After me

OUR DATES

At confession A new priest was sent to the Sretensky Church, where Father Alexander Men served. By all appearances, the father is strict, exacting. He admonishes his flock, consisting mainly of village old women: “Don’t read the Old Testament, everyone ...

At confession

A new priest was sent to the Sretensky Church, where Father Alexander Men served. By all appearances, the father is strict, exacting. He admonishes his flock, consisting mainly of village old women: “Don’t read the Old Testament, you won’t understand anything anyway.”

His voice is loud, and everything that is said at the lectern is heard in the narrow porch by each of those who come to confession.

The grandmother is confessing, she is wearing a bright Pavlovo Posad shawl.

Have you been to the cinema or the theater? the priest asks.

- Was not.

Do you read the gospel?

- I'm illiterate.

- Didn't you eat meat?

- I didn't eat it.

- And why did you dress up?

Grandmother whispers something about her sins, repeating every now and then: “Klavka snake” ...

“I won’t let you take communion.”

- Do you allow

- I won't. It was Father Alexander who took your sins upon himself, and they killed him. And I have plenty of mine. I will not allow.

- And I will die, and you will answer.

The priest immediately covered her with a stole.

- Name?

— Maria.

Our Lord and God Jesus Christ...

Baba Nadia

Baba Nadya is a talkative, troublesome old woman in her eighties. Under Father Alexander, she cleaned the church and today in the same position. After mass, she sat down on a bench, waiting for the parishioners to disperse. With her are two women, her assistants. I haven't seen her for a long time. What are we to talk about, if not about the priest.

“A glorious death, God-given… He washed himself with blood… Wait, I will bring his image.

I went to the temple and brought out a color photograph wrapped in a rag and pasted on a cardboard. A famous photograph from Yves Amand's book Witness to His Time. Indeed, an image. Iconic face. All three women crossed themselves and kissed the cardboard.

“He is a holy martyr,” says Baba Nadya, “a passion-bearer.” One policeman told me: if all the priests were like Father Alexander, there would be paradise on earth.

The abbot offered her an easier job, in a candle box. Baba Nadia refused.

- Anyone can sell candles, but go and find out to clean up. Mopping floors, cleaning toilets...

Witnesses

The train I was in a hurry to take was cancelled. The next one will go only in two and a half hours.

But there is no evil without good. I will visit the father's monastery - a temple and a chapel at the place of his death; indeed they can be considered the embodiment of his spirit. There is no service today, I will sit on the logs, I will read my beloved Leskov. “Leskov is with me again in a travel binding.”

Little has changed on this track in sixteen years. The same steep staircase with exorbitantly high steps, the same aspens and thick bushes on the sides.

And yet... A white-stone cloud appeared on the roadside clearing, fanned by the breath of ancient Russian architecture. It became lighter around ... Yes, and the lanterns along the road are all intact, not a single broken one, not like then, the day before. Now there is no one to kill here.

Father Victor renovated the goddess, put a copy of the one that we built with him next to the oak, where the first blood stains were on the grass. Overlaid with pebbles, flowers, burning candles, it does not seem to remind of grief, although the inscription is bleeding in red script: "At this place, Father Alexander Men received the martyr's crown."

Silence. It is not violated by shuffling boots, tapping heels.

I read Leskov - a visionary story about the Russian church ... I raised my eyes and froze, dumbfounded. The oak, opposite, gaped with a deep scar along the trunk to the very roots. The flesh, cut once, long before the fateful day, had already swollen and bulged out in a rough bark. But it is impossible not to notice the scar. Strange that I didn't notice before...

But every meeting with the priest during his lifetime was a surprise, the meaning of which was revealed time later.

Here, a little further away, grows an oak tree with cross-shaped branches. He was also noticed not immediately, after a few years, in the fall, when the leaves flew around. Nature gradually reveals its signs of presence.

In that terrible September for us, I wrote:

Where the ax overtook the long-awaited victim,

Where you can’t wait for evidence from hundred-year-old oaks, -

Those who stood nearby, these saw it for sure.

These are silent - because they were not touched, they were not cut down ...

It turns out they are silent. But they testify in their own way.