levkas, the haloes of the four saints applied with gold leaf, the little sable brush with which she fills in the background with brown ocher, then the clothes with silver-white vermilion-red cobalt-blue, slowly and meticulously the magic image takes shape, it’s wonderful to watch Sashka work, among the Theotokions, the Saint John the Golden-Moutheds, the dizzying Stylites, the red dragons, Demetrius of Salonika pierced by spears, Theodore emperor of Byzantium, John Climacus on top of his ladder, James cut into pieces, a crowd of martyrs, of colors, of almost identical faces, the four little Dalmatian sculptors find a golden life in the magnificent shadow of martyrdom, before joining the seabed, Sashka the serene is not moved by all these massacres, she is protected by Luke the Evangelist, patron saint of painters and doctors, there is great gentleness in her drawing, infinite patience, when I met her I thought she was the angel herself appearing to me in her golden halo, at night, the troubled night of Rome, at a café terrace, back from an endless visit to the papal chancellery, Campo de’ Fiori, right next to me Sashka lit the square up the whole bar had eyes only for her, in that place they offer you peanuts with your aperitif, whole, in their stringy shells, and the customers looked like monkeys in the zoo, compulsively throwing the useless husks on the ground: the terrace littered with goober shells crunched underfoot, opposite the statue of Giordano Bruno the tortured, I imagine the spectacle, in February 1600 the filthy ribalds from the vicinity came to check if the impious one given over to the flames would cry out despite the gag, everyone ran up to hear the flesh crackle and fill their nostrils with the aroma of human meat, at the very place where today tourists are gulping down peanuts, Bruno the swordsman magician cosmologist occultist and poet was a great traveler, he visited half of Europe before being betrayed by the Venetians and brought before papal authority: that same authority recently expressed its regrets about burning him, sorry, they say today, for having tortured a naked philosopher chained to a metal stake on a pyre of logs, Giordano Bruno dead by pontifical stupidity opposite the bar where I shelled peanuts without being able to drag my eyes away from the young woman so beautiful, so present at the table next to mine, in the company of a man who was devouring her with his eyes, she didn’t seem to be paying attention to his concupiscence, even less to my own or to the carbonized body of Bruno, her eyes were too light for the demon to be reflected in them, too light, I heard her rolling pretty rs, she spoke Italian slowly, calmly, with a slight accent, I was sure she was Slavic and I prayed secretly for her to be Croatian, or Slovenian, or even Serbian, I would have had a hold over her through language — of course she had to be Russian, from Russia mother of Orthodoxy tanks and assault rifles, that’s all I knew, I could have itemized to her at leisure all the models, the variations, the calibers or secret activities of Great Russia in the Zone, at great length, spoken about Russia’s equivocal relations with certain Arab countries, about the curve of the cartridge clip, the Kalashnikov’s stroke of genius, but no, we talked about Jerusalem the gentle, about my entomological field trips in the Libyan desert or in the north of Morocco, quickly, without insisting, she is not curious, Sashka, she lives in a world of images, she expects nothing from anyone, especially not from words — I asked her why she had left St. Petersburg and she told me that she hadn’t left St. Petersburg, she’d left Leningrad, precisely because Leningrad was disappearing, that she had arrived in Jerusalem by chance, with a contingent of fake Jews looking for a host country, and there wasn’t a single ideological ulterior motive in her, no nostalgia, she was just uttering facts, when I asked her if she wanted to go back to Russia she replied simply that the Russia she knew no longer existed, that the city of her childhood had disappeared, that the people, the streets had changed, but she added immediately it’s just as well like that, and what for another would have been an utter I-don’t-give-a-fuck attitude in her signaled a detachment, an elsewhere, her life is in her gestures, in the movements of her brush, of her wrist, in her eyes riveted on a saint to be reproduced, a face to be modeled, the drape of a garment, she doesn’t have any pretensions that she’s creating, inventing new representations, no, she repeats ad infinitum what tradition has left to her, content to be able to make a living from this singular activity and towards me she acts in the same way, Sashka the distant, if I’m there so much the better, if not, too bad, she doesn’t try to convert me to anything, does she see me, even, she sees what I show her, which is nothing, or so little, disarmed by her simplicity and her statue-like forms, how could she know, if I don’t tell her anything, she has neither the universal maternity of Marianne the generous nor the devouring curiosity of Stéphanie the headstrong, Sashka is a mirror from which I keep myself hidden, my face veiled so as not to be reflected in the tormented faces of the executioners scalding the saints, whipping them to death before drowning them in the Adriatic like the four crowned ones from Split — in 1915 it was hundreds of bodies with no coffins they sent to the bottom, valiant Serbs, a little south of Corfu last stop before Ithaca, the British have a taste for islands even in the Mediterranean, Minorca Malta Corfu Cyprus belonged to them, and their ships with the bulging sides were masters of