The Anonymous Novel

by Alessandro Barbero

  We’re interested in this district because it is home to – oh yes, who is it home to? All readers who still remember this, please raise your hands! So it’s true then that the readers of today are no longer capable of following a complex plot, and after ten pages they’ve already forgotten the names of the characters. When they come across them again, they don’t know who they are: frankly the situation is hopeless… Of course, this is the district where Mark Kaufman lives; we were talking about him back there at chapter… to hell with it, must have been chapter five or six. Check it out yourself.

  The performances of The Sarcophagus have been cancelled for the moment, although we know that here in Russia there are theatres that continue to open their doors throughout the summer to entertain the workers. But their collective decision was to close for August, and who could argue with that? In August people go on holiday, damn your mother! So off they all went: Andrey Arkadyevich, who played the part of the nuclear power station’s manager, had vouchers for a spa in Gelendzhik – God knows how he managed to scrounge them – and went by car with his wife, two daughters and the granny; what philanthropists, taking the old woman to the seaside. Vladimir Vladimirovich, who had jettisoned his wife long ago and never had any children, thank God, and whose grandmothers he had buried, went off camping in the woods on the Baltic – Latvia or around those parts… This year you’re not going to trap me again, he had told Andrey Arkadyevich, and everyone laughed, because his misadventures last year, when Andrey had persuaded him to share the delights of that Gelendzhik of his, had become an epic worthy of Gogol. You had to hear the way he told them! I get there, he says, and I start looking for a hotel; everywhere they’ve got these notices: NO VACANCIES. Then they say, go to Waterfall Hotel, there they’ll fix you up nicely. And where is this hotel? It’s got nothing to do with a waterfall. Go right down to the last street in the city, the very last one, turn where the crane is and carry straight on until you get to the building site, but be careful of the excavations! I go and I stare in amazement, there aren’t any hotels. There is a building site, though, and two or three corrugated-iron shacks, a rusty bulldozer, and they’ve filled the hole with poured concrete, but no one is doing any work. I find the drivers of the bulldozer and cement lorry playing cards. Excuse me, I say, they told me there was a Waterfall Hotel around here… Perhaps I can help you, says the driver of the cement lorry, I live just across the road, and there’s room at my house. We have a garden! What can one do? It costs nothing to take a look. I go along: there is a house and there is even a garden. In the garden there’s a woodshed, and in the house there are box rooms all over the place, and in each box room the profiteering bastard has put a few camp beds! He opens the woodshed, and there are no less than three camp beds in there: every home comfort! That’s two roubles, he says. He can see that I’m not actually too keen on the accommodation, but he doesn’t turn a hair: You don’t like it? Come this way! We go into the house, he throws open the door of one of the box rooms: There’s a sofa bed, but you have to share it with someone else. How much? I ask. Well, he says, according to the tariff, eight roubles: per night, of course. I twist my mouth, and he’s quite relaxed: You don’t like it?

  Come with me! He opens another room: Here, you’ll be on your own. There’s everything you want, bed, carpet and aquarium. Only twelve roubles, he says. But listen here, I say, and what about – you know! I wanted to ask him about the lavatories, of course, but I couldn’t find the words. He looks at me with a baffled expression, and then the light goes on: Ah, he says, what about that? In the courtyard behind the pine tree. What could I do? I settled for two roubles a night on the camp bed, and there were two others in the woodshed with me: a geologist from Leningrad and a professor of mathematics from Kursk. I put up with it for a week, and in the end I found it wasn’t too bad. The landlord, well he was a cheery fellow, and in the evening he was handing out watermelon, and there was as much fresh water as you could want. He could afford it, as he was taking in sixty or seventy roubles a night… And I said to myself, I wonder why they’ll never finish building this Waterfall Hotel?

  So no surprise that Mark Kaufman was not going on holiday.

  No, no, he could not see himself sleeping on a camp bed in a woodshed with a geologist from Leningrad and a mathematician from Kursk, and as for the vouchers for the spa, which would make everything so much easier, he had never been able to get his hands on any, even though they assured him that it was very easy. Who knows? He clearly wasn’t up to it… Besides, why would he want to go on holiday on his own? It’s completely different when you’ve got a woman, and she’ll start to get restless in the middle of winter: Where are we going this summer? So you have to get on with it; there is no choice. You get on the phone and you make enquiries… And that’s without taking into account that it’s also more pleasurable to go on holiday with a woman; she clings to you, the kitten, and is available during the night. It is even better than when you’re at home, as you don’t have to get up early in the morning. Okay, we have to admit that Mark did not get up at all early, even when he was working, but if he had had his little wife and she had worked as, let’s say, a teacher or secretary, then the alarm would have been going off every morning in time for her to go to work, and she would have got out from under the blankets all sleepy with her hair in a mess. Well what a delight that would have been, to laze around during the summer nights with the whole morning ahead of them and to make up for all that lost sleep! Yes I know, these are just pointless, superfluous fantasies, but what can you do? Mark was indulging in them all the time; that was the kind of man he was! It’s unpleasant to live without a woman at forty years of age, and the worst thing is you don’t know how these cursed forty years crept up on you. And yet a few opportunities did turn up along the way; it’s just that you didn’t know how to grasp them and you let them slip away.

  Lyuda, for example, when you had just got to Moscow, do you remember her? You were studying together at the Institute.

  And before that, ouch the wound is still open and cannot be touched or it will bleed: Masha, Masha at the secondary school in Odessa, and where will she have ended up after all these years… Mark had of course invented a system for protecting himself against these fantasies: when he realised that his thoughts were wandering in a certain direction, he would almost always shrug his shoulders, open his notebook full of newspaper cuttings and set about inventing stories about, say, Malvina Landau; but during the summer it wasn’t so easy. It was stifling in his flat, even at night it was impossible to stay under the sheets; his pyjamas stuck to his skin and he had no desire to write, so he would end up switching on the television, but he had no interest in sport, while that was the period in which THEY never spoke of anything else. There were the Olympics – where the hell were they held? Mexico City or some place like that. Tass correspondents interviewed our athletes after the medalawarding ceremony: brutes dressed in jackets and ties with shoulders as wide as a wardrobe – and the badge on their lapels revealed their sport: wrestlers, shot-putters… Yes, they came one after another to rattle off the same spiel, I wish to thank the Soviet Union that has allowed me to… The hours passed, a dull flickering light appeared at the window and heralded the dawn: good, now we can get some sleep. If, however, his anxieties plagued him during the day, there was nothing for it but put on a shirt and a pair of canvas trousers, and go out into the streets. He could not stand another moment in the flat. This is what happened on the day we wish to speak of: Mark was wandering around the district’s lanes towards Simonovsky Val, and he had been out for more than an hour. He was no longer close to home and had no desire to return there. It was perhaps around four in the afternoon, and the humid heat was oppressive, as was the smell of rubbish. For some reason the dustbin men had not come round the district that morning and the rubbish from the day before was decomposing in the bins. Some were leaking a yellowish liquid, which looked like apricot juice, but I wouldn’t want to taste it. And as he was looking around,
Mark realised that some guy at the corner of a shoe shop had been observing him for some time. What kind of guy? you say. Well, much like any other man really. You know, hasn’t shaved for a few days, fag hanging out of his mouth: in other words, a regular guy… And when this layabout encountered Mark’s stare, he detached himself from the wall he had been leaning against, and came a few steps towards him, and touching his neck with his index finger in a meaningful gesture, he drawled: Listen, friend, what do you say about going for a drink? Hey, thought Mark, you scared me, and by the look of you, you’re one of those people who go around with a knife in their pocket; then he understood that he had to reply – the other guy was standing a few steps away and staring at him, with his hands in his pockets and the look of a man who has nothing very urgent to do, but on the other hand does not like the idea of wasting time while you make your mind up.

  Well, said Mark, with all this heat a drink would not be such a bad idea, and what shall we get, a small beer? The man pulled a face, What the fuck? A beer? He spat his cigarette butt on the pavement to express his disgust. Here, he said, they don’t even sell beer, we wouldn’t know where to go. But we want half a litre, and they sell that. There’s a little shop on the corner. Not much to look at, but they’ve always got some vodka. What do you mean when you say “we”? Mark asked. The man snorted, took out an almost empty packet of Belomor and lit one up, There’s an old man and he’s there at the shop waiting for us, but between us we couldn’t put enough money together; do you have a couple of roubles? That way, he explained, we also get something to eat – we wouldn’t want to build a wall without cement, would we? Oh all right, thought Mark, and why not?

  Everything is such a nauseating shithouse anyway! The heat is killing me and I’ve no desire to go back home. And what would I do there? He rummaged around in his pockets: the roubles were there, and there were more than two of them.

  And so there’s two of you, he investigated. That’s it, two of us, the other man confirmed. Okay, let’s go, Mark agreed.

  The other man threw out his arms and his mouth widened into a toothless grin. Well, my friend, you’ve saved our skin.

  I’ve been waiting here for half an hour, fuck it, and no one coughed up a single kopeck – must all be fucking teetotallers. Just as well you came along. As soon as I saw you, I said to myself, this one will go for it. It’s over there, he pointed to a squalid little shop: there wasn’t even a shop sign, just a narrow half-opened door next to an empty shop window thick with dust, but behind that door there were about five or six people with their money ready in their hands – and this could only mean that the friend had not lied, what we have here is a goodly supply of vodka…

  As they got close, an old man detached himself from the queue; he was decked out rather nicely, not like his mate; he was even wearing a jacket and tie in that heat! Hey, Stas, any luck? he drawled in a voice that gurgled with catarrh and giving Mark a sidelong glance. All according to plan, the other replied, didn’t I tell you? Now look, this friend has joined us and now we’ve got the money. While he was waiting, the old man had made a few enquiries: Listen here, he says, they sell cheese too; we can get some of that, I reckon.

  Go for it, says his mate, but Mark interrupts: Hold on a sec, what kind of cheese do they have? Because occasionally in these places they palm you off with some filthy cheese that tastes like sawdust… No, no, what are you talking about.

  Sawdust? No way, this is the best processed cheese with the “Friendship” trademark. Good stuff, I can tell you. Okay, not at all bad, Kaufman acknowledged, let’s buy a couple of packets and half a litre, what do you say? Half a litre, the old man turned nasty, you could hardly smell that when you divide it in three! I’d rather we just took one packet of processed cheese! Mark looked at the other partner. No, he said, doubtfully counting the money, we’d better take half a litre, otherwise we’ll not cover it. The old man shook his head and looked askance at them; clearly he considered them spineless wimps – in his day people knew how to drink… In the meantime their turn had come and the old man went in and a few minutes later came out with a bottle under his arm and the cheese wrapped in newspaper. Right, he said proudly, we’ve even got the tablecloth! Mark looked around with an air of uncertainty: Now, where are we going? But Stas was already signalling to them, Over here, guys! There’s a courtyard I know, it’s bloody fantastic; there’s even shade and a bench… They followed him and in fact five minutes later they came to a courtyard, and the bench was there as well. The only thing was that at that time of day the shade was on the other side. Well, what can you do? With this heat and humidity, there’s not a great deal of difference between being in the sun or in the shade. Besides the sun is not out and the sky is just grey mud. They sat down and the old man set out the newspaper and opened the cheese. His partner removed the top with his nail. There you go, he said to Mark, you take the first drink! Mark grabbed the bottle, looked at it against the light: Yes, it’s clear, you beauty! Let it not be my last! he shouted and then he upended it and drank deeply as his two new buddies looked on, at first placidly but soon with increasing alarm. When he slammed it back on the bench so fiercely that he almost broke it, the younger of the two partners whistled. Fuck it, he said, that was some crack you gave it! On you go, old man, and I’ll finish it off. Once Mark had got his breath back, he started to chew a mouthful of cheese. The old man seized the bottle with determination and gulped down his share, but then at the climactic moment, he started to cough and had to put it down, while he was spluttering all over the place, a revolting mess… His partner shook his head: You’ve lost your touch, old man! At your age, I would expect you to be more savvy.

  Well, there’s nothing for it, it’s my turn now, and up went the bottle and he drank long and longer still without stopping to breathe until he could put it down empty.

  “Yes, now I’m beginning to feel it,” Mark said enthusiastically as he continued to chew on his cheese.

  Large beads of sweat were running down his forehead, but it was the salutary sweat that purifies. Now he feels good, forget the fantasies! “Yes, that didn’t go at all badly,” Stas agreed. But the old man protested; he didn’t feel that they had divvied it up very fairly at all. Look! I got a coughing fit, damn your mother!

  My catarrh cheated me, and you just went for it – you emptied the bloody bottle under my nose. No, here we are going to have to make amends! We’ll have to get another one, he stuttered resentfully. What was that? Stas suddenly objected. Before you were saying that you didn’t have any money! Right, the old man became confused, but the truth is that I still have something here now that I’m taking a close look… Fuck off, you old bastard, said his partner, suddenly overcome with rage, You had the money and you made me lose all that time. You said, we’ll have to find a third person, on our own we’ll never have enough… The old man nodded grandly: Well, he said, we’ll now put that right.

  What do you say to another and this time a whole litre? He undid his jacket, pulled out a wallet and in a second he had the roubles in his hand. Stas shook his head.

  “Nothing! I’m running on empty. Not a fucking drop of fuel.”

  The old man turned his watery eyes to Mark, “Just another two roubles,” he implored, “and we’re there. What do you say?”

  Well, what do you say? You can’t say no. You’ve got the roubles in your pocket, and the company is congenial – rough and ready it’s true, but what’s wrong with that. You can’t just drink with academics and conductors all your life!

  Besides, with all that heat Mark was still thirsty and the cheese was burning his throat. There was nothing for it, he wanted to give it another good rinse. The old man happily grabbed the money and counted it: it covered a half litre and another cheese. Well, I would get a sausage, Stas advised.

  He hadn’t contributed to the funds, but he did not intend to wind up the business simply because of that. The old man agreed: Of course, that’s enough of the cheese; sausage would be better this time. I�
��m off, he exclaimed, and a moment later he was trudging across the courtyard. Yes, in Russia we have nice old men like that: obliging and willing to do their bit… Mark settled himself down more comfortably on the bench and wiped away his sweat. As for the heat, there’s no two ways about it, you could have croaked indeed, and there wasn’t much shade in that courtyard.

  “Strange fellow, wouldn’t you say?” Stas muttered. “Who?”

  “You know, the old man. Helpful: I’ll go, he says, and off he goes,” chortled the partner.

  “But who is he,” Mark asked lazily.

  “Fuck knows? I bumped into him at the shop. He buttonholed me and wouldn’t leave off. He’s a railwayman, he says, retired. What was the work like? I say. Didn’t give it much thought. It was more to pass the time. Was it heavy work? I say. Well, he says, I was a supernumerary railwayman and they only called me in when they needed to. Otherwise I just stayed at home. And your wages? I say. Oh, they still came in, he says, God forbid anything less than a fair wage. Do you get it? He didn’t work, and he still coolly picks up his wages. And now the parasite is on a pension. No surprise that the country is falling apart. These things would never happen in the West!” said Stas as he started to get riled.