Confession of a Ghost. F.M. Dostoevsky award. Playing Another Reality. Alexandra Kryuchkova

perhaps they’ll have time to paint the icon before you leave.”

      I entered the icon shop of Janis’ family. His parents spoke Greek, but Janis studied Russian. He always congratulated me on Orthodox holidays by sending a photo of a hand-painted holiday icon from their shop. Janis had got a daughter recently.

      “Alice! Welcome, dear! How are you? How is your cat?”

      The cat wasn’t mine, but periodically he visited me and, walking around the flat, including open shelves with Athos icons, he put his forehead to the icons, just like a person. I photographed the cat to show to the Athos’ locals.

      Janis’ father greeted me in Greek and immediately asked the girls who worked in their shop to make coffee. Janis showed me the new icons and shared the latest news, while I slowly walked around the space greeting the Saints, and they greeted me in return. Janis used to say that I felt alive icons. There were also watching ones, the Saints on them looked directly at you, following your movement in space.

      “You have already Nicholas, and Alexandra too,” Janis remembered all the icons that I had already got. “What don’t you have?”

      “The Stairs,” I admitted.

      “Rare icon! Tomorrow I’ll call the cell of St. Nicholas to find out if they have a painted one, if not, I’ll order it to get the icon before your departure! You just need to choose an image. I’ll show you how we paint it, and the size. That icon helps souls to go through the Postmortem Ordeals. I hope nobody of yours died,” Janis opened an Internet page and showed me the options.

      Having chosen the image of the Stairs, I looked around to find the desired size, and my gaze stopped on the bottom shelf in the corner rack, from where the Virgin Mary, clearly alive, was staring at me, and I involuntarily shuddered,

      “That size.”

      We used to drink coffee outside, at the entrance to Janis’ shop. It was customary there, shopkeepers drank coffee, chatting with passers-by, then crossed the street to have coffee with those opposite, exchanging news or silently examining tourists’ packages – the ones flashing more often indicated the most prosperous shop in Ouranoupoli. Janis usually told me about Athos, since he visited the cells, talked with the monks and took tourists to the Mountain.

      “Have you ever met 12 hermits?” I asked.

      “To meet them, you have to be a Saint,” Janis sighed and dived into the shop to the customers who had just entered it.

      “I’m so glad you’re back with us!” exclaimed Leah, a Georgian of my age, who had lived there for almost ten years, an employee of Janis. “Thank God you are alive and well! You are very bright, even the mistress said, there is another kindness in Alice, a real one, from Heaven.”

      “Thanks, Leah! Do you know the name of that icon, the Virgin Mary?” I showed it to Leah through the window.

      “I don’t even remember where we got it from. I’ll tell you tomorrow!”

      Janis was Dimitra’s nephew. Kiriyaki, or simply Kiri, was Dimitra’s niece. In that village, almost all were relatives, although not everyone was friendly with the others. Kiri inherited the icon shop of her father, who had retrained as an ice cream vendor two years before. The shop, like Dimitra’s, was small, but Kiri bought mostly big and expensive icons. I liked one of the icon painters who painted for her for reasonable money.

      “Hello, Alice! I’m pregnant again, as you see!” she smiled.

      “And a boy again?!”

      “Yes,” she laughed and after some welcoming questions proceeded to review her new icons.

      “Alice, it’s great to see you!” having entered the shop, Kiri’s father said, hugging and kissing me on cheeks three times. “For how long? You know, you’ll never leave! You’ll stay on Athos forever!”

      “Do you happen to have St. Barbara with the cup?” I asked Kiri, pondering her father’s words.

      “Not with the cup, another one. What do you need it for? It protects against sudden death, doesn’t it? Thus, you don’t want to die without communion, right?”

      Kiri promised me to find out about St. Barbara, and I headed for Socrates.

      Socrates was a friend of Dimitra, native Greek, but we communicated in Italian, although he spoke English as well. No one understood us in Italian, and it was useful to practice. Socrates was fond of rare icons and told me about them – emotionally! – similar to the Italian temperament.

      “Oh Alice! Welcome back! Well, I’ll show you something!” he shouted from afar, and then pulled out his phone and found a photo, “They wrote an article about me in ‘National Geographic!’ Look! Do you see it? Here’s my name, the name and address of my icon shop! And those are my icons, from this wall! Imagine, some journalists came here and didn’t even say who they were and where they came from! You know, I always tell the truth about icons, and I told them everything! And they wrote it!”

      “Congratulations!” I smiled and, having turned my gaze to the wall with icons, froze in my tracks.

      “Coffee?” Socrates offered, not noticing my stupor.

      “You knew it! I need this icon, I couldn’t find it anywhere. I’ve even supposed that it doesn’t exist!”

      “Which one?”

      “The Four Evangelists!”

      “Ha! I always have something that supposedly doesn’t exist! You are here like a local, you know everything about everyone, who is who, who sells this and that at what price, you understand the painting techniques. Why do you need ‘the Four Evangelists’?”

      “To rewrite the Future.”

      Somewhere in the Mist

      We took the lift to the top floor of a huge shopping center.

      “Close your eyes and give me your hand!” Michael said mysteriously and led me somewhere, and then whispered, “Open!”

      “Wow!” I exclaimed, since right in front of us, as if hovering in the air over the abyss, under the dome of the shopping center, there was an Island of Violets, to which a narrow bridge led.

      “Don’t worry, the bridge is real, it won’t collapse! Here is an amazing cafe, where we are the only ones to have breakfast today!”

      We landed on a sofa, immersed in violet thickets, the flowers surrounded us from all sides – real, large, beautiful and … sad. The waitress left us, taking our order, and Michael took out and handed me a gift box.

      “Happy Valentine’s Day!”

      “Thank you! Angels are always needed, one can never have too many of them,” I smiled when I saw a lovely silver Guardian Angel, and then, once again glancing at the flowers, I remembered, “Violets in Greece are a symbol of mourning! Imagine, the young Persephone, picking violets, was kidnapped by the Lord of the Kingdom of the Dead. Since then, the Greeks have been covering prematurely dead girls with violets.”

      “Leave Greece apart! Better tell me why haven’t you emigrated to Italy yet? We talked with you a hundred times, there is nothing for you to do here! You know Italian. They take you for a local in Italy. You are young, smart, beautiful. So? Today we’ll register you on international dating websites. Remember the photo shoot in the fall! Lots of amazing photos! We’ll choose the best ones, and in a month, you’ll invite me to your wedding! You’ll see! What’s the point of wasting time? You are a miracle in feathers! Speaking of feathers, what are you writing now?”

      “Nothing… I know what I have to. I saw it there.”

      “About Another Reality?”

      “Yes, perhaps the time for that book hasn’t come yet.”

      “What