Adamov has time, and because he has never seen the home of an Old Believer, he willingly accepts the detour. He realizes immediately that he has crossed over the frontier into another world. We pass by cemeteries where Orthodox, Lutherans, and Catholics coexist. Calm, cleanliness, agrarian enchantment. We ask for directions to an especially beautiful wooden church in a town called Raja, between Mustvee and Kallaste. It’s Sunday and maybe we can attend the service.
A farmer dressed in his Sunday best tries to help us, and immediately people come streaming out of neighboring houses to point out the best route to Raja.
“You see?” Alexander says. “If we were in an Estonian village, nobody would have come out of the houses to talk to us!”
After a wooden church, Orthodox but with a Lutheran look, we come to a village so enchanting that Monika and I, exchanging a knowing glance, share the same resolution: not to reveal the name of this place. The names of the people we meet are enough—biblical and unusual names, such as Apalon, Salamania, Jelpindifor, Mercury. A vivacious woman by the name of Anphia invites us into her house, shows us her icons and her pechka, and then opens the door to her garden full of hydrangeas, on the edge of a rust-colored escarpment overlooking the lake. The long palisade is called Krasnaya Gora, and it’s teeming with swallows’ nests. Off the coast, in the middle of the horizonless blue-gray infinity, all I can see is a fishing boat. I’m no longer in Estonia but on the Sea of Galilee.
Not far off, Tatiana Pimenovna and Alexander Pimenovich, both in their eighties, are working the soil behind a little wooden church with an orange glint.
As we approach, they emerge from the tilled earth like two soldiers coming out of a trench in the Great War, only they are incredibly clean. She has a wide face, high cheekbones, sky-blue eyes, and an amaranth handkerchief, tied like a pirate’s bandanna around her still dark brown hair. Alexander is a handsome suntanned muzhik, and he is Tatiana’s second husband. The first died twenty years ago in a storm on the lake. Their garden is a masterpiece of beauty as well as productivity. The tomatoes, almost inconceivable in these latitudes, are flourishing, the beneficiaries of some unknown devilish magic. Only the Walser were capable of such things, when they colonized prohibitive heights in the Alps.
“Come to Pentecost,” the old strapper exhorts us, “when we paint the eggs for the poor.” “But our garden is nothing,” Tatiana smiles in the midst of a forest of wrinkles. “The most beautiful place here is the cemetery.” Now I understand why the Old Believers have always been offered hospitality in foreign lands. They are able to transform anything, even cemeteries, into gardens.
A distinguished gentleman goes by on a bicycle, gives Monika a perfect kiss of the hand, and one to me, too, hears of our interest in the religion of his people and offers to take us to the house of the batyushka, “little father,” the priest elected by the community. Something that has very little to do with popes and archimandrites. The batyushka of the Old Believers is more like a rabbi, a sage entrusted with the task of talking with God and acting as a great father to families in search of the way of the Lord.
The sun is shining, and outside the house of Andrei Ivanovich, there are two women in bikinis immersed in the black earth up to their knees. One is his daughter, blond and tan; she’s planting potatoes. The other is his wife, who lets go of the horse, throws on some clothes, and comes to prepare us a welcoming cup of tea. The batyushka has the face of a whaler from Nantucket, a well-kempt beard with no mustache, in the Protestant manner. He’s confined to the house because he has recently had a slight heart attack, and he is happy to talk to us.
He shows us a picture of a little boy baptized in an iron washtub, and explains that adults are baptized in a boat, in the middle of the lake, like the ancient Christians. He tells Monika that he’s a self-taught priest. When his predecessor got too old, he realized that the community would soon be left without a guide, and so he went to have himself taught the trade. “He opened up the sacred texts for me, and then he blessed me.”
He explains further: “I’m just a simple Christian,” and as a simple Christian, he has to work to live. “There’s the horse to take care of, the grass to mow, the potatoes to plant, the field to fertilize. I had the heart attack because of too much work.” Another world compared to the Catholic hierarchy, celibacy, economic dependence on the state. He pours the tea, then takes from the credenza a New Testament from 1680, which is “a lot older than Czar Nicholas,” and then a clandestine breviary (the books of the Old Believers were condemned to burning) written by hand by a certain Fyodor Sovotskin before the Great War.
“Three centuries ago, the people who came here from the Solovetsky Islands brought with them an icon with our whole calendar painted on it.” I talk to him about the beauty of their wooden churches. He responds that they’re not cold like the Catholic churches. “In our liturgy, it’s not just the priest who prays, but the whole community. That’s a big difference.” Then he looks at Monika. “I can see from your eyes that your interest in us comes from the heart. Others come here as though they had come to the zoo to see exotic animals. Not you, your eyes have goodness in them. May God bless you. In the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. And now go in peace.”
The next day my foot is in such bad shape that we have to rent a small car in Tartu. It’s the only sensible thing to do if we want to get to Vilnius in some reasonable amount of time. There aren’t any trains or buses that go south on the strip of terrain that interests us, the one closest to Russia. The rent-a-car place in Tartu is a realm of pharmaceutical cleanliness and has the tranquillity of a carpenter’s workshop. The manager is a fledging woodsman who inundates me with friendly assurances. In Italy, rental car agencies are hotbeds of neurasthenia, devoured by haste. In Estonia, among the silent people, it’s a totally different scene. After the angst of the initial contact, in response to our courtesy, the man of the North lavishes us with attention, becomes paternal, even loquacious. In the end, after watching us leave, he goes happily back into the office, almost trotting. I notice it by chance, looking into the rearview mirror.
Now the wavelength of the Baltic ups and downs begins to shorten compared to the area around Narva. The landscape is less planar, the curves more frequent, and with Latvia on the horizon, you start to feel the proximity of Poland. The air tastes of klezmer, Yiddish, Ashkenazim. In the copper-rimmed dark clouds, it’s easy to imagine flying violinists, synagogues, and rabbis hunched over their Talmud, reading by candlelight. Chagall, Kandinsky. The dark wooden buildings in the countryside look like synagogues or sailboats lying belly-up in dry dock, and enkindled by the grazing yellow light of sunset, they stand out against the backdrop of immense clouds like a cubist painting. I glimpse the first redbrick houses, like the ones in Masuria and Prussia. The fantastic sky over our heads more than makes up for the monotony of the terrain. In the Mediterranean, the totalitarian azure vault of the sky crushes you. Here, on the Baltic, the sky offers constantly changing visions. Fat, bulging clouds, infused with black and Prussian blue, or white and light as fluttering banners. Sails flying incredibly high, wispy and puffed out by the wind. Or else anvils, galleons, lead-gray schools of sardines suspended in midair, in slow migration. And underneath them, perhaps, a hole, where the low sun shines through and fills every furrow in the firmament with a golden glow.