Stargorod

by Peter Aleshkovsky

  “Come on, come on down everybody – don’t upset your Boss!”

  Men shoot the breeze on the benches. Comrade Karponos shares news from the capital; Patrikeyev farts inappropriately. He blushes. Men hoot. I’m embarrassed.

  And now we’re back to the deck – in our swimming trunks. “The Pot” is pink as a piglet and steaming. Someone squeals with delight. Someone is talking up the pleasures of Stargorod’s river. Men egg on the fat Razkin – jump, here, overboard, cannon-ball. It’s deep here, the water’s clean. Here, on the Senga, on a channel no one will bother you – you can be sure of that. Once in a great while some idiot sails by, but they rarely come here.

  And suddenly – it comes, from around the bend – the stench! A pair of muddy, stinking Stargorodian scows covered in clay dirt – smoky, tarred, fishing nets dangling in oily balls, and on the decks piles of fish guts, rot, fry. The stench! Everyone turns away, only I stare. I know what you have to do to get that fish. The fishermen, as if on command, turn away to hide their alcoholics’ noses, and only the man at the wheel stares back at me, steady and vicious. Not a gleam, not a spark in his eye. I am embarrassed, scared.

  ✵ ✵ ✵

  “Lyamochkin, wake up! Lyamochkin, the day’s over. What are you supposed to say to that, Lyamochkin? You’re supposed to say, ‘And to hell with it!’”

  It’s Timofeyev from the Letters Department, the eternal drill sergeant. Lyamochkin stretches, wipes off a bit of spit from the corner of his mouth – less than a drop, really, more a perspiration, the sweet drool of a midday nap. Did anyone notice? And if they did, who cares! He waves, at no one in particular, and heads for the street door. Some dreams, man! Sometimes you don’t want to know where they come from.

  Lyamochkin goes straight to the beer stand – to have a mug or two, shoot the breeze, maybe hear a story. In advance, he prudently takes off his tie. He sips his beer. He listens.

  “That Potyekha, son of a bitch, did he fuck up today or what! Captain’s on vacation – you ain’t getting no fish. Potyekha’s in charge. Made us haul ass all the way to Senga, the knuckle-dragger, to this side channel – and there’s fish alright, but you ain’t getting it, except maybe with a trammel. Thought I’d sprain something for sure, but we got it all pulled up – and what did we get there? A load of thorny coontails! We dragged right over it – twisted our nets nice and tight.”

  “Coontails? Gramps used to say, they fed it to goats after the war.”

  “Gramps? You just go on and listen to that old fart – he’s the biggest mouth for miles,” the story-teller says before turning around and sizing up Lyamochkin. The man’s dull eyes are pure beer – not a single spark glows there. The beer pushes him; it pushes him towards Lyamochkin. A fork-like paw shoots out, grabs Lyamochkin’s lapel and reels him in, like a boat’s propeller spooling weed.

  “What are you... staring at? Huh?”

  “All right, just take it easy, man,” Lyamochkin says. He knows how to deal with these types.

  “What are you now? Who’d you think you are? You from around here? I fish, dude, I am a man, you get it? And what are you now?”

  Suddenly, Lyamochkin recognizes him – recognizes his eyes, the same eyes he’d seen across the channel – and gets scared. That’s bad, that’s really bad – he cannot be scared now. That’s the worst thing he can do. Lyamochkin makes a step back; he’s in trouble.

  ✵ ✵ ✵

  Filimonov comes to visit him in the hospital. He arrives; he congratulates Lyamochkin on having been approved for the promotion to Executive Secretary, and inconspicuously slips a glass flask of cognac under his pillow.

  “So you can celebrate.”

  He then proudly places a pair of lemons on the bedside table – greetings from sunny Greece. (“Konstantidi Georgius” read the tiny, bright stickers, the name lettered carefully in minuscule brown script, sharp and dark, as if inked with the pure oak sap. Now, that’s a transformation!)

  It’s a shame he doesn’t have his wings here, but it’s all right, he can manage, he’ll just have to try harder. Lyamochkin closes his eyes – and his broken jaw does not hurt anymore: he is far away already, in distant and sunny Greece. This is his personal secret. He flies away light and quick, and returns healthy and full of energy.

  But being an Executive Secretary is a dog’s work – you get heckled from all sides, and there’s never a break from it. You’re up to your ears in meetings, strategic planning, reporting, budgeting, schedules, complaints, people ratting on each other, people backstabbing – and it’s all you. Still, Filimonov knew what he was doing when he picked Lyamochkin to be elevated. Lyamochkin took to the job; he began to shine. Carved out his own niche. Spread his roots. Bought himself a new mug for tea, bigger than the old one, and a cast iron ashtray with the image of a hound dog, a set of fountain pens and an electronic Smena watch. Strange as it may sound, everyone came to love him. That is, everyone to the last man. Only his wife at home knows what it’s cost him – how hard it’s been. But it’s always hard. And not everyone knows how to get things done.

  Lyamochkin returns to his pantry-sized bedroom, pulls out his old wings from the wardrobe – washed by his wife countless times in a special tub, white swan wings that he inherited from his grandfather, who picked them up for a dime in a tavern somewhere in Galicia in 1915 – puts them on right over his tshirt and flies out the window.

  In a suburb of Rome, maybe perched on a pier facing the deserted sea, or perhaps on the deck of an ancient, creaky galley, seated on a spool of rope on the stern, hidden from prying eyes, Lyamochkin unfolds his scroll. Lyamochkin reads; he recites the lines out loud: “Some things are in a haste to become; others – to cease; even in the becoming, a flame is extinguished; change and the flow of things keep the world young exactly as limitless time is eternally young in its every speeding instance. Thus, how could one admire any of a myriad things flowing past in this river any more than another, if one cannot even stand close enough to touch it? It would be the same as to give one’s heart to a fleeting sparrow – a blink, and the bird’s gone, never to be found again...” Lyamochkin contemplates. No, he cannot agree with this... yet he also can. But how could you not love a sparrow? A tweet – and it’s gone!

  Yet it stays. It is here. Lyamochkin writes. Another fable, a tidbit of a story, a morsel of news to be fixed in his thick, clothbound notebook. It has room to spare for sparrows, of course, and it’s true: up and down fly the swings of time, but the motion is not the reward, the merit is elsewhere – in the miraculous transformations he re-lives alone.

  ✵ ✵ ✵

  His wife calls him to the table; the family gathers for a late dinner. Ivanov and his wife stop by – they are friends and neighbors. From a fogged-over bottle, Lyamochkin pours thick, lazily flowing vodka infused with the peel of Greek lemons. Then – clink! – and he bites a pickle, crunches it loudly with his teeth. Ivanov tells a joke; the women laugh.

  He is at the same paper, the same editorial office still – the unhurried, thoughtful Lyamochkin who can sometimes be as restless as a sparrow in springtime, our Lyamochkin, the irreplaceable one. He is no longer afraid of anything; sometimes he goes to the station to receive important visitors, then rattles all over town in the decrepit editorial van, picking up other banya fans. More often, though, he finds an excuse to stay behind at the office.

  And if he doesn’t stay late there, drinking countless cups of tea with the guy responsible for closing the issue, and if he manages to get everything on his list done early, Lyamochkin heads out to the beer stand. To get a mug or two, to shoot the breeze, to hear a story perhaps. He goes there with his tie on; he never takes it off now. He sips his beer, smokes his cigarette, and, unembarrassed about his advancing boldness, looks with a quiet joy at each passerby.

  * * *

  21. Lucius Apuleius (died December 100 BC) was a Roman popularist and tribune.

  Vladik Kuznetsov

  Stargorodians are a special tribe. While it is unlikely that
anyone has ever taken it upon themselves to determine the exact number of emigrants from Stargorod, it is well known that Moscow and Leningrad are constantly receiving large numbers of former Stargorodians, and one can reasonably believe this process to have begun long before the Great October Revolution. Later, the flow of Stargorodians increased quite a bit in the aftermath of the Great Patriotic War, which significantly curtailed our ancient town’s native population. But it feels unseemly to talk about it; after all, the whole country knew of Stargorodians’ heroism – among the likes of Lyonya Golikov and Marat Kasey, young pioneers everywhere revered Billyakhut Maxuddinova, whose deeds on the Black Shore of the lake won her first a Hero of the Soviet Union star and later an honorable seat at the Professional Unions’ Association of the Russian Federation.

  Indeed, we should not talk about those whose faces are familiar to every schoolchild; let us rather turn to the unknown and the forgotten. Their name is legion, and restoring their memory is an honorable pursuit, undertaken, in particular, by the Red Scouts of School No. 2 of Stargorod’s Left-bank district. Their displays present for public consumption much that is instructive and curious; hence we shall refer any members of the public who find themselves at leisure and with an interest in local history to the modest, cottonwood-shaded building of the school on Vera Zasulich street.

  We, however, shall tell a tale of another hero – a hero of our own time.

  The old man Kuznetsov was still young when he broke away from the despicable world of Stargorod’s pre-revolutionary stockyards into which he’d been born, and signed up for the Red Army. From that distant but romantic period of his life, he retained for the rest of his days a special affection for the color green, discipline and the principle of unitary authority as embodied in the chain of command. Kuznetsov retired into the rank of an infantry Colonel, felt no desire to return to his forgotten hometown of Stargorod, and instead was perfectly happy to settle in the small town of Lyubertsy, where the garrison allotted him an apartment, to be used in perpetuity by Kuznetsov and his descendants. History has not preserved any information as to the whereabouts of the old man’s only daughter, Svetlana, lost to the immense expanse of our land; one could well have doubted the very fact of said daughter’s existence, were it not for little Vladik, left in his grandparents’ care. Grandmother Kuznetsova died a mere three weeks before her grandson’s high school graduation, and was buried in the Lyubertsy town cemetery without a church service – something her husband, the old Red Army veteran insisted upon. Vladik, who was considered a wunderkind in the school, was deeply affected by his grandmother’s death, but nonetheless graduated with the Gold Medal which, combined with his unimpeachable proletarian pedigree, gave him a free pass to the alma mater – the History Department at Moscow State University named for Mikhail Lomonosov.

  Much like the provincial boy who lent his name to the university, Vladik Kuznetsov arrived at the department in humble attire: he wore sturdy green pants that looked like they’d been re-cut from his grandfather’s, an army-issue officer’s shirt without shoulder straps but with two capacious pockets filled with sharpened pencils, a fountain pen with regulation black ink, a thick plastic comb and a military-discount railway pass for the Moscow-Lyubertsy line. Unlike his more comfortable local classmates, Vladik lived on his 55-ruble stipend (which included a 15-ruble bonus for his perfect grades) and had a crystal clear idea of what he wanted. While the snobs around him debauched themselves in decadent luxury and skipped classes, instead laying siege to the One-Armed Man pub, Vladik methodically studied Latin and prepared to write his thesis on Cato the Elder and his tract De Agri Cultura.

  Many readers, of course, will be familiar with this work as well as the biography of its author, a luminary of Ancient Rome. For those whom circumstances have prevented, thus far, from reading Cornelius Nepos’ Excellentium Imperatorum Vitae or Plutarch’s Lives, we offer here the plain but exhaustive entry from the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (2nd edition, v. 20, p. 383):

  Cato, Marcus Porcius (not to be confused with Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis, commonly known as Cato the Younger) (234-149 BC) – one of the great Roman politicians and writers. He came from a wealthy plebeian family, from the city of Tusculum. In 199 BC was elected Aedile, in 198 BC – Praetor to Spain where he suppressed an uprising of the local tribes. During the war with the Syrian King Antioch III, C. secured for his countrymen the victory in the 191 BC battle at Thermopylae (not to be confused with the one fought by King Leonid and 300 Spartans). In 184 BC, he was elected Censor. Once in a Senatorial position, C. defended the aristocracy and its privileges; he held significant real estate and liquid assets. C. became the voice of those nobles who had made the transition to new forms of estate management by organizing large, slave-labor-based latifundia aimed at producing surplus for the marketplace. All his actions aimed at promoting an active foreign policy and the expansion of the Roman conquests. C. advocated for destroying Carthage – Rome’s major trade competitor. Being, at the same time, a representative of conservative views, he introduced strict anti-luxury laws and fought the growing influence of the Greek culture.

  C. is also a major figure of Ancient Roman prose. He was fluent in Greek and well acquainted with Greek culture, in particular the works of Thucydides and Xenophon. C.’s most significant work was The Origins, which relates the history not only of Rome but also of other Latin cities. Of his many speeches, only fragments have survived. The tract De Agri Cultura is another complete work; it contains fundamental information about contemporary economy and agriculture.

  We shall admit that we were not among the lucky few who had an opportunity to leaf through the young historian Kuznetsov’s thesis; rather, we watched from the shadows. We cheered from the sidelines. Kuznetsov’s work (415 pages long!) drew immediate attention from the department’s senior professoriate and, submitted to the contest for student research, rightly won Vladik first place and a special gift: a copy of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which was widely available in bookstores at the time. In any case, we are not in a position to judge the merit of Vladik’s work, but we do know for certain, from Vladik’s close friends, that no work of such length, exhaustiveness, and, most importantly, elegance – nothing written in such a vivid, lively, elegant style so uncommon among our homegrown historians – has been produced by a student ever since the department’s founding. People saw a great future for Vladik; the old Latin professor, Dr. Troitsky, recognized Vladik publicly, before the entire class that had so much trouble memorizing Exegi monumentum (The Odes of Horace, book 3), for his virtuosic command of the toothache-inducing but eminently useful Latin. “Ab uno disce omnes” (from one, learn all) Vladik’s classmates said in the hallways, expressing their respect. “Quidquid Latine dictum sit altum videtur” (anything said in Latin seems more profound) Vladik answered, dazzling the class with his erudition and blushing ferociously.

  We don’t know whether Vladik’s hero, Marcus Porcius Cato, also possessed the gift of turning his countenance a healthy rosy color at the drop of a hat, but he can be presumed, with a great degree of certainty, to have undergone physical training of the same exacting standards as Vladik’s. The young Kuznetsov, who has been taught that every man is a master of his fate, and that mens sana in corpore sano, followed every prescription of the old Colonel to the letter, and these, rumor had it, included running six miles every day in full combat gear, which in peacetime was replaced by a special set of bricks loaded into a backpack on Vladik’s back. It was clear that Vladik intended to live, like his Ancient Roman hero, to be eighty-five – no more, no less.

  Gaining a certain degree of fame among his classmates did nothing to check Vladik’s passionate pursuit of achievement. Even his appearance – his very image as the fans of Western borrowings would call it – dramatically set Kuznetsov apart from the rest of his jeans-wearing, sloppy-looking cohort. Always trim, although not at all tall; always in perfectly ironed grandfather’s trousers and a clean shirt with a na
rrow officer’s tie, with his hair cropped short, and with a pair of plain, wire-rimmed glasses and his unchanging fake-leather briefcase of immense capacity, even in winter Vladik did not wear anything that was not absolutely necessary. Once, during the ferocious frosts of ‘75, he was seen in a simple gray sport coat with neatly stitched leather elbow patches.

  During the annual September trip to the vegetable warehouse, where the students were used as cheap labor to help with the harvest, Vladik always stood post at the packing machine, and while others found countless excuses to go check the fruit room, he spent his shift filling sacks with wet potatoes, the sight of which invariably prompted him to lament the poor storage conditions and, sometimes, express his personal, deeply held belief:

  “My grandfather,” he might say to a really close friend, “did not fight the war so that some little thief from Armenia could nickel-and-dime the Empire.”

  The warehouse manager, as chance would have it, was a stunningly handsome Armenian who got his start in the History Department in Yerevan, but later traded his humanitarian bona fides for a Moscow degree in Food Technology.

  “All my friends are now PhDs,” he would tell the students. “But I’ve no regrets. I’ve been here three years – and I’m driving my third car.”

  We must also mention that, back in those archaic times – the mid-70s – even the most critically-minded students who may have been reading The Gulag Archipelago on the sly and occasionally tuned in, for lack of better things to do, to the Voice of America broadcasts, were not nearly as politicized as they are today. Sure, you could easily tell who was opposed to the regime, but things never went beyond a political joke or two. Neither were Moscow’s suburbs as stratified and divided as they have become: Lyubertsy, for example, was yet to produce its famous tribe of body-builders. We do believe – and let it be noted that we are the first to formulate this historical hypothesis – that it was Vladik Kuznetsov himself who planted the seed of this Schwarzenegger movement on one particular occasion, especially when one recalls that, in addition to running, Vladik also lifted weights according to a unique method developed, again, by his legendary grandfather.