood early on that He is by no means obliged to be as we imagine Him. I can even say exactly when this understanding came to me: at the age of eight.
Ridiculous, isn’t it? Better if I’d fallen for some boy…
Several pages are already filled, and if I go on tormenting the paper with my useless thoughts like this, this diary won’t last me even six months. I’ll finish for today and come back when there’s something new. One must live life, not endlessly dig about inside oneself—and life itself will lead you where you need to go. The main thing is not to be afraid to walk ahead, not to be afraid for a single second.
It’s a good thing there’s a little lock, though! It would be terribly embarrassing if someone were to read this…

* * *

5 February 2009, Thursday

Nearly a week has passed and nothing has happened. Not that much ever does happen here. The sky would have to fall in before anything actually occurred in our Orthodox Gymnasium.
My classmates gossip about one another: so-and-so was seen arm in arm with someone, either a cadet from the military college or a grown man… It’s revolting, and I consider it beneath my dignity to write it down, or even to remember it. And then there’s a petition going round: to let us girls come in our own clothes on Fridays. I signed it too, but I couldn’t care less. Our grey uniform dresses with the white kerchief suit me perfectly well. I haven’t got any nice clothes of my own anyway, and never have, as long as I can remember. Growing up with just your father till you’re sixteen means growing up a bit… half a tomboy, sort of. (And thank God for that!)
Besides, I’m plain: no matter how much I primp, it won’t do any good. That is, not entirely plain—there’s no accounting for taste—but still… If only inner beauty shone out to the world! And who told me that such beauty is bound to shine out in me, that there’s something in me to shine out at all…
Lessons roll on as ever, and I carry on reading the books I was given, sometimes right there in class. Sometimes even in literature. But honestly, they’re more interesting than THE MASTER AND MARGARITA! I don’t know whether Bulgakov is a good writer or not—he is perhaps even a genius—but the Lord Jesus Christ in his novel is simply an embarrassment. “Yesterday we ate sweet spring baccurotes…” Ugh! A fine thing to be teaching in an Orthodox Girls’ Gymnasium, I must say.
He probably even thought (Bulgakov, that is) that he was doing us Orthodox folk a good turn! Well, thank you very much, what a joy, what a splendid feast-day treat: they’ve stuck a fool’s cap on Christ’s head! There I go, though, grumbling like some ancient old crone—I annoy even myself.
No, my two books—and how lucky I am to have them—are simpler, truer, and more important. Oh, what books they are! I’d sleep with them under my pillow—and often do. I won’t let anyone, a-n-y-o-n-e at all, decide for me what matters. Rebellion? Come now, is that really rebellion—rebellion is walking about with a skull and crossbones round your neck like Natasha Yakovleva. Some sort of monastic skull, like a schema-monk’s, but it’s still ridiculous. Whereas I’ve got such well-bred reading, perfectly safe: Olya probably gave it to me for that very reason. She’s a whole month older than me, you see, and therefore considers herself ‘her sister’s keeper’. She gave it to me, but I bet she hasn’t read past the first page herself.
A great book—a book about flawlessly honest people. And so much humour in it! I’ve already fallen in love with all of them, sight unseen: Abba Sisoes, Abba Macarius, Amma Syncletica, and the two nameless brothers who wanted to quarrel over a brick and never managed to. And THE LITTLE PRINCE is every bit as good: it’s clear and ringing and true. There are no sweet spring baccurotes in it, nor in THE SAYINGS either. Should I mention this to Viktoria Denisovna? No, I won’t: what would be the point? She’s a good person, she’s a wonderful teacher. And as for her living by her o-u-t-e-r self—well, she’s no Amma Syncletica.
Remarkable books. I’m reading them both at once, and they’re beginning to fuse a little in my head: as if the Little Prince were a desert-dweller, and as if the desert-dwellers were princes. And really, they are alike! I’m amazed no one has noticed it before.
But both of them trouble me. They’re packed with explosive material, kilos of it, and neither Olya nor Sonya has the faintest idea, of course.
Here’s what torments me: if the first Christians were like that, how did we manage to become so spoilt since? Why did we become spoilt? I couldn’t pray all night, from sunset to sunrise, like Abba Arsenius. Or could I? I long to try, but how could I try it here! Until I’m eighteen I’m a person in bondage. And after that, too, I’ll most likely be a servant of God and of my husband.
And also… but this is so shameful to write, even under lock and key, even knowing for certain that no one will ever read it during my lifetime, for ever and ever, amen, that I think I won’t write about it today. No: this is something serious—let it ripen, and when it’s ripe I’ll have to confess it. On Saturday, then, after confession, I’ll tell you everything in detail, dear diary. If you were a person, I’d be friends with you. How much blushing you’ve yet got ahead of you, on my account.

* * *

6 February 2009, Friday

It happened after all!
Not the thing I was ashamed of, but that I spoke my mind to Viktoria Denisovna, our literature teacher. Friday is quite a day for us: two periods of literature, and straight after that, two of English. God grant everyone such a day—I mean, not bad at all. But let me take things in order.
So, Viktoria Denisovna was conducting an oral quiz. (She’s a very young woman, came to us straight out of university, unmarried.) She wanted to know what, as she put it, we’d taken away from the great novel. And at the same time she wants us to practise speaking. As if it’s the same thing we do in English—but it’s not the same. I can’t explain what the difference is. Maybe there isn’t one.
No, there is: Alexander Mikhailovich listens to what you say, listens carefully, like a doctor. Viktoria Denisovna listens too, but she hasn’t the patience for real attentiveness, and the main thing is, she’s already got a ready-made picture of what she expects to hear. A little ruler made of her own ideas, which she holds up against you and checks how much valuable product you contain. Most teachers have a little ruler like that, why pretend otherwise? But she does pretend, though she herself doesn’t know it, poor thing, that she’s pretending. She sincerely believes she’s entirely democratic and unbiased.
I was asked, and I blurted out the first thing that came into my head. Well, not the first: I’d been thinking about it for almost a week.
“Viktoria Denisovna, my impression came out all jumbled, and I’m sorry, but I don’t consider THE MASTER AND MARGARITA a great book at all. It’s not for my mind to judge what kind of book it is: perhaps it is great, and monumental, and for the ages, as you said. But what does ‘for the ages’ even mean? The Gospel—that’s for the ages, but as for everything else, I’m not sure about any of it. First, I find all the devilry unsympathetic, which Bulgakov himself seems even to enjoy. Second, it worries me that we seem to be going downhill: last year we studied Dostoevsky, this year Bulgakov—what’ll we finish with? Even Dostoevsky isn’t all that sympathetic to me…”
At this point someone behind me laughed. I sit at the front desk, supposedly because of poor eyesight, but my eyesight’s perfectly normal—just that nobody else wanted to sit right in front of the teacher’s table. I went on:
“…Isn’t all that sympathetic, and yet, you know, his Raskolnikov says firmly that he believes in Christ and in the raising of Lazarus—believes literally. T-h-a-t’s serious. T-h-a-t’s literature. But a black cat swinging from a chandelier and shooting at the police with a revolver—that’s, I’m sorry, like comics for children. No, honestly, think about it!”
(Here the laughter got louder, and I went red. But I carried on anyway.)
“And the most damning thing in this novel of his isn’t Yeshua, of course—who resembles the real Christ about as much as I resemble Mary of Egypt—but the epigraph. ‘I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.’ Well, what sort of rubbish is that?! The Devil eternally works good?! Show me, just show me, how much good he’s worked! How can anyone spout such nonsense with a clever face?! The fact that Satan can even pass himself off as the Lord Christ—that’s no reason to say he eternally works good! If only your Bulgakov had read the teachings of the desert fathers, or something… Seven-year-old children know more about the Devil than he does! All right, not seven-year-olds, but at eight I’d never have made such a mistake. What are you all—what’s so funny…”
By then nobody could be stopped—everyone was, as they say, sprawled across their desks, flat out. Viktoria Denisovna’s eyes went round, but she was smiling too. Smiling and murmuring:
“Extraordinary! I had no idea that religious obscurantism in the style of Pobedonostsev was still so alive, so energetic, so vital and categorical. Poor girl… Sit down, my dear, sit down. And never be afraid to speak your mind, even if it’s that… straightforward.”
I sat down, red as a boiled lobster. At break, the only thing anyone talked about was “if only your Bulgakov had read the desert fathers”. Olya even seems a bit proud of me—the way you’re proud of a lapdog that’s done God knows what, like scrambling up the curtains right to the pelmet. But she says one ought to know the measure in all things.
In what should I have known the measure?! What did I say wrong?!
On what grounds, and since when, have we Christians decided that a secular writer, Bulgakov, is more important than the Gospel?! And if we have decided that, maybe we’ve all made a mistake together, and not just me alone?!
Or maybe it’s really quite simple: maybe none of us are Christians at all, and the Orthodoxy in our gymnasium is just a name?!
That’s terribly proud of me to write, terribly harsh, terribly merciless. And who gave me the right to judge, anyway? I’ll have to repent of all of this tomorrow, too. But more than repentance, what I really want from the priest is answers to my questions!
And by then, that other, more serious thing will have ripened as well.

* * *

7 February 2009, Saturday

Just back from confession. Oh, it wasn’t easy for me—and no easier for the priest!
Saturdays we have lessons of a lighter sort: two periods of Church history and two of Divine Law. We hardly ever get marks for them, as both are considered optional. Father Vadim teaches both subjects.
You can confess to him on Sunday, right before Liturgy in the morning—but I don’t like that: too many people wanting to, a queue. Or you can do it on the Saturday itself. After the fourth lesson I put up my hand and asked to make my confession. More sniggering, and whispers too, about how our little holy fool is showing off again. I couldn’t care less—not the slightest bit.
We went up to the house church. Our gymnasium building has one; it would be strange if it didn’t. The trouble is, it’s rather cramped. The windows are small, and they don’t switch on the electric light. Here, in the half-dark of the church, I told Father Vadim everything I wanted to tell him.
I began, naturally, with yesterday’s proud and harsh thoughts. And then I went on to the more serious thing. Time to confess it to the diary as well, not only to the priest.
Here’s what happened: this week I was visited by carnal longing. And it all came about, of all things, from reading THE SAYINGS.
There are many passages in THE SAYINGS about how the monks struggled with their lust. I began thinking about that struggle, and inadvertently, through those very thoughts, the thing one is meant to struggle with awoke in me. Before that, I hadn’t really thought much about that side of life… Absurd, isn’t it? Absurd and shameful: you feel like a wicked child who was given a precious, valuable toy and then cracked her own head open with it.
Carnal longing is a powerful and frightening thing. Surely I’m not meant to wage war on it all my life, until death itself? How I wish I didn’t have to… “Even I, an old man now, am still assailed by lustful visions,” one of the abbas relates in THE SAYINGS. There you are—those people stood with one foot already in the Kingdom of God, and they weren’t ashamed to admit all this! And we pretend every day that we’ve been whitened by holiness—as if the doors to the Kingdom had swung open for us? It’s laughable…
I think it’s harder for men than for us. Well, that’s some comfort.
I can’t remember if I said that to Father Vadim as well. I could well have, with my runaway tongue. But I did put my questions to him, and not only about Bulgakov. Here is my most important question as of today.
It is said that woman is saved through childbearing. Children aren’t born without carnal love. And yet it was precisely desire that the Egyptian fathers struggled against—the most honest, the most steadfast people Christianity has ever known. So how am I, a young girl and a Christian, meant to regard carnal desire?
Anyone, of course, will tell me that with a wedded husband everything is good and unashamed—”Isaiah, rejoice”—and only with another it is debauchery. That answer is correct; Olya would give me that answer, if I had the sense to ask her.
I don’t believe that answer. Arrogant, foolish, but I don’t believe it. If it were all so simple, the ancient fathers wouldn’t have fled into the desert from their wives, nor the desert mothers from their husbands!
All of this I dumped on poor Father Vadim. What’s more: I bossily asked him that we shouldn’t stand in the middle of the church, but sit down on the little bench. There is a bench there, just the one—they sometimes bring it out before services. The church is tiny; ten or twelve people fit in for Liturgy, that’s all.
Poor Father! He was silent for a long time, looking somewhere past me, off to the side. I’d already had time to grow afraid that he might, God forbid, imagine it was about him that lustful thoughts were visiting me. Father Vadim, by the way, is a handsome man, and his gaze is gentle, tender, almost like a woman’s, and his voice is beautiful, soft.
But no, he didn’t think that. Or if he did, he didn’t let on. A full minute later he answered me:
“There may be, Daryushka, a gift for monasticism in you.”
“There’s nothing of the sort in me…”
(I’m writing it down as dialogue, from what I remember.)
“Even so—who knows?—there may be. And don’t be in a hurry to deny it, don’t be in a hurry to decide about yourself before the time is ripe.”
Here I broke in:
“You know yourself, Father, how we’re pushed to decide, and quickly at that. If a girl is a priest’s daughter, and an orphan like me, she has no future other than being a matushka. I’m… being impertinent, probably, to speak of it so?”
“No, no—you’re speaking the truth.”
“…But I’m not thinking about how to arrange my life. There’s still time to think after I finish school. What troubles me is something quite different: which way is more right? Which is better?”
“You mean to marry, or to take the angelic habit? Only the Lord knows which will be better for you. Only the Lord—and you yourself, in the unsearchable depths of your heart.”
“I just knew you’d answer that!”
“…And my answer doesn’t satisfy you. Don’t argue—I can see it doesn’t satisfy you. There, you’ve gone all red! When you confessed those things, you didn’t blush, and now you are. Ah, Dorofeyushka, you’re a good girl, one of our own, an Orthodox girl…”
(He remembers my passport name is Dorofeya. That’s nice!)
“I even doubt that!”
“If you doubt, then you’re certainly a Christian… A good Orthodox girl, with high standards for herself, a sensitive conscience, a clear mind set upon the one thing needful. With great courage: everyone your age suffers these longings, but you’re the only one from your class who’s admitted it to me. And for such a good girl, I’m an insufficient spiritual father. I’m, you know, a very small priest.”
“How do you mean—small?”
“Just that: modest, feeble. Rather like that country cur; written about by…”
(Father Vadim named some French name, which, naturally, I can’t recall.)
“Haven’t you read his novel? Well, you’ll read it yet—you’ve plenty of time… Just as this church is tiny—see, only the Royal Doors, without deacons’ doors, and at one point they even thought of making do with a simple curtain—so I too am tiny in my understanding. And yet you ask me questions that, even if they aren’t at the very heart of Orthodoxy, run somewhere very close to that heart. How am I to answer you? I hope that one day you’ll be blessed with a more perceptive spiritual father. Until then—seek, look inward, pray.”
“You may be small, but you’re genuine. Thank you! Is that impertinent? Forgive me!”
“No, it’s not impertinent.” Here Father smiled. “Let me now read the prayer of absolution over you…”
And so the confession ended. Relief, of course, I did feel—and hearing “a mind set upon the one thing needful” from another person was lovely too. But answers to the questions tormenting me—those I didn’t find.
Or maybe I’m tormenting myself for nothing? Maybe there’s nothing here to be tormented by? We’re not living in the third century, we’re in the twenty-first. I’ll become like everyone else, have a brood of children, stop pretending I’m in any way like Amma Syncletica. I’ll leaf through this diary and smile, just as Father Vadim smiled at my naivety.
Or maybe, after all—monasticism? A heavy cross, and—it frightens me. Not the weight of it that frightens me, I’m not afraid of hardship—but it’s far too cold.
Life in the desert, my first love! No, there doesn’t seem to be any desert-dwelling in this century.
One more thing, an amusing one: Lena Ochagova, I think, has taken offence at me—said a few choice words to me at supper. I suspect she’s in love with Father Vadim and thinks I was showing myself off from an interesting angle all through confession, abusing the sacrament. If only she knew…
I ought to write about my classmates in this diary. But I’ve no strength left today. I’ll write tomorrow.

* * *

8 February 2009, Sunday

Today, Sunday, we were meant to go to U., but the trip has been put off till next week. Absolutely nothing to do. I’m sitting here writing my diary.
As I promised, about our class. The eleventh form at the gymnasium is small: thirteen of us. All girls. That’s not terribly clever: if there were boys around, we might mind ourselves more—I mean, there’d be more that was womanly in us and less that was purely hen-like. I mean that seriously, and I’m not pining after boys at all: with my looks, I’ve “got no chance” anyway, as Ksyusha once declared. Ksyusha thinks far too much of herself: Alya Florenskaya is much prettier, and she doesn’t put on airs!
Our class has somehow divided itself into two camps: the church-going girls and those who stand apart from the faith. Although we should all be in our camp—nearly half of us are priest’s daughters, and as for being “from good Orthodox families”, that’s every single one of us without exception. And yet, there you have it…
I wrote “our” and stopped to think: am I really in that camp? On the one hand—where else would I be? On the other—am I Christian enough? It’s all complicated, not for a teenager to reason about, and what am I if not a teenager.
I won’t write about everyone in detail, only those who are at least a little bit close to me, or interesting to me.
Olya Smirnova, my cousin. Daughter of Lyubov Sergeyevna, my aunt and, until I come of age, my guardian. My “elder sister,” so to speak. (By forty days—ridiculous!) I don’t recognise this seniority, but it makes no difference to her whether I recognise it or not. I keep up with Olya even out of necessity, as with someone close. Though what kind of close person is she to me, really? It’s very wrong to reason like this, but I’ll lock it all up under the key.
Olya is very sure of herself, very steadfast, very direct (that runs in the family, no helping it), very Orthodox. She bosses our whole “church wing” within the class. She’d like to boss the whole class too, but the post of prefect was given, bypassing her, to Alya Florenskaya. Alya does exactly as much in that post as is needed, and irritates no one—except Olya, naturally. Very Orthodox, I said. But very much a Christian? Having written that, I’m burning with shame: who am I to judge? But I’m judging myself, not her. In judging myself, whether you want to or not, you compare yourself to someone. I know for certain that I don’t want to and cannot be as sure about questions of faith as she is. How can anyone even be sure about them?! The Church isn’t an army, and God isn’t a supreme commander-in-chief. I once talked about all this with Olya, but we didn’t find a common language. My shyness before the mystery of life isn’t fear of God to her, it’s “a whim”. That’s a fashionable little word that’s turned up among the girls lately—they use it whether it fits or not…
Sonya Agapkina is my only close friend. I think she’s a little Jewish: a characteristic nose, and slightly curly hair. Sonya’s tall, thin—it wouldn’t hurt her to put on some weight. Sonya’s a great daydreamer: not that she lies without blushing—no, not that—but she adores imagining herself in all sorts of improbable situations, or making something up out of nothing, or inventing things about other people. (The latest being: “What if Mr Azurov is a British spy?” Rubbish, of course.) Sonya is full of admiration that I’m so pure and unspoilt, so “not of this world”, and says that if I were a boy, she’d fall in love with me. I ought to forbid her these silly things—only, the more I forbid her, the more she praises me and my modesty. Sometimes, though, a wild mood comes over her, and then it takes seven people to hold her down. Well, never mind—at such times I’m no slouch with words myself! I’m no airy fairy, whatever some people may think of me. So far from airy that Ksyusha reckons I could stand to lose a couple of kilos. Let her lose them herself, if she’s that desperate.
I shan’t write about Ksyusha—she’s spoilt my mood enough already. A frivolous creature, as is Liza Chulkova. The only difference between them is that Liza likes showing her Orthodox side to the other girls and to the teachers, while Ksenia doesn’t even try.
Lena is very touchy, and there’s a great deal in her that’s purely womanly, as if she were thirty, not seventeen. Her marks are so-so, even worse than mine, and I’m a famously “excellent” pupil.
Evdokia is wrapped up in herself, silent, severe: she won’t allow anyone to call her Dusya. Once, out of foolishness, I called her Dusya—oh, I was afraid she’d burn a hole through me with her stare! Evdokia has some goal in life unknown to us, but that goal seems to have no connection at all with Orthodoxy.
Rita is sweet, but apart from her being sweet, nothing about her comes to mind.
Katya is a sheer child: she only turned sixteen recently. A trifle, you’d think, but at our age even a year matters. I like her and sometimes say nice little things to her, but she’s frightened of me. To be fair, she’s frightened of everyone.
Maria Sabaneyeva is a “madame-tank”—don’t stand in her way. Tall; a low, coarse voice; a heavy jaw. Olya and Masha can’t stand each other; if they clash, sparks fly. Maria is perhaps the only person my sister is a bit afraid of. Sonya gossips that Masha has already begun to live a carnal life. What do I care! But when did she find the time? And it’s a sin to say so, but who’d fancy her? Still, there’s no accounting for taste… Perhaps some men like exactly that type.
With Varya Sedova I’m on friendly terms. She’s as straightforward in that village way as I am. Varya is kind, but a bit rough. Her father, like mine, died… Her mother is alive, though. We might have been real friends, but something gets in the way. Perhaps because we both have our own grief—painful to remember—or perhaps we simply aren’t that close. I don’t share my innermost thoughts with her, or else she’d think them a whim too, like Olya, and she’d be partly right.
And I don’t share them with Sonya either. Not because I’m ashamed, but simply because: the most important thing you can’t tell anyone. Only the diary. All right, let’s say thank you to Ksyusha for her present.
Natasha Yakovleva and Alya Florenskaya always go about in a pair, and because of that both of them are somehow set apart from the whole class. Natasha resembles Maria, but with her you don’t doubt that women of that kind are exactly what men like. Of Orthodoxy—no, I’ll cross that out—of Christianity there isn’t a trace in her; instead there’s something like a grudge against the whole world and a desire to get even. Natasha is clever, but I’d go up to her and ask her gently, the way you’d ask a child: “What have you ended up here for, my dear, in an Orthodox school? Come, I’ll take you to a different one!” I’ll never actually do that, of course: who am I to her? And where would she go? Perhaps Natasha committed some secret sin, but somehow under compulsion, even though nobody really forced her. Looking at her face with its high cheekbones, I suddenly understood once that almost every sin comes from pain. Probably I shouldn’t be reasoning about such things—they’re not for my mind, and not for anyone’s mind except the holy elders’.
Alya is probably the most interesting girl in our class. First, the prettiest one: a finely chiselled figure, that light-brown hair with a slight reddish gleam—everything in her is harmonious. Second, she’s top of the class, clever, unassuming. She’s well-read, cultured—the only one besides Evdokia. Alya is friendly to everyone—and friends with no one, except Natasha. There’s some secret suffering in her, and one day I want to take her by the hand, sit down beside her, and begin listening to her attentively, the way you’d listen to a sister—not a cousin, a real one. I want it very much, but I’m afraid to do it: she hasn’t invited me. And besides, next to her I feel she’s a little star and I’m a green frog.
I wonder—how do the girls see m-e? The mirror shows me nothing but the most ordinary Russian lass—you’d pass her in the street and not notice. And no one in the whole world knows that this lass… What? What did I want to write—what did I want to boast of? I’ve nothing to boast of. No one to open up to.

* * *

13 February 2009, Friday

I’ve been walking about all day, beside myself with joy. Though nothing has happened! There’s no reason for joy, and no one can see my joy.
Here’s what happened: Friday English. English as a subject I don’t much like—I’m more afraid of it, really. First, I’ve never shone at foreign languages; I’ve yet to master my own. Second, with the new teacher these lessons make you think a great deal. Though what else is school for, if not for thinking? Any foreign language is a foreign way of thought, and this new teacher of ours pushes that way of thought into our heads with some effort. He pushes—we resist.
The homework was to analyse a poem we’d listened to the week before, and to answer questions on it. We’re working through the theme of “Education”; the poem is “Among School Children” by William Butler Yeats.
“Among School Children”—yes, well, only the text isn’t schoolish at all. While I was hacking my way through it, I remembered Alexander Mikhailovich a couple of times with some “tender” words. Afterwards I had to laugh at myself: grumbling like some ancient granny, and I’m not even eighteen yet.
Alexander Mikhailovich organises the work like this: he rolls a red rubber ball across the table, and whoever the ball stops in front of has to answer. The desks in his classroom are arranged into one big table.
So. Already by the fourth question, the ball stopped in front of me. Even now, remembering it, my heart quickens a little, so I’ll write in the present tense.
The ball stops in front of me. I give my prepared homework answer. Alexander Mikhailovich listens, but doesn’t seem especially interested. And I’m not especially interested either. A complicated, sophisticated poem—but what is it next to the books I’m reading now!
Growing bold, I suddenly say—not sure if it’s correct:
“This poem has a problem. And the poet has a big problem, too.”
“Which is…?”
The teacher smiles with the corner of his mouth. He’s so terribly clever, stylish, not entirely Russian—rather like… rather like Alya Florenskaya.
“Which is that he is a pagan,” I blurt out, saying what I’d long wanted to say.
The word “pagan”—I’d remembered it from some lesson or other; and if I hadn’t remembered, I’d have looked it up in the dictionary.
Alexander Mikhailovich is silent, his mouth slightly open, and taps his fingers on the table. I repent and have a presentiment that soon, just as the other day in literature, everyone will begin laughing at my Christian fustiness.
“True,” he says at last. “True enough. You have your reasons to call him that. Is there anything else you can say about W. B. Yeats, looking down at him from the shining hill of your irreproachable Orthodoxy?”
He’s laughing at me, it seems. There, even Alya Florenskaya is hiding a smile. Thank goodness it’s only her.
“He is a pessimist,” I answer. “He is not a Christian, because he is a pessimist.”
“You probably wanted to say ‘and therefore’ rather than ‘because,’ “ the teacher corrects me. “ ‘This is why’, not ‘because of’.”
It seems he’d been listening to me all that time, not only laughing.
“Yes, ‘therefore’, not ‘because’. Alexander Mikhailovich, I’ve so much I want to say, and not enough words! May I switch to Russian?”
“There, you see: how to speak without words? And that goes for more than just English. Of course, Dolly, you may use Russian—if a C is enough for you.”
“I’ve never laid claim to more! Yeats is not a Christian with all his heart, he’s a scholar—the Greek myth of Leda is dearer to him than the Lord Jesus Christ. That’s precisely why he’s a pessimist! Wandering about among three pines, unable to accept his old age, remembering the girl he loved who’s now a granny… What a marvel! We’ll all grow old, we’ll all die. Yeats lacks courage, and trust in God besides—that’s what. It reminds me of the story of the three hermits who once came to Abba Sisoes…”
Sniggers break out in the classroom. “Mr Azurov” does not laugh, does not even smile. Looking round the class, he asks quietly:
“What are you laughing at, actually?”
“They’re laughing at me, Alexander Mikhailovich,” I explain. “They think I’m something like a holy fool who’ll drag in some abba or other no matter what. And you—do you think so too?”
“Quite the contrary: the story about the three hermits sounds intriguing. Go on, please!”
“But in Russian, right? So, I’ll go on about Abba Sisoes! Three monks came to him, and the first said: ‘Father, how am I to escape the River of Fire after death?’ The second: ‘How am I to escape the gnashing of teeth and the worm that devours?’ The third: ‘Father, the memory of the outer darkness torments me!’ The abba listened to them all and answered: ‘Brothers, I don’t keep all these horrors in my head. The Lord is merciful; I believe He will be merciful to me, too.’ Forgive me for telling it in my own words…”
The classroom falls silent. The teacher is silent too.
“Blessed Feodora of Troitskoye,” Ksyusha mutters under her breath. “Of Troitskoye”—because my father served as a priest in Troitskoye, and everyone knows it. Alexander Mikhailovich waves her off:
“Xenia, what you’re saying is downright insulting… And to you, Dolly, I’ll answer in Russian: that is the cleverest thing I’ve ever heard anyone say about Yeats. Your story is incredibly apt: in both cases—mythology, that is, fabrication, literature. And it’s true, its possibilities are limited. The way beyond literature isn’t within literature itself, but in saying: I believe the Lord is merciful. I shall remember this—thank you. What a pity you can’t say all that in English!”
“I’m not planning to emigrate!”
“No one knows how life will turn… By the way, about Abba Sisoes: did you know his name was pronounced a little differently?”
“No—and why would I?” I suspect some mockery, so I answer rather rudely. He’s not offended:
“You might, because Sisoes is simply the Latin transcription of his Coptic name. In Coptic it sounds like ‘Jijoi’. Or rather, that’s in only one dialect of Coptic; in another…”
Alexander Mikhailovich—no, that name doesn’t suit him now—Mr Azurov writes on the board ;;;;;, and then utters some word I couldn’t repeat after him, something like “Didyoi”, but with different consonants, unlike anything else. In that word there is the ancient past, the heat of the desert, a staff gripped in the hand, prayer from sunset to sunrise. I stare at him wide-eyed:
“How do you know all this?!”
“I’ve been to those parts,” he answers simply. “The Coptic Quarter in Cairo, and not only there. Yes… But you and I have been talking too long, Dolly—my fault. Would you give me back the ball, please? Or simply pass it on to the next speaker. Xenia, with her miso-Christian attitude, now fully deserves it, I guess…”
And that was the end of it—it took all of three minutes, though I’ve spent far longer writing about it, choosing my words so carefully, as if I were some sort of writer.
What’s happened? What am I so happy about? Why am I glowing and struggling to hide my smile? (I’m allowed to smile at odd moments—I’m the “blessed” one, after all.) Have I fallen in love, or something? God forbid! And no, it doesn’t feel like that. Not love, but—a sense of unexpected comradeship. Even that’s not right, not comradeship. What happened was a recognition. Mowgli looked at Bagheera, Bagheera saw Mowgli, and both understood they were of one blood. Though, if we’re taking that tale, he’s the one who’s Bagheera, and I’m Mowgli…
He and I, it seems, are of one blood: desert blood.
What a pity I wasn’t born earlier, didn’t know him when he was twenty! Or no, not a pity: boys at twenty have quite different things on their minds. Those different things have nothing to do with the Desert, and I’m even ashamed to think about those different things.
I wonder: could I ask him my questions—about Bulgakov, and about… the other thing? And if I did ask, what would he answer?
No, no, impossible, simply improper: an English teacher is not a confessor. What nonsense is creeping into my head!

* * *

15 February 2009, Sunday

The class is finally off to U. I’d rather have rested, lazed about… But never mind.
The trip is paid for by the pupils’ parents, and I’d hoped it wouldn’t occur to Aunt Lyuba to spend the money. It didn’t, as it happened—but the fees for me, as an orphan, were covered by some special fund. Roza Markovna explained that the school has one, and told me to keep my mouth shut, otherwise there’d be too many others keen to take advantage.
The journey’s long; I get a little travel-sick—not to the point of nausea, but pleasantly so. I doze, and through my sleep I think about our teachers. How different they all are! We’re different—and so are they.
How differently people end up in the role of teacher, what different faiths they follow, how differently they treat their pupils…
I remember, back in the autumn, we had an English lesson given over to presentations. Everyone had to prepare a talk. I prepared mine too, and sat down in the presenter’s chair. And realised I couldn’t say a thing: I’m afraid to speak aloud in a foreign language—I simply can’t. Tears began pouring down my face in floods.
Alexander Mikhailovich dealt with me somehow astonishingly humanely. He asked me to go back to my seat and told a story about how once, in his far-off childhood, he rang the doorbell of a girl he was in love with, and her father opened the door—and he, a young boy, could neither utter a word nor move from the spot. He gave me no mark, even though normally missing homework in English means an F—he’s quick enough with those.
Any school is a cruel sort of training. But we need that training, don’t we? Without it we’d grow round and plump and dull, like a tiger in a zoo.
And yet training isn’t the noblest occupation. You have either to dislike children, or to love them very much, to work as a teacher: to love them in spite of themselves. The beasts are discontented, they growl… Didn’t I growl myself, reading “Among School Children”?
But why do I keep going on about him? He’s nobody to me. (Or is he, after all—an unrecognised comrade? And haven’t I imagined it all?) He goes his way, I go mine. Only my little road has just begun. Where will it lead? What do I want to be?
A schoolteacher? Hardly of English, in that case: better of the junior classes. Just my sort of thing…
No, no, I don’t want to be a teacher. Unless of Divine Law, like Father Vadim—but they’d never let me near that. The reason I don’t want to is that the ideal teacher, as the world understands it, is not Alexander Mikhailovich Azurov. It’s Viktoria Denisovna Korolyova: a woman who pours her whole soul into her subject, who could easily burn out at her work, who sees in her literature nothing less than divine revelation. Well, yes—and we know what that leads to. It leads to “yesterday we ate sweet spring baccurotes”. It leads to “Sit down, dear child, sit down! And never be afraid to speak your mind, even if it’s that… straightforward.” “Dear child” yourself! I’m only seven years younger than you…
Alexander Mikhailovich is different: he doesn’t think the English language is the be-all and end-all. For him language is like a key to a door. The key unlocks the door—and what’s behind the door? Behind the door is the world, vast and full. And somewhere in that world is the Coptic Quarter of Cairo, and further still than that, the Desert… And that is precisely why—and therefore—Mr Azurov is a white crow in our school, in any school. We’re both of us slightly holy fools, only he has learned to hide his folly, and I haven’t yet.
What else awaits me, what can I do, what would I want? Marry a foreigner? Ugh! It’s repulsive even to think of it. And no foreigner would want me anyway, with my pitiful English and my potato nose.
Become a matushka? That goes without saying—that won’t run away from me. And then what? “Saved through childbearing”? That’s work, too, no worse than any other. Better than many, even. But what about… the Desert?
The truth is, I feel an enormous, unspent store of love inside me. Only not love for a man—that’s too narrow. I’m almost indifferent to boys—those boys I occasionally see or hear about. Boys are terribly stupid while they’re young, and when they grow up and get cleverer, they’ll hardly stay single—they’ll find themselves a more promising prospect than Blessed Feodora of Troitskoye.
Taking the veil? I must think about that seriously—I must. Father Vadim is a “small” priest, but a real one. And his church is just the same: tiny, but the realest thing. (Did I offend him by agreeing too quickly that he’s “small”?) He didn’t just toss out that word about my “possible gift”—no, he thought about it for a long time. But I’ve already said what I’m afraid of in monasticism. And now I’ll say it even more plainly: I’m afraid that I’ll come to the convent and be met there by the familiar face of Olya Smirnova. Everything ironed, numbered, blankets tucked in, collars sewn on, heresy and whimsy—to the isolation ward for infidels. Little boots on the parade ground—thump-thump, thump-thump! Eyes—right!
And then a hermit appears on the parade ground, in a woollen cloak, with a long beard, a staff in his hand. “Who’s that?!” cries Olga from a distance. “I’m Jijoi,” the hermit answers. “DJ? A rapper, is it? A junkie? An American spy? Get o-u-t of here this minute!”
I’m writing some sort of rubbish. I must be falling ill.
Another future option: to spite everyone, become a business lady, wear trouser suits, ride about in a car with a personal chauffeur, summon men with a manicured finger. But no—I wouldn’t last, I’d run away. Dull, petty…
Now, here’s an occupation that would suit me: to be a soldier, a woman soldier like Joan of Arc. I’d endure it—I could manage. Only the coarseness repels me… I’m not coarse—God knows, I’m not coarse! I would so love to be delicate, gentle, tender—like Alya Florenskaya, for instance. And nobody, nobody supports me in that wish! A future matushka has no need to be too delicate. Nor a nun, for that matter.

*

The coach is returning to the gymnasium, and I carry on.
In U. we visited two monasteries; in the cathedral inside the local kremlin we listened to a sermon; then the whole class went to a museum—the “Chambers of the Appanage Prince”. A two-storey building, red-brick, cheerful, with a touch of fancy. Ancient: it is the oldest one in our diocese.
So what? I’m ashamed to say it, but I’m almost indifferent to architecture. The architecture of any church is for Christ. Architecture for its own sake is “yesterday we ate sweet spring baccurotes.” And it isn’t history that moves me, but something personal inside it.
In the museum, it wasn’t the icons of the murdered Tsarevich that drew me, nor the frescoes, nor the bishop’s throne, nor the weaponry. I got stuck in front of a very simple exhibit on the ground floor. A notebook for writing down lessons, belonging to a fourth-form pupil, Anna Surina. 1910, the 11th of January.
There—a Russian girl in a provincial town, a hundred years ago, also kept her diary. For some reason I want to believe that it was a diary indeed, though the little notebook is quite tiny.
Above the notebook there was a photograph too—a graduation class of a girls’ gymnasium. I fancy I found that same little Anya Surina, though there were no captions to the photograph at all; I simply chose a girl and decided to consider her the owner of the notebook. That one, fourth from the left, in the front row. A roundish face, a concentrated expression in the eyes. Hair combed back in a side parting. A white lace collar. The uniform is almost identical to ours. And really, people haven’t changed in a hundred years: the same faces. There’s a priest in the second row, third from the left—that was their local Father Vadim. And beside him a teacher in a double-breasted frock coat, with a stand-up collar: trimmed moustache, short beard, attentive gaze—almost like a doctor’s. I wonder, did they teach English in 1910? Hardly—Latin, more likely. He, too, probably knew that Sisoes is a Latin transcription of a Coptic name? Perhaps he’d passed through Cairo as well…

*

I’m finishing late in the evening. I did end up quarrelling with Ksyusha.
It began with a sheer trifle: Ksyusha was sitting across the aisle from me, and I decided to thank her once more for the present.
“You’re welcome,” she answered. “I’m always glad to support… the less well-off.”
I didn’t catch on straight away. Then I said, quietly:
“I’m not poor!”
“You?”—and Ksyusha practically tumbled into the aisle, leaning over the armrest. She looked me over from head to toe, her eyes bulging. “You’re a complete beggar! Dashulya, don’t get offended that I say so! Everyone knows it, and nobody gets offended at the truth!”
At that, the girls fell silent.
Ksyusha is right: I am almost a beggar, and it’s true, everyone does know. As an inheritance I received a flat in a two-flat wooden house in the village of Troitskoye—and even that I won’t be able to manage until I come of age. Papa amassed no riches, because, first, he was a remarkable man not of this world. Second, all his strength and all his spare means went into restoring the Church of the Holy Trinity—too large for the village, enormous, rising two storeys of windows. They replaced the roof, restored the cupolas, but never fully completed the restoration! And in the last years, with his illness, he had no time at all for earning any capital.
All I managed to whisper back was:
“One day you’ll be terribly ashamed of this…”
And I heard in reply:
“Oh, are we offended, then? Are our little eyes getting watery? And I thought, Dashulya, that Abba Sisoes had taught you money isn’t the most important thing in life.”
No, my little eyes didn’t get watery—I only blinked a bit more often than usual. But never mind, I pulled myself together. Abba Jijoi really has taught me a great deal, and money really isn’t the most important thing in life. What would he have said to me right now? “Spit on her, Mother Theodora.” Or no—more gently, more tenderly: “Don’t fret about these things, little sister.” And what would he have said to her? He wouldn’t have shamed her—he’d have found something to answer, with humility and with humour! And Alexander Mikhailovich would have dropped something about downright insulting too, with his English aristocratism. What a pity I’m neither the one nor the other; what a pity nothing came into my head…
Sonya asked to swap places with me and began whispering a scolding at Ksyusha. Ksyusha began defending herself: it’s our holy fool who’s always poking her nose in everywhere! Varya joined in too and barked at Ksyusha, who snapped back. In short, the usual girlish squabble broke out, not one second of it Orthodox. I huddled into a corner by the window and went quiet. I caught Sonya’s palm and stroked it gratefully. She squeezed my hand in return.
I don’t recognise myself! Before, I’d have answered back, no worse than Varya. Why have I become so thin-skinned? Have I been staring too long at Anya Surina, that Russian girl? You mustn’t, mustn’t, mustn’t let yourself grow fragile! And yet I long to…
It’s not even love I long for—it’s recognition, when all barriers fall away and for a few seconds you speak to another person entirely in his language, and he in yours. I long for complete, carefree trust, like between the Fox and the Prince. Does such a thing—now—even exist?
One more thing, a small one: Olya never did stick up for me! Does she think I got what I deserved? Do I irritate her with my “holy-foolery”?

* * *

18 February 2009, Wednesday

Running a temperature, lying in bed, not going to lessons. Caught a cold on the trip; there was a draught in the coach.
Last night I dreamt of Satan (I’m embarrassed to write this down). Below I’ve set down the dream as best I could.

Heat rises from the sand, and the sky glows orange, but the sun is nowhere to be seen.
Right in front of me, about fifty metres away, the Enemy sits on the ground. He is exactly as they depict him on icons: black, covered in fur, with two short wings and short horns, with a muzzle like a wolf’s. He is tall—about ten storeys—and terrifying.
He doesn’t try to frighten me, though—he simply looks at me, narrowing his red eyes. His face wears a contemptuous expression, mocking, but intelligent. He looks for a long time, as if at someone he once knew.
Satan speaks:
“I’ve recognised you, Theodora. I shall torment you again, as I did before.”
Now’s when I should have swallowed my tongue. I don’t swallow it: he’s picked the wrong one! I’m not some rootless wench. I’m the daughter of Arkady Venediktovich, a Russian priest.
“What do you mean to torture me with?”
“With lust, like Amma Sarah, and other foul passions—fourteen years in a row.”
“You’ve lied, Horned One,” I answer. “Thirteen years you tormented Amma Sarah, not fourteen. I don’t believe a single word you say. And what awaits me after?”
“After, you’ll die for your great sin. Expect the river of fire, and the gnashing of teeth, and the worm that devours, and the void that tortures.”
“And again I don’t believe you, because the Lord is merciful.”
“You won’t believe an old acquaintance? I haven’t lied to you in everything. One of the things I’ve said is true. What will you do with that?”
“What I’ll do, I don’t know,” I say. “One thing I do know, Wicked One: however many years are granted me, I shall fight you. Torment me—I don’t care! I shall fight you back till my last breath.”
Satan wavers in the air, like a mirage, and I understand that I’ve been speaking with a phantom.

When I woke up, for a while I remembered it in every detail and was very proud that such a serious dream had come to me, as if to a desert mother, and I was proud of my answers too. Then it came into my head: what if it’s a deception? What if the whole purpose of the dream was to kindle pride in me?
(Writing “he” about the Enemy with a small letter feels strange, but with a capital would be worse still. I’ll use a small one.)
Of course—what else would it be for? And besides: how can one believe Satan? And yet there is a difference from an ordinary dream, even if you can’t tell it to anyone. The difference is in the horror. The horror in the dream was thick, thick.
I’ve decided: I shan’t confess this dream to Father Vadim. First, we’re not answerable for our dreams. Second, it all sounds far too proud…
But I almost did something else: I almost wrote about my dream to Alexander Mikhailovich, the English teacher, to his electronic mail.
The only thing that stopped me was that I’d have had to go down to the computer room. How could I go anywhere with a temperature? And no one would let me, anyway.
What sort of delirious ideas come into my head? Why would an English teacher need to know my dreams? I’m a fool and a half…
But the Enemy—I shall fight him all the same, however many years are granted me. Fourteen—then all fourteen.
If only I could learn how to do it…

* * *

20 February 2009, Friday

I reread my last entry with a feeling of slight awkwardness. Only illness can explain it.
I’m not renouncing anything I wrote—but all the same, it’s unseemly for a seventeen-year-old girl to write such things! Above her station.
Today I’m almost completely well and going to lessons. Today, too, a small incident took place during English. Here’s how it was.
Waiting for the little break between the two periods, I raise my hand and ask:
“Mr Azurov?”
“Yes?”
“Do you believe in Satan?”
“What kind of a question is that!” he laughs merrily. “You’ve startled me, Dolly.”
I don’t laugh, don’t even smile in reply, but go on looking at him. Alexander Mikhailovich stops smiling too.
“You mean, do I believe that Satan exists?” he asks. And after a small pause he adds, without taking his eyes off me:
“Yes, I do. I absolutely do. I told you so in my improvised lecture about the Jabberwock, remember?”
“I remember your lecture!” I answer in Russian. “But then I was sixteen, and now I’m already seventeen.”
“I see. May I ask why you’re asking?”
I shrug my shoulders, pull some sort of face. I can’t exactly tell him! Or rather, I would tell him, but… not in front of the class! Half the girls have gone out, but half are still here.
“I think you should consult Father Vadim about that,” the teacher says slowly, thoughtfully.
“I thought about it… but better not. And I beg you very much, Alexander Mikhailovich, don’t tell him either.”
The teacher hesitates for a while before giving his promise, and I say to myself, as if making a notch: if he takes everything that’s happening to me with complete seriousness, then perhaps he can be trusted. And if, despite everything, he gives me his promise now, that means he considers me fully an adult, responsible for my own actions. Then he can be trusted all the more.
“I hope you know what you’re doing… I won’t tell him,” he says at last. “I promise.”
I nod—and it’s as if tears rise to my throat because, for the first time in my life, someone has treated me as fully adult. Nonsense, no need for that. Still, I get up and go out into the corridor. The break isn’t over yet. The girls follow me with puzzled and astonished looks.
Sonya both saw and heard my dialogue with the English teacher. Afterwards she pestered me to pieces: what was all that? Was I trying to make an impression on the teacher? I still wouldn’t be able to compete with Alya Florenskaya anyway…
No, I’m not competing with anyone! I couldn’t hold out and told Sonya about my dream on the night of Tuesday into Wednesday.
Stupid, endlessly stupid! Such things shouldn’t be told to anyone, an-y-one, except perhaps a spiritual father—and even then one has to think a hundred times… What was especially stupid was that I didn’t make my friend promise to keep quiet: it simply didn’t occur to me.
Well, of course, not a day had passed before all the senior forms—the eleventh and the tenth—were gossiping about how Satan comes to Daria Smirnova in her sleep. Most of the girls in our class now look at me as if I’m a genuine holy fool, over-fasted, over-prayed, not far from the madhouse—and the smaller part look at me as a spiritual ascetic. How am I to explain to them that I’m neither one nor the other? Sonya, for instance, declares she admires me. Oh, Sonya…

 
* * *

21 February 2009, Saturday

Saturday with us is considered a parents’ day. Lyubov Sergeyevna comes to see me—Papa’s half-sister, Olya’s mother, my guardian until I come of age. Aunt Lyuba is a tired woman with a kind face and large, rough hands.
We sit on my bed—me with my legs drawn up near the pillow, her at the foot—and talk of all sorts of trifles. I’m asked about my illness, told to look after my weak health. As if it were so weak! Once you get a name for being a holy fool, people start making up all sorts of tall tales about you…
Then: may she take in tenants for my flat? I’ve no use for it just yet, after all.
“What a question, Aunt Lyuba,” I answer. “If it's needed, it’s needed. An extra kopeck won’t hurt.”
And I add one of our village sayings—that I’ll remember her kindness to me, a poor orphan, for ever and ever. Aunt Lyuba is touched by my answer, wipes away a tear that isn’t there. She gets ready to leave, then suddenly remembers:
“Oh, yes! I’ve brought you a picture.”
“What picture?” I don't understand.
“Of the boy,” she explains, artlessly.
I’m shown a photograph of a certain Misha. On the back, a telephone number is written in pencil. Misha is thin, with narrow shoulders, a moustache just beginning to show, and protruding ears. He smiles shyly into the camera.
Misha, my aunt explains, is a seminarian, in his fourth year. With the Bishop’s blessing, he'll be ordained a deacon this very summer, and before that moment, like all seminarians, he urgently needs an Orthodox matushka. That I’m seventeen isn’t a problem: they give seventeen-year-olds the blessing to marry, the Bishop will allow it.
“I’ll think about it,” I answer diplomatically.
“Think, Daryushka, think—though there’s nothing to think about: a good boy, pure. I’ve given him your photograph, too. You can start meeting now, or after the exams. Only don’t drag it out too long, all right?”
After Aunt Lyuba leaves, I hold out for a while, and then I fall face-first into my pillow and sob, like a peasant woman, howling.
I don’t want to!
I don’t want to marry without love, even if this jug-eared one with the moustache is “a good, pure boy”, and probably a decent person, and he’ll make an excellent deacon and, in time, a priest.
I don’t want to—but there it is, my fate has caught up with me, and there’s nowhere to run. Where else can I go—an orphan, a beggar, as Ksyusha said, untalented, unambitious, with the most ordinary of faces and Cs in my future school certificate?! If not this one, then another—you’ll get used to it, you’ll grow to love it, “they've all got the same tackle”, as Varya once blurted out in front of me (I must ask her to explain that one). Let it be Mikhail, then. In the photo he’s polite, shy, not ugly. The ears—well, what about the ears? You don't have to look at him all day, and I’m no beauty myself. It’s time I got used to him. We could even start meeting now—just holding hands, of course, nothing before the wedding, no-no, and we’ll get on splendidly…
No, no, Lord, no! Why?!
And what about the Desert? And Abba Jijoi? And the Little Prince?
For a long, long time I lie sobbing into the pillow. Sonya comes in and strokes my back. I, all tear-stained, tell her everything about the “picture”. She’s indignant, outraged—she even goes white with anger. Sonya starts inventing ways out, for me and instead of me. All her inventions are fantastic.

* * *

26 February 2009, Thursday

I’m plucking up my courage and resolving to speak about what’s tormenting me—with Varya. I warn her in advance that I need a word with her.
In the evening she throws on her coat, I, my jacket, and we go out into the inner courtyard of the gymnasium so that no one can overhear us. I stun my friend with the question:
“Varya, tell me honestly: are you… still a girl?”
Varya stops, blinks, opens her mouth:
“What sort of an interrogation is this? The d-e-s-e-r-t f-a-t-h-e-r-s wouldn’t approve?”
“Oh, shame on you!”
Flustered, I tell her everything: about Misha; about the fact that, most likely, I’ll marry a seminarian as early as this summer; that I’m as inexperienced in one area of life that everyone finds interesting (but me—not one bit!) as a first-former; that I’ve nowhere to get any knowledge from… No, Varya, I don’t want to go to the computer room and search the net for naked men! God strike me down, I won’t! I’m afraid, Varya… Does it… hurt? And afterwards, every time—does it hurt then too?
Varya shakes her head, marvelling at my naivety. She explains certain physiological details to me in plain Russian words. I listen with an effort, fighting the urge to cover my ears with my palms.
“What you should do is have a word with Maria,” she finishes her account. “Or with Natalya. They’ll teach you… the finer points.”
“They’ve both already…?”
“I haven’t been sitting under their beds! It’s just, Dasha, how to put it for you… They look like women. You’ll grow up, and you’ll understand.”
And yet at the end she can’t restrain herself from a jab:
“What, Daria—not much help from Abba Sisoes in these matters? You have to ask sinners, eh?”
Without answering, I look at her with pain. Varya grows embarrassed, looks away:
“Sorry, that was out of line.”

*

With Masha, of course, I shan’t bring myself to speak about this, and not with Natalya either: I’ve no need of any—Lord, save me—”finer points”. It only hurts the first time—I don’t need to know any more than that. Mercifully arranged.
About Maria I’d guessed before—or rather, not guessed, I’d heard what people say. But Natasha? She doesn’t even seem to be seeing anyone. Or…
An unpleasant suspicion creeps into my head, but I wave it off like a fly. Not true! I’ve made it all up. I’m rotten, rottenly made—I invent foul things about people. And on top of that, look at me: I’ve decided to fight Satan fourteen years in a row. Laughable and shameful, that’s all.

* * *

28 February 2009, Saturday

The last day of winter. Thick, wet flakes of snow are flying—the moment they touch the earth, they melt.
Father Vadim is ill; we’ll be without Liturgy tomorrow.
But we won’t be without Divine Law and Church History today. They’ve sent us a substitute: Father Vasily.
Father Vasily is a corpulent man, strong, robust, black-bearded, with a ringing bass voice. During Divine Law he paces between the rows, furiously branding the pagans and calling on us to devote all our strength, all our thought, to the battle of Orthodoxy against paganism, against the feast of Ivan Kupala and the God-abominable Krishnaites.
I gaze out of the window at the flying flakes of snow falling on the parade ground. (That’s what we call the asphalt yard where we have our PE lessons and ceremonial assemblies.) I’ve no wish to look at Father Vasily.
Lord God, what misery!
We don’t value what we have! It’s only after training like this that you begin to value Father Vadim’s gentleness.
I’m utterly indifferent to the feast of Ivan Kupala and other Slavic games. I don’t pour out a saucer of milk for the house-spirit. I’ve never once told fortunes at Christmastide, either. It’s all foolishness—who’d argue? Only, fighting against this foolishness is foolishness ten times worse.
Christ is Light, Christ is Truth, Christ is Life, Christ is Love. This I know firmly. But whoever finds Christ to be Light, Life, Truth and Love—that person no longer wants to jump through bonfires or leave a glass of vodka on a grave. And whoever doesn’t find it so—well, you can’t force someone to love what they don’t love.
About the “God-abominable Krishnaites” I know absolutely nothing. Only, before throwing stones at them, shouldn’t one first ask them, let them speak in their own defence? And whom could I ask—surely not Father Vasily? Not a chance…
Oy, Father Vadim! We don’t need this loud black-bearded priest—God save us, we don’t! Give us back our own, our “small” one!
No: perhaps I shan’t ask Father Vadim about the Krishnaites either—he too won’t tell me the truth about them.
Orthodoxy, I understand today, comes in very different kinds. The Orthodoxy of Abba Jijoi is a battle with Satan in the scorching desert. My papa’s Orthodoxy is a village church on a hill, and a clear blue sky above it, and a quiet churchyard, and lilac bushes under the windows. Father Vadim’s Orthodoxy is when a beautiful person in the half-dark of a church says to you: “For such a good girl, I’m an insufficient spiritual father.” Father Vasily’s Orthodoxy is wet snow falling on grey asphalt and melting at once, of no use to anyone.
How much blue sky will there be in my life, and how much grey asphalt? That now depends on the mysterious Misha, on what sort of person he turns out to be. His protruding ears and small moustache say nothing about him as a man.
But something about him is said by the fact that he so readily followed Aunt Lyuba’s lead, so readily took my photograph, so readily saw his future matushka in a girl he didn’t know. Had my aunt brought him a photograph of Alya Florenskaya, he’d have seen it in her too. Or no—he wouldn’t: he’d have been frightened, he’d have sensed she’s someone beyond his reach. Better a bird in the hand, after all…
And he still hasn’t rung me even once! A single phone call, you’d think, might be enough for me to understand what sort of person he is, whether he can be trusted!
My thoughts are interrupted by Father Vasily. Pointing a finger at me, he asks me to stand and list the main dangers that paganism poses to young people. Father Vadim would never have allowed himself such a thing, and never jabbed a finger at anyone…
Standing up, I say with displeasure:
“Father, I understood the lesson material very poorly—forgive me. I only know that the Egyptian desert fathers didn’t fight against paganism. They went into the desert and prayed for the salvation of their souls, sometimes the whole night through. And the one they fought against was the demon of fornication—not in others, but in themselves.” Here, for some reason, I look him in the eye and add: “Right into old age.”
At once I feel horribly ashamed—I probably even blush. I mustn’t do that, I mustn’t! Even a good-for-nothing priest is still a priest, and a married man doesn’t wrestle with any demons at all. (Or does he? Father Vadim never answered my questions…)
There’s a stunned silence in the classroom, then whispers. Natasha Yakovleva, sitting in the back row, gives a mocking clap. A fine ally God sent me there…
Sonya, leaping up from her seat, whispers something in Father Vasily’s ear, glancing in my direction. He softens.
“Sit down, girl,” he booms. “What you need is to get married—that’s what. Then all this foolishness will fly right out of you… Can anyone else answer?”

* * *

6 March 2009, Friday

Spring is already in the air, but the snow hasn’t melted yet. The days drag on, dreary and overcast.
At the start of the week I rang Misha first. The voice on the line is polite, pleasant, with a slight burr—in short, exactly like Misha himself in the photograph. We didn’t arrange a meeting: I explained that right now, at the end of the eleventh form, I’m swamped with studies, that I couldn’t get out of the gymnasium even for an hour. (I lied—Lord, forgive me, I lied!) And besides, they’re not keen on letting us off the grounds. (Partly true: when we go out, we have to report at the desk—where we’re going, and what for, and why. But for such a g-o-d-l-y purpose they’d have let me out.) We decided to speak again in a couple of weeks, exchanged pleasantries.
A splendid boy, no doubt. But can I really believe he’ll be a rock for me?

*

My own misery makes me more sensitive to what’s happening in other people’s lives. Or rather, not sensitive—watchful. I’m beginning to notice things—today, for instance—that I’d never have spotted before.
Alya Florenskaya behaves strangely in Alexander Mikhailovich’s presence. She speaks little, thinks long over what she says. Her voice is like a wounded bird’s. It’s painfully pitiful.
After watching DEAD POETS SOCIETY (last week), she prepared some very thorough answers to the questions on the film—so thorough that today the two of them, teacher and pupil, spent a good twenty minutes talking to each other. In English, naturally. They talked, and we listened, in no hurry to butt in: none of us speaks English as well as she does. I, for my part, wasn’t so much listening as watching her face. In all those twenty minutes she didn’t once look him straight in the eye.
The girl’s in love.
Ah, if I were in her place, perhaps I’d have fallen in love with him too—with her looks! I’m lying: even with her looks I wouldn’t have fallen in love, and I’d never have ended up in her place. And anyway, a girl’s beauty is both a gift and a punishment: straight away you start worrying about the wrong things.
Alya, my dear—how could I help you?
Now I understand Sonya’s little remark about how, if I wanted to make an impression on the English teacher, I still wouldn’t be able to compete with Alya Florenskaya. I’ve never dreamt of it! But, as the saying goes, where the horse goes with his hoof, the crayfish follows with his claw. At break I put up my hand again and ask:
“Alexander Mikhailovich, Mr Keating was indifferent to his pupil’s fate—and he took a sin on his soul, isn’t that right?”
“That wasn’t in the questions, but… I’m inclined to agree. And why don’t you want to discuss it in the lesson?”
“Well, we’ve been through your ‘in the lesson’ before: I’ll speak in Russian and earn myself a C.”
“You will. That C says nothing at all about you as a person.”
“Yes, yes, I know… But I wanted to ask about sins as well, even if it’s not quite on topic for the film… Is marrying without love also a sin? Not according to the Holy Fathers, but in your view?”
For a long, long time he looks me in the eye:
“So you never did speak to Father Vadim, Dolly?”
“Father Vadim is ill.”
“True. A pity.”
“A pity for me too. So what do you think?”
“I think one should n-e-v-e-r, n-e-v-e-r do that.”
“Thank you!”
“Nothing to thank me for… I’d very much like to help you, Dolly,” he says suddenly. “But I can’t think how.”
“You already have.”
“Already?”
“Yes. Already. You’ve already helped.”
Out of the corner of my eye I catch Alya Florenskaya’s gaze on me. She’s looking at me with horror. Jealous? Or does she know what’s happening with me and feel sorry for me? The second, probably: of course she knows—who doesn’t know? I sobbed into my pillow a fortnight ago loudly enough for the whole gymnasium to hear!
My dear—you can’t help me, and neither can I help you. Our fates are too different.

* * *

8 March 2009, Sunday

International Women’s Day isn’t observed in our gymnasium, though they did put up a greeting on the ground floor. A secular holiday—and in Father Vasily’s opinion, practically pagan.
Speaking of whom—Father Vasily, so they say, served Liturgy today in the house church. There was none of the usual crush and scramble for places. No surprise there. Has he taken up permanent residence with us, then? A bull in a china shop… That’s unkind; I ought to cross it out.
And I wasn’t at that Liturgy. On Friday I went to Roza Markovna and, with all due decorum, asked to be excused on Sunday for a solitary pilgrimage. On the northern edge of the regional centre, in a district called Gorskoye, there are four little churches standing close together: the Archangel Michael’s Miracle, the Dormition, the Annunciation, and Holy Trinity. How could I, “Feodora of Troitskoye”, not visit the Trinity  Church? And I’d be in time for Liturgy too… She let me go.
The journey to Gorskoye is a long one. I did look round the churches—nothing special, sweet enough—and I did stand through Liturgy in one of them, but I didn’t stay for Communion: I hadn’t made confession, after all.
I came out of the church and fought the temptation to catch a bus into the city centre: they’re few and far between out here. I didn’t get on. I went wherever my eyes led me.
The town soon ended—Gorskoye is the very, very northern edge of it. The road stretched on across a snowy field—the snow already soft, sunken, but still lying. I turned off the proper road and made straight for a lone, tall poplar (I was wearing rubber boots; and even if I hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have minded). How I love poplars! It’s a pity they’ve started cutting them down in the cities…
Right at the foot of the poplar the ground had thawed. I knelt down on the sturdy canvas bag I’d inherited from my grandmother, and stayed there a long, long time.
It was good for me there—so good, so peaceful. Tears came flying, dripping down like spring rain, and then they stopped.
There, under that poplar, I understood something about myself. There are days that are forerunners. Today is my future life—that is, if I don’t let my own life, my very own, slip through my fingers; if I don’t get on the first bus that comes along. And that life, if I manage to choose it, is the easiest, the most peaceful, the very best.
To go into a church. To stand in it a little while. Then to walk wherever my eyes lead me, alone; to turn off the beaten path. To sink to my knees on the ground, to touch the earth with my hands. And to stay like that. There will be rain, and there will be fair.
All of this, God willing, will happen—I don’t know how, in what form, but it will happen. If only I don’t frighten it away…
Back at the gymnasium, Roza Markovna scolded me: I’d come back late. I just kept quiet and blinked with innocent child’s eyes. Since I’ve already got a reputation as a “holy fool,” I may as well turn it to my advantage from time to time, instead of only to my harm.
In the end Roza Markovna softened: she hugged me, kissed me on the forehead, and said that from people like me even the Lord Himself wouldn’t demand an accounting. She gave me her personal phone number, in case I was ever delayed somewhere.

* * *

13 March 2009, Friday

Oh, holy saints, our troubles have begun…
Today, the first big clash between the English teacher and our class has happened.
Well, it’s been building, of course. There’ve been sparks before: I remember back in December Natasha pulled something, but it blew over. Alexander Mikhailovich is simply too “not like us”: not very “teacherly”, as we all understand that word, and not even very “Russian”. What wind blew him into our gymnasium, I cannot fathom. And we are very much “like us”—that is, all of us are very ordinary, provincial. We haven’t studied at Oxford, we haven’t walked through the Coptic Quarter of Cairo. So there you have it…
I’ll set it all down in detail, however many pages it takes.
Last week we were assigned to give reports on the peculiarities and problems of education in the countries of the language we’re studying. (Something I like least of all! I burst into tears like a little fool during the last report. I’ve already written about that.) Still, with God’s help and a dictionary, I managed to cobble together something short.
Most of the girls prepared nothing. I remember Ksyusha pacing the corridor at break, hand on hip, holding forth:
“Do what you like—I’m not writing about it! The loo on the third floor’s had standing water for a week and no one’s lifted a finger! Have you seen it, girls? And have you seen what they gave us for lunch? And we’re supposed to sit here croaking about the problems of American schools from our own swamp? Ha! Three times ha!”
DEAD POETS’ SOCIETY, which we watched two weeks ago, didn’t impress her: “It’s old stuff,” “Everything’s completely different now.” It most likely is completely different now in American schools—only for some reason I think it’s not better, but worse…
The church-going girls, myself included, were also mildly irritated by the assignment. To prepare it properly you need to search for material on the internet, go to the computer room—and there are, I might add, exactly six working computers! (Though, unlike the rest of us, both Evdokia and Alya Florenskaya are frequent visitors to that room. The girls whisper that Alya isn’t preparing for lessons, but supposedly writing love letters to the English teacher—and that she was even caught at it once. Have they no shame!) Six computers, and thirteen of us, and it’s our final year, and besides, English isn’t our main subject! Varvara Konstantinovna, who taught English in the first term, never set any such reports!
To cut a long story short, we didn’t prepare our reports. Their turn came in the second half of the double period. (In the senior forms, lessons are doubled up. Preparing us for university, I suppose.) Alya would have got going, but the teacher probably felt awkward about having spoken with her for so long the previous week, so he began asking the other side of the room. “Not ready,” “Not ready.” There I am, burbling something for the sake of variety. Mr Azurov cuts short my torment and reaches out for my exercise book. Having glanced over my laughable excuse for a report and given a short grunt, he writes in my book and draws a circle round a C+.
“That would be a ‘C plus’. You don’t mind, Dolly, do you? If you still want to deliver your report in full, you are, of course, very welcome to do so.”
“No, I don’t still want at all,” I agree quickly. “Thank you.”
And again—“Not ready,” “Not ready.” Who’s ready at all? Alya timidly raises her hand. Alexander Mikhailovich gives a short shake of his head, showing he won’t ask her; drums his fingers on the table. I understand: there’s still half an hour left of the lesson—the half hour has to be filled with something. No, teaching’s a dangerous profession—unpredictable. I don’t want to be a teacher.
“Fine!” he says at last. “If you cannot prepare your own materials, you’ll deal with mine. There you go…”
He takes from his bag and hands out to us printouts of a newspaper article from THE TELEGRAPH entitled SIR, ARE YOU QUEER?, quite fresh—from the tenth of March. We’re to read the article on our own, pick out the most important points and be ready to say what we agree and disagree with, and also what we think about it in general.
I whisper to Sonya to clarify the meaning of the word queer. She, also in a whisper, explains: about sodomites. Varya, with a smirk, adds aloud: about cocksuckers.
“I like your straightforward manner of calling things by their names, Barbara,” the teacher remarks. Hard to tell whether he’s serious or ironic. Hard. But he’s hit the mark with the topic. How can you compare the lenten cabbage soup in our canteen, or that wretched toilet, with the fact that somewhere schoolchildren are patted on the head for sodomy? For now they’re only patted on the head—soon it’ll be made compulsory…
The fifteen minutes we were given to read the article go by. I write down new words: homosexual, lesbian, LGBT. I ask the teacher the meaning of these words. (The girls smirk: I’m the only one, the village girl, who doesn’t know them.) I prepare my statement—in Russian. In English lessons there’s a rule: you can answer in Russian if you are content with a C, and I’m perfectly content with a C. I’m afraid he won’t ask me, even if I raise my hand: I’ve already got a mark.
And indeed he doesn’t ask me. They ask my sister, Maria, Varya. Olya and Masha take turns reading aloud and somehow translating their assigned paragraphs, but refuse to discuss the article. Varya goes so far as to declare that studying the habits of the ‘queer brethren’ is repulsive to her, which is why she understood and translated nothing—didn’t even try. This trouble won’t touch us!
At this someone laughs nastily—Natasha, I think. I remember my suspicion about her.
The teacher, shrugging his shoulders, writes an F in Varya’s book with an unwavering hand and, at random, asks Katya. Our little mouse Katya couldn’t manage it either. And then from Natasha comes:
“Alexander Mikhailovich, really—why are we reading this? We’re all so different here, and all of us find it unpleasant! Some people even have homosexual friends, but they keep quiet about it! They just want to be left in peace! What were you trying to achieve? Why have you spoilt everyone’s mood with this article?”
There’s something utterly shameless in her words—and most shameless of all is that the “homosexual friends” are her own. And perhaps even… Not my business, but, my dear Natasha, why did you come to an Orthodox school, then? To tickle your nerves? And you wear the symbol of the schema-monks from holy Mount Athos—a skull and crossbones—round your neck! Now that really is disgraceful!
All this I’m bursting to say, though it’s better to keep quiet: stupid words, heated ones. We’d all do better to keep quiet, cool down: we’ve all been stung. And the teacher has been stung too. He stands up, walks about the classroom, and at last addresses us with a speech, in Russian:
“You are all in the wrong. Those of you who count yourselves inside the Church, and those who are in a hurry to shake the dust of your native faith from your feet—not understanding that it’s not dust, but the precious soil of your homeland. You, the first group: what will you say when, twenty years from now, your daughter comes to you and asks, ‘Why can’t a girl go to bed with a girl?’—or, worse, announces: ‘Mum, meet my husband—this lady here!’? You’ll have nothing to say, nothing at all, because you never took the trouble to think through in advance why sodomy is a sin; because thinking about it was repulsive to you! And you, the second group, craning your scrawny necks towards the shining West: where did you hear that your mood is a sacred cow? It isn’t, believe it or not! Strain every power of your mind and consider that education is not conducted for the purpose of making things ‘pleasant’ for you! You are like ostriches burying their heads in the sand! But you can’t bury your head in the sand—life too often shoves a concrete floor under you! I’m very displeased with you—and with you, Madame Yakovleva, especially: this is already your second attempt to shut my mouth with your ‘offended feelings’. To all who didn’t prepare their reports, I shall have to give an F: you’ve deserved nothing more. Complain about me to Svetlana Borisovna, if you wish! And don’t imagine that in that case I’ll stay on at your school a single minute longer. You’ll receive the homework via the prefect. Goodbye!”
He leaves, though the bell hasn’t rung yet. We sit, crushed, silent, for a minute or two. Then someone throws in Natasha’s direction:
“Showed off your cleverness, did you? Done a good thing, have you?”
She, naturally, doesn’t stay in debt. Word for word, and quickly enough a racket and squabble breaks out, just like on the bus back from U. Maria rises—big, terrifying—and bellows at the class:
“Shut you gobs, you stupid cows! Served you right! Only, I can see, it wasn’t enough!”
I’ve no strength left to listen to any of it, so I go out of the classroom. I stand in the corridor, collecting my thoughts.
Reading the article was unpleasant, and the girls perhaps had reason to be angry—but didn’t it force them to think, too?
Is it really necessary to fight—always to fight? (A thought comes: yes, he and I are of one blood, because he too is not afraid to take up battle.) To fight—with words too, not only with prayer? But what about those who, like me, can’t produce clever words? Have we already lost in advance, then?
The war against the Wicked One takes many forms—and A. M. in this war is taking the field against the Enemy. Taking it bravely, without fear of getting dirty or hurt. Hurting others, too, without meaning to… But this is a war for the heart, and in it words aren’t the main weapon—after all, words alone don’t convince, and you can’t force someone to love what they don’t love. He’s wrong about something, and I need to tell him so.
 
*

I’ll pause, rest a little.
Now, rereading, I’m amazed at myself: how did I find the courage—or the cheek—first, to lecture a teacher; second, a person of the greatest intelligence, no Father Vasily? I found it because my spiritual kinship with him revealed itself to me again in that moment. And I don’t regret it: if I had to do it over, I would. I wasn’t mistaken: it all turned out wonderfully.
There, now I’ll go on.

*

A. M. hasn’t left yet. I find him in the staffroom which we’re not allowed to enter, so I simply knock on the door and poke my head in. The teacher is sitting, staring unseeingly ahead of him. He turns his head towards me; there’s a frown on his forehead.
“Dolly, is that you? Wait a second.”
He comes out into the corridor:
“Is this about the mark? I gave you a C, don’t worry.”
“No, not about the mark”—a wave of anger suddenly comes over me. “How could you even think I’d come up to you about a mark?! What do marks matter?!”
I’ve frightened him, I think. He takes a step back, smiles guiltily, says in an apologetic voice:
“Please don’t scold me, Dolly! I’ve done nothing but scold myself. It seems I am a lousy teacher, you know…”
“Please don’t scold me”! A child, a pure child…
“I don’t know the word lousy,” I answer, “but what are we doing—standing in the corridor? Let’s go up to the third floor.”
We go up to the recreation area and sit down on the bench opposite the entrance to the stairs to the house church. A. M. winces when he sees this bench:
“If you only knew…”
“What is it?”
“No, nothing… Natalya once tried to seduce me on this bench. I shouldn’t have told you—forgive me. It slipped out.”
“How do you mean—seduce?”
“Just that: she proposed meeting after lessons, with unambiguous intentions.”
“Well, yes—and you’re a fine figure of a man, after all. She didn’t get you, and now she’s furious. I see!”
“You’re endearingly direct—just like Varya.”
“No, not just like… Alexander Mikhailovich, I think I really am cross with you.”
“How have I offended you?”—he looks into my eyes. “Did you also find it repulsive to read about…”
“As for ‘repulsive’, you gave us a fair reprimand today, and I’ve taken it in. No, it’s more complicated… I keep thinking about your words: ‘Mum, meet my husband—this lady here.’ A horrible picture! Like a knife through the heart. And if my daughter says something like that to me, it’ll mean that clever words are already useless, that I made a mistake as a mother much earlier, that no good mother came out of me! And even those other words—’Mum, why can’t a girl sleep with a girl?’— they…”
It suddenly comes to me that I’m discussing these matters so boldly with a grown man, a teacher, a man—and I blush deeply. He encourages me:
“Don’t be shy—please, say everything you’re thinking.”
“I’ve got all tangled up already…”
“You want to say, Dolly, that this battle can’t be won with words. And therefore there’s no point raising problem topics?”
“Topics are worth raising, especially if you’re a fearless person. The girls will remember those F’s you gave them… It’s worth it—but indeed, this war can’t be won with words.”
“Then with what?”
“Prayer…”
Having spoken this last word very, very quietly, I want to crawl into a crack from shame. A real desert saint, aren’t I?
But A. M. doesn’t argue with me, doesn’t look surprised or angry. He only shakes his head, sighs:
“Perhaps you’re right! Only I’m a poor man of prayer.”
“And I’m a poor mother,” I say unexpectedly. “I understood that today.”
“Pardon? Are you already…”
“No: it’s just that the only thing I’m fit for is to be an Orthodox matushka. They’ve even found me a bridegroom already—a seminarian! I can’t, I don’t want to—my whole soul shrinks from it…”
“Your question last Friday—was it connected with this?”
“Of course!”
“Poor girl…”
We sit, and for a while we are sadly silent.
“I don’t know what your path will be, Dolly, or how you’ll walk it,” A. M. begins. “I don’t know what would be best for you—such a special and remarkable person—or where in our coarse world one might find that ‘best’. I only hope that you’ll manage to walk your own path—your own, and no one else’s—right to the very end.”
“I said the same thing to myself last Sunday! Listen…”—I stand up. “Give me your blessing, even if you’re not a priest! A secular blessing—to walk only my own path and no one else’s!”
“Verbal or written?”—he smiles.
“Any!”
A. M. thinks for a short while. Then he takes out his teacher’s diary. Opens it to a blank page. Writes four lines in his beautiful, clear handwriting. Carefully tears out the page and hands it to me:
“There you are! It’s from a poem by a woman who, in some ways, was very much like you.”
I fold the page in four and hide it in my joined palms. Quietly I ask:
“I’ll go now—may I? Before they start gossiping about us.” (“There’s enough gossip about Alya already,” I want to add, but I bite my tongue.)
The teacher nods.

*

There—I’ve somehow got to the end of today’s events. I’ve never written so much in my life! I’m completely done in. But it needed doing: I’ll reread this more than once or twice, think over what I’ve written. Everyone learns from life as best they can. I’m learning now from my own diary.
Something tells me the troubles aren’t over, but only just beginning.
And now—a minute of English poetry.

Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
—Yes, to the very end.
Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?
—From morn to night, my friend.
Christina Rossetti

A woman far, far away from me wrote this. A. M. is twenty-three years older than me—and she? A century? A century and a half? I’ll never see her, never speak with her. And yet there you have it! Already now she’s closer to me than many of my classmates. Wondrous are Thy works, O Lord.

* * *

17 March 2009, Tuesday

Discontent with the English teacher is brewing in the class. Whispers are spreading, gossip is being told, intrigues are being spun. Most are resentful about the Fs—a whole column of Fs—and exams aren’t far off. Many of the girls took offence at the “ostriches”. It seems to me that my very own little sister is the one stirring the waters.
Yesterday evening Olya and I had a conversation.
She’s the one who started it—unexpectedly, straight off the bat. She goes on at length about my naivety—ecclesiastical and political.
And then she gets to the main thing. The English teacher is bad for the school; perhaps even dangerous. He’s too “not like us” (exactly my own words—well, we are cousins, after all). He’s opened a little window in our gymnasium, thinking he’s airing the room, but there’s a draught from that window, and many could fall ill. Why, indeed, do future matushkas need to know about the “queer brethren”? Varya put it crudely, but she grasped the essence of the matter correctly.
I listen to Olya and understand more and more that A. M. was right about something—or rather, what exactly he was right about. You can’t win someone’s love with words, you can’t straighten what’s grown crooked—there he was mistaken. But well-chosen words can stop someone else’s cunning or foolishness. My sister’s plan has both cunning and foolishness in it. And the right words, as luck would have it, are almost beyond me…
The plan is this. Mr Azurov is a great clever-clogs, but he’s not an Orthodox person. Most likely he’s not even a believer at all. One must pose the question to him: “How believest thou?” What do you believe in, what God do you worship?
And… it seems I’m the one who’s meant to pose this question!
“Why on earth me, Olya?!”
“Because you’re our very own registered ‘holy fool’! You get away with anything! I’m amazed by it, frankly… On Sunday you disappeared for six hours—and nothing! You got a mild scolding; anyone else would have had their head taken off. You were rude to a priest—and it was like water off a duck’s back!”
“I wasn’t rude…”
“Daria, understand—I’m not reproaching you,” Olya stubbornly ploughs on. “Your qualities will come in very handy in this matter. Do a service for the good… of the collective, and not only for your own fantasies! Put up your hand in English and say: ‘May I ask a question, Alexander Mikhailovich? Do you believe in God? And in which God? The Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible – or some foreign God of your own? And the Symbol of Faith – do you know the rest of it?’“
To be honest, the question of A. M.’s belief in God troubles me too. I’ve almost resolved it for myself in a positive direction – almost, not entirely. But what Olya is proposing is horrible. In private, perhaps I could ask such a question. But in front of everyone, in class? In that accusing tone? After his blessing, after Christina Rossetti? Unthinkable.
I try to explain why the whole scheme is absurd:
“Olya, you think a person can be led to Christ with words. It doesn’t work like that…”
“Foolish Daria—how foolish you are! I’m not trying to lead him to Christ—what an idea! I want to expose him, and then see that he’s asked to collect his things and leave! When a fly comes into a room, are you going to lead the fly to Christ too? You open the window for it!”
“A fly, then?”
“Be thankful I didn’t say a cockroach!”
“And you want to turn me into a flyswatter?”
“Why so crude!”
“Olenka…”
“What?”
“How about you… go and…”
“Shameless! And Mother still worries about you!”
I’m amazed I didn’t get a slap from her. At that point the conversation, understandably, came to an end.
I ought to warn A. M. of the danger. But should I? And how great is the danger? To him, who’s wandered all over the world, our squabbling probably seems ridiculous—and his post as a teacher in a provincial gymnasium, of little importance…

* * *

18 March 2009, Wednesday

I resolve to act. Perhaps I’ve exaggerated everything, but to sit with folded hands would be shameful.
At break, seizing a moment when no one’s nearby, I go up to Alya Florenskaya:
“Alya, could you give me Alexander Mikhailovich’s phone number? I know you must have it—you’re the prefect.”
Alya, sullen, nods, takes her phone from her little bag, begins scrolling through her contacts. I admire her up close. She’s so beautiful! Like an ancient fresco.
Alya suddenly catches herself:
“What do you need it for?”
“He’s in danger,” I explain. “Intrigues are being spun, and you don’t even know. I think it would be a good thing to warn him. Actually, you could do it too… Perhaps you want to ring him?”
Alya shakes her head resolutely from side to side and holds out the phone to me:
“There—I’ve found it.”

*

In the evening, having gone out into the gymnasium courtyard, I dial the English teacher’s number:
“Alexander Mikhailovich, this is Daria, whom you call Dolly. Good evening! You’re in danger—do you know that?”
“Dolly? How unexpected… What sort of danger am I in?”—from the voice on the line, he’s smiling.
“They want to make you out to be a non-Orthodox person, practically a heathen. They may ask you in front of everyone whether you believe in God, and in which one exactly. And, by the way… do you believe in Him?”
“I believe. I believe in One Lord Jesus Christ.” (My heart lifts.) “To borrow your own expression: how could you even have doubted?! Only I lack the drama of your seventeen years, alas…”
“Well, don’t be offended, please… They want to discredit you somehow and force you to resign—is that a joke too?”
“Goodness, goodness!”—nothing ruffles him. “If you weren’t such a whole-hearted and, most importantly, unliterary person, I’d think you’d been reading too many detective novels. Dolly, dearest, whatever I may regret on my deathbed, I’ll hardly regret an unfulfilled career as a teacher of English.”
“I knew it…” I whisper, crushed.
“No, no, wait, don’t hang up! Forgive the silly joke about your unliterariness. Truly, though: what are you reading at the moment?”
“What do you want to know for?”
“I take an interest in your development outside working hours, that’s all. If you don’t want to—don’t answer.”
“No—why not. I’m not reading much, but I’ve just finished THE SAYINGS OF THE EGYPTIAN FATHERS and…”
“APOPHTHEGMATA! I’m impressed. And?”
“…And THE LITTLE PRINCE.”
Now he’ll surely laugh at me for not having grown out of childhood—he’s always laughing at me…
No, A. M. doesn’t laugh. After a short pause he answers thoughtfully:
“A great book! A great p-h-i-l-o-s-o-p-h-i-c-a-l book. What flawless, fine books you read—and you know, I’m a little envious: of your seventeen years, your strict selectiveness. In my time I was omnivorous—I’d devour anything that came along… Who is closest to you in THE LITTLE PRINCE?”
“The Fox, I think,” I say before I have time to think.
“A marvellous answer! And entirely understandable: you are exactly like him yourself… Do you remember that the Fox needs no less than a Prince? You do remember, don’t you? We’ve had a strange conversation, Dolly, and forgive me for keeping you. I live alone—I get melancholy sometimes… Why are you laughing?”
I really am laughing, and through the laughter I explain:
“It’s not for me—the person who asked you if you believed in Satan—to complain about the strangeness of our conversations! Goodbye! And, this… take care of yourself, as far as you can, all right?”
We say goodbye and I go back to the dormitory to make this entry. I’m happy for no reason. It’s as if I’ve spoken with a distant older brother, with a fellow countryman in a foreign land.
It’s a sin, a sin to talk of a foreign land! I live in Russia, the most wonderful country in the world. I have a splendid friend (one) and perfectly tolerable classmates. And yet—the feeling of desertness: you can’t cancel it.

* * *

20 March 2009, Friday

No, my presentiment about troubles didn’t deceive me…
Alya is still missing, and the whole school is in uproar. And my hands are shaking as I write these lines. But I must set everything down in order. While I write, I’ll calm myself at the same time—insofar as it’s possible to calm down at all…
Today was the grammar lesson. We’re studying the difference between Past Simple and Present Perfect. Natasha suddenly raises her hand.
Even before she stood up, a wave of nausea and horror came over me. Oh, I should have left the classroom!
“Alexander Mikhailovich, may I? I wanted to thank you for the article we discussed last week. For your suggestion that we shouldn’t be shy about discussing the problems of sexual minorities.”
“Thank you, even though it wasn’t quite what I meant…”
“Wait! It’s precisely thanks to the courage you gave us that I can now say aloud that I am a lesbian and lead a sexual life with women.”
Natasha pronounces every word loudly, clearly, contemptuously.
Trouble has come, and the gates are standing open. Not from Olga, but from a completely different quarter.
Who gave you courage, you shameless soul?! Is this what the courage was for?!
“Why do you need this scandal?” the teacher asks, with compassion and sadness.
“To be honest!” Natasha throws back. “May I sit down?”
Alexander Mikhailovich waves a hand—do what you like. Somehow, without much care, he gets through to the end of the lesson; leaves the classroom before the bell. I want to go out after him, but I can’t: I realise my legs have gone as weak as cotton wool.
“What?! Is?! This?!”
Olya, of course.
At once, as if everyone had only been waiting for her signal, bedlam breaks out in the classroom. Natasha sits, staring straight ahead, arms folded across her chest. On her face is a contemptuous smirk.
For a second I press my palms to my ears, then hide my face in my hands. I’m painfully ashamed, though I’m not to blame for anything. This is noticed too: I’m “raised up like a banner” and people shout something like “Look at Dashenka! Did she enrol in an Orthodox Gymnasium for this—to listen about perverts in class?!”
A circus, a circus, a bloody circus, like in the time of the early Christians…

*

My sister develops a whirlwind of activity and organises a class meeting in the Recreation Room after lessons. Natasha is absent from the meeting.
Natasha’s behaviour is discussed. A decision is taken to boycott her. My heart is uneasy. The girls’ indignation is understandable, but… it all smacks far too much of the bullying from SCARECROW—that old film about the girl the whole class tormented! And how can you decide without the person you’re deciding about?
And another thing: a boycott as a way of healing sin? In all the two-thousand-year history of the Church, I don’t recall such a thing… I want to speak about this, but my tongue won’t obey me. And it’s hard to speak in such a din anyway.
Alya, who sits through this meeting whiter than chalk, announces that she abstains. I don’t vote either. The decision to boycott is carried without our votes.
So—can we disperse?
No, we can’t disperse. Olya raises a new question: our attitude towards the English teacher.
Yes, of course—it’s the English lessons that give courage to the sodomite in our class to speak openly about her sodomy. Everything is clear.
“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly,” said the Fox. “What is most important is invisible to the eye.” But my classmates are looking with their eyes just now. And those eyes see the picture painted by Natasha. Natasha will go far—she’ll become a politician, probably. God save us from such politicians…
Indignant shouts and questions fly from all sides. “Who ever said a future matushka needs English anyway?”, “What good can we learn from a country whose prime minister shagged pigs in his youth?”—and more in the same vein. “Cover your ears,” someone advises me. And I really do cover my ears for a while.
Alya takes the floor—she has to raise her voice a little. She tries to explain to the class that that wretched article was not an evil, but an inoculation against evil. What a clever girl she is! If only her words might reach God’s ears. But not the ears of our class.
“You’re saying,” Varya objects, “that Alexander Mikhailovich is on the side of Orthodox people. Then why were we given an article about lesbians last week, and this week your friend has declared herself a lesbian? Is there no connection between the two? Purely coincidental?”
“It was a provocation, Varya!”
“And why would she need such a provocation?”
“Out of jealousy,” Alya whispers, barely moving her lips. The classroom falls very, very quiet.
My poor, dear girl! Fearlessly, with your eyes squeezed shut, you’re clambering up your own little Golgotha. Perhaps you, too, are of our breed?
“Well, I’m not surprised,” Olya cuts in. “Everyone has long known—except for a couple of people who have their heads in the clouds”—a glance in my direction—”that Alya has a soft spot for the English teacher… But jealousy—that’s something new. Alya, do tell us: did the jealousy just arise by itself? Or did you also give… hope to your friend? Perhaps not only hope?”
Alya’s eyes fill rapidly with tears. I must go and put my arms around her, at once! Embrace her—and lead her out of here. But instead I hide my face in my hands. Sensitivity is a rotten quality, a rotten one! When it’s time to help, that quality only sheds tears—and so there’s little real love in it. I must learn this for the rest of my life, learn it firmly! A painfully expensive lesson…
Again shouts from all sides, both hostile and sympathetic. I feel so awful that I can’t even make out what’s being said, who’s now being proposed for judgement…
Suddenly it’s as if I’ve been struck on the head with the back of an axe: Alya Florenskaya is no longer in the Recreation Room! I didn’t notice when she left. And those others are still cawing! A flock of crows…
I leap up from my seat and, paying no attention to Olya’s shouts, run out too.

*

Our prefect isn’t in the recreation corridor. Not in the house church. Not in the dormitories. Not in any of the classrooms. Not in the canteen, the cloakroom, or anywhere in the building at all. Not in the inner courtyard.
I run out into the street, into the fresh March air. I stand there, uselessly turning my head, my hands hanging down. Where to run now? Oh, what blockheads we all are! And I’m the worst of them. A fine time I chose to dissolve in tears, like a muslin miss!
In the yard next to the gymnasium, by a tyre half-buried in the ground—the kind they use to fence flowerbeds—I find Alya’s hairclip. For some reason everything inside me collapses at the sight of that hairclip. I sit down on that same tyre and weep, sobbing my heart out.

*

The meeting is sluggishly bickering, and Varya is scribbling minutes in the corner, when I enter the Recreation Room and, holding the hairclip in my hands, my eyes still red, but my voice firm, announce that Alya has disappeared. We need to inform the gymnasium administration, first, and the police, second. If no one does it, I’ll do it myself.
All heads turn towards me, and I see how shame slowly descends on the girls’ faces, and the understanding that they—that we—have truly done not simply a nasty thing, but something not far off a wicked deed.
A wicked deed—I’ve written it, and I won’t take the word back.

*

The clock shows about ten in the evening. Alya still hasn’t come back, and isn’t picking up her phone. It’s lights-out, but of course no one in the whole gymnasium is sleeping. The headmistress and the deputy head don’t have the strength to insist: this is no time for the daily routine. Roza Markovna and Svetlana Borisovna walk helplessly about the ground floor, like shadows of themselves. Someone seems to have rung her parents already, and someone has surely called the police too.
I’m writing my diary. Olya tries several times to draw me into conversation. I don’t answer—once, twice, three times. The fourth time I turn my head towards her and, looking her in the eye, answer:
“I don’t want to talk to you. We’ll talk later, all right? When she’s found. If she’s found.”
My sister turns away, her face drained of colour.
Hard-hearted of me—but I’m not the Lord Jesus Christ. I’m just a seventeen-year-old Russian girl, and this girl is hurting, and ashamed, and afraid.
I’ve just been telling fortunes by the Gospel, and this fell out: “Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings? And not one of them is forgotten before God. But even the very hairs of your head are all numbered.” Oh, how good that is! Everything will yet turn out well. I believe it will all turn out well.

* * *

21 March 2009, Saturday

Alya was found yesterday evening. And today she’s already been taken away.
No, everything’s all right: she was taken home, alive and well, by her parents, not by strangers. But the story itself… I don’t know what to think.
Never has my heart been so ill at ease!
I’ll simply set down the events—I’ll think them through later.
Yesterday, having already finished writing my diary, I understood that I still wouldn’t be able to fall asleep. So I went up to the house church to pray. I reproach myself for not thinking of it sooner. In general, we’re all a fine lot, a bunch of hens. In any trouble, the thing isn’t to panic but to pray! What kind of Orthodox are we!…
While I was in the church, I heard the sound of a car pulling up, rectangles of light from its headlamps travelled across the ceiling—and by intuition I understood that, it seemed, everything had already sorted itself out.
I went downstairs. To go down all our staircases to the ground-floor vestibule takes about three minutes, no less.
In the vestibule I saw the same crowd of idle people, including half our class, and a policeman reading Alya (relief!) a lecture about the dangers of drinking spirits and disordered sexual relations (what?!), while she listened, now and then swallowing a tear. I left quietly: Christians aren’t spectators in the Colosseum. I couldn’t have helped anyway. Why the others didn’t leave—let that remain on their conscience.
Later I learned the details—from Sonya, from Varya. Both told the same story, so there’s no reason not to believe them.
According to both, Alya returned to the gymnasium at half past eleven. She walked in—and immediately ran into the crowd of whoever was there on the ground floor. Olga at once flew at her, shouting that “we” had rung every hospital, every morgue! Where had she been, for heaven’s sake?
(And what right did Olya have to shout, when she herself was the first cause of it all? Humanly speaking, it was understandable—morally, she had no right at all. But perhaps I’m the one to blame. I answered her hard-heartedly, and she carried that hard-heartedness onward.)
Where had she been?! And our top-of-the-class clever girl said where: with the person she loved. A hasty word… Sometimes one ought to keep hasty words to oneself!
Despite all the suspicions about a connection with Natasha, somehow everyone at once suddenly understood it was A. M. she meant. (Varya, admittedly, says she asked for clarification—and Alya confirmed it.) Svetlana Borisovna, understandably, sank onto the bench at once, clutching at her heart. The girls ran to the headmistress’s office for valocordin. Somewhere around that point I appeared too.
Afterwards, they say, there was a one-on-one conversation with Roza Markovna. After the conversation, Alya was put to bed not in the common dormitory, but in the Recreation Room, on a camp bed. Sensible and merciful.
On Saturday morning, sweeping all before her, the “child’s” mother burst into the gymnasium. (Ah, a child! Alya is nine months older than me—she’s nearly eighteen.) Burst in—started shouting from the doorstep, stamping her feet, threatening courts, investigation, the prosecutor’s office, and heavenly retribution. They led her away to the headmistress’s office, where she continued to rage.
Afterwards the father arrived too: he serves a church in a distant village with a name beginning with L, not close to the regional centre, though nearer than Troitskoye. Somehow I’d never kept it in my head before that Alya—so well-read, so refined—is, like me, a simple village priest’s daughter. The father went straight to the headmistress. He asked his matushka to step outside—otherwise, he said, he’d drag her out by the hair. Oh, Father—what a wise man! The salvation of Russia will come through Russian priests.
And Alya’s father, they say, came to an agreement with Svetlana Borisovna—”struck a bargain” over new terms. The parents won’t bring charges against the gymnasium, won’t file statements, won’t disturb the authorities. And the gymnasium, as a courtesy in return, will permit the eleventh-form pupil Alla Florenskaya to complete her last two-and-a-bit months by distance learning.
That’s it—the end of Alya’s story. Today she was taken away—she barely had time to gather her things. She said goodbye to no one, except, it seems, Natasha.
The story may be over, but what to think about it—I don’t know. I’m all churned up. For some reason almost every girl in our class is convinced that between those two—Alya and A. M.—everything happened yesterday, everything took place. “Almost”, because Varya, for instance, has her own opinion on the matter, an unpopular one. Varya told me she saw in Alya’s eyes: although the girl is head-over-heels in love, the “mister” didn’t touch her. Supposedly, those who’ve become women look different. Well, well! Can you really see that in someone’s eyes?
In any case, even if it did happen—is it any of our business?
But it’s bitter, bitter! A person I considered an older brother, a fellow countryman in a foreign land, has turned out to be a thief.
Though… who knows—perhaps he saved her? Saved her from suicide—the thing I so dreaded when I found that wretched little hairclip? And if he saved her, can one blame him? Surely it’s better to lose one’s innocence and stay alive? And even the desert fathers fell at times in the struggle against this sin—fell, but rose again. They asked Abba Jijoi: Father, I have fallen—what shall I do? Then rise, the abba answered. And how many times shall I rise? Until death itself. (I must stop, or I’m afraid I’ll spatter the paper with tears.)
In spite of everything, I’m still writing “Jijoi”, not “Sisoes”. And I don’t even know if I’m spelling it correctly. Ah, who could advise me…

* * *

24 March 2009, Tuesday

Life goes on as usual. But, of course, the eleventh form now has enough food for gossip and rumour to last right until graduation.
Over three days, three versions of events have managed to ripen, and each has its own supporters. Well, I’ll write about these versions too, though I don’t know—maybe it’s just rubbish.
Version one. It was the English teacher who set it all up, calculated everything, and even put Natasha up to making her mad declaration. Alya fled from the inquisition and straight into his waiting arms. And he already had the car ready, and the cake, and the champagne. Unbelievable, I think. How could anyone possibly have calculated that? If Olga had decided not to start the trial, nothing would have happened. Or did he bribe her too? One has to set a limit even to wild fantasies!
Version two. Alya wanted to seduce A. M. in order to make him marry her—only she didn’t reckon on his already being married. How can he be married if he told me he was single? Or did he lie? Well: a man who takes his pupil to bed could certainly lie, of course. But how shamelessly I’m writing about this: was I there—did I hold the candle?
Version three. After the suspicion of sodomy, Alya wanted to prove to the whole world that she wasn’t a sodomite at all, but a normal girl. And so she proved it—turning from a girl into a woman. There might, I think, be a grain of truth in the third version… if it happened, of course.
And so, if something did happen between them, I won’t be able to trust A. M. How could I have trusted him before, anyway?! Asking him about Satan, about God, about the path of life?! And I’ll marry Misha—there, I almost even rang him today, almost wept on his shoulder about my fate, almost asked his advice. I’ve decided to put it off for now: he’s not yet a close person to me—one shouldn’t hang frantically on anyone’s neck, like… certain girls. And the four lines from Christina Rossetti—I’ll tear them into tiny pieces and throw them away, too.
No, no, no!
How can one throw away such a treasure?!
I’m writing—and again I’m struggling with tears. What a cry-baby I’ve turned into! I disgust myself…

* * *

25 March 2009, Wednesday

I’m tormented by the wish to speak with someone, somehow to darn up this hole a little, to quiet this pain that we—we, the whole class—caused by our stupid hen-like foolishness.
I could speak with Natasha or with Olga.
Natasha has been boycotted. Even after everything that’s happened, they haven’t given up their absurd, mad boycott!
This boycott means nothing to me: today in the canteen, for all to hear, I asked her, loudly:
“Natasha, pass the salt, please!”
She looked at me, startled, frightened, with pain in her eyes. Oh, she’s suffering! How could she not suffer? She’s to blame for everything herself—she herself destroyed everything she had. Yes—I understand now, Alya was right. It was all done out of jealousy. Ah, people… How is one to live among you?
But I still didn’t get round to speaking with her: I don’t know how, I don’t understand why. To judge her—I’m nobody to judge her, and besides, she’s punishing herself without my help. To comfort her—I wouldn’t find the right tone. And she’s proud—she has no need of anyone’s comfort.
And I didn’t get round to speaking with Olga either. Oh, I could have said many “tender” words to her! Only, what for? To pride myself on my own clearsightedness? Or do I hope to soften a wicked heart? But I won’t soften it: I won’t manage to stay kind myself. I’m too stirred up these days. And wisdom—I have so little wisdom! And love too—real, active love. What would it have cost me, at that inquisition, to put my arms around Alya and walk out with her—instead of bawling like a little girl! Now I’ll be gnawing at my elbows for evermore.
Well, the girl didn’t perish—that’s a joy in itself.

* * *

26 March 2009, Thursday

I’m walking about—and glowing all over. Again, no one knows of my joy. And the cause is so insignificant; maybe even false. But—I believe.
Here’s what happened. Having tormented myself to pieces with my doubts, I remembered that I do have his phone number—and sent a message.

A. M., I have no right to ask you this. But I beg you, I implore you to answer. On March 20—did it happen? Did it not? You know what I mean. Dolly

I signed it with that English name he christened me with at the first lesson—like Dolly the sheep, who, they say, was a bit dim and died young. Incidentally, he called Alla “Alice”.
A very cheeky message—you don’t write things like that to teachers. But what do I care whether it’s cheeky or not—what do I care for the rules of good form? My whole life is being decided here—no time for good form. I’m a “holy fool”; everyone already knows I don’t live by those rules. Let him give me an F if he’s offended by my cheek.
I sent it and switched off my phone. And this morning I saw that I’d received an answer.

Dolly, in the head of every honest teacher there is a taboo. It’s as inviolable as the Creed is for a Christian. And therefore—it didn’t happen. Believe it or not—that’s your affair. I haven’t lied to you.

What a weight off my soul!

*

And so I spent the whole morning rejoicing—stupidly, uselessly—and then it hit me over the head: but he’s been slandered, then? The word’s not quite right: no one consciously slandered him. They simply believed an untruth.
And why am I sitting around doing nothing?!
At break I found Sonya, drew her aside, and began trying to persuade her that the two of us should go together to Svetlana Borisovna, or at least to Roza Markovna—to restore the good name of an honest man. Sonya listened and listened, then shook her head.
No, she isn’t going anywhere. She doesn’t wish Alexander Mikhailovich any harm, and she bears no grudge about the “ostriches”. And she didn’t sign any collective petition either. What—hadn’t I heard about the collective petition? Olya took it to Svetlana Borisovna on Monday. They didn’t even show the paper to me, as the “holy fool”. (And rightly so.) The contents—”we respectfully request that the class collective be protected from the influence of anti-Orthodox Western morality and from being drawn into debauchery”—she can’t remember the exact wording, of course. She only remembers “respectfully request” and “drawn into debauchery”. (The “debauchery” part must have been added later: nobody knew in advance that Alya, on returning, would announce from the doorstep about her “beloved person”.) It was after the petition that Svetlana Borisovna took to her bed—she’s on sick leave now—didn’t I know? So there’s no point going to anyone: Roza Markovna doesn’t make staffing decisions. And it’s too late to go: all the decisions have already been taken—the English teacher, that very Monday, the day before the day before yesterday, handed in his notice “of his own accord”. Whether he’s working his two weeks or not, Sonya doesn’t know, but it’s very possible he isn’t, and that there’ll be no English tomorrow.
But what about his good name?—I don’t understand. Sonya shrugs. Smiles weakly:
“But it doesn’t matter any more, I’m telling you… And besides, how do you know your version’s the right one? You don’t want to say where you got it from? Well, I think: everything did happen. Just think, Dashenka, my dear: they met alone, held hands a bit, and went their separate ways home—is that how you see it? How naive you are—what a sweet thing you are… You… you’ve never even kissed anyone, have you? Please don’t think I’m judging!”
“Me?”
“What do you mean, ‘you’! Him and her. It’s so romantic, Dasha! An abduction from the gymnasium! If only someone would abduct me… You know, I’ve dreamt about it three nights running, imagined it in every detail… You mustn’t imagine things like that—forget I said anything. She only made a mistake coming back! That’s the main mistake she made!”
That conversation upset me, I won’t deny it. “Three nights running” she’s been dreaming—just fancy. “I’ve never kissed anyone.” Of course I haven’t! I was brought up: “Die, but don’t give a kiss without love”—and I think that’s right. Does it really mean something—that I’ve never kissed anyone?
The resignation, they say, has been handed in indeed, and it’s true the deputy head doesn’t make staffing decisions. But I went to Roza Markovna anyway. It’ll be hard to write about my evening conversation with her. Let me catch my breath…

*

At first she didn’t even want to talk to me—I insisted. Then she asked me to come in and locked the office door behind me.
Having heard my muddled explanations—at which, I was afraid, she would grow angry—Roza Markovna sighs heavily, says nothing; sits motionless in her armchair. Then she speaks:
“My good, sweet girl, you haven’t discovered America for me. I know he didn’t even touch her.”
“You know?!” I can’t believe what I’m hearing. Fresh relief, but horror too.
“I know.”
“But how… And the resignation, all the same—did he hand it in?”
“He did. He handed it in himself—no one forced him. Where we’ll find a subject teacher now, in the spring…”
“But… Rozochka Markovna, I don’t understand how it can be like this…” (Tears begin to fall of their own accord, however much I fight them.)
“It can be like this, my starry-eyed girl. And how can it not be like this?” It’s clear she’s suddenly grown angry. Roza Markovna stands up, takes a step back. “Sit in my chair! Go on, sit—have a seat! Look: doesn’t it pinch? Doesn’t it wobble under you? Sit in this chair and judge for yourself how one ought to act when a teacher at an Orthodox gymnasium spends an evening alone with a pupil—and when that pupil’s mother threatens you with a prison sentence for aiding and abetting the corruption of a minor! What’s the right thing to do according to Christian wisdom and a Christian conscience!”
“Roza Markovna, forgive me, please…”
“And you forgive me. Come here—let me hug you, let me cry with you a little. Did you think you were the only one with damp eyes? It’s the girl I pity most of all! Who pulled her tongue, the fool?”

*

I don’t know how to finish today’s entry. Let it be without any ending at all.
Life is terrifyingly unjust. There is no salvation except in the Desert.
And in Russia there are no deserts…

* * *

27 March 2009, Friday

“So… there will be English after all?”—I say the stupidest thing one could possibly say. And I didn’t even greet him!
A. M. smiles weakly:
“There will: today, and on the third of April. Well—you haven’t got long to put up with me now…”
“Why do you say that… I believe you—I believe you told me the truth in your message. I’m the only one in the whole class who does, perhaps.”
“Thank you.”
“I looked into your eyes just now and believed you. Will we… see each other again?”
“Yes—next Friday. Let’s go to the lesson, Dolly, dearest. Otherwise, God forbid, they’ll accuse me of seducing pupils on a mass scale.”
A short, sad laugh escapes me.

*

I bet I’ll remember today’s English lesson for as long as I live.
A. M. greets the class in English and asks them to sit down. Not a single person answers him.
“I’d like to start with your home assignments. Let’s begin from the beginning of the register, for the sake of a nice variety. Sophie?”
He asks Sonya because she’s Agapkina—that is, she really is at the top of the list. Sonya shakes her head stubbornly, her lips pressed tightly together, not looking him in the eye, and doesn’t utter a single word.
“As you wish… Eudoxie? Well, she is absent, apparently. Peggy?”
Rita is silent, staring straight ahead.
“Helen?”
No answer. I raise my hand.
“Alexander Mikhailovich, may I explain what’s going on? It seems they’ve declared a boycott against you. It was done without my knowledge, and I’m not taking part in it—I’ll gladly talk to you about anything at all. And I’ll give my homework too, for a C, as usual. Only I don’t know—is it worth it? We’ve already talked about all the most important things…”
“So I am boycotted as a sexual predator! I see… Thank you, Dolly,”—he switches to Russian. “That explains everything. I’m not sure we’ve talked about all the most important things, but… this isn’t the place to talk about them, is it? Well,”—he smiles,—”if no one wants to answer, let’s simply sit. Let’s see how long the girls can keep up their boycott.”
He shouldn’t have said “how long they can keep it up”: now they’ll be the last to break. And yet that man is made of steel. He ought to be walking into a tiger’s cage, or leading a platoon into an attack.
We sit in silence: one minute, two, ten, twenty. Katya makes as if to say something. No, nothing important: it seems she simply needs the toilet, and for that she has to ask permission. She’s torn between fear of being rude and fear of going against the will of the class. At last it bursts out of her:
“May I go out?”
A. M. is silent, smiling slightly. As if to say: as you treat me, so I’ll treat you. I can boycott you too.
“Katya, dear,” I say in a tired voice, “go to the loo—don’t make people laugh. And you, Alexander Mikhailovich, you ought to be ashamed. Why are you tormenting the girl?”
“Yes, Dolly,” he agrees. “Katya really isn’t to blame for anything, except being too quick to submit to what in English is called groupthink. And there are times when even such silent submission can turn out to be a bad thing to do. But you’re right—it’s foolish to answer in kind. They’ll understand later—one day, sometime. Kate, off you go.”
We sit it out until the little break. The bell rings. The whole class stands up and silently walks out.
“I have a feeling the second half of the lesson will go the same way,” the teacher says thoughtfully.
“Then go home,” I suggest.
“You don’t think they’ll sack me for absence from my workplace?”
“What difference does it make now? There’s no one to sack you: Svetlana Borisovna is off sick… I’ll explain what happened, if need be. You know, Mr Azurov, I feel like roaring, biting! Do you think I should tear a strip off them when they get back?”
“Don’t tear a strip off anyone, Dolly, dearest! It doesn’t suit you—and save your strength.” He stands up. “Miss Smirnov, madam! I most cordially thank you for the pleasure of today’s conversation.”
“You’re laughing at me, aren’t you?”
“Oh, no!”—he looks sadly astonished. “How could you think so… Please let them know that a written test is planned for the whole of the next lesson.”

*

The class returns to the empty classroom. I explain that the teacher has gone home. Olga asks me to step out into the corridor for a moment.
In the corridor she seizes me painfully by both wrists, brings her face, white with fury, close to mine:
“What right did you have?! How can you go against the class?!”
I want to answer that a boycott can’t even heal a sin, and here there isn’t even a sin—only their own stupidity; that the class is not the Holy Church. But these aren’t the ears for that, and instead I say:
“Olenka, you’re a small-town girl, and I’m from the country. Since childhood I’ve milked a goat, and mown grass with a scythe, and chopped firewood. And I’ve climbed the roof of the church with the workmen too. I’m physically stronger than you. So let go of me—for your own good! Or else, my dear, I really will break your fingers…”
Olga reluctantly unclenches her hands. There are bruises left on my wrists. Never mind. Nothing is a disaster.
Here is the lesson I’ve learnt today: nothing, except death, is a disaster. And even death itself, if you think about it, is not a disaster. With God, all are alive.

* * *

1 April 2009, Wednesday

April Fools’ Day.
The fools, of course, will be all of us—after the English teacher leaves. So be it. There are only two months till graduation, and he’s already taught me the most important thing.
Or hasn’t he?
He goes his way, I go mine. My own, special, foxy way. But I still need to scout out that path, that narrow little track. It would be worth meeting Misha—giving him at least one chance, not judging him hastily from a single photograph and a single phone call.
I’m a bit unwell (woman’s weakness—”the custom of women”), sitting on my bed in the dormitory, rereading THE LITTLE PRINCE.

I hunt chickens, and people hunt me. All chickens are alike, and all people are alike. And I find life a bit dull. But if you tame me, my life will be flooded with sunlight. I shall learn to pick out your footsteps among a thousand others. When I hear a human step, I always run away and hide. But your walk will call me out like music, and I shall come out of my hiding place.

The Fox, said A. M., needs no less than a Prince. But here’s what’s strange! The Prince is a boy. And the Fox—isn’t he a boy too?
And yet I’m certain that what’s meant here isn’t at all what Natasha boasted about in front of the class. It’s not about love, but about taming, recognition, spiritual brotherhood, being of one blood. The girl in the Tale does exist—she’s the Rose. There’s no mistaking that.
I’m not a Rose. I’ve never been a Rose and never shall be, of that I am certain. Even at seventeen, I’m a cucumber flower at best—yellow, unremarkable.
And I’m not even a cucumber flower. I’m precisely the Fox—so I told him on the phone in a moment of complete sincerity. And if I’m the Fox, then the Fox needs a Prince. What is a Prince? Where could I find my Prince?
Suddenly a thought comes to me—clear as day, huge, like an avalanche of snow—and for several seconds I stop breathing.
I don’t need to look for him. I already know him. His name is Alexander Mikhailovich Azurov.
It was the Prince who gave me the poem of a distant sister. It is he who knows the true name of Abba Jijoi—and a thousand, a thousand other of the most important things in the world, things that no one else in the whole world, except him, can teach me.
Ah, how simple!
What does this mean? I mustn’t hurry. I must think through what I’ve just understood, very carefully. Trust it to no one—not a single living soul. Not even trust the details to the diary, or I might accidentally frighten it away, and then perhaps it won’t come true.

* * *

3 April 2009, Friday

What a day!
A. M.’s last day at the school. Everyone already knows he’s leaving “of his own accord”.
The last two lessons with him. We write a test in complete silence. No one wants to drop a single word in farewell—not even a simple human “forgive us”. “Forgive us”—what am I saying! For them, he’s the guilty one. They don’t even lift their eyes to him (except me). Are they afraid?
Five minutes before the end of the last lesson, Roza Markovna comes into the classroom. Everyone is ordered to the assembly hall. An official from the Ministry of Internal Affairs has arrived; he’ll be giving a “very important” lecture for the whole school. Attendance is mandatory. Good—splendid.
Everyone leaves. I leave the classroom with everyone else, so as not to draw attention, stand in the corridor for a short while, and return. A. M. is packing his bag—and now he’s finished. He’s deliberating whether to take the red rubber ball with him or leave it on the desk.
I come closer. The blood is rushing in my ears. He lifts his eyes to me.
“It seems the time has come to say goodbye?” I begin.
“Yes, it seems so.”
“I’m very grateful to you, Alexander Mikhailovich. I meant to say it earlier—there simply wasn’t the chance. I’m, of course, the least talented of your pupils…”
“That’s not true, Dolly,”—he smiles.
“Well, judging by my marks…”
“Don’t judge by marks.”
“I’m very glad you don’t judge people by them either. There…”—I’m burbling. “I wanted to say so much to you, and now I’m standing here and nothing will come out…”
“Dolly, dearest, write to me, if you need to,”—that’s probably him answering out of politeness. “Do you know my email?”
“I don’t have a computer, but I do know it. You gave it to everyone.”
“And you have my phone number, if needed.”
“Yes, I have it…”
Very kind—but I’ve run out of steam. And how was it I thought myself clever at the beginning of the diary? Rash, my dear, rash. And now I’ve lost what little wits I had. He’ll leave in a moment—he can’t stand here for ever. And it’s time he did leave, really. He’s not my fianc;, not my beloved, not someone close: he’s an outsider.
I wonder—will anyone on the whole earth ever understand what I’m about to say to him, and, more importantly, why I’m saying it? They won’t understand—don’t even hope. They’ll take me for a lovesick idiot. How to explain that it’s not about that? Impossible.
I take a deep breath. And I say, looking him straight in the eye:
“Your Highness! I address you with a request I’ve been thinking about all week. Permit me to be your Fox!”

*

And in his eyes there’s a special expression, which tells me even now: yes, yes—it will all work out!
“That’s from THE LITTLE PRINCE?”—he clarifies, just in case.
“Where else!”
“And you know, Dolly, I was expecting something of the sort. From you, precisely…”
“You were expecting it—and you kept quiet, dragged it out till the last minute!”
“But how could I have imposed myself—think! Right, then… And what do you understand by the “Fox”?”
“Isn’t it clear to you?”
“Clear… almost. But tell me yourself!”
“I want you to be my teacher.”
“But I’m not a teacher any more…”
“That doesn’t matter. It has no significance at all. It’s not English lessons I need. I need…”
“What?”
“…Lessons in life.”
A dozen times on the eve I’d rehearsed this dialogue, and now it’s taking place in reality. Not entirely as I imagined it, but in reality!
“I… Very well!”—Alexander Mikhailovich suddenly makes up his mind. “We must discuss this.”
“But not in the classroom!”
“In the courtyard?”—he suggests.
“No, not in the courtyard. In the street! Go out through the gates and wait for me: it’s better if we’re not seen together. I need two minutes to fetch the most essential things from the dormitory.”
“I understand…”
“You don’t understand: my diary! Do you promise you won’t leave?”
“I won’t leave,” he says simply.

*

Outside, A. M. looks me over with doubt—fully “equipped” as I am. My rucksack is stuffed to bursting, as if I have no intention of ever returning to the gymnasium. He asks:
“Well, then—where to now?”
“I suppose—to your home!”
“Are you aware, Dolly, that I live with…”
“…A woman?”
“My mother: she’s ailing, and it would be better for her not to be left alone for too long. I’ve nearly found her a carer, but she keeps refusing.”
“And do you still ask her permission to bring guests home?”
“What a cheeky pupil I’ve acquired… No, I don’t ask. And another thing that gives me pause is that the only time I invited a pupil to my home, it ended with my dismissal, as you must be well aware.”
“But you’ve already been dismissed!”—I answer light-heartedly. “There’s nothing threatening you now.”
We both laugh.

*

We walk on foot, and the mirthful—no, the sunlit mood doesn’t leave me.
“Well?”—I tease him. “Did I land on you like a ton of bricks?”
“I should say so!”
“Don’t know how to get rid of me?”
“Don’t talk nonsense… Only, Dolly, I’ll say it again: I am a lousy teacher—even of English, how much more of life. I’ve never had spiritual pupils before. You are the first person who’s asked me for this—and possibly the last.”
“Well, don’t chase after quantity! Even if it’s only one. I don’t doubt your qualifications: I listened very attentively about the Jabberwock. And about Abba Jijoi, and about a great deal else! You didn’t notice—but I listened.”
“Who’d have guessed that the dilettantish musings of a military interpreter on JABBERWOCKY would serve as your letter of recommendation…”
“So you’re a military interpreter? I didn’t know! Your letter of recommendation wasn’t your musings—it was…”
“What?”
“…Your last text message. Answer me now, as if before God! Is it true—it didn’t happen?”
“It’s true—I’ve already told you.”
“You simply held hands a bit and went your separate ways?”—I recall Sonya’s words.
“You’ve a sharp little tongue, I see…”
“Yes, I’m no gift, generally!”
“I’ll answer you, though you don’t deserve it. We sat, listened to music, and spoke about a possible shared future. Which, it seems, will never come to pass…”
“True—because Alya was taken away to the countryside and locked under seven locks. Do you regret it? Sorry,”—I suddenly check myself. “I’m getting a bit carried away. It’s not kind, teasing you with this—you might have grown attached to her too…”
“I’ll leave that last remark without comment. One must know how to restrain one’s feelings, Dolly. I think Evgeny Abramovich was mistaken, after all.”
“Who is Evgeny Abramovich, and what was he mistaken about?”
“Baratynsky. He was mistaken in saying

We have no power in ourselves.

Without having power over oneself, we can’t become fully human.”
“I remember, I remember that line! And then it goes: ‘…And in our youthful years // We make rash vows…’?”
“ ‘…Perhaps laughable to all-seeing fate,’ ” he finishes. “And how do you know it, miss?”
“From a film—where else!”
“I’m glad you’ve watched WE’LL LIVE TILL MONDAY too.”
“Those were the only kind of films I watched as a child, under Papa’s guidance! And I grew up a ‘blessed Feodora’… Give me back my rucksack, now!”
“I won’t: this isn’t a rucksack—it’s Samson’s saddlebag. Have you decided to move out of the gymnasium dormitory?”
“We’ll see about that… Give it here! I’m strong, sturdy. Not like your Alya Florenskaya!”—I can’t stop myself from needling him.
A. M. laughs out loud.
It’s wonderful that he laughs. I can say any cheek, any absurdity, and he’ll forgive me everything. Not out of love—not that love that exists between a man and a woman. But because today something has happened that, in this senseless and cruel world, occurs more rarely even than the Easter matins.
The Fox has found the Prince.
 

Part Two
Until Pascha


[3 April 2009, Friday—continued]

Let me stop and catch my breath.
How quickly life has changed, turned upside down! In a day. What am I saying—a day! In three hours.

*

A. M. lives in a perfectly ordinary two-room flat in a high-rise. When we go in, he asks my permission to look in on his mother for a few minutes. The funny thing! As if I wouldn’t permit it! Though, for a man with his manners, such a request is simply a way of keeping one informed. And I, a country girl, am not trained in manners…
I ask: shouldn’t I go in too, say hello? He thinks briefly and shakes his head:
“No need. My mother would be far too glad to see you…”
“Oh, I’m sure!”
“…In my bachelor dwelling, and she’d immediately start making plans for you—plans it’s not your task to fulfil. How would I explain that you’re the Fox, not the Rose—that you might as well be a boy? Don’t worry, I’ll pass on your greetings. Give me a quarter of an hour, all right? Find yourself something in the kitchen, please; make yourself some tea…”
A. M. disappears into his mother’s room. Taking advantage of the permission to “find something”, I go to the kitchen. Arming myself with an apron, I fry up some eggs with vegetables from whatever I find in the fridge. Is that too forward—will he scold me? Let him. I’ll blink with the innocent eyes of “Feodora of Troitskoye”, and he won’t be able to stay cross for long. At home, until Papa’s death, the cooking was down to me. Doing simple things with your own hands is a real joy! In the gymnasium we’re deprived of that joy…
No, I’m not scolded—quite the opposite: thanked. We eat my unpretentious meal; though, in my case, the food almost won’t go down my throat. We move into his room.
“Well, then,” he begins, “I’m ready to accept your remarkable proposal…”
“Hurrah!”
“…But to begin with, I’d like to discuss with you what we’ll study, for how long, and in what form. Forgive me this grown-up tediousness! What exactly do you want?”
“I want… You know, I was almost truly offended by your ‘tediousness’, as you called it yourself, but now I understand—yes, we must discuss it. I want to learn more about something of the most important things worth knowing, things humanity has accumulated—because I know almost nothing, nothing at all, apart from the order of the Liturgy and Church history! And even that—at a C-grade level…”
“Literature?”—he suggests.
“Y-yes, but not Bulgakov and his ilk.”
“Understood. Music?”
“A little, perhaps. Only not Beethoven, all right?”
“…And, evidently, not Stravinsky… Poetry?”
“If it’s in the spirit of Christina Rossetti—then certainly.”
“Philosophy?”
“Absolutely!”
“Theology?”
“Y-yes, if you don’t overload me with it. Make allowance for my seventeen years and my profound ignorance. I also want to get answers to certain questions about life. And in general, I want to stop being narrow!”
“You’re not narrow—God knows, you’re not narrow.”
“No, I’m probably almost nothing. I’m under-formed, shapeless…”
“I think I’ve grasped your wishes. I’ll try to fulfil them, insofar as I can”—he says it seriously.
“I can hardly believe it! A big, grown-up person is going to carry out my whims!”
“They aren’t whims, Dolly—by the way, you don’t mind that name?—anything you like, but not whims.”
“About the name: call me a pot, just don’t put me in the oven! Oh, how I’d love to pay you! But I’ve nothing to pay with. I’m a beggar, as Ksyusha Pastukhova called me…”
“What nonsense!”—he laughs. “I wasn’t planning to boast, but I’ve saved enough to live without working for several years.”
“Well, I never! I can’t even believe it. From a teacher’s salary, or what?”
“Wrong guess! You’ve forgotten what my main profession is…”
“True, I forgot.”
“And that brings us to the second question. I have a new—it was almost decided recently—a new ‘posting’ awaiting me.”
“For a couple of weeks?”
“Six months, minimum.”
“Far away?” I ask anxiously.
“Far away—and it’s better you don’t know where. There’s sand there too, and a lot of sun.”
“I see… Give my regards to Abba Jijoi, if you see him. Is it soon?”
“I have to leave for Moscow early in the morning on the thirteenth of May.”
“The thirteenth of May!” I’m dismayed. “That’s less than two months… And why were you keeping quiet about it before!”
“I was ‘keeping quiet’, as you were so good as to put it, miss, because your request only came today. One can’t teach ‘the most important things’ uninvited!”
“But it seemed to me that with our class, that’s exactly what you were doing…”
“To a very small degree,”—he agrees. “Well—and you see how it all ended!”
“It ended exactly as it needed to end!”—I object, bluntly and naively. “Now you’ll have more time… for me. No, don’t laugh! Right, so we’ve discussed two questions. What was the other one?”
“The form of our lessons.”
“Square or round?”
“Wrong guess: oral or written.”
“Written—what sort of news is that!”
“We could exchange emails…”
“I don’t have a computer!”
“There’s a computer room at the gymnasium, I believe.”
“I’m hopeless with computers… Mr Azurov, you’re killing me without a knife! We’ve got a month and a half—no, less—until your departure, and you’re talking about written form!”
“Would Roza Markovna really allow you to leave the gymnasium for several hours every day?” he asks doubtfully.
“The gymnasium—what’s this gymnasium of yours? I’ll leave it altogether, if need be!”
“No!”
“Yes! Alexander Mikhailovich, how, for Christ’s sake, do you imagine me returning to the common dormitory in the evenings? In that case we might as well not begin at all…”
“Now, don’t be cross with me! I can see too that you’re cramped in that lukewarm Orthodox hothouse.”
“On the contrary—it’s me who’s expecting every second that you’ll get cross.”
“Why would I get cross?”
“Because,”—I say timidly,—”I’m asking a very great deal.”
“You are indeed asking no small thing, but you are a chance—the kind that comes to most teachers—what am I saying, teachers—people!—once in a lifetime. I’d be a God’s own fool, a right Simple Simon to let it slip.”
“So you know our folk sayings too,”—I praise him. “And not only pray accept my most cordial thanks for the pleasure of your delightful conversation. How nice!”
We both fall into thought. The situation seems hopeless. A. M. several times looks as if he’s about to propose something, then changes his mind.
I think too. Ah, how easy it is to walk a path someone’s trodden before you—how hard to turn off it! How almost effortlessly my meetings with Misha could have been arranged! And how the headmistress and the deputy head will rear up when they find out whom I intend to see every day…
Suddenly a solution comes to me—so obvious that I even laugh with joy. In response to his puzzled look, I ask permission to make a call. I dial Roza Markovna’s number on my worn, cheap little phone.
“Well, speak of the devil!” the deputy head greets me. “Why did you tell the desk I’d given you permission to go out into town? Lied, did you?”
“I lied,” I agree readily.
And then I dump my scheme on her. I’m the fianc;e of a seminarian, and I’ve moved in with him today. I’ll attend school lessons in the same way as the “town” girls do. No, it’s not a whim—it’s… life. No, Rozochka Markovna, don’t be cross, don’t shout! I love you very much, but I won’t back down. You know what I’m like, what dough I’m made of, what oven I was baked in. Yes, the urge has really “taken me”. No, I can’t wait two months—out of the question. With us… things have already gone too far for me to wait two months. Yes, that’s how it is. Yes, still waters run deep. Of course I’ll let my guardian know. And anyway, after marriage I won’t be needing her any more. Yes, our woman’s lot is a heavy one. Yes, we’ll discuss it further, the three of us with the headmistress—and we’ll arrange it my way: the school doesn’t want to destroy a future Orthodox family, does it?! Yes, I’ll be careful…
I finish the call and turn to A. M. Guiltily I ask:
“Did I… do something very wrong?”
“I recognise myself in you, Dolly,” he says in reply. “In my youth I was just as… just as reckless, and I’d have done the same thing, if I’d had… your brains.”
“Now, don’t over-praise me!”
“No, seriously. Whether you’ve done wrong by inventing this innocent tale, I don’t know: it’s not for me to judge you. The Prince doesn’t judge the Fox, if the Fox accidentally steals a chicken from the henhouse. The Prince isn’t friends with chickens.”
“How splendidly you’ve said that—and how you’ve comforted me…”
“The only thing that worries me is: how will you produce the seminarian when they ask? Well, never mind—we’ll think of something by then… We’re both a little mad—do you know that?”
“I do. Do you regret it?”
“No—I’m weighing the risks. Never mind—I’ve been in merrier scrapes. Regret? Not for a single second! Come along!”
“Where?”—I take fright. “Back to the gymnasium?”
“No, don’t wound me so deeply… I’ll drive you to my dacha now, and from tomorrow morning I’ll start looking for a little flat for you, nearer the school.”
“Not a flat—a room’s enough for me!”

*

And that’s how we arrived at the present moment, with me writing this diary, having curled up with my feet tucked under me in a wicker chair. (The Prince has gone home.)
The dacha is enchanting. A log cabin, like an izba, but smaller. Upstairs there’s a real mansard, not a simple attic. The logs are dry, painted. Carved window-frames. There’s a stove—smaller than a Russian one, like a Swedish stove. I lit it at once, and he could only marvel at my deftness. As if there were anything to marvel at!
Towards evening I rang Aunt Lyuba and let her know I’d moved in with my “seminarian”. She was stunned, of course; shed a few tears. Well, it’s done now. She shouldn’t have handed me Misha’s photograph! Though come to think of it: if she hadn’t given me that photograph—I’d never have dared.
In general, one thing I understood today: when talking to “grown-ups”—especially those on whom your fate depends—you mustn’t hesitate for a single second! You mustn’t ask. Asking—that’s only for the Prince, and even then only once. To everyone else, say: I’m doing this, and no other way, because this is how it must be. And it must be.
Must it, though? Of course, I cooled down a little once it was all done. What have I gone and done? There’ll be no way back. What if I’m disappointed? What if, worse still, A. M. lied to me and turns out to be a “thief” after all?
No—one mustn’t entertain such thoughts. Once you start doubting, you’re lost altogether. And I—I believe. Life will show whether I was right. If I was mistaken, I’ll pay for my mistake myself—I won’t blame anyone else.
Forty days! Is that a lot, or a little? Terribly little. But also—wonderfully much.

 
* * *

4 April 2009, Saturday

Early in the morning—I’m still asleep—a text arrives. Would I object to a wooden house? The Prince probably means this very dacha. I answer briefly: “No objection”—and go back to sleep. The sweet possibility of not going to Church History, which Father Vasily will be teaching.
A call forty minutes later. New lodgings have been found for me! The Prince will collect me in an hour.
“Splendid,” I answer, “and what are you planning to collect me in, A. M.? Bought a motorbike, have you? Ah—a taxi? Are you simply rolling in money? Don’t tempt God! I’ll get there perfectly well on my own, by bus.”
Yes, the question of money troubles me—no point denying it. This morning, with a cool head, a great deal troubles me.

*

It’s overcast; a fine rain is falling. We have breakfast in a caf; not far from the final stop of the bus that brought me into town. The Prince tells me how he rang a dozen landlords, but something about each of them gave him pause. And then—an excellent option: a whole little flat, in a wooden house, true, but very close to the gymnasium. He’s already met the landlady—a sweetheart of a grandmother—and paid two months in advance.
“I’m very embarrassed, Alexander Mikhailovich,” I say, awkwardly. “I’m turning out to be in your debt, and I’ve no way to repay you.”
“No, that’s not true! Or rather—we’re both in each other’s debt.”
“How are you in debt to me?”
“Not yet in debt, but I soon will be. How? I’ll tell you now. I had far too high—an undeservedly high—opinion of my teaching abilities. Your class proved to me very clearly that I’m about as much use as a teacher as—ahem—a certain well-known substance is as a bullet.”
“Now, it’s not that bad.”
“No, to a large extent it is. Only two people in the class derived any small benefit from my teaching, and those two were…”
“…Me and Alya Florenskaya.”
“Exactly. Alice’s parents took her home. You are my only chance to prove to myself that I’m not a completely useless teacher. No money can buy that.”
“All right, then—I’ll believe you… But I don’t need any sort of rivalry—I don’t want you proving anything! I simply need you to be nearby and to speak about things that you yourself consider important, in the way you know how. All right?”

*

We inspect the little flat on the first floor of a wooden house on a quiet street, with its own entrance via a side porch. (The porch has sagged a little, “slumped”. The stairs are still all right, sturdy.) In Troitskoye there are plenty of houses like this; I’m only surprised that some have survived in the regional centre too. Be that as it may, this is my first separate home, even if temporary! We have a playful tussle over the keys: the Prince doesn’t want to take the second set of keys. It’s my flat, he says, and nobody else’s.
“Alexander Mikhailovich, don’t talk nonsense!” I put an end to the argument. “You can keep your scrupulousness for London. You’ve been to London too, haven’t you? It shows… For London—not for a girl from the countryside. If something happens to me, how will you get inside? Eh? There you are, then! Wh… where are you off to? Are you in a hurry—do you have things to do?”
“No, I… wanted to give you a chance to settle in, and to drop by this evening…”
“There’s nothing to settle into,”—I cut him off sharply. “Floor, ceiling, four walls—the same as anywhere. Let’s begin our studies without delay. Our lot are sitting listening to Father Vasily right now—and I’m supposed to laze about?”
“As you wish! Only…” He smiles timidly. “Only I’m not ready for the first lesson. There wasn’t time…”
“Nonsense—you’ll manage somehow.”
“Dolly, to be honest, I’m even a little afraid.”
“And you think I’m not afraid?! Which of us is more afraid?! That’s precisely why I want to begin now. Take your armchair, Mr Azurov! There—and I’ll sit on the floor, on my knees, and wrap myself up in a blanket.”
“A strange posture—and it makes me feel awkward…”
“Strange or not—I’ll decide my own posture. I’m the mistress in my own home—I’ll sit as I please. Shall we… begin with my questions—the ones I wanted, God knows, to ask you as far back as February? May I?”

*

And so the “first lesson” begins. My first question: is Bulgakov really more important than Scripture—and if not, why study him? At the same time I tell him about the lesson with Viktoria Denisovna, about “Pobedonostsev” and “obscurantism”. The Prince frowns and clarifies at once:
“I’m troubled not by you, but by my colleague… former colleague. To say such things is simply not decent. Still, let us forgive: we’ve all been young, we’ve all made mistakes…”
“Forgive me?”—I don’t understand.
“Forgive h-e-r. Bulgakov really is dangerously close to beginning to sympathise with Woland and his retinue—though he doesn’t cross that line. Or does—it’s not for me to judge. Evil can sometimes be attractive…”
“And that’s horrible! I interrupted, sorry.”
“Yes, it is horrible! …Can be attractive to a tormented person. What attracts, to be precise, isn’t evil, but daring—especially against the background of helpless, feeble good.”
“Yes—’daring’ in Natasha’s style—eurgh! But helpless good—is that still good?” (I remember my own weakness during the inquisition.)
“Absolutely true! Some people need half a lifetime to understand that… In general, many live to old age without ever understanding that words are only words. Not everything people call good is good; what they call patriotism is patriotism; and…”
“…And not everything they call Orthodoxy is Orthodoxy—right?”
“That’s not quite what I meant… but about Orthodoxy—you put it well!”
“Christ wasn’t as helpless as Bulgakov portrays Him?”
“I think Bulgakov isn’t portraying the Son of God at all, but a mortal man callef Yeshua.”
“And how are they… no, never mind. Why?”
“Ah, ‘why’!”—the Prince smiles weakly. “Great is the mystery. Who can decipher a writer’s thoughts?”
“So a believer has no obligation to read THE MASTER AND MARGARITA?”
“No obligation indeed,”—he agrees,—”and in general it’s foolish to apply the word ‘obligation’ to reading a work of fiction. Such an ‘obligation’ is almost a purely Russian—or rather, Soviet—invention. But we do, Dolly, have an obligation to play by the rules of the world, without putting our whole soul into the game. Unless, of course, we want to be holy fools.”
“Incidentally, the two of us are breaking those very rules right now,”—it occurs to me.
“I couldn’t agree more,”—he agrees, smiling only with his eyes. “What we are doing is indeed rather irregular.”
“And how are we different, then, from… Natasha Yakovleva, for instance?”
“In that we do no harm to others. And in our aim. She wanted to destroy. We are building.”
“Yes—that’s true! Will you… allow me to write down our conversations?”
“Who’s to forbid you? Though, perhaps, they aren’t worth it…”
“No—they are!”

*

For a while I simply sit on my knees, absorbing, running through it again, laying it down in my memory. I have a good memory—God grant everyone such a one. No one rushes me.
At last, having plucked up courage, I ask my second, main question. Is it true that there is no sin at all in married life—none, not the slightest? If not, why did the Egyptian fathers flee into the Desert?
I tell him, too, where my question came from: in two words, without details. And even for those two words I thought I’d burn with shame. No—I didn’t burn. How good it is that the Prince is now not my schoolteacher! Awkward to write, but how timely his resignation was!
A. M. falls into thought; he thinks for a long time—a minute, probably. Now I’m the one who doesn’t rush him.
“Your question isn’t quite about sin,” he begins. “There is no sin either there or here…”
“But that doesn’t mean there’s no sin at all!”—I’m cross with myself for interrupting, and can’t help it. “Perhaps fornication doesn’t exist either?!”
“No, of course it doesn’t mean that,”—he agrees. “And there is so much fornication around us in this century that it’s laughable to pretend it doesn’t exist. Still—which path to follow, the worldly or the monastic, each person chooses for themselves. But, I think, your intuition hasn’t misled you. The monastic path is—quicker.”
“Quicker?”—I don’t understand. “Are we in a hurry to get somewhere? Running a race?”
“No, not running a race… But don’t you feel it yourself?”
“I do feel it!”—I agree. “Of course I feel it. But I also want to understand—after all, it’s… it’s in your style! Who was it told our class that it’s shameful to be too lazy to think?”
“Fair point. And you… you aren’t afraid of complicated material, Dolly?”
“No—I’m not afraid of anything. I wasn’t afraid to run away from the gymnasium! The last thing I’m afraid of is complicated material.”
“And do you grant me the right to treat you—for the duration of the lesson, that is—as a fully adult person?”
“I do.”
“Then let’s storm this height together. Your question about the difference between the worldly and the monastic path is, in reality, a question about the difference between salvation and sanctity.”
“What’s the difference? I’m not arguing—I’m trying to understand. Both the saint and the one who is saved will be in Paradise until the end of the ages. Even if not at the right hand of Christ, but… I’m a humble sort—I don’t need much!”
“Until the end of the ages—you think so?”
“How else!”
“It may be otherwise in that—now imagine, even though it will be difficult!—in that Paradise for the soul may not be eternal.”
“You’re undermining my faith,”—I whisper. “Alexander Mikhailovich, this is almost unfair. You’re asking me to choose between loyalty to you and loyalty to the faith?”
“Rather—not to the faith, but to the Church?”—he answers a question with a question.
“To the Church—very well.”
“And the Church, too, differs from age to age… The Egyptian fathers didn’t affirm the eternity of Paradise. I’ll use your own parable: the Lord is merciful, said Abba Jijoi.”
“That’s not the same thing!”
“I’m afraid it’s literally the same thing—because to an imperfect soul, an eternal Paradise would be a torment, and the Lord doesn’t torment people without cause.”
“Why would Paradise be a torment to an imperfect soul?”
“Because it’s like marrying or being given in marriage while still a child. Even something good is a torment if a person isn’t ready for it.”
“Now that’s an image!” I whisper. “That’s hit the bullseye… I’m not a child!”
“No one was talking about you.”
“But it came out as if it were about me. Very well—I accept it. An imperfect soul couldn’t bear the full glory of God. It needs not the dazzling, final Paradise, but some small, intermediate one. But what am I saying! That’s—against the teaching of the Church?”
“Possibly,” he agrees. “But not against Christ.”
“How could Christ have allowed the teaching of the Church not to contain the full truth?!”
“That’s part of a more complex question—the question of why God permits evil in this world at all. I’m afraid we can’t storm that new, most complex question in one assault.”
“And I’m already worn out as it is…”
I press my fingers to my temples. My mind is boiling. I feel an almost physical pain inside my head. A. M. asks solicitously whether I need an aspirin. No, I don’t need a tablet. I need time to write all this down and, rereading it, to think it through again—several times. The Prince understands this and, with his usual delicacy, “remembers” that he still has things to do today. I don’t object.
On the table he leaves money—what else am I to have breakfast and dinner with? I hadn’t managed to think of that, but he had. What a clever man.
Nevertheless, our parting comes out a little awkward. Or so it seems to me. I’m simply tired.

*

Well, there—the first lesson has taken place. I, a naive child, fell, without thinking, upon questions that the cleverest men have racked their brains over for millennia. No wonder my own head aches now!
Did I get answers? I did, in abundance—shame to complain! And along with them, a dozen new questions. A former priest’s daughter, a seventeen-year-old girl, is poorly equipped for these questions.
What if—a monstrous thought, but, having begun to think, one must write it down; after all, paper doesn’t blush—what if A. M. is not a carnal seducer, but a spiritual one? Not a Prince, but a Wolf? My cosy, “small” faith—just like Father Vadim’s—he will destroy, and leave me nothing in its place; leave me standing in a cold wind, wrapping myself in philosophical clevernesses. A man can wrap himself in clevernesses—I, a girl, can’t even cover my shame with these pitiful rags.
It’s frightening!
Frightening—but there’s no way back. I no longer want to go back into my little shell. And what of it—didn’t the desert fathers also have a faith that was clearly not a “shell-faith”, not a tiny one?
In the evening I pray for a long time. I resolve for myself—I resolve firmly: if our lessons lead to the glorification of Satan, to blasphemy against Christ—I will leave. Go back to the gymnasium. No one, thank goodness, is keeping me here.
But… surely the fact that God permits evil in the world—that’s not blasphemy against Christ? It’s the truth—and once you open your eyes to this truth, they don’t close again so easily…

* * *

5 April 2009, Sunday

In the morning I go to Liturgy at the Cathedral. I don’t go up for Communion. I haven’t made confession, after all! And even if I’d been asked to, I wouldn’t have known what for. That is, literally wouldn’t have known: being sinless and not knowing what you’re sinful in are two different things.
A. M. comes around one o’clock (I manage to think through a great deal in that time). He doesn’t refuse dinner—that’s nice.
“I’m glad you’ve come!”—I say the first thing that comes into my head. “Will you… forgive me?”
“Forgive you? For what, Dolly?”
“I thought badly of you yesterday.”
“I sensed it…”
“He even sensed it! What a disgrace I am! No—I’m no good as a disciple!”
“And I’m no good as a theologian. We probably hurried too much. I cursed myself out yesterday with all sorts of words.”
“No—I’m just a greedy fledgeling who swallows more than she can eat. Well, then—have we forgiven each other?”
We laugh.
“I wanted to ask you, Alexander Mikhailovich: could we put aside all this… theological stuff for a while?” I ask.
“Or even for good?”
“For good—no need. Yesterday I simply got too large a dose, and I feel slightly unwell.”
“Mea culpa.”
“I don’t understand Latin… I write with mistakes even in Russian. Today—tell me about yourself. You don’t mind?”
“Checking my credentials, aren’t we?”
“Now, enough of your foreign lingo!”
“Guilty, young lady—I’ll mend my ways.”
“That’s better. I simply want to know about you—where you, such a remarkable person, dropped in on us from!”
“Not on you any more…”
“Do you regret leaving the gymnasium?”
“Not in the slightest: I lost copper and found gold.”
“Enough with the shameless flattery!”
“Silent now…”
“Oh, I’m terribly ashamed of my character! Don’t be silent, please!”
“Then listen…”
…In my youth I was intellectually omnivorous, Dolly: everything interested me. Everything, that is, except the Party official line, naturally. I was also, as goes without saying, arrogant, proud, full of admiration for my own abilities and profound contempt for the Soviet regime living out its last years—in short, something between a young dissident and an everyday Nietzschean. Believe me, it’s unpleasant even to recall…
By some miracle I, a provincial, managed to enter the Philosophy Faculty of Leningrad State University. Ah, Leningrad! The Rock Club; Vitya, Sergei, Boris—still so young…
My admission was helped by my father and his connections. Father was a Party functionary—a sincerely believing “orthodox” one, at that—and he never recovered from the collapse of the Soviet Union; he died two years later.
And few people did recover from it! In 1991 our motherland was a sorry sight.
Like almost any young Soviet citizen—by the time of my graduation the Union was already on its last legs, and half a year later it gave up the ghost—I gazed at the West with stupid, wide-open little eyes, and so, as soon as the chance for study abroad presented itself, I seized it.
I ended up first in the former FRG…
“I didn’t understand—where?”
“That’s what they called West Germany then. It probably hasn’t even crossed your mind that at one time there were two Germanys?”
“I remembered from history lessons, but very vaguely. It’s terribly shameful to be such an uneducated fool!”
“It’s shameful only to persist in ignorance, and you, Dolly, have nothing to be ashamed of. …First in the FRG, and from there I moved on to London, where I really did study conscientiously at some shady outfit, and I didn’t even think about going back.”
“What did you study?”
“Philosophy, a tiny bit… Mostly, what an ignorant country Russia is, and what happiness Western democracy brings to savage peoples like ours. What else could Britons teach a Russian lad?”
“Don’t you find that shameful?”
“Of course I do, my dear.”
“So something must have happened, if you don’t think so now?”
“Obviously. I can’t say exactly when; I can’t say what was the final straw. But the cup overflowed. A real Russian person can’t purge Russianness out of himself, and nor should he. I…”
“You returned to your motherland?”
“I did. But even earlier, I went to the Russian embassy and… offered my services.”
“What services?”
“Any.”
I sit, struggling to take in what I’ve just heard. Yes, I’m a silly village girl, but it’s hard to mistake.
“Well, I never!” I whisper. “So you really were a spy? Sonya wasn’t mistaken?”
“She was, all the same: I wouldn’t call it exactly that… They got in touch with me later and indeed gave me a small assignment—nothing special, more in the line of research. Probably just testing whether I’d disappear, whether I was a reliable person. Nothing even remotely resembling James Bond films, believe me. I carried out the assignment. Soon after that, I returned to Russia for… reasons of a personal nature.”
“Won’t you tell me about them?”
“Not just now, I think. I returned—and understood that both my educations, the Russian and the British, were in little demand in my remarkable, beloved, impoverished country. The whole country at that time seemed to have turned into bandits, with the difference that some bandits wore epaulettes and others didn’t. A graduate of the Philosophy Faculty of LSU didn’t fit into either camp.”
“…Just as I didn’t fit into either camp at the gymnasium. Sorry! What happened next?”
“I scraped by for some—even unpleasantly long—time on odd jobs, both translating and teaching, until suddenly I was contacted by people who… well, in short, people for whom I’d carried out that first assignment. That’s how my ‘postings’ began. During the last one I injured my leg and came back to Russia to recover, and so as not to be bored, I took a post at your gymnasium.”
“Yes, with us you’d hardly be bored… Tell me about the ‘postings’ in more detail!”
“More detail, alas, I can’t give you—and I don’t really have the right—but I’ve been to many places. North Africa and the Middle East became something of my speciality.”
“Goodness! Do you know Arabic too?”
“Less than I’d like! But among Jews I could, with some effort, pass for an Arab. And among Britons—all the more so.”
“Say something in Arabic!”
The Prince, smiling, looking at me sideways, as if teasing slightly, sings something like:

Ana la habibi u habibi ila
Ya ‘asfura baida la baqa tsa’ali
La ya’tib hada wala yaz’al hada…

“What does it mean?”
“It’s a song by the Lebanese singer Fairuz, and she sings about… no, I shan’t translate it for you—sorry. You’re the Fox, not the Rose—you don’t need to hear such songs. Sorry again.”
“Very well, very well… Since we’ve started talking about… these matters, then… could you tell me about when you were in love?”
“I’m not sure. Perhaps later.”
“I need it for practical purposes! I want to understand how people… fall in love with each other in the first place. Only for that! You haven’t imagined, have you, that I, for instance, am in love with you?” I ask, a little more sharply than I meant to.
“I never even thought it.”
“Well, excellent.”
“Truly, I didn’t think it, Dolly. Our relations are entirely special—it would be foolish to stain them with anything so banal.”
“I’m glad,”—I say sincerely. “I’m very glad!”
“And why—forgive the silly question—do you need to know how people fall in love with each other?”
“Because… I’m searching for myself. You do remember they found me a seminarian? We’ve already spoken on the phone, to be honest.”
“So the thought of a career as a matushka is no longer so repulsive?”
“Now, don’t be ironic at the expense of a poor country fool! Perhaps I’m resisting simply out of pride? Out of thinking I’m someone terribly special—just like you in your youth? But that’s a bad quality! What if I do grow to love him? You know, Mr Azurov, or whatever your name is, it’s funny to propose, but… what if I invite him to the canteen or a caf;, and you sit at the next table? Your opinion of him is very important to me!”
The Prince laughs—merrily, infectiously, almost to tears. Through the laughter he says:
“I’ve never yet been used for such a purpose… Dolly, it’s foolishness! It’s not me who’ll be marrying him—it’s you! But, as they say, in for a penny, in for a pound. I won’t refuse—as a friend—to tell you what I think of your fianc;.”
“Fianc; already!”
“Well—you’ll have to present someone before God and man sooner or later… I won’t refuse—but in the end, it’s for you to decide.”
“That goes without saying!”
“Oh, I know—I know you’re sharp-toothed! Foxes are all sharp-toothed—you needn’t prove it to me every minute…”
Wasting no time, I ring Misha—he’s both glad and surprised. We arrange a “date” for Friday. Today, according to him, he hasn’t a single free minute. Can’t he shift his affairs for the sake of his future matushka?! Very well, Mishutka! I’ll remember this…
Soon after that, the Prince leaves. Talking about nothing, he says, is pleasant, but one should know when to take one’s leave, and he does still need to prepare for our future lessons. And, as it happens, he needs to disappear for two days—go to Moscow: preparations for the future “posting”. I’m not too offended?
Disappointing, but what can one do!
After he’s gone, I wander about my little flat for a while, busying myself with all sorts of domestic trifles. I hum under my breath:
Ana la habibi…
A terribly catchy melody.
I’m afraid of putting a jinx on it, but—it seems I wasn’t mistaken in him. Though an Orthodox person shouldn’t be afraid of jinxes and all that magical devilry at all.

* * *

6 April 2009, Monday

Just before the end of the sixth lesson, Roza Markovna comes into the classroom and asks me to go to the headmistress’s office. The girls follow me with their eyes.
In the office, the door is locked behind me.
Both of them—the headmistress and the deputy head—fall upon me. First, sternly, with shouting: “Well?! Where have you been roaming all weekend?! What new ideas have you got into your head now?!” Then, appealing to my reason: it’s rash, improper, to start living with a boy in your final year of school, even if he is your fianc;. They try to press on my feelings: how many grey hairs I’ll give both Lyubov Venediktovna and themselves!
(According to her passport, Aunt Lyuba really is Venediktovna—she’s Sergeyevna only from her own father. She’s an illegitimate child.)
I don’t yield. I don’t get cross, I don’t argue, I go on smiling. For everything, I have one armour-piercing argument: an Orthodox family, even a future one—is a holy thing. And yes, it’s more important even than someone’s grey hairs. Rash or not—let the Bishop decide that; let him give or not give his blessing for the wedding to me, a young girl. (And all three of us know he will give it.)
Yes, I’m lying, openly lying, but my conscience is at peace. I’m covering with my lie a truth, a more important, more wondrous truth. So what if I still have a few doubts left myself? Small ones—a couple of grams’ worth. My doubts are my own private affair. About Father Vasily, for instance, I have no doubts whatsoever. Better to doubt than to be certain of a life the colour of grey asphalt.
Roza Markovna brings out her last argument. I’m a minor. I should be praising God on my knees that my aunt hasn’t filed a statement with the police! If she had—oh, what a hard time both I and my fianc; would have had!
And I answer with an argument of my own. I can, after all, leave the gymnasium for good! How? Like this. Like Alya Florenskaya—only for ever, not for an evening.
The faces of the headmistress and the deputy head turn grey. And I, pressing my advantage, share another thought:
“Rozochka Markovna, Svetlanochka Borisovna, no other fate awaits me but the fate of a village matushka—with my marks, with my looks. Isn’t that so? No, no—don’t say anything: I know it myself. Well, there’s no escaping it now! But before my fate is fulfilled, I want to know whether I’m doing the right thing. I want to get a proper look at another person, to grow to l-o-v-e him—before I submit to the fate of a matushka. I can’t do that from a distance. I know a marriage can be strong even without love. But I don’t want that! Is that really such a great sin?”
Svetlana Borisovna, the wife of a protopresbyter, averts her eyes, as if swallowing a lump in her throat. For a second, someone else’s secret opens itself to me. Oh, how I pity her! She too deserves for someone to go up and embrace her—embrace her and weep with her a little. I don’t do it, of course…
Both sit silently for a while. Roza Markovna says, quietly:
“This girl is cleverer than you and me…”
All that remains is mere formalities. They ask me ten, twenty times to assure them that I and my fianc; “will be careful”. Of course we will, I smile. And anyway, they’re worrying for nothing: my fianc; and I are both Orthodox, church-going people. And who said things had “gone far”? I said it myself? Really? Well, all I meant was that we’ve already promised ourselves to each other—isn’t making promises “going far”? Both of them are touched by my naivety, smile, exchange glances.
And I’ve got one more surprise in store for our directors. I won’t be attending Saturday optional lessons. Why would I need them n-o-w? What use is Divine Law to me now? My future husband—that’s who’ll be my Divine Law…
With a few sighs, they agree to this too.
Once I’m out of the office, I understand: the most surprising thing is that I didn’t really lie all that much. I could still become an Orthodox matushka. With Misha—who knows—things might still work out. But for them to work out, I need freedom: to look, to think, to weigh up. Freedom—and also the chance to say “no” to him. In the gymnasium I had no such freedom. Now, in my little flat and with an older comrade always nearby, I do.
In the corridor outside the headmistress’s office, Olga is waiting for me:
“Don’t you want to tell me anything?”
We look each other in the eye.
“Everything I had to tell, I’ve already told the headmistress and the deputy head,”—I say calmly. “Go and ask them.”
“And me?! I’m your closest person—not Svetlana Borisovna!”
Again I have to struggle with a fit of irritation—what am I saying, genuine fury. But I speak almost calmly:
“In time, Olya. Not today.”
“How is it—I can’t make sense of it—a little drab nothing like you has suddenly turned into a bride?! Where did it all come from!”
“From exactly where it came from.”
“Oh, t-h-a-t’s where?” she understands in her own way. “Oh, Dashka, you reckless fool! That’s all he wants from you! You’ll weep bitter tears yet! Mark my words—you’ll weep!”
“Life will show,” I answer shortly. “Olya, let me pass, please.”

*

In the evening I do a major clean. I wash the floors, wipe away ages of dust. I sort out the storage closet, which holds nothing but useless rubbish, and, having gathered all the rubbish into a sack, I carry it down to under the stairs in the porch. What could I use that little closet for?
My soul feels good, clear. Yes, my position is an unusual one, and that’s the very least one can say about it. Only I—”blessed Feodora”—could have turned to a grown man with my incredible request. Only he—who has travelled half the world, accustomed to all sorts of strange things—wasn’t afraid to agree. Well—and what of it? Are we doing anyone any harm? Will anyone be the worse for it?

* * *

7 April 2009, Tuesday

After lessons, already on the ground floor, Sonya catches me in the corridor. Rita and Lena are with her. The girls want to “show me something”. What exactly? No, they won’t tell me… I suspect some sort of trick and, laughing, dig in my heels—and they, also merrily, insist. Just like that, with giggles and jokes, they bundle me into the Recreation Room. Rita shoos away two sixth-formers who’d started making a collage, whispering something in their ears. Sonya “locks” the door by threading a mop through the door handles. (There isn’t usually a mop in the Recreation Room—she’d stashed it there beforehand.) She turns to me, worried:
“Dasha, dearest! Tell us the whole truth! Are they forcing you to get married?!”
I almost laugh at them: all three of them have cooked up a story that the groom’s family is watching every step of mine, driving me to and from the gymnasium, and then locking me up; that they’re coercing me, taking advantage of my innocence, naivety and sense of duty; that Aunt Lyuba, my guardian, owes the groom’s father a large sum of money and is “paying him off” with me… Fantasies like the ones that were spun about Alya Florenskaya. Only when the fantasies start being invented about you yourself do you understand what all these fantasies are worth.
But they’ll save me! They’ve tracked down some organisation in Moscow—a shelter for underage victims of domestic violence. They’ll send me to Moscow—today, right now! They’ve even collected the money for the tickets!
My dear, good girls… But I’ve got to answer something, or else, like as not, they really will pack me off to Moscow—and under guard, at that!
I can’t tell these girls the truth. They won’t believe the truth—or rather, they’ll believe it, but they won’t believe the innocence of my relations with the Prince. In their eyes I’ll instantly turn into the victim of an experienced and cunning predator—that is, a second victim in a row. And then the Moscow shelter will definitely be waiting for me.
The truth can’t be told, but I’ve got to tell them something—otherwise they won’t even let me out! And again I start lying—ingeniously, inspiredly. My fianc; isn’t Misha at all—no! I ran away from Misha. Then who is he?! A mature man they don’t know—a former… (I recall the Prince’s story about the Leningrad Rock Club) …a former rocker, on a motorbike. The bold gaze of a lone wolf, a cigarette in the corner of wind-chapped lips. And, needless to say, I’m head over heels in love with him.
The girls listen to me open-mouthed. This is exactly what they wanted to hear—I’ve guessed right. Having shared my story, I now beg them, implore them to keep their mouths shut. Otherwise, disaster is unavoidable: I’ll be sent back to my family, and what awaits me is marriage to an unloved, jug-eared seminarian. Do you promise, girls?
They promise. They wish me happiness—and they’re full of admiration for me! A little envious… The mop is removed from the door handles.
It was probably wrong of me—the lying. The gossip will go circulating, and one day it’ll come back to me in some utterly monstrous form. But here is my chief lesson for today: truth in this world is an unwelcome guest. Some truths are stranger and more wondrous than any invention. And that’s precisely why there’s no one to tell them to.

*

In the evening, having finished all my household tasks and prepared my lessons, I’m melancholy. Lessons—who needs them? My real lessons are only just beginning, and the first pancake came out a lump, mostly through my own fault.
If only he’d write, or something…
The Prince seems to hear my thoughts. A short message arrives from him on my phone:

Back tomorrow. All is well. Posting confirmed.

“All is well”! Better if it hadn’t been confirmed… And hasn’t he got any warmer words for me than that?
Amazingly, he seems to hear that thought too. Another text arrives from him, in English. Three very short sentences again.

Already missing you, Dolly. Please don’t take this the wrong way. I know you won’t.

For some reason I blush, and go to wash my face with cold water.
Young girls shouldn’t be written to like that. Even in a perfectly friendly sense: I know the note is innocent, and I read it as such. And still, writing such things to girls my age is like throwing lit matches into dry hay. (With me, of course, he’s safe: I don’t keep dry hay.) If he were right here, I’d probably scold him for that note. Foolishness!
And yet—thank you…

* * *

8 April 2009, Wednesday

On the night of Tuesday into Wednesday (again!) I had a dream. Not Satan this time. Two doors.

Before me are two doors, and both are half-open.
Behind the first is an ordinary little village, like our Troitskoye. Cottages, a little church, a little bell-tower. Children running about, geese crossing the road, someone hanging washing on a line.
And behind the second is the Desert.
The doors are connected by a mechanism, and I know: the moment I fling one wide open, the other will close for ever.

*

The school day flies by without incident. The Prince comes towards evening.
When he crosses the threshold, I very nearly throw myself on his neck. Of course one mustn’t do that, and so I say, almost sternly:
“I hope you’ll be having dinner?”
Over dinner, A. M. tells me cheerfully that he didn’t waste his time these two days: he picked out some splendid little books for me in Moscow shops. He suggests we start straight away with one of them—THE SINGING HEART.
“I’d be glad to!”—I agree. “I’d be glad to, but… could we put that book aside till a little later? I’ve had two dreams—one today, and one back in February. You don’t mind if we begin with them?”

*

We move from my tiny kitchen into the room. I settle myself at his feet, wrapped in my blanket, and tell him today’s dream.
“You don’t need to be a psychoanalyst to decipher your dream,” the Prince says thoughtfully. “The meaning is almost transparent…”
“Yes,” I agree.
“And did you make a choice in the dream?”
“No—I can’t make it in real life either!”
“Well, no one is rushing you. This choice is one of those you can spend your whole life making.”
“To be tormented my whole life! Eurgh…”
“I understand!” he smiles with his eyes alone. “You don’t fancy being an eternal Petya Trofimov.”
“Who’s this Petya?”
“A character from Chekhov’s THE CHERRY ORCHARD.”
“Are you suggesting I read it?”
“I am very far from it. That’s not a prohibition, of course!” he corrects himself as if in fright (and I wouldn’t have minded a few prohibitions: I don’t share his English scrupulousness). “It’s simply that THE CHERRY ORCHARD is a very melancholy play. As all of Chekhov is melancholy for people of your age—and especially of your cast of mind.”
“What cast of mind is that?”
“The heroic. Chekhov has a great deal of sensitivity, delicacy, attentiveness to people, even love—and one day, who knows, you may acquire a taste for him. But there’s rather little in him of soaring…”
“I’m so grateful to you!” (This came out of its own accord.)
“For what?”
“For the way you treat me—not as a schoolgirl. That’s what for!”
“Well, we’re not at school, fortunately… And the second dream—the February one? What was it about?”
“I’d almost started telling you! Wait—just let me pluck up my courage…”
Having gathered my nerve, I tell him about Satan in the Desert. The Prince listens to me very attentively, intently—I even grow awkward under this attention, and once or twice I fall silent, finishing with difficulty.
Having finished, and fearing his praise—which, I sense, is almost certainly on the tip of his tongue—I hastily blurt out:
“Why would the Wicked One have recognised me?”
A. M. looks at me for a long time and doesn’t answer at once. And when he does answer, he answers with a question:
“From a previous life? Perhaps you’d already crossed him before?”
“From a previous life?! I don’t much believe in those.”
“Some things exist regardless of whether we believe in them or not… But we’ve again come dangerously close to theology, so for now let’s leave aside all manner of metempsychosis. In any case, one mustn’t believe Satan, whatever he tells us.”
“That’s what I think too! So it was Satan himself?”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s above my rank to see Satan in a dream—as if I were some great ascetic!”
“Satan doesn’t look at rank… His appearance—if it wasn’t simply an ordinary dream, which I also allow—may speak of your rare purity and clarity…”
“Stop that, now!”
“…Or of a hidden gift.”
“A gift for what?” I don’t understand.
“For visions. I’m shy to ask, but… have you never, before February, seen anything similar? Never tried to immerse yourself in visions deliberately—to travel through various invisible realms?”
My first impulse is to answer these strange questions with a firm “no”. But that “no” wouldn’t be entirely honest. I pause to think, and at last answer:
“In childhood—when I was about twelve—I used to imagine I was walking along a footpath. That was the usual beginning, and then the pictures simply appeared by themselves, and I followed them. I’d meet different people… Like a dream, but awake. It usually happened when I was ill, when there was nothing else to do anyway…”
“And you saw Satan when you were ill too!”
“That’s true enough… but I thought all children had such… daydreams. Don’t they?”
“More likely not than yes. In general, rudimentary abilities for all sorts of astonishing things really do exist in almost all children. We don’t develop them, and they fade. Living in the world, it’s difficult to develop them.”
“I see! Alexander Mikhailovich, I’m afraid…”
“Of what?”
“Of prelest’ — in the Orthodox sense of the word. You do know it?”
“Of course I do. But you’re a rare pearl, Dolly! Your fear is clear to me—more than that, it has grounds. I’ve seen many people who used visions and—pardon me—’spiritual gifts’ to justify all sorts of things! There, I’ve remembered something amusing: Cyril Scott, in one of his books, writes about a lady who excused her marital infidelity by claiming she was seeing to the spiritual development of her lover.”
“Ugh, how vile… I was afraid before—and now I’m even more afraid. Maybe I should just forget it—this hidden ‘gift’ of mine? Seal it up in a little box and put it away in the storage room, on the farthest shelf?”
“If you live an ordinary life, that’s exactly what will happen by itself. I can’t give you an answer! Spiritual prelest’ threatens you less than others, I think—but no one is fully protected from that misfortune. And at the same time, any talent is like a weapon. If a weapon can serve in battle, it’s foolish to bury it in the ground.”
“Yes, yes, of course! ‘Thou wicked and slothful servant! Thou knewest that I reap where I sowed not, and gather where I have not strawed… Take therefore the talent from him, and give it unto him which hath ten talents.’“
“How splendid that you’ve been reading the Gospel while your contemporaries have been reading notes from boys.”
“Enough with praising me! It’s simply indecent… And so—are these words of Christ applicable to any talent at all?”
“How should I know? But people like Abba Jijoi would most likely have answered ‘yes’.”
“It’s frightening, if that’s so… I must think…”

*

“Where did Satan come from in the first place?” I ask after a pause, without connection to what went before. “No—don’t speak yet: I know the story of the beloved angel of the Lord who grew proud and fell. And still? Or am I again reaching for things beyond my mind?”
“How am I to answer you, Dolly? I’m only a ‘reader’, not a mystic. The mystic among the two of us is—perhaps—you: a future one…”
“No!” I protest.
“Who knows… The spiritual world is transcendent in both directions—upwards and downwards.”
“What does that word mean?”
“Incomprehensible.”
“That is—closed. And will it always be closed?”
“No: I believe that one day, in the far-off future, all its mysteries will be opened to us.”
“To us—to humanity?”
“To us—to each one, personally.”
“And until they are opened, we’re left to wage war on him?”
“Exactly—and he takes a thousand forms. Do you know what I’m thinking, Dolly?” the Prince suddenly asks. “You’ll scold me again for praising you—well, so be it… Of all your classmates, you are the only one who wishes to fight against Satan. What am I saying—classmates! Out of a thousand Orthodox girls—and boys too. Which doesn’t make those girls and boys worthless Orthodox. No—they’re simply lukewarm, as in that famous passage from Revelation. But you—you’re hot. Oh, Dolly! I… I’m full of admiration for you,” he says with feeling. “How astonishing is it to find in a girl, and a seventeen-year-old one at that, a comrade in spirit—and almost not a younger one…”
My eyes fill rapidly with tears.
“I think you probably need to go,” I whisper.
“Have I… offended you?” the Prince asks cautiously.
“No, no, no! It’s simply too much for today already. If we go on, I’ll break…”
The Prince kneels down beside me and, reaching out his hand, shakes mine—not hard, as if to a comrade in arms in a field hospital. Then he stands up and leaves without a word.
Did I accidentally offend him? But I truly couldn’t take any more.
No—I haven’t got all that much courage after all. How good it is that on the third of April I gathered all my courage and didn’t turn coward!



* * *

9 April 2009, Thursday

We read together THE SINGING HEART by Ivan Ilyin.
That is, the Prince reads, of course—individual chapters, and from them not everything in a row—and I listen. I listen and write down what strikes me: I ask him not to hurry, to dictate word for word.

Reason and empty imagination are not enough for reading. One must feel with the heart and contemplate from the heart.

A person cannot live without love, and also because love is the chief choosing force in life. One must choose: to renounce a very great deal for the sake of comparatively little.

A creative person must learn to see with love, to leave his small personal shell for the bright spaces of God, to find in them the Great—the kindred—that which belongs together.

Wrathful struggle against harmful things is sometimes necessary, and the incapacity for it can turn a person into a sentimental traitor.

Hatred is healed by love, and only by love. A ray of true love tames wild beasts; what is told of the saints in this regard is no fantasy, no pious legend.

Who among us is free from blameless desires and impulses? Who among us is right from birth and holy from our mother’s womb?

If I want an objective victory, I must scorn deprivations and despise threats.

There is much, much more like this! I chose almost at random—but really, one could copy out the whole book.
I’ve started a special little notebook for our lessons. And high time, too.
A. M. reads cautiously, glancing at me with unease—as if to say: does it not repel you? Are you not bored? (He worries for nothing.) After two or three chapters he asks:
“What’s your general impression, Dolly? Does any of this resonate, even a little? What do you think of him?”
“Of course it resonates! The impression is like meeting someone close—a true brother. I have many, many thoughts…”
“A penny for your thoughts.”
“I didn’t understand you.”
“I’m saying: share, if you have many!”
“Take as many as you like! Only I don’t know which to begin with… Here’s one: why is it that at school they study Dostoevsky, for instance, but not Ilyin?!”
“You’re not terribly fond of Dostoevsky, it seems.”
“No—not terribly,” I confess.
“Why is that?”
“He’s… hysterical,” this somehow says itself. I correct myself at once: “Very crude of me? Forgive me, please! But it’s between us, after all…”
“I don’t know about ‘crude’—but it’s subtle, clever!” he praises me, and I blush with pleasure. “All the same, one day you’ll discover, Dolly, that Dostoevsky, happily, is not only hysterical. And then you’ll willingly forgive him a certain nerviness, the way one forgives weaknesses in a person one loves. Returning to your question: I think it’s because philosophy in general isn’t studied at school.”
“But… but school is a place where they’re supposed to teach you to think? You told us so yourself! And philosophy—isn’t it the science of how to think? Then why?”
“You’re asking very precise, very apt questions, Dolly! But in reality, school doesn’t exist quite for that.”
“What does it exist for, then?”
“To gather adolescents together and place them under supervision, so they don’t roam about the town… Sorry, that was very cynical. No—mainly to turn adolescents into adults. The ‘material’ of the process isn’t so important. What matters is to teach a schoolchild to cope with a large volume of dull routine—to do what the majority will go on doing in adult life. And there’s common sense in that! If you make school-leavers too ‘aerial’, too ‘ethereal’, too refined and intelligent, they won’t cope with adult life in the world. Despite my forty years, I was naive enough not to understand that.”
“All for the best!”
“True,” he agrees. And unexpectedly adds: “Only I’m sorry for Alice… Well, never mind: she’ll get over her infatuation—I’m almost sure of it.”
The words hover on the tip of my tongue: “And you?” But I don’t ask: it’s not decent. And he’s already answered me, after all! “Evgeny Abramovich was mistaken.”
I continue, after a little cough:
“My other thought is this: everything Ilyin writes about is so simple, so obvious! Only, when he articulates something, you think with surprise: yes, yes—that’s exactly how it is. It’s as if he finds names for things I’ve always known. Like the names of colours you learn from your parents in childhood—but the colours are right there all along! Another thing: why have I, a pupil of a Russian Orthodox gymnasium, a girl of marriageable age, heard nothing about Ilyin—nothing at all about Russian Orthodox philosophy, about the science of thinking boldly while remaining an Orthodox person and not diminishing the complexity of one’s thought? Church History is also an important subject—granted—but surely not that important, especially for a future matushka… It’s not for me to judge, but… it’s hurtful! I feel as if I’ve been robbed…”
The Prince smiles with the corners of his lips alone and remarks, very sensibly:
“Well, it’s foolish to complain that life in general, and education in Russia in particular, are arranged this way and no other. Let me try instead to fill this gap, and…”
“Yes! Oh—I interrupted… Yes—and right now, without delay!”

*

The Prince tells me about some other Russian religious philosophers. Here is Vladimir Solovyov, the “northern Novalis”, who dreamt of wedding Catholicism and Orthodoxy. (I’d be the first to agree, if Solovyov had proposed such a union with the Moscow Patriarch at its head—but as it is, it’s sheer foolishness!) Here is Nikolai Fyodorov, with his “incredible but tender” dream of resurrecting all the dead. (There wouldn’t be room for us on earth then, would there?) Here is Father Sergius Bulgakov—that heavy-set gent from Nesterov’s painting, and his thoughts are a little heavy-set, and his way of setting them out—but what precise words! Like the idea that religion strives to make the transcendent (yesterday’s little word) immanent (kindred). And it’s true, after all! I’ve found myself a suitable Bulgakov… Here is Father Pavel Florensky—slender as a crane, unexpected as lightning, deep as a well. (I wonder—could Alya be his great-great-granddaughter, or a great-niece? It’s perfectly possible…) Here is Tolstoy, the creator of a new faith, who walked out of the city of Christianity to arrive at the city of Buddhism—and never reached it, dying on the way, at a railway station. Here is Dostoevsky… what—he’s a philosopher too? Here is Daniil Andreyev, an astonishing Orthodox mystic, “the Dante of Stalin’s camps”. I listen, my mouth half-open, and don’t notice how the hours fly by, one after another.
“One could listen to you for ever!” I confess. “Just like… a nightingale in summer!”
“It’s been so long since I taught philosophy… No—I’m lying: I’ve, in fact, n-e-v-e-r taught philosophy, never at all—me, a graduate of the Philosophy Faculty of LSU! For the first time in my life, believe it or not, I’m working in my own speciality!” he laughs.
“And I was thinking something else—not thinking, feeling. Could it be—though I know nothing about it, have never read it anywhere!—that before birth a secret angel imprints in our mind the most important moments of our life? That isn’t against the teaching of the Church? For me, one of those moments is my study with you.”
“O-u-r study, Dolly: I’m learning something from it too—and a great deal.”
“Ours—very well,” I agree. “It’s as if I was born—for this.”
“I hope not only for this?”
“Not only, of course! Not only—but right now I feel I’m doing exactly what is needed, what I must.”
“And I too, I must confess… Well—let’s say thank you to each other for the chance, and not become sentimental. You aren’t sentimental, are you?”
“I scolded myself bitterly for a fit of sentimentality on the twentieth of March!”
“You’ll tell me about that one day, won’t you?”

*

We come to our senses past nine o’clock. The Prince jokingly apologises for having stayed so late, and leaves.
I watch him from the little window of my room: the windows look out onto the street. At first glance he’s almost unnoticeable—some middle-aged gent like thousands of others! Some photographer, or a doctor from a clinic, or a fire-safety inspector. How deceptive appearances can be…

* * *

10 April 2009, Friday

Nearly forgot about the meeting with Misha! The Prince and I hurry to the caf; we’d discussed with my “fianc;” on the phone, and we’re almost late for five o’clock. A. M. is cheerful. I’m more anxious…
I go into the caf; three minutes after him, giving him the chance to find a table convenient for observation.
Misha in real life is exactly the same as in the photograph. He gives me a single white carnation. I thank him, lay the carnation on the table. I order tea and a pastry, having asked in advance for separate bills. A week ago I’d have been afraid to do that—something new and confident has appeared in me. My “fianc;”, hearing about separate bills, blinks helplessly but doesn’t object.
In general, he’s sweet… almost. He smiles at me; he isn’t put off by my plain looks. He’s tactful, delicate. His nails are evenly trimmed, his cassock is neat, his shoes are clean. His ears no longer seem quite so repulsive to me. The moustache could be shaved off. No—probably not: a deacon and future priest is, by tradition, supposed to be bearded. Not for me to judge, but, generally, it is a most foolish tradition. Only a tradition, though, not a strict requirement. Should I tell him so, perhaps…
Of course I don’t say anything of the sort: I’m learning his tact (or his timidity). Once you enter the orbit of a person, especially a man, you start behaving like him without meaning to. With the Prince, after all, I’m completely different…
And still, I’m not made of plasticine! Something in me has already changed. The Fox ought to be cunning too, in part. I never thought I’d be practising cunning! But there you have it…
I tell him about myself: the things that can be told and come out easily. Naturally, I keep silent about the third of April, about having “moved out” of the gymnasium. Misha listens and, it seems, is touched by the picture he sees. He sympathises with my grief—the loss of my parents. He’s a kind person. Kind, pleasant. His voice is gentle, almost feminine, like Father Vadim’s, only higher. Maybe we really could become friends?
I ask him to tell me about himself. Mishutka responds—willingly, talkatively. A bit too talkatively, even… I don’t need verbal portraits of his groupmates, the title of his diploma thesis—why, why? And there’s much else I don’t need—but he’s convinced I absolutely must know his whole life, that I’ve already almost shared that life with him… But no, my good fellow.
Another fifteen minutes pass, and I realise with sadness: Misha is boring. Either he’s boring because he’s timid—and not only with me!—or he’s timid because he’s boring. He’s never once met a girl, for instance: he tries to present this as following strict moral rules; laughing, he tells a story about how he was taken for an Old Believer. What I think is that he simply never had the nerve, and no one ever proposed it either… Misha is preoccupied with his future ordination and, in general, his career as a cleric. I listen for about five minutes to melancholy musings on why he might not be ordained, and stories about poor souls whose ordination “didn’t come together”. As if I cared a fig about that! His troubles aren’t my troubles, and his small joys aren’t my joys.
Misha is timid not only in his actions, but in his thinking. Cautiously I ask about his attitude to Ivan Ilyin, and he makes frightened eyes: reading dubious philosophers without a blessing is not good. What’s dubious about Ilyin? Well, he seems to have held fascist views… (What?!) Fascism is deeply repellent to me, but the timidity of a person who’s even afraid to open a book, preferring to believe not the book but other people’s words about its author—that’s not sympathetic to me either. Perhaps Ilyin’s fascism is the same sort as the tall tales about Alya being met by the Prince outside school with cake and champagne—or like my fairy-tale about the former rocker that I spun for Sonya?
And besides, Misha wouldn’t read Ilyin—he’s got other things on his mind. He already, at twenty-one or however old he is, resembles a busy little beaver. Oh, how the defence will go; oh, but that, they say, matters for “placement”. If they send him to serve as a deacon in Yeremeyevskoye, then “you can’t live off private services” there, but if, for instance, in Vozdvizhenye—”you very much can”. A sweet, pleasant beaver. But you don’t marry beavers!
More about Ilyin: as a deacon, Misha will be perfectly tolerable. (His little voice is a bit weak for singing, though…) And in time he’ll become a priest too, “if it comes together”, and he’ll read sermons—but they’ll be boring sermons, and they’ll be boring because of his fear of independent thinking and reading. Of independent, risky, unblessed thinking—and independent, risky conclusions. (And wasn’t it me who, not long ago, rebelled against just such independence, reproaching the Prince for asking me to choose between loyalty to him and loyalty to the Church?) Those sermons—almost the main work of his life—will come second-hand. And how am I to respect a person who takes the main thing second-hand?
All these thoughts come to me later, in the evening, while during our meeting only the first shoots, the rough drafts of such thoughts flash through my head. I recall, for instance, Ilyin’s words: at the foundation of every true marriage lies free, spiritual friendship. The warmth of the heart’s fire, kindled in one and met by answering warmth. Nothing much is kindling in me, somehow, and nothing’s meeting anything…
“Misha, dear,” I interrupt his speech, “I have a distant acquaintance named Alla, only nine months older than me. A very, very beautiful girl! Tell me: would you go out with her?”
Misha opens his mouth, blinks in confusion.
I feel horribly ashamed: why, why did I wound him for nothing? He wouldn’t go out with Alya Florenskaya—you can see it just by looking at him, no need even to ask. She’s a bird beyond his reach; he’d be too timid. So what—trample him for it now?
I try to apologise. I see I’ve offended him—but no, he’s “not offended”, he’s too shy to admit he’s offended: if he admits it—then, quite likely, he won’t get his grey sparrow in the hand, who sat opposite him a whole half-hour and even smiled. My poor fellow… Haltingly, stumbling, we agree that “we’ll probably speak on the phone”, “it’s good we met, had a look at each other”. We ask for the bill and each pay our own. Misha offers to see me back to the gymnasium. “No!” I answer quickly and almost rudely. He takes his leave, startled.
Having waited a minute, I move over to the Prince’s table. I speak more sharply than I meant to:
“Laughing?”
“I never even thought of it!”
“Of course you were—come now… Don’t tell me anything! I can see it all myself.”
“As for me, I liked him,” A. M. answers simply.
“Really?!”
“I liked him, but… in marriage with him you’d feel cramped. Like in a tight dress or tight shoes.”
“I know! If I’d married him a year ago, and if I hadn’t become your Fox…”
“If you’d married him, you certainly wouldn’t have become it. Fraternising with sympathisers of fascist writers is not permitted without the Bishop’s blessing.”
“Stop it, stop it! I’ll hit you in a minute…”
“About ‘a year ago’: well, and why marry at sixteen? Only if it’s a great love.”
“Aunt Lyuba also married for great love, very young,” I suddenly blurt out. “And they even had a church wedding. Only there was no civil registration! ‘Husband’ waved her goodbye, and you can’t even claim alimony! That’s why her surname is still her maiden one… Ah, I’m sick of it—I can’t sit here. Shall we go for a walk?”

*

We walk through the spring city, skirting puddles, and I tell the Prince about my father: naturally, I couldn’t help comparing the future deacon Misha with my papa, a Russian priest.
Papa could be all sorts of things. He could be tender, he could be rough. He could be wise, he could be foolishly pugnacious. He could be very stubborn; he could be drained, weary. He could be anything at all—but he was never narrow! And timid he was not either.
“Do you know that one well-known deacon advises seminarians never to seek wives among priests’ daughters?” A. M. says, as if thinking aloud. “They’ll be comparing you to their father all the time, supposedly—and always to your disadvantage.”
“So what should I do—ring him and say: ‘Misha, darling, forgive me, I was wrong—the demon led a sinful fool astray!’?”
“Don’t be cross with me! You won’t do that—and it’s good you won’t. I’m glad of your strict, persistent selectiveness. So long as…”
“…So long as I don’t end up a lonely old thing, with my ‘persistent selectiveness’?”
“ ‘A lonely old thing’!”—he smiles. “What a charming word… Y-yes, that’s more or less what I was thinking.”
“And you’ll judge me then? Be disappointed in me?”
“Not in the slightest! Word of honour: not in the slightest! And I’ve no right to, anyway: a ‘lonely old thing’ can’t judge a ‘lonely old thing’.”
We laugh. I want to take his hand—in a friendly way, a childlike way. I don’t do it, of course: no need.

*

Having seen me to my house, the Prince informs me that, sadly, he’ll be busy all weekend. I’m upset. A reproach escapes me:
“What, again?! And there are only forty days—eight of them already gone!”
He explains that he wants to show his mother to a medical celebrity from another city. Better to do it before his departure.
“And why don’t you want to take me with you?!” I don’t understand. “I could be useful too—even as a carer! I don’t only want to take, Alexander Mikhailovich! I want to give, too!”
“Because it would complicate everything terribly, especially if she grows attached to you—and that could easily happen… You’ll give still: to others, later. Forgive me! I’ll be back on Monday, without fail.”

*

I’m finishing today’s entry. It’s turned out long—but what can one do. I notice that my writing now has some sort of form, a certain “literariness”. Ilyin is probably to blame! He’s really very good even simply as a writer—it wouldn’t be bad at all to study him at school just as a writer, if the Ministry of Education is so afraid of philosophy—like a certain future deacon!
THE SINGING HEART lies on the table. I hope to finish reading it completely over the weekend.

* * *

11 April 2009, Saturday

Towards morning I have a dream. The great Russian philosophers pass by in procession; each greets me with a slight inclination of the head. One of them—Bulgakov? Ilyin? I don’t yet remember their faces firmly—says with a sigh:
“How they’re ruining nature, brothers! Just as if it were the Tabernacle.”
Just a dream, of course; there’s nothing in it of Satan in the Desert. But still—what an astonishing little phrase! I’d never have come up with such a one myself. Perhaps there really were v-i-s-i-t-o-r-s in my dream?
Nature is the Tabernacle, the Temple. A temporary one, a travelling one, but still a Temple. I must remember this. And I’ve always felt it, after all! There—I’ve written it down already.

*

I lie in bed and laze about. How sweet to laze on a day off! But it’s from idleness that all bad things breed.
Anxious thoughts come. First a small one creeps up: shouldn’t I go to the Vigil today? And stay for confession. And—is there anything to confess?
There is. Yesterday’s “hand” troubles me: my wish to take the Prince by the hand. Childish… but that’s how it starts. Any such guidance, if both haven’t taken monastic vows, will throw off sparks: ordinary, human ones. Not even shameful, but not good for a teaching relationship.
That’s the sort of foolish thought that comes—from idleness, from doing nothing.
Over breakfast I send the Prince a very stupid text. Stupid, and almost nasty, too!

A. M., I know you’ve no time for this now. Truly sorry. But I’m very, very troubled that the spiritual teacher and the disciple in our case are of different sexes. Has such a thing ever even existed?

I’ve done a bad thing, of course. I’ve tried to shift my own worry onto him. Is it he who is to blame for my worries?
Straight away I repent. I repent—and even feel a slight horror. He’s an impeccably honest person, and he doesn’t like coercing others either. He might even answer, “Yes, Dolly, I’ve thought about that too. Well, then—let’s stop, no point making people laugh.”
No, he won’t answer that… probably. He’s older, he’s cleverer—he ought to show wisdom and put up with my antics. He ought to, but is he obliged to? And there it is—he isn’t obliged. Everything he gives me is out of generosity—a gift. And I’ve taken it into my head to be finicky. Shameful!
I repent, yes, but you can’t call back what’s already been sent. And besides… one can’t really say my worry is completely empty! (Or is it?)
I go out shopping, and at the same time I think about how to make amends. There is no “different sexes”! A Prince is a child—what sex can a child possibly have?! And to me he’s precisely the Prince, and no one else. Why am I still thinking of him as if he were a thief?
Then a wonderful idea comes into my head: a yellow scarf! (I brought the gifted book with me to the new flat, and I remember the pictures from it, of course.)
A yellow scarf—well, of course! Perhaps not bright yellow, but closer to ochre, the colour of the Desert. April can still be cold in our parts—it’ll come in useful. In May, true, he won’t need it any more. And he won’t need it t-h-e-r-e, either. But this gift isn’t practical—it’s symbolic. With it I’ll silently apologise for my question, foolish and ill-timed. With this gift I’ll say: I recognise in thee the one thou art for me. Even if only for me—no matter! Thou art the Boy from the picture in the Tale, and it’s foolish to worry about that boy in the way I was worrying. Then he’ll forgive me, if he was cross: he won’t be able not to forgive.
(Of course, I only say “thou” to him in my thoughts. I may be a “holy fool”, but not so much as to forget all the rules of behaviour in society.)
I buy a beautiful sandy-coloured scarf in the department store (not cheap!) and only after that do I do my main food shopping. I keep the receipt: if he rejects my gift, I’ll return it.

*

Almost immediately afterwards, Olga rings me. She begins with unimportant things, then tells me she wants to come over to mine, to have a look at “my life”.
I refuse, with jokes and banter, but Olya insists. She lets it slip:
“I have to do it! Mama charged me with doing it! We let you, a minor, go off to a stranger’s flat. We’re obliged to see how you’re living—whether it’s some bug-infested hole. Obliged, do you understand! Otherwise Mama will start worrying, and… it could all end badly!”
(“A minor”… And what are you yourself?!)
I mumble something about having to get permission from my fianc;. I promise to ring back soon. I hang up and immediately dial the Prince’s number. The number’s unavailable. Yes, of course—he’s at the clinic now. (Or did he take offence at me after all?)
Where to invite Olya: to my flat on the first floor, or to the dacha? I’ve got the keys to the dacha too: I tried to fend them off; A. M., you could say, forced them on me—”just in case of emergency”. After long hesitation I decide: the flat. The flat, in the very worst case, can be abandoned—I can move to another. (Oh, what a lot of trouble I’m causing the Prince! What a lot of fuss with me—like with a puppy taken in from the street!) But the dacha is the last redoubt, the refuge. Olya doesn’t need to know about the dacha.
With a heavy heart, I send my sister the address.

 
*

Olya comes to my home around two o’clock: cheerful, almost dressed up, in “worldly” clothes rather than our uniform dress. (What’s got into her?) She looks around. Comments unceremoniously:
“Just as I expected! Just as I expected that your boy wouldn’t have enough money for anything but this little hovel…”
(“Yes, the Boy,” I think to myself. “The Boy, only with a capital B.”)
“Well, never mind—I’m satisfied all the same,” Olya continues. “Satisfied you’re not sleeping in a kennel. I was underestimating you, I must say! There’s only one thing I can’t understand, though: what was the rush for? I’ve met someone too, you know—a deacon. A graduate, unlike yours. He had a fianc;e, but she vanished—and he’s already ordained, by special dispensation. Now he needs a new one, urgently. He’ll be kissing my feet yet! Already is… But we, unlike you, aren’t running about looking for a flat helter-skelter! Listen… you’re not pregnant, by any chance? If you are, then it all makes sense straight away…”
“Oh, shame on you, Olya!”
“Shame’s for when it shows… All right, all right! And where are h-i-s things?”
Before I can think of anything, Olya’s unceremonious little paws reach for the bag I left on the bed. She takes out and unwraps the scarf, notices the receipt too. Exclaims in admiration:
“Ooh! Pure wool, it looks like. What expensive presents your seminarian gives you!”
“It’s not from him to me—it’s from me to him. Leave it—it’s not yours. Put it down proper!”
(I say “put it down proper” on purpose, using a rough country form, as if reminding her that a village girl can outdo a small-town one in some things.)
“From you—to him? Since when have you had that kind of money?! No, really—there’s something you’re not telling me… Where are his textbooks, at least, his books? Ah—there they are!”
Before I can stop her, my sister is already holding Ilyin’s THE SINGING HEART in her hands. She’s surprised, frowns:
“Ilyin? Isn’t he an ;migr;? A defender of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia? Flirted with ecumenism too—a strange reading… Or is this your seminarian developing y-o-u? He’s overestimated your abilities, I’d say…”
“Put it down proper, I said! This minute!”
But Olya doesn’t hear me—and when did she ever listen to me! She—horror!—leafs through the book, as if wanting to find something interesting in it. And she will find it—and now she has found it. I’d hidden the Prince’s note with the four lines of Christina Rossetti inside the book. A note precious to me! Sometimes I fall asleep with that poem lying beside me…
Olya unfolds the paper, folded in four. She looks at the English text for a long time. She doesn’t even try to read it: the important thing is that the text is in English. And she could have recognised the handwriting too—it’s the distinctive, characteristic handwriting. The very one A. M. used to write on the board in class.
Everything inside me goes cold. Olya lifts her gaze to me—stern, condemning. We look each other in the eye, and I understand that she’s understood, or at least suspected. Not a trace of a smile shows now on her severe face.
“So that’s how it is… So that’s who’s been enlightening you with foreign wisdom… And does Svetlana Borisovna know?”
Svetlana Borisovna?! So you, my own flesh and blood, are planning to inform on me to Svetlana Borisovna?!
I snatch the volume of Ilyin from the table and grip it in my hand like a weapon. Not much of a weapon, God knows, but even such a one will do.
“Get out! Get out this minute!”
“Have you lost your mind?! You… you’re not on drugs, by any chance?!”
“Get out, I’m telling you!”
There’s probably something in me at that moment that tells her: I will use Ilyin—and not only Ilyin, but anything else that comes to hand.
Without a word to me, her thin lips pressed tightly together, Olya leaves.
At once I repent bitterly. I even want to run after her, but… no, no! It will only make things worse.
Half the day passes in agitation and pangs of conscience. What to do now? How to be? She has no proof, but Olga is capable of acting without proof.

*

In the evening I send my sister a text, using the full form of her name, and offer to talk tomorrow morning. If I don’t talk to her in the morning, on Monday they might well not even let me out of school. Alexander Mikhailovich, poor man! He’ll catch it too. How I’ve let him down…
Olga replies, dryly confirming that she’ll be free after Liturgy.
Late in the evening an answer finally comes from the Prince. For a while I’m afraid to open it: what new trial is being prepared for me? One thing on top of another. Well—if he drives me away, I’ll go back to the gymnasium…
But no—not a trial.

But of course, Dolly. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. St Francis of Assisi and St Clare (even though yours truly in no way resembles St Francis, make no mistakes about that). Swami Vivekananda and Sister Nivedita. Sleep well.

I don’t immediately grasp that this is an answer to my question “Has such a thing ever even existed?” It has, it turns out, and more than once. A weight off my soul. What a clever man he is!
There is a difficult conversation with Olya in store for me tomorrow, but, fearing nothing, I know I’ll fall peacefully asleep once I’ve made today’s entry. My angel is still watching over me, and I’ll trust myself to him.
The phone and the Rossetti poem will lie not far from my pillow.

* * *

12 April 2009, Palm Sunday

Olga can’t—or rather, doesn’t much want to—go far from the gymnasium. We meet in the yard next to the school, by the flowerbed fenced round with tyres: the spot where Alya Florenskaya lost her hairclip on the twentieth of March.
We greet each other dryly. For some time we are silent. Olya begins first:
“You’re coming back to the gymnasium today, Daria. Do you hear?”
“No,” I answer.
“No?!”
“No.”
“Then… then I’m ringing Mama right now and telling her everything. And the police too! On your own head be it!”
Many, many thoughts and feelings rush through me. Brief relief—Aunt Lyuba doesn’t know yet—and horror, and fury. And—”Why didn’t she ring yesterday, then? What’s she afraid of?” And the urge to answer at once with a sharp word, even an action I’d regret.
No: someone wiser than me is carefully leading me by the hand, steering me aside from irreparable follies. I do none of the things that flashed through my mind. I only look her in the eye and say quietly:
“Ring them. Go on, ring them. You’ve already destroyed one happiness—now you’ll destroy another. Ring them! Who’s stopping you… At the Last Judgement, Olya, I won’t be speaking up for you.”
We go on standing like that, looking each other in the eye.
Something changes in Olya’s face: it grows anguished, almost wounded.
“So you’re… happy?”—she forces out, as if not believing it. “The way I think?”
“I don’t know how you think,” it answers itself from me. “I’m very happy.”
“ ‘Very’, even… And with whom!… Look—I’m telling you again: you’ll weep bitter tears yet!”
“Maybe,”—I agree. “Let it be my fate, then.” (“And it’s not you, Olya, whose mother gave birth at eighteen, who’ll be my keeper,” I want to add, but I restrain myself.)
I restrain myself, but the thought seems to leap across: it’s as if I see that thought in her eyes. Olga sighs wearily and suddenly confirms it:
“True enough: fate… I can’t stop you at all—you’re reckless! Mama, you know yourself, is only good for crying. Svetlana Borisovna—that one’s a proper hen. And I shan’t tell Roza Markovna.”
“Why not?”
“She wouldn’t believe me anyway! I’ve been slandered, little sister.”
Olya tells me, with a bitter smirk, some strange story about how Evdokia, after the third of April, went to Roza Markovna’s office and spun her a pack of lies: that it was precisely Olya Smirnova who’d slandered the English teacher and Alya Florenskaya; that it was her doing that one was hounded and the other dismissed. And if those two hadn’t met on the twentieth of March, Alya might well have done away with herself altogether, and the sin would have been on Olya’s soul for the rest of her life. And Evdokia didn’t stop there, but set all this out to Olya herself in a letter. She came up and handed it over in silence, with burning eyes. Would I like to read it? (I don’t want to: I don’t like reading other people’s letters.) What wild fantasy! How could the wretch’s tongue even have turned to say it! Now Olya is ignored by the administration, avoided—they’re disgusted by her. The world is a wonder! Lies triumph, and truth is punished.
“And what if Dusya wasn’t lying, after all? Wild fantasy, you say?” I’m dying to ask, but I don’t ask it. In my eyes the question reads plainly enough in any case—it’s not hard to read.
My sister averts her gaze. She continues, as if almost apologising: she’s no enemy to my… friend! On the twenty-third of March she even pitied him—well, more precisely, showed him leniency. Before taking the collective petition and the class meeting minutes to Roza Markovna, she rang Alya Florenskaya and extracted the English teacher’s phone number in her new capacity as prefect. Then she wrote to him: thus and so, wouldn’t you like to conclude a truce, mister? We won’t touch you, and you don’t touch us—give up your notions and teach from the textbook. She received some mocking, incomprehensible, outrageous reply: re-read what Aglaya once dictated and Prince Myshkin wrote down in an album. Where’s that even from—history? Viktor Ilyich never taught anything like that… (I don’t know either.) Now judge for yourself: how else was she supposed to act? He’s an impossible type—insufferable, incapable of reaching an understanding with people! He has no place in a school—no business working with young people! She doesn’t repent of anything!
“I’ve nothing to blame you for,” I answer, and Olya softens. She smiles cautiously, blinks guiltily. And I don’t finish the thought: I’ve nothing to blame her for because I’m not Alya Florenskaya—it wasn’t me who suffered at her hands. But there’s no need to say that; let Alya settle accounts with my sister herself.
Olya extracts a promise from me. She won’t tell Aunt Lyuba anything, but I must solemnly assure her that I won’t do any great foolishness and, most importantly, that I’ll never, never drive her away again. After all… she was so frightened for me yesterday! (Who knows—perhaps she really was?) She’s no stranger to me! We must stick together, not wage war!
I give her such a promise and, at the same time, ask her forgiveness if I inadvertently offended her yesterday. This, unexpectedly, touches her—she tries to blink away a tear. Well, I never! Where did that come from? Has her deacon had an effect on her? Does a woman grow kinder under the influence of a man? I won’t ask… Today is Palm Sunday, and we are reconciled—we even embrace, briefly.

*

I don’t go to the Vigil—I go out of town and walk for a long time in the woods. I go on thinking about Olya’s motives. Why did she, so resolute, stop short?
Of course, informing on me would be entirely against her interests: what if our headmistresses took fright, declared a state of siege, banned outings into town—and her deacon would be lost, would find himself another girl. There’s a case of every cloud having a silver lining. But it’s not only the deacon…
Did she grasp that there’s something she doesn’t understand? That the world is wider than her correctness? Was she frightened of committing a new bad deed—did Dusya manage to get through to her mind? Was she simply afraid of a scandal? And it’s a scandal inside the family, at that—bad repute would fall on the family, and it’s far merrier to strike at strangers than at your own, isn’t it, Olya?
One more thing opens itself to me: Olya, it seems, thinks I’ve begun to live a carnal life. (How stupid!) She thinks it, but she’s less troubled by it than she wants to show. Why? Because she wasn’t all that troubled by Alya’s lost innocence either. “These things happen. We’ve all been young.” Then why the boycott of the teacher as a ‘predator’? To get rid of him, of course: he’s harmful—he is not the right sort, not one of ours. That’s dishonest… but she believed it was for a good cause. What she’s imagined about me is a sin, but an ordinary one. Whereas my discipleship—the real thing—that, for her, would be the sin of all sins. Which means it’s a good thing I didn’t tell her—and I mustn’t confess it.
I come back with three little branches of pussy willow.

*

In the evening, exactly two words come from the Prince:

Home safely.

Well, thank God! I ring him back and say warmly that I’m very glad. I can barely stop myself from inviting him over to mine right this moment. I do stop myself, though: he’s tired from the journey. And I, if he stays late at mine, will be nodding off in lessons tomorrow. And it’s not proper, after all. No—everything tomorrow. All is well.
Holy Week begins tomorrow Monday.

* * *

13 April 2009, Monday

The Prince comes at half past four. He eats; I watch him, sitting opposite at the kitchen table.
“Why aren’t you eating?” he asks.
“Thank you, I’ve already had dinner. And besides… Ksyusha, for instance, thinks I should lose a couple of kilos.”
“You shouldn’t believe everything she says… I feel awkward eating alone.”
“What can one do!”
But something can be done: we agree that “dinner” on weekdays will be at five o’clock. That way I’ll have time to get hungry too. Funny: I feel like a fully grown woman, a mistress of the house! Though, come to think of it, I used to feel that way before Papa died too. It was the gymnasium that turned me into a child for a short while…
We move into the room, and I, having forgotten all my prepared words, simply say, handing the Prince his scarf:
“This is for you. The receipt is in the bag, if you want to return it to the shop.”
“Thank you, I’m very touched! You needn’t have spent the money…”
“Out of your own money!” I laugh.
“I’ll leave some more today.”
“That’s not what I meant… And do you understand the meaning of my gift?”
“To be honest, not quite…”
Instead of answering, I open THE LITTLE PRINCE at the right page—eighteen—and show him the picture. The hero is weeding his planet of baobab shoots; a yellow scarf streams behind him in the wind.
A. M. draws a deep breath. He confesses:
“I don’t know whether to laugh or cry…”
“Why laugh?”
“Because you’re the only one out of… the only one, period, who’s thought of elevating me to… royal status.”
“Why royal?”
“Because ‘prince’ is, after all, a royal title.”
“Ah, yes… And why cry?”
“From being moved. I’m very touched, honestly!”
The Prince immediately puts on the scarf, flinging one end over his shoulder. I clap my hands:
“Splendid! I don’t know whether to tell you or not, but I—I meant this scarf as repentance for my stupid text yesterday.”
“It wasn’t stupid at all,”—A. M. remarks, sinking into the armchair. “There’s intelligence in it, and responsibility, and sensitivity… But it did frighten me yesterday!”
“Frightened you? You? An Arabic Stierlitz ?”
“An Arabic Stierlitz!”—he laughs. “Well, I never… Shouldn’t it have frightened me? I imagined you’d already be telling me today: ‘This is all unseemly, sir, and not in the Orthodox way.’ And then I could kiss goodbye to you!”
“And after I sent it, I got frightened myself—that you’d say something of the sort to me, too…”
“Well, then—shall we try not to frighten each other from now on?”
“We shall try! As best we can… I’m glad we’re not quite such white crows, if you look at it broadly. That is, we are white crows all right, but there have been other… oddities like us. Of those six names you sent me, four are Hindus, of course…”
“Hinduism,” the Prince interrupts me, “is not one religion, but a whole ocean of different faiths, about which you, an Orthodox girl, know almost nothing. I don’t say it as a reproach, believe me.”
“What of it! Let it be a reproach. …Four are Hindus, and two are Catholics—so, not exactly the best example…” (A. M. smiles.) “No, that’s not true,” I check myself aloud. “I shouldn’t have said that. I don’t want to be as narrow as Misha. It was worth seeing him, it really was, to understand that! I know nothing at all; I am a little nonentity. See, I don’t know who Prince Myshkin is, or when he reigned… Tell me about one of those six, then! Sister Nivedita, for instance.”
“As it happens, that’s exactly what I wanted to devote this evening to!”

*

We sit in our usual posture (me—on my knees, wrapped in the blanket). A. M. tells me about Nivedita, an astonishing Irishwoman, struck by a dark-skinned guest in London drawing rooms and his high aim—the liberation of his country; who in one moment understood with horror that London’s luxury came from the plunder of other nations; who threw aside her whole accustomed life in order to learn a new language, new details of daily life, new forms of piety. All in order to pay an unrepayable debt—the enlightenment of an entire people.
He mentions, too, Vivekananda himself, and also his teacher, and the Holy Mother. Again I sit with my mouth half-open:
“Where on earth do you know all this from?!”
“The thing is, I’ve been to Calcutta as well,” he explains, “and I couldn’t help looking in at Dakshineshwar: my ‘task’ at the time was being carried out very close to it. And having looked in, I grew interested.”
“She was astonishing! All of them were. Do you have a photograph of her?”
A. M. shows me two photographs from the English edition of Sister Nivedita’s—Margaret Noble’s—memoirs called MY MASTER AS I SAW HIM. One of them shows Nivedita in full length. The other, Nivedita, half-turned to the camera, in conversation with Sarada Devi.
I study both photographs for a long time. In the last one she’s almost beautiful…
“A penny for your thoughts.”
“What I think? That in her face you can see all the narrowness of the English…”
“The Irish,” he corrects me.
“Are they very different from each other?”
“Very—and some Irish can’t stand the British.”
“So that’s why she left, then! …Narrowness—but also the dignity of a small, steadfast people. How brave of her it was to leave everything—homeland, culture, even faith—to follow her Prince! I couldn’t have done that… Or could I? If I were to imagine, for a moment, that you weren’t an Orthodox Christian… By the way,” I interrupt myself, “who are you, Mr Azurov? I’m no longer the girl who rang you on the phone in March. A year, by my reckoning, has passed. Don’t be afraid, tell me! I won’t run away… now.”
“Hm! Who am I?”
The Prince thinks for a long time before answering:
“I’m an Orthodox person by birth and inner feeling. And at the same time, I’m a person who now, at forty, sincerely believes that God is capable of revealing Himself to all faiths—even if not in equal measure.”
“What an answer!” I whisper. “It seems it leaves me no choice…”
“Choice?”
“No choice but to believe the same thing.”
“I regard your religious convictions with tremulous respect, Dolly!”
“Even narrow ones?”
“Even narr… I mean, that’s not what I meant to say.”
“Oh, never mind! I myself regard any narrowness without respect. And I can’t, after all, consider Nivedita a pagan, the way… Father Vasily would. You know—believe it or not—after the first lesson I told myself: if he starts glorifying Satan, blaspheming Christ, I’ll run from him at once. Confess: are you ashamed to be the teacher of such a fool?”
“No, I’m not ashamed. You’re moving in enormous strides, and I’m happy that in my declining years I can, so to speak, be conducive and instrumental…”
“There—you’re off into your lingo again…”

*

The Prince reads a little to me from Nivedita’s memoirs, translating as he goes. He also reads from Vivekananda’s FOUR YOGAS. That text, perhaps, is rather far from me: straightforward, somewhat journalistic, insistently persuasive, in places a touch crude. Perhaps the foreign language is getting in the way. But one parable, from KARMA YOGA, stays with me: about a lion who grew up among a flock of sheep and learned to behave like a sheep.
“That’s me, exactly!” I can’t help myself. “I was just such a sheep—and then you came along and held up a mirror before me!”
“No, Dolly! You were never a sheep—and I’m not saying it at all to flatter you. I’ve never flattered you, if you want to know—not once. Sooner or later you’d have discovered everything that’s in you by yourself.”
“Yes, I would have… perhaps! If I hadn’t married Misha, or Vasya, or Petya, or Vova before…”
“The question of marriage is still open for you,” he remarks. “The door that led, in your dream, to the little church on the hill, isn’t closed. And I am the last person able to tell you which door is the right one for you.”
“Whichever door I choose, I’ll never be the same as before—and don’t pretend you have nothing to do with it! And do you know what else troubles me?”
“What?”
“You talk about others so well—you read so skilfully, so expressively! Can it really be that you haven’t a single book of your own? Can it really be that you, a graduate of LSU, have written nothing on philosophy or religion?”
“I don’t recall…” he’s embarrassed. “A few sketches, perhaps… In any case, Dolly, you are a very exacting reader. Someone whose reading circle is APOPHTHEGMATA PATRUM, THE LITTLE PRINCE and THE SINGING HEART will judge any text very strictly.”
“Laughing again?”
“No, I’m completely serious.”
“And wrong to be! I’d so love it if, before your departure, you were to write something personally for me! Even a little article, or a sermon, or a poem.”
“I shan’t promise you that… but I promise to think about it.”

*

Again we sit up until dark. The Prince is again the first to realise that it’s already late.
“Why are you always in such a hurry to get away from me?” I tease him. “Afraid my head will turn into a pumpkin after midnight?”
“No—but one must give you a rest, too… How timely your scarf is! The evenings are still cold…”
He leaves. I write my diary and finish nearly at midnight. While I write, I think through everything said today once more. That’s probably why my words on paper look more polished than in life. And so be it! This diary is not a verbatim record. I need it for myself—for study, for the work of understanding. Perhaps one day it will be of use to someone else, too…

 
* * *

14 April 2009, Tuesday

In the evening the Prince confesses that he’s prepared something for me.
“A scarf as well?”—I can’t hold back a smile. “Pink, I suppose? Or fox ears? Or a tail?”
“No—not a scarf, and not ears… Not a poem, not a sermon, and not a lecture. I don’t even have a name for this text! But yesterday I already wrote two chapters.”
The Prince reads aloud two chapters of his astonishing, nameless composition—”On the Retinue” and “On the Rose”. He finishes, and we sit for a long time without speaking. He surely wants to ask my impression, but doesn’t dare.
In the second chapter, in the discussion of the “planet of drunkards”, there’s something eerie. It speaks of a hell for the dissolute, of course. What a strange warning, if one considers it was written only for me! Or—do I need that reminder too? Does everyone?
“Will you let me copy them out?”—I manage at last.
“Why copy them? I’ll leave you the whole text, my manuscript. After all, I’m not leaving tomorrow!”
“Thank you! Tell me—though I shouldn’t ask… Was Alya Florenskaya your Rose? The real one?”
“You’ve put your finger on the sore spot, Dolly.”
“Oh, I am sorry!” (I don’t know the word sore—I’ll look it up in the dictionary later—but I seem to read his thoughts directly.) “It probably still hurts…”
“Almost not any more. I’ve no time for sadness—I have so much to do! The preparations for the trip, and—one young disciple.”
“Yes, I shan’t let you rest! One more thing I wanted to ask: by ‘sheep’ did you mean our whole class?”
The Prince laughs:
“No, Dolly! First, it would be tactless to call them that. Second, it would be too much of an honour.”
“For you?”
“For them.”
“Do you know what I’ve been thinking, Mr Azurov? By the way, here’s another problem: I don’t know what to call you now! ‘Alexander Mikhailovich’ is terribly cumbersome.”
“Call me simply Bond. James Bond,”—he suggests jokingly.
“Where’s that from?”
“Have you never watched a single James Bond film, you innocent soul?”
“I haven’t. Have I missed much?”
“You’ve missed nothing at all… Then Max.”
“Why on earth?” I don’t understand.
“Stierlitz’s first name—his Christian name.”
“I won’t call you Max: it sounds as if we’re in a pub. Oh, forget it! I won’t call you anything at all—you’ll go about nameless! So—do you know what I’ve been thinking, mister? There’s something in you of Leo Tolstoy.”
“Goodness! What an unexpected thought!”
“And entirely my own! What I mean is not his writerly side—the religious one. You, with your talents, could easily compose a ‘scripture’, declare it a revelation, and found a new cult.”
“…In the name of Alexander Azurov, you mean? ‘The Azurov Park of Culture and Recreation’?”
“In the name of James Bond.”
“I hope, Dolly, you don’t think I’m writing my text for that?”
I grow ashamed.
“No,” I whisper. “I don’t think it…”
“Don’t be so timid: perhaps you’re very close to the truth. Philosophy has always been the sister of religion—even the rival sister…”
“…Like Olya. Sorry, that’s just me, talking to myself. Go on!”
“…The rival sister—after all, it wasn’t for nothing they executed Socrates. And some philosophers, even in more recent times, really did lay claim to the role of prophets—Nietzsche, for instance. Though Schopenhauer too was almost deified by his followers, come to that…”

*

A. M. tells me about Nietzsche and Schopenhauer—at length, in detail, lucidly, absorbingly. He apologises for not being able to quote verbatim: he didn’t bring their books with him.
“No great loss!” I answer. “I shan’t read either of them, anyway.”
“Why’s that?”
“I don’t want to read a man for whom ‘God is dead’. He’s dead himself!”
The Prince laughs merrily and claps his hands.
“I didn’t mean to say something witty,” I try to justify myself. “Sorry for that.”
“But you did—without meaning to—and how skillfully! And yet the Nietzschean ‘God is dead’ is, mainly, a way of needling the philistine, a provocation, a bold joke, if you like.”
“Provocation, provocation…”—I grumble. “We know these provocations! We saw one on the twentieth of March! ‘So Do Mites’! I mean SO DO MITES, the book for kids—what did you think I meant? And if it’s a joke, I don’t want to be friends with people who make jokes like that!”
“Nor am I suggesting it! I got over all that long ago…”
“There, you see! If even you—you, Alexander Mikhailovich, the cleverest person I know…”
“Well, now!”
“Don’t worry: I don’t know many people—coming from a village fool, that’s a so-so compliment. …If even you didn’t escape the sin of Nietzscheanism in your youth, it’s frightening to think how many young people that black hole has swallowed!”
“Yes,” he agrees. “Many, I think. The thought of one’s ‘superiority over others by right’ is attractive to an unformed mind—and in youth, with strong muscles and a quick wit, it’s so easy to ‘surpass’ others and imagine it’s forever.”
“Tell me, could you write…”
“…A penitential word?”
“No need for ‘penitential.’ You’ve already repented, haven’t you?”
“I don’t remember, to be honest. And just in case, I repent anew—before you.”
“Oh, nonsense! I’m not a priest! Not even a matushka…”
“No, not a matushka—but, if you’ve read Ilyin to the end, you remember, Dolly, that we are all guilty. All for all, and each one before each one.”
“I remember… God will forgive, Alexander Mikhailovich.”
“Thank you!”
“About my request: no, not a penitential word—but a warning to young people about the horror of Nietzscheanism!”
He shakes his head:
“Such warnings don’t work—and I don’t know how to speak to young people anyway. I tried for a whole half-year and couldn’t manage it.”
“Then—just for me? How do you know? What if I, when I grow older, am drawn to that black hole too? I need some reminder of its deception—something small, but very firm, indestructible.”
“You’re setting me an almost impossible task, Dolly! But I shall try to carry it out…”
And once more the lecture on Schopenhauer continues. Schopenhauer, it turns out, was not original in his e-p-i-s-t-e-m-o-l-o-g-y (I ask for that word to be dictated to me syllable by syllable). His entire epistemology comes from Berkeley. This flows smoothly into a discussion of Berkeley. I listen, trying not to nod off.
“You’re already falling asleep!”
“No, no,” I perk up. “I’m not sleepy in the slightest. It’s interesting, really! In any case, it’s more important than maths. I can get by in life without logarithms. But that we always see images of things, not the things themselves—that’s unexpected. Unexpected, astonishing—and it makes one rethink a great deal. At your lesson Natasha tossed just such an image into the air, and everyone seized on it—when what was needed was to look at the root!”
“SO DO MITES, and why they do that?”
“Yes—exactly. To look at what drove her to it!”
“Jealousy…”
“No: at what drove her to commit the original sin!”
“Thinking about such things is hard work,” the Prince remarks. “And not always a pleasant one.”
“…And a necessary one, even if it’s unpleasant. There’s your Berkeley for you. Well done, Berkeley!”
“I’m struck by how you’ve seized the most important thing in the most complex material.”
“No, there’s no merit of mine in it,”—I confess honestly. “You simply explain well. Honestly so.”
And yet my eyes are sticking together, sleep tugs at me: I’m not used to thinking about these complicated things for so long. The Prince, noticing this, jokingly promises to find a less soporific subject for tomorrow. We say goodbye for today.
Tomorrow there’s a maths test, for which, of course, I haven’t prepared—and I shan’t prepare. I’m writing my diary instead. Here—this is my mathematics.

* * *

15 April 2009, Wednesday

For the test, of course, I got an F.
Here’s how it happened: we wrote it over both lessons. It consisted of six problems. Out of the six, I solved exactly two and, having sat for a while, understood I’d not manage another blessed thing.
At the small break between the two lessons, no one left the classroom. Only I go up to the teacher’s desk (it’s exactly one step from me) and hand in my sheet.
“What is it, Smirnova?” Nadezhda Stepanovna is astonished. “Done?”
I nod.
Nadezhda Stepanovna, arming herself with a red pen, quickly looks over the first problem and puts a plus next to it. Next to the second, a minus. She announces:
“One problem out of six—that’s an F. Are you sure you’re handing it in? Think, Daria, think carefully! I’m giving you a chance: sit down, sit a while, write something else.”
“Thank you, Nadezhda Stepanovna, but I won’t sit anything more out, forgive me,” I answer. “My head’s foggy. I didn’t sleep till one in the morning yesterday.”
The girls behind my back whisper, snigger in low voices. At first I don’t understand what they’re laughing at, and when I do, my ears start burning with shame.
“Shame on you!” I hear Olya’s furious whisper behind me. “Have you lost all shame!”
Nadezhda Stepanovna, putting on an impenetrable, stern, almost angry face, accepts my work and permits me to leave the classroom.
Unpleasant… But do I care a fig! They’ll scrape me a C for the term somehow. In two months I shan’t see any of them again anyway—not the teachers, not the girls.
“And I shan’t see the Prince either,” my heart clenches. “For a long time. Half a year.”
But how can they have no shame?! On the other hand, come to think of it, what should they be ashamed of? I spun a fairy-tale about myself—two fairy-tales, the one about the seminarian and the one about the rocker. So I’m reaping exactly what I’ve sown.

*

In the evening I dump all my troubles on A. M.: today’s idiotic story, and the reconciliation with Olya on Palm Sunday, and the falling-out with her the day before, and her threat to ring the police, and the fib I spun for Sonya. The Prince listens attentively and doesn’t laugh. He almost frowns. My heart sinks into my boots at his frown.
“Forgive me for bothering you with my foolishness!” I’m ashamed. “It’s just that I’m alone in the whole world! I’ve no one else to turn to for advice…”
“Every person in the whole world is alone,” he answers thoughtfully. “I… don’t know what advice to give you, Dolly. Perhaps in your place I wouldn’t have spun the tale about the rock musician. Or perhaps I would—I haven’t been in your shoes; three of my friends didn’t lock me in the Recreation Room with a mop… It’s not for me, definitely not for me, to judge you! Try, as far as possible, simply not to do yourself harm.”
“And you?” it escapes me.
“I worry least of all about myself. The days remaining till my departure I can wait out in Moscow too, if need be.”
“Please don’t go to Moscow!” I beg pitifully. “We’ve so little time as it is! Of course, I’ve no right to ask you—who am I to you? Precisely no one. And yet…”
My eyes fill with tears.
“You are my Fox,” the Prince answers, “and you have all the rights of the Fox over me. I shan’t go anywhere before the date I told you. Please let me know if things at the gymnasium go altogether badly. All right?”
I nod, swallowing tears.
The Prince suddenly takes a folded sheet of paper from his diary, folds it into a concertina, opens this concertina into a fan, and begins to fan me with it.
“What for?” I don’t understand. “What are you doing?”
“So the little tears dry faster,” he explains.
I laugh against my will.

*

Today we study poetry. A. M. announces that he overloaded me yesterday with “immovable” philosophy and therefore intends to arrange a lighter day today. Which poet would I like to begin with?
“With Christina Rossetti, of course!” I answer, and he nods, smiling with the tips of his lips alone.
The Prince tells me a little about Christina’s life. A dear person, infinitely close to me! (She, not he. Though he too, of course.) Then he reads the full version of “Up-Hill”—the poem four lines of which he once blessed me with. (I keep those four lines!) First in English, then in a translation by Viktor Toporov, with whom, he says, he was acquainted for a time. After his reading, we are silent for a short while.
“Every word here is like a nail,” I remark.
“Heavy? Sharp? Or driven deep?”
“All three. One more thought: Christina was a Christian, an absolute Christian, not like Nivedita, who in her India went all Hindu. But she too says that after death we shall find—how does it go?..”
“ ‘Of labour you shall find the sum.’ ”
“That’s it! The sum of one’s labour. And that sum, of course, will be different for those who simply lived a good, honest life and those who chose monasticism—isn’t that so? There’s the answer to my old question—and no need for any ‘intermediate paradise’. Isn’t it?”
“You’ve said all that beautifully.”
“And why didn’t y-o-u say it to me on our first Saturday?”
“If I had, you might not have heard me—you’d have reproached me for undermining your native faith,”—the Prince answers judiciously.
“Yes, I wouldn’t have heard. Funny: what a thing I was… Everything ripens in its time. What else have you got in store for me?”

*

A. M. reads Pushkin. Unexpected! For any Russian schoolgirl, Pushkin—whom they stuff us with in horse-doses from childhood—is a mortal bore. But this is a completely different Pushkin, not familiar to me at all.

When for a mortal the noisy day falls silent,
And on the mute squares of the city…

And so on—the whole poem, in full. He has a remarkable voice. Or rather, the voice itself is perfectly ordinary, but for me his voice is like cold water for a thirsty person.
Soft waves of some sweet horror pass over me one after another while he is reading it.
“What is it about?” I ask quietly when he finishes.
“About repentance. And also, of course, about the mysteries of eternity and the grave. This poem is slightly opaque, not transparent. And it’s good that it is, because the most important thing can’t be spoken in words.”
“I shall remember that…”
For a while we are silent.
“You’ve already given me two gifts today, and to me, fool that I am, it’s still not enough,” that’s me again. “I’m shy to ask, but… might there be one more?”
“There is—how could there not be! I’ve prepared a third for you.”
“Well—read it, then!”
“Only I don’t know in which language. A Russian translation exists, but it’s rather weak.”
“Then translate it yourself!”
“I hope to, one day.”
“Read it in English!”
“It’s Rilke,”  he explains. “So—only in German.”
“I forgot, you lived in West Germany…”

*

The Prince begins to read Rilke. Now it’s not simply waves. I feel a high-voltage electric current humming inside me, in my whole body.
And I feel many other things. I feel, for instance, how all the little hairs on my arms have stood up. “The Fox bristled.” Almost funny…
And one more thing—I’m shy to write this—I understand every word while it sounds, as if once, long ago, I studied German.
The poem ends. We are silent.
“Goodness me,” I whisper. “Now I know what happened at Pentecost.”
“What, then?”
“This very thing.”
“You… understood?” he asks, even a little incredulously.
“Yes, I understood. It’s about the Secret Life. That is, about God, of course.”
“And now it’s my turn to say, ‘Goodness me!’ You’re a mystic, Daria Arkadyevna.”
“Alexander Mikhailovich, I have two requests for you,” I ask quietly.
“Anything at all.”
“First: never, never tell anyone that I understood this poem in a foreign language. All right?”
“Of course,” he agrees. “And I’ve no one to tell, anyway.”
“And second: please write it down for me in my diary!”
A. M. sits down at the table and does what I asked. He raises his head, smiles:
“I have a presentiment of your third request today, too, Dolly.”
“What would that be?”
“For me to leave straight away.”
“No!” I breathe out. And, after a moment’s thought, I add: “Though, yes. Whatever we spoke of now, it would be pale.”
The Prince nods and leaves. Neither of us even remembers dinner. I repent later: I didn’t feed him!
I remain with my evening’s work: to recall once more, to relive these three poems, and to write my diary.
He left Pushkin on my table.
And now—a minute of German. I carefully cut out that page and pasted it in the right place.

Geheimnisvolles Leben Du, gewoben
aus mir und vielen unbekannten Stoffen,
geschieh mir nur: Mein Sinn ist allem offen
und meine Stimme ist bereit zu loben.

Wenn du mir weh tun willst, so komm und schneide
mein Herz entzwei, das tausendfach empfindet,
blende mein Aug mit Brand, bis es erblindet;
ich glaube, dass ich wachse, wenn ich leide.
Und wachsen will ich nun um jeden Preis.

Rei; mich hinauf an meinen Haaren,
dr;ck mich der Erde in den Scho;!
Nur lass mich deinen Sinn erfahren,
denn ich vermute: Du bist gro;.

Lass mich nicht sterben, eh ich wei;,
wie sich der Tod zu dir verh;lt.
Ist er ein Widerspruch der Welt?
Ist er ihr Heil?
Ist er ein Teil von dir, des Lebens Teil?
Weil ich ihn nur so denken kann—im Leben.

Du musst mir nicht sagen, wie alles ist.
Du musst mir nur einige Zeichen geben
und mich mit allen Dingen verweben,
darinnen du verwoben bist .
 
* * *

16 April 2009, Thursday

Maundy Thursday. Dripping eaves, April sun. I’m washing the windows in my little flat, hurrying to finish before the Prince arrives. Misha’s call catches me at this task. How inconvenient! But I pick up, of course.
Misha asks me to meet today, and he asks insistently.
“Misha, I’ve already got plans,” I answer, almost crossly. “Can our meeting really not wait till tomorrow?”
No, it can’t, because tomorrow, he explains, is Good Friday. They definitely won’t let him into town. Even today he barely managed to get permission! Under the personal responsibility of Father Varlaam.
With a sigh, I promise to ring back in fifteen minutes.
Naturally, having hung up, I immediately dial A. M. and incoherently tell him about the call from my fianc;. What should I do? If only he’d talk me out of it…
“It’s all right, Dolly,” I hear on the line. “We’ll cancel today’s lesson. Everything’s fine, word of honour! ‘Harlequin withdraws on tiptoe,’ as the unforgettable Jean-Paul said in THE PROFESSIONAL—only not Richter, but Belmondo…”
The phrase about Harlequin suddenly stings me. Stings—what am I saying! For a second (I’m shy to write this) I can’t even find words for fury. I breathe out:
“What kind of Harlequin are you! You… you’re a regular Punch! Shame on you!”
“But, Dolly, think: what are you scolding me for? What should I be ashamed of? You’re sorting out your personal life—and that’s splendid, wonderful. When, if not at seventeen, should one sort it out! Naturally, any philosophy will be a little superfluous today…”
“I’m not sorting out anything! I’m forced, it seems, to meet him—otherwise he’ll complain to his relatives, they’ll complain to Aunt Lyuba, and my whole deception with the seminarian will be exposed!”
“That’s sensible.”
“Promise you’ll still drop in on me today!” I ask, almost plaintively. “Around seven, eight—even nine. Even without a ‘lesson’, without any new material. Do you promise?”
The Prince promises.

*

Misha is waiting for me in a small square not far from the seminary, by a tall metal column with a double-headed eagle on top—the one the Bolsheviks destroyed and the present authorities restored four years ago. The snow in the square has already melted completely; it’s dry. The benches are still slightly damp, but Mishutka has thoughtfully provided a tourist seat made of foam matting for me. He often uses it himself when he sits here. Poor lad! He can’t go far from the seminary—he’s tethered to it by a lead… “Father Varlaam isn’t watching us from the window, by any chance?” I’m dying to ask, but I restrain myself.
We sit down. Misha, after a silence and a cough, begins to speak.
He’s figured out my recent question about the pretty girl. It was a test, wasn’t it? He doesn’t need any pretty girl. He doesn’t need any other girl at all, in fact. He needs me, Dasha Smirnova.
And he’s understood the reasons for my question, too. Was I offended at him for something? For his joke about our gymnasium being a “production line for brides” for the seminary? He said it without thinking—and what’s so offensive about it… (“No, no!” I protest.) Then for the joke about the Bishop—about his “daring”? But he said it with all respect, even with admiration… (I don’t even remember any joke about the Bishop.)
To cut a long story short, he’s ready to become engaged this very day. True, it’s Maundy Thursday… but surely it’s not forbidden even on Maundy Thursday to promise yourselves to each other. And he suggests the wedding on Krasnaya Gorka —or, in any case, no later than June. The Bishop’s blessing will be needed for marrying a minor, but Father Varlaam says he’ll see to that… There, that’s it.
I look into his face. If I were vain, like Ksyusha, I’d probably rejoice at how quickly I’d won the lad. No, it’s not rejoicing I feel, but wanting to cry. Misha came prepared, thought it through, didn’t lose his nerve in saying everything he’d planned. A splendid lad! What has he found in me? How did he manage to get himself into this! How unjustly life is arranged!
“Misha, dear,” I say with sharp pity, “forgive me for the question about Alya Florenskaya. I wasn’t offended at anything. I… oh, how hard this is. I don’t love you. Without love you can’t build a good family…”
All the blood drains from his face, and he wasn’t rosy to begin with. The lad’s underfed: it seems they get nothing but lenten food there… We sit for another minute. Misha coughs again:
“I… shall go?” (He’s already risen.)
“No, you’re going nowhere!”
I seize his hand and sit him back down on the bench. I begin to speak—in terms he’ll understand: that I’m undergoing a spiritual obedience. That’s why I moved out of the gymnasium into a rented flat, using him as an excuse: let him excuse me my little lie and let him not be in a hurry to contradict it if he’s asked.
The part about the little lie seems to fly right past his ears. Misha still doesn’t understand. An obedience? To… some sort of elder, or what?
“Yes, something like that,” I confirm. And indeed: how else am I to explain it to him? Misha definitely doesn’t need to know about Vivekananda, Rossetti and Rilke, so let it be an elder.
“And… from which monastery?”
(“In the name of James Bond,” it hovers on the tip of my tongue.)
“I can’t answer—I’ve no right.”
“And does the elder… not give you his blessing for marriage?”
“He does—why not! But he says I also have a talent for monasticism. I have to choose for myself, and I haven’t chosen yet. I haven’t chosen, but… you know, I’m strongly inclined towards secret monasticism—in the world. So don’t be upset, my good one. You see, it’s not about you! I probably won’t belong to anyone else either.”
Misha is silent for a short while, then suddenly says something entirely unpredictable:
“One of my grandmothers has a creeper growing on her windowsill.” (“Lucky fellow—he’s even got grandmothers alive!”) “A creeper like any other, nothing special, like Virginia creeper, only the leaves are smaller. She puts supports in for it and trains it into a ring. And once every half-year this creeper flowers. And what a flower—if only you could see it! Not even exactly beautiful—roses are more beautiful—but unlike anything else: cosmic. You’d never expect such a flower from such an unremarkable plant. You, Daria, are like that flower. The plant is called passionflower.”
I’m so touched I can barely hold back tears. No, I was wrong, wrong to foretell so hastily that his sermons would be boring! If he can find images like that, they won’t be boring at all.
We stand up and say goodbye—most likely forever. Looking him straight in the eye, I say:
“May everything be well with you. You deserve the best girl in the world!”

*

The Prince comes past eight o’clock. I tell him about the meeting with Misha. He listens attentively, without his usual smile. He asks:
“So you’ve made your choice in favour of monasticism?”
“No, I haven’t made it yet… But today the door to the Desert opened a little wider for me, and the other door closed a little.”
“Don’t be in a hurry to choose—and don’t allow anyone in the whole world to decide for you.”
“All right, I won’t. I think my heart made its choice far earlier than my foolish head.”
“How’s that?”
“Like this! I’ve had two spiritual fathers, two mentors, this year: you and Father Vadim. Father Vadim is a married man, and you’re single. We seek out those from whom we can learn what we need. If I wanted marriage—truly wanted it—I’d be listening to Father Vadim, so he could instruct me in the duties of a matushka. And yet—look, where is he? I ran away from the gymnasium. I’m trying to learn from you… and you keep running away yourself!”
“Running away?” he’s struck by my unexpected accusation; I’m struck myself. “No, surely not!”
“Of course you are! Remember: after my first meeting with Misha, you ran off to another city!”
“I’d made the appointment with the doctor in advance…”
“I know, I know I’m talking nonsense—and yet, you see, I can’t stop! You’re so unobtrusive, so tactful, as if I were a mimosa! My poor wee thing… I bet you’ll dream up some pretext for these weekends too, so as not to see me!”
The Prince looks at me, smiling slightly, and, as if suddenly making up his mind, suggests:
“Would you like to go with me to Zagorsk for the weekend?”
“I would,” I answer, before I’ve even had time to think. “Where’s that?”
“Sergiyev Posad,” he explains. “The old Soviet name.”
“To Sergiyev?! To the Lavra, on the night of Pascha?! Of course I would!”
“I’ll buy the tickets today, then…”
“How will you buy them without my passport, you muddle-headed man?!”
I place my passport before him. A. M. sits down at the table and copies my passport details into his diary, humming under his breath:
“On the road to Zagorsk…”
“What’s that you’re singing?”
“A romance, on verses by Evgeny Blazheyevsky.”
“Why have I never heard it? Sing it all, please!”
“A fine singer I am…”
“That doesn’t matter! We’re not at a concert—we’re in… a cell, where spiritual guidance is taking place!” (I’m clearly cross with him about something.) “A fine time to be thinking about what sort of singer you are! Please…”
The Prince sings, quietly. His voice is ordinary, but he reproduces the melody accurately.

On the road to Zagorsk you understand, without meaning to, that time
Is no caftan, and no one is granted to resew fate.
Either the vodka’s grown sweet, or the jam has turned bitter,
Or autumn is a bad season for a poor heart…
And the words from the romance—”I’ve nowhere left to hurry!” —
Make you want to shout into the driver’s buttonholed ear.

I stand up and pace the room. At last it breaks out of me:
“I don’t agree! I don’t agree!”
“With what?” he’s astonished.
“With your mood! Where did you swallow a sadness-pill? What makes you think you won’t come back from your ‘posting’? You’ll come back, don’t you worry—and we’ll be friends, for a long, long time! And you’ll have other spiritual children—with me you’ve only just begun, and well begun is half done! Do you understand?”
“Perhaps…” the Prince smiles weakly. “I’m a poor teacher today—I’ve precisely ‘swallowed a sadness-pill’, as you so accurately put it, so don’t scold me too harshly, Dolly! I’ll be off soon. Forgive me for not being in very good form today. I’ll make up for it, I promise. Do you… have a glass of water?”
I bring water at once. (To wash down a tablet, of course.) I ask, with unease:
“What’s wrong with you?”
“My leg’s started aching again. An old injury.”
“Why doesn’t our state look after its valuable specialists… Shall I call you a taxi?”
“No, I’ll walk.”
“I’ll go with you! Just in case…”
We make the whole journey to his flat together; he’s limping. I return home after dark, by taxi—which he called for m-e, not listening to any of my objections. Foolishness!
Back home, I put a stool in the storage closet, shut myself in there, turn off the light, and wait for my feelings to settle. I’m dissatisfied with myself. I’m too blunt, too quick to strike, there’s still too much “village roughness” in me. “I don’t agree!”—really! A fine one I am… the Cumaean Sibyl! Perhaps I did touch a nerve, after all. If I hadn’t spoken about the sadness-pill today, who knows—he might not have thought himself a poor teacher, and the lesson might still have taken place.
I send the Prince a text:

A. M., you’re not cross with me?

And almost at once I get an answer:

For God’s sake, Dolly, what an idea! No. A smiley goes here.

I sit down to write my diary, smiling too. All will be well, I know it.

* * *

17 April 2009, Good Friday

The Prince reads to me a new chapter—”On Dignity”—from his parable.
He finishes. I say nothing, only ask him to read it once more, more slowly.
Afterwards we are silent again, in no hurry to discuss. With him, even being silent is pleasant.
“So many thoughts… I see now that you’re writing not simply a tale, but… a doctrinal text?”
“Y-yes, perhaps,” he’s clearly embarrassed. “Is that… immodest of me?”
“I’ve no idea… I only know that your new chapter truly does give me a weapon against the enemies of Christ. Space cannot be destroyed, and that’s splendid. Thank you! But is Christ… really space?”
“Christ is everything we can think Him to be—and something beyond that, besides. Do you know Keshub’s thoughts about Christ?”
“No!” I confess. “I’m hearing the name for the first time.”
“He was an acquaintance of Vivekananda’s teacher. Keshub once said: it seemed to him that the gentleness of Buddhists, the wisdom of Vedantists, the courage of Mohammedans—all came from Christ. Isn’t it wonderful, if that’s truly so?”
“But if it is, then… there are no non-Christians in the world at all?”
“Why not! Those who have turned away from good entirely.”
“What a curious Creed! And how does it combine with the Niceno-Constantinopolitan one? Forgive me for asking a question in Olya’s spirit.”
“I won’t take a sin on my soul by saying ‘easily’, and yet I think it does combine.”
“And… the mystery of the Crucifixion?”
“The mystery of the Crucifixion is a mystery—like the mystery of the Incarnation, the mystery of the Descent into Hell, and a multitude of other mysteries.”
“Which we’ll never uncover?”
“Which we’ll uncover without fail—without fail! One day… Ah, Dolly!” he smiles weakly. “You expect from me knowledge of why the King of Kings chose our humble earth and the earthly person of a lad from Galilee, as if that knowledge were my property, as if I myself were the King of Kings or a winged being from His retinue! I’m only a prince, and a Little one at that…”
I laugh quietly.

*

The Prince tells me about all sorts of early heresies, about other understandings of Christ that, it turns out, also existed in the Church—and there wasn’t a unified Church then anyway; there were groups of people arguing with each other till they were hoarse. Christ as “all God”, without anything human (the Monophysites). Christ as not-quite-God (the Arians). Christ as simply a good man and teacher… as a joining of two completely different parts… My head spins from all this, and I ask:
“Wait, please, wait! I’ve stopped understanding how they all differ from one another!”
“Perhaps they didn’t fully understand it themselves, Dolly? Perhaps they were all partly right and at the same time partly mistaken? For a person—a weak, mortal and sinful person—to believe he’s said something definitive about Christ is a little naive, isn’t it?”
“I should say so…”
“To return to your question about the mystery of the Crucifixion: I think it’s impossible to understand it. One can try to live through it—that is, insofar as a person can draw near to it.”
“And that… probably hurts.”
“Yes—most likely,” he agrees. “Would you like to watch a film called THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST?”
“Watch it how?”
“On my laptop. I brought it with me.”
“Oh… about the last hours of Christ’s life?”
“Yes—beginning with the Garden of Gethsemane.”
“No, no, I don’t want to! I won’t be able to stand it—I’ll burst into tears and then cry half the night. What a… weak Christian I turn out to be!”
“We all are, Dolly—all of us, without exception, are only weak Christians.”
“Even the saints?”
“The saints would be the last to agree to call themselves mighty Christians. Remind me, when the chance comes, to bring you some lives of women saints. You received Nivedita with sympathy, but Vivekananda without great enthusiasm—and I connect that with the fact…”
“…That I’m a girl?”
“Precisely.”
“And do you really think of me as a girl?” I can’t resist teasing him. “Only a girl?”
“I think that in understanding the Secret Life—in listening closely to it—you’re as experienced as any seminarian. The average seminarian doesn’t come close to you! Still, in the sense of your innocence and purity you’re a girl, of course. Only a girl could have approached me on the third of April with your astonishing request. And it’s splendid that it’s so!”
“And you… want to give me your blessing to remain always the same?”
“It’s not in my power to give you such a blessing,” A. M. answers. “To give such a blessing would be to encroach on the territory of your free will.”
“I recognise Mr Azurov in all his glory! Do you treat everyone as carefully as you treat me?”
The Prince smiles with the corners of his lips:
“I strive to. But of all the people I know, you, perhaps, deserve it most of all.”

*

We decide to go to the service. I believe such a service is called the Matins of Great Saturday, even though it begins on Friday. The wish is mostly mine; the Prince probably agrees out of a teacher’s duty.
The church is stuffy—many people. From the stuffiness I nearly faint. A. M. carefully leads me outside, sits me down on a bench. He disappears somewhere for five minutes; comes back with water and a caffeine tablet.
“How foolish!” I’m ashamed and say it aloud. “That’s never happened to me before. How many services I’ve stood through, a priest’s daughter…”
We return to mine, unhurriedly. The Prince asks me to go to bed earlier. He’ll call for me in the morning, while it’s still dark.
I do just that, only scribbling a couple of lines in my diary to ease my conscience. I’m finishing the Friday entry already on the train, on Saturday morning.

* * *

18 April 2009, Holy Saturday

A. M. takes an interest in my diary—I’m finishing yesterday’s Friday entry. (Writing on the train isn’t very comfortable. I’ve temporarily switched to printed letters.)
“It’s simply a ‘travel log’, a chronicle,” I explain. “Or rather… if you were to ask to read it, I wouldn’t refuse, of course! But I’d burn with shame.”
“Then I won’t ask.”
“And it would distract you from your own work, anyway. You’re writing a parable about the Prince, aren’t you?”
“Of course.”
“I’m glad that… I’ve spurred you into writing. In my crude, simple, village manner, of course.” (“And Alya, for all her refinement, didn’t spur him!” I think, in that same village manner. But I stay silent: I’m not her rival—never have been, never will be.)
The Prince glances sidelong at me, suppressing a smile: perhaps he’s read my thought. Even if so, he stays silent too.

*

Sergiyev is the holy land of Russia, a fairy-tale town. The houses here are, of course, of the same brick as everywhere, and painted with the same paint. And yet something is subtly different.
We stroll about the town. I’m completely, cloudlessly happy. Is it almost improper to be so happy on Holy Saturday?
I ask the Prince this and receive an answer:
“I think the Saviour died, among other reasons, so that we might be happy.”
“…The way our grandfathers died in the Great Patriotic War. Yes—and it’s obvious, really. Only we aren’t so happy! We’ve been given an enormous gift, and we go on living like ants—like grey mice. It’s embarrassing, for all of us.”
“Well, you’re no grey mouse.”
“What else, then?” I laugh. “In this dress especially…”
“Allow me one day to buy you a couple of dresses, will you? As a gesture of reciprocal courtesy for the scarf.”
“No, I won’t allow it. A scarf for the Prince is a necessity, part of the ‘canon’, so to speak—but the Fox can make do with her own fur. And besides… why waste money! Pay for dinner instead! Fairy-tale or no, they’ll take your money without a blush! A tourist town, an expensive one…”

*

After dinner we go to the unprepossessing cottage where Father Pavel lived. A memorial plaque, beautiful, artistic, is fixed to the cottage, but the house is private, not a museum, and you can’t go inside. I’m a little hurt: not for myself—for our motherland, which finds billions for building new churches, yet still hasn’t bought this little hut from its present owners.
My sadness passes as I listen—on the way to the Gethsemane Skete—to a new account from the Prince about Father Pavel, about that unexpected, wondrous, brilliant mind which, armed with its faith, looked at the whole world in reverse perspective. The idea of the reverse perspective of icons is so obvious that I’m astonished I’d never seen it before.
“You know, Mr Azurov, it’s very like the mistake our whole class made, myself not excluded! We looked at you in direct perspective: what can this oddball give us; why does he show us films, one of which is already outdated and the other practically a hundred years old; why did he drag in that stupid propaganda article about sodomite morals as if it were a new revelation? But we should have looked in reverse!”
“In reverse—how?”
“Like this! We should have asked: what do all his—your—materials say about ourselves? How do they look at us and judge us? What answer shall we give them? In general, the student isn’t a spectator, and the teacher isn’t a film or a landscape. The teacher is an image with reverse perspective. Why, why didn’t you tell us that?!”
“I tried, Dolly—I tried, truly!”
“Yes, you began to try! ‘Education is not conducted for the purpose of making things pleasant for you.’ You began—but you began too late! And why didn’t you simply tell us about Father Pavel?”
“There was no occasion in an English lesson… And you wouldn’t have understood me, most likely. And to the complaints against me would have been added yet another complaint, about extraneous material.”
“We wouldn’t have understood—because we didn’t come with you to Sergiyev?”
“No, not only that. After all, any journey to Sergiyev is preceded by what happens when a former schoolgirl approaches a former schoolteacher and says to him: ‘Your Highness!’ That doesn’t happen often in our world. A schoolteacher of the senior forms is one of the most impossible beings on earth, Dolly. He is called to teach the Good, the Beautiful and the True to bored people, the majority of whom—and herein lies the whole tragedy—never chose him in the first place. To learn anything at all means to pass through the pain of growth, and his nearly adult pupils, with their nearly adult problems, don’t want any additional pain—they simply want to be left in peace. And who can blame them?”
“No one… And could school be restructured differently?”
“If only I knew! I’m not a teacher by profession, after all…”
“And that’s a great pity! Or no, not a pity: if you were only a teacher, you’d have become Viktoria Denisovna in trousers. ‘Sweet spring baccurotes…’ Eurgh!”
The Prince laughs:
“Forget about poor Viktoria Denisovna already—her ears must be burning by now! And, seriously: why can’t you look at her material from a reverse, ‘Florenskian’ perspective?”
“Because it’s not an image—it’s a landscape.”
“Homosexuals in British schools aren’t an icon either.”
“A fine icon, indeed! It’s just that Yeshua is safe. He’s not Christ; he’s the Christ of one of the early heresies: a nice, kind man. He simply heals Pilate, and he’ll heal you too, if you get a toothache. He doesn’t judge you, doesn’t demand you decide whose side you’re on. But homosexuals do demand.”
“And Woland?”
“Woland is so smoothed-over that the Devil’s almost invisible in him. If y-o-u’d been telling us about Woland he might have become…”
“…An icon?”
“An anti-icon. Though Satan does appear on icons too. And there he is as he should be: vile.”
“You have an astonishing ability to think, Dolly! Swiftly, precisely, about what’s truly important. And I’m learning from our conversation, perhaps, no less than you are. I’m learning what I probably ought to have said to your class—and what I said too late, too poorly…”
“And I’d like to learn your tact—because it’s very tactless of me to tell you you’ve done something wrong. Does it hurt?”
“No, it doesn’t. Not being indifferent is the best compliment to a teacher.”
“I don’t know… If one sees things like that, then Natasha paid you the best compliment ever! She certainly wasn’t indifferent! Do you agree?”
The Prince chuckles shortly. After a moment’s thought, he answers:
“Perhaps I’m partly to blame before her, too. Her request to meet me after lessons might have been not only an attempt at seduction—which it clearly was; I don’t delude myself on that score—but also, in a certain sense, a cry for help, even a request for discipleship—simply expressed crookedly and clumsily: the kind of request whose meaning she herself didn’t fully grasp, didn’t know what she really wanted. I pushed her away too decisively…”
“Enough, enough! I don’t want to hear any of it any more! Let’s just load all the sins of the world onto you, shall we? Perhaps you personally shot Father Pavel, too? Men are astonishing creatures: one moment they’re perfectly predictable, the next they plunge into holy-foolery. Being the ‘blessed one’ of our class is my profession! Mine, not yours!”
The Prince laughs merrily. I think with repentance that I’m behaving almost like a quarrelsome wife. I really ought to be a little more modest…

*

At the Skete we stand briefly at the service, then seek out the graves of two great Russians—Vasily Rozanov and Konstantin Leontiev. I write “great” from my teacher’s words: I myself had never even heard their surnames before. But, of course, close to him, they’re already somehow close to me. Rozanov is a defender of Eros, who strove to ennoble it (complicated, not for me). Leontiev was a man who tried to show his contemporaries the attractive face of conservatism.
The crosses above the graves are wooden, weathered…
A. M. finds a small stone by Rozanov’s gravestone and takes it with him.
“You’ll take it there?” I guess. “To the Desert?”
“Yes—and leave it there.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“And won’t you miss your motherland?”
“I will, of course. Will she miss me? That’s the question. I’m afraid, Dolly, my real motherland is an asteroid. The Prince arrived from another planet, and he mustn’t forget it.”
“Yes,” I agree sadly. “Sometimes it really does seem you’re from another planet.”

*

We go to the hotel and rest a little. I ask the Prince to look in on my room in about two hours. (He took two rooms! An odd fellow… Even a little hurtful. Hurtful that he might have thought I’d think badly of him. Though he might not have thought anything at all—I’ve invented it all myself…)
A. M. reads to me a little from Father Pavel, from THE METAPHYSICS OF THE NAME, the chapters devoted to Olga and Sophia. Terribly interesting! Though not entirely about Sonya—about someone else. Sonya, my friend, has not yet become Sophia. About Olya, however, much coincides. How did he discern it all? Not a man—a golden eagle.
“What a pity he wrote nothing about my name, about Daria!”
“But you’re not Daria.”
“Well, good morning to me!”
“You’re Dorofeya, that is, Theodora…”
“Oh, true! I’d forgotten.”
“…And the closest to Fyodor of all those he wrote about is, perhaps, Mikhail.”
“It can’t be! No, it’s a good thing I didn’t marry Misha!” I laugh. “Two Mikhails in one family—what good would that be?”

*

Afterwards we go to the Lavra for Compline. We stand through the Paschal Matins too, of course. There’s not a pin to drop, but standing is easy, joyful. A. M. whispers to ask whether I’m all right. I’m very much all right.
On the way back to the hotel, I take his hand. (The Prince starts slightly, but leaves his hand in mine.) It means nothing and invites nothing! Simply, once a year, after “Christ is risen!”, a person is without sin, and one needn’t worry about such a trifle.
Sweetly I fall asleep. I’ll make this entry on Sunday.


Part Three
Bright Week


19 April 2009, Holy Pascha

At breakfast in a caf; we eat two coloured eggs and a small kulich. The Prince tells me the legend of Mary Magdalene and the Emperor Tiberius—which, of course, I’ve heard before.
“From your father, naturally,” he agrees.
“No—not from Papa. Though who knows… In general, ancient times are closer to me than today or the nineteenth century that everyone’s so mad about—schoolteachers especially. The world hasn’t moved on all that much since the third century, the way I see it! Does that sound ‘obscurantist’? In the spirit of Pobedonostsev?”
Instead of answering, A. M. tells me about Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev and his correspondence with Dostoevsky. A most intelligent man, it turns out! And the way he’s depicted nowadays… Exactly like me after the lesson with Viktoria Denisovna. “History is written by the victors—the history of thought, too” (from the Prince). One of the reasons, he says, for the obscurity of the other Konstantin—Leontiev—at whose grave we paid our respects yesterday.
“And that’s terribly hurtful!” bursts out of me.
“I should say so!”
“But besides the general, official history—isn’t there also a hidden history? What you’re passing on to me—isn’t that a hidden history of thought? And your little book, the one you’re writing?”
“Perhaps…”
“I’ll keep it safe,”—I promise. “It will be my history. My own—no one else’s.”

*

Today we do and study nothing important. We go on strolling about the town. I feel like a schoolgirl on holiday. I tell the Prince all sorts of funny tales from village life—like the rumour that the village shop had finally got in “hind” chicken legs, “meaty” ones, not front ones—and there were actually people who fell for it! I imitate village old women—Granny Gelya, Granny Manefa—and their questions to the priest, like whether you can “christen a pussycat”, seeing as she’s peed all over the floorboards. We laugh together. Probably I ought to be ashamed of spending time so idly? I ought to be—but I’m not ashamed. Everyone has days off, spiritual disciples included.
I ask A. M. to tell me something funny too—an incident from a “posting”. He recalls how in Cairo he was woken every night at exactly two o’clock by the adhan—the call to prayer—and he sings it, masterfully, with complex modulations, exactly like a real muezzin. Some Orthodox old woman recoils from us. We laugh again.
I ask him to sing something else—only not as melancholy as “On the Road to Zagorsk”, and, if possible, something spiritual—not Fairuz, so there’ll be no need to apologise afterwards. Smiling, he demurs. I insist. The Prince sings, under his breath:

There is no rose of such virtue,
As is the rose that bare Jesu.

The words are Christian, but the melody is Middle Eastern. Mr Azurov has a virtuoso gift, in general, for reproducing Arab melodies. Did he overhear this tune somewhere, or compose it himself, on the spot?
“How strangely your carol combines Christianity and the Middle East! What an unfamiliar combination!”
“Indeed… Abba Jijoi, a native of Egypt, would have been surprised.”
“Oh, enough of you! You’re always making a fool of me… One more thought: the Mother of God is the only Rose in the whole world who bloomed in full womanly flower, yet remained innocent. Probably no one else could manage it.”
“True.”
“I wanted to learn from you about…”
“…About romantic love and its dangers?”
“How did you guess?”
“It wasn’t hard to guess,” he confesses. “And the theme itself is heavy and… sad. Let’s put it off till tomorrow, shall we?”
“As if it wouldn’t be sad! You’re a man of the Desert…”
“That’s too flattering to be true,” the Prince remarks.
“No, all the same. …Of the Desert, and the eyes of the Desert look quite differently at what the world considers the greatest joy in life. And that’s wonderful. Who else would have told me that this theme is heavy and sad? Not even Father Vadim would have said it…”
“I’m glad you’re ready to look at it that way too. Otherwise I… you won’t be offended if I say it?”
“I never even thought of it.”
“…Otherwise, yesterday I was a tiny bit frightened when you took my hand.”
(“Frightened”! Of course—I’m a monster, after all!)
“You’re always afraid—you’re always imagining horrors over nothing!” I answer mockingly. “Don’t worry about me so much: if I’d decided to ‘sort out my personal life’, as you put it, I wouldn’t have chosen you—I’d have chosen Misha. And how could I take you away from your… fair lady!”
The Prince laughs, waving his hand.

*

We’re sitting on a bench in the Lavra, drinking hot sweet rosehip tea we bought at the “Archondarik”, the local caf;. A tidy, smiling little old man stops opposite us. He seems to be a local holy fool—not like me, but a real one. He looks at us cheerfully with clear blue eyes:
“Is it a priest with his daughter, then? Or… a spiritual daughter?”
I nod, smiling.
The old man, meanwhile, peers at A. M.: he looks not into his eyes, but at his forehead or slightly above it.
“Is the priest, then… setting off on a long journey?”
I grow uneasy.
“Quite right,” the Prince answers. “Give me your blessing, my dear man.”
Placing his cup on the bench, he folds his hands into a little boat, but the old man doesn’t give his own hand—instead he blesses him from a distance, with a threefold sign of the cross, slow and solemn. Without a word, he leaves.

*

On the train, A. M. reads to me excerpts from Rozanov’s SOLITARIA, under his breath, so as not to disturb the other passengers. He tells me, among other things, about one of the main tragedies of the philosopher’s life. Apollinaria Suslova, the fatal lady of the nineteenth century (what a vile woman!), even after she’d separated from him, wouldn’t give him a divorce. He had to marry his second wife—his most beloved, a meek, believing woman—in secret.
“Unhappy, unhappy woman,” I mutter. “I pity him, of course, but I pity her more. And the priest, too—he took a weight on his soul, marrying a man who was already married. I remember Papa was once asked to do something like that… Eurgh! And Granny Polina, Papa’s mother—she was also asked to marry a second time, with her husband still alive! She’d separated from Grandfather Venya, but she never did marry Sergei, even though she had a daughter with him…”
“Do you judge them?”
“Who am I to judge? Me—to judge Granny Polya or Vasily Vasilyevich? I’m a seventeen-year-old fool who’s seen almost nothing of life! A small sin can stop a great one—and she was blessed for the secret marriage, as you said, by the venerable elder Amvrosy himself. Who am I to argue with Elder Amvrosy! No—but, the horror of it. How love between a man and a woman breaks and tears a person apart! In that sense I’m innocent—I’m a ‘romantic colour-blind person’, it seems—and thank Christ that’s so! And yet Mishutka suffered at my hands. Shameful…”
“But one doesn’t marry and bear children out of pity, surely?”
“I think many people do it exactly out of pity. I’d… I’d have done it myself. On Maundy Thursday I nearly wavered. If I hadn’t approached you on the third of April, I’d already be an engaged bride. I’ll pray for them today! For Vasily Vasilyevich, and for Varvara Dmitriyevna, and for Granny Polya.”
And I really do pray, once I’m home. I pray, and afterwards I write the diary for both days at once. I sit for a short while in my dark closet: it’s my little Lavra, my quiet joy. I’ve come away from the big one, so let me keep a little one.

* * *

20 April 2009, Monday

A rainy day.
The Prince comes at the usual time, around five. He’s less talkative than usual—he even seems a little frightened. After dinner we go through to the room.
“Today’s theme, I take it, is romantic love?”—he begins.
“Quite right.”
“The very theme I wanted to put off—or not to approach at all…”
“Well, I am sorry I forced it upon you! Consider me a lad, someone like a younger comrade, and please be as frank with me as you would be with him,” I deliver a phrase I’d prepared in advance.
“Yes, indeed, ‘in for a penny…’ And it would be wrong to damage our comradeship with my fear—which may be a figment of my imagination. But besides the fact that the theme itself throws me into confusion, I’m the least suitable teacher for this theme.”
“Because they didn’t teach it at LSU?”—I ask innocently, switching on “blessed Feodora”.
“No, not for that reason. Because not one of my… sympathies for the opposite sex has ended happily.”
“Including the most recent one… Sorry, that was crude. But who else am I to turn to? And perhaps it’s precisely such a ‘useless’ teacher, as you say, that I need—because I’m a useless pupil. A ‘romantic invalid’! I spoke about it yesterday already.”
“You’re slandering yourself.”
“No, not in the slightest.”
“Did you never have girlish daydreams, the kind so natural for a girl of fifteen, sixteen, seventeen?” the Prince asks cautiously. “Were you never carried away by Pechorin, Andrei Bolkonsky, Vyacheslav Tikhonov or whoever girls are carried away by nowadays?”
“Whoever it is, it’s definitely not Pechorin and not Vyacheslav Tikhonov… Who do they get carried away by? I don’t know! I never had such daydreams, imagine that. The honest truth. Perhaps I did dream of a prince… only a Little one. And that, as you know, is something else entirely.”
“Astonishing.”
“It astonishes me too. Perhaps I’m… not entirely healthy? Only don’t laugh!”
“It’s not for me to make such suppositions, Dolly! I’m no psychologist—though in one country I successfully passed myself off as one. Not a tricky business—I even had a clientele there! I think you’re simply repelled by what seems to you not entirely honest. Romantic love is a very dishonest theme. Well, then—let’s begin, crossing ourselves and with fear of soul…”

*

The Prince reads to me excerpts from Tennyson’s “Maud”, in Russian, in Kruzhkov’s translation. There’s nothing here, he says, that requires the straining of all one’s spiritual powers. Tennyson is not Rilke.

Come into the garden, Maud,
For the black bat, night, has flown,
Come into the garden, Maud,
I am here at the gate alone;
And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad,
And the musk of the rose is blown.

For a breeze of morning moves,
And the planet of Love is on high,
Beginning to faint in the light that she loves
On a bed of daffodil sky,
To faint in the light of the sun she loves,
To faint in his light, and to die.
<...>
There has fallen a splendid tear
From the passion-flower at the gate.
She is coming, my dove, my dear;
She is coming, my life, my fate;
The red rose cries, “She is near, she is near”;
And the white rose weeps, “She is late”;
The larkspur listens, “I hear, I hear”;
And the lily whispers, “I wait.”

She is coming, my own, my sweet;
Were it ever so airy a tread,
My heart would hear her and beat,
Were it earth in an earthy bed;
My dust would hear her and beat,
Had I lain for a century dead;
Would start and tremble under her feet,
And blossom in purple and red.

(I’ve copied it out from the book he left me. He needn’t have left it, and I needn’t have copied it. Never mind, it’s material too.)
He finishes, and we are silent. It’s not the silence that followed Pushkin or Rilke. This is a silence of awkwardness. Well, I was warned.
“Why didn’t you choose Shakespeare?” I ask at last, to say something. “From ROMEO AND JULIET, for instance?”
“Because Shakespeare is more honest. Tennyson, in this passage, is simply the epitome of dishonesty. Innocent dishonesty, perhaps—the sort people consider forgivable…”
“…But lying without necessity is always bad, isn’t it?”
(Having asked this, I blush. And what about myself? In my case it was precisely from necessity, though.)
“Exactly. What did you hear in it? Share your thoughts!”
“One moment… There, for a start: all these flowers don’t bloom together. Larkspur—isn’t that delphinium, by any chance? O-u-r delphinium bloomed in midsummer. And jasmine, at the beginning.”
“Precisely! I hadn’t thought of it, I confess… And in the original there’s also passionflower: it was the passionflower that dropped its ‘splendid tear’, not the white rose. Passionflower is a fastidious bloom altogether…”
“Passionflower, my acquaintance! And, by the way, flowers sleep at night—lilies do, that’s for certain. Who was he talking to in the night? ‘A junkie’, as Granny Dunya would say… Flowers don’t talk, in fact. Or rather, that’s too crude. Of course they talk! But they don’t talk like that…”
The Prince laughs merrily.
“But those are trifles, probably,” I continue. “Here’s what really stung me: his heart, even if he turns to dust, will ‘burst’ towards this very Maud ‘from under the earth’. Is his beloved Christ, then, to raise the dead? Can any person at all be put in the place of Christ? If we do that, then by that very act we put Christ in the place of any ordinary person! ‘Baccurotes…’ ”
“Exquisitely put. Do you see, Dolly, how the heady fragrance of romantic love completely deprives us of our senses, so that the temporary seems eternal and the eternal, temporary—the human, divine, and the divine, human? And here we’re not even speaking of sexual desire yet: we’ve bracketed it out—but you can’t bracket it out very far; that beast always prowls somewhere near the campfire of romantic love.”
“I see. Hard not to see! Yes, precisely a beast, and I know its growl, too… But, Alexander Mikhailovich, I’d like to understand… to understand the mechanics. How one little lever catches on another. How this blindness comes about. I’d like you to spend your precious time—without joking—on a great foolishness, and of course I’ll understand if you refuse…”
“Well, ask, then, so I can understand whether to refuse or not!”
“Please read me ‘Asya’,” I ask. “Slowly, with feeling, with attention to every phrase, the way you know how.”
“ ‘Asya’ by Turgenev? An astonishing request! Surely it’s read in the ninth form, or something?”
“In the eighth. In the eighth it flew straight past my ears.”
“I didn’t bring Turgenev with me…”
“I brought it! I took it from the school library.”

*

The Prince reads to me “Asya”, in full. I hear this story as if for the first time. A tormenting story! Oh, how one pities people!
And I blamed Misha for not arousing this “intoxication” in me? What a blessing it wasn’t there!
When the Prince reaches
 
“What are we doing!..” I cried and convulsively drew back,

I stand up and, having whispered, “Thank you very much—that’s enough,” begin to pace the room, saying:
“How could she! How could she!”
“She—Asya?”
“She—Lidia Grigoryevna! Our literature teacher in the eighth form of the Troitskoye school. How could she deceive us so! She asked us, ‘Why did the hero renounce his love?’! She led us with questions: because someone else knew about their love, and that knowledge ‘frightened away the timid bird of feeling’. What rubbish! What nonsense! Knowledge doesn’t hinder love! He renounced it because he never even thought of marrying the girl—he said as much to her brother! That’s no ‘fragile bird of feeling’! That’s—forgive me—a sin, because it’s a sin to sleep with a seventeen-year-old girl without the intention of marrying her, and a sick girl into the bargain!”
“How glad I am that on the twentieth of March my taboo held me back!” the Prince remarks. “Otherwise my ears would be burning with shame right now…”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean…”
“It’s all right. Go on! ‘…a sick girl into the bargain.’ ”
“Yes, sick! Asya is ill. The hero flies to her illness like a bumblebee to a flower. Not for me to speak, with my colour-blindness—that’s an illness too—but… How strange it is—to desire a sick, unhappy person! If he’d truly loved her, he’d have thought for a moment about what she actually needed! Perhaps not marriage at all…”
“I confess I was thinking the same thing while reading: it’s good that we reread it together. What else did you notice?”
“The hero is a coward,” I blurt out. “It wasn’t time he lacked—it was courage. ‘Judge for yourself—can I now…’ And why not?! It’s not that he ‘couldn’t’—he didn’t want to! Well, that’s his affair. To each his own. But then what right did he have to d-e-s-i-r-e her? Why did he go to the rendezvous at all?! He could have passed a note through her brother… And why do teachers all across Russia, year after year, grow tender over his cowardice?! Ah— ‘a tale of first love’! Of first betrayal!”
“Not everyone will agree with you, and I wouldn’t judge N. N. so very harshly, but…”
“But you do agree?”
“Fully. My judgement, I should note, is worth little. I myself am an unfortunate man, a sick man, and…”
“And the beast!” I interrupt. “Before I forget: the beast of carnal love, the one you spoke of! It really does prowl nearby all the time! Oh, how blind I was in the eighth form!”
I seize the book and read out selectively:
“ ‘Those eyes implored, those eyes entrusted themselves, questioned, gave themselves…’ ‘—Yours!—she whispered, barely audibly.’ ‘Already my hands were sliding around her waist…’ How infinitely naive one must be to give this to an eighth-former!”
“You, however, didn’t notice any of this in your eighth form.”
“And thank God! That’s all I needed—to notice such things at fourteen! And the girls call me the ‘blessed one’! No, I shall never understand the adult world with its absurdity… A terribly sad story, Alexander Mikhailovich. A story of unhappy people—people deprived of courage, deceived people; of a narcotic that turns the whole world’s head right into old age.”
“Ah, Dolly…” the Prince smiles weakly. “And the technique, or rather, sorry, the mechanics of self-deception, the thing you so wanted to understand? Have you understood it?”
“I have. To look at another through rose-coloured glass. To see in them merits they don’t possess. To close one’s eyes to their flaws, to show deafness to another’s pain. Deafness—that’s practically obligatory. To desire happiness fervently—personal happiness, only for oneself. What’s not to understand! I wish I hadn’t understood…”
We sit in silence for a while.
My eyes suddenly fill with tears.
“Alexander Mikhailovich,” I say in a breaking voice, “am I truly a spiritual invalid, if I don’t see the beauty of this thrice-accursed romantic love? Is it now my lot never to know a woman’s happiness in life either? Tell me! Tell me honestly!”
A. M. slowly shakes his head:
“You are not a spiritual invalid. You are an incredibly rare ascetic flower, and you don’t know it yourself. Lie down on the sofa! I’ll wrap you in the blanket, bring you some water, and sit beside you for a little while.”
I obediently agree. The Prince does all this. With concern he asks:
“Perhaps I should warm some tea too?”
“No—just sit with me!” I ask. “I’ll calm down as it is. Perhaps even fall asleep…”
We sit on, and I calm down almost completely. The Prince, under his breath—barely above a whisper—sings some song, in English. It seems to be about the Christ-child.
“What’s that?” I ask, growing interested.
“It’s ‘A Cradle Song’ by William Blake, from his SONGS OF INNOCENCE.”
“But it sounds like a lullaby…”
“It is a lullaby.”
“Oh!” I’m touched. “Who could imagine: Mr Azurov singing me a lullaby! If only Olya could see this—or anyone at all from our class! A lullaby, then…”
Tears rise to my eyes again. A moment ago they weren’t there—and now, here you are. I can’t hold them back; they stream down in torrents. Where did they even come from? Probably from this unexpected tenderness—from him, a man not very sentimental. Or perhaps, in secret? How little I know about him: perhaps he once wanted a child—a daughter, whom you could wrap up like this and sing a lullaby to—and with no woman did anything work out…
It’s painful to think about that, too. I sob loudly several times (the Prince sits patiently beside me). But relief comes as well: once you’ve had a good cry, it grows easier. I close my eyes, thinking I’ll doze for literally one minute—but I fall asleep: from emotion, from weariness.
When I wake, the Prince is no longer there. On the table is his note:

I didn’t want to wake you up. I will come tomorrow around 5 p.m., as usual.

Below are added four handwritten lines.
 
Sweet babe once like thee,
Thy maker lay and wept for me.
Wept for me, for thee, for all,
When he was an infant small.
W. Blake

And these four lines, too, I shall certainly keep. And what lines they are! So simple, so achingly tender, so deep, with the great mystery of our Christian faith. A. M. never brought anything like this to class. Of course he didn’t—though from him, an experimenter, an “original”, one might have expected it! But thank God he didn’t think of it. These things aren’t read—they’re sung to someone who is in great pain, and that’s when they reach the heart. And to speak of them in class? What foolishness…

* * *

21 April 2009, Tuesday

In the middle of the sixth lesson, the deputy head comes into the classroom and asks me to step outside. (Probably the teachers have already silently decided that it’s all water off a duck’s back for me, anyway. That’s why, since last Wednesday, no one’s called on me in any lesson—no one’s asked me anything.)
She leads me down the corridor by the hand, like a child. Her office, as has become customary, she locks from the inside.
“Well?! Out with it!”
“Out with what, Roza Markovna?”
“The truth—the pure truth! Don’t you want to tell me the truth?”
“To be honest—I really don’t.”
“Then I’ll tell you something!”
R. M. explains how she “tracked me down” and what exactly she “tracked down”. Olya kept her word—stayed silent. It all came out differently.
Her, Roza Markovna’s, suspicions began with Nadezhda Stepanovna, who burst into her office last Wednesday, all seething—steam practically pouring off her! “It’s simply indecent! Why are you allowing final-year pupils to live a married life?” By “married life” she’d obviously taken my lack of sleep.
They calmed the maths teacher down somehow, but a worm of doubt crept in.
Then, on Good Friday, Lyubov Sergeyevna rang her—Misha, through yet another relative, had asked to be spared any further matchmaking. (He didn’t heed my request! Though was he obliged to? He wasn’t—but the lad’s a muddle-head…)
Aunt Lyuba asked her, the deputy head, not as an accusation but with a peasant woman’s lament: how could you allow the girl to move out and live in a rented flat? “How could y-o-u allow it?” Roza Markovna returned the question. “You’re her legal guardian, after all!” — ”But I allowed it for a good cause—for the sake of a future family! And she’s cast Mishka aside—the poor boy’s a shadow of himself…”
So, then—Roza Markovna put two and two together. If she’d “cast Mishka aside”, then clearly she wasn’t “living a married life” with a seminarian. Then she summoned Sonya—yesterday—and put pressure on my friend, and Sonya, almost at once, in tears, cracked, spilling about my “magician” (why on earth a “magician”—because he’d “bewitched” me?)—or was it a “metalhead”? Well, we’ve really landed in it now, holy saints preserve us. “Still waters”, indeed… Well?! And what explanation will be forthcoming from m-e on this score?
“Speak, girl—speak! And if you don’t tell me anything, you’ll leave through that door either with your guardian or with people from Child Protection!”
I’m not very afraid of her threats—though who knows what she might be capable of? But it’s so exhausting to lie… Should I now invent a third fairy-tale? God spare me…
“Do you really want to know the truth, Roza Markovna? All of it?”
“She asks! Don’t beat about the bush with your riddles!”
“Then… may I sit down?”
I sit down and tell the whole truth—about Abba Jijoi, about the third of April, about spiritual discipleship, about my rented little flat, about the yellow scarf. I speak calmly, evenly, artlessly, not taking my eyes off her. At some point in my story, Roza Markovna doesn’t even blush—her face goes blotchy. She makes as if to interrupt me, but restrains herself. I finish.
We sit in silence—I can’t reckon for how long. Someone tugs at the office door. Roza Markovna doesn’t stir. The phone rings. She picks it up and puts it straight down.
“You don’t believe me?”—I ask, with concern.
“I… believe you—because you couldn’t dream up such… delirium in your worst nightmare. Yes—it’s all in the character of… that projector! And in yours, too. There’s only one thing I can’t understand: is he in love with you, or something? What’s he found to fancy… Forgive me, of course.”
“Nothing to forgive. No—not even close. And I’m not in love either.”
“And aren’t you afraid he might look at you—as a woman?”
“I’m not afraid. He’s had a hundred chances to ‘look at me as a woman’. In Sergiyev, for instance…”
“You went to Sergiyev as well?! What for?”
“ ‘What for’! For the Paschal service.”
“Yes, of course… Ah, what a… strange girl you are, truly. And if he did look at you like that, all the same?”
“I don’t even want to think… I’d weep, of course! I’d submit.”
“Ah, child, child… Our bitter lot…”
Roza Markovna hides her face in her hands, repeating:
“Why, why?!”
“I’ve already explained: he wants to prove to himself he’s not the worst teacher.”
“Decided to play Pestalozzi in his old age, then, the fellow…”
“Let it be as you say.”
And again we are silent. A bright thought suddenly comes into my head.
“Rozochka Markovna, may I show you something?”
“What’s this?”
“This is my private diary. I sometimes take it to the gymnasium with me—to reread. Today I brought it too. It’s not for other people’s eyes! You’re the first person I’m showing it to. I know you still don’t fully believe me. But I wouldn’t lie to my own diary, would I?”
I carefully remove the little lock and open the diary at the third of April.
Roza Markovna, with a sigh, draws it towards her and reads. Half an hour passes—more—and she’s still reading. She turns the pages, smiles over some, frowns over others. I wait—patiently, but with my heart frozen.
The deputy head closes the diary. She blinks several times and pronounces, not in her own voice:
“Child, you really are a blessed one. Like Xenia of Petersburg.”
Shaking herself, she adds in her usual, deputy-head tone:
“I have not read this diary, and you have told me nothing. I’ll ring Lyubov Venediktovna today and tell her that the reason you’re living alone now—alone, do you hear?—is that you’re passing through a spiritual crisis, that you’re self-defining in the faith. And I shan’t be lying to her, because it’s very possible that all of this is indeed a crisis. How you sort things out with her—that’s your own affair.”
Instead of answering, I go up to her and simply put my arms around her.
“Now, now—stop those antics!” she demands. “Stop it, do you hear! Stop it… my mascara’ll run, you fool…”

*

From all these new upheavals, I’m drained of blood. I walk about the town for a long time and barely manage to warn the Prince that I’ll be home later. It’s a good thing he has a second key.
“I am so terribly sorry! I didn’t make dinner!” I catch myself on the doorstep.
“Today I made dinner,” he announces, smiling with his eyes. “For the sake of a nice variety. Nothing complicated: cheese dumplings, and I cut a salad.”
“Oh, I’m so ashamed…”
“You had other things on your mind,” he chuckles. “Roza Markovna rang me not long ago. Our testimonies coincided, it seems, so she’s calmed down a little.”

I’ve no strength for a “full-scale lesson”, so we simply listen to music from his laptop: Chopin’s nocturnes.
“Does it… resonate with you?” the Prince asks cautiously.
“Yes,” I confirm. “It’s like a lace tablecloth. Very beautiful. But it’s a fragile beauty, like a graduation dress. You can’t go out into the fields in such a dress. And every person has their own field, where they must work. And for that field we need simpler clothes. But don’t think I’m an enemy of Chopin! It’s good to listen to him from time to time—to watch how the snowflakes whirl…”
“They did whirl today, in the morning.”
“Yes, and now it’s dripping again… If you listen to Chopin too much, then, when you collide with the world—with the vulgarity of the world—you find yourself defenceless. Today I collided…”
“Dolly, is that vulgarity! It’s natural, almost maternal concern—in the heavy-duty gloves of an administrator. You don’t know real vulgarity… And thank goodness.”
“Or unfortunately. I’d like to ‘set out for Khitrovka’ like the Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna. Do you remember, you told me about her in Sergiyev? I’d like to know…”
“…The limits of human baseness?”
“Yes, something of the sort—because you’ll be leaving, for a long time, and life will bring me together with all sorts of people. But not so as to dive into the deep head-first—more like standing on the bank for a while. Is that possible, at all? I’m setting you difficult tasks, aren’t I?”
“Not simple ones, it’s true. You know, Dolly, I have an acquaintance—or rather, a former classmate. A successful man; he now owns a bar called ‘The Horizon’—and there’s a flourish in the name between ‘The’ and ‘H’ that resembles ‘W’. Whore-izon, with your permission. Ever since the autumn, when he heard I was back, he’s been trying to meet up with me—and I’ve been refusing under various pretexts. I could invite him over. I think he’ll provide material for a lesson—and plentifully so.”
“Invite him!”
“Only… perhaps at the dacha? I’d feel awkward if he turned up at your home.”
“Why?”
“You’ll see.”
“Perhaps you’ll hide me altogether when he comes? In the wardrobe, say, so I can eavesdrop?”
(I say this with humour, of course.)
“I would hide you,” the Prince answers seriously. “I’m only worried about you.”
“Well, now! So he’s really an outright beast of prey?”
“Really an outright beast.”
“Let me think… No, I shan’t think: ring him and bring him—only warn me, so I can vanish from his sight beforehand. And let it be here, not at the dacha. I don’t want him to know the dacha’s address!”
“And I don’t want him to know yours.”
“There’s no need at all for him to know about me! And no one needs to know about the dacha. The dacha is the last refuge.”

*

In the evening, after the Prince has left, Aunt Lyuba rings (why not earlier?) and weeps into the receiver. Oh, how… How could it… Such a nice boy…
This goes on for quite a while, until at last I “bark” at her:
“Enough! Enough, Aunt Lyuba! I don’t want to hear anything! I won’t marry your ‘nice boy’—I won’t!” (“Marry him yourself, if he’s so nice!” nearly tears off my tongue. I don’t say it, of course. And that’s more or less what happened in her own life: she also had a church wedding with a ‘nice boy’, who a year later, for no known reason, did a runner. I’ve written about that already. Ah, grown-ups! Your astonishing trait—inviting us to repeat your own mistakes!)
Aunt Lyuba asks to meet with me—she’ll come specially to town for it. With a heavy heart I agree to Friday. I’d have put it off longer if I could…
I’m writing the diary. You saved me today, my dear little thing.
Was it my imagination, or are the girls looking at me strangely now, somehow?

 
* * *

22 April 2009, Wednesday

A. M. has arranged with Gennady, the owner of the establishment “The Horizon”, for this evening. I come home early and scatter books over the table to imitate a creative, “masculine” disorder. I hide all traces of my presence in the storage closet. I’ll sit in there too: I’ve already got a little stool ready. The closet is separated from the room only by a door. I’ll hear every word.
I settle into my hiding place about twenty minutes early and manage to sit in silence for a little while. I think I fall asleep.

I dream of a staircase down which I am descending, very deep, to where black water laps.

I wake to the sound of male voices and the clink of glasses.
Gennady, judging by his voice, is a corpulent, “fleshy” man, a jovial merry-maker—a “jolly good fellow”, as the saying goes. I could look at him through the crack, but for some reason I feel squeamish. The voice is enough.
And what that voice says—holy Lord God!
“The Horizon” is, as I suspected, a den under the guise of a drinking establishment (or rather, a half-den). Relishing it, with details, its owner discusses the going rates for second-freshness c—t these days. (I don’t want to decipher that word: it means a woman looked upon as veal or pork, and in whom they see only one organ.)
“The Horizon” is also a film set for the shooting of “films for adults”. If that’s adulthood, God grant I never grow up! The Prince deep down is just the same as me—a child, I realise with relief, as I’d understood before. That’s my one and only relief in my closet…
In half an hour I learn more vile details about “adult films” than I’d have learnt in a lifetime (and God grant I never learn more). What’s horrifying in all these details is the routine—the ordinariness of sin: businesslike, brazen, and as fearless as butchers are fearless in their trade. And why should they be afraid? C—t almost never murmurs a complaint. True, sometimes the “owners”, the “gods”, show a touch of inventiveness.
No—even here I’ve no need to write down everything I hear. But I cannot forget what I hear: foul little pictures are being seared into my memory.
The glasses clink; the owner of “The Horizon” grows tipsy and loosens his tongue more and more. The Prince, it seems, isn’t drinking; he answers him ironically, with restraint. I feel nauseous; I want to come out and push that “Gena the Crocodile” down the stairs. (I shouldn’t have written “Gena the Crocodile”: that type disgraces the honest name of any crocodile.) I mustn’t do it: I couldn’t handle him. My dear man! Just smash a bottle over his head already!
At last the owner of the den, stumbling, lurches towards the exit. On the threshold he asks the Prince one last time why he’s refusing the generous offer of two luxurious heifers for almost nothing. Impotent? Or more into boys? The door closes. Waiting three minutes, I come out of the closet.
The Prince is gathering the remains of the snacks into a rubbish bag. He turns a guilty face to me:
“I’m very awkward about this… It was a bad idea!”
“I asked for it myself… Ugh! You’d almost want to have the flat blessed after him!”
“It would be good to open the windows wide and go for a walk,” he suggests. “Only wait till his taxi has pulled away. All right—it’s gone now!”
(My windows look out onto the street.)

*

Outside, I’m silent for a while, and then I fall upon the Prince with questions:
“Alexander Mikhailovich, to voice one’s ‘Ugh!’ is foolish: no one would ask anyone to look at a bacterium through a microscope just to exclaim afterwards, ‘What filth!’ No one forced my tongue. I want to make sense of this; to understand: where does such a cast of mind come from—such fearlessness in sin, such blind certainty that after death everything will be over for him?”
“To put it more simply—where does evil in the world come from?”
“No, not quite. ‘The Horizon’ isn’t all the evil in the world! But, by the way, how he’s befouled even the purest word! A horizon—that’s what the desert fathers saw when they looked out from their cells: the edge of the visible world where Heaven touches the Earth. And he’s scribbled his filthy little ‘W’ over it! Did his mother never read him fairy-tales at bedtime?”
“Perhaps she didn’t,” the Prince smiles sadly. “In general, cynicism in dealings with the opposite sex often proceeds from a lack of motherly or fatherly love, Dolly.”
“And perhaps cynicism in general is born from a lack of love?”
“It may well be so.”
“And Natasha… did she also suffer from that in her family?”
“I can’t say with certainty. ‘The heart of another is a dark forest’, as someone once said.”
“Perhaps she was looking for a father in you, not a lover?” it suddenly dawns on me.
“Even if so, she wasn’t able to say it, unfortunately.”
“Who at seventeen knows how to say such complicated things?”
“You managed. That’s why I’m answering your questions now, and not hers. And your questions are of the most complex kind! ‘Evil in the world’ we’ll leave for another time, but about ‘The Horizon’ I’ll tell you…”
The Prince walks beside me in silence for a while, collecting his thoughts.
“Do you remember your dream about Satan, Daria Arkadyevna?” he begins. “Satan is not necessarily horned and hairy. He has a thousand faces—and the most precise thing that can be said of him is the words of an absurdist poem that slip through one’s fingers because we don’t know what they mean…”
“I was going to ask you to write down your lecture about the Jabberwock, just for me! I interrupted, sorry.”
“I’ll try. I think one of the faces of this Being—one of the great demonesses in his hierarchy—is the very spirit that inspires the owners of ‘The Horizon’ and people like them. It is the spirit of the Whore of Babylon from Revelation, arrayed in purple and scarlet, adorned with gold and precious stones. The spirit of the Anti-Rose. And, to be precise, the spirit of the Anti-Theotokos.”
“The what?” I break out in gooseflesh at this terrifying name.
“The Anti-Theotokos,” the Prince repeats firmly. “You remember that there is no rose of such virtue, // As is the rose that bare Jesu? In just the same way, there is no thorn of such depravity, // As is the thorn that will bear the Enemy. The Theotokos is chaste. The Anti-Madonna despises chastity. The Theotokos laboured as a mother. The Anti-Madonna despises the labour of pregnancy and childbearing; she would like to instil the same contempt in all people on earth. The Theotokos gave birth to the Saviour. The Anti-Madonna will give birth to the Antichrist.”
“How will she give birth to him if she doesn’t want to give birth?!”
“By sowing people’s minds with debauchery and preparing them for his coming.”
And again we walk in silence. My heart is pounding; the blood throbs in my temples.
“Will you… write about this in your parable?” I ask timidly.
“I’m afraid not: it’s too terrifying to write about. No more need to write about it in a parable about the Prince than to write out drunken Gena’s confessions in full letters. And who am I, Dolly, dearest, to write of such things? Father Pavel Florensky? Meister Eckhart, perhaps, or Jakob B;hme? I’m a retired drummer-boy to a performing goat, a failed teacher at an Orthodox girls’ gymnasium, a parody of an ‘Arabic Stierlitz’. It’s not for me to announce the Anti-Madonna to the world.”
“But I believe you,” it escapes me. “Know that I believe you!”
“Thank you.”
“It’s hard, Your Highness—so hard! Today…”
“…Gena wore you out today?”
“Gena—what of it! Today I’ve glimpsed one of the faces of Satan, again. Or for the first time. Will you… give me your blessing to pray all night?”
“Dolly, dearest—only not all night, if possible! Tomorrow’s an ordinary weekday, and you have lessons in the morning.”
“Yes, an ordinary one. It’s hard, how our study combines with school… Only don’t you dare disappear! You will come tomorrow, around five, for dinner? You won’t vanish?”
The Prince nods, smiling weakly.

*

In the evening I really do pray for a long time, on the prayer rope I bought at the Lavra. Afterwards I spend half an hour peering inside myself in the closet—and only when I see that I’ve completely recovered from the horror do I sit down to write my diary.
God knows, we don’t know what we want. How skillfully the Prince led me to the very edge—what an abyss he showed me! And how firmly he held my hand all the while!
Christ our God, protect us from the Whore of Babylon.

* * *

23 April 2009, Thursday

No, I wasn’t imagining it. Today at lunch the girls gathered in a huddle, laughing about something; when I came into the canteen, they fell silent. They look at me as if they’re plotting something.
I wanted to go up and ask them directly: what’s the matter? I waved it off…
Sonya might have been able to tell me. But Sonya’s ill—no one to ask.

*

In the evening, the Prince brings three fat books. I sense the lesson ahead won’t be an easy one.
“Who are you going to regale me with today?” I ask. He presses his lips together humorously:
“To begin with—the one who, by your lights, earned the name of hysteric. Your namesake, Dorofeya Arkadyevna!”
“Dostoevsky?”
“The very same. We’re going to storm the heights of theodicy. At the very least, launch a first assault.”
A. M. gives a short preface. Dostoevsky, he says, is decidedly no enemy of faith. He is a Christian—a most Christian—writer. For creating a favourable image of Orthodoxy in general, and of monasticism in particular, he did more than many a metropolitan. And yet it is precisely in THE KARAMAZOVS that he gathers together almost every possible grievance that a secular, educated person might hold against faith—against God! He puts a case against God any atheist might envy. Why does he do this?
“Indeed—why?” I don’t understand.
“I suppose, for the same reason I brought that article about homosexuals in British schools to class! He’s inviting us to think. I shan’t torture you with ‘The Grand Inquisitor’—but we shall study ‘Rebellion’.”

*

The Prince reads to me the chapter “Rebellion”. Ivan wishes to return his ticket to the Lord God. “Stop the earth—I’m getting off.” How familiar…
When he finishes, I don’t rush to say anything—only wrap myself more tightly in my blanket, shivering a little.
“Well, then?” he encourages me. “What would you answer Ivan?”
“I wouldn’t even talk to him,” I move to a chair. “A sick man. He needs treating, not talking to.”
“Precise—clever! But, Dolly, surely sick people do need to be talked to? His brother, who resembles you in so many ways, didn’t scorn him.”
I grow awkward:
“Yes, of course they do! It’s just that such illnesses can’t be cured by talking.”
“I remember that! We’re returning to our conversation on the third-floor bench. To what you told me then: they’re cured by prayer. And there’s great truth in that. But if it were the whole truth, I’d have no need to write that Christ is space. Oh, if only the soul of a believer were always protected from doubt!”
“When doubts come, one should also pray, not philosophise… Very well,” I give in. “Very well, let’s allow it. I’ll try to say something, so as not to look like Natasha or Varya, for whom the material is unpleasant—and that’s that. It’s probably not Dostoevsky himself who’s hysterical, but his characters. Ivan, for instance. Ivan behaves like a child, but a capricious, wicked child. Oh, the world’s not to my liking! Oh, kind God didn’t come down from heaven and build us the Kingdom of God on earth! Oh, they didn’t let me, a little child, get my hands on matches, a hammer and a pistol!”
“Excellent—excellently said… And yet: why was the little girl locked in the privy all night?”
“Because she… and anyway, it’s not for him to say, clever-clogs! How old is your Ivan in the novel?”
“Twenty-four, I think.”
“And had he, at twenty-four, raised so much as a single child? Lost nights of sleep over one? It’s him—a childless man—who sets up to judge her parents?”
“A crude argument, but a weighty one. And what to say to the mother of the boy torn apart by dogs? What will the mother say to the offender at the Last Judgement?”
“And was it the Lord God who tore the boy apart with dogs?”
“No, of course not. Why did God permit it?”
“How could He not permit it? People are made in such a way that they decide for themselves.”
“The great argument of free will, and you’ve discovered it on your own… So, then—is the Lord not all-powerful?”
“He is all-powerful, of course.”
“Why, then, did He not stop the wicked squire?”
“Because…” (I pace the room.) “Because we also learn from pain. From the full measure of pain, not from a toy version.”
“Isn’t there rather too much pain?”
“For whom—for the child? He died and went to Paradise. To your Ivan, Paradise and Hell are obviously empty words! He measures everything by earthly justice. But life doesn’t end on earth!”
“No—but for the mother?”
“Let him find himself in the mother’s place,” I say stubbornly. “Let him find himself there, and then let him decide for himself how much pain he’s ready to bear. What did he do for the mother, clever-clogs? He untied her bloody bandages and began waving them about like a red banner—exactly like some of our girls after Natasha’s stunt. ‘Oh, look how true Orthodox believers suffer!’—that was about me, about the fact that I hid my face in my hands. And they didn’t care a fig about me! And Ivan doesn’t care a fig about anyone or anything except his own grievance.”
The Prince raises his palms jokingly upwards, as if to show he’s surrendering:
“You can’t be knocked off course!”
“And you wanted to knock me off?”
“I wanted to test you.”
“A dangerous test, Alexander Mikhailovich! At the start of our work, I’d have run away from you after it. I’d have thought you were undermining my faith.”
“But… not entirely useless?”
“No—probably not entirely…”

*

The Prince tells me about theodicy—the “justification of God”—and about how “God was justified” by great men of the Church and secular philosophers. I listen and marvel: does God really need justifying at all? All these reasonings can, with some effort, be grasped by the mind, but they don’t catch at my heart.
“You know, Alexander Mikhailovich,” I can’t hold back, “it seems I’m no good as a theologian! I did warn you… I don’t believe any of them—not the first, nor the second, nor the third.”
“You don’t believe their logic?”
“What has logic got to do with it?! Beautiful logic, and we must thank them too, for having laboured for the sake of faith. Only… only do you know what it’s like? It’s as if someone asked you: is it true that nothing happened between you and Alya on the evening of the twentieth of March? Is that terribly tactless?”
“Let’s set tact aside for the sake of the matter. Go on!”
“…Someone asked you—and you started proving that nothing happened. You’d put forward one argument, then another… But what good would it do! No one except God saw the two of you together! Whom would you convince among those who don’t believe you? I believe you. I don’t need proof.”
“The cleverest things you say—a pure pleasure to converse with you… And what if—let’s imagine!—what if Alice, once she’s grown into an adult woman, should want to write memoirs and in them reveal the whole truth? Would I still not be believed then? Applied to God, that’s similar to the argument ad mysticum, not ad rationalem.”
“My Latin’s poor, but I understood. My God, what a naive, dear man you are! They won’t believe you, of course! And they won’t believe your mystic either, even if he sees Christ face to face. When did Ivans ever believe mystics? They’ll say Alya is defending the man she loves, and the mystic is pouring water onto his own religious mill.”
“So, then—all theological learning is meaningless?”
“Mean… no, don’t ask me that! I’m not the Cumaean Sibyl, to pronounce on such things. I’m a girl, Alexander Mikhailovich, and I’m seventeen. Who am I to pronounce on the necessity of theology! Theology is like higher mathematics—and I only just got an F in school maths.”
“I understand!” he seems slightly saddened. “But I shall be so sorry if everything religious philosophy has said about God seems to you merely Ivan’s boring affair.”
“And have you really got nothing else besides Ivan and those… lawyers for God?”
“As it happens, I have. A certain… sermon.”
“Yours?”
“No, not mine. Shall we try it?”
“A pity it’s not yours! Of course we’ll try it.”

*

A. M. reads to me “The Edifying Thought that Before God We Are Always in the Wrong.”
This is an astonishing, astonishing discourse! Several times I stop him and ask him to repeat one phrase or another. By the end I stand up and go to wash my face with cold water: I’ve even grown a little feverish. I come back.
“You’ve perked up and freshened!” the teacher praises me.
“Yes, freshened. There, someone did manage it… I’m so glad! Who is this remarkable priest?”
“This ‘remarkable priest’ is Kierkegaard, a Danish philosopher of the nineteenth century.”
“Write his name in my diary, please. And leave me the book for the night, will you? I’ll reread it. You know, he seems to have spoken straight about me: if we love someone, we don’t want to be in the right in an argument with them—it would pain us. That’s exactly how I felt all evening: in my quarrel with Ivan and the other clever-clogs I kept turning out to be in the right—and, because of you, it was almost painful to me…”
I blush, realising what I’ve said. But A. M. only smiles:
“Let’s call it a day, Dolly. I really did make one mistake after another today, giving you food that was ill-suited for you, until I found the ‘Danish key’ to you.”
“An excellent key… Are you perhaps a little disappointed in me? Would it have been more interesting for you to teach a boy?”
“I’m full of admiration for you, as I am almost always.”
“You didn’t understand anything… in a bad sense?”
“Oh, no! You couldn’t be understood in a bad sense.”
“Tomorrow we’ll begin about two hours later: Aunt Lyuba is coming, I have to meet her,” I recall with vexation. “Is that all right? You won’t run away from me for the weekend? No? Well, splendid…”

*

The Prince looks like a small, steadfast little soldier. He set himself the goal of justifying God before me—dear, funny man—and in the end he achieved it, found words for my faith. He armed me with a clever name. If anyone asks me now, “Whose theodicy seems to you the most convincing?” I can boldly answer, “Kierkegaard’s, who was a Danish philosopher of the nineteenth century.” Only, who’s going to ask me that? Foolish Dasha…

 
* * *

24 April 2009, Friday

A grey sort of day today—grey, hopeless.
The lessons drag on—no use to anyone. Instead of English (they haven’t found a replacement for A. M. yet), they’ve temporarily stuck Health and Safety into the timetable. It’s taught by Vitaly Stepanovich, a former military man. V. S. dictates a most boring lecture in a loud commanding voice. I don’t write; openly, without hiding it, I’m rereading Kierkegaard.
“Daria! Daria Smirnova! Stand up, if you’d be so kind! Two questions for you. First question: what is it you’re reading there? Second question: is what you’re reading more important than the Heimlich manoeuvre, then?”
I stand, smooth my dress. I speak, looking the teacher in the eye, calmly, evenly:
“First answer, Vitaly Stepanovich: I’m reading ‘The Edifying Thought that Before God We Are Always in the Wrong’ by the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard. Second answer: God knows which is really more important…”
V. S., coughing, averts his eyes and permits me to sit. It’s pleasant being a “holy fool”, even if only on the scale of the classroom. Though there’s nothing to be done about the whispering behind my back…

*

Sonya appeared today. At lunch during the long break, I ask her directly:
“Sonya, dearest, do you know why everyone’s looking sideways at me and doesn’t want to speak to me? Have they declared a boycott on me, or what?”
“Oh, how unpleasant… No, Dashenka, not a boycott. They’ve c-e-n-s-u-r-e-d you.”
“Seriously?!” I even half-rise from my seat, look round at my classmates. “You’ve censured me? May I know what for?”
“Sonya will tell you,” Ksenia answers spitefully. Everyone else is silent, buried in their plates.
After lunch we go up to the recreation area and sit on the bench opposite the stairs to the church.
I learn the details from Sonya. It turns out that once you’ve held even one “class meeting”, it’s hard to stop. A new meeting was called the day before yesterday by Ksyusha; Olya, as the new prefect, could have said “no” but didn’t want to. I marvel: What’s Ksyusha got to do with it? What grudge has she got against me? What harm have I done her?
Sonya explains: the grudge isn’t against me personally, but against the “Orthodox camp” as a whole. It turns out Ksyusha sympathised with Alya Florenskaya (well, fancy that!) and especially with her “brave lesbianism” (utter rubbish!). She considered the previous meeting an attack by the “patriarchal majority” on the “sexual minority” of our class. In her picture of the world, it immediately became clear whose side the truth was on. So she wanted to damage the “majority”—and I, being the well-known “banner” of that majority, caught it.
But it so happens that the girls really are displeased with me: not exactly angry, just displeased. They’re cross with me. I allow myself too much (“Just look at today!”); the teachers let me get away with too much. I’ve wrung concessions from the headmistresses that no one else—no one at all—has been permitted. I don’t attend Church History and Divine Law, and that’s actually indecent for an Orthodox girl—and I mustn’t cite the seminarian who’s supposedly going to teach me everything: Father Vadim is an outstanding cleric, not some downtrodden, rightless, and maybe even semi-literate seminarian no one’s ever heard of! I’m shameless. I boast about my “sleepless nights” right in lessons. Everyone wants the same! Every girl would like, after lessons, not to take part in dreary school theatre rehearsals, playing “Virtue” or “Guile”, but to lie in bed with a boy from the seminary, who, as some are aware, is no boy at all! I, being so bold, could lead the movement for the rights of senior pupils! But I couldn’t care less about others’ sufferings… In short, they put the question to a vote and decided, for a first offence, to wag their finger at me. (And what comes next, I wonder—a boycott?) Do I want to know who voted in favour?
I refuse: thank you, no need. Sonya, it seems, didn’t vote in favour. But she almost certainly didn’t vote against, either.
“Censure”—imagine that. “Majority”, “minority”, “self-governance”, “rights movement”… Political life, it turns out, is in full swing here. Grey, worthless scrabbling…
And there’s no need, Sonya suddenly takes offence, no need to look at her like that! The fact that she told Roza Markovna about my “sorcerer”—well, she had every right! I’m still a minor—I cannot possibly know what’s good for me and what’s bad!
Shrugging my shoulders, not entering into argument, I say goodbye and leave. My little friend has, it seems, stayed in the past.

*

Lyubov Sergeyevna comes at the end of lessons; she sits in the vestibule. We go to a cheap caf;. (“What, Daryushka—not to your home?”—”No, Aunt Lyuba, to the caf;.”—”But why…”—”Because.”)
In the caf;, Aunt Lyuba no longer reproaches me for Misha—she scolds me for something else. I’m shiftless, careless. How am I going to pass the Unified State Exam? (Badly, probably. Well—I’m not worried.) What’s all this about a “spiritual crisis”—a “search for faith”? Why did her generation live without any spiritual crises? (I shrug.) She marvels: how am I living—on what, what do I earn? Ah, the flat’s paid for two months in advance? But the two months will end! (You’d better not have reminded me, dear…) So I’ve kicked Mishka out and I’m lording it up for my own pleasure—not good, Daryushka, not good… What university am I thinking of applying to? Though where would I go, with my future grades… Where do I plan to live after leaving school?
Here I grow animated for the first time: what about asking the tenants to leave “my” flat in Troitskoye? Aunt Lyuba takes fright: no, no—how could I! They’ve only just moved in: it wouldn’t be proper… Such a nice family… And surely I’m not aiming to go back to the village? What have I left there?
(And indeed, what? In any case, until I come of age—until January of the new year—I can’t manage my village flat.)
My aunt lets it slip: let me not hold a grudge against her, let bygones be bygones… but one more reason she was matchmaking me to Mishka was that everything would have sorted itself out at once. Now I have no home (she’s right), no prospects (right again). “Daryushka, you ought to find some technical college with a dormitory? I dropped into the sewing one the other day…”
I shrug: let it be a sewing college. Yes, of course, I’ll submit my documents after graduation. Her face smooths out. Well, there—she did what she could. She tells me the news and gossip for a little longer, until she catches herself: the bus!
Why, in truth, do I think so little about the future? Aunt Lyuba’s questions are fair—I ought to think about all this—but I can’t: it simply makes me sick. Perhaps I too, like the Prince, am from another planet?

*

The Prince comes in the evening, two hours later than he might have. (Though I did invite him for seven myself, not knowing how long the meeting with Aunt Lyuba would drag on. Oh, foolish head!) I’m on the point of telling him about all my little troubles. I’m on the point—and I don’t tell him. He’s my spiritual guide, not a career consultant. What can he advise me, if I myself don’t know what I want from life—and I don’t especially want anything, apart from the Desert? And besides, he’s already advised me: with four lines of Rossetti he’s advised me to walk my own path, and no one else’s, to walk it right to the very end.
A. M., meanwhile, peers at my silence and sees my sadness.
“Did I… offend you in some way yesterday? You didn’t believe that I’m on Ivan’s side?”
“No, no… What a thing to say! Just ordinary school troubles. I’ll tell you tomorrow, all right? And you—did you perhaps write another little chapter?”
“I did, of course!”

 
*

The Prince reads to me “The Chapter on the Journey to Other Planets.” I listen attentively and even draw a little ladder in my diary: Drunkard—Businessman—Geographer (alias “Ivan”)—Lamplighter—Fox—Prince. By the measures of his parable, I’m not standing so low! And I’m not worth so little. But by the measures of the world—I’m simply a nonentity…
“Well, now—you’ve swallowed a sadness-pill too!” he remarks.
“Yes, because there are two and a half weeks till the thirteenth of May; because someone is leaving, and someone is staying… Your chapter about journeys is really about the growth of the soul, isn’t it? I like it so much—I’d think about nothing else! It’s just that the Fox, when you leave, will need to dig herself a little burrow, and the ground is hard…”
“Well, or find herself a mate: digging a burrow is merrier together.”
“I already tried.”
“ ‘Well begun is half done,’ as you yourself like to say! And besides, some people spend half their life searching.”
“The last thing I want is to spend half my life searching! Journeys, journeys… On your journey, by any chance, is there no need for a talentless Russian girl who can’t do anything except cook dinner?”
“Alas, Dolly, dearest, alas.”
“I asked just on the off chance—I understand myself that there isn’t. But I too am setting off on a small journey tomorrow!”
“Where to?”
“To Troitskoye,” I explain. “I’ll go by the morning coach and come back by the evening one. I want to have a look: is there really nothing for me to do in the village after graduation? Perhaps I’ll drop into the village council, ask about vacancies… I’d like to get to the Vigil! But then I’ll definitely miss the evening coach.”
“A taxi after the Vigil?” he suddenly suggests.
“What next…”
“No, seriously: I can order you an intercity taxi when you’ve finished all your business and ring me.”
“And you won’t come with me?”
“I was afraid of seeming intrusive…”
“You silly, silly, dear man!”
And so we agree on tomorrow’s journey. My mood improves, and till the Prince leaves we chatter merrily about all sorts of trifles.
I am, perhaps, truly “shameless”, as Sonya said today. I make unscrupulous use of his knowledge, his money, his time; I don’t object when someone pays for my intercity taxi, and I’ve as good as tried to hang my problems on him, as if he didn’t have problems of his own. Shameful, my dear.
My only excuse is that it’s not forever. A slightly bitter taste has this excuse of mine.

* * *

25 April 2009, Saturday

We set off for Troitskoye from the town coach station on the midday coach. (There are only three coaches: morning, midday, evening.) With some delay it dawns on me: the moment I appear in the village, where everyone knows me, together with an unknown man, rumours will start. Well, and what do I care? Aunt Lyuba lives in Guryev, a little town five kilometres from the village. The rumours won’t reach her all at once. When they do, then we’ll think. I can’t spend my whole life being afraid!

*

On the way I can’t hold back—I tell him about yesterday’s “censure” by the class and about the meeting with my guardian. The Prince, in reply, cautiously, delicately asks me about the same things she asked: my plans for the future. How, for instance, could he help if I decided to apply to university? Though his possibilities are more than limited…
“Stop it, Alexander Mikhailovich!” I cut him off. “I wore myself out enough yesterday as it is: I’ve hung myself round your neck like a yoke, clung to you like a limpet! I’m already in your debt—don’t increase it! And I don’t need any university, word of honour!”
“What, then?” he smiles with the corners of his lips. “Should I find you a new Misha?”
“Ah, what a pity one can’t hit one’s spiritual guide! Otherwise I’d give you what for…”

*

Here she is, my own, my beloved little hamlet! (Though it’s really a village, but ‘village’ doesn’t make a diminutive, and my heart wants a diminutive.) Poor, dreary little thing… I go into the Administration, which everyone still calls the village council, in the old way. The head isn’t receiving today, and in any case he only sees people by appointment. The secretary gawps at me through her glasses. Vacancies? How did the idea of vacancies even enter your head, young woman?
We go to the nursery school too. A. M. asks me now to let him try his luck: he’s looking, according to his cover story, for a place for his niece. I stay outside. The Prince comes back half an hour later:
“They’re short of junior carers; the director gave me her number. I applied all my skills to charm her! True, your age gave them pause, and the pay’s a pittance, but… would you like to try?”
Having thought—I think for a long time—I shake my head in reply. I catch myself:
“Leave me her phone number, please! Who knows, I might yet say yes.”

*

There’s absolutely nothing to do in Troitskoye before the service: there isn’t even a caf; in our village. (There was one—it closed.) The Prince and I stroll about the familiar streets. To my surprise, few people greet me, and no one at all follows our strange pair with their eyes. Have I changed so much in a year? I suppose I have: girls my age change quickly. I love this little village—this corner of earth—very much, to the point of pain in my heart! And yet, look—less than a year has passed, and to this corner I’ve become almost a stranger. I’m infinitely close to it—who, if not I?—and just as far from it. I’m homeless. In the literal sense: strangers now live in my house, and asking them to move out would be “not proper”. But perhaps I’m homeless on the whole planet! And my older friend, my teacher—he’s probably homeless too. That’s why he can’t sit still.
We go to the graveyard by the church: the graves stand in little fenced plots, each with its own bench and table. We open the gate to ours and sit down by Mama’s grave. I tell him about Mama—about all my kin: artless, simple stories. The Prince, surprisingly, listens attentively. He praises me for knowing all my great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers by name (do town-dwellers not know theirs, then?). He jots something in his diary. (Why would he?)
“Look, the birch has put out its little leaves,” he suddenly smiles. “The sticky green little leaves that so gladdened a certain… mutual acquaintance of ours. Do you love life more than its meaning, Dolly?”
“Life more than its meaning?” I answer. “Oh, what hard questions you set… I love small earthly things very much—things you can touch with your hands, the unobtrusive ones, the simple ones, like… like myself. Our church, even this very churchyard. It seems to me that if you live among quiet things, you can also make out the meaning of life. But in the city it’s almost impossible. The city is very loud, motley; it’s decked itself out, like the Whore you spoke of. A terrifying teaching! And truthful, it seems: in our Troitskoye there are no establishments like ‘The Horizon’, and not for nothing are there none. The city empties you out. It lures you with its possibilities—and all those possibilities are just trinkets, fakes, like those artificial cemetery flowers that have no scent and from which you’d never coax any honey. Does the city even know the most important thing? You all reproach me—Aunt Lyuba, and even you—for not thinking about the future, but how can I think about it if any future, any ‘career’ of mine, is just such a trinket? The important things are done within. I’m blooming right now, invisibly to others. Blooming, like a passionflower, a strange flower, from the water and light of your knowledge, now, while you haven’t left yet. You’ll leave—and I’ll close my petals, my bud will fall; another life will begin: sewing college, some suitor or other, rented accommodation, a so-so little job… I’ve run on—I rarely talk so much; what I’m talking about, I don’t even know myself. What is it, my dear, have I moved you?—you look as if you have tears. What a trifle to weep over—whom to pity! Let’s go; the service will be soon. You weren’t offended that I called you ‘my dear’? I said it artlessly, without any hidden thought…”

*

We stand through the Vigil. There aren’t many people in the church. A young priest serves, clearly not long out of the seminary. He serves decently, conscientiously. How could he compare with Papa, of course!
The walls still haven’t been whitewashed… Probably they’re still hoping to find restorers (the church had frescoes before, not terribly valuable ones, though). God grant they find them one day.
At the end of the service I go up for confession. I confess my small, ridiculous sins: I fell out with my friend yesterday, I lied to the same friend, I was angry at human stupidity, I wanted to push a certain crocodile down the stairs (he had it coming, mind you). My sins are quickly absolved. The new priest didn’t recognise me as the daughter of the former priest. And how would he know? It’s probably for the best.
I wonder: could I make my confession to A. M.? He’s my spiritual father, after all, in a way… No, it seems I can’t: only a priest can hear confession. And my little trespasses wouldn’t interest him, anyway: the Prince isn’t going to count how many chickens the Fox has stolen from the henhouse.
How to combine my Orthodoxy and this—my discipleship? In no way, it seems. Do they hinder each other? No, they don’t hinder. What is there to combine, then? Nothing to combine.

*

In the taxi on the way home we are silent.
“A penny for your thoughts,” I say playfully to A. M., using an English phrase I learnt from him.
“What am I thinking about? About how to arrange things so that your flower goes on blooming further.”
“Hardly anything can be devised there… Monasticism, then? But it’s frightening…”
“Frightened of the barrack-like quality of it?”
“Y-yes… Shall we go to a nunnery one day, Alexander Mikhailovich? I want to have a look.”
“Any day you say, Dolly.”
I finish this entry already past midnight. Why did I grow so emotional today? Ivan Karamazov in a skirt, indeed… All right—I won’t scold myself too much. The Lord will forgive.

* * *

26 April 2009, Krasnaya Gorka

In the morning, still nice and early, I send the Prince a text to say I’m off to Liturgy. Just in case: what if he decides to drop by, and I’m not there…
He rings back almost at once and suggests we go to the main church of the Vvedensky Convent. (Until the recent restoration of the Cathedral, blown up by the Bolsheviks, this main church was the largest in the town centre.) At the same time I could “have a look at monasticism”…
So we do.
The priest—I think his name is Father Veniamin—before Communion asks me insistently, twice, whether I made my confession the day before. He accepts the confession in Troitskoye with distrust, but admits me to Communion. I know him—we went more than once on excursions to the convent, and took part in the work of the Catechetical Centre attached to it, and sometimes did work obedience after lessons—but he doesn’t remember me. All this is vexing and almost hurtful. I had thought confession was each person’s own spiritual concern… Why turn the Church into a second police force? As if the ordinary one weren’t enough?

 
*

After the service we catch a young sister in the convent courtyard and ask her to tell us how to find the Mother Superior.
The sister—short, with a pale little face, pretty as a doll—takes in the Prince with lively little eyes, smiles slightly. She leads us to the office and asks us to wait. Twenty minutes later we are received.
The Prince tells his cover story: his niece, a girl of pious life, has begun to think about the monastic path. (Why a cover story? It’s the truth! Only the “niece” doesn’t resemble her “uncle” in the slightest. Probably the two of us together look like a thoroughbred hound and a rootless mongrel.)
Mother Euphrosynia, having looked me over from head to toe, quickly loses interest in me. (“With this one, everything’s clear.” What’s clear to her?!) She’s more interested in A. M.: it’s obvious she wants to figure him out. What sort of bird is he? Where has he come from? She wants to—and can’t: she lacks the vision of the little old man at the Lavra. And so she doesn’t know how to behave with him. Politely, distantly, she lists the requirements: for six years newly admitted girls are counted as novices; only afterwards is the tonsure into a nun performed. “That’s the case almost everywhere.” Oh, and: an entry donation is highly desirable. Not a small donation. Though it depends on family circumstances, too. The sisters live two to a room, usually an experienced one together with a young one; they perform such-and-such obediences…
We promise to carefully consider everything we’ve been told; we thank them for finding time for us. A. M. and Mother Euphrosynia exchange smiles and pleasant phrases. The Mother Superior takes leave of me with a barely perceptible nod of the head.

*

In the convent caf; (“50% discount for monastics and clergy”) we discuss what we’ve seen and heard. The Prince begins:
“This convent… you don’t much like it, it seems?”
“Not this one, no,” I confess. “And it would probably be a sin to complain, but… I’m afraid here they’d turn me into a little soldier. And, you know, an e-m-p-t-y little soldier, a useless one, just for the honour guard. I’d look after the convent roses—their flowerbeds are splendid, did you see?—trim the bushes, wash the windows, work as a ‘museum attendant’.”
“They don’t have a museum.”
“I was speaking figuratively! They’re the museum themselves! I’d smile at guests. Did you see how that first sister, the young one, smiled at you? And how she looked at you?”
“How, then?”
“With an appraising look. The way one looks at a man.”
“We’re all sinful people…”
“True, we’re all sinful people; there’s nothing so terrible in it, and you’re probably used to it, besides… But in the angelic habit it’s not good. Of course she keeps herself pure—it’s just that for her, so far, it’s still fun; she still wants, at times, to feel like a girlie. Which means, Alexander Mikhailovich, she’s not fighting Satan every day. No one demands or expects it of her. And that, after all, is the chief—the chief!—aim of the tonsure! That’s why I say: they’d make me into an empty little soldier here. I’m reasoning horribly, with such conceit, aren’t I? What right do I have to judge; who am I, a nonentity…”
“You, Dorofeya Arkadyevna—I make bold to remind you—are the daughter of a Russian priest and a girl who at seventeen has read the APOPHTHEGMATA PATRUM,” the Prince replies. “And therefore, even if not publicly, in private conversation you are, of course, entitled to judge. Well, then… there’s another convent not far from town.”
“I know, I know! A thoroughfare for tourists. What I’d need, Alexander Mikhailovich, is a very small little monastery, a skete, with ten or twelve sisters… Are there any like that?”
“There are, even now. They struggle to survive, it’s true… Shall I look for one for you?”
“No, my dear, thank you: I need to look for one myself. Otherwise it’ll be like the nursery school: you’d almost married me off to it, and I turn up my nose. I need to do it myself… And may I tell you the honest truth? Right there in Mother Euphrosynia’s office I felt: I don’t want it. Just like when I got Misha’s photograph from Aunt Lyuba. A most powerful ‘I don’t want it!’, almost to the point of tears. It’s probably just temporary; it’ll pass…”
“Or it won’t pass.”
“Or it won’t pass,” I agree. “Oh, bother them! I don’t want to think about a convent while you’re still here. Even if I do find some small skete—they’ll take me in hand at once, I think; they’ll suggest I come to the services every day, do labour obedience so they can take a good look at me. And then, there we are: goodbye to our lessons! I’m planning to go out of town now, to have a walk in the forest. See, I’ve even brought my little rucksack, and my boots are inside. Will you keep me company?”
“And what about study?”
“And what about nature? It’s a day off!”
“The voice of common sense… Of course I’ll keep you company.”

*

We stroll through the spring forest. I am in my favourite rubber boots, which I sometimes even wear to school, and which look, of course, a bit poor, a bit simple: the girls smile condescendingly at the sight of them. (Tomorrow, to spite them, I’ll wear them again. Though the streets in town have already dried out…) We think about nothing, speak of almost nothing, except various trifles. For instance, A. M. asks, smiling slightly:
“How are you feeling, Frau Saurich?”
“Who’s Frau Saurich?” I answer a question with a question.
“A character from SEVENTEEN MOMENTS OF SPRING. An elderly lady whom Stierlitz used to take out of town to ‘fill up on oxygen’.”
“Elderly, you say?”
“No joking: yesterday you seemed very mature to me, Daria Arkadyevna. As if you were around fifty.”
“Impossible.”
“Oh yes, you did. There is an immense fearlessness and clarity of mind in you, the kind one rarely associates with youth. Take that ‘my dear’ you dropped so easily, like some old granny. You are already a more whole person than I am…”
“I don’t want to hear another word!”
“…And it’s I who ought to be learning from you. Just think: how many times already you’ve given me a lesson…”
“Stop it this minute! I don’t deserve anything you’ve said. It’s just that we village people live in a different rhythm, breathe a different air. ‘My dear’ just slipped out by accident. And now, as ill luck would have it, it’s about to slip out by accident again, that…”
“What?”
“…That I love you very much, only not in a woman’s way. You won’t reproach me for that? You won’t shy away from me?”
“No, I won’t. And I love you too, Frau Saurich; I do too! And certainly not in a man’s way.”
We both laugh quietly.
“What a strange declaration,” I remark.
“A non-declaration,” he answers. “Or rather, I don’t know what to call it. The Greeks would have called it philia or storge, but the modern world has lost all those words.”
“We won’t tell anyone about this, will we?”
“No—who would even understand… Perhaps you should write it down in your diary.”
“Only if…”

*

We emerge from the forest near the dachas. A. M., luckily, has brought the keys to his.
In the kitchen I quickly light the stove. At the end of April it’s not that one couldn’t do without it, but it’s cosier with a living fire. The fire is visible through the heatproof glass door. In villages there’s no such indulgence: our stove doors are of ordinary cast iron. But it’s beautiful…
I refuse the wicker chair. I ask permission to go up to the mansard floor and discover a thick carpet there. Together we shake the dust out of this carpet outside and spread it closer to the stove. I sit straight down on the carpet. A. M., after some hesitation, follows my example, though he keeps a sufficient distance from me.
“Don’t be afraid, I won’t bite!” I laugh.
“From you, Daria Arkadyevna, that’s the last thing I’m afraid of…”

*

The Prince tells me about the nineties—the years of his youth, his return to Russia; terrible years, for which he feels no nostalgia at all.
“Imagine: I even thought of scattering leaflets, resurrecting the work of the White Rose on Russian soil! But what would I have written on them? ‘Vote against the traitor Yeltsin!’? Yeltsin wasn’t the issue, or at least not the only issue. ‘The oligarchy is strangling the people!’? As if no one knew that… ‘Awake, Russian people!’? But the Russian people—including even me, the blockhead—had, at the end of the eighties, chosen capitalism voluntarily. It wasn’t a wicked squire setting dogs on us—like the boy from Ivan’s monologue—we were setting them on ourselves… And besides—’White Rose’? There is no rose of such virtue, and all other roses pale in comparison.”
“Even Alya Florenskaya?” I can’t restrain myself.
“Ah, what a creature you are! Yes, perhaps even her.”
The conversation about the “White Rose” turns into a conversation about Sophie Scholl: the courageous girl, a member of the anti-fascist underground in Germany in the forties.
“There’s the third path,” A. M. remarks. “Not the world, not monasticism, but political heroism.”
“…And martyrdom. Yes, but not in Russia, surely! I don’t want to wage war against my own country. Remember, you didn’t either! The authorities aren’t the chief Satan. But Sophie—she was a remarkable girl,” I agree. “I’ll pray for her today. Or to her: perhaps it’s already time for her to save us, rather than for us to pray for her…”

*

In the evening A. M. calls a taxi for me. For half an hour I sit in my little closet.
Should I look for a small convent in the summer?
Yes, Sophie Scholl fully revealed the meaning of the name “Sophia” according to Father Pavel! And my name—my two names—when shall I reveal theirs? Where is my gift; what is it? No one in the whole world, not even the Prince, knows the answer. No one—and certainly not Mother Euphrosynia.


Part Four
Thomas Week


27 April 2009, Monday

As I’m leaving the gymnasium, almost at the front desk, Varya catches up with me:
“Are you going far?”
“Home,” I answer.
“I’ll walk you a little way. You don’t mind? Seeing a friend home!” she calls to the woman on duty. “May I?”
(“Are we friends?” I want to ask, but I keep quiet. Varya isn’t my enemy. And I can’t afford to throw friends away, not after Sonya turned out to be a fifteen-year-old child.)
We walk through the town. Varya begins first:
“People are saying a lot about you, Daria…”
“God be their judge.”
“And what—is it all untrue?”
“Not even close.”
“And can you tell me what’s happening with you?”
I shrug. I weigh up: tell her or not? Trusting that Varya will keep quiet isn’t wise: she’s not a close friend, after all—and even close friends don’t keep quiet. But hiding it is foolish, too. What terrible thing could happen if I tell? The headmistresses find out? Roza Markovna already knows…
“Yes, I can,” I answer. “I’m living alone.”
(And that’s the truth, by the way!)
“And the man?”
“There is no man. There’s a teacher.”
“A teacher?”
“Yes, a teacher. Alexander Mikhailovich.”
“Alexander Mikhailovich?! The one who…”
“Nothing happened between them, if you mean that business!” I interrupt.
“And am I arguing with you? I too think that nothing happened. Well, well… And so… you’re learning English from him?”
“Why English? What do you and I, village priests’ daughters, need English for? Philosophy: he’s a graduate of LSU. Theology. Life.”
Varya falls silent, and for some time longer we walk together.
“I had a feeling, Daria, that something like this would happen with you,” she says calmly. “Though you’ve astonished me, of course… I think you’re doing a foolish thing.”
“Foolish—because you think that…”
“No, no!” she waves it off. “I’ve never suspected you of that, because you’re both… oddities, you and him alike. Not for that reason.”
“Then why?”
“You’ll be offended, you know… You see, Daria, it’s hard for a girl without a father. So you’ve found yourself one of those… a false father. And he’s childless—he is childless, isn’t he? So the two of you are playing at fathers and daughters. Foolish! He’s a stranger, after all.”
I open my mouth: I have an irrepressible urge to tell her about Frau Saurich, about the non-declaration. Luckily, I bite my tongue in time. No one—no one!—must know that. And without it, how can I explain that he’s not a stranger? What will she understand about the desert breed?
We somehow say goodbye: Varya needs to go to the shop; she’d simply come out while she was at it.

*

A false father! Almost like “False Dmitry”. A silly lamb went and found a sham…

*

When the Prince comes—at the usual time—I stun him practically with my second or third sentence:
“Alexander Mikhailovich, what would you say to Varya Sedova, who thinks that I’ve found myself a false father in you, but that a real father can’t be replaced anyway?”
“What would I say?” he seems startled, but quickly collects his thoughts. “I’d say she’s both right and mistaken. A father can’t be replaced, but I’m not even a false father to you. To you, Dolly, I’m precisely no one.”
I grow ashamed, to the point of colour in my face.
“Forgive me,” I whisper. “How can you be no one? I didn’t mean to speak of her. There, and I’ve hurt you too…”
“I understand everything: you yourself were wounded…”
“Yes, I’m like a calf bitten by a fat gadfly—it runs, not picking its road. Do forgive me! What a lot of trouble I’ll still give you. I’m far from being Frau Saurich…”
“No, you’re not far, it’s simply hard for a mature soul in youth.”
“How splendidly you’ve put that…”

*

After dinner we move into the room, and my teacher (and no false father at all—what an idea!) seizes the bull by the horns at once:
“We’ve not so much time left, Dolly, so it’s time to take stock of what we’ve done and what we’ve still not done. I thought long about this yesterday. I’ve not been entirely useless to you till now—and yet we’ve been moving almost at random. But it seems we’ve found something, even by such blind movement. You don’t want to go into the world, into ordinary life…”
“Though I may yet have to!” I interrupt.
“Perhaps, like everyone,” he agrees. “But the question is how much to render unto Caesar, and I’d like you not to render him too much. …You don’t want to—but ordinary monasticism may not be for you.”
“Unless it’s in a small skete.”
“Yes, unless. At present we can more or less see what isn’t yours. It remains to understand what is yours, your own.”
“You’re admirable! I’ve probably never had such a conscientious teacher…”
“Whether I’m admirable or not, we’ll see at the end: don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched. I suggest we go back a little. The February dream about Satan. Your childhood ‘waking dreams’. Have you dreamt anything special since then?”
“Almost nothing, except the descent into dark water before the arrival of your ‘crocodile’. But anyone would have dreamt that… I dreamt it, by the way, in the closet. I still sit in there sometimes, and I turn off the light. Just to think, to calm my thoughts.”
“Very good. Please don’t abandon that practice, keep it up!”
“I will. But you can’t sit and peer into yourself for very long; you can’t peer out very much… Or can you? You know, I still feel a sort of… constriction. How hard it is to speak of things for which we have no words and almost no senses! Something’s hindering me. As if I’m a chick that wants to hatch, that’s already made its pecks, that knows the shell is quite weak, but is still sitting in the egg. And may yet sit there its whole life, just imagine.”
“Thank you: that’s important.”
“Do you… understand, at least roughly, what I’m talking about?”
“Roughly—through the words, as far as I can. Evidently I must help you break this shell, though I’ve no idea how. After all, it’s my first time trying myself in the role of a spiritual guide! So forgive me for walking without knowing the road. And besides, I’m no mystic. But I see that the possible mystic here is you—and I’d like, insofar as I can, to become the midwife to that future mystic. Perhaps that’s the only thing by which I’ll justify myself in the next world…”
“I don’t know what you are, but you’re a fearless person, that’s certain. You’ve already given me a very great deal, Alexander Mikhailovich, and I’m already enormously in your debt.”
“Yes, but one wants to give more. We shall search… Well, then—let’s bracket the shell for now. What would you like to study with your mind, to think through?”
I pause to think, and after a while I answer:
“Philosophers, but not modern ones: everything’s clear with the moderns. The older, the better. From the time of the Egyptian fathers. Not necessarily all of them! A couple, at your choice. Also, the heresies left their mark on me. I didn’t even expect it myself. Of course, there’s no need to go too deeply into heresies—that’s why they’re heresies, after all. But I see that—I’m saying it badly, clumsily; the words aren’t enough—that the Church was once broader. And now it’s shrivelled… It used to accommodate, for instance, both monasticism and desert-dwelling—and now only the first is left, and even that mostly in the form of a museum. I’d like—only please don’t laugh!—to find the p-r-e-C-a-t-h-o-l-i-c and p-r-e-O-r-t-h-o-d-o-x God.”
“…Which, incidentally, coincides with your interest in antiquity.”
“Yes. And remarkable women: you suggested them yourself, and I agree.”
A. M. makes notes in his diary—touchingly, how thoroughly, in such a “grown-up” way, he approaches it!—and promises to think properly. For today he has no ready material. Almost none: just trifles, past preparations.
The past preparations are music. Excerpts of five to seven minutes each. We listen to them together. The Prince tries to determine my musical tastes and predilections. My predilections (a funny word) are the simplest. Monteverdi is closer to me than Bach. Tchaikovsky is dear and beloved to me, as long as he doesn’t grow stormy. Debussy and Delius make me feel queasy. The twentieth century, all the Sch;nbergs, Stravinskys and their ilk—I can’t even listen to them without revulsion: it’s like someone running a nail over glass.
We sit for a long time, sorting through different composers, like examining different flowers, until A. M. catches himself that it’s time to take his leave. We say goodbye for today.

*

I go on observing myself in the closet which is my favourite occupation now.
Something has shifted. The Prince now wants to uncover something new in me. Aren’t we hurrying too much? Such things ought to be done without hurry… He’s rushing before his departure, that’s clear. But life doesn’t end after his “posting”, does it! Or is this just a short “pedagogical episode” for him, and afterwards he’ll find himself a new disciple?
But what about me? Where will I be in half a year? What if I marry a young officer and go off with him to Siberia? Couldn’t that happen? It easily could! So be it, then—let’s try…

* * *

28 April 2009, Tuesday

The last two lessons on Tuesdays are history. During the last history lesson, a scandal brews—with the participation of me, the sinful servant of God.
Viktor Ilyich works in the old style—he calls people up to the board. Ksyusha, standing at the board, is speaking about the pre-revolutionary situation in the Russian Empire:
“…Many ladies of high society were drawn to the so-called holy elder. Not out of piety, of course…”
Here she looks me brazenly in the eye and, smirking, pronounces distinctly:
“Under the guise of spiritual exercises, these ‘honest Christian women’ gave themselves over to the most unbridled debauchery. Nor did Rasputin scorn group sin: with two ‘spiritual pupils’ and more.”
All the blood drains from my face. For some reason I stand up, beside myself. I gasp for air.
“Daria, do you wish to add something?” Viktor Ilyich, though he isn’t very bright, nevertheless, shifting his gaze from me to Ksyusha and back, finally grasps that I don’t “wish to add” at all. He opens his mouth in fright and sits down. And what else is left for him to do?
Where did it come from?! Surely not Varya? Varya probably didn’t tell Ksyusha directly—they’re not friends—but it seems she let something slip to someone, and it went the rounds of the class, naturally, and reached Ksenia through a game of Chinese whispers: each added a little invention of her own.
But how can she feel no shame?! What have I done to her?!
I myself acted very foolishly, of course: I shouldn’t have stood up, and I shouldn’t have responded to her look either. One must never respond to such looks. But now, in the eyes of the whole class, I’ve disgraced myself, and, what’s more,  signed my name to my “unbridled debauchery under the guise of spiritual exercises”—isn’t that what they think?
It isn’t Olya who stands up for me, nor Varvara, and certainly not Sonya. It’s—who would ever have imagined!—Natasha: she stands up, walks over to Ksenia, and deals her a resounding slap.
At once a fight breaks out—the first in this school in my memory—or rather, a “girl-fight”. Ksyusha would have liked to seize Natalia by the hair, but Natalia twists her arm: she’s strong. Ksyusha squeals with pain and pours out abuse. The girls have already jumped up and are pulling them apart. Interesting customs we have in our Orthodox Gymnasium, indeed…
Viktor Ilyich vanished in the commotion. Probably went to report to the headmistresses. And what else can the poor man do? After A. M.’s departure, we’ve only three male teachers left: Viktor Ilyich, Vitaly Stepanovich and Father Vadim whose optional lessons I no longer attend. At this rate, soon there’ll be none: they’ll all leave of their own accord…
I don’t take part in the general squabble—I walk out of the classroom. No doubt there’ll be another “meeting”—they’re probably starting it right now. Well, girls, did the last ones help, then, did your “boycott” help? Hens, that’s all you are. And I’m a hen too: who pulled me up by the scruff?
Going up to the recreation area, I find Natasha’s bed and slip a note under her pillow with two words: “Thank you.” Then I go home. The history lesson is clearly not going to continue after a fight. And even if it does, my absence from it is the least of the things the teachers and headmistresses will be having headaches about.

*

To my astonishment, the Prince, when I tell him about the scandal, laughs: merrily, like a child. (I’m taken aback by his laughter, almost indignant.)
“So now they take me for a new Rasputin? ‘With two and more’? Flattering…”
“I see no cause for merriment!”
“But I do. Since the stable’s burnt, let the whole farm go… Dolly, my dear, you reacted like an honest, respectable, but thoroughly b-o-u-r-g-e-o-i-s girl. Does the path of true holy-foolery not attract you in the slightest?”
“And how should a true holy fool have acted?”
“She would have confirmed all the accusations, of course! Always agree with everything you’re falsely accused of. You’ve nothing to lose, after all! I may not have accumulated much wisdom by my forty years, but this I’ve learnt firmly. And best of all, pay no attention whatsoever.”
“Then why did you answer my March text with the truth, instead of agreeing that it had happened?”
“Because you weren’t accusing—you were asking honestly, and there’s an enormous difference. And, after all, you’re not… a stranger to me, all the same.”
“But yesterday you assured me you were a stranger…”

*

Today’s theme is “Meister Eckhart”. The Prince tells me about his life, and then reads one of his sermons—”On the Fulfilment of Time”—in its entirety. He finishes. Shaking my head, I announce:
“I understood nothing!”
“Shall we go over it again?” he asks, without giving up.
“Yes, if only you’re not sick of my rare stupidity.”
“Don’t blame yourself! It’s simply that the temporal distance is great: between us and Eckhart is nearly a millennium. Not yet antiquity, but not bad for a first swim into ancient times. And I made a mistake too: I read it to you all at once, without pausing. Let’s go through it now without hurry, paragraph by paragraph, and let each paragraph sink in…”

*

We move to slow reading. I write down the thoughts that strike me, both the beautiful ones and the wild ones, unlike anything else. They’re all beautiful, and all wild.
 
If the soul had anything in common with time, God could never be born in it.

The least powers of my soul are higher than the high heaven.

In essence, the angel Gabriel was called Gabriel as little as Conrad. No one can know the name of an angel; to the place where his name is, no sage has ever penetrated—no human thought. Perhaps he has no name at all!

…I point you to the scripture that says, “I have said, you are gods!”

Do you know why God is God? Because He is without creatures.

Grace does not act… Grace performs no deed.

It would be good to know what he was like! Tall, thin? Short, stocky? There’s an unremarkable engraving in the book that shows a German like any German, a typical German who’ll now get into his Audi and drive to the hypermarket. This typical German doesn’t connect in my mind with the bold words of the sermon. How little remains of a person! And how much, in his case.
In a couple of places (“Grace does not act” is one of them) my hairs begin to stir from the electricity I’ve felt once before—from admiration at how directly all this is said. With the same frank directness with which Ksyusha, looking me in the eye, announced the “holy elder”. But there’s a difference, of course: this isn’t about someone else’s bed—this is the mystery of how God is born within us. And another difference: Ksyusha was lying. (And Eckhart—does he deceive in nothing?) How non-Orthodox he is, all the same, how unlike an ordinary parish sermon! (Oh, his parishioners must have been climbing the walls! I can just imagine him in Troitskoye, or even in the house church at the gymnasium…) Perhaps not “non” but “pre”? Precisely as I wanted.
“What do you think, Daria Arkadyevna? You’ve gone rather quiet.”
“What, is it already over? My mind’s boiled; I can’t keep up with my thoughts… Meister Eckhart is anti-Vadim.”
“Anti-Vadim?”
“Anti-Father-Vadim, in the sense of ‘anti-Divine Law’, the kind he teaches. And Father Vadim is a most wonderful person! This isn’t law—it’s sheer lawlessness. This Eckhart of yours simply took and broke everything I knew, everything I’d learnt, easily, casually. The soul is stronger than heaven. People are gods. The angel of the Annunciation had no name. God is without creatures. Grace does not act.”
“The last one must be understood mystically…”
“I understood! I understood that it’s not for my mind. How long did he read this sermon in his church—fifteen minutes? Another fifteen minutes of talking, and he’d have talked his way to the point where the Ever-Virgin isn’t the Ever-Virgin, and Christ wasn’t born, ‘in a mystical sense’.”
“Are you angry with him? Or more: do you suspect he’s a false teacher?”
“Aha, and you’re a false father. Enough of those little words! I’m not Varya. No, I’m not angry. I’m afraid… My childish Orthodox faith has foundations, and they’re very firm. Then this mister comes along—I think he was something like you; he studied at LSU too, at their medieval German LSU—and declares with a little smile, ‘Ah, Dolly, my dear, it’s all just a metaphor! We know nothing about faith except that we know nothing—and Gabriel, it seems, was really Conrad…’ I see you’re hammering away at my shell, aren’t you?”
“I should say so!” A. M. laughs. “But I’ve only just begun.”
“Only just begun, and I’m already frightened. Perhaps we should slow the tempo just a little? I don’t look like an ungrateful monster, do I?”

*

The rest of the lesson we devote to a “reconciliation” between Eckhart and Father Vadim. The Prince patiently stitches together two pieces of cloth: he shows me how both can be right and why each is good in his own place.
At the very end of the day we “role-play” the situation with Ksyusha once more. A. M., standing at an imaginary blackboard and imitating my classmate—he’s not bad at it; there’s a lost actor in him!—repeats the filth about “unbridled debauchery”. I don’t bat an eyelid. He provokes me: “What do you say, Dashenka?”—“You’re a fool, Ksyushenka,” I answer calmly. We laugh.
All this is amusing, sweet, but it’s a game, not life. A real battle, however you look at it, is harder than any training. We’ll see what happens tomorrow.
After the Prince leaves I collapse into sleep. I wake around ten in the evening to make today’s entry.
Sleep is even. I dream of nothing.

* * *

29 April 2009, Wednesday

Lessons pass without incident. Ksyusha is absent.
At lunch I sit down beside Natasha and speak with her a little. A crumpled, restrained conversation—about nothing, about trifles. To speak with her seriously, one would have to drag a very great deal into the light of God, including the twentieth of March, and that’s hard, painful, both for me and for her. All the same, I manage to thank her once more. She replies that she found my note under her pillow. She reaches her hand across the table and briefly, carefully strokes mine. I don’t pull mine away. SO DO MITES? Well, let them. We’re all sinners. And I’m not appealing to her, anyway: how could I compare with Alya?
I wonder, what does s-h-e think about me? Which version does s-h-e believe? Does she take me for a rebel, too? Who can make head or tail of a person?
The girls sitting nearby look at us in silence, with surprise, timidity, perhaps irritation too. Look, my dears, look. I don’t grudge it.

*

At the end of the sixth lesson, Roza Markovna comes into the classroom.
“The bell is for the teacher, not for you! Everyone sit down!” her voice rings.
Zoya Alexandrovna, a wizened little old lady, gathers her things quickly, not wishing to hinder the administration. A blink, and she’s gone.
We pull our heads into our shoulders. Ooh, it looks like we’re in for it now…
And we are in for it.
“Enough! That’s it! The last straw! I’ve no more strength to tolerate your revolting class! You hounded out the English teacher! You hounded the cleverest girl in the class too, nearly drove her to the noose! Yesterday you staged… a sparring match! ‘Self-governance’! ‘Petitions’! You want self-governance? Pack your bags and get off to America, to the Negroes! They’ll self-govern you there in no time! Democracy is over, my little mothers! You’ll toe the line for me now! You’ll say the Lord’s Prayer before meals! Lights out at half past nine! Earrings off! Pendants off! Especially that one with the skull, Natalia knows what I’m talking about! If I see lipstick—I’ll wash it off myself, with my own hands—I won’t be squeamish! I’ll grab you by your uncombed ponytails and wash you in the sink! No more going out into town now! None at all, I said! No arguments! No exceptions! What—sanitary towels? You’ll get sanitary towels from the nurse’s office! Brothers, fianc;s, husbands, lovers, who else—they’re out of your life! You haven’t grown enough for fianc;s if you fight in lessons! What a disgrace, what a scandal! ‘Orthodox’, I ask you! You don’t like it? I can’t hear: does someone not like it? Anyone who doesn’t like it packs her bags and rolls out of here in five minutes, any direction you like! Out without a school-leaving certificate, off to the factory! Daria, and where do you think you’re going? Did I not express myself clearly?”
I stop in the aisle. I should have waited out the storm, not put myself in her line of fire. There’s no worldly wisdom in me; I’m stupid, clumsy. But… it’s not honest to hide, is it? It’s not honest. No, you can’t prepare for life: yesterday I prepared for one thing, and something else came up. But, whatever I’ve chosen, I mustn’t betray my choice. My heart is pounding, and my voice trembles a little when I speak:
“Roza Markovna, I don’t blame you. Please don’t blame me, either. You’re asking me to decide: either locked up here—or out, without a certificate. But I’ve already decided—on the third of April I decided… Forgive me!”
At the front desk, no one stops me: either Aunt Zina hasn’t yet been told of the new order, or the deputy head blurted out the ban on going into town in the heat of the moment, to scare us. You can’t scare me, Rozochka Markovna. I’m a “holy fool”, you see; I take words at their full weight…

*

At home I calm down a little. Nothing terrible has happened yet. It would be a pity, true, to go out into life without a certificate. Oh, bother! They’ll take you into a technical college with nine years of schooling, if it comes to that. And maybe it’ll all sort itself out yet. Aunt Lyuba? Yes, that’s unpleasant. And what of it: will they return me to the gymnasium by force, set a policeman on me? We’ll see how they manage that…

*

The theme of the evening lesson is “Boethius”. From the high Middle Ages we descend deeper, into late antiquity. An astonishing man—wise, talented, and a Christian martyr. It suits Catholics to consider that he suffered for the faith, but in truth, the Prince says, the matter was more complex: he, a Christian, dared—while serving the pagan ruler Theodoric—to give that ruler advice not from sound political sense, but from his Christian conscience. (A lesson for me: never rise high, try to have no dealings with the authorities, don’t catch their eye.)
We read THE CONSOLATION OF PHILOSOPHY—a rare book, written in prison, awaiting execution. Now there was a philosopher, if he could be consoled by philosophy! Nietzsche couldn’t hold a candle to him… The Prince retells a great deal—the book is long—but reads out individual paragraphs. I write the ideas down in my notebook for my lessons with him; I cover page after page with my handwriting. It writes itself merrily; Boethius’s thoughts settle into me easily, compactly, brick by brick. The thought about indifference to worldly goods—fame, wealth, good name—resonates with particular joy. If only I’d read about this a little earlier!
Boethius is not a revelation, not a mystic genius, not a “hooligan” like Eckhart. He’s like a primary school teacher, and that teacher explains something once told to you long ago, but forgotten, all over again, with patience, clarity, gentleness and love. Ah, what a necessary little book! Necessary from the fourth form onwards—right to one’s death.
“You’re getting on well with my Roman friend, aren’t you?” A. M. remarks.
“And mine now, too.”
“Nothing scratches at you?”
“No! Should something be scratching?”
“The fact, for instance, that God is the unmoving centre of the turning world. Note, it’s almost literally the same thought as Eckhart’s! ‘Grace does not act.’ ”
“Oh, it’s true! I didn’t even notice… The same, right enough, but he said it more gently.”
“Or rather, we forgive him the departure from dogma more easily, because the dogmas hadn’t hardened in his time. And did you appreciate his theodicy?"
“That the wicked punish themselves by distancing themselves from God—and God does not interfere? I always knew that! I simply didn’t know the words.”
“With him it’s always like that: everything is already known to the soul, but everything is said so exquisitely, so honed, that you want to learn it by heart. A quality of late antiquity, partly already Christian. Does it trouble you that he was not only a Christian, but also a Neoplatonist?”
“What’s a Neoplatonist?”
“A follower of Neoplatonism.”
“And what’s Neoplatonism?”
“A religion—or rather, a ‘philosophical religion’.”
“Does his double-faith trouble me? Well, it doesn’t trouble the Catholics, after all…”
“It has troubled some.”
“Some are troubled by Ilyin, too—but I’ll not give up Ilyin to anyone! When I’ve studied Neoplatonism, then I’ll answer you. But I don’t think it will trouble me. Do you know why? Because it’s exactly my own story. I’m a Christian—Orthodox. And at the same time…”
“What?”
“…An ‘Azurovian’.”
We laugh. A. M., with pleasure, writes this new word down in his diary.

*

Towards the end of the lesson, I decide to tell the Prince that I’ve left the gymnasium “for good”. He frowns; massages his temples.
“Are you… very displeased with me?” I ask timidly.
“What has ‘displeased’ got to do with it? I’m trying to understand what to do… Has your aunt rung you yet?”
“Not yet… I think Roza Markovna herself is in no hurry to ring her. There’s… nothing to boast of here. I also think she reckons I’ve simply ‘called her bluff’.”
“And didn’t you call her bluff?”
“I chose, Alexander Mikhailovich. I chose you, not the certificate.”
“My dear good girl, how unreasonable that is!”
“And would you have chosen differently?”
“In my youth there was no Prince; even though life once brought me together with a Teacher… No. I’d have chosen exactly the same. I’ll… ring her myself. It’s strange s-h-e hasn’t rung me yet. Perhaps the two of us will be able to work something out together…”
“Only not about locking me up in the gymnasium!”
“No, no. This option is not on the table, I promise.”
What would I do without him!

*

In the evening, after the Prince has left, I try in my closet to see Boethius or Lady Philosophy.
I don’t manage anything, to be honest. But instead a simple, joyful thought comes into my head. Lady Philosophy is no pagan deity. She is simply Sophia , the Wisdom of God.
There you are, then—and nothing to worry about.

* * *

30 April 2009, Thursday

The last day of April. The little clock is ticking…
I don’t go to the gymnasium: one must answer for one’s words. And besides, they might lock me up and not let me out. Today they’ll start marking me down as truant. If there are many truancies, they really won’t certify me.
And what of it? Nothing. I decided everything yesterday.
Instead of school I go to the “Artist” shop and buy some clay. In Troitskoye I’d simply have gone down to the ravine with a bucket and dug myself some clay. Ah, town-dwellers, you’ve got to pay for everything…
At home I sit down to model. What comes out is a little figure of the Prince, with the Fox at his feet. I’ve done little modelling in my life, but it’s not turning out so badly! And it brings enormous pleasure: clay is warm, alive—this isn’t logarithms and “spring baccurotes” for you.
Here, perhaps, is my calling: to make small earthly things with love. Well, if not a calling—a profession then? Sewing college might come in useful, after all. Or culinary: I can cook borscht too. After graduation I’ll submit documents to both, and go wherever I’m accepted. If, of course, I don’t find a small convent earlier.
A convent, a convent… The sensible thing would be to create a convent oneself, not to wait for one to be handed to you on a platter. (Funny: a seventeen-year-old fool, and she’s aiming to be an abbess.)

*

In the evening, on the Prince’s laptop, we watch the film THE SONG OF BERNADETTE. An old film, black and white, about a young girl who saw the Mother of God and afterwards became known throughout France. We watch half the film in Russian, then I ask A. M. to switch the soundtrack: I want to hear the actress’s voice. Understanding the words isn’t so important to me. But, by the way, I’m understanding English, it turns out—every other word, or two out of three. Well, I never thought… The lessons haven’t been in vain! A. M. is a teacher from God, of course.
By the end of the film my eyes are quite red.
“Shall I make you a fan again?” the Prince offers jokingly.
“No, thank you, they’ll dry by themselves…” I go to wash my face and come back. “I’m not ashamed of these tears. Beside you, I’m not ashamed of anything at all, except what’s truly shameful.”
“She’s inspiring, isn’t she?”
“What—you too?” I laugh.
“Imagine, me too. You watch a film like that and ask yourself: why am I not a young girl from a village? Where did my life take a wrong turn?”
“Don’t envy young girls from the village, Alexander Mikhailovich—their lives aren’t all that sweet… She had a hard time of it too.”
“And yet she saw the Most Holy Virgin, face to face.”
“One in a thousand. The Virgin appeared to her through her humility, through her purity. And what humility is there in me, what purity?”
“You’re slandering yourself, Daria Arkadyevna.”
“No, no! Yesterday I tried to see Boethius in the closet—not even the Ever-Virgin, far from it—and nothing came of it. I haven’t earned it yet, it’s not my rank. I mean, really, what sort of saint am I?”
“A future one.”
“Be quiet—a curse on your sinful tongue! Was that too rude? No, but truly… You overestimate me. Cut your coat according to your cloth.”
“And Satan?”
“What about Satan?”
“The dream about Satan. And understanding Rilke without knowing the language?”
“Well, there are all sorts of wonders in the world… Will you find me her portrait, a little icon, or better still, a photograph? I’ll pray to her sometimes. Two village girls will surely understand each other.”

*

We talk about other holy women. Some are very dear to my heart; some are distant from me. It’s sinful to write such things, but the Holy Equal-to-the-Apostles Princess Olga, for instance, is not close to me. She’s like my cousin, and I haven’t seen all that much kindness from her in my life. Closer to me are the simple, dear, “irregular” saints, like Blessed Xenia. And the Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna—the venerable martyr—was “irregular” too, though when I think of her I grow a little timid. I’d have gone to an abbess like that.
Perhaps my straight road leads to the Marfo-Mariinsky Convent?

*

Just before the Prince leaves, Aunt Lyuba rings—my mood drops at once—and simply weeps into the receiver. “How could I?! It’s a good thing Arkasha didn’t live to see this disgrace…”
A. M. gestures to me to pass him the phone. I obey with a slight horror. Things can’t really get worse, after all.
The Prince gives his name and patronymic, introduces himself as a teacher at the gymnasium who is right now trying to resolve the question of her ward. (Well, he didn’t lie—he simply forgot the word “former”.) He’s almost resolved it. He and Roza Markovna have supposedly agreed that for a couple of weeks the eleventh-form pupil Dorofeya Smirnova may study at home, by distance. Don’t worry, Lyubov Sergeyevna, don’t be anxious, I’m keeping my finger on the pulse. (His voice is soft, enveloping, like a doctor’s.) Don’t mention it.
He presses the hang-up button. I look at him incredulously:
“What—truly?”
“Truly. I’ve bargained a couple of weeks for you. And then I’ll be gone…”
“Wheeeee!”
“Daria Arkadyevna, what are these squeals, unworthy of an Orthodox girl?”
“These are squeals of joy, you silly man!”
“Well, now—now she’s hung herself round my neck too…”

*

The Prince tries to cool my joy a little: the permission to study at home will be valid for exactly two weeks, “in view of special circumstances.” Roza Markovna is a little embarrassed about her outburst—or rather, about the fact that I got in the way: her aim wasn’t at me at all. I’m to submit assignments for all subjects on Friday; I can leave the exercise books at the front desk. R. M. will check them personally, so as not to burden the teachers with extra work—but she has no right to give a mark higher than a C, not having knowledge of all subjects. Ah, what of it! Higher than a C isn’t in the cards for me in almost any subject anyway.
One more thing: I’m strictly forbidden to tell my classmates that an exception was made for me. Let them think that their outrageous antics were the cause of my expulsion, and let their consciences torment them! She’s a clever woman, though…

*

In the evening, in the closet, I feel something like goosebumps running over the surface of my body. I can’t concentrate on them: the moment you start peering at them attentively, they vanish at once.
All the same, how far I am from Bernadette! An abyss, an abyss between me and her.

* * *

1 May 2009, Friday

A state holiday, a day off. “Wholidai”, as Uncle Ashot the cobbler wrote on a piece of cardboard and stuck in the window of his kiosk. No getting my little boots mended today! (The heels have worn down.) And what about my rubber boots? I’ll wear them for now, then, if the boots fall apart entirely.
In the morning I do the week’s homework, not trying especially hard, and leave it at the gymnasium’s front desk. Afterwards I busy myself with cleaning, washing, ironing.

*

The Prince, with it being a holiday, might have come earlier! But he isn’t here at the usual time either. I worry; I even grow a little cross. I’m on the point of ringing him. I pull myself up: who am I to go looking for him? I have no rights over him.
At last he comes.
“You’ve missed dinner, Alexander Mikhailovich,” I try to make my voice sound strict. “Now you’ll go hungry.”
(This isn’t true, of course: naturally I would have heated up the soup for him.)
“That’s for the best,” he answers. “I’ve brought you such a text that you won’t be able to get a morsel down your throat.”
“But I’ve already eaten. I wasn’t going to wait for you, was I!”
“You’re cross in a funny way…”
“Now I’ll stop being cross on purpose, so as not to give you the pleasure!”
We go through to the room.
“Taking into account that the day before yesterday we already began speaking of Neoplatonism, Daria Arkadyevna, I decided not to beat about the bush, but to bring the primary source at once.” A. M. takes a new book from his bag.
Plato.
“I’m afraid it’s terribly difficult, Alexander Mikhailovich…” I say timidly. “I shan’t understand. Who am I, after all, to take a swing at Plato!”
(All my mocking mood evaporated at once at the sight of this “brick”.)
“You’ll understand splendidly, Dolly! You have a heart to which everything will be clear.”
“That is, to put it simply, the only hope is my heart—because my brain, it seems, isn’t sufficient for Plato…”
“How ironic you are… I’m not forcing you! Let’s put him aside and talk about something else.”
“No, we shan’t put him aside. There’s nowhere to put him aside to… Forgive me!”
“Nothing to forgive. Well, then—are we ready?”

*

The Prince tells me about Athens and the essence of the charges brought against Socrates. He draws my attention to the unusualness of the genre: not a sermon, not a meditation, but an almost exact record of a real trial, as exact as my diary—that is, not word-for-word, but without any mistakes as to the most important things.
Then he reads the APOLOGY OF SOCRATES, in full.
What a searing book! How contemporary! And how terrifying.
Socrates is a model of how to stand before the judgement of the world: firmly, courageously, with a smile; managing not only to answer the charges, but to speak his own truth. I shall never be like him: I simply haven’t the brains for it. The most I’ll manage is to play the holy fool—to accept all the guilt falsely attributed to me. But this picture—a brave, short man before a lying court—I shall remember. I’ve already seen it…
I’ve wrapped myself in the blanket, but a shiver runs through me. How could I have been joking an hour ago about silly things like his dinner!
Tears roll down my cheeks. Who could have imagined it would catch at me so…
“It’s exactly what happened to you,” I suddenly whisper. “They slandered you, like him, and they accused you of the same thing. Of corrupting the young with your ideas! The doctor who heals, accused of spreading infection…”
“Very flattering for me,” A. M. smiles with the tips of his lips alone. “Though not quite accurate: no one executed me—here I am, before you, alive!”
“Yes, only people aren’t eternal… Though what am I saying… I promise you, and I swear, that you will always be alive for me.”
He shakes his head:
“Don’t make of me a mummy for worship, Daria Arkadyevna. I’ve never dreamt of lying in a mausoleum.”
“I’m not making one,” I answer briskly. “By God, I’m not! But is it a sin—to think of a person as always alive? Socrates, even before Christ, knew there is no death, that with God all are alive. Where else would his courage come from?”
The Prince nods.
“See how you’ve seized the most important thing in the APOLOGY!” he remarks. “And you were afraid you wouldn’t understand. Plato and the Platonists are no enemies to Christ—do you see it now?”
“I see it… Just as many of those whom Father Vasily painted to us as His enemies are probably no enemies to Him at all, are they?”

*

Afterwards we talk of various things. At last I show him the closet I’ve mentioned so often. I briefly report my still very modest results. The Prince praises my idea; he advises, as an experiment, isolating the legs of the stool with ceramic or glass jars: he read somewhere that this can be useful for concentration, for cutting off superfluous energies—though where he read it, he can no longer recall. He says thoughtfully:
“You probably need manuals on meditation.”
“To be honest, the word ‘meditation’ frightens me.”
“The word frightens you, but the thing itself doesn’t?” he finds it amusing to listen to me. “You’re like a housewife who’s already baked a hundred loaves, but is afraid to say ‘dough’ aloud.”
“Not a hundred, ten at most. Yes, imagine! I’m a Christian, after all.”
“Boethius wasn’t shy of discoursing on meditation—and he was a Christian too. ‘Let the contemplator of truth turn his gaze within and, not letting his mind wander, find the treasure in his own heart; let him scatter the dark clouds with the radiance of the sun of reason’—do you remember?”
“Ah, yes…”
“What do you think,” A. M. asks, ”could Theodoric have executed Boethius precisely because the philosopher meditated too much? And, given that Theodoric was your namesake, your own bellicosity becomes understandable…”
The death of a martyr is no cause for laughter, but we both laugh quietly. This laughter isn’t about Boethius: it’s precisely about my “bellicosity”.
Funny: Theodoric was my namesake too! I hadn’t kept it in mind.
“Very well,” I give in. “I don’t want to be as wicked and stupid as Theodoric. I’ll look at your ‘manuals on meditation’, with one eye. But please don’t expect me to worship Eastern idols!”
“Idols shouldn’t be worshipped at all,” the Prince replies, as if thinking aloud. “Neither Eastern ones nor Christian ones.”
“And do C-h-r-i-s-t-i-a-n idols really exist, too? That’s something new!”
“They do, Dolly—alas! The longer you live, the more you’ll notice them.”
There’s some wisdom in this, and I don’t yet fully understand it. I must think about it more… But if one seriously thinks about this, how much of ordinary Christianity will be left?

*

We say goodbye. The Prince leaves. I follow his figure in the window, screwing up my eyes against the setting sun.
But we didn’t agree on tomorrow’s time! I fling the casements wide open.
“Alexander Mikhailovich!” I shout to him. “Alexander Mikhailovich!”
He hears and comes back. He stands under my window and raises his head to me.
“Alexander Mikhailovich, I forgot to say: write to me tomorrow first thing in the morning! And come, if you can, in the morning, not like today—all right? And besides… You can come to me at any time, do you hear? At any time!”
(What am I saying, though?)
The Prince smiles at me, a little guiltily:
“Dolly, my dear, tomorrow I have several errands that can’t be put off… And one must prepare for the lesson, after all. I’ll come tomorrow at the usual time. All right, an hour earlier. Will that do?”

*

In the evening I subject myself to a careful, strict trial. What was that today? Why did I fling open the window and lean out of it, like some improper lady? Could it really be that I’ve fallen in love, after all? What a misfortune… If so, I must tell him straight out and not lead him by the nose.
Aha, aha! He won’t even want to talk to me after that…
No, no. It’s not true. It’s simply gratitude—an excess of tenderness. And girls do foolish things at seventeen, it’s forgivable.

*

The same goosebumps in the closet. A faint sensation of warmth. Nothing truly new.

* * *

2 May 2009, Saturday

The Prince comes around four. He hasn’t wasted his time: he spent part of the day searching for “manuals on meditation”. His words don’t part company with his deeds. One can’t help admiring him! Though, to be fair, I’m the same myself.
He’s found, I must confess, rather little. Two slim little books land on my table, both in English.
“What a pity they’re in English!” I’m disappointed aloud. “I can barely read in it. I’ll be plodding through them for half a year.”
“Take as long as you like: they’re a gift. As for ‘barely read’—who stopped you from learning!” he laughs. “You see, language isn’t important for its own sake. Language is a window onto the world. Without that window, we sit in our cosy little shell and believe its contours coincide with the borders of the globe.”
“And I see you’re tapping at my shell this way and that… even being slightly tedious about it!”
“Guilty, Daria Arkadyevna, and I truly repent…”

*

We’ll leave the reading of these two books, which look unimpressive anyway, for later. The Prince sits down in the armchair and begins simply to talk, warning that his knowledge is unsystematic, fragmentary: he’s no meditator, after all, and has never tried himself at it.
Meditator or not, he knows an astonishing amount. The eight-limbed yoga of Patanjali which begins with right living and cannot do without pranayama, the control of breath. (I’ve never done that. Isn’t there some falseness in it, some magic?) The Buddhist meditations of shamatha and vipassana: observation of a single object and attentiveness to everything. Middle Eastern exercises like spinning in one place: A. M., laughing, assures me he once glimpsed or overheard these somewhere, and what connection they have with Sufism (another new word), he’s no idea. Hesychasm. John Climacus (a name new to me, though I’m Orthodox). The Jesus Prayer (what, is that meditation too?!).
I cover page after page. I mercilessly pester him with questions, to most of which he jokingly raises his palms in a gesture of “I surrender”: how should he know? No one knows the details until they try it themselves…
And at the same time, a feeling of unease grows. The Prince finally notices it:
“Are you overwhelmed by… the unsystematic nature of my material?”
“Y-yes,” I blush, having said it. I try to correct myself: “Not so much the unsystematic nature as the enormity of it. One could devote one’s whole life to this, couldn’t one?”
“One could.”
“And it’s all so different…”
“Your own instinct will one day tell you what precisely you need—if you need anything at all.”
“Or it won’t tell me… And besides, it’s all from different faiths. A bit from everywhere.”
“That didn’t trouble Boethius.”
“But I’m not Boethius! And the world has changed.”
“Are you… afraid of offending Christ with your meditations—or the Church? The Church needn’t know about them. In the closet there is just you, without a second.”
“Just me and God, without a third.”
“Right you are.”
“Yes, He probably wouldn’t hold it against me… I remember we once spoke of all this! I was afraid of prelest’, and you advised me not to bury my talent in the ground. How much time has passed since then—it’s inconceivable… I would like not to bury it! Only I’ve racked my brains over how to combine it with life, any life! Even nuns in a convent live two to a cell: you can’t hide. And in the world there are children, a husband. How much time men must take up, probably…”
“Take me, for instance.”
“Shame on you for saying that! It’s I who shamelessly steal your time. I’m afraid, Alexander Mikhailovich, that I’m like a five-year-old girl who’s scribbled something or other—and her parents grow tender over her, foretell her future as a great artist. That’s how you grow tender over my ‘childish mysticism’, or whatever one should call it…”
“No, no, word of honour, no. I’ve no grounds—cross my heart—to grow tender over you as if over a little girl in a pink dress. You’re not a little girl—that is, you’re a girl only outwardly. You’re a concentrated, strong, courageous and stubborn person, and that’s as obvious as the fact that grass is green and the sky is blue.”
“The sky is cloudy today, but thank you all the same… I wonder, will there be a storm?”
“One more word of caution, Dolly: whatever meditative practice you may choose—if you choose anything at all: meditation isn’t the be-all and end-all—don’t expect quick results. Arm yourself with patience.”
“ ‘Quick’!” I sigh. “If only I could see any results at all…”

*

After almost three hours of work, I suddenly catch myself: we’ve missed the Vigil. A. M., smiling, takes out his laptop: in one sense, we’ve missed it—in another, not. He has with him Rachmaninoff’s ALL-NIGHT VIGIL.
We listen to this astonishing music. At times I draw deep breaths, barely holding back tears. How piercingly beautiful! You couldn’t sing like that in church—it’s not a service, it’s a concert—but the soul needs concerts too.
“You like it too, don’t you,” I whisper. “You do, don’t you? That means you’re Russian too—somewhere deep in your soul, Russian! And not some ‘mister’ at all. I’m so glad…”
“I’m universal, Dolly,” he answers me quietly. “I belong to everywhere and to no one.”
“That’s something else… You’re not a stranger, that’s the main thing. Why didn’t you tell the girls you were Russian?”
“They wouldn’t have believed it…”

*

At eight o’clock I catch myself—I haven’t fed him dinner (again!)—and hastily cook up something. I’m a useless housekeeper and a useless disciple. I’ll be an equally useless wife and an equally useless nun.
Around nine, the Prince leaves. I see him a little way—until, laughing, he insists I go home. We agree that perhaps tomorrow morning we’ll go to the convent out of town, especially if we wake up and ring each other not too late.

*

In the evening, in the closet, I try a couple of the methods from those I wrote down today. I follow my breath, counting. Unfamiliar… but somehow monotonous. Like milking a goat with an enormous udder—the milk never ends, and it never will end.
How did I, an Orthodox girl, come to these strange exercises?
And, by the way—is it not a sin, all the same?
The chick sits in its shell and cheeps: “Is it not a sin? Is it not a sin?” Funny and sad.
 
* * *

3 May 2009, Sunday

I’m writing, and my hands are still trembling. Help me, Lord.
At half past seven in the morning I’m already waiting for his call—and I wait until ten, losing patience. So, we’ve already missed Liturgy. How vexing!
At eleven, when the rain begins, I can’t hold out any longer—I ring the Prince myself. I hear from him:
“Dolly, dearest, I haven’t forgotten you! Please give me another half hour: to deal with what came, to write it down. I’ll be with you by noon.”
A. M. appears not at noon, but somewhere around half past twelve. His eyes are strangely bright, and his whole appearance is as if… as if someone’s struck him over the head with a sack of dust. What’s wrong with him?! This is where I should have asked—but I’m slightly cross, and I don’t ask. Strange, but… maybe he’s been drinking? I’m bad at telling when a person’s drunk and when they’re not: I’ve no nose for it, no skill; it wasn’t the custom in our family. I’m bad at telling, but I’ve loathed drunks since childhood.
“We’ve probably missed the convent,” I say, more rudely than I meant to.
(And what did I need that convent for, anyway! All I’d wanted was to get out of town, to stroll with him in the forest afterwards. That won’t happen now: you can’t go walking in a downpour like this…)
“Really? I’m terribly sorry.”
“Well, never mind,” I soften. “You were writing something, it seems. A new chapter? I’m ready to listen.”
“Two chapters,” he explains. “One appeared earlier, and the second today.”

*

The Prince reads the chapter “On the Predators of the Desert”. I can barely hear it out to the end. I stand up and begin to pace the room. I announce:
“Say what you like, Alexander Mikhailovich, but I don’t much like this. Especially the part about the hyenas gnawing the bones of dead giants. We—the majority—are humble Christians. We didn’t study at LSU. Yes, we depend on the Church, on sacred tradition! The saints of the past have died; no new ones have appeared. So what now—drag us through the mud? And they’re not bones—they’re relics, and no one’s gnawing at them…”
“You… didn’t quite mean to say that, Daria Arkadyevna.”
“What did I mean, then?”
“I don’t know, but you seem displeased with me.”
“Of course I’m displeased: I was expecting you at nine! Yes, I know, you’re nobody to me, and I’m nobody to you, and all the rest of it. But could you not have written, at least?”
“Forgive me. I can delete the paragraph about the hyenas.”
“No, no need: you won’t delete it from your own head, anyway.”
“Have you… begun to doubt me, Daria Arkadyevna?”
“I haven’t begun to doubt anyone! I have the right to say what I think, don’t I?” I very, very much dislike the way I’ve been behaving since morning, but I can’t stop—it’s as if I’m flying down a hill on a sledge. “Read the second one… please!”

*

The Prince reads the chapter “On the Meeting with the Serpent”—and it openly frightens me. I can’t grasp what it is. Partly out of this fright, I ask, the moment he finishes:
“What is this—are you glorifying death?”
“Not at all.”
“Is Satan the Angel of Death?”
“No, no! I believe that after death we are met by a special angel who helps us to make the crossing.”
“You b-e-l-i-e-v-e? And is there proof of this? In the Holy Fathers or at least in your mystics?”
“To be honest, I haven’t come across any.”
“Ah! You haven’t come across any…”
“No—but I spoke with the Serpent today.”
I let this pass my ears. I answer, very much in the village spirit:
“I don’t know who you’ve been talking to… Forgive me, please, but—not with a bottle?”
A. M. flinches.
“I simply loathe drunks, since childhood,” I add in an apologetic tone.
“I assure you, Daria Arkadyevna—no.”
“All right, all right… Whoever you were talking to, I didn’t like this chapter either. Not at all. ‘Angel of Death, be merciful to me!’ Not Christ, not the Mother of God, but precisely the Angel of Death! A fine thing you’ve dreamt up! And besides… This isn’t a chapter about death. Sorry, but it’s a chapter about flight.”
“Flight?”
“Yes, flight! And it’s your own portrait, by the way. You’re always fleeing. You fled Russia for London. Then from London back to Russia. But after that too, you kept fleeing back and forth. You fled from our class. You even…”
(I understand perfectly well that I’m saying wicked things! There’s no one to rein me in.)
“…You even fled from Alya whom you call Alice! You didn’t hold her back—and that, for all intents and purposes, is the same thing. What stopped you on the twentieth of March—your ‘taboo’?”
A. M. looks at me with horror and pain.
“Oh, what a great matter!” I continue. (Amusing: it was I—in March—who used the word “thief”. As if half a lifetime has passed since then.) “You simply didn’t love her. There, and now you’re fleeing from me, too… into fantasies! And soon you’ll flee altogether.”
For a long time neither of us utters a word. At last the Prince pronounces, sadly:
“Perhaps you’re right.” (Where does that brightness in his eyes come from?!) “To an enormous degree you’re right: I truly didn’t love her enough—or rather, I didn’t fully believe in her love, in the strength of it…”
“A great pity. Now gnaw your elbows.”
“It… seems to give you pleasure to wound me. If only you knew how…”
“I don’t want to know anything,” I interrupt him. “How thin-skinned you are!”
“Well, then, Daria Arkadyevna, and once again you’re right,” he agrees. “I am thin-skinned—and that means, as a teacher, I’m unfit today. It’s better for me to leave today.”
In silence he gathers his things and leaves. We don’t even say goodbye.

*

After he’s gone I pace the room. I understand that I’ve done a great deal of wrong, but right now I can’t cool down. I’m furious. Paganism, pure paganism! His book encourages paganism. And he’s a fine one himself! Truly, we’ve found ourselves a magus! A fakir! A communicator with serpents!
Stop.
T-h-a-t Prince—from the book—also spoke with a serpent. Yes, and we remember how that ended.
My throat goes dry. With not very obedient fingers I find the right place in the book.

“You have good poison? You won’t make me suffer long?”

With the same wooden fingers I dial the Prince’s number:
“Alexander Mikhailovich, could you… come back? It’s important.”
“You don’t much want to see me today, Dolly, so let’s drop the idea.”
“Oh, Lord,” I whisper. “I just knew you’d answer me that. It serves me right, I’ve earned it… And what if… what if I run after you myself? And I w-i-l-l run, never mind that it’s pouring buckets…”
After hesitating a few seconds, the Prince agrees to return.

*

Once more he comes into the room, having left his open umbrella in the hallway—but this time he doesn’t even sit down; his whole manner shows he’s looked in for a minute.
“Tell me,” I avoid looking him straight in the eye, ”tell me about your conversation with the Serpent. In a dream? This morning?”
He nods. He adds:
“Strange, considering I’m not the least bit a mystic. It seems everyone gets their three minutes of mysticism. I didn’t ask for anything, Dolly. I’m not trying to flee: you’re unfair to me. I was simply told the timescale.”
“And… when?”
“In three or four months. I can still be of use. You see, what you took for intoxication was simply the slight fright of an ordinary mortal man. But at the same time, I’m glad to know. This is a privilege.”
My legs give way beneath me. They won’t hold me at all.
How could I—how could I! And on the very day he learned, of all days!
I fall to my knees, hide my face in my hands, and roar with sobs like a simple Russian peasant woman. I gasp for air with my mouth, like a fish: there isn’t enough, it’s hard to breathe. I haven’t even the strength to say, “Forgive me!” For everything I said to him today there is no forgiveness. I never guessed that so many tears could fit inside me, stupid thing that I am, and they never end.
The Prince carefully wraps me in the blanket, like one would wrap a child. He kneels down opposite me. I don’t lift my head—I’m afraid to look him in the eye. I know what will be in his eyes: forgiveness and love, only that. And that is very, very painful.
He whispers some words of comfort to me. I can’t make them out: my head feels as if it’s stuffed with cotton wool.
At last I calm down—not fully, but enough that I can breathe without hindrance; enough that I can look at him. Only then does it come out of me:
“Forgive me; forgive me, please…”
I’d said “thou ” to him. A new impertinence, of course—he never gave me permission to call him “thou”. The Prince answers:
“Thou art not to blame for anything. All is well.”
As if he could have answered anything else…
For a long, long time we stay like that: the everywhere-and-nobody’s man who has conversed with the Serpent—and the rough, cruel Russian lass from the village.
The Prince quietly tells me various things. One thing I remember: only life is the measure of our philosophy, and the time has come to apply the day-before-yesterday’s lesson to life. Socrates knew there is no death—he knew it firmly, indestructibly. What sort of Christians are we, if we haven’t even mastered with mind and heart the teaching of a pre-Christian sage?
Yes. Yes, of course.
A thousand different details suddenly become important to me, and I begin to ask questions—but it turns out he’s already thought of everything. That’s why he was late today. And he, in turn, begins to ask me about small things, of no use to anyone: Aunt Lyuba’s phone number, for instance. Why? But I give it to him without a murmur.
And we speak of something else—but speaking grows harder and harder. I’m calm now, but a shivering unexpectedly begins to shake me, and the blanket doesn’t help. A. M. brings me hot tea, settles me on the sofa, and insists on giving me a rest for today. He leaves.

*

After he’s gone I pray: on my prayer rope, lying right on the sofa, staring at the ceiling. I haven’t got the strength to get to the closet. I force myself to stand up, go to the kitchen and prepare something. I force myself to make this entry.
I want, now in the evening, to ring the Prince again, but… one must give him a rest, too. How utterly shameless I am…
All the same, late in the evening I write him a text:

The two new chapters are splendid!

And in truth, they really are splendid. “Love the Desert, if thou canst live in it!”—isn’t that beautiful? Why didn’t I hear it straight away?
From him comes the answer:

Oh yes, you clearly like them, Dolly dear.

There is no smiley at the end, but I suppose one was meant. Absurd as it is, I can’t help laughing. Through tears, of course.


Part Five
The Days Before Departure


4 May 2009, Monday

In the morning I journey from church to church, lighting candles to various saints: to Saint Sergius, and to Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker, and to Saint Demetrius of Thessaloniki. Probably what’s already been decided can’t be undone… but what if? If I’d stayed at home, I’d have felt completely useless.
Between two churches arrives Varya’s call. The girls want to meet me. I didn’t expect that.
A drizzle is falling—fine, not like yesterday—so I set the meeting for the same cheap caf; where I talked with Aunt Lyuba, twenty minutes after the long break begins. Catching myself, I ask:
“But how will they let you out?”
Varya promises mysteriously that “for such a cause” they’ll be let out.

*

There are three of them: Varya herself, Masha, and Sonya. Varvara and Maria avert their eyes. Sonya’s eyes are perfectly round:
“Dasha, tell us the whole truth! Are you preparing for monasticism?! Are you undergoing obedience under a holy elder from the Lavra?!”
I laugh, shake my head, neither confirming nor denying. With questions I ferret out where this rumour, pleasant to me, came from.
After my departure, the whole gymnasium, of course, talked of nothing but me. “The girl sacrificed her certificate for love!” Against this background, the version about “group sin” faded a little. What group sin if there’s a love like that! And besides, who asked us to peek under someone else’s blanket?
(Ah, my dears, why didn’t such a simple thought enter your heads earlier?)
No one now seriously considered the former English teacher my betrothed, either. Such passion—for a forty-year-old bloke with grey in his hair? And besides, he’s a homosexual, isn’t he, it seems? And if not, why did he bring an article about his “brethren” to class? Or is he simply incapable of anything as a man?—no wonder he brought Alya back to the gymnasium the same evening…
There were, of course, those who believed in Ksyusha’s version right up to Sunday, but they turned out to be in a clear minority. Varya, feeling shame that her loose tongue had sent the version about A. M. round the class, and that it had sprouted invented details on top, also actively refuted it.
Everyone, naturally, turned against Ksyusha herself—and she fell ill, whether in earnest or in pretence, declaring that the “bullying” of the class had driven her to a “nervous breakdown”. Ksyusha is a “town” girl—she lives with her parents, not in the gymnasium. She didn’t come to lessons today. There’s talk that her parents want to transfer her to another school altogether. (A month before graduation?! However, anything happens in life.)
And on Sunday, Father Vadim, during a short sermon, held up “one of their classmates” to all the girls as an example of a girl who doesn’t waste precious time, but already now, at a young age, is sacrificially preparing for monastic life. Father Vadim himself learned of my visit to Mother Euphrosynia from Father Veniamin, and Father Veniamin, from one of the sisters of the Vvedensky Convent: the earth is full of rumours. After the service, the priest named the classmate.
Then, from somewhere, a new rumour flew in—that I’d been at the Lavra at Pascha—and everything fell into place for the girls. Of course, it’s impossible that Dashenka, our holy fool, should be in carnal relations with a seminarian, let alone with a rocker or that English f—g. She slandered herself, took upon herself the podvig  of holy-foolery! The angelic habit is dearer to her than anything in the world—her certificate, her career, her good name!
And we… and because of us…
This morning a small delegation was formed to go to Roza Markovna with a request to permit me, as an exception, to live in town. The deputy head listened about my holy-foolery, smiled, confirmed about the Lavra, and about the permission asked: why are you asking m-e for this? It was your class’s behaviour that caused the bans. Go to the one you offended, in the same company, and ask h-e-r to come back. Which is why, essentially, they came…
“Dashenka, I could kneel before you!” (This is Sonya, with her fantasies, of course.)
I laugh, stand up, go over to Sonya and kiss her on her forehead. A picture for Sunday school, indeed. Everyone’s moved: in the girls’ eyes, even Maria’s, tears glisten. (Maria today called me “Dashenka, my dove” several times in her bass voice.) I’m moved too.
I agree: I don’t want to disappoint them. I agree, on condition that Roza Markovna still permits me to live in town. The delegation cries out, all talking at once: “She’s already permitted it—already!”
Well, splendid, then. All’s well that ends well. I’ll have to sit through dreary lessons again… but during lessons you can busy yourself with something else. Read Plato, for instance. At least I won’t have to do “distance” assignments—and I long ago waved my hand at ordinary homework: no time for it. Every cloud has a silver lining.

*

The most important thing happens in the evening, after dinner during which I’m timid and don’t dare lift my eyes to the Prince.
“…I thought and thought, Daria Arkadyevna: what more can I do for you? What new instrument can I apply to your ‘shell’? Many thoughts entered my head yesterday, but all of them rather useless…”
(Today we use the formal “you” again. And that’s not bad. In the end, there must be respect for the teacher—and I’m not his lover, after all.)
“Good Lord, you’re still thinking about such things?! After everything that happened yesterday?!”
“And what happened yesterday?” he smiles with the corners of his lips. “A slight misunderstanding which we seem to have successfully resolved already. Or are you still cross with me?”
(I hide my face in my hands and, probably, turn completely crimson with shame.)
“…Useless,” the Prince continues, ”but all the same, one idea didn’t seem entirely bad to me. True, even this one may not work… And besides, I don’t know: how will you take it?”
“Take what?”
“If you were to agree…”
“To what?”
“To listen, from beginning to end, to one of Stravinsky’s ballets—the composer whom, note, you cannot stand.”
“What an astonishing man you are… I thought you’d suggest I put on a hair shirt and walk to the Lavra, if not on my knees.”
“No, that’s more in the spirit of Father Vasily, and we somehow differ in our methods. So what do you say about Stravinsky?”
“Whether I agree? I agree. I agree to anything. Until your departure, Alexander Mikhailovich, I shall be obedient as a little dog.”
“You shouldn’t, you shouldn’t, and it would be a pity if that’s how it turns out!”
“I’ve only one small request in return. Could we, perhaps, give up ‘Daria Arkadyevna’?” I ask. “ ‘Dolly’ sounded so nice. And ‘Dolly, dearest’ was even nicer…”
“As you wish!” he smiles. “Well, then—if you agree, kindly sit on the sofa, or even lie down, and I’ll put the headphones on you.”
“You won’t listen with me?”
“I know THE FIREBIRD almost by heart. I’m afraid of disturbing your neighbour downstairs… and I also want you to be alone with this music. I’d draw the curtains, too.”
With a sigh, I obediently lie down on the sofa and allow the headphones to be put on me. An obedience like any other. A sheer punishment, of course—but for yesterday’s behaviour, it’s still too little. And indeed: a hair shirt would probably have been more unpleasant.

 
*

Five minutes in, I’m already doubting that a hair shirt would have been more unpleasant.
This is not simply a collection of sounds: one can get used to any collection of sounds. This is complex, intelligent, terrifying music. Quiet at first, like a creeping wolf, but menacing from the very beginning.
There’s a great deal of paganism in it—but it’s not the harmless paganism of some Krishnaites or other, about whom, admittedly, I never got round to learning anything (and bother them entirely). The Krishnaites couldn’t hold a candle to this! They’re children next to Stravinsky—let them go to nursery school. This is our own, Russian, visceral paganism. Dark forests; the horn of a shepherd who, probably, is horned and has hooves; kikimoras  in the marshes…
Any ordinary music, beside this, is like Father Vadim’s lesson beside A. M.’s; like the admonition “Fear fornication” beside “There exists an Anti-Theotokos.” Here there is boundless openness in all directions, and it’s terrifying.
The anxiety mounts, then gives way to a tender melody—tender, but also uneasy. Has the Firebird spread her wings?
Little cracks run inside me in different directions.
And now the Bird flits from branch to branch—or are those her fire-nestlings? How many of them…
Another calm picture, purely ours, of the people. But he’s a most beautiful composer! How did I not notice before?! The picture opens out in full breadth—and I feel shivers running all over my body.
The Enemy invades this world which I’ve already recognised, already come to love. Sounds collide chaotically. I want to take the headphones off. No, I mustn’t. This is like abandoning the fight. One must stand to the end.
A short first skirmish. A lull. The loud laughter of a wicked kikimora, a discord of voices, a crowd.
And now, the main battle. Beings have clashed, impossible to describe: there are no such words in the Russian language, nor in English—and all invented ones are useless, too. I start at every blow. A mad battle in which you don’t know whom to sympathise with, whose side to fight on. The sides have parted; the field is strewn with dead bones.
A new, drawn-out melody, as if born from the earth itself. The clouds part—and in them, for a brief moment, a shining heavenly city is visible. Tears rise to my eyes and a lump rises in my throat.
The Enemy is not idle—he slithers like a viper, flutters up like a kite, gives his final battle. He is vanquished, struck down by a single blow. And again, from a small seed, a fiery flower—the Firebird—grows, unfurls, and blazes across half the sky.
Something is ringing—probably the bells in the churches of Heavenly Russia, and the little bells of troikas on her roads. No, not only that: it’s the shell I lived inside—crumbling, falling down with a ringing sound. That’s it—it’s gone. It won’t be there any more.


*

I take the headphones off and open my eyes. The Prince carefully draws the curtains. He turns to me:
“Well, now—I’ve made you cry again!”
“These are different tears…”
(I ought to go and wash my face, but I don’t want to stir. I could lie on my back like this the whole evening.)
The Prince sits down beside me and says, in a half-whisper, that I needn’t hurry: it’s best to let my soul absorb everything it has lived through. He won’t disturb me now.
And he really does leave, locking the door with his key.
I do almost nothing for the rest of the evening—only, without hurry, weighing the words, recalling what I saw, I write this diary. What exactly happened—I’ll think through later: tomorrow, the day after. For now, I must preserve the fresh imprint.
Around nine I send the Prince a text of six words:

Thank you. Thank you! Thank you…

How did he manage it?

* * *

5 May 2009, Tuesday

In the morning, before waking, I dream again of the Desert.

A wall in the Desert. Several date palms (an oasis?) beyond the wall. A door in the wall.
At the door stands Abba Jijoi. Though I’ve never seen him, I recognise him without mistake, as always happens in dreams. His beard is black, lightly touched with grey, soft, slightly wavy; his eyes are dark, but gentle. He’s not yet old: about forty, no more.
Abba Jijoi, smiling with the tips of his lips alone, turns a key in the door and opens it for me.

Nothing new at the gymnasium. New whispers behind my back, but now the whispers are approving, even admiring. Girls smile at me, look at me with tender eyes. They search for some special meaning in my simple, silly little words. All this is funny, of course, and won’t last long. “The wheel of fortune has turned,” as Boethius would say. And it may turn again—and then many, many more times in life…
Sonya, who can never sit still, wants to organise a collection for my “dowry” for the convent. Should I really go to the Marfo-Mariinsky Convent?
It’s pleasant that the boycott against Natasha has ended. On the contrary, she’s looked at with new respect: it was she, after all, who defended me! And even before Sunday’s sermon. Now a new rumour has started, flattering to her: that she’s no lesbian at all, and that her self-slander was yet another—unrecognised, as in my case—podvig of holy-foolery: she did it for the class, for the expulsion of the pernicious English sodomite. Not everyone believes it, but those who don’t are keeping quiet for the time being. Even Olya is keeping quiet: from this angle, though she lacked clearsightedness, she did show resolve in the struggle against evil, so it’s to her advantage not to contradict the general mood.
A conversation with Olya at break. My sister restrainedly praises me for finally ceasing to associate with the English teacher—that adventurer, that secret Protestant, that puffed-up clown (what an image!), from whom no one ever got anything good. “How on earth did he pull the wool over your eyes? Never mind, many in our family sowed  their wild oats in youth…” (I keep quiet, neither confirming nor arguing.) She’s preoccupied with my “decision” to enter a convent and scolds me: how did it all pass her by? Why didn’t I turn to h-e-r for help? I’m muddle-headed, not of this world, but she could have arranged things for me! She’s no stranger to me, after all! Oh, how many times I’ve heard that little phrase… And to my mind, she’s precisely a stranger, though it’s a sin to write such a thing. I temporarily calmed her by saying I haven’t finally decided yet; and that, if I do decide to take the tonsure, it certainly won’t be at the Vvedensky Convent.

*

“How grateful I am to you!” Those are my very first words on meeting the Prince in the evening, before any “good evening”.
“What for?” he smiles (we go through to the kitchen).
“You know what for.”
“So the little shell cracked?”
“Cracked—what are you saying! It crumbled! How did you find that key for me? A master!”
“There, only you can appreciate me… How does it show that it crumbled? Please, tell me in more detail! I’m like a child who’s done something important but hasn’t fully grasped how or what.”
“How does it show, you ask? In that something has appeared in me… Fearlessness, perhaps. I’m ready to trust my own instinct more than—it’s shameful to say such a thing, but this is only in your ear—more than the whole Church from head to toe. Not Christ, note—the Church! And besides, now I’m afraid of nothing. Not afraid of the world, not afraid of marriage, not afraid of monasticism… By the way, could we go to the Marfo-Mariinsky Convent?”
“Without fail. I’ll buy tickets for Saturday.”
“Oh, splendid! …Not afraid even of dying in the street as a beggar. And it’s all you who’ve done it.”
“No, I don’t accept the honour: it was precisely you who did it—I only stood nearby.” The Prince laughs. “What a strange result I’ve led you to! Your parents wouldn’t thank me for it.”
“On the contrary, they would. By the way, I even think I might be able…”
“What?”
“…To see them, if I wanted to, one day. But it’s too early to think of that.”
“So you believe in yourself to that extent?”
“Yes—precisely to that extent.”
“Well done, Stravinsky!”
“Indeed. But I wouldn’t recommend him to just anyone, and I certainly don’t want to listen to him any time soon. My ears curl up into tubes from him! Yesterday and today—that was a hill on my path. There’ll probably be more descents. Maybe I’ll forget my courage a little… But that doesn’t matter. I’ll never forget it completely. Thank you! And why, I wonder, haven’t I given you your dinner yet, and why haven’t you reminded me?”

*

We don’t feel like doing anything heavy, so today’s theme is “Fairy Tales”. The Prince assures me, half-jokingly, half-seriously, that every deep, good fairy tale conceals a mass of teachings, not only for children but for adults too.
“Like THE LITTLE PRINCE!” I catch on.
“THE LITTLE PRINCE is a philosophical book altogether—that is, not even secretly, but openly—and I’m surprised it hasn’t yet been included in the curricula of philosophy faculties. No, take any other one, something simpler.”
“PINOCCHIO?”
“The trials of the soul, no worse than John Bunyan’s PILGRIM’S PROGRESS.”
“LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD?”
“The deception of the vulgar world, which pretends to be a kind granny while already baring its wolf’s teeth at us.”
“I understand that perfectly… ALICE IN WONDERLAND?”
“A philosophical treatise—whole volumes have been written about its meanings. No, don’t smile: truly! I’ll bring you a couple of articles later, if I don’t forget.”
“WINNIE-THE-POOH?”
“Oh, that’s my absolute favourite!”

*

The Prince develops his theory. The English fairy tale about the stuffed bear is, in reality, an image of religion. (I can’t tell whether he’s joking or not. He’s perfectly capable of pulling the wool over anyone’s eyes…) He gives his keys to WINNIE-THE-POOH: Winnie-the-Pooh himself is the believing layperson, a simpleton, an everyman; Piglet is the ordinary priest; Rabbit is the theologian, a professor of the theological academy; Owl is the sage—or rather, the false sage, the “worldly guru”. With these keys in hand, he suggests I think about the meanings of individual chapters.
“…Remember the very first one, Dolly! Winnie-the-Pooh tries to get honey from wild bees, armed with a balloon and singing, ‘I’m a little black cloud, I’m not a bear at all!’ The ordinary person desires the sweetness of Secret Knowledge and, having armed himself with a couple of fashionable methods read in a book like MEDITATION FOR DUMMIES, tries to pass himself off as a Spiritual Practitioner—something he is not at all. Of course, the wild bees—guardians of True Knowledge—discover him, and he gets his comeuppance: he flies head over heels from his imaginary height.”
“And won’t that happen to me?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re not a bear, Dolly—you’re precisely a cloud. It’s in your nature to rise upwards, and if you sing that song, you won’t be deceiving anyone.”
“But a cloud doesn’t need honey, does it?” I suddenly realise.
“Quite right! It carries everything it needs inside itself.”

 
*

“…Doesn’t it strike you that Piglet, a tiny creature, lives in a huge house?”
“I’ve got it! It reminds me of Father Vadim—that phrase of his about being a ‘small priest’!”
“Yes, and I’m the last person to cast a stone at him for that honest phrase. If I’d been ordained, I’d probably have been a quite tiny one too.”
“Ah, what a pity you turned away from the priesthood!”
“But no one ever seriously offered it to me, and my flirtation with the idea remained a romantic flirtation, so what’s there to regret… None of us is equal to the greatness of our faith; we all live in a huge house with a sign saying ‘Trespassers W’, but we disregard the menacing meaning of that solemn prohibition and drag ourselves into the temple, often precisely as trespassers—and drag along a whole heap of worldly cares into the bargain. We’ve forgotten how to read the tablets on which the Testament was brought to us; forgotten how to see their simple, clear meaning—and we start fantasising that ‘Trespassers W’ is the name of our grandfather.”

*

“…Or take that charming story about the Spotted Backson, when Christopher Robin leaves a note on someone’s door: ‘Gon out. Bisy. Backson’—and from that word a beast that never existed is created! God communes with us, but we can’t read His writing, and the priesthood, the theologians, the worldly gurus—all of them interpret His signs crookedly and askew.”

*

“…And Tigger in Winnie-the-Pooh—who’s that?” I ask. (I’m leafing through Zakhoder’s translation and looking at the pictures.)
“Tigger? That’s Blake’s Tiger, tiger, burning bright—and Blake himself, of course. That’s Vivekananda, the Bengal tiger. That’s the visionaries, who roam the jungles near the little village of the Church, but are capable of smashing all notions, overturning all orders, with a single leap. That’s you, Daria Arkadyevna.”
“There, we did agree on ‘Dolly’… What sort of Tigger am I?! I don’t want to hear another word about it. Tigger—that’s more likely you.”
“Good heavens, how could I be… I, who have spent my whole life circling around religion—am I a visionary? In this tale, I’m, at most, Kanga: a not terribly clever single mother with a long tail of old sins and mistakes.”
“Then I’m your Baby Roo!” I laugh, and I expect him to laugh after me, but with surprise I see a tear in his eye, which he quickly brushes away. He nods silently, as if ashamed to agree aloud.

*

From fairy tales—about house-spirits—the conversation turns to spirits of human dwellings and, in general, spirits of nature. The Prince is convinced that all of them exist; that there’s no sense in worshipping them, but it’s perfectly possible to commune with them. I’m so tempted to tell him how Father Vasily would have torn strips off him for such “paganism”! But I don’t: it’s a pity to waste time on one of the fat little piglets of our native faith and their desire to see traces of malicious Woozles and Wizzles anywhere and everywhere.

*

Right at the end of the evening we watch THE ADVENTURES OF LITTLE DOMOVOY  KUZYA on A. M.’s laptop. A charming cartoon—and how did it pass me by in childhood? What a pleasant rest after Stravinsky! Just my sort of thing—I don’t need anything more complicated…

*

I notice (in the closet) that I don’t seem to need to do anything special. I simply need to stay alone with myself and give myself time. The waves come and go by themselves. My body seems to ring itself through, switching on and off little bells in different places.
If anyone ever reads all this, they’ll hardly understand what I’m talking about… Or, on the contrary, they’ll understand at once.

* * *

6 May 2009, Wednesday

Today we listen to music again, but the theme is not music—it’s “Outstanding Women”: one of them.
A. M. tells me the biography of Jacqueline du Pr;, the English cellist. She didn’t live long—by twenty-eight she was confined to a wheelchair, and she died at forty-two.
“…You see, Dolly, a short life is not at all necessarily an empty one.”
“I’d never have thought it was,” I answer. “Wasn’t Boethius also around forty-four at the moment of his death?”
“Quite right.”
(I keep silent about another short life—h-i-s. One mustn’t speak of it, and better not to think of it. He could have been mistaken, after all!)
“And note,” the Prince continues, “married life, too, is often not at all useless. She and Barenboim were a wonderful couple, weren’t they?”
“You’re still trying to marry me off to my future husband! How touching… Yes, but she had her cello. Recordings remain of her; those recordings serve people. And what will remain of me—a couple of clay whistles?”
“Not every life consists of great victories! But I don’t like playing devil’s advocate myself: it comes out, against my will, as if I’m talking you out of what is yours, exclusively yours—and that’s awful.”
“And what is mine, exclusively mine? My closet? Where could I set up that little closet…”
“I’m no less concerned about that than you are, believe me.”
“Well, probably for nothing. I shan’t sit in your pocket forever, Mama Kanga, poking out timid ears!”
 
*

We listen to and watch recordings of du Pr;. First—the second movement of Beethoven’s GEISTERTRIO (I asked A. M. to write the word down for me). The first and third movements, he says, are too stormy—they wouldn’t be to my taste. The Prince confesses that this middle movement is among his most beloved pieces of classical music.
“Yes, it’s in your spirit,” I agree.
“In what spirit of mine?”
“It’s strict, restrained, bashful and deep—there’s a whole ocean of feeling in it, but you don’t hear it at once.”
“I’m afraid that’s not about me at all. I’m a superficial and cheerful person.”
“Tell that to someone else. ‘Among the most beloved classical,’ then! And what do you like in non-classical music?”
“What I like in non-classical music will almost certainly repel you, my remarkable Baby Roo. I was one of the regulars at the Leningrad Rock Club, if you remember. Incidentally, a certain Tibetan sage advised spiritual disciples not to resemble rotting sheepskin coats, to which gold doesn’t stick—only dirt. It will be a bad thing if the musical rubbish of my foolish youth sticks to you.”
“Aha! But with Alya Florenskaya you thought differently, I bet… Tell me, then—what music did you listen to with her on the twentieth of March?”
“Tsoi, Grebenshchikov, Nautilus…”
“There, you see!”
“But you’re not her—and thank goodness, for you! Can Boris Grebenshchikov really compare with Beethoven?”
“No, probably not… But still—tell me a little more about… the twentieth of March.”
“Truly, the female thought proceeds by unpredictable paths.”
“But you provoked me yourself, by mentioning the non-uselessness of married life!” I tease him. “Now put up with it. So, Mama Kanga, you sat with her at your dacha…”
“…In the wicker chairs.”
“That’s why I didn’t like them at once! You listened to the songs of your youth…”
“Yes.”
“And… struggled with desire?” (I blush, having said it.) Forgive me for asking. I shan’t judge you in any case. I’m not the Orthodox prude who wrote to you in March, ‘Did it happen? Did it not?!’ ”
“No, not with desire—or rather, you’ve put it rather crudely. With romantic attraction, which in her case might have been simple gratitude.”
“You understand nothing about girls, mister. ‘An Arabic Stierlitz,’ who has lived in London, visited Cairo and Calcutta—and ‘simple gratitude.’ Well, of course!”
“Or simple foolishness, which is even worse. Right at the end, Alice asked me whether she could stay till morning. I replied: only if we go to the registry office the next morning—but they wouldn’t accept her application because of her age.”
“They would now!”
“I beg your pardon?”
“They would now: she turned eighteen in April.”
“Daria Arkadyevna, Dolly, dearest, don’t poke at old wounds! What possible difference does it make now, for the love of all that’s holy?”
“Shall I bring her to you?” it suddenly bursts from me.
“What?!”
“I’m serious. Don’t make such round eyes!”
“No, no, please, don’t!”
(From the energy with which he protests, I understand that the wound really hasn’t healed yet.)
“Forgive me!” I apologise. “That was tactless of me.”
“No… You are the most astonishing woman of all I’ve ever met, Dolly.”
“You’re mistaken all the same, Mama Kanga. Baby Roo isn’t a woman—she’s a girl.” (“And that’s probably what she’ll remain,” I finish inwardly.)
“It’s Beethoven, probably, who stirred you up so much that you were drawn to questions about the twentieth of March…”
“That’s why I don’t like him!”

 
*

After Beethoven comes C;sar Franck—his Violin Sonata, which du Pr; performs on the cello. An exquisite sonata! It shimmers with colours, from azure to deep blue.
“Little sister, what a clever girl you are…” I whisper.
After the sonata comes the turn of a short film—an interview with du Pr; in the last year of her life. The whole interview is in English. The Prince translates in a low voice. He asks me, when the film ends:
“What do you think?”
“I think she’s a saint,” I say, simply.
“Figuratively?”
“No, literally. To endure physical pain with such fortitude, courage and love for people, you have to be a saint. Her illness took her instrument from her, but it opened for her the door into the Desert. Fourteen years of Desert—that’s a very great deal! I myself may have only fourteen years—what if Satan didn’t lie… Oh, thank you!”
“For what, Baby Roo?”
“For the fact that I now see how important it is not to squander a single year, a single week, a single little second! On marriage—it’s simply indecent.”
“Decide that yourself, only yourself, without looking back at others.”
“I’ve almost decided already… Put the sonata on again!”
And once more we listen to this remarkable music.

*

Something joyful: we’ve definitively agreed on the trip to Moscow, to the Marfo-Mariinsky Convent, on Saturday, and we’ll take Sunday with it. The tickets are already bought.
Something disappointing: he’ll be away all Friday. He has an appointment with a notary in another town. (I didn’t ask why in another town. Probably because in the regional centre there’s a queue before the May holidays.) Well, then—I can’t follow him everywhere, like a little lapdog.
Did I do wrong today, asking about the twentieth of March? It’s not my business, after all… But perhaps I should ring Alya? There are only six days till his departure…
I won’t hurry that thought. Let it ripen.

* * *

7 May 2009, Thursday

A horrible dream. Not prophetic, I hope—just an ordinary one.

I dream that A. M. has concealed something from the state, and now I am being interrogated by people from his Department. They are searching for something: some kind of records, or a black Coptic cross. I weep and swear that I know nothing. My flat is searched; they turn everything upside down. Finally the Department staff calm down. “All right, then… He was a patriot, after all… Everyone has their little sins…” They leave.

After waking, it comes to me: the thing they were searching for was me. My existence.
That vile “was” of theirs, the way you speak of the dead…
The fault is mine: I must stop asking stupid questions. They invite bad thoughts.

*

Today, at my request (yesterday’s, in fact; an interesting coincidence), we speak about demons. There are only a few days left, so the most important topics can’t be postponed any further. And this one, it seems, is the most important of all.
At the start of the lesson I get my comeuppance. Mama Kanga justly prescribes Baby Roo a dose for yesterday’s tactlessness. Here’s how it happens.
“Tell me, Dolly—do you understand demons mystically, or patristically? In other words, are they real beings with their own evil will for you, or simply symbols of our bad impulses, like lustful thoughts, for instance?”
He looks at me—I’ve long known that mockery, that little spark in his eyes!—and adds:
“Like those lustful thoughts from which you so touchingly tried to protect me yesterday, asking whether I had struggled with them on the twentieth of March?”
“Oh, Lord!” I blush to the roots of my hair. “How can you! Did you really think I’d judge you? And besides, if you’d gone with her to the registry office the next morning, it wouldn’t even be sin…”
The Prince laughs merrily.
“Forgive me that little jab!” he apologises. “I didn’t mean to, but I couldn’t resist. I hide nothing, nothing from you, and I didn’t lie to you in March. It’s simply that you’re precisely a girl, as you so splendidly put it yesterday, and an almost-ready desert-dweller into the bargain. It’s better for you not to think about such things…”

*

Both varieties are important, but real demons interest me more. A. M. tells me in detail about unclean powers: how they were seen in Rus’ before Christianisation, in Europe in the Middle Ages, in Arab countries, in India; what modernity has to say. I’m not too lazy to take notes… but all this isn’t quite it. This is entertaining mythology, perhaps even someone’s fantasies, but what I want to learn about is reality.
“Alexander Mikhailovich, and you—what demons do y-o-u believe in? How many kinds are real for you?”
The Prince doesn’t answer at once.
“I think there are small ‘mental lice’ which don’t even deserve the name of demons. And there are powerful, strong enemies. Of these strong ones I would count three kinds: demons of pathological will and intellect; of lust—servants of the Anti-Madonna; and, finally, of pride on a satanic level. There are probably more—I’m simplifying the picture. What they truly look like, Dolly, I don’t know, and I don’t know precisely where they dwell. Visionaries past and present, from John the Theologian to Blake and Daniil Andreyev, describe their appearance, give them names. Are we to believe these descriptions? No more than the note ‘Bisy Backson’ left by Christopher Robin. The note is truthful, but everyone reads it in their own way. What I trust here is not mystical treatises, but art. It’s precisely art that sometimes—very rarely, true—manages to catch the devil by the tail. I anticipated your question and prepared some artistic excerpts for you: two in prose and two in verse. Would you like to hear them?”
“If you think they won’t harm me.”
“You are a person of great fortitude… but even for you they won’t pass entirely without trace: this evening, I think, you’ll have to pray longer than usual. Don’t pity the demons for a single second, and don’t believe them for a single second! If you remember the name of Christ, you are sufficiently protected. Shall we try?”
I nod.

*

The Prince reads to me the predatory monologue of Pyotr Verkhovensky from Dostoevsky’s Demons. “We shall kill desire: we shall unleash drunkenness, gossip, denunciation; we shall unleash unheard-of debauchery…” I wrap myself shivering in the blanket.
“That’s an example of possession, isn’t it?” I ask when he finishes.
“No, you’re slightly mistaken.”
“Mistaken?”
“Not possession: conscious demon-worship.”
“O-o-oh… What a terrifying thing revolution is! I’m ready for the second.”

*

The terrible conversation between Tamara and the Demon from Lermontov. “And punishment—the torments of hell?”—“So what? You’ll be there with me!” Now I’m not shivering—I’m literally trembling. Two pages of pitch-black horror and lies from the first word to the last, but Tamara wants to believe. Poor girl! So that’s how it happens! And all she wanted was a man’s love, strong male arms…
“You’re not very well,” the Prince remarks. “Shall we stop here?”
“No, no!” I ask, almost begging. “Don’t pity me. You’re training not a girl, but a soldier—you told me so yourself! If you pity me now, later—without you—they won’t pity me.”

*

And then Blok crashes down on me: “And again the suns have opened // This door.” The poem is so terrible that I cannot write it out in full. Perhaps I should cross out even the first line?
For a minute after the reading ends, I say nothing.
“I shouldn’t have read it, should I? You’ve gone quite white.”
“No, you were right to… Yes, that really is in the spirit of Satan: it’s Satan who sees the world upside down. Blok grew tired of boring, lenten goodness and wanted merry evil; you’ve already told me why that happens; I remember. And if you read it a hundred times, you could probably bewitch yourself with it. Like a black prayer. You know, Alexander Mikhailovich, if it were up to me, I’d burn every book that contains that poem. Every last one.”
“You’re not entirely right: viruses need to be preserved, to create vaccines against them.”
“But not in school!”
“In school, such Blok is, fortunately, not studied.”
“Yes, fortunately.”
“Well, then—I’ve still got the Devil’s monologue from DOCTOR FAUSTUS, with his famous ‘Thou canst not love’…”
“No, no, enough for today! I can’t manage four. Will you… pray with me?” I suddenly ask.
“I was going to suggest it myself—only I didn’t know how you’d take it…”
I light the lampada before the small image of the Holy Face, my own. We kneel. I recite the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary aloud several times (from memory), and then the ninetieth psalm (from the Psalter), clearly, firmly, and some of the Jesus Prayer—on the prayer rope, in a whisper. We remain silent for a while longer, until I say with a sigh:
“I’m off to put the kettle on.”
“You won’t forbid me to sit with you in the kitchen?”
“What foolish questions you ask, Mama Kanga!”
“Mama Kanga sees that there is no more Baby Roo. In place of the little child there stands before her a mature and beautiful beast, a true soldier of spiritual war—and in this war she will be stronger than I am. What a useless lesson today’s has turned out to be, I think.”
“Not true.”
“Not true?”
“Not true.”
“Well, then—I’m glad if it’s not true. Your training is complete, Private Smirnova. The ‘Arabic Stierlitz’ has nothing left to teach you.”
“Somehow I can’t quite believe it…”
“Just believe it.”
“Alexander Mikhailovich, you won’t abandon me before your departure, will you?” I ask with pain. “You’re perfectly capable of it…”
“No, no, I promise! I’ll only be away tomorrow. By the way, how do you know the ninetieth psalm?”
“I’m the daughter of a village priest, you’ve forgotten. Will you… let me see you home after tea?”

*

We walk through the town. The Prince quietly sings “There is no rose of such virtue” to an Arabic melody. I want to cry, and afterwards, back home, I struggle with that wish all evening.
Never mind. It will pass.
I do indeed pray longer than usual.

* * *

8 May 2009, Friday

A pre-holiday day. In honour of it, lessons are shortened. Everyone’s in a cheerful mood. Well, and I try not to be sad—there’s no need for others to know about my melancholy. Is it their fault, after all?
There’s something good about holidays, too: the eleventh of May, the Prince’s second-to-last day, will be a day off.

 
*

I come to the gymnasium unexpectedly early and try, before lessons, to get Alya Florenskaya’s phone number out of Natasha Yakovleva. She bristles.
“What for?”
“I want her to say goodbye… you know to whom. He’s leaving far away, for a long time, and perhaps he won’t come back.”
“I’m not giving you her number!”
“Don’t, then—I’m not forcing you… And don’t you want to say goodbye to him yourself?” it suddenly comes out of me.
“Me?!”
“Yes, you.”
“How can you even… Why on earth?! Am I supposed to?”
“No, you’re not supposed to. But it’s better to be reconciled with people than to be at war with them.”
Natasha shrugs.
“That’s something from the Gospels. Dashenka, sorry, not my bedside reading.”
“It seems you still haven’t forgiven him…”
“No, I haven’t forgiven him. He took everything from me! Why should I forgive him?!”
“You took everything from yourself,” I want to say. I want to—and keep quiet: it’s both rude, and right now these aren’t the ears for it. I say instead:
“But he’s forgiven you…”
“Very glad for him! Give the man a medal. There’s two on the shelf—let him take the middle one.”
“…And he asks your forgiveness—not for what you blame him for, but for the fact that, in his time, he wasn’t able to hear your cry for help.”
“Daria, go to hell…”
And so our conversation ends. I know how to fight demons, but how to speak with an unrepentant person, my sister in humanity—that I don’t know…

*

In literature, everyone reads their own compositions—this was the homework, and I missed it completely. Compositions in the literal sense: artistic texts, confound them. Poems or stories. Viktoria Denisovna insists that she won’t accept an ordinary argument or analysis—the text must be precisely artistic, that is, in plain Russian, invented. I don’t write such things.
My turn comes. I stand up and announce honestly:
“Viktoria Denisovna, give me an F—I’ve prepared nothing.”
“And why, if I may ask?” The literature teacher smiles with a little smirk. “Does the Church consider literary creativity a sin?”
“No, it doesn’t—though literature can also be a sin… Yesterday a person close to me read to me a poem by Blok, after which I said I’d burn every book that contains that poem.”
(Snickers in the classroom.)
“Daria, you’re in your element! Can it be that your faith makes literature hateful to you? Perhaps something’s wrong with the faith, if that’s happening?”
“We’re talking about different things, and I shouldn’t have brought up Blok. Creativity is a voluntary matter, isn’t it?”
“For a writer or a poet—yes. But for you schoolgirls, it can be an exercise, useful for your development.”
“Tell me, Viktoria Denisovna—can giving birth to a child be an exercise?”
The teacher even takes a small step backwards. There’s almost fright in her eyes.
“I don’t understand your question.”
“Then I’ll explain. For me, a deep, serious and intelligent text seems as important as a child. But you can’t give birth to a child on the state’s orders, or because it’s  good for a woman’s health!  Birth is a mystery, and creativity is a mystery. And mystery doesn’t happen under duress.”
The class is silent. The teacher is silent too—but no, she doesn’t give up. She makes a last attempt to draw me into the common work:
“But I’ve heard from Roza Markovna, Daria, that you keep a diary, and a very interesting one! Perhaps you’d like to read to us from your diary?”
“I do. Viktoria Denisovna, I’d sooner die than read my diary to you and the class, especially as a ‘sample of creativity’, as a graded assignment! And not because it contains indecent details, as some people still think! Quite the opposite. A teacher isn’t God, not even a spiritual one, and I haven’t shown my diary even to my spiritual guide. I’d rather stay uncertified and, of course, remain in your eyes an obscurantist and an admirer of Pobedonostsev. With whom, by the way, Dostoevsky himself corresponded—my namesake by passport name. Put him in the company of dunces too, please.”
Again everyone is silent with awkwardness.
“You’ve grown very much, Daria, and unexpectedly, over these three months, you’ve got to be very articulate,” the teacher answers. “If only one knew where from… I’m sorry that you continue to regard secular literature with hostility, and that to this hostility has recently been added hostility towards me personally.”
“No, Viktoria Denisovna, you’re mistaken!” I answer calmly. “You’re a likeable young woman, who’s probably happy with the person she loves—one can see it. I’m deaf to that kind of happiness—God didn’t grant it to me—but I’m certainly not envious. May God grant you every happiness! And may I… will you please let me leave right now? I’m afraid I’ll miss the coach to Lyutovo.”

*

I’m not envious—God knows, I’m not envious! That’s exactly what I repeat to myself on the coach. I only want a person close to me to be happy in the last days before his departure. Is that such a great sin? I myself can’t give him that happiness, with my blindness to romantic love and my potato nose. I’m not his Rose—so I’ll bring him his little scarlet flower. I’ll have to step aside for the last days; even the trip to Moscow will have to be cancelled (how vexing!)—but “your training is complete, Private Smirnova,” isn’t that right? Never mind, it won’t be the end of me…
Lyutovo is a village no bigger than Troitskoye. By questioning the local grannies, I find out where to look for the priest’s house.
Here it is, this house. I’m standing about ten metres from it. A cottage like any cottage—the same as the others in the row. Though it has plastic windows and a satellite dish. Dish or no dish, one corner seems to have begun to sag. The foundations need raising…
Somewhere in this cottage Alya, his Alice in Wonderland, is sitting right now, preparing for her exams… Precisely: preparing, and not expecting me. Only here, on the village street, do I understand how essentially absurd my scheme is.
No, her parents won’t let her go, that neat, domestic, clever little girl. Never mind that at eighteen you could already not ask your parents… They won’t let her go, and besides, she probably wouldn’t come herself. If she loved him even a little bit more, she’d have come long ago.
Something like anger rises in me. Why is it that I, who am only the Prince’s disciple and friend, managed to contrive to see him these forty days, while she let herself be taken away and locked up?!
“Ah, why…” Because a Rose is not a Fox. A Fox has four sturdy little paws—she’ll jump the fence and be gone. And she can bare her little teeth, too. But a Rose is a tender plant; she has to be covered with a glass dome at night. There you are, Daryushka, and no point being cross with her.
And the main thing, after all, is that my scheme is doomed because happiness takes two. The Prince won’t be happy with a girl who let herself be talked round, who came to him out of a sense of duty or guilt.
I turn around and walk to the coach stop. In fact, I don’t wait for the coach—I go out to the main road and hitch a lift.

*

In the evening, the Prince, back from the other town, drops in on me briefly. Tomorrow’s trip to Moscow is confirmed.
Unable to restrain myself, I blurt out my foolish, failed scheme. (Obviously, I want to boast of my selflessness, my spirit of sacrifice.) The Prince clicks his tongue, sighs, shakes his head:
“Baby Roo never ceases to astonish me… Dolly, dearest, please give me your word of honour that until my very departure you’ll refrain from any new attempts!”
“I give it,” I agree. “And even with pleasure! And in return I want to ask you: please write to the girl a farewell little letter, will you?”
“To you?”
“To her! If, after your departure, she does come to her senses and starts looking for you, I’ll give it to her. Who knows—perhaps it’ll be less bitter for her.”
“Or, on the contrary, very bitter.”
“Or very bitter, yes. But we learn from pain, don’t we?”
“Is there not a single ounce of gloating in your proposal, Dolly, dearest?”
“No, not an iota! By God, no! I wish her only happiness! And eternal happiness is in salvation, and salvation is through the growth of the soul, and the growth of the soul comes from understanding whom we’ve lost…”
Smiling with the corners of his lips, the Prince sits down at the table and, in about fifteen minutes, writes a farewell letter to Alya. I tactfully go out to the kitchen and return when he folds the sheet of paper in four. The Prince holds it out to me:
“You may read it!”
I shake my head:
“I don’t read other people’s letters. Did you… tell her about the conversation with the Serpent?”
“No—I only hinted that I might not come back. I gave her a faint hope that I’d return in a year: supposedly I don’t know what awaits me. I don’t want her conscience to torment her for half her life.”
“You’re a kind man…”

*

After he’s gone, once more I judge myself strictly. Did I do the right thing, not knocking at the gate? Probably, yes. Then why did I go to Lyutovo at all? To pride myself on myself, to show off in my own eyes—for what other reason!
Even if “my training is complete”, a long path lies before me, a high ladder—and I’m on its very bottom step.
 
* * *

9 May 2009, Saturday

We’re late for Liturgy, of course—with our train, we couldn’t have made it anyway. And still we’re expected: A. M. arranged it in advance. We’re shown into Mother Natalia’s office.
Mother Natalia is a woman not yet old; her eyes are gentle, her expression concentrated. The Prince tells her about me—far more than he told Mother Euphrosynia: about THE SAYINGS OF THE EGYPTIAN FATHERS, about my first clash with Viktoria Denisovna. They laugh together, but this laughter isn’t wounding—not the laughter of an adult over a child. Mother Natalia speaks too: about the convent’s great social service, about plans for a children’s home for girls with Down syndrome; about the need to be a worker and not to flinch from human pain, ugliness, cruelty. I’m asked questions, listened to attentively, nodded at. A. M. and the Mother Superior exchange phone numbers.
We walk unhurriedly through the quiet courtyard, admire the church from outside (very beautiful, unusual!), stand by the monument to the Grand Duchess. We go out through the gates. The Prince looks at me enquiringly. I shake my head. I explain:
“A wonderful place! Perhaps the best in Russia. A month ago—two weeks ago—I’d have agreed without a second thought. But something has happened to me: even here I feel a little cramped… I’m a poor, bad disciple, aren’t I? Ungrateful, unable to value the care of clever, good people. I’ve taken up so much of your time…”
“I was glad to spend that time, Dolly. So—not a convent, then. Definitively not?”
“I don’t know… How hard it all is—and if only someone would tell me what to do! If not a convent, then what? Where will a fox dig her burrow? Back to Troitskoye? Work as a nursery-school assistant? Nanny to other people’s children and torment myself that I’ve none of my own?”
“Are you so hostile towards children?” he teases.
“Why do you keep making me out to be some sour old maid! Children are God’s blessing. It’s just that beside them I’d have to be a grown-up, not a child—a tiny little sergeant, lining everyone up in rows. Exhausting… And probably very far from what’s moving inside me. And besides, children don’t happen without… you know what. And stupid human envy of other people’s personal happiness—what am I to do with that? Oh, how I must have worn you out! And worn myself out too…”

*

The Prince has to drop in at his office on business connected with the forthcoming posting. I’m surprised that any state departments are working on the ninth of May. H-i-s department, he explains, works always. It’s not the main building, but an inconspicuous two-storey wing with a high fence but no sign at all: you’d walk straight past it without paying any attention. I wait outside, bored…
When he comes out to me, having finished his business, I ask, unexpectedly for myself:
“Tell me, Alexander Mikhailovich—have you ever concealed any records from our state?”
“What a question, Dolly!” he laughs. “Only the parable I’m writing now. I don’t think they’d find it interesting.”
“I see… And the black Coptic cross?”
A. M. looks at me long, intently, as if not believing:
“Your intuition is astonishing—it’s not even intuition; another word is needed here… I’ll tell you one day—later.”
“What do you mean, ‘later’!” I burst out. “Very soon there’ll be no ‘later’!”
“Now, what foolishness! It’s not for you, a Christian, to talk like that. There is always a ‘later.’ “

*

In Moscow, A. M. feels like a fish in water—not like me, a provincial. By some little streets and lanes we come out at the Choral Synagogue. We visit it (nothing special). In an unremarkable old bookshop, the Prince leafs through THREE DIALOGUES BETWEEN HYLAS AND PHILONOUS with admiration.
“Look, they were publishing Berkeley in 1937! As an ideological enemy, but still… I simply must buy this little book.”
“What for?”
“As a present for you.”
“You’re an extraordinary boy… But from you I’d gladly accept anything, even a telephone directory. Thank you!”
“Don’t mention it. ‘A terrible time, a terrible time…’ Yes, terrible, who’s arguing! But full of possibilities. And now the only real possibility is to drown in low-grade entertainment and bourgeois self-conceit. Do you agree?”
“I agree. Though you, my dear man, are in no danger of that.” (“And it’s even a pity!” I suddenly think, with a sharp pang of sorrow. “If only he could have married Alya, lived a normal family life, like everyone else! They’d have had wonderful children—he could have told them about Berkeley…”)
“I hear a note of sadness in your voice. Don’t pity me, Baby Roo! Each person lives the life he deserves—and, indeed, the life he wants.”

*

We take the metro to Kolomenskoye and wander for a long time through its gardens, admiring the old churches. By the wall of one of them, the Prince picks up another small stone.
“Pity you didn’t take a stone from Troitskoye!” bursts out of me.
“Why didn’t I? I did! You simply didn’t notice…”

*

In the evening, at the hotel, the Prince reads the two final chapters of his parable—“On Battles” and “On Living Water”. Now there are eight chapters. Alas, he won’t manage to write more.
“You… will give me the manuscript, as you promised?” I ask timidly.
“Without fail—as soon as we’re home. For now, I don’t want you lugging extra weight in your rucksack.”
“As if it were a weight… Am I… to try to publish it?”
“Why? Though, yes—perhaps you should, if you ever decide to and are able. It’s for you—you are its chief reader; possibly its only one. And you’re its author, too.”
“I’m the author?!”
“Who else? No less than I am. Without you it would never have been born—do you understand? Without the day-before-yesterday’s prayer, without our walk through the churchyard at Troitskoye; without your most important question, on the third of April.”
“How glad I am that I asked it… What shall we call it?”
“Suggest something!”
“THE GOSPEL OF THE LITTLE PRINCE?” I laugh.
“A bold title! I was thinking of something simpler: FOR DOROTHY, for instance.”
“Who’s Dorothy?”
“Indeed, who is she?”
“Oh, stop it…”
“No—about THE GOSPEL…: isn’t it rather immodest? You won’t reproach me later for the ambition of founding a new sect in my own name? Or, in general, for… theological audacity?”
“Foolish man! Give me your hand!”
“What for?”
“Give it, give it! I want to kiss it.”

*

I, too, suddenly decide to read A. M. a passage from my diary: yesterday, when he wasn’t there. Let him judge me, and let him condemn me, if he wishes.
“You could have become a writer,” the Prince remarks thoughtfully, when I finish and raise a timid glance to him. “You write well.”
“Never!” (Though it was pleasant to hear it all the same, I note to myself. And wasn’t that why I read it?) “I don’t write fiction, untruth, invented things. And for that craft, you need them.”
“And one more thought: how was my assignment to your class—to express your thoughts about the article on homosexuals—so very different from Viktoria Denisovna’s assignment? You’re simply biased towards me.”
“Precisely through that! You asked us to write the truth! And she asked for a story about what never happened.”
“Not necessarily a story. In a poem or an essay you can express real, genuine feelings—your own.”
“Yes—take them and turn them into something pretty, for general pleasure! I can’t do that. And what do you say about… the content?” I ask, frozen. “Do you scold me terribly for my tactlessness? Or, on the contrary, for not bringing her after all?”
“Me? Scold you? There’s nothing to scold you for: you’re right in what you write. You’re astonishing, Dolly. And truly—there’s nothing more to say.”
And I’d secretly hoped, probably, that he’d comment on my thought that I’m not a Rose… But there’s nothing to comment on in it, and nothing more to be said, indeed. I’d be the first to feel dreadfully awkward if it had turned out otherwise.

*

For a long time we chat about this and that, until the Prince, apropos of nothing, remembers an old pre-war American film called IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT.
“You remember how the heroes solve the question of spending the night in one room?”
“I haven’t seen it.”
“Gable’s character—I forget his name—strings a rope between them and hangs a sheet over it. I confess, that’s exactly what I’m about to do now. I have, quite by chance, two screws and a coil of string with me.”
“By chance, I’m sure! Go ahead, as much as you like… You, with your old-fashioned politeness of the thirties!” I grumble, settling down to sleep. “As if I’d try to seduce you, when I wanted to bring Alya Florenskaya to you…”
“You growl charmingly… Good night, Baby Roo!”
“Good night, mister!”

* * *

10 May 2009, Sunday

“The day before yesterday’s,” I whisper. “It’s the day before yesterday’s! Oh, what a mighty creature—and even beautiful… What chance has a poor little fox got against him? But never mind, never mind! Never mind. Our day will come, too…”

*

Afterwards we simply walk through the city. We look into a large shopping centre: in such places you can eat more cheaply than in ordinary caf;s.
The Prince insists on buying me some new things, clothes and shoes, because my uniform dress is “the colour of eternal melancholy”, and my little boots are begging for mercy. Not true—they’re still sturdy! Only the heels have worn down… I playfully refuse, but he won’t hear any objections.
“Where I’m going, I won’t need roubles!”
We’re both silent, but we’re probably thinking the same thing: where he’ll be going a-f-t-e-r that, he won’t need any money at all.
With a sigh I agree, and I do pick out a few things for myself: a summer dress, a pair of shoes. The day is clear and warm—one can go about in a dress. We’ll make ourselves pretty, then, if he wants to do something nice for me. It’s vain, of course—foolish, almost a sin—but… perhaps the only time in my life!
The Prince playfully throws up his hands when I come out of the changing room:
“Why, you’re a proper little queen!”
“Yes, yes, tell me another! Let’s be honest: I’m far from your Alya…”
This playful phrase leaves a little splinter in me, and the splinter aches. I can’t replace Alya Florenskaya… or can I? The debt of gratitude simply demands that I offer, and my debt is enormous.
Outside, by the fountains, I ask him to sit down on a bench. I sit beside him and uneasily begin:
“Alexander Mikhailovich, I must tell you something! It will be difficult, and it will embarrass you, but… bear with me a little! I’m not in love with you, as you know; I insist on that, as before. Don’t reproach me for it: I simply don’t know how. And yet, if your posting were by some miracle to be cancelled… if the Serpent you spoke with was mistaken… and if you were suddenly to understand that you need a wife, after all… I’m ready to be her. Just know that.”
My heart is pounding; I’m afraid to look him in the eye. After a short silence, the Prince answers quietly:
“My posting won’t be cancelled. We are using the Unreal Conditional. I’m happy to serve my country, even in such a strange form. As for your ‘ifs’, Daria Arkadyevna, you’ve forgotten one more ‘if’: if you weren’t a person of ascetic mould! And you are precisely that—and over these nearly forty days I’ve fully convinced myself of it. Of course, people of any mould marry and bear children—one can use a precious instrument for the wrong purpose; as the saying goes, one can drive nails with a microscope—but it would be a pity to exchange your gift for such a banality. And yet, were it not for all those ‘ifs’, especially the last one, I would be happy and proud to accept your astonishing proposal. There, now… why the tears?”
“I’m done, I’m done already… What a pleasant refusal!” I can’t help laughing (and, incidentally, I feel a strange relief). “Who could have guessed that refusals could be so pleasant… You’re not angry with me, are you?”
“What a thing to say…”

*

On the train, having first leafed through a copy of FOMA  that I nicked from some church’s free-distribution rack, I fall sweetly asleep. Tomorrow I’ll change out of this pretty summer dress and back into the grey uniform, or the jeans and check shirt I wear at home. The moment I dress up like a beauty, for which I have neither the wit nor the talent, the most absurd thoughts creep into my head! Why did I embarrass him? Though, in truth, he wasn’t embarrassed. Relief, yes, no doubt about it! And still, hearing “happy and proud” was pleasant…
About the jeans: in that same issue of FOMA I saw an article with the headline: “Can Jeans Hinder Salvation?” I didn’t read it. They’ve gone quite mad over there in the Moscow Patriarchate, that’s what.

* * *

11 May 2009, Monday

Still a day off: the ninth fell on a Saturday, so the holiday was moved to the eleventh.
The Prince rings in the morning and suggests a walk in the forest. He is worried: isn’t that rather forward of him? Won’t I refuse? Where he has a head full of wisdom, there he fails to grasp the simplest thing: that I won’t refuse! Or is it again that London delicacy I’m not used to?
We repeat the same route we took on Krasnaya Gorka.
“Do you remember, you called me Frau Saurich here?” I smile.
“How could I not remember…”
“And you will remember what I told you then? Thank you! And I, too…”
Again we come out at his dacha, but we don’t go into the house. The Prince walks me around the plot and tells me in detail about his “charges.” Here are old apple trees, here are thujas, here is a juniper taller than the house. This tree can have its dry branches pruned in spring. Those, still young plantings, should be shaded from the sun in late spring and summer. As for fertiliser, overfeeding harms adult conifers more than underfeeding.
He needn’t be telling me, a village girl! (Though in the village we take plants more simply: we don’t hover over every bush.) And, most importantly, why do I need to know any of it?
“It’s a splendid plot, Daria Arkadyevna, isn’t it?”
“Splendid,” I agree.

 
*

The strange briefing continues in the house. One can live here all year round, he says: the house is fit for permanent residence. I can see that myself—I’ve lived almost my whole life in one just like it, only several times larger, and our attic was lower… And of course I’ll work out how to open the flues, where to store the firewood! (There are electric heaters here, too.) Why, why?!
“What’s happening, Alexander Mikhailovich?!”
“What’s happening? I’ve prepared a small present for you. This, in fact, is why I was away almost all Friday: such things can’t be given to a minor without the guardian’s consent. Kindly take a look…”
He lays before me on the table a document with a coat of arms. Without even reading it, I guess what it is: a deed of gift for the house and land.
“Oh—let me sit down, my legs won’t hold me… I can’t accept such a present, Alexander Mikhailovich!”
“You can, Daria Arkadyevna, you can. Lyubov Sergeyevna thinks you can. I explained to her that I’m moving to another country for… permanent residence, and I had to lie to her that I’m a relative of yours—a very distant one. Practically speaking, it was barely a lie: one of your grandmothers had an aunt called Granny Gutya , and one of my grandmothers was also Augusta, just imagine! Whether it’s the same person, I didn’t ascertain and didn’t try very hard. Probably just a coincidence, though the name is rare…”
“Well, I never! Granny Gutya—who’d have thought… So while I was telling you about my great-grandmothers in the churchyard, you were listening and taking note… No—it’s not right. Not proper.”
“It is right. It is proper. You can—and indeed must—accept my gift, because it’s foretold in the Gospel.”
“In THE LITTLE PRINCE’S GOSPEL?”
“No—in the real one. ‘Jesus said unto him: The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests.’ Foxes have holes, do you hear? Are you going to argue with the Saviour’s words, Daria Arkadyevna?”
I laugh through tears—tears of enormous gratitude, tears of joy. Yes, one really can’t argue with the Saviour.
“And I also wanted, remembering your interest in ceramics, to buy you a kiln,” A. M. continues. “But the prices bite, and such kilns require industrial voltage, not domestic, and they need to be ordered well in advance…”
“Stop it, stop it this minute! Stop, or I’ll hit you! No, my dear, truly: you’ve shamed me to the depths of my soul. I have nothing to thank you with—absolutely nothing.”
“How do you mean, nothing! And what about the fact that I’ll justify myself before the next world through you, for various ugly deeds and doings of mine—is that a trifle?”

*

An ordinary day passes, one might say a serene one. I cook lunch from the meagre provisions I find in the house. I pour down the sink (having asked the owner’s consent, admittedly) an opened bottle of red wine. “Let there be no such disgrace here! You were entertaining Gena, I suppose, or some other drinking companion?” A. M. laughs and claps his hands.

*

The Prince finally tells me a couple of stories about his “infatuations” before Alya. All these stories are shorter than they might have been, and all of them are inexpressibly sad. So sad that I shan’t even write them down. I shouldn’t have asked. No—the worldly life isn’t for me, with this eternal groping in the dark! I don’t want it, I don’t wish it—and how splendid that he refused me yesterday!

*

“When do you want me to go home?” I ask, towards evening.
“No—that’s when y-o-u want to hint to a guest that it’s time to take his leave. You’re the mistress here now!” he laughs.
“Let’s agree, Alexander Mikhailovich, that I’ll simply be the caretaker of this little house, all right?” I ask him. “I’ll return it to you as soon as you come back, I promise.”
The Prince slowly shakes his head.
“I won’t come back, Dolly. I am certain about that much.”

*

We leave for town in the evening, in one taxi.

*

Aunt Lyuba is probably stunned, too, that’s why she hasn’t rung me since Friday. I ring her myself and thank her for not standing in the way. In her voice there is embarrassment, bewilderment, timidity. I feel she’s afraid of something quite different from what needs fearing, and I feel she wants to ask me directly whether my friendship with my suddenly discovered distant relative is entirely innocent (“…He, of course, such a respectable man, but still… Ah, Daryushka, I beg you by Christ our God, be careful! After all, it’s a sin to harm an orphan…”). She wants to, and doesn’t dare. And so, probably, she never will.
How astonishing it is, to live half one’s life in timidity! And what am I astonished at? Had there been no third of April in my life, who knows—I too might have lived my whole life in timidity.
I’ll turn the mansard into a little prayer room—my own private house chapel. Silly? Audacious? What do I care!
Joy, and pain, and both together. Tomorrow is the last day.

* * *

12 May 2009, Tuesday

It’s hard to write, so I’ll write as much as I can.
The Prince comes around noon. I’ve been waiting for him, of course, since early morning—I don’t go to the gymnasium. What gymnasium!
We begin the last lesson. Like a conscientious teacher, A. M. makes a careful review of our whole “course,” going over what we’ve studied, what we’ve managed to make sense of.
And it really was a course, a real one! A special course, unlike anything else, for one person—invented, assembled only for me alone. A royal gift.
I wonder: if Alya Florenskaya had had the sense to ask for discipleship—if she’d had the wit to see in A. M. not a beloved but a teacher—what course would he have given h-e-r? Probably a quite different one. And where would I have been then? Would I have hindered her studies? Or would we have sat side by side at the same desk? It might have worked out, after all. There’s no way to know now: you can’t change life—can’t play it over again…
The Prince gives me a detailed list of books I might still read; films I may one day want to watch. I obediently write it all down. I’m unlikely to get round to the films, though—and as for the books, I’m not a bookish, not a literary person. Or am I, already? It seems he’s quietly drawn me into reading. No, not into reading: I read before. Into a readiness not to wait for gifts from others, but to search for myself, and not to be frightened by big names, and not to scorn unknown ones.
I must thank Sonya for her January present: it changed my life. Without it, I might not have dared to ask my third-of-April question. No—I’d have dared anyway. Perhaps my request wouldn’t have contained “Your Highness” but something else—does it matter?
I ask everything I’d wanted to ask, and the Prince answers, in more detail than on any other day, sharing everything he still has time to share. He tells me what he has learned from me: simplicity, sincerity, fullness of faith; the knowledge that not everything is decided by words; trustfulness in dealing with another person; the ability not to expect treachery from a friend and to believe in his honesty; the ability to forgive and to ask forgiveness; true, heedless selflessness. Hearing all this is both sweet and, for some reason, painful.
We recall nearly every day we spent together—we have plenty to recall. My diary helps us: I read passages from it, ashamed of nothing, and the Prince now smiles, now blinks more often than usual.
We sit there unable to talk enough about everything in the world, like old friends after a long separation. Only not after. Before.
For the third time he glances at his watch, and at last gets to his feet.
“Well, then—’it seems the time has come to say goodbye,’ as you yourself once said to me this spring?”
I stubbornly shake my head.
“No, we’re not saying goodbye. What time is your train tomorrow?”
“Early in the morning, but I beg you not to see me off. Short farewells are the best, as the saying goes. I’ve left my set of keys to this flat on the table.”
“And all the same, we’re not saying goodbye!”
“Why not?”
“Because… because with God, all are alive.”
“There now, Baby Roo—your eyes are going damp again…”
“No, no, everything’s fine… My dear, let me at least embrace thee!”
And I embrace him, and we stand like that—for a long, long time.
The Prince gently lets go of me and leaves. I watch him walking down the street from the wide-open window, but this time I don’t call him back.

* * *

13 May 2009, Wednesday

Lessons at the gymnasium go on as usual. I get a mild scolding for yesterday’s truancies.
In class the only talk is of the graduation ball: who’ll be wearing what, and who’ll be meeting whom afterwards. Well, life goes on—it’s foolish to be cross about it.
I probably won’t go to the ball. I do have a pretty dress, but I don’t feel like putting it on just yet.
(Today I’ll finish the diary: on the cover it says “A Personal Diary for a Girl”—and what kind of girl am I? Something has changed, and for ever.)

*

At break, Natasha comes up to me and asks, in a dull, colourless voice: could she say goodbye to… I know to whom.
“He left this morning,” I answer calmly. Inside, of course, I’m glad: people do change, even if slowly. Slowly—too slowly, at times…
“I see… You’re holding up well… Could you… tell him that I… I’m sorry for what happened, something like that?”
“I’ll tell him, Natasha dear!” I promise. “I’ll tell him, certainly.”
How will I tell him? My morning text never got through. He’s probably already switched off his Russian phone. But never mind! I’ll pass it on somehow—one day.

*

After lessons I don’t go back to the rented flat. I go to the stop for the suburban bus.
The little apple trees are standing, and the juniper is standing too—nothing has happened to it in two days. The bench backs need redoing… No matter—I’ll manage myself. I can work with wood, too; Papa taught me. I’m not afraid of a hammer, or a saw, or a chisel.
The grass is already tall—soon enough it’ll need cutting. Perhaps there’s a scythe in the tool shed. Or I’ll bring my own from Troitskoye: mine is light, fitted to my hand. But there’s no hurry—no hurry at all. Let it stand uncut for now—no harm to anyone.
I sit down straight in the grass and touch the earth with my hand, as I once did beside the tall poplar. I sit like that for a very long time, motionless, not feeling the cold. This is my land; I will not leave it. One could, perhaps, live one’s whole life here—and I shall.
I shall live my life—whether short or long, I don’t know. Anything at all can fit into my future life—quiet, unremarkable to anyone looking from outside: joys and griefs, good and bad people, peace of soul and war with the Enemy, discoveries and troubles. I won’t grieve too much over the troubles, nor rejoice too much over the joys: every evening the sun sets, every morning it rises.
Anything at all—but marriage, children? Hardly (though one shouldn’t swear off anything). Monasticism? Yes—but not recognised by the world: here is my desert, my small hermitage, and I need seek no other.
I shall live my life—long or short, but, I want to believe, not entirely useless to God and to people. And afterwards I’ll meet the Serpent. Her poison will be good, and I won’t suffer long.
And perhaps—one may dream sometimes, may one not?—the first person I see in that world will be the Prince. The same as in life—or the same as in the picture from the book; it makes no difference. I’ll recognise him in any case. By the yellow scarf, for instance: it was I who gave it to him.
I think I’ll see him from behind and call out, quietly:
“Your Highness!”
And when he turns round, I’ll add, a little flustered, in my foolish, village way:
“Well… Your Fox is here. You didn't expect me?”

The End