Stargorod

by Peter Aleshkovsky

  The little man bears right from the bridge, past The Young Sailors Club, through the back alley of Public Bathhouse No. 1, through stacks of the brewery’s old crates, until he makes his way to the five-domed Church of Jacob and Anna, “on the gorges.” He climbs to the gallery, pushes the heavy door of the city archives open, enters and greets the guard.

  Pavel Anatolyevich Ogorodnikov always arrives 20 minutes before the start of the workday. He takes off his coat neatly and hangs it on a hanger in the wardrobe. He remains in a checkered jacket, worn over a checked flannel shirt closed at the throat with a solid tie with a pin. Then he puts on his over-sleeves. He pulls out his pencils and pens, his razor and his pen-knife, his sharpener and his erasers – the red one with powdered glass and the gray Coh-i-nor one with the tiny mammoth on it, his black-ink fountain pen, and a second one exactly like the first – a spare, just in case. Then: a light switch clicks; a green-shaded desk lamp comes on, as it always does, even on a bright spring day, even in the middle of the stuffy Stargorod summer: Pavel Anatolyevich’s nook is walled off from the archive’s shelves with large oak wardrobes moved here from the diocesan offices in March of 1919. He flexes and warms his fingers. He sits down to his desk, pushes his chair in, nice and tight, and takes the first folder from the pile on his right: opens it, leafs through, counts pages, checks the count against the last inventory. Then he studies it closer – he savors it, reads it, moving his lips along the more rhythmic formulas: “And by the order of our lord the Tsar it was decreed to carry out such acts in perpetuity...” or “and the cannoneers’ children, should they resist learning and despise letters, to be found and, at first, warned with ferocity,” or “by the mercy of God and through your Lordship’s blessed governance this was so done. And I, your humblest servant, do now have the honor of laying this petition at your Lordship’s feet,” or “a Pyramid is a Body, sometimes dense and sometimes vacant inside, with a base that is broad and commonly of four corners, ending on top in a pinnacle.” Who can write like that today?

  Denunciations, personal letters, complaints, writs, chits, suggestions for the benefit of the Motherland, accounting sheets, traveling papers, indignant epistles by the wrongfully righteous and reports on the progress of long-forgotten construction projects, notations to thunderous speeches delivered at an unknown date to an unknown audience, sometimes put down by the skillful hand of a professional scribe and sometimes in a amateur’s scrawl, a myriad of loops, squiggles and apostrophes – for Pavel Anatolyevich there are no secrets here. There is a special kind of bliss in this, a beauty – of the language itself perhaps, or maybe of the scribe’s penmanship – it doesn’t matter really! The cursives, the capitals, the cinnabar savers. Somewhere outside, a day was on its way, but here he was surrounded by beauty.

  “To learn how various countries and kingdoms, into which the universe is divided, had come to be; by what means and steps they had reached the grandeur we behold in our reading of history, and into what kind of union did families and cities have to join in order to form a single body and live collectively under a single authority, obeying common laws, one must return, so to speak, to the days of our world’s infancy, to the time when people scattered all over after the separation of tongues and began to fill the Earth.”

  Reading that, how could you not start thinking about the days of our world’s infancy, about the immense base of an Egyptian pyramid that does, on top, “end in a pinnacle”?

  He thinks about these things in passing, because his hand never rests, but continues to make entries in the ledger without pause: the hand’s hard at work on the archive’s inventory; the hand pencils in page numbers on unnumbered pages and binds loose leaves together; it holds up the paper to the light so that the eye can discern the watermark; and it can note, “Lipsia, 1785, Crown and Cross,” and he can pull up the main index, which he knows by heart, and yes, there is already a folder for this case! His hand fills the appropriate cell in the record – quartern – his creaking pen draws its own loops, fixes, records once again forever, and only at the very bottom of the record will he add a few squiggles for “entered by P. A. Ogorodnikov.” Personally, he would have preferred not to do even that – he long ago conquered the youthful vanity of all neophytes.

  He too had once been a neophyte, a student at the local Pedagogical Institute who looked around and could not see a place for himself in the world; he didn’t know it then, but he was looking for diocesan wardrobes and the worsted coat he would wear until his penniless archivist’s final days. But this is now, and that was then. Back then, he was assigned to the archives for his summer practicum, and the ancient gnome Tsvetonravov, who came from a long line of priest’s children, pointed his withered finger at the paper landslides produced by the Red Army in the same 1919 and said: “Here. This – is work!” Pavel Anatolyevich (nobody addressed him that way back then) began to dig; he wanted to make a discovery. A breakthrough! An accomplishment! But Tsvetonravov chastised him: “You must proceed in order; what have they done to you to be tossed around like that?” ‘They’ were the cases. Pavel Anatolyevich obeyed and, once he sat down at his desk, never really got up again, except, people seem to remember, when he stepped out to get married and the second time – to bring his baby daughter home from the hospital. But home was his second fortress, if not the third, the archive being his first, and his coat the second.

  Here, behind the shelves and the wardrobes, a new zeal took over – the zeal of a keeper and a preserver, and with it came a different vanity – not the kind that is common among academic historians who are seriously convinced that they are, in fact, revealing the truth – but the pride of the expert that is nourished by imagination. Life among dead sounds caught on paper became joyful and sweet like the delicacies that he found sometimes in dull inventories: “four tesha sturgeons, a side of hausen, assorted salted fish – two large barrels, dried raisins, Gilan millet (meaning, imported rice), ginger, cinnamon bark.” This was a monastery kitchen’s ration. He remembers the same monastery’s inventory, compares it mentally with the order’s charter, and he can almost see it: early morning, the novices are building fires under the cauldrons in the kitchen, the sky is just turning pink, it is spring...

  Pavel Anatolyevich is interrupted: a scholar from Leningrad is asking for help. She is writing a history of Stargorod’s fortifications and is trying to find the city inventory conducted after the fire of 1724. Pavel Anatolyevich looks up from his work – his eyes look gullible at the moment, they regard his petitioner kindly. “Just a minute, just a minute...”

  He gets up, walks away between the towering shelves, pulls out a drawer, runs his finger over the catalog cards as though over the strings of a giant instrument or a fat stack of banknotes. He pulls one out. He reads. It’s simple now: the scholar can take the card to circulation, and they will bring her the case that, Pavel Anatolyevich remember, had to do with the burnt out settlements beyond Kopanka, with the destruction of the city’s moat and the newly-paved Pozagorodnaya Street. Of course, of course: the moat then was overrun with weeds and the water in it stood “mainly rotten,” and “it wasn’t good to take that water even to water the orchards.” He turns back before the scholar is finished thanking him. The man in the over-sleeves walks back to his desk – with his thinning hair, his forward bent as if he is struggling against a gale, and his shuffling, heavy soles. The scholar hurries in the other direction, to the circulation desk, where she may strike up a conversation with the girls about the televised debates, or perhaps will just wait until they bring her the records to spread out before her and stare out the window until she is either too tired or too lazy to stay awake.

  Pavel Anatolyevich walks between the empty desks in the reading room – how many eccentrics out there, really, spend their time on Stargorod’s history? He is lost in his own thoughts, lost to his world, when suddenly he catches a teary gaze and the rest of the apparition before him: fuzzy, helpless. He changes course and approaches the apparition’s desk, quickl
y. A very young student holds out a sheet of paper, “I’m sorry, I can’t make out any of it... Could you possibly?..”

  “Just a minute, just a minute.”

  Pavel Anatolyevich holds the document closer to light and immediately begins reading, “By the order of the Great Tsar, the Lord of all Russia, Great, Small and White...”

  He reads without pauses, but steadily, as if reading a newspaper for a blind man. The student tries to write it down, can’t keep up, fidgets, and finally throws his pencil down on his notebook.

  “No, it’s just too hard! It’s impossible.”

  “Nothing of the sort, young man, just the common shorthand of seventeenth century scribes.”

  “But these are hieroglyphs – they don’t even look like letters!”

  “Of course they are hieroglyphs, and rather beautiful ones. You’ll get used to them, don’t worry, it’s just a matter of practice. Let’s go again from the beginning...”

  Ogorodnikov reads again, slowly now, making sure the student can write everything down. Finally, it is done.

  “Thank you, thank you so much! I have just one more little text here, could you...”

  “I’m afraid I can’t, young man, I do have other things to do, you know,” he says, looking haughty now and walks away from the student’s desk, shuffles steadily back to his corner. He thinks, if the boy really wants to know, he’ll figure it out – he’s got enough written down to compare, to decipher the shorthand and start reading. And if he can’t – he shouldn’t be here anyway.

  A minute later he is back at his own desk, working again.

  Pavel Anatolyevich Ogorodnikov – a small fortress of a man – sits behind a big solid desk. Look at him: his over-sleeves, and his boots, and his glasses in their impossible black frame, and his briefcase of the kind no one carries anymore – everything about him is fundamentally permanent. Could this be why the archive’s girls, who forever dream of happy, romantic love, dote on him so movingly at lunch? He chews his sandwich, stirs the tea in his glass with an aluminum spoon, and when they ask him, tells them one of his peculiar stories, like the one about coronet Savelyev who was so desperately in love with the merchant’s daughter Pilgina that he shot himself in the White Tower when she turned him down. The girls listen, unblinking, hanging on his every word. Who would have thought such things were possible? Pavel Anatolyevich does.

  Then they go back to their respective corners. The girls scurry between the stacks and the reading room, pushing carts loaded with case folders, books and microfilm boxes, chat with rare visitors; he works. “Feed inventory for the 4th Royal Guard Uhlan division quartered in Anninskaya Sloboda,” another one – from the following year, “The case of Coronet Sergeyev’s lost rapier,” “Note by widow Vechtomova about her degraded situation due to the non-payment of her dead husband’s pension,” and more things like that, gray and trifling, a litany of complaints, cowering petitions, the usual fervent Russian begging laced with despair and abandonment. And all of it local, Stargorodian. The city, the town but a tiny dot on a large map, yet there are so many cases, so many files have piled on in the stacks and there is no one but Pavel Anatolyevich to take up the tedious work of sorting through them.

  The work day is over. Pavel Anatolyevich neatly collects his pens, pencils, erasers, his penknife and his razors, dusts off his desk and nods his goodbye to the girls as they dash out ahead of him. He pulls on his heavy coat, seals himself behind its massive buttons, and steps out to the gallery of St. Jacob and Anna’s little church that’s “on the gorges.” A long time ago there was a grove of trees here. Later, when the plague came – a cemetery with a tiny temporary wooden chapel, and later still they built the five-domed church. He does not walk past the brewery, oh no – he is walking down the non-existent rows of the Klykov merchant family, past the old fish market, over the three-span oak bridge with heavy breakwaters, and on through Potters’ Corner. And if someone should think that this little man in his coat is oblivious to the charms of spring, if someone should judge that “the briefcase guy” does not breathe as fully and joyfully as the judge himself, the judge would be wrong, very wrong indeed. Although sometimes it is true that one’s own joy can make one completely blind to the world, and the joy of others seems all but repulsive, and one does not want to share this momentary, private bliss with anyone else, well then, there’s nothing wrong with that, is there?

  Pavel Anatolyevich has gotten hungry. Against his will, he stumbles into the wonderful prose of life – he begins to daydream about the hot borsch and the potato pancakes with mushroom sauce that his wife makes so well. He enjoys an affectionate home, where the best of dinner is always set aside to wait for him.

  His gaze is still distant, aloof, his eyes almost haughty in their refusal to focus on the quotidian.

  Metamorphoses, or The Art of Instant Transformation

  For A. Arkhangelsky

  Let me spin a tale for you, a fable like in the old days, one to delight and amuse. Let me sweet-talk you – only give me kindly of your time and do cast your gaze upon this piece of paper I have filled with ink. I promise that you will marvel at the transformations of fates and of the human forms themselves, and at their return, by same miraculous means, back to their original state. I shall begin.

  But who am I, you’ll ask. Listen then: our name is the Lyamochkins. I am a Stargorodian, a son of a Stargorodian, and a grandson of a Stargorodian’s grandson, and very few of us remain these days. Captured for a while by Moscow, I studied there at the Moscow State University in the Department of History, pursuing the thoroughly forgotten Lucius Apuleius.21 Here in Stargorod I now labor at the local paper, although back then people expected a great future for me, a great future indeed. But that is all in the past; now I am just making regular progress up the career ladder, and Filimonov even let it slip recently that he might make me his Executive Secretary. That would be logical: I am meek and clever. But I am a Stargorodian, born and raised, flesh and blood, I am Lyamochkin who writes his tales sometimes and puts them in his desk drawer – I have a fancy to compile a chronicle of my generation. Thus, first and foremost I beg you not to take offense should you find in my crude prose some folksy turns-of-phrase and foreign words. A shifting dialect does befit, when you think about it, the art of instant transformation, and the latter is my single and most compelling subject. Metamorphoses – or perhaps, fate itself. I do begin. Lend me your ears, reader, and let me please you.

  ✵ ✵ ✵

  It’s not that long ago that they made me head of a department, and Filimonov announces, “Do hustle tomorrow. Tomorrow we are going to pick up comrade Karponos at the railway station. I want you there early. Before. Half-an-hour before the train pulls in.”

  All right. I run. I take flight. I curse my fate as I rush, but I obey – though it is Thursday, I’ve got work to do, and instead I must stand here, wait, greet: Karponos is an auditor, come all the way from Moscow to inspect us. Is it good I’ve been included? I don’t know. I really don’t – I rather think it’s bad. Before, I only heard of these meetings in passing, but now that I’ve climbed higher – here I am, they bring me along. And thank God for that. I run. I fly. I curse the day I was born – I’m embarrassed.

  But. The sleeping car pulls up. First, a Gut emerges. A Pot. A Cauldron. Everyone’s on the platform now affecting great liveliness, only I’m bent over under the luggage, silent. They do bring me around to shake hands – I’m the last one. The driver takes up a couple suitcases. The Volga rolls away towards the dacha, our van – with its death rattle – hangs back. We’ve got someone else to pick up: the city’s head architect, naturally, Ilya Semyonovich Razkin, then the unions – Boris Borisovich Draftin, the city administration – Bobchinov, district committee – Dobychin, and so on down the list. Filimonov is in charge of the list; our boss rides in the Volga with comrade Karponos. They must be sitting down to dinner already, and we’re still making rounds, still fetching people: Alimzharov – the market, Eaglov – the furnitur
e factory, Patrikeyeva... Wait a second! Who’s this Patrikeyeva? Oh, it’s Patrikeyev – the gathering is men only. Pardon me – he is tiny, small-boned, and a leather coat obscures his shape. He is the bank. Is that all? All. Off we go then – to the pier.

  “Where’s the Armenian?”

  “Suren Biglyarovich? He’s already on the boat – grilling shashlyk.”

  Suren Biglyarovich is our independent retailer.

  And here we are at the boat, and it’s moored off the main pier, by the Fishing Guard motor-boats. This way, the tourists won’t notice us, and they’ve got better things to do anyway – it’s summer, it’s Thursday, it’s a beautiful day, who wants to poke around with the Fishing Guard?

  We climb the boardwalk. The Boss is right there – a one-man receiving line.

  “Lyamochkin? Didn’t your father work at the printing shop?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Look at you now! The new guard. Why don’t you go to the galley, given Suren a hand with the shashlyk.”

  Shashlyk. More shashlyk. Onions and tomatoes. Lamb shoulder.

  “Sweetie, why vinegar? Marinate in cognac, vinegar ruins it.”

  The shashlyk is divine.

  “Let’s go, boys!”

  We take the food to the deck. It smells! It oozes! Some dill, a salad. Sliced lemon for those who want some.

  And the little steamer’s pretty as a picture: blinds are down over the portholes, no one can see in.

  I sit off to the side, alone, and gorge quietly on my shashlyk. I’ve eaten too much already, but I keep wanting more – it’s so good! My face and hands are soiled with fat. I keep my mouth shut – I love a good shashlyk.

  The toasts wind down – it’s time for the banya. A real Finnish sauna right here on the boat! Now, that’s a wow!