The church of St. Seraphim of Sarov on the Obvodny Canal had been boarded up by the city in the autumn of 1997, the year the ruble fell and the mayor's wife hanged herself in the Mariinsky Theatre. The padlock was still there, rusted the colour of dried blood, but the side door that led from the baptistery to the alley had lost its hasp long ago. Snow found its way in through the broken rose window and lay across the cracked marble floor in long white wounds, as though someone had scourged the church itself and left it for dead.
Ilya Valerianovich Rogozhin came every night at the hour when the last metro train screamed past on the elevated tracks and the city held its breath for the count of three heartbeats. He never carried a torch. He knew the distances by heart: thirty-seven steps from the door to the solea, nineteen more to the place where the floor dipped like a grave. There he would kneel in front of the icon of the Mother of God of the Seven Swords and wait for the cold to eat him alive.
He had once been a novice at the Valaam Monastery. He had worn the black robe, had risen at three in the morning to sing the midnight office, had learned to kiss the hand of an elder until his lips bled from the roughness of the skin. Then, on the feast of the Transfiguration in the year 2000, he had seen something on the altar that no one else saw. A light that had no source, a voice that spoke his name without moving any human mouth. After that he could no longer stay. The superiors said he had been visited by prelest, spiritual delusion. They were gentle about it. They gave him a train ticket and a hundred dollars sewn into the lining of his coat. He never went back.
Now, in the winter of 2003, he was twenty-seven years old and worked as a night stoker at the bread factory on Ligovsky Prospekt. He fed coal into furnaces that never cooled, and when his shift ended at five in the morning he walked across the city to the ruined church and knelt until the bells of some other, living parish struck nine. Then he slept in a cellar room that smelled of damp and kerosene, woke at dusk, and did it all again.
On the third night of Great Lent the temperature fell to minus twenty-three. The Neva froze so hard that drunk students walked across it for bets. Ilya came later than usual because the factory boiler had burst and he had spent two hours up to his waist in scalding water, pulling slag out with his bare hands. His palms were blistered and shining. He pushed open the baptistery door with his shoulder and stepped into the darkness that belonged to him.
Someone was already kneeling in his place.
She knelt exactly where he knelt, in the shallow depression worn into the marble by generations of penitents. A black wool shawl covered her hair and shoulders; only the oval of her face showed, pale as the inside of a seashell left too long in moonlight. A single candle (his candle, the one he had lit the evening before and left to burn for the souls in purgatory) stood between them on the floor. The flame had almost reached the end of its wick; the wax had pooled and hardened into a small white heart.
Ilya stopped just inside the doorway. The cold air carried the smell of her: beeswax, fasting bread, and something metallic like blood under snow. For one moment he thought he was seeing his own soul standing outside his body, wearing the shape of a woman.
Then she lifted her head.
Her eyes were the colour of winter water over deep places (neither blue nor grey, but the absence that makes both colours possible). They looked at him without surprise, as though she had been waiting since the foundation of the city for this exact second.
"You left it burning," she said.
Her voice was low, almost hoarse, the voice of someone who had not tasted oil or wine for many days.
"I always leave it burning," Ilya answered. His own voice sounded foreign to him, rough from disuse.
"That is a sin against fire," she said. "Fire must be loved wholly or it dies betrayed."
She reached out two fingers (narrow, childlike, the nails bitten to the quick) and pinched the wick. The flame bowed, trembled, gave a small obedient hiss, and surrendered. Darkness folded over them like the lid of a coffin.
In that darkness Ilya heard his heart beat for the first time in months. Loud, treacherous, alive. It sounded like a man pounding on the inside of a sealed tomb.
He understood immediately that he would have to kill it. Not tonight. Perhaps not even this year. But the decision was made the instant the light went out.
Neither of them moved. Snow sifted through the broken window and settled on their shoulders like the dust of centuries.
At last she spoke again, so softly that he felt the words more than heard them.
"Do you know what it means to keep vigil with a dead candle?"
"I know what it means to keep vigil," he said.
"That is not the same."
"No," he admitted. "It is not."
She rose. The movement was slow, as though her body had forgotten how to stand. The hem of her skirt brushed the floor and made a sound like dry wings. She was taller than he had expected; the crown of her head reached his eyes. She did not look at him again. Instead she walked past him toward the door, close enough that the sleeve of her coat touched the burned skin of his hand. The contact lasted less than a second, but it was enough for him to feel the fever coming off her in waves.
She paused on the threshold.
"I will come again tomorrow," she said to the night outside. "If the candle is lit, I will know you are waiting. If it is not, I will know you have understood."
Then she was gone.
Ilya remained standing in the dark for a long time. He could still smell her. He could still feel the place on his hand where her coat had touched him, as though the cloth had been woven from nettles.
When he finally knelt, the marble was warm where her knees had been.
He did not light another candle that night. He did not need to. Something else had begun to burn.
He left the church just before dawn. The sky over the canal was the colour of a fresh bruise. The snow had stopped falling, and every footprint from the night before had already been filled in by the wind, so that it seemed no one had ever walked there. Only one set of prints led away from the baptistery door (small, narrow, pointing toward the city) and they ended abruptly at the edge of the ice as though she had been lifted straight up into the air.
Ilya looked at those prints for a long time. Then he stepped into them, placing his own boots exactly where hers had been, and followed them until the ice took her secret and his weight together.
He never felt the cold.
That afternoon he did something he had not done in three years. He went to the public bathhouse on Zvenigorodskaya Street and paid for the luxury of hot water. He sat in the steam until the blisters on his hands opened and the pain became indistinguishable from cleansing. An old man with a prison tattoo of the Virgin on his chest asked him why he was crying. Ilya had not realized he was.
When he left the bathhouse the sky had already gone dark again. Lent was only three days old, but the city felt older than sin. He walked to the bread factory, clocked in, and spent eight hours feeding the furnaces. The heat no longer bothered him. Nothing bothered him. He moved like a man underwater.
At five in the morning he walked back across the city. The streets were empty except for stray dogs and municipal sweepers in orange vests. He carried a paper bag with fresh kalach still warm from the oven. He did not know why he had bought it. He had not tasted white bread since he left the monastery.
The side door of the church stood open exactly as he had left it. Inside, the air was so cold it seemed to have teeth. He stepped over the threshold and stopped.
The candle was burning.
It stood in the same place on the floor, new, tall, its wick black and untouched. The flame was perfectly steady, as though the building itself had learned to hold its breath.
Ilya set the paper bag down beside it. The smell of fresh bread mingled with beeswax and frankincense long turned to dust. He knelt.
He waited.
She came when the flame had burned down exactly one inch. He heard her footsteps long before he saw her (soft, deliberate, the steps of someone walking over graves). She entered the pool of candlelight and knelt opposite him without a word. This time she wore no shawl; her hair was the colour of ash after the fire has gone out, braided tightly against her skull. Her cheekbones were sharp enough to cut paper.
They looked at each other across the flame.
Minutes passed, or hours. Time had begun to behave strangely in that building.
Finally she spoke.
"My name is Anastasia Mikhailovna Tikhonova," she said. "But you must never call me Nastya. That name belongs to the world I am leaving."
"I am Ilya Valerianovich Rogozhin," he answered. "I have already left the world. It simply has not noticed yet."
She studied him for a long time. Her gaze moved over his face the way a blind person reads braille, slowly, hungrily, remembering every scar.
"You are burning," she said.
"So are you."
"Yes," she said, and for the first time the faintest shadow of a smile touched her mouth. It was not a happy smile. It was the smile of someone who has just recognized the instrument of their own death and finds it beautiful.
She reached into the pocket of her coat and drew out a small object wrapped in a black handkerchief. She unfolded the cloth with the reverence of a priest uncovering the Gifts. Inside lay a splinter of wood no longer than a finger, dark with age and what might have been blood.
"Do you know what this is?" she asked.
He shook his head.
"It is from the True Cross," she said. "My grandfather brought it out of Solovki in 1938 sewn inside his stomach. He lived. Most did not."
She held it out to him. Their fingers touched when he took it. Her skin was so hot he almost dropped the relic.
"I want you to keep it," she said. "Until the day comes when one of us must use it."
"Use it for what?"
She did not answer. Instead she leaned forward and blew out the candle.
Darkness again, absolute.
But this time he was not afraid.
He felt her move closer. He smelled her breath (fasting, myrrh, winter). Then her lips brushed his, not a kiss exactly, more the verification that he was real. The contact lasted less than a heartbeat, but it was enough to brand him forever.
When she drew back he heard her gathering her things. The rustle of her coat, the soft intake of breath as though she were preparing to dive into deep water.
"Tomorrow," she whispered, "do not light the candle. I will know what it means."
Then she was gone.
Ilya remained kneeling in the dark until the first pale blade of morning slid through the broken window and found the place where her knees had been. The marble was still warm.
He pressed the splinter of the True Cross against his lips. It tasted of iron and old grief.
Outside, the city woke up and began its daily work of forgetting God.
Inside the ruined church, two people who had never truly lived began, very quietly, to die.
Much later, when the investigators came with their flashlights and plastic bags, they would find the kalach untouched, dried into a perfect white heart beside a puddle of wax. They would take photographs. They would write reports. They would never understand that the bread had been an offering and the wax a covenant, and that both had already been consumed by a fire no human eye could see.
But that was still months away.
On that first morning all that existed was the echo of a woman's footsteps walking away across snow that would never bear witness, and the knowledge, sharp as a splinter under the fingernail, that something irrevocable had begun.
Ilya stood up. His knees cracked like breaking ice. He slipped the relic into the inner pocket of his coat, directly over his heart, and walked out into the city that no longer had any claim on him.
Behind him, in the gathering light, the candle stood cold and white and waiting.
It would not burn again for a very long time.
And when it did, the whole world would weep.