by Andrei Bitov
And so, having been seen to the door by our dissatisfied audience, who continued to wave to us from their laboratory threshold, with modest and perhaps even blue kerchiefs, we rode off in two cars, a Gorky jeep and a Volga 21, climbing more and more steeply into the mountains. And while HE celebrated his triumph by recounting an odious drunk-tank incident which had taken place in my student days and which struck him as entertaining and jolly for some reason—while my friends gave him dazzling smiles and nodded knowingly—I relived my shame. With Lucy perched in my lap, I sadly stroked her receding forehead and looked out the window. Through the vibrating, cloudy little window installed in the well-traveled canvas of our jeep, I increasingly saw the side of the road: a cow warming her udder on the warm asphalt … a piglet unhurriedly trying to penetrate a fence, squeeze through it despite the triangular frame on his neck … suddenly … a man was lying at the side of the road, still wearing the same fine red shirt, with his arms serenely outflung in a way that doesn’t even happen … and I had seen him somewhere. Million Tomatoes passed me his reefer. I took a reluctant toke, eyeing his inordinately large fist, with which I had seen him pound a nail into an inch-thick board … But having tried it, I took another toke. “Good grass?” Million Tomatoes asked proudly. And really, I did feel better. “Good … ” I even thought that HE had left me for a seat in the Volga traveling behind us, in order to tell the same old story to the other crew … “Good”—at last I was able to pronounce a word, though what I meant to say was “Papa!”
For this was Papa. He was contained in a smallish blue cup on Mama’s lap, as though he had been won in a minor competition, and my mother was gently stroking him as if he were alive. The resemblance to a trophy was heightened by the diagonal gold script: what he had earned the cup for. For his final date, he had been awarded both a birth date and a proper name. This was indeed a trophy. The only one of its kind, the first, unique. Papa, forgive me for that letter! … Mama and I were in the back seat of this same kind of car, a Volga 21. We were taking him to our cemetery at Shuvalovo. The driver was the husband of a niece of my father’s, in other words a cousin-in-law of some kind, or anyway my cousin’s husband, Chereshnya by name, proud of his automobile, his origin, and his scholarly degree, a nice fellow and basically not stupid, who played at being a churl but wasn’t a churl at all—a kind, ugly man. He was surprised at the force of Mama’s emotion. “What made you love him so much?” he asked her, with his characteristic bluntness. Looking forcefully into his eyes, which glinted dully in the cheerless long face canceled by his nose, Mama said with all distinctness, “His beauty.” Chereshnya, as I have said, was not a fool, but now he, too, understood.
The return from the cemetery …
Again, we hadn’t arrived at the promised monkeys.
The tooth came out of Lucy’s jaw by itself and was easy to put back in. I would have to be sure not to lose it, I reminded myself. And now we arrived.
They were expecting us. The liberated populace had finally gotten through the fence pickets. They kissed us on the shoulder. They waited on us. They didn’t have bread and salt on an embroidered guest towel here, but they did have the towel itself. One dignified woman held the soap and the kettle, another the towel. They poured for us while we washed our hands, and then passed us the towel. Both women, as they later explained to me, were Supreme Soviet deputies, one to the Abkhazian ASSR, the other to the USSR. These were villagers.
And in fact there was a village here. My drunken Russian heart thrilled and sobbed. This was what it meant to have an uninterrupted life of three generations! It meant wealth. Impossible even to compare—I did not tire of comparing. In place of the two-story Abkhazian stone house on pillars or pilings, I substituted our leaning, five-walled log cabin; in place of their traditional agazon (lawn) in the farmyard, I imagined a puddle, the clay-and-dung slop trampled by cow and boot; instead of their orchard—fig, persimmon, apple—our modest little vegetable patch with its onions that had once again failed to come up; and instead of their hydraulic pump, our little farm pond, teeming with life like a droplet under Leeuwenhoek’s lens … The sorrow of the patriot welled up within me, in proportion to my admiration for their well-deserved plenty. The climate, of course. In our country such things don’t grow. Here, just poke a finger in the ground—lemons, mandarin oranges … In our country we have winter. In our country, just try and take anything outside the house. Here they have the kitchen separate, the livestock separate—they can run across the yard on the lawn. In our country we have to keep one flank pressed to the stove and the other to the cow, lest we freeze to death. They have it easy. Thus reasoned the patriot within me, the city dweller who in his fifth decade had guessed the secret of our “five-walled house”: it has nothing to do with our five-pointed star, it’s the wall in the middle, which divides the log cabin into a lived-in half and a roofed barnyard.
Now the same women passed shot glasses of chacha. So we were still standing out in the yard. Not only were the yard, the lawn, and the house theirs, but the elaborate iron gates that locked what was “theirs” were also theirs. And the chacha was theirs.
With this slightly different nuance: not store-bought. Theirs and their own—in the sense that they had produced, prepared, made it. But so were the yard and the lawn and the orchard—they were THEIRS, like the chacha. It was strong chacha.
The climate, of course! Grapes won’t grow in our country, under any system. What, didn’t they have the Soviet Regime here? Not only did they have it, it was standing before me in the flesh, in the form of a deputy to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR (which, as I had learned in school, according to the Stalin Constitution is the Soviet Regime itself), and its name, through some heavenly misunderstanding, was Sophie. Sophie herself, bashful and blushing, handed me the chacha as she had handed me the guest towel before it. What harm had she done me?
Let us describe the blush of her cheeks separately, for such it was—separate. Separate from her cheek, from her face—independent. Her blush was like one more part of her body. Aha! A forgotten word: strong. Just used in another connection, however. But for the same reason. Strong house, strong chacha, strong color. We also used to call it a “rustic bloom.” It’s a long time since I’ve encountered it on our haggard faces. Even in the countryside … So it’s not just the fresh air—you also have to work. In that same fresh air. At home in Russia, you’ll encounter that kind of bloom only in a traffic cop. Because, rain or shine, he ventilates his rustic gene in the fresh air. The Russian village population, increasingly often, has left to join the police. That’s where it survives. The names of our emptied wayside villages, as you ride along the highway from traffic cop to traffic cop, always recall the surnames of policemen, for some reason. But it turns out they recall where the policemen are from. We city dwellers simply become acquainted with the police earlier than with the village. For example, the name of the village AKSHONTOVO flashes past your window on the roadside. Exactly. In your youth you had an encounter with a Sergeant or even (keep going) a Lieutenant Akshontov. He composed the statement and you signed it, seemingly not even for what you had done but for what you had not done. Solid negatives: unprintable (expressions), illicit (intoxication), insubordination (to the representative of authority). Or maybe it wasn’t Akshontov, it was some other surname. But it’s Akshontov who is waiting for you right now, at his post at the exit from the village of AKSHONTOVO. Benevolently he detains you: you have exceeded the speed limit, in your reverie on the fate of the Russian village. And such color in his cheeks!
As in Sophie’s. A bloom. Like a flower. And would you believe, through this natural and acquired color, this dark-claret-red, almost-black rose, there also emerged a blush of bashfulness. How could they help adorning the Supreme Soviet with this dawn of the east … “With rosy dawn the east was mantled … ”{46}
Pushkin, of course, first of all. That’s another obsolete word—“rosy.” In Pushkin’s time, they still had rosy cheeks. The word was still usabl
e, for it fitted. And yes, rosiness was characteristic of Pushkin himself. He was the rosiest boy at the Lyceum. Rosiness particularizes him no less than do curls and whiskers. Anyone who even once saw him alive … Again, not we.
There was a man here who resembled Pushkin. In rosiness and face. Pushkin’s head sat atop the big strong neck of our young host (Sophie was his). The elder host, his father, who was not inferior to him in strength or rosiness, bore a striking facial resemblance to my own father. The resemblance was further heightened by the fact that I had just been remembering him, my father … But he was alive and well. He had never been so healthy when he was alive. Blazing with health … If the Russian language used to have so many exact and varied words to describe health, perhaps we had health, too?
He sits at the head of the table, my father does. Gives the blessing. Hands the reins to his son … Now, how shall we describe a masculine rosiness? Their faces are covered with fine cracks, like bark, which is why they always look as though they’re making fun of you and winking, because these fine lines radiate around their eyes and mouth on their toast-brown skin, and at that moment you break off a piece of toasty-brown crackling from the suckling pig, as Voroshilov did in Iskander,{47} and they raise their glasses … to you, it turns out. Evening light falls on their faces as on tree trunks in the woods at sunset, proving that the bark has no less life than the leaf and flower, and as I look at their … quit choosing your words like a beggar! as I look at their honest faces … I cannot condemn either their unmistakable guile or their self-satisfaction.
We are upstairs, in the formal half of the house, where no one ever lives. It has a parquet floor. It has carpets and crystal and polished furniture. It has daggers and horns worked in silver. It has a beautiful painting on the wall: a tiger is chewing up a young woman, and her breast is bared to the moonlight—she gazes at us with frigid farewell. But this is not Rousseau. It’s an original.
Here, everything is store-bought. The most expensive. What they don’t use. What the rest is all about. No worse than other folks’. As good as other folks’. Better than the neighbors’. Their life and work hum busily on the first floor, at the level of the sinful earth, for the sake of building this domestic paradise on the second floor—where none of them live during their lifetime, not so much because they’re unworthy but because they don’t have time. Too much happening downstairs to go running up to the second floor. Although right there, beyond the salon in which we sit, I can also see the main bedroom—again, a suite of furniture, with Arabian linens and silken coverlets, everything the best and most expensive, for “simple human happiness.” Again, they don’t sleep in it, they sleep downstairs, they’re worn out from a day at the plow and collapse on a sagging cot. That they don’t sleep here is not a conjecture or a figure of speech, in this instance, for the floor is spread with a layer of nuts and persimmons—the farewell sun reaches them now. Finding an angle of vision through the crack of the slightly open bedroom door, I admire this sudden painting until … Until Sophie notices my gaze and closes the door. This, then, is the question: Why did she close the door, so that I wouldn’t see the bed or so that I wouldn’t see the persimmons? Was it the violation of order that embarrassed her, or the conjugal bed?
Sophie and her older sister-in-law (the one who is a deputy to the ASSR) and her mother-in-law and yet another aunt, all of them in braids, have lined up at the far end of the table and are benevolently surveying our masculine repast. Seniority among them is by age, not by rank. When the mother-in-law, who is no deputy, notices anything that looks to her like a violation of order, she whispers to the ASSR deputy, who whispers to the USSR deputy, and the capable Sophie comes running, now with cheese, now with chicken.
Why, how can I help loving the Soviet Regime here! When she reaches her imperial arm to the most out-of-the-way place and caresses her disgraced poet with an unexpectedly motherly caress—as though she weren’t the one who had chased him here, out of her sight. The good thing about a machine is that it operates without intent.
Not only is the Soviet Regime here, it has been here repeatedly! Khrushchev himself, without formality, used to sit in the chair next to mine, where the father now sits. And this is why the whole village is so overgrown with greenbriers. My memory being uncertain, let’s call them asparillas. Once a year, in spring, when still soft and green, these briers become a delicacy. The rest of the year, they’re just briers. Khrushchev visited right at asparilla season. He loved the flavor, which he had never tasted before. Having no reason to plant corn in Abkhazia, because everyone here had been raised on cornmeal mush, he daydreamed aloud that asparilla, possessing such a foreign name, could fetch hard currency for the country. This was jotted down and then also taken under advisement by the local leadership, which naturally was not far away—that is, in the very same room where we are now. And a campaign was launched to introduce the new agricultural crop. Asparilla ceased to be edible the very day after he left, but Abkhazia became impassable because of the greenbriers. Khrushchev was dismissed and the asparilla receded, remaining stuck on the borders of the fields like a natural fence. Thus the ferocity of the local fences is not due merely to agricultural necessity or kulak character.
So that’s the source of their wealth! This yard was blessed by that visit, and ever since the toilers have been untouched. And they’ve taken advantage of this niche, to toil. Without the regime you get nowhere … You have to be friends with it. Time preserves interesting monuments after a ruler: a Ukrainian Crimea, but also a corn boundary that has advanced two hundred kilometers farther north, and asparilla fences!
I don’t know whether Fazil Iskander has recorded that story in his encyclopedia of Abkhazian life … but here I can no longer avoid acknowledging how much he’s bothering me! And I have no intention of writing better.
Mine is a different story: I had almost lost Lucy’s tooth again …
I should watch myself, and especially HIM. What all didn’t I tell him! I ordered him under no circumstances to drink wine, which was exactly what everyone was drinking, after having paved the way with the shot of chacha. “Wine will ruin you!” I told him impressively, allowing him to sip chacha just a little at a time (in violation of custom, which, as a guest and an exception, I was allowed to violate) from the clouded little glass. “At least don’t bother me!” I told him disgustedly. “Have something to eat!” I advised him, like Mama. He mustn’t fall apart in such honest company! Let’s call it a sense of dignity. Especially since our hosts had someone with whom to compare us. Not only had Nikita Khrushchev been here before me, but the President of the United States had also meant to come, though he didn’t, Yevtushenko was a frequent guest, and other writers, foreign ones … Greene? Böll?
… Yes, I think they were the ones. Hemingway did not come. That Englishman was a pretty good drinker, yes. But again, only chacha. Then it was surely Greene.
They drank to the peoples. This is a special toast, perhaps just a local one. With no reference to “internationalism” or the “friendship of the peoples.” Pre-Soviet, apparently—a traditional toast. God, it says, so created the world that there are peoples … Chechen, Jewish, Moldavian … and thank God! this is good, that there are peoples. Well, as the only Russian here, how can you not drink, finding yourself in a fortunate (for you) minority!
The good thing about the tradition of toasts is: you can’t outfox it. You can vanquish the table only in honest battle. How can you not drain your glass to the peoples, to the earth that gave us this table, to the parents who seated us at it, to the ancestors who uniquely chose our parents, to the living (may God grant them health!) and to the dead, who are alive right now, in that glass of yours; to all who are not with us at the moment, though they’re with us all the same, and to those who are … it’s such a remarkable gathering of people! that you must drink to each individually, and only when the toast is to you yourself may you accept it and not drink, modestly lowering your eyes. But if you keep in mind that no one has
the right to rise from the table until the whole series of toasts has been completed, without a single omission (and the toasts are drunk by the glassful), and that to get up for a slight need is shameful for a man, you will not be surprised that diseases of the bladder are quite prevalent in Abkhazia, a fact which also allows me to hint to the gathering that the Abkhaz may possibly have a great kinsman in the astronomer Tycho Brahe, who wore a silver cone in place of his nose, which had been cut off in his youth in a duel, but who died quite old, though not by the saber or dagger but from the rupture of his bladder, for, when he was invited to be a court astronomer in a strange land and didn’t know the customs of the court, he did not allow himself to get up from the table, just in case, not knowing what was correct there and what wasn’t, and such implacable adherence to purely Abkhazian traditions could only mean that his mother had been an Abkhaz or an Ubykh … and this hypothesis of mine is heard out with unexpected attention and accepted on faith—that is, as fact.
How strong a man is when there are few of him! When he must prove to the world that he exists, and besides must not doubt it himself. Any outside corroboration will seem like a buttress. Just yesterday they so little doubted their own existence that they stole horses and women from each other and sold them. The women were renowned, and they ended up gracing harems so far from their homeland that if you so desire you can now trace the most unexpected kinship on your mother’s side. The famed janissaries or seyfülmuluk will suddenly turn out to be from our village, and even Napoleon is only a stone’s throw away. After the mekhad-zhirstvo. the suicidal exodus of the Abkhaz{48} into Turkey at the turn of the century, Abkhaz and non-Abkhaz began to be counted differently: kinsfolk were counted on one’s fingers. Thus, of the Ubykh tribe, cousins to the Abkhaz, not a single man was left. They had departed, scattered, and vanished, along with their horses and women, weapons and pots and pans, songs and dances, customs and language. The language no longer existed. And if a certain German, who had never even heard of the Abkhaz and Ubykhs, hadn’t collected folklore in Central Africa, if he hadn’t come across an ancient Negress who began to tell him fairy tales in a dialect he did not know—that is, a nonexistent one … The German did not garner the fame of a Schliemann or a Dahl, but (“boundless is the fame of the Teucrians”) I see no feat more heroic than the rescue of another’s fame. As a girl, the Negress had been sold into Egypt and worked as a servant in a certain harem, which a party of Ubykh women entered—in proof of which she lit up a pipe … The German tape-recorded her unintelligible senile babble. Freed of a duty that even she had not recognized, she then and there entrusted her unburdened soul to a pitying God …