"Oh João, it's me, Rosa, I just thought I'd call to say hello. You know we keep meaning to come up there and visit you and Mom and Dad and John, but it's been so hectic here with the mayoral election ..." It was Rosa phoning him. She spoke with the energy and emphasis she put into everything she did. She apologized that she had been appointed to a committee, she had hosted a distinguished visitor from Japan when he spoke at convention, she had helped her husband straighten out a neighborhood credit union. When he talked to Rosa on the phone, he felt like the catcher in a friendly baseball game.
João briefly gave the news about himself and some relatives, then added. "I have been looking at Aunt Anna's letters. I found something disturbing in one of them."
"Oh, I'm sure those letters are fascinating," Rosa interrupted, "All those people lived such different lives from what we can even imagine today. I'm sure you'll have to show some of them to me the next time we're up. We're all so grateful to you for dealing with all that. I just don't know what I would have done if I were the one."
"It's disturbing, Rosa," he said.
"Oh, I'm sure it is, all that drinking, and that religious fanaticism, authoritarianism, Saturday and Sunday were like two worlds for them."
"It's about Grandfather Ivan," João said a little evasively.
"Listen, Bob's coming in a minute," Rosa said. "I've got to put away his birthday present before he sees it. Give a hug to John, and I'll be up soon," and she rang off.
Just the talk of old women. He would ask his cousin, Brother Ieronim, the last male of his grand father's generation. Brother Ieronim lived in a ground-floor studio in a building by the river that the Orthodox Church maintained. Although he walked the six blocks, he decided not to take the dog; he felt as if Oscar would not like the gloomy atmosphere. The church was a small dark wooden building under tall redwoods. It and the buildings around it, a small monastery, and the apartment building dedicated to elder brothers, were dark wood in perpetual shade, without any vegetation, without even the rhododendrons that grew in spindly profusion in the wild redwood forest. A small river ran behind the community, but the sound of the highway on the other side drowned it out. No green leaf was allowed to appear he had always wondered why and the whole , always in shadow, gave the impression of a military barracks in an eclipse of the sun. The door to his cousin's quarters was unlocked and he entered the single room. He recognized the musty odor of tallow candles recently snuffed. Only gray filtered light came through the single window. A narrow bed covered with an unadorned coverlet pressed against wall. There was a low partition and a kitchen and dining area, but, because his cousin took his meals at the church, the space was used for an altar. A large gold cross stood between the icons, the saints with their stiff, glaring faces on a background of gold looked cynical in the gray light.
He went outside again where he saw Brother Ieronim raking the loose, dusty surface of the brown earth that surrounded the buildings, removing the twigs and little cones that fell from the towering trees. Brother Ieronim was a man in his late 70's with a wispy white beard, slightly bulging eyes, a prominent nose and a tiny mouth. He was João's distant cousin, the son of his great grandfather's sister. As he raked, he scanned the ground. Under his brown robes, dirty at the hem, you could sense his body twisted into a question mark. He had been João's spiritual guide when he was a young man and still in the church. Then João had been a weed held in the hand of a gardener, now he was watching flecks of acetate peel from an old movie. João spoke to Brother Ieronim in Russian in a respectful manner and asked after his well being. João's Russian was slow and formal, but it always came back in a conversation.
"Christ has granted me a comfortable nest for my old age." Ieronim went on in a weak sighing tenor like the voice of a convalescent. "The sky is at peace, and the earth is at peace, but what is under the earth?" He gestured toward the ground with his rake. "Only tell me, my son, why, even in the time of great contentment, a man cannot forget his sorrows?"
João worried that the old monk wanted to draw him into one of those endless polemic conversations that had helped to drive him from religious practice, so replied, "What sorrows have you, father?" João was not sure whether his old confessor had forgiven him for ceasing practice, or had merely forgotten his lapse.
"My son, but a year ago today a special sorrow happened in this church," he gestured with his rake to the small wooden church at the foot of the trees "At mass, during the reading of the Bible, the monk and deacon Nikolay died."
"Well, it's God's will," João said, falling into the tone of his old faith, "We must all die." He remembered wondering as a child if the monks were called father to make up for their having no children.
"That's true. The Holy Scripture points clearly to the vanity of sorrow, and so does reflection," said Ieronim, "but why does the heart grieve and refuse to listen to reason? Why does one want to weep bitterly?"
"That's an uneasy question," João answered.
"He was a kind soul. My God! how kindly and gracious! Many a mother is not so good to her child as Nikolay was to me, Lord, save his soul! And such a lofty gift, my son!" He spoke the words 'my son', but somehow the intonation was now as if he had said 'Your Honor' and João noticed how much shorter than himself the old man was now who once had towered over him.
"What gift?" João asked, wanting to get away from church clichés.
The old father scrutinized him, and as though he had convinced himself that he could trust João with a secret, he laughed good-humoredly and said "He had a gift for writing hymns." João had heard vaguely that one of the fathers had been writing canticles.
Ieronim lowered his rake and hid his face in his hands, as though frightened at something, or overcome with shame, and shook his head. "'Light-radiating torch.' He wrote that. I was the only one who really read his hymns."
João thought how different this old man, trembling for the sweetness of another, seemed from the sinister figure to whom he had made confession, who had seemed to him to have the face of a wolf, as if his stained robes contained the body of a wolf.
"Why were you the only one who read his hymns? Didn't the other fathers appreciate them?" Talk of Ieronim's friend made João feel like a conspirator.
"Oh, my son, there are those who say it was the work of the devil to write hymns, that the devil was trying to work through him to replace the works of the Fathers. But they did not understand 'Light-radiating torch to all that be' ... There is no such phrase in conversation or in books, but you see he invented it. I used to go to him in secret, that no one else might know of it. He would embrace me, stroke my head, speak to me in caressing words as to a little child. He would shut his cell, make me sit down beside him, and begin to read." João had thought before that the impulse to nurture children prompted many of the relations among the monks, but this image of the younger monk mothering the old disturbed him.
"Do you remember my grand-uncle Ivan?" João asked.
"Of course my son, a vigorous, hard working man, with a brazen eye. Yes, I remember his eyes, that had in them the fire of...Daniel, but if you'll pardon my saying, he drank a little too much. Too many of us, laymen and holy men too ..."
"Were you his confessor?"
The man with the rake shook his head. "No, I was too young in those days my son. It did not please God..."
João wanted to put his arm around him, or punch his shoulder with one of his comfortable gestures of touching, but was afraid of the wolf man of his childhood. "Do you know who his confessor was?"
Father Ieronim put his weight on his rake and slowly bobbed his head. His welter of words hung suspended for an interval and then he said.
"That would have been father Arkady the Elder, blessed be his memory, a zealous servant of Christ."
"He's dead, then," João said.
"Yes, I was afraid of him, bless him, his holiness burned like a flame."
"Did you ever hear of any stories," João interrupted him, "that Ivan...had committed any especially grave transgressions?" The old man looked blank. "Given in to the temptation of the devil." He thought of John going to court in his gray suit and Italian shoes where he grilled strangers. João was wearing a heavy cotton flannel shirt, worn blue jeans, and worn tennis shoes.
The old man leaned closer "You mean heresy?" he said trembling.
"No, I mean things within the family."
The old holy man crossed himself, "The family is the domain of the father; we are all the children of our Holy Father, all bathed in His light."
"You said he drank too much." João shrugged encouragingly, "We all know some people do, even holy men, and then they do things that are not themselves."
"It's a terrible thing, may the mercy of Christ rain upon them," Brother Ieronim interrupted.
"Well, if he was drunk he might have done other things ..."
"The father of the family should chasten with the rod as the Holy Father chastened the enemies of St. Vladimer." Father Ieronim interrupted him, lifting his rake and making striking motions in the air.
"I don't mean ... I don't mean using force in that way, I mean sexual matters."
"There's a great difficulty." Ieronim shook his rake. "You can do nothing by wisdom and holiness if God has not given you the gift. The monks who don't understand, they argue that you only need to know the life of the saint for whom you are writing the hymn" as João realized the old man had returned to his thoughts of Nikolay as if nothing had interrupted his sorrow. João felt hopeless of ever learning anything from him "and to make it harmonize with the other hymns of praise." Brother Ieronim continued. "But that's a mistake, sir. Of course, anyone who writes canticles must know the life of the saint to perfection, to the least trivial detail...."
