The Firebird

‘That one’s from the second, in the year 381,’ Yuri told me. ‘I’m impressed. You’ve done your homework.’

‘I do try.’ I smiled. ‘I like to know the history of a piece.’

I knew there’d been four murals painted by Surikov, back in the late 1870s, one for each of the four ancient councils at which the rules and creeds and shape of Christianity itself had been debated and decided by the Church’s leading clerics. Those murals had graced Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour for over half a century, until on Stalin’s orders the cathedral had been dynamited, totally destroyed.

There’d been no room in Stalin’s Russia for religion, or the art that was a part of it.

Only one mural had managed somehow to escape the destruction, along with the sketches in pencil on paper that Surikov had made to show those who’d hired him what he planned to paint.

From those sketches, we knew what the murals had probably looked like. Two of the sketches had come up at auction a few years ago. Yuri showed me a picture of one of them now, from a file he’d set out on his desk. ‘You can see here,’ he said, ‘this one bishop who’s standing and reading the scroll to the others – this is clearly the same man we see in the study in oils. I believe that it’s Gregory, Bishop of Constantinople, perhaps even reading his famous speech.’

There, he had lost me. I asked, ‘Famous speech?’

‘Yes, you don’t know this story? He made many enemies, Gregory did, and a lot of the bishops opposed him, and so he resigned, saying he was like Jonah the Prophet, who brought the great storm because he did not wish to deliver the bad news God sent him to carry, and that he was willing, like Jonah, to be cast out, sacrificed, if it was needed. But first, he delivered his finest oration. I think,’ Yuri said, ‘this is what we see here, in this mural.’

I studied the print of the sketch, and compared it again to the face in the work in the catalogue. ‘I think you’re right.’

‘He has good taste, this client of yours.’

I agreed. But it went beyond that for Vasily, I knew. He had personal reasons for wanting this painting, and when I explained them to Yuri he nodded with new understanding.

‘Then I think you may have an excellent chance of convincing Miss Van Hoek to sell you this piece. She is also very sentimental.’

‘We can hope.’ I didn’t want to overstay my welcome. Yuri was polite enough to sit here talking with me half the day, but I knew that he kept a busy schedule, so I closed my catalogue and stood. ‘This was so kind of you, Yuri Stepanovich. I really do appreciate it.’

With a very Russian shrug he said, ‘It was my pleasure. Have you somewhere you must go at once, or would you like to visit your young man?’

I know I stared at him a moment, wondering how on earth he knew I’d come with Rob, and why he’d mention it. And then the penny dropped, and I remembered who he meant.

I grinned. ‘Yes, please. I’d love to.’

My ‘young man’ was not a person but a painting of a person, hanging on a wall below us in a room on the first floor. It was my favourite of the Russian paintings here, not as important as the larger and more celebrated canvases that easily commanded their own walls and had been lighted so that people could admire them, but this modest portrait did for me what all the best art did: it drew me in, and held me captivated.

Yuri said, ‘It’s too bad we don’t have a copy of this in our gift shop, since you’re fond of it.’

Flattered he’d remembered just how fond of it I was, from my last trip here, I replied, ‘I really don’t mind coming here to visit him. And anyway, it wouldn’t be the same. A print would never have this kind of depth.’ Even though I was with Yuri, I could feel the keen eyes of the woman supervisor seated in the corner settle on me out of habit as I leant a little closer to the portrait. ‘I always wonder,’ I told Yuri, ‘who he was, and how he lived, and what it was about him that caught Briullov’s eye.’

‘You see, for me it is the people who have owned the painting,’ Yuri said, ‘that always make me wonder. What their lives were like, and how they came to have this. Why they let it go.’ As though inspired by my own fascination with the portrait, he looked closer, too. ‘A painting like this would have witnessed a great many things. It’s a pity we can’t see what it has seen, over the years.’

I could tell him, I knew. I could touch it and tell him who’d owned it, and give him a glimpse of their lives. What surprised me was not that I realised the fact, but how much I was actually tempted to do it. My hand almost lifted and I had to catch myself, not wanting to alarm the woman supervisor.

Even after Yuri had excused himself and gone back to his work, I lingered a while longer in my study of the portrait, and the urge to touch it was a thing that took some effort to control.

Only a week ago, I’d been half-dreading holding the Firebird carving a second time, and it rattled me now that the wanting to touch and to learn was becoming a kind of compulsion.

That feeling didn’t lessen when I left the painting and the room and wound my way back through the crowded galleries. Come find me, Rob had said, and yet my mind was too distracted to allow for focused searching, so I didn’t try.

I slowed my steps in the Pavilion Hall, a soaring bright space with a high open gallery running around it, supported by rows of white columns and graceful vaults patterned with gleaming gold leaf. From the intricate pale parquet floors to the light-coloured marble and elegant high-arched French windows that looked out across the broad Neva, this was a space that spoke to me of privilege and of royalty. I felt the pull of other voices speaking, too, and trying to be heard.