Best European Fiction 2012

by Aleksandar Hemon

  TRANSLATED FROM RUSSIAN BY ARCH TAIT

  thought

  [CZECH REPUBLIC]

  JIŘÍ KRATOCHVIL

  I, Loshad’

  From Ivančice we made for Brno. Our cavalry was part of the First Guard equestrian and mechanized division under the command of General Pliyev; after Podivín it was accompanied by the remnants of the 41st tank brigade, which after the fall of Captain Chepukh in an engagement near Dolní Kounice was led by Lieutenant Mutkin. All this I remember exactly—I may be a horse, but I have a memory like an elephant. We had been the best Cossack cavalry detachment, the elite konarmiya of a Cossack general whose dream it was (yes, I even remember the chevaliers’ dreams) to enter Berlin in glory on my saddle. But then and there, we were merely a part of Marshal Malinovsky’s Second Ukrainian Front, whose victory promenade had the character of a long, all-devouring gut. I saw horses die, I saw men die. Horses by the dozen, men by the hundreds. The horses either dropped to their knees, slowly tipped onto their sides, and lay that way with their bellies twitching, or else they fell to shells, blasted into two or three pieces—red flags that were too heavy for their poles, and so flopped into the mud or settled on the heads of horrified soldiers like enormous, bloody uhlan shakos. We horses also served as meat that the soldiers called “live bully”; it was expected that those who fell would end up in the field kitchen. But sometimes there was no time in which to prepare horsemeat and it was simpler to plunder a house in some village; when that was the case, our bodies would lie at the wayside bejeweled with flies, who were the true victors in this vile war.

  The boy who was assigned to care for me—though a mere malchiska from some insignificant dyerevni by the Dniester, he had a great understanding of horses—died in a minefield; he was torn to hundreds of small pieces that the great jewel box of the heavens sent back to earth as rubies with the first rays of morning. I despaired then for the touch of a hand that was gone forever—a hand that groomed me so well, stroked me with tenderness along the long, strange, white bump that starts between my ears and ends at my nostrils, which distinguishes Arabian horses from all other members of the horse family. Nor, I hope, will I ever forget how he would crouch down to my belly and with deft fingers pick out the military lice there, which were as big as the cherries in Dmitri Ivanovich’s garden. (We shall speak of Dmitri Ivanovich a little later.) The boy who cared for me had the ordinary name of Volodya. There are millions of Volodyas in the land that stretches from Lake Ladoga to Okhotsk, but only one among them knew that I understand not just a few human instructions and commands but the whole of human speech, so that while he was grooming me or collecting my lice he could tell me (provided there was no one within earshot) how he had bidden farewell to his girl in the village on the Dniester and confide his words of love to me. And the bloody rubies that later spangled the heavens beyond Ivančice, this was his last brilliant bouquet, his last words of love for his girl, which I firmly believe she then read in her dreams. If she did not, then nothing in this world could make sense ever again.

  We took Brno after endless days and nights that were indistinguishable from one another—the same cascades of explosions, rumble of steel tracks, machine-gun chatter, screams, and dying. The city survived, more or less—only every fifth building was wrecked; some Germans, too, survived—savage, suicidal striplings from the Hitlerjugend, snipers in attics, a few barricaded remnants of German units whom Starshiy Leytenant Andrei Tolstoy discovered to be holding Schörner Street under orders to ensure that the Red Army advanced no further than Brno. For the liquidation of these militant remnants a special group was set up. It proved possible to save a number of prisoners who were still awaiting execution at the Kounic Dormitory, but not to apprehend their executioners. Nor was it always possible to control the soldiers of the Red Army who yielded to the usual victors’ frenzy, which is always taken out on the conquered territory, in particular its cows, pigs, hens, and also its women. And in Brno, cows, pigs, and hens were not plentiful.

  General Issa Alexandrovich Pliyev didn’t want to give up on the idea of his passing through the Brandenburg Gate on an Arabian thoroughbred. As he was a favorite of Marshal Malinovsky, he was granted permission to stable me and several horses of our cavalry in a residential quarter of Brno. A little later I discovered that our stable was known as the Tugendhat Villa.

  So that we might make further progress in our story, I now owe you an explanation. I belonged originally to a translator from French and German, one Dmitri Ivanovich Khlomakov. His love of the poetry of Mallarmé and Valéry was wedded to his love of the Arabian thoroughbred. As a translator of some importance (he had translated the work of Marx and Engels), he was permitted to live at the Peredelkino writers’ colony, and it was here, with the fee for his new translation of The Three Musketeers, that he acquired me. By lucky chance he learned that an Arabian—and a very rare specimen at that—was for sale at a certain kolkhoz by the Volga. Without hesitation he went off to the place in question, where he noted right away that apart from my possessing the qualities of a true Arabian—a bold, fiery temperament guided by a noble character—I was a specimen with a particularly well-developed second signal system, as conceived by Pavlov and his disciples. I showed him the workings of something I had kept hidden from the kolkhozniks for fear they would take me straight to the slaughterhouse—my intellectual apparatus. With a hoof I drew in the sand a sketch of Euclid’s theorem. As a result, Dmitri and I cultivated a deep intellectual friendship founded on the understanding that although my highly developed second signal system would be of great interest to the Pavlov Institute, we would not entrust it to the shifty sort of people who worked there. Dmitri’s apartment had two rooms; I was accommodated in the library. We carried on our conversations in the garden, under a magnificent spreading pear whose crown gave these conversations such shade that not a word of them got through to Dmitri’s neighbors. But speech caused me considerable difficulties—in the process of phonation my vocal cords move toward and away from each other in a manner completely different from that by which humans articulate. Furthermore, before now I had considered it a good idea to understand human speech but very dangerous to use it myself. Dmitri and I came to spend whole evenings talking together under the pear tree. He gave me my initiation into the conquests of world culture, and he seemed to regret I lacked his enthusiasm for experimental poetry. I was keener on philosophy—classical and modern—and was quite interested in the history of metaphysics. Still, I was allowed to delve into his library, where a thinker of my stripe could find whatever his heart desired. Things quickly went to rack and ruin, sadly. Dmitri Ivanovich rashly expressed his admiration for the poetry of Osip Mandelstam in public; to my horror he was sent to the Gulag. But by this time Hitler’s tanks were rolling toward Moscow and again I was requisitioned. I was assigned to the First Guard equestrian and mechanized division under the command of General Pliyev. But the general’s Cossack heart spared me the worst, and I was sent to the lines only after the victory at Stalingrad, once the front had been redrawn, and we were on course for Berlin. I traveled a large stretch of the front in an armored vehicle, because it was the general’s dearest hope—as I shall repeat ad nauseum—that he should live to make the triumphal entry into Berlin on my back.

  When we were put in the Tugendhat Villa, the place had already been pillaged, if not entirely cleared out; we weren’t its first plunderers, that’s for sure. Of those of us billeted there, I was the only one who knew anything about modern architecture: in Dmitri Ivanovich’s extensive library there had been a book about Le Corbusier, which I had read with great pleasure. Although the villa was in a dreadful state—its glass walls had caved in to the pressure waves delivered by nearby bombardments, and its “dematerialized space” had been violated—I understood immediately that what we had here was a true wonder of functionalist architecture. All the others, from the general down to the lowest orderly, saw the villa as nothing more t
han a military installation with a good location that made it an ideal stable. The city was in full view; the villa sat on an urban promontory, which enabled us to see where the fighting was still going on and also the wide ring of American Shermans from Marshal Malinovsky’s arsenal that were protecting the city center like so many steel-plated battlements. I was stabled in the great hall of the ground floor, where there was enough space for us studs to horse about and to couple with the mares, when our hooves would press down on the cork linoleum in a kind of choreographed equine ballet.

  Even though the dear soldiers made fires on which they roasted pieces of meat, and the smoke then trailed about the room before withdrawing through the broken glass wall, and even though the cream-white floor was beset with bundles of stinking horse dung, every evening at dusk the onyx wall (which had seen out the plunder with a Moroccan calm) conjured with the setting sun a light that took one’s breath away, and for a moment we horses appeared to be cast in stone or bronze; and if this moment caught us rearing up, we would afterward hold this position, our hooves in the air, and the ocher puddles of light would turn brown and perhaps even red and be reflected in our flanks and backs like deep, bloody gashes, or blows from a broadax, or burning stigmata, and the soldatiks would stare captivated at the onyx wall as if it were an iconostasis, and one of them would whisper Gospodi pomilui! and make the sign of a large Orthodox cross.

  As I think I mentioned already, by now we were part of the Second Ukrainian Front, and we were waiting—that is, General Pliyev was waiting—to see what Marshal Malinovsky would decide to do next. But dear soldiers impelled onward and onward and then, all at once, rendered marooned and motionless, don’t know what to do with their urges. To begin with they found entertainment in inciting the stallions to couple with the mares, which requires a certain know-how, and all the soldiers here were grooms who had lived among horses since they could walk. But me they left in peace: they were well aware that I was the general’s protégé. Anyway, had they tried to involve me, they would have failed: I had no intention of playing the fool in their sex games.

  Then, at the end of April, the news came through that Hitler was kaput. These were tidings both glad and grim. There were many among the generals who had been looking forward to taking Hitler prisoner themselves: Stalin had promised half of the Volga-Don Canal and the hand in marriage of his daughter Svetlana to whomever delivered Hitler to him alive. There would never, they knew, be another such opportunity.

  General Pliyev granted permission for a small party in celebration of Hitler’s death. There was no danger here of what happened in Ořechov, where a totally soused regiment was routed during a lightning attack by the Germans. None of the dear soldiers needed to lift a finger—somehow the news of a forthcoming party at the Tugendhat Villa went around of its own accord. The residents of the fancy villas nearby gave voice to the full range their throats permitted, some in fear that these throats might soon be slit, particularly as the Krasnaya Armiya had in the course of its mine clearance through the city done other things besides; it did not pay to rely too heavily on the dovish Slav character.