The Russian Century: A Hundred Years of Russian Lives

Valentin Kataev was a Russian author who had the rare privilege of going abroad during the Soviet period. On one such trip to San Francisco in the 1960’s he met a woman whom he had loved in Odessa before the Bolshevik revolution. He had proposed marriage to her then, but she declined. He recalls seeing her on an Easter Sunday, Paskha, the central holy day of the Orthodox Church which is celebrated after seven weeks of fasting with great expectation, solemn joy, and feasting. It is customary to kiss family, friends, acquaintances, and others three times on the cheeks this day, one time each for the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. For timid and shy people, the tradition served as a way of kissing a person one liked. The lit candles which Kataev recalls were traditionally carried home after Saturday night vespers before Palm Sunday and after the Holy Thursday “Passion Gospels,” always celebrated in the evening. In many families, upon arriving home, the youngest child would get to illuminate the darkened house from her candle. Excerpted from Valentin Kataev, Sviatoi kolodets [The Sacred Well]. Moscow, 1979.

[Kataev begins]: “Tell me, why didn’t you marry me back then?” “I was young and foolish,” she answered with an unreflecting and sorrowful lightness as if she had anticipated the question. Then, her head slightly down, she continued to look at me from beneath her brows not wiping her eyes, smiling quietly. On the wall in back of her I noticed a vaguely familiar watercolor. The only item which she managed to take with her from Russia some forty years ago. The painting was of a young woman, almost a girl, in a paisley kerchief carefully carrying before her a Holy Thursday candle in a paper cone lest the March wind blow it out. The candlelight illuminated the girl’s face from below her cheeks with a bright and tender glow. The upper

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Valentin Kataev, A Paschal Memory

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face was in shadow but her eyes, with a gold-leaf flame in each pupil, looked straight out at me with innocence and joy. And I immediately recalled Blok’s poem.

Little boys and little girls Cradling candles and pussy willows

Set off for home. The flames glimmer, Passersby cross themselves,

And it smells of spring.

“Do you remember?” I asked. And right away, reading my mind, she answered:

Playful little wind, Light, little rain,

Don’t put out my flame. I’ll be first to rise On Palm Sunday morrow

For the sacred day.

Then it was my turn to read her mind and I saw what she saw: our first and only kiss, which never really counted as real for we did not really kiss but performed a socially accepted ritual.

Near the festively decorated table with tall Easter cakes, pink shavings of hyacinth, colored eggs in a bed of watercress, a baked ham, and a silver bottle of raspberry liqueur produced by the Brothers Shustov, stood my beloved girl. Her eyes were sleepy after the all-night Easter services, but her face was fresh and turned to me with expectation. Her arms were raised. The lace cuffs of her dress half-covered her fingers with their polished nails. She was looking at me without concealing her curiosity: what would I do? That was the first time I had seen her out of her school uniform. She was wearing a fine blouse that was a little big on her. It was honeycombed with tiny perforations through which pink silken shoulder straps showed. The outfit did not suit her at all, giving her slim figure a matronly appearance.

“Christ is Risen!” I said with more conviction than the circumstances demanded and stepped toward her with hesitation—washed clean, brushed, short on sleep, perfumed with my aunt’s cologne “Brocar,” with my hair larded stiff with Vaseline and my new shoes screeping.

“Truly He is risen!” she responded and asked smiling, “Do we have to kiss?”

“I guess we have to,” I said, barely controlling my breaking voice.

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Chapter Twenty-Nine

She placed the palms of her hands on my shoulders. Her hands smelled of old-fashioned elder blossom perfume, either hers or wafting from the lace sleeves become a bit yellow with time. We kissed primly and I saw close-up her lips pressed together and stretched into a cool smile with a tiny beauty mark and her eyes revealing absolutely nothing, not even self-consciousness.

It was then that I saw her father for the first time, although I had been a frequent visitor to their home. He was never there, having just left or not yet returned from the nobleman’s club.