In Siberia by Colin Thubron

Stalinist mouldings of the ceiling. The night is close and humid. It is over 85°F. I lie on the bed and watch the full moon shining through a pattern of dainty flowers in the lace curtains. I cannot sleep. The sweat leaks from my chest and forehead. And this is Siberia.
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    Next morning, outside the big, unlovely cathedral, which in Stalin’s day had been a cinema, I found a coach-load of pilgrims setting off for a rural monastery. They welcomed me on board. The monastic foundations were only just being laid, they said, and they were going to attend the blessing of its waters. In 1987 an excavator at the site–near the state farm of Rechnoi–had unearthed a mass grave, and the place was revealed as a complex of labour camps, abandoned at Stalin’s death. The inmates, mostly intelligentsia, had died of pneumonia and dysentery from working in the fields, and their graves still scattered its earth.
    As our bus bowled through ramshackle villages, the pilgrimsrelayed the story with murmurs of motherly pity. They were elderly women, for the most part, indestructible babushkas in flower-printed dresses and canvas shoes, whose gnarled hands were closed over prayer-books and bead-strings, and whose headscarves enshrined faces of genial toughness. When a fresh-faced cantor began chanting a hymn in the front of the bus, their voices rose in answer one after another, like old memories, reedy and melodious from their heavy bodies, until the whole bus was filled with their singing.
    We reached a birch grove on the Rechnoi farm. It was one of those ordinary rural spots whose particular darkness you would never guess. As the women disembarked, still singing, the strains of other chanting echoed from a chapel beyond the trees. It was the first of four shrines which would one day stake out the corners of an immense compound. Inside, a white-veiled choir was lilting the sad divisions of the Liturgy. As the pilgrims visited their favourite icons, a forest-fire of votive candle-flames sprang up beneath the iconostasis, and two or three babushkas shuddered to their knees.
    In the south transept, meshed in scaffolding, an unfinished fresco of the Deposition from the Cross loomed above us. It was almost complete; but the flesh tints were still missing, as if the artist were afraid to touch too closely on Divinity, and pots of pigment lined the scaffold. So only the painted garments of the disciples semaphored their grief, while their hands and features were empty silhouettes in the plaster: here a face uplifted in dismay, there a blank caress on the unpainted body of Christ–which remained a ghostly void, like something the onlookers had imagined.
    Sometimes, whimsically, I felt as if this scene were echoed in the nave where I stood, where around the great silence left by God the worshippers lifted their heads and hands, crossed themselves, and wept a little.
    From outside came the squeal of bulldozers in a distant field. They were smoothing the earth of the labour camps into monastery foundations. I strained to catch the sounds, but our singing drowned them in the mournful decrescendos of the Russian rite.And out of the mouths of these ancient women–whose sins, I imagined, could barely exceed a little malicious gossip–rose the endless primal guilt ‘ O Lord forgive us! ’, over and over, as if from some deep recess in the national psyche, a need for helplessness.
    The sanctuary curtains parted on an incense-clouded region inhabited by a very small priest. His hair shimmered down in a phantasmal jumble, like a Restoration wig, and melted into a droop of violet-clad shoulders. Occasionally, feebly, one of his arms swung a censer; in the stillness between responses its coals made a noise like suppressed laughter. As he intoned the prayers he constantly forgot or lost his place, until his chanting dithered into confusion, and three deacons in raspberry robes prompted his responses with slips of paper. He would