BATYUSHKA! by John Roycroft

"Who, what or where is Batushka?"

"Stop asking questions, and pack your toothbrush. You'll find out."

Maybe 25 miles south of St Petersburg, beyond the township of Krasnoe Selo, lies the dispersed village of Taitsy, whose main visible asset is the railway station on the elektrichka line to somewhere or other. The roads (a better name than streets, given the distances between the detached dacha-like residences with wooden paling fences and voluminous enfolding foliage) have numbered houses. Like a scene from a soviet film we plodded through the rain towards our destination, No. 106, Young Follower-of-Lenin street.

'Batyushka' is Father Viktor, a Russian Orthodox priest. His appearance on Russian television had nothing to do with his religion but was due to the size of his family - nine children between the ages of 2 and 16. All but two were at home. So were his father-in-law, a cousin, and the cousin's wife. The three of us arriving - wet, our one umbrella would have kept the rain off a six-year-old - made small difference. No. 106, Young Follower-of-Lenin (or should it be Follower-of-Young-Lenin?) street has no running water.

Years before, Father Viktor had been an actor-manager in Kiev. He had a fan, an impecunious young fan, anonymous. This fan fought her way in to the theatre one evening, without paying. Opening doors, she found herself in the orchestra pit. She gazed at her hero throughout, brazenly sought him out after the performance, and outfaced his sarcasm. Yes, she's now the unflappable housewife and all-encompassing mother of his children.

Her father, fond of vodka, was an infantryman in the Great Patriotic War, in the Caucasus campaign -the town names Makhachkala and Ordzhonikidze trip off his liquid tongue. Naturally he was a staunch and idealistic Komsomol-ite. When they called for volunteers to attack a height held by the Germans, of course he stepped forward. Machine guns blazing, five or six perched on the outside of each assault tank, they shot their way through, with many losses. After eventual demobilisation he embarked on legal training. With his acquired expertise in employment, labour and residence regulations he became a security functionary at a factory, where he had the power to hire or fire, almost the equivalent of life and death. He always wore a cross in battle, and he is sure it protected him. Isn't he the living proof?

The two-year-old was the star. She had a cassock made to fit that she donned over her head. Wearing it she started speaking the words of the service she heard her father use. She moved behind and in front of the bedroom door, opening and closing it as she intoned, reciting and acting, copying her father from memory, whether visible in front of, or invisible behind, the iconostasis. As far as I could tell she was word perfect. It has to be a mistake of the Russian Orthodox Church not to allow women priests.

We ate outside, shashlik barbecue style, with plenty of wood for the fire. When it rained we huddled under mini-tarpaulins. That was when I taught the 12-year-old to sing 'Ten green bottles'. The narrow plank table and backless bench seats, like the other garden furniture, were home-made and functional, more fixture than fitting. The same went for the outdoor table-tennis table, the rope-swing attached to a branch of a tree, and the basketball practice hoop that had once been a lavatory seat.

The actual lavatory - just the one privy for the whole household - was upstairs and consisted essentially of a rough circular hole hewn on the slant in a plank suspended 15 feet above an effervescing khaki midden. Such things are seen on Open University TV programmes for the social history of England course, but this modem specimen was at least part of the house, and not, or no longer, at the end of the garden. The smell was, well, tolerable. The circular wooden disc plug more or less fitted the functional hole. If the structure could take Batyushka's weight it could certainly take mine. Or so I told myself. 

 

Another of John's essays which I'd call "Have chess set, will travel"

 

back to Russian page	Back to prose index
Back to English page	back to Daf's homepage