Wrong, Part 2

“Nec plus, nec minus, nec aliter.” - Pope Pius X, proclaiming that it was right for Russian Byzantine Catholics to continue observing the rituals and spirituality of the Orthodox church while entering into communion with the Holy See.

Viatka was a hamlet in Russia. It was known for nothing except Exarch Leonid, a Byzantine Catholic who was internally exiled in the late 1920s or the early 1930s and chose Viatka in lieu of the other post-federalist centers that were mired in Russia at the time. It was a rough going. St. Petersburg and Moscow were now off limits to him, and he would never lay eyes on or step foot in either for the rest of his life. He walked around the Viatka square once, twice. He patted a dog on its creased head. He watched children skirmish. He grinned at the sun to keep its dirty milk from his eyes. But as he was Russian, his eyes were deep and dark, and he never needed to squint. The whole world looked dim. So dim, in fact, he sometimes forgot to rouse. The cock might’ve crowed, but the sound fell in with his dreams. If it was an hour past noon, the leaden drizzle on his pane clothed the day in early morning.
Exarch Leonid arrived as an ailing clergyman, and he died in 1935. The folks of Viatka, clutching potato sacks to their chests, bothering with their noses, looking all identical – brown and quiet –, barely acknowledged the death of a man who had believed in something strongly enough to be banished for it, cast away to a damp little village whose economy, politics and community were apparently the stuff of a penal colony. (The people of Viatka were hardly offended by this categorization. The hardbitten Russian men knew their home was a shithole; it was their shithole.) The consensus about Exarch Leonid had been clear upon his arrival, the moment they saw him. The emaciated churchman shuffled through the streets and looked askance at their homes, all incondite buildings, dilapidated and crowded, with brickbat edges and bruise-dark damages, soaked and chewed by the water and the rats. They knew: This man believed something, or practiced something, that was wrong.
There was no day in Viatka commemorating Exarch Leonid. They tucked in his limbs to fit him inside a plywood box. It was raining. The dirt pile outside the chapel became a mound of slime, eroding in freshets as the grave was clumsily fed. Down the coffin went. It buoyed on a puddle, bobbing and glistening in the wetness as weighty shovelfuls slapped its lid. Once the earth was finally packed down, good and tight, barely a thought ever again returned to Exarch Leonid if it wasn’t through the hazy reflection of a history citation or the unintentional grazing of one’s eyes over his tombstone. He became two things: a name written in rock and perfunctory academia. He was a forgotten man, a dead man. And he was buried outside an Orthodox church.
Utschevek was born in Viatka. He would tell any Russian historian who dropped the name Leonid that he had never heard the man’s name before in his life; this, and he was one of the few boys in Viatka who didn’t drop out of school.
Utschevek liked school. He was good at school. And adding to the despair of Exarch Leonid’s worldly evaporation, Utschevek enjoyed most of all the rote memorization of dates and battles, the notation of things he was bound to forget, and the skimming apprehension of watershed moments that were divisive enough to get other people’s dander up, but never his. He longed to attend college somewhere. In bed, he had dry dreams about dry libraries, where he’d finger through tomes and know exactly what was to be read in all of them, top of the page to bottom. He’d swallow up knowledge and become a full-bearded academician – a regular Russian intellectual. He imagined himself with a pipe and wearing English tweed – a softened Russian intellectual. He’d invest in a pair of tiny round spectacles and become an expert at constantly look perturbed, as though there were some thought on his mind that was critical to the explanation of life and death, existence and non-existence, et cetera.
But dry always preceded wet, as expected.
Soon he got to thinking about girls. He thought about their shoulders, among other body parts, and he drifted to sleep under a ceiling of salacious imagery. His trembling hand groped the underside of his pillow. A white-hot poker squeezed through his heart, making a hissing and squealing noise. He filled his mouth with sighs, emptying his lungs in big dizzying winds. Then he awoke, forehead wet, and trousers wet, too.
Utschevek was exhilarated those nights. The feeling in his loins was a relief like no other, like nothing he could have comprehended before, before that magnificent release, before he sensed its cold substance on his lap.
But it was just as lifting as it was heavy. He’d been told about these such occurrences. He’d received lectures of curt simplicity about them. He’d been informed about their vileness, his iniquity, and how it was a thing of damnation. Thus, panting and gulping, he watched as Sister Tolstoy appeared on the ceiling, glaring and frowning, stone cold, coldly stone, and the stain on his lap became a mar.
Sister Tolstoy had told him it was wrong. Sister Tolstoy had assured him it was embarrassing. Sister Tolstoy had aimed a nail at his throat and taken a hammer to the stud. In mid-pant, he whinnied, coughed, and swallowed hard so that he gave himself a headache. His temples pounded in the dark, and a split, like lightning, shot through his skull and into his pillow.
Sister Tolstoy lived cloistered with the rest of the nuns. He watched her now and then. She marched in gliding procession, stiff and spooky like a military ghost. She was thin, and she was young. The other nuns looked just wretched, with their faces pilloried in their habits and their gowns folding over their thighs; those over fifty seemed always pugnacious and hot. Their fleshy cheeks sagged and their eyes glinted, like pepper crammed in hair-strewn wrinkles. But Sister Tolstoy didn’t look like them. She had an alabaster face, smooth as soap. It blended with the white hood of her uniform, and she appeared almost to become a part of it, all of her bearing crafted from one sample of pure marble column, her face the full-lipped decoration.
But of course, she kept those full lips chapped. She was a nun, after all.
And she was even beginning to frame those lips with a pair of wrinkles.
Her frown deepened as the years drew on, and she practiced till it was a deadpan scowl, a leery purveyor of disapprobation. She made her countenance into a clenched fist. Once, Utschevek caught something nasty in her expression: the tight and lifeless mouth of a harridan librarian, a septuagenarian – a witch called Sister Lenski.
There was a limerick that went with Sister Lenski, that followed her.
Translated from Russian, it would sound something like:

Lenski, Lenski, Sister Lenski
How does your garden grow?
“It doesn’t,” she snarls
Her face up in gnarls,
“’Tis a graveyard, covered in snow.
Repeat, with creative extemporization.”

Of course, something is always lost in translation. In this case, the hardness, the brick roughness, is missing in the English version. The Russian version necessitates the speaker to brutally scrape the back of the throat, to make a scuffing sandpaper noise that rams up against the tonsils, forces mucus to the roof of the mouth and mimics the gurgle of a contagious flu victim. The cutting consonants get muffled by flubby ‘f’ sounds and choking ‘g’ sounds. It’s a strange mix of violence and congestion. It’s all muddiness and biting, stinging cold water alternated at random with grime.
Sister Lenski taught poetry. The mediocre limerick for which she’s eponymous was inspired by bad marks and the raging hormones of a student who liked to think of himself as intellectually rebellious. Sister would have commented on his awkward rhyming scheme, the simplicity of the content, and given his limerick a poor mark, too.
Sister Tolstoy taught mathematics. Yes, it was a surprise to everyone.
Pretty women, most often mindless women, went about writing things in journals, parsing through bits and snippets of literature as though they stimulated the brain instead of their most primal emotions. They clutched novels, such women did. Often they pressed them against their breasts as they walked through town, to show them off to passersby – that she read Dostoyevsky, and Nabokov, and Tolstoy. But ask one such woman to explain a passage, and she’d remove all doubt. Her elocution would prove elementary, made adorable by a brick-laying style of pronunciation, the way she marched through the passage, tongue stumbling. When she finished, she stared blankly at the period, looked up at the sky, squinted, then fired off an analysis that might have meant something to a keen literature scholar, but meant nothing to her. She vomited what was in her skull: misunderstood concepts and demotic phrases that had long lost significance, yellowed and overgrown. Occasionally locking eyes with her listener, she pleaded through deep pupils to, please, understand what I’m talking about, or at least nod along. And the listener did usually nod along, watching her visible concentration, how she gesticulated like some anxious carnival juggler, getting her words right, often wrong.
Sister Tolstoy wouldn’t have any of that. She understood literature, could explain it far better than most who tried. But it was impractical to devote her life to emotion. It didn’t do anything, after all. What about literature changed society, other than adding another few sheaves to a tired stack? It did but make a soaked thing damper, provide only inches to a towering collection. A massive something got only slightly more massive.
Instead, she dealt in quantities – things that could be counted, and then recounted to prove she was right. Blessed with an analytical mind, Sister Tolstoy went beyond mere apples and oranges. On impulse, she plumbed the beyond. So many conundrums and quagmires drifted and snared just an inch beneath the surface, floating without pattern, seemingly nonsensical, definitely numinous, and waiting for the crack of her meter stick. She could sustain a train of thought like a marble in a groove, and she started off bulldozing through mild impediments, to move on to ox-sized ones, till her grill was thick with the hide of mind blocks. She went careening toward questions that weighed heavier, and heavier, but it was worth it for those quick bursts of speed – when the obstacle was ripped through and she flew unrestrained into glorious resolution, smoke trail straight, front light beaming. The longer the delay, the greater that freedom.
And yet she was confined, as confined as confined can be. She was so confined, it made the indentations around her mouth deeper still.
She drew a plus sign on the board – ‘+’ – and the children waited for her to explain. But it was so simple. Why couldn’t they just see? A child raised his hand and asked why she had placed a crucifix between a pair of numbers. Sister Tolstoy frowned and asked how the child could be so dumb: He was in math class, not the chapel. When he insisted that the twos on either side of the plus sign were the hills of Cavalry, she snapped up his little wrist and yanked him outside for a walloping.
There was a time when Sister Tolstoy had encouraged the students’ creative thinking, especially when they interpreted things Christianly, but her patience had worn thin. Now it was time for the children of Viatka to understand what was and what simply, unequivocally was not.
The walloped child was Utschevek. He remembered the incident well, would recall it every day of his life. The buckle of her fingers drained him of all warmth. He turned an icy panic, wiggling in that grasp like a mad hooked fish. He stumbled catching up. The eyes of his classmates were scalding, all turned at him – innocent! – being taken someplace unseen for an unruly beating. His heart quivered with proud fear, terrible rage. Self-pity gulped him up, the more poignant because he thought it justified. She couldn’t do what she was doing; surely, she couldn’t. Surely, he thought, she wouldn’t.
But then they were outside, and she was striding toward an olive tree. She thrust him underneath, unclasping him to let him flail and trip and fall on a big root. Then she approached, a deadly colossus. His bottom was sore, and he looked up. Utschevek had heard that some Dominican nuns wear white, but Sister Tolstoy did not.
She came down on him in a dive, her smooth face turned stonely cold. He was reminded of a gargoyle. But there was still a trace of his mother in those round eyes. That delicate nose.
She beat him in the shade of the olive tree, muttering banal frustrations as she did it, tossing away her big looping sleeves and starting again, tossing and starting, pushing back her big billowing habit that kept getting in the way. It was like she was entangled in a cloud of smoke, trying to extricate herself so she could better get at him, tear him to shreds in her rapacious white claws.
He whimpered and shouted. He covered his face but always saw her smooth ivory brow, now wimpled by a crude knot between her eyes, and all her snarling hatred. There was no sympathy in that look. It was the gaze of judgment – a cold, straight shot. And yet – and this made Utschevek writhe in his sleep – it was not an inhuman gaze; there was the capacity for warmth. Deep within her pupils, there was glinting personality. There was someone who laughed and enjoyed the company of carefully selected others. There was lukewarm water at the bottom of those wells, but it was not for him. She left him dry; she left him thirsty. Her only concern, a quizzical twist in her beauty, practically disgust, was that he existed as he did. She panted and stared, panted and frowned, concerned.
She left him under the olive tree and drifted back inside the schoolhouse. He was left bruised, crying. Nearby, a drunken old fool sat back too far on a stump and fell with a ruffle and a crunch; he landed on his week-old newspaper, breaking something wrapped up inside. He bellowed a groan, sat up and pawed his understand, tugging the newspaper out from under him and letting bits of glass sprinkle loose. Seeing them scatter in the grass, lost to the world, hidden and sunk, made him gurgle. He started laughing, then coughing, then laughing again. Then he lay back down in the grass, fell with a short grunt, and stayed like that for a while – a forgotten man, a dead man.