The occasion was this. Vladik was always gallant. He was gallant to a fault and without any ulterior motives. One night, he and a friend were going home after classes, and came upon the following unattractive scene next to the Dawn movie theater: A gorilla from among the local thugs who even back then were considered dangerous, stood at the steps to the movie theater next to a person of female gender and, without taking the cigarette out of his mouth, asked, “So what, bitch, are we going or not?”
That is how his question was related to us – verbatim.
Pushing his friend aside, Vladik rushed to the gorilla, and the sidewalk, we should mention, is quite a ways off from the steps of the theater, so the gorilla had plenty of time to consider Vladik’s approach. Vladik’s intentions, however, were so unexpected, that the gorilla felt compelled to move his cigarette from the right corner of his chapped mouth to the left. Vladik slammed on the breaks right before the guy, and, breathing hard, demanded, “Apologize to the lady right this minute!”
The king of thugs – and the gorilla happened to be the notorious Grammar, may he rest in peace – made a step back and said to no one in particular, “I be killing him now.”
The jab followed swiftly and caught Vladik on the bridge of his nose. Awash in blood, Vladik quickly got up and ran up to Grammar again.
“I repeat, you must apologize!” he demanded again, his voice breaking into a single extended sob.
“Naw,” Grammar said, utterly confused. “I be killing him now for real.”
He hit again and knocked Vladik down, but even that did not stop Kuznetsov. After he went down the fourth time, the presumably offended female party saw fit to interfere: she took Grammar by the arm, half-hugging his shoulder to contain his zeal, and said, “Let’s go now, or else you might kill him for real.”
“All right,” Grammar said, and they left.
Vladik shouted after them – he still demanded an apology.
The person who told us this story swore that he remembered the face of a curious boy who happened to be hanging out on the scene, and many years later recognized him in the picture that accompanied a long article about the “Lyuberneggers” in Ogonyok: the protruding ears and the particular shape of the superciliary arch, he said, left no doubt about it.
But let us return to Vladik’s first year at the University. Aside from his general physical stamina, his disdain for luxury, his persistence and motivation, Vladik was known for his humble Stargorodian roots.
“All my ancestors plowed land,” he liked to say.
This insistence on rustic roots, which, admittedly, does not fit very well with the apocryphal narrative of the old man’s split from the stockyard, has become such an integral part of Vladik’s public persona that we feel it is perfectly legitimate to include his illuminating biography in our series of true life stories of the brilliant and ordinary people associated with Stargorod in one way or another.
As is frequently the case, Vladik was derailed by love. Cupid, that pesky, bare-assed troublemaker, took aim at Vladik right after the first exam session. Admittedly, he was not alone in his misery; moreover, consumed by his work on Cato the Elder, Vladik was the last of his classmates to become aware of the Varya K. phenomenon – by the time he finally noticed her, others had already had time to get over the charming yet unyielding art historian. Even the sailor Dyakovenko, blown from the North Sea Fleet decks into the marble halls by the stormy winds of the night-school quota enrollment, once, being significantly inebriated, complained to his friend Zhenya Rayev who came from distant Usol-Sibirsk, “I took her by the ass once, and you know how she hissed! That’s a rotten shrew right there, but I’d still do her.”
“True that, Sailor – she’s out of our league, that one,” Zhenya Rayev thoughtfully agreed.
After reaching this remarkable conclusion, the two friends set out for the dorms of the Soils Biology Department, where their visit produced a legendary series of events with broken windows and their pursuit of Aunt Klava the door-lady, performed naked and with a fire-extinguisher that had been previously discharged into the wall. The events, naturally, engendered quite a stir; in the aftermath, sailor Dyakovenko, since he was not involved in the unauthorized handling of fire-fighting equipment, got off with a reprimand, and Zhenya Rayev, to his own stunned glee, was expelled and sent back to his native Usol-Sibirsk, where we lost track of him forever.
Still, because we do not want to resort to citing, on rather questionable grounds, the even-more questionable fetish of liberal intellectuals, Dr. Freud, we will simply say: It was all Varenka K.’s fault.
She came from an old Moscow aristocratic family, whose name resonated just so with her given name – the simple Russian Varvara – which had become rare by the late 50s and was loaded, of course, with secret anti-Bolshevik sentiment, but which today has lost, unfortunately, its signifier. We, much to our own chagrin, do find ourselves employing, on occasion, the high-flying academese, not – as we’re sure our reader will understand – due to any shortcoming of our magnificent native tongue, but rather compelled by our stubborn pursuit of the resulting musicality), the name, then, which in our own time... But you already know what’s going on, without all this scholastic nonsense, don’t you?
Varenka K. Her hair redder than a flame, trim, athletic, a brilliant gymnast, a bit of a ballerina – she was a creature that captivated the imagination and tempted the heart with coy green eyes, and, of course, she was fluent in French and played the piano. With a memory like a steel trap and her awesome natural talent, she beat Vladik 17 times in a row at Word Squares and thrice at Battleships one day when she ended up sitting next to him during a History of the Communist Party lecture.
Vladik was cut to the quick. Varenka was triumphant. Vladik followed her about like a puppy-dog. He carried her book-bag. Yes, exactly like a fifth-grader. He helped her into her coat. He pawed at the ground and haunted her large, professorial home until dark (and later). He was never allowed inside.
Was he truly suffering? At the time, several hypotheses circulated among his classmates; there were some who, because they envied him, said Vladik was merely seeking more cheap popularity, but we believe otherwise. Especially when one remembers the countless pages of Kuznetsov’s love poems that were passed around the class and, of course, landed in Varenka’s pretty hands. Did you notice that their initials were the same? This, for some reason, inspired in Vladik great confidence.
The number of poems rose in geometric progression. Sharp-tongued aesthetes found special delight in “Oh, you, whose hair is a fire’s blaze” in which “blaze” rhymed with “craze,” “maze,” “braise,” and “malaise,” as well as “Like a general, valiant on the eve of battle,” and the late-period “Oh, Roman courtesans...” (It is worth noting here that Vladik appears to have possessed the gift of foretelling: Varenka, after she married Vittorio Macini, a left-wing radical, now lives in Rome where, rumor has it, she teaches Russian grammar at the Jesuit collegium.) Sailor Dyakovenko was one of the sympathetic few, and found his poems pretty but worthless.
“She won’t give you any, mate, trust me,” he would say to Vladik, suggesting he instead come along to visit the soil biology girls.
Vladik refused every time, and instead went straight to his post outside his Muse’s windows. He appeared not to notice when people made fun of him. He knew how to handle public opinion and worked at it patiently, until everyone, or almost everyone, got accustomed to seeing things his way. So it was that when another lost soul replaced him outside Varenka’s windows – someone from mechanical mathematics, who was equipped with his father’s Volga, and was also, to be fair, eventually discarded without ever having been allowed inside the house – most of the class mourned together with Vladik.
That’s when Kuznetsov threw himself into his work, buried himself alive in the library with Cato the Elder’s De Agri Cultura and produced the above-mentioned four hundred and fifteen brilliant pages.
✵ ✵ ✵
The
summer after Kuznetsov’s first year passed in the shadow of The Newspaper Story.
Vladik’s class was sent to an archaeological dig, where, according to witness testimony, Vladik had earned the honorable moniker “Bulldozer” for his incomparable ability to raze, stratum after stratum, ancient grave mounds. There was no job that he would refuse. He enjoyed climbing the piles of dirt and moving more dirt by shovelfuls, and it was there, in the trench one day that Vladik, lost in the rhythm of the work, brought his shovel down on his bare foot and sliced off a bit of skin. This happened in the middle of a workday, so there were plenty of witnesses. There was very little blood, but it must have been Vladik’s own sudden, treacherous negligence that frightened, or rather, stunned him. At first, as was his custom, Kuznetsov blushed red like a poppy, but in almost the same instant he began to turn pale, then completely white, and then he suddenly fainted. This disgusting weakness lasted mere seconds, but it was enough for Vladik to bear its shame forever. His resilience, his vigor, his stamina – all that failed him, and, utterly destroyed, he fled into the bushes and, it appears, even cried bitterly, because when he came out at the end of the day to board the truck back to the base-camp, Kuznetsov was described as having puffy eyes, bright purple cheeks, and a beaten-down expression.
From that moment, a new Vladik Kuznetsov begins.
From that day on, no one, not even sailor Dyakovenko who was a professional at the art of drinking, could ever outdrink Vladik Kuznetsov. By the end of the summer, Vladik’s face acquired a distinct purple tinge, but that was it; every morning, Vladik rose before dawn, brushed his teeth, did a series of stretching exercises and went on his run. His hangover was purged by sweat, and afterwards Vladik swung his shovel just as methodically as before; only now he was really careful about his feet and wore his grandfather’s cow-hide boots. Vladik’s special affection for military style was not the same as the contemporary fashion fad indulged by his classmates: for them, uniforms were stylish only in a kitschy way, worn with a special carelessness that made the wearer resemble a carousing hussar. Vladik would not have any of it. When he put on his green shirt, it was also with a belt and a shoulder-belt; he was a whiz with foot-cloths (he thought socks a decadence), and, since the day of his shameful bloodletting, did not part with the heavy boots that his frugal grandfather had shod with cavalry-issue metal horseshoe taps.
Over a drink, Vladik liked to talk about the victories of the Russian military: aside from his dearly beloved Romans, he also admired Suvorov and reserved a special place in his heart for Marshal Zhukov, under whose command Vladik’s own grandfather had the honor of serving. All this did not prevent Vladik from respecting Hitler as well; he even developed a peculiar way of greeting people by raising his arm from the shoulder, almost Nazi-like, with the invariable accompaniment of a resounding “Hi!” This behavior, naturally, only increased Vladik’s scandalous popularity, but he remained democratic and drank with everyone. Since he was often the last man left standing, Vladik didn’t mind cleaning up, until one day, sweeping the evidence of yet another party into a piece of paper he had found, Vladik made a mistake. We must mention that the head of the expedition was Professor Lokotov – a pedantic bore of a man, who had been wounded tragically in the Great War. On May 9, 1945, a snotty Hitler-Jugend kid shot Lokotov’s tank with a Faustpatrone, killing his crew and leaving the future Professor one-armed. The injury made Lokotov anti-social, but it must have done wonders for his scholarly diligence, and by the mid-70s the old soldier had attained the rank of Professor, managed his own research group, and gained special fame in the academic community for his insistence on replacing, in his articles, the foreign borrowing “ceramics” with the simpler and more resonant phrase “broken pots.”
So, Vladik, highly intoxicated but still securely vertical, was taking out the trash. Right at the street door (the students were housed in the village school) he lost his focus for a moment and almost fell on top of Professor Lokotov, who was entering. Drops of red goo from the leftovers of sardines in tomato sauce, a non-negotiable item on the student menu, fell onto the Professor’s trousers. An empty bottle dropped from Vladik’s grasp and hit Lokotov painfully on the foot. Vladik hastened to retreat, but was instantly trapped by the enraged archaeologist.
“What is this? What is it?” the former tank commander shoved Vladik’s bundle of trash into his face. The paper into which Vladik had wrapped everything turned out to have been a school display; a picture of Lenin in the center had been pierced with a knife (Vladik recalled he sliced an onion there earlier) and the Leader of the Proletariat was smeared all over with the same red goo.
What happened next stunned everyone. Vladik – who may have been irked by the rough treatment, or insulted at being cornered like that, or perhaps simply not in the right mood – suddenly shoved the broken-pot luminary away and said, loud and clear:
“Fuck off, old man...”
The old soldier, we must admit, lost his bearings for an instant and gave in. Vladik bolted through the opening, thundered out the door, and fled to his cot accompanied by the angry clicking of his heel pads on the brick floor.
As a result, there was a personal complaint about the behavior of Komsomol member Kuznetsov. The History Department’s Komsomol Committee, however, was well acquainted with Professor Lokotov; they had been dealing with the professor’s personal complaints for years – he never came back from an expedition without a whole stack of them. It was, in fact, only the professor’s reputation with the Committee that saved Vladik from being expelled; he got off with a reprimand.
Kuznetsov responded with words that are not fit to print, expressing his disdain for such Komsomol nonsense.
The whole story appeared to have been the final blow to Vladik’s already shaky commitment to science. Marcus Porcius Cato the Elder, who lived so many centuries ago, was cast into oblivion once again. Instead, Vladik was consumed by the idea of creating his own political party. He already had the greeting and the uniform; his ideology was a mix of Cato’s sense of entitlement, austerity and directness and Suvorov’s patriotism, with a dose of Nazi-smacking intolerance for Jews and Armenians. The latter sentiment was something Vladik developed following the advice of sailor Dyakovenko, who by then had transferred to the History of the Communist Party Department. Dyakovenko never made a secret of his intention to go back to the North Fleet after graduation: with his blue buoy of a diploma he fully expected to find a cushy political gig.
Vladik did not want a cushy gig. Vladik chose to fight. While he respected his grandfather’s lessons deeply, he was heard, in his inner circle, bemoaning the fact that the old man had not quite seen the things the way they were. Vladik was not satisfied by merely speaking truth to power; as every true Russian, he cared about the oppressed masses and dreamed of liberation, while he continued to plan for his radically new party.
Vladik acquired a pair of bodyguards: Kolya Bolshoi and a guy named Footmanov from a once-noble family. No one knew where he found them; the three held court at the University’s tap room and proselytized there without fear (and this was mid-70s, not today!), sometimes using their fists to make their arguments stick. Kolya Bolshoi’s fists, we must observe, were as big as his last name.
What was keeping Vladik at the University at this point? It seemed there was one more thing he wanted – the military course, despised by everyone else. That’s just the kind of man Vladik was – forever swimming against the flow, driven and stubborn.
Another story comes to mind.
A group of students led by Major Borodin, a well-known liberal, who had once aimed high but got burned (and was, people said, to remain a Major forever), an excellent military translator who had even been seen reading Salinger in the original on a subway train on his way to work – this group of students was ready to take in another class full of Major’s stories about his adventures around the world. The students had developed a sure method for getting the Major to talk. Whenever they were supposed to be memorizing something i
ncredibly boring about the American Minuteman or Polaris missiles, one of Major’s favorites would raise his hand and ask, for example:
“Comrade Major, would you happen to know – can you see a submarine from a plane?”
Major Borodin would lean back on his chair and study his audience. When he was satisfied that indeed, everyone wanted to hear the answer, he would begin, “The Red Sea is home to a unique genus of giant sea-shells (here he would fire off an unpronounceable Latin name). If you are sailing, let’s say, a small storm-boat, the shape of one of these sea shells looks very much like the contour of an enemy submarine at periscope depth, as seen from, let’s say, a patrol helicopter.”
On the day in question, things were proceeding as usual: the rapt audience was listening to the Major expounding on the distinguishing features of Ethiopian women (as compared to Somalis), when, at a rather important point, the lecture was interrupted by the measured thumping of someone marching in the hallway. The noise seemed to be approaching. The tactful Major Borodin allowed his face to acquire the look of a gourmand surreptitiously surveying the dinner table, to make sure that indeed, his roast snails have been served without the garlic-and-marjoram sauce. The thunder outside, meanwhile, climaxed in the command, “Halt!” followed by a distinct clack of heels snapped together. Then, Vladik’s deep voice rumbled forth from behind the door:
“Permission to enter, Comrade Major!”
Major Borodin lifted himself from his chair just a bit, and, glancing at the door with growing alarm, replied almost according to the Manual, “Enter, granted.”
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