Stargorod

by Peter Aleshkovsky

  And it would have gone on like that, but you know what times those were. After the war, in the nighttime, a man’s life wasn’t worth a kopek. And we had our share of those amnestied, or escaped ex-cons and bandits, hell knows where they came from. So, one time these two toughs stayed at Matryona Timofeyevna’s place, this divorced lady we had. People rumored the two were on the run, but if anyone knew it for sure, they didn’t tell. The men kept to themselves, Matryona brought them vodka and liver and innards from the sausage plant – that was where she worked. If she pleased one of them at night, we don’t know which one it was, the old one or the young one. One was about 40 – he’s the one we called “old” – and the other still wet behind the ears, but rotten already: foxy, beady, angry little eyes, mustache like a thread, stylish pants, and his whole body taut like a string – a viper about to bite. In the evenings, the old one would take a stool outside, sit on it and roll himself a cigarette; he’d sit there and smoke and watch the street, and his sidekick, like a pup, would be right there, just in case. Sometimes, the young one played cards with the boys, or pulled out his knife, just making threats, but the old one was always quiet, never messed with anyone’s business, just watched silently and went inside by nightfall.

  And that’s when, as fate would have it, Serafim Danilovich got conscripted into hay mowing and was sent into the Lake Country, onto the islands there, leaving his Mother by herself. Except it’s only now we call her Mother, because her husband is a righteous man in their faith, almost a saint, and back then she was just a girl, never mind she was married. And it seemed her husband didn’t indulge her much, either. Or what have you – you know they live pretty strictly there.

  So our Lyubasha was alone, no one to talk to, but she stayed away from the village youth, didn’t go to their parties, turned off the light in the evenings to go to church, and afterward – straight to bed. And with first roosters – she was up, milking her cow, driving her out to pasture, doing chores, busy as a bee.

  One day she was walking down our street, at nighttime after her service, and the hooligans came after her, teasing, pulling her braids, cat-calling, you know – she blushed like a poppy-bloom and made to run, but that’s when the younger thug blocked her way. He pulled out his knife and grabbed her, in front of everyone. The poor thing couldn’t even scream, or move – he held the blade to her chin. He pushed her to the little banya in the back, and there would’ve been trouble but the old one suddenly rose from his stool, motioned like so with his hand and snapped his fingers – the young one instantly forgot the girl, and dashed to his boss.

  “Kneel!”

  He fell to the ground like a cut sheaf. The old one reached behind him slowly, making a point, grabbed the stool and – wham! – smashed it against the young one’s skull, splinters everywhere, the boy face down in the mud. When the boy came ‘round and rubbed the blood out of his eyes, the old one pointed to the shards of the stool and said, “Have a new one here tomorrow.” He was about to go in to Matryona, but stopped and looked a Lyubasha kindly – as she stood there, and the boys around her, neither alive nor dead, too scared to move.

  “What’s your name, pretty-eyes?”

  She lit up as if with a spark.

  “Lyubov.”

  “Fine, fine,” the old man nodded. “Go on, sweetie, what are you afraid of? It’ll be a lesson for this here goat.” He shot one glance over her little figure and went home. And she dashed home, too – she couldn’t have hoped for such a rescue.

  After that day, people noticed that Lyubasha changed her path to walk past Matryona’s house: she started fetching water at Kopanka, and she’d always gone the other way ‘round, to Kosmodemyanskaya, before. What can you say? The old one must have won her over. Hooked her in, touched some string in the girl’s heart. And of course, soon after there were rumors that he went to her at night. People gossiped, but no one dared to check – they also said the old man carried a gun on him.

  All in all, they dallied like that for just over a week: Lyubasha bloomed like my lilac bush, even her gait changed – she used to skip around like a girl, and now she floated swan-like, and her eyes, the eyes – you wouldn’t recognize her, she had these happy little impish sparks dancing in them… But all things end.

  Serafim Danilovich returned, to his misfortune, at night – all the neighbors were asleep already. He went in – and there they were: caught red-handed. But what could he do against an ex-con? What all happened, I don’t know, but the thug got him pinned down and shoved her into the pantry and told her to shush. And what then, what got into his head – but who would know those thugs, they’re heartless after the camps, the girl only believed him out of her youth and foolishness – anyway, they had this old, banded trunk in the corner that held all her dowry: beads and necklaces, and money, too, for sure. He emptied it all into his sack, then dragged Serafim Danilovich, stripped of his pantaloons, to the trunk and clamped his manly stuff under the lid, the brute. Shut the trunk, locked it with the key, threw the key out the window, and placed Serafim’s favorite German trophy razor on the lid. Just put it there and vanished – no one saw him or his pup after that. Robbed them, you know, locked him down, and ran.

  They say the pain took Serafim Danilovich’s power of speech – all he could do was moo a little; saying anything clearly or calling for help hurt like a white-hot iron brand, and Lyubasha was locked in the pantry, waiting, scared, not knowing what was going on and praying to every saint she could remember. He couldn’t stand it for very long – he was shut tight and things started to swell. So the man grabbed his razor and – slash! – freed himself for the rest of his life. That’s when he screamed. And she bawled, in the pantry, too, sensing woe. People ran in from everywhere; the old ones charmed his blood to stop and patched him up. When they freed Lyubasha from the pantry, you know, the first thing she cried out, before she knew what happened, was, “Don’t beat my Nikolai (so that’s what the thug’s name was), it’s all my fault, mine alone!” Of course, once she saw it and grasped what had happened, she went out like a light and for about a year afterwards no one heard her utter a word. Later, she started talking again, little by little.

  Her father then visited Serafim Danilovich, asking him to throw her out, but Serafim didn’t. He did not send her packing, but kept her on as a servant; he hardly talks to her in public, mostly gestures, and what happens at home, we don’t know. And he punished her with a 50-year excommunication, which will last to 2001, which is soon, and which is also when they have prophesied the End of the World.

  He probably won’t make it – he’s been ill a lot lately, but he doesn’t let anyone into the house, she alone looks after him.

  And that’s their life.

  After that, he never touched the razor again – the community gives them everything, and reveres him as a saint almost. People come to see him from other cities: he must forgive them their sins and such and, people say, he also casts out cancers with his hands. Lyubasha, poor thing, has ever since dressed all in black, like a nun. Always on her knees, at the window, praying for forgiveness. Why wouldn’t he let her go, with God? What use does he have for her?

  This is all true, and so we can testify, having seen it with our own eyes out of grandma Nastya’s window: beneath a November drizzle, in the cold, the woman kneeled – a tiny black silhouette, covered with a raincoat, at her post, bowing every so often, forehead to the ground.

  What we don’t know is what sense there can be in it, because if God is Love, then how do you explain this?

  The Fourth Dimension

  Critic Igumnov has been to America. To Washington, DC itself. And to New York City, too.

  The New York subway scared him.

  “It’s a prison, a real prison,” he told his listeners back in Moscow. “And blacks. You know, I’m not a racist, unlike the majority of our émigrés, but one does see some really scary black people. Poor, lazy. They have no desire to work – just stand on every corner and beg for quarters, but even a
dollar won’t buy you anything decent.”

  The listeners sighed devotedly. Igumnov sighed back.

  “No, you wouldn’t believe it: Manhattan is the city… it’s the Yellow Devil! It’s really embarrassing even to put it like that – makes me sound exactly like the newspapers, but there are many, so many problems there that we can’t even imagine: everything’s sold on credit, down to a microwave oven – your average American is in debt up to his ears.”

  “And what about sausage?”

  For some reason, someone always asked this question, although they all knew, sons-of-bitches – and perfectly well – what the answer was.

  “It’s not about the sausage, believe me, man does not live on sausage alone,” Igumnov sighed with even deeper concern. “It’s impossible to explain this to you. You have to see and feel it. Sears stores, for example, don’t open unless they have 30,000 different food items on the shelves. And what of it?”

  “And what of it?” the listeners echoed, transfixed.

  “I swear to you, guys, it’s hard to communicate fully, but… it’s stifling there – there’s no soul. Everything wrapped in plastic, everything standardized. It’s a nightmare.”

  The listeners nodded happily. Smiled their inward smiles. Proudly rubbed their hands together. Igumnov would end his story with a short conclusion:

  “The one thing they don’t have there, perhaps, is a kind of a fourth dimension.”

  And everyone would noisily drink vodka and praise the good man Igumnov. True, every so often there would be someone who’d say openly, with unconcealed sadness, “You’re so full of shit, Igumnov,” but no one listened much, and Igumnov would shake his head ruefully – what’s to be done, you can’t put your head on another man’s shoulders. But he never entered arguments – he nipped them in the bud.

  Things went on like this for about a month. Igumnov grew tired. Nothing was keeping him in Moscow: the story he’d promised the American magazine, “Europe or Asia? (A word of praise for Eurasians),” he’d written right away, with fresh impressions, and submitted it by fax. Drinking vodka and telling his American tales was growing old. His six-month stipend to Munich was still being processed. The televised debates from the Party Congress bored him to tears. The newly-minted Slavophiles were disgusting.

  “Of course, today we’re all about the roots, even me, with my universal perspective,” he complained to his best friend. “But, you must understand, when they pulled me up, like a village bumpkin, in the late sixties… it was a different time – we were all together against the same thing, and now… No, the middle, the golden middle – the ancients had it right.”

  Igumnov deflected as many offers as he could, did not join any parties, kept to unorthodox magazines that occasionally printed his essays, and if the opportunity presented itself, garrulously criticized his employers among literary circles. Still, he was beginning to sense, could sense already, that he was irretrievably sliding to the left.

  “You must understand, I can’t very well go to April, April exhausted itself almost as soon as it was born,” he moaned to the same friend.

  All this “domestic” fuss grew unspeakably nettlesome. He wanted to rest, he wanted to go home, to the village, close to Stargorod, where, on the site of his mother’s dilapidated hovel, he had finally built, four years ago, a sturdy, five-walled cabin. Lord, how many times did he dream of the Lake over there, in America!

  The computer that he had bought with his earnings had yet to find a buyer, but the VHS player had already fetched 7,000. He found a good deal on new tires for his Zaporozhets, filled the trunk with a set of excellent fishing rods and tackle (a gift from an American colleague), kissed his wife and daughters, and set course for Stargorod.

  Before he left, he called Piontkovsky and talked him into waiting a bit longer. Piontkovsky was about to receive, through the Literary Fund, a new car, a Model Nine, which prompted him to part with his almost-new Niva. Igumnov had offered to buy the Niva for a very good price – the money from the sale of the computer should be more than enough.

  The wife packed, as always, substantially: a case of canned pork, four logs of bologna, little jars of instant coffee and Yugoslavian ham, and about 20 packs of 36-grade tea. The food was meant for the village where people expected Igumnov to bring gifts. There was no family left, and his classmates from school were also, nearly all of them, gone (after the army, following the usual formula, they all went anywhere but home). But not to bring gifts for the neighbors was, for Igumnov, unthinkable. People wouldn’t understand if he came empty-handed; they wouldn’t show it, of course, but they wouldn’t understand.

  The Zaporozhets struggled down the last ten miles of dirt road (it’s a good thing we had a dry May) and Igumnov’s native village welcomed him. They unloaded the food, and the case of vodka he bought on the outskirts of Moscow. They embraced.

  It was early summer. The beginning of June. Leaves. The infinite Lake. Fish stew on a campfire. Smooth vodka. Talk. His soul relaxed, rested, awash in pure oxygen.

  He didn’t fear his American stories here. Quite the opposite – it was impossible not to tell them. His stories were sought after, waited for. People were proud of him. They did not hide their admiration when they inspected the waterproof Seiko on his left wrist, and, of course, they needled him, joked and peppered him with questions.

  They listened just as raptly as his Moscow friends. Masking their curiosity with the Russian old-boy spirit, they attentively refilled his glass with his vodka. Shook their heads.

  “And what about sausage?”

  Oh! That eternally-expected question! Igumnov almost cried – people listened sympathetically.

  “Well, what do you expect? – it’s a strange land,” commented tractor-driver Abrosimov on Igumnov’s “fourth dimension,” as it was self-evident, and for some reason, asked again, “So, you’re saying, one can just walk up and buy a wind-up cock like it’s no big deal?”

  The whole company roared; the American theme was finished.

  After about a week, after they finished all the provisions brought from Moscow, and Igumnov stoically switched to potatoes and fish soup, he began to experience an inextinguishable, tormenting longing. The locals, pretending to work, went on different errands in the mornings and came back only late, around dinnertime, followed by a search for more vodka or modest domestic chores. Increasingly, Igumnov found himself alone. Drinking Stargorod vodka didn’t feel right and it bored him anyway. He was tired of pike soup. And, generally, fits of the familiar Moscow angst caught up with him, even in the country. Caught up and held him in their grip.

  Against his instincts, he began to think. He wanted to convince himself that it wasn’t, after all, about sausage. But what was it about? It was easy to talk about “the fourth dimension,” but how could it be quantified? And was that necessary?

  Take, for example, our national literature – what’s the measure of quality there? Tradition? And what is this tradition? Western influence, through and through, especially after Peter the Great. And even before Peter… he kept thinking of Sophia Palaiologina and even saw her in a dream.24 His obsession threatened to develop into a mania.

  In the article he had sent to America, everything was nice and smooth, things were neatly explained by our geography, multiplied by our history. But this no longer satisfied him. Something mysterious had crawled into his subconscious. The voice of blood? Genes? Collective archetypal memory? The question tormented him; his American article seemed meaningless. On top of everything, the sky began to drizzle, lightly yet hopelessly. Igumnov hastened back to Moscow.

  The neighbors brought him a bit of honey for his girls, and smoked some fish. Asked him to keep in touch. To come back sooner rather than later. And to make sure to bring sausage. The kind without fat. Two-ninety per kilo.

  And Kolka Zhogin, a big fan of spoon bait, requested some cold-water spoon bait from Munich, along with Japanese fishing line.

  Igumnov stepped on the gas.

&
nbsp; He had almost made it to the paved road – about two miles from the asphalt – when his Zaporozhets sank into mud. Neither digging nor beech branches jammed under the wheels could extract the little car. After wearing himself out and getting dirty up to his ears, Igumnov relaxed. In about three hours, the co-op’s Kirovets tractor would pass by on its milk delivery run. All he had to do was wait.

  Igumnov unfolded his seat, lay back and took a nap. Right before he fell asleep, it occurred to him that the four-wheel-drive Niva would get through the mud no problem, and the thought made him happy.

  He dreamt of a large supermarket shelf filled with little plastic lemons containing real lemon juice, for cooking.

  He woke up to the drone of the Kirovets.

  The big yellow tractor easily pulled the Zaporozhets onto the asphalt. The driver was a bit drunk, and unfamiliar – a wrinkle-faced little man from the neighboring village. Igumnov had no vodka to pay him with, so he promised to settle up next time.

  “All right, America,” the driver waved, “I see you don’t know me, must be too proud now, or something. I’m Pashka Bokov, we were in the same class in school.”

  Igumnov gasped, mentally, and quickly started a sociable conversation. They talked for half an hour.

  “All right America, Godspeed, I have to take this milk places,” said the former classmate as he climbed back behind the wheel.

  From there, over the growl of the Kirovets’ engine, Igumnov heard a giggle and the excessively-upbeat, “And don’t forget, when you come back, bring sausage for me, too!”

  Igumnov returned to Moscow in dark and rotten spirits. He avoided his friends for a while, but it was not characteristic of him to hide out for long. Things returned to their well-oiled tracks and rolled along. Even with a kind of newly-emboldened abandon.

  He still planned to go to Munich, although he changed the theme of his research to the poetics of Gogol’s Mirgorod, which had been his focus before he took up Eurasianism. He bought Piontkovsky’s Niva and sold his Zaporozhets for a good price. He surprised his friends with his new interest in videos. In his free time, he visited his neighbor, and together they watched detective and sci-fi movies.