Stargorod

by Peter Aleshkovsky

  So don’t you start with the Korean human-faced carp. But then, again, if you think about it – Oh, my God...

  Pickle and Little Dragon

  In the time before memory, in what would become the Stargorod district, there lived a people called the Komsi. They worked only so hard, drank themselves silly on braga,2 and then soaked for weeks in banyas which in their tongue they called “saunas.” When the hard-working Slavs arrived, they easily crushed the Komsi. The Komsi did not resist and, legend has it, retreated quietly beneath the earth.

  Stargorodians who today live in the region are pure-blood Russians and visit banyas only on Saturdays. Having lost their jobs after the collapse of the kolkhozes, they drink cheap moonshine and swear that even if liquor turned to stone, they would gnaw on that rock – they have discovered no better medicine for their boredom.

  It is said that moonshine kills 40,000 each year in our country. This horrific figure was pronounced by Putin himself, who proposed that the state take charge of alcohol production, so that it might be of the highest quality. Fortunately the Duma hit the brakes, and the plan was scrapped. We remember too well the two bottle limits of ‘87, and don’t want to go back there.

  Once the villagers polished off all the foreign alcohol known as Royal, they turned to a domestic product called Little Dragon, an oily, green, glowing beverage. I was assured that, if you stare long and hard into your glass, the liquid will congeal into a furious yellow snake that will spin on the surface of your drink like a resinous shard of pine wood in a spring puddle. The villagers drank Little Dragon without looking in the glass. Some lost their minds; others were carried straight to the churchyard. But the engine of history runs on accidents: thanks to a miraculous confluence of events, the villagers have stopped consuming this poison.

  Kolya Piklov, whose nickname was Pickle, downed a glass in the morning and then added two more at lunchtime, right there in the field, at which point he lost all interest in plowing, since he had a three-liter bottle of Little Dragon at home.

  Pickle hopped behind the wheel of his Belarus tractor and rolled out onto the road. The next instant he was rammed by a new Audi A-8 that three goons were delivering to their commander, Anton Bes, the district’s chief bootlegger.3 Abandoning the tractor, Pickle fled as far as his legs could carry him, which was Bald Mountain, some ten kilometers from the village. There he sat down on a stump and began to think.

  For ruining such an expensive foreign car, the Stargorodian thugs would definitely leash him up like a dog. Pickle became frightened and began to cry bitterly. Suddenly, he saw before him a snotty old woman in birch-bark shoes, who said, “Kiss me.”

  Since he had been a boy, Pickle had heard of a Komsi sorceress who, coming across a traveler, asked for a kiss. Those who did not show respect simply disappeared. So, without much ado, he gave her a peck on the cheek.

  “You’re a true Komsi, Pickle. What do you have to fear?” the hag laughed.

  He told her of his woes. The sorceress gave him a vial of poison, and ordered him to drink it at home, then quietly lie down. Pickle thanked her and ran home. Meanwhile, the bandits drove the Audi in for repairs, then doubled back to beat the living daylights out of the tractor driver.

  At home, Pickle poured the contents of the vial into his bottle of Little Dragon and gulped down a mouthful of the cocktail. His body suddenly began to bulge and broke out in pimples all over. Not quite himself anymore, he stumbled out onto the porch, climbed into the bottom of his brining barrel and promptly turned into a large pickle.

  The goons arrived and sat themselves down at his table. They sat for an hour… two… No sign of the master of the house. They got thirsty. Someone found Pickle’s bottle. Someone else ran to the porch and brought back a ladleful of brine and a large pickle. They poured and drank, and the one who ran to the porch took a bite of the pickle. The poison worked instantly: two kicked the bucket and the third was transformed into a chimpanzee.

  Pickle woke up on the table – either the brine had absorbed the poison or the effect of the drink had worn off. He had half an ear bitten off, but he was alive. Next to him were a whimpering chimpanzee and two stiffs.

  The police pulled in. They did their tests and found cyanide in the Little Dragon. The case began to acquire the stench of prison, since everyone knew that the alcohol was supplied by Bes. The chief of police, Ivan Pankratovich Bolt, who had been protecting Bes’ business, ruled thus: first, he would keep the Audi for himself; second, Bes would be forbidden from trading in Little Dragon.

  Bes transitioned to Monolit, Mozaika and Maximka - “clear, colorless glass-cleaning liquids based on ethyl alcohol, without any mechanical additives.” It’s easy to order them: just search the internet for “Wholesale Liquor.” They even offer home delivery.

  The sorceress has not appeared to anyone since. Pickle brews braga and drinks nothing else, having completely stopped working. He proselytizes in the village that the Komsi will soon awake, as the time has come for their auras to be set free from their underground incarceration. When everyone laughs at him, Pickle goes home, climbs into his pickling barrel and soaks there for weeks, activating his chakhras.

  The peasants now drink Maximka, which paralyzes the tongue for two days. But what is there to talk about, if everything is so clear? The chimpanzee lives in Bes’ garage; at night he howls at the moon. Meanwhile, the chief of police has a new headache: the Duma has doubled traffic fines. What’s good for a Muscovite is trouble for a Stargorodian. Each road police crew, which used to turn a hundred dollars a day over to the bosses, now has to deliver two hundred. The question is this: will people give them more money, and will it lead to public unrest?

  * * *

  2. Fermented birch sap.

  3. Bes is Russian for “Devil.”

  The Holy Monkey

  A true miracle, as everyone knows, requires time to become accepted as such. The bandit Foma,4 whom a spell by a Komsi-sorceress turned into a chimpanzee, lived in the garage of his former commander, Anton Bes. The latter dressed the chimpanzee in loafers, slacks, a padded jacket, a fur cap, and dark glasses with white rims, making him look like an unhinged clown. Bes had his fun and quickly forgot about the poor wretch.

  Foma ran off to the city and hung about the cemetery church of St. Christopher. He begged for alms at the gates and bit by bit edged his way inside. An elder informed the abbot, Father Artemon, that Foma appeared to be a monkey. On one occasion, Artemon attempted to speak to him. Foma flung himself to his knees, seized his head in his hands, and froze in a repentant pose. The half-blind Father Artemon evaluated such zeal thus: “He’s mute and a fool, but not without Christ; leave him be. St. Christopher also had the face of a beast; there’s a reason he is portrayed with the head of a dog.”

  The batushka’s word is law, so Foma began to sweep the churchyard, and was even given a place to stay in the warm storeroom, where he slept in his clothes like a true holy fool. The old women began to say that Foma was a Hindu mute and that he was tormented by some exotic disease.

  The church, naturally, had an icon of St. Christopher painted by an ancient hand, from a time when they portrayed the holy warrior with the head of a dog and a large sword. Only a few of these ancient images survive to this day, having evaded the order to paint over the dogs’ heads with human ones. Father Artemon prized the icon and, through all his 57 years of service, he humbly waited for it to perform a miracle.

  A graveyard church is a profitable place, so they sent a second priest, Father Pavlin Pridvorov, to assist the abbot. Father Pavlin, having filled his head with street vendors’ books, was consumed by the idea of canonizing Ivan the Terrible and preached that Holy Rus’ could only be revived by a strong hand, which he had the temerity to assert in a letter to the Metropolitan. In reply, Father Pavlin was advised to display his intelligence less prominently.

  Father Pavlin craved a cause. Someone related to him a local legend: in the graveyard church Ivan the Terrible had treated the orphan Ivas
hka to an apple. The boy ate the apple, lit up like an angel, and died. Father Pavlin felt it would be useful for the church to have a locally revered saint. So he issued an appeal and Young Guard activists excavated all over the church grounds, but they turned up no remains that could qualify as holy. Instead, for excavating without permission, they had to pay a fine to the Committee for the Protection of Culture. Father Artemon paid the fine and severely forbade Pridvorov from muddling the minds of parishioners with stories of false miracles. As a result, Father Pavlin bore a grudge against the abbot.

  Meanwhile, Foma for some reason wandered back to his former boss and overheard a certain conversation: an order had arrived from Petersburg for the icon of St. Christopher. The boys who usually did the stealing didn’t feel up to breaking into a church, so Bes boastfully declared that he himself would take care of it within twenty-four hours. At night, he slipped into the church. Barely had he pried the icon from the iconostasis when Foma sounded the alarm from the bell tower. The thief ran. Foma flew from the bell tower like an arrow, overtook Bes and ripped the icon from his hands. Bes struck him in the chest with a knife. Townspeople came running and surrounded the thief. The abbot joined them. Foma, not taking his eyes off the icon, died in the abbot’s arms. And it was only at that moment that Father Artemon realized that the savior of the church’s treasure was in fact a chimpanzee.

  The police were so fed up with Bes that they gave him the maximum sentence: twelve years of hard labor. Father Artemon prayed long and hard, and then wrote to his superiors about the Holy Monkey. Father Pavlin Pridvorov’s denunciation followed shortly thereafter: it informed the authorities that the chimpanzee had attended liturgies, while, as everyone knows, the only animals allowed into churches are cats, because they alone do not eat their own feces.

  As the bishop’s bell ringer told it, the day before the bishop received the letters, the believers attending the Stargorod church, which was not even big enough to hold a service of extreme unction, beat the bishop’s guards until they bled. Reading a letter about miracles of an all but heretical nature, and having grown weary of public unrest, the bishop quietly sent Father Artemon into retirement, then transferred Father Pavlin to the town of Soggy Tundra, to enlighten the pagans. News of the miracle flew through the city, and it was whispered that, before his death, Foma regained human form. The number of worshippers at the church increased. The hero-monkey was buried outside the walls of the church’s graveyard, but pilgrims still beat a path to his grave. The profitable church was assigned to the monks of Boris and Gleb Monastery and Stargorod bandits gifted their Father Superior a new Jaguar, in order that he might pray for them. The people quickly christened the priest Jaguarius. Many take the name at face value…

  No matter, it’s a distinguished name, and it suits him well.

  * * *

  4. The Russian equivalent of Thomas.

  Wings

  Roza Musayevna Bakhtiyarova did not return to the capital after she was released from Stalin’s camps. The ex-ballerina moved in with some distant relatives in the Tatar community and established a dance school under the auspices of the Bearings factory. She passed on quietly in 1995 and was buried in St. Christopher’s Graveyard.

  After Roza Musayevna’s death, the dance troupe faded and eventually dissolved – without her genius, everything seemed pointless. Stargorod had become her fate; the school was the vocation of her ruined – as it seemed, once and for all – life. At one of her interrogations, right in front of her, the investigator had snapped in two the training wings gifted her (and passed through an English diplomat) by a half-crazed Nizhinsky.

  She was strict and would sharply dismiss any of her girls’ dazzling dreams of making it to the Bolshoi: “This is where you were born, and this is where you will be put to use.”

  Aigul Sarayev, the pride of our nation, the great flying ballerina, was her student. Her father, Rifat Sarayev, had wanted his daughter to master the art of gold embroidery, just like his wife, who had died young. Dance, he said, is not a profession; it is utter misfortune.

  The girl worshipped her father, cried bitterly, but could not give up dancing. When, in her final year of high school, she fell in love with Vasya Peryshkin, her father, who had dreamed of wedding her to a Tatar, stopped talking to her altogether. Vasya was drafted into the army. He died in Grozny, during the first Chechen Campaign.

  Spring arrived, and the birds sang their mating songs. Aigul fled the wake and wandered into the stall of old Kambiz, who since time immemorial had been trading all sorts of junk and antiques near the kremlin’s entry tower. The Persian resembled a tower himself: ponderous and unscathed, he perched on a massive stool. His legs were like pillars; his wildly brilliant eyes like two searchlights.

  The girl went inside; Kambiz blinked his eyes in greeting. Alongside the Pioneer bugles and the carved distaffs Aigul spotted a set of small wings mounted in a leather harness. Self-conscious in front of the old Persian, she tried them on before a mirror. The wings fit perfectly: they didn’t restrict her movement, nor did they rub on her shoulder blades.

  “Not afraid?” the old man asked.

  “What’s there to be afraid of anymore?” Aigul replied.

  The stall owner took her small bill and brushed it on the shelves loaded with goods, as if sealing a deal with Fate.

  The wings, fashioned to a one-eighth scale by some unknown craftsman in some unknown town, begat a new Aigul Sarayev. She staged the ballet Eurydice. Naked and wildly sensual, as flexible as a lash, she exploded the aura of tragedy, flying across the stage full of life – but landing as a sorrowful, discarded shadow from the Kingdom of the Dead. Aigul outlined her slanted eyes with make-up in a way that allowed her face to express something languid and bestial, just as the great Nizhinsky had done in The Afternoon of a Faun. Some imbecile lashed out at her innovative dance in an article in the Stargorod Herald titled “Sex on Stage,” and she ran off to Petersburg, and then to Paris, and soon became famous the world over.

  I watched Night Flight, which had made Aigul famous, with Roza Musayevna, on the government TV channel. The old ballerina was ill and I had stopped in to see her. Aigul flew across the stage in large, webbed wings crafted by a hereditary wing-maker in Verona, the last of his kind.

  “The little bird flew away. No use for her here,” the old teacher said of the performance.

  A week later, Bakhtiyarova died. A month later, the shoemaker Rifat passed on. Aigul did not return to bury either of them, something the yellow press slobbered over for quite a while. Aigul doesn’t give interviews, and basically talks to no one, always giving the impression that she lives on another planet, and thus she is often reproached for arrogance and haughtiness. The journalists have nicknamed Sarayev “the doleful diva” because she always performs tragic roles.

  Not long ago I ran into Volokitin, the head of the Department of Culture, and chatted with him about the monument the city had promised to erect at the gravesite of Roza Musayevna.

  “Now is not the time. National projects are the priority, and all money is going to teachers and doctors.”

  Out of sorts, I walked to the cemetery. A large Rolls Royce with darkened windows pulled out of the gate. Not the sort of car you see in Stargorod.

  I brushed off last year’s leaves from Bakhtiyarova’s grave and suddenly I noticed, lying on the cement gravestone, a set of small, worn-out wings on a threadbare harness. I picked them up, and as I was looking at them, a girl of about fifteen popped up from behind me – I think I had seen her break-dancing in the park, near the monument to Kirov, where the kids hang out.

  “May I?”

  She snatched the wings from me and put them on. They fit her as if she was born for them. In the face of such impudence I lost my power of speech. The girl smiled lightly, leapt up, and soared into the air. Fragile, almost weightless, she flew above the gravestones and disappeared through the branches of the cemetery’s linden trees.

  Cat and Dregs

  Anyon
e who, having taken out an extended warranty on his new car, has ever found himself in need of replacing a warrantied part, has experienced moments of acute anxiety: what if instead of a new part, the garage sticks him with a used one? Fifteen years of free market later, one can safely say the insurance system has developed significantly. Here in Stargorod, everyone knows the story of Cat and Dregs.

  Vassily Andreyevich Spitsyn saved up his fees from group portraits of kindergarten graduations and finally acquired his first “Volga”.

  He quickly painted it pink and equipped it with a pair of large brass wedding rings on the roof. Spitsyn Services, when it opened in 1991, was the first business of its kind in our city: Vassily Andreyevich worked as a hired driver and also offered his services as a wedding photographer, which maximized his earnings. He quickly became well known at the Wedding Palace as well as at the district wedding offices. Always a spendthrift, he paid the clerks there who referred couples to him with the chocolates and champagne that the newlyweds frequently shared with him.

  He was always busy. The local gangsters, for instance, decided they liked hiring the only pink car in town to take them and their girlfriends to the Freedom Monument at night. They called it “trying the knot.” The locals refer to the monument – a large, upturned bell resembling a giant shot glass, at the edge of town – as “one big drink”. In 1014, the Novgorod army, after the battle at Soggy Tundra, expropriated our bells, but then the bells began to ring of their own volition, and the Novgorod folks promptly returned them, with their apologies. They had to drive them back to Stargorod upside down because the bells’ indefatigable clamor had made them all deaf. As soon as they handed the bells over to the Stargorod bishop, however, the Novgorod crew miraculously regained their hearing and to celebrate their joy threw a feast for the locals where both sides drank themselves silly. So, as you can see, my compatriots have known since the olden days how to punish their enemies and how to forgive them.