Rock, Paper, Scissors

by Maxim Osipov

  MAXIM OSIPOV (b. 1963) is a Russian writer and cardiologist. In the early 1990s he was a research fellow at the University of California, San Francisco, before returning to Moscow, where he continued to practice medicine and also founded a publishing house that specialized in medical, musical, and theological texts. In 2005, while working at a local hospital in Tarusa, a small town ninety miles from Moscow, Osipov established a charitable foundation to ensure the hospital’s survival. Since 2007, he has published short stories, novellas, essays, and plays, and has won a number of literary prizes for his fiction. He has published five collections of prose, and his plays have been staged all across Russia. Osipov’s writings have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He lives in Tarusa.

  BORIS DRALYUK is the executive editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. His recent translations include Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry and Odessa Stories and Mikhail Zoshchenko’s Sentimental Tales. He is the editor of 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution and co-editor of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry and Lev Ozerov’s Portraits Without Frames (published by NYRB Classics).

  ALEX FLEMING is a translator of Swedish and Russian literature and children’s fiction. Her previous translations include works by Therése Söderlind and Cilla Naumann, and in 2015 she was awarded the British Centre for Literary Translation’s Emerging Translator Mentorship for Russian. She is based in London.

  ANNE MARIE JACKSON has lived for extended periods in Russia and Moldova. She is a co-translator, with Robert Chandler and Rose France of Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me: The Best of Teffi, and with Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler, and Irina Steinberg of Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea (both published by NYRB Classics). Her previous translations include works by Alexei Nikitin and Olga Slavnikova.

  SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH is a Belarusian journalist, writer, and historian. The daughter of two teachers, she studied journalism at the Belarusian State University in Minsk and went on to work as a teacher and newspaper journalist. She published her first book, The Unwomanly Face of War, an oral history of women’s experiences in World War II, in 1985, and since then has released five chronicles of Soviet and post-Soviet history, including Boys in Zinc (1991) and Voices from Chernobyl (1997). In 2015, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first time it had been given to a journalist.

  ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS

  and Other Stories

  MAXIM OSIPOV

  Translated from the Russian by

  BORIS DRALYUK, ALEX FLEMING,

  and ANNE MARIE JACKSON

  Edited by

  BORIS DRALYUK

  Preface by

  SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Original Russian texts copyright © 2019 by Maxim Osipov

  English translations copyright © 2019 by Boris Dralyuk except: “The Cry of the Domestic Fowl,” “Rock, Paper, Scissors,” “Polish Friend,” “The Mill,” “On the Banks of the Spree” copyright © 2019 by Alex Fleming; “Moscow-Petrozavodsk,” “The Waves of the Sea” copyright © 2019 by Anne Marie Jackson; “After Eternity” copyright © 2019 by Boris Dralyuk and Anne Marie Jackson

  Preface copyright © 2019 by Svetlana Alexievich

  All rights reserved.

  Cover image: Guillaume Apollinaire, Still Life, c. 1900; HIP / Art Resource, NY

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Several stories first appeared in the following publications: “Moscow-Petrozavodsk,” translated by Anne Marie Jackson, The White Review Online (September 2012); “Rock, Paper, Scissors” (excerpt), translated by Alex Fleming, Image, no. 92 (2016); “The Mill,” translated by Alex Fleming, Asymptote (January 2018); “Objects in Mirror,” translated by Boris Dralyuk, Granta Online (February 2019)

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Osipov, Maksim, author. | Dralyuk, Boris, editor, translator. | Fleming, Alexandra, translator. | Jackson, Anne Marie, translator.

  Title: Rock, paper, scissors and other stories / by Maxim Osipov ; edited by Boris Dralyuk ; translated by Boris Dralyuk, Alexandra Fleming and Anne

  Marie Jackson ; introduction by Svetlana Alexievich.

  Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2019. | Series: New York Review books classics | Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018036766 (print) | LCCN 2018046038 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681373331 (epub) | ISBN 9781681373324 (alk. paper)

  Subjects: | LCGFT: Short stories.

  Classification: LCC PG3492.87.S553 (ebook) | LCC PG3492.87.S553 A2 2019 (print) | DDC 891.73/5—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018036766

  ISBN 978-1-68137-333-1

  v1.0

  For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Preface

  The Cry of the Domestic Fowl: In Lieu of a Foreword

  Moscow-Petrozavodsk

  The Gypsy

  Rock, Paper, Scissors

  Renaissance Man

  The Waves of the Sea

  Polish Friend

  The Mill

  After Eternity: The Notes of a Literary Director

  On the Banks of the Spree

  Good People

  Objects in Mirror

  Notes

  PREFACE

  I LOVE Maxim Osipov’s prose. I started rereading his stories and caught myself thinking that his prose now reads like something of a diagnosis: an accurate, unforgiving diagnosis of Russian life. Although the author is filled with love for a simple, human existence, he is simultaneously struck by how little this existence actually coincides with his own expectations. The drama of those raised by culture, raised by books. Culture normally protects us diligently from reality, but here it is hardly able to do so, because Osipov is a writer with a double vision: First, he is a doctor—a cardiologist—a profession directly related to time, to the impermanence of man; the heart is nothing more than time. And second, when you live in the provinces, it’s harder for culture to deceive you, harder for it to mask reality with fashionable ideas and superstitions—that of the “Russian world,” for example. Out in the provinces, everything is in full view, more exposed—both human nature and the times beyond the window. And that’s why the author isn’t moved by the sight of the oh-so-familiar peasant when he sees him running naked through the streets, chasing his mother with an ax, “a crucifix dangling from his neck.” In another story, one of his characters (a policeman) explains to a writer—a naïve man, as he sees it—that murderers are “just your average people.” These stories tell of people who haven’t come to understand the meaning of their existence—what is it all for? Very few of us have, it must be said. The soul is forced to toil night and day. But who has the strength? The author relates to his characters as to patients; he asks them where it hurts and whether . . . in general, does it hurt in the soul? The Russian soul—yet another myth. In reality, there is but one soul; the real question is: Is there a person?

  Russia as a country has overextended itself across an enormous territory, and it lives as though time had stopped. And any attempt to speed up time—the October Revolution, for example—has ended in bloodshed. When you delve into Osipov’s texts you see that they are deceptively simple, just like Shalamov’s: Behind this childish ordinariness there lies a hidden chasm. The whole time they leave you thinking how diff
icult it is to love humanity—wonderful, repulsive, and terrifying as it is—but in order to stay human, that’s exactly what you must do: You must love man. Your soul is restless—it is thinking. To inspire such thoughts—that’s something that only true literature can do.

  —SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH

  Translated by Alex Fleming

  To a reader, a councilor, a doctor.

  THE CRY OF THE DOMESTIC FOWL

  In Lieu of a Foreword

  THE PROVINCES as home: warm, grubby, ours. But there’s another way of looking at them—an external, superficial point of view, yes, but one shared by the many who didn’t choose to end up here: the provinces as sludge, the doldrums. That the locals are pitiful is the most flattering thing one can say about them.

  •

  The cry of the domestic fowl drives out the dark thoughts that take hold through the night.

  Morning at the hospital. On the bed lies a skinny, smoked-out man—a bus driver who’s had a heart attack, a bird of the wild. For him the worst has passed, so he watches the medics treat the patient next to him, a trampish-looking old man whose wrist bears the blue sun tattoo of a prison-camp guard. An electric shock, his heart rhythm returns to normal. “Old fella’s still ticking,” the driver chuckles from behind the screen. He and I exchange glances. Will they let him drive his bus again? And the more burning issue: What if his wife runs into that other woman—the one who brings him shashlik—at his bedside? But this driver could also tell you a thing or two about me. These wild birds are very perceptive.

  We’re compelled, clearly, to love not only those we are close to—our fellow domestic birds—but our wider surroundings, too: the people and the place. And to do this one must notice, recall, invent.

  And so, from my childhood: my father and I are walking somewhere, it’s far away, the day is hot. We’re out in the countryside and I’m desperate for a drink. My father knocks at a stranger’s house, asks for some water. The woman says there is none, but she brings us some cold milk. We drink and we drink, a lot—probably three pints. My father offers her some money, but she just shrugs and asks, straight-faced: “You out of your mind, dear?”

  The place could be anywhere with its own kind of appeal—particularly Central Russia. You can fall for this place just as easily as a woman can fall for a loser. “Yes, we love this country, as it rises forth,” goes Norway’s national anthem. We also extol the virtues of our geography, which, considering our size, is hardly decent. Our anthem was written by our authorities—by others—not by little birdies like us.

  Another memory: I’m eighteen, driving an old Zaporozhets, when suddenly in the back—where the engine is—I see a cloud of smoke. I’m expecting the worst, an explosion. There are people on the pavement—get back, it’s going to blow! “Pop it open,” says a man, about thirty, walking by. He takes out a rag and—calm, unhurried—smothers the flames. Then he walks off. Another bird of the wild.

  Of cars, of travel more generally, the memories come thick and fast; domestic creatures are prone to trouble on the roads. This is where they cross paths with wild and predatory birds. Such encounters make their mark, through unexpected goodness, through evils previously unimagined. “Killers, they’re just your average people,” the police chief will say, and then all of a sudden you—you chicklet, you domestic little thing—you’ll accept it, you’ll get it; it’ll become part of you.

  While on the subject of the police: the doctors here enjoy their own special relationship with the force. Whether it’s getting a patient up the stairs when the elevator’s broken down, locking up the drunks till morning so they don’t brawl in the wards, or even towing an ambulance out of the mud, they have the police on speed dial. They too wear a uniform and give the local populace the illusion of security.

  Just outside the casualty ward there’s a policeman with a man in handcuffs. The man is young, a little roughed up, must have done something serious; around here they don’t cuff just anyone. “If you’d just played the wife-and-kids card straightaway. . .” the policeman berates him, “but no, you had to go on about that lawyer of yours and your Moscow thugs.”

  Suddenly, alongside the guy who put out the flames in my car, I remember a sweaty, unkempt ice-hockey player. “You must be doubly pleased to have beaten the nation that invented the sport in their own backyard?” an interviewer asks. The ice-hockey player smiles a toothless grin, “Like I give a shit!” With an income like his, he could afford some new teeth, but clearly this man can still chew his meat perfectly well, thank you very much. The impression is resounding.

  What else? A sermon once heard on the Intercession of the Theotokos: the day on which our pagan forefathers were defeated is now one of our most respected holy days. There’s no easier pastime than bad-mouthing the church. Much like bad-mouthing Dostoyevsky: it’s true, of course, all true, but it also misses the point. The church is a thing of wonder, Dostoyevsky is a thing of wonder, and the fact that we Russians are still here—that, too, is a thing of wonder.

  You out of your mind, dear?

  That could easily have been one of our grannies in ward one. Grannies is no insult here; it’s what they ask to be called. The one who’s in the worst health hears and sees things: “Yuri, that you?” she’ll ask the patient next to her.

  “Nope, not me,” she’ll reply.

  “So who are you?”

  “Granny.”

  “Then who’s this—Yuri?” she’ll ask the patient on her other side.

  “No,” Granny Three will reply, “I’m Granny, too.”

  To these women, there’s nothing insulting about the word granny, even if they don’t in fact have any grandchildren; they view themselves not as sharp-witted ladies of advanced years—like their city-dwelling avian contemporaries do—but as grannies.

  In the afternoon, two of the orderlies have a loud argument. One of them works here so that she can pocket the food the patients don’t eat and take it home to that swine of hers, while the other owns several hectares of land, holidays by turns in Turkey and Europe, and became an orderly just to find a place for herself in society. Apparently it gets messier: Orderly One went on holiday to Europe, and, poor as she is, put it on credit. The bailiffs have already paid her a visit.

  Around here, the private comes before the public. A tax official, a twenty-something kid, does our auditing. “Oh,” he’ll say, “good thing you’re a doctor . . . as it happens, the army have . . . I’m trying to . . . you know?” It’s not hard to catch his drift. On compassionate grounds is a reliable turn of phrase—we’re all in one another’s hands. But where Moscow doesn’t believe in tears, as they say, around here tears are the only things we do believe in. When the need is great, we make an exception.

  It’s ugly—we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be touched by it—but this happy-go-lucky collective deceit unites the nation just as well as any good law. Electricity, gas, phone bills unpaid? In the capital, a lack of money is something to be ashamed of; here, it’s pretty much the norm. The utility-company employees try to help us out here and there: “These meter readings look way off. Why don’t I reset a few values for you here . . .”

  “Thank you, that’s just what I thought. And if you or your family ever need a doctor . . .”

  Uncles, goddaughters, nieces; water, electricity, gas. It’s familiar, comfortable, benign. And though it may have its drawbacks, as a way of life it’s pretty stable. Here nobody has any secrets. Just like in heaven.

  The orderlies and the grannies are the afternoon’s affairs, and by evening it becomes clear that far too much time and energy have gone into one of the day’s tasks, while many are left undone. Twilight sees the return of cruel, exasperated thoughts, specifically: Where did all the bright people go? When we were young there were enough of them around. What, did they all emigrate? One thought latches on to another—it’s a vicious cycle. Night and its fears make the spirit more vulnerable to evil. To make matters worse, swallows and tits often fly into the house—a very
bad omen. But there’s nothing you can do; you can’t live your life with your windows closed: either move, if you’re afraid, or let go of these superstitions. Such are the thoughts that churn in the mind until dawn arrives, with its brief respite of sleep.

  Life is scary, whether you’re in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, or the provinces. We can say as much—it is scary. There are things in life of which it is impossible to write: the deaths of innocents, young people, children. The terrifying, unnecessary experience of their deaths stays with us. That can’t be cried away; no cry can drive it out.

  But then day will come, and the birds will still be there—fowls of the air, fowls domestic, wild, all of them. The world doesn’t break, no matter what you throw at it. That’s just how it’s built.

  September 2010

  Translated by Alex Fleming

  MOSCOW–PETROZAVODSK

  Mark well, O Job,

  hold thy peace, and I will speak.

  —Job 33:31

  TO DELIVER man from his neighbors—isn’t that the point of progress? And what are the joys and calamities of humankind to me? That’s right—nothing at all. Then why is it that I can’t have any time alone, even when I’m traveling?

  They asked us: Who’s going to Petrozavodsk? A conference. An international conference. Come on, doctors, someone has to go! Yes, we know what these conferences are like. A couple of émigrés—that’s the “international” for you. The short bout of drinking, the hotel, the lecture, the long bout of drinking—then back home again. After the lecture, you’re still answering questions, but behind your back, brawny little red-faced men are pointing at their watches—time’s up. These little men are the local professors—in the provinces these days any fool can be a professor, the same way that in the American South any fool, if he’s white, can be a judge or an army officer.