The Goose Fritz

by Sergei Lebedev

  www.newvesselpress.com

  First published in Russian in 2018 as Gus’ Frits

  Copyright © 2018 Sergei Lebedev

  Translation Copyright © 2019 Antonina W. Bouis

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lebedev, Sergei

  [Gus’ Frits, English]

  The Goose Fritz/ Sergei Lebedev; translation by Antonina W. Bouis.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-939931-64-1

  Library of Congress Control Number 2018963467

  I. Russia—Fiction

  He drove bulls, dogs, and white-fleeced sheep, tied together. Here the massacre began; some he struck in the head, others in the throat, others he chopped in half with his sword; some he tortured in fetters—he must have seen men in them and not mute beasts.

  Ajax, Sophocles

  Table of Contents

  The Goose Fritz

  A sound.

  The sound of water gushing into the rain barrel outside the house.

  The overturned geyser pounds water to the very bottom. The small carp caught yesterday, half the size of your palm, swim back and forth, crazed. Swirling in the barrel, the pollen-yellow foam, the pink apple blossoms, last year’s brown leaves and dried apples with yellow spots of rot that had all washed through the rain spout; the spider web with bugs caught in its spiral is swirling, too—there, the flash of mica in the broken wing of a dragonfly!

  The storm tears down and carries off everything that has faded and died, as well as everything that was just born and has not yet grown strong or well fastened: the remains of the past and the fruits of the future.

  In the morning, when the storm has passed, the beaten grass around the barrel reveals the overflow of the night: the shriveling flakes of foam, the blossoms washed to fatal translucency. The carp will float white belly up, death depriving them of the only dignity of creatures—being properly positioned in space.

  And you will stand there, a small child, your cheek still remembering the pillow’s warmth. And you will pity no one and no thing: not the fish, not the blossoms, not the fruits, as if you’ve seen it all dozens of times, in different places and at different times; as if of earth’s many sounds you love only one.

  The sound of water gushing into the rain barrel.

  ***

  Kirill took another sip of wine, lit a cigarette, closed the file with the text he’d started writing, and set aside his laptop.

  Now that there was no one in the house, he could smoke inside. There’s the corner where he slept as a child. But they’d moved the couch. And the rain was absent now. But the season was the same—early June.

  Why had he started the text that way, with his memory of the storm?

  In the distance, the commuter train started out of the station—probably the last one to Moscow ... Until morning ... The train left, which meant the crossing would be closed.

  Kirill thought about how he had been lined up at that crossing six hours ago.

  The wind had cooled the dew on the grass and caused the dewdrops on hot hoods of cars to swell. To the left—houses behind impenetrable fences, silent, unlit. To the right—a small river in a hollow, looping through stands of reeds, surrounded by meadows. It was from those meadows, where the cattle were not yet pastured—the marshy soil had not dried out from spring—that the heavy fog rolled in, creating deceptive rainbows in the headlight reflections.

  The wind stopped. The fog dampened the sounds. Suddenly from within the fog, illuminating its floating veils, came a blurred glow, turning into a bright yellow moving ball of light. All the drivers turned. Out of the gloom there came something as mystically ominous as a halo around the sun, a sign of coming events so horrible that they could extract an inarticulate symbol from mute matter.

  An instant later, the terrible sensation vanished. Braking in the heavy fog, the Moscow train quietly rolled up to the crossing; its headlight shone brightly.

  A ball of light. It set off a chain of associations that led Kirill to the night of rain.

  A ball of light. The image was tied to Grandmother Lina. Kirill closed his eyes, trying to recall that stormy night long ago.

  He was a child again, he heard the announcement through the hiss of interference and the singsong moans of radio waves: “Forecasting a strong storm in the Moscow region, with winds gusting to eighty kilometers per hour.”

  That storm had been gathering for over a week, its heat oppressive and enervating. Grandmother Lina’s joints ached, but she went out and set supports under the fruit-laden apple trees. It was a good harvest year, she said, she didn’t remember that many apples ever, except right before the war, in June, forty-one.

  And on the seventh day, when it seemed that the storm would dissipate, exhausting itself in a protracted warm-up, or bypass them, thundering beyond the horizon, the radio said in the morning: “Forecasting a strong storm in the Moscow region, with winds gusting to eighty kilometers per hour.”

  Kirill did not believe the forecast: the sky was pale, the grass and branches lifeless; even the water seemed to hunker down, weakened by the heat, and the forest brook moved listlessly.

  After noon a blue-gray wall of clouds appeared in the distance. Seeing it, Grandmother Lina stopped eating—an unheard-of event, for she believed in finishing every task, movement, gesture, and phrase—and hurried into the garden to hide tools and things, telling Kirill to shut the windows tight, every single latch.

  Something happened with her that Kirill had never seen. It was as if ghosts of terrible, unimaginable catastrophes, wars, fires, floods, were nipping at her heels. His grandmother didn’t rush around pointlessly, she picked things up with tight, precise movements, and the trajectories of her steps followed the shortest, most economical path, as if they had been calculated and rehearsed.

  She was taking her own possessions out of harm’s way—the old pup tent she used to carry hay, the bench they used when picking gooseberries. A stray cat was rubbing itself against the porch, but she paid no attention to it—the invisible dome of her concern covered only people and people’s things.

  Kirill ran through the rooms, checking the window latches; he came out on the porch, annoyed by Grandmother’s anxious precautions—it was just rain, what was there to be afraid of?

  Then they secured the greenhouse beds. Kirill brought smooth stones to hold down the plastic, and their weight gradually made him internalize the power of the coming storm; when the cucumbers and tomatoes were covered tight, he straightened up and turned to look—and froze.

  The separate mass of clouds coming from the north was gone. The sky itself was changing color and materiality, as if a fatal and fast-moving gangrene were devouring the heavens.

  A violet tongue lashed out, as if from a snake’s mouth, and licked something beyond the forest.

  There was a deafening thunderclap.

  The slowly rotating weathervane made from aluminum at the military aviation factory—a gift from grandfather’s army friends—suddenly whined, its propeller humming and turning into a bright shimmering disk.

  The wind gently pushed against the walls. The window-panes reinforced by nails moved and jangled. The tree crowns moved as one.

  The weathervane slowed down and froze, like the reel on a fishing rod when a pike touches the bait and leaves.

  The rain started—tap, tap, tap, tap-tap, tap-tap-tap ... The pure, large drops made noise on the l
eaves and on the roof. Nothing terrible. A summer shower, maybe a little harder than usual.

  If not for the purple boil of the sky!

  Grandmother Lina, a raincoat over her shoulders, walked around the yard, picking up everything metal—a hoe forgotten in the beds, a dustpan, the compost bucket, a frying pan filled with soapy water.

  She always worried about lightning during storms.

  She had long been asking her son, Kirill’s father, to chop down the big birch trees on the property. Tall trees attract lightning, she would say. She seemed to think that the storm’s electricity was looking for her, trying to get her.

  They considered it an eccentricity: lots of people have odd fears. And Grandmother laughed about it when the weather was good. But the storm was approaching and Kirill sensed that there was a reason for her fear. She seemed to know what could happen and she put away everything that could attract evil and conduct it—literally and figuratively.

  The rain, having wet the grass and leaves, was almost over. The weathervane spun lazily.

  The sky had turned to glass, its belly low to the ground, thickening with inky toxic murk.

  Then the weathervane sang again; they say the reel sings when the pike has swallowed the hook and disappears into the depths.

  Kirill instinctively looked at the homemade lightning rod, sticking up above the television antenna: a stripped branch with a metal rod on top and a wire running into the ground. He had picked up his grandmother’s tense anticipation and he felt that the clumsy construction was their only defense.

  The lights flickered. From way up high, with a great swoop, a wall of water pounded the house. The dampness fogged up the windows. Turbulent rivers flowed from the drainpipes into the barrels, the rain lashed at the windows with such ferocity that water seeped through the cracks in the putty.

  Grandmother Lina was taking off her raincoat in the entry. Kirill went up to the attic, one floor closer to the thunder.

  The lights blinked convulsively. Blue lightning ripped through the dark. The storm’s whirlwind spun the apple tree foliage.

  A branch broke off the Arcad apple tree that Grandmother was treating for lichen on the bark. An Antonovka tree was split down the middle, fell, bounced, and scattered apples in every direction. The crowns of the enormous birches were tossed at a height beyond his vision, but he could see the thick trunks straining in the wind. Any of the birches could fall on the house, destroy the thin apex of the roof resting upon the rafters.

  The lights went out.

  Hail. Icy clumps, a strange summer sugar. It banged and drummed on the panes.

  Water fell from the ceiling, dripped from the window frames—the old house wasn’t made for a storm like this.

  The mice scurried, climbed up the stairs; the cellar must be flooded; there were so many of them!

  Primal fire cast long shadows. Grandmother lit a candle on the first floor.

  There were lots of people around, in the neighboring houses. But he and grandmother were alone with the wind, dark, and rain.

  Usually Kirill sensed that Grandmother Lina knew where he was in the house, kept him in her field of diffuse but still sensitive attention; that field was gone. Grandmother Lina was walking around with the candle, rechecking the latches. Her figure was reflected in the sweaty windows. She moved like a sleepwalker.

  A thud—and the window smashed, broken by an apple tree. The candle fell from her hands and rolled along the floor, without going out. Grandmother picked up a kitchen tray and covered the hole, as if expecting someone to try to climb in. He picked up the candle, not feeling the hot wax burning his fingers, and stood behind her. The neighbor’s window reflected the flame—not as a narrow sharp tongue but as a glowing rainbow sphere. Grandmother shuddered and backed up, holding the tray before her like a shield; she was terrified of the flickering sphere.

  The wind blew into the broken window and put out the candle; the ball of light reflected in the window vanished.

  Grandmother Lina sank to the floor. Kirill hurried over. Her breathing was weak and quiet but light and clean, as if the person breathing were the little girl Grandmother used to be, and not an old woman sick with asthma.

  A minute. Two. Three. The breathing did not change.

  He saw the white cabinet on the wall with the medicine kit; the pale word “faint” floated in his mind and then the sharp, stinky, and bracing “ammonia.”

  Kirill brought a wad of ammonia-soaked cotton to his grandmother’s nose. He remembered how she used ammonia to remove old stains and had cleaned a silver ring’s patina. He believed in that liquid as an alchemist would, believed that it would chase out whatever had settled inside her, preventing her from breathing fully. The ammonia did not let him down, Grandmother opened her eyes, pushed away his hand holding the cotton, and muttered weakly, “That’s enough, enough, don’t, Father ...”

  Kirill did not notice the word “Father,” it had sounded to him, in his happiness, like “don’t bother.”

  “Please bring me some water,” she asked; if she was as polite as ever that meant that she was herself again and the strange fear was gone.

  Kirill helped her up. He wanted to ask why she’d been frightened by the glowing reflection in the window, but he sensed that she did not want questions.

  “I’ll go to bed,” he said and kissed her check.

  “Go, my dearest,” she said tenderly. “The storm is passing.”

  He shut the door behind him.

  The rain was no longer pelting, it was drumming steadily; the frenzy was gone. Kirill was tired, as if the tempest had lifted him into the air and then thrown him to the ground, breaking him, twisting him, whipping him with sudden bursts. His muscles ached. Kirill realized that he had lived through the storm with the apple trees; mentally and emotionally he had struggled, held up trunks, supported the branches; his strength was gone, physical and spiritual. Without making the bed, he fell onto his couch in the corner and fell asleep. The water fell noisily into the rain barrels. He felt the strain of their metal hoops.

  Kirill slept without dreaming—dreams require effort; he fell into the depth of nonexistence.

  He woke close to noon; opening his eyes, he listened to his body, empty and new, not lived in yet.

  When he came out on the porch he thought he was still asleep and had stepped into a chaotic world where things had not yet returned to reality, found their place and assumed the usual order.

  The branches of a fallen apple tree blocked the porch. Emptiness gaped where the crowns and trunks used to be, as if some evil force had abducted them and removed them to another dimension, removing the usual supports of vision, consciousness, and memory.

  Juice still foamed out of the snapped trunks, but the leaves were faded; yesterday the foliage had been full of life, and now life was gone, all at once. The apples in the grass were shiny, washed by the rain.

  A poplar had been toppled by the fence. Its leaves were still glossy and firm. He thought, if you could raise the poplar it would easily grow back into its previous place. The apple trees, exhausted by the ripening apples, died instantly, but a fruitless tree was tougher; a repulsive law of nature was revealed to Kirill.

  The yard was thoroughly destroyed. The plastic vegetable bed covers, which they’d patched and mended, were torn to shreds. The currants and plums were ruined, only the smaller and prickly gooseberries survived, clinging to the sharp branches. The beds were washed away, and the pathetic, childlike bodies of immature carrots, turnips, and beets stuck out of the ground. The cucumber netting was pounded into the mud; the infantlike tiny cucumbers floated in dirty puddles—only yesterday they were in the silvery sweat of birth, in a tender fluff.

  The neighbors hadn’t had time to take down the wash. Now an old cotton dress with big roses hung on the fence, children’s shirts lay on the grass like evidence of desperate flight, running through the dark with demons of the night at their heels; the disheveled traces of the chase were still in the air, you cou
ld feel them in your nostrils.

  Only now did Kirill notice that the storm-washed air carried a burning smell. Smoke of a dying fire rose over the village.

  He understood where the smoke was coming from, whose house had burned down.

  The Sergeant’s house, recently left ownerless.

  ***

  Even decades later Kirill remembered the old man as if it were yesterday.

  The Sergeant had a special aura.

  He was of medium height, nothing remarkable about him, with an ordinary face, pockmarked in an ordinary way; his clothing was slightly shabby—a missing button, worn cuffs, a spot on a trouser leg, but a lot of village men dressed like that.

  But everyone in the village and in the dachas knew that he had been recommended twice for a Hero of the Soviet Union award and both times he was not given the Gold Star. He did not brag about the many other orders and medals he had, he kept them in a box under his workbench. He didn’t show them to just anybody—they were personal—but he didn’t pay much attention to them, either. He was not invited to speak to the Pioneer volunteer group or to lay a wreath at the obelisk marking the war graves.

  Only the most perceptive guessed that the Sergeant was eaten by his envy of commanders who had received the Red Stars and Red Banners on his blood, as well as the Khmelnitsky and Suvorov medals, for which he was not eligible as a noncommissioned officer; envy for everyone who stole glory and a piece of the big victory pie, who brought home German trophy goods by the truck- and train-load and then wrote memoirs about the division’s glorious war, something like Beneath the Guards’ Banner or Frontline Roads. And what was he? A sergeant. There were millions of sergeants like him, dead and buried.

  The Sergeant was born in this village, served as a scout in the war, and came back afterward. They whispered—secretly—that he had gotten into mischief after the war, for Moscow was nearby and there were lots of hotheads like him there. But then he gave it up, got a job as a watchman at the vegetable warehouse; he made money from “unofficial” truckers—but these were just rumors; sometimes the police car was parked by his house, the chief of the regional crime division would come to share a bottle. He, too, was a former scout, they had fought on the same front.