Stargorod

by Peter Aleshkovsky

  So, what I’m saying is, Tatars are special, and I personally can totally see things their way. But then, on the other hand, life is life, and you can’t do anything about that either. The Tatars, by the way, had their women in line longer then everyone else, but they’ve given up now, too. The old guard – those still hold strong, but with the young ones – there was trouble. Take Ravil Nigmattulin with his Gulnara. This all happened right before I retired from taxi-driving, and Ravil – we called him Igoryok – only just came to the trade. Ravil’s not exactly a tall guy, but sturdy, you know – big bones, shoulders like a pair of tires. Only a fool doesn’t like good food, and then you sit behind the wheel all day long – Ravil started getting fat, and the guys talked him into taking up body-building. He was made for it, too – he was such a softie, a real teddy bear. He got hooked up with Tolya Kazak, the one with the striped pants, and started lifting in Tolya’s gym. It was only later I figure out that getting fat wasn’t the whole story.

  As far as drinking went, he never really did any. Very rarely, once in a great while he’d have a glass with us on payday – he was afraid of his Gulnara, and I’m here to tell you, that’s how you spoil a woman. And I’m not just saying so – I was there.

  This one time, the guys were parked at the railway station, and I just came to shoot the breeze with them – I was already retired, and had gone to work at the banya, been sitting here ever since – when all of a sudden, we heard a fight. We went to take a look: here’s this one massive dude cleaning up private cabbies like puppies – he’d grab one by the scruff with one hand and slam him on the head with the other, like hammering nails, and go for the next. They’re beating on him, but he pays them no mind, just works them over like that: grab, slam, toss, grab, slam, toss. Guys, I yelled, they’re beating up our Ravil – let’s go help him! I knew he wasn’t the kind of guy to get himself into a bind over nothing. I knew it: someone crossed him – asked three times the meter rate when Ravil wanted a ride home, and it’s not kosher to rip off your own, folks supposed to look out for each other, any one of us’d give a brother two meters if he could, but you don’t ask, it’s a matter of honor... But these young punks – they’re wolves, never mind they park with us; they have their own rules, especially at night, so they just told him to pay up or beat it.

  Long story short, we extricated our Igoryok from the pile, and I took him home – we lived on the same street. But here’s the thing: the boy was wasted, drunk as a fish, I’ve never seen him like this.

  When I got him to his gate, Ravil pulled on my sleeve – he wanted to sit down on a bench outside, and you couldn’t get away from him if you wanted to, he had an arm like a crankshaft. So we both sat down. Being drunk, he started talking. Turns out, Gulnara works at the furniture factory, and they just made her a section head. So he was out of options: try as he might, fight as he might with other drivers to get the fattest cats, he had no chance of catching up with her. No equality in his family. And for a Tatar – that’s worse than a knife under the ribs. Plus, the neighbors started talking that Gulnara had fallen in with some bad women. She, of course, told him that she was late all the time closing out and settling accounts, but he was like: “I don’t buy that!” I set him straight: my mother-in-law’s sister’s daughter works at a store, and is forever stuck there till late with the books, they have to – if they get audited, and something’s not right, it’s her head on the plate. But this was now, and the day before he decided to teach her a lesson: when she came home late again, Ravil locked the door and wouldn’t let her on. She must have heard him inside, though, because she cried a little, whined a bit, and then went ahead and yelled: “Help! He’s raping me!” That’s no joke – Ravil ran out of the house. That’s when she, the fox, snuck in, and locked the door on him – let him sit outside or go sleep in the woodshed.

  So alright. He went to the garage, borrowed about two hundred from the guys, bought everyone drinks, drank himself, and now was ready to come home. Only he was afraid to go in: “Brother,” he said, “I’m afraid I’ll kill her.”

  “Don’t you worry about a thing,” I told him. “She is afraid of you herself, and loves you a lot, and respects you, too. Want me to prove it?” Man, you should’ve seen him – he started kissing me, slobbered all over, such a teddy-bear. I told him to wait there on the bench, and he couldn’t be happier: he just rolled his head back and zonked out. And thank God, I thought – I needed him out of my way at the moment. Women, you know, they are all the same, but the Tatars are even more so – she bought into it right off the bat.

  First, I knocked on her window – nice and polite. She peeked out.

  “Gulnara, open up.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Mikhal Mikhalych from the taxi garage.”

  “Oh, it’s you! Has something happened?”

  “Did you or did you not lock your man out of the house?”

  She’s just standing there, looking. Then I see her face turned stony. That’s a good sign.

  “Do you know where he is right now?” I asked.

  “What happened, Mikhal Mikhalych?”

  “You heard of Nelka and Lyubasha? (and everyone in town has) So. That’s where he went, your Ravil, and borrowed two hundred rubles from them, to party with their whole crowd, I barely pulled him out of there. Mind you, they let me have it on my word alone – if you wait till tomorrow, it’ll be two-fifty, not two hundred even. You know those girls – he’s not the first one to get on their hook, and generally speaking, I thought it might not look good if people start talking.”

  “Oy, Mikhal Mikhalych, how could I ever thank you?”

  “You,” I said, “just run and fetch me the money.”

  “Oy, one second.”

  She dashed off. Brought the money.

  “Are you sure this is enough?”

  “Sure, sure, don’t you worry now. Just, next time, think twice about it.”

  “But he’s the one who started it, being jealous and such.”

  “If he’s jealous, he loves you. You be nicer to him, softer. You girls are all the same – takes a man to teach you how to handle one.”

  “Oy, thank you, Mikhal Mikhalych, I’ll never forget it.”

  The two of us went out to the bench, and lifted Ravil up to lead him home. You should’ve seen her leading him in – she rubbed him behind the ear, like a bull-calf, and whispered something to him in their own language, and he just shook his head and smiled in his sleep. Finally we got him to bed. Gulnara, bless her heart, gave me another bottle as a present she was so moved. And ever since then, she always says hello to me whenever she sees me – and she’s a big boss now, a director, her earrings alone could buy a Zhiguli.

  My Ravil, though, soon quit taxi driving (of course, I gave him his two hundred back the next morning, and we had a good laugh about it) and became a butcher. No sooner did he get ahead in the meat business (and he, by the way, always sold me meat at the government price) as Gulnara outran him again: she got promoted to deputy assistant director. Of a furniture store – a man’s job, really, which only made it worse. That’s when Ravil challenged this one out-of-town guy to arm-wrestle, right here, in my banya. The other guy warned him that he was the Arm-wrestling Champion of Sverdlovsk, but Ravil wouldn’t listen – he’s a real game cock. He gave it his best, squeezed as hard as he could – and got hurt. He tore a ligament. Vdovin referred him to a surgeon and banned him from weight-lifting, and Ravil switched to isometrics and working only on the muscle definition. That’s tricky business, I’ll tell you – if you quit suddenly, you just turn into mush. Long story short, it took six months and three surgeries and a whole ton of money. Finally, they patched his arm back together; it wasn’t going to atrophy, but his old strength was gone for good.

  And the amazing thing was – through all of this, he didn’t turn to drinking. A bear of a man! He went to work at the gas station, with the coop guys, and you know what kind of business that is – I don’t have to tell you how they
run things. I ran into him once, told him, “Ravilka, quit messing with this bullshit, you’ll get in trouble.” And he says: “Don’t I know it, Uncle Misha, but a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do,” and his eyes were so sad – a teddy-bear, a real teddy-bear. “You,” I said to him, “can’t ever catch up with the furniture factory. Your only chances are to go apprentice yourself with the Isors19 with their gems and enamel, but they’re kind of like you, Tatars – they only teach their own. Or you have to start a construction co-op, and you don’t have the education for that, so I’d say you’re better off just to make peace with it and enjoy the ride.”

  He didn’t listen. Instead, life gave him a checkmate. Gulnara eventually made the director and he... he became a sort of a hero.

  When the Chechens and the Ossetians came to town and went after the gas stations, Ravil put up a good fight: there were three guys with broken spines on his count, one with a cracked skull (Ravil pulled his hammer number on him with his left fist – he’s had time to adjust), and one he dispatched all the way to his brave mountain ancestors. They kept their gas station, but Ravil wound up in court.

  I went to his hearing. The room was packed. Chechens on one side, locals on the other. Both sent for lawyers from Moscow, and both, of course, bought the judge and the prosecutors well in advance. Still, no matter how you sliced it, Ravil got five years – they called it self-defense, because the Chechen came at him with knives. A lot of other things came up at that hearing, and a lot of them got swept back under the rug – you know, the way it always goes, we have cases like that about every two years. Folks, of course, were all behind Ravil, except the reporters. Those are forever after the same thing: “Mafia Brought to Justice!” Make you laugh. And the Chechens, by the way, later bought that gas station anyway.

  When they took Ravil away, Gulnara started to wail, but he just shushed at her, like: “Quiet, the boys will take care of you.” She choked back her tears.

  I saw the way she looked at him when they took him away – the same as back then, when she was leading him up the steps to the porch, but he – oh no! – he went out proud, like a big bear. He finally beat her, that he did. You don’t worry about guys like that in the camps: they’ll make him a barrack boss for his biceps alone, and then there’s his legend – how he worked over those Chechens. And then there is Gulnara’s money – on the inside, money is everything.

  * * *

  19. Armenian Assyrians.

  Lady Macbeth

  That’s it. She’s had it. She’s started saving up pills.

  She’s heard women say police never do autopsies on drunkards. And even if there were one, it’s no proof: maybe he swallowed the pills himself. People imbibe all kinds of junk these days. A handful – and he’s done.

  She’s made up her mind and started saving up the pills the doctor prescribed for her when she got out of detox last time.

  How’d that come about? Well, he’d been drinking and living his high life for a few months, half-a-year maybe. Not a penny of his wages made it home. That day he came in already loaded, naturally, and it was his payday, she knew his schedule. All right. Dang it, she just had to have this bright idea to get him even more addled and then trick whatever was left of the money out of him. Pull it out of his pocket if she had to. She poured him some, and, the idiot, had one herself – for her nerves. He got woozy all right, but she lost it a bit too. So when she asked, “Where’s the money?” he just started laughing, and then swung at her. She called the police. Well, by the time they got there the son of a bitch had his teeth brushed, and his head freshly washed under the shower, and as soon as they rang the doorbell, he grabbed a pot of pea-soup from the stove and flipped it onto his head. The police comes in and he’s standing there hollering, “Help me guys, she’s blinded me!”

  Who? What? How? No one believed her.

  “Did you drink?” they asked.

  She said she did.

  “The man brings you money, what else do you want, stupid?”

  She looked: there was the money, on top of the fridge – he managed to lay it out for the cops. She screamed. Something possessed her – she shook and almost threw up – and he just went on with his show, groaning and moaning under the pot. She kept screaming, and screamed at the whole lot of them, as it turned out, enough to land her in the slammer for fifteen days.

  Her mother took little Seryozha to stay with her, of course. When she got out, the walls were bare: he’d sold everything and drank through the money. There he was, waiting for her on the couch, grinning:

  “Shall we start a new life or what?”

  Her knees buckled under her... she fell onto her knees and wailed, and such love came over them both as they hadn’t had since the days when they were making their little Vasya.

  Vasya was how it all started. He ran out into the street and got run over by a car. And he was gone, on a trip for work. Her neighbors, kindly souls, made sure he knew she had a party that day – ‘twas her girlfriend’s birthday. And that was it. He beat her – he beat her a lot, and cursed her, then started drinking.

  And what about her? She was the mother, was she not grieved? She had to live with her guilt. She had to live with the memory of it – but wasn’t there supposed to be forgiveness in the world somewhere? She was ready to beg for it, do whatever it took when she came out of the detox.

  He’s not a man any more – a wild beast from the forest has more heart. And little Seryozha is growing up and watching all this. In the evenings they sit together behind the locked door – she’s got two locks, a guy from work put them in for her – and there he is, banging on the door, yelling, “I’ll kill you!” He’s started stalking her too. And anything she ever does is a crime. And she’s ruined his life.

  No, this has to stop. She’s made up her mind – she’s saving up the pills. He’s an alcoholic – she is scared. Men like that – how many people have they killed already? And children too. “Let’s sell the flat and live apart,” she said. Nope, no go. He doesn’t come to sleep with her, but wants to know her every step anyway. And how can she sleep if he’s at the door every damn night... She’s not 20 anymore.

  After her detox, he toed the line for a week. He was like before. Then they went to the movies on Sunday and had a bit of champagne after. That was it. He hasn’t been dry since.

  If she’d turn him in to the LTP – he’d kill her.20 She’s afraid of him. She can’t forget what she did. She has to live with that. Girls said, screw it, find someone new, let the new guy beat him up. But, how to put it? It’s not about beating him up. The guy who put in the locks for her – he didn’t do it for free, but bumming from man to man like that... it’s not what she’s after. She’s got to stop it once and for all. Autopsy, or no autopsy – she’s got to do it.

  Just yesterday, he barely made it – crawled up to her door and lay there breathing, stinking of burnt rubber – they must be getting high on formaldehyde glue. No, she’s got to do it!

  In the middle of night she woke up; at first, she couldn’t tell what was happening. He was screaming, howling – she thought, it was the usual thing, but then he fell out into the hallway, she took one look at him and – Lord Almighty! She called the ambulance. They pumped his stomach, but it was no good – he’d drunk acetic acid concentrate. He had some in a vodka bottle under his bed. The doctors decided he’d drunk it by mistake, but she knew better – he’d been threatening to do it for a long time. So he made good on his threat – and she didn’t have to use the pills.

  But at the funeral, when the priest said to say goodbye, the girls couldn’t pull her away from the coffin – she was screaming. Steam trains used to scream like that when she was little – it was frightful to hear them up close.

  * * *

  20. LTP stands for “Labor therapy preventative clinic,” a variety of Soviet penal institution which basically amounted to a forced-labor detox facility.

  Fortress

  Through the thin air of an early morning, th
rough the city drenched in sunlight, down its streets flush with the new greenery of cottonwoods and lindens, among sparse pedestrians, moves a small man. He is not young, but neither is he old enough that one could call him “grandpa.” More than any physical signs of age, it is his appearance that ages him – a look he adopted once and has stuck to ever since, having fixed it in his peculiar clothes: a small gray hat, wrinkled but donned carefully and handled lovingly, like an adopted mutt in a lonely home. Then – a pair of glasses with special lenses: barely concave, and with thick glass disks cut into the middle – and his eyes behind them, washed out with work, eyes that sometimes look gullible but more often detached, almost haughty in their refusal to focus on the quotidian. Lower lies the collar of the man’s thick, unseasonably warm coat, with a thick belt and a fat black button that locks the mighty gates of this worsted fortress. Lower still are trousers that lack any conclusive personality, and heavy boots of the ugly stitched variety cranked out by the local factory. A brown briefcase in his hand.

  Thus he moves, through a spring-time city, as if completely oblivious to the kind of pure beauty that descends on it only once a year, this armored little man – because he does not walk, not at all, he has to move, to heft and roll. He is a fortress, walled off and locked to the outside world not because he does not give a damn about it, but, it seems, because, having once detached himself from this world, he sees himself as having very little to do with it. He advances with a slight forward tilt – not like a man bent down by illness or frailty, but rather like someone fighting against a strong wind: his work sitting daily behind a desk has given him this shape.