An hour later he got a call from the owner of The Three Rivers, Yegor. The resort had bought a large charter rig, and Yegor was calling to see if Genka would like to be her captain. Yegor wanted him there right away, but, purely for appearance’s sake, Genka negotiated himself a week to get packed. This was a shameless lie: whenever Genka returned from The Three Rivers, he had his tackle and bag packed for the next trip three days later, as soon as the previous trip’s laundry was dried and ironed. It was all there, ready, waiting for him in the closet. In the kitchen, Genka swallowed the pills his doctor had prescribed, and washed them down with kefir. He looked at the clock: he had plenty of time to catch his flight. On the way to the airport, Genka stopped at the mall, but the vending machine was no longer there.
“They took it away for maintenance, but you can pay at the customer service,” the manager told him.
Genka smiled and shook his head. He kept smiling as he flew, and as he looked at the clouds and saw monster catfish slipping in and out of them. He’s going to catch one just like that, for sure – he’ll catch it in Babka’s Dip and will personally nail the framed picture in the den, right above the fireplace!
The Hourglass
Until he was old enough to start school, Seryoga Kuznetsov lived with his grandfather in the village, while his Mom, having lost her husband, was trying to fix her personal life in town. Seryoga and his grandfather together mowed grass for the rabbits and fed the chickens. The grandfather also had an hourglass: two bulbs of murky glass welded into a copper frame etched with a symbol that looked like a hut on crooked stilts. Grandfather brought the thing back from the Japanese war. The sand trickled from the top to the bottom so slowly that it seemed it didn’t move at all. Playing with the hourglass was strictly prohibited.
In the evenings, after supper, grandfather would settle onto a little bench in front of his house, light a pipe and pronounce – as if it were a spell: “If you could turn back the clock, would things take the same course?” Leaving this question without an answer, he would send a thick ring of smoke up into the air, where it would melt and vanish. It was great fun living in the village; days there went on forever and did not end until sleep got the best of you.
Sergei graduated valedictorian of his class, to spite his mother – so she’d have one less fault to find with him. He also acted in the school theater, which he joined when he was in the ninth grade and was head over heels in love with Nastya K. When Nastya recited Katherine’s monologue from The Thunderstorm – the one that begins with “Why is it people cannot fly?” – it took Sergei’s breath away and it seemed to him that the very next instant a gust of wind would snatch his beloved from him and take her away forever. On their prom night, he took Nastya for a long walk along the riverfront and told her he loved her.
“You’re going to Moscow next,” she said, “and I want to live my life here, to make a difference in Stargorod. And, also, I don’t love you.”
He ran away to the village after that. His grandfather had died by then, the house stood vacant. Sergei did not sleep; he smoked and drank strong tea. The sand in the hourglass at the head of grandfather’s bed seemed to trickle down faster now than it did back when he was a child, but Sergei didn’t really notice it. He was thinking about Nastya. He promised himself that he would achieve anything he ever wanted, including winning her over.
Kuznetsov went to Moscow State University. After he graduated, he stopped in Stargorod to take care of his mother’s funeral, and then flew on to France for an internship, and from there to Japan. He had no family left. He took grandfather’s hourglass with him everywhere he went, but never showed it to anyone. How would he have explained that the sand now trickled down from the top bulb even faster, but the lower bulb always remained only half-full? He himself, for some reason, never felt any urge to solve this puzzle. But he did notice that as soon as he would turn the hourglass over, he started feeling apathetic, everything he was doing went wrong, and his heart lost its rhythm and beat unevenly, with starts and stops, as if struggling for oxygen.
To keep in working shape, Sergey worked out every morning, and then studied like crazy. In the nineties, time took off at a gallop, the country was desperately short of professionals with international experience, and Sergey did not miss his chance. At 24, he defended his doctoral dissertation in Economics and went to work for a very large and important company. Soon he became the youngest and most promising of the company’s department heads. He was also one of the most desirable bachelors around, but he paid no attention to women.
He worked hard and did well, and one day he was offered the task of supervising the construction of the phosphate plant in Stargorod. The position came with the kind of authority in his native city that was comparable only to the governor’s. Kuznetsov never forgot the promise he had made to himself. A trusted friend told him that Nastya, after school, graduated from the Pedagogical Institute, got married, had a son, got divorced and was now teaching math at their old school.
The first thing he did when he got to Stargorod was go and see her. Nastya was happy to see him, served him Lipton tea with strawberry jam, interrogated him about Japan and France and glanced, on the sly, at the one hundred roses he brought and she had put in an enameled bucket on a stool in the corner where she always set up her Christmas tree. Sergey suddenly realized that the woman sitting across the table from him did not in the least resemble the heroine of The Thunderstorm he had fallen in love with. The window was open; outside, the evening was muggy and hot. Nastya asked him for computers for the school. Then, she started ranting about the new Unified State Exam, and, once she really got into it, no longer listened to him when he told her about educational systems in France and Japan. After he’d been there an hour, Sergey took his leave. At the door, Nastya gave him a peck on the cheek.
The riverfront, where he had once confessed his love, was brightly illuminated. Sergey drove along slowly and looked at the oily surface of the river that reflected the streetlamps. A Japanese professor explained to him once that the hieroglyph on the hourglass’s frame meant “time.” Kuznetsov remembered his grandfather and what he used to say, arranged his fingers just so, and stuck his hand out the car window, at someone out there, in the night. At home, he automatically glanced at his hourglass: the sand poured down thick and fast, but there was never any more of it in the bottom bulb. Sergey opened his day planner, wrote down “Computers” on the 8:30 line, and turned off the light. He slept fitfully and twisted his sheet into a rope as he used to do some nights in the village, when he was little.
Goats and Sheep
At the Institute of Asian and African Countries, Alisa defended the thesis “Kan-re-do: Bourgeois Ideology of the Civil Service in the Post-War Japan.” Afterwards, while she was interning with Professor Yotiro Simada at the Tokyo University, she heard him formulate a civil servant’s motto as follows: “A man must swim with the current in such a way that it does not drag him out to sea, where he may lose sight of land forever.” Alisa framed her sensei’s maxim in a cedar frame and put it above her desk. Another thing her professor taught her was breathing exercises. The sequence Alisa learned from him helped to focus one’s inner force, “hara,” on achieving one’s goal, while remaining, outwardly, utterly unperturbed.
Alisa’s father, a high-ranking Soviet official, as he pulled the strings to get his daughter a job, told her the tale of the lion who came to be sheriff in a new forest: “Just remember to send a goat or a sheep up to the bigger lions every so often, and you’ll be fine.”
That is how she did things. Bosses promoted Alisa for her agreeable disposition and sharp wits, and sprang to attention at the sight of her waspish waist, but Alisa remained faithful to one Olady Evlampovich, a successful artist she married after she returned from Japan. His position as secretary to the Soviet Artists’ Union, however, proved to be not quite important enough in the new Russia. Alisa transferred to the Ministry of Culture and started helping her husband obtain commissions. She w
as always good at manipulating state funds, wasn’t greedy, but never missed a good opportunity, knowing full well that a civil servant in traditional Russia is an immortal force, and no one and nothing would ever end the sheriffhood. Her daddy was right: the “goats and rams,” transformed into the brick and mortar of her dacha on the Klyazma reservoir were mute just as one expects cattle to be.
In her work of implementing the government’s priorities, Alisa often had to fight against conservatism and provincialism, but that was okay – she liked a good fight. For instance, take the recent government decision to cut federal funding for regional museums. It meant cultural institutions would have to learn how to make money on their own. The Pottery Museum in Stargorod fell victim to the cuts. The museum was undeniably provincial, with an inflated budget of a million dollars a year and its only claim to fame as an archaeological site was that Putin himself had visited and subsequently allocated funds to build an open-air dig. The director, loyal to Alisa, pocketed most of the money and gave her a kickback. And everything would have gone smoothly, if not for a small-time ram of a researcher who blew up the whole story in the local press. The director got cold feet, fired the researcher and shut down the dig.
Alisa flew out to Stargorod post-haste; she had to nip the scandal in the bud. They raked the director over coals of such heat that everyone knew right away: his days were numbered. The archaeologists and other museum employees, with the bitter provocateur in the rank of assistant professor at their helm, looked on with distrust. Alisa made sure to speak to them quietly, intimately, her eyes hidden under half-lowered eyelids, so that the overhead light did not allow them to read her expression (a trick she learned from her Japanese mentors); she called the director an embezzler, and asked the staff to give her a year to set things straight in the capital. They struck a deal: the museum would be disbanded, and then created anew. The archaeologists, in the meantime, were to organize themselves into an independent structure, a corporation that would later become the basis of the resurrected museum. A grant to continue exploration would ensure their independence of their old supervisor.
A glimmer of hope lit up in the eyes of the rebels – as if their scientific explorations could change anything. Big money was beginning to flow into Stargorod; a Moscow general (not without Alisa’s prompting) had begun a wholesale renovation of the city’s historic center. As the Ministry’s official, Alisa needed to implement archaeological and historical oversight over the renovation, but it didn’t matter to her who would get to do it and file the reports.
As she departed, she said casually, “Come visit, I’m always happy to help.”
That evening, at her dacha, Alisa sat in a rocking chair under an apple tree. The museum’s director called. He apologized, made promises, flattered and fawned. The proud assistant professor did not call – did not send “a goat and a ram” up to the bigger lion – and missed his chance. In a year’s time, the scandal would be forgotten; Alisa decided to forgive the loyal director.
A number of different animals lived at the dacha – it’s fashionable now. Olady, seeing his wife in low spirits, brought to her Glasha, her favorite nanny-goat. Glasha took a piece of carrot from Alisa’s hand and licked her fingers.
“Go milk her, I’ve had enough of this!”
The husband obediently led Glasha to the little barn in the back. Alisa had long been bored with Olady Evlampovich; getting any use out of him was like milking a billy-goat. Alisa closed her eyes, drew in the air and focused on her “hara”; she imagined herself swimming out into an endless ocean. The chair rocked gently, peacefully. With her narrow, exquisite foot, Alisa felt for the ground – just in case – and there it was, she hadn’t lost it. She never will.
Our Progress
The military support base in Pankratovka – a village half sunk into the marshes north of Stargorod – was dismantled in the early 90s. Soon after the order was issued, the army stopped supplying coal for the base’s boilers. The pipes of portable corn-stalk stoves emerged like bristles from the two-story lime-and-sand-brick housing units, which came to resemble a Pacific fleet flotilla awaiting its sad fate at Port Arthur.5 The base veterans wrote to the Defense Ministry twice a year: they were entitled to new, comfortable apartments, but the Ministry had forgotten about them. Over the next 15 years, of the 82 officers’ families that used to live on the base, only 43 were left in Pankratovka.
The very first year, the retirees planted orchards and vegetable gardens and would have become complete peasants were it not for Lieutenant Colonel Semyon Semyonovich Bulletov. Understanding that the men had to be kept busy, the former CO ripped the old banner “Our Progress Heads for the Woods!” from the gates of the base’s garage and nailed up a new sign. It read “Automotive Club Varyag.”
To start with, the men hauled a T-34 tank out of a nearby gulch and returned it to combat-ready condition. Then, in a marsh, someone found the shell of a light BT-7A tank. This machine was a rarity; you can count the surviving examples of this model on the fingers of one hand. The crew dug up original construction blueprints, restored the machine to its old glory and power, and added it to their fleet. Over the next decade and a half, the repair workshops of the former military base gave new life to several ZIS 151 trucks (basically assembling them from snot and shoelaces), a three-ton army workhorse – the ZIS 5 (1934 vintage) with a 6x4 wheelbase, one each of a German and a Soviet AFV, and a legendary Nazi Tiger tank. The crown jewels of the collection were one of the first trucks of the 1940 Freightliner model, manufactured by James Leland and Co. at their Utah plant, before the corporation moved to Portland, and a GAZ-A which was said to be one of the cars that took part in the 1933 motor rally across the Karakum Desert, as described by Ilf and Petrov in The Little Golden Calf. Collectors would have offered insane sums for either of these two vehicles, but Varyag was not in the business of selling history. At the very dawn of the club’s existence, Bulletov purchased, at scrap prices, a garageful of vintage Volgas, Pobedas, Moskviches, and ZIS and ZIM limousines; a special division – Varyag Corporation – restored and custom-tuned these for private clients.
In the new millennium, in light of the new trend for vintage vehicles, the business finally began to turn a profit. Twenty-two mechanics, four spare-parts experts, an accounting office and a crew of laborers – almost all of them retired military – worked under Semyon Semyonovich’s management, and, what is most important, no one felt left out or short-changed.
The club began to attend vintage car and machinery shows; a TV crew made a show about them, and it was broadcast on national television. This brought it to the attention of the governor himself, a great lover of all things vintage. To line up the heroic machines in the Red Square, just before the elections to the federal Duma, where the Governor aspired to win a seat, struck him as a brilliant political move. On top of that, an influential person from one of the forces’ ministries let it be known that, were the legendary GAZ-A to come into his possession, he could smooth out a few disagreements that had arisen between our Governor and the Kremlin.
The Governor sent a message to Bulletov.
Bulletov sternly demanded the long-promised apartments for his veterans.
At the end of April, a team of auditors descended upon the village and the prospect of serving time was revealed to Varyag’s director.
On May 9,6 a convoy of two tanks and three trucks delivered a strike-force of camouflage-clad Pankratov men to Stargorod’s central square. The police let them through, thinking they were costumed actors from Moscow. Once on the square, the uniformed squad unfurled banners and signs: “We’ll fight for the promised apartments!” The tanks aimed their guns at the Big House. The press snapped pictures. A special commission from the Ministry of Defense landed in Pankratovka a week later and signed a deal with the retirees that obliged the Ministry to move them all into warm apartments within two years. The event was covered in the national 9 o’clock news. The anchor spoke of the progressive trends in a government that fin
ally dealt with its veterans. In the hubbub, Moscow quietly removed the Governor from his post. The machines were donated to the Stargorod museum. The important person never got the GAZ-A he wanted.
Bulletov won the battle and the war, but didn’t move into a new apartment. Instead, he settled in a log house on the river, not far from the village, and took up beekeeping.
A Stargorodian Herald reporter once tried to interview him. The lieutenant colonel stunned him at the door by asking: “From the intellectual point of view, does technical progress move translationally?” And then he answered it himself: “Even if it does, I’m tired of it.” Then he poured them both some mead, clinked his glass with the reporter’s and drained it. The interview was not to be, the drunk correspondent was delivered home by a bread truck that happened by.
Bulletov was not so humble, however, as he made himself out to be. He didn’t quite revert to getting around by horse and buggy; he drives a brand-new diesel UAZ and the corporation, which moved to Stargorod, pays him good dividends off its profits. When he works on his beehives, he often sings an old army song about how every soldier has a right to rest at the river’s edge.
* * *
5. In 1904, the Russian fleet was destroyed by the Japanese at Port Arthur, in the Russo-Japanese War.
6. Victory Day, celebrating the end of World War II.
Kindness
Turk’s pained eyes haunted Marina all night long; she slept fitfully, kicked off her thin comforter and got cold – it was already autumn. She woke up bruised, barely made it to work on time, and worked on her client’s make-up mechanically, although she regained her focus at the very end and finished by doing a good job. When Marina’s client left, Artavaz – the owner of the Diarissimo beauty salon where Marina had been working for the past two weeks – started lecturing her.
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