In Lausanne in 1961, I met a priest who baptized me. It was a very funny meeting, because I went there as a young bishop (young by consecration), met him, and said, "Father Constantine, I'm so glad to see you again!" I said: "Father Constantine! Shame on you, we've known each other for years – and you don't recognize me?!" – "No, I'm sorry, I don't recognize me..." – "Why, you baptized me,," Well, he got very excited, called his parishioners who were there: look, he said, I baptized a bishop.. And the next Sunday I was in his church, in the middle of the church there was a book where baptisms are recorded, he showed me, he said: "What does it mean, I baptized you as Andrei – why are you Anthony now?" And then he served and read the Gospel in Russian, and I didn't find out that it was Russian... We spoke in French, he served in Greek, and he read the Gospel in my honor in Russian language – it's good that someone told me: did you notice how he tried to please you, how wonderfully he reads Russian?.. Well, I thanked him cautiously.

     For two months after my birth, we lived with my parents in Lausanne, and then returned to Russia. At first we lived in Moscow, in the present Scriabin Museum, and in 1915-1916 my father was again assigned to the East, and we left for Persia. And there I spent the second part of my relatively early childhood, up to the age of seven.

     I have no clear memories of Persia, only fragmentary ones. For example, I can see a number of places with my eyes now, but I could not tell where these places are. For example, I see a large city gate; it may be Tehran, maybe Tabriz, or maybe not; for some reason it seems to me that this is Tehran or Tabriz. Then we traveled a lot, lived in about ten different places.

     Then I have a memory (I think I was five or six years old) of how we settled not far from Tehran, I think, in a mansion surrounded by a large garden. We went to see him. It was quite a big house, the whole garden was overgrown and dry, and I remember walking and dragging my feet through the dry grass, because I liked the crackle of that dry grass.

     I remember that I had my own ram and my own dog; The dog was torn apart by other, street dogs, and the ram was torn apart by someone's dog, so it was all very tragic. The ram had peculiar habits: every morning he came to the living room, took flowers out of all the vases with his teeth and did not eat them, but put them on the table next to the vase and then lay down in an armchair, from which he was mostly expelled; That is, at one time they were always expelled, but with more or less indignation. Gradually, you know, everything becomes a habit; The first time there was great indignation, and then just another event: we need to drive the sheep and throw it out...

     There was a donkey who, like all donkeys, was stubborn. And in order to ride it, first of all, we had to hunt, because we had a large park, and the donkey, of course, preferred to graze in the park, and not to perform his donkey duties. And we went out in a whole group, crawled between the trees, surrounded the animal, one frightened it from one side, it rushed to the other, pounced on it, and finally, after an hour or an hour and a half of such a lively hunt, the donkey was caught and saddled. But it did not end there, for he had learned that if he fell to the ground and began to roll on his back before the saddle was placed on him, it would be much more difficult to saddle him. The local Persians weaned him from this by attaching a Persian wooden saddle to him instead of a Russian Cossack saddle, and the first time he fell down and fell on his back, he instantly took off with a howl, because it was painful. But it didn't end there, because he had a principle: if you want one thing from him, then you have to do another, and so if you wanted him to move somewhere, you had to deceive him, as if you wanted him not to go. And the best way was to sit real high on the Persian saddle, catch the donkey by the tail and pull it back, and then it would go fast forward. Here is a memory.

     I also have a memory of the first railway. There was one railway for the whole of Persia, about fifteen kilometers long, between either Tehran or Tabriz and a place called Kermanshah and revered (I don't remember why) a place of pilgrimage. And everything was going great when we drove from Kermanshah to the city, because the road went downhill. But when the train was going to pull up, it would come to the bridge, the one with the hump, and then all the men would get out, and the whites, the Europeans, the nobles, would walk beside the train, and the less noble men would push. And when it was pushed through this hump, it was possible to get back on the train and even get there very safely, which was, in general, very entertaining and a great event: well, think about it – fifteen kilometers of railway!

     Then, when I was about seven, I made the first great discovery of European culture: the first time in my life I saw a car. I remember my grandmother took me to the car, put me down, and said, "When you were little, I taught you that you don't stand behind a horse, because it can kick; Now remember: you don't stand in front of the car, because it can go." Back then, cars were only on the brakes, so you never know whether it will go or not.

     Did you have any tutors?

     In Persia there was a Russian nanny at first; then there was a period, approximately from 1918 to 1920, when there was no one – grandmother, mother; There were various Persians who taught how to ride a donkey and things like that. I can't say anything about cultural life, because I don't remember, in general, anything. It was a blissful time – I didn't go to school, they didn't teach me anything, they "developed", as my grandmother used to say. My grandmother was wonderful; she read an awful lot aloud to me, so that I "read" a lot in the first years: Brehm's "The Life of Animals", three or four volumes, all the children's books - you can imagine. Grandma could read for hours and hours, and I could listen for hours and hours. I would lie on my stomach, draw, or just sit and listen. And she could read; firstly, she read beautifully and well, secondly, she knew how to pause in those moments when it was necessary to give time to react somehow; From time to time she stopped reading, we went for a walk, and she started conversations about what we read about: moral assessments, so that it reached me not as entertainment, but as a contribution, and this was very valuable, I think.

     In 1920 we began to move out of Persia: a change of government, the transfer of the embassy, etc. My father stayed, and my mother, grandmother and I, we set off on a road somewhere in the West. We had a diplomatic passport for England, where we never arrived; Or rather, they arrived, but much later, in 1949. And so, partly on horseback, partly in a carriage, they rode through the north of Persia in the dead of winter, under the escort of robbers, because this was the most certain thing to do. In Persia at that time it was possible to travel under two escorts: either robbers or Persian soldiers. And the most unfaithful thing was the convoy of Persian soldiers, because they will certainly rob you, but you cannot complain about them: how is that? We didn't even think of robbing them! We defended them! Someone attacked them, but we don't know, probably in disguise.. If robbers appeared, the convoy immediately disappeared: why would the soldiers fight, risk their lives to be robbed themselves?! And with the robbers it was much more certain: they either guarded you or simply robbed you.

     Well, under the escort of robbers, we drove through the entire north of Persia, crossed Kurdistan, boarded a barge, drove past the earthly paradise: even before the Second World War, they showed the earthly paradise and the tree of Good and Evil – where the Tigris and the Euphrates join. This is a wonderful picture: the Euphrates is wide, blue, and the Tigris is fast, and its waters are red, and it cuts into the Euphrates, and a few hundred meters can still be seen in the blue waters of the Euphrates a stream of red waters of the Tigris... And there is a rather large clearing in the forest and in the middle of the clearing a small withered tree fenced with a lattice: you understand that it has dried up since then, of course... It is all hung with small rags: in the East at that time (I don't know how it is now), when you passed by some holy place, you tore off a piece of clothing and hung it from a tree or a bush, or, if it was impossible to do this, you put a stone, and you got such heaps. And there this tree stood; it almost crashed, because during the Second World War, American soldiers dug it up, loaded it into a jeep and were about to take it to America: the Tree of Good and Evil is much more interesting than transporting some Gothic cathedral, after all, it is much older. And the local population surrounded them and did not allow the jeep to move until the command was warned and they were forced to dig back into the tree of Good and Evil. So it's probably still there...

     During this period, I smoked for the first and last time. On the way it was surprisingly hungry and even more, perhaps, boring, and I kept whining to be given something to eat to pass the time. And there was nothing to eat, and my mother tried to distract my attention with a cigarette. For a week I tried smoking, sucked on one cigarette, sucked on another, sucked on a third, but I realized that the cigarette was a pure deception, that it was not food or entertainment, and that was the end of my career as a smoker. Then he also did not smoke, but not at all for virtuous reasons. I was told: you will smoke like everyone else, but I did not want to be like everyone else. After that, they said that you would smoke when you got to the anatomical theater, because otherwise no one could stand it, and I decided that I would die, but I would not smoke; they said that when I got into the army, I would smoke; But he never lit a cigarette.

     Thus we came to Basra, and as there were mines in the ocean at that time, the shortest way to the west was from Basra to India, and we went east to India; We lived there for a month, and the only thing I remember is the red color of the Bombay buildings; the high towers where the Parsees put their dead to be eaten by birds of prey, and flocks of eagles and other birds of prey circled around these towers; It's the only memory I have left, except for the barely unbearable heat.