Russia (#18) -- 10 April 2004 -- The Day Before Easter

NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND

     The last of our basketball opportunities was a 3-on-3 tournament held in a small gymnasium at a sports center. This is the kind of competition that gets many players excited since it offers multiple opportunities to have a good game that does not require running the floor. Pick and roll, pass and cut, block out and rebound. Stand at the 3-point line and launch one up. It should have favored men in their fifties who hadn't played together much. Alas!  

    I was paired with Ken Brubaker, Mason Sorensen, and Skip Lord, which, unfortunately, made me the "big man" on our team. I used to play "big" reasonably well, but not any more. We lost all three of our games, finishing, as they say, out of the money. There were some pretty intense games, however, especially in the under 30 category. The team that won the whole thing had three real bruisers, that being a result in no small way to their ability to put the hurt on opponents. I took part in the 3-point shooting and the foul shooting contests, which I figured (incorrectly) would allow me to leave international competition with a shred of dignity. But, no: I went 1 for 5 in the 3-point and 3 for 5 in foul shooting. No sour grapes here, but I think it was the unforgiving rims.

    My disappointments were overshadowed by the success of the tournament itself in drawing young people to the event where we were able to mingle, to share good will despite the language barrier. Local TV coverage also meant that the local church got some very positive exposure.

    After the tournament our friend and interpreter Andrew took some of us to meet a friend of his who is a master wood carver. The trip to his shop near the Golden Gate of the old city was a story in itself. We took the trolley-bus to a spot near the restaurant where we had had dinner the Sunday before. From there, we walked through an archway that was continuous with the buildings along the street. Almost as if we had passed through the back of C.S. Lewis' wardrobe, we seemed to enter a different world. The main street with the trolley-bus was clean and in good repair if somewhat old with its grey, soviet style, square construction.

    On the back side of the archway, the streets were rough, the buildings single-story and wooden. We passed St. George's Church (St. Georgi), the second oldest church in Vladimir dating from the 12th Century (although the present structure was built in 1784). The street we entered was muddy and puddled, the houses old, generally unpainted, and run-down. It had a neglected, 19th Century feel. One hundred yards or so along this street we turned into an alleyway that ran downhill. This was "old city" but not the part tourists usually saw.

    Clearly, this was a poor section of town, hidden behind the three and four story connected buildings that presented a respectable, clean, if dated, front on the central thoroughfare. Near St. George we could look across to another slope and see the gold domes of the Assumption Cathedral. Below on the slopes of the ravine were old shacks. That was the area we were heading into, St George rising in the background.

    A short way down this narrow mud street we turned in at a gate in an old wooden fence to the side of a very old, unmarked, nondescript house owned by the Artists Union. It was not hard to imagine that life for an artist under the Soviet regime required a willingness to work on the margins, in clandestine rooms. In 2004 it seemed to be a question of resources rather than government interference, but who was to know?

    We entered by a back door beyond a pile of rubble and a wooden outhouse. Dark entryway, dark stairs down to a basement, through a heavy metal door, down a corridor that spoke of age and ruin, through another heavy door, where we knocked on yet another door beyond.

    The master woodcarver -- Andrew's friend and teacher, both of them 43 years old -- opened the door. We went into his shop, an incredible little place, as clean, tidy, and compelling as the outside had been dark, dirty, and depressing. There were two rooms. One held a sink, a workbench, tools of a wood carver's trade, and a project in process. The other was a sitting room, with a small couch, shelves with books and spaces for finished carvings.

    Wood carving is often practiced as a craft-art, if I understand sufficiently. Andrew's friend, whose name is not in my notes, considered himself an artist, first and last, both in traditional Russian forms of wood artistry and in imaginative forms. According to Andrew, he had been working on icons when we arrived; these he had been commissioned to create for an Orthodox congregation in another city. I understood he made the icons principally as an act of spiritual devotion.

    Many of the imaginative pieces on the walls and shelves were made from "unusable" or leftover pieces of wood. He would study each piece of wood until he knew what it might become -- what it needed to become. And when he wasn't working in wood, he would use his sitting room for reading, for meditating, or for studying texts from his shelves. I wanted to know more, to ask questions. Translation, of course, can be a slow process and Andrew had a great deal to attend to; because there were 7 or 8 of us in the room, and because the master woodcarver spoke slowly, with great care, I was not able to ask as much as I had hoped.

    Nothing in the workshop was for sale, so we could not purchase anything. All these pieces were to be shown at a country-wide exhibition in Moscow in the near future. Our host was both excited and apprehensive about this show. These were all recent works made after several years of depression during which he could not work. The depression, as I understand the story, was occasioned by the loss of two fingers on his right hand to a band-saw, an accident that had occurred as he was teaching seventh graders at the local trade school.

    We could easily have spent the whole day in these rooms, asking questions, listening to the answers, and marveling at the creations on the walls. Or just marveling. For me in those underground rooms many things were beginning to come together in my understanding. I felt more than understood what that dark day before Easter held, what might be germinating, what the conviction of hope might look like.

    Too soon we had to thank our host and venture back through the dark corridor and heavy metal doors to the mud streets outside. Nineteen years on, I am struck anew with wonder at what we saw on that afternoon in those clean, bright rooms.