Stargorod

by Peter Aleshkovsky

  Antonina Pavlovna clears the table, washes the dishes, thinks. She plans how she will share the news with her neighbor. It’s not anything special, of course, just a regular bit of news, but the fact that it made the first channel – that’s different.

  Maxim Maximych waters his potatoes. It’s been dry, the earth is hard and caked solid; chinks of it come off like flint. He swears at the dirt, the sun and the potatoes, and in-between, when he stops for a break at the well, he repeats in amazement: “Would the shock loosen its grip on the minds of the operator’s family, his colleagues’ minds?”

  “He ain’t got no family – that bitch – never had one and never will!”

  He fills his bucket-sized watering can and, bending under its weight, carries it to the next row of potatoes.

  Devil’s Bride

  That Alexandra Konstantinovna Zaikina was a witch was not doubted by anyone in her neighborhood. One – she kept her curtains drawn, two – her fence and gates were solid plank, three – she had no TV set, and four – her cat was black and her chickens piebald. And if that weren’t enough – she’d go spend two months every winter with her grandkids in Leningrad and lock her place with two locks. No one, mind you, would ever be seen going in or out of there, feeding her animals, but in the spring – voila! – they’re all there and in perfect health.

  “And she’s proud, too! I asked her once to put a blood spell on my Lyoshenka, so he’d finally get rid of his mange, but she just laughed at me,” complained Tanka Solodkova, Zaikina’s neighbor and, in the old days, her closest friend.

  “What else would you expect from that crippled bitch! I wouldn’t ask her for a drink of water.”

  “No, ladies, I know better – she used to do spells for me in the old days, before she got mixed up with those devils.”

  Everyone knows Zaikina’s devil story.

  A while back, in ‘47 or ‘48, Tanka and Alexandra – people called her Shurka then – were thick as thieves. Tanka was always a go-get-em kind of girl, and Shurka was born sort of lop-sided, grew up awkward, not a match for quick Tanka – so they stuck together. At work, they were side by side, but spent their nights apart. Tanka went out with the zampolit;16 Shurka listened to her stories the following morning, and sighed to herself, but she didn’t envy Tanka. Tanka was a beauty, Shurka was a cripple, and she knew it; to each her own, that’s how her mother, Lord rest her soul, raised her. Tanka, then, waitressed in the officers’ cafeteria, and Shurka washed the dishes there. And the zampolit was a handsome man: shiny boots with steel heels, brown strap across his chest. Single. Quick to laugh. Kind to Shurka, too – Shurka let him and Tanka into her hay-loft, why not, her house was too big for her alone anyway.

  And then one day this happened. Shurka went to bed, and forgot to lock the doors. She was just lying there, without lights, and couldn’t sleep. Maybe thinking of Tanka’s stories – no one could go to sleep doing that. Shurka was dreaming. And suddenly she heard this click-click sound, like someone in the mudroom was stepping lightly on shod hooves. She pulled the blanket over her head. And then the door to her room opened all by itself, and closed just like that. Shurka peeked out – there’s no one there. And the next instant – something black, and smelly, and creaky darted to the bed from the corner, and reached his arms under the blanket.

  “Sh-h-h,” the thing hissed.

  “Who are you?” she asked and froze.

  “The devil!”

  Shurka couldn’t make another peep. And he climbed on top of her, pressed down on her, tickling her with his stubble, and whispered, “Don’t be scared, I’m not a scary kind of devil, I give gifts to those I love.”

  And indeed, she felt with him like she got a great present. Then he vanished – and she didn’t even see how.

  In the morning she was angry with herself: she knew better than to believe in demons, but then she’d remember the way his hooves clicked on the floor... and the feel of goose bumps on her skin, and a sweet, sweet tingling.

  She kept mum that day, and didn’t say a word to Tanka. The following night, she left the door unlocked on purpose, but thought up a trick: put her bedside lamp under the bed, so she could click it on when he showed up. She wanted to see him.

  She waited and wondered: would he come? Or not? He didn’t.

  He came two days later. Clicked in the mudroom. Shurka lay quiet, as if she were asleep, and held her hand on the switch. He asked: “Are you asleep?” and that’s when she pushed it – click! But the light didn’t come on – she only knocked the lamp over under the bed – that’s how scared she was. And he made a sort of a bubbling sound: “Oh-ho-ho, you can’t look at the devil. I make the lights go out just by being there.” Then he rolled on top of her again, the beast!

  The lamp convinced Shurka. The next morning, she told Tanka everything – her friend laughed her head off:

  “You, Shurka, are long overdue for a real guy – you’re liable to go nuts if you keep carrying on like this. I’ll set you up with one, if you want – he’s not much to look at, but serviceable.”

  “No, Tanka, he’s really a devil: he turns lights off just by being near them.”

  “I’ve had enough of this – you’re making it all up!”

  Tanka had no interest in devils: first she had the zampolit, now she found herself a Gypsy with money. Shurka, however, took offense, and said mean things to Tanka. So they fought. And it’s lasted forever. “Stupid cripple” and “fat rat” are about the mildest things Shurka’s heard ever since.

  Shurka kept to herself, but she didn’t need Tanka anymore anyway. She could spend her day dreaming, and then at night her devil would come. As soon as she’d hear him clicking in the mudroom, the lights would go off, and he would come in. He was nice and kind to her.

  So all right – let’s say he’s a devil, that don’t make it right. Shurka got to thinking. And the more she thought, the scarier it got. She tried to remember what her mother told her about devils – and it was all scary! He, meanwhile, was telling her how he flew in the sky, and flew to visit her.

  “You, Shurka, are a witch. You’ve got some mighty spell on me, I tell you that,” he’d say, and she’d feel happy. And then scared again – in the morning. When she couldn’t stand it anymore, she went to see the priest one Sunday. The priest, Father Amvrosy, listened to her, but she could tell he wasn’t paying attention. Clearly, he didn’t believe her. He’s heard enough of those stories. Father Amvrosy used to be Metropolitan’s sub-deacon. There were great hopes for him. But when the Metropolitan died, they shipped Father Amvrosy off to Stargorod, and that’s the end of any career: you just sit here, reading books and listening to old ladies and stupid girls. He absolved her, and told her to do a hundred bows, and read Our Father and Hail Mary before bed. Shurka took offense at him too. This was not what she came for.

  She stopped going to church. But waited. Every night – she waited. Then she’d hear the nettles rustle – that’s him, walking through the vegetable patch.

  “I can’t go in the street, Shurka. If someone sees me, they’ll go mute.”

  “Why didn’t I go mute?”

  “You’re special.”

  And then he’d tell her such things – her head would spin!

  About three months went by. Shurka noticed things were not as they were supposed to be with her. She went to see an old lady – she took one look and said, “You, my dear, are pregnant. Who’d you get it from?”

  “The devil,” Shurka said.

  “I’ll show you the devil, you little bitch! Don’t you sin in my house. Out with it – who was it?”

  Shurka told the old lady everything. As she knew it. The old lady didn’t believe her, but just in case gave her a little icon of St. Nikita the Exorcist and some holy water.

  “When he comes next, sprinkle some on him. If he’s a man – he’ll marry you, and if not...”

  “Then what?”

  “Then I really don’t know. You go now.”

  At night, Shurka w
as afraid to sprinkle him at first, but told him everything. He just laughed: “That won’t hurt me!” It’s his own fault then: she sprinkled him later on the sly.

  The next morning she went out into the mudroom and found one of the breakers flipped in the breaker box. She flipped it back. And got to thinking.

  The next night she left the door open – he didn’t come. He didn’t come the night after that either. Or the one after.

  Whether it was the holy water, or the icon, or maybe it really couldn’t hurt him – who knows. But he never came again.

  Shurka had her baby. The neighborhood filled with rumors – women kept asking, but didn’t get a single peep out of her. They shamed her, didn’t believe her, but she stuck to the same tune – the devil came to see me. So they didn’t believe her and didn’t believe her – until they finally did. Shurka, in the meantime, changed radically – kept away from people. Stopped saying hello. Moved from the officers’ cafeteria to work at the technical school.

  The cafeteria was soon closed anyway: they dismantled the military airfield, handed the buildings over to the city, and transferred all the soldiers to Motovikha.

  Things only got worse from there. Shurka Zaikina got herself a black cat and some piebald chickens, and raised her son a little bastard. He kept apart from the other kids ever since he was little; he was always by her side, doing chores at home, or in the garden, and got all A’s in school. After school, he passed the exams into the Leningrad Shipbuilding Institute. He’s a big boss there now, and comes to visit his mother in a black Volga. Doesn’t say hello to anyone either. His wife too – she’s either Jewish or French. And our reader at church said that the Antichrist will come from the French – it’s from a book that scientists dug up in Palestine, it says so right there.

  Alexandra Konstantinovna for the most part stays at home. She limps around her orchard and drinks tea. Tanka says that the cucumbers and tomatoes in Shurka’s greenhouse ripen faster than anyone else’s in the whole neighborhood.

  “And she’s too skimpy to share. And I wouldn’t take any from a witch anyway, I’d be scared.”

  “No,” Tanka admits, “I’ve taken plants she’d offered me, but they don’t come out right. She must have a spell on them.”

  “Of course she does – wouldn’t you?”

  So Zaikina stays in her kitchen and drinks tea with gingerbread, and the neighborhood kids nail all kinds of iron things, horseshoes and such, to her gate. When her son comes to visit, he takes them all off, but she never does. She’s a proud old lady – her pension’s a pittance, so she sells produce in the market, but other than that, she just keeps drinking her tea and lumbers around in her garden.

  “Did you see Zaikin the other day? Had a trunkful of jellies again, he did!”

  “And where, pray tell, does she get all that sugar on her pension?”

  “Like you don’t know. He’s a boss – so he must be stealing somewhere. Everyone does.”

  * * *

  16. The political officer embedded with a military unit; a white-collar job responsible for keeping the troops ideologically sound.

  Petrushka

  “Petrushka, is the beer here?”

  “Mhhhmmh,” he grins and moves his lips trying to say something, but words never come.

  “How many thousands do you got there already?”

  “Mhhhmmh”

  Everyone knows Petrushka counts money. He’s been caught at it more than once – writing columns of numbers on a piece of paper, all in thousands, doing sums.

  “Petrushka, what are you going to do with all that cash?”

  “Mhhhmmh,” he makes a scooping motion with his hands. It’s all his, all his. He sits in the store’s backroom, stares at the picture of the actress Nemolyayeva pinned to the wall, and counts something on his fingers. He mutters sometimes.

  “Watch out, Petrushka, you’ll get to be a millionaire!”

  He shakes his head happily.

  Why would Oleg take someone like that to work in the store? Well, no one else would come, would they? Petrushka doesn’t know any better – so he went to work for Oleg.

  After work, Oleg is building a house. A mansion. Two floors, an underground garage, yellow brick, a fireplace. He’s put a welded iron fence around the plot. And the first thing he did was build a greenhouse. Then he parked his boat next to it. And his UAZ.

  The construction crew is Oleg himself, his wife, his wife’s cousin and Petrushka – he’s the runner, the go-there-get-me-that guy. Oleg doesn’t have any children. He makes sugar-coated cranberries. Not himself, of course: he drives around making deals and heads out to the villages to buy cranberries when they are in season.

  “Oleg? He won’t touch anything less than a semi! Everyone knows that. But you can’t build all summer from cranberries alone, if you know what I mean.”

  They are always at the site. Every Saturday. Every Sunday. They got the roof done, and started on the inside jobs, were laying the parquet floors.

  “Of course he’s got parquet floors! You should see his fireplace – Stepanych charged 500 for the work alone.”

  “Five hundred? Didn’t I hear he borrowed 25,000 at the bank, though?”

  “Twenty-five? Well, let’s see... The brick for the fireplace – it’s the special yellow kind, fire-proof. Then the insert itself, the grate...”

  “Mhhhmmh, Mhhhmmh,” Petrushka’s right there, follows the men around. They sort of – wave him off, let’s say, not hard. He stayed down for a bit. But then he got up and walked away like nothing; it’s not the first time for him. He wiped the blood that was coming out of his nose and muttered – was he counting something? He had to have been.

  At night, on Monday, Oleg’s house caught on fire. Oleg got there after the firefighters – to see what was left. He lives in town, at his wife’s flat. Out here, on the Lake, this was supposed to be their winter home. The women had to hold him down, or else he would have pulled all his hair out. You would too if your house burned down.

  At the other end of the village, in his own house, Petrushka lay on the couch. After his mother died, he moved onto her couch – his other bed is falling apart really. He lay and sniffed at his hands: do they smell of kerosene? He’d sniff, and then snicker, and make small noises, and then cry, sobbing, choking on his tears. He shook his clean-washed finger at someone invisible and kicked the arm-rest.

  The Man with a Sense of Humor

  I’ll tell you where you might’ve seen me: In Riflemen’s Izba – I used to man the bar there with Lukeria, back in ‘79. I moved on to Cooptorg and Zagotskot after that, drank some good cognac there, but got out just in time – boys don’t end well if they stick to those gigs: easy money is sure death for our kind. Did you know Seryoga Kostyurin? The guy was 39 and had kidneys like Andropov – they hooked him up to the machine in Leningrad, and all for nothing. Whatever was in the coffin we buried wasn’t our Seryoga, I’ll tell you that much.

  All because why? Because it’s free. How much can a man drink really when it pours faster than from a kitchen faucet? And the nerves? Now you’ll tell me you know some who get along just fine sniffing glue, and paint stripper ain’t stripped anything off them yet, but it’s not about what you drink, and not even how much – it’s about your margin of safety. Take a man who drinks to numb his pain – people say he’s just muffling it, and he’ll pay for it, just not right away. But do you know what kind of reserves the human heart has? How many times it’s made to beat? I’ll tell you – there are enough zeros in that number to put a fence around my place. Twice. And take the liver. Under laboratory conditions, it can handle rat poison, no problem. What does this tell us? It tells us we humans have all kinds of reserves we don’t even know about, and you can’t live without a sense of humor. If you just go at it dead-serious, just for the money – you won’t last.

  Trust me, I know, because I did it all. Tatyana, that wife of mine, she’s not the sharpest crayon in the box, but she’s got a heart of gold: she let me tr
y everything. Why? Because she understood this one thing about me: I have to reach out and touch it. Whatever it is. And not just touch it – I’ve always got away clean. Back in the old days, I’d burn through three grand in a single night in Petersburg, and that was when you could still buy caviar at the old price. But I’ve done my share, and at some point that cognac just wouldn’t go down any more. I had a heart murmur, and my liver was acting up, but as soon as I realized I had to quit I felt better. And Seryoga, the poor soul, he snapped. I tried so hard to get him to quit Zagotskot back then, you wouldn’t believe it – I tried everything. But he wouldn’t budge.

  “I can’t go back to living with a ruble in my pocket,” he said to me. “And Svetka would never understand.”

  Crash and burn, he did. And did he even enjoy drinking all that vodka? Not a bit. He sucked it like a vampire – ‘cuz he couldn’t do otherwise, but it made his heart groan. But God gave us drink to make us merry, isn’t that what they say? You can’t force yourself, not forever. All my old pals – they’re all living the good life, high the whole time, and when you live like that and get depressed – that’s it, man, lights out. There ain’t nothing scarier than that. The stuff that gets into your head, you can’t get away from it, and you can’t drown it either. You know, I’ve paid a thousand rubles for a case of Coke, can you believe that? We were having a good time once, late into the night, and, what do you know, we ran out of stuff to chase our booze down with. We got up. We went looking. We found the barman. At home. Woke him up. That’s what we mean when we say the good life, and who cares if no one took a sip of that Coke after all – that’s not the point. But how do you go on like that? Play harder? Go sit at the table for 48 hours straight playing blackjack? You could of course, but then you sleep it off, and you wake up, and the world’s so black it makes you want to howl like a wolf! And you don’t do it once, or twice, or just for a month. That’s your life – and it’s the same, day in and day out. And I can’t live like that, I’d had it – to hell with the money, I’d rather be free like a bird in the sky, you’re only free when you’re young, am I right? Maybe I’m not. I don’t know.