20 grams of holy water

The village of Kuremäe is in one of the most sparsely populated areas of North Estonia. The houses cluster around a hill which is the home to a sprawling monastery, the Pühtitsa Dormition Convent, which started as an Orthodox Russian nunnery in 1891. The village has an estimated population of 271 people, most of whom are nuns.

From Paldiski, it is two trains and a local bus to get to Kuremäe, just under five hours travel if you time it right. The bus runs three times a day; the village is the end of the line. As we all disembarked, I stopped for a moment to look at the monastery and feel the afternoon sun on my skin.

One of the other passengers, a tall man with stooped shoulders and a lined face, stopped and looked at me, standing there. He asked me something in Russian. I recognised him: he had been sitting in the front seat and nonstop chatting at the bus driver for the hour-long trip. Now I saw that his clothes were worn and he was missing his front teeth.

I shrugged helplessly, not sure which language I should use to say that no, I don’t speak Russian.

He frowned. “German?” He asked in English, which did nothing to clear my language confusion.

“Deutsch,” I said, the German word for German. “Ja, ich spreche Deutsch.”

He looked shocked, as if he hadn’t actually expected me to say yes. I was surprised too, but he was Russian-speaking and around my age, exactly the right generation for German to have been the preferred second language in school. He spoke quickly in heavily accented German. Was it my first time here? He looked disappointed when I said no, I’d been before. But he recovered quickly, explaining that he was there for the water. Was I there for the water? Was I staying at the convent?

“The hostel at the apothecary,” I said, trying to keep up with the rush of questions. He carried on without pause. He worked for the church, he said, they didn’t pay him but it was still work. He sounded a touch defensive as he explained some connection to Germany, his grandfather, Russia. He mentioned Riga, the Latvian capital city and then the Estonian/Latvian border town of Valga and then another place that I had never heard of. The Russian church, he told me, would have someone visiting.

I blinked. Luckily, it seemed that a response was not needed.

He flitted from subject to subject, including details of Russian Orthodoxy as if I were a member, using phrases and titles that sounded vaguely religious to me but nothing that I knew anything about. Then, with no context whatsoever, he asked if I had four euros.

“Um, maybe,” I said, remembering that my wallet was heavy with change.

“Really?” He looked shocked again.

I checked my change. “Yes,” I said. “I do. Lucky day.” I emptied the coins into my hand and held it out to him. His chest and shoulders were broad and I thought that he might once have been very strong. His remaining teeth looked white and sturdy: I’d assumed lack of dental care but now I wondered about an accident or maybe a bar brawl? He had that sort of look, as if he would never flinch in the face of danger.

He took the coins and thanked me and explained that he’d worked on a ship before and then for the church in Valga and he was doing other work, but it only paid a hundred euros a week, maybe not even that. I didn’t know if he meant then or now or what kind of work or what type of ship. He asked me my name.

“Sylvia,” I told him. “And yours?”

“Sergei,” he said, and then laughed. “My father was Alexander. We have very common names.” I struggled to understand him after that, something about German Russians. I had lost all context, again, and soon had no idea at all what he was talking about. I glanced down the hill, wondering how to make my escape.

“You should go,” he said. “I should go.” He put the coins in his pocket and then looked embarrassed. “Should I carry your bag?”

“Don’t be silly.” He looked relieved but didn’t move. It was going to be awkward now if I carried it. He’d told me that he was here for the water, the sacred spring at the bottom of the hill. I looked in the opposite direction. An old woman sat under an awning, selling pots of honey from the convent’s hives. I had no room in my bag for a kilo of honey. Besides, I’d just given away my change. Still, I could look.

“I’m just going buy some honey,” I said. He nodded and stepped back and I crossed the street before he could start talking again. When I glanced back, he was walking down the hill.

The spring was already described as ancient in 1910, when it was known as Ohvriallika, the sacrificial spring. People would leave coins or flowers (the sacrifice) as a thank you for the healing properties and blessings of the spring. In the 12th century, the Votians claimed the hill and the spring as holy land before they were driven out by invaders. Before them, who knows?

I’d brought a hydration pack that fit in my backpack, so I could drink the famous waters while hiking in the local area. I was reliving childhood memories. My grandfather used to take me walking in Odenwald, the forest of Odin, leaving before dawn on a Sunday morning. Each trip, we would collect water at a different forest spring. As a child, I thought that we had discovered them together, in the middle of the forest, what luck? Now, it is obvious that he had planned the walks that way. My grandparents had lived in Odenwald after the war and he’d probably scouted these walks out for his children decades before taking me there. Perhaps, though, following those half remembered paths from a previous life, I didn’t imagine his happiness each time we actually found a spring.

Here, there were no surprises. A curved cobblestone road led to a fairy-tale stone bridge and the brick building of the blessed spring with a small tiled pool marked with a cross. It was dry.

Next to the bridge, built over the stream, was a wooden hut. The first time I came here, two women in black and white habits stood in the wooden doorway. They called out when they saw me looking at the dried-out basin.

One of them had pointed and waved her hand to show me that the spring was there now, a few hundred metres downstream. I followed the beat-down grass where she had pointed and soon found the spot.

Today, the doors to the wooden stream-hut were closed and a man sat on the bench outside. To my surprise, he called out to me. It was Sergei. He was waiting for the water, he told me. Something about the women, that they were using the water first. I smiled and said I was going to collect water from the spring.

“Already been.” He opened his backpack and showed me a battered plastic bottle full of water. Then he got out a cup. Did I want to borrow it? So that I could drink the water?

I opened my backpack to show him my hydration pack which I was quite proud of, really, but he had already changed the subject again. He had to get the water first, he said, because he’d run out. He took 20 grams every morning to treat the trauma to his back, as if it were a prescription. The next few sentences went straight past me as I tried to work out how much 20 grams of water was. Not much more than a sip, I thought, and then realised he was still talking. “This is all I have left,” he told me.

The water? The pilgrimage? I didn’t know what to say. “I’m going to the spring,” I repeated.

He didn’t seem offended, just pointed me on that same beat-down grass path towards the spring and dropped his backpack onto the ground.

The path was a bit muddier than I remembered as I walked downstream, smiling at a couple coming towards me, each holding two plastic bottles. Visitors come all year around to collect the water, following the ancient ritual. Bathing in the spring water was a more recent custom, the Estonian woman who ran the hostel had told me. “Russians,” she said with an easy-going shrug, as if that explained everything.

The off-kilter wooden railing came into view through the trees, marking the path of stone slabs for kneeling over the spring. A plastic table covering had been glued to a rickety table covered in pots, pitchers and siphons to collect the water. I knelt on the concrete platform, precariously close to the cold water. The reflection of the blue sky and clouds was broken by the tiny silver bubbles of the spring. The water was icy cold, chilling my fingers as I dipped the small saucepan into the depths.

Once I had drunk my fill and filled my bag, I walked back through the rustling trees. The door to the wooden hut was open. There didn’t seem to be any one around. I peeked in. There was a hole in the wooden floor and a ladder leading down to the running water. Here, I realised, was where you could immerse yourself in the water. I wondered how it worked. Did the nuns bathe here every day? Once they were gone, did Sergei enter alone, closing the door behind him, so he could strip and lower himself into the stream? Did you have to bring your own towel? How deep was it? Were there any fish? River trout? I regretted that I had stopped him from talking. I shouldn’t have rushed off so quickly, losing the opportunity to find out more.

I climbed the hill and found Sergei again, waiting at the bus stop on the far side of the road. The old woman packing up her honey into the back seat of her car. I waved to get his attention just as the last bus of the day pulled up. He called out to me. “You are staying?”

“Yes.” Did he think I might have changed my mind at the last minute? Perhaps he had just forgotten. It seemed nice that he was checking, as if I wanted to get out of Kuremäe, I needed to be on that bus.

“Sleep,” he said, and then something else I didn’t quite catch. “I almost always do it well.” He stood there, waiting for my response.

“Sleep?” I shouted across the road at him, starting to worry that the bus might leave without him. The old woman paused to watch us.

“Yes.” He nodded seriously. “Here, yes. Almost always.”

The bus driver said something and he lifted a hand towards me.

“Tschüß, Sergei” I called out, a colloquial goodbye. He flashed me a smile, the first one. The bus pulled away just as soon as he stepped up, before the door had finished closing.

I thought about me, with my 1.5 litres of cold water in my hydration pack, and Sergei with his well-worn plastic bottle of healing water and the sacrificial spring. People like us, Russian, German, Latvian, Estonian, Votian, had gathered here for at least 900 years, drawn by the spring’s magical promise.

If I left a gift, the way they did in the old days, maybe I could wish for something better, for me, for Sergei. Or maybe we were both already doing ok. Maybe I should just wish that we both sleep well tonight.

I sipped another 20 grams of holy water as the bus disappeared down the windy road.