The city woke on the fourth day of Great Lent to a wind that tasted of the Gulf—salt, pine, and something metallic like old blood under snow. The temperature had risen overnight; the ice on the canals groaned and sighed as if something enormous were turning over in its sleep.
Ilya did not go to the bread factory. He called the foreman from a payphone on Sadovaya and said his mother had died. The foreman, who had buried two wives and a son, swore compassionately and told him to take a week. Ilya hung up while the man was still speaking. He would never return. The furnaces could devour someone else.
He walked instead to the Alexandr Nevsky Lavra, arriving just as the monks were finishing the Third Hour. The gates were open; tourists and pilgrims mingled like mismatched chess pieces on the wet cobblestones. He slipped past them, past the ticket booth and the babushkas selling paper icons, and made his way to the Tikhvin Cemetery behind the church of the Joy of All Who Sorrow.
He had not been here since the day they buried his mother in the summer of 1995. The grave was easy to find—second path on the left, under a birch that had grown crooked from too many winters. The wooden cross had rotted and been replaced by a metal one that read:
Rogozhina Elena Dmitrievna
1959–1995
Forgive me.
There were no flowers. Only a plastic cup filled with rainwater and cigarette butts left by some drunk who had mistaken the place for a bench.
Ilya knelt. The ground was still half-frozen; his knees sank into the thin skin of snow. He took the splinter of the True Cross from his pocket and pressed it against the earth as though planting a seed.
"I lied to the foreman," he said aloud. "You are not dead. You are only sleeping. And I have met someone who will wake us both."
The wind answered by tearing the last dead leaves from the birch and flinging them across the grave like a handful of brown bones.
He stayed until the bells rang for the Sixth Hour, then walked back through the city. The thaw had begun in earnest; water dripped from every gutter, every cornice, every icicle that had guarded the roofs like a row of spears. The streets smelled of wet stone and dog shit and the sour promise of spring.
He did not go to the church on the Obvodny Canal.
He did not go to Bolshoy Prospekt.
He went instead to the public library on Fontanka 44, climbed the marble stairs that still bore bullet scars from 1917, and asked for the reading room.
The librarian—an old woman with a face like a dried apple—looked at him over her glasses.
"You need a passport."
He placed his internal passport on the counter. The photograph inside was three years old: a younger man with frightened eyes and the beginnings of a monastic beard.
She wrote the number in a ledger that smelled of mildew and gave him a slip. "Table twelve. No pens. Pencils only."
He took the pencil and sat beneath a portrait of Lenin that no one had bothered to remove. Then he began to search for Anastasia Mikhailovna Tikhonova.
He did not know why he thought she would be in books. Perhaps because everything else in his life had already begun to feel like scripture—written in advance, inevitable, annotated by invisible hands.
He started with the catalogues of the 1990s theological conferences. Old Believers were rare in Petersburg; their names appeared like black pearls on a string of grey paper. Tikhonov, Tikhonova—there. A paper delivered in 1997 at the Rogozhskoe Cemetery in Moscow: "On the Two-Fingered Sign of the Cross as Ontological Resistance." Author: Mikhail Tikhonov, with footnotes by his daughter, Anastasia Mikhailovna Tikhonova, age fourteen.
Fourteen.
He felt the splinter against his heart shift, as though it had grown teeth.
He found more. A samizdat journal from 1999, printed on newsprint so thin it tore when he turned the pages. An article signed A.M.T.: "The Body as Relic: Toward a Theology of Unhealed Wounds." The language was ferocious, almost erotic in its insistence on pain as the only honest prayer left to Russia.
He copied sentences in the margins of a newspaper he had brought for the purpose:
"We do not ascend to God. We are dragged. By nails."
"Love that refuses to wound is not love; it is nostalgia."
"Every kiss is a rehearsal for the kiss of Judas."
He read until the library closed and the lights dimmed like dying stars. When the librarian touched his shoulder he flinched so violently she stepped back.
"Closing," she said gently. "Come back tomorrow."
He walked out into a night that had turned soft and treacherous. The snow was melting so fast the gutters ran like rivers. Somewhere a drainpipe had burst and water poured from a third-storey window in a steady silver rope.
He found himself on Nevsky Prospekt without remembering how he got there. The bright shops and the neon crosses of pharmacies looked obscene after the cemetery and the library. He passed a kiosk selling pirated CDs and heard a song leaking out—some pop singer whining about love that hurts so good. He wanted to smash the glass.
Instead he bought a bottle of vodka he had no intention of drinking and walked until he reached the Kazan Cathedral. The square was full of couples kissing under the colonnade, their mouths open like baby birds. He stood watching them with the detached curiosity of a man observing a foreign species.
One of the couples detached and came toward him. The girl was drunk; she stumbled and laughed. The boy caught her around the waist.
"Hey, friend," the boy called. "Got a light?"
Ilya looked at him for a long moment. Then he took the box of matches from his pocket—the ones with St. Seraphim's face—and struck one. The flame flared between them, brief and holy.
The boy leaned in to light his cigarette. In that instant the girl looked straight at Ilya and her laughter stopped. Something passed across her face—recognition, perhaps, or fear.
The match burned down to Ilya's fingers. He did not move. The pain was clean, familiar.
The boy stepped back, muttered thanks, and pulled the girl away. She looked over her shoulder once more before they disappeared into the crowd.
Ilya dropped the match and ground it under his heel.
He walked home through streets that now ran with water the colour of weak tea. The room on Podyacheskaya smelled worse than ever—apples and death and something new: the sour sweetness of thaw. He lit no lamp. He undressed in the dark and lay on the bed fully clothed, staring at the ceiling's map of Russia until it dissolved into blackness.
He did not sleep.
At some point in the night he became aware that he was not alone.
He sat up slowly. The room was unchanged, yet the air had thickened, as though someone had opened a door to a place where the atmosphere was different. He smelled beeswax and fasting breath.
She was standing by the window.
Moonlight—or whatever light manages to find its way into Petersburg courtyards in February—outlined her silhouette. She wore the same black coat, the same shawl. Her hands were clasped in front of her like a child about to recite.
"How did you find me?" he asked.
"The candle told me," she said.
He understood. The candle he had left on her threshold had carried his address in its smoke, the way certain letters in the old days were said to carry the writer's soul.
She did not move closer. She simply stood there, pale and terrible and inevitable.
"I read your father's books today," he said.
"My father is dead."
"I know."
She tilted her head. "What do you want from me, Ilya Valerianovich?"
The question was so simple it felt like a knife sliding between ribs.
"I want to stop existing," he said. The words surprised him, but they were true. "And I think you are the only person who can help me."
For a long moment she was silent. Then she reached up and unwrapped the shawl from her head. Her hair fell loose, ash-coloured, longer than he had realised. She looked almost ordinary in the half-light, almost human.
"Stand up," she said.
He obeyed.
She walked toward him slowly, as though the floor might give way. When she was close enough that he could feel the heat radiating from her skin, she stopped.
"Give me your hands."
He held them out. The blisters had begun to heal; the skin was shiny and tender.
She took them in hers—cool now, almost cold—and turned them palm upward. Then, without warning, she pressed her thumbs into the centre of each palm, exactly where the nails had gone through another man two thousand years ago.
The pain was astonishing. He gasped and tried to pull away, but she held him fast.
"Look at me," she said.
He looked.
Her eyes were dry and shining.
"This is only the beginning," she whispered. "If you want to stop existing, you must first learn how much existence you still have left to kill."
She released him and stepped back.
"I will not come here again," she said. "Tomorrow night the church will be open. Father Pavel will serve the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts. He thinks no one will come. He is wrong. You will be there. You will stand in the back and you will not take communion. Not yet."
She turned to leave.
"Wait," he said hoarsely. "Your sister—Varvara—she is afraid for you."
Anastasia paused at the door.
"Varvara still believes love can be gentle," she said. "That is why she will suffer more than either of us."
Then she was gone, the door closing soundlessly behind her.
Ilya stood in the dark with his hands on fire and his heart beating so loudly he was sure the entire kommunalka could hear it.
He did not sleep again that night.
At dawn he went out and bought the darkest clothing he could find—black jeans, a black sweater, a black wool coat that reached his ankles. He looked like a priest who had lost his faith and kept the uniform out of spite.
He spent the day walking. Along the Moika, past the house where Pushkin died, past the spot where Rasputin was thrown into the water still breathing. The city was full of ghosts, but none of them spoke to him. They were waiting for something.
At seven o'clock he reached the church on the Obvodny Canal.
The side door stood open. A faint light flickered inside—lamps, not candles. He stepped over the threshold and smelled incense for the first time in three years. Real incense, not the cheap chemical stuff they sold in kiosks. Frankincense and myrrh and something darker underneath, like earth freshly turned.
The nave was empty except for one figure moving about the altar. Father Pavel—thin, trembling, wearing a riassa that had once been black and was now the colour of ashes. His beard had gone almost white. When he saw Ilya he froze, the censer dangling from his hand like a dead bird.
"Ilyusha," he said. His voice cracked on the diminutive. "My God, my God."
Ilya said nothing.
Father Pavel set the censer down and came toward him, arms outstretched. Ilya stepped back.
"Don't," he said.
The old man stopped. His eyes were red, whether from drink or tears it was impossible to tell.
"You look like a corpse that learned to walk," Father Pavel whispered.
"I feel like one that learned to want," Ilya answered.
They stood in silence while the incense smoke coiled around them like repentant serpents.
Then, from the shadows near the iconostasis, Anastasia stepped forward.
She wore a long black skirt and a black sweater. Her hair was hidden under a dark scarf tied beneath her chin in the Old Believer fashion. In her hands she carried a small prosphora sealed in wax paper.
Father Pavel looked from one to the other and understood everything in a single heartbeat.
"No," he said. It was almost a moan. "Not this. Not you."
Anastasia inclined her head, neither yes nor no.
The bells began to ring somewhere far away—St. Nicholas, perhaps, or the cathedral on the other side of the city. The sound reached them muffled, as though the church itself refused to let the world in.
Father Pavel made the sign of the cross over them both, using only two fingers, the old way.
"May God have mercy on us all," he said.
Then he turned and walked back to the altar, his footsteps echoing like nails being driven into wood.
Anastasia looked at Ilya across the width of the nave.
The Liturgy began.
There were only three of them: the priest, the penitent who would not receive, and the woman who had come to witness the first cut.