by David Miller
“Give me ten,” Vera said, handing me back my wallet. “We’ll spend five, and the rest you can keep to get by. When’s your next payday?”
I told her that I would get paid again in four days. We went back into the street. Vera took me by the arm and leaned her shoulder against mine. We walked up the cooling street. The sidewalk was covered with wilted vegetables.
“I’d love to be in Borzhom right now in this heat,” she said.
Vera’s hair was tied with a ribbon. The lightning of the street lamps flashed and bounced off it.
“So hightail it to Borzhom!”
That’s what I said – “hightail it.” For some reason, that’s the expression I used.
“No dough,” Vera answered with a yawn, forgetting all about me. She forgot all about me because her day was over and she had made easy money off me. She knew that I wouldn’t call the police, and that I wasn’t going to steal her money along with her earrings during the night.
We went to the foot of St. David’s Mountain. There, in a tavern, I ordered some kebabs. Without waiting for our food to be brought, Vera went and sat with a group of old Persian men who were discussing business. They were leaning on propped-up sticks, wagging their olive-colored heads, telling the tavern keeper that it was time for him to expand his trade. Vera barged into their conversation, taking the side of the old men. She was for the idea of moving the tavern to Mikhailovsky Boulevard. The tavern keeper was sighing, paralyzed by uncertainty and caution. I ate my kebabs alone. Vera’s bare arms poured out of the silk of her sleeves. She banged her fist on the table, her earrings dancing among long, lackluster backs, orange beards, and painted nails. By the time she came back to our table, her kebabs had become cold. Her face was flushed with excitement.
“There’s no budging that man – he’s such a mule! I swear, he could make a fortune with Eastern cooking on Mikhailovsky Boulevard!”
Friends of Vera’s passed by our table one after another: princes in Circassian jackets, officers of a certain age, storekeepers in heavy silk coats, and potbellied old men with sunburned faces and little green pimples on their cheeks. It was pushing midnight when we got to the hotel, but there too Vera had countless things to do. An old woman was getting ready to go to her son in Armavir. Vera rushed over to help her, kneeling on her suitcase to force it shut, tying pillows together with cords, and wrapping pies in oilpaper. Clutching her rust-brown handbag, the squat little old woman hurried in her gauze hat from room to room to say good-bye. She shuffled down the hallway in her rubber boots, sobbing and smiling through all her wrinkles. The whole to-do took well over an hour. I waited for Vera in a musty room with three-legged armchairs and a clay oven. The corners of the room were covered with damp splotches.
I had been tormented and dragged around town for such a long time that even my feeling of love seemed to me an enemy, a dogged enemy.
Other people’s life bustled in the hallway with peals of sudden laughter. Flies were dying in a jar filled with milky liquid. Each fly was dying in its own way – one in drawn-out agony, its death throes violent, another with a barely visible shudder. A book by Golovin about the life of the Boyars lay on the threadbare tablecloth next to the jar. I opened the book. Letters lined themselves up in a row and then fell into a jumble. In front of me, framed by the window, rose a stony hillside with a crooked Turkish road winding up it. Vera came into the room.
“We’ve just sent off Fedosya Mavrikevna,” she said. “I swear, she was just like a mother to all of us. The poor old thing has to travel all alone with no one to help her!”
Vera sat down on the bed with her knees apart. Her eyes had wandered off to immaculate realms of tenderness and friendship. Then she saw me sitting there in my double-breasted jacket. She clasped her hands and stretched.
“I guess you’re tired of waiting. Don’t worry, we’ll do it now.”
But I simply couldn’t figure out what exactly it was that Vera was intending to do. Her preparations resembled those of a surgeon preparing for an operation. She lit the kerosene burner and put a pot of water on it. She placed a clean towel over the bed frame and hung an enema bag over the headboard, a bag with a white tube dangling against the wall. When the water was hot, Vera poured it into the enema bag, threw in a red crystal, and pulled her dress off over her head. A large woman with sloping shoulders and rumpled stomach stood in front of me. Her flaccid nipples hung blindly to the sides.
“Come over here, you little rabbit, while the water’s getting ready,” my beloved said.
I didn’t move. Despair froze within me. Why had I exchanged my loneliness for this den filled with poverty-stricken anguish, for these dying flies and furniture with legs missing?
O Gods of my youth! How different this dreary jumble was from my neighbors’ love with its rolling, drawn-out moans.
Vera put her hands under her breasts and jiggled them.
“Why do you sit half dead, hanging your head?” she sang. “Come over here!”
I didn’t move. Vera pressed her shirt to her stomach and sat down again on the bed.
“Or are you sorry you gave me the money?”
“I don’t care about the money.”
I said this in a cracking voice.
“What do you mean, you don’t care? You a thief or something?”
“I’m not a thief.”
“You work for thieves?”
“I’m a boy.”
“Well, I can see you’re not a cow,” Vera mumbled. Her eyes were falling shut. She lay down and, pulling me over to her, started rubbing my body.
“A boy!” I shouted. “You understand what I’m saying? An Armenian’s boy!”
O Gods of my youth! Five out of the twenty years I’d lived had gone into thinking up stories, thousands of stories, sucking my brain dry. These stories lay on my heart like a toad on a stone. One of these stories, pried loose by the power of loneliness, fell onto the ground. It was to be my fate, it seems, that a Tiflis prostitute was to be my first reader. I went cold at the suddenness of my invention, and told her the story about the boy and the Armenian. Had I been lazier and given less thought to my craft, I would have made up a drab story about a son thrown out by his rich official of a father – the father a despot, the mother a martyr. I didn’t make such a mistake. A well-thought-out story doesn’t need to resemble real life. Life itself tries with all its might to resemble a well-crafted story. And for this reason, and also because it was necessary for my listener, I had it that I was born in the town of Alyoshki in the district of Kherson. My father worked as a draftsman in the office of a river steamship company. He toiled night and day over his drawing board so that he could give us children an education, but we took after our mother, who was fond of fun and food. When I was ten I began stealing money from my father, and a few years later ran away to Baku to live with some relatives on my mother’s side. They introduced me to Stepan Ivanovich, an Armenian. I became friends with him, and we lived together for four years.
“How old were you then?”
“Fifteen.”
Vera was waiting to hear about the evil deeds of the Armenian who had corrupted me.
“We lived together for four years,” I continued, “and Stepan Ivanovich turned out to be the most generous and trusting man I had ever met – the most conscientious and honorable man. He trusted every single friend of his to the fullest. I should have learned a trade in those four years, but I didn’t lift a finger. The only thing on my mind was billiards. Stepan Ivanovich’s friends ruined him. He gave them bronze promissory notes, and his friends went and cashed them right away.”
Bronze promissory notes! I myself had no idea how I came up with that. But it was a very good idea. Vera believed everything once she heard “bronze promissory notes.” She wrapped herself in her shawl and her shawl shuddered on her shoulders.
“They ruined Stepan Ivanovich. He was thrown out of his apartment and his furniture was auctioned off. He became a traveling salesman. When he lost all his money I left him and
went to live with a rich old man, a church warden.”
Church warden! I stole the idea from some novel, but it was the invention of a mind too lazy to create a real character.
I said church warden, and Vera’s eyes blinked and slipped out from under my spell. To regain my ground, I squeezed asthma into the old man’s yellow chest.
“Asthma attacks whistled hoarsely inside his yellow chest. The old man would jump up from his bed in the middle of the night and, moaning, breath in the kerosene-colored night of Baku. He died soon after. The asthma suffocated him.” I told her that my relatives would have nothing to do with me and that here I was, in Tiflis, with twenty rubles to my name, the very rubles she had counted in that entrance on Golovinsky Boulevard. The waiter at the hotel where I was staying promised to send me rich clients, but up to now had only sent me taproom keepers with tumbling bellies, men who love their country, their songs, and their wine and who don’t think twice about trampling on a foreign soul or a foreign woman, like a village thief will trample on his neighbor’s garden.
And I started jabbering about low-down taproom keepers, bits of information I had picked up somewhere. Self-pity tore my heart to pieces; I had been completely ruined. I quaked with sorrow and inspiration. Streams of icy sweat trickled down my face like snakes winding through grass warmed by the sun. I fell silent, began to cry, and turned away. My story had come to an end. The kerosene burner had died out a long time ago. The water had boiled and cooled down again. The enema tube was dangling against the wall. Vera walked silently over to the window. Her back, dazzling and sad, moved in front of me. Outside the window the sun was beginning to light the mountain crevices.
“The things men do,” Vera whispered, without turning around. “My God, the things men do!”
She stretched out her bare arms and opened the shutters all the way. The cooling flagstones on the street hissed. The smell of water and dust came rolling up the carriageway. Vera’s head drooped.
“In other words, you’re a whore. One of us – a bitch,” she said.
I hung my head.
“Yes, I’m one of you – a bitch.”
Vera turned around to face me. Her shirt hung in twisted tatters from her body.
“The things men do,” she repeated more loudly. “My God, the things men do. So … have you ever been with a woman?”
I pressed my icy lips to her hand.
“No… . How could I have? Who would have wanted me?”
My head shook beneath her breasts, which rose freely above me. Her stretched nipples bounced against my cheeks, opening their moist eyelids and cavorting like calves. Vera looked at me from above.
“My little sister,” she whispered, settling down on the floor next to me. “My little whorelet sister.”
Now tell me, dear reader, I would like to ask you something: have you ever watched a village carpenter helping a fellow carpenter build a hut for himself and seen how vigorous, strong, and cheerful the shavings fly as they plane the wooden planks? That night a thirty-year-old woman taught me her trade. That night I learned secrets that you will never learn, experienced love that you will never experience, heard women’s words that only other women hear. I have forgotten them. We are not supposed to remember them.
It was morning when we fell asleep. We were awakened by the heat of our bodies, a heat that weighed the bed down like a stone. When we awoke we laughed together. That day I didn’t go to the printing press. We drank tea in the bazaar of the old quarters. A placid Turk carrying a samovar wrapped in a towel poured tea, crimson as a brick, steaming like blood freshly spilled on the earth. The smoking fire of the sun blazed on the walls of our glasses. The drawn-out braying of donkeys mingled with the hammering of blacksmiths. Copper pots were lined up under canopies, on faded carpets. Dogs were burrowing their muzzles into ox entrails. A caravan of dust flew toward Tiflis, the town of roses and mutton fat. The dust carried off the crimson fire of the sun. The Turk poured tea and kept count of the rolls we ate. The world was beautiful just for our sake. Covered in beads of sweat, I turned my glass upside down. I paid the Turk and pushed two golden five-ruble coins over to Vera. Her chunky leg was lying over mine. She pushed the money away and pulled in her leg.
“Do you want us to quarrel, my little sister?”
No, I didn’t want to quarrel. We agreed to meet again in the evening, and I slipped back into my wallet the two golden fivers – my first fee.
Since that day many years have passed, and I have often been given money by editors, men of letters, and Jews selling books. For victories that were defeats, for defeats that turned into victories, for life and death, they paid me a trivial fee, much lower than the fee I was paid in my youth by my first reader. But I am not bitter. I am not bitter because I know that I will not die until I snatch one more gold ruble (and definitely not the last one!) from love’s hands.
THE HARE AND THE TORTOISE
Aesop
Aesop (c. 620–564BC) was born in in Turkey and died in Greece, in the city of Delphi. He was probably a slave, was freed at some point and ended his days being thrown off a cliff on an exaggerated charge of theft from a temple whilst working as a diplomat for King Croesus of Lydia. All this may or may not be true and, indeed, he may or may not have written his fables, but they have endured and are often the first stories we come across.
The Hare was once boasting of his speed before the other animals. ‘I have never yet been beaten,’ said he, ‘when I put forth my full speed. I challenge any one here to race with me.’
The Tortoise said quietly, ‘I accept your challenge.’
‘That is a good joke,’ said the Hare, ‘I could dance round you all the way.’
‘Keep your boasting till you’ve beaten,’ answered the Tortoise. ‘Shall we race?’
So a course was fixed and a start was made.
The Hare darted almost out of sight at once, but soon stopped and, to show his contempt for the Tortoise, lay down to have a nap.
The Tortoise plodded on and plodded on, and when the Hare awoke from his nap, he saw the Tortoise just near the winning-post and could not run up in time to save the race.
Then said the Tortoise:
‘Plodding wins the race.’
BABYLON REVISITED
F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) wrote four novels, including The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night, and a host of stories that reflected the age he lived in, between the wars. Born in Minnesota, he hung around Princeton for a while writing, and met Zelda Sayre, who he married in 1920. The Fitzgeralds lived in Paris for a while, but – in the words of Ira Gershwin’s ‘The Saga of Jenny’ – “gin and rum and destiny, they play funny tricks”, and Fitzgerald was dead, aged forty-four.
“And where’s Mr. Campbell?” Charlie asked.
“Gone to Switzerland. Mr. Campbell’s a pretty sick man, Mr. Wales.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. And George Hardt?” Charlie inquired.
“Back in America, gone to work.”
“And where is the Snow Bird?”
“He was in here last week. Anyway, his friend, Mr. Schaeffer, is in Paris.”
Two familiar names from the long list of a year and a half ago. Charlie scribbled an address in his notebook and tore out the page.
“If you see Mr. Schaeffer, give him this,” he said. “It’s my brother-in-law’s address. I haven’t settled on a hotel yet.”
He was not really disappointed to find Paris was so empty. But the stillness in the Ritz bar was strange and portentous. It was not an American bar any more – he felt polite in it, and not as if he owned it. It had gone back into France. He felt the stillness from the moment he got out of the taxi and saw the doorman, usually in a frenzy of activity at this hour, gossiping with a chasseur by the servants’ entrance.
Passing through the corridor, he heard only a single, bored voice in the once-clamorous women’s room. When he turned into the bar he travelled the twenty feet of green carp
et with his eyes fixed straight ahead by old habit; and then, with his foot firmly on the rail, he turned and surveyed the room, encountering only a single pair of eyes that fluttered up from a newspaper in the corner. Charlie asked for the head barman, Paul, who in the latter days of the bull market had come to work in his own custom-built car – disembarking, however, with due nicety at the nearest corner. But Paul was at his country house today and Alix giving him information.
“No, no more,” Charlie said, “I’m going slow these days.”
Alix congratulated him: “You were going pretty strong a couple of years ago.”
“I’ll stick to it all right,” Charlie assured him. “I’ve stuck to it for over a year and a half now.”
“How do you find conditions in America?”
“I haven’t been to America for months. I’m in business in Prague, representing a couple of concerns there. They don’t know about me down there.”
Alix smiled.
“Remember the night of George Hardt’s bachelor dinner here?” said Charlie. “By the way, what’s become of Claude Fessenden?”
Alix lowered his voice confidentially: “He’s in Paris, but he doesn’t come here any more. Paul doesn’t allow it. He ran up a bill of thirty thousand francs, charging all his drinks and his lunches, and usually his dinner, for more than a year. And when Paul finally told him he had to pay, he gave him a bad check.”
Alix shook his head sadly.
“I don’t understand it, such a dandy fellow. Now he’s all bloated up –” He made a plump apple of his hands.
Charlie watched a group of strident queens installing themselves in a corner.
“Nothing affects them,” he thought. “Stocks rise and fall, people loaf or work, but they go on forever.” The place oppressed him. He called for the dice and shook with Alix for the drink.
“Here for long, Mr. Wales?”
“I’m here for four or five days to see my little girl.”
“Oh-h! You have a little girl?”