On those occasions when his colleagues began talking about America, he cut them short with a single, inappropriate question, “Have you heard? They say a joint-venture factory in Saratov has obtained permission to manufacture wind-up polyurethane cocks.”
The colleagues would exchange giddy glances, drop the painful topic and immediately start discussing women.
* * *
24. Sophia Palaiologina: Grand Duchess of Moscow, was a niece of the last Byzantine emperor Constantine XI and second wife of Ivan III of Russia. She was also the grandmother of Ivan the Terrible.
2010
A Change of Consciousness
Lent just ended. Sociologists from Moscow’s Levada Center agency asserted that 79 percent of Russians had no intention of fasting or otherwise observing Lent. Two local hot-heads shot off fireworks during the church procession – I’ll never forget how ashamed the boys looked when they were caught; they just wanted to make it better.
The Church continues to teach: prayer and repentance are the most important thing during Lent. The word “repentance” comes into Russian from the Greek “matanoia” meaning a change of consciousness and even the broadening of consciousness beyond the individual intelligence, sense. It implies a special spiritual procedure that can transport a believer’s consciousness from one level of being to another. But then I also read in The Stargorod Herald: “Repentance is an identifying feature of our national character.” I read that and didn’t want to keep reading. It reminded me of a story.
In the late ‘80s I found some part-time work with a restoration team at the Old Believers’ Pokrovsky Cathedral in the Rogozhsky neighborhood of Stargorod. The Old Believers were banned from building temples that looked like Orthodox churches, so when seen from the street, architect Kozakov’s creation resembled a large box with a few domes on top. Inside, however, it was indistinguishable from, say, the Novgorod Sofia. A sweep of a ceiling. Stern icons in the ancient style. Monumental murals. Dusk, wax candles in massive silver candelabras. The smell of incense mixes with strangely Oriental, ancient harmonies, music that sounds mysterious and difficult to the modern ear, trained in Baroque polyphonies. At the entrance, an old lady vigilantly guarded this world against strangers.
Every morning for three weeks we climbed the scaffolding and washed the frescoed walls with a special concoction made with boiled soap, and for three weeks Maria Lukinichna, the door-woman, watched us with unconcealed disgust. Smoking on the temple grounds was strictly verboten, so when it was time for a break, we took our buckets of boiled-soap into the keeper’s cottage, put them on the stove to heat, and went to the park next door. There, we smoked. When we came back, the gas under the buckets was almost invariably turned off. The old lady would come in to boil some tea and turn our stuff off just to spite us – we always left her a burner. When caught red-handed, she would not negotiate. She’d squeeze her lips into a disdainful line and stare at the floor. She observed her boycott as if it were a monastic vow. From the scaffolding, we could watch her: she spent her free time polishing the church’s silver and scrubbing the floors, or else she prayed, bending again and again to the ground in countless bows. Once we heard her upbraiding a drunken reader:
“All you know is how to fill your gut! Watch my word – the Green Viper will get you!” she raged, and the poor little man could only mumble every so often, “I do repent, Mother…”
“I do repent, Father,” Lukinichna would thunder back, bow, and pick up right where she left off, with fresh ire.
Then, a holy day of great significance was upon us. The Metropolitan himself was to come from Moscow. For two days before his scheduled arrival the old ladies scoured the church with zeal undreamt of by generals on the eve of a Marshal’s inspection. On the day itself, the service went on forever – the Old Believers don’t believe in hurrying their prayers. A few of our crew decided to wait the mass out on the scaffolding; myself and another guy, having finished what we had planned for the day, descended from the exulted heights, tip-toed around the faithful, and went outside. Not far from the church we found a shashlyk place where we had some kebabs with fries, washing it all down with the 777 port that at the time was served in “bombs” of 0.8 liters each. We ate and drank, then drank some more, bought more still to take with us, and then felt compelled, for reasons passing understanding, to go back to work.
Back in the church, we climbed the scaffolding to the top platform where I promptly slipped on a wet board and knocked down a bucket of dirty water. Its flight down to the bottom of the church remains branded into my memory to this day. It hit the floor and exploded, dousing the solemn gathering. But the Metropolitan did not shudder or make a noise out of order, and neither did the other priests – they only wiped their brows with the embroidered sleeves of their garments. The congregation did not stumble in its responses either, but carried on with the mass as if there had been no exploding bucket whatsoever. We took a nap up there on the scaffolds and retreated home when the coast cleared.
The next morning I came back to work; I was ashamed and scared. I prayed for the old door-lady to fall ill, to disappear, to vanish inexplicably from my life. Of course, that was not to be! A pair of burning eyes pinned me at the entrance to the church, alive and terrifying like the eyes of an Old Testament prophet in the icon above her. My legs folded of their own volition, I fell to my knees and blurted loudly, “Lukinichna, forgive this fool, I got drunk yesterday. I was the one who dropped the bucket.”
Instantly, she dropped on the ground next to me – the way an axe falls on a log – and slammed her forehead against the floor. The sound of bone making contact with stone echoed through the church. Then she rose, and dropped her head again, and couldn’t stop after that – she bowed and bowed, hitting her head against the very clean floor, sobbing, and saying, “You forgive me, brother! I thought you a godless pest, forgive me!”
I was shaking all over; I could feel no strength in my legs, no way to get up.
The old lady helped me up to a chair. She assessed my condition with one look, and said, “Go home, have a drink, take a nap.”
I shook my head and went to climb the scaffolding.
No one ever turned off gas under our boiled soap again. Instead, Lukinichna now served us tea in the kitchen and chastised us gently for siding with Patriarch Nikon in the schism1. I don’t drink port any more either, even the most expensive kind.
* * *
1. Patriarch Nikon’s reforms of 1653, aimed to establish uniformity between the Greek and Russian church practices, caused a schism between the official church and the Old Believers movement.
The Horizontal and The Vertical
The other day, Styopa Morozov, director of Timber Concern No. 2, and I were summoned to tea at the home of the retired vice-mayor of Stargorod, Sergey Pavlovich Triflin. A short man, with intent, avian eyes that looked forever hungry, he had been the terror of the city in the early days of democracy. It was whispered in town that he very well might be a witch. Having outlasted two governors and three mayors, this 65-year-old man was finally fulfilled: he retired, and now spends his time doting on his prized German pointer Rida and taking an active part in the city’s social life. Triflin is also a passionate photographer; his album Wildflowers of Russia’s Middle Zone was published by a Moscow art-house. He is waiting for primroses now – spring is almost here. “I dream,” he says, “of flowers in the snow.”
We met three years ago, because of an old English rifle. I was the one who told him back then: it’s a rare piece, a pre-Revolutionary W. W. Greener, with an elephant stamped on it and the safety button on the left side of the bed.
While we drank tea, the news on TV showed the former mayor of Vladivostok being arrested. Triflin commented on the story, then pulled a thick volume out of his bookcase and read to us an order by Peter the Great. In the year of our Lord 1719, on the 24th day of March, it was so ordered: “Smolensk vice-governor and associates to dispatch due statements of income and expenses. And if ye
shalt not execute said errand the May of this year, then all ye, vice-governor as well as other subordinates, to be shackled at the ankles, chained by the neck and kept in the Chancellery until ye the above-mentioned duty fulfill.”
“Now that’s how they used to keep the vertical strong in the old days – and this here clown got flown by plane, and without a chain on his neck like a Gypsy bear. The progress is obvious!” Triflin smiled. “Charged with mismanagement of a million rubles – what kind of money is that! They’ll find more, you can be sure, because you should remember the vertical, of course, but you must also keep a grip on the horizontal. We here, of course, figured this out back in the nineties.”
And that’s when Styopa asked how exactly one was different from the other. Triflin glanced at Styopa, quickly sized up his jeweled ring, as if snapping a picture of it, and began:
“It’s simple. I had this lad under me, former military. One day, I pull up to work, and see this hot-pink Humvee parked right in front of city hall. No one around here ever had one of those. I barely made it to my office, and my phone’s ringing. The mayor, Veslo Vasyl Petrovich, is on the line.
“Whose beauty is that out there?”
“I’m on it,” I say, “post-haste!”
I asked around – turns out it’s my own deputy’s! I called him in.
“What happened?”
“Sergey Pavlovich,” he says, “I admit I couldn’t resist it – it’s a gift.”
“You,” I said, “watch out – the mayor himself doesn’t have wheels like that.”
Next thing you know, our mayor is rolling around in style, in a pink Humvee. It didn’t do much for him, though – he lives in Argentina now. And this lad of mine, the deputy, has gone far and climbed high in the capital, sends me cognac regularly, to thank me for having taught him about life. My other deputy, Khokhlov – he turns his nose up now, rules his own kolkhoz and drinks moonshine. So, as far as the horizontal went, we got that leveled out all right, and if Veslo couldn’t take care of the vertical, I’m not one to judge him.”
We sat for a while longer, drank tea with jam. Styopa, I noticed, was very nervous. Finally, we took our leave.
Outside the gate Styopa breathed a sigh of relief:
“I think we’re all right now... That rifle he had you look at – he took it from me.”
“You hold a grudge?”
“What’s to grudge? Back then he signed over so much land, we logged for a year.”
Styopa left in his beat-up jeep with the all-terrain wheels, exactly what he needs for driving around his logging plots. I stood for a minute at the fence, looking at Triflin’s house, one of the first built in the village by the lake – people call the place “The Count’s Ruins”: A low-slung building in the shadow of cottonwood trees, with an inconspicuous second floor and a large basement (banya, garage, storage room), it stands in sharp contrast to the fashionable turreted castles surrounding it. Modestly extended horizontally, it is simple and comfortable inside. A tall antennae tower with a lightning rod pierces the sky; the national tricolor flag beats in the wind at its top.
And then I saw a magpie fly out an open second-floor window – a dart of black-and-white, and it was gone into the woods. Soon the bird returned and alit on the windowsill. In its paw, it held a brilliant object. I recognized Styopa’s diamond ring. The bird seemed to admire its loot, then slowly turned what looked like a scrunched-up human face in my direction: it was Sergey Pavlovich looking at me. Reason failed me, for an instant, and when I could see clearly again, the magpie was gone.
All kinds of wondrous things happen in Stargorod. The actress Katya Kholodtsova, for instance, because of unrequited love drowned herself in one of Stargorod’s channels and turned into a mermaid. Afterwards, many people saw her bathing there in the moonlight, and I am inclined to believe them. Now I also understood the fear Triflin inspired in local businessmen. No one seemed to know where he came from, but it only took him a year to take over the city.
I sighed, crossed myself, and went back to my local history museum, to work on the “G-whiz!” exhibit planned to mark “The Year of the Russian Language.” The exhibit was why Triflin had called us in the first place: he decided to show his series Thunderbolts of Our Native Land. He charged me with preparing the catalogue and hanging the pictures; Styopa would be responsible for matting and framing.
53:76
The other day I came across a sensational clip on the internet: Koreans have bred carps with human faces. The picture showed a couple of fish with protruding snouts that, with a stretch, could be seen to resemble human features. Just another hybrid, nothing special. They should try coming here, to Stargorod, to catch the Catfish Man – but they ain’t coming, are they? Our news is not big enough for the world-wide web.
Our national television couldn’t care less for real marvels, they just fill the air with scary stories about thieves and cops. Somewhere in Stavropol region, a police captain fired his gun point-blank at an innocent family – the wife now rides around in a wheelchair and the husband got three years for “assault on an officer in the execution of his duty,” but was amnestied right there in the courtroom. The policeman is now a colonel. There’s no help for common folk. Every teenage boy in Stargorod knows this, and that is why they all worship our Sashka Pugachev, the people’s avenger. They write on the District Police Station’s wall, in spray paint: “Greetings from Pugachev! 53:76.” Cadets paint it over the next morning, but the writing seems to bulge from the surface of the wall as if injected with the fashionable collagen that, if one believes the ads, “pushes out the wrinkles from the inside.” The newspapers at first also wrote up a storm about Sashka, but even then they were afraid to tell the whole truth. Here’s what happened.
Sashka, a born and raised Stargorodian who, after fighting in Afghanistan, lost all fear but not his soul, was doing well: he had two sawmills, eight small stores around the city, a construction supplies warehouse and the Lyubava tavern on the highway out of town, serving tender chicken cutlets, stuffed fish from our river and girls in the rooms upstairs. As well, there’s the free gym, two schools’ worth of computers and a city soccer team – all paid for by the man himself. Colonel Erikh Romanovich Mushtabel, the city’s Chief of Police, was a frequent guest at Sashka’s table in Lyubava. He was also the one who “protected” him and, once he got the taste for it, kept pushing for a bigger share of the spoils. They got along fine, however, until Sashka’s love of fishing ruined him.
Mushtabel was also a devout fisherman, and they once made a bet about who could catch a bigger catfish. Each went to his spot: one man went upstream to Pimshin Dip, the other downstream – to the Ferry Dip. Erikh hooked a 53-kilogram beast, but the one Sashka dragged in weighed 76 kilos. Mushtabel took offense and declared war on Pugachev. He found an excuse to close down Sashka’s stores, took away his sawmills, ordered a full inspection of Lyubava and publicly threatened to burn the whorehouse down. So Pugachev decided to go all in, told Mushtabel to meet him at night at the station, rolled in with two AK-47s and let both rip from the hip, right in the doorway. Three guys who just happened to be there went down, four more got wounded, but the Chief was not in his office – he was waiting in an ambush outside. The chase began.
They flew to the river. Pugachev had a chance to call out: “Don’t come to the water, I’ll come for you as a catfish!” – and dove from a tussock into the rapids. The police shone spotlights on the river, opened fire, bullets rained on Pugachev. He swam, then went under. No one ever saw him come up again. They never found the body, although they searched hard.
Mushtabel didn’t give much thought to the curse. He handled the ensuing shit-storm and took over Lyubava, but it burned down soon afterwards, and not a single girl got hurt, as though someone’d warned them. Rumors of Pugachev’s last words spread through the city. Someone spray-painted “53:76 – That’s how we do it!” on Mushtabel’s SUV, and the man just lost it. Plus, right at the same time, fishermen started saying a mo
nster of a catfish had turned up in the river, no less than 200 kilos, tearing nets, letting their catch out, and there was no way to get him. The fishermen were also paying Mushtabel for “protection.”
The colonel became obsessed with the idea of getting this fish – given that his authority in the city was rapidly approaching zero. Exactly what transpired when he went to the river at night, nobody knows, but people said Erikh Romanovich ran home covered in catfish slime, two fingers of his right hand bitten off at the root, his eyes filled with madness. He lost his speech, and could only moo – he pointed at the river and mooed, long and sad, like a terrified calf: “Oo-oooo-oogoooo!” At the hospital, they said he had a stroke, patched the old dog up, but, obviously, that was the end of his service. The colonel came down with hydrophobia: a mere glimpse of the river and he turned hysterical, like a baby. Once out of uniform, he turned into an old, sick man; kind people heap shame on him in the streets, reminding him about Pugachev. His wife didn’t put up with it for long, packed up and moved the family to her Kalmykia – there’s no water there to speak of. The fishing folks arranged for a church procession, prayed to the miracle-fish to get their fishing rights back. Some old man also advised them: if they caught a catfish, even a baby one, to always throw it back. So now you’ll never find catfish cutlets anywhere on the menu in Stargorod – but we do have plenty of perch or zander.
It’s been ten years, and boys still call out at discotheques “53!” and someone always shouts back “76!”
Stargorod Page 23