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The boys spit on the pavement, dig each other in the ribs; some whistle shrilly, others swear obscenely and several tune into dance bands on their transistors. They hug their girls on the processional path and pull them from each other's arms and look them over cockily. At any moment you expect them to draw knives: first against each other, then against the believers. For the way these youngsters look upon believers is not as juniors upon their elders, not as guests upon their hosts, but as lords of the manor upon houseflies. Still, it doesn't come to knives. For decency's sake, three or four policemen are patrolling here and there. Nor are the obscenities roared across the yard, but merely shouted, as in hearty Russian talk. Legally there is no breach of public order for the police to see, so they look with friendly smiles upon the rising generation. You can't, after all, expect them to snatch the cigarettes from between their teeth or the caps from off their heads. The place is a public street, and to disbelieve in God is every citizen's constitutional right.
Pushed against the railings of the churchyard and the church walls, the believers, far from objecting, look around nervously for fear of getting a knife in the back, or of having their watches stolen—the watches on which they keep track of the remaining minutes before the Resurrection of Christ. Here, outside the church, they, the Orthodox, are much fewer than the grinning, milling rabble who oppress and terrorize them more than ever did the Tartars. The Tartars, surely, would have let up for Matins on Easter Sunday.
The legal boundary to crime has not been crossed, the banditry is bloodless, the insult to the spirit is in the bandit leer of those grinning lips, the brazen talk, the courting, pawing, smoking, spitting—two paces away from the Passion of Christ. The insult is the triumphantly contemptuous expression with which the snotty brats have come to watch their grandfathers re-enact their forefathers' rites.
Among the believers, one or two mild Jewish faces are to be seen. The Jews may have been baptized, or not. They, too, glance nervously around them as they wait for the procession. We all run down the Jews, the Jews are always in our way, but we'd do well to look: What kind of Russians have we raised? Look, and your heart stops still.
Yet these are not our shock troops of the '30s—those who, yelling like demons, tore the Easter cakes from the believers' hands—oh no! These are moved by intellectual curiosity, as you might say. There is no more ice hockey on TV, and the football season hasn't yet begun—they're bored, that's why they crowd around the candlestand to buy candles, pushing Christians aside like sacks of straw and swearing at what they call "church businessmen."
One thing is remarkable: none are from Peredelkino, yet each knows all the others by name. How can this be? Are they all, perhaps, from the same factory? Can it be that they sign on for these hours of duty as they do for volunteer police work?
The bell strikes loudly overhead—but there is something artificial about it: the strokes are tinny, somehow, not full-voiced and deep. The chimes announce the Easter procession.