“Bad town,” the Mongol hordes had cursed Kozelsk back in the thirteenth century. “The people here are mean,” said the Tajiks, shaking their heads.
They threw their scant belongings into a bag and got ready to depart for Moscow. As they passed through the village, an old woman with a face wizened like a baked apple made the sign of the cross over their stooped backs. At the bus station they managed to beg enough money for their tickets. But when they got on the bus the guards from the farm appeared and threw them into the car like sacks of potatoes. They took their passports and brought them back to the container with the door which flapped in the wind like the wing of a wounded bird. “Next time we’ll break your ribs,” they said.
The rain poured all day long, beating on the metal roof like an uninvited guest. The Tajiks huddled under the quilt, letting light through the door to save candles. They lay in silence, staring at the field, too tired to talk.
Even the name of the village, Deshovka, sounded unpleasant: it meant cheap in Russian.
“Be-cause life isn’t worth two ko-peks here!” Sveta said in a fit of anger.
“But what about in Dushanbe?” asked the milkmaid snidely.
“There it’s worth no-thing at all,” said Sveta.
The locals grumbled when they saw the Tajiks: “If it’s not the blacks, then the saints!” The saints were the Muscovites who had settled there after the restoration of the Optina monastery. Barefoot and grubby, their children raced around the neighborhood just like the village children.
When they got back from the field the Tajiks found the things which some of the people of Kozelsk had collected for them. They ripped the parcels open right there and then, trying on the clothes and stuffing their mouths full of bread. Zafar pulled on some colorful girls’ tops, and the grown-ups looked on, laughing softly. Sveta handled the pots with a doleful look. She only knew how to cook flatbread, so they weren’t much use to her. In the evening Zafar raced around clanging the frying pan against the pot, so that the old folks began to cross themselves, thinking it was the fire bell.
Every day Sveta would bring in the cows, and the chubby milkmaids, flushed from vodka, fed her leftovers. She was usually quiet, but one time she began to open up: “I got used to hav-ing Kolya a-round, shame to have to give him back.”
“Who to?” the milkmaids asked.
“His wife,” Sveta replied. And she described how they had met while travelling from Tajkistan and had already become a couple during the train journey—in Russia, as in war, it was impossible to survive alone.
The jasmine was in bloom and the air was sticky and cloying like Eastern sweetmeats. Shashlik kebabs were roasting, and guests had come together around the long table, their conversations sparking up and ebbing like the coal flames on the grill.
“I’ve decided to do some good deeds,” announced the fat man loudly, wiping his hands on his trousers.
Laughter broke out around the table.
“One good deed a day—surely that’s not too much,” he said, offended.
“You’ve got an alarm clock in place of a heart,” tutted the host, “everything right on schedule.”
The fat man grew indignant, and the priest sitting next to him, his beard wet with wine, said with a loud cough: “The Lord welcometh the intention.”*
Children were swarming around like midges.
“Such wide expanses all around,” said the hostess, gesturing with arms outstretched. “How on earth could we have lived in Moscow?’
“We envy you!” said the Muscovites, nodding. “When we go back, the advertising boards all say ‘Welcome to Hell.’”
“And peoples’ eyes say the same thing,” said a thin man, taking a notebook from his pocket. “I began to note down the random thoughts which come into my head,” he went on. “Here, listen: man lives as if already dead, and comes back to life only after his death, in books, gossip, and remembrance speeches.”
He straightened his glasses nervously. Silence fell around the table. Each of the guests thought their own thoughts, staring at their plates, and even the children were quiet, exchanging looks which asked why everyone had stopped talking.
“In the kingdom of heaven we trust,” said the fat man, crossing himself in the direction of Optina.
The priest nodded wearily. “What else could we trust in …”
Darkness fell quickly, as if someone had switched off the lights, and the hostess brought candles. On the far bank a fire could be seen.
“They don’t even have electricity,” someone mumbled.
“Just like the middle ages,” someone added.
They poured the wine, reminiscing about Samarkand, hikes to Karakul, and Moscow street cleaners as black-skinned as earth, and they cursed the slave-driving farmer. And when the bottles were empty, they decided it was time to make a stand for the Tajiks.
Their jeeps roared through Kozelsk, waking the dogs, which barked fit to choke. The night was dark and there wasn’t a single star in the sky. Navigating the muddy tracks with difficulty, they came to the meadow. They hooted the car horn again and again, and the fat man knocked on the metal container, which shook as if in fear.
The Tajiks came out, holding hands, squinting in the blinding headlights. “You stay home,” the fat man told Zafar, patting the boy’s cheek.
They took Sveta and Kolya to the farmer’s place. Along the way they picked up a couple of men from Kozelsk, and an officer from the army base who hugged his double-barreled hunting rifle close like a lover.
The inhabitants of Kozelsk called this street the “Poor District.” The grand town residences towered over the humble village dwellings, which looked like sheds in comparison, and the farmer’s house had turrets and battlements, like a medieval castle. High up on the fence, light glinted off a crest of arms depicting an imperial eagle with cockerel heads—the man who had forged it with such skill had worked all his life in a poultry farm, and he still chopped wood as if he were chopping chickens’ necks.
But the farmer did not meet them alone, he came out through the gate with his guards. The Muscovites sobered up in an instant. The farmer smirked, the guards looked on menacingly, and the dogs pulled at their chains, snarling. The visitors had already begun to regret that they had come. No one wanted to speak first and it seemed as if they stood there, in silence, all night. They could hear a drunk woman swearing somewhere in the village, the Tajik woman sniffling, and the heavy breathing of the bulky farmer.
“It’s not right, you know,” said the officer at last. “You should pay them, they’re not serfs after all.”
One of the guards, the back of his head tough like an old turnip, fixed a heavy gaze on the proceedings, looking as if some distant memories were coming back to him.
“Come on, we Russians know how to do a deal,” said the farmer, blowing his nose with a snort in the direction of his feet.
The Tajiks huddled close to each other.
“A deal!?” yelled the fat man. “What makes you think you can treat people like cattle?”
The farmer gave a sign and disappeared behind the cast iron gates. The guards tugged the Tajiks out from the group by their hair, as if pulling carrots from the ground, and dragged them towards the car. The officer made a grab for his rifle, but was floored by a blow from a knuckleduster. Sveta saw blood, and began to wail. The car took some time to start, and she could be heard inside, beating against the window.
Left alone, the Muscovites looked around confused, and the officer spat blood. Curtains stirred in the neighboring houses, but no one came out.
“That’s a nice state of affairs,” said the thin man, grabbing for the notebook in his breast pocket as if clutching at his heart.
Suddenly the gates opened and the dogs shot out. The farmer looked on from his balcony as the visitors dispersed in panic, the dogs ripping their clothes to shreds, while the officer tried to fend them off with the butt of his rifle. Some of the visitors managed to get to the safety of the car, from where th
ey hooted the horn to scare the dogs off.
Seeing the farmer, the officer quickly raised his rifle and fired a shot without taking aim.
There was a sound of breaking glass.
“The kids just smashed a kitchen window,” said the hostess, returning.
The candle flames petered out and a moth flapped futilely inside a glass jug.
“You’ve watched too many gangster films,” said the thin man in resignation, picking nervously at the pages of his notebook. “What kind of people would set dogs on you? It’s a criminal offense.”
Their mobile phones lit up like glowworms in the dark, illuminating the road ahead, and the visitors started off for home.
“We’ll visit the farmer tomorrow in any case,” said the fat man, getting up from behind the table.
“You’ve put that in your list of good deeds, have you?” said the hostess, chuckling.
The women cleared the plates from the table, throwing the leftovers to the cats rubbing up against their legs.
“You don’t know the local people,” said the host shaking his head. “We’ve seen some sights in the last ten years. They’ll start a fight over a bag of potatoes, and when they’re drunk they’ll kill a man for nothing.”
Unprompted, they turned together to look at the river. On the far bank the fire had long gone out, and the container had dissolved into the thick darkness.
According to the calendar it was already autumn, but the summer was like a clingy girlfriend, hanging on into September. The town was growing emptier as the holidaymakers departed, leaving behind their boarded-up cottages and their children’s laughter, which had tumbled through the cracks between the floorboards.
The herdsmen were no longer needed, so the farmer dismissed them.
The Muscovites passed a hat around for donations, the fat man struggled for a while to find the right words, but in the end he just shoved a carefully wrapped parcel into Kolya’s hand, giving a low bow.
“Bad town,” whispered the Tajiks as they left.
But next summer they came back. Construction works were underway in the town, and the locals looked on bemused as the dark-skinned Asians plastered the church walls. Among them were Kolya and Zafar. The boy mixed the plaster and carried the tools, while Sveta swept the pavement. “Back home’s even worse,” said Kolya, gesturing in resignation.
New herdsmen had moved into the container on the other side of the river. Smoke rose from a fire in the field, and a grubby boy herded the cattle towards the river. The container had begun leaking after heavy rains, and the herdsmen had covered it in a piece of tarpaulin stolen from the building site.
And on the container someone had written “Bad Town.”
TRANSLATED FROM RUSSIAN BY MATTHEW HYDE
* From St. John Chrysostom’s (Russian: Ivan Zlatoust) Paschal Sermon: “The Lord accepteth the deed and welcometh the intention.”
[SERBIA]
IVAN TOKIN
FROM Molecules
“Tender Girls”
TENDER GIRLS ALWAYS have yellow hair and blue eyes. Their eyes are always green. They always have black hair, which is always red, and their eyes are the color of chestnut, and black. They’re tall and skinny, beautifully plump with small breasts that are, as a rule, big. They have delicate bones and protruding cheekbones that don’t show at all.
Tender girls are always beautiful, except when they, quite often, aren’t. They have long, flat nails on their long, slender, shapely fingers which are blunt and crooked and with nails that are bitten. Tender girls without exception have long and short legs, with sturdy ankles and dainty, beautifully shaped feet that are narrow and wide, rough-skinned.
Tender girls are young. They are exactly twenty-nine years old, they are four years old and only like wearing leggings, they’re always about fifty-eight years old and they follow fashion. I know a young, tender girl who is sixty-five. I remember one who at the age of seventy-four was the youngest and tenderest of all the young and tender girls that I have met.
Tender girls are always and often and never born, they are most often sometimes and only born of beautiful poems and sometimes all of them often appear at sunset, and especially always and very rarely at sunrise. It virtually never always happens. Because I know one that was born of a waterfall, of water drops in the air through which the sun shone. And another one and all of them that appeared out of a simple gaze at the open sea.
Tender girls have black skin that is white, always yellow and red. They have big round white bellies, flat and tight. They wear high heels with flat air soles and nothing but summer sling dresses and long sleeves. They’re as tender as a razor blade melting into the veins. As a summertime dusk, on the sea coast, at about nine-thirty, in June.
You never ask tender girls anything, you ask them everything, and they won’t say a thing when you talk to them about everything. They move at the speed of light while being completely still, in someone’s arms, while sleeping in their nightgowns carefully tucked in, naked and uncovered, with their bare feet with socks on, wandering around the bed.
Tender girls are tender on purpose. They’re silent on purpose when they talk and careful when they randomly choose who to dream with while awake. Tender girls have nothing in their heads but wisdom.
Tender girls are numerous. There are really a lot of tender girls. There are so many tender girls that it can make a man go crazy. Tender girls are only fewer than the ways you can love them.
“On Stumbling”
A man stumbled on Starine Novaka Street. A tall, serious man, with a beard. It was a man with an agenda, going somewhere, completely aware that he was on the street, that there were others on the street too, and that they might be looking, even studying him. This man was going around, playing his part, with a bag over his shoulder, in a brown jacket and jeans and black shoes. He was passing between parked cars when his left foot slipped down the white slope of the curb of the sidewalk. In that moment, completely stripped of his role, the man’s entire being became absorbed in one single objective—restoring the balance that had been lost.
It was just a short moment. A moment in which the man, single-mindedly, directed all his abilities towards a simple goal. In that moment, although I couldn’t know what he was thinking, I knew that he had nothing else on his mind, and that his body didn’t move for any other purpose. In that one short excerpt of his life. It wasn’t just me who noticed it; any of you could have seen it, had you been there. And you would have recognized the situation in which you find yourselves from time to time. Something goes wrong, something completely harmless, something you can’t predict, and everything else simply disappears—you’re left alone with your problem, and it gets the best out of you. If there’s even a slight chance to get out of it, you will, because you’ll do your best. It’s not something you plan, or something that happens because you practice positive thinking—you just give your best, because you have to.
Somehow you always count on getting where you’re headed. The risks are understood, and you manage them unconsciously; you don’t cross the street when you see a bus coming, you don’t take a shortcut by jumping off a bridge instead of going down the stairs—things like that. But you never think: “I must take care not to stumble.”
Being close enough, I had a good view of the man’s face. His foot had slipped, the whole body followed, and his face told me everything. It showed surprise first, then the acknowledgement of the situation, and then the beauty of it all—dedication, as well as freedom. All else ceased to exist, his entire life and everyone in it, and all other plans disappeared before a simple task—keeping the frail body away from the potential danger caused by stumbling on the very edge of a busy road.
In order to be able to experience whatever there is left for you in life—to see the woman you love or your children busy with their own lives a certain number of times, to sit at the pub as many times as your liver allows you to, to earn another, say, two hundred and eighty paychecks, one hundred pensio
n checks, or a completely unpredictable number of fees, move to the seacoast to grow olives and watch your own wife walk barefoot along the shore of that sea at least two hundred and fifty days a year—that frail body of yours needs to be kept alive.
I saw the face of the man in the moment when he was giving his best. I saw it clearly, and I was jealous. I was jealous of the unity of his body and spirit, of the fact that, for him, in that moment, everything else was gone. All that he loved most and that drove him crazy and all the other fripperies in between. There was a situation, and he remained alone in it.
To be alone in a situation, with one’s entire being perfectly engrossed in it—well, I can’t think of anything better. How I wish I could cook one lunch in that state of mind. Not wander off the topic when talking about something. Not start crying.
Let me tell you something—that man pulled through in a second. He found his balance, and he did it safely too. His left knee cracked a little, but his right leg was strong enough to deal with the situation on its own. His body jerked backward, and he found himself on the sidewalk. He was back in his normal state, with everything that he is, distributed evenly on both the left and the right side of his being. His face became calm, satisfied. And he forgot what had happened right away. That’s what we all do. It goes away instantly. If I met him again in a while and asked him: “Do you remember that one time when you stumbled on Starine Novaka Street some ten days ago, about five-thirty in the afternoon?” he would remember. But if I didn’t ask him, the situation would most surely fade into oblivion—he’d never think of it again. Just like the rest of us wouldn’t.
But we should. There aren’t many things that I’m sure of—I can honestly say that there is almost nothing that I’m sure of—but I couldn’t be surer about this stumbling thing. You stumble on the curb of a road and get a glimpse of an excellent version of yourself. Then, you use that version every time you have to fight to survive, and you’ll have nothing to worry about. Just like the bearded man, who, only a moment later, was a regular guy again, on his way to finish some errands. Like anybody else in that street.
Best European Fiction 2017 Page 26