German Pray

I always considered myself a rational woman. There was no room in my life for ghosts—only numbers, reports, morning runs, and a match in a glass. Fairy tales, mysticism, and all that nonsense like numerology were things only people with big gaps in their education believed in. My life, my Moscow, was confined to the glass of skyscrapers, the apartment in Cheryomushki inherited from my grandmother Maria Genrikhovna, and comfortable public transport on the way to work—until this whole nightmare began.

One autumn evening last year changed my calm and measured Moscow life. A video popped up in my TikTok feed: a girl in a hood, her face distorted with fear, whispering near the fence of the German Cemetery that she could hear music coming from underground. “There’s an entrance to the underground city of the plague victims,” the comments said. I laughed, saved the video “for memory.

”Three days later, I had a dream. I was standing in that very cemetery, and from underground came the clear sound of a harpsichord. And a voice—someone’s insistent, calling voice, but muffled, as if from beneath the earth—called my name. “Elvira… Elvira.

”The next morning I went there. Just to check, to prove my own sanity to myself. The cemetery was ordinary, but of course European—after all, it was Lefortovo, the former German Quarter. Here, among these crypts, lay those who built Peter’s fleet and treated the tsars—engineers, doctors, apothecaries. I had read about all this once. Russia had accepted them, but in 1771, when the plague began mowing down Moscow, an enraged mob started a riot, accusing—of course—them, the Germans, Dutch, and Danes, of spreading the European contagion. Here in Lefortovo, entire families of “infidels” were slaughtered, accused of spreading the plague. There was no time to bury them. Their bodies were burned in their own homes or thrown into mass graves without names or funeral rites.

At the Vvedenskoye Cemetery (as it is called now), crooked crosses and fallen leaves greeted me, together creating a frightening Gothic vibe. But deeper in, closer to the wall of the Lutheran church, I saw a crypt. Tiny, almost invisible behind a fence of neatly trimmed bushes. On its rusty door was a bas-relief of an angel with its head broken off. That very head lay in the nettles, and the angel’s empty eye sockets stared straight at me.

I raised my iPhone to take a photo, and at that moment I heard it. Not the creaking of trees, not the noise of the city, nor the cawing of black crows. It was a string quartet. Perfectly clear, as if played through headphones, but now the sound came from behind the door.

Common sense told me I should run. But my feet carried me forward on their own. The door was ajar; an icy draft poured from the black crack, smelling of incense, damp earth, and… copper, and blood.

“Elvira, turn back,” everything inside me screamed. “Right now, turn back!” But I pulled the door toward me.

Inside there was no crypt—just a narrow stone staircase descending into pitch darkness. The steps were wet and sticky. I turned on the flashlight and began to descend. My body was covered in icy sweat, my heart pounding wildly somewhere in my throat. I counted thirty steps when I heard whispering. Dozens, hundreds of voices merging into an indistinct hum, calling my name. And then they began to sing. It was a chorale in German. “Christe, du Lamm Gottes…” Lamb of God.

Finally the staircase ended, and I found myself on a night street. But not a modern Moscow one—rather a Moscow one, but as if I had stepped onto a Mosfilm set during the shooting of a historical series. Only here there were no props. The pavement was cobblestone, half-timbered houses with carved shutters stood on either side. In the bluish light of oil lanterns, people crowded in frock coats and dresses with panniers. Their skin was covered in black buboes that pulsed like living things. Some led children by the hand. The children carried their own little coffins—small, polished ones.

A man in glasses and a black frock coat approached me. The bubo on his neck moved like a second throat.

“Fr;ulein,” he said in German, then switched to Russian with a noticeable accent. “Madam, we have been waiting for you for two hundred and fifty-three years. We did not call you, but you came yourself.

”I recoiled. He smiled, revealing blackened gums. “The door with the broken angel… the last one that remained open. The others were sealed after the riot. But since you entered… you are now part of the city and of us. We have been waiting for you for so long because we cannot depart to the other world forever. Fr;ulein Elvira, we were not given funeral rites after death during the plague riot in Lefortovo—we were all killed or burned without repentance. Please do it, you—for German blood flows in your veins. Your great-great-grandmother, Anna-Maria, was a Lutheran, a German. She survived then by leaving the German Quarter on the eve. And we remained.

”I ran back. Up the wet steps, toward the barely visible spot of light. Behind me the hum grew—footsteps, creaking wheels, children’s crying; it seemed they were all running after me. I heard their voices merging into one desperate plea: “Sing us out, Fr;ulein Elvira, sing us out in the church!” And they recited names, one after another, in a chant like a prayer: “Henrietta… Heinrich… Irmengard… Friedrich… Irmgard… Karl… Irma… Ludwig… Christina… Wilhelm… Frederica… Konrad… Gottlieb… Augusta… Bernardine… Ermengard…”

I burst out onto the surface and fell into the autumn leaves. The door slammed shut with a crash.

Now I’m home. I’ve been home for six months already, but I’m only writing this now. That same night and every night since, at 3:17, the same thing begins. First—a quiet harpsichord arpeggio. Then—the chorale, and then—creaking. Not behind the apartment door, but right in the wall behind my bed. The plaster cracks, and through the fissure seeps that same smell—incense, copper, and blood—and they call their names, again and again.

They don’t come to visit. They are already here. And they no longer need the door.

For six months now, almost every day I go to that same Lutheran church in Lefortovo and hand the pastor a note with a single name from those I hear every night. I don’t explain why. I simply pay him a hundred rubles for the commemoration.