Winter Palace (8 page)

“Wherever,” she said, trying to hide her smile. “Of course, I would miss seeing all those men in kilts. You know what I heard about—”

“A honeymoon in Monte Carlo sounds fantastic,” Jeffrey said. “But it's a little out of our price range.”

“We're talking business here,” Alexander said. “Plus maybe a little extra wedding gift. Believe me, if I could go, I would. As I cannot, I would be most pleased—and grateful—if you could go in my stead.”

“I guess I should see to hotel reservations,” Jeffrey said.

“The Hotel de Paris,” Alexander said firmly. “The only place to stay in Monte Carlo, if you don't mind my saying. It is situated on the harbor, just across the square from the Casino. A marvelous old place, as grand as the Vienna opera house.” He smiled fondly at them both. “It should make for a most memorable start to what I have no doubt will be a wonderful life together.”

****

They went directly from the hospital to Alexander's flat. Katya bid Gregor a sad farewell, then left to resume the complex business of moving a wedding. Gregor followed Jeffrey toward their waiting taxi and asked, “When are you again coming to Poland?”

Jeffrey turned to stare at him. “You can't be serious.”

“A shipment is ready for you,” Gregor replied. “And the young man from the Ukraine, remember him?”

“I can't leave Alexander alone. Not now.”

“The young man's name is Yussef. He is ready to take you across the border. He says there are some excellent buys waiting,” Gregor pressed. “This may be a major opportunity.”

Jeffrey remained silent.

“I understand, my young friend. I truly understand. But you must also ask yourself, what would Alexander have you do? Who will pick up the reins if not you?” Gregor gave Jeffrey's shoulder an affectionate pat. “I shall hope to see you before the end of the month. Such urgent matters cannot wait longer than that.”

“I'm sorry to see you go back to Poland so soon.”

“I have been away as long as my responsibilities will allow.” Gregor hesitated, then added quietly, “Not to mention my own human frailties.”

“You don't want to go?”

“Want, want, want,” Gregor shook his head. “So much of our thoughts hinge on that word, don't they? Especially these days. And yet I must follow the call of my Lord; that is what I
want
above all else.”

“But you'd
like
to stay?” Jeffrey persisted.

“Life is very hard in my Poland just now,” Gregor replied. He climbed into the taxi, waited while Jeffrey gave the driver directions, then continued, “Change has brought benefits for some, trauma to many. It is easy to forget, while living there, that such places as London truly exist.”

“Conditions are growing worse?”

“Conditions, as you say, are chaotic. Robberies and violent crimes are skyrocketing. Most people who have to be out at night have bought the sort of dogs who walk their owners, rather than the other way around.”

“So why don't you stay?” Jeffrey tried to keep the pleading
from his voice. “Especially with everything that's happening, we'd love to have you here.”

Gregor was silent for a time before replying, “Philippi was the apostle Paul's first church in Macedonia. For that and other reasons it held a very special place in his heart. When he was imprisoned in Rome, distant and powerless, frustrated that he could not continue his work, he remained utterly certain that the bonds between him and that church remained strong. No matter that he could not see his friends, no matter that he could not hear of their progress or be a part of it. Always he was sure the church was growing stronger day by day.”

“This sounds distinctly like a ‘no' to me,” Jeffrey said glumly. “Nicely put, but still no.”

Gregor smiled and continued, “Such confidence comes from a sharing of the key experiences of life, bonded through shared faith. We yearn for one another in the heart of Jesus Christ. He is the divine link which held Paul together with his distant brethren then, and He will do the same for us now, my young friend. What is more, He will unite us all on His glorious day. What we feel now for one another will then be made perfect in His glory.

“Our fragile strands of feeling are but slender threads constantly snared by the myriad of things left undone, strained by doubt and pulled by earthly hardship. They remain but a hint of what God promises to bring to completion. And this completion is not an end to itself. Not at all. It shall be for us, for those risen above all endings through their love of man's only Savior, just the beginning of all eternity.”

Gregor held him with eyes that saw far beyond their earthly confines. “On that day, my dear young friend, at the dawn of our eternal day, we shall rise with the morning star, and with the angels together we will sing our endless, boundless joy.”

Chapter 9

Jeffrey returned from the airport, stopped by the antique shop to check over the day's proceeds, and read Katya's note to meet her at the church around the corner. He did that often, but he still did so with reluctance.

Katya had been making a widening inspection of the neighborhood that was soon to be her home. In the process she had discovered a church that she pronounced delightful. It served many of the local immigrant communities and held weekly masses in several Eastern European languages. Between masses, the rows were filled with kerchiefed women and old men bowed over canes, murmuring their prayers in a soft tide of foreign tongues.

Upon the great pillars flanking the embossed altar frieze hung two of the largest icons Jeffrey had ever seen. One of the paintings was of a Christ figure painted in the flat two-dimensional style of ancient Byzantium, the other depicted Mary and the holy Child. Both were embedded within frame after frame after hand-etched silver frame. The outermost frames were shaped as peaked medieval doorways and stood a full fourteen feet high.

Beside each of them rose ranks of flickering candles. Often when entering the church Jeffrey's eyes stung from the cloying blanket of incense, and his sense of proper worship felt offended by the sight of old women making exaggerated signs of the cross and then bowing before the icons. Masses were announced by the solemn intoning of great brass chimes hung above the main entrance.

On Sundays he and Katya attended a very evangelical Anglican church in Kensington, and Jeffrey truly felt at home among that congregation. But almost every day Katya insisted on entering this strange world of foreign rituals. She settled herself in the corner of the central side alcove, the
only person in the church under sixty. She knelt alongside several dozen old women, who greeted her arrival with smiles that stretched leathery faces into unaccustomed angles. The alcove contained two smaller icons, before which burned rows of glimmering candles. The side walls were decorated with soaring marble angels whose gilded wings stretched almost to the distant ceiling.

As they had left the church after his first visit, Katya had asked him, “Well, what did you think of it?”

“I don't think I like it very much in there.”

“Why not?”

He shrugged. “Too many smells and bells.”

“Don't get smart,” she replied sharply.

“I don't know what to tell you, Katya,” he replied. “It just seemed strange to me.”

“And I asked you to tell me why,” she insisted, a hard light gleaming in her eyes.

“I watched an old woman kiss one of those icons, and I felt pretty sure she did it every day.”

“So? Since when did you decide your own faith was so perfect that you had the right to criticize somebody else's?”

He deflected her, or tried to, with, “I just don't understand why you want to go there, Katya. Doesn't the Bible say something about going into your closet to pray?”

“I pray in private,” she replied, still hot. “I also like to join with fellow believers in silent worship. This place and what it represents is a part of my heritage, Jeffrey. I feel very close to these people and their lives. I like the sense of communing with them in spirit.”

Jeffrey decided it was best not to respond.

She understood him perfectly. “Listen to me, Jeffrey Sinclair. Those people in there may not be doing things exactly right. As a matter of fact, they may be doing a lot of things wrong. But they are worshiping in ways that were designed back so long ago that almost no one was able to read. They were taught rituals as a way of remembering their faith. They
have not had a chance to learn different ways because for the past seventy or eighty years anyone who tried to evangelize in their homeland was murdered. They have escaped, and now this church with its ‘smells and bells' is the only taste of their homeland they will ever have, because they know they can never return.”

“I guess I just don't understand what you see in it,” he replied, wanting only peace.

“That is a grand understatement,” she said, and strode forth with a full head of steam.

That evening Jeffrey waited by the back wall and bowed a formal greeting to the old women who were coming to know him by sight. He had long since learned to keep his concerns about the church to himself. Eventually Katya stood, crossed herself, folded her headkerchief and stowed it in her pocket, and walked back toward him. Her eyes shone with the soft luminosity he had come to associate with her times of deep prayer. Sensing her inner glow after almost every time of communing here had done much to make Jeffrey more comfortable with the alien surroundings.

They returned to share a quiet dinner at his apartment, content to sit across from each other and drink of each other's eyes. Conversation came and went like a gentle breeze, the food more a reason to sit and enjoy intimacy than to satisfy a need. The hunger that mingled with their gazes of love was one more easily kept in control when not spoken of openly. Instead, they talked about their plans and made little jokes about the piles of boxes that surrounded them.

For the past week, Katya had spent what little free time she had, between helping in the shop and planning a wedding, moving her things into Jeffrey's flat. As a result, the minuscule living space had taken on the look of a refugee center. Every inch of formerly free space was now crammed with her things. Jeffrey had helped carry in cases and boxes and seen them as a herald of deeper changes to come. He
had found himself continually inspecting his own internal vistas, discovering fear mixed in with the joyful anticipation.

By agreement, the cramped front hallway would see duty as her future dressing room. The bathroom grew new shelves, which immediately were filled to overflowing. Jeffrey freed up half the closet and all but two of the bedroom drawers, and discovered his gesture had made not even the slightest dent in her seven suitcases. A dozen boxes containing about half of her books—the ones she did not want stored in his minute cellar—were stacked by the window.

They would have to move; he could see that already. But his world would not permit yet another transition just then. Katya had shown great wisdom, and made do in silent acceptance. For the moment.

“What did you and Gregor talk about?” Katya asked over coffee.

Jeffrey found himself unable to tell her he had agreed to Gregor's insistence that he travel soon to Poland and the Ukraine. Instead, he related the experience of watching Gregor's face in the hospital. “He has the most incredible eyes,” Jeffrey said. “I've always thought of them as a martyr's eyes. You know, like in the paintings of the saints getting mauled or shot like pincushions, with all the fancy-robed priests standing around and watching.”

“Eyes of the soul,” Katya agreed.

“They aren't any bigger than anyone else's, I guess. But when I think of them, they always seem twice as large.”

“Opened by the wounds of suffering, filled by faith,” Katya said. “I don't see how anyone can look into Gregor's eyes and doubt the existence of our Lord.”

Laughing at his own embarrassment, Jeffrey said, “Sometimes when I think of Gregor, I imagine him with this light glowing all around, like the old paintings of saints. I know it's not there; it's just this impression I have when I think of our talks. That and his eyes.”

Katya was silent a long moment, then told him, “Several
years ago, the BBC sent a television team to India to film a special on Mother Teresa. Later they interviewed some of the people who worked on the program, the host and a couple of the technicians. They all talked about filming the hall where the sisters worked with the dying and what an incredible experience it had been for them.

“As they were setting up, they explained, they found that there wasn't enough light for their cameras. The sisters wouldn't let them set up electric lights. There wasn't any electricity, and if they started carting in batteries and cables and stands and lights and everything it would bother the deathly ill patients. So they decided to go ahead and try filming anyway, hoping that they'd come out with at least a couple of clips they could use.

“When they returned to London they found that most of the film they had made in the hall was perfectly clear. Not all of it, though. Where there was no sister, just somebody lying on a bed, you couldn't see anything. Nothing at all. But whenever a sister moved near, Mother Teresa or any other of the sisters, it was all the same. As soon as they came up to the bed, you could see
everything
. The lighting was
perfect
.”

Jeffrey fiddled with his cutlery, straightened the tablecloth, placed the salt and pepper in regimental lines, refused to meet her gaze.

“You might as well tell me,” Katya said quietly. “It's written all over your face.”

“What is?”

“Whatever you and Gregor talked about that has you so tied up in knots.”

Jeffrey knew the time had come. Quietly he announced, “I need to go on a buying trip very soon, Katya.”