I wanted to have a Christmas drink with the icon maker before I left Warsaw. He said 3pm.
I was in a restaurant, sitting at a small table by the window with an American-style menu where all the food was displayed in images; juicy burgers with forests of lettuce on top.
The yellow trams outside had their lights on, and the blue light of an ambulance was flashing at the entrance to a building across the street.
A mother and daughter sat at the table next to me. The teenager wore a white woollen jumper and high, black boots. She had blond hair and wiped her mouth very delicately with a serviette every time she placed a morsel of potato between her lips. The older woman watched her like a mother swan.
“I’ll be there at 3pm,” I said, speaking into my phone, as the waiter placed a credit card machine on the table beside me. “You like to pay in euro or zloty?” he asked.
“Euro,” I replied.
“Of course,” he said. “You are Irish.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
"I watch Father Ted continuously," he replied, without the slightest irony.
Swan feast
The swans at the next table watched me put on my coat with the clarity of animals who are feeding and detect a beast from elsewhere close by.
I left the restaurant and strolled through the crowds towards the old town and into a small bar, where the icon maker sat nursing a whiskey.
He’s a small man of middle age from Ukraine who wears old shirts and drinks whiskey with a quiet passion.
“I don’t know where my brother is,” he said to me after his first sip.
Through the bar window I could see the door of a church. For a moment I thought his brother might be joining us.
“No, my brother lives in Kiev,” he said. “But he is not there. Yesterday a friend went to his apartment. Everything was in its place. But he was not there.”
One great idea floated before us; there is a quiet war going on in Ukraine.
“I am an artist,” he said. “I ask no questions.”
As an artist he has worked across Europe for years. He spent decades in Berlin with elite auction houses, restoring paintings and period furniture, but his passion is icons. He has written them as large as life on the walls of churches from Moscow to Minsk. In Smolensk he worked on a great facade for the cathedral, creating a mosaic 7m high just below the dome and using more than one million individual mosaic bricks; 27,000 of them in gold.
His eyes devoured me, as if he was wondering what nature of flesh I had before he would eat me.
I began fiddling with my phone, found Spotify and tapped “Russian Choir” so that the little snug of tiny white lights filled with the chanting of orthodox monks. The lady behind the bar wagged her finger in disapproval, but the icon maker was delighted.
“When I am working on an icon, I listen to the monks all day with my earphones,” he said. “The music helps me physically.”
He made a gesture with his elbows, holding them out like wings. “The music holds my arms up, so I don’t get tired,” he said.”
There were large crowds heading in to the church across the street.
“God,” I said, pointing out the window. And he laughed, as if he understood this to be a word that has outlived its meaning for many western Europeans.
And yet, as we drank more whiskey, I wanted to tell him that I felt lonely without God. I wanted to tell him that beyond the loneliness of losing friends, or beyond the loneliness of grief after death, there is nothing more cutting than the blade of awakening that opens the heart when the last fragrance of God has withered.
And because it’s easy to move from Christmas lights in a Warsaw bar to a feed of spinach dumplings, we finished our whiskies and went to a cellar, where a matriarchy sat like fat cats at their soup.
There was some stillness in his gaze that pinned me down. I imagined him on the outside wall of the great cathedral in Smolensk, on the scaffolding, with his little golden bricks and his eyes fixed on the image. We ordered goulash and bread, and Russian pierogies, and we ate almost everything in silence.
“I can’t find my brother,” he said eventually when the food was finished, as he stared across the table at me.