The voice of the high priest floated out the office door:
“…He wrote a letter to the chief conservationist: ‘All the princes and persons of eminence in this world have given to the church, so why can’t the artist show his generosity and, out of his honorarium, give Father Pavlin a karaoke machine, in addition to the refrigerator and television he had already contributed, for which he would be inscribed in the church rosters as a warden and be eternally commemorated throughout the parish.’ That’s something, eh?”
“He’s indulging his fancy… We all know what he wants that karaoke for,” the secretary replied. “He is weaving intrigues. When we go out to sanctify that church, you keep Pavlin away from the Minister, while I keep him from the bishop. We keep our eyes peeled, and we’ll get through cleanly. I’ll get the message to the artist to not gift that karaoke.”
Father Artemon left the bucket with its greeting card in the corridor and quietly retreated. At home, he took his savings from beneath an icon and bought the best karaoke machine he could find in the department store, then boarded a bus for Soggy Tundra.
The Minister who is now all-powerful was born 57 years ago in Soggy Tundra. And now, as has become the custom at the pinnacles of power, he decided to restore the single little church in his tiny hometown. The restoration team had been working for two years, and the opening of the church was planned for Christmas, in the presence of the church leadership, politicians and the press. Everyone knew that after the holiday feast both the Minister and the bishop loved to sing Russian folk songs using a karaoke machine. Thus the lachrymose appeal to the brigadier of the restorers, which had somehow been intercepted by the eparchy. Father Pavlin’s calculations were precise: after the lavish feast and libations, the bishop’s and minister’s souls would thaw, songs would soften them to tears, and it would be the perfect moment to throw oneself at their feet and beg for forgiveness and a transfer – it hardly seemed likely that the bishop could refuse him in front of the worldly boss.
Father Artemon rode on the bus and fervently thanked Providence for sending him to the right place at the right time. His apples and cards had been ignored for three years. No, he had fallen behind the times, so far behind, and it was right that they sent him into retirement. He, with his unsophisticated nature, would never have come up with a plan such as this, but these envious fools, they’re quick on the uptake and just get in the way.
Father Pavlin welcomed him warmly. Rural life had been good to him. His children were healthy and did not look like a gang of ragamuffins; their childhood was nothing like his before the war. But the main thing was that Father Pavlin had become warmer and more easy-going; the first thing he did was embrace the old priest and ask his forgiveness. Gratefully accepting the karaoke machine and learning of the intrigues being woven at the eparchy, he broke down sobbing and called Father Artemon “sweet Father.”
They parted warmly the next day. The priest’s wife packed a basket of pies and fresh boiled eggs for Father Artemon. The old priest rode the bus and looked out the window at the November sky. No tracks are left in the heavens, he thought, for some reason; even the birds have flown away. The clouds hung low and thick, covering the endless, happy azure beyond like armor. Father Artemon closed his eyes and died quietly and joyfully, as he had lived.
* * *
7. Priests in the Orthodox Church can be married before taking their vows and thus have children.
The Magic Letter
When Misha was little, his Mom always told him: “Don’t you go aiming high, Misha – you’re soft, anyone can squeeze you however they want, and eat you on a bun.” Misha didn’t listen to his mother’s words.
At the institute he did skits with the KVN team,8 and caught the eye of Sergey Pavlovich Triflin himself; Triflin brought him into the Stargorod mayoral administration and kept him close. So it came to pass that Misha put on his stone boots. Their agreement was that, when he wore out seven pairs, they’d give him an iron staff. If he then wore down 12 iron staffs and did not err – they’d make him a sheriff. Every night Misha delivered a postman’s bag of cash to Triflin’s safe. He learned his trade on the fly – threatened here, flattered there, but one way or the other delivered what was Caesar’s better than all the other young guns. Soon, they moved him up a floor.
Misha developed the taste for double-breasted blazers with crested buttons and ties with a sparkle, but always half-a-shade dimmer than his master’s. He wore his boots out in two years, put on a pair of Salamander suede zip-ups and kicked it up a notch: you should’ve seen him then, with his iron staff doing toe-loops on the asphalt – only sparks flew! He got an office, too, with a double paneled door and brass handles all carved in curlicues like an iconostasis. Around his seventh staff, Misha got to ride around in the bank’s collectors’ van with two porters to help him, and found a trick for his staff, too: every day the knife grinder at the market worked off a quarter-inch on his wheel for him. The levies were enough to keep Misha in bread-and-butter, but he wasn’t greedy, and his master didn’t mind.
One morning, Triflin gave Misha in his usual pile of paperwork a “Good Luck letter” – you’ve probably seen them: “The original is being kept in Amsterdam, copy this letter five times and send it to good people, Count Blondenquist did the same and won a million, Khrushchev forgot – and was deposed the next morning.”
Misha lost the letter in the daily hustle, and three days later – boom! – a scandal: he was supposed to get it to the Governor himself, who wanted to stitch the letter into the lining of his suit coat that he would wear to his appointment with the President. They flew a copy in from the museum in Amsterdam, barely made it. Triflin didn’t care that Misha had only one more iron staff to wear off – banished him to manage the rotten Boozersk kolkhoz. All the money Misha had saved had to be doled out – the governor’s crew threatened to put him in jail and the Mayor left him to bail himself out.
Misha understood he was punished for violating democratic centralism’s primary principle: he nearly put a higher authority in a bind, and let down his boss. The Magic Letter doesn’t forgive – born in 1264, it’s still doing its work around the world!
At the kolkhoz, Misha made do: loosed a lumber gang into the forest – they mowed it down in a blink – sold all the old machinery for scrap, but there was no way he could raise the kind of cash he had gotten used to in Stargorod.
Misha started to drink.
Fortunately, he still had enough brains to make the move, once he ate his way through the kolkhoz, for the position of the local administration’s Election Commission head – a quiet harbor, but there was no money in it. Misha’s lean years dragged on; the administration forgot about him, so he sat in his middle of nowhere and wracked his brain over how he could remind Them of his existence. Once he read in the paper a quote from Metropolitan Bishop Cyril, who stated that “he would very much like to see the moral condition of our society restore itself, so that, perhaps, one day we could yet see an Orthodox monarchy.” Misha armed himself with this quote and told a bunch of visiting reporters that it’s time to anoint our President to the throne. And that’s when he got fired.
“Why me? All I did was repeat what the Metropolitan said!”
“The Metropolitan can say it, but you can’t. It’s still too early, plus look how wisely he put it: “perhaps, one day, we could yet.” And you just dropped it into their laps like a done deal – what were you thinking? Gone feral in your woods is what you did.”
Misha drank hard then, spent everything he had. Next morning he dug into his wallet for something with which to buy a cure for his hangover, and found the old wrinkled “Good Luck letter.” All these years he’d been carrying his misfortune right under his heart! It was then he remembered his mother’s words. What made him mess with the higher-ups, really? They almost ate him alive.
He went to his cousin in Udomlya and bought from him 50 female rabbits to breed, built a bunch of cages and fenced off his yard, so the rabbits could
come out and graze. Raising one rabbit costs 28 lbs of feed, 14 lbs of hay, and 3 rubles’ worth of electricity. Total over four months: 80 rubles. For that you get: fresh meat, almost 6 lbs, equals 400 rubles, liver 50 rubles, fat 50 rubles, pelt 25 rubles, total 525 rubles. You clear 445 rubles from one animal, and an average female rabbit has 40 pups in a single year.
There was only one thing he tried to keep secret – and still it got out somehow: before he got into rabbits, he copied the magic letter five times and sent it to people he knew, and the very first copy went up to the Governor certified mail. Make of it what you will. Misha now is doing just fine, bought a Gazelle van, hired two hobos to look after the rabbits, and drives around without a care in the world, delivering meat to restaurants.
No, it wasn’t his mother’s advice that saved him – ask anyone in Boozersk, they’ll tell you. They’re still mad that Misha, the bastard, kept the Good Luck letter to himself, didn’t share it with his own kind when he should have. So now the guys are all waiting, hoping the letter will make it back to Boozersk somehow. People say it’s got a five-year-cycle and then comes back around. Here’s hoping it’s sooner rather than later – this life will grind anyone down.
* * *
8. KVN - Клуб Весёлых и Находчивых – a popular game show that has been on Russian/Soviet TV since the late 1950s, in which teams of contestants compete to answer questions with humor, do extemporaneous improvisations, and present prepared skits.
Stone Soup
Folks have been working fields around Stargorod for centuries, but every year, new boulders come up from under the ground. The pagan Komsi tribe that used to live on these lands believed that a fire-breathing dragon lived in the depths of the earth and the boulders and rocks were the petrified tears he shed mourning the people’s hard lot. The Soviet government, when it arrived, explained everything: our region lies at the foot of a large plateau and for that reason is rich in highly valuable construction materials – they started quarries everywhere and caravans of trucks loaded with high-quality gravel began crawling daily to the Stargorod’s railway station. They even began building a narrow-gauge line to the quarry in Kozhin, the local army unit engineered bridges for it and raised a levy, but then perestroika happened, and the unit was disbanded. The rail line soon disappeared in thickets of wild raspberry and mushrooms; carps found their way into the quarry’s flooded pits.
For a long time, no one had any use for the abandoned piles of gravel and cobblestone, until a man named Rashid arrived in our lands – the fourteenth son of an Azerbaijani farmer, he had wandered to Stargorod in search of a better life. Rashid turned stone into money: he hired cheap trucks and had hobos load them up in exchange for booze, then sent his cargo to Moscow and sold it there on the Rublyov market. Rashid paid Musa the Chechen “for protection,” and his trucks made their way to Moscow without any trouble. One day, Musa introduced Rashid to a hot-shot Muscovite.
“So, you’re in the gravel business?” the Muscovite asked Rashid.
“A little.”
“The kolkhoz has been divided into individual lots – get me the whole package for Kozhino, and I’m especially interested in the lots that border the old quarry. A hundred and forty hectares altogether, ten owners – get me the lot, I’m paying triple.”
“Five times, and I’m getting the signatures,” Rashid said sternly and glanced at Musa. Musa nodded silently.
The Muscovite shook his hand – they had a deal. In the kolkhoz administration, a bottle of cognac and a box of chocolates produced the records Rashid needed. He copied down the owners’ names and drove to Kozhino. He was not a stranger there: every fall he came to buy sheep he supplied to Stargorod’s Muslim diaspora. After two neighbors got ten thousand in cash each, the rest lined up to see Rashid by themselves; Rashid told them he wanted to build a pig farm in Kozhino. He had eight deeds in a blink. Simple math showed that at the price of 1800 rubles per hectare, each 14-hectare lot made him 152,000 rubles in profit. But to get the ninth lot, Rashid had to face the old witch Alevtina Pimenova. And she wouldn’t budge.
“My father wrung this lot out of the kolkhoz. It used to be my great-grandfather’s way before the revolution. Father said we could make soup from these stones for the next hundred years.”
They sat there for four hours, bickering; Rashid went hoarse, Pimenova, without him noticing, got him to agree to pay 40,000 more than he’d started with. Her lot was right next to the quarry, Rashid could not let it slip.
Cursing the hag under his breath, Rashid paid up, grabbed the deed, and went to find the last address on his list. Kolya Piklov, also known as Pickle, was waiting for him.
“You’re after the stone, aren’t you?” he inquired of the entrepreneur.
“I’m building a pig farm.”
“Don’t play with me, pal. There’s a dragon guards our rocks – you gotta give him something, or else there’ll be trouble. We the Komsi know how to do it. And as far as selling the land – I’ll sell, why not, what do I want with it.”
Pickle went to the pantry and returned with a strange-looking rock with a hole in it.
“Here, put this rock under Pimenova’s deed; she’s my cousin once removed, I’ll do spells for our blood. And you, here, have some beer in the meantime – we, the Komsi, don’t do deals otherwise.”
Being a well brought up Azerbaijani, Rashid did not dare violate the ancestral law and took a sip of the beer. The world spun around him, and he fainted. When he woke up, it was night, and he was sitting in his car parked somewhere in the middle of a forest. He counted the deeds – there were eight. The ninth one, Pimenova’s, was gone.
Musa, when he heard Rashid’s story, said simply:
“You got conned. You don’t have the whole lot – the Muscovite won’t give you the money.”
Then he offered Rashid a hundred thousand rubles for the eight deeds that he did have. Rashid was afraid of Musa and did not refuse. The quarry, of course, in due time opened anyway. The Muscovite’s corporation bought out the last two lots, for a totally different price. Alevtina had long been living with Pickle, and now they used their money to buy a small cottage at the edge of Stargorod. With gas and hot water.
Pickle still drinks his homemade beer, same as always. Alevtina grumbles, but she knows – he’s a Komsi, and Komsi can’t go without. The other folks in Kozhino drank through their cash in a week, had themselves a grand ol’ time, spent another week hung-over, and went back to living their lives as they had before. They never bore a grudge against Pimenova and Pickle; quite the opposite – the Kozhino folks take great pride in them, and whenever they make their way to town, come to visit and stay until either Alevtina or Pickle throws them out.
Rashid, soon after, ran into Pickle in the market, offered him his hand, and gave him a slap on the shoulder, “You’re a wily son-of-a-bitch, but whatever, I’m not angry.”
Pickle shook the hand of the Azerbaijani farmer’s fourteenth son and said, “The dragon, Rashid, is crying under the ground there, mourns us every day, wails and sobs, and we live like we’re not brothers – that’s our problem.”
Beauty and the Beast
Katya was a beauty. For five years, she fought with her husband, Sashka, a drunk and a good-for-nothing. In return, Sashka regularly beat her. Finally, Katya took their little daughter Sveta and left him. The commonly accepted maxim, “If he beats you – he must love you,” did not sit well with her.
Stargorod’s hospital, where Katya worked as a nurse, took pity on her and found her a one-room flat in an old barrack still heated with firewood. The neighborhood women only shook their heads: Sashka was known far and wide for being ferociously vindictive. Katya’s neighbor, Aunt Klava, pitying her, called the young woman “my kamikaze.” Several times Sashka tried to break through Katya’s door at night and broke her windows. Katya would call the police, they would put him in the slammer for 15 days, but every time he came out he’d go after her again – the official divorce seemed to
have done nothing but rile him up more.
Katya’s life turned into a nightmare. She would gladly sign up for a job in the North, but she had neither the energy nor the money to pull up roots and move to a new place with a small child: under the auspices of a new national program, the hospital’s clinic and emergency room doctors got a 10,000 ruble raise, and the nurses saw a grand total of 700 added to their monthly 3,000. Katya worked two full-time shifts and could barely make ends meet.
One night Katya was walking home after her shift; it was late, already dark. She had to walk past St. Christopher’s cemetery, about which people liked to tell many scary stories – many featured werewolves who gnawed on buried skeletons at night, robbed passersby and demanded pay-offs from passing cars. Katya walked faster along the cemetery’s fence; she could hear someone breathing heavily behind her, catching up with her.
“Wait, bitch, I gotta talk to you!”
Katya recognized Sashka’s voice. Facing him in this deserted place, at night, alone did not bode well at all – Sashka had long been threatening to stab her. Katya gripped the handle of her purse harder and prepared to defend herself. Her ex pounced at her like a rabid animal, drunk and vicious, knocked the useless purse out of her hand, and twisted her arm behind her back; she saw the gleam of a blade. Realizing she was done for, Katya screamed.
Suddenly, the nearest bushes shook and a thing, a creature, something so dreadful it could only be called a Beast climbed out. Without idle talk, it struck Sashka on the jaw, knocked him off his feet and went to work on him, saying: “I see you bother this beauty one more time, I’ll bury you right here.” Sashka whimpered in horror and pain and swore to forget Katya forever.
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