Red Star Tales

by Yvonne Howell

  “Even you?”

  “Even me.”

  “Is this why you decided to become such a loose cannon?”

  “Partly,” he said modestly. “When I first tried to call Professor Glagolev and tell him that I have interesting new data about the authorship of “The Lay of Prince Igor,” he hung up on me. I called again and asked: ‘If I found a manuscript with Mitus’s signature on it, would you still not believe me?’ He laughed and said ‘What a joke,’ and hung up on me again. I thought, ‘You want a joke? Well, why not? Why not laugh at all you conceited people?’ After all, the real joke is not when the people laugh at the clown, but when the clown laughs at the people.”

  He cast a sidelong glance at me.

  I felt a flush of embarrassment, but asked “Well, did you find this all-powerful mode of thinking?”

  That was my second mistake.

  “Yes, I found it.”

  It was time to teach him a lesson.

  “Great,” I said. “Let’s have a demonstration.”

  “Why demonstrate?” he said. “I’ll bring the pills tomorrow, that’s all.”

  “What pills?”

  “Take them, and you yourself will start to think creatively.”

  He wasn’t even laughing, the jerk.

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll try your pills.”

  He nodded and left. In the meantime I had a shot of vodka. Without pills.

  10. Flour and Sugar

  What happened next was ridiculous.

  He showed up the next day with some kind of homemade pills. Six tablets.

  “There aren’t any more,” he said. “I need the rest for myself.” The little punks who knew what was going on all jostled forward with their eager little hands outstretched. Six of them grabbed the bait.

  “You’re going to get poisoned!” the others yelled at them.

  “You won’t be poisoned,” he assured them.

  They took the pills, chasing them down with water from our carafe.

  “Alright guys, don’t get too pumped up,” he said.

  “The work day has already started,” I growled.

  Our group moved down the hallway, giggling obnoxiously. The six poisoned ones were in front. I was disgusted with myself, both because I had wanted to take one of the tablets myself, and because I wasn’t bold enough to do so.

  I couldn’t sleep that night. I sucked on one of my own creativity pills – Valium.

  At first, nothing in particular happened at work the next morning. He just ignored the smirking and kept making the rounds of all six pill-takers, asking them how their work was going, and in so doing, he distracted them from their work, because after all each of them was supposed to be concentrating on a problem. Still, I let him be. I felt sorry for him. Once again I recalled who he had been and who he had become, and how hard it was to find your place in life without your silver wings. Poor Soda-Sun.

  That morning, five out of six problems were solved. Brilliantly. The only one of the six who hadn’t solved his problem was our most talented and productive researcher, Pasha Bidenko. The hallways grew quiet. The five of them looked completely startled and flushed. Valya Medvedeva sat in the corner of my office crying.

  “From happiness,” she explained. “And from despair. I think I’m in love with him….”

  He was surrounded by a vacuum of fear.

  We barely made it through the day.

  That night I dreamt that I was flying, swooping down through the burial grounds of the Minusinsk cultures, grabbing clay jugs from their graves. The jugs contain creativity pills, and I flew off with them in the direction of the sun.

  The next day I planned to go to the director and report what had happened.

  Pasha Bidenko stopped me in the hallway. He could barely keep his eyes open.

  “This is torture,” he groaned with exhaustion.

  “What?”

  Flour and sugar,” he said. “There’s nothing else in them. In those pills. Zilch. I spent all night analyzing them.”

  11. That Was Just the Beginning

  After the whole fiasco, after we vigorously interrogated him and took measures to ensure that the scandal would not expand beyond the walls of our institute and make us a laughingstock in scientific circles, after I managed to push through my suggestion that the best solution was not to fire him, but to send him off on an expedition… I asked him quietly, just as he was climbing into the expedition vehicle with his sleeping bag:

  “Why did you do it to begin with?”

  He leaned over the side of the truck to answer.

  “So our scholarly friends would stop strutting around as if they know everything.”

  “Ok, fine. But still, why did five out of six achieve such spectacular results?”

  “Two reasons. The first you will have already guessed – their imaginations lost all inhibition and they started to think more freely and independently. The second reason is that I myself prompted them toward the answers to the problems they were working on.”

  The truck moved out of the institute parking lot in a noxious cloud of exhaust. That was it.

  Actually, that was not it at all. That was just the beginning. On the expedition, things continued.

  No sooner had he left than I immediately remembered his name was Soda-Sun. I always remembered this at the times when I didn’t see him. Now both my annoyance with him and our senseless condemnation of his former profession seemed petty. Why shouldn’t he have had another profession? Does the profession really determine the person? A person is determined by what he brings to a given profession. Humankind has thousands of needs, and each need spawns a profession. The important thing is what each person brings to humanity through his profession. When a talented person came to us with his ideas, we just gaped at him and called him a clown. Maybe a clown is exactly what we needed. We are always afraid of appearing silly, which allows any jerk to shower us with flattery and praise until we end up adopting his ethical code. While we wallow in our pride, we are completely conned. A clown is a surgeon who operates on our ethics. A clown is a poet of laughter. With one little word he pokes a hole in our conceit. I didn’t get it at the time, but now I do.

  Now I get it, but as he headed out with the expedition, I was thoroughly irritated. He was exceptionally good at irritating people, that clown. Stupid clown! After all, I was his friend, and he knew it. Why did he have to taunt me as well? Never mind, I thought, don’t be petty, help him. So I helped him. I made sure he got on the expedition. I thought about it a lot, sending him on an expedition I would have gone on myself, if I had the strength. I sent him to the place where my career had started. He’d put in enough time comparing historical documents. Let him get back to the basics. Let him go to Turgai. So he went. And it turned into a mess.

  At first we didn’t hear a word from the expedition, even though communication these days is hardly as difficult as it was in 1913. Then, a crazy letter arrived.

  The worst part wasn’t the fact that the letter was filled with all kinds of ideas on all kinds of topics, none of which had any direct relationship to the archeological task at hand – the highest mark of a dilettante. That much I expected – I knew who we were dealing with. What was most absurd was the soppy beseeching at the end, which sounded almost like mockery. He begged me to use radioactive dating to establish the age of the Indricatherium I had dug out of the ground in 1913, and send him the results immediately.

  12. Whaaat? I Exclaimed

  Let me explain the radiometric method to those who are not familiar with it.

  We take a bone from an ancient burial place and incinerate it in a special oven. We catch the carbon dioxide that is released and then measure the radioactivity of the carbon in the sample. Radioactive carbon dating works on organic material because all living organisms absorb carbon-14 – a radioactive isotope of ordinary carbon. After the plant or animal dies, the carbon-14 it contains slowly decays. If we compare the amount of radioactive carbon left in the bone
s to the amount of regular carbon in the atmosphere, which varies only slightly, we can determine the age of an object with a high degree of accuracy. This is all true, but it only works for organisms that died less than 40,000 years ago. Indricotheria went extinct millions of years ago. Therefore, my entire department laughed at the request in the letter.

  “I hate him,” declared Valya Medvedeva.

  “Pasha,” I said to Bidenko, “He’s asking for a stint in remedial ed. Do you want to take him on this time?”

  “Sure,” said Pasha. “If you get me a little piece of bone from your Indricotherium.”

  “Good,” I said. “We’ll send him back an official answer on Institute letterhead. With an official seal.”

  It wasn’t hard to call the museum and pay a visit to my beloved colossus. My five-meter-tall beauty was still in one piece, and the sign underneath it included my name. I sighed.

  While I immersed myself in reminiscences, the museum technicians brought me a small sliver of bone. I forgot to mention that at the time, I had brought back an entire skeleton as well as a few other bones – all of the bones had been caught in the same landslide; therefore, they were all of the same age. I thanked my museum colleagues and handed the piece of bone to Pasha Bidenko. As for myself, I sat down to write that clown a devastating letter, in which I poured out my accumulated anger, laid out what we all thought of him, and lectured him about how a responsible scientist should approach the field. As I was writing, I could see his long face with that smile of his, and I realized that a big letter would only mean more scoffing on his part. I tore up the letter and wrote a brief note on the letterhead: “For some reason no radioactivity can be detected in the bones of the Indricotherium.” I underlined the words for some reason, got the office to put an official stamp on the letter, and signed it “Dr. V. A. Gorbunov, PhD.”

  When I got home that evening, Pasha Bidenko called to tell me that, according to radiometric analysis, the bones were only 5 thousand years old.

  “Whaaat?” I exclaimed.

  13. It Was All Very Sad

  Why does everything in life pale after a while? Probably because everything we encounter only looks close to what it should be, but falls short of being the best version, and you keep thinking there must be something better out there. Fashions change. Yesterday’s clothes are no longer attractive, yesterday’s beauty seems to fade, yesterday’s thoughts are ignored, yesterday’s happiness makes you feel awkward (what were you so happy about anyway, you idiot?), yesterday’s joy turns out to be yesterday’s naïveté. Now I wised up and my teeth were set on edge.8 We look for salvation in endless quests, but endless questing is endless hunger. Of course, it’s pleasant to imagine that a delightful dish of perfection lies just ahead of us, but doesn’t that dish remind you of the clump of hay tied just beyond the donkey’s nose? The poor donkey keeps walking on and on, his hunger never filled, as the clump of hay moves further into the distance at the exact same rate as the donkey moves toward it.9 Why should we wait for the future to solve today’s problems? The future will have its own problems, but we will not be in that future.

  Try to recall. Let your body recall. When was the last time something did not pale with repetition, did not grow boring after a while? Flip through everything you can think of, and suddenly you remember the touch of someone else’s hand, that feeling – the feeling of tenderness. Every shade of that feeling: from the fierce tenderness of the soldier who drops his sword to pick up a slain enemy’s child, feels her pressed to his stony cheek, and commands the rest of the world “don’t touch her,” all the way to the melting tenderness of a lover’s embrace.

  Only tenderness is unambiguous and cannot abide falsehood, masks, or deceit – it’s either there, or it’s not. We experience this tenderness too rarely, we almost don’t notice the role it plays in our lives. But perhaps it plays the most important role of all. When reptiles still lumbered over the earth, it’s not as though any lizard-philosopher noticed the little creature slipping out of its hole, the one who carried his own warmth in his blood and did not depend on changes in the weather. The big lizards left, and warm-blooded creatures filled up the world.

  Plus, I still want to talk about hematomas.

  “Whaaat?” I asked.

  Although I didn’t need to ask, because I was sure of the answer. I’d just forgotten it, over the past half century. That is, I didn’t exactly forget, but I’d chased it deep down into the depths of my mind, where we keep the memories of things that never came to be, but still live within us. We stay sane by habitually avoiding this dark spot like a bruise, like a hematoma in our psyche. A hematoma is nothing more than a localized pooling of blood that the surrounding tissue won’t absorb. If you don’t touch it, it will just stay there like a harmless foreign body, but if you disturb it, it can cause trouble. “Harmless” in a hematoma is a relative term; after all, something dead in a live body cannot be neutral. In a live body, everything must be alive and participate. There are two ways to get rid of a hematoma: remove it surgically, or, theoretically at least, reanimate it. There’s a third way – give up. Obviously there is nothing worse than giving up, which is a bad end. And nothing better than reanimation, which is a good start.

  Therefore, when I exclaimed “whaaat?,” the question, the yelp of surprise, was not in response to Bidenko’s statement, even though he had just announced in a bored voice that the animal we thought had disappeared millions of years ago had perished as recently as the age of the Egyptian pharaohs. It turns out my gigantic beast was on this earth at the same time as humans, which makes it a real question for archeology. Unless it’s a mistake. Bidenko was mistaken, the instruments were mistaken, who knows who was mistaken, maybe the museum director mistakenly delivered the wrong bone sample. The most important thing for an old fart like me (who once upon a time was young and not afraid of sensations and thirsted for the kind of thrills that shake up your whole world and make you feel like anything is possible – youth thinks this is the way life should be, and chases after thrills constantly, incoherently, charging behind every rock in hopes of finding something – naturally, old age, with the wisdom of its scars, proceeds methodically and correctly, but less passionately, in the name of self-preservation, in the name of preserving what’s left of his strength he tells himself that if the grapes are still green you shouldn’t eat them, but he feels the astringency on his soul anyway; the guy who never risked anything and diddled away his youth ended up with nothing in old age except his comfort and his fear of the unexpected…), the most important thing for me, an old fart, was that when I lucked upon a big find in my youth, it seemed like the fulfillment of a presentiment; but when I was stunned by the reanimation of my long-dead fossil in old age, it seemed like the reanimation of a long-dead hematoma.

  In other words, all these reflections on tenderness and reanimation of dead matter were necessary for me to understand myself, and were the reason why, when I yelled “whaaat?,” it suddenly came back to me that a month ago, when I had walked out of my office and for the first time and called him Soda-Sun, he said “don’t!” and slapped my hand.

  It also came back to me that fifty years ago I had guessed that my colossal beast was only a few thousand years old, and not millions of years old, as the scientists had subsequently affirmed.

  As I walked along the street, I felt like a boy whose loved ones were still alive and nearby, and whose life was all ahead of him. I felt immortal. The wind was blowing and tearing at the flaps of my coat, but I didn’t care. It was raining as well, but I didn’t notice the rain and my eyes were dry.

  “Haha, just you wait, all you old farts,” I muttered, my heart pounding. “I’ll still show you, this is just the beginning… “

  I didn’t know at the time exactly what was just beginning, but I felt ready for anything. Let it be a circus or some kind of hellfire, I didn’t care. At least something had started! However, in the end, it was all very sad.

  14. The Human Skull


  I’ll never forget those days, full of happiness and secret striving.

  At first nobody believed the results of Pasha Bidenko’s analysis, least of all Pasha himself.

  “Ridiculous,” said the director.

  They retested. The results were the same. Did it cause a sensation? No, of course not. They could have mixed up the bone samples in the museum. A meeting was called. It was decided to take a piece of bone from the skeleton itself, in a place where it could be easily repaired and restored. They tested again… the Indricotherium I had found in 1913 was five thousand years old.

  A sensation? Try a complete scandal!

  Nevertheless, the fact is that at age 23, I had voiced my supposition that the bones I had found were relatively recent. However inexperienced I may have been in those years, even I could tell that the animals whose bones I was digging up had perished in some kind of unnatural circumstances. It didn’t look like a natural death. The bones of all sorts of animals were mixed up and tossed all over the place, all of them in one layer, which means they were not a result of successive changes in the earth’s crust. That was the crux of the matter, which made me think of Pushkin’s lines: “oh field, field, who strew you with dead bones?” It resembled either a battleground of various animals, or a cemetery, or, more likely, a dump. The whole mishmash was located quite close to the surface, in layers that could not be more than a few thousand years old, as even I, a student at the Mining Academy, could figure out. At the time, I suggested that these animals, including the Indricotherium, existed not so long ago. I was laughed at. Now my suggestion was confirmed, a full half-century later. At least, according to the analyses. They have decided to launch a comprehensive expedition to conduct “high-level” excavations. I am supposed to go, but I don’t feel like it. The original plan, to be simple and honest, has already accrued too much baggage. It’s all his fault again, that Soda-Sun.