cold feet; the distant shore, the coastline, and the glossolalic mission.
I had the phone numbers of a few acquaintances in Helsinki, but when I dialed them, I got answering-machine messages or the recorded music that tells you the person you wanted, who should have been there to give you a place to stay, isn’t home, he’s off in Oslo or Copenhagen or God knows where. It was nine at night and the snow hadn’t let up since I left the ferry. I listened to one after another of these devastating messages, and I stood in the phone booth watching the Finns saunter by, all of them with homes, and beds to lie down in, with the easy manner of people with keys in their pockets. Of course, it wasn’t the first time: I had watched—trying to keep from freezing in a telephone booth, or in some clean well-lighted American fast-food place—as merry Viennese waltzed by, and happy Krakovians, and the fine folks of chilly Stockholm, looking forward to a hot cup of tea in their kitchens at home, while I was strolling around the great outdoors, looking for a spot to throw down my backpack and if I was lucky (in Prague) a cardboard box to shield my shoulders from the cold, sleeping on the ground.
Someone had told me about a couple of priests who provided lodging for travelers. Would I still have the number? Yes, fortunately. One of them—I first greeted him in Finnish and then described my situation (“I’m in … distress, quite honestly”)—was kind enough to say he’d pick me up at the station. An excellent beginning: tomorrow at this hour, I would be home in St. Petersburg. “My name is Peckas,” he told me. Peckas? Perfect (great, terrific, whatever).
He looked like a priest on a pirate ship. With his sleeves rolled up you could see he-man arms covered with tattoos, anchors and sayings in Finnish. I imagined his past with the fleet, the tough chaplain who forced the refractory cabinboy to his knees, putting a hand on his neck and pushing him down onto the polished boards of the deck, in Jakarta or some other South Seas port. Seeing him come toward me, rocked by the swaying of his muscular legs, his thick finger between the pages of a Bible, I felt like I’d been shipwrecked.
Many wandering souls had taken shelter in the church, so the tongue-speakers couldn’t keep track of which of their guests had been baptized (they baptized them all; that was the price you paid for your lodging: letting them baptize you). Peckas put his arm around me good-humoredly and asked if I had been baptized at his hands. Two Nigerians and a Kurd, who were also spending the night in the church, piped up that they’d never seen me before. I explained that it had been another time, when they weren’t around. Peckas, speaker in tongues, let me lie, to use up my supply of lies for the day. The Kurd pulled me aside and asked me to say yes. Baptism would put the priests in a good mood, they’d slice up the salami for supper. Did I like the bland sausage in Helsinki? And the whipped cream? They wouldn’t leave without eating. They were devout Christians, but there’d be no mortadella or nut butter for me. I’d already taken a shower on the boat, I told them. So what did another bath matter? Should we go to the North-Nautic? Sure, the North-Nautic is a nice little place, at a hundred eighty dollars a night…. He had let them baptize him many times … I agreed, what else could I do? Peckas called to his companion with a big loud speech in Finnish—more than ten grammatical cases—and a second tongue-speaking priest appeared, also smiling and rosy as a baby.
To talk to God, they told me, you don’t have to know any particular language; you can address him in any language whatsoever, because at the peak of your communion with him, you’ll be possessed by “the gift of tongues”—by glossolalia. To most ears they may be unintelligible sounds, but to God they are sounds that come from the deepest part of your soul and transmit all your love for him. I couldn’t stop staring at Peckas’s forearms, the play of the tattooed anchor and the siren, fascinated; he had even opened my shirt and pulled out the money I had hidden against my heart, dearer to me than my feelings for God. I didn’t have time to think, to ask any questions. They read some passages from Peter’s Epistle to the Romans, put their hands on my head, and from either side I received an imperious order, they shouted in unison, “Speak,” and my mouth opened and out came a mad rush of inarticulate sounds, blending with the incoherent phonemes of a speaker in tongues, and for I don’t know how long, I talked to God in words from my heart because onto me, too, had descended the Gift of Tongues.
Shaken to the bottom of my soul, deafened by everything they had shouted in my ears, I thought I was waking from a dream when there was a sudden silence and Peckas asked something that made me think my program for deciphering human language had gone completely haywire. That getting converted, becoming a glossolal, too, had overwhelmed me, and with the many languages I would understand from now on, I had lost the ability to understand my own. Peckas asked me in Spanish, “Do you have clean underpants?” And since I just stared at him (unable to believe my ears) he realized how ridiculous his question sounded and explained: “to use as a bathing suit for your baptism. You have to get wet.”
I still have the photo: I’m emerging from an Erickson bath that they had filled with running water from the fountain, supplied by the many lakes and glaciers of Lapland. I’m shivering with cold, in a well-worn bathing suit (no clean underwear) and an ill-fitting alb, which was supposed to symbolize the purity of the newly baptized, my sins running off into the gutter and to the Gulf of Finland, my heart cleansed of the stigma of the dollars hanging around my neck, between the glacial waters of Lapland and the pure water of the sea.
And then to capture the moment for eternity. Next to me in the photo, Peckas, smiling slightly. It’s just possible to make out a faint filigree on the forearms piously crossed over his belly. In this holy gesture I have always thought I could see—examining the photo so many times—the many innocent throats those hairy hands had forced into silence in his shady past, long before he had decided, perhaps to atone for his guilt, to make as many others speak in garbled profusion. I could not send this photo to V. I looked, quite properly, like a hungry person, waiting for dinner. The end of the ritual consisted in recording my name, which would be included in an annual report, a missive they sent to His Holiness in Rome, as testament to the good works of their temple in this remote province of Christianity. The next morning, before leaving, I received a tape of sermons recorded in Spanish, English, and every Scandinavian language (glossolalia), all delivered in the same voice, the stentorous Peckas, speaker in tongues.
3
ST. PETERSBURG
It was raining in St. Petersburg. The city was suspended from the sky by dark gray threads that melted onto its sidewalks and zinc-covered roofs. I caught a cab at the metro entrance, and we drove down Nevski, through raindrops spattering on the asphalt. I told the driver to let me out on Liteinaya, the booksellers’ street. I wanted to visit Vladimir Vladimirovich, an elderly gentleman always bent over a book, his back to the bookstore’s main room. Which was in a small cellar beyond the sound of the rumbling streetcars; you got to it through an arch that opened onto a patio with crude bars on the first-floor windows and drain pipes whose ends were cemented to the ground by silver icicles. The basement was in a second patio—there was also a third, through which you could exit, escape to the next street if necessary—behind a door covered with layers of pasted-up signs. They were the work of the girl who watched the cashbox, the girl I had discovered one afternoon passing a colored pencil over a plastic stencil of the alphabet. They ran because of the constant humidity in St. Petersburg, which soaked right through them and even dampened the pages of books that sat too long in unheated basements. Like the copy of Diurnal and Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire, for example, which I found on a shelf near the door. In the same room one afternoon I found a book that I didn’t dare return to the shelf once I held it in my hands and leafed through it, that I kept clutched to my chest, exultantly. I remember it perfectly well but won’t say what it was. This had to be the best bookstore in St. Petersburg, which at the time was called Leningrad, an ugly name. So when my new business interests forced me to embark on a preliminary study, following the trail of the yazikus through the Public Library and the used bookstores, I remembered this man, who spent hours—the time I lost sniffing around the shelves—bent over a book, like
