'I can't do it alone,' this practical man replied. 'And I certainly can't do it with the kind of priests you've been sending to eastern Siberia.'
The bishop surrendered to these blunt truths: 'To correct my church's past deficiencies I shall be sending with you a priest of true devotion and unlimited promise, Madame Zhdanko's nephew, young fellow named Vasili Voronov.' At this, Marina rang a bell, and a servant brought into the room the young man who had already garbed himself in the black robes of a priest whose life was to be dedicated to the welfare of his church, and for the first time these two conspirators, the aspiring young cleric determined to save souls in the islands and the energetic businessman afire with a desire to enlarge Russia's power, met. Neither man, at that moment, appreciated how important in his life the other was to be, but each knew that a partnership had been established whose purpose was to Christianize, civilize, explore, make money, and extend the might of Russia deep into North America.
FATHER VASILI VORONOV, WHO LEFT IRKUTSK MONTHS before Baranov could arrange his affairs, had not been in Kodiak a full day in 1791 before he identified the man with whom he would wrestle for the spiritual leadership of Russian America. He was walking about, exploring his parish, when he saw coming toward him a tall, gangling Aleut man of untidy appearance and haunted eye who appeared to be roaming aimlessly, with no apparent affiliation with The Company, and from his disheveled looks, with not even a home. He was the kind of person Vasili would normally meet only when visiting him in some pastoral capacity, like the distribution of alms or the extension of sympathy over a death, but this old man had such a penetrating gaze, and was obviously so interested in the new priest, that Vasili felt compelled to know more about him.
Nodding austerely, a gesture that was not returned, he hurried back to Company officials and asked: 'Could that strange-looking Aleut be a shaman?' and the Russian said:
'We think so,' but Vasili uncovered no substantial proof until he queried Ensign Belov: 'Yes, he's a known shaman. Lives in a dugout among the roots of the big spruce.'
Satisfied that he was on the track of the devil, Vasili asked to see the acting manager, who listened respectfully as the young priest warned about 'the presence of Anti-Christ in our midst,' and agreed that Voronov should 'keep a sharp eye on that one.' But the priest's attention was soon directed to his major task, for a Company official informed him: 'You arrive at a propitious moment. A young Aleut wants to join the church, so you have your first conversion waiting.'
'I'll see him at once,' Vasili said, and the official made a correction: 'It's a girl,' and when the young priest inquired into the matter, he discovered that this was a conversion with strings attached, for when he met with Cidaq to discuss what conversion meant, he found her strangely ambivalent. Obviously she was interested in becoming a Christian, for this would mean that she could enter the favored world of the Russians, but she lacked the emotional intensity of a real convert, and this dualism was disturbing. And even after three long discussions, with her looking soulfully into his eyes as if in search of enlightenment, he failed to discover that she was playing games with him, and had he learned that she was interested in Christianity only as a weapon with which to castigate her would-be husband, he would have been outraged.
But fortified by his innocence, Father Vasili forged ahead with his instruction, and the beauties of Christianity were so real to him that Cidaq, despite her original scorn, began to listen. She was especially impressed with his stories of how Jesus had loved little children, for this had been one of the attributes of her Aleuts which she sorely missed, and twice when the priest elaborated on this she found tears coming into her eyes, a fact which Vasili noted.
Unaware that in fencing theologically with Father Vasili, she was confronting a far more dangerous adversary than either Ensign Belov or old Father Petr, she found herself increasingly seduced by the Christian testimony on redemption, for this was completely alien to the teachings of the shaman and the mummy; for them there was good and evil, reward and punishment, and no vagueness in the dichotomies, and to learn that there was another view of life in which a human being could sin, repent, and gain redemption, with the sin being totally erased, was new and perplexing. After asking a few preliminary questions which revealed her honest interest, and which provided Vasili with an opportunity for an enthusiastic elaboration of this cardinal principle, she unwittingly asked the question that would entangle her in the real and very beautiful mysteries of Christianity: 'Do you mean that a man who has done really awful things can be redeemed?'
'Yes!' he replied with great excitement. 'It's exactly that man that Jesus came here to save.'
'Did he come to the Aleutians too?'
'He came everywhere. He came especially to save you.'
'But this man ...' She hesitated, dropped her question, and sat for some moments staring out the window toward the spruce tree. Then she said in a low voice: 'He is a real man, this one. He did terrible things to me, and now he wants to marry me.'
Vasili jumped back as if he had been struck, for he had supposed that Cidaq was thirteen or fourteen, and in the society he had known at Irkutsk, girls that age did not marry.
'How old are you?' he asked in a state of shock, and when she said 'Sixteen,' he stared at her as if seeing her for the first time.
But her last statement had contained so many surprising revelations that he had to sort them out. 'You're sixteen?' Yes. 'And a man wants to marry you?' Yes. 'And he's been a terrible man?' Yes. 'What did he do to people?'
In a low, controlled voice she said: 'He did them to me,' and Vasili gasped, for up to this moment he had seen her as a child of some maturity who was perplexed by the arrival in her primitive community of the advanced concepts of Christianity; to discover that she was of marriageable age and bewildered by problems relating to that was confusing. Had he known that she was grappling in her own unsophisticated way with the most profound moral and philosophical problems nothing less than the nature of good and evil he would have been astounded.
Keeping the discussion on the only level he comprehended, he asked: 'What could he have done to you?' and his continuing innocence made him so attractive to Cidaq, that in her sympathy for him she realized that she was already much older and better informed than he.
'He was ugly' was all she thought him capable of understanding at this time, but Vasili pressed on, unaware that he was about to detonate a bomb that would shatter him far more gravely than it would her: 'In what way did he harm you? Did he steal?
Did he lie?'
A half-smile sneaked across her face as she stared into the eyes of this earnest young man who was trying to bring her into his religion, and she recognized his goodness of spirit and his desire to help, but she felt it was time he understood aspects of life that apparently he did not know. In quiet, unemotional words she told him of the depopulation of Lapak and the intended death of the women remaining there, and by the daze that came over his face she saw that he could not believe his people capable of such brutality, and for a while she lost him as he contemplated Russia.
But when she resumed her narrative she brought him back with a force that sickened: 'So I was sold to this man on the Tsar Ivan, and he kept me in the hold of the ship, without much food, and when he was through with me he passed me along to his friends and there was no day or night.' Now Vasili closed his eyes and tried to close his ears, but she continued with her account of her life in Kodiak: 'So this evil man was shipped off to the Seal Islands and I was free of him, but others like him caught me here in Three Saints, and I might have been killed, but the shaman brought help and we killed the worst of the men who abused me.'
Once more the details cascaded so rapidly that Vasili could not absorb them: 'What do you mean by abused and she replied: 'Everything.'
'When you say killed, you don't mean you murdered someone!'
'Not exactly.' He sighed, then gasped anew when she added: 'The shaman fetched five Aleuts with clubs and they beat the m
an to death and we hid his body under rocks.'
He leaned back, clasped his hands, and stared at this child, and when the physical horror at her account had passed, the psychological shock remained: 'Twice you said that you went to the shaman. You mean that strange old man who lives among the tree roots?'
'He's the keeper of our spirits,' Cidaq said. 'He and the spirits saved my life.'
This was too much: 'Cidaq, his spirits do not control the world. The Lord God does, and until you and your people acknowledge this, you cannot be saved.'
'But Lunasaq saved me, and he was able to do it only because the mummy warned us that the men were coming to kill us.'
'The mummy?'
'Yes. She lives in a sealskin sack and is very old. Thousands of years, she said.'
'Said?' he asked incredulously, and she replied: 'Yes, she talks to us about many things.'
'Who are us'
'Lunasaq and me.'
'It's a deception, child. Don't you know that wizards can throw their voices? Make anything talk, even old mummies? The Lord has brought me here to end the reign of wizards and shamans, to bring you into the salvation of Jesus Christ.' He stopped, resumed his position near her, and stared once more into her dark eyes: 'They tell me you wish to join His regiments.' The metaphor missed her, and she asked: 'What?' and he translated: 'They said you wanted to become a Christian.'
'I do.'
'Why?'
'Because they said I couldn't marry Rudenko, that's the evil man I told you about, unless I did.'
Again the statements were incomprehensible, but patient questioning elicited the truth: 'You're converting only to get married?' Yes. 'Why would you marry a man who had treated you this way?' and because she was an honest young woman, devoid of duplicity when she was not playing games, she told him: 'I discussed this with the shaman and the ancient one, and they approved when I told them that I would fool you Russians and make believe that I was becoming a Christian so that I could marry Rudenko.'
Vasili was completely lost, unable to believe that she could have devised such a strategy, and confused as to why: 'But what did you hope to gain by such trickery?'
Again she had to be honest: 'When that evil man's heart was joyed with the thought of escaping the Seal Islands, I wanted to look at him and all the Russians and say in a loud voice: "It was all a sham. I did it to torment you. I will never marry you. Now back to the seals ... for the rest of your life."'
In that ugly moment of complete revelation, Vasili no longer saw her as a delightful, innocent child of thirteen. He heard her low voice as a wanton cry from some ancient past when horrible spirits roamed the earth and devastated souls. He was shattered to learn that such hardness of heart could exist in a young girl like Cidaq, and he felt his own secure world trembling.
Of the horrors she had endured in the hold of the Tsar Ivan he had no conception, and the slaying' which had rescued her from a continuation ashore he was able to dismiss as one of those fractures of the peace to be expected among sailors, but her proposed use of Christianity to exact revenge was abhorrent, and the discovery that her shaman had encouraged her in this perversion strengthened his resolve to eliminate shamanism from Kodiak. From here on, it would be a battle to the death.
But first he must attend to the spiritual needs of this child, and the purity of his own soul, which had been nourished and kept untarnished by the simple country faith of his father and mother, enabled him to regard Cidaq for what she was: half child, half-woman, brave, honest and surprisingly uncontaminated by what had happened to her. She was, like him, a pure spirit, but unlike him, she was in mortal danger because of her traffic with a shaman.
Putting aside other tasks, he directed his considerable spiritual energy to the salvation of her soul, and with extended prayer, and exhortation, and the telling of noble Bible stories, he showed her the ideal nature of Christianity, and having discovered that she was moved by Christ's relation to children, he stressed that aspect, and now, having learned that she had been forced into sin, he emphasized especially the theory of redemption. Christ was no longer one who could redeem the hypothetical sinner Rudenko; He could now redeem Cidaq.
After five unbroken days of this incessant pressure, Cidaq said, with no conviction but only to please the young priest: 'I feel called to Jesus Christ,' and he interpreted this as a true conversion, shouting to the members of his little world: 'Cidaq is saved!' He told the Company managers, the sailors, the uncomprehending Aleuts that the child Cidaq was saved, at which the trader who had escaped murder at her hands growled: 'That one's no child!'
On Sunday after service in his rustic church at the end of the world, Father Vasili informed his tiny congregation that Cidaq had elected to march under the banner of Christ, and that she would, in conformance to the law of the empire, take an honest Russian name: 'Henceforth she will no longer be called by her ugly pagan name, Cidaq, but by her beautiful Christian name, Sofia Kuchovskaya.
Sofia means the wise, good one and Kuchovskaya is the name of a fine Christian woman in Irkutsk.' Kissing his convert on each cheek, he proclaimed: 'You are no longer Cidaq. You are Sofia Kuchovskaya, and now your life begins.'
WITH THE PERPLEXING SIMPLICITY THAT CHARACTERIZES many devout believers, Father Vasili became fixed upon a course of theological action which seemed to him completely rational, indeed, inescapable: Sofia has become a Christian, and with her love and faith she can redeem the prodigal son Rudenko. Together they can find a new life that will bring honor to Russia and dignity to Kodiak.
Eager to believe that Rudenko was no more than a repetition of the Biblical prodigal son who had perhaps drunk too much or wasted his patronage in what was euphemistically termed riotous living, and incapable of believing that any man could be inherently evil, the young priest saw that his next task was to convert him as he had Sofia, and since he had never met the criminal, he asked Ensign Belov to take him to the darkened room where Rudenko still lingered.
'Be careful of this one,' the young officer warned. 'He killed three men in Siberia.'
'It's just such men that Jesus seeks,' Vasili said, and when he sat with Rudenko, still in manacles and assigned to the next ship returning to the Pribilofs, he found the murderer still convinced that the girl he had purchased on Lapak was going to prove the agency for his rescue from the Seal Islands. Assessing Father Vasili correctly as one of those benign priests who could be convinced of anything, he saw that it was important for him to win the man's good graces, and he presented himself as submerged in contrition: 'Yes, the girl you now call Sofia is my wife. I did buy her, but I developed a sincere affection for her. She's a good girl.'
'What about that sinful behavior in the hold of the ship?'
'You know how sailors are, Father. I couldn't stop them.'
'And the same kind of behavior here at Three Saints Bay?'
'I suppose you know that one of them was killed by the Aleuts? He's the one that did it all. Me? My father and mother were followers of Jesus. Me too. I love Sofia and am not surprised she's joined our church, and I hope that you'll make us man and wife.' He made this final plea with tears filling his eyes.
Vasili was so affected by the prisoner's apparent transformation that the only matter which remained to be clarified concerned the murders in Siberia, and Rudenko was eager to explain: 'I was wronged. Two other fellows did it. The judge was prejudiced.
I've always been an honest man, never stole a kopeck. I wasn't supposed to be sent to the Aleutians, it was a mistake.' Now, speaking of his deep love for his wife, he became even more unctuous: 'My whole aim is to start a new life in Kodiak with the girl you call Sofia. Tell her I still love her.'
He delivered these sentiments with such a display of religious conviction that Vasili had to suppress a smile, and even though the priest knew that Rudenko had committed the murders, he was disposed to accept the man's longing to begin a better life.
Everything Vasili had been taught about the wishes of God and His Son Jesus
made him want to believe that repentance was possible, and next day when he returned to talk with the onetime criminal, he asked that the manacles be struck from his wrists so they could talk as man to man, and at the end of the dialogue he was convinced that illumination had entered Rudenko's life.
Yearning to save what the prophet Amos called 'a firebrand plucked out of the burning,' Vasili reported to Sofia: 'God's wishes will be served if you marry him and initiate a true Christian home.' In saying this, he was viewing her not as an isolated human individual with her own aspirations but as a kind of mechanical agent for good, and he would have been astonished had someone pointed this out. It was no tortured chain of theological reasoning which produced this impersonal conclusion, but rather the teachings his parents had hammered into him: 'Even the lowliest sinner can be reclaimed.'
'God is forever eager to forgive.'
'It's a woman's job to bring her man to salvation.'
'Woman must be man's beacon in the dark night.'
So when Vasili spread his plan before Sofia, he told her: 'You are Rudenko's beacon in the dark night,' and she asked: 'Now what does that mean?' and he explained: 'God, who now has you in His care, loves every man and woman on this earth. We are His children and He longs to see each of us saved. I grant your husband has had a troubled past, but he's reformed and wants to start a new life obedient to Christ. To do so, he must have your help.'
'I never want to help that one. Let him go back to his seals.'
'Sofia! He's a voice crying in the night for help.'
'I was crying in the night, real tears, and he gave me no help.'