“No, Amelia, it wasn’t, but never mind. I love to be avant-garde, as the French say. But since you are both so addicted to a past long gone, I’ll show you something that’ll curl your hair!”
She turned off the suburban road and accelerated on to the New York Thruway, perhaps delighted at the suspense she had created among her passengers. What, they each wondered uneasily, is she going to show us? At the exit for Herkimer, she left the freeway. Shortly thereafter, a sign announced their arrival in Jordanville. The only sound in the admirably soundproofed Buick was then the soft clicking of the indicator, followed by the crunch of gravel as the car entered the immaculate grounds of Holy Trinity Monastery of the Russian Church in Exile, and coasted to a sharp stop in a small manicured lot set aside for visitors, but too late to prevent the car from inflicting damage on a sign that read ‘Please Park Gently. God Bless You.’
“I don’t need to be ‘blessed’, whatever that means,” scoffed Edna. “It’s a bit like visiting Mormons or the Amish, all weirdly out of touch with the rest of us. I come here to have a good laugh at them and their crazy beliefs in “sin” and “salvation.” All such nonsense, of course.
"Over there,” she pointed vaguely in the direction of an apple orchard, “is their cemetery, full of White Russian generals and princes dispossessed-- by the Communists, you know, Conrad.”
“Yes, Aunt,” replied her nephew. “I’m not a child. I have read about it.”
“You have?” She stopped walking in order to scrutinize her nephew. “Where?”
“Well, in John Reed’s first-hand journalist’s account of the Revolution for one, but as another Communist, he isn’t objective, but also in Yakovlev’s A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia, an expose of what the government he served in did to its own people. His book is grim reading, as is Anne Applebaum’s Gulag. No wonder Russians who could do so fled to sanctuaries like this in upstate New York. Most couldn’t. Those who did, found freedom, but lost their homeland.”
His aunt had never heard her nephew say so much at any one time. To her, he was really still a needy adolescent. She looked at him with new curiosity as the visitors moved towards the church. As they passed the front of the Buick, Conrad noticed the sign that the car had damaged, the paint scratched, some words illegible, and the sign itself tilted up to the sky. Aunt Edna ignored it.
The door to the Cathedral was ajar; a bearded monk opened it wide for them as they entered. The sound of deep-voiced chanting in a foreign language came from behind a painted screen at the front. Robert crossed himself and his son genuflected discreetly. There were icons all around, and a cloud of incense was released from a censer swung by a rotund monk at the side. Seeing his bulk, Aunt Edna could not resist. “I bet his name is Brother Roly-Poly Polovski,” she whispered, too loudly, to her brother, but he did not smile. After a few minutes, she declared, “I can’t bear that smoke; I’m going outside for a smoke of my own.” But she hesitated at the door. What could they possibly expect to find inside? Did they want to be forcibly converted?
