Fish- a History of One Migration

by Peter Aleshkovsky

  I tried to ignore the gossip, but later at home Leyda always asked what was going on in Zhukovo and what was being talked about.

  “Oi, oi, what a nasty story: you say Antoshka Gutyonov went carousing with Olga the nurse again? The devil, he doesn’t care—he’s got plenty of money from the sawmill, and money, it makes you stupid. Olga’s got three little kids and a husband; her husband, he’s quiet but solid. And this Antoshka’s like the devil, it’s all fun for him. Although, Vera, sweetheart, this has been going on for a long time, must be eight years now they’ve been squeezing each other in barns. I don’t understand this foolishness. It’s all because of idleness. Love your own, leave the other’s alone. I wouldn’t say my Peter was the handsomest man out there, but when he’d hold me tight in a bathhouse, he’d set my soul on fire. The rest is foolishness. Take you and your Gennady—I’m sorry to say—you should have worked towards each other more. The fault is not yours alone, and the grief is not all his, you just lived too much each on your own. You say, the fire of love, the chill of love—that’s nothing. I say what I think. You should have submitted more.”

  Her philosophy was tested by life itself, and most of the time I agreed with her, but this submission thing—no, thank you, I don’t buy it—not now, not ever. Leyda habitually smoothed over sharp corners; so taught her wisdom, the wisdom of her mother, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers, and I did not argue with it. It’s just that I don’t know how to swim with the current: fish spawn and sleep upstream and that’s just the way things are.

  When I recounted to her the news tidbits I picked up at work, she listened with a lively interest and always commented. Even though she was isolated where she lived, in the middle of nowhere, she knew the entire district, and I realized that maintaining a connection with this invisible community was as important for her as talking to her little chickens and cows. For the first time in my life, perhaps, I came to appreciate the local “telegraph.” Information flowed the same way through the chatty women on the bench in front of our apartment building in Dushanbe. Back then I despised them, and now I was learning the value of their talk. Oral editions of “Nurmekundia’s Daily” came out regularly and circulated widely, adding meaning to life and strengthening the bonds that threatened to collapse in front of our very eyes.

  And still, when I got my pauper’s pay from the factory I became depressed. It was clear that I had become part of the local life, that this place had swallowed me like a garter snake swallows a frog. When Leyda learned that I got a hundred rubles in cash for two months of work, she said, “It’s not much, but it’s good that they paid something at all. Last year they paid in grain. Put the money away; there is no place to spend it here, and if you start eating sausage and other fancy food, you’ll just get gas.”

  I had no taste for sausage anyway; I had no taste for anything. By September, my potatoes were ready, the apples had ripened, and my dill stood thick as a wall. I cut it and dried it on cookie sheets on the stove. In the woods, mushrooms and berries abounded, so I made jams, dried mushrooms for soup and pickled some more in jars according to Leyda’s precise instructions. New to pickled mushrooms, I quite liked them. Generally, I craved salty foods more than meat. Out of the blue, Valerka and Oleg Petrovich showed up, dug up the potatoes, sorted them and layered them in the basement, for food and for next year’s seeds. They each took three sacks for themselves, which left me four sacks of large ones, much more than I needed. They stayed for two days, not reporting any special news, except that Gennady took his vows, was named Germogen and sent to Valdai monastery. I felt nothing when Valerka told me. It seemed much more important that he had managed to save enough for the Moskvich[16] he had driven here, which meant he was living smart. Sveta sent her greetings; I sent her pies. The men did the harvesting, horsed around, had a steam bath, drank a bottle of vodka and left. And again, I was plunged into silence. And again, a throbbing, thundering hell awaited my free labor in Zhukov.

  One day, on my way from work, I sat down under a pine tree and lost touch with the world, as if I had fallen asleep. For some reason I envisioned Gennady in a black cassock with a beard and a big golden cross on his chest. This pulled on something, like a vein that had lain heavily in a tight, cold coil in the pit of my stomach. Drink like the locals, and neglect my children? I could not release my will: it had happened once under Nasrulló’s tent, and for the rest of my life I would remember the groping tentacles of the monsters that prey not only on the body but on your very “self.” Empty, unpaid work was another such monster, and I had almost been sucked into a vortex like Babkin Dip, into an abyss from which there was no return. I sat there for a long time; a familiar chill began to creep up from my stomach toward my mind, but then I spotted a strange little bird. It sat within an arm’s length of me. It was small and cartoonish: two long, spindly legs with sharp claws, a puff-ball of a body, a pair of round eyes and a funny beak, half-sunk in feathers. Suddenly, the bird hooted, rolling its eyes madly and making itself bigger—it was very angry—in order to scare me and chase me away. It was so full of comical bravado that I burst out laughing. It was an owl, the smallest of the species that we had in Karmanovo. The bird became even angrier and hooted at me with great ferocity. I laughed still harder, until tears rolled from my eyes and—I do not know why—the next thing I knew I was wailing like a banshee. The little owl startled and fled, and I stayed there and cried—cried bitterly and inconsolably until the tears melted the chill. When I came back to my senses, it was quickly growing dark, and the arms of my watch pointed almost to nine. I jumped onto my bicycle and pedaled hard down the empty road, where I knew every dried-up puddle, speeding as if a coven of witches was on my heels. I dashed into the house, flipped on the lights and fell onto the couch. I thought for a moment, then gave the finger to the darkness beyond the window. I did not return to work after that, only went to get my pay. I bought vinegar at the store, some salt, matches, sugar and flour, some cheap candy; I spent all the money and went home, to Karmanovo, to winter.

  . 9 .

  Mark Grigoriyevich once recounted to me, from his mother’s words, how she survived the siege.[17] His own memories of those years are vague: he remembers the wonderfully sweet latkes made with frostbitten potatoes; oilcake in large rounds that his mother chopped with an axe in a wooden tub; the gray pigeon broth, with delicious, bloody foam settling to the bottom. His Grandfather, with his long white beard and skullcap, sitting in a huge armchair; a thick book lies open on his knees, and he is muttering something, rocking back and forth as if he were using his dry beak of a nose to bore a hole in the book. His Grandmother kneeling before the small iron stove, stoking the fire with books from her library. She throws the books into the red maw of the stove and for some reason cries, covering her mouth with her hand. Both Grandmother and Grandfather later died; his Mom and older brother took one and then the other to the cemetery aboard the boys’ sled.

  “I wanted nothing. I spent the last six months lying flat under a blanket. Mom made me get up and exercise—it was torture. We lived for food, from one feeding to the next. Grandfather was a watchmaker and he must have had some gold pieces; Mom sold those, traded them for bread, but she never spoke of it. Right before the siege, her brother came to visit. He was a mechanic at an airfield, so as a present he brought us four bars of bitter Air Force chocolate. He got killed somewhere in Poland. The family’s gold saved our lives, but we never got around to the chocolate. Mom was saving it for our final days. But how could you know which day would be your last? Her mother and father starved to death, my brother and I were on the brink of death, Mom was thin as a bed sheet, but the chocolate remained untouched. And then they opened the Road of Life—the Nazis retreated. Only then did she give each of us a small square of chocolate, but our stomachs could not take it. I had never been so sick in my life; it was as if my soul was begging to get out of my body. Mom took us to the rehabilitation center in a pram: at six, I weighed thirty-five pounds, and my nine-year-old brother, fo
rty-seven. Soy milk—that’s what saved us. Fifteen years ago, without telling Mom, I threw away the remaining one half and three whole chocolate bars. I found them in an old suitcase, at the very bottom, wrapped in an old newspaper. They were horrific to look at.”

  I look at Grandma Lisichanskaya’s peaceful face, remember this story, and think that, had I managed to last that whole winter in Karmanovo, I would probably have saved and stretched each piece of hard candy the same way they did with that ill-fated chocolate. I was in no danger of starvation, of course, but I did purposefully isolate myself. I holed up in my cabin; Aunt Leyda visited me regularly, every morning and every evening, sat with me and talked. I listened, but I did not hear her. Day by day I was sinking deeper and deeper into a comatose slumber.

  I have a complicated relationship with my age. Sometimes even now I feel younger than my forty-two years; more often, I feel a lot older. That winter, in the cabin in Karmanovo, I felt ancient, feeble. My needs were pared to a minimum. To boil some tea, to cook some potatoes, pasta or cereal, to stoke the stove. I often just lay there for long stretches of time, could not tell day from night, and watched for hours how the trees bent under the wind at the edge of the forest or how the October rain finished off the dying grasses. Even Mustang, whom I suspect Leyda intentionally sent grazing under my windows, could not lure me outside. The sun painted the woods with yellows and oranges; the wind tore off leaves. In the yard, Leyda pounded the chopper against a wooden tub: she was cutting cabbage to pickle for the winter; I did not go out to help.

  As before, a jar of milk appeared on my table every day, and the basket of eggs appeared on Sundays. I barely touched my wonderful neighbor’s gifts. Occasionally I would sip sour, clotted milk, but more often than not, on her regular visits Leyda just stubbornly replaced spoiled milk with a fresh jar, filled the same morning, confident that my apathy would pass and I would awaken to a new life.

  “Get up, Vera-sweetheart, without work there is only death,” she would greet me in the morning in her sing-song voice. I looked through her and squeezed out a smile, but had no desire to talk. I mean, I could speak, but did not want to. I kept my mouth shut on purpose, like an idiot. How sorry I was for myself during those three weeks! What tales I told myself when left alone! I’m ashamed to remember it.

  Work! What work was this Estonian grandma talking about? Hacking at cabbage, mucking stalls—was that all I was born to do? Sloth enveloped me like frost encasing a fall flower. I lost weight. Dry and hollow, with no hope of anyone ever needing me again, I reached the extremes of despair and sanity.

  One night I woke in the small hours. I was cold, having forgotten to stoke my stoves the evening before. Rain hammered on the roof; it had been pouring for three days—drizzling, cold and endless. Going outside to the woodpile seemed cruel and unnecessary, a torment. I opened the flues and stoked the fires with books.

  I crouched and tore them into thinner sheaves, breaking spines with a crunch, then throwing them into the stoves, first into the big Russian stove, then into the one under the bed. Jack London, Mayne Reid, Emile Zola, Feuchtwanger, The Captain’s Daughter, Dickens, Dead Souls, Nekrasov, Mayakovsky, textbooks with my Pavlik’s scrawls in them, two misplaced grade books from sixth and seventh grade, with the fat signature of Faizullo Rakhmonov, the boys’ literature teacher, next to each A.

  At first, the books burned slowly; the pages only blackened around the edges and the thick sheaves did not catch fire. I jabbed at them inside the stove with the poker-kukovka, as it was called, and the flames overcame them, grew angrier, curled the cardboard into pigs’ ears, leapt up the bricks, wailed in the chimney. The fire’s orange flares danced around the walls of the cabin, chasing nervous, rag-tag shadows into the corners. I did not turn on the electric lights; the light of the open fire was enough for me. I tore, tossed, burned, tore, tossed, burned.

  The cabin became hot, sweat beaded on my forehead; drops of perspiration or tears ran down my cheeks. Loose-haired, in a dirty, slept-in robe, I looked like a witch mixing a potent brew at midnight.

  It is not easy to burn two hundred volumes in one go, but I almost did it. I worked my shift like a stoker on a steamship, tossed book after book, no longer tearing them, just opening them and feeding them, pages first, into the fire. The Collected Works of Balzac and of Chekhov, Russian fairy tales, Tajik fairy tales, Nils’ travels with the wild geese,[18] Andersen. When we read The Little Mermaid, it made Pavlik weep. I remembered it and broke down sobbing: “Here’s your “Tinderbox” and here’s your “Thumbelina,” and here’s your “Tin Soldier”!

  The bricks became too hot to touch; the sharp smell of burning mushrooms filled the air. I had forgotten about them. I had set four strings of my choicest porcini on the stove to dry and now I had set them on fire. But I noticed them in time, swept them into a dustpan and tossed them into the stove. The chimneys above my cabin spewed thick clouds of smoke. The Varyag’s[19] stacks must have smoked the same way as it sped to its lethal rendezvous. The rain had stopped, the wind had parted the clouds. Stars dotted the skies. I opened the door to help vent the fumes from the mushrooms and stepped out onto the porch. A full moon hung over the near woods. Its light had thinned the darkness, casting everything around in an otherworldly color, seductive and ruthless. The wind had died down; the trees stood tense as bow-strings.

  With a gulp of fresh air, I went back to my crematorium: the draft in the stoves was excellent, the chimneys hummed evenly, great words and crumbling letters silently grated against the brick and disappeared like something that cannot be returned, restored, rewritten. A word taken apart stops meaning anything; it turns into nothing. Like a body that after being dissected becomes less than a corpse.

  I sat down on a stool in front of the Russian stove, rested on the poker and closed my eyes, but did not fall asleep. Rather, I entered a strange form of consciousness where dreams are not quite dreams, and yet reality is also not real: my thoughts became images and flickered in front of my eyes like movie stills, cut and pasted out of order. When I came back to my senses, night was in retreat, and Leyda’s rooster was about to crow. Ashes still breathed in the stoves; their charred, deformed pages swayed, having died a martyr’s death. It really is true, as Sirojiddin once told me, in the words of one of his sages, that one learns more in a single sleepless night than in a whole year of sleep!

  I got up from the stool, lowered my face into the water bucket and felt my skin cool. I put on man’s pants and boots, threw a padded coat over my shoulders, tossed into my knapsack potatoes, onions, a loaf of bread, matches and salt, a handful of candy, camping pot and a pocket knife. I stepped out onto the porch. Quietly, I crossed the clearing; Karay, Leyda’s husky, came out of his doghouse, shook off his sleep, rocked a little on his front legs, and yawned, but didn’t bark—we were friends. I walked across the empty, long-untilled field toward the woods. Where, why—those things did not matter. It was necessary to walk, and so I walked, put one foot in front of the other. Soon I was in the forest, reached the first and the second clearing, where I used to pick mushrooms, crossed the creek, thick with wild roses and odoriferous currant bushes. Taking the creek as my reference point, I set a course for its source. The ground rose. My feet sank in soft, wet moss; silently as a fish moving through water, I was putting distance between myself an Karmanovo, which had sheltered me and where I had my official propiska.[20]

  . 10 .

  For a whole day, I walked. The creek soon ended—it was fed from a long marsh. I walked around it and intuitively turned right. Whenever I wanted, I stopped, found a dry spot, usually under a large fir tree with widely spread branches, and sat down to rest. Several times broods of partridge exploded from branches ahead of me. They made so much noise with their wings it was as if they were not small birds but flying elephants. Yet when a grouse suddenly lifted out of a blueberry patch off to my side, the racket made me fall to the ground in fright. He flew across the undergrowth, a shadow, and I calmed down and even laughed—he w
as a big bastard and I probably scared him more than he did me. If birds can give one chills, what about animals? I felt unsettled, but I was too ashamed to turn back; I couldn’t imagine explaining my foolish actions to Aunt Leyda. I sighed heavily and set out again. At times, it was almost fun, as if I were just out on a stroll and not running away from point A to some point whose name I didn’t even know.

  The heavy rain that had been pouring down for days had stopped the night before; the weather front moved on, and the sun came out. As I crossed cut timber clearings I was almost hot. Then I would take off my padded coat and carry it in my hands. The forest around me was mixed—birch and aspen—the pine and fir trees were systematically and greedily destroyed by just about everyone, from peasants, the kolkhoz and the forest farm, to the main predators: roaming bandit brigades. These plundered wherever they wished, breaking a path with heavy machinery, cutting a temporary road, and then carving out the most valuable hundred-year-old mast trees, lopping off six-meter trunks at the root, sometimes even getting two standard lengths, then leaving the rest—branches, tops—strewn about, not even bothering to bulldoze it into piles. Of course, no one planted saplings on these plundered patches, and they became impassable dead spots. The criminals gave a cut to the authorities, so there was little chance of stopping their marauding. Kupryan, the main forest-killer, was said to be an aide to an important elected official; policemen on the road nearly bowed at the sight of his maroon Pajero SUV. In this plundered land, where factories and plants closed, farmland shrank, and tractors vanished without a trace, sawmills sprang up like mushrooms after a rain. The forest was the only thing that could provide some sustenance, and so it did. Monstrous trucks ground up already broken roads; day and night they pulled lumber to the asphalt, where it was loaded on second-hand Finnish “fiskras” and rushed to the St. Petersburg port to be shipped abroad. And yet the forest fed only a few; most people got by on potatoes washed down with hydrolytic alcohol[21] and, having forgotten how to work, stole whatever wasn’t locked up.