Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [217]
It was hardly surprising that, for some time after his arrival in Moscow, Andrei lived in a state of happy excitement. After all, it was a fine thing for a young Cossack to enter a mighty capital and find himself well received.
For they had been warmly welcomed. When they delivered their letters to the Kremlin, a senior functionary let them know that the Tsar and the boyars were well disposed towards them; and when they left the Kremlin and went to the Palace of the Patriarch on Ilinka Street, they were told that the great churchman would give them a personal audience in a few days.
Andrei was full of hope. After the hard months of fighting and uncertainty, he felt like a schoolboy suddenly granted a holiday.
And if Tula had been impressive, he found Moscow awe-inspiring. He would walk across the vast expanse of Red Square towards the extraordinary building already called St Basil’s Cathedral. The floor of Red Square was slightly curved so that, as one walked, St Basil’s seemed to rise up over a shortened horizon. He would advance three-quarters of the way, to the tribune platform where announcements were made and stare with wonder at those strange, barbaric Asiatic towers and domes. Nearby, the high, massive Kremlin walls, so blank, so pitiless, seemed both threatening and protective. On one of the towers there was now a huge English-designed clock, as though to suggest that, despite the huge, tomb-like silence of the Kremlin, it was still watching each minute of the present, passing world.
Sometimes he would wander through the suburbs, through street after street of dark brown, stolid wooden houses, whose roofs were still thick with snow. At every corner, it seemed, there was a church. Many were wooden, with high tent roofs but often, over the wooden houses, he would see the big, squat, pale shape of a masonry church looming over the quarter, with softly glowing domes and, perhaps, those gay little tiers of false arches arranged in a pyramid that the Russians called kokoshniki, meaning ‘headdresses’, such as women wore.
And above all, as he wandered about in the icy city, he noticed the endless sound of bells. How many churches could there be, to produce such a continuous noise?
‘They say there are forty times forty and I believe it,’ he concluded.
Indeed, a friendly priest assured him, in the summer, when the nights were short, the monastery bells could be heard all through the night. ‘Just like so many nightingales,’ the priest said, laughing.
Truly this was the capital, the northern fortress of the Orthodox Church.
But what a study in contrasts Moscow was. He had always heard that the Muscovites were given to whoring and drinking. ‘They get as drunk as us Cossacks after a victory,’ his father had always told him. And to be sure, Andrei saw plenty of people getting drunk, even lying helplessly in the freezing streets by dusk. Yet at the very same time, he would see crowds of men and women moving in a solemn stream into the churches to pray.
And how they prayed! While the priests appeared before the iconostases in their gorgeous vestments, the people stood for hours – longer even than in the great cathedral in Kiev. Many of the faithful even suffered from an incurable foot ailment because of this, he learned. There was a communal zealousness about some of them, too, that he had not seen in the Ukraine. A little knot of women was often to be seen by the church doors and he had supposed they might be asking for alms until one day he saw a drunken man approach, and watched, astonished, as the women suddenly turned upon the fellow with scorn and shoved him brutally away. Truly these Russian women were devout.
Everything is done to extremes in this land, he concluded.
He noticed something else,