THE ICON

“No,” I told my granddaughters Chloe and Astrid, “this is not a picture, it’s an icon.”

I know that the “icons” on their tablets or smart phones don’t look like that at all, and that got me wondering. My husband Rick and I have been talking about our Final Exit plans, and what would happen to all our stuff once we’re gone? Would our kids be interested in any of it, and how much would this icon, among others, fetch at a sale?

It’s a fairly small icon, about four inches by six, but its facing is made of silver, and the halos of the Mother and Child, and especially the Virgin’s robe, are delicately patterned into a floral design.  Well, there are a couple spots of wear, particularly the one close to the bottom edge. One of the flowers on the Virgins’ mantle now looks like a face with two big eyes and a wide-open mouth.

The faces of the Mother and Child, however, painted on wood under the carved silver cover, are well enough preserved. The icon must date to the nineteenth century. By then the Byzantine tradition of icon painting had evolved. The saints’ unnaturally elongated, somber faces and inner-directed gaze now came to reflect the vision of the icon painter Andrei Rublev. The facial expressions are quiet and meditative – no eyes lifted heavenward in a fit of Baroque ecstasy of the later European tradition.

The icon in question belonged to my grandmother, my dear Babushka, and was given to her by her uncle the bishop on her wedding day (date unknown). In 1917 the Russian Revolution broke out and in 1920 Babushka received word from her husband, who was fighting on the White side of the Civil War, to gather up their two daughters and try to escape. She landed with other refugees on the Greek Island of Lemnos. The refugees there suffered various epidemics, and Babushka’s youngest daughter, Galina, died of scarlet fever. I imagine that the icon was present as Babushka buried her little girl. It is in memory of my young aunt that I too was named Galina. 

My grandparents did eventually reconnect in Yugoslavia, but their marriage did not hold, and they became divorced. Much later Babushka revealed to me that she had been engaged not to Grandfather (Nikolai) but to his brother Dimitri. But Dimitri had been killed in the early days of World War I – and Babushka was talked into marrying his brother, Grandfather Nikolai. Despite the fact that the icon’s blessing failed in

Babushka’s case, it was called upon to bless my parents’ wedding as well. But that union also ended in divorce.  But then again, you could cite extenuating circumstances.

Babushka was, after all, marrying the wrong guy. And as Mom told me, when she looked up at the icon during the blessing, she noticed that the priest was holding it upside down. 

Still, whether the icon was to blame for the family’s marital failures or not, it continued to be part of our lives. My own earliest memory of the icon must go back to when I was about five years old. We lived in Belgrade, still the capital of Yugoslavia then. I was the youngest of a gang of friends, and proud to be accepted. My friends told me to look under the pillow on Babushka’s bed where she kept her purse, and take out a few dinars. I did so and accompanied my friends to the corner candy store, where we bought something called “lilihip.” Supposedly a “Turkish delight,” it was a very sweet-white-gooey-mealy blob that stuck to my teeth and I pretended to like. Encouraged by my companions, I repeated my performance a couple times and we pigged out on more lilihip.

I don’t remember how Babushka and Mom addressed the mystery of the missing dinars. The day Mom decided to mend the hole in the lining of my coat pocket, and found some coins jingling in the bottom of it, the mystery was a mystery no longer. What followed was a very big deal. Babushka cried, and Mom made me kneel in front of the icon, and went on and on about begging for forgiveness. I was in a quandary. What are you supposed to do when friends expect you to come through for them? It was a tough choice, but I loved Babushka too and didn’t want her to cry anymore. So, I looked up to the icon again, and the Mother and Child looked back at me. There was a lampada or votive light flickering in front of the icon, and it seemed that Baby Jesus’ hand, raised in blessing, just moved a little.

The next episode with the icon happened the following year. We had to go away. The year was 1944, another war was going on, and we were in the middle of it. First the Germans had bombed us, then the Americans, and now the Russians were going to liberate us, and that’s why we had to go away. Go figure: don’t even try. Anyway, Dad was going to take us away in his truck, so Babushka took out the big suitcase from under her bed, and began to pack. She took down the icon from the corner shelf and brought it out to the porch. She took a hammer and smashed the thick wooden frame and glass facing that protected it. Then she wiped the icon carefully, wrapped it in a silk scarf, and placed it in the suitcase. 

The next episode of the icon’s intervention takes place in Germany. I now understood that we had ended up in Germany because we wanted to be liberated by the Americans and not the Russians. But the war was still going on in 1944 and we now lived in Blankenburg in what they called a labor camp. We lived in a big, dark, damp, cold place with lots of other people and our bunk beds stood so close that they almost touched. There was no shelf to put up the icon, so I imagine that it remained in Babushka’s suitcase.

Then the Americans came at last and we moved to Munich, and there the labor camp became a “displaced persons” camp. We now shared a room with only one other family, so Dad put up a shelf for the icon, and life went on. One day there was some trouble on the school grounds. I don’t think it was the German kids spitting at us anymore: after all, “we” had won the war. But there was a fight and during the scuffle I fell and hit my head on a stone. They brought me home to the barracks and I was put to bed. A fellow-refugee who was a doctor came by, and I don’t know what he said. Dad sat by me all night holding my hand, and all night, Mom kneeled in front of the icon and talked to it. I would drift off to sleep and wake up and there they were: Dad, and Mom, and the icon. The doctor friend came back in the morning, and said I was going to be O.K. 

I was O.K., and it was time to prepare for our next adventure: we were going to go to Africa. It wasn’t like the place I had imagined with tigers and monkeys like in The Jungle Book. It was stony and bare, but I was told that they did have snakes – only cobras instead of pythons. The little mining town we came to was located on the side of the Atlas range that slopes into the Saharan Desert. There were plenty of scorpions there as well, but no school. The country was Morocco and they spoke Arabic and French there. I had managed in Russian, Serbo-Croatian and German thus far, but now school would be

conducted in French. So, I would have to go to a boarding school in Marrakech run by nuns, and instead of icons they had crucifixes and statues of the Virgin. The Virgin’s face was sort of bland, and even Jesus on the Cross looked like he was asleep.

There were a few Russian émigré families in Marrakech, and they took turns taking me out on weekends. One of these families had transformed their garage into a makeshift Russian Orthodox church, and an elderly priest came from Casablanca to celebrate the liturgy once in a while. We kids were turning into teenagers, and found plenty to snigger

about. Our favorite occasion had to do with Misha’s grandmother. We stood patiently through the interminable service, waiting for the moment when she would do her thing. She usually stood right in front, and when the priest called on us to pray for the soul of blessed Nicolas II, the saintly martyr who had been killed by the Bolsheviks during the Revolution, she would turn around, and make a big show of stomping out. She had known him, and HE WAS STILL ALIVE! We kids would look at each other, half choking with giggles and half wondering whether maybe the Tsar would walk right in, dripping blood from every wound.

But soon enough all this fuss about martyrs and saints and icons took a backseat to figuring out boys. They were only too real, trying to kiss and touch me in dark corners. They were rough and I didn’t care for them that much. But there was this one older boy, and I let him do it. The problem, though, it was a sin. I knew better than to ask Mom or Babushka (what would they know?) and decided to do the obvious thing: go to confession.

The elderly priest sighed a deep sigh when I whispered my problems to him. He put his hand on my head ever so gently, and passed the buck: He told me to pray to the most holy Virgin and blessed Mother of God. Our icon was now installed on a corner shelf in Babushka’s room. When I got to go home during the next vacation, I kneeled in front of it the way Mom and Babushka had done, and waited. The blessed Virgin, her head gently bent toward the Holy Child, looked composed and peaceful, yet I thought I discerned a faint smile. What could she really tell me, she who had borne a child and never even messed with boys?

It looked like I was on my own. They tell you (the nuns did) that you can’t wear a white dress on your wedding day if you let a boy do things to you. But there are those strong feelings that come over you – and some of the boys are real cute… If that’s how babies come to grow in your belly, what are you supposed to do? Wait for the day the icon will bless you on your wedding day? What if it’s the wrong guy, like with Babushka? What if you want to go to Paris and study at the Sorbonne instead of having babies? So which part was the sin – fooling around with boys or having a baby?

Life can get complicated. I was seventeen when I met some Evangelical Christians. They invited me to their worship hall, and it was a relief not to be surrounded by watchful icons or plaster saints. They told me that all the answers were in the Holy Book. In the meantime, it was strongly suggested that “graven images” were idolatry plain and simple. I had my own disappointments with the icon – so when I met an elderly Russian woman who had lost everything, I gave her our icon.

It was missed right away, and I boldly explained my action to the family, quoting the relevant passages from the Bible. My parents quoted some Biblical passages of their own and insisted that I get back what was not mine to give away. I had to deal with the embarrassment of going back to the woman to retrieve my gift. But she was gracious, and the icon regained its position on Babushka’s corner shelf.

From then on, the icon’s story becomes muted, even if the story of our family continued to take unexpected turns. Well, it would not have been altogether unexpected that the Moroccans would wish to take their country back from the French, and so we needed to find another safe place. This turned out to be Australia, and that’s where we ended up in 1958. There I met Rick, who was Belgian born, but whose parents worked for an American company in New York. We got married and moved to the U.S. in 1962. Our wedding had been a modest civil affair – no white dress and no divine blessings. The icon stayed back with my Mom in Sydney.

It wasn’t until Mother died in 1988 that the icon came into my life again. I was happy to have it back, and every time I look at it, it’s as if my sweet Babushka, whose bones rest somewhere in France, and my Mom and Dad, whose bones rest in a Russian Orthodox cemetery in Sydney, were with me again. I have arranged to have it re-framed and protected with a glass front just as I remember it back in the day when Babushka broke the frame and placed the icon in her suitcase.

And so, my dear Chloe and Astrid, it will be up to you one of these days to make your decisions about the icon. There are many ways an object can be sacred. Since time immemorial people believed in supernatural beings. They figured it took that kind of divine power to rule the world and its unpredictable ways. So, they fashioned objects which they invested with sacred power to help them figure out right from wrong. At other times they rebelled against such beliefs, and tried to figure out life and make choices for themselves. The family icon bears traces of some of these beliefs and efforts. In the end,

the most sacred power the icon holds is the power of love it witnessed in our lives despite all the troubles and failures. And that power of love is what I leave you with this icon.