Among the Russians(36)

Idly, in the middle of the liturgy, I followed a babushka who was carrying a sheaf of gladioli down a stairway at the back of the cathedral. The chanting above us faded away. I traversed a corridor and found myself outside the crypt. The woman had disappeared. Then, as I pushed through the doorway, a hideous, chthonic screaming exploded around me. It echoed and vibrated in the vaults like the howling of caged animals. The whole crypt was strewn with babies’ garments, towels, dummies, diapers, toys. Such a wailing, screeching and whimpering seemed to herald a Herodian massacre rather than a Christian baptism. But I now saw that in the centre of the crypt a huge priest was remorselessly dunking babies in a silver tub. Mothers and grandmothers cooed and chirruped at their bellowing progeny, joggled and gurgled and jingled toys for their diversion. But the screaming raged like a fever. The infants were subjected to a pitiless triple immersion. ‘Katya is baptised in the name of the Father, Amen….’ boomed the priest, and the baby’s yells suddenly stopped as she vanished into the water then was lifted gleaming and bawling again into the light, only to be plunged implacably down ‘in the name of the Son, Amen.’ Once more she rose to swell the cacophony round her, her small eyes dilated in horror and her mouth blowing cloudy bubbles at either corner. Only the adults, clutching candles, looked pleased with her progress. But no sooner had the name of the Son roused her to a pitch of blubbering outrage than she was plummeted into the water and salvaged for the third time, reduced by the Holy Ghost to a whimpering, grey-white papoose. Fourteen infants were baptised in this pandemonium, and touched with oil on forehead, hands and feet, with six elder children who lifted long skirts and trousers coyly for their anointing. Then the parents and children together circumambulated the font—well-dressed and dowdy side by side, all beaming, all peaceful. The mass expulsion of original sin had shrivelled the babes-in-arms to a cyclorama of wet, distorted faces, eyes pinched with misery and mouths puckered in a stunned reverie.

Some baptisms are undertaken for reasons of sentiment and tradition rather than belief. But others are held in secret. Nobody knows how many Christians remain in Russia. In this empire of more than 260 million, perhaps thirty-five million are believers. But there are no true statistics. Bitterly persecuted in the twenties and thirties, and again by Kruschev, the Church is enjoying a quiet revival now, tolerated as a conservative moral force and as part of the immemorial personality of the Motherland.

The monotony of ordinary life may invest the contrasting liturgy with a magical allure—or render it brutally redundant. When I returned to the nave after the robust goings-on in the crypt, I stared with a renewed wonder at its mise en scène. It might have erupted into the present by a time-warp. Drifting in their immemorial sacrament, holding up crossed candles and golden fans, the long-haired and green-robed acolytes seemed as meaningless and effete as Byzantine angels. Despite the huge congregation, the nave spread half-empty. The place looked threatened and evanescent, the people so old. The chanting rose and fell with unbearable melancholy. Even the singing priest, his head thrown back for the Hymn of Heavenly Victory, intoned in the swallowed bass of a Chaliapin, as if his anthem sounded from the grave. Then the central gates of the iconostasis opened. Above them the holy dove spread its wings in an explosion of gold cloud and flame. And within, lifted high beyond the priest-crowded altar, the aged metropolitan of Leningrad leant like a wintry emperor on his pastoral stave and prayed in a tiny, faraway voice. His robes were of etiolated gold. He seemed almost faded away. It was as if the very epicentre of all this cathedral, of religion, and of God Himself, were a fluting whisper. Under the globular crown the silver-bearded face, framed in its white sanctuary, might have been speaking a mile or a millennium off.

For half an hour the people queued to receive communion by chalice and spoon, kissing the hands of the officiating priests. Then the metropolitan came shuffling down the aisle towards the exit, touching the foreheads of the women who surged forward for a blessing. I was almost crushed against him in the rush. Now, as they marched through us, the magisterial priests and ethereal acolytes turned to flesh and blood. They lost their numen and became what they were: portly peasants in fancy dress. The metropolitan himself was divested of majesty, and looked mundane as he fumbled past—a weak-faced old man. The theatre was over. It only remained for the old lady in her coffin to be committed to eternal life. Her friends kissed her on the brow—one weeping, comforted by a stately husband—and the lid was clamped over her. Birth, marriage, death—there is no state ritual which can invest such moments with the same perspective as the Church does. Secular funerals are desultory affairs, and state-run weddings ring hollow: not because God is not there—that cannot be helped—but because a spurious effort is made to keep the trappings of religiosity where the promises of religion don’t apply.

One day I added myself ashamedly to a group which was mounting the staircase of the ‘wedding palace’ on the Neva. Only little parties of relatives and friends attend these ceremonies, and this group perhaps numbered thirty in all. Tchaikovsky’s Number One Piano Concerto sounded from behind a gilded screen as we ascended. Then we filed into a gallery, lining it on either side, and I took note of my adoptive relations. The same look of wooden uneasiness pervaded them all. They appeared pleasant but not very happy. Their gaze drifted incuriously over me. The men wore best suits in bland colours. Their hair was plastered down. Most of them fidgeted with a carnation or two, while the women, in short, styleless dresses, cradled bouquets of gladioli.