Stargorod

by Peter Aleshkovsky

  Soon, the transmission on Spitsyn’s pink Volga went out. Spitsyn went to the service shop Under the Bridge, which, according to his insurance contract, was obligated to fix his car for free. The prospect of doing so, however, held little appeal for mechanic Nikolai Perhavko. The freshly-minted entrepreneur was told, in no uncertain terms, that the transmission could be replaced, but first he had to get the car inspected all the way over in Gorky, which usually takes a month or two. In response, Spitsyn uttered four simple words: “See you in court.” That was a knock-down.

  “All right, we’ll fix it up, come back tomorrow,” the mechanic said, apparently in consent. Of course, no sooner had the client disappeared around the corner, than the furious Kolya jerked the car up on the lift. He did replace the transmission, but personally dropped cat feces (“dregs” as folks around here call them) into the new transmission oil. The gears shifted smoothly, Spitsyn drove out of the shop triumphant.

  In a week, he came back.

  “When it’s cold, everything’s fine, but once I’ve driven around for an hour or so, the stench in the car is unbelievable. What did you slip me? I give up – replace the transmission again, I’ll pay cash this time.”

  He put a bottle of cognac on the hood as a peace offering.

  The client’s always right, as they say. Perhavko replaced the transmission with a used one; it creaked but worked. Since then, not a single person in Stargorod has called Spitsyn anything but “Dregs” behind his back.

  Of course, the rules of the plot demand revenge. As luck would have it, Spitsyn heard that Perhavko was invited to an upcoming wedding as a friend of the groom; Spitsyn sent him a box with a present, making it look like it came from a friend of the bride, and enclosed a note asking Perhavko not to open the box until the big day. The box was delivered at lunchtime, after Perhavko had imbibed a respectable amount of vodka and was about to take his repose in the storage room. Intrigued, he untied the colored ribbon that held the box shut, and lifted the lid. A howling, catnip-mad female cat was instantly catapulted from inside the box and onto the mechanic’s face. The cat’s claws marked him for life, and the hero of this tale, as could only have been expected, was immediately christened with the name “Raggedy-Cat,” whose first part was subsequently lost.

  Spitsyn went on working hard. When a chance presented itself, he bought two more cars, and then a few more. He now sells imported cars. All his cars are insured and repaired in his own garage.

  Once, during a break at the meeting of the “Friends of Stargorod” society I overheard Styopa, the director of Timber Concern No. 2 complain to Vassily Andreyevich about the 450 dollars Styopa had to pay at Spitsyn’s garage for a routine oil and filter change on his new SUV.

  “You bought yourself peace of mind,” Spitsyn replied. “Everything’s according to the law and your warranty contract. Or you could go to the Under the Bridge garage if you don’t care about your car.”

  “But they say Cat now works for you,” Styopa needled him.

  “Cat, once he started to earn real money, forgot about his drink. We’ve reformed that fellow, and we’ll change others too.”

  Styopa had nothing to say to that. They rang the bell, and we went back to the meeting room. Spitsyn railed at our businessmen for not contributing funds for the beautification of the main square and the monument to the architect Barsov, which was in need of repair. And you know, he shamed, squeezed, and banged the three million he wanted out of them – although not until he put his own million in the till.

  It’s been a long time since I heard anyone call Spitsyn “Dregs.” People like to make fun of his love of cleanliness, some even call him eccentric, but they still respect him.

  After the meeting, Spitsyn and I went downstairs together. All of a sudden, he grabbed my lapel and whispered, “Let’s go get wasted – I’ve had it with them all, to be honest.”

  I was in no position to refuse Vassily Andreyevich, and really didn’t want to. If I’m being honest.

  How a Soldier Saved Himself from the Army

  Not so long ago, there was a debate on TV: should people of creative professions be required to serve in the army? Folks from the parliament took it up with the intelligentsia. They got quite worked up, I thought for sure there’d be a fist-fight, but they cooled off in the end and pronounced their verdict: the Army needs to professionalize, but until that happens, everyone just has to live with the draft. And one rather well-known politician publicly promised one well-known choreographer a deferment for all the guys in his troupe – struck a deal with his opponent, basically, as politicians are wont to do. Those guys got really lucky – like in a fairy tale. Although, we in Stargorod have seen our own share of fairytale luck.

  Once upon a time, there was this soldier who decided to go AWOL. Before he got called up for service, he studied at an art college, but then he angered one of his professors: the boy didn’t want to paint still-lifes; he only wished to do landscapes, en plein air. His mother earned little, and his little brother was ill with asthma and needed expensive drugs. His father watched a parking lot at night and read mystical books about reincarnation. He did not help the soldier’s mother any, seeing as he’d taken such offense at her having divorced him. And they all lived in a tiny two-room apartment in a barrack-like apartment block. So it came to pass that our hero quit college and decided to serve his country. He went to the enlistment office and asked to be a Marine. Instead, they shaved his head and sent him off to the chemical weapons brigade, where they taught him to be quick and limber in a gas mask. And things would have just run their course, and he would have come home in just another six months, but as luck would have it, new winds came a-blowing through our good old army.

  A whole bunch of new contracted privateers got sent to the soldier’s brigade: every single one of them had done time, and was used to going about life not by the book but by their “notions.” These privateers set to breaking in the rest of the enlistees, in order that they, too, would sign up as contractees. If everyone in the brigade did, Central Command promised them a ton of bacon. Some gave in; our soldier was the last hold-out. When the beasts promised to give him the blanket treatment after the evening roll-call, he called it quits and did what he’d been planning – dove out through a hole in the fence, and headed not to the village but out into the steppe.

  So our soldier walked along the rail line and thought about putting a leg under a train – but when a train rolled along, he got cold feet, and didn’t go through with it. He walked some more, and then kept walking, thinking his sad thoughts, until he came upon a great big palace where a general lived with his daughter. The general’s daughter sat high up in a tower, watched “Animal Planet” thanks to a satellite dish, and thought sad thoughts. The general had a mind to get her married to the solicitor general’s son, but the boy had bad breath. The general himself did not care all that much for the solicitor general, but knew he had to make the match for his daughter; it was the politically correct thing to do.

  The general spotted the soldier at the gate; he thought they had sent him a denshchik (a day worker) – he’s actually just asked for one. So he called out at the soldier, and ordered him to get the banya heated by 1600. The soldier went to work: chopped some firewood, got the fire going, and soaked the birch-bunches to bring them to life. Then the general’s daughter showed up – brought the new denshchik bread slathered in lard to snack on. He ate tidily, then they worked over a handful of sunflower seeds, and took a great shine to one another. The girl went back into the house to do her nails, and the soldier sat down on the stoop of the banya to have a smoke.

  And the general, it must be said, kept fancy black-cocked chickens from a distant land. So, one of these, the boldest hen, came up to the soldier, stood there and looked at him askance, but he was nice to her – didn’t shoo her or throw a boot at her, and instead gave her some bread crumbs. The hen, for his kindness, gave him a magic grain. At 1600, the general’s guests rolled in for their banya: it was
the solicitor with his son. In they all went; the soldier slapped and whipped the birch-bunches on the solicitor’s back – the solicitor only grunted, he liked it so much. He started asking the general to sell him his banya expert. The general wouldn’t do it – he hadn’t had his fill of him yet.

  Once they got done steaming, they all sat down to vodka. Drank up a bucket, started on another. The solicitor started bragging about his son – what a beast he was, strong as an ox, breaks everyone’s arms. That’s when the General asked the soldier:

  “Can you out-arm-wrestle the solicitor’s pup?”

  “Yes, sir,” said the soldier, then tucked the magic grain the hen gave him behind his cheek, got big as a tiger, and ground the solicitor’s son into the mud.

  The solicitor took offense.

  “You cheated, you rotten wolves!”

  The general, without much ado, right-hooked him on the chin, then said, “You’re the rotten wolf, and your kid’s teeth stink!”

  The solicitor left, hissing, “You’ll be sorry you did this!”

  “You wish!” hooted the general. “Our people always beat up on your people!” and made an indecent sign at the solicitor’s back.

  He was having such a grand time, he had the soldier sit down and drink some vodka with him. They drank one bucket; started on the next. The soldier held his own. The general liked this, hollered for his daughter. She was right there – she’d been peeking from behind a corner.

  “This here common soldier saved you from the solicitor’s pup,” the general explained. “Wanna marry him?”

  The girl agreed on the spot before her father changed his mind – she’d had it with sitting up in her tower. The general threw them a party, and got the soldier decommissioned. Afterwards, the newlyweds came to live in Stargorod, where the city allocated them a corner behind a curtain in a big communal apartment. The general’s daughter stuck with it for a week, then ran away to Moscow, where she promptly landed a job with a modeling agency. She now advertises Blissful Ravioli and Tough-as-Nails Nail Polish. The soldier wasn’t sad for long – the main thing was, he got out of the army. He went into carpentry, carves iconostases, makes good money, and doesn’t dwell on the past. He told us his tale once – the guys all but fell over laughing: who now believes in fairy-tales?

  Do you?

  Boots and Ballet Slippers

  There is a good reason why a boot is featured so prominently on Stargorod’s crest. When the Muscovites, led by Vassily III, arrived to lay siege to Stargorod, the city’s militia, all in leather boots, lined up atop the city walls. Prince Vladimir headed our forces.

  “Heck,” said the bast-shod Muscovites, “their last footman’s got leather boots. We ain’t getting far here.”

  And they beat their drums, and went back to where they’d come from. Prince Vladimir died soon afterwards, but a city tradition was born: every night, the citizens placed a pair of boots on his grave. Wearing these, the prince, invisible to the human eye, made his nightly rounds about the city, keeping guard and warding off various calamities. In 1917, the powers that be got skimpy and gave the prince a pair of worn-out, threadbare clogs. I don’t need to remind you what happened after that.

  Jean Borisovich Protege arrived in Stargorod during perestroika. He went to live in a humble communal apartment, where he soon struck up a friendship with his neighbor, a third-generation boot-maker named Nikifor. Prior to his relocation to Stargorod, Protege had run a small glove-making workshop in Tbilisi. In 1987, as a result of his conversations with Nikifor in the kitchen of that humble communal apartment, the cooperative The Sole was born. It produced boots, ankle-boots, and bootees for both genders. Protege was indefatigable: in the era of barter trading, he conceived and executed incredibly complicated chains of exchange, procuring for his enterprise raw leather, tanning supplies and imported dyes almost for nothing. Nikifor was his one-man Quality Control Department. He didn’t squeeze a boot’s toe with his fingers to see how the leather would crinkle, didn’t drip water on a shoe to see if a stain would remain, didn’t pull on fur lining to see if the pelt would separate – he merely rolled a bulging, blood-shot eye over all that was brought before him, then without fail tossed out any defective goods. By the end of the day, of course, he would get drunk as a cobbler, bragging that it was his way of maintaining the co-op’s good reputation.

  Nikifor told Jean about Prince Vladimir – Protege liked everything mystical. A young technologist named Sveta was charged with taking a pair of brand-new boots to the local hero’s grave. Sveta, dreaming of promotion, diligently executed her duty. The boots always disappeared by morning; the prince must have liked them. The Sole’s cheap products were selling like hot cakes. Jean Borisovich began to experiment with styles and colors. His new models found demand as far away as Moscow.

  It was passion that became Protege’s undoing. Sveta the technologist also showed great diligence in making eyes at him, and eventually got the aging entrepreneur to marry her. In the interest of her professional education, the young wife demanded to be taken on a tour of shoe-making capitals of the world. Protege took her to Europe. In their absence, there was no one left to take boots to Prince Vladimir’s grave. The 1998 default all but bankrupted The Sole. Jean Borisovich grew feeble overnight, and soon died.

  Now in charge, Sveta began by dispatching Nikifor into retirement. Then she erected a grand monument to her departed husband, at the ancient St. Christopher cemetery, next to Prince Vladimir’s chapel. There, on a bench, in quiet, she contemplated the facts, considered the low purchasing power of her fellow citizens, and decided to take a risk. The factory began making cheap shoes out of synthetic leather, innocently pink ballet-slippers, brightly-colored, sexy sandals with strip-tease heels, and moccasins sewn of sturdy, clear plastic. Crystal-studded ankle-straps on acid-green alligator-print thongs; “retro” clogs of quilted black, periwinkle and purple leather on soles carved from local pine; scarlet lacquered soles and silver beading – she pulled out every trick she’d picked up abroad. The Sole’s products glimmered on store shelves like sparkling glass in a kaleidoscope. At the same time, a new female technologist was charged with taking a pair of boots made in the old facility to the prince’s grave. The company turned around and began to turn a profit, which Sveta refused to share with city hall, entrusting her fate to her more exalted patron.

  Nikifor founded Quality Control – a civic organization. They promoted native traditions, demonized the West, and accused The Sole of using low-quality materials and violating production standards. The lattermost, unfortunately, happened to be true. Sveta maintained a stony silence in the face of this criticism, until one day a furious Nikifor threw a pair of frivolous blue ballet-slippers onto her oak desk.

  “Look – these were found on the prince’s grave!”

  The technologist was called in. She arrived, noiseless in her Nike sneakers, and confessed she only wanted to take the best product to the grave.

  “And your boots – they’re a throw-back, they suck!” she blurted, choking on tears. The next day, a high-profile city council commission descended upon the factory and discovered that The Sole was putting brand-name labels on their, basically, counterfeit shoes. The city hall wouldn’t take Sveta’s bribe. The factory was bankrupted.

  The prince, her patron, took offense at this as incompatible with his medieval moral values, and that’s a shame. The boots you can now buy in Stargorod look a great deal like the departed Jean Borisovich’s products, except that their soles peel off in about a month. Young people prefer to save up and support foreign manufacturers. The girl was right: Protege’s boots were a throw-back.

  Winds of Change

  The Garden of Eden Estate, a federally protected historical landmark, lies about ten miles from Stargorod. One of our own, the famous architect Barsov, designed and built the place at the end of the eighteenth century for Tsar Pavel’s General Ableukhov. The manor house, hunting lodges and magnificent park stood vacant and decaying for a long time.
In the last couple of years, the property has tempted ten investors, each of whom, however, gave up soon after they started making renovations. Restoring a place like that is meticulous, expensive work that requires constant consultations with scholars, who tend to meddle and waver and fuss over every old pebble. All of this notwithstanding, one bright May day Garden of Eden was sold at auction for the eleventh time, this time with a 69-year lease.

  Our new governor found new investors with very serious intentions. The way things were presented to them – packaged as the governor’s Old Estate Project – was essentially no different from every previous venture, but the press trumpeted it as “the winds of change.” There were two main contenders for the property: Vassily Paip, an oil magnate, a man who, in the highest echelons of power was simply referred to as The General. Few could appreciate the delicacy of the situation in which the governor found himself: his friendship with Paip was important in view of emerging profitable projects, but to slight The General meant to rock even harder the already-leaky boat of the governor’s relationship with the current administration. The governor decided to sacrifice a pawn: the head of the Culture Department, Kim Volokitin, a civil servant of the old, Soviet school. Volokitin accepted his part and memorized his lines.

  When the prospective investors were being taken on a tour of the park, Kim approached The General and mentioned to him, in passing, that the president visited “The Garden of Eden” once, on his way to the capital, spent a long time contemplating the melancholy cupids on the mansion’s frieze, and then said, with an elegiac sigh: “Now here’s a place to retire to – it’s just perfect!” The General was not previously aware of this information, and swallowed the bait.