Ilya did not go home.
The cellar on the fifth courtyard of Ligovsky Prospekt, where he paid two thousand roubles a month for the right to freeze slowly, felt suddenly obscene. A place for a man who still believed tomorrow might be different. He walked instead along the Fontanka, past the shuttered kiosks and the drunks sleeping upright against walls, until he reached the house with the cracked atlantes on Bolshaya Podyacheskaya Street. The door code had not changed since 1998. He punched 1991# and climbed to the fourth floor.
The communal flat had once belonged to a professor of ancient languages who vanished in '93. Six rooms, one kitchen, one toilet that flushed only when bribed with buckets of boiling water. Ilya had lived here before Valaam, when he was still a student of theology and believed words could save anyone. The room at the end of the corridor still bore his name on a rusted tin plate: И. В. Рогожинъ. The lock had been broken for years; he simply pushed the door and stepped inside.
The air was thick with the smell of apples rotting in a crate under the bed and the sweeter, more intimate smell of the previous tenant's death. Old Marina the midwife had died there in November, sitting upright in her armchair with a half-finished embroidery of the Last Judgement in her lap. The neighbours had left everything exactly as it was. Even the needle was still stuck through the Saviour's eye.
Ilya closed the door behind him and stood in the middle of the room. A single window faced the courtyard well; the light that reached it was the colour of nicotine. On the wall above the bed someone had once painted an icon of St. John the Forerunner in cheap oils. The saint's eyes had blistered and run so that he seemed to be weeping blood.
He took off his coat and laid it carefully on the chair as though it were a body. The splinter of the True Cross made a small hard shape against his chest. He did not remove it.
He sat on the edge of the bed and waited for something to happen inside him: terror, joy, lust, anything that would prove he was still human. Nothing came. Only a vast, ringing emptiness, the kind that follows the amputation of a limb you did not know you had.
After a long time he lay down fully clothed and stared at the ceiling where a water stain had spread in the exact shape of Russia. He tried to pray. The words of the Jesus Prayer rose to his lips and died there. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God… He could not remember the rest. Or rather, he could, but the words felt like stones dropped into a well that had no bottom.
He slept without meaning to.
He dreamed he was back in the church, kneeling in the dark. Anastasia stood behind him, her hands resting lightly on his shoulders. She was singing something very softly in a language he almost recognised. When he tried to turn and see her face she pressed harder, pinning him to the floor with the weight of her palms.
"Stay still," she whispered. "If you move, the knife will slip."
He woke with her name in his mouth like a mouthful of blood.
It was past noon. Grey light leaked through the window and lay across the floorboards in exhausted strips. Somewhere in the flat a radio played Vladimir Vysotsky at low volume: "We were born to make fairy tales come true…" The irony was not lost on him.
He rose, went to the kitchen, filled the electric kettle from a plastic canister. The other tenants were asleep or at work; the corridor smelled of yesterday's cabbage and cat piss. He made tea strong enough to float a horseshoe and carried it back to the room. Then he sat at the small desk beneath the window and opened the drawer.
Inside lay the only things he had salvaged from the monastery: a photograph of his mother taken in 1987, she was smiling at someone outside the frame, a battered copy of The Way of a Pilgrim, and a notebook bound in cheap black oilcloth. The notebook had been a gift from Father Pavel on the day Ilya took his vows. On the first page the elder had written in his spidery hand: "Write everything, even what you dare not confess. Especially that."
Ilya opened to a blank page. The pen shook slightly as he wrote the date: 20 February / 5 March 2003. Then, without pausing, he wrote:
Tonight I met my death and she is beautiful.
She has grey eyes and a mouth that has forgotten how to ask for anything.
She blew out my candle and lit another inside my chest that will never go out until I do.
I am afraid, Father. Not of dying. I am afraid of living long enough to love her.
He wrote for three hours without stopping. Pages filled with fragments: the smell of her coat, the exact pressure of her fingers when she passed him the splinter of the Cross, the way the darkness had felt almost tender after the flame died. He wrote until the pen tore through the paper and his hand cramped. When he finally stopped, the light outside had thickened to the colour of old bruises.
He tore the pages out, folded them small, and slipped them into the same pocket as the relic. Then he left the flat and walked back across the city to the bread factory. The night shift began at six; he was four hours early, but the foreman owed him for the boiler accident and waved him in without questions.
The furnaces roared like captive lions. Heat rolled over him in waves. He fed coal until his blistered hands reopened and the pain became a kind of prayer. At some point he realised he was smiling. The other stokers kept their distance; they had learned long ago that when Rogozhin smiled it was safer to be somewhere else.
At five in the morning he walked out into a city glazed with fresh frost. The sky was the colour of mother-of-pearl. He did not go to the church. She had told him not to light the candle, and he understood that obedience had already begun.
Instead he went to the market at Sennaya Ploshchad where the old women sold church goods under the table: icons wrapped in newspaper, bottles of Jordan water, prosphora stamped with the Lamb. He bought three thick beeswax candles, the kind used for forty-day memorials, and a box of matches with the face of St. Seraphim on the cover. He paid with crumpled hundreds that smelled of coal dust.
Then he walked to the Petrograd Side.
The address had come to him in the night, complete, unasked for, the way a murderer sometimes remembers the exact weight of the stone years later. Bolshoy Prospekt 118, apartment 9. He did not know how he knew. He only knew it was true.
The building was pre-revolutionary, once grand, now sagging like an old woman who has forgotten she was ever beautiful. The entrance stank of boiled sausage and piss. The lift was broken; he climbed five flights on foot. On the landing someone had chalked a crude phallus and the words СМЕРТЬ МИЛИЦИИ. Death to the police.
Apartment 9 had a door upholstered in cracked brown dermatine and three bells that did not work. He stood in front of it for a long time, listening. From inside came the faint sound of a woman singing. Not a hymn exactly; something older, a psalm tone in Church Slavonic, but slowed almost to stopping, as though the singer were underwater.
He raised his hand to knock and found he could not. The candles in his pocket felt suddenly heavier than lead.
Instead he knelt, there in the filthy communal corridor, among cigarette butts and broken syringes, and placed one candle on the threshold. He lit it with a match struck against the wall. The flame rose straight and bright, indifferent to the draught. Then he stood, turned, and walked away without looking back.
He was halfway down the stairs when he heard the door open behind him.
He did not stop.
He reached the street and kept walking until the candle was no longer visible even in memory. Only then did he realise he was weeping. Not the theatrical tears of repentance he had shed in the monastery, but something quieter, more terrible: the tears of a man who has just laid the first stone of his own gallows and finds the work beautiful.
That afternoon he returned to the room on Podyacheskaya and slept again. This time there were no dreams, only a vast plain of snow under a white sky, and somewhere far away a woman walking away from him carrying his heart in her bare hands. He watched until she disappeared over the horizon and felt nothing but gratitude.
When he woke it was dark. The radio in the kitchen had moved on to the news: another suicide bombing in Moscow, another minister caught with his hand in the till. He dressed, put on his coat with the relic and the folded pages burning against his breast, and went out into the night.
He did not go to the church.
He walked instead to the Neva and stood on the Lieutenant Schmidt Bridge watching the ice floes grind against each other under the streetlights. The river smelled of iron and coming thaw. Somewhere a siren wailed and was silent.
He took out the notebook again and wrote by the light of a streetlamp:
Day four of Lent.
I have left a candle burning on her threshold like a idiot with a death wish.
She opened the door but did not call me back.
That is mercy enough for now.
He tore the page out, folded it into a small hard square, and dropped it through a crack in the ice. The river took it without comment.
Then he walked home through streets that no longer recognised him.
In apartment 9 on Bolshoy Prospekt, Anastasia Mikhailovna Tikhonova knelt before an icon corner lit by a single lampada. The candle Ilya had left was burning in a glass before the Smolensk Mother of God. Its flame did not flicker even when the wind rattled the old window frames.
Her younger sister Varvara watched from the doorway, arms folded tight across her chest.
"You're going to kill yourself over this," Varya said. It was not a question.
Anastasia did not turn.
"No," she said softly. "I am going to kill something else."
She reached out and touched the flame with one finger, holding it there until the skin blistered white. Only then did she smile.
The same smile Ilya had glimpsed in the church, the smile of someone greeting an old friend who has come to collect a debt.