Jane Riley doesn’t know.

No more than she knows how much life it can buy for 14-year-old Ilya Fedotov who won’t make it on dialysis alone. He’ll have to have a kidney transplant if he’s to live long enough to know how deep his talent as an artist really runs.

But for now, for a while at least, his talent is deep enough and his plight sad enough to attract Jane Riley and members of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church and their friends to look at 24 pieces of his work — and buy them.

We told his story in this space a little over a week ago. How Jane and her husband, John, went to Russia in 1997 and visited St. Sophia’s, a cathedral in Pushkin, that has become a mission of St. Luke’s.

World War II left it badly damaged. Communists used it as a garbage dump and incinerator after the war.

But now ashes that nearly filled the inside are gone. The doors are open again. And worshippers once more fill the inside.

Jane and John were pleased with what they saw when they attended a service there. And touched by a young boy who offered a basket of small pieces of bread for the communion service. Jane, herself the mother of three grown sons, will never forget the first moment she looked down and saw Ilya looking up at her.

Then she met him again in the priest’s office,when he came in to show his paintings, and learned that he had to have a kidney transplant. She came home committed to doing something for him. But commitment isn’t always enough. Nothing that she tried worked. And both his kidneys are diseased. Then came a letter from from Igor Tolochin, who is their translator.

Ilya, who’s on dialysis three times a week, needs money for medications, Tolochin wrote. Maybe Jane could sell some of his paintings.

So she and church friends priced and displayed his work — and people bought.

And I could hear it. Her voice on my answering machine is up at least an octave from its usual gentle tone.

“We sold all the paintings!” she exults, “and someone just made another donation! I am speechless. It’s wonderful beyond our wildest hopes! We’re very, very happy and soooo very grateful to all the supporters who came and to those who made very generous donations.”

If someone wants to buy a packet of 10 “very lovely note cards ” Jane had printed with one of Ilya’s pen-and-ink drawings, they’re available at the office in the Canterbury House on the corner of Council and Church streets across from the church. The light, airy drawing depicts a Russian street scene with the familiar onion domes.

“When we get the medical information from his doctors,” Jane says, “we’ll proceed with what can be done here about a transplant.”

But to help him last that long, “all this money,” she says, still unable to believe they raised $5,319.10, will go directly into Ilya’s medical fund. “It will mean the world to him.”