Letter
To Professor Donald Nicholl,
‘Rostherne’,
Common Lane, Cheshire
Here, in this country, Donald,
that you so loved, and never visited,
in this country that makes us sick
at heart – or somewhere more fundamental,
in this unbearable country,
I remember your house
standing by its English common,
the plain, dignified house of someone steeped in work,
and Dorothy bringing tea on a tray,
and your radiant death.
Holy Russia was what you talked about:
the drowned city of Kitezh,
where Saint Sergius shares his bread with a bear,
where at Easter the blessed Serafim
says, Good morning my delight,
where his smile lights stars in the noon sky,
where prisoners pray for their guards.
Maybe now they’ll come to greet you, Donald.
They must do, when you believed in them so.
Blessed Serafim, Saint Sergius, the multitudes from Mogadán
and Kolymá,
without number or name, those whose faces,
as you said, would fuse into one,
the face of the Holy Spirit.
But, Donald, my heart is as hard
as earth scarred by the passing of tanks.
If anything grows there, it’ll take years –
centuries, two centuries at least.
Your words about how
everything passes into a single inexorable whole
like waters into the sea,
how everything will be changed, forgiven,
flowing into one immeasurable ocean,
the infinite depths of mercy
whose existence we sense –
your words won’t sink deep.
This exterminated soil
can’t sustain the growth of stray seeds.
It’s suffering of that ugly kind
you asked about with the persistence
of someone used to talking to God.
It’s not anger or affront, Donald:
that passes quite quickly.
But now,
in this late wet autumn
full of misery and reconciliation,
irrational misery, irrational reconciliation,
I remember you
and your voice talking in another language
about the blessed Serafim greeting Easter,
about St Sergius and his bear,
about the prayers said in Solovkí camp,
about the infinite depths of mercy
resounding like the Northern seas.
and theologian, whose works include Holiness,
The Testing of Hearts, The Beatitude of Truth, and, of
special relevance here, Triumphs of the Spirit in Russia.
Translated by Catriona Kelly
Page(s) 178-179
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