Filipp was sick at heart. But now vexation at Marya got mixed in with his bitter gall.
‘You were a fine one, too: just couldn’t wait, so you rushed off to Krayushkino! All impatient-like. And there was no sense in it, either… And now what?
‘I’ll tell you what there is now,’ Filipp said to himself in conclusion. ‘There’s nothing now. Except to find some way to live out my days. And get ready, too – to follow in her footsteps. You can’t undo the past.’
The wind had slackened noticeably, the sky had become clear, the sun shone, but it was cold. All around it was somehow barren and cold. Well, it was autumn, after all. Why would it be warm?
First published in 1972
Translated by John Givens and Laura Michael
ASAR ISAYEVICH EPPEL (b. 1935)
Eppel was born in Ostankino, a suburb of Moscow, and he studied architecture at the Institute of Civil Engineering. Unable to publish his own work under the Soviet regime, he worked for many years as a translator. As well as translating Bruno Schultz and Wislawa Szymborska from Polish (the foreign language he knows best), he translated poems by – among others – Petrarch, Boccaccio, Kipling and Brecht. It is possible that the exactness of Eppel’s ear owes something to his experience of this demanding discipline. He is a master of rhythm and tone: some sentences are short and staccato, others ramble down half a page, but the reader is always in the presence of a speaking voice. This rhythmic vitality – a quality also apparent in his libretto for a popular musical based on Isaak Babel’s Odessa Tales – reflects both vivid perception and complex feeling. In one story Eppel describes his writing as ‘my bold and rambling prayer’.
The first collection of Eppel’s stories, The Grassy Street, constitutes a semi-fictionalized portrait of the decaying Moscow suburb where he grew up during and after the Second World War. In the words of the writer Andrey Sergeyev: ‘Eppel introduces us to the world of Ostankino, transformed after the Revolution from an elegant country spot into a dustheap of people of all nationalities… His stories are modern classics, some of them comparable to the best of Chekhov.’1 ‘Red Caviar Sandwiches’ is one of the most joyful stories from this collection.
RED CAVIAR SANDWICHES
As you approached Ostankino Park, coming from Mariyna Roshcha along wide Novo-Moskovskaya Street, on your right you would soon see the Pushkin student dorm, an accumulation of stuccoed barracks. A barrack is done fast and slapdash. And always for drastic action. Like a barricade, its direct predecessor. But a barricade may fall, and then be taken down, whereas a barrack will never fall, and never be taken down, witness that heir to the barricade, the Pushkin student dorm.
Having at some point performed its panicky mission, become a shelter for faceless working-class students, and cast the ones who finished out into the world of socialist achievements and rah-rah Soviet songs, it did not fall and was not taken down, but occupied: by the ones who never finished, by all manner of riffraff, and by good souls. Occupied permanently and in perpetuity.
I had various acquaintances there. Of the first, second, and third ilk. Take, say, of the third, the amazing Samson Yeseyich. But about him later. Not here. Instead I’ll tell you about Aunt Dusya who took care of him. And not just about her. First, however, let’s celebrate the barrack. The Pushkin student dorm.
The barrack is an oblong two-storey structure crouched low to the ground with two entrances along the front and two outside wooden staircases going to the second floor. It is a barely whitewashed construction under a black tarpaper hat inside which people walk, sit, lie down, and out of which they peer. I couldn’t tell you the length of the barrack today, but we can easily establish the width. Since the plaster walls were nothing but timber inside, the barrack’s butt-end could not have been more than twenty-four or twenty-five feet wide; or rather, that’s exactly what it was, since that is the length of a timber. Said feet contained the lengths of two rooms plus the width of the corridor. Allow five feet for the latter, and that leaves eight feet for each room. That’s right! Along the length you may fit a working-class student’s bed (six-and-a-half feet) and, at the head or foot of the bed, a night-stand in which the working-class student may keep his Marx or his tattered little tome with the disturbing but trivial title Without the Bird Cherries.1
On each floor you have a corridor five feet wide and, on either side of this corridor, opening on to it, you have rooms stretched the length of their beds and, crammed into these rooms, people, children and belongings.
The corridor, which is also the kitchen, is absolutely endless, for beneath its ceiling burn only two yellow ten-watt bulbs, as sooty as oil-stoves, and in the smoke and steam the nightmarish chiaroscuro from many different objects creates countless screens and culs-de-sac, and all of this corroded by the rich, fetid, murky air.
Smoke and stench pervade. Along the walls loom washtubs, rags on nails, twig baskets, two-handled saws wrapped in dusty, brittle yellowed newspapers wound round with twine; the floor is a sea of trunks piled one on top of another, little padlocked cupboards painted white, and damp soapy stools supporting basins under small hanging washstands. There is no rule or rest from the dimly glinting buckets of water, the trash buckets, and the buckets of slops for the pig which someone’s godmother is fattening in a nearby village, from the old-fashioned camp beds (canvas on crosspieces), from the sleds, the vats, the barrels, the bowls, from the shovels caked with yellow clay, the pitchforks and the rakes, for the ground-floor tenants have vegetable patches under their windows, and some keep rabbits or chickens. There are children’s skis, faded and flat as boards, one ski shorter than the other for lack of means. And there are plain boards, also of different sizes, with crooked brown nails bowed down to their rough surfaces.
There are even some things – marvellous but unsuited to the needs of barracks troglodytes – that once belonged to the ruling class: a broken chair lined with cord on velvet upholstery, a stand for walking sticks, and a settee (facing the wall) whose rounded back in tandem with the wall makes a marvellous receptacle for storing potatoes.
A frightful corridor, a foul labyrinth, no end to it! But even its endlessness is not beyond reproach, for it is broken up by open doors, by the odd conversation, always more akin to an argument, or by the um-pa-ra um-pa-ra-ra of an accordion, and from one of the rooms comes the astonishing voice of a portable gramophone which goes on valiantly playing the same popular tune from the last war on the same dull needle (sad to say, the record cracked badly not long ago).
Aunt Dusya lives in the cornermost and most pitiful room. The eight linear feet abovementioned multiplied simply by five become forty square feet, and anyone who has occupied such a room knows that opposite the door is the window, that to the left you sleep and rummage in your trunk, while to the right you sit at the table and keep moths in the closet. A treadle sewing machine, if you have one, may stand by the window; if not, you may put, say, a stool there.
The bedding on Aunt Dusya’s cot forms a hummock, since non-seasonal things and big bunches of torn brownish stockings, the raw material for darning heels, are stowed under the mattress. The stockings tend to contain flakes of the epidermis of the once-young Aunt Dusya; the stockings are all knitted, though an occasional exhibit is of lisle or even Persian thread.
The ceiling is low, six feet ten inches, but that doesn’t bother anyone because people were short and stumpy then, like the Oryol peasants in Turgenev’s novels. Turgenev’s stately Kaluga peasants did not settle here and were found no closer than Grokholsky Lane, and that was miles and miles away.
So then, on the bed there was a hummock and this caused us – me, pressing against my girl, so as to die, and my girl, pressing against me, so as to restore me to life, my girl who, unlike me, knew wide beds and how best to use them – various (we won’t go into it!) inconveniences frustrating the ancient and inarticulate rite of embrace.
The barrack, its corridor, Aunt Dusya… My blindingly beautiful girl, who knew other – Oh God, I slid do
wn again! – much wider beds, and I, who knew only trestle-beds – Oh God, you slid down again! – but who also knew that my blindingly beautiful girl, who knew other wider beds, had come to see me. Why all this together? Why did all this couple, combine, connect on the ground floor of a barrack, more specifically in its right-hand rear corner, if facing the barrack from the front? – oh God, we slid down again! – here’s why.
Little, wheezing, old Aunt Dusya took care of my old friend, the never-married physics teacher Samson Yeseyich, who lived in the barrack across the road. But about him, as I said, later and not here. So now, Aunt Dusya, who considered friendship with me good for the brilliant Samson Yeseyich (about which also later and not here), and therefore respected me, had supplied me with the key to her tiny room through the kind offices of Samson Yeseyich. She was in the habit – for a little something or simply for a word of thanks – of loaning her key to friends of the physicist, probably because the carnal life of others excited pleasant thoughts in her.
People with good memories will never forget how hopeless it was in those days to find a corner in which to consummate the unbearable half-meetings begun in bushes, in building entrances, on park benches or in dormitories when the room-mates had fallen asleep – as if they ever did! So to land on Aunt Dusya’s lumpy bunk, while Aunt Dusya herself went to her employer’s to tidy up or just dashed out somewhere, was a rare and welcome piece of luck.
Now about her – the girl for whose sake I had got hold of Aunt Dusya’s key:
We were trudging, by now deeply chagrined, uphill – this climb up a rough, rutted road studded with round flat sea stones and shingle on which one’s feet kept twisting, had been a very bad idea of mine, and it seemed that she, my new friend, a Calypso-like beauty with fear in her eyes, was on the point of rebelling and wanting to turn back, since even the pretext for our ascent had been unclear and unconvincing: either to survey the sea from on high or to see what the new fruit on a tangerine tree looked like.
But my companion did not rebel, though she could have turned right around, and I waited in dread for her indignation, for her acquiescence to cease: I was young then, but I knew that acquiescence could easily turn to indignation. After all, she suspected, or rather understood our secret, or rather my intention – my clammy and intolerable hope. Of course she, too, was party to our tacit compact. If not for that torrid climb! At first she agreed to look at the new fruit, then she changed her mind.
We sat down under a tangerine tree on the baked earth, on the dry hot clods, and my hand began to insinuate itself between her softish, slightly cool, but also slightly flushed thighs. My five-fingered touch was discovering the longed-for world tucked between those stunning buttresses; suddenly my wrist was creeping along the dry hot clods of cultivated earth under the tangerine tree, and my fingers were squeezing in between her thighs, now relaxed, now clenched, and burying themselves like pups in the damp, vast – after the closeness of her thighs – tangle of the thickets attained. My girl was quivering, twitching and protesting, ‘Don’t, or else I’ll get a headache, a really bad one!’ Yet she went on, with her slender, ringed fingers, squeezing whatever she liked. ‘Let’s wait,’ she whispered, ‘this isn’t the place. People will see us, and the sun… Let’s wait!’ She went on twitching, her knees now irrevocably parted, but she was right, and the arid incline under the wayside tangerine tree was wilting and dying under the sun.
Wait till Moscow? Which one of us was going away that day, I don’t remember. Let’s wait till Moscow!
We walked to Aunt Dusya’s at the end of a warm summer afternoon past the barrack and the mangy little vegetable patches, fenced in, or rather off from one another, with all sorts of junk. Standing in the windows of the low ground floors were people and insipid indoor plants, growing out of cans either rusty or once gold, now peeling.
Note: Russian cans have always been the colour of tin, and it was only the war, on top of all its meagre miracles, that produced the gilt, black-lettered cans of stewed pork that were our salvation. And though the war was over, and though it was already so over that we had somehow decided to return the Dresden art collection to the Germans, once we had shown it to all comers, these cans still rotted in the windows of the Pushkin student dorm, though some were wrapped in pretty white paper cut-outs, now shrivelled from the sun, mildew and water.
We walked to Aunt Dusya’s, past low buildings in the windows of which stood people who seemed not to know me, though my acquaintances might just as easily have been standing there. Our skilfully chosen route allowed us to avoid meeting anyone since, in the first place, I was with a woman and, in the second place, a woman utterly unheard of in these parts.
People’s first and most correct thought would be that she was a spy, since she was dressed and adorned as no woman to this day has ever been dressed and adorned, save the heroine of that universal film favourite The Girl of My Dreams. Even I, whose fingers retained the memory of her bathing suit, wondrous for those days, heavy to the touch, like a portière, and phosphorescent beneath the stars of our night-tide swim, when everything was beginning and when she kissed me with a kiss unknown in my once and future life, well… even I, who knew her sartorial means, was stunned by what I saw.
As I said, the war had ended to such an extent that it was remembered as a time of hunger, but hunger with stewed pork, as opposed to the hunger after the war without stewed pork. The wartime styles (noted for battlefield chic) varied with American gifts (by those who had them) had ended, and the captured finery – fabulous for its elegance, its shimmering linings, its neat seams, its lacy underthings, and the many possible ways of wearing all this even inside out if you liked – had faded. The wartime styles had ended for everyone, and everyone was arrayed in their own homemade clothes. But not my girl. She came to me in a fantastic guise, which one I no longer recall, though she had her own, very good reasons for her appearance.
Women came to Blok2 wafting perfume and mist. This I learned later. She came to me sparkling with rings, earrings and necklaces. All this would become known as costume jewellery and over the years people would get used to it, despite their shame and prejudices, they would get used to wearing this stuff that made broads look like ladies. But where could it have come from when it wasn’t supposed to exist yet? Where did she get it all: the strange dress, the shoes with golden clasps glittering with glass beads? Where? Here’s where: she was with the occupation forces in the Eastern bloc, had lived a long time in East Germany, and recently come from there, where she worked as a staff translator and lived with her husband, an officer in the secret service.
She was deathly afraid of her spook. With his secretive way of life and omniscience he compelled her soul and flesh to suffer, generally treating the latter with an unbearable brittleness. And this flesh was not assuaged, neither beside the warm sea, nor under the tangerine tree, for fear of being seen by some acquaintance, a junior officer, say, dispatched by the spook.
Nor could we arrange a meeting in Moscow. Not for a long time. But now Aunt Dusya had given me her key, had gone out somewhere, and I was walking with my girl, a little to one side and a step ahead or, you could say, behind, along the little paths and backways around the Pushkin student dorm to Aunt Dusya’s barrack. It certainly tests a man’s mettle: trying to sneak a glittering woman in the door of a teeming barrack right on the main street.
As it is, people are lolling dumbstruck in every window, old women perched on banks of earth are combing out wisps of grey hair with fine-tooth combs, former classmates may appear, and then there’s the man by the shed who has been fixing his bicycle for a year now.
The summer street is light and sunny, and behind another shed boys are mating rabbits. Girls huddle at a deliberate distance, but still see how the rabbit, raptly nibbling grass beside the doe one instant, rears up on her the next, one of the long-eared little beasts squeals, then both wiggle their noses, and resume eating. The boys insist that the rabbits are fucking. The girls, watching from afar
, know what the rabbits are doing, but don’t use the word fucking. The brazen boys, wanting the girls’ attention, make circles with thumb and forefinger, then insert the other forefinger, and slide it back and forth. The girls walk off.
Thus I lead my girl through my childhood, but she neither sees nor cares; she walks beside me in silence, thinking only of how her spook may have had her shadowed.
She walks with amazing calm. She is simply numb and blind with fear. Her fear. My fear has made me monstrously sharp-eyed and, when we pass from the daylight into the barrack’s pitch-dark corridor, I manage to make out someone’s slummy laundry hanging at the far end and a man sorting maggots for bait in a tin can.
Some trouble with Aunt Dusya’s key… and we’re in the room. I’ve brought sandwiches. Red caviar. Five of them. Cheap eats in those days. And she produces wine! She produces… wine… Never in my wildest dreams would I have expected such a thing. She produces a wine I don’t know, the only wines I know (and those by hearsay) are Cahors and ‘three-sevens’ port, highly regarded by local experts in anything you like – but not this.
‘Wait a moment!’ she says when I, having drunk a little wine and eaten half a sandwich, begin aquiver to embrace her, freely fondling the heavy warm folds of her soft dress, in itself a voluptuous sensation.
‘Wait a moment!’ she says. ‘I have to run out first!’
‘Run out?’
‘I have to! Or else I can’t…’
I am crushed. In the Pushkin student dorm they run out, here’s where: for the entire barrack there are all of two barns, resembling, as it were, rural granaries. Each one is high and light on account of the chinks in the walls and a lone dormer window. The barns are bleached with lime which drools down the dingy boards to create a unique atmosphere of slovenliness and untouchability. Each granary is divided by a wall that would have reached the ceiling, had there been one, but above the wall is empty space, and higher still one can see the ridge of the gable roof.
Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida (Penguin Classics) Page 47