mystery

Just when you think you have found every enchanted place there is in a city, you meet Simeon and his saints and his house of wood. He shows you his antique lamps and his family portraits and his great mystic talent passed down unchanged, dot for holy dot, through six hundred years of painting. His family even made icons for Ivan the Terrible, he says. His black prayer robe hangs on a thick nail on the door and the wood takes you back in time to his childhood in a Siberian wildnerness and his manhood in a Gulag nightmare and his now in a small haunted house under a bridge where he lives with his lover David and his cats and his holy iconas. His eyes are wild and his stream of consciousness insults and visions are a Russian/English mix of perfect old country bite.

"Who? Putin? He is a bullshit. He is religious like a kitchen sink. He would steal the Jesus from the cross and come back for the nose later. He eats fingernails for breakfast."

He talks of a weeping, healing Icon that literally ran out of her holy alcove when she heard that Putin was coming to visit. He tells you about every saint and every miracle and every torture.

"Who do you pray to? What saints do you pray to? Ah, yes, I know, Saint Paraskeva, she is calling you. She was beaten and burned and poisoned and even had her underarms cut open and still prevailed. Finally, she was decapitated. Yes, I will paint her for you."

He digs through a garbage bag full of sketches on yellowing tracing paper. He shows you the one he wants for you. He tells you his head holds centuries of stories and when he goes, they are gone forever. Will you write them down for him? He says he cannot find an apprentice to pass all of this on to. He wipes the sweat off his forehead with a kerchief. He looks at his wall of icons and holy books and the room smells of dust and frankincense and there is cat hair on your stockings and you are looking up at him from your seat on the floor and he says, this is the most vast desert you can cross, the desert of your mind. Many devils live there. He gives you a hairband covered with feathers.

"Here," he says, hugging you tight and showing you out the door and through the rock garden watched over by a big stone Confucius, "here, I don't need it. It is something pretty for your hair." You thank him over and over again and he says, "Oh knock it off." You wish you could freeze time for him like he has for you.