Stargorod

by Peter Aleshkovsky

  I just didn’t have it in me anymore. And if you don’t have it in you, it’s time to run. It wasn’t fun. I wasn’t laughing, at least. And I can’t live without laughing; who lives like that – owls and peasants, and let me tell you, if they ever ran into each other, they’d fall over laughing, it’d be like looking into a funhouse mirror, no?

  That’s what I’m saying: a sense of humor is essential. It’s the only thing that’s kept me alive. People say I’m easy, travel light – well, that’s because life makes me laugh, and if I get depressed, I don’t get down, I’ve got an answer for that too: change everything, go to a new place, and look – here I am again, alive and well! I know no one can live your life for you, and I’ve always stood up for myself ever since I was a kid, and others... other people also do what’s best for them, they just don’t like admitting it. Anyway, I ran away. Some will tell you that was a stupid thing to do, left as I was without a penny in my pocket, but I got my warning call, and I heard it good and clear.

  For Seryoga it was the kidneys, and for me it was my back. Oh man! First it didn’t hurt all that bad – I’d feel better after a hot banya, but you can’t live like a walrus, can you? Then it got worse. I went to see Lukeria’s mother, she’s our resident witch. She rubbed me this way and that, and gave me some herbs to make compresses with, and did her soothsaying thing, and at first it helped, but then the pain came back bad enough to make you howl. This, she said, means it’s not your back that’s hurting – it’s your soul that’s gotten twisted by ill-gotten money. You’ve got to leave it now, easy money’s like a jinx – you’ll never get better while you’re around it. If that’s how it is, I said, why don’t you get your Lukeria out of that restaurant if cash is so bad for you? The old woman took offense and refused to heal me any more, and it was probably for the best, else she’d have healed me straight into the grave. I’m not saying she doesn’t know things – she probably did save Lukeria’s life after the drive shaft had gone through her, and all the doctors gave up – but she just wasn’t the one to help me. Still, I could feel she was right – I knew somehow money wasn’t going to make me happy.

  I quit drinking. It still hurt. I left Zagotskot – then I felt a bit better, but then the pain came back again, and wrung me so bad, I couldn’t take a piss. It felt like someone took out my spine, and put in an iron rod instead, and it wouldn’t bend in any direction, and the rest of it is on fire as if a whole bunch of Chingachgooks were skinning me alive. At the time, I got the cash collector’s job at the bank, driving around in an UAZ, and you can just imagine what a back like that can do to a man on our roads. You can sit on a down pillow and wrap a rabbit-hair shawl around your midsection – none of it helps. You’re in hell, literally: you’re sitting in a pool of molten lead and someone’s pouring boiling oil down your spine. I kept mum at home – it didn’t feel right to let Tatyana down, but I was starting to think some dark thoughts. There, Oleg Petrovich, I said to myself, looks like it’s the end of the party for you. But Tatyana’s a good wife: she sized me up, packed me up, and dragged me into the Central Hospital – and you know I did everything to get out of it, I know what these hospitals are like where they have the same pill and the same enema for the whole floor.

  But whatever. They put me in bed and tucked me in with a warm blanket. To the right was an asthmatic guy with bronchitis, to the left – one with arthritis, up by the wall – a dude with ulcers, desiccated as a mummy, and up by the other wall a couple of half-paralyzed folks with strokes who had their own stroke talk to pass the time. And there I was – with whatever I had – in the middle. A circus! You, my dear Oleg Petrovich, Doctor Vdovin said, have podagra, the disease of kings. That’s what he called it. But I hurt like hell after the exam, so I told him to go kiss an Eskimo’s ass, milk a walrus, make some ice-cream and feed it to baby penguins, so he left without saying anything more.

  Things are looking rotten: scream – no one will hear you. The paralyzed dudes pee on themselves, the ulcer guy’s mute as a log and just keeps checking his tongue in the mirror, and the guy with asthma sounds like he’s about ready to go pay St. Peter a visit. The gramps to my right is all I’ve got: he seems to have a sense of humor – when he heard me send Vdovin to hell, he chuckled and I glimpsed this mischievous glint in his eyes. Aha, I thought, you’re my guy; you won’t let me rot here – and my back’s on fire, Vdovin’s made it all worse with his poking and prodding.

  I could see gramps was bored, but with me being the new guy, he was hanging back for the time being. Instead, he went to work on the guy to my right.

  “Semyonych, you sound like a steam-train pushing uphill – are you fixing to die or something?”

  And Semyonych, of course, can only lie there and gasp for air like a fish out of the water – he’s got asthma. Mitryunchev (that was the old dude’s name) won’t let go:

  “Semyonych, I tell you what – you oughtta’ ask for a different bed. That one you got’s cursed – no one lasts longer than two days on it, trust me.”

  The poor Semyonych went into a bit of contortion then, coughing and wheezing, so I had to throw my slipper at Mitryunchev – it hit the top of his head, and he vanished.

  A bit later, he came back, with tea for Semyonych: of course, he wasn’t nagging him out of meanness, he was just bored. He helped him drink his tea, like a nurse, fluffed his pillow, and got him talking. Old dudes, they only have one thing to talk about: the war, and who fought where. Turns out, they both stormed Budapest. Well, you should’ve seen the uproar: they jumped up and waved their arms, and went hugging and kissing each other – obviously, they were going to want a drink. Sure enough, five minutes later, Semyonych turns to me (Mitryunchev got him turned around in a blink):

  “Olezhek, help us out here – we’ve got to celebrate.”

  Why shouldn’t I help – that’s about the only joy those geezers got left in their lives, and Semyonych sat there glowing like a marine’s belt buckle, all his asthma disappeared. He pulled his wallet out of his bedside table, found a 10-ruble note in there, and handed it to me (Mitryunchev, of course, was broke – his whole life he’d never had much). I called a guy I knew, asked him to run over a bottle for us – my old connections worked like a charm for stuff like that – and handed the bottle over to my veterans. I didn’t drink.

  They finished it in a flash. Old Mitryunchev only looked fragile, and when it came to business, turned out he was in the penal battalion: he could tie that bottle into knots and squeeze it dry.17 He threw them back in six seconds each – I saw it with my own eyes, and his pal Semyonych wasn’t far behind.

  Finally, they called lights out. In the glow of the night-light, I could see Semyonych was feeling good: his eyes glistened, he even got up from his bed.

  “Guys! Guys, why did I listen to them, I should’ve done this a long time ago – I’m breathing now. I’m breathing!” he said, glowing like a first-grader. He held his pillow in his hands and dabbed his face with it: tears were running down his cheeks. It must have really been a long time since he felt so good.

  He spent about an hour in this bliss; then the blood-vessels must have contracted again, and he turned for the worse: he couldn’t stay lying down, but he couldn’t stay sitting up either, his breath went in and out quick and shallow with this small sort of whimper:

  “Nadya, Nadya, Nadenka...”

  He was trying to call the nurse. As soon as I’d get up – “Semyonych, do you want me to go get her?” – Mitryunchev would hiss from his back: “Just go ahead and croak, you old bastard! Croak but don’t give us up!” And Semyonych shook his head, he was hard as a flint, too.

  After a while, he got up and walked around a bit, then came and sat at the edge of my bed, leaned against my head rail and whimpered his “Nadya, Nadya, Nadenka...” as if raving. Mitryunchev stuck to his guns:

  “Croak already, you bastard! You’ve got nothing left, but don’t you dare give us up.”

  I looked into Semyonych’s eyes – his pupils were wide w
ith fear, huge, but he still wouldn’t let me go get the nurse. At some point, he felt ever so slightly better and begged me:

  “Oleg, please, can I rest on top of you just for a bit? If I can have something hard under my chest, it helps.”

  What could I say? He lay down across my chest, and he was heavy as hell, so my back cramped right away, but not too badly, I could live with it. So there we lay. Semyonych started gasping again, but in a different way: he could inhale, but couldn’t let the air out – it was like he was choking. The choking made him shake. He lay on me, twitching, for another ten minutes or so, then went to get up, but keeled to his right and went down on the floor. Like a sack.

  Mitryunchev jumped up, felt for the pulse, then closed Semyonych’s eyes and folded his hands on his chest.

  “End of the line,” he said. “Go fetch the nurse,” he ordered, and ran out, ostensibly to smoke in the bathroom where no one would find him. I believed him on the spot; he’d seen more than his fair share of dead people, I figured, so he knew what he was looking at. And I was right: later he told me some stories that would make your hair stand up; he doesn’t see death the way you or I do.

  Of course it was I who had to go to the nurse station. Mitryunchev wouldn’t show his face: he was afraid someone’d smell the alcohol on him. It was also I who helped Nadezhda carry Semyonych to the morgue on a stretcher – you try finding anyone else in the hospital in the middle of the night.

  In the morning, at breakfast, I saw Mitryunchev put his boiled egg in his pocket and then reach for the one that was meant for Semyonych. I thought, whatever, let him eat for two, but the old weasel had something else in mind.

  At noon, Vdovin entered our room and headed straight for the two of us. Gramps was ready though: he was already squatting on his mattress, under his blanket draped on him like a tent. He made small clucking noises like a chicken in the roost. Vdovin, of course, has seen enough of the old man’s tricks and was not going to be taken in.

  “Mitryunchev!” he thundered. “You drank with Semyonych, rest his soul, didn’t you? Pack up and get the hell out of here back to your village!”

  Gramps looked as if he hadn’t heard the doctor; he stared into the middle distance and mumbled:

  “Yes, yes, Sergei Sergeyevich, just a second, I will, right away, just as soon as I lay this egg.”

  Vdovin couldn’t help it – he chuckled, and, of course, that’s exactly what the old man was waiting for: he flailed his arms, and twitched all over, exactly like a hen, and then pulled the egg from under himself and offered it to Vdovin with an absolutely innocent face.

  “Here, Sergei Sergeyevich, send it to the Academy of Sciences to be studied, I swear I don’t know what’s happening to me. I’ve been laying eggs for two days now. Here, ask Oleg, he won’t let me lie,” he said pitifully and made such a grimace that Vdovin burst out laughing in earnest.

  Vdovin took the egg and fingered it, and the old man started oohing and aahing again, and gasping and clucking, and in between all that managed to talk, in starts and stops:

  “Sergei Sergeyevich, my dear, OOH, do something, I beg you! What is... AAH... happening to me?! This thing – once it starts, ain’t nothing can stop it! Argh!” he gasped and pulled another egg from under himself, still warm. And he made it look so natural – with his head moving side to side, cheeks puffed out, eyes rolled – you could charge admission.

  Vdovin, however, was not impressed.

  “Thank you for the eggs, Mitryunchev,” he said. “But do pack your stuff, you’ve been here long enough. Tell me honestly – why’d you drink that vodka yesterday?”

  But Mitryunchev’s also an old hand at these games, so he didn’t give up so easily either.

  “Oh, oh, doctor, please, it’s coming again! Another one! Oh, it’ll kill me, please – you don’t believe me, then feel for yourself!” he grabbed the surgeon’s hand and pulled him closer, and all with such desperation in his eyes it’d melt a stone. Vdovin went along with it and stuck his hand under the blanket – he must’ve wanted to pinch the clown from under there – and that’s when Mitryunchev dropped the bombshell: he tensed for an instant, then ripped one – loud enough to rattle the windows.

  The room just fell over laughing. The guy with the ulcers slid off his bed, he was laughing so hard, and the paralyzed dudes just made one high-pitched whine – “eee-eee-ee!” with tears coming out of the their eyes. Vdovin froze for a second, then cursed and fled.

  The next day he came back as if nothing had happened – meaning, he’d forgiven the old man. Vdovin pulled up a stool, and told us that Semyonych had no more than a few days left to live, and that was a miracle in itself, given that his lungs were worn to threads. So, really, the vodka only cut his suffering short by a bit. Still, the doctor promised to catch Mitryunchev red-handed the next time he tried to pull something, and to throw him out no matter what – even if the eggs he laid were golden.

  Gramps perked up after that; strutted around all proud.

  “Vdovin,” he informed me, “is always like that: he keeps threatening to kick me out of here, but he doesn’t really mean it – he knows my situation.”

  The victory kept the old man in good spirits for the day, then wore off. At night he sulked; his heart ached – he remembered Semyonych. He grabbed me by the shoulder:

  “Olezhek, you say we should all fight and live, but what have I ever seen in this life? I only got out of Stargorod during the war,” he lamented.

  He started telling me about his life, his childhood and stuff, and I’m an orphan myself – I don’t need stories to know about hunger. I grabbed my grandpa and carried him to the bathroom, gave him a bath, took his mind off his blues, and brought him back to bed. Only it was scary to look at his body – it’s all holes. It sort of made me gasp, and gramps perked up: he’s a hero compared to me! I said, you’re full of it, gramps – people only fought in the penal battalion to first blood. And he goes, oh yeah? How about second? Or third? They sent me right back into the meat grinder five times – from the hospitals.

  I really don’t know what part of what he said was true and what was lies, but there wasn’t an inch of him that hadn’t been mangled, and that’s a fact.

  So there we were, the two of us – clean (I took a shower too, while we were at it), warm in our beds and not the least bit sleepy (you do nothing but sit around all day) – and that’s when Mitryunchev confessed to me that he only pretends to be sick.

  “How should I put it, Olezhek? At nights, sometimes I get so sad – it just comes over me, like goo, this sadness, like it crawls in through the window and under the door. I started dreaming of dead people – there were days I used to sleep on top of them, you’d be so tired in the trenches, you fell where you stood, right onto the dead. This must be their payback for me now: they come and talk to me, but I can’t understand what they are saying. Probably, they want to take me with them, but what the heck do they want with me – I saw worse things in the war, they’ve nothing new to show me. Sometimes, to be honest, I do wonder if I’m losing it, but then again, I don’t think so, the wheels seem to keep spinning. That was a long time ago, in the war, when I was wild. I’m quiet now. So, you see, in winters, I run away from them, the dead, here, to the hospital. I’ve a whole stack of maladies – I just never had time to pay them any mind before, but now they come in handy: I’d dig around in my magical bag of tricks and pull out something shiny for Vdovin. He can’t do anything about me: I’m a veteran, and disabled to boot, and I’ve got heart trouble, and hypertension, and what not. He lets me in. I usually spend about three months here. They can’t really fix anything, but I get three meals a day, and that, if you ask me, is a good start. Vdovin’s a kind man, not like Pankratov. Vdovin – he, if he doesn’t understand why something does what it does will cut you open, dig around in there for appearances’ sake, and put everything back the way it was – he’ll never do any harm. Pankratov, on the other hand, is a pure Nazi: he likes experimenting on his patients, you
know how many he’s dispatched to the next world already? All for his dissertation.”

  He was a funny old geezer, my Mitryunchev. We got to be friends. Whenever he’d sulk, I’d yell at him and find him a chore. Meanwhile, one of our paralyzed dudes kicked the bucket, and so did the guy with the ulcers after Pankratov’s surgery. That happened in the ICU, not in our own room, but still. They brought in some new people, but the gramps and I didn’t take to them, and mostly kept to ourselves. We had nothing to do all day, so he nagged me to play cards with him. All right. I was bored too, so I started beating him. Little by little, I won all his clothes and all his medals too (he always came to the hospital decked out as if for a parade). This got him perked up again: I could see the old gleam in his eyes – he’s gotten into the heat of it, but he had nothing left to gamble. So he was stuck.

  I saw him trying to figure something out; he paced the room, and I pretended I was sleeping – in fact, my back hurt and I didn’t feel like talking to anyone. Finally, he couldn’t stand it any longer, came to my bed and perched on the edge:

  “Is it hurting bad today, Olezhek?” he asked, all concerned-like.

  “Go away, you mooch, I don’t give on Tuesdays.”

  He saw he wouldn’t get far on kindness alone, and decided to be bold:

  “Son, give me my suit-coat back, I need to go to town.”

  “What suit-coat?”

  “What do you mean, what? This one right here.”

  “And did you, Gramps, forget that it’s now mine? Here, I was just about to grab me some scissors and cut it up into a nice big pile to put under my back. It hurts, you know.”

  “You can’t do that! What’ll you do with all the medals on it?”

  “I’ll take them to Leningrad, trade them in for booze.”