Fish- a History of One Migration

by Peter Aleshkovsky

  Inside me, something important snapped. I, who was not afraid of dead bodies, felt repulsed by my own mother. She would go to work and come back intoxicated; eyes to the floor, she’d slip into her room and later, after she’d drunk some more, she’d come back out and begin declaring something incoherent to me. She thumped her chest, confessed, cursed her fate, cursed people, and asked me to forgive her for not watching me better, not preserving my “purity.”

  The hint was enough to make blood run cold in my veins, turn me into stone, make me deaf and unresponsive. I had nowhere to go from home: I didn’t want to visit the dig, and when I stopped at the hospital to see my boys, they didn’t recognize me, having forgotten me in the year that I had been gone. Dimulka gave me a suspicious sideways look and didn’t run into my open arms. Their old teacher had been replaced with another, even sterner and colder woman; whether I had changed somehow, or whether the boys were completely repressed, I couldn’t tell, but I felt like an unwelcome stranger.

  I don’t know how I managed to stay on there for a week. Then I gave up. I fled. I cursed my weakness, but I could not live with my Mom any longer. Apparently I could find a way to connect with the most desperate patients, but when it really mattered, I didn’t have what it took.

  I rode the night bus to Dushanbe, feeling as cold as the insides of our fridge, which I had filled with food. Then I left a note on the table, kissed my sleeping mother, and left. Most of the passengers were asleep; the headlights cut through the darkness and the tiny lights of the villages that clung to the highway passed by outside the windows. Then the mountains began, and the howling of the engine on the serpentine road echoed in my soul. I sat still, my teeth clenched, hands gripping the armrests, and watched the sunrise.

  . 5 .

  It took me a long time to realize that Vitya Bzhania was in love with me. I ran to see him whenever I had a spare minute, and in his free time he came upstairs to our unit. We did homework together; we traded books. Vitya borrowed books from the Central City Library. I liked adventure stories and so did he. The Headless Horseman, The Heir from Calcutta,[4] Captain Daredevil, Moonstone—these favorites were always in high demand, but Vitya made friends with the librarian, and thanks to him I enjoyed many beautiful books. Sometimes, I would close an unfinished volume and imagine the rest of the story, out loud, to Vitya. He listened, never interrupting, and looked at me as if he was afraid to miss even a single word I said; I liked that. Later, he told me that’s when he fell in love with me, but at the time I thought of him only as a close friend. I seriously convinced myself that I would not be able—would not have the right to—love anyone.

  Gennady Bystrov was brought to our hospital when we were finishing our second year in college. A junior sergeant on the police force, he had miraculously survived a shoot-out: his lungs and abdominal cavity had penetrating wounds, there were slash wounds on his chest and back, and his knee was shattered by buckshot. His night patrol had stopped a truck coming down from the mountains; it was smuggling a load of poppy straw, and the load was too big for them to give up without a fight. Gennady was immediately shot in the knee, and then the smugglers set to finishing him off with knives. But they didn’t get the job done. Of the three policemen in his patrol, he was the only one to survive. A border patrol that happened to be returning to its barracks by the same route joined in the fight and eventually detained the traffickers. One of the four smugglers arrested was Nar.

  I learned the details from Gena’s friends, who visited him regularly. The sergeant lay unconscious, strung up in an apparatus after an eight-hour surgery; Marat Ishakovich pulled him back from the other world.

  “He’ll live, but do keep an eye on him,” he said to me.

  I kept an eye. Gennady was very weak, and I checked on him every fifteen minutes. It was convenient, too—I also cleaned, part-time, in the ICU unit. For the first four days he hardly said anything, only kept asking for something to drink. I soaked gauze in tea and let him suck on it; he was not allowed to drink much. The nurses, seeing that I doted on him, did not pay as much attention as they otherwise might have done. The wounds on his back became infected from lack of movement, and then he got bedsores.

  At night, I sat by his side, held his hand, and felt the force that his body was using to fight, to heal, even though he was as helpless as a baby. I don’t think I was helping him much; I mean I would have given all my power to him, but he managed the pain and the weakness on his own, and this was new for me. He would open his eyes, as if he had not been asleep just a moment before, whisper, “Candy,” and I would give him the tea-soaked gauze, and he would smile. He smiled, said nice things to me, and always joked with me. When I washed his body with a sponge, I only had the bath on my mind until Anya Steblova, one of our nurses, noticing the size of his member, said, laughing, “Look at that stud!” and I suddenly felt my cheeks burn. Anya was the first one to tease me.

  “You must’ve fallen in love; you don’t leave your Bystrov for a minute. Better go wash the floors in the hallway.”

  I washed and thought, “She is so full of it, and I am just feeling sorry for him, the way I would for any other patient.” And then I caught myself thinking that I thought of him all the time.

  When Gennady began getting better, we talked often and at length. He had a single fear: that he would be left with a limp, would be decommissioned, and would no longer be able to catch bandits. I reassured him that everything would be all right, and he believed me. It was funny: he was like a kid, so grateful for the sympathy.

  “Hello, Candy!” he would shout as soon as I entered his room. I felt at ease with him; he was strong. When he learned that Nar had rescued me from the bandits’ den, he said: “Don’t fool yourself; he wouldn’t have let any other girl go. They are all like animals; drugs destroy your brain once and for all.”

  Gennady also insisted that I go to court and then report back to him in detail.

  Nar sat calmly on the accused bench, gave monosyllabic answers to every question and curved his lips in disdain. I tried to catch his eye, but he pretended that he didn’t know me; he just glanced around the room once, then turned away and did not look back at anyone.

  The ringleader got the death sentence—he was the one who had gone berserk and finished off the policemen. For Nar, the prosecutor requested a fifteen-year sentence; the judge gave him twelve. The convoy took Nar away through a special door. I did not run after him—out into the street where the van would be waiting for him. This was not a named brother, my rescuer, but a cold-blooded criminal.

  When he heard my report, Gennady praised me: “You got it all right, Candy. You are alright, through and through.”

  I suddenly felt an urge to cry, jumped up from the chair and ran out of the room.

  At night, I thought about my sergeant. He was a hero, just like Maurice Gerald from The Headless Horseman, fearless and honest. Vitya Bzhania, by the way, shared my opinion.

  Bystrov was awarded a medal, but he laughed when I asked him if he was going to wear it.

  “Why would I? It’s just a button, a toy.”

  He wanted to have children, which nagged at me. He talked about the children he would have one day, pierced me with his hot eyes, smiled warmly, and… did not say anything else. At moments like these, he was suddenly tongue-tied.

  Later, the doctors sent him to the rehabilitation sanatorium in Kislovodsk and after that to Moscow, to the Trauma Institute. Gennady had to have complex surgery on his knee.

  “Ta-da, Candy! Thanks for everything. You going to wait for me?”

  He pressed me against him and kissed me hard on the lips. My head spun.

  “Yes.”

  I did not know I would give him such a simple answer.

  He left, and I waited. For a whole year. He did not come back and did not write.

  . 6 .

  But, out of the blue, my Mom wrote. Apparently, thank God, things had straightened out there. Akó Ahror, who must have been put on earth for the sol
e purpose of saving our family, rescued her. One day he stopped by her place and had a long conversation with her. “It was as if he poured a tub of ice-cold water over me,” she wrote. After their talk, Mom never touched wine again. Ahror had left the expedition and was working for the hospital, driving his truck around and “doting on it, as always.” Mom also wrote that Ahror had married a young woman and they were expecting a baby. He was especially curious about me, and Mom told him that I was studying to take entrance exams to the institute.

  She asked me to forgive her, wanted me to come spend the summer with her, and, most importantly, informed me that she had met and was now living with a wonderful man, Viktor Petrovich, a doctor’s assistant who had one year left before he could retire from his job at the clinical hospital. He owned a small house with a garden, and Mom was planning to move there with him.

  Everything had fallen into place, but for some reason, the news did not make me happy. I remembered this Petrovich—he was a nasty little man, a pedantic bore, and I could not imagine my Mom finding happiness with him. And yet she did, and she lived with the old crone for eleven years, part-wife and part-nurse: with age, Petrovich succumbed to ferocious asthma and she nursed him like a baby. By the time my kids were old enough to visit, she did not invite us for the summer—she could not manage two boys and a sick man.

  Foolishly, I was offended. Our lives simply went their different ways and I had no desire to go back to Panjakent. The news of Ahror’s new marriage did not seem to affect me in any way; I do remember dreaming of him for a while after getting the letter, but soon I did not think of him at all. On the other hand, I never dreamt of Gennady. Rather, he would appear in my mind’s eye, as if he were right there and had only stepped away for a minute. I waited for news from him, but there was nothing. His mother lived in Tver oblast, in Vyshny Volochok—perhaps he had gone there? He had stayed in Dushanbe after he served there in the army.

  My year—the last academic year in college—dragged on. Viktor was set to graduate with a gold medal; my grades were a bit worse, but still above average. Viktor finally decided to become a cardiac surgeon. Trying to get into an institute in Tajikistan was out of the question: money was the key, and we had none. Marat Ishakovich advised me to go to Kalinin, where the medical school had a good reputation and where I could try to get in without a bribe. Viktor aimed for Moscow and only Moscow and wanted me to come along.

  “We’ll get in, I swear—you know this stuff as well as I do.”

  We studied together every night. On the weekends, Marat Ishakovich drilled us in Chemistry, and his wife, Olga Romanovna, an academic director at a high school, critiqued our essays. I dreamed of becoming a physician. Now, letting that chance slip is my only regret, if I even have any.

  In May, on the eve of graduation, Gennady appeared in the doorway of the doctors’ lounge. In civilian clothes, with a light wooden cane. A new, serious man, one I had not seen before.

  “Candy!” he opened his arms, and the next instant I was at his chest, hugging him back.

  “Let’s go, I have to tell you everything!”

  I left my shift, and we went to the orchard. Gennady was visibly limping—the Moscow surgery did not help, and to this day he cannot completely flex his leg.

  From the orchard we went to our dorms. Gennady bought champagne and chocolates. I was not walking—I had wings. His troubles seemed trifling to me now. The main thing is that I told him everything, I gave him my horror in exchange for his little fears. Gennady then held me tight against him:

  “You silly girl, you’re not denied anything. You need to be loved, loved forever! Let’s go somewhere—I’ve been dreaming of you for a year.”

  The fool did not write because he was afraid I would not have a cripple. And before he left—he did not say anything because he did not want to upset me!

  My fear and doubts vanished in an instant. My mind, which had tormented me all my life, went mute. His strength, his awkward tenderness, robbed me of all reason. There was that moment when I felt his hand closing over my mouth, kindly but persistently: I was moaning and screaming, and the dorm walls were thin as cardboard. Afterwards we lay there for a long time, mute, on a wet sheet; I pressed against his back, strong and supple, like a stallion’s croup, smelling sharp and sweet of sweat. My palm sheltered his shame; the way a mother guards her sleeping babe. The empty space around us crackled with the electricity released by our bodies: tiny grains in the drywall sparkled green and blue and the moon that peeked in the window was flushed, coy and generous, like the face of the old Tajik I bought milk from when I was little. When the bottle came out of his fridge, its neck was beaded with sweat, like Gennady’s shoulders. I wanted to pick up the beads with my tongue, but had no strength left to reach them; I could not even fall asleep.

  My dream of becoming a doctor instantly evaporated. In the morning, we applied for a marriage license.

  The next day, they brought to the hospital a badly burned young construction worker. The pain would not release him. Even drugged with dimedrol and promedol, he screamed and woke, his eyes filled with horror, his forehead bathed in cold sweat. I sat by his side several times and held his hand, but could not catch the signal; I was thinking of other things.

  . 7 .

  The shot that smashed Gennady’s knee cut short his career: he had dreamt of big cases and big stars on his shoulder straps, of studying at the Academy, but it was not to be. He was offered a job in the police archives, but he could not stand the boredom. He fought with his bosses, was fired, and left. No job, no place to live. I was pregnant. One could get an apartment by working in construction, but what good is a cripple for mixing concrete and laying brick? The meat-packing plant was also building its own apartment block, and Gennady, without a second thought, went and got a job on the floor there.

  He came home and announced proudly, “I got a job at the meat-packing plant; comes with an apartment.”

  “Can you handle the work?”

  “Piece of cake. They pay for output, up to three hundred. We’ll be fine, Candy!”

  We were put on the waiting list, and a year and a half later we moved into a two-room apartment—Gennady earned it.

  A floor man killed up to two hundred head of cattle every shift. I was the one who got him ready for work, who washed his uniform, exorcised the smell of death that had seeped through his underwear, ironed his overalls, pressed sharp creases in his trousers, all the time straining to think of him and not of the terrible things he told me, bragging, with a smirk. In his hospital bed he could not brag and strut—there he fought for his life and won. Now he was fighting against himself. Sometimes his eyes would grow dull and distant, like the eyes of an old horse waiting to be sent to slaughter. Often, after dinner, he would sit staring into space, and not respond to anything I said.

  I tried to convince him to quit, but every time he would cut me off with, “No! Am I worse than others?”

  “You are better than they are; that’s why you have to quit.”

  “Shut up!”

  He would raise his voice. He would turn and go to the other room. After these skirmishes, he would not respond to my touch at night. Gennady was as stubborn as a Panjakent donkey.

  When I was in the eighth month of my pregnancy, I went on maternity leave and stayed at home, waiting every day for Gennady to return from his shift. I would sit at the window, not wanting to miss him. As soon as I saw him limping across the yard from the bus stop, my head would start spinning. I would rush to the door, and he would come in: first stepping over the threshold on his good leg and then heaving in the bad one. He would say a tired hello and go to the bathroom to wash his hands. I would hand him a clean towel—that was our ritual. When I snuggled against him at night, I could feel with the full breadth of my soul how quickly the invisible force that had raised him from the hospital bed was transforming: he was growing a protective shell, and I could not pierce it. He became capricious and demanding and delighted in finding fault in
me. I took offense, but he did not apologize, and would only pat me on the shoulder in the morning, as if I were his cow or horse. That was supposed to be his “I’m sorry.”

  At the hospital, even though he had survived a furious battle, he never had nightmares, but at home Gennady often screamed in his sleep, bolted awake, and went to the kitchen, where he would sit smoking for a long time. He was ashamed of this weakness; if I followed him, he would turn on me, “What do you want? Go to sleep!”

  “Gena, what happened?”

  “I said, go to sleep!”

  He would be glowering at me then, his whole being filled with some unknown, malicious force, as if he had to restrain himself from hitting me. I would return to bed and bawl into my pillow. He would return, too, a mute stranger, turn to the wall and go to sleep without a word.

  He developed another unattractive trait: suddenly, everyone around him was a terrible person; everyone was against him, trying to short his wages or trip him up. This was impossible to deal with.

  “You are making this up; you must trust people more.”

  “You idiot, what have you seen in your village!”

  He called me worse, too. My Mom never cussed at me; even if she called me “Porky,” it was lovingly, in jest.

  The first time he came home drunk I was making eggplant ragout, which Gennady loved. He went straight to the bedroom, shook out of his clothes, tossing them into a heap on the floor, collapsed onto the bed and blacked out, snoring. I covered him with a blanket, put a glass of sweetened water with lemon juice on the night stand, and went back to the kitchen. I ate supper alone. Finally, I had to go to bed and had to figure out how to perch on the bed without touching him: I could not stand the smell of alcohol on his breath. The sheets were wet. Somehow, I shook him awake enough to pull him off the bed. As many times as I’d had to change bedding for hospital patients, I never seemed to mind the sharp smell of urine, but here, at home, I barely swallowed the urge to vomit. I carried the bedding to the bathroom and soaked it in a bucket, then dragged the mattress to the balcony and put down clean sheets. He watched my maneuvers silently, sprawled on the floor. He blinked and did not say anything.