by Dan Pollock
“Marcus says it is a long story, but if you would like to hear it, and I wouldn’t mind translating, he will gladly tell you. But to do this properly, he also will need a little vodka.” She smiled faintly.
Arensky filled all three glasses. They toasted in Russian and English, with Arensky demonstrating how to take the vodka in a gulp, leaving the little glass upended on one’s nose.
Then the American began to tell of his adventures. It was a tale, recast in the melodious voice of Eva Sorokina, such as Taras Arensky had never before heard, a contemporary odyssey which both inflamed his jealousy and captivated his Russian soul.
Seven
The vodka, a bracing, icy syrup on his palate, transformed itself farther down his throat into molten lava. Marcus gasped for breath, then grinned at the two Russians across the table. His lovely blond guide smiled back, dimpling plump cheeks, plainly eager for the promised story of Marcus’ life; her sullen military cadet boyfriend, meanwhile, maintained his inhospitable glare. I love you, too, pal, Marcus subvocalized, then addressed Eva:
“Don’t translate all this stuff, or you’ll bore your friend Taras to death. Just hit the high points. It starts with me being born in a log cabin in Illinois, like Abraham Lincoln.”
“But this is not correct,” Eva said. “Abraham Lincoln was born in Kentucky.”
“Are you kidding me? And all these years I thought I was following in the big guy’s bootsteps. Anyway, I was born in Illinois, so help me, and grew up in a one-gas-station town like some of the hellhole places we passed on the train between here and Nakhodka.”
“Why you did leave?”
“Well, I didn’t actually leave, Eva. I’d rather not go into all the details, okay? A fire burned my grandparents’ house to the ground, killed both of them. My grandmother’s damn kiln started it, blew up one afternoon when she was firing some of her china painting. Ted and Cassie were my whole family, you might say, raised me from a little guy.”
Eva reached for his hand, but Marcus pulled it away. “Hey, thanks, darlin’, but it’s past, and I’m not looking for sympathy.” Marcus had caught the extra flare of jealousy in Arensky’s dark eyes at Eva’s sympathetic gesture. And Marcus didn’t want to scrape away at the scar tissue of his own feelings. Let it all stay safely buried, with his grandparents.
The Adventures of Marcus Jolly really began in the fire’s aftermath anyway. He’d been left, after funeral and other expenses, with about a thousand dollars insurance money and an empty feeling—like he no longer belonged to the town, or himself. He had moved in briefly with school friends to finish his senior year. But one morning he stuffed his backpack with food instead of books and started walking west.
The direction felt right—following the sun. He hitched rides here and there, mostly walked. Days and nights passed. He crossed into Iowa, then Nebraska, slept in fields to save money. Gradually a plan took shape in his mind. It was a scheme at once lazy and ambitious, grand and aimless enough to match his mood. Why not just continue walking toward the sunset—till he’d gone around the world?
He liked seeing what lay around the next bend in the road, but was in no hurry, with no particular destination. Maybe when his footsteps had circled the globe, he’d find his way back to Illinois and decide what to do with the rest of his life. More likely he’d never come back. Probably jump ship somewhere, Tahiti maybe, shack up with some little cocoa-skinned girl.
Eva rolled her eyes at that, then translated very briefly. Marcus suspected censorship. When she signaled him with her eyes to proceed, he did so.
As his adventurous plan took shape, Marcus had begun to feel life flowing through him again. He would become a person nobody knew. A mysterious stranger, like Clint Eastwood, the way he’d ride into a town with that funny squint. He’d do things he’d read about, or seen on television. He remembered them in handfuls. Crazy things. Go hang-gliding. Jump out of a plane. Ride an elephant and maybe Gilley’s mechanical bull. Climb the biggest pyramid in Egypt; if there was enough room up there, he’d unroll his sleeping bag and spend the night. He’d run with the bulls in that place in Spain. And survive a knife fight in a waterfront bar...
“You are total crazy!” Eva said to him.
“Hey, this was a couple years ago, remember? But yeah, maybe I’m still a little ‘rad,’ as the surfers say. What the hell do you think I’m doing here in Siberia ten degrees below zero wearing a pair of dumb cowboy boots?”
“This is the Far East, not Siberia, but anyway that is a good question, about those high-heeled boots you are wearing. Taras thinks they are from Texas.”
“You tell Laughing Boy there I got them from Tohei Films, which is outside Tokyo, for two days of stunt work in a Japanese cowboy-samurai movie. This here is genuine armadillo, something like that.”
“But how did you come to Japan?”
“I’m going to tell you that, too. First I need more vodka.” Marcus fished ten rubles from his jeans and semaphored his arm at the waitress. “Dyevushka! More vodka! “Bolshe, bolshe! How’s that, teacher?”
“Fantastic!” Eva laughed. “And see, for you she comes quickly!”
“Can’t help it if I was born beautiful. Now where was I?”
“Nyebraska?”
“Somewhere along there. Dreaming up adventures. Like Indiana Jones. And what I figured was”—he tapped his blond head—“if I kept heading west, eventually the continent was going to come to an end and I’d be staring at nothing but ocean. See, I’d studied my geography in school.”
Marcus’ little joke perished somewhere in translation. Neither Eva nor Taras cracked a smile.
“Anyway, I decided what I really wanted to do was cross the ocean—the whole damn Pacific, preferably in some kind of a sailboat. I decided this somewhere in Kansas, I think, which is pretty much like being out in the middle of the ocean. And I’m thinking, why not? The whole wide world is out there just waiting for me, and absolutely nobody cares what I do. I’m totally free. I can do anything, be anybody, go anywhere. Understand? Panimayesh?”
Like his last joke, this bit of vehemence seemed lost on Eva, who now registered skeptical amusement. But Marcus detected definite glimmerings of interest in Taras’ dark eyes. Following one’s own star was obviously not a very Russian notion, he decided, but wanderlust certainly ran rampant in the young people Marcus had run into, all the way from Champaign-Urbana to Osaka. He thought of Yuli, a pimply Latvian teenager he’d met on the M/S Dzerzhinsky, the steamer from Yokohama, who’d spent most of the rocky two-day voyage listening to John Denver’s Greatest Hits on his Walkman.
Anyway, with the Pacific always gentle on his mind, like in the old song, Marcus had begun hitchhiking farther west, stopping for odd jobs here and there to save up passage money—in case he couldn’t work or bum a ride across the ocean. Again Eva hesitated in her translation.
“Hitchhiking, right?” he said. “You probably don’t do much of it here. Not enough cars. I can just see some poor bastard standing out on a lonely road till he freezes to death, waiting for a truck to come along.”
“No. We have many cars, even here in Khabarovsk. On Karl Marx Street you see many, many. And we have a word for hitchhiking. But this is not the way to cross a country like ours. Even driving, it is much too far. Only the Rossiya Express or Aeroflot can cross the entire Soviet Union. Roads and cars are for cities, or between cities and towns, or to drive into the country.” She paused. “But ‘odd job’ is a more difficult word.”
He laughed. “‘Odd job’—‘strange occupation,’ I guess it doesn’t make much sense.” He tried to clarify but apparently the concept still posed difficulties.
In the Soviet Union, Eva explained, workers could obviously not be allowed to walk away from their jobs without permission, simply in order to work somewhere else. Anarchy would result. But there was one exception. Those were the shabashniki, migrant workers or “moonlighters.” These itinerant labor gangs, many of them Armenian, were sometimes hired in emergencies, to help with harvests or
on construction projects. “Perhaps this is similar to your ‘odd jobbers’?”
“Close enough,” Marcus said. So, that’s what he’d been—a shabashnik—more or less from Nebraska to Yokohama, in between the fun and games. He’d spread and tamped asphalt on highway crews in Colorado. Done rough-framing carpentry in Oregon and Washington. Even picked apples up there, real shabashniki work. A couple of the sleazier jobs he omitted from the account, like a weekend of dancing bare-ass in a “boylesque” bar outside Reno.
But both Eva’s and Taras’ eyes lit up when he told about joining up with the traveling carnival. It turned out they thought it was a tsirk, a circus, something all Russians apparently adored; they even had one in Khabarovsk.
Marcus hated to disillusion them. There’d been no elephants, no trapeze girls, trained bears or clowns. Just a bunch of old trucks and trailers that, in a day’s gut-busting labor, could be slammed together into a neon midway, freak show, shooting gallery, three-for-a-buck tosses, tattoo parlor, Ferris wheel, Big Whip and other lose-your-lunch mechanical rides. Marcus’ drove a truck, helped with the setup and takedown, hung out with the other roustabouts, did a little barking.
But when the caravan hit Oakland, and Marcus got his first glimpse of San Francisco shining across the Bay, and the vast Pacific through the Golden Gate, he walked away from the sawdust without looking back, just the way he had left his hometown.
The land had finally run out; it was time to go to sea.
But how? He wasn’t about to join the Navy or Merchant Marine. He didn’t want to spend his hard-earned money on a passenger berth. He wanted to sail. There were sailing schools, he found, but they were for rich hobbyists, too expensive and too slow. Besides, Marcus never played by normal rules. His method was always to jump in and learn by doing.
The next morning he showed up in the Sausalito marina, in the majestic shadow of the Golden Gate. He went sauntering along from one slip to the other, wherever he saw people readying boats to go out, chatting, asking if they could use some extra crew.
“Sorry, not today,” was the usual answer, though several inquired if he had any experience.
“Nope. But I work hard and learn quick.”
“Some other time maybe.”
After an hour he’d found himself standing on the dock, watching longingly as, one after another, the nifty little sloops and ketches and yawls followed each other out of the channel. “I was totally frustrated, like the kid stuck outside the candy store,” he told Eva. “So guess what I did.”
She couldn’t.
“Simple. I got so desperate that I took off my jacket, my shirt, my shoes and socks and jeans—everything, right down to my Jockey shorts—and I jumped into the water. Let me tell you, San Francisco Bay is frigging cold, even in the summer, which it wasn’t. And I swam out into the channel. So I’m out there treading water, freezing my ass off and a few other parts, and as each boat comes by, I’m waving like this. And people are standing up and grabbing their life rings and shouting, ‘Hey, are you okay? Do you need help?’ And I’d shake my head and yell back, ‘I’m fine. Need any crew?’”
The fourth or fifth boat had picked him up—a fat, bearded ex-Marine Marcus had talked to earlier on the dock. Five minutes later, toweled off and wearing borrowed, giant-sized foul-weather gear, Marcus was learning how to bring a genoa across the bow and winch it tight in five knots of wind.
“You liked this?” Eva asked.
“I loved it.”
Within a year, he told them proudly, he was not only a pretty fair country sailor; he was actually skippering sailboats up and down the Pacific Coast himself, from Vancouver to Acapulco.
As this was all being relayed to Taras, Marcus detected a different kind of envy, almost admiration, in the Russian’s eyes. Marcus stood up.
“The moral is—be sure you translate this, Eva—the moral is, find out what you want to do in life, and then jump in feet first, goddammit! And do it!”
“But Marcus, where are you going?”
“Let’s take a break here. I’m tired of talking and I’m tired of sitting, and in case you didn’t notice, this place is turning into a sauna. Aren’t you supposed to be my guide? Let’s go see something. Let’s go back and watch the old farts fish through the ice, I don’t care.”
“Of course you are right, Marcus. I am not doing my duties.
Taras also is here for the first time, and there is much to be seen in such a fine city as Khabarovsk. But,” she added, her blue eyes flashing as Marcus narrowly beat Taras in helping her on with her heavy coat, “we wish to hear more of your adventures.”
“That can be arranged.”
And so the three bundled up and went out into the brutally cold day, then quickly squeezed into Eva’s tiny, apple-green Moskvich.
Eight
Many of the recommended sights of Khabarovsk—those to which Intourist guides invariably drag their helpless victims—are lugubrious in character. And Eva Sorokina did her cheerful utmost to conduct her two young men to as many of these as possible.
Reluctantly by-passing the oil refinery, machine-tool factory and other shining examples of local industry, she drove Marcus and Taras to a succession of war memorials. There was one honoring the fallen Amur Sailors; another (erected over a ravine where mass executions had taken place) commemorated civil war victims; and a tower beside the Amur River marked the spot where Hungarian and Austrian prisoners had been shot for refusing to play the imperial Russian anthem. Only the most vocal opposition from her charges dissuaded Eva from driving them fifty kilometers over icy roads to view the wonders of the Volochayevka Battle Museum.
By the time they returned to the Tsentralnaya, on the inevi-table Lenin Square with its inevitably monumental statue of V.I. Lenin, both young men were out of sympathy with slaughtered martyrs. And they did not brighten when Eva pointed out the tombstone nearby of four soldiers killed in a long-ago skirmish with the Chinese.
Taras had plainly had enough, and said so in a muttered protest, which Eva translated for Marcus:
“It seems Tarushka is now angry with me. He would rather hear about your trip to South Seas, and also about those bad Tahiti girls.”
For the first time since the restaurant, the two men exchanged smiles. Boredom had temporarily allied them, much as vodka had done earlier.
“However, while you are telling us more naughty things you did,” Eva said, “let us visit our famous Museum of Local History. It is in the Park of Culture above the Amur. There are no graves, I promise, but two tigers, some sea otters and other most interesting exhibits.”
*
As they wandered the overheated corridors, peering at stuffed Siberian tigers and the artifacts and handicrafts of various northern tribes, Marcus resumed his narrative. He told how the westward urge had carried him on to Hawaii, and how, for a short time, he had even rowed tourists in a Waikiki outrigger—an unusual job for a haole, or Caucasian. He’d spent part of a summer operating a skip-loader on Maui, helping to rape paradise for a Japanese construction company. Which had in turn paid for a winter of hanging out on Oahu’s North Shore, where he’d learned to surf—and been damn fool enough to get himself wiped out on a twenty-foot storm wave at Waimea Bay, and just lucky enough to survive.
“How high in meters this is?”
“Maybe three times higher than that doorway over there. And about a ton of water, which is, shit, a thousand kilos or something, all falling on my head. Pretty stupid, huh?”
Eva agreed vehemently.
They gave short shrift to the dusty, upstairs displays dedi-cated to agrarian and industrial progress achieved in the Far East under socialism. By then both Eva and Taras were caught up in Marcus’ adventures on a sixty-foot gaff-rigged ketch he had helped crew all over the South Seas. They followed his long strides over to a Pacific wall map and watched his finger trace a zigzag route across the vast blue expanse. South from Lahaina to the Marquesas, east to Tahiti, Moorea and Bora Bora, northwest to Samoa, then
on up through Micronesia and Guam to Yokohama. Nine glorious months.
“You see no Tahiti girls?” Eva teased.
He’d seen his share, but none to play with. No pretty island playmates of any kind, unless he counted a couple of unattached New Zealand girls he’d met on Ponape, living aboard their uncle’s big schooner in Jokaj Harbor. Kiwis were islanders, after all. But Eva didn’t want to hear about them.
Finally, two and a half years after leaving home, Marcus had arrived in Japan. He’d spent the last six months mostly in Tokyo, doing more “odd jobs,” including teaching English and trying his hand at movie stunt work. He’d also managed to climb Mount Fuji and acquire a brown belt in aikido and Japanese fencing along with a taste for raw fish.
As the trio returned to the museum’s ground floor, Marcus brought his story up to date. Next, as they knew, he intended to head west on the Trans-Siberian, stopping twice along the way—in Irkutsk to see Lake Baikal, and at Novosibirsk. He’d go on to Moscow and Leningrad. After that, he had no idea.
Then, as they were on the verge of leaving, Marcus paused to look at some old photographs. Eva explained they were actually stills from a recent Soviet film about a famous explorer and ethnographer of Eastern Siberia, Vladimir Arsenyev. There was, in fact, a plaque honoring this same Arsenyev on the museum wall.
“I know these pictures,” Marcus said. “They’re from Dersu Uzala. A great movie. I saw it in Tokyo in a Kurosawa film festival, with some of his old samurai movies—like The Seven Samurai and Yojimbo. Sorry, Eva, but it’s Japanese, not Russian.”
“Dersu Uzala, yes, it is the title. But this is a Soviet film. Mosfilm.”
The museum director emerged from his small office to shed light on the matter. His name was Serdyuk, and he was a thin, schoolmasterish fellow with round, rimless eyeglasses that miniaturized his watery-gray eyes.
“You are both correct,” he said in singsong English. The film had been a Russo-Japanese co-production, made in the Far East in the early Seventies by the very well-known Japanese director. Indeed, certain of the events depicted had taken place in the vicinity of Khabarovsk. For many years Arsenyev had worked in this very museum, and his house was still standing not far away. And Dersu—the native hunter who was Arsenyev’s loyal companion on many expeditions—had been buried just south of the city, near what was now the Korfovskaya Station along the Ussuri River.