Fish- a History of One Migration

by Peter Aleshkovsky

  The old witch—her name was Olga Davydovna—died a year later. Her son, an inconspicuous little man, found me and gave me a tiny toy donkey: apparently, his mother insisted that it be given to me after her death. The donkey was made of sturdy plastic, his legs attached to the body on screws, and a string with a heavy ring at the end could be pulled out of his chest. If you set him on a table and pulled the string, the donkey began walking after the ring. He trod slowly, rocking side-to-side, but he never stumbled or fell—he’d reach the edge of the table and stop above the abyss, where the thread hung loosely, no longer exerting its pull. Pavlik fell in love with it. The sight of the little donkey working his way steadily across the table and freezing at the edge made him giddy—a small miracle. Sometimes, after everyone at home had fallen asleep, I would pick up the toy and pull once, and again, and again. The donkey clambered to the edge and stood there, helpless, lonely, and beautiful. The toy was eventually lost, and no one knew what happened to it; I was sorry for the loss, but the wily old toad had achieved what she intended: I remembered her for the rest of my life.

  . 10 .

  I did not talk much to our neighbors. It did not take Gennady long to begin selling meat in the courtyard, and once he started, of course the money did not make it all the way home. Things got tighter, but I was not unhappy. I am no good at sales and always feel embarrassed when I have to sell something. Gennady by then was drinking so hard that sometimes he, too, would forget about his meat; he lost his good clients and would trade his “grab” to anyone for a bottle of vodka. I suspect that he used my nickname in the yard, and after a while everyone called me Fish behind my back.

  The women who at first hadn’t welcomed me soon came around. One needed her blood pressure taken, another had me give her a course of injections, and they began to think of me as the building’s medic, but the nickname, once it stuck, would not be forgotten. I pretended I did not hear it and did not try to make friends. With Farshidá, it was a different story. Born the same year as I, in some godforsaken mountain village, she was betrothed as a girl to her Sirojiddin. He went to the madras in Bukhara, graduated as a mullah, and served at the local mosque. Trim, sharp, tactful and excessively polite, he automatically inspired respect, and for some reason the ladies on the bench were afraid of him. Farshidá stayed at home and had babies; by the time we had to flee Tajikistan in ’92, they had ten of them, and Farshidá was pregnant with the eleventh. They lived on the same floor, in the three-room apartment next to us; it was quickly too small for them. They never had much. Farshidá was constantly saving for the circumcision of their next son, and I always helped at their tui-pisars. Of course, I could never think of taking money from them. The mullah’s children went to the same school as mine; Valerka was in the same class as their eldest, Avzaleddin—or Afi, as everyone called him, and they were friends. Farshidá was illiterate, and I often helped her kids with homework and otherwise; in exchange, they shared with us fruit, nuts and highland honey, which their rural relatives sent in abundance.

  By this time, I straightened things out with Uncle Styopa and Aunt Katya, and visited them on holidays. Gennady—if he happened to be sober—refused to come with me and the children. He did not like “the Colonel,” as he called Uncle Styopa (who, in fact, was only a major then), or his “General in a skirt,” and openly envied them. My return to the embrace of my family could not have happened without the intervention of beloved Uncle Kostya and Aunt Raya: they came from Kurgan-Tube twice a year, and on one of these occasions they got me to join the family feast.

  I had quickly paid back the money that Ninka had stolen; the brooch, strangely enough, turned up on its own (“must’ve fallen behind the dresser”). We never reminded each other of that particular conversation. Sashenka had matured into a beautiful girl, and was always happy to see me. Our rare family celebrations were pleasant. We missed my mom, but she could not leave her Petrovich even for a minute and had not had a chance to visit Dushanbe since I had left home. Her grandchildren did not know her; they each got birthday cards and shared New Year’s cards from their two grandmas—one from the faraway Volochok and the other from the not-so-distant Panjakent. They were closer with our neighbor Farshidá, Aunt Raya, and even Aunt Katya than with their own grandmothers.

  Vovka, my cousin from Kurgan-Tube, studied for a while in Dushanbe, majoring in mining engineering. He often stopped by and I fed him, since he was a student. He and Valerka became pals: they both loved messing around with motorcycles. Pavlik, who was four years Valera’s junior, had a completely different personality—he wanted books. I spent all my spare change at the bookstore and shopped at the Central Committee’s distribution center with Aunt Katya’s party card. Sometimes I would also receive books as presents from my patients. Books and meat back then were better than money. By the end of our stay in Tajikistan we had accumulated two large bookcases, sixteen shelves in all.

  In fourth grade, Pavlik contracted tuberculosis. He was diagnosed accidentally, when everyone in school was given the routine Mantoux skin test. He went to the hospital. His doctors suggested surgery: the upper lobe of his left lung was completely affected.

  Unexpectedly, Gennady insisted on accompanying me to the appointment with the surgeon. He even shaved, put on a clean shirt and a suit. In a word, he was unrecognizable. He did most of the talking; all I had to do was sit there quietly. The surgeon insisted on the operation. Gennady refused.

  “All you want to do is cut! I won’t let you do that to my son, I’ll cure him myself!”

  It was said with great power. He was capable of that, when he wanted to be.

  The surgeon finally agreed to wait and see, but refused to take Pavlik off ftivazid, an anti-tuberculin drug. So it was a tie.

  The story of his leg engendered in Gena a deep hatred of surgeons, whom he blamed for everything that had gone wrong in his life. The men in the yard gave him the idea to visit some old native medicine women in the mountains. He went into the country, to a Doukhobor village,[5] and came back with some dried herbs, then made the poor boy drink disgusting bitter concoctions. I did not see how the herbs could do any serious harm, but instead studied the x-rays and hoped that the trusty ftivazid would do its work.

  We began home-schooling. Mom by then had buried her Petrovich and was living alone; I wrote her a letter asking her to come and stay with us, since I needed help. The reply came from Dr. Davron: Mom had suffered a severe stroke that had left her completely paralyzed; she was in the local hospital. I had to go to Panjakent, but I could not leave my sons, and Mom died there, without me. I barely made it to the funeral. No one blamed me, of course, but I caught certain looks from the hospital staff and from our old neighbors, and they did not make my three days in Panjakent any easier. Akó Ahror came to the funeral as well—it was his truck that carried Mom to the cemetery.

  Afterwards, at the wake held at the strange home on the edge of the city, where she had lived with Petrovich, I went out into the orchard, and stood under a tall walnut tree, leaning against its coarse bark.

  The walnut grew next to an earthen duval; on the other side fruit trees framed a dusty pasture. Fields stretched beyond. In the distance, very far away, through an opening in the trees’ canopies, I could glimpse the blue mountains. It was midday, hot and silent. A homeless donkey, unkempt and skinny, shuffled along, barely moving his feet: old, unwanted invalids like him were often just set loose, free to roam the countryside until they either died or were captured and slaughtered. There was a truck with a boxed-in bed that people called “Oswiencim.”[6] Two Tatar brothers drove it about unhurriedly, hunting stray dogs and old donkeys to be turned into soap. The donkey in the meadow walked as if he were pulled along by an invisible rope with a heavy ring at its end. It was not as hot in the shade of the walnut tree, and soon I tired of staring into the distance and instead focused on the intricate patterns of the tree bark. No human hand could have produced such rhythmic, fierce beauty.

  Akó Ahror came up to me there,
in the garden. The years had left no trace on him. In simple words—in his speech he was always miserly and precise—he expressed his sadness. I listened, silently, and nodded. It seemed as if I were listening to a stranger.

  “I’m sorry, Vera, that you left.”

  I shrugged my shoulders and went back to the house. Ahror followed me silently; there was nothing more to say.

  We returned to Dushanbe in Uncle Styopa’s government Volga. After that, nothing linked me to Panjakent. Now I often remember things from there, but back then I was certain I was erasing it from my memory forever. When my grandma Lisichanskaya stares intently into the shadows drawn on the ceiling by the Italian lamp, she stares as if trying to glimpse the nocturnal angels that stand between her and the other world, and I know she is remembering. Her face changes—first it is warm, then it is stern and distant. She must be engaged in some unfinished conversation with the past. When people tell me that all my efforts are meaningless and that it is time to stop nursing the life in this half-dead body, I do not argue with them, but keep my peace. How could I convey to them what I know from being at her side? I look at her little dried-up face that has become part of my family and sometimes I am ashamed: I did not get to my mother in time, did not have time to help. Mom died alone, although the kind doctor Davron stopped by her bed after his morning rounds.

  “She left quietly and gracefully,” he said at the wake.

  He said what people always say on such occasions. I kissed him and went to the orchard, to stand in the shade of the old walnut tree. I stood there, alone and quite, until akó Ahror came.

  . 11 .

  Ftivazid did slow the progress of the disease and Pavlik’s tuberculomas calcified. Now the doctors insisted on a change of climate. Pavlik needed time in sanatoriums, places such as Abastumani or Teberda—the high-altitude facilities where, it was believed, the lung disease could be completely cured. I could not possibly send him away for a year on his own and entrust him to the nursing staff at the sanatorium, and Gennady also would not hear of it. Incredibly, my son’s illness had changed my husband. He quit drinking, left his job, and spent all his time traveling from one folk healer to another and having lengthy conversations with them. I could not begin to list all the disgusting things Pavlik had to force down: from mumije[7] dissolved in water to melted badger fat and all manner of herbal brews. Gennady prepared these salves with his own hands, in our kitchen, based on the recipes he had written down in a large ledger.

  My husband endlessly expounded on the topic of sin and, despite the fact that he did not go to church himself, became vehemently opposed to me interacting with the mullah and his wife. He hung crosses and icons everywhere, and procured from somewhere a large, thick Bible, that he read from in the evenings. All his interpretations yielded the same conclusion—Satan was everywhere, hidden, biding his time, and as soon as one stopped praying, if only for a minute, he would sneak into one’s thoughts and there lie in wait. Demons were constantly watching. Any word we said, any thought that occurred to us, they would snatch up and use in their battle against our Lord for the corruption of human souls. Gennady now constantly mumbled something inaudible. I quickly got used to this new habit and stopped noticing it.

  This new life (on top of everything, he also became a vegetarian) stoked his lust, previously drowned in vodka, and he was constantly after me, either threatening me with divine punishment or begging in a disgustingly unctuous voice. I could not go back to bed with him; I continued to sleep in the children’s room. He got angry and accused me of having affairs; in the end, I also became the Whore of Babylon, for whose sins our baby was paying.

  I also did not stop seeing Farshidá. And I learned to listen to Gennady’s fire-and-brimstone rants with just one ear, as they say, and initially I was simply happy he had stopped drinking. I decided I could earn enough for both of us for a time; perhaps, he would come to his senses. I wished he would go to church like normal people, but he had a special theory for that, too: the Church had sold out and God had abandoned it. Personally, I never had the habit, but people I knew who were regular church-goers—the old nurse Aunt Shura, the night watchman at the dormitory, the aging ophthalmologist Shmelev—were all kind and completely harmless people. I understood that my husband needed to find a foundation, a pivot on which to build his life, having lost the one that serving in the police had given him. I even offered to go to church with him, to speak to a priest. But he instantly turned the conversation into a rabid argument, in which he referred to some special knowledge he possessed, and when he saw that I had lost interest in his rubbish, he became angry again, screamed at me and called me a cold, coarse, empty fool.

  Listening to him was tedious, and besides, I did not have time for it. There was one positive thing: Pavlik, sensing that his father cared, reached out to him. Gennady became an advocate of cleanliness and gave the apartment a twice daily mop-down. He opened the windows even in winter. Air, water, sun, herbs—these were all the right elements, but they were mixed in the wrong proportions in his twisted mind.

  One of his fresh-air spells mowed down Pavlik: he ran a high fever and I took him to the hospital despite Gennady’s objections. Pavlik had pneumonia. At first, the doctors were afraid that one of his tuberculomas had burst, but thank God, that did not happen. Nonetheless, the attending put his foot down—surgery was unavoidable. Pavlik had the upper lobe of his left lung removed.

  Gennady brought a million curses down on me. He raved all night, and I went to work on very little sleep, tired and frustrated. I stopped by Pavlik’s room: the boy was a fighter and the doctor promised to take out the stitches very soon. In the doctors’ lounge, there was a surprise for me: Vitya Bzhania had come to visit. He invited me out to a café later that night. I was happy to see him.

  . 12 .

  Vitya belongs to the same breed of men as akó Ahror: not especially tall, but slim and sinewy. His appearance was also almost untouched by age, except that now his hair was completely gray, which, in my opinion, is very attractive. Even now he never forgets to do his morning exercises and takes ice-cold showers. Only on a few occasions had I ever seen him tired, and never depressed. He is good at hiding his feelings and at the same time is always attentive to others, a great listener. Patients in his unit adore him, and he always has time to spend with them. He can be militarily stern with them as well—sometimes that is what a patient needs, a bit of reasonable discipline that can inspire respect for another person and distract one from anxious thoughts. Nowadays, when specialist surgeons have little time for patients, preferring to dump them, with all their fears and suffering, into the laps of the attending physicians, attention from a unit head is rare, even though care, in my opinion, is the foundation of therapy.

  With his family and friends, Viktor is kind and soft, his eyes radiating warmth. He uses words as a last resort and would rather listen and watch; he reminds me of a purebred horse whose eye, whose mere look fills you with the power, warmth or joy of your encounter with him. Viktor speaks with extraordinary precision that sometimes borders on curtness, and this often makes people who do not know him well feel uncomfortable, sending them into long-winded apologies.

  That day, in the café, Viktor gave me a bouquet of scarlet roses, opened a bottle of champagne and said simply, “Here’s to seeing each other again, Vera. I think about you often.”

  Gennady and I never went out on the town, and I was pleased by the attention. I relaxed, even though I knew Vitya would get to his point very quickly.

  He reported his grief as if at an evening check-in in the barracks.

  “I buried my Mom four days ago. I will stay until the ninth day,[8] and then I’m going back to Moscow, my patients, and my dissertation.”

  His mother had died of a heart attack, and he, a cardiac surgeon, could do nothing to help her; she had refused to move to Moscow.

  “You say I’ve become stern. That’s nothing; my mom, now she was stern. It’s a pity you didn’t get to know her.”
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  He smiled imperceptibly. I could not help myself and took his hand into mine; almost mechanically, I began to massage his fingers just as I did hundreds of times for frightened, worn out patients. I talked for a long time, telling him about Pavlik, about Valerka, about the aging Karimov who was being pushed aside by the young and the bold. Suddenly, he interrupted me, jerked his hand back. Looking me in the eye, he came straight to the point.

  “You must come to Moscow with me. How can you live with that worthless slime?”

  He drew Gennady’s portrait with a few simple, medical strokes: “An alcoholic is the same as a drug addict: the changes in the brain are irreversible.”

  Something invisible had passed between us: his pity, up till then masked with rationality, put a chill on our conversation. I could feel my limbs stiffen involuntarily, my temples grow cold. I felt an approaching headache and winced; Viktor interpreted it as a sign of my being offended, and it made him go on the offensive. Never before had he said so many words to me. He had a place to take us, a two-room apartment in Moscow. He promised a job for me and the TB hospital for Pavlik, the best clinic in the country. He had thought it all through down to the smallest details. At the end, as precisely as he had laid out his previous arguments, he dropped the bomb: “Vera, I have loved you all my life. I promise you—the boys will be my sons.”

  He fell silent then. I could see he did not know what to do with his hands and busied them with a paper napkin shredding it into little pieces, then rolling up each piece into a ball and throwing it into the ashtray.