VOLODIA P. makes a living taking souvenir photographs under the bulgy, dark bronze monument to Russia’s millennium for tour groups that come to Novgorod to see the collected masterpieces of old architecture and painting — the local kremlin. (A kremlin is a type of ecclesiastical citadel, a gathering of churches, cloisters, and service buildings surrounded by walls and, once, the seat of princely power.) Because the lower section of the monument consists of statues of 129 great Russians, Volodia can take your picture against whatever group of celebrities and heroes you choose. If a tour group of military men arrives, Volodia will position them against Aleksander Nevsky, Dimitry Donsky, Aleksander Suvorov, Mikhail Kutuzov, and Ivan Paskievich. If it is a group from some Writers’ Union, they will have Mikhail Lomonsov, Ivan Krylov, Aleksander Griboyedov, and Mikhail Lermontov in the background. Teachers will find themselves in the company of Cyril and Methodius, Maxim the Greek and Tichon Zadonsky. Volodia will place a tour group of government workers and economists between Mikhail Romanov — the founder of the dynasty — the slender, gracefully sitting Catherine II, the pensive Peter I, and the proudly upright Nicholas I.
Volodia’s occupation must be quite profitable, for when he takes me to his home, the first thing I see in his bachelor’s apartment is countless shiny, dark metal boxes, columns, and towers — all sorts of Panasonics, JVCs, and Sonys, which my host immediately switches on. There is also a pretty girl with a good figure, who, after only a moment’s conversation, asks me in all seriousness if I would intercede on her behalf and persuade Volodia to get married. “Because he refuses to marry me!” she explains, worried and slightly offended.
We go back to the kremlin, to the monument. A school excursion group, waiting for Volodia, who has promised them a photograph (he is the only photographer here) stands in the drizzling rain, bent over a table on which Anna Adreyevna displays souvenir postcards for sale. When the children go to have their picture taken, I start picking out some postcards for myself. I do not know what brought it on, but suddenly Anna Andreyevna, a woman of maybe forty, maybe sixty, years of age, stretches out her hands to me from the overly short sleeves of her coat.
“Look,” she says, enraged and despairing, “look, they made my hands like a man’s!”
She shows me her veinous, rough, massive palms and repeats: “They made my hands like a man’s!”
On her lips, this sounds like the most terrible of accusations, like horror, like a curse.
“From the time I was a young girl,” she explains, shouting and bursting into tears, “I had to work as a locksmith. My whole life — as a locksmith.”
“And today, look,” she tells me with a mixture of pain and dread in her voice, “today I have hands like a man’s!”
And although she has kept company with them since childhood, although she sees them every day, she looks at them now with shame and terror.
Slender, slight Anna Andreyevna, a woman with graying hair and a pale, ill-looking face, threatens the air with the steel fists of a strong, overworked locksmith.
And yet in the end she discovers in this accursed fate of hers a bright spark, a crumb of some sort of human comfort, for a moment later she adds: “They made my hands like a man’s, they made me a Stalinist, but they never made me a Communist!”
Slowly she calms down, and when I am leaving she says to me in a voice already quiet, gentle, and resigned: “If they would only let me live normally for a while now.”
TO REACH the large old building in whose basement work Professor Grekov and his wife, Valentina Borisova, one must pass the great Sofia Cathedral (an eleventh-century masterpiece) and walk deep into the kremlin, crossing various squares and courtyards. It is a spacious room — actually several connected cellars — furnished with rows of long, wide tables on which are arranged piles of small wall fragments. Lights are on everywhere; otherwise it would be dark in here, even pitch black. Two or three people are seated at each table, picking up fragments of masonry and examining them closely. Total, vigilant, and concentrated silence reigns, only rarely — and this is an important moment — interrupted by an exclamation:
“I have Elias’s eye!”
“I have the sky-blue color! These are probably the martyrs of Paraskieva!”
And a discussion begins, consultations, comparisons.
This is what is happening here:
Many smaller churches and monasteries had stood in the vicinity of the Novgorod kremlin. Among them was the Church of the Lord’s Transfiguration, built in the fourteenth century on a small hill three kilometers away. In 1380, a group of anonymous painters (probably Serbs) decorated the interior of the church with magnificent frescoes. Their surface area totaled around 350 square meters. During the Second World War, Russians turned the church into a bunker and an artillery observation point (it is on the only elevated land on an otherwise flat, meadow-covered, treeless plain), at which the Germans constantly took aim with cannons and mortars. Because they fired at the church for more than two and a half years, after the war all that remained on the hill was a mountain of rubble more than five meters high. For the next twenty years, the mountain was overgrown with grasses, weeds, and bushes, until, in 1965, someone started to poke around in the rubble and discover small, colorful fragments of frescoes. Over the next several years, three hundred cubic meters of debris were carefully dug through and ten cubic meters of colored bits were sifted out of it, then transported to the Novgorod kremlin, to the building where for the last twenty years Professor Grekov, his wife, and a group of enthusiasts have been attempting to piece together again from these little stones, morsels, and particles, thoroughly shattered and ground up by artillery fire, the old, fourteenth-century frescoes, in which anonymous painters (probably Serbs) conveyed their vision of the Lord’s Transfiguration.
Wooden frames line the walls of the entire workroom in which lie the already recovered fragments of Christ’s head, or the aureole of St. Yefrem, or the garments of a young martyr.
The greatest difficulty, says the professor, is that the frescoes had never been adequately photographed, that there is no documentation, and that consequently one sometimes has to rely on the shaky and misleading testimony of eyewitnesses.
Talking with Aleksander Pietrovich Grekov, I am aware of being in the presence of a man of unique, extraordinary imagination. It must be an imagination replete with thousands of question marks, of dilemmas. This piece of wall, on which the trace of a flame remains: Is it a fragment of the fire in which God appears, or, on the contrary, is it part of the infernal fire into which the Almighty will cast the hardened and incorrigible sinners? And this tiny sliver on which the clear image of a tear has been preserved. Is it the tear of the mother, who lays her son, Man, into his grave, or the tear of joy on the face of one of the women who hear that Christ is risen?