If you’re wondering where to find a temple in Moscow, start by looking underground.
At the bottom of a seemingly endless escalator is a huge temple made of what looks to be marble.
The Moscow subway: the world’s biggest and most luxuriously appointed nuclear shelter. Just show your Troika card at the wicket and toss the militsiya a few rubles, and they won’t even give you a funny look.
You don’t need proof of identity to buy a Troika card, after all.
I can’t speak for anywhere else, but fares on the Moscow underground are determined not by distance, but by how many times you get on and off. The discount you get from a Troika card is better than buying one or two tickets individually.
Although I think it will take another century or so before it gets good enough that you just touch the card to the wicket, like in the government advertisements.
I took the subway along the Moscow riverbank, heading for Varvarka Street, near Red Square.
I was going there to pray, of course.
In this glorious motherland of ours, invisible, unscientific things are considered not to exist. That includes God, naturally. An unscientific being if ever there was one.
But we do still have churches and monks who pray there. I didn’t know if that was because of God’s blessing or something else taking care of them—but if I’d known, I still wouldn’t have had any right to comment on it.
Anyone strives to survive in this world. It’s just nature.
Which was why I was going to the khram <place of worship> to gain that blessing.
—The Church of Saint Barbara.
It was connected to a woman from long, long ago—Barbara, the great martyr of Heliopolis.
Barbara was burned by her father, who rejected her faith. God, however, healed her wounds and miraculously hid her. Then she was stabbed with a sword and died.
People do some real shitty things to each other, you know? Wasn’t there even one person who tried to help her? If something like that ever happened to Stasia— No, no. That was just my dumb imagination at work. Nobody would try to burn Miss Moscow to death. She was in the safest place in the city.
One thing is true, though: Barbara’s a real stand-up girl. Instead of holding a grudge, she gives protection to men. Supposedly she gives safety from fire to soldiers and firefighters. Wonder if she’ll consider doing the same for a Janitor.
It’s not like this stuff is on my mind all the time. It’s just that when I saw the church’s belltower as I trotted along, the thought passed through my head.
I guess this girl who died ages ago might not be thrilled to know she was getting sympathy from a Janitor.
I shrugged and went through the door. The vast stone nave of the church was so quiet that I felt bad about my footsteps. Maybe it was the candles. The air was chilly but didn’t actually feel that cold.
At the far end of the nave was a big screen depicting Jesus, his mother, Mary, and a Russian Orthodox cross. The screen was called an iconostasis: Only clergy were allowed to enter the holy of holies behind it.
“Hey, Monashina,” I said.
“Danila Kragin. Could you perhaps keep your voice down?”
The rich, alluring voice of a woman came from behind the screen. I’d called out because I wasn’t allowed to go back there myself, but I guess she didn’t like that, either.
Then she appeared, a woman so richly endowed that there was hardly a point to her wearing a nun’s habit. Her hair, hidden by her wimple, was tonsured. Of course it was: Why else would she call herself Monashina—the Nun?
If you asked me, though, with a beautiful woman’s outfit only made her face stand out even more sharply. Stasia could shave her head and I’m sure I would still think she was lovely.
“You interrupted the liturgy to summon me,” she said. “I hope you have something important enough to warrant such behavior.” She gave me a pointed look. That habit really suited her.
Thinking how Stasia would look in that outfit, I said, “As it happens, I’m after some ammunition.”
“My, my. What a dreadful thing you ask for.” The woman hugged herself as if to deliberately emphasize her voluptuous breasts and shivered theatrically. “This place is a haven for the human heart. I fear to think what sinful acts you intend to commit using bullets…”
I shrugged and gave her a lopsided grin, then pulled some rubles from the envelope in my pocket. “I’ll make a donation. Will you hear my confession?”
“Yes. Yes, of course I will. That is our duty, after all.” She led me to one of the pews, where I sat down and looked up at the nun standing before me. “O Christ Jesus, Son of God. By your mother’s intercession and that of all the saints, we pray you have mercy upon us.”
She accompanied this invocation with some portentous gestures, then whispered, “Amen,” and ended the liturgy. Then she let out a long breath and smiled brightly at me. “Now, then. Tell me what secrets pain you.”
“I used up a box—no, two boxes of Tokarev ammunition. Bang, bang.”
“Now, that is sinful. To injure or kill another human being is a terrible trespass, Danila Kragin.” Monashina’s face and voice were severe, but her eyes smiled.
—The whole thing with her calling herself a nun was fishy from the start.
As far as I was aware, the Orthodox Church didn’t recognize female clergy—I don’t mean nuns. And yet here she was, running this church.
I thought about it for a moment, then said, “I’m planning to sin some more by smashing up some cyborgs. What do you say to that?”
“If you are asking me to hear such a fearful contrition, then I assume you have commensurate resolution in your heart?”
Of course, Monashina added, without letting her smile slip, that she would be happy to hear what I had to say even without such recompense.
I took several more rubles out of the envelope and offered them to her. She took them with a grin, so fast my eyes could hardly follow, and nodded.
“What level of sin do you propose to commit? Will you be killing…or inflicting rovnaia liniya?”
She went on about “the horror,” as if to drive her point home.
“Who, me?” I said. “I’m not going to commit a sin that bad. No human deaths. Just some breakage.”
“My, my…”
She remained committed to pretending to be frightened.
I heaved a sigh and passed her even more rubles. “I’m begging you. Think of the pious disciples.”
“Yes, yes, of course, God will surely hear you.”
She urged me to wait a moment, then disappeared behind the screen, her hips swaying as she went.
—Monashina is torgovets oruzhiya <an arms dealer>.
After the old junk dealer died, I was introduced to another purveyor of used goods, but then he pulled up stakes for a new location, and that was when I met this woman.
I was frankly impressed that she could do this kind of business out of an Orthodox Church so close to Red Square.
—“Oh, please. That’s why I have to be friendly with the KGB folks.”
That was what I remembered her saying, with a smile, when I asked about it. She was strong and frightening and beautiful.
“Thank you for your patience, Danila Kragin. I assure you, God will watch over you.”
Monashina returned and handed me a bundle wrapped in oil paper. As I checked over how to use the contents, I asked a question that flitted through my mind. “Does this mean I’m forgiven?”
“We cannot grant forgiveness,” Monashina said brusquely. “The forgiveness of sins is the business of our Lord Jesus.”
Meaning humans couldn’t do much about it, I guess. Repent and confess and beg forgiveness, yada, yada.
O God, in your great mercy have compassion on us; by your abounding grace wipe out our iniquities.
Those were the words of the liturgy Monashina spoke over me, and as I listened, I found myself thinking about that long-ago woman, Barbara, again. Even if the unscientific being called God didn’t exist, Barbara and Jesus really had. Really did, still.
Did that mean they would actually turn a blind eye to what I was doing? I wouldn’t be selfish enough to ask for a real blessing.
I had no way to know, of course. And if I had known, I wouldn’t have been able to do anything with that knowledge.
As I went back out the door of the church, I heard Monashina call from behind me: “Amen!”