Fish- a History of One Migration

by Peter Aleshkovsky

  “Why should I? Let them pout at me, it’s easier not to notice. It’s all nothing.”

  I did not hold a grudge against Valerka; he couldn’t have made it here even if he had wanted to: the five miles of the road from Konakovo were a single snowdrift with the tracks of Manizer’s sleigh barely visible on top of it. Yuku told me that, traditionally, Estonians celebrated Christmas, not the New Year, so I prepared to give him a present on the night of January 6.[28] I was so delighted when he returned from Konakovo on December 30 and put a bottle of champagne on the table.

  “It’s Uus Aastat—New Year’s Eve—tomorrow, come on, Vera—whip up your dough, we’ll celebrate!”

  I baked pies, made cutlets, and put head cheese to set in the cold mudroom. I had noticed that Yuku was up to something; for the last week, he camped out in the shed where he kept his tools, fussed with the soldering iron, and answered my questions evasively. For my part, I was secretly knitting him a high-necked sweater. On the front, I embroidered “Nurmekundia” in white wool, and on the back I put “Yuku Manizer” and a big number 1, like on a soccer-player’s jersey. We sat down to the table at eleven, drank a shot of homemade cranberry-infused vodka and ate a bit to say goodbye to the old year. At about ten to midnight, Yuku stepped out into the mudroom. At midnight sharp, there were three loud knocks on the door.

  “Who is it? Come in!” I said ceremoniously.

  Yuku came in wearing Jõuluvana’s costume: ballooning red pants and a red cloak, he didn’t have it in him to make a tailored coat. He had fashioned the outfit from an old Soviet flag, and the cloak still showed a faded hammer and sickle painted in bronze.

  “Head uut aastat !” the Kukovkino Jõuluvana greeted me.

  “Head uut aastat ! Happy New Year!”

  I hugged him and kissed him, thrice.

  Yuku pulled a small birchbark box from his pocket. It held a golden cross on a leather string.

  “Aitah , Yuku!”

  “You’re welcome, Vera!”

  I still wear this Lutheran cross—Yuku had one exactly like it, only copper. He used his cross to take the measurements, carved a mold out of stone, melted an old coin with his soldering iron and cast my present for the holiday. The old labor camp smithy made a wonderful little cross, giving it such a high polish that it shines to this day. The old man had found the coin when he cleared the remains of his parents’ burned out home. The builders, by ancient custom, had placed a gold piece, for luck, under the front right corner of the foundation.[29]

  I thanked the old man, but kept my present for later. I laid out the sweater next to his bed on Christmas night, and when he woke up, he appreciated the answer I had given him: traditionally, Estonians celebrated Christmas, not New Year. So I held no grudge against my son; I’d be ashamed to admit it, but I was happy to spend that night with Yuku Manizer in Kukovkino.

  Now I resolved to trust Valerka, to wait for a month, to help him plant the potatoes, and maybe then… I did not make any plans, just prayed silently while superstitiously holding on to my little golden cross.

  On the first of May, Andrei Mamoshkin drove in, with three other hunters in his large American SUV. The hunters came after wood-grouse; there were four different mating grounds around Karmanovo. They put up two blinds in the fields: two men hunted heath-cock and the third went after grouse, under Andrei’s guidance. The following day, they switched sites; everyone was happy, everyone had his kill. They slept during the day; at night they’d go down to the stream, to shoot woodcock in the clearings. Andrei would not let them hunt hazel-hen in the spring: hazel-hens mate for life, if you kill a male, the female won’t choose another. I liked this thoughtful approach, and Leyda simply adored Andrei. He had been coming there for years and had been friends with her Peter, who respected real hunters but never took a rifle into the woods himself, as he pitied all living things.

  The main hunter, an entrepreneur, stayed with Andrei at Leyda’s and I took the other two. They paid five dollars a night for the room, fed me out of their provisions and entertained me as best they could. With them in Karmanovo, we had fun—roasted shashlyk, sang songs, and drank very little vodka: being real hunters, they saved their energy for the hunt.

  Igor and Ilya, my guests, were surgeons from Moscow. Once they learned that I was a nurse and heard my saga, they wanted to take me back to the city: there were plenty of vacant nursing positions, since they paid very little, like everywhere. The men worked in the Bakulev Institute. I plucked up my courage, and asked, “Do you know Vitya Bzhania?”

  “Vitka? How do you know him?”

  It turned out their units were next to each other. How could I not believe in miracles after this? We decided that I would write a letter to Viktor and they would give it to him as soon as they got back. Together, they would figure something out for me.

  When it came time to part, we hugged as if we were family. Igor said, “Set your clocks: you won’t spend more than a month here. We’ll get you out!”

  They left on the tenth, right after Victory Day. On the holiday, we planted potatoes—Valerka, Petrovich, and I; Lyonka Kustov from Zhukovo helped with a tractor this time. I walked around Karmanovo counting the days, dreaming, dreading. To work in a hospital in the capital, with modern drugs and state-of-the-art machines… and yet I knew I could do it, I was prepared to learn and work like a horse.

  Ten days after the hunters left, in the evening, a humble Zhiguli drove up to my house.

  four

  . 1 .

  Viktor arrived with his wife, Lyuda, a radiologist who also worked at the Bakulev Institute; they had met there. Their four-year-old daughter Natasha stayed behind in Moscow, entrusted to Lyuda’s mother. It looked like Vitya had found his happiness: Lyuda loved him and he was irreplaceable at work (as I later found out, it was not at all easy for them to take three days to go to Volochok). His wife was the right woman for him: easy-going, kind, quick to defer to him in public. The way she readily went to make the beds, swept their room and joined me in making dinner convinced me that Viktor was in good hands. Bzhania sat in the kitchen, listening to our chit-chat, and gradually opened up: we reminisced about Dushanbe and our Head Doctor Karimov. Some young, worthless surgeon did push him into retirement after all, and Karimov and his wife lived in poverty, although so did just about everyone in Tajikistan. Karimov and Viktor maintained correspondence for many years, but about six months ago the letters had stopped. We decided to write to the old man together. I, who could barely be made to write even to Kharabali, agreed surprisingly quickly.

  Vitya chastised me for not writing to him from Dushanbe; he felt confident in his position now, and, had I written to him before we left Tajikistan, I believe he would have moved mountains to get us all to Moscow. He acted as if he had never said anything about his love for me, as if he had never been the one trying to conceal his anxiety in a café, when his fingers mechanically shredded a paper napkin. There could be no doubt: Viktor loved his wife. My soul rejoiced for him. Viktor Bzhania was solid as a rock.

  We finished dinner. At tea, I finally asked the question that had been nagging at me all this time: where and what would I do for a living? The answer was not what I had expected:

  “A nursing job, plus side jobs—doing injections, massages, and, if you take a special course, other home-care procedures. You can live on that, but it won’t solve your housing problem. Housing in Moscow is expensive. The guys—the ones who came here to hunt—and I have found a different option, at least to start. There is an old lady, a stroke patient, in a difficult condition, and her son is willing to pay five hundred dollars a month for live-in care, plus five hundred more for food and drugs.”

  “Many nurses now leave to take up private home care. There’s a colossal difference in pay,” Lyuda added.

  I couldn’t have imagined this kind of money in my wildest dreams. As far as the work was concerned, beggars can’t be choosers—it was more important to get a start in the city.

  After dinner, I pu
t them to bed and began to collect my things until I suddenly realized that I could not possibly appear in Moscow dressed in the clothes I wore in Karmanovo. A few of Ilsa’s shirts, a sweater, the socks I knitted at Yuku’s, three skirts I had brought all the way from Dushanbe, and a dress. I didn’t have a fur coat or even a lined raincoat; I would have to buy everything in Moscow.

  The next evening, I said my goodbyes to Leyda. We ate pies, Viktor roasted shashlyk. Leyda was happy for me and chatted as gaily as always; I just sat there quietly looking at her, as if trying to fix her in my memory. Early in the morning, while the Bzhanias were still asleep, I visited “the chickens,” “the doggy” and “the little cow,” saying goodbye to them all, and then went to see Mustang. I stood, pressed against him, and watched his mighty pulse throb in the vein of his neck, breathed in his spicy smell. Fear came out of nowhere. Frost covered my cheeks, my face instantly lost all feeling, and if it weren’t for good old Mustang, who warmed me with the heat of his body, I wouldn’t have held it together. A tear rolled down the horse’s eye—I scooped it into my palm and rubbed it on my face, like night cream. Mustang nodded his head in affirmation, as if putting an unbreakable seal on our pact of friendship.

  The following day Viktor and Lyuda asked me to take them to Kukovkino. I had told them so much about Yuku’s homestead the night before that they wanted to see it with their own eyes. We drove their Zhiguli as far as Konakovo and parked the car at the unfinished bridge. In Soviet times, this was supposed to be part of a road to the neighboring Kuvshinovsky district, to a military testing track, but the construction had been abandoned. Either the money ran out, or the track was no longer needed, or the idea had proved unpromising. The few residents of Konakovo, when they spotted us, turned away and hurried into their homes. Since I had hardly spoken a word to anyone here, I could not possibly care less about their envy and hostility. We forded a shallow little river and walked the three and a half miles through the woods and across the fields dotted with low bushes and volunteer saplings.

  The picture we saw next remains branded on my mind. Not even a month had passed since Yuku Manizer’s death; I, the lawful heir, had not yet left for Moscow, yet the hungry scavengers from Konakovo had already had their fun with Kukovkino. Everyone knew that I had no official papers for the homestead, which meant that the police could be ignored.

  The house still stood, but someone had knocked the door off its hinges and threw it into the grass. They ripped out and carried off the window panes, demolished the stove. The brick that could still be used was stacked into several piles, ready for evacuation. Yuku’s bed was gone; the couch I used to sleep on had been broken. They had already yanked out several floor boards, pulled them through the window and stacked them neatly into a pile outside. Strewn everywhere were broken plates, dirty glasses, cigarette butts and empty bottles—left from the demonic wake the locals gave to Nurmekundia’s last Estonian.

  The workshop had been pillaged even worse than the house: all the shelves were collapsed, and the tools were gone; a horde of wild Mongols, had it run over this place, would not have produced such thorough devastation. All that was left was a house ripped wide open and gutted; the wind whirled freely over the trampled orchard, through the defenseless remains of the home. With Yuku, even the wind here had howled in a peculiar way, singing on stormy nights—wild and fierce songs in endless blizzards that somehow seemed organic to the place. Manizer’s fortress received their assault gamely, playfully, with a vigor appropriate for a duel with an enemy of equal spirit. Now the wind slipped mutely through the empty eye-sockets of the windows. It cared more for the grass and the overgrown weeds, stroking them far more gently than the abandoned and defiled home, a home that had been tormented expertly and ingeniously, left with a broken spine and cracked ribs. Only partizans are this good at crippling someone, and they only do it to one of their own, someone who had been caught or suspected of treason. The sound that used to inhabit this place had already left; the earth prepared to swallow the ruins. A cloud floating in the sky looked like a monstrous fledgling of an unknown bird, its bottomless maw open wide, showing the abyss of its gut.

  Grief and destruction penetrated me. My stomach hurt, my pulse slowed, I leaned against the single standing pillar of the bell tower and watched Viktor and Lyuda wander around the homestead. Lyuda found an old copper ladle.

  “Vera, take it with you, as a memory.”

  I shook my head and gestured that she could keep it for herself. Viktor appeared from around the corner of the house, carrying a large, German-made padlock. They could not break it and tore it out together with its brackets.

  “My god, what bastards, they threw it into the weeds.”

  I reached into a crack between the logs of the workshop and felt the key. Viktor opened the lock and freed it from the mangled, busted piece of iron that a pickaxe had left.

  “It works! It must be a hundred years old, and it works!”

  “Everything used to work here. Let’s go back.”

  They nodded in agreement, and we walked away. At first we were silent, but soon Viktor’s anger spilled out and he began upbraiding the locals.

  I cut him short, “They have nothing, you can’t blame them.”

  He had nothing with which to counter that, and proposed that the past had to leave, to die, in order for a new life to be born. It was unclear, however, what kind of new life it was and how it would manage to be born here.

  On our way back, we stopped at Pochinok cemetery; they hadn’t stolen the bell yet. We stood at the grave. Yuku knew how to go on living in unlivable conditions, so I would survive, too. You can always make money, just don’t be lazy, as he liked to say.

  On Viktor’s last day off, after a hurried goodbye to Leyda, we left for Volochok. At the cemetery, at Pavlik’s grave, Viktor and Lyuda left me alone. I tidied up, fixed the sagging mound of dirt and packed it tighter by patting it all around with a spade I borrowed at the office. I weeded the plot. Then I ordered a flower bed and a simple monument with an inscription. Endless rows of graves, open holes even along the paths—the cemetery could no longer hold the new dead—random trees struggling to survive on sandy soil, plastic flowers, and bronze cemetery paint. I did everything that was supposed to be done and knew that I could not come here again.

  Valerka and his wife gave us a warm welcome. While Sveta made dinner, Valerka gave Viktor’s Zhiguli a thorough inspection in his garage: Vitya complained that he never had time to service the car in Moscow.

  “Bring it here—I’ll fix it for the price of the parts!”

  Valerka had always respected Uncle Vitya, and now it was Viktor’s turn to respect my son. In the year that I had been gone from Volochok, Valerka had acquired a tire business, took out a loan, and, while working to pay it off, dreamed of adding a facility with lifts to his small metal building. And then he did just that: Tajik’s Service Garage with three bays. He’s in debt up to his ears, they never have any money, but he looks confidently into the future. He is the pioneer who cleared the virgin land, raised his barns and will be fine as long as collectivization doesn’t strike again.

  . 2 .

  I’m not new to urban living, but it turned out I had good reason to feel apprehensive: Moscow is not Dushanbe; everything here is different. In Dushanbe, I avoided people on purpose, I didn’t need them—I hardly had time for my own family. But at the same time I knew more people than just my immediate neighbors; the whole apartment building was as open as an unfolded palm: there were the Politonovs, the Babichi, the Khazins, the Krimcheyevs, the Gafurovs, the Rovinskys, the Asafovs, the Vzvodovs, the Katzes, the Arkhangelskys, and the Karins. They belonged to the hospital, the police, the school and the meat packing plant. Only in Moscow did I realize that in Tajikistan I lived in the thick of a real crowd, all of us melding together in the giant Dushanbe pot. It’s just like cooking our famous plov. Every one of its big and small ingredients has its proper role and place, whether it’s a grain of salt, a crack of fiery
pepper, a dried tomato, a slice of carrot, a cumin seed, a dried barberry, a choice cut of lamb from the shank or the shoulder, a translucent piece of sheep fat, a sweet, round-bellied head of garlic or the thrice-washed rice, hard as scatter-shot, that is the foundation of this celebratory dish that brought all the peoples of our southern city to one table. Without well-chosen rice, plov is nothing; all its precious elements become no more than sides for the fried meat, and the whole dish has none of its exulted culinary meaning.

  The Moscow stew is not cooked like this at all; there is no single, named main dish. Instead of the lively bazaar, stores and supermarkets rule the kitchen. Bread alone comes in so many varieties, you can’t even remember them all: spongy white, rye, poppy-seed halas , mantakash,[1] sandwich baguette, Capital baguette, hulled-wheat, mustard-seed, French baguette, matzo, croissants, Armenian lavosh in sheets, Georgian lavosh in scoops, tortillas, Tajik and Uzbek flatbreads (not nearly as tasty, of course, as those made in a Panjakent tandyr), Finnish bagel chips, diet waffles and German bran loaves, Borodino[2] with caraway seeds, tofu bread, Viennese buns, rolls, and pretzels. Perhaps the only kind of bread that is commonly available and equally loved by all is the liquid variety: vodka. It is always referred to diminutively, as “vodochka.” It unites, cheers up, heals, accompanies weddings and funerals, fills life’s empty pauses.

  The capital shuffles people like cards in a deck dealing each one to a new place—Zhulebino, Mitino, Sviblovo, Strogino, Kapotnya, Varshavka, to the Red Dawns street, Kuusinen Avenue, Lower Zhuravlev Alley, to Bolotnikovskaya, to Liza Chaikina Street, to Carriage Yard, to Academician Lifshits, or Standard Street. The newcomers try to stack together into their own decks and line up as best they can, from two to ace, in begged-for, paid-for, fought-for or just shamelessly stolen slots. Each to its own suit, but there are only four suits in a deck and as many decks as stars in the sky. Some disappear, some ignite: love, death, betrayal, law, chance, luck and sloth… An invisible hand keeps shuffling the deck, keeps tossing them out, one by one, to fly, like the Milky Way, ahead into the unknown, where each is doomed to live his allotted time. This constant moving of people from here to there creates a frantic energy in Moscow’s guts: theirs is the heat that melts any snow that comes to the city, theirs is the strange, insufferable microclimate in which winters are not cold and summers are not warm, and only springs and autumns retain a degree of normalcy.