Raise High the Bell

There is something vaguely grotesque about following the news from home here... I get on line to check e-mail in the morning, and discover long threads of discussion about whether or not one can get "swine" flu by handling student papers.... So far Petersburg has bred no major forms of contamination, even though its literary reputation is firmly linked to all sorts of dread disease: just think of all those consumptives in Dostoevsky, Raskolnikov's feverish homicide, the bacillus-breeding islands in Bely's Petersburg that threaten to plunge the elegant boulevards of the capital back into the swamp they came from... Petersburg in the 19th century was rank with typhoid, cholera, rats, syphillis, suicide. The list of dead poets from our class yesterday is a sobering one (or alternatively, one to drive you to drink). In more or less chronological order: Blok, Khlebnikov, Gumilev, Esenin, Mayakovsky, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva... Handling paper turned out to be lethal in their case - but thank God they had the courage to handle paper and hold the pen...

The dark draws in upon us. I often awake these days to the high-heels-down-the steps of our upstairs neighbor, on her way to work. In the invisible early morning there's no doubt about the gender of those fast steps on the stairs. According to the on-line weather that I check, we're losing about five minutes of light a day. 8:30 now, with the sky above our roof top beginning to gray, and if I judge correctly by the mottle beyond the antennas and stove pipe, we may just get some clear sky. The weather site promises a break in the clouds. Even if we get sun, it's not clear I'll actually see it: as the earth rolls over like a sleeping giant, heading toward the polar darkness, the orb retreats in the other direction, so that even on those days when theoretically one could see the sun, it goes lower and lower. In this city of low buildings the horizon is still obscured. I'd have to walk to the river and stand on one of the bridges to get a broad view. If I want to do a sun dance, I'll have to do it there.

What do I see? Walking on Sunday to meet students at the Museum of Political History, I saw something extraordinary. The walk to the Museum took me down Liteinyi Prospekt, one of the main boulevards of the central city, and then left on ulitsa Pestelia, one of the many streets in Petersburg named after 19th century revolutionaries. This corner is one of my favorites: Joseph Brodsky - greatest inheritor of that line of brilliant, too-early-dead poets - lived in one of the mammoth fin-de-siecle apartment houses on the corner. The location gives you a glimpse of two gorgeous churches: the Preobrazhenskii Sobor (Cathedral of the Transfiguration) in one direction, and the Church of St. Panteleimon in the other. I headed for Panteleimon (he's known as a saintly healer) on my way towards the river: a lovely melon-colored building with white trim, restrained baroque with a cupola and a bell tower. In the Soviet era it had been closed and used as a warehouse - a not unusual fate for any religious building in those years, and in a way a blessing: at least it wasn't torn down. Over the past decade it's been repaired and repainted; on one earlier trip I wandered in to find the sanctuary thick with scaffolding, so that you had to make your way through a maze to come out face-to-face with the iconostasis. All those saintly figures standing there patiently, waiting for the work to be finished. Among them the lovely late 19th century icon of Sergius of Radonezh, tall and slender, looking calmly out from his wooded monastic silence onto the pilgrims who wander toward him from a different kind of forest. Even in the maze of scaffolding, I was his.

But last Sunday I was a different kind of captive. As I turned the corner I realized there was a huge crowd of people outside the church, more than a hundred, standing outside the main entrance and beside a huge crane. Traffic on the already narrow street was slowed but proceeding. There was a crowd on the far sidewalk too, cameras at the ready, looking curiously over toward church and crane. The reason for the crowd, I soon realized, was a bell: I'd happened upon the after-service blessing of the final "tsar" bell intended for the tower, and the crane was there to lift it. As I stood to watch (lamenting that I didn't have a camera, and that I had to meet my students in about half an hour) the rest of the congregation gathered on the sidewalk; one of the priests - in purple robes and neat black hat - came in and out, getting everything ready for the ceremony itself to begin. When everything was set a whole procession of priests and deacons emerged from the church door: there was a brief salutation and homily, and then the beginning of chanted prayers to bless the building and its bell. Little boys scrambled up onto the lower part of the crane; the congregation - young and old, women and men, in overcoats and hats and scarves - pressed in toward the priests and crossed themselves in prayer and celebration. At some point a guy got into the cab of the crane, and I hoped I might actually get to see the bell lifted. But there was still clearly a lot of praying to do, and I had my students to meet. And so I hurried on.

How much would one have to pray, how many people would have to say how many prayers, to sanctify this corner, this church, this bell? I'm prone to a certain sentimentality in such matters, which I'll try to curb here. But how can one not be moved by this spectacle? The church of the healer has been returned to its congregation; a congregation gathers to bless the bell, to see it lifted to a height from which it will sound out over the Summer Garden and Mars Field and to the River itself; to the FSB (erstwhile KGB) headquarters a few blocks away, to the tourists and shoppers and the people who live in the apartment building where Brodsky once lived. When I came back from the Museum later in the afternoon the crane was gone, the congregation had scattered, and the bell was in its place. And it was sounding, deep and resonant, a steady booming on its own - without as yet the company of the smaller, higher bells that hung there already. This was, I presumed, a test run, to check for whatever one checks after you've hung who knows how many tons of brass thirty meters up. It sounded fine to me - not as exuberant and celebratory as Russian Sunday bells, with their intricate patterns and interlacings of pitch - but the big one sounded good to go, ready to add its bass to their baritones and tenors.

And so I missed the raising of the bell, but I got to hear the bell itself. And I saw that congregation - a gathering of people of all ages, ten young priests and deacons (including one black man), a congregation doing what congregations do: taking care of its church, letting its light shine forth into the world. Whatever imperfections exist in the Body of Christ in the world - and they are legion - the fact that after fifty years as a warehouse this place named after a healer monk can raise its bell and gather a congregation seems nothing short of miraculous to me. I will not presume to know how they see their role in today's Russia. They understand their challenge better than I do. They live on that corner with a view to Brodsky's apartment and a bell tower as high as the headquarters of the secret police. My own prayer, as I stood there watching, was not only for them but for all of us. For the sustenance of faith and the courage of our voices.

May their bell ring deep and clear for years and centuries to come. And may the world hear its calling.