“Picasso”: God Exists!

Time: 1987
Place: Kyiv
Characters: Kirill Bulatov, Mikhaïl Kaminsky, both twelve years old.

The church door was open. Kirill stepped inside. A slow solitary walk, a book read to the very end, the midday heat—all this had left him in a slightly melancholy mood, which deepened the moment he crossed the threshold of the church.

A slow walk alone, a book read through to the end, the midday heat – all of it had left him in a slightly melancholy mood, and that mood deepened as soon as he crossed the threshold of the church.

The first thing he felt was the coolness, so desired in the July heat. There seemed to be no one in the church, and Kirill walked hesitantly farther inside. The interior was quite modest: a plank floor with paint worn away in many places, painted walls, icons here and there framed with embroidered towels – rushnyky – dim, greasy candlestands with extinguished candles and melted wax upon them.

Kirill walked along the walls, looking at the icons, touched a candlestand with his finger, tilted his head back and looked at the ceiling. Having done all this, he thought that perhaps it was time to leave.

“Not exactly St. Volodymyr’s Cathedral,” flashed through his mind.

And yet he did not want to leave. He felt nothing special. Nothing here particularly interested him. He simply did not want to go – that was all.

Kirill sat down on a bench by the wall and fixed his eyes on the red flame of a lampada, the only one, for some reason, burning in the whole church.

Some time passed like this. Kirill did not even notice how much. He only noticed that his head, usually always busy with some thought or other, was now thinking of nothing at all. Not a single thought entered his mind, something that had never happened to him before.

The next thing he noticed was that he seemed afraid to move. Even to turn his head slightly or straighten his leg, which, bent under the bench, had begun to go numb.

Though “afraid” was not quite the right word. He was not frightened. He simply did not want to move, as though by moving he might disturb something. So he made no attempt to do so. He simply sat in the church on the bench and did not stir.

Neither his leg, nor his hand, nor his head moved. Even the thoughts inside his head were still. Only his steady breathing and the measured beating of his heart disturbed that motionlessness.

A kind of silence descended.

It wrapped itself around Kirill like mist. But this silence was not empty. It was somehow full, as though alive.

Silence…

A silence one felt one could touch.

More time passed.

Suddenly Kirill heard the quiet creak of a door opening, and, turning his head slightly, he saw a boy of about his own age emerge from one of the side doors of the iconostasis. The boy was holding a small bucket with a brush in it and was wearing a blue work smock two sizes too large for him.

Going over to a candlestand, he began very deftly collecting the candle stubs and placing them in the bucket. Then he took the brush and, just as deftly, began sweeping away the melted wax. After that he moved on to the next candlestand.

At first he did not notice Kirill. When he did, he gave a slight start of surprise, shot him a quick glance, and returned to his work.

Kirill’s brain, meanwhile, slowly began to move again. He had not expected to see someone his own age in church. And, by the look of it, some sort of church worker.

His school lessons in atheism began coming to mind.

A boy! His age! Serving in church!

Somehow this did not fit together in Kirill’s mind. Well, old women – dark, naïve, people who understood nothing – that was one thing. It was clear enough how they might be in church. But how could a boy like Kirill, a Soviet Pioneer, already in the fifth grade and already knowing everything about life and its origins – how could he be in church?!

It was some kind of absurdity.

Could he really be that naïve? Could he really not know that, in fact, there was no God?

Well, that was something.

Kirill got up and walked over to the boy. The boy again cast him a quick glance and continued cleaning the candlestand.

“Listen, why are you in church? Do they pay you for this or something?” Kirill asked, without much ceremony.

The boy was silent.

Kirill looked at him mockingly and as if from above, though they were about the same height. Confusion and hurt appeared on the boy’s face. The question had been asked as though in ridicule, as though meant to mock his faith. And it seemed he ought to defend that faith, to say something in reply, but he did not know what to say.

His thoughts scattered, and he could not gather them. He could not find an answer.

Instead of replying, he fixed his eyes on the candlestand and continued gathering the wax. His face began to flush.

A heavy silence hung between them.

Of course, there had been mockery in Kirill’s question, and bewilderment, and a desire to show his superiority. But at the same time, he truly wanted to understand why this boy, his peer, was in church when he, Kirill, was not.

The boy never answered.

Kirill gave a condescending snort and headed for the exit.

* * *

After he left, the boy abandoned the candlestand, shuffled over to the bench, and sank down, tired and defeated, onto the very spot where Kirill had been sitting.

His face was burning, his temples were pounding, and tears were ready to spring to his eyes. He felt terribly ashamed and hurt for himself.

He – a church altar boy, the son of a priest! – had been unable to answer the simplest question: why was he in the Church?

Of course, he could have replied with a phrase learned by heart from The Law of God: that the purpose of life is the salvation of the soul, and salvation takes place in the Church, and therefore he was in the Church because he was being saved, and so on.

But that was not it.

He felt it.

He felt that such an answer would only provoke another sneer. Saved from what? Life was beautiful! The sun was shining, the lake was nearby, the beach, ice cream, summer holidays. Later there would be school, lessons, breaks, games, friends.

And he was here in church, cleaning candlestands.

And in general, so much was forbidden to him. He did not eat meat on Wednesdays and Fridays or during the fasts. He cleaned the church while the other boys were swimming in the lake. He had not been admitted into the Pioneers because his father was a priest, and from time to time the whole class laughed at him because of it. He was made to stand for prayers when in the morning he wanted to sleep a little longer, and in the evening to watch television. And even television itself he was almost never allowed to watch.

In general, he was not like everyone else.

For what?

The little altar boy got up and, trying to shake off all these heavy thoughts, began cleaning the candlestand again. But the work would not go. His hands had become as if made of cotton and refused to obey him. And the task itself, which had once given him pleasure, now suddenly disgusted him.

He set the bucket on the floor and placed the brush inside it.

He wanted to go somewhere, crawl into a little burrow, and never look out. And for no one to touch him. No one to ask him anything.

He climbed the steps up to the choir loft, the place from which the singers led the services, and sat down on a bench.

“Why am I in the Church?” he now asked himself. “For what am I depriving myself of so many pleasures that other boys have? Why am I doing all this – cleaning the church, serving during the services? Am I earning the Kingdom of God? And what is it? What do I want to be there? Many boys already have here, without any Kingdom and without the Church, the very things I would like to have, the things I dream of. And does it even exist at all? No one has ever seen it. What if our teacher is right, and there is no God, no Kingdom, and all of this is just something invented by priests to collect money from people? After all, my father really does collect money – for baptisms, for funerals, and people put quite a lot into the church donation box. Could all of this really be for money?”

There was utter confusion in the soul of the twelve-year-old child.

He was the son of a priest.

While his mother had suffered in labor, his father had stood in the little square outside the maternity hospital reading prayers for his wife’s safe delivery. After the birth of his son, he served a thanksgiving moleben in church. On the eighth day the boy was baptized. On the fortieth, he was churched.

From that time on, he had been in church at every service, since his mother directed the choir and his father served at the altar, and even when he was little there had been no one to leave him with. At every Liturgy he received Communion. From the age of seven, he went to confession. From the age of five, his father began taking him into the altar, where he slowly started to serve: carrying candles, handing over the censer.

The Gospel, The Law of God, and the lives of the saints were read to him. Later he began reading them himself to his younger brothers and sisters.

He had grown up in the Church, among services and prayers, and did not know that one could live any other way.

True, when he went to school, he encountered another life, another world. He quickly sensed that he was not like everyone else, that he was different. But within him there immediately formed a kind of opposition between himself and that world, like a turtle’s protective shell: “My world is right because it is mine, and that world is wrong because it is not mine.”

His parents told him that the other world was not right, that it lay in evil, and he believed his parents because they were his parents. He set himself against the school environment, though he was not a complete outcast there. True, the offensive nickname Popovich – “priest’s son” – had attached itself to him, but all the same, the teachers taught him as they taught the other children, gave him grades like everyone else, and the boys played war and football with him. Almost all of them had nicknames anyway.

He fulfilled all the religious rules and restrictions his father and mother placed upon him: he prayed, fasted, went to church, served there, and cleaned. But he did all this mechanically, like a child, obeying the will of his parents. Without thinking, without asking whether it was right or not.

And now from that other, “wrong” world, a boy just like him had come and asked one little question: “Why?”

And from that simple question his whole faith began to shake – or rather, not his own faith, but his faith that his parents’ faith and their entire life were right.

He realized that he had to answer this question – why? – as an adult now. He had to answer it for himself. And by himself.

Without his parents.

He sat on the bench in the choir loft and looked down at the church from above. Everything was familiar and ordinary to him: the floor, the benches, the iconostasis, the memorial table. He loved all of it, and when he was among these things he had been happy and had thought of nothing else.

But now the whole setting of the church seemed to him like a cage in which he had been locked and from which he had no right to leave. Everything seemed dull and monotonous. The same services, prayers, rites, Law of God, Gospel. He already knew almost all of it by heart.

And so what?

A terrible anguish and despondency came over him.

“Why am I here?”

There was no answer.

He began to recall what his father had said about this in sermons, what he had read in the spiritual books he was not exactly forced to read, but was strongly encouraged to read. He remembered the Gospel.

“Oh! Of course! The Gospel. The sacred book. I just need to remember what is written there – and the answer will be ready.”

The altar boy took heart.

“Now I’ll think of something,” he told himself, and began remembering familiar passages: the Nativity of Christ, the calling of the apostles, the Sermon on the Mount, Judas’s betrayal, Golgotha, the Resurrection.

“Yes, but what does any of that have to do with me personally? All of that happened a very long time ago. And did it happen at all?” The little worm of doubt was doing its work faithfully. “Maybe none of it happened at all?”

No, he could not “think of something.”

He felt his own helplessness. He felt that he could not answer this question himself. And he also felt that if he did not answer it, he would never come to church again.

* * *

The footsteps of the boy descending the stairs echoed through the empty church.

The altar boy was walking back to the candlestand to take his bucket again. His gaze fell upon the icon of Christ lying on the analogion in the middle of the church.

“I need to pray. If God exists, He will answer.”

The boy stood before the icon, turning over in his mind the familiar texts from the prayer book, almost the whole of which he knew by heart.

But…

Nothing fit. The texts did not help.

Despair and helplessness seized his heart. And suddenly something in his soul seemed to tear, and he almost stopped understanding what was happening around him.

With firm steps he entered the altar, fell to his knees before the Holy Table, and his child’s heart, gathering all its spiritual strength and all the faith that remained, silently cried out:

“Where are You?!”

And in that same instant, there, in his heart, a quiet and gentle voice sounded:

“Where are you?”

But it was not an echo. It was not a sound.

It was an answer.

His heart understood: it was not he who was asking God. It was God who was asking him.

“Where are you?”

Just as He had once asked Adam in Paradise.

“Where are you?!” his mother had called when, at the age of six, he had run away from home and hidden behind the garages in the courtyard, frightened that his parents would scold him for breaking the chandelier with a football.

He had sat there for several hours, while his mother, having run to all his friends and acquaintances, walked through the courtyard calling:

“Misha, where are you?!”

And when at last he crawled out from behind the garages and ran to her, she embraced him and, pressing him close, exhaled in relief:

“Found you!”

Back then Misha had felt that the greatest punishment there could ever be in the world was to go away from his mother.

“Where are you?”

“I am here, Lord. Here, in Your church. I haven’t gone anywhere.”

Misha suddenly shuddered at the thought that he had already been almost ready to leave, to stop believing everything, to believe that there was no God. He was terrified by the awareness that only moments before he might have left God forever, abandoned the church, forgotten the prayers, the Gospel.

This was far more frightening than leaving his mother at the age of six.

It was as though he had looked into an abyss: to go away from God.

Misha froze in fear.

But it was not panic, not horror. It was the fear of God. In that fear, in that reverence before Christ and His question full of love – “Where are you?” – he knelt and did not dare move. He did not dare say anything. Not even in thought. Not even pray.

He only felt with his whole being the presence of the One in Whom he had doubted only a minute earlier.

Time stopped.

And suddenly he remembered Kirill, the boy who had asked him: “Why?”

Misha felt unbearably sorry for him. For he, Mikhail, was with God, was in the church – while that boy had gone away.

His heart ached.

No! He had to catch him, had to bring him back, had to tell him…

Misha ran out of the church, stumbling in his oversized smock. Somehow, while running, he pulled it off, threw it over the railing at the entrance, and raced farther along the path.

After a hundred steps the path forked: left toward the tram, right toward the lake.

He ran to the right.

He caught up with Kirill almost at the lake itself.

“Wait, m-m-m…” He had wanted to call him by name, but did not know his name. “Wait!”

Kirill turned around. His eyes widened, and his mouth was ready to open in surprise. The church altar boy was running toward him – but instead of the crushed, confused child he had left behind, Kirill saw a determined, strong person.

The change in the altar boy was so striking that Kirill even took a step back.

“Wait,” the boy said, stopping to catch his breath. “I wanted to tell you…” He could not breathe properly. “You know…”

“GOD EXISTS!” the altar boy blurted out, looking him straight in the eyes.

Kirill shrank back. It seemed to him that he was looking up at the boy from below.

And the boy was looking at him with joyful, open eyes, in which something unearthly shone. Something unearthly and so bright that one wanted to squeeze one’s eyes shut.

Kirill could find no answer.

All he managed to do was shrug and walk away.

To be continued.