I quickly try once again to take in everything at once, looking down from above. I see us, the woods, the lake. But where are the people we are looking for? And who are we looking for anyway? They… for some reason I have a sense that we are too late. I wonder what for, but we are already dozing off in the heat. The sun is setting, warm, glowing. The birds are singing and Sasha begins to snore.
I dream about a dog with a ginger coat. Someone has killed it.
Would I ever have come down from my gallery? What was there for me to do down there if these kids were so keen to play and beat up and torment each other. But May arrived. It was cold. Roma Jah swathed himself in his long ginger scarf, knocked at the door of my gallery and said, “Hey Titch you really ought to go with them.” “Why don’t you go? I’m not one of their crowd.” “I’ve got ‘flu.” “So what?” “You go, Titch. Otherwise…”
We agreed to meet up at Savyolovsky train station and go to the lake, but the only people who met up were me and Sasha. We arrived at the spot we’d agreed and ran to the platform only to see the train waving its stumpy tail at us as it disappeared. Sasha looked after it like an abandoned dog. I could swear he was thinking Lenka had done it deliberately. “We know where they’re headed,” he said. “Let’s go after them.”
We wake up when it’s already dusk, pitch the tent, light a fire and warm ourselves at it. “Lenka asked me immediately whether I would allow her to love him,” Sasha tells me. “I said, go for it!” “Who?” “Producer, of course. I told her, go for it. The type he is, it makes no difference whether you love him or not.” Sasha takes out his pipe and lights up. “It’s good here,” he says. “What more could anyone need?” The fire is reduced to a pitiful heap of ash. We climb into the tent. Shelter.
“Sasha, why don’t we just sleep all day tomorrow and not go anywhere. “You’ll croak, Titch.” “Go on, Sasha. I know everything that’s going to happen tomorrow anyway. Want me to tell you?” “Go on, then.” “Tomorrow’s Victory Day. We’ll meet up with some people, and the very first man we meet will pour you a vodka to drink to the Victory of 1945. He won’t pour me one, only you. You’ll get drunk and we’ll hitch back to Moscow. On the way we’ll spend our thirty roubles on food.” “Fine by me. Let’s do it all the same.”
I sigh. We cling together for warmth. “Sasha, let’s pretend we’re soldiers killed in the war, here in the swamps, and nobody will ever find us.” “You’re nuts, Titch. Go to sleep.” We hug each other tight and sleep all night, freezing cold.
In the morning we come upon a narrow gauge rail-track and wonder who extended it on to the island. We follow it and reach a village. Everything happens as I said it would. The first man we meet has a bottle and pours Sasha a vodka, but his empty stomach means he’s immediately unsteady on his feet. No, friend, with you in that state I’m not going to play any games.
We come to the store and I send Sasha in. I sit on my pack, shut my eyes, and see red spots jumping in the darkness of my eyelids. The fever will be purged from our commune by the spring, the cold, hunger and swamp water. I should have told Roma to ventilate the place thoroughly while we were away.
I open my eyes and out of the dancing sunlight two figures walking down the road materialise like a mirage. I blink and see it is Julia and Producer. Julia’s red setter is running ahead of them. I sit there smiling. They go into the store, and the dog runs over to me wagging its whole body.
Producer comes out, sees me, nods and sits down on Sasha’s pack. I smile but we don’t speak. He is very suntanned, Julia’s Producer. He is stripped to the waist and the colour of oatmeal cookies. He sits beside me and I try to get a look at him to see, smell, sense whether anything has changed during his two days and two nights with Julia. It turns out Lenka wasn’t with them, and that just strengthens my feeling that I have somehow missed the boat.
Well then, friend, where’s your child? The one we all carry within ourselves from childhood? Sasha comes out. He gives me a biscuit and eats one himself but he’s woozy. Julia has a half-smile on her lips, she’s lolling about with a man’s T-shirt over her bare breasts. She looks at Sasha with her invariable hint of mockery. She tells us where they were, where they waited, but we know very well what happened and how. You go to the woods when you want to be with the one you want to be with. Julia laughs. She knows now how much Sasha will put up with for her sake. Hunger, cold, vodka, brackish swamp water…
“What’s your name?” I ask Producer. “Ivan,” he says, and winks twice.
Farewell, Revolution!
“Any time you leave you are leaving forever. It can’t be otherwise, because it is impossible to return forever.”
Such was Grand’s first rule. He gave it to us the morning we met, an early morning as freshly washed Sretensky Boulevard was waking. We saw it was a good rule and decided to leave Yakimanka that same day. By then the air was stale there and we could see it was time to get out. We ran away without a word to anyone, because Grand’s second rule was, “Cover your tracks”. We did, without a word to anyone and leaving the same day we met him, both of us, I, Titch, and Sasha Sorokin.
It was our flight together to the East. That is what Grand said: “Go East”, and Sasha and I acted on it. We knew immediately that we would leave, although at first we mumbled something about needing to think it over. What was there, though, to think over when the light of summer dawns was failing. Yakimanka was sound asleep and all night Sasha and I had been up walking our iron, tracing circles on the boulevard ring road and seeing Cara off.
Cara, Cara the Black, Cara the yawning night. On the road I will dream when I’m wide awake that your gleaming eye, in which nothing reflects, is fixed on me. You watch me and draw nearer, your fearsome beak touching my open hand, you nod three times and loudly call out your name. Cara, Cara the Black, the raven which put out the light of Yakimanka.
If there is happiness or unhappiness on earth, you alone, Cara, know their ins and outs. If there is joy, anger, hatred, or sorrow, to you alone they are of no account. You came to show us the path and in all probability we shall see you no more, so more power to your wing, Cara, heiress of the ravens of the Tower.
That evening we had taken the iron for a walk and didn’t want to go back. We walked on doggedly and in silence, with Cara’s shadow circling above us and our dolorous memories. We saw night taking over Moscow, and Moscow gambolled in delight, greeted us in the laughing faces of women of the night, raced by in shiny cars, thundered her music and closed the barriers of metro stations like the pale wings of moths. We walked, chatted with cops, smoked in silence with morose characters we came across, talked to the homeless, bought beer and fruit juice at 24-hour kiosks, drank it looking at Moscow, and went on our way, saying goodbye to our own personal night before it flew away forever.
We both knew we were saying goodbye to Cara but made no mention of the fact.
Then on dear, familiar Sretensky Boulevard we met Grand. He was sitting on a bench towards which both of us were impelled by the force of our loss. When he saw us, Grand knew it was us he’d been waiting for.
“My friends!” he said, looking neither at me nor at Sasha but somehow between us to where our humble iron was coyly hiding behind my leg. “All night long I have been walking through this city unable to leave its streets, because a feeling was constantly with me that this night would bring me companions with whom to begin my journey to the East.”
Or if he did not say that, he might have done, strange Grand, a breeze blowing freely along wide roads. He told us hitchhiking was his life, and that hitchhiking was about always moving on, that he could not endure stops, but that this time Moscow had not let go of him and he had understood that someone would come to him, someone the road was expecting. “Hey, Stalker, how much to take us into the Zone?” I quipped and we all laughed.
Grand is a lone hitch-hiker, but there comes a time when any sage takes on disciples. We all realised this was our destiny. We recognised it when we saw it, because we knew the
road, and you learn to see destiny, friend, when you have gone out on the road.
“We’ve never hitched that far before,” Sasha and I said. “I will be your teacher,” Grand responded. “Here is your first rule: Every time you leave, be prepared for the fact that you may be leaving forever.”
We returned to the commune buoyed up and with the iron clanking quietly behind us. We returned with a sense of clarity and confidence as to our way, because we knew that Cara truly had changed our world.
Cara came to me in the Yakimanka courtyard. She came like a shadow suddenly incarnated as a bird. She flew down from a tree to perch at the end of the bench I was sitting on, arched her neck, swayed and repeated her name three times.
It was a lovely, warm June day and the poplars were clapping their new leaves above my head, but if a black raven sits beside you, friend, you can be sure your life is about to be turned upside down. Anyway, how often have you had a black raven sit beside you?
That day I had given up my courier job. I’d passed my last exam the day before and now in summery mood wanted nothing to do with travel agencies ever again. I left the office and came back home, my head light with a dizzying sense of freedom. Nothing now held me in Moscow. I felt so much space around me I could have flown up in the air like a balloon whose thread has broken. My knees gave way, I sank to the bench and Cara flew down.
A raven is a messenger of fate, and that day it was my fate. I brought big black Cara back to the commune, a free gift from Providence to all on Yakimanka. They reacted to her as Babylon might have. Ashen faced, shocked, they filled their lungs and all together began shrieking hysterically. Before we had time to do anything, the instant we entered the invariably crowded hallway of the commune, there was such a commotion that Cara soared to the ceiling and began swinging on the lamp-holder.
“Unbelievable!” Yakimanka ranted. “Unheard of!” it concurred with itself. “It’s against the rules!” “Why isn’t the landlord doing something about it?”
“It’ll steal our belongings!” “It will foul everywhere!” “Where’s the landlord!”
“Young people are getting completely out of hand!” “I’ve wanted to have a dog to guard my sofa for a long time but it’s against the rules!” “Landlord!”
Cara swung and uttered the curse of her name over the lot of them until Roma Jah did finally show up in the kitchen. Everyone fell silent, because he is our landlord. Everyone does as he says, even though his hair is in dreadlocks and he carries perpetual hippy springtime in his heart. He is always calm, and for us lunatics that is a sign of wisdom and good judgement.
Roma Jah stayed calm, and when he saw my Cara swinging on the lampholder said softly, “Titch, you know the rules don’t allow people to bring independent animals into the commune.” The rules were unwritten. Actually, they used to be written but were soon torn down by someone in a fit of pique, but they were remembered and generally known by being passed on to newcomers. One of the rules was that animals were classified as independent if they could find and eat things or leave the space allocated to their owner. That ruled out cats, dogs, ferrets and excessively frisky rabbits, but did not rule out caged mice, rats, hamsters, fish, reptiles, or Madagascar hissing cockroaches.
After that it was hopeless trying to defend Cara. It remained only for me to bring her down from the lampholder and for us to leave with our heads held high. The denizens of Yakimanka scuttled off to hide, barring their doors. I put a chair on a table and climbed on top. Lenka ran in, opened the window to give Cara somewhere to fly out, and jumped up and down, laughing loudly to give her something to be frightened by.
I found myself on a level with her. Balancing precariously, I stood up straight and reached for her. Cara looked at me almost reproachfully, turned her head and cawed distinctly, “Caa work!” Thereupon she abandoned the light fitting and flew off down the hallway, instigating a small tornado in the heart of the commune.
“Well, well, well!” muttered old Artemiy approvingly, or perhaps disapprovingly. “Hurray! Welcome to the Psychiatric Clinic!” Lenka shouted in delight and ran after her. Stilling a trembling in my knees, I climbed down and ran to our room, because straight down the hallway is Roma Jah’s and my room with the piano and my gallery.
The window was wide open and the room alive with street sounds. Lenka was sitting on the windowsill, holding the flowerpot with Sasha’s chilli plant above the courtyard. Lenka and Sasha’s destinies within the commune had jointly ordained that at this time he was again living in the bathroom while his chilli, a small green plant, was growing in our room. That was what held him in the commune, that and Lenka’s lunatic eyes, which were presently staring out the open window down the vertical drop to the courtyard.
On the day Sasha planted his chilli, a swollen husk with a white proboscis, he had been rushing round the room until Lenka could stand it no longer and said heatedly, “What are you hanging around here for? Go and do something useless. Why don’t you take the iron for a walk.” Sasha obediently said: “Okay,” I lent my support, and Lenka burst out cackling. She couldn’t believe we were really going to do it.
From then on we went for a walk with the iron every evening and Lenka renamed the commune ‘The Clinic’. At first, we only took it out to the grass near the house, but then Sasha found a skateboard. We tied a lead to it and fastened the iron on, so that now we could take it for longer walks outside the courtyard. Lenka gleefully shouted from the window, “Loonies!” as we turned out through the archway into the street.
“I wonder how long it would take to land?” she mused, sensing that people had returned to the room. “Has she gone?” I asked and my heart shrank.
“No way!” Lenka said with a shrug and returned the chilli plant to the piano. She leaned against the window frame and put her nose back in a textbook. I turned round to see Sasha standing on the locker from which the ascent to my gallery begins, and looking inside my home. “Oh, what kicks, what kicks!” he intoned.
I got up on the locker beside him and looked. There was Cara, crouching by the far wall next to my book towers and sleeping bag, which was rolled up because it was daytime.
“Roma,” I said. “Is it all right if she leaves the commune when it’s the right time for her?” “We will all leave the commune when it’s the right time for us,” Roma responded from his corner. “I will soon be leaving. If she stays after that you won’t be able to control the riot.” “So be it,” I agreed.
A red plastic sign on our window reads, ‘Emergency Exit’. Lenka put it there. She met up with a young punk and in the evenings they would walk around building sites, from one of which this icon came to enliven our commune. The window is always open here and how delightfully true that is. Lenka sees things very precisely, which gives her whimsical ideas a slightly existential touch.
Like a harbinger, Cara, you know about time and when your own time will be up. You strut around our room, your claws clattering like horseshoes, not deigning even to glance in the direction of the open window. The Emergency Exit is for the future, and for the present you are here, Cara, changing our world.
That wasn’t my idea, it’s what Max said. Max is a strange being, everybody’s friend and yet nobody knows anything about him. He is a visitor to the commune. He comes in like a shadow, almost unnoticeable but tangible. He photographs us and all kinds of odd stuff in the apartment, talks to each of us about things personal to us, and goes away again. After he leaves, we always find sweets in unlikely places, but he never admits to bringing them. He is a Muscovite and it seems to be like a visit to the zoo for him, or more precisely to a safari park where you can see animals in their natural habitat.
He is older than me and like an elder brother. I have known him for a long time, in fact he brought me to Yakimanka. Nobody knows what he does for a living, but he has the confident manner of an all-round professional. He has already made his way in life, unlike the rest of us who live in the commune, and that seems to give him the right to be unfat
homable and keep his cards close to his chest. That’s all I know about Max.
He visited us the day Cara arrived. His eyes lit up and he had his camera pointing at her the whole evening. “These creatures arrive to change our world. As you know,” he said when he was leaving.
Cara would stroll round our room and Yakimanka’s hallways would throb as people listened to the clatter of her claws. She was against the rules, but how can you change the world without breaking rules? “Anarchists!” old Artemiy grumbled when we went into the kitchen.
Cara likes to crouch motionless and stare for a long time at the bookcase glass which protects Roma’s books. If you squat down and pat your knees, she will come nearer and touch your outstretched hand with her big, polished beak. She loves to play, to roll crumpled paper over the floor, throw it up and catch it. She invites you to join in her volleyball by fluttering around and tapping your legs with her beak. It doesn’t hurt, although it’s a little frightening, because if nature contains anything really alien to human beings it is surely birds.
She is a fussy eater and her favourite fish are very pale, scary caplin. Sasha and I were at our wits’ end at first about how to feed her. We placed different foods near her beak. “Craap”, Cara would say unambiguously and move away. She found only the caplin acceptable. She would twitch her head, give the fish a shake and swallow it so fast we could never see her do it.
Sasha and I looked after Cara, Roma shook his head, and Lenka took to answering the phone with a deadpan, “Psychiatric Clinic”. The caller would ring off. Lenka would cackle, jump up on a stool in the middle of the room and recite, Exegi monumentum aere perennius… and continue to the end of the text. This was an indication it was exam time.
When you go to sleep in my gallery, Cara, you move away as far as you can, tuck up your feet and roll back your eyes, covering them with a frightful membrane. I watch you for a long time and can’t get to sleep. You inhabit a world as remote from our own as it is possible to imagine, and yet so close, so near to us. Who can say that is not totally miraculous?
Off the Beaten Tracks Page 11