Saint Zinaida’s Day

FICTION

by Peter Newall

          The little church was full of the scent of cypress wood. A storm had been building up all morning, and the combination of atmospheric pressure and approaching rain was drawing this fragrance out of the bare planks of the walls and ceiling. The church was old and darkened by time, but the smell was fresh and resinous, like newly-planed timber, and strong enough to overpower the dusty honey perfume from the glowing clusters of beeswax candles.
         An arched window near me framed a patch of dark greenish-grey sky and three or four slender young birch trees, which stood out in the deep gloom as if newly whitewashed. The storm seemed so imminent that I expected to see their branches bent by a gusting wind, but they were still.
         There were perhaps ten people in the church. On my left was a woman clutching a handful of unlit candles, her head bowed, a swatch of tired blonde hair emerging from under her headscarf. To my right was a thick-necked man in a leather jacket who crossed himself deliberately at every point in the service permitting it. In front of me stood Zinaida Olegovna, Zina for short. She was wearing a bulky coat and a scarf patterned with dusty pink roses, which covered her head and shoulders, ending in a pointed V halfway down her back.
         Today was Saint Zinaida’s day, Zina’s name day, and she had rung me this morning to suggest we go together to the monastery church just outside the city. I was surprised at the invitation; I had not seen Zina for months. After a year together, we had parted last winter.
         This parting was my doing. Zina was attractive and clever and desirable, and we enjoyed many things together, but I told her I couldn’t fit the life of a musician into the settled domestic arrangement she wanted. That was my excuse, but underneath it, I’d persuaded myself my freedom was being impinged on. What I meant by freedom was hard to say now, unless it was the freedom to chase after other women, or get more drunk than was good for me, but that is what I came to believe.
         Zina was visibly distressed, unusually for her, and said it was a terrible waste, but I insisted. In the end she said if I really didn’t want to be with her, it would only harm us both to try to keep me.
         Since then we’d scarcely crossed paths, mostly because we led very different lives. We had different interests, different friends. We even occupied different parts of the day; I was often not awake until noon, and my evenings were taken up with rehearsals or performances, after which I unwound with a few drinks. Zina, on the other hand, kept the regular hours required of a schoolteacher. I have to say, my life has been pretty full since we parted. I’ve written some good music, given some good concerts. I have been quite content, really.
         I had no idea why she had invited me to accompany her today, but Zina’s calm, assured manner had always suggested she had good reasons for whatever she did. If after months of silence she was inviting me to accompany her to church, I assumed there was a reason for that, too, which would become clear when I saw her. I wasn’t concerned about what it might be; another kind of woman might be planning to ask a favour, trading on my guilt about leaving her, but that was not Zina’s style at all. Anyway, I didn’t like to think of her alone on her name day.
         I found my way to the corner outside her apartment building, where we had agreed to meet. I’d forgotten the landmarks that used to guide me there, and I got off the marshrut bus one stop too soon, so I arrived a few minutes late. Zina was waiting, looking just as I remembered her. She greeted me undemonstratively, as if we had last met a week ago. ‘Shall we go?’ she said simply.
         We took another marshrut to the monastery, out on the edge of town. It seemed to be a route not much used, and the little bus was old and rusty, with squealing brakes. There were only three or four other passengers, each distant in their own thoughts as we bounced along the potholed suburban roads. It was a cool day even for October. The storm had not yet come across the horizon then; the sky was merely clouded over, with a dull grey light that threw no shadows.
         That light, and the whole atmosphere of the day, reminded me of the autumns of my teenage years, spent in a small provincial town. In all other seasons the place was utterly unremarkable, but in late autumn the sky, overcast every day, held a strange luminosity that seemed to me pregnant with something vastly important, and only just beyond my understanding.
         Walking around the muddy streets behind the railway station, or standing on the edge of the dark pine forests on the hills above the town, I felt certain that near me was a portal through which a whole other kind of life, parallel to mine but much richer, was being conducted. That gateway seemed very close, almost visible through the flat grey cloud low above me. The acute sense of its nearness was inextricable from the damp air, the scent of brown pine needles, and the drawn-out cries of departing crows. And I’d always felt that if I did not find that portal today, there would be another chance tomorrow, and with a more concentrated effort I would certainly pass through it into a better life. I had, I thought in those days, all the time in the world.
         The reminder of those adolescent years was so strong that when we got out of the marshrut I stood looking up into the sky, feeling like that teenage boy I had been, and wondering whether the door into that other world might still after all be there. I stared upward for so long that Zina asked if I wanted to walk with her or stay behind.
         The monastery was at the end of a straight sandy road. We were watched as we walked along it by a pack of big lemon-coloured dogs with inflamed red eyes, and by a group of beggars who knew visitors to the monastery had to use this path. Today their begging was half-hearted; they were sitting on the ground, handing round a big plastic bottle of beer.
         We entered the grounds through tall gates set into a white-plastered wall. At the little booth inside I bought two candles, the biggest they had, in honour of the day. We walked together to the small wooden church. Zina adjusted her scarf, crossed herself, and bowed, and we went inside. The church had been built for another time, and another people; I had to duck my head to pass through the low doorway.
         One of the attendant babushkas helped me set the big candles in front of the icon of Saint Zinaida in the centre of the church. Once lit, they stood tall amidst the forest of small quiet flames already there. The icon was old and simply framed, varnished by generations of beeswax and incense smoke. The saint, wrapped in her customary green shawl, almost merged into the dark background.
         The service had already begun. A single priest was intoning the liturgy, coughing occasionally. The responses were sung in harmony by three women standing at the front of the congregation. The candles burned steadily, and the unwavering gaze of the icons met our temporary human enquiry.
         Standing there behind Zina, I had begun to wonder whether the storm might pass us after all when a sharp gust of wind whistled past the eaves. I glanced out the window; the trunks of the young birches seemed even whiter, almost glowing. The sky behind them was a heavily threatening grey-green, full of something, rain or hail I couldn’t tell. It was dark as late evening outside, even though it was not yet noon.
         The comfort and shelter of the church, small and wooden, yet defiantly gold-domed under that lowering sky, were very real in that moment. I was reassured to be in a building so full of certainty and strength, even if it was not my certainty.
         For me, attending service was not exactly a diversion, but certainly not a regular part of my life. For Zina it was different. From the gravity of her expression, and her serene, measured movements whenever she lit a candle or crossed herself before an icon, I had always understood her observance was important to the organic balance of her existence, to the health of her body as well as her soul.
         She kept track of the major holy days, and sometimes, if she had stayed overnight at my flat, we would go to the small green-painted church nearby on Troitska Street. In fact, whenever I thought for long about Zina, I saw an image of her in a church, either that little chapel on Troitska, or the cavernous, smoky, resonating monastery church we visited once in Kyiv, or the marble, white, and gold silence of the Odesa cathedral.
         But while she took her devotions very seriously, Zina was not at all prudish or humourless. She was full-figured and dressed with a distinct personal style. She liked to dance and she liked to prepare and eat good food, she liked, occasionally, to drink, she liked sex. Her devotion to the church did not prevent her from reading the cards, or from carrying out small rituals of domestic magic. ‘I must tell you I am a witch,’ she had said to me, smiling, the first time we met.
         The service had come to a close; I must have stopped paying attention. But I felt refreshed and peaceful, as if I had received a blessing nevertheless. The two tall candles were still burning, their flames steady in the quiet nave. They looked solid and permanent, and I was sure it would please Zina to know they would remain alight throughout her name day.
         We came out through the narrow portico into the grounds. The sky was greeny-black. I had never seen such a dark sky by day. It rose up from the horizon like a great vertical wall in front of us, and the metal domes of the church stood out with unnatural sharpness and clarity against it. The air was absolutely still. Soon, surely, there would be a crack of lightning, and a heavy crash of thunder right on top of us.
         I was thinking only of hurrying to the bus stop before the rain came, hard, soaking rain no doubt, but Zina turned away from the walk leading to the gate and set off through the monastery garden. I could hardly leave without her, so I walked alongside.
         Bordering our path were banks of small purple flowers with waxy olive-green leaves, and sprays of even smaller white blooms on short pale stalks. Around us stood slender young birches, some still in ragged yellow leaf. Pastel-painted concrete grottoes had been placed throughout the grounds. They looked crude, almost childish, but inside their curved shells were new, finely-executed mosaics in a pure Byzantine style.
         We paused to allow a priest in a black cassock, his long hair tied back, to walk quickly across our path. He did not raise his eyes as he passed. A bell rang out, marking the beginning of another service.
         It was a strange suspended time, waiting for the storm. Everything was perfectly still, but it was evident the stillness must end soon, and violently. The air was compressed, difficult to breathe. Yet all over us was a great hush, and nothing stirred leaves, or the delicate flowers at our feet. The moment was so poised, so dramatic, that I decided Zina must have chosen to remain here in the garden to tell me something important. But as I considered what it might be, she looked up at me and inclined her head enquiringly towards the gates.
         We walked back down the sandy path to the junction with the main road, and stood under the dark sky waiting for a marshrut bus. I could smell wet black earth, so rain was already falling somewhere nearby, and I thought I could smell lightning, a sort of hot scorching in the air.
         I had just accepted that we were going to be drenched, and was trying to remember the safest place to stand in an electrical storm, when a yellow minibus came over the low rise on our left. Zina was perfectly composed. Not as if she had known all along the marshrut would reach us in time, but as if it were wholly unimportant whether it arrived or not, whether the storm broke over us or not, because such things did not touch on the real essence of our lives.
         We took our seats in the bus. It was the same rusty vehicle with the same thin, balding driver that brought us here. There was a crash of gears and we bounced off down the ill-kept road.
         A minute or two later a whoosh of wind rocked us, and I heard an impatient tapping of heavy raindrops on the metal roof, which rapidly became a steady loud drumming. Water began to stream down the windows. The wind and rain very quickly became strong enough to be alarming. Our bus felt small, fragile and unstable in the middle of it all, and I wished for the security of the church we had just left. I expected lightning, but there was none. The rain fell in sheets; I could see only a blurred blue-grey outline of the shacks lining the road. I looked forward; the windscreen wipers weren’t working. At my feet a rivulet of water was already running down the aisle.
         It seemed we were entirely swallowed up in the rain, that it was the heaviest rain in the world, heavier than the deluge that floated Noah’s ark. It attacked the bus from all sides, beating threateningly on the roof and windows. By now I couldn’t see out. I was waiting for us to be washed off the road. But then, astonishingly quickly, the downpour shrank to an irregular handful of taps, and then stopped altogether. It was as if we had driven out from under a waterfall.
         A strip of pale green sky appeared on the southern horizon. It widened, then the cloud peeled back from the sun, and the soaked landscape was washed in light. I pushed the window open a few centimetres; the air was soft and clean. We approached a factory, a row of brick boxes topped by high blackened chimneys. Banks of wet shiny windowpanes flashed, each in quick turn reflecting the sun, as we passed. Then came rows of concrete-block apartment buildings, and soon we were approaching Zina’s suburb.
         We had ridden most of the way in silence, and I was preparing to say goodbye to Zina when she asked if I would come to her flat for a meal, to celebrate her name day. It seemed rude to refuse, so I agreed.
         We got out at her stop. Zina wanted to go into the small supermarket on the corner, and I trailed around with her while she selected eggs and kefir and oil and sour cream and red peppers. Then we walked to her building, stepping carefully along the patchwork of cracked concrete slabs making up the footpath.
         I fell into a strange sense of familiarity, as if I had gone back in time, as we rode up in the cramped lift. Its green metal walls with their roughly welded seams, the graffiti scratched into the paint, the grating crash as the lift arrived at the ninth floor, the smooth touch of the brass handle with which I dragged open the grille; all of it was so well-known to me that I felt as if I’d come back from a holiday abroad to my daily life. That feeling grew as I watched Zina, with the same swift circular jangling of keys as always, unlock the two big locks on the door of her flat.
         Inside, her home was very much as I had last seen it. In the living room the paintings I remembered still hung on the walls, although a pencil portrait I’d drawn of Zina the summer we met had been taken down. I felt slightly hurt, though I knew I had no right to be.
         I knew from experience it was better to leave Zina to herself in the kitchen. I riffled through a pile of CDs lying on top of the veneer cabinet; they had a fine coating of dust. I’d left these discs with Zina, the soundtrack to our time together. I found Aquarium’s 10 Pushkinskaya and slipped it into the player. Zina loved this album; we must have played it a hundred times, mostly in the mornings. Cheerful music to start the day, Zina used to say.
         I recognised with a strange tightening in my chest the opening chords of the first song. The familiar notes and words flowed out of the speakers, but this time they didn’t make me cheerful. Instead, they summoned up a whirl of images; the softly-folding collar of a red woollen dress, afternoon light through the windows of a Georgian restaurant, the high arch of Zina’s hands when she played piano, trees dissolving into evening mist in Shevchenko Park, and the weight of Zina’s arm in mine as we walked along its muddy paths. Before the track could end, I took the disc off, and went out onto the balcony.
         Geraniums in plastic pots still cluttered the small tiled space. At my feet was a tin ashtray half-full of cigarette butts. Zina didn’t smoke. Absurdly, I hoped it was her father who had, on one of his visits, stood and smoked out here, not somebody else.
         The view from the balcony hadn’t changed; the scrubby overgrown yard nine storeys below, the rusty roofs of the lock-up sheds lining Tinistnaya Street, and the sky stretching out to where the Black Sea glittered on the horizon. There was no movement anywhere, as if the whole city had fallen under a spell after the storm. I stood out there for a time, staring without thinking, as if I were caught by a spell myself.
         When I returned to the kitchen, Zina, wearing a yellow sunflower-print apron over her dress, was busying herself at the table. She had removed her headscarf, and her thick dark hair fell in soft waves about her face, her brows compressed as she concentrated on setting out the dishes.
         She had prepared wonderful food, meat marinated in pomegranate juice and served with buckwheat kasha, spicy bright red tomatoes from a big old-fashioned preserving jar, and beetroot salad. She served it on her collection of old mismatched plates, and we sat at the small square laminex-topped table to eat. The late afternoon light came still and clear through the kitchen window.
         After the main course I made tea, surprised how readily I remembered where the tea canister sat, and just how to twist the knob to ignite the gas. While the tea was brewing Zina cooked blinis in a small black pan. Flipping them quickly, in a few minutes she had a plateful. She set them on the table with a jar of cherry jam and a bowl of sour cream. I was nearly full, but I ate as many as I could. It struck me that every time Zina had made blinis for us, I had been happy.
         Once the meal was over, I expected the conversation to turn to Zina’s reason for inviting me today. But we began by speaking of other things; she told me about the year’s crop of fruit she had preserved, and that she’d finally bought a Leica film camera; I described Warsaw, where I’d played at the autumn music festival. I didn’t ask anything about her personal life, nor did she ask about mine. At one point I noticed the light outside had faded to lavender, but we continued to talk, unhurriedly, about nothing very much.
         At half past eight she glanced at the clock; I realised I had been at Zina’s for hours, and ought to go. I rose, and we went out into the hallway. But, convinced that something had happened I didn’t understand, I couldn’t leave without asking. Why had Zina invited me to spend the day with her? She smiled.
         ‘Actually, you might say I was being very selfish,’ she said. ‘When we parted, I had a lot of bitter thoughts about you, and I couldn’t let them go. I decided if we could go to church together today, I could put an end to this bitterness.’ Zina looked down, and actually seemed to blush, or it may have been just the light and my imagination.
         ‘Well, that’s to say, I had to forgive you. As it says in the Gospels, “when you pray, if you hold anything against someone, forgive them.” So I did. And I hoped if you were there with me, you might forgive me for everything I did wrong, so we could finally part in peace. Now it can all be put to rest.’
         I didn’t know what to say. For me to offer forgiveness to Zina seemed absurd. I thought rather of making some kind of apology to her, but in the same moment, I understood that discussion of our past was irrelevant now. I simply thanked her for the meal, and we said goodnight. The metal grille in the lift made its familiar crash as it closed behind me.
         In a few minutes I was standing at the bus stop, where three or four people were already waiting in the smoky, misty darkness. There was no trace now of the midday storm and its washed-clean air. A 146 marshrut arrived, and I found a seat. I was hardly aware of the trip back to the centre. I got out automatically at Grecheskaya Street and walked the two blocks home.
         Then I sat at my kitchen table with a glass of vodka and tried, unsuccessfully, to unravel my thoughts. Everything was out of alignment, the past, the present, the future, my feelings. For a moment I even considered ringing Zina, knowing how foolish that would be. We had really parted now, that was clear. But I kept seeing her in a kind of radiance, as she’d appeared standing, the light behind her, in the doorway of her flat as I left.
         Of course Zina had every right, given everything that had happened, to ask for a few hours of my time in order to obtain peace of mind, and to conclude things between us cleanly. And if the effect of that was to make me realise I’d thrown away something infinitely valuable, something that I could not now recover, that was not her fault.
         I sat looking out my window into the quiet night sky, listening to the murmur of traffic down below on Rishelevskaya Street. So we screw up our lives, I thought, with selfishness and stupidity, and yet we wonder why we suffer. I had wasted a real chance for happiness, and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.
         I looked at the kitchen clock; the hands were pointing precisely to midnight. And that is how the day came to a close, yesterday, Zina’s name day, Saint Zinaida’s Day.