Red Star Tales

by Yvonne Howell

  The golden days flew by

  A thief’s reckless love,

  O you, my raven horses

  You black steeds of mine.

  He didn’t engage in any romances, and no one knew who this “reckless love” might be. He didn’t drink, other than snatching drops of rain after a flying a mission without a single mishap. He always flew away from the Messerschmitts in the direction of the sun. His bright wings dissolved in the blinding disk.

  I’ll line my sled with wraps

  Braid ribbons into their manes,

  Flying with ringing bells,

  I’ll snatch you up along the way.

  Then he disappeared for the last time into that solar disk. His wings sparkled and dissolved into the blinding brightness. After that, nobody saw him again. He disappeared.

  The American shuttle-pilots finished another flight and showed up at our base, unbuttoning their Canadian jackets.

  “Soda-Sun!” they shouted, looking for him.

  “Soda-whiskey,” corrected the new girl tending the bar.

  They got drunk again, but this time morosely. One of the airmen kept crying and shouting “Soda-Sun,” as if he’d find him somewhere in the room.

  We escaped their crazy chase.

  Stop crying, my dear, please stop.

  The black steeds have not betrayed us,

  And nobody will ever catch us.

  The night he appeared at our expedition’s campfire, I recognized him immediately by his whistle. He whistled the same song of thief’s love and raven-black horses. I recognized him immediately, even though he had filled out and his face danced with constantly shifting expressions. A total circus. Now he had been accepted into the Institute of Archeology on the basis of his da Vinci article, and he turned out to be a clown. He was going through a trial period.

  I never let on that I knew him. And he didn’t recognize me as the humble technician who helped lift the tail of his silver plane, but now had a doctorate and served as his boss. I’m old now, I don’t want to see chaos anymore. When I look at him, I remember how he was called Soda-Sun and how he caught drops of rain with his bright lips. Those poor little drops – there are thousands of them. Now it is nighttime, and it’s raining. The drops fall flat and disappear. But every drop is someone’s sea. Somebody with bright eyes is rowing across to the other shore. We are all oceans inside, oceans surrounding a continent. And I decided to let him be, let him do his thing. In the name of Soda-Sun, I’ll help him, help him get whatever he wants. Nothing has changed. I’m the technician, and he’s Soda-Sun, except he’s injured, and I have to help him fix his silver wings.

  “What kind of help do you need?”

  He thought about it.

  “Tenderness…” he said.

  “What?”

  “I work well,” he said, “when I am loved.”

  “Soda-Sun…” I let it out, unable to resist.

  His close-set eyes widened.

  “I recognized you right away,” he said quietly, “which is why I went up to the campfire, back there, in Kherson… I had an old piece about Leonardo,” he said. “When I saw you at the campfire, I thought, why not become an archeologist?”

  “That’s absurd.”

  He swallowed and put out his cigarette.

  “Don’t be upset,” he said as he left.

  The sun came through the window of the room. I took some cool water from the carafe. Soda-Sun…

  7. An Elderly Man Was a Boy

  I signed the necessary papers, and he left the Institute, this time forever.

  I went to see the director.

  “Don’t even think about asking me, Vladimir Andreyevich,” said the director. “I’ve had enough of this craziness.”

  “But we’re going ahead with his expedition anyway.”

  “Yeah, but without him,” said the director.

  “Didn’t he do a lot for us?”

  “He did plenty,” said the director. “Plenty. Our institute has become the center of a hellish uproar. Sensationalism. Priests swarming around. As if it’s not bad enough that our findings ended up supporting religious ideas instead of debunking them.

  “Quite the contrary. If we can prove the existence of an actually existing prototype for the devil, then that puts an end to about half of any religious system. What kind of devil can there be if it has an anatomy, real flesh, and a metabolism? And what kind of religion can make do without the devil?”

  “Alright, let’s take another example. Why did he have to bring up that ‘slave poet’ Mitus, who supposedly might be the actual author of the epic The Lay of Prince Igor?4 All he did was bring the wrath of the entire Slavic professoriat upon us. They don’t even want to hear about Mitus! He did it simply to be obstreperous. It’s not as though he proved that the court jester Mitus was actually a great poet!”

  “It’s true that he could not prove authorship, but he made some interesting findings. First of all, the medieval chronicles refer to a slav poet, not a slave poet. In those times, all names ending in ‘slav’ designated princes and kings: Yaroslav, Bryachislav, Mstislav, and so on are specifically noble names. All other names – your Dobrynyas, your Putyatas – are for non-nobles. Now, how could a person designated as ‘Mitus,’ a word which has been interpreted as slang for ‘one who mutters’ or ‘one who mixes words’ – in short, a jester – also be a noble? Well, he combed through all the sources and did not find any other examples of this slang usage. Instead, in the documents of the Carpathian Slavs who emigrated to Canada, he found that among the Lemko ethnic group the name Mitus occurs to this day. Finally, he even found genealogical records of the Mitusov family, which traces its noble lineage all the way back to the Slavic singer of tales, Mitus.”

  “Sensationalism. Troublemaking.” The director was adamant. “This is not serious work, this is provocation in the name of scholarship. He is going too far. Like all dilettantes, he’s searching for sensational ideas. I give him credit for tenacity, though. He could become a real scholar.”

  “He could become anything. He is a real human being. As a human being, he was offended on behalf of a great poet, who the specialists decided was a simple jester. As a human being, he wanted to show that anybody can become anything. He is a human being, Sergei Aleksandrovich, whereas you and I are just specialists.”

  I shouldn’t have said that. Sergei Aleksandrovich did not appreciate my little witticism. For him, “specialist” is a sacred category.

  “In any case,” I said, “these things were just small digressions from his main work. The main task is to find the locus of the evil spirit, or whatever you call it.”

  “What are you talking about?! I can’t believe it! This is the twentieth century! I am a dues-paying member of our professional organization. I study ancient Greek folklore. I’m learning old-fashioned Lipsi dances from T.V.5 We don’t need to be ridiculed. Can you imagine the following announcement: the Institute of Archeology of the Academy of Sciences initiates a new study on the origins of the devil. Please!”

  “As you like,” I sighed. “If you look at it that way, it does indeed seem ridiculous.”

  Thank God he hasn’t remembered the incident involving that woman, I thought to myself. Then I realized: he couldn’t remember it. Because during those 24 hours our director – a scholar, a specialist, an elderly man – was a boy.

  8. We Are Going Because of Him

  We’re launching the expedition without him. I go along with mixed emotions. Everything is strange on this strange journey: the fact that I am going without him and in all likelihood will never see him again; the fact that we are going to verify the hypothesis of the person that we fired; and the fact that we are going to Turgai.

  I never thought the Kazakh village of Turgai would reappear in my life after it played such a large role in it once before. It’s as if I am once again twenty years old, my parents and loved ones are still alive, and I’m just starting my scientific career, as if half a century had not passed since
that time.

  It was the summer of 1912. A few brigades from the Department of Land Improvement were working on the Turgai steppe. The brigades had been given the task of elucidating hydrological conditions, in order to provide a water supply for future resettlement plots. Along the Kara-Turgai River, a brigade under the supervision of the mining engineer Mokeyev found several very large teeth, a long spine, and a foot bone. During the same summer, a Mining Institute student by the name of Gorbunov, on a different brigade, found rich fossil layers a bit to the west, on the river Dzhilanchik. He was able to gather a large number of elk and tiger bones. These fossils were all delivered to the geological museum of the Academy of Sciences, which in the following summer of 1913 directed that same Gorbunov to proceed with further exploration of both sites. Gorbunov, student of the Mining Institute, was me. My secret ambition was to find the bones of a mammoth. That expedition was a turning point in my life and brought me unexpected success.

  The Turgai region was carved out of a part of the Central Asian steppe populated by the nomadic Kyrgiz people. It was gently hilly country, dotted with reed-rimmed saltwater and freshwater lakes. I put in supplies for the caravan, hired some local Kyrgiz to help with the dig, and set out on the expedition. Along the way, my Kyrgiz told me that, in a different place, on the shores of one of the salty lakes, there are much larger fossil deposits than the ones by Lake Dzhilanchik. They called the place Battle of the Giants.

  You can imagine what I felt when I heard about a “battle of the giants.” I was overcome by a mixture of smoldering excitement and almost superstitious dread that the local stories might not pan out. These conflicting emotions forced me to examine my true motivations and face my real calling; in other words, it was a revelatory moment. I forgot all about the Mining Institute, the instructions of my bosses, and about the fact that I even had a boss. I immediately turned the expedition toward the Salt Lake, although I had always been considered a person who valued steady judgment and discipline above all else. Without a doubt, my decision was a breach of conduct, but I could not resist the temptation of finding those mammoth bones.

  I found them. We returned with the bones. At this point, I was met with a bitter disappointment.

  I had been sent to collect the fossils of some heretofore unknown elk and tiger specimens, and instead I had come back with the bones of a mammoth that had been discovered long ago and was well-known to experts in the field. Nevertheless, the boxes arrived. Even though no one was particularly interested in the mammoth, we opened one of the biggest boxes and looked inside. At the very first glance, it became clear that these bones exhibited features that could not be a mammoth’s. What was it? It seemed to be a completely new, unknown and gigantic animal. Disappointment abruptly turned to keen interest, and the technicians unpacked the rest with a great deal more care and attention.

  The colossal skeleton of the five-meter tall Indricotherium6 that hangs in the Historical Museum will always be the monument to my first success. Yet now we are setting out on an expedition without him, even though we are going because of him.

  9. Without Pills

  He was driven out because everyone got tired of him.

  It started when I asked him why, exactly, he had begun to investigate Mitus and Leonardo.

  That was my first mistake.

  “I was interested in the Mitus question because I don’t know any foreign languages,” he said.

  “What do foreign languages have to do with it?”

  “The dawn of our millennium was a time of remarkable poetry. In Germany they had the “Song of the Nibelungen,” in Spain they had “El Cid Campeador,” in England, “The Ballad of Robin Hood,” in France, “Song of Roland,” and in Russia, “The Lay of Prince Igor.” It was easier for me to read in a Slavic language than any of the others.”

  “So what?”

  “One gets the impression that all creative forces at the turn of the first millennium went into poetry – anonymous poetry, at that.”

  “Let’s say that’s true. And your point is…?”

  “My point is that the epoch of the Renaissance, which occurred in the middle of the millennium, was supposed to exhibit its creative force in more rationalistic forms. And that was indeed the case – literature became a form of philosophy, drama a form of public intellectualism, and the fine arts overlapped with the natural sciences.”

  “All points that have been made before. It follows that…?”

  “It follows that if you look at humanity as a whole, not as an aggregate of many individuals, but as an organism, then the first two stages look a lot like the first two stages in the Theory of Reflection, i.e. direct experience, followed by abstract reasoning. It follows that the final stage, coming at the end of our millennium, should be marked by action in the form of creativity. And what does this mean?”

  “Well, what does it mean?” I said. “You twist things around. Creativity is a form of action, so how can there be ‘action in the form of creativity’? People were creative a thousand years ago, five hundred years ago, and today they create as well.”

  “But what do they create?” he asked. “Where are the unique creations of culture, the great works, the synthesis of poetry and reason? Today all of our analyses, investigations, discoveries and theories are just a heap of fragments, a demolition job, a search for the truth. They take apart the universe like a watch and then try to put the parts back together, but a bunch of little pieces don’t fit. Is this really what we mean by creativity?”

  “People have always sought the truth, both moral and scientific.”

  “Yes, but what for? Why so much seeking, but so little actual inventing?”

  “People are inventing enough! We hear about new inventions every day…”

  “We hear about them! That’s the point – there should be so many that we don’t even hear about them. You don’t hear about it when they release another pair of shoes or an automobile, because those aren’t things that are talked about, they are things that are made. No, our age does not like new inventions. It likes research. What is the most difficult job to have? Being an inventor. But a researcher… well, all of our institutes are in fact scientific research institutions. Why is that? Because research means researching what nature has already designed for us. Invention, on the other hand, is an act of human consciousness, a creative action, a synthesis.”

  “There wouldn’t be any invention without research.”

  “Sure, but without inventions there wouldn’t be anything. There wouldn’t be life. Man differs from the monkey not in his research of the cudgel, but in inventing the cudgel. Nowadays we are simply afraid of inventors, afraid that they will disorganize production. Yet we’re long overdue in producing inventions, not just objects. Production should produce inventions. Then there can’t be any disorganization, because it will already be written into the plan – to produce something new.”

  “How are you going to accumulate all these inventions? An invention is not the same as shoes or a car,” I said.

  “Exactly. This is different, because nobody knows what creativity really is, where it comes from, or how you should serve it.” Then he added, somewhat reluctantly, “although Leonardo knew.”

  “How do you know that he knew?”

  “By his results. The list of his inventions alone is dozens of pages long. It’s exhausting just to read it,” he added sadly.

  “Leonardo was a genius!” I pronounced grandly.

  “Genius!” he was practically yelling. “Doesn’t it occur to you that his whole way of thinking must have been different from ours? Doesn’t it look as though a genius is actually a person who has figured out a different way to think? And the rest of us… we try to use logic.”

  “Well what else…”

  “Whaddya mean ‘what else?’ What is logic? It’s an instrument. Instruments get old. It doesn’t bother you that Euclidean geometry doesn’t work anymore?”

  “Some people still use it.”

&nbs
p; “Of course, for certain tasks. For flat surfaces. But any flat surface is a segment of a sphere. On this sphere the sum of the angles of the triangle will never be equal to 180 degrees. You can also still use a hammer, but there are better implements out there.”

  “With what do you propose to replace logic?”

  “If our brain is capable of sudden discovery occasionally, then it is capable of this all of the time. If Mendeleyev discovered the periodic table in his sleep, it means that at that moment his brain was thinking the right way.”

  “That’s ridiculous!” I exploded angrily. “He slaved over that table for years, trying to figure it out, before it ‘came to him in his sleep.’”

  “That’s correct. He ‘slaved over it.’ What’s so great about that? It only means that for years he was thinking the wrong way, logically picking apart each variant, thinking linearly. When there were enough lines, they finally converged into single bundle, and it worked.”

  “There is no other way to do it.”

  “Oh yeah? And what if suddenly there is?”

  “And you have it.”

  “Chopin once said: ‘When I sit down at the piano, I just start to improvise, until I come upon the blue note…’7 What that means is that his whole being resonated with the right harmony at the right time. He followed that note, and produced a masterpiece.”

  “Uh-huh…. And how do you suggest we plan these bursts of creativity?”

  “You don’t need to plan the creativity, you need to plan the people who are capable of being creative. Even now we don’t plan production, we plan the output of our production. The production process itself is the result of the output.”

  “Then how are you going to plan these creators, how do you know who will be a good inventor?”

  “Everybody will be.”