Life Stories

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

  "The whistle speaks bird!" Dasha whispered.

  She wanted to ask the bird about life in the forest and about the treasures her grandmother said were guarded by the hunchbacked forest-spirits. She went through the birch stand toward the bird, blowing on her whistle. The bird answered.

  But, after letting Dasha closer, it took off again and flew away, fluttering its wings.

  Beyond the birch stand an old thick pine forest began. The bird flitted into it.

  "Come back here, you nuisance!" shouted Dasha, like the grownups did at an unruly animal.

  She thought the bird had flown to its nest, like a chicken. And nests were always set up in quiet places so there wouldn't be any hindrance. That must be where the bird's nest was, in the dark pine forest. It'll perch there, settle in, and tell her about the treasures, and show her the secret places. And she and Daddy could get a shovel and go and dig it up. And buy a horse. And ride it to Lyudinovo. And buy all kinds of good things there.

  Dasha walked out of the birch stand, made her way between two enormous hazelnut bushes with their warm, soft leaves, stepped over a crumbling tree overgrown with moss and dried-up toadstools, and raised her eyes.

  The fir wood stood before her in a shadowy wall. Dasha entered into it. The tall firs closed in over her head. And the sun was hidden. Her shoes were suddenly able to step softly. It was cool and very quiet inside the wood. Dasha whistled. There was a faint bird peep in the depth of the wood.

  "Oh, you..." Dasha muttered, and moved toward the whistle.

  She walked between the fir trunks over the soft earth strewn with fir cones and needles. All around her it became still more gloomy and quiet. Dasha stopped. Up ahead in the half-gloom the fir trunks pressed closer to each other. It seemed to her that there, up ahead, was night. And that she could enter into it. It was dreadful. Dasha glanced back to where the birch stand bathed in sunlight was still visible. There, in the meadow, her father and mother were waiting. But she had to find the bird. Dasha whistled. The forest was silent. She whistled again. The bird responded from up ahead. And Dasha moved forward, into the night, toward the bird's voice. She strode along the soft earth, rounding and touching the rough trees, skirting tree stumps, tearing spider webs, and stepping through dry branches. And suddenly she arrived at a completely straight alleyway. The stout firs stood in front of her in two rows, just as if someone had planted them long, long ago. The firs were enormous, old, and half-dead. Their trunks, eaten away by beetles, gaped with dark hollows and spreading crevices filled with petrified resin. Dasha entered the alleyway. It was completely dark up ahead. Decay wafted from there. Dasha whistled. The bird responded. Dasha went down the alleyway. The shadows thickened, and the powerful fir branches wove themselves together above, hiding both sun and sky. Up ahead something small and white appeared.

  "The bird!" thought Dasha at first, but then she remembered the bird was spotted.

  The small whiteness was hanging in the middle of the alleyway.

  Dasha went closer to it. It hung motionless. Then disappeared. And reappeared again. Dasha went quite close. The white disappeared again. And reappeared. Dasha watched attentively. And suddenly she noticed that the small whiteness was the clouded eye of a horse. It blinked. Dasha looked at it some more. And saw the entire black horse. The same one. The horse was standing in the dark alleyway. It was barely visible in the half-gloom. Its black body seemed to merge with the shadowy air that smelled of needles and resin.

  Dasha stopped still.

  She wasn't frightened at all. But she didn't know what to do.

  The horse didn't move at all. Her lips weren't chewing and her nostrils weren't drawing in air.

  "Sleeping?" thought Dasha, and looked at the mare's healthy eye. Damp and a deep violet, like a plum, it was looking somewhere off to the side. Not at Dasha at all.

  "Don't be afraid," Dasha pronounced.

  The horse gave a start, as if she'd woken up. Her nostrils exhaled air.

  "Don't be afraid," Dasha repeated.

  The horse stood as motionless as before. Dasha carefully extended her hand and placed it on the horse's lips. They were warm and velvety.

  "Don't be afraid, don't be afraid..." Dasha stroked the horse's lips with her strawberry-sticky fingers.

  The horse slowly lowered her head. She sniffed the needly ground. And fell still with her head lowered. Continuing to stroke the horse's lips and nostrils, Dasha squatted down on her haunches. The clouded eye was quite close. Dasha stared at it. The eye was not entirely white. The middle was dark with a small black pupil ringed in slender darkish blue. Dasha brought her face close to the unusual eye. It blinked. The horse stood as motionless as before, her head lowered. Dasha examined the eye. It reminded her of a tube their teacher, Varvara Stepanovna, had brought from Lyudinovo and showed them in class. The tube was called by a long grown-up word that started with a "k" sound. Dasha didn't remember the word and called the tube a "carol-carol." There was a small hole in the tube. You had to look into it while turning the other end of the tube toward the light. You could see a red flower in the tube. If you turned the carol-carol, the flower turned into different flowers, and they became so many, and all of them were so beautiful and so different that it took your breath away, and you could spend your whole life turning and turning that tube.

  Dasha peered into the horse's eye.

  She was sure everything in the horse's eye was the whitest of white, like winter. But there turned out to be no white at all in the white eye. To the contrary. Everything in there was red. And there was so much red stuffed in the eye, and it was all so large and deep, like the whirlpool by the mill, and it was so very-very-very thick and greedy as it sat oozing and threatening, rising up and swelling like dough. Dasha remembered chickens' heads being chopped off. And the sloshing red throat.

  And suddenly she clearly saw a Red Throat in the horse's eye. And there was a lot of it.

  And Dasha felt such dread that she froze, like an icicle.

  The white eye blinked.

  The horse took a breath. Her whole body gave a start. She snorted. Lifted her head, noisily drawing the shadowy air into her nostrils. And without paying Dasha any mind, went into the deep wood.

  Dasha stayed squatting on her haunches, not breathing. And suddenly she realized she would never in her life see that black horse again. She had walked out of Dasha's life like out of a barn. She wandered, snuffling a little. And soon disappeared from sight among the trees.

  Dasha sat on the ground. Her hands sank down onto the fir needles. And her terror passed immediately. Dasha felt wistful somehow. She felt terribly tired. And very thirsty.

  She stood up and went toward the light. Leaving the forest, she squinted from the bright sun. In that time it had become still hotter. She found her basket in the field amid the birch stand, hung it on her shoulder, and went to the meadow.

  The men had reached the middle of the meadow with their scythes. Her mother was turning the hay. Dasha went up to her.

  "Well, was there good pickins?" Adjusting the scarf that had slipped over her eyes, her mother glanced into the basket and started laughing. "That's it? A lot!"

  "I looked into the horse's eye. There's a red throat in it." Dasha said, and unexpectedly broke out in tears.

  "What's with you?" Her mother took her in her arms and touched her forehead. "My girl got overheated..."

  Dasha's mother carried her, crying, under the tree and sprinkled some water on her. After crying herself out, Dasha drank her fill of water and fell into a deep sleep. When she woke up she was in the arms of her father, who was carrying her home to the village. The sun had set, the cows had arrived home and were lowing, and the dogs were barking.

  Her grandmother and three-year-old brother Vovka were waiting at home. Night was already falling as they sat down to supper by the kerosene lamp. Grandma pulled a kettle of warm soup out of the stove. They ate it with freshly-baked bread, silently. Dasha swallowed the soup greedily and chewed the fr
esh tasty bread. Her mother touched her forehead.

  "It's passed..."

  "Grandma's girl got overheated!" Grandpa Yakov winked at Dasha.

  "A touch o'sun, you know how 'tis..." nodded her solid-bodied, wide-mouthed grandmother.

  After eating, everyone headed off to sleep in different places: Grandpa Yakov in the garden, Grisha and Vanya to the hay loft, mother and little Vovka in the cottage, and Grandmother on the Russian stove. Dasha's father, yawning, started putting out the copper-bellied lamp with its tasty smell of kerosene. But Dasha latched on to his pantleg.

  "Daddy, what about the page?"

  "The page..." her father remembered, and smiled into his beard.

  Every evening Dasha tore a page off the calendar that hung on the wall near the clock and the wooden frame with photographs. In the frame were her father in a soldier's uniform, her mother and father with flowers and kissing doves drawn around them, Grandpa Yakov with a rifle during the First World War and him again with the old chairman at a fair in Bryansk, a KV tank, Stalin, Budyonny, and the actress Lyubov Orlova.

  Dasha's father lifted her up and she tore a page from the calendar.

  "Go ahead, read what tomorrow will be," her father said, as always.

  "June twenty-second...Sun...day..." read Dasha aloud.

  Her father placed her back on the ground:

  "Sunday. Tomorrow we'll go scything again. Sleep!"

  And he gave her a joking swat on the ass.

  Translation by Deborah Hoffman

  The Novel

  (A Tragedy)

  Vladimir Voinovich

  Not long ago I wrote a tragic novel about the life of émigrés. The novel is called... Actually, I can't remember what it's called; I'll have a look at the manuscript and write in the title later.

  Although it took me about two and a half years to write the novel, I can't say I pushed myself particularly hard. The work generally flowed easily. All I had to do was write one line, and another would immediately write itself in my imagination, and after that a third one. I experienced no difficulties in describing nature or the state of the characters, while the plot unfolded as though of its own accord.

  The storyline, incidentally, was extremely simple. A Russian émigré writer discovers that his wife has been cheating on him with his best friend, an artist. He kicks up a stink, and she has no other option but to leave him for the artist. As soon as she leaves, he realizes that he can't live without her for a single second. He calls her, and she immediately returns, because she cannot live without him. But once she has come back, she realizes that she can't live without the artist. The situation is made more complicated because the writer and the artist cannot live without each other. The three of them curse and swear at each other, and then declare their mutual love. They try various ways of resolving the problem. Either the writer throws the woman out of the house, or the artist does. Sometimes she leaves one for the other of her own accord. Sometimes she leaves both of them. Sometimes the writer gets sick of both of them and goes away, but cannot hold out and returns. Another time, the artist goes away. Then they decide to live together, all three—and live suffering from jealousy and hatred. Then they realize that they should all actually split up. It ends up with all three of them wearing formal evening attire in the artist's workshop. They put on a record of Schubert and drink champagne by candlelight. The champagne, of course, is poisoned.

  That's the novel in a nutshell. I wrote the last full stop about a month ago, and straight away took the manuscript to my publisher.

  Yesterday the publisher invited me round. We sat in soft, leather armchairs in his office, which is hung with portraits of his best writers (my portrait, of course, is among them). Between us was a coffee table, on which lay a book, title side down.

  Before starting the conversation, the publisher offered me something to drink: coffee, cognac, whisky, beer... I asked for a coffee. He poked his head round the door and gave an order. His secretary brought the coffee, then left us. Stirring the coffee, the publisher looked at me carefully and said:

  "Listen, Vladimir, you've written a wonderful novel!"

  "Yes," I said humbly. "I think so too."

  "I cried while I was reading through it."

  "So did I," I admitted.

  "And the last scene, when they drink poisoned champagne by candlelight while listening to Schubert, is sublime. There's nothing like it in world literature."

  "Yes," I agreed. "I thought so too."

  "Now, Vladimir, listen to me carefully. The thing is, we already printed this novel two and a half years ago."

  I was surprised. "You printed it before I'd even written it?"

  "No, no. We haven't reached quite that level of sophistication yet. Two and a half years ago you wrote this novel, and we published it. It was a huge success, it got rave reviews, you won an award for it and gave a marvelous acceptance speech at the ceremony."

  "That's impossible," I exclaimed. "Do you really think I can't remember what I wrote?"

  "I don't think anything," he sighed. "But here is your manuscript, and here is your novel in printed form."

  He turned over the book lying on the table and held it out to me.

  I felt ill. I saw that the printed novel, just like the manuscript, was called... Now I can't remember what it was called. I'll have a look later and tell you then. Confused, I put the book and the manuscript into my briefcase and went home, forgetting to say goodbye to the publisher. At home I pulled out the book and the manuscript and began comparing them. As I was reading, I wept.

  Interestingly, not only had I written the same novel word for word with the same title and the same number of chapters and words, but even the punctuation marks were the same throughout. This was even more surprising, as I'm usually pretty haphazard with punctuation.

  I cried all night. I cried over the awful misfortune that had befallen me. How, I wondered, could this have happened? I'm not yet old enough to be struck down by such total senility. For two and a half years, I had written this novel straight through, passionately and in a fit of inspiration. I had smoked thousands of cigarettes and drunk gallons of coffee. Everything had turned out so well that, by turns, I laughed at my creation, or showered myself in tears, or slapped myself on the back, exclaiming: "Way to go, Pushkin, you son of a bitch!" And what of it?

  When it was nearly morning, I decided that I would go to see the doctor as soon as I got up. Of course, the illness was at an advanced stage, but even so, there must be some medicine for it—some kind of anti-sclerotic or whatever it's called.

  It was already getting light when I finally fell asleep.

  After waking up, I decided to postpone my visit to the doctor. Never mind, I thought. I've just wasted two and a half years for nothing. To hell with them. It's a shame, of course, but I'm not going to spend my time going to see doctors. I'll get started on a new novel straight away instead. Especially as I have a splendid idea that I've been nurturing for two and a half years. The plot is extremely simple. A Russian émigré writer discovers that his wife is cheating on him with his best friend, an artist. He kicks up a stink, she leaves him, various other collisions happen (I still haven't thought of everything yet), and it ends up with all three of them getting together in the artist's workshop, putting on a record of Schubert and drinking poisoned champagne by candlelight.

  Actually, I've got everything all thought out already, and in about two or maybe two and half years I'll probably finish this novel.

  Translation by Peter Morley

  Rehabilitating d'Anthès

  Viktor Yerofeyev

  I arrived in old Soultz-Haut-Rhin at about three in the afternoon, when the French finish their "second breakfast" and stroll out of restaurants with wooden toothpicks in their mouths. Unlike Obernai or Colmar, Soultz is a moribund, remote and extremely poor Alsatian town. On the central square under a hulking Catholic Church, I searched for a parking place among French compact cars. I noticed that my new silver Audi
with German plates was drawing covetous stares from the locals.

  I asked one, who had the red nose of a lover of dry wine, "Where is the D'Anthès Museum?"1

  He pointed me in the right direction with an unfriendly wave of his hand. In just five minutes I was walking into the museum, under the intent gaze of two French girls, who were sitting on a bench and eating ice cream, their splayed legs in blue knee socks. I bought a rather expensive ticket from a dark-haired woman who was some kind of museum guide and quickly realized that the museum was only partially about d'Anthès. The first floor had local history. The third floor, where I didn't go, had some kind of Israeli exhibition. But the second floor was dedicated to d'Anthès and his family.

  I immediately saw an outsized portrait of the Baroness de Heeckeren d'Anthès, née Yekaterina Goncharova, in a ball gown and holding a lorgnette, painted by the decidedly mediocre artist Henri Beltz in 1841. It said that she married d'Anthès on January 10, 1837, which meant that Pushkin dueled with him in the midst of his honeymoon. Judging by the portrait, Yekaterina was an unattractive, long-nosed brunette with oily hair. True, the portrait had sumptuous breasts painted rather poorly by Beltz, but all the same Yekaterina seemed lost and vague, and in her eyes was the question: "What am I doing here?" If you put Yekaterina in a bikini on the beach at the resort of Koktebel today, she would sit out her whole vacation alone, gazing romantically at the bay, unless some local hot-blooded Tatar with gold teeth first drank down a Tatar's Dream cocktail (one part vodka and one part white port wine) and went into ecstasies over her pale northern skin. Yekaterina Goncharova's deeply cracked marble gravestone was leaning heavily against the wall next to her portrait, as if there were no other place for it. This disconcerted me. It was as if the Last Judgment had already come and the dead had crawled out of their graves. I must have turned around as if looking for an answer when the dark-haired museum guide glided towards me. She had the most suspicious resemblance to Yekaterina Goncharova.