No, even now the boss showed no displeasure. Why, he seems . . . like an understanding sort of person. So Ivan Ivanych came out with another example, having no shortage of them.
“In the hamlet of Kata—Kata stream is right opposite Iodorma, where we are headed—one old lady never did let them tear down her cottage: ‘Kill me here, on the spot.’ They left her alone . . . And so she catches burbot in wintertime, and piles it up frozen in the barn. They bring her bread by helicopter, in exchange for the fish.”
He now caught himself, for he had gotten carried away, and laid out well too much.
“Be so kind as to pardon me, but the imidzh of a mayor does not permit me to be silent, either ...”
In reality, the visiting boss was no minister, but only a deputy—the deputy, however, of a very highly placed minister indeed. He came here to sort out the privatization of the huge, clumsy local timber processing complex, which needed a rapid and sure exit out of the hands of the state—-rapid, because privatization had not only many friends but likewise many opponents. A monster like that no one could buy, and no one would want it all anyway, so the solution was to break it up into forty-two enterprises. That had all been passed during the past few months, and the deputy minister came just to close the deal as soon as possible. This he had done successfully, and knew he would make his superiors happy. Now, these past few days, he kept being asked to take a ride down the Angara, so why not indeed? And today, in his last day here, they took off in the cutter. But who was this woman? Who got her in here? She is so hot and bothered about all this! Must be she’s not married. He hadn’t ever heard of this problem of a downstream power station, so now what? . . .
The cutter went onward, but they had not reached Iodorma as yet, and Scepura, in full frontal assault, persuaded the company to sit down at the table. He bustled about warmly, all cheerful, as if on a big holiday, even though the day was as common as they come. Shall we start off with some champagne?
Corks popped from two bottles, glasses filled with foam. Valentina Filippovna wouldn’t even take a seat at the table, somberly refusing for a long time.
The whole of Ust-Ilim had known Scepura—the round-headed little fat man, energetic despite being on the wrong side of fifty, and quick with words—even as far back as twenty years ago, when he was an electrician hanging on ropes above the Angara, erecting the dam. Here they assembled the best from the whole Union, and he made the cut. After that, he took law classes by correspondence course, then was promoted to the prosecutor’s office, then returned to the pulp plant. Here he managed worker life, then made personnel decisions, then headed up the administration, signing permission slips for people to return back to Russia, and was even nominated for deputy director of the whole timber processing complex. When everything turned upside down, he became merely a hotel manager, and here he was: catering, pouring champagne, entertaining, his assistants at the ready.
Before the good cheer settled in, the taciturn representative of the governor had occasion to tell the visiting leadership of a few more gloomy items, leaving it to the guests how to report the issue further. So many power stations were built in Irkutsk province that up to fifty percent of the electric capacity has stood idle for the past three years. It was planned that aluminum smelters would consume it, but those wouldn’t be built even in another twenty years. So if one were to complete the Boguchan project now, where would one send the electricity? China seems like the only option, but a high-voltage line halfway across the Siberian taiga is a more expensive proposition than completing Boguchan station itself.
The minister was amazed. It was all hard to believe, yet a real government official was reporting it. The situation was only getting more complex.
“Yes, to be sure,” he resonated in a weighty bass. “These solid arguments need to be taken into account.”
Then the governor’s representative added that the Boguchan completion was being egged on by the Krasnoyarsk authorities. They settled over twenty-five thousand people down by Boguchan to build the dam, and now they have no jobs.
The minister raised his brow. “Egged on” sure did not sound like a government term, but then, but then even this breaks through sometimes, it’s only human . . .
The promontories receded, first on the right bank, now also on the left.
What breadth!
The men had started on the vodka.
The minister’s cheeks acquired a bit of rose.
He glanced toward the windows on the right, glanced toward the left, then pronounced thoughtfully: “Didn’t Pushkin make some mention of the Angara?”
But no one offered to take him up on it.
In the meantime, the cutter approached the left bank.
The whole company left the table and went ashore to stretch their legs.
The shy captain descended from the cabin, too. And the mechanic popped out of the motor room. Scepura’s assistants, in their white aprons, scurried and scurried to set up right onshore, next to the water, to prepare a barbecue and soup from the fish they had brought.
In single file, they ascended the pockmarked bankside hillock.
. . . There, a village street ran parallel to the river with houses on one side, and deep behind it, another—much shorter—set of houses. The street was comprised of something like a road—but no wagon could make it through here; its axle would break in the ruts and potholes formed of dried mud.
Besides, it wouldn’t have anywhere to go, in any direction.
Nor was it much of a place to walk or stretch: You could break your legs here.
With the motor off, silence stood over the entire Angara, on both shores, and for several miles beyond. Only the ring of mosquitoes by one’s ears.
The houses, still undestroyed, stood in a row. One of them even had freshly painted light blue decorations at the roof-end. In front of it, the sides of a turned-over flat-bottom boat were painted with the same blue color. Along the row of cottages, not a single door, not a single window was open. On one house was a sign: “Everyday wares.” The bolt on the door had rusted, but not yet the sign.
No one. No chickens to peck at the ground here, no cat to sneak by. Only the grass grows on, oblivious to tragedy. And the peaceful green treetops in the front yards.
Life had been here . . .
Then again, here was a tall pile of freshly cut thick branches, just the size for splitting into firewood. So people live here even now.
It grew warm; the day had heated up.
Suddenly a cuckoo. From across the Angara—how far that must be, yet how audible.
That is breadth. That is stillness . . .
All stood around in silence.
Then Zdeshnev called out lustily: “Za-bo-lot-nov! Niki-forych! Zabolotnov!”
Meanwhile, he explained to the leadership. This was the hamlet of Iodorma, twenty-two households in all. It had a clinic once, and a school through fourth grade, but now it has all been cleared out for flooding. Here, too, Irkutsk province ends, and Krasnoyarsk lies beyond. But Zabolotnov, sixty-three himself and with an old sick wife, wouldn’t go anywhere. “Here lie my father and mother,” he said, “and I am not leaving.” Well, they let him alone for now. And so, in the new times, with collective farms disbanded, he has taken up farming on his own. What you see on the other side of the Angara isn’t the bank, but two islands, with a sleeve of the river behind them. On the rocky island he keeps his calves, and on the fertile grassy one—the dairy cows. The milk is transported downriver by cutter. His wife cannot move about anymore, so he rows across the river at dawn and does the milking himself. He has plowed and planted there, too.
“He does all this alone?”
“No, he has his two sons with him. One of them painted these roof decorations. Their wives live in New Keul. They will be coming in summertime, bringing his seven grandchildren. Why, there he is.”
He was walking from somewhere, a long rein hanging in his hand. Wearing sackcloth pants, a cheap color-drawn jersey and a bl
ack short-wool cap, he made a so-so impression, a nondescript, ragged little man, yet with a firm step. He looked over the whole scene from afar and understood it was the leadership.
He approached.
“Good health and greetings!”—his voice was not that of an old man.
No beard, and keeps up with his shaving. Face and neck look brown, with a wart on his cheek.
Only Ivan Ivanych extended him a hand, and shook it.
“So tell us, Nikiforych, how many head do you have?”
“Oh, used to raise three hundred. Nowadays, if we’re not counting the leased-out cattle, seventy are left. And a score of horses.”
Hard to believe he could run all this.
“So how do you manage?”
“Oh, I’d be managing a lot better if not for the scoundrel speculators. The regional co-ops fell apart. The meat plant cheats you. The milk plant cheats you. An honest buyer is what we need, but where do you get one? We can’t get to market without our own engines, either.”
Ivan Ivanych put his questions to Nikiforych, but set his eyes on the visiting boss.
“So how do you get your bread?”
“I can get up to twelve hundred pounds off an acre sometimes, after it’s been fallow; that’s enough for us. We grind it, and we bake it.”
“Where are your sons?”
“Over on those islands.”
“Two sons?”
“There were three. One drowned. Age sixteen,” he sighed. “His boat capsized,” he sighed again. His eyes, not wide to begin with, compressed further. “God gave him. God took him away.”
He fell silent—and everyone stayed silent out of politeness.
Nikiforych, as if none of these arrivals was present, as if not seeing anything, faded out and quietly concluded, persuading himself: “I do love God.”
Everyone became uncomfortable and awkward. They stayed silent again.
And now hobbled over his old lady, in a dark skirt and warm, brown knit sweater. She was carrying a clay pitcher, careful not to trip, and two mugs. These she placed on a wide log.
She bowed: “Fresh hot milk. Care to sample it?”
Valentina Filippovna: “Do I ever, missus. Thank you.”
She poured, and began to drink, even closing her eyes: “Can’t get this in the city anymore.”
No one seemed to be drawn to the second cup, and so the quiet captain walked up from the back row, with an innocent look.
Yet he exchanged a conspiratorial glance with Valentina Filippovna.
He poured in silence, and began to drink.
Ivan Ivanych, meanwhile, had found a way to continue: “So, say, Vasily Nikiforych: How do you view the new life?”
Eyes alive again, he answered: “Seems it’s taken a turn for the better. They never dispossessed my father, but they sent him, age seventy-five, to work under some kid. ‘I am a landholder,’ my father would say, ‘and they stuck me under that pipsqueak.’ He died of the bitterness.”
Even while answering, Zabolotnov realized that these guests had not come to listen to his stories. In that case, it was obvious what brought them. So he continued: “Such a merry folk we had here, a working village. Fields were sown on every bank. A place full of life. Rye stood two meters tall. Every island in green. Hayfields. Cropfields. Potatoes sprout here—thirteen-fold. Now, all have quit. Hopeless. You break your back not knowing what comes next.”
This boss seemed to be a listening one; he understands it all, nodding his head. What’s not to understand here? Such a land of plenty—and to abandon it, put it under shallow standing water .. . But he answered cautiously:
“The government in Moscow has its reasons. One can’t see them from here.”
Zabolotnov didn’t lose his nerve.
“So what about Moscow? I’ve been to Moscow once. The sky there is low. And people walk about in a herd.”
Thus they stood, in a cluster on a random slope, some higher, some lower, beside two pits. The odor of smoke beckoned from the bank below, where the barbecue and fish soup were coming along well.
Zabolotnov finished his thought: “What course has been set—for river or for man—is the one to follow.”
The untidy mechanic reared up from behind, walked around the others and fired off, looking straight at the minister: “And do we have any say?”
The boss readily turned with a receptive look: “Of course you have a say. We have democracy now. That is what campaigns are for.”
It seemed the mosquitoes avoided the cast-iron figure of the mechanic—was it because of his smell? But then they flew past Nikiforych, too, like one of their own.
“And when there’s no campaign? When a bear tears a cow to death, he doesn’t just eat it; he lets it lie around, so it has an aroma.”
The minister didn’t understand, and crossed his brows: “What question are you talking about?”
The unkempt portly mechanic stared familiarly at the equally portly, albeit taller and carefully coiffed, minister.
“We have questions piled up taller than that rye, which used to grow here. You want a question: How about the timber complex, why did they rip it into forty enterprises? Now they have all stopped. For every man there are three foremen, and all are out of work. Meanwhile, those who broke it up lined their pockets with millions. And not in rubles, either. They steal in a big way, not like us—and they know how to hide it and not get caught.”
The modest captain looked at the mechanic with reproach, but the latter didn’t see him. He had been afraid of his getting wound up and rabid, ruining everything. All was coming together, and the boss seemed amenable: So speak gently to him. And not about everything all in one go.
The minister’s lips grew willfully curled. And for the first time he said in a scolding voice: “Without direct proof, you have no right to make such statements.”
But Khripkin was not a bit fazed: “Make statements or not, no one will hear us. Now then—all that is left of the Angara is this middle stretch, so let it go to rot, too? Whoever had a brain could produce electricity just by turning wheels in the current, without any dams. Instead they put up a whole series of them. And now we’re going to finish it off? The water is not even warm enough for the fish any longer.”
Valentina Filippovna fixed her gaze on the minister. No, he wouldn’t just ignore this, would he? Hadn’t it touched him? How could he not be inspired by the doomed breadth of this proud river, standing here over this reach? He must be feeling something.
He was sure to be feeling the bites of the mosquitoes, because he kept slapping at them, but even then his arm didn’t twitch nervously, as if sure that it would reach and crush its target.
As for this greasy troublemaker, you cannot explain everything to him—and why talk specifically to him, anyway?
The mosquitoes were getting the better of the others too, just when the ever-present Scepura quietly reported that the food was ready. But—with the mosquitoes, and not to invite extra people—why not repair to the salon?
They descended to the bank.
Nikiforych stood as he had stood, legs apart. No motion. No surprise.
Zdeshnev found a moment to say to him: “Maybe, old man, we will get somewhere with this.”
The mechanic walked alongside the captain. They had not been invited to the salon.
“This tourist? No-o, Anatol Dmitrich, you need to know their type. They are not going to reverse anything, no matter what.”
But the melancholy captain kept hope.
Valentina Filippovna walked uncertainly, head bent down, trying also not to trip on her heels.
Down by the bank the boss caught up with her and said quietly, with sympathy: “Don’t be downcast. All your arguments have been noted. They are going to be taken into account.”
She threw up her head toward the minister joyfully: “Thank you!”
The cutter reversed course and started upstream.
The bluffs along the bank reappeared in the distance, then drew closer.
Later, a crag passed by.
Back in the salon, the men boisterously savored their fish soup, with vodka.
Scepura held court the loudest: “Oh yes, I was, you might say, a manager with a future. But now, they broke me under.”
Who doesn’t let loose a bit with vodka, served with soup and a barbecue? The minister’s face grew softer, redder, even more youthful. In a high position, you simply have to comport yourself with dignity. But here, we’re all people; and there is a hot meal, too.
Apricot Jam: And Other Stories Page 38