Stargorod

by Peter Aleshkovsky

  Eight years ago, Vaska was in a bad accident that killed his wife and daughter, and left him crippled. He drank himself almost to death after that. M suddenly decided to visit him.

  Vaska still lived in the same Stalin-era apartment building where M himself was born 45 years ago, in the same communal flat with two other families. He was very happy to see Nikolai, showed him to his room, pulled some canned fish out of the fridge, put out black bread and poured them vodka. Very quickly, however, the joy of their reunion was gone without a trace – Vaska got drunk and broke down crying: two days before he had buried his beloved shepherd dog Rada, the only other soul that loved him. Drunk, restless, in panic, he kept saying he would kill himself. M tried to comfort his school friend, thought of kind, soothing things to say to him, and, in the process of talking him off the ledge, somehow discovered that he had lifted himself out of his earlier despair. They finished the vodka, hugged, and sat there for a while, reminiscing about their childhood. Then Vaska lay down on his threadbare couch and zonked out. Nikolai found a blanket, tucked his friend in, and went home.

  He walked and thought that the surest way of conquering one’s own madness was to visit someone who was even madder. So your dog died – get another one; so they didn’t publish your book – write another one. He works for history, after all, and on the historical scale, a year or two don’t mean a hill of beans. When he was climbing the stairs to his apartment, he heard his neighbor Nastya call his name: shyly, she invited him to celebrate Christmas together. He accepted, hurried home, took a shower, put on a suit and a white shirt, and got a bottle of Champagne out of the fridge.

  And then he talked, and she listened. It turned out that Nastya used to attend his lectures at the university. She was born in a village. It was hard for her to get out of there, and she did not miss it in the least. Now she was happily working at the museum; she lived alone. Nikolai, without quite realizing it, retold his entire book to her – and Nastya wasn’t bored! There was only one thing he couldn’t understand: how was it that he had never noticed her before?

  Everything that is supposed to happen after dinners like that happened. In the morning, M. woke up early, snuck out of bed, dressed and rushed to the square. He was possessed by the need to buy Nastya a rooster on a stick. But the Gypsy woman was not there – instead, there was snow, fluffy and new, and it erased the gloomy city of the day before. Passersby, all to a man, smiled at the bespectacled man in his beret.

  M. bought a rose bouquet instead of candy – and that’s exactly what he said to Nastya when he gave it to her, that and many other words. Piling his plate with eggs and breakfast sausage, Nastya asked, “So does this mean that the word ‘neighbor’ is not completely meaningless in big cities?”

  The only thing left for M to do was to admit his own stupidity, which he did, promptly and happily.

  The Pencil Stub

  The pencil stub served me faithfully and reliably for an entire year, just like the man who had given it to me – Parfyon Dmitriyevich Malygin.

  I met Parfyon Dmitriyevich in the tap-room at the old market, where I went in the hopes of overhearing a good story. Writing a story a week, I’m here to tell you, is pure madness, but a happy madness nonetheless. I lived it for a year – I forgot everything else, I listened to the human choir around me and stole from it everything that was worth stealing.

  Some of it, when written down, inevitably lost its sheen, but I survived, owing much to Parfyon Dmitriyevich, who was always there to critique, edit, and supply a new twist borrowed from one of the ancient newspapers he read in his retirement. Parfyon Dmitriyevich, the son of a geography teacher and the grandson of a village priest persecuted by the Soviets, spent his life as a purveyor of stationery. First on foot, with a suitcase, then in a broken-down GAZ four-wheeler, and by the end of his long career – driving a Gazelle mini-van, he had crisscrossed the entire Stargorod region a million times. He sold simple sets of colored pencils, purple and blue ink, cheap fountain pens, presser feet for sewing machines, graph paper, slide rules, and, closer to the end of his service, markers in colors wildly divergent from the natural hues of the rainbow.

  Countless Grandfather Frosts, Snowmaidens, bunny-rabbits and sad crocodiles, posters and certificates of birth came into this world thanks to his labors. Love letters and denunciations, sympathy notes and recipes for blinchiki with mushrooms would not have been preserved and would not have reached their addressees if it hadn’t been for Parfyon Dmitriyevich. And the great volumes of milk and potatoes, pickles and barley that were accounted for in parallel columns on the pages torn from school notebooks, the baseline of a life now long gone? The world does not exist thanks to the atomic bomb, Parfyon Dmitriyevich used to teach me over a shot of vodka, but by the singular grace of stationery that enables people to describe the world around them, to convey its breath to a loved one, a neighbor, or the humblest log hut in Soggy Tundra, where a woman everyone knows only as Ivanovna, once the mistress of a Detective Krotov whom she alone remembers, is living out her days.

  In the tap-room at the old market, Parfyon Malygin shared a cheburek and a fifth with me and gave me the gift of soulful conversation and a simple magical pencil stub.

  “You’re going to tell me they don’t make them like this anymore, aren’t you?” I prodded.

  “Of course they don’t!” he said and stamped the table conclusively with his glass. “You’ll see what I mean, when it’s time.”

  He went on to talk about the Truth of Life, which has much in common with the truth of fairy tales, and about the newspaper fairy tales that have nothing whatsoever to do with life. He spoke simply; we were instantly fast friends. I went to visit him many times over my year of writing a story a week, and read him the stories that seemed to spool from under the hard, sharp tip of his magical pencil almost against my will. Parfyon listened, sometimes grunting in protest, sometimes nodding in agreement, but most often he would interrupt and start on a story of his own, which led to another, and then the third, and that’s how we spent our evenings. He was ill for the entire year and sat there behind his enormous writing desk, huddled in an ancient wool blanket, his bare feet stuck inside soft valenki.

  “Take speech, words,” he would begin meaningfully and fix me with his soft eyes bleached to the color of blotting paper. “Words are magic,” he would declare, hold a solemn pause, and then burst out in giggles like a proper girl who’s just heard a dirty joke.

  He was fading, slowly and quietly – he knew this, but did not complain. Every day, he would shrivel another quarter of an inch – a fact recorded by pencil lines on the bathroom doorframe.

  Two days ago, when I first had the idea for a Christmas story, the last in the series, I went to get his advice. The pencil he’d given me had turned into a meager stump by then, and secretly I was praying that perhaps he’d find me another one somewhere in his stocks – the prospect of life without the assistance of magic frightened me.

  Parfyon Dmitriyevich looked at me with his characteristic smile:

  “Will the story have miracles in it?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, good then – and Merry Christmas!”

  His eyes gleamed, the blanket emitted a strange rustle, and his head suddenly disappeared from behind the desk. I called his name; he didn’t answer. I went around the desk: the valenki were there on the floor, and the blanket pooled around them, empty. When I lifted the blanket, I found a brand new pencil – the new shape into which my dear friend changed himself. I left the apartment on tiptoe, slinking along the walls like a thief. At home, I read the letters impressed on the pencil: “Travels.”

  “Enough of your stories, try another genre, don’t bore your reader, you can’t just spin tales out of thin air all your life,” Malygin used to tell me.

  Having crisscrossed the Stargorod terrain a million times, Parfyon was trying to push me out the door and into the wide world beyond.

  I, too, felt like trying something new, and so I list
ened to my friend’s wish. I packed quickly, threw a bunch of socks and shirts into my backpack, and topped it with a spare pair of pants. I put my new pencil carefully into a sturdy pencil case. I opened the door. It was snowing; the weather was beautiful. I started my car, let the engine warm up, and drove out of the yard.

  Ahead of me spread a vast land, no better or worse than the Stargorod country, a land where life glowed quietly, awaiting the great magical holiday. Someone would be selling stationery out there too. I’ll buy myself a school notebook and write in it, and if my fingers get cold, I’ll hold them in the breath of the world and warm them.

  About the Author

  Peter Aleshkovsky was born in 1957 and graduated some two decades later from Moscow State University. He worked for several years as an archaeologist in Central Asia and as a historical preservationist in the Russian North before turning full-time to literature in the mid-1990s. He has authored a dozen books and first attained literary success with Stargorod, followed by the works Seagulls; Skunk: A Life (translated into English by Glas); Vladimir Chigrintsev, The Institute of Dreams and The Other Side of the Moon. Aleshkovsky has thrice been short-listed for the Russian Booker Prize, most recently in 2006, for Fish: A History of One Migration, which was published in 2010 by Russian Life Books.

  About the Translator

  Translator Nina Shevchuk-Murray was born and raised in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv. She holds degrees in English linguistics and Creative Writing. She translates both poetry and prose from the Russian and Ukrainian languages. Her translations and original poetry have been published in a number of literary magazines. With Ladette Randolph, she co-edited the anthology of Nebraska non-fiction The Big Empty (U of NE Press, 2007). Her translation of Peter Aleshkovsky’s novel, Fish: A History of One Migration, was long-listed for the Rossica Translation Prize. In 2012, her translation of Oksana Zabuzhko’s Museum of Abandoned Secrets (AmazonCrossing) was released.