The Beast turned out not as scary as it was in the cartoon Katya watched with little Sveta. It had a pleasant voice and spoke kind words to Katya, comforting her as she wept with relief from the terror she’d survived, and it stroked her hair in a way that sent electric sparks flying all over her body and instantly robbed her of any sense. The Beast saw Katya home, went through her door and told her not to turn on the light. “Shh, keep quiet, lest we wake up the kid.”
The Beast seemed to have paralyzed Katya’s will; she felt no fear whatsoever towards him. Everything happened in a blink, almost like in the cartoon. No – it was better, much better, so much better. No movie could ever hope to match what happened between them.
At dawn, Katya woke and stoked the wood-burning stove – she had to start potatoes boiling in the cast-iron vat for the piglet she kept in the yard. The Beast was sleeping, arms spread wide on the bed, and his linen-blond curly hair gleamed on the pillow. Last night, before they climbed into bed, he told her specifically not to touch the skin he shed on the floor. Katya considered the prohibition, thought about all the trouble that usually ensued in fairy-tales when such orders were disobeyed, and decided not to listen. Be what may! She bundled the whole pile together, threw it into the stove, and added a few logs for a good measure. The flames shot up high, red flashes leaped around the room. Katya made sure the skin couldn’t be saved, then went back to the room, climbed under the blanket and pressed close to her Beast. He mumbled something in his sleep, and put one arm around her shoulder.
And that’s when the bullets began to explode inside the stove.
Lieutenant Ivanets jumped up as if someone had scalded him; a terrified Sveta howled from behind the curtain. Katya prepared to receive her well-deserved death.
Ivanets dashed to the stove, grabbed a pale of water and splashed it onto the fire. Then he grabbed a poker and spread out what was left of his uniform. Seeing that he wouldn’t be able to save any of it, he looked reproachfully at Katya. She, chin held proudly high, explained, “I was afraid that you would turn into a Beast again and leave us.”
At those words, Kolya Ivanets looked at her with awe and, suddenly finding the courage, said, “Now not in a million years!” and stuck his tongue out at Svetka who poked her head out from behind the curtain.
For leaving his post without permission and for negligence in handling his personal weapon Lieutenant Ivanets was discharged from the State Traffic Police.
“I’ve done my turn as a werewolf in uniform – that was plenty,” he declared, returning to Katya’s apartment with a bottle of champagne and a bouquet. “Tomorrow, I’ll submit an application to the fire brigade, the guys promised to find a spot for me.”
“You do know how to handle a fire,” Katya said as she came up to the Beast and kissed him.
Everyone knows since times immemorial that the Beauty got seriously lucky with the Beast – but why is it that those who make it their business to write such stories never bothered to wonder: and what about the Beast?
Bribe
Ivan Nikanorovich Lyapunov took great pride in his ancestor Lyapun, the source of his last name. In 1546, scrivener Lyapun, sent to Bakhchisarai as the head of the tsar’s embassy, refused to pay “the staff duty” to Khan Sakhib-Girey’s murzas. The murzas – Crimean nobles – had the custom of meeting Moscow’s emissaries before the Khan’s palace and throwing their walking staffs under the Russians’ feet; they demanded a significant sum as the price for free passage. This wasn’t merely about having to bribe them: the payee, by virtue of having to buy himself entrance to the palace, acknowledged the supremacy of the Khan and his own lowly position as a payer of tribute – something upon which the Crimean Khans, who traced their lineage to Genghis Khan himself, were keen to insist. The poor Lyapun was stripped naked and paraded around the market with his nostrils and ears sewn shut to shame him before Bakhchisarai’s citizenry, but he did not give in and returned to Moscow never having gained an audience with the Khan or having signed a new treaty. Upon his return, Lyapun was promoted to clerk and sent to Stargorod, where he was destined to beget the famous Lyapunovs.
In the early days of democratization, Ivan Nikanorovich spent two years working as Stargorod’s mayor’s deputy, but he didn’t fit into the system, for he despised bribing as a phenomenon. So he returned to his old position at Stargorod University, where he taught Russian history and was a department chair.
He was just about to deliver his lecture about the relations between the Rus and the Golden Horde one day when an unexpected question made him revise his narrative: a student asked where bribes came from. Ivan Nikanorovich began with the Byzantine Empire, in which the administration was broken up into districts called dioceses (from the Latin dioecesis). Each diocese had its own judge and its own bishop. The judge was responsible for adjudicating civil disputes, and the bishop for keeping the spiritual peace, correcting violations of moral and religious norms. Neither official was ever paid a decent regular salary, as, for instance, judges in the West would later receive from the government, so they had to rely on whatever the parties to the suit could donate to the court for having justice done – and that’s how the bribe was born. No one saw it necessary to set a standard for the donations, so corruption quickly became the norm in the state’s apparatus. Over time, the state weakened and fell – easy prey to bloodthirsty Turks. In the West, where governments inherited Roman law, bribing was seen as a great shame and was punished severely. However, it was Byzantine customs that were imported to Rus along with Eastern Christianity; a prince, for instance, who was expected to act as a judge, received lands “to feed from” – basically, a token maintenance – and how much he charged privately for solving a citizen’s dispute was never discussed. The nobles and the common people traditionally looked the other way.
“Do you mean to say that bribing is in our blood and we can do nothing to root it out?” the student asked.
“I believe it is wrong to give bribes, and that we should fight this,” Lyapunov answered and ended the discussion.
After class, Kostya Stupin came by Ivan Nikanorovich’s office – Kostya was his graduate student and a fourth-generation fisherman from the Lake Country.
“Ivan Nikanorovich, dad sent you some fish,” Kostya said shyly offering the professor a box of smoked zanders.
“Are you offering me a bribe?”
“We caught these together, I smoked them myself, I just wanted to share – try them, it’s from the heart!”
To refuse would have meant to offend the boy. Lyapunov shook his head and took the box.
Later that day he went to visit his mother – she lived in a village, a dozen miles outside of town. His mother loved fish, so the zanders came at a perfect time. He drove through the gathering dusk, having forgotten to fasten his seat belt or to turn on the lights, and thought that he really should not have accepted the fish. At St. Christopher’s Cemetery, something – an apparition with a sergeant’s shoulder-straps jumped out of the bushes and waved the traffic police stick at him; Lyapunov pulled over. The apparition was skinny as a child: it had an almost-bald skull with a bit of thin hair on it, and its big-knuckled fingers ended in razor-sharp nails.
“Driving without lights, without the seat belt, and when you made that turn you traveled into the facing lane! Oh, is that fish you got there?” the skeletal apparition wheezed happily, poking its head into the window and looking over Lyapunov’s shoulder into the back seat.
“I won’t give you any money,” Lyapunov said sternly.
All of a sudden, the skeleton broke apart into three small boys in tattered clothes.
“Mister, we’re hungry, help us, ple-e-ase!” they sang out in unison. Their gaunt little faces would make a rock cry.
“To heck with you – here!” Lyapunov threw a couple of fishes out the window. The boys snatched them and vanished into the bushes.
In the village, he complained to his mother about the traffic police – they’re way out of line!
/> “You’re always judging people, Vanya,” his mother said. “And you should know better. To hear you say it, everyone’s just getting fat, and there are all kinds of people out there. Take Katya Pimenova – she lives on the other end of the village – her husband’s in the traffic police, and he’s skin and bones, a breeze could tip him over, but he works hard and does all the chores at home, and they have three kids, and he doesn’t drink but they’re poor all the same. Power’s gone to your head, Vanya – why did you ever want to mess with it?”
Ivan Nikanorovich did not argue with his mother, but threw back a shot of vodka, bit a pickle and went outside. It was frosty; the sky was pierced with stars. For some reason, he suddenly imagined his ancestor – how he walked across the Bakhchisarai market, naked, with his ears and nostrils sewn shut, the crowds cursing him with words he couldn’t understand. The vodka spread warm throughout Ivan Nikanorovich’s body. He brushed off a quick tear, turned, and went inside, to sleep.
Institute of Dreams
A small diesel engine pulled a local train along the narrow-gauge line between Soggy Tundra and Stargorod. It was December 24, and Nikita Yurievich Kostochkin was on his way home from a business trip. It had been three years since his wife Alyona died, leaving him alone with his daughter Masha, now a student at the university. Masha’s boyfriend was an asshole, but Kostochkin did not believe he had the right to talk to his daughter about this, and, on top of that, he was afraid of being abandoned by her in their three-room apartment. At the moment, however, on his way home, he wanted nothing less than to walk in on the boyfriend staring idiotically into the TV in his kitchen.
There was a time when Nikita Yurievich worked at a museum, where he collected folklore by traveling around the region. In the 90s, the position at the museum was cut, so he found work at a new place called The Institute of Dreams. Its 10 employees published dream interpretation guides, read coffee-grounds, recorded Gypsy predictions about the future of the country, and had a director who in all seriousness declared that their mission was to teach people to see and appreciate their dreams on a whole new level – to become what he called “cognizant dreamers.” Nikita Yurievich did not bother to look for a deeper meaning in the director’s bullshit, and instead continued to collect the same old folklore he’d always cared about – along with the new legends that were being born right before his eyes.
Kostochkin always traveled second-class – he could count on meeting fascinating characters there. This day was no exception: a drifter who boarded the train in Emmaus informed him that the station had been named after one Emma Us, an old-timey landlady who was built like a grenadier and loved nothing more than shooting hares.
“She’d shoot 240 of them in a day!” the drifter boasted, as proud as if he’d counted the bodies himself.
The drifter had never heard of the vision of the Risen Christ that had appeared in Emmaus to some travelers, only snorted dismissively when Nikita Yurievich mentioned it, then turned to the old lady on the seat next to him and proceeded to enlighten her about the ongoing battle between the forces of White and Black magic. The forces of Light were currently being represented by Kaloyev, the guy who stabbed a Swissair traffic controller, and who had just been let out of Swiss jail.
“Because he fought a German!” the hobo proudly declared.
“You mean a Swiss,” Kostochkin corrected.
“How’s that different?” the hobo snapped back. “Those Krauts opened a gravel pit in Kozhino, next thing you know they’ll take the whole country down, stone by stone. One of our guys has had a dream about it.”
“It’s German Christmas today,” the old lady piped in. “Whatever dream you get will come true. Only the dreams tonight don’t bode well – that’s because the Laodokian Angel leaves his post to revere St. Nicholas; we are orphaned for the night. My neighbor dreamt on this night in 1991 about Gorbachev, and the spot on his head shrank in her dream into a dot. And the very next morning he said goodbye to everyone on TV, and they lowered the Soviet flag over the Kremlin!”
Nikita Yurievich sat there silently, listening, committing things to memory. He’s already collected a bookful of such stories heard on the road. Traditional dreams – the kind in which a fish means pregnancy, a dog is a friend, and losing one’s teeth betokens death – have come to seem common and boring to him; they were a legacy of another time, and gravitated to notions popularized in Martyn Zadeka’s fortune-telling book that enjoyed great popularity among the Russians in the middle of the nineteenth century. The new folklore, in its living, passionate, confusing, sometimes raving spontaneity, reflected the condition of the common mind and was, to Nikita Yurievich, far more interesting.
His fellow travelers, having bonded over their long and substantive conversation, got off the train together at some small station. The diesel engine strained, the car rocked hard on the rails, and the storm tossed handfuls of snow against the window. Kostochkin fell asleep. He dreamed of a child, a girl of magnificent beauty – they were picking mushrooms in the forest together and laughing happily about something. The girl looked both like his daughter Masha and his late wife Alyona.
When Kostochkin woke up, the train was already pulling up to Stargorod’s platform. He took the back way home from the railway station, cutting through the dark yards, and yet he couldn’t shake off his dream. If you see a maiden, that means a marvel, a miracle is near, Zadeka maintained – a naive interpretation based on the similarity between the words “maiden” and “marvel.” Kostochkin expected no miracles.
Masha, fortunately, was home alone. On the occasion of Christmas, albeit Catholic, she had roasted a duck with sour Antonov apples, and bought a bottle of champagne. Nikita Yurievich told her about his dream and, jokingly, suggested they drink to a miracle. That’s when his daughter broke down and told him she was pregnant, but added sternly that she would never even consider marrying the child’s father, and called him an asshole.
“That’s great – there’ll be three of us!” Nikita Yurievich hugged his daughter and spent a long time holding her and stroking her hair.
That night he dreamed he saw the Angel of Laodokia, carved into a schooner’s bow. The ship flew up to visit St. Nicholas. He, Kostochkin, stood at the helm, and a fishing net long as the Milky Way hung down from the stern. Snow fell all around them, flakes coming to rest atop Martyn Zadeka’s book, forgotten on the ground below. Suddenly, the volume changed its shape and turned into the map of his country, except that instead of its name the letters written across its curving expanse spelled “The Institute of Dreams.”
Tiny trains sped through the snowstorm in all directions, their passengers slept, and their dreams, colorful like candy wrappers, flew up and fluttered towards the stars, but were caught instead in the mesh of the ship’s fishing net. Nikita Yurievich realized that he was inside a “cognizant” dream. In his sleep, he hid his face in his hands, to make sure he wouldn’t wake up, the way he used to do a long time ago, when he was a little boy.
A Caramel Rooster for Christmas
It was Christmas Eve, and Nikolai M was beset by unpleasant thoughts.
In the morning, he found in his mailbox a card from his daughter, who’d run away to live in Germany, only to find out that his daughter and her husband were celebrating Christmas in Morocco this year, instead of visiting him in Stargorod. Then his publisher, who’d been feeding him one excuse after another, finally admitted that, unless a sponsor suddenly materialized out of thin air, they wouldn’t be able to publish Nikolai M’s fundamental study of Stargorod’s history for another year. And really, who cares that St. Christopher’s Monastery, founded by St. Ephrem back in the 11th century, is today, after Ukraine’s independence, the oldest monastery in our country? The day before, he visited both the church and the city council, and neither gave him any money to publish the book.
It is the pinnacle of insanity to believe that we have solid footing. In fact, our history attempts to convince us of the opposite from the very beginning. W
e thought we were moving forward by walking on hard ground beneath our feet, and all of a sudden we learn that there’s nothing even remotely resembling ground there, and, what’s more – there’s nothing that could be called movement. The democratic transformations – an object of M’s heartfelt faith – fizzled out; the city did not want his work, his daughter did not want him, and the people in the street met his beret and eyeglasses with cold, unfriendly looks. He dreaded even imagining their eyes in times of trouble. In 1611, the crowds hung pharmacist Von Rhode right here, on the midtown wall – they thought he was a Swedish spy. Indeed, the word “neighbor” means nothing in big cities. Perhaps it is still relevant in villages, where everyone knows everyone else, and everybody can still love and hate each other in a true neighborly fashion?
Thus obsessing, M came out onto Bolshaya Square. In the middle, the city had put up its Christmas tree; somewhere nearby children were screaming happily. A Gypsy woman pounced on M, stuck a rooster candy-on-a-stick into his fingers, snatched a hundred rubles from his wallet, and, running away, promised that he would meet his happiness today.
M sat on a bench, unwrapped the rooster from its cellophane wrapper and put it into his mouth. The taste of burnt sugar reminded him how he and his friend Vaska used to slide down ice hills here, in the park by the Stargorod kremlin. Back in the day, the caretakers of the city park made those ice hills especially for the kids. It was also here that the boys snuck to smoke Dymok cigarettes, then hid the rest of the pack in a secret cache, and went home, happy and drenched, sucking on rooster stick-candies just like this to mask their tobacco breath. Or chewing on almonds – which were disgusting and filled your mouth with a sort of perfumey after-taste, but cost less than two roosters.
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