Kolya

The story was that he’d cured a woman of her cancer. And then another one a few weeks later. His reputation grew. He grew a beard and changed his clothes. You could still find pictures of him on Vkontakte looking like any other guy of his age from a backwater town in the outer orbit of the capital city. He worked at a food processing plant, lived with a girl and on the weekends drove out to the forest with shashlik skewers and his friends. After several more apparently miraculous events in the town, he thought he’d try his luck in Moscow and present himself to the Patriarch. A natural in self-publicism, he sought out a donkey for his journey but in the end when none was forthcoming, decided he’d go on foot for all 350 miles.

Second Comings are not uncommon in Russia but there was something about him that convinced people. By the time he reached Troitsk, 25 miles outside Moscow, he had amassed a following of almost 1,000 people, trailing in a wake of tents and slow-moving vehicles. “My name is Kolya,” said a softly-spoken man to the news cameras in a dusky Troitsk car park. “I have come to forgive the world its sins.”

That was three weeks ago and now Kolya was in the city doing rather well for himself, having taken a suite at an expensive hotel in the north, an austere new-build haunted by officials and foreign businessmen. I had a commission to interview him for a magazine that would occasionally hire me to write lurid tales for the back pages. It paid well, at least relatively, and I envisaged it to be the sort of story that would write itself, the structure, the mood, the ending you already knew, like a fable or a ditty.

I left the metro damp and running late. The hotel was across two busy roads and a strip of parkland where happy dogs were splashing in the commemorative ponds. Kolya was busy seeing someone else when I reached the suite on the 9th floor. The bellboy, summoned from a cool corner of the lobby to show me up, excitedly referred to him as the “mystic” and said that he had ordered nothing but steak frites with ketchup since he had arrived. There was a security guy on the door; the bellboy slipped off with a grin. After half an hour or so there were low voices. The brawn opened the door and there, in the mirror lined entranceway, was a well-dressed young man bent down before his elderly mother, helping to put her shoes on. “God be with you!” she cried and the son bustled her away. 

This, I knew, was how Kolya was earning his handsome living. The first few miracles back home he had done gratis. Later on he courted donations. Then he demanded them. His stated ambition – to present himself to the Patriarch – was likely another stunt of his, a dignified vehicle by which to get him to Moscow, where the real money was to be had. To pay for the room he must have been making upward of £5,000 a week.

The small man swathed in a black cassock, sipping tea and reading a guidebook to Moscow, was not the mercenary I had in mind. In that vast and high-windowed room overlooking the wide Moskva, he looked as out of place as a mole aboveground. 

He didn’t notice me come in and went on leafing through the book. I said his name and he jumped. He regained his composure and put the book down beside him. 

“Pour yourself some tea,” said the mystic in a thin voice, motioning to the samovar on the sideboard, beside which were various devices and chargers, and a box of wagon wheels.

I crossed the room and sat down beside him on the sofa, tea in hand. Saying nothing, he smiled serenely and fixed me with eyes like berries in a bramble of beard and brows. As I patted my jacket packets in search of a dictaphone, making some introductory spiel, I noticed his slippers were not the same flimsy freebies I had been given at the door. Instead they were a pair of comfortably well-worn Manchester United ones. Drawing on scant footballing knowledge I made a remark about the club’s fortunes the previous season. He offered nothing in reply but almost seemed to wince slightly at the words. 

I tried again: “I saw them play at Anfield a few years ago. Van Persie won it with a last-minute penalty.”

“Yes, I saw that game on the television” he said softly, looking down at his feet before collecting himself. “But I do not feel this is an appropriate topic for conversation. Football belongs to the life of another man. That was Nikolai’s, you see. I am Kolya. And I have come to save the world and forgive its sins.”

“Understood,” I replied, pleased to get the ball rolling, “but if you are who you say you are then I think people would be interested to know – and have a right to know – a little more about who you are and where you came from. Your family, for instance. Can you tell me something about them?”

Now I smiled. But he was not to going to be drawn. He got up and walked over to the windows and picked up a bible. He could not have been more than 5’5”. 

“You are in the presence of someone very special,” he began, gently patting the book against his palm, “who has performed miracles, who has come to do God’s work, who people have put their faith in, yet you want to talk about football and my family. I’ll tell you about my family – they were very poor, they were very humble, as Joseph and Mary were too, the Virgin who gave birth in a stable surrounded by the animals. My mother birthed me in a corridor at Hospital No. 26. But my purpose is greater than that. The people of Russia, of the world, have been handed redemption in human form, the very form you see before you. People must hear this good news.”

He went on like this for several minutes, building in gusto and resembling more and more as he did the soap-box peddler of a small town square. He spoke fluently and clearly, had his lines well-honed, but I wasn’t interested in listening to his sales pitch. After a few more attempts at getting him to talk about anything else, I gave up. I’d go back to my flat, ring the editor and churn out a few hundred words, about another one of those funny little quiddities of modern Russian life. The Messiah is a Man Utd. Fan, nothing too heavy. “Keep it light,” the editor would say.

I switched off the dictaphone, and told him I had all I needed. “I hope you write a nice article,” he said, smiling serenely once more. It was beginning to get dark and I heard him click on the lamp behind me as I left. I put on my shoes and opened the door to leave. The doorman wasn’t alone in the corridor. In front of him was another lady of around 60, smartly dressed again, with a shawl wrapped around her head. I edged past and saw she was counting out with shaking hands a wadge of notes. “God be with you!” we said to one another.

By the end of August, the heatwave had broken and Kolya had vanished from Moscow. It wasn’t clear whether he had been hounded out by the authorities or simply run out of money. I checked his Vkontakte page every few days to see if he’d gone back to his girlfriend and the plant, but nothing. Eventually his page disappeared too. When I sat down to write the thing, suddenly it didn’t seem so clear-cut at all. 

I told the magazine so and asked for extension after extension until they forgot about it all together. It didn’t matter in any case, for by then some other subject had turned up, another chancer from the sticks who said he’d woken up one morning and realised he could play Liszt’s La Campanella. I didn’t bother wearing a suit to that appointment but he sat there in front of me and played for all the world like a concert pianist. 

Tom Ball is a journalist based in London.

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