Calligraphy Lesson

by Mikhail Shishkin

  “I came out of the courthouse and felt like I was flying! I swore I would never get married again. I kept my word for five years and then Alinka came along! I love my Alinka like a madman! How could you not love a woman like that? Have you seen her body? Tell me, have you?”

  He had a revolting habit of slapping his companion first on the knee, then on the shoulder.

  “And I love my Yanochka so much that I’d do anything for her! You believe me?”

  I kept nodding my head the whole time. That was enough for him.

  We sat there for a long time. In any case, one bottle wasn’t enough and he started ordering himself more shots.

  Kovalev told me something muffled and unclear about his business, about the criminals he had to deal with, about how disgusting it was for him to take part in all this filth, and how he was doing it all only for Alina and Yanochka.

  “See,” he yelled so loudly that everyone in the bar kept turning around to look at us, “I don’t have anything on this earth as dear as Yanochka! I’d kill anybody for her sake! If he so much as touches her with one finger! I’ll do everything for her! I’ll become a murderer myself! I’ll stuff my face with shit! I’d do everything for her, for my bunny! Got it?”

  And then he whispered confidingly in my ear that he had ensured a future in Switzerland for his wife and daughter in case something were to happen to him.

  “You never know,” he explained. “Anything could happen. But I did everything so that Yanochka can grow up here. Among all the flowers and chocolates! I’ve fixed it so that everything’s provided!”

  When he was totally wasted, he started to confess that his enemies were out to kill him.

  “See, I’m already a marked man! And I know it! And I know who!”

  I think he didn’t really understand where he was and who he was talking to. He drunkenly growled, “But I won’t let them get me! I’ll hang onto life by my teeth, see? By my teeth!”

  We left the bar and went outside to get some fresh air down by the lake.

  We stood on the waterfront. We couldn’t see the mountains in the fog and it felt like we were standing at the edge of a great sea.

  Kovalev yelled out to the whole Lake Leman in the night.

  “You think they marked me alone for death? No, they marked all of us! All! And you too, understand? No, you don’t understand shit! You have to live now! Maybe this lake won’t even be here tomorrow!”

  I smirked. “So where’s it going to go?”

  He waved me away with his arm. “You didn’t fucking understand anything!” and trudged back to the hotel on unsteady legs.

  But I spent some more time walking along the waterfront. I felt like I was drunk, like I was talking to myself. The rare passersby turned to look at me. I told myself, “What if something happens to you? He ensured a life for his wife and child—you didn’t. You despise him, but how are you any better than he is?”

  And then I felt very sharply that the lake might not in fact exist tomorrow.

  The next morning, we said our goodbyes. Kovalev seemed crumpled. His eyes were red and glazed. He looked at me strangely, with a heavy and unpleasant stare.

  “Yesterday I might’ve blabbed a little too much—forget it! Got it?”

  I nodded.

  The tip I got from Kovalev was fit for a king. In a good movie I would leave his money on the table and proudly walk out. But we were not in a movie.

  Alina and I said goodbye almost like friends, and Yanochka just hung on to me and wouldn’t let go.

  We didn’t see each other after that.

  On her birthday, my wife unwrapped the boxes of presents. I badly needed to hear her laugh happily, to see how our son smiled from his bed.

  Having your loved ones near you is the only important thing, and everything else has little meaning.

  One morning a couple of months later I sat down at my computer and on the Yandex newsfeed I stumbled upon a familiar last name. Kovalev, one of the executives of a well-known bank, had been shot to death on the street right in front of his building. Just a typical news story for Moscow at that time.

  The killer had waited for the victim next to the entrance lobby and fired an extra shot at his head to be safe—the neighbors saw this from their windows.

  I don’t know what happened to his wife and daughter. So many years have passed. Yanochka has to be so grown up by now. I wonder what she’s like today. Who did she become? What happened to her life after the death of her father? She must have grown up somewhere around here, in Switzerland.

  What if you’re here now, reading this, Yanochka? The strangest things can happen in life…

  I wonder what you have left in your memory about our trip? Maybe everything’s been erased, besides the pony? How’s Pinga doing? He’s probably long gone by now.

  And what do you remember about your father?

  He would’ve explained to you himself about our Institute, and about everything else. And about why he was killed.

  Or maybe he wouldn’t have.

  You know, the only important thing is that there was a person for whom you were the most important being in world. Everything else is inconsequential.

  Tell me, do you remember that inkblot?

  Translated by Mariya Bashkatova

  Of Saucepans and Star-Showers

  All winter long I fantasized about spending the summer in Valais and roaming the mountains every day. I pored over the map and plotted out various routes. I’d be mountain-bound bright and early and homeward-bound come evening, tired and happy after a full day’s ramble.

  But then summer came, and I landed up in hospital with a bilateral hernia. There was no escaping postoperative complications, either—inflammation, high fever, antibiotics. As soon as my stitches were out I went off to Brentschen. But I had to kiss goodbye to all my wonderful plans. No hours-long hikes in the mountains. The first few days I ventured only as far as the table on the lawn in front of the chalet. I gazed at the Weisshorn and rejoiced at life.

  The mountains in this vicinity have inspired so many descriptions that they seemed like quotations emerging suddenly from beyond the clouds.

  I thought, too, about how, as the years go by, taking genuine delight in something becomes possible only when you can share that delight with somebody else. My son had promised to come and visit for a couple of days, and, watching the Rhône valley change colour in the twilight, almost as if it were pulling on a lilac stocking, I so wished I could enjoy this spectacle in his company rather than alone.

  But he could never seem to find the time to come.

  As I waited for his visit, I gradually started getting out and about, venturing further and further from the village each day, now taking the level road towards Jeizinen, now the mountain track in the direction of Leukerbad, and every time I imagined how we’d stroll around these parts together. I walked at a leisurely pace, often stopping. The stitches itched unbearably—I wanted to pick the plaster off and tear at the scars with my nails.

  Then my son emailed to let me know he was already on his way. His short message ended with the following riddle: imagine a saucepan big enough to hold anything you like—a chicken, a whole bull, a house, the entire Earth, even the entire universe. Yet what can such a saucepan never hold?

  Let me explain. The thing is, his mother and I divorced when he was seven. I became a pop-in father. And, later, a fly-in father. Things were probably better that way, for everybody and for him first and foremost. When his mother and I fought—undignifiedly, inanely, smashing crockery and slamming doors—he didn’t cry, just threw himself now at her, now at me, his hands clenched into little fists. Living like this was impossible. My leaving home did us—my son and myself—a world of good. Had we continued to live together, I would have only shouted at him: put your shoes away! Or, Do your homework! Or, Stop badgering me, can’t you see I’m writing! But because I’d left, our get-togethers throughout his childhood were about him and for him only, and I never told him to sto
p badgering me. Not a single time. It was worth leaving home for that alone.

  In periods away from one another we’d exchange letters. About anything and everything. I thought up various charades for him, crosswords, riddles. In each letter he’d pose tricky questions of his own, such as: If steam is lighter than water, then why is ice not heavier than water, but lighter?

  He’s all grown-up now, but he still rounded off that email with one of his riddles.

  He’s twenty-three now, an adult.

  By the age of sixteen I already knew everything about myself. I knew what I wanted from this life: to write books and to travel. And I knew that this was impossible. Because I was born into a country where whatever I might write would never be published, and beyond whose borders I would never be allowed to travel. This was a slave-country, and my slave-parents had birthed me into bondage. I knew exactly what I wanted, but it was all impossible—and I felt like a disconsolate wretch.

  My son, in contrast, has it all within his grasp: he’s already travelled half the world, he writes, makes films, gives concerts of his own music. But he still doesn’t truly know what he wants from this life. Which makes him feel wretched, too.

  Happiness, most likely, is conditional neither on liberty nor on its lack.

  There I was, strolling along the track in the direction of Leukerbad, the air laden with the sharp aromas of the warm sunlit forest, of pine resin and wild strawberries, and I pondered what it was that wouldn’t fit into a saucepan big enough to hold the Milky Way, all the galaxies, and the entire universe from beginning to end?

  And then I encountered my father. He was walking towards me, a rucksack on his shoulders, sturdy mountain boots on his feet, sun-bronzed, healthy, young. This was my father, but not as I knew him in his final years, a grey-haired, gnarly guzzler. This was the father I remembered from my childhood. I stopped, astounded, while he strode over to me, nimbly and vigorously, as does a weary traveler at the conclusion of a whole day spent on mountain paths, with the end of a long, splendid hike finally in sight.

  Drawing level with me, he smiled and said, “Grüezi!”

  “Grüezi!” I replied.

  And he strode on towards Brentschen.

  The fact that my father had spoken to me in Swiss German brought me back to reality. Needless to say, this young man, many years my junior, could not be my father, delivered to the flames of a Moscow crematorium in his sailor’s uniform seventeen years previously.

  During the war my father had been a submariner in the Baltic, and a photograph of his Shchuka hung on our wall. That Daddy had a submarine was a source of great pride for me as a child, and I’d constantly be making drawings of the photo in my school exercise book, carefully inscribing the number Shch-310 on the submarine’s nose. Every ninth of May—Victory Day—my father would get out his sailor’s uniform, which he was always having altered to accommodate his ever-growing belly, and pinned on all his badges. Later I grew up a bit and realized that in 1944 and 1945 my father helped sink German ships which were evacuating refugees from Riga and Tallinn. Hundreds if not thousands of people met their deaths in the waters of the Baltic—for which my father was decorated. I’ve long since ceased being proud of him, but nor do I condemn him. There was a war on, and my father won in that war. He was avenging his brother.

  My father went off to war as a volunteer at the age of eighteen—to avenge Boris, he would tell me. His older brother was killed in the summer of 1941.

  As a child I’d spend every summer at my grandmother’s, in the holiday village of Udelnaya near Moscow. A wall in her room was hung with old photos. One showed her sons: two teenage brothers sitting in embrace, head to head, floppy ears touching. Nowadays everyone always smiles on photos, but these two gazed seriously into the camera as if they had foreknowledge of everything that would soon happen to them. Another snapshot showed a youth in headphones: a ham-radio aficionado, Boris was training to be a telephonist.

  I remember Grandma unfolding the frayed old sheet of paper marked “NOTIFICATION,” kissing it and wiping away tears. He was twenty. Looking at my son today, I find this simply impossible to imagine. He’s just a boy still, no more than a kid. But back then, Boris seemed like a big grown-up hero to me.

  My grandfather was a peasant from down Tambov way. He was arrested in the midst of collectivization in 1930. Grandma would tell me about how, when requisitioners arrived at their yard to take away the cow, he became indignant at being left with nothing to feed two little children. He was arrested and sent off to Siberia to build the Baikal–Amur Mainline. He managed to pass on two short letters before vanishing. When Grandma was dying, aged ninety-five, her mind started going a bit, and everything that happened to her in 1930 began resurfacing. I’d phone her, I remember, and at first she’d speak to me as normal, but then she’d suddenly start asking, “Who is this? Misha? Who’s Misha?” And I’d tell her, “It’s me, Misha!” Her husband, my grandfather, was also called Mikhail, and she’d scream down the phone, “What are you doing? Leave him be! Don’t take him away! Let him go! Misha, where are they taking you?” She had been transported back to that year, and her husband was being arrested all over again. To avoid dying of hunger, Grandma had to flee the village with her two children, my father and Uncle Borya. She found a job as a cleaner near Moscow before spending the rest of her life as a kindergarten nurse.

  On every form he filled out, my father held back the fact that he was the son of an enemy of the people, and he lived his whole life in fear that this would come out into the open. It’s so important for a son to be proud of his father. But it was fear, not pride, that dwelt in my father’s soul.

  That frayed and yellowed document Grandma kissed and cried over wasn’t actually a notice of death, but a notification that Boris was missing in action somewhere in the Kandalaksha area. Such an odd word that it stuck in my memory. This is a small town in Karelia. Now I realize she was forever hoping that he hadn’t perished, that he was still alive somewhere. “Missing in action”—what does this mean, exactly? Could mean anything. And she thought, What if he’s still alive, what if we’re to meet again? And my father harboured the same hope about his brother.

  Grandma died in ’93, my father in ’95. And then, in 2010, something happened—the sort of thing that normally happens in films or books, not in real life. I was in Norway. A translation of my novel Maidenhair had been released there, and I was invited on a tour of speaking engagements across several cities. My Norwegian translator Marit Bjerkeng and I were strolling around Tromsø, a town in the country’s far north, and we popped into the small local museum. Two diminutive rooms housed an exhibition about Soviet POWs in Norway during the war years. The retreating Germans evacuated their camps from Finland to the Tromsø region. And all of a sudden I remembered that word from my childhood—Kandalaksha. That was where the notification had come from! Kandalaksha was somewhere in Karelia. And I thought, what if my Uncle Borya had been captured there, and was then transferred to Norway in 1944 together with the other prisoners? Marit helped me make an enquiry to the Norwegian archives. A copy of the registration card of POW Boris Shishkin was found immediately and sent to me by email.

  POW’S PERSONAL CARD. ISSUED AUGUST 29, 1941. STALAG 309. All their camps were called Stalag—a contraction of Stammlager. This number designated a network of camps in Finland. Every POW was given a metal ID tag, and his number was 1249. SHISHKIN, BORIS. BORN DECEMBER 30, 1920, IN THE VILLAGE OF NOVO-YURIEVO. NATIONALITY: RUSSIAN. PRIVATE, MILITARY UNIT NUMBER. CIVILIAN PROFESSION: RADIO-MECHANIC. TAKEN CAPTIVE AUGUST 27. IN GOOD HEALTH. FINGERPRINT. SURNAME AND ADDRESS OF KIN IN POW’S COUNTRY OF ORIGIN. MOTHER: LYUBOV SHISHKINA—my grandmother.

  Reading this, I came into a sharp realization of what it was to be resurrected from the dead. This person, my twenty-year-old uncle, now thirty-three years my junior—this boy had suddenly come back to life! And it hurt so much that neither my grandmother nor my father had lived to see this day.

  I went straig
ht off to the Internet, and you can find everything there, including information on this Stammlager 309. Photographs, investigations, documents. Stories of people who were imprisoned there and survived. There were even photographs of firing-squad executions taken on the sly by a German soldier. POWs were predominantly employed in construction—they built railways. I read about POW telephonists—and realized: of course, that was him! He must have been given work within his profession!

  On the reverse of the card was a note: ES BESTEHT DIE VERMUTUNG, DASS DER KRIEGSGEFANGENE JUDE IST, LAUT AUSSAGEN EINES VERTRAUTEN MANNES. WURDE AM 25.7.1942 DER SICHERHEITSPOLIZEI ÜBERGEBEN. Which means he was shot.

  In the course of my Internet research on Stalag 309 I came across a photograph of executed POWs in a big pit. Perhaps one of them was my father’s brother.

  How can I convey this feeling? My uncle Borya has just been resurrected—and he’s been killed again. It’s a good thing after all, I remember thinking, that Dad and Grandma didn’t live to see this!

  That he was killed as a Jew is, of course, astonishing. He was of Tambov peasant stock, going back generations. Evidently someone had got square with him: the slightest denunciation might get you shot.

  I set about tracking down that photograph from my childhood. Our family archive was destroyed ten years ago when my brother’s house near Moscow burnt down. I got in contact with my father’s last wife, Zinaida Vasilievna, but after moving house numerous times she had nothing left. It’s extraordinary: I see it right before my eyes, that prewar snap of the youth in headphones, but it exists nowhere except within me.

  Every document, every photograph, everything that should be kept in the family from generation to generation—it has all perished. But it all still survives in what remains of that machine of death. Why? How on earth can this be?

  I was also struck that a Russian translation had been written onto the card in someone’s hand. Who did the translation? What for? When? There was a Russian stamp, too: PERSONAL REGISTRATION CARD AMENDED. REFERENCE NUMBER 452. 1941. And a handwritten word: Notified. Meaning that Boris’s mother, my grandmother, had been sent the paper she was to cry over for so many years.