Fandango and Other Stories

by Bryan Karetnyk

  I was again at the threshold of ordinary emotions. They had returned from the fiery sphere scorched but assembled securely and precisely. My state now differed little from the usual reserve one feels during any dramatic episode.

  I passed through a door and cut across the twilight of a room that I did not have time to examine. Carpeted steps led downstairs. I descended into a large and very bright room that had a low ceiling and was filled with beautiful furniture, divans, and flowers. Its walls were covered in an array of colored silks. Halfway I was stopped by Bam Gran’s gaze; he was sitting on a divan holding a cane and a hat in his hand; with a biscuit he was teasing a fox terrier, which was jumping about and barking amusingly, ecstatic at both his failure and anticipation.

  Bam Gran had on a suit the color of seawater. His gaze recalled the end of a whip lashing the air.

  “I knew I would see you,” he said, “and though I had intended to take a stroll, I place myself entirely at your disposal. If you wish, I’ll give you the name of the town. It’s Zurbagan, Zurbagan in May, when the orange trees are in blossom—the pleasant Zurbagan of jokers like myself.”

  With these words he let go of the biscuit and, standing up, shook my hand.

  “You are a brave man, Don Kaur,” he exclaimed, “and I like that, just as I like all things extraordinary. What do you feel, having conquered thousands of miles?”

  “Thirst,” I said. “I feel a difference in air pressure, and I feel terribly unnerved!”

  “I understand.”

  He squeezed the dog’s muzzle with his elegant fingers and, peering into its ecstatic eyes with a smile, ordered:

  “Go and tell Remm that we have a guest. Have him bring some wine and ice.”

  With a yap, the dog sped off.

  “No, no,” said Bam Gran, noticing my involuntary movement. “It’s only a matter of first-rate training. The word ‘Remm’ means ‘fetch Remm.’ Remm himself knows what to do when he sees Pli-Pli. Meanwhile, Señor Kaur, treasure what time you have, for you can stay here for only half an hour. I should not want you to have cause for regret. In any case, we’ll each have time for a glass of wine. Remm, your alacrity is touching!”

  The servant entered. He was wearing white pyjamas and his head was shaved. Having set down on the table a tray bearing a colored-glass carafe of wine and a decanter filled with pomegranate juice, as well as ice in a silver vase and some straws, he retreated and looked at Bam Gran with adoration.

  “We’ve run out of ice, Señor!”

  “Take some from a Norwegian fjord or a river in Siberia!”

  “I took Remm from Tristan da Cunha,” said Bam Gran after the servant had left. “I removed him from the terrible mystery of a looking glass, by which he became transfixed during a particular moment in his life. Let’s have a drink!”

  He dipped a straw into a mixture of ice and wine and thoughtfully sipped it, while I, tortured by thirst, simply emptied the glass into my mouth.

  “Well then,” he said. “The ‘Fandango’! Such wonderful music, and we’ll hear it presently from Barcelona, in a rendition by Van Herd’s orchestra.”

  I looked at him in astonishment, for truly at that moment I had been thinking of the guitars that broke into that remarkable dance as Bam Gran disappeared. I had been silently humming it to myself.

  “Barcelona is not Zurbagan,” I said. “I’d like to know what radio you’ll use to produce this orchestra.”

  “Oh, you simpleton!” said Bam Gran, standing up with a rather haughty air. “Van Herd, play us Walter’s arrangement of the ‘Fandango.’”

  A rich bass answered politely and succinctly out of the void:

  “Very well! Right away.”

  I heard a cough, some noise, the rustle of sheet music, and the clatter of instruments. Biting his lip, Bam Gran listened. A dry tap of the conductor’s baton put an abrupt end to the squeaking of a violin string; I looked around, trying to figure out the trick, but, recalling everything that had already taken place, I sat back and began to wait.

  Then, as if the orchestra were truly there, the one and only “Fandango” surged forth in all its glory. I can say that I was hearing it with greatly heightened emotions, but nevertheless it raised them higher still, to heights from which the earth is scarcely visible. The exceptional purity and plasticity of this music, in combination with the perfection of the orchestration, caused my legs to grow numb. I myself reverberated, like a pane of glass that vibrates when it thunders. Spinning in the rapid, circular movements of the glittering rhythm, I watched Bam Gran vacantly and found it difficult to understand what he was saying. “It bears everything away,” said the man who had led me there, in the way a firm hand guides a diamond on glass to score a whimsical, wonderful pattern. “It bears it away, scatters it, rends it,” he was saying. “It stirs the wind and inspires love. It strikes at the strongest bonds. It holds the heart in its ardent hand and kisses it. Instead of calling you, it gathers whirlwinds of gold discs around you, spinning them among a frenzy of color. Long live the dazzling ‘Fandango’!”

  The orchestra slowed and paused silently for the final transition. It broke into a nerve-rattling explosion of ultimate triumph. The music soared to its captivating zenith, being borne from summit to summit, and descended touchingly and proudly, with a restraint of expressiveness. Silence fell, like a train that comes to a standstill at a station—a silence that puts an abrupt end to the melody that plays out to the rhythmic clatter of turning wheels.

  I came to my senses, like a stopped clock when its pendulum is given a push.

  “You see,” said Bam Gran, “Van Herd really does have the world’s finest orchestra. He gave us his best. Let’s go now, for time is slipping away. If you stay here another ten minutes, you may have cause to regret Bam Gran’s hospitality!”

  He stood up; I, too, got to my feet, my head full of smoke and the flying, impetuous rhythms of the fantastic orchestra. We passed through a blue-glass door and found ourselves on the landing of a grimy stone staircase.

  “Now it is I who mustn’t remain here,” said Bam Gran, retreating into the shadows, where he became a design on the wall’s crumbling limestone, a design that bore, it was true, a vague resemblance to his angular figure. “Farewell!”

  The voice came either from the courtyard or from a door that slammed shut below, and so I was alone again …

  The staircase led down a narrow seven-story well.

  The pale-blue summer air was shining through the open window on the landing. Below was a very familiar courtyard—that of the building in which I lived.

  I inspected the three doors that led onto the landing. On one of them, below a number seven, was a brass plate bearing my landlady’s name: Maria Stepanovna Kuznetsova.

  Beneath this plate, affixed with tacks, was my visiting card. It was where it ought to be, but the card itself had changed.

  I read: “Alexander Kaur” and after it an “and” written in ink. It was placed between the upper and lower lines. The lower line, whose meaning was connected to the top line by this conjunction, was also written in ink. It read: “and Elizaveta Antonovna Kaur.” Well! Behind this door where I stood, my wife Liza was waiting for me in a small, out-of-the-way room. Remembering this, I seemed to receive a mighty blow to the forehead. But I did not come to, for the sequence of events that had only just relinquished its power over me came flowing back to me vividly. At that moment I fell; it was as if I had leaped on top of a creature that had begun to shriek in the darkness. With the horror of an exhausted mind, I came to life through a life that had vanished without trace. My strength deserted me, while two years, emerging from the void, rushed into my consciousness, like water through a burst dam. My fists hammered on the door, and I went on pounding until Liza’s quick steps and the sound of a key confirmed the validity of my violence in the face of my own life.

  I leaped inside and embraced my wife.

  “Is it you?” I asked. “Is it really, truly you?”

  I pressed
her close, repeating:

  “You, you, you?”

  “Whatever’s the matter with you?” she said, freeing herself, her face pale and startled. “Don’t you feel well? Why have you come back so soon?”

  “Soon?!”

  “Let’s go,” she said with the determination of sudden, extreme agitation brought on by fear.

  The faces of curious residents appeared in the doorways. Ordinariness was regaining its lost strength; I went in and sat down in an armchair.

  I sat there, perfectly still. Liza took off my cap and turned it over in her hands.

  “Tell me, what’s happened?” she said blankly, in growing fear. “Your hair is matted. Are you hurt? Did you bang into something?”

  “Liza, tell me,” I began, taking her by the hand, “and please don’t be afraid of my questions: when did I leave the house?”

  She grew pale but immediately surrendered to the mysterious internal transmission of my state. Her voice was unnaturally clear; she fixed my eyes in hers. Her words were rapid and submissive.

  “You left to go to the post office about twenty minutes, maybe half an hour ago.”

  “Did I say anything to you as I left?”

  “I don’t remember. You slammed the door a little, and as you left I heard you whistling the ‘Fandango.’”

  My memory performed an about-face, and I recalled having gone out to send a registered letter.

  “What year is it?”

  “Nineteen twenty-three.” Saying this, she began to cry but did not wipe away the tears; very likely she did not realize she was crying. The intensity of her gaze was extraordinary.

  “The month?”

  “May.”

  “The date?”

  “May twenty-third, nineteen twenty-three. I’ll go to the pharmacy.”

  She stood up and quickly put on her hat. Then she took some small change from the table. I did not stop her. Looking at me peculiarly, my wife left, and I heard her quick steps in the direction of the front door.

  While she was gone, I reconstructed the past; it did not surprise me, for it was my past, and I saw clearly all the minute details that constituted this moment. However, I was faced with the problem of reconciling a certain parallel existence with the past. The parallel’s physical essence was expressed in a yellow leather purse, which weighed the same two pounds in my hand now that it had also done some time ago. I surveyed the room, making a complete connection between the individual moments of the two years that had flashed by and the history of each object that had knotted its loop in the lacework of my existence. And so I grew weary, reliving the past, which seemed as though it had never been.

  “Sasha!” Liza stood before me, holding out a phial. “You’re to take twenty-five of these drops. Please, take them …”

  But at last the time had come to give vent to everything. I sat her down beside me and said:

  “Listen and think. It wasn’t this room that I left this morning. I left the room I lived in before I met you, in January, nineteen twenty-one.”

  With these words I took out the yellow purse and poured the glittering piastres into my wife’s lap.

  Only by means of repeating the conversation under those same circumstances could I convey both it and our agitation following such a demonstration of the truth.

  We sat down, stood up, sat down again, and interrupted each other until I had related what had happened to me from beginning to end. Several times my wife cried:

  “You’re raving! You’re frightening me! You want me to believe that?”

  Then I pointed to the gold coins.

  “Yes, I know,” she kept saying, her head spinning so much from the hopelessness of the situation that all she could say was: “Ugh, I’ll die if I can’t understand this.”

  Finally, in profound exhaustion, she began to ask questions over and again, almost mechanically, now laughing, now dropping her head onto her arms, tears streaming. I was calmer. My composure gradually rubbed off on her. It had already begun to grow dark by the time she lifted her head with a distraught and meaningful look lit up by a smile.

  “I’m such a fool!” she said, sighing fitfully and attending to her hair—a sign that the psychological turmoil was at an end. “It’s really quite clear! Everything has gone topsy-turvy, and in this topsy-turviness turned out in its rightful place!”

  I marveled at woman’s ability to define a situation in a few words, and had to agree that the accuracy of her definition left nothing to be desired.

  After this she began to cry again; I asked what was wrong.

  “But you were gone for two years!” she said, horrified and angrily twisting the button on my vest.

  “You know yourself that I was gone for thirty minutes.”

  “All the same …”

  I agreed and, having talked a little longer, Liza, like one overwhelmed, fell into the deepest sleep. I left quickly and quietly, hot on the trail of life—or of a vision? Feeling the gold roundels in my vest pocket, I could not—and still cannot—give a positive answer.

  I reached the Madrid almost at a run. Terpugov was pacing up and down the half-empty hall; spotting me, he rushed toward me, shaking my hand with the vigor of a gracious, cordial meeting.

  “There you are,” he said. “Take a seat, you’ll be served right away. Vanya! His bream! Go and ask Nefedin whether it’s ready.”

  We sat down and began to talk of various things, while I pretended that there was nothing to explain. It was perfectly simple, like any other day. The waiter brought the food and opened a bottle of Madeira. A fried bream sizzled on the dish; I was sure it was the same fish I had given Terpugov, for I recall that its gill had been torn lengthwise.

  “Well, Terpugov,” I said, unable to restrain myself, “you’ve kept your word after two years.”

  He gave me a sly look.

  “He-he!” said the former cook. “What’s this you’re remembering? I saw you just yesterday—you were bringing a bream from the market, whereas I was drunk and began pestering you, I admit, in order to drag you here.”

  He was right. I remembered it now with the annoying unassailability of fact. But I, too, was right, and, leaning into Terpugov’s ear, I whispered:

  Over the sea, in the plains,

  Full of the heat and the snow,

  Dreaming, and in fluid motion,

  An evergreen palm bends down low.

  “He-he!” he said, filling the glass with more Madeira. “You do like to joke.”

  It was evening. A drizzle was falling.

  * Man! How proud the word rings: A line, now proverbial in Russia, from Satine’s monologue in Act IV of Maxim Gorky’s (1868–1936) play The Lower Depths (Na dne, 1902).

  * Levitan’s … suggest an intended “idea”: Isaac Ilyich Levitan (1860–1900) was an influential Russian landscape painter, whose “mood landscapes” sought to capture the lyrical qualities of the Russian countryside.

  * an artel: Artels were cooperative workshops that existed throughout the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, generally operating in the areas of art, crafts, and light industry.

  * That’s … life of yours: A gloss on the final lines of Nikolai Nekrasov’s (1821–1878) poem of 1855 “The Secret” (“Sekret”), which in ballad form tells of two brothers who stand by their father’s deathbed and quarrel over their inheritance.

  RUSSIAN LIBRARY

  Between Dog and Wolf by Sasha Sokolov, translated by Alexander Boguslawski

  Strolls with Pushkin by Andrei Sinyavsky, translated by Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy and Slava I. Yastremski

  Fourteen Little Red Huts and Other Plays by Andrei Platonov, translated by Robert Chandler, Jesse Irwin, and Susan Larsen

  Rapture: A Novel by Iliazd, translated by Thomas J. Kitson

  City Folk and Country Folk by Sofia Khvoshchinskaya, translated by Nora Seligman Favorov

  Writings from the Golden Age of Russian Poetry by Konstantin Batyushkov, presented and translated by Peter France


  Found Life: Poems, Stories, Comics, a Play, and an Interview by Linor Goralik, edited by Ainsley Morse, Maria Vassileva, and Maya Vinokur

  Sisters of the Cross by Alexei Remizov, translated by Roger John Keys and Brian Murphy

  Sentimental Tales by Mikhail Zoshchenko, translated by Boris Dralyuk

  Redemption by Friedrich Gorenstein, translated by Andrew Bromfield

  The Man Who Couldn’t Die: The Tale of an Authentic Human Being by Olga Slavnikova, translated by Marian Schwartz

  Necropolis by Vladislav Khodasevich, translated by Sarah Vitali

  Nikolai Nikolaevich and Camouflage: Two Novellas by Yuz Aleshkovsky, translated by Duffield White, edited by Susanne Fusso

  New Russian Drama: An Anthology edited by Maksim Hanukai and Susanna Weygandt

  A Double Life by Karolina Pavlova, translated and with an introduction by Barbara Heldt

  Klotsvog by Margarita Khemlin, translated by Lisa Hayden