Fish- a History of One Migration

by Peter Aleshkovsky

  The hour for which I had been excused had long since passed, but I had no intention of leaving. Signs of discomfort appeared on Mukhibá’s face—her pain was returning.

  Suddenly, inexplicably, I could feel it throbbing. My hand, which was still on her forehead, received the signal.

  Now I know this sensation well; I have learned to seek out this throbbing and to distinguish pain from helplessness, anger or bottomless despair. Back then, the feeling was new, and I almost jerked my hand away from it, as from hot oil spitting in pan. Mukhibá blinked fearfully and whispered:

  “Don’t take your hand away, may Allah keep you!”

  “I’m here, Aunt Mukhibá, I’m not going anywhere.”

  “I must wait for Ahror.”

  “He’ll come soon,” I lied automatically, since I was not at all sure when he was coming.

  “He’ll meet the kids after school, feed them dinner and then come.”

  Mukhibá closed her eyes; it was easier for her that way.

  We sat for a long time in silence. I could feel her pain, and it was difficult; my hand felt like stone, but it did not hurt. There was just something heavy and cold at the bottom of my stomach, and my eyes were tearing up. Mukhibá’s forehead grew warmer; a barely visible blush spread over her cheeks, her wrinkles smoothed out, and her breathing became more regular.

  I sat there, afraid to open my eyes, deaf to the outside world, and thought about Mukhibá, and about Ahror who was about to become a widower with three children. I remembered his truck and the old walnut tree in whose shade he loved Lidiya Grigoriyevna. I even thought of the terrible Nasrulló, but the thought did not frighten me, because he was long dead and could do me no more harm.

  I didn’t feel it right away when someone else put a hand on my shoulder. I finally felt it when I heard my name; I turned and saw akó Ahror standing by my side.

  “Thank you,” he said. “You can go now.”

  I got up. He was looking not at me but at his Mukhibá, and his eyes were sick.

  “Aunt Mukhibá fell asleep,” I said. “At night, before bed, they might give her morphine. She refused it earlier—she was afraid that she’d miss you if she were sleeping.”

  Ahror nodded and sat down on my chair.

  “It would be better if she didn’t wake up,” he said in a muffled voice.

  He was not aware of my presence any longer, having pressed his palms against his eyes. And that’s when I heard Mukhibá say, soft as a breath, “Inshallah!”[19]

  Ahror did not hear her. I think he was praying.

  I tiptoed out of the room.

  . 12 .

  There was no need to inform my mom: she knew that if I did not come home at night it meant I was substituting for the night-shift nurse. I knew I had to spend the night with Mukhibá.

  At ten, after lights out, I went back to room four. The nightlights were dim. The window was left open, allowing the coolness of the night and the moonlight to seep in. A pack of dogs was howling with many voices in the wasted field behind the hospital.[20] The moon was full.

  The fruit and water on the bedside table had not been touched. Mukhibá did not open her eyes. The night nurse told me that, at Ahror’s insistence, she’d been injected with morphine.

  I sat, very still, at Mukhibá’s side all night. For a long time, my hand did not feel anything; the woman’s waxy forehead glistened in the moonlight, lifeless. My hand went numb and heavy in just half an hour, but I did not give up. Suddenly, as always, without warning, I sensed a weak pulsing signal. It came again and again.

  The pain had not left her. It was hidden, lying in wait, cuddled in the drug like a pot of mashed potatoes wrapped in a blanket. The drug had also stifled all her senses, leaving alive only touch. I had known the same state when I drank Nasrulló’s “tea.” Mukhibá could feel my hand. The instant I realized this, it seemed that she felt a bit better. Then, I left my body to be with Mukhibá. I had no weight, no awareness, no smell; I submerged into the cotton-wool silence where I could catch the feeble signals of her heart. I gathered other impulses as well: Mukhibá was resigned to her fate, and, rather than suffering, the hidden pain was causing her discomfort, as if she’d been laid naked onto a crusty old sheepskin. The touch of my hand alleviated this discomfort. At some point, I returned to reality and the hospital room: I desperately had to pee, but I forbade myself from thinking about it, and the need disappeared.

  In response, as if in gratitude, Mukhibá flooded me with waves of emotions which stretched me thin, like a plastic bag filled with water. For some reason, a single sentence came into mind and kept turning over and over: “It would be better if she didn’t wake up.” It was a terrible idea. I kept thinking about it, and I was certain that Aunt Mukhibá was thinking about it too.

  She did not wake up. Just before sunrise, for an instant, my hand felt as if it were branded with a burning piece of ice. I jerked it away, frightened. All at once, my sight, hearing and smell returned to me. It was all over; Mukhibá had passed. A stone lay upon a stone.

  I got up and called for the night nurse. There was nothing more to be done there. I went back to my department, curled up on the couch in the nurses’ room and covered myself with a cotton-padded quilt, pressing my numb, slowly melting right hand between my legs. The hand reluctantly returned to life. I didn’t notice how I fell asleep, and woke up only when the doctors came to work later in the morning.

  Later, Ahror came. Someone came to tell me to meet him at the door; our building was closed to the general public. He hugged me, pressing his whole body against me as my boys often did, but strangely, it was as if I were hugging a rock. I was frigid myself, too, like an iced fish. Ahror started crying. Still, his tears did not melt the stone that had rooted itself in my stomach. I withdrew and stood there with my arms hanging at my sides like a guilty schoolgirl in front of a teacher. I had nothing to say to him.

  “Thank you, Vera,” Ahror whispered. He peered into my face and drew back abruptly; then, turning on his heels, he walked towards his truck. I turned, too, and went to my boys.

  That night I told my mom that I would like to take the exams to study at the medical college in Dushanbe.[21] She had been trying to convince me to do this for a long time.

  two

  . 1 .

  From 1969 until ‘92—for twenty-three years, I lived in Dushanbe. The city was created overnight, on Stalin’s order, out of a mountain village, and development continued the entire time I lived there. Trucks, cranes and construction crews were raising apartment blocks in the center and in the suburbs; they even went back and installed elevators in some buildings engineered in the seventies. Asphalt and concrete advanced against blooming trees and flowers along Lenin Boulevard; the sun heated the building bricks to the cracking point, and the watering trucks that crawled the streets did little to alleviate the heat—everything here was different from little Panjakent. In winter, when the weather was bad, the wind gathered speed on the boulevard and swept through the yards of the apartment buildings. Furious and bone-chilling, it ripped laundry hung out on balconies to dry, bit into people’s faces, and rattled window-frames. Little Pavlik, my second child, was so afraid of the wind’s howling noise that I invented its agent: Old Man Wind-Blower, a single mention of whom was enough to send the boy to bed with no further discussion. Valerka, my older boy, was never scared of anything, but even he respected Old Man Wind-Blower and would retreat to his perch on the top bunk, in the bed their father had built for them, and promptly fall asleep hugging a boat or a plane he’d been making (he’d turned into a mechanic before he even entered kindergarten). I read them fairytales that I checked out from the hospital’s library; Pavlik always listened attentively, but Valerka only pretended to be interested. From birth, the boys were very different.

  We don’t have such winds in Moscow, or such exhausting heat, but the air here is hopelessly poisoned with exhaust. When my Grandma Lisichanskaya starts to gasp for breath, I use an oxygen bag to help her. The o
xygen clears her airways, and then her cheeks flush with color, the muscles of her face relax, her hands, clenched into tiny fists, unfold, and I massage her fingers and palms for a long time—she really enjoys this. I came up with the massaging trick when I baby sat little Sashenka, the late daughter of Uncle Styopa, Mom’s younger brother, and his wife Aunt Katya. Sashenka was born anemic, so I tried to improve her circulation, to warm her cold hands; massage made the bluish tinge recede from her lips and sped her pulse. The girl became so accustomed to this half-play, half-therapy that she wouldn’t fall asleep until I “warmed her hands.”

  I got into college easily. They had some sort of quota for students from Panjakent, and all that we—me and my neighbor Ninka Surkova, the one I used to raid orchards with—had to do was turn in our applications.

  They gave us a room in the dorms on the other end of the city, Second Soviet District. That neighborhood had a rough reputation, and Uncle Styopa, who served in the Border Guard Command, said with military authority:

  “You will live with us. Our building is respectable; it belongs to the local government, and is not far from the college. And you could help with Sashenka.”

  I obeyed, especially since Mom fully approved of her brother’s decision, and thus I became my cousin’s baby sitter. I brought the girl home from daycare, fed her dinner, bathed her and put her to bed. Uncle Styopa often had to travel for his job; Aunt Katya worked as a secretary for the Republican Central Party Committee and it was not unusual for her to be delayed till midnight and driven home in a shiny black “Volga” with a miniature leaping deer on its hood.

  Their home was always well stocked with delicacies: Aunt Katya received special rations. It was there that I had my first taste of “Truffles” chocolates, candied roasted almonds, cold-smoked hard sausage and many other things that I hadn’t even known existed. From his trips to the border posts, Uncle Styopa brought back wild goat; he enjoyed hunting, and a special rifle with long-range optics was displayed against a Bukhara rug on the wall above their bed. The rifle was a present from a general.

  My studies went well; I was good at physics, chemistry and other sciences. I always let Ninka Surkova copy my work. In a big city, she let loose, fell in with a group of older guys, and didn’t really connect with anyone at the college—she had little time left for studying. At first, we were always together, and our classmates decided that I was the same kind of girl as Ninka. In fact, I feared meeting boys: I was afraid that they would find out my secret, and so I pretended to be an independent, mature person. To be quite honest, I was bored with them anyway, just as I had been in school back home, and they quickly dropped their attempts to flirt with me. I was polite and distant with everyone; I had convinced myself that I would never love anyone. It was too embarrassing to admit that the reason I had to rush home after classes was because I was earning my keep as a baby sitter, so I intentionally cultivated the mystery that surrounded me. Soon the college rumor mill concluded that I was living with a much older man, which was why I never came to the club to dance and never spent a night in the dorms. Some girls seemed to envy me, but when they asked me questions, I only shrugged my shoulders. Again, I was alone, hiding in my cocoon of secrets and fearing the same old thing—that my biggest secret would be revealed and I’d be ridiculed. It was stupid, of course; I had cornered myself.

  I only saw Ninka in class. She was the one with a truly secretive life that she did not see fit to disclose even to me. When I asked her where she spent her evenings, she cut me off:

  “Would you like to come to the Café Seagull with me? Oh, but you can’t—you have to watch Sashenka, slaving for your kin.”

  She wasn’t making fun of me; she mostly felt pity. She never told me what exactly went on in that café, and if I asked her, she’d just say, “It’s great!” At this, her eyes lit up with a special light, and her face became cunning and coy—she was proud to belong to a circle of grown-ups. Her Mamikon, or Mamik, picked her up at the college a few times, riding his trophy German motorcycle. It was rumored that Mamik had done time and that, besides brass knuckles, he carried a small Belgian-made Browning in his pocket.

  I heard this from Veronika Svetlova. One day, the three of us left the college building together. Mamik was already there, waiting for Ninka: he straddled his bike smoking a crude cigarette and inspecting the brightly polished pointy toe of his orange boot. When he saw us out of the corner of his eye, he kicked the starter with his heel; the bike’s engine roared and blue smoke exploded out of the tailpipe.

  “Let’s go for a ride, beauty,” he pointed to the seat in the sidecar.

  “Some other time.”

  Ninka climbed onto the high seat over the rear wheel, behind Mamik.

  “Then you, go ahead, jump into the sack,” he leered at Veronika.

  “Thank you, but I have to go home.”

  Mamik immediately lost interest in us, shifted into gear, and rolled away, downtown, to the Café Rendezvous or Seagull, where their circle met.

  That’s when Veronika whispered to me conspiratorially:

  “They say he always carries brass knuckles and a small Belgian Browning in his pocket. Is that true?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Oh, come on!”

  “No really, I don’t know. I haven’t even met the guy.”

  Veronika gave me a long look, but I don’t think she believed me. She looked like she wanted to ask me something else, but hesitated. Soon we parted; Veronika caught her bus, and I walked home: my uncle’s apartment building was only two blocks from the college.

  I “lived with a man” my entire first year in college. I lived in a large apartment building designed specifically for party officials, downtown, next to the shopping center; I warmed Sashenka’s hands before bed, ate chocolates, went to classes, and didn’t have a care in the world. Sometimes I would get a letter from Mom and write back saying hello to Aunt Gulsuhor and Uncle Davron, but mostly for politeness’s sake—Panjakent was growing more and more distant in my mind. I knew I would never go back.

  . 2 .

  Life moves in waves. I realized this a long time ago and have accepted the nature of this flow. If someone had invented a device that told you exactly when it was time to rush down the crest of a wave, living would no longer be interesting. Neither is it true that old people live adrift in a dead calm. My Grandma Lisichanskaya is a great example of this: her rhythms are as unpredictable as a heartbeat during a fibrillating arrhythmia. This morning she was chatty, gave me a double “morning-morning,” even laughed when I rubbed her fingers and massaged her temples; her eyes were alive. I gave her a sponge bath, changed her clothes and bedding, and Grandma lay propped on a fluffed-up pillow bright as a new penny. She ate, smacked her lips, and later, after I came back from the pharmacy, listened with obvious pleasure to a chapter from Smoke Bellew about the stampede to Squaw Creek.[1]

  During the night, Grandma died. I was ironing in the other room, but heard her wheezing, unplugged the iron, rushed to her—and made it. Moist, marble-like skin, cold sweat, feet like icicles. The tell-tale sign: press on the base of a fingernail and the white spot stayed there. Blood pressure sixty over thirty. Pulse that refused to be regular and then disappeared altogether. I pumped her chest, fearing that I would lose her. I didn’t. I managed to restart her heart and then mixed a quick IV: dextran and dopamine with glucose. Oxygen mask. Then I lay next to her for half of the night, keeping her warm with my entire body as best I could. Together we surfaced from the depths that are terrible to remember, and it began—the slow, quiet ascent to the crest of a new wave.

  I kept repeating my laywoman’s prayer; God must have heard it, and didn’t let Grandma go. I was the Robinson Crusoe on our island of pain and despair, and she was my Friday, the speechless savage whose mute presence rescued me from loneliness. Later, when she fell asleep, I sat in the armchair, stupefied, drained of all emotion, and leafed through Jack London without putting words into sentences. I remembered how I
read “The Stampede to Squaw Creek”[2] by Sashenka’s bedside: the room we shared also had a cozy armchair and a table lamp under whose warm orange light I stayed up until midnight, swallowing book after book from Uncle Styopa’s library. Their books, like the food, were purchased by Aunt Katya in the special, internal Central Party store.

  Sashenka and I became close friends, and that closeness irritated Aunt Katya. I once overheard her complaining to her husband that I was the only person their daughter listened to, to which he sensibly responded:

  “Spend more time with the girl; no one’s keeping you from her.”

  Such answers only made it worse for her. I don’t mean to say that Aunt Katya became my mean stepmother; she was a reserved, almost terse woman, with military-like discipline and good in her way, but she, too, got frustrated. I could feel this, and tried to stay out of her sight as much as I could.

  Our life went on like this for a year—a well-measured, clockwork life from dawn to lights out. Only the night hours in the armchair with a book were my own, like the personal time that the army mandates for every soldier. The little doors opened on the cuckoo clock, the cuckoo slid out on its perch, cuckooed, bowed comically, raised her tail and slid back in to come out again in an hour and cuckoo twice, then thrice, and sometimes I would hear four cuckoos before I went to bed.

  At school we were getting ready for finals. May was drawing nearer, and in summer they promised to add us to the construction crew of the Medical Institute students, where I was hoping to make some money. I dreamt of buying something for myself; everything I wore came from Aunt Katya’s wardrobe.