Life Stories

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

  In short, they got married.

  She treated him with kid gloves; he was the apple of Aunt Sveta's eye.

  But suddenly he manifested a strange quirk of character.

  To Aunt Sveta's enormous anguish, he was constantly collecting grains, pasta and matches to tide him over in the dark days of old age, although they were both getting respectable individual retirement benefits, those of an innocent victim of Stalin's repressions and a veteran of the Fatherland War. Alas, this psychologically unbalanced captain would run with feverish eyes to the grocery store and use both her pension and his to buy up tons of grain and pasta.

  They didn't go to the theater, or the museum, or ride the little tourist tram along the river, just the two of them, like she'd always dreamed of doing; and they didn't go to the forest in autumn to rustle the fallen leaves, and they didn't go skiing in winter, not even once a season! God, no.

  Nikolai Mikhailovich Oreshkin turned out to be totally insane, and now there was absolutely nothing she could do about it.

  He crammed the kitchen cupboard full of grains and matches, then he stuffed the clothes closet and the linen cupboard full, and he even took to hiding bagfuls of boxes behind the stove and in the ceiling storage space, and by now grains were packed into every corner of the room: rice, buckwheat, millet and special Artek-brand millet porridge for children. The long and the short of it is that he filled up the entire apartment with his strategic reserves.

  Poor Aunt Sveta Bronstein, horrified, watched her living space shrink and observed what kind of person her chosen one was.

  Everyone told her to throw the scumbag the hell out, that executioner of innocent babes, that wolf in sheep's clothing. But no, she didn't throw him out, she didn't even confront him with accusations; clearly she was hoping, up to the very end, that she could get her extremely sad life in order.

  So when only one little patch of space was left free of pasta, grains and matches in all her familial home, she sat down on the floor, crossed her legs, and placed her hands in prayer position on her breast; having sat that way for about three and a half weeks, she entered peacefully, soundlessly, and with Christian humility into Nirvana.

  At this, all of Old Bolsheviks village was filled with the unusual perfume of flowering orchids. You could smell the aroma for several days, in the course of which her body, sitting up with a very straight back, looked alive.

  But Captain Oreshkin, the unobservant naval officer, didn't notice his wife's absence right away. Only after a month had gone by, when the mailman brought them their government pension checks, did he start to call her name and look for her, finally stumbling over her body, sitting in deep peace and calm submissiveness in the labyrinth of bags and boxes.

  Then this quasi-respectable Nikolai Mikhailovich turned to the mailman and said, "Svetlana Ilyinichna isn't feeling well, see, she's sitting right over there? Something's not right with her head. I'll sign for her and give her the money when she comes to!"

  That happened once, twice, even three times. But the fourth time the mailman got to suspecting that something bad was going on. Horrible rumors started going around the village, and a doctor came in and certified the cessation of breathing and heartbeat. So Aunt Bronstein was sitting for, let's call it half a year, just like she was alive, with a beatific smile on her lips, and no smell of decay.

  A bunch of TV crews showed up, and then newspaper and magazine journalists rushed over, they blew it up into a big sensation, and it leaked through to the foreign press, and what an unwelcome brouhaha it started for Nikolai Mikhailovich!

  Just then, Oreshkin discovered a court summons right there in his mailbox for unlawfully pocketing Aunt Sveta's pension for four months, when she no longer had any need of financial assistance.

  So this was all to say that when somebody rang the doorbell, he knew they'd come for him, and he would never see the dark days of his old age, which he'd tried to provide for—maniacally, day in and day out—in pasta.

  Oreshkin trailed dejectedly over to open the door and froze: an unfamiliar Indian in a turban was standing at the threshold. "Greetings, Nikolai Mikhailovich," he pronounced, pronouncing his r's with a little bit of a French accent. "My name is Swami Bodhidharma. Please accept my apologies, but answer me in the name of all that's holy: is it here where, for several months, the incorruptible body of your wife Svetlana Ilyinichna Bronstein has been located?"

  "What's my wife's body got to do with you?" asked the captain, surprised.

  "I have arrived from India with a secret mission," said Bodhidharma, "all the details of which I will relate to you as soon as we go inside and there's nobody else around."

  Nikolai Mikhailovich looked his Indian guest up and down, from his turban to his toes, with enormous suspicion. But he didn't find anything that would've given him a reason to slam the door shut in his face. On the contrary, this Hindu was remarkable for his unheard-of politeness and courtesy, the kind you seldom come across in our central Russian region, especially when they start dragging you to court and a district policeman is coming by every day.

  "Why not? Come in," said Oreshkin. The agile Hindu slipped swiftly inside and, nimbly maneuvering through the bags and boxes, made his way to the body of Svetlana Ilyinichna.

  "So it is true!" he said. "It is SHE!" Then, performing a countless number of prostrations, he began lighting incense sticks.

  "You'll set the place on fire!" said captain Oreshkin anxiously. "I've got boxes of matches in here."

  "My dear friend!" Bodhidharma pronounced triumphantly and ceremoniously. "I will explain everything to you now. The point of the matter is that your wife, Svetlana Ilyinichna Bronstein—she is the earthly incarnation of the goddess Devi."

  "Of what goddess? What are you talking about!?" said Oreshkin, amazed.

  "Of Devi, the goddess of love!" said Bodhidharma. "The symbol of womanhood, the life-giving womb! She is the mate of Shiva, the Lord of Worlds and the God of Gods..."

  "So that means that I'm... the incarnation of Shiva?" Nikolai Mikhailovich asked, dumbfounded.

  "Oh my, no," Bodhidharma burst out laughing. "You are Captain Oreshkin, which, taken for what it is, is quite nice. However, once she turned up in your world, she waited her whole life for her beloved, the radiant Shiva, lost among the worlds."

  He continued, "She might not have remembered that, but in every man she loved (there were two of you), she was looking subconsciously for the true essence of Shiva, that is, for the miracle-filled Universe. But, as if just to spite her, instead of her divine mate, she came across two very nervous and fussy earthly beings; one was an informer, while the other... ," he paused and threw a penetrating glance at the mountains of grains and pasta, "... was a hoarder!"

  "If you came here from distant India to shower me with insults," captain Oreshkin flared up, "then I'll throw you out the door double-quick. But tomorrow your goddess Devi is scheduled to be cremated, which will be followed by burial in the Wall of Old Bolsheviks in the Novodevichy cemetery in the same niche as her repressed mother, Sara Naumovna Bronstein, who they still suspect deep down of being Trotsky's relative. I can just imagine what would happen if they found out in Lubyanka about this love affair with Shiva!"

  "Don't put her in any Communards' Wall!" begged Bodhidharma. "Give her body to me! I will pay you well for it."

  "That's another question entirely," said Nikolai Mikhailovich, softening. "I just don't see what you want her body for?"

  "Look, this is a picture of Shiva," the Hindu held a portrait with some kind of strange figure drawn on it out to Oreshkin, "half a man, and half a woman."

  "One of those, eh?" the former Captain First Rank, now retired, noted disapprovingly.

  "Don't take this the wrong way," said the Hindu to the offended Nikolai Mikhailovich. "It's Shiva and Devi. The goddess Devi isn't just his wife. She is Shiva's other half. If a couple loves each other, then the deeper they enter into it, the less and less they remain two people, and the more and more they become
a complete whole. And there comes a moment," Bodhidharma continued to Oreshkin, "when the summit is reached, and it only seems that there are two of them. The boundaries of duality are overcome—listen carefully to this thought, Nikolai Mikhailovich: their bodies are different, but something that is beyond the boundaries of their bodies unites. And that is the single reality of our life experience that brings us closer to God... For many centuries we made no sculptural representations of Shiva. We made only phallic symbols, shiva lingam. But a Dark Age has come upon us, Nikolai Mikhailovich, and people don't understand the language of formless things. Now we need a clear and simple representation, one that opens the Path toward consciousness of the treasured wisdom. So if people see the body of Shiva and the body of Devi, then the meeting of these great lovers in the Dark Age of names and forms will unite yin and yang, the female and male essences, in the minds of all living things; it will return the lost Universal Harmony to the human consciousness; it will serve to awaken the Truth in the soul of every living being."

  "I'm going to go nuts!" said captain Oreshkin. "Let's get back to the point here."

  "We have come right up to the point," said Bodhidharma. "Shiva, the God of Gods and Lord of Worlds, is sitting in a serene pose in the cave of Agna Parameshwara, on Mount Kailash, in India, and his presence has been there throughout the ages until this very day. A temple has been built right over this cave. Shiva's body will soon be placed there. But we've been missing the earthly incarnation of Devi. What good is Shiva without his Devi? Nobody would even bother to bow to him. Without her, nobody will even admit that it is he, people will say he's an impostor. So we've been waiting, just in case she turns up. And so she did. We've been reading in the Daily Telegraph about this case of yours. We've been asking the astrologers and fortune-tellers, and they all answer as one, Yes! It is SHE!' Even the photograph—well, to tell the truth, it's hard to see, it's a copy of one from the Russian press. But there can be no doubt that Svetlana Ilyinichna Bronstein is the earthly incarnation of the goddess Devi."

  Swami Bodhidharma took his canvas sack and started untying it. "Look," he said, "these are rubies, emeralds, diamonds: Hindus took up a collection for this enterprise and sent me to you in Soviet Russia. I hope we can come to some kind of agreement."

  "Well, now," answered Nikolai Mikhailovich, with that same well-known awareness of his own dignity that a citizen of the Land of the Soviets famously exhibited whenever he entered into conversations of this kind with rich foreign tourists. "Of course, I wouldn't give my dear Svetlana Ilyinichna away for all the money in the world. But considering that you have this entire philosophical foundation worked out for it," he added quickly, "okay then, you can take her, and you hand over your rubies, diamonds and emeralds on the double."

  At this, a Gazel van drove up to captain Oreshkin's window and let out two stocky Hindus carrying a stretcher. They carefully carried Sveta Bronstein out of her father's house and loaded her into the van.

  As they were taking her away, the entire village of Old Bolsheviks came pouring out of their buildings. Everyone was amazed at how well our Aunt Sveta had kept! She was a young girl once again. A golden light was surrounding her, and calendula and peony petals were falling from the sky.

  The only one to pay no attention to her, just as before, was Captain Oreshkin. He took the money and precious stones and ran off to buy grains, matches, and pasta.

  The local old-timers say that when his place was full to bursting of all that stuff, and he sat down in the middle of it, satisfied, because now the black old age wouldn't take him so easily, suddenly hundreds of kilograms of rice, buckwheat groats, millet and special Artek-brand millet porridge for children came crashing down onto his head.

  Nobody ever heard anything else about the retired captain Oreshkin, while meanwhile Aunt Sveta is sitting with the God Shiva in profound Nirvana on the holy mountain of Kailash, promoting the awakening of Truth and Universal Harmony in our callous hearts.

  Translation by Anne O. Fisher

  Ontology of Childhood

  Viktor Pelevin

  Usually, you're too caught up in everything going on with you in the here and now to suddenly start remembering childhood. In general, the lives of adults are self-contained and—how can I put it?—don't have any free space to put feelings about things not happening right around them. But sometimes, very early in the morning, when you wake up and see something really familiar—even a brick wall—you recall that it used to be different, not the same as it is today, even though it hasn't changed at all since then.

  Over there is a crack between two bricks—in it you can see a hardened ribbon of mortar curling like a wave. Not counting those years when, for variety's sake, you lay down to sleep with your legs the other way around, or that really far-off time when your head was still gradually receding from your feet and the morning view of the wall was undergoing small daily shifts—if you don't count all that, then this vertical whitecap in the crack between two bricks was always the first morning greeting from the huge world we live in—both in the winter, when the wall was permeated with cold and sometimes was even covered with an amazingly beautiful silver patina, and in the summer when, two bricks up, a triangular, ragged-edged sun spot appeared (but just for a few days in June, when the sun goes far enough to the west). But in the time it takes for them to make the long trip from the past into the present, the objects that surround you lose the most important thing—some completely indefinable quality. I can't even explain it. Take, for example, how days used to start out: the adults left for work, the door slammed behind them, and the entire huge space all around, the infinite multitude of objects and arrangements, became yours. The do's and don'ts no longer applied, and it was as if things relaxed and stopped concealing something. Take anything at all, the most ordinary thing—even a plank bunk—upper, lower, it makes no difference: three parallel boards, a metal crossbar underneath, and three rivets sticking out of every bar. Anyway, if there were even a single adult nearby, I swear, the plank bed would somehow shrink, become narrow and uncomfortable. But when they went to work, it was as if it got wider, or maybe it was just that you could finally get comfortable on it. And each board—back then they didn't paint them—would take on a pattern, and you could see the tree rings that once upon a time were intersected with a saw at the most unimaginable angles. Either they disappeared when grownups were around or it just didn't occur to you to pay attention to such things when you had weighty talks about work shifts, production norms and imminent death playing in the background.

  The most amazing thing, of course, is the sun. Not the blinding spot in the sky, but the stripe of air coming from the window in which fuzzy dust specks and the tiniest coiled fibers are suspended. Their movement is so circuitous and graceful (actually, in childhood you see them swarm with amazing clarity from a distance) that it starts to seem that there's a special little world that lives by its own laws, and maybe you yourself used to live in that world, or maybe you might still be able to enter it and become one of those glistening, weightless specks. But again: in fact, that's probably not it at all, but there's no other way to say it, you can only get so close. It's just that you see camouflaged realms of total freedom and happiness. The sun has an astounding ability to pick out all the very best from among the little that it is able to touch as it moves from the upper corner of the first window to the lower corner of the second. Even the iron-clad door says something about itself that lets you know that you don't have anything to fear from what might come out from behind it. And the stripes of light on the floor and the walls are saying that there's nothing to fear. There is nothing frightening in the world. At least that's how it is so long as this world is speaking with you; later, at some incomprehensible moment, it begins to speak at you.

  When you're a child, you usually wake up to the morning swearing of adults. They always start the day off swearing, and through your continuing dreams their speech seems strangely drawn out and glutinous, and from their intonatio
n you can clearly sense that both the ones doing the yelling and the ones standing up for themselves aren't actually experiencing the feelings that they are trying to express through their voices. It's simply that they themselves have only just woken up and they haven't yet come out of their dreams—even though by now they don't remember anything—and they're trying to convince themselves and others as quickly as possible that it's morning, life, there are just a few minutes to get ready, that this is all real. And when they succeed at this, they link up with one another. The last of their morning doubts vanish, and they're trying to find a more comfortable place for themselves in this hell that they have only just entered so precipitously. And from swearing they move on to jokes. And so long as there are some minimal differences, which they have learned to see, the fact that they all share a common fate becomes irrelevant, and it's no longer important that they will all croak here, it's just important that someone sleeps on the top bunk and far from the window. The main thing is that you understand all this when you're still quite small, when you'd never be able to express it out loud—you understand it from the voices of adults that reach you through your morning half-sleep. And this seems amazing and strange, but then all the world is still amazing, and everything in it is strange. And later you have to start getting up along with everyone else.

  At first, grownups bend down from somewhere up above and present their face to you, stretched out into a smile. Evidently there's a law in effect in the world that compels them to smile when they talk to you—it's understood that the smile is forced, but you realize that they aren't going to harm you. Their faces are frightful: pockmarked, with spots and stubble. In some ways they resemble the moon in the window—the same degree of detail. Grownups are easy to understand, but there's almost nothing to say about them. Their relentless attention to your life can become loathsome. They don't seem to be asking for anything: for a moment they drop the invisible log that they've been carrying all their lives in order to bend down over you with a smile and then, once they're done, pick it up again and carry it on—but that's just how it seems at first. In fact, they want you to become what they are, they need to hand over the log to someone before they die. They weren't carrying it for nothing. In the evenings, they get together in groups of several people and beat someone—the one being beaten up usually plays along with the ones doing the beating, very subtly, and for that they go a bit easier on him. As a rule, they don't let you watch this, but you can always hide among the plank beds and see everything through the standard centimeter crack between the boards. But later—and although there is still a long time between the moment when you're watching the entire procedure from your hiding place to the one when it will happen—later, for the first time, the day will come when you yourself will be writhing on the floor amidst flying feet shod in boots of felt or kirza1 trying to play along with the ones who are beating you.