Читать книгу Confession of a Ghost. F.M. Dostoevsky award. Playing Another Reality - Alexandra Kryuchkova - Страница 10

“Finally! I’m here! God, what a joy it is to come back here again and again!”

I was waiting for my luggage at Thessaloniki airport with the anticipation of a cup of coffee on the balcony overlooking the sea in my cozy hole in Ouranoupoli. In August, I used to rent an apartment on the top floor in Nicolette’s house, a 5—7 minutes walk to the ferry to Mount Athos.

Athos in Greece was not only a state within the state, an Orthodox monastic republic on the Holy Mountain, where women were not allowed. Athos was a peninsula that almost entirely belonged to Orthodox Athos before the war with Turkey. Later, in order to settle the Greek refugees, part of the monastic territory was given to secular Greece with a shift in borders to Ouranoupoli, the city of Heaven (or Uranus, the planet in charge of Heaven), then a small village accessible for everyone. There was an early morning ferry to Dafni (the port of Mount Athos) there, and at 10 a tour ship to the Holy Mountain so that tourists could admire the monasteries from afar and venerate the Shrines brought to them in boats by Athos monks. At the foot of the Mountain the spirit was breathtaking! – a huge pillar of Light goes up to the Sky.

Oh, if I had been a man, I would have climbed the Mountain, lived in monasteries and … would I have returned? Happiness was to die in the Holy Land!

However, even in Ouranoupoli, you could feel the Gates open, and you were instantly heard in Heaven, every word and thought.

I loved Ouranoupoli. I loved everything there: the people, the sea, the food, the atmosphere of peace of mind and the Spirit of the Holy Mountain. Athos was my love at first sight, and my heart would forever remain there.

The luggage began to crawl onto the belt. Shifting my gaze from one suitcase to another, I noticed an Old Monk. I’d met him before, but where and when? However, monks were everywhere on Athos, especially in August, the peak of pilgrimage, when many Orthodox holidays were celebrated, including the day of St. Panteleimon, after whom the Russian monastery on Athos was named, and the Assumption of the Virgin. I liked listening to stories about Athos, when monks, stopping for the night in Ouranoupoli, had dinner in cafes and shared their impressions.

I walked out of the airport building. Outside, as usual, I was met by Kostas, a friend of my friend Dimitra. He grabbed my things, and we were already rushing along the serpentine roads towards home. In an hour or an hour and a half, I would throw myself into Nicolette’s arms, grab the keys of my hole, drink a cup of coffee and run to the sea – the most beautiful, azure, paradise sea with a view of the fabulous island of Ammouliani, the Holy Mountain and the mysterious Tower; sea with fish and a white sandy beach, with few people and a shade from the olive trees. By lunchtime, I used to return home and work on my manuscripts until 18:00. That time I had with me some miraculously surviving stories from the book “Do You Believe in Ghosts?”

At 18:00 the heat usually began to die down, and I went for a promenade to watch the sunset on the border with Mount Athos at the dilapidated Zygou monastery, where one could swim in a bay hidden from prying eyes, and then to return to the Tower, the symbol of Ouranoupoli (a former hotel for monks, and later – museum), drink coffee with friends, exchanging stories, including those about Saints and icons. I loved Athos icons, I liked to look at them for a long time – to feel them, there were many alive and unique ones there! At midnight, I used to return home.

Ouranoupoli, Athos, Greece

“Welcome back!” exclaimed Nicolette. “Alice’s flat is waiting for its mistress! Coffee?”

I opened the door to the balcony and smiled, “Hello, City of Heaven! Hello, Sun and Sea! Hello, Athos and the Holy Mountain!”

Suddenly the phone rang, but the number wasn’t identified.

“Hello, Alice,” a familiar male voice said. “Welcome back!”

“Ray?!” I couldn’t believe my ears.

“Where are you now?” he asked.

“On Athos… Listen…”

“Athos?” he seemed surprised.

“I’m always on Athos in August… Ray, listen…”

“In August?!” he was even more surprised.

“Yes, listen to me! How can you call me? You are a ghost!”

“A ghost, so what? You have communicated with ghosts, haven’t you?”

“Like this as with you now, not yet!”

“So it’s time to start it that way as well!”

“What do you want to tell me?” I asked, almost relaxed and resigned to the opportunity to communicate on the phone with ghosts calling live to Athos from unidentified numbers.

“Well, nothing special… Okay, I get it. See you.”

“Where? Here, on Athos?” I got surprised.

“Who will let me, a magician, go to Athos? In a dream!” Ray laughed, and the connection was cut off.

***

There were only two crowded streets in Ouranoupoli – the sea one, with cafes and shops, and the central or main one, two houses from the sea one, mostly with icon shops. The streets met at the Tower.

Dimitra’s icon shop was located on the main street directly opposite the Tower, and St. Marina, wielding an ax at the devil, the icon, purchased from Dimitra, was my first Athos icon. Dimitra and her family were Greek. We communicated in English.

“Hello, Alice! I hope Kostas rushed you here at lightning speed! How is the sea?”

“I’m in Paradise, thank you!” I smiled and glanced at the wall with hand-painted icons.

“You have Marina already, and the Holy Family, too,” Dimitra remembered all the icons that I had already got. “By the way, how is Marina doing? Has she already chopped up the devil with an axe?”

“Still in process,” I sighed. “I need the icon of St. Peter.”

“I’ve got Peter and Paul!”

“I have Peter and Paul. By the way, I go to the church of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul, the Metochion of the Optina Pustyn Monastery. Do you know what they symbolize?”

“I’m not so pious, that’s why I’m asking you about icons, taking advantage of the fact that you like coffee,” Dimitra smiled.

“Peter and Paul are a symbol of the duality of the world, black and white, merged into one, left and right paths. Peter was considered the main Apostle in Catholicism, while Paul – in Orthodoxy. The Athos image presents them embracing in the shape of a heart.”

“White and Black Magic?”

“You can say that also, but I need Peter with the keys,” I clarified, continuing to inspect the hand-painted icons, but many of them I had already seen there a year before.

“With the keys to Paradise?” Dimitra asked.

“He has two keys,” I laughed, “it’s not a fact that both are to Paradise!”

“Here on Athos, you are already in Paradise!” said Dimitra, taking out a notebook, in which she kept a record of all the icons ordered on Athos, their receipt and sale. “No, I’ve never ordered Peter with keys. I’ll call the twin monks at St. Anna’s hermitage tomorrow, perhaps they’ll have time to paint the icon before you leave.”

I entered the icon shop of Janis’ family. His parents spoke Greek, but Janis studied Russian. He always congratulated me on Orthodox holidays by sending a photo of a hand-painted holiday icon from their shop. Janis had got a daughter recently.

“Alice! Welcome, dear! How are you? How is your cat?”

The cat wasn’t mine, but periodically he visited me and, walking around the flat, including open shelves with Athos icons, he put his forehead to the icons, just like a person. I photographed the cat to show to the Athos’ locals.

Janis’ father greeted me in Greek and immediately asked the girls who worked in their shop to make coffee. Janis showed me the new icons and shared the latest news, while I slowly walked around the space greeting the Saints, and they greeted me in return. Janis used to say that I felt alive icons. There were also watching ones, the Saints on them looked directly at you, following your movement in space.

“You have already Nicholas, and Alexandra too,” Janis remembered all the icons that I had already got. “What don’t you have?”

“The Stairs,” I admitted.

“Rare icon! Tomorrow I’ll call the cell of St. Nicholas to find out if they have a painted one, if not, I’ll order it to get the icon before your departure! You just need to choose an image. I’ll show you how we paint it, and the size. That icon helps souls to go through the Postmortem Ordeals. I hope nobody of yours died,” Janis opened an Internet page and showed me the options.

Having chosen the image of the Stairs, I looked around to find the desired size, and my gaze stopped on the bottom shelf in the corner rack, from where the Virgin Mary, clearly alive, was staring at me, and I involuntarily shuddered,

“That size.”

We used to drink coffee outside, at the entrance to Janis’ shop. It was customary there, shopkeepers drank coffee, chatting with passers-by, then crossed the street to have coffee with those opposite, exchanging news or silently examining tourists’ packages – the ones flashing more often indicated the most prosperous shop in Ouranoupoli. Janis usually told me about Athos, since he visited the cells, talked with the monks and took tourists to the Mountain.

“Have you ever met 12 hermits?” I asked.

“To meet them, you have to be a Saint,” Janis sighed and dived into the shop to the customers who had just entered it.

“I’m so glad you’re back with us!” exclaimed Leah, a Georgian of my age, who had lived there for almost ten years, an employee of Janis. “Thank God you are alive and well! You are very bright, even the mistress said, there is another kindness in Alice, a real one, from Heaven.”

“Thanks, Leah! Do you know the name of that icon, the Virgin Mary?” I showed it to Leah through the window.

“I don’t even remember where we got it from. I’ll tell you tomorrow!”

Janis was Dimitra’s nephew. Kiriyaki, or simply Kiri, was Dimitra’s niece. In that village, almost all were relatives, although not everyone was friendly with the others. Kiri inherited the icon shop of her father, who had retrained as an ice cream vendor two years before. The shop, like Dimitra’s, was small, but Kiri bought mostly big and expensive icons. I liked one of the icon painters who painted for her for reasonable money.

“Hello, Alice! I’m pregnant again, as you see!” she smiled.

“And a boy again?!”

“Yes,” she laughed and after some welcoming questions proceeded to review her new icons.

“Alice, it’s great to see you!” having entered the shop, Kiri’s father said, hugging and kissing me on cheeks three times. “For how long? You know, you’ll never leave! You’ll stay on Athos forever!”

“Do you happen to have St. Barbara with the cup?” I asked Kiri, pondering her father’s words.

“Not with the cup, another one. What do you need it for? It protects against sudden death, doesn’t it? Thus, you don’t want to die without communion, right?”

Kiri promised me to find out about St. Barbara, and I headed for Socrates.

Socrates was a friend of Dimitra, native Greek, but we communicated in Italian, although he spoke English as well. No one understood us in Italian, and it was useful to practice. Socrates was fond of rare icons and told me about them – emotionally! – similar to the Italian temperament.

“Oh Alice! Welcome back! Well, I’ll show you something!” he shouted from afar, and then pulled out his phone and found a photo, “They wrote an article about me in ‘National Geographic!’ Look! Do you see it? Here’s my name, the name and address of my icon shop! And those are my icons, from this wall! Imagine, some journalists came here and didn’t even say who they were and where they came from! You know, I always tell the truth about icons, and I told them everything! And they wrote it!”

“Congratulations!” I smiled and, having turned my gaze to the wall with icons, froze in my tracks.

“Coffee?” Socrates offered, not noticing my stupor.

“You knew it! I need this icon, I couldn’t find it anywhere. I’ve even supposed that it doesn’t exist!”

“Which one?”

“The Four Evangelists!”

“Ha! I always have something that supposedly doesn’t exist! You are here like a local, you know everything about everyone, who is who, who sells this and that at what price, you understand the painting techniques. Why do you need ‘the Four Evangelists’?”

“To rewrite the Future.”

Somewhere in the Mist

We took the lift to the top floor of a huge shopping center.

“Close your eyes and give me your hand!” Michael said mysteriously and led me somewhere, and then whispered, “Open!”

“Wow!” I exclaimed, since right in front of us, as if hovering in the air over the abyss, under the dome of the shopping center, there was an Island of Violets, to which a narrow bridge led.

“Don’t worry, the bridge is real, it won’t collapse! Here is an amazing cafe, where we are the only ones to have breakfast today!”

We landed on a sofa, immersed in violet thickets, the flowers surrounded us from all sides – real, large, beautiful and … sad. The waitress left us, taking our order, and Michael took out and handed me a gift box.

“Happy Valentine’s Day!”

“Thank you! Angels are always needed, one can never have too many of them,” I smiled when I saw a lovely silver Guardian Angel, and then, once again glancing at the flowers, I remembered, “Violets in Greece are a symbol of mourning! Imagine, the young Persephone, picking violets, was kidnapped by the Lord of the Kingdom of the Dead. Since then, the Greeks have been covering prematurely dead girls with violets.”

“Leave Greece apart! Better tell me why haven’t you emigrated to Italy yet? We talked with you a hundred times, there is nothing for you to do here! You know Italian. They take you for a local in Italy. You are young, smart, beautiful. So? Today we’ll register you on international dating websites. Remember the photo shoot in the fall! Lots of amazing photos! We’ll choose the best ones, and in a month, you’ll invite me to your wedding! You’ll see! What’s the point of wasting time? You are a miracle in feathers! Speaking of feathers, what are you writing now?”

“Nothing… I know what I have to. I saw it there.”

“About Another Reality?”

“Yes, perhaps the time for that book hasn’t come yet.”

“What did you see?”

I wondered how to explain to an earthly man what they had shown me in Heaven, and shifted my gaze to the flowers, but I noticed Ray on the bridge to the Violet Island.

“So what did they show you, Alice?” Michael asked, sitting with his back to Ray approaching us.

“Aggregation of atoms,” I breathed out to Michael.

“I delved into scientific books. So many discoveries in the fields of quantum have been made, and all that stuff about Another Reality, it just takes my breath away! Do you want me to bring them for you to read?”

“Alice, do you want a trick?” Ray asked as he sat down nearby.

“Okay, bring them,” I replied to Michael.

“Don’t be afraid,” Ray held out his hand to me. “Close your eyes.”

I looked at Ray with a question in my eyes, but I couldn’t disobey. We took a couple of steps away from the table, while Michael, as if nothing had happened, continued,

“Next time I’ll bring you three books at once. So, what are we going to do today?”

“Open your eyes, Alice,” Ray whispered, and I obeyed.

Ray and I were standing on the bridge. I turned my gaze to… Oh no! There, at the table, on the Violet Island! There was still me there!