Off the Beaten Tracks

by Irina Bogatyreva

  “I am not Sasha to you. To you I am Yesaul Alexander Nikiforovich Ulanov, understand? They change, do they? Well… Of course they do. But we were the Cossacks, and as the Cossacks still we stand: for Rus, for the Fatherland, for the Holy Orthodox Church! Hurrah! Do you know how long the Cossacks have been guarding the borders of Russia? For all eternity, and we still are! Yes, Sergey, you can take it from me, we’ll yet defend our Russia, our mother, to the last man any time, any time she needs us! ‘From behind a distant is-land like a sho-oal of fearsome sha-arks…’. Come on, Sergey, sing along! ‘There come sai-ailing with the cur-rent Stenka Ra-zin’s painted barques.’ Come on, now the chorus! ‘There come sai-ailing with the cur-rent Stenka Ra-zin’s painted barques’.”

  The red ball flies along the highway like a bullet fired from a gun. I’m cringing at the bottom of it, looking up at the sky where a big, blazing star is hard on our heels.

  We’ve have taken off, broken away and now we’re flying. “Hey, world, stand aside!” We live in crazy times, my friend, where eras and empires follow one after the other as our drunken driver stares into the impenetrable night. I was born in one country and live in another, and God only knows what’s coming next. I only know it’s nothing to do with me.

  “You’re apolitical, you’re infantile, Titch,” Tolya kept nagging me on Yakimanka. “You sit up there in your gallery reading and don’t give a toss about anything.” I smile and say nothing. Lenka and Sasha say nothing as they kiss mutely on the bed. Tolya is in the throes of a bout of righteous indignation. “What an unbelievable generation of airheads is growing up! They don’t give a toss about anything. You don’t want anything, you aren’t going to change anything.”

  “Tolya, what are you getting so het up about? Everything’s fine as it is.” “That’s what’s so bad, Titch. Let’s face it, what are you? A courier! We live in a country of managers and couriers. Oh, gods, bring me poison!” I feel the urge to give Tolya a round of applause.

  What are you expecting from me, friend? I would like to have been born in your era. Then we would surely be able to talk to one another heart to heart.

  Three brothers had I, three older brothers. The first founded a business and became rich. The second had two children and all he could think about was how to make ends meet. The third disappeared from our family’s view as soon as he was any age at all. Three brothers had I, three older brothers. Just like in a fairy tale.

  I loved my brothers devotedly, as a puppy loves the hands which give it sugar. They were a whole lifetime, a whole epoch older than me. They were going to school when I was born, and started families when I went to school. We never had anything in common. In my memories they are fine young men, the embodiment of manliness; in their memories I am a bundle of snot and tantrums bereft of brains or understanding, whose only function was to be a nuisance to them as they lived their important adult lives.

  The gift I got from my brothers was to love anybody older than myself, and fate cast me up on Yakimanka. For my fellow members of the commune, hippies, stonewashed jeans, rock on the earliest cassettes, the Afghan War and the Young Communist League were features of their youth, not history like they are for me. For all that, they were still lost souls, searching for and ready to give all their love to whoever came along. I understood them, and that is exactly what they needed. Those around me on Yakimanka did not remember me as a child, but even so for them I was Titch, the eternal younger sister of all of them.

  Once upon a time there were three brothers, Kiy, Shchuk and Khoriv, and they had a sister, Lybed. Just like in a fairy tale.

  Your life long ago became reality but mine is stuck in a state of suspended attraction to you.

  Oh, time, how inexplicably you allocate destinies! Where is justice if everything good seems to be in the past, and all that is left in the epoch of my own generation is to scrape out the burnt leftovers?

  Max cast Aquarium up on Yakimanka, the same highly mysterious Muscovite Max by whose will I first went to live there. He brought a whole stack of cassettes, said nothing to anyone, and left them on the piano. “In the past I used to store all the junk up in the gallery,” Roma said. “But now you’re there, Titch, we’ll have to chuck it out.” “Why chuck it out? You can store it with me. He may just have forgotten them.”

  I hadn’t understood Aquarium’s music before and didn’t like it, but these cassettes had been brought here by Max, and everything Max did had hidden meaning, or so I liked to think. I kept the cassettes and listened to the music. A week later, Lenka and I were skipping about to one of their hits whose title was ‘2-12-85-06’ and racing each other to the phone to dial the number. One time the phone was answered by a tired, cross old gentleman. We said nothing and stopped calling.

  I listened so much to their songs that I started seeing chaotic, poisonously coloured dreams of hills and rivers, I started rambling incoherently and all but talked in rhyme. Max had accomplished his mission – I had discovered Boris Grebenshchikov, the guru of a generation, and if you could only become initiated into that generation by being poisoned by BG, I cheerfully gulped down the poison.

  It is a great torment to love something that happened before you existed. When Boris was singing his best songs, if I was born I might as well not have been. Nowadays he’s a big old sad gentleman with a beard and narrow eyes, and back then when I would have wanted to love him, I didn’t even know the word. What justice is there?

  I picture the women to whom he dedicated his songs as beautiful, enigmatic, a little drunk, a little sinful, and that only makes them seem the more beautiful to me, and makes me all the more aware that they are not me.

  Oh, time, how inexplicably you allocate destinies! Where is justice if it is so easy to love something you don’t even remember, and so difficult to love what is close at hand.

  Although, then again, who says I don’t remember? One of my brothers would sing “Under a Blue Sky” in the disconsolate tones of an abandoned cat, sitting on our kitchen balcony in the hope that our neighbour would come out and talk to him. I remember that. During the day he locked himself in his room and put on Aquarium. I understood none of it, but would sit by his door and weep over their songs, as magical as they were incoherent. At kindergarten I didn’t play with the other children but wandered off into the bushes and sang them to myself, almost swooning.

  By the time Aquarium arrived in our commune my brother had forgotten his songs and BG had gone to Tibet. The mossy, decaying trunk of Russian rock music was covered in thin, vigorously sprouting shoots and my pimply peers were joyfully hoovering them up. It’s what is called a generational difference.

  Oh, time, how inexplicably you allocate destinies! But if we want to talk about justice, friend, we will see there is nothing to talk about. The world outside the windows of Yakimanka was a glossy neon world, and if there was anything about that I didn’t like, where was I to find a different one? You, my brothers, didn’t have one either.

  Tolya related that he came to Moscow in the 1990s, paraded about on the barricades, drank vodka and hugged tank drivers. He told me he was a long-haired hippy then. He and his friends intended to confront the tanks naked, covered only in flowers, and bring about the hippy revolution, but either they couldn’t find enough flowers or they got blind drunk too early in the day. “What was it you hoped for, Tolya?” “Oh, Titch, you’re not old enough.” He gestured dismissively without even looking at me. “‘Yesaul, Yesaul, why abandon your steed? Why not put down your mount in its hour of great need?’ Why aren’t you singing, Seryozha? I’m not your bleeding radio!” “Tell me rather something about yourself, Sasha.” “Ekh, Seryozha, why tell you when very soon we’ll be home and you’ll see everything for yourself. I’ll take you to my home and to the bathhouse! You’re helping me and I’ll help you. People should be good to each other but today there aren’t many good people around. The moment I saw you I knew, these are just the people I need, I’ll certainly make it home with them, but without them… It’s
not good to be driving on your own. Your thinking’s clouded, and the first cop you meet will pull you over. The bastards can sniff you out a mile away. So you’re helping me and I’ll help you. What, isn’t that right? Ekh, Seryozha, it’s not far now and soon we’ll be home, if we don’t die first.”

  You don’t know whether to pray or not to bother. The Red Star scuds through the black sky close on our heels.

  The way it happened was this. Right at the end of my shift, the owner of the travel agency where I was a courier found out where one of her top customers was. She was pushing through visas for him to take a whole group to India and needed his signature on some crucial piece of paper. We’d been trying to get hold of him all day until she finally discovered he was at the theatre and immediately sent me off to intercept him.

  Rushing out of the office, I bumped into Sasha. He had finished his jobs for the day and was heading back to Yakimanka, but I knew that with him I’d be able to get into a theatre or a museum or anywhere else. As a courier Sasha Sorokin was a gift from the gods. He could have nipped down to hell, completed his delivery and been back out before the smell of sulphur had time to settle in his hair.

  There was a crowd in front of the theatre and the performance was obviously expected to be sold out. We announced at the staff entrance who we needed. The name worked. It was a new theatre and labyrinthine, with gleaming laminate floors and white corridors full of people. They took us to the upper circle and left us there, promising that so-and-so would show up at any minute.

  “Titch, do you know what he looks like?” “I think so.” In fact I did recognise him, although he had only been in our office once when I was there. He breezed into the upper circle and started shooing everybody out. There were heavily made up middle-aged ladies with fat legs in gleaming stockings under short tight dresses who protested they were journalists. Sasha and I tried to interpose our request, but he shooed us out too and disappeared. The ‘ladies of the press’ began indignantly to leave. Sasha gave me a wink and we sneaked back in and stood over to one side.

  The lights went down and the evening began. It was a performance by Buddhist monks. They chanted in eerie, unearthly voices, their brass cymbals clashing and ringing and their thunderous rhythmical mantra filled the auditorium. Sasha and I were stunned as well as deafened. Spectators in the stalls were sitting on the floor in the lotus posture and swaying in time like the shallows of a lake.

  After fifteen minutes or so the door to the circle opened. Our target entered, followed by a number of other people and a couple, the male resplendent in his attire, the female insignificant, like birds. Our customer was fussing over them, getting them comfortably settled.

  “Sasha, look!” My knees gave way. I recognised the man who had entered last as BG. He was just like he looked in all his recent photographs, a big, broad man in a brightly coloured jacket with a spade-like Tutankhamun beard. He and his lady remained standing, their faces composed and serious. When the chanting was over and the Buddhists in the stalls started their ceremonial prostrations, BG turned and left. My customer followed and, but for Sasha, I would have lost him that evening.

  I remember thinking that if he looked so much like his photographs now, he must have been exactly the same as in his photographs back then. “Titch is in love!” Tolya hooted. “Titch is head over heels in love like a schoolgirl. For heaven’s sake, he’s got a daughter older than you!” “Tolya, pack it in. What do you know!”

  I repaired to my gallery. “You’ll wilt up there!” Tolya protested clownishly. “Want a beer?” “No.” “What’s up? Have you gone teetotal? Oh, Titch has given up drinking! You’ll dry out like a radish! Time for you to retreat to a nunnery, a Buddhist one – Ommmm,” he hooted. “See what’s become of our gentry!”

  Artemiy had stuck that label on me, Tolya had blabbed and now the whole of Yakimanka had heard. I got strange looks. In no time at all they would all be thinking it was true. I might even myself. When it comes to lineage, who knows…

  My father had dreamed of hussars. He loved talking about their light blue uniforms and gold epaulettes, their bravado, moustaches, and the popping of champagne corks. Frantic races across the steppe at night like flashes of blue flame, unbuttoned uniforms flapping in the breeze, epaulettes and aiguillettes like sparks in the wind. Frantic racing, perpetual racing, and only that star, that red star up there, shining out of the blackness.

  Another car overtakes us at high speed. The driver yells something, mimics the tightening of a loose screw at his temple and points backwards. Yesaul Ulanov attempts to understand, lowers the window. He too yells, can’t understand, so starts swearing. The driver in the car gets pissed off, gives up contemptuously and rockets away from us. The Yesaul looks around puzzled.

  “Okay, guys, seems we have a problem.” He drives over to the verge. We get out. A rear tyre is torn to shreds. “Change it!” the Yesaul barks. “Seryozha, have you ever changed a tyre? Nothing to it. Dead easy. I’ll give you the tools, tell you what to do, and you can change it. I’m too drunk to change a tyre.”

  Grand pulls on the gloves the Yesaul has given him and takes the jack. I hover around. The Yesaul goes to the car and comes back. “We’re down on diesel too, guys. My car gallops on diesel. Not enough to make it home. Need to find a tractor. I’ve got foreign currency…”

  He surveys the dark steppe. Somewhere in the middle of it points of light flicker in the windows of what is presumably a farm. “Forward!” Yesaul Ulanov commands and, withdrawing a bottle of vodka from the glove box, leaves the road to head off into the blackness of the steppe. Grand and I attend to the wheel. The night is chilly. We have just finished when the Yesaul returns.

  “The wretches, they’re holding out for more!” he shouts and curses as he comes up. “How simple everything was under the Soviets. You gave someone a bottle of vodka and they let you take as much diesel as you needed, but now ‘This isn’t right, that isn’t right…’ Ekh! Okay, guys, pile out. I’ll drive over there. I haven’t a bent kopek. Perhaps I can talk them round. If you get a lift, goodbye, otherwise we’ll drive home together.” We barely have time to pull our rucksacks out before the car roars away over the weed-choked field and races, bouncing up and down, towards the distant lights.

  We stand on the road. It’s cold and barren and dark. We have roused ravenous mosquitoes from the ditch and nearby stagnant puddles. There is, in any case, nowhere for us to sleep. We stand. Then we dance. Then we run around in circles. Suddenly from the direction of the farm we hear engines revving. Two pairs of yellow beams bump over the black earth, one towards us.

  We wait motionless to see what will happen next, but much closer than the headlights and engines we hear the lowing of cattle and dogs barking. Almost at once a small herd of calves, sheep and lambs, mooing and bleating, spills out on to the road. Half crazed by running in the night, they stumble across the strip of asphalt and disappear into the darkness on the far side. The last across is a bullock with a white star on its forehead. It is being herded by a small but vociferous dog. The bullock halts when it sees us and moos in our direction, but the dog chases it on and they too disappear into the darkness.

  One pair of headlights is already close, while the other is doing U-turns in the field. A minute later, Yesaul Ulanov is with us again. “What’s this, guys, nobody give you a lift? I’m telling you, there are just no good people around any more. Oh, guys, we have a firm bond now. You’re helping me and I’ll help you. There’s no parting us now, no way. In you get!” I‘m dumped in the rear seat again. For an instant I resent it, but only for an instant. Who cares. At least it’s warm and there are no mosquitoes.

  “I talked them round and they filled me up with diesel. We shared out my bottle on the spot, and they had some hooch of their own.” “What’s going on over there?” Grand asks. We look across to where yellow beams continue weaving an intricate pattern in the black field.

  “I introduced a bit of discipline. I said to him, why aren’t you work
ing? Why hasn’t that field been ploughed?” He says, “Absolutely right. It hasn’t been ploughed for donkeys’ years. Any time now it will turn into swamp,” and damn me but off he went and there you have it. But why are you looking so glum, Seryozha? Let’s get singing again and cheer you up. ‘Oh, from behind a distant is-land…’ Come on, sing!”

  Oh, the Russian soul, so unfathomable, so boundless.

  Yesaul, Yesaul, Yesaul Ulanov, in the murk the red star rushes onwards. The untamed steppes exhale the scent of wormwood; our eternal Russian, boundless steppes breathing wormwood, the night, and an inebriate yearning from which we cannot wake.

  “You don’t know anything about life, Titch,” Tolya continues to instruct me. “You don’t know anything. This BG of yours was the ruin of Russian rock. Think about it, Titch. Rock is fate, it is struggle, it is like a revolution, something people die for. Victor Tsoy died, Sasha Bashlachov died, so why is he, your Grebenshchikov, still alive and kicking?” “Tolya, what are you talking about? He doesn’t sing any more.” “When rock becomes big business you get pop. We live today in an era of pop. But actually, you’re right, rock died a natural death. The era of managers is coming, and managers don’t listen to rock. And this is the era you are going to have to live in!” “What about you?” “Well, what about us? We’ve already seen it all. It’s you I’m sorry for. Where are the young punks who will wipe us off the face of the earth? There are none!” “Nutter,” I shrug and go back to my book.