The Industry of Souls by Booth Martin

Author:Booth, Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2013-05-10T04:00:00+00:00

7

The unassuming church of Saint Lazarus stands on a grassy knoll across the river from the village with a fine, spreading walnut tree shading the main door. When I first came to Myshkino, it was in a state of semi-dereliction. One of the side chapels remained in use by a few old crones who hobbled up there once a week, or on feast days, to light a candle stub and chant a while, but the bulk of the interior was used in good years to store excess grain from Myshkino Motors’ barn and, for the rest of the time, winter fodder, firewood, communal agricultural tools and spare parts for the village tractor which were locked in the seventeenth century vestment chest. In there, they were secure from thieves and moisture for the lid was a tight fit and the chest weighed at least five hundred kilos when it was empty, the hasp fashioned from iron a centimetre thick.

There was no village priest. The post had been vacant almost since the Bolshevik uprising. In 1919 the incumbent, a young man not long ordained called Father Mikhail, prophesied the future course of Russia. He was, in retrospect, exceedingly accurate in his vision but he kept it to himself. One spring day, he conducted the service, led the prayers, sang sturdily and gave the blessing: the next day, he was gone. His small tied cottage behind the church was empty, the fires in the stoves out and his wardrobe bare. For weeks, the villagers prayed for his safe return, scoured the countryside for his body and put out tentative feelers as far away as Voronezh. Six months later, they learnt from a deserter fleeing south that he had renounced his faith and joined the White Guard. He was never heard of again.

No other priest arrived as a replacement. The villagers kept the church going as long as they could but, in the face of the ravages of the weather, time and socialist dogma, it fell into decay and underwent its secular utilitarian transformation.

As the world changed, however, and the rolling clouds of Communism started to thin, the villagers gradually turned back to the church. There was no outward manifestation of this: it happened in their hearts and minds, far away from the tentacles of the Party and the KGB. Eventually, there arose a determination to restore it. At first, the excuse was that the building had a cultural connotation which should not be ignored. Religion, it was argued, was not the point. The church was a part of the village – and Russia’s – heritage. After all, it was argued at a meeting with officials in Zarechensk, churches in Leningrad and Moscow had been preserved or restored to show to foreigners the history, the traditions, the grandeur of the Soviet past. The precedent had been set. That the chance of foreign tourists ever coming to Myshkino was about as great as a cake of cheese become a commissar was ignored.

I attended the meeting, with some reluctance.

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