the Phlog

Gregory breathes heavily in his slick purple robe, panting through a haze of cognac and icons, while the snow drifts through the open doorway into the little wooden church that the fascists tried to burn down.

In the Nineties, while Russia turned itself inside-out, while things went so beyond chaos they invented a new word that cannot fully be translated into English, when people either lost everything or got everything, Gregory got very rich on the novie Russkie, the new Russians who stepped into the vacuum and made palaces for themselves.  And Gregory made the kitschy moulding that wrapped itself along the interiors of the palaces.

“But I blew it up like this,” he says, wheezing, spreading his hands from one end of the little log-lined room to the other, where candles I had lit for the dead flickered as he dumped make-believe rubles over everything. “What was it all for?”

And that was around when the Polozhenia Rizi Gospodnei Xram at Donskaya street got broken into and its religious treasures stolen. They fired the guard and needed someone else. And Gregory needed God.

So he gave up business, kept his long hair and alcoholic habits and became a priest, rising to the second level but knowing he’d never get to the third because he’d accumulated too many sins along the way.

But it’s getting late and though the candles burn with a warm glow the church is cold. There’s a green bottle of something interesting on his desk but he offers me a tea instead.

Gregory is tiring of me. A man walks in but he isn’t there for God either. He’s got a tattoo on his hand, like the kind you get in prison. Whispered Russian from the reception: “I don’t have money today.” “It doesn’t matter,” says the priest. They seem to be talking about alcohol.

Gregory gives me a good, hard Russian kiss on the cheeks on my way out.

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