Off the Beaten Tracks

by Irina Bogatyreva

  When I came across Kerouac I was unspeakably happy. I read him and felt his stuff had been written by a mate in the Yakimanka commune I just hadn’t run into yet. Not so improbable, there were plenty of people in the commune I never met. I dreamed of going to America, hitching on American roads, of reaching the mountains, the warm, solitary, misty mountains of California. I dreamed deliriously of meeting Jack, and when I heard he was dead and all this had been written – ohmigod, it couldn’t have been written so long ago – when I heard that, something inside me just collapsed.

  Once again, I was trying to live in an echo of the past. The America Jack Kerouac wrote about was long gone. It was killed in Vietnam, burned out by grass. It had become flabby and bourgeois, stuffed its cheeks with hamburgers and gone to Hollywood.

  We live at the junction of two eras, friend. From here we can see clearly enough what used to be, but who can tell us what is coming next?

  The dashing hussars of my father’s imagination trample the wormwood in a black field. One of his grandfathers was killed in Stalin’s purges and everyone carefully forgot him. Another was ‘expropriated’ as a rich kulak farmer and they fled their home at night in a cart, losing some things and hastening to leave others behind. Who will gather up all the loose ends now and where will they find them? My father had a grandmother who told him how much like her brother he was, a young officer who died in the First World War. He was serving in the Tsar’s Lifeguards. She remembered everything about him and told my father, and my father told me, but there was a lot he didn’t remember. Now it’s all lost, our roots, the traces, but in my father’s mind the dashing hussars still wear jingling spurs and sip golden wine.

  What do we know? What have we seen and what have we yet to see? The last times are coming, friend, and all you can do is get blotto on beer. “You don’t know life, Titch. You are infantile and dreadfully boring. You’ve got to change, Titch, it’s time you changed.” Tolya has his back to me and is kneeling by the windowsill with a board in front of him on which he is carefully smoothing the modelling clay for his next picture.

  “Who is going to change me?” “Anyone. Why not me! Why not, Titch? Do you want me to make you into a human being in two shakes of a lamb’s tail?” He evidently finds the idea so inspiring that he immediately bounds over to the gallery. “Let’s live together. If you like I’ll shack up with you right now. We can live together and if you don’t like it, we’ll stop. But you might like it! You’ll be a human being and Roma will give us a couple’s discount. How about it, Roma? Will you knock a bit off the rent?” he asks. Roma has a policy of charging couples a bit less than two singles. It’s not that he’s concerned about demographics, he just thinks a couple take up less space, which has some truth in it.

  “How about it Roma? A discount?” “Everything has to be consensual.” “Of course it does. No sweat!” Tolya is jubilant. “How about it, Titch? Shall I come up now? We’ll soon make a human being of you!” He clutches at the gallery and puts a foot on the locker. People in the room are laughing.

  “Get lost!” I retort, pushing his face away and slamming the door. You sometimes can’t tell when Tolya is joking. I hold the door shut. “Rapunzel, show me your little face. Why are you fearful? I’m not going to eat you.” He tugs at the door but I’m holding on tightly. “Titch, come to me. Hello-o.” He waits. Then, in a different voice, “What is it? Are you offended or what?” There is silence in the room. “That’s just silly.” Silence. I hear him moving away. “Come out, Titch. I won’t touch you, okay? I was only joking! We’re friends, okay? Do you hear? Peace!”

  I stay silent and don’t move but let go of the door. I’m on all fours, in the dark, and it’s as warm as a womb in my cubbyhole above the ceiling, in the gallery. So what if you don’t understand me, friend. What’s that to do with me? I hear Tolya sit down heavily by the windowsill. Then I hear him squeezing his plastic bottle. It sits by the foot of the piano, a brown plastic bottle of beer. As he drinks it crackles.

  Quietly, very, very slowly and quietly, I grope in the corner for a candle and lighter. Roma tells me off for lighting candles in here. Don’t worry, Roma, I’ll be careful, I really will. I asked him once whether he would take me on the road with him. “No,” replied Roma Jah. “Why not?” I asked surprised. “I won’t be in the way, and I so much want to go to the seaside.” “I understand, Titch, but I’m not going to take you. You have to appreciate, for me the road is the only place I can be alone.”

  Yes, Roma, I understand. I light the candle and fix it with a drop of wax to a jam jar lid. I wonder, if Roma were to knock at the door of my gallery whether I would open it. There’s no sound from down below, though.

  Curling up like a little animal, I hunch over a book. I don’t read it. Instead I watch the paper swelli under my tears.

  The lighted place in the darkness of the steppe is a traffic police post. Yesaul Ulanov cuts his speed. I peep out from behind his shoulder. “They can sniff you out,” the Yesaul mutters, suddenly quiet. “They sense you, the devils.” I can see the sleepy face of a young traffic cop when the Yesaul suddenly rams his foot on the accelerator. The car jerks, roars and takes off like a missile. “Now let’s see what they’re made of!”

  A siren wails behind us. I turn to see glaring headlights. “Put yourself in my place, Sergey. What am I going to say to them: ‘Okay, guys, I’m drunk’? What am I going to bribe them with when I have no money? I left my driving licence in Novosibirsk. The last time, just two weeks ago, I forgot it at my brother-in-law’s and had to go back for it. Looks like I’m going to have to do the same again this time …”

  He laughs. What is he laughing about? I am scared to look back in case I suddenly see not just headlights but the faces of two cops bellowing through their windscreen. “Let them try,” the Yesaul sniggers. “I’ve got a turbocharger!” I feel better. Looking back I see their lights really are falling behind. “They won’t keep that up for long. I know. This is not the first time I’ve been here. I’m just giving them a bit of fun. What of it? They’re bored. It’s really boring for them at night.”

  The sirens can still be heard. The Yesaul starts getting annoyed. “See what they’re after, eh? They want to make some easy money! The kind of people you meet nowadays! No one thinks about other people any more. Me, me, me all the time! They’re wolves, not human beings.” “Come on, Sasha. It’s not like that at all.” “It’s not like that, isn’t it? Well, let me tell you, if that had been my son in my place he wouldn’t have given you a lift. No way! I know that for a fact. It’s obvious from just looking at you that you haven’t got any money, so he wouldn’t have stopped. He’s young – younger than you, I’d say – but the way he is… I can’t think who he’s got it from, the little brute. All he thinks about is money, fancy gear, and picking up skirt… He hasn’t got an idea in his head. What kind of generation is growing up, Sergey, eh? I ask you! Where’s it all going to end? He wouldn’t have given you a lift, and why not? We need to help each other out on the road, am I right? The road is all of us in it together. You help me out, I help you. We’re all harnessed in the same team, aren’t I right?”

  “You’re right, Sasha, but keep your eyes on the road. It’s just life. Life is always that way.” “Well what I say is…” The sirens fall away in the darkness and we calm down. I snuggle between the rucksacks again.

  “No way am I going to drive into town, Sergey,” I hear the Yesaul whisper conspiratorially. “There’s a police post there where every last dog knows me. They’re bound to stop me and I don’t need that. I can do without losing my licence. When I get closer I’ll stop and have a good sleep.” “But for now we need to keep driving, Sasha.” “Right, right…”

  Oh, my gods, this night will never end.

  I’m half asleep, half waking. I see my own, dear Yakimanka, a big old house where the history and the people come and go and will come and go. Only the house will stay the same, and who now remembers who lived in it and when, or who might h
ave lived in it if things had been different. This vast old house is our Yakimanka with its archways, its high ceilings and its cavernous stairwells. The house is alive. We ourselves do not know just how alive.

  Half asleep in someone else’s car, I see the house, or perhaps not the house. I drive through its gates in my motor car, step down, run quickly up the porch and throw open the door.

  No, in the dream I’m not Titch. I’m the last descendant of an illustrious family. I see shining floors covered with thick runners, a broad staircase. Behind glass doors is the old-fashioned lift whose gates you have to push back. That’s unmistakeably it, only now it’s gleaming with varnish and bright light-bulbs. The hall porter is sitting at a large brown desk reading a newspaper, pushing it in under the green lampshade. He is wearing a dark blue jacket and has a peaked cap on his bald head. He greets me.

  “Hello, Artemiy. Is Papa home?” “He’s upstairs in his office, milady.” The hallways are wide, the furniture massive, huge windows are draped with heavy curtains. I advance to the large, shiny double doors behind which I know I shall find my father. When I throw them open he’ll be there in his blue dress uniform with gleaming epaulettes. But I’m called back.

  “What is it, Artemiy?” “An officer has arrived.” I go down. A traffic cop is standing there in a dazzlingly white uniform like the street wardens wear in old Soviet films, with a strap across his chest and holster at his hip. Saluting, he says, “You have parked your car in the wrong place. I am fining you.”

  “How can that be?” I ask in consternation. “I left it in my courtyard.” “No, you have not left it in your courtyard.” “Let us go and see how that can be,” I say, following the cop. He opens the front doors and dissolves like a white cloud in the darkness, because it’s already night outside. I take a step forward and a glossy raven flies up from under my feet.

  “Car-ra! Car-ra! Car-ra!” she caws three times. I survey the courtyard. There are cars parked in it now, children’s climbing frames and a sandpit. I turn back and see behind me the tattered entrance to Yakimanka, in the depths of which Roma’s commune lives.

  “Car-ra! It’s me, a lonely fragment of a Time of Troubles.”

  “Don’t you believe it, Sergey, don’t you believe it. It’s all going to change.” “Of course. It’s changing already. Even now everything is changing.” “Well, what did I say? Of course, Sergey. Look, that girl of yours has woken up.” Yesaul Ulanov gives my crumpled reflection an amicable smile in the mirror. “What is it with her that she never says anything and keeps staring at the roof? What’s your name? What is it you’ve spotted up there?”

  “I’m not looking at the roof. I’m looking at the sky.” “And what’s up there?” “A star. It’s so big and red. Look, there, to the left. It’s been visible all night.” “A star? Oh, right, that’s Mars. It’s August, so Mars is visible. Go back to sleep now. When we arrive we’ll wake you up. You have the word of Yesaul Ulanov. With me you’re as safe as houses. Go back to sleep. Well, what do you think, Sergey, shall we sing some more? Can we really have run out of songs to sing?”

  I lie back in the seat and something clicks. I see everything at once and from above: the steppe, the night, wormwood, blood-red Mars, and us in a red car. The car rushes along, the road rushes by, and all our immense, immense country is asleep…

  “Volga, Volga, loving mother,” a voice thunders above the road. “Mighty talisman of Rus,” it soars higher and higher. “Let my bride drown in your waters, that our men fight fast and loose.”

  May all the gods of light forfend!

  The Woodchuck

  Our commune is like the Flying Dutchman. Like an old, empty, creaking ship on the boundless black waves it is sailing headlong into the unknown, full of ghosts and memories. Roma and I are together in the single lit room. We two are the only living souls in an apartment full of ghosts and memories, old smells and unexpected sounds from the corridor. Everybody else has run away but we remain.

  “It’s fine, Titch,” Roma Jah says, smoking. “Sooner or later everybody gets out of substandard accommodation like this. When they get a few bucks together and find work they want to live like human beings. Some leave and others come in their place. Everything changes. It’s fine. It always happens.”

  He’s sitting by the windowsill, his back pressed against the ribbed radiator, huddled from top to toe in his very long, ginger scarf. It’s a cold autumn and we’re feeling the chill.

  “What are you going to do now, Roma?” “Wait for new people. They’ll come.” He knocks his defunct pipe out in his hand. Everybody ran away when Roma Jah and I were on the road. We heard that Tolya did eventually find a girl with a Moscow residence permit and went off to live with her. All that Lenka left behind were strange books, cheap jewelry, make-up and a lot of small items of uncertain purpose. She herself was scooped up and carried off by her unbridled femininity. Sasha Sorokin made it back from the road, that I know for a fact, and he can still sometimes be found in the vicinity of that same entrance hallway where he used to be a courier. He answers his mobile but has not come back to live on Yakimanka. Even old Artemiy has disappeared, and I’ve been afraid to ask Roma where he has gone.

  When I got back, of all our old neighbours only Sergey the Violinist was still here, in a room parallel with my gallery, and Sonya Muginshteyn had her new brown upright piano in the room next door. But even they, even they, you sensed, were thinking of leaving Yakimanka. Sonya came back to spend the night here less and less often, and Sergey gave Roma notice he was intending to move, only there was something holding him.

  Now even they have gone. I still sleep in the gallery although there is no need to, but I can’t imagine sleeping anywhere else. And for all that, Yakimanka, my kind Moscow cradle, you gave me one last gift. You arranged my last adventure here in the shape of Sergey the Violinist who, as soon as I came back, started visiting our room, sitting near the gallery, and saying nothing.

  He would come in, sit down, and begin to sigh without respite. He was awkward, bespectacled, had a broad square face and body, big ears, bad teeth and a dark mark on his neck caused by his violin. He would adopt a very intense expression, not look at me, and not know what to do with his hands with their broad palms and stubby fingers with short, white, flat-ended nails. When I once asked what he had come for, he replied adenoidally, “I want to get to know you, Titch. You are so strange. I really can’t make out what kind of person you are.”

  He called me Titch, but was embarrassed by it and tried to swallow the word. Despite that, he never called me by my proper name. He said he wanted to understand me, but after that spoke never a word. I did feel sorry for him and would have been pleased to have someone to talk to, but he didn’t respond when I spoke to him, and if he did would blurt out something beside the point, or start telling me something in a dull, incoherent manner before again falling silent.

  I was still strange after the road, disorientated and totally unsure how I should live now. I wanted either solitude or understanding, and wordless Sergey could give me neither. Neither would he go away until it was time for Roma and me to retire for the night.

  “Well, ask what you want to know and I’ll tell you.” He sighed loudly. I found him ridiculous but spoke kindly to him, in order not to laugh. “Sergey, smile. You look so glum.” For the first time he raised his face to look at me. “Dear Titch, you’ve changed so much this summer,” he said regretfully. “You’re completely different…” “I saw the world in a different light,” I replied flatly. “Someone probably showed it to you in a different light,” he suggested archly before looking away again. “It was just the road,” I said.

  Roma Jah came in with the teapot and poured a glass for himself and one for me. He offered one to Sergey, sat down and started playing the guitar. Sergey said nothing, but I could see his curiosity had been piqued.

  “So you really went hitchhiking?” he finally asked. “What of it?” “Well, it’s just it seems so… out of character for you.
You’re so… vulnerable. Getting into other people’s cars, not having a home of your own, meeting strangers… People are all sorts, Titch. Were you really never scared?”

  “You’re afraid of something you don’t know. When you don’t know, you make things up and frighten yourself.” “That’s why I really want to know you, but you don’t tell me anything.” “How can I tell you? Let’s go hitchhiking and you’ll find out for yourself.”

  Roma struck a bum chord. Sergey had a hangdog expression but lacked the courage to refuse. We agreed to make an early start, and he immediately left the room. Roma Jah shook his head. “You need to think what you’re doing, Titch. That’s not for everyone, and he is a mole.” “He should have thought of that himself. For some reason he agreed.”

  Roma shook his head again. With each additional road trip he became wiser and accordingly more and more placid, did Roma, the landlord of our commune. But the deed was done, and the pre-road trip butterflies in my stomach could not be stilled. A faraway smile lit up my face, my eyes began to shine, like Grand’s crazy eyes. It took me a long time to get to sleep that night. I lay and stared the length of the room through the window to see the stars and the gentle glow of the Moscow sky.

  Oh, Stalker, Stalker, why is the Zone drawing you back again?

  We are footloose and fancy-free wayfarers on roads without end, friends of long-distance truckers and drivers, their amulets, talismans, their guardian angels. Even the cops leave us alone. They know us for who we are and where we are going. We may not know that ourselves, may laugh and gesture into the sun, but the cops know. They swear, shrug, hand back our ID, and send us on our way. There is no stopping us, but why that should be they don’t know.