Heart of Iron - Ekaterina Sedia [93]
“That doesn’t sound like something I would want to try.”
Volzhenko laughed, slapped his knee for emphasis. “You have to. For the experience, see? It’s not as awful as it sounds.”
“Right.”
“Well, it is pretty awful,” Volzhenko admitted. “But you have to have experiences like this, you know.” He removed his feet from my bench and leaned forward, elbows in his knees. “This is one thing I believe. You know how Father in church, how he always tells you about your soul, and how he’s always yapping about soul this and soul that?”
I nodded. “I know, although I haven’t been to church in a while.”
“No matter, you remember. And how they always make it sound like your soul is something you always have, how you get it when you’re still in your mother’s belly and have it till you die, and how it is always the same and unchanged?”
“That’s the long and the short of it, yes.”
“But I think they are wrong, and I don’t care if they say it’s heretical and such. I think that we are born only with a capacity for the soul, and the things we experience and learn and think about, this is what makes the soul up—the layers of everything. I heard there was that Father, a priest in Moscow who wanted to take a picture of God, so he bought this contraption for taking daguerreotypes, and took pictures of everything—his room, trees, streets, birds, just everything around him. And he took them all on the same plate, because he hoped that all these images one on top of each other, all of them translucent, would make a portrait of God.”
“Did it work?”
He laughed and ruffled his hair, his hand traveling a familiar path from the back of his neck to his forehead. “I don’t know; I doubt it. But I think it works with us—we, people, we are just cameras, and every image, everything we see and experience becomes us, becomes our soul, all of them layered and translucent . . . ” His voice trailed off as his gaze grew remote, directed at something far away, beyond the walls of the train carriage.
“That’s beautiful,” I whispered, entranced by the delicate elegance of his heresy. “I didn’t realize you were a philosopher.”
“I took a course at the seminary in Moscow,” he said. “The rotmistr, bless him, persuaded me when I was still young enough to listen that one didn’t have to serve God by repeating the most trivial babblings of his most unimaginative servants.” Like the rotmistr, Volzhenko possessed the valuable gift of changing his diction to suit circumstance. I was starting to feel I was in a den of shape-shifters of a most peculiar kind—those who changed from simple and uneducated bumpkins to sophisticated gentlemen in a wink of an eye.
“It’s hard to imagine you a priest,” I said.
He nodded. “I was going to join the black clergy too—to become a monk. White, the parish priests, are too well fed and too content with their wives and children and being pillars of the community. The monks at least have a greater purpose than keeping their belly full. Monks . . . one could become an archimandrite. But yes, higher purpose is what I wanted.”
“None higher that the cavalry,” I said.
“You said a mouthful there, Menshov. Maybe you’re not as dumb as you look.”
“Look who’s talking.”
He laughed. “Fair enough. What I learned in the seminary—that was all nothing. I really started to develop true understanding when I started listening to the rotmistr.”
“I know. He is your teacher, prophet, and God.”
Volzhenko did not laugh but grew serious instead. “You need