City of Ghosts by Ben Creed (most important books of all time txt) 📕

Rossel flicked the radio off.

He turned back to the files. The pile of fifteen were cases he had already discounted. The other two were the ones who had a connection to the monasteries around Pskov. According to Nurse Durova, the city seemed to have piqued Gerashvili’s interest.

The first of the Pskov files was that of a former archbishop who had been patriarch of the Cathedral of St John before the revolution. He had taken to drink in his declining years and been reported missing by one of his old parishioners about fourteen months ago. The parishioner wondered if he had been kidnapped. According to the file, the local militia suspected he’d got blind drunk on moonshine, wandered into the forest near Lake Peipus and frozen to death.

The second one was much more interesting.

17

Sunday October 21

In the twilight, the great stone walls of the Pskov-Pechersky Dormition Monastery rose and plunged like a giant white serpent in some twisted Slavic fairy tale. Driven into sloping ground, over the centuries the walls had been built and attacked and rebuilt; now they were going through the same process and, as Rossel did a circuit, he could make out rickety scaffolding clinging to the thick fortifications. The weather was still but cold – minus twenty, he had heard someone say on the bus from Pskov – and thick clouds kept the day dark. The city was nearly three hundred kilometres from Leningrad. A long drive at the best of times but in this freakish winter, a true odyssey. The train journey had helped him to think before the rattling bus had set him on edge again.

Every now and then, at even intervals, a large wooden gatehouse jutted out of the shadows, their pointed roofs looking like the hut, minus the fat chicken legs, of Baba Yaga, the old witch with iron teeth and an appetite for a human supper. His mother had read the stories to him when he was small. ‘Do you know what it means to allow a wicked thought to enter one’s heart? The wicked thought grows all the time like a poisonous plant and slowly kills the good thoughts.’ Rossel’s mother had often read him that line from the folk tale. Lifting her head up from the book and staring, so he understood its meaning and importance. She needn’t have bothered. Stalin and Beria made the same point daily, in the papers, on the radio and in the propaganda posters. And besides, a few years spent mingling with the blackmailers, spivs, prostitutes and corrupt cops of Sennaya Square had convinced him of its truthfulness.

He dropped the cigarette he had been smoking under the glare of a flickering street light and started to walk through dots of snow across the cobbled path that led towards the monastery’s St Nicholas Gate and, he hoped, information on Father Tikhon, the troubled priest who had attracted Gerashvili’s attention.

*

Archimandrite Pimen was sitting at a large zinc desk whittling a piece of pinewood with a small, pearl-handled penknife. The head of the monastery had long and yellowing nails; his fingers were curled and gnarled. The image of what looked like a tiny bird was emerging from the pine.

There were not many places left in Stalin’s empire where a man could believe the revolution had never taken place but the caves of the Pskov-Pechersky monastery was most definitely one of them. Built fifty kilometres away from Pskov itself, it was on the edge of the Russian Socialist Republic, a stone’s throw from Estonia. Its blue and gold domes stood proud above the walls and the grounds; under the churches was a network of caves in which the holy men who had established the community had once lived. The caves were freezing and the damp air penetrated everything Rossel had put on as a defence. How the archimandrite could stand it for more than an hour or two was beyond him. But Pimen preferred to work here, he had been told.

There were icons everywhere, lit by candles hung in the alcoves; each stony nook and cranny housed a golden image of Christ, the Trinity, St Catherine or some other saint. Pungent, cloying incense filled the air. From somewhere impossible to trace, Rossel could hear monks chanting plainsong.

‘My predecessors generally preferred to live and work in the monastery proper, but I like the solitude of the caves. I have been an archimandrite, here at Pskov, since 1915 and a humble monk for twenty years before that. This working into the wood is a habit I have affected to quiet my sometimes-troubled soul, Lieutenant Rossel.’

‘You have lived through turbulent times, Father.’

Rossel sat opposite the monk on a low stool, the table between them.

The archimandrite, himself seated on an ornate, cushioned chair with his arms dangling off high rests, nodded. He rested the incomplete bird, if that was what it was, on the bench and then pulled at a loop in his long grey beard. Twisting it with his fingers so it slowly began to smooth and straighten. Well into his eighties, he looked younger, no more than sixty-five. But his face was gaunt, his cheeks hollowed.

‘Before the war, our troubles were many. All the churches and monasteries were dissolved and our buildings absorbed by the state but, in its darkest hour of need, the Great Leader, guided by God, called the faithful back to into his own fold, so we could help fortify the Russian soul against the Nazi aggressors. I recently carved a figure of St Catherine. Do you know her story?’

Rossel shook his head.

‘At school, I was taught only to genuflect before statues of Marx or Lenin,’ he said.

Pimen let go of his beard.

‘A stunning beauty, St Catherine, as the story goes, desired by the Roman emperor Maxentius. He had the greatest philosophers of his day converse with the young girl in an attempt to break her faith by force of their reason but they could not. She broke them, can you believe it? She