Red Star Tales

by Yvonne Howell

  “What’s that, Vladimir Andreyevich?” whispered Pasha.

  “I have no idea,” I whispered back.

  Some kind of figure was visible far ahead of us. It was not a shadow.

  “A statue…” Pasha said uncertainly.

  “No,” I said. “It moved.”

  “Let’s check it out,” said Pasha, pointing his light into the distance.

  The figure moved abruptly.

  I grabbed Pasha and yanked him back. Pasha slipped and grunted. Something like a satisfied guffaw sounded from afar.

  “Now what are we going to do?” said Pasha, breathing heavily.

  “Let’s go back,” I said. “We have to think it over.”

  Trying not to rush, we started back. We didn’t dare look over our shoulders. Sometimes it seemed as though someone was running behind us, lightly, as if on tiptoes, and at other times we seemed to hear a multitude of running feet.

  “This is nonsense,” said Pasha, throwing me a sidelong glance. “Normal echoes. Multiple reverberations. That guffaw – also an echo.”

  “I know,” I said. “But it’s still unsettling.”

  Finally we heard voices and caught up to the groups who were finishing their work. We could hear the business-like rap of their hammers; we saw the flash of cameras capturing a few more images; one group was already slacking off, singing from the same old repertoire of camping songs. Everything was so normal, and therefore so heartwarming. It was impossible to believe in either hell or in devils. Even the behemoths we had excavated and loaded onto trucks seemed like nothing more than instructive models, manufactured by our own brigade. Young men and women, serious graduate students and exhausted doctoral candidates, were busying themselves with the most tranquil of sciences: collecting and preserving the remains of an already disarmed past, so that people would not forget past mistakes, which were always paid for in blood.

  Back on the surface, at the camp, it smelled of gasoline and stewed meat. The heavy trucks turned around slowly, transistor radios beeped. This was the most peaceful and cherished of scenes for me – a joyful human caravan, busy with the search for answers. There was nothing devilish in sight.

  True, but that figure in the deep underground had moved.

  Shots fired. The caravan set off with a pistol salute and cries of “hurrah!” This was the only sporting moment of the expedition – those were the rules. The last trucks rumbled off, stars spilled out into the sky. Bidenko and I remained on our own.

  Except for that figure deep underground, which had moved.

  22. That Did Not Help Us

  Now we are once again underground, crisscrossing through familiar passageways. We are all alone, if you don’t count the figure down there, in hell, which would have looked just like a statue, if it had not moved.

  Our freshly charged lamps shone brightly. We had no right to do what we were doing, although it was not risky, at least not according to the handbook of rules. We had not discovered any evidence of a collapse in the mine at any point during our long investigation at this particular site. The mine’s galleries had held up for thousands of years, there was no reason to believe they would cave in now. My entire life’s experience told me – there is no danger. As far as risk that was not anticipated in the handbook – nobody knew. The only danger was in the fact that we did not take our rifles with us. We didn’t want to provoke any unnecessary suspicions. We claimed to have stayed behind in order to finish recording all our data. The only thing Pasha grabbed was a hatchet for each of us. At the last minute, he also took the starting pistol.

  Why did we insist on going back? The answer is simple. Although, like all simple answers, it was based on complicated assumptions. The two of us went back into that hell alone, without weapons, without backup, without telling anyone, defying all rules – in short, we went heedlessly – for two opposite reasons. For me, it would be the last adventure of my life, and for Pasha – the first. What does it mean to choose an adventure, to take a risk, without being asked to? A person does it to prove that he is worthy. I am more than seventy years old; Pasha is just over twenty. Between us lies half a century. I will soon be gone; he is just starting. Of all my students, he was the only one in whom I truly believed. Do I need to explain why? I do. He considered the truth to be higher than himself. Half a century – and five thousand years. Only one hundred generations ago, somebody had fled from this hell in order to tell the truth. I am convinced that it was a scholar. Just as I am convinced that the first person to voluntarily descend into this pit was a poet. According to legend, his name was Orpheus. Orpheus’s beloved, whom he almost managed to lead out of Hades, could not resist looking back. By the way, this happens to poets to this day. And who among us is not a little bit of a poet? If the ancients could go into hell at a time when devils really existed, then we should be able to do as much, in an age when the devil has been pretty much disavowed by everyone.

  Everything around us was so fantastical that I even found myself thinking: what if the devil really exists? Aliens from another world, pursuing their own unknown goals, experiment on humanity, every so often tossing them an idea for, say, an atomic bomb.

  I thought of the fantastic because, I’m ashamed to admit, once the rest of the expedition had left, Bidenko and I opened the letter. We opened the letter because we had the right to give ourselves at least a little bit of warning. What if he really did know something about those figures that were dancing about underground?

  By opening the letter, we would admit that we were unenlightened bores, whereas he was a visionary genius, capable of directly apprehending essences without first sorting through the possible variants. But this is all blather. The truth is that we just couldn’t resist. When we were left alone with the letter, we looked each other in the eyes.

  We opened the letter. But it didn’t help us.

  Here it is.

  23. He Looked At Me

  It seems to me that I know what you found there. What looks like hell is, of course, an ancient gold mine. However, how did I know that the search for the devil should be carried out in this region? When I was studying Mitus, I noticed that the rebellion in which our poet-bard participated occurred right at the onset of the westward invasion of the Tatar hordes under Ghengis Khan. Then I remembered that the word ‘Tatar’ meant ‘those who come from Tartarus,’ which is the Latin word for hell. So perhaps the word ‘Tatar’ did not designate an ethnic group; rather, it referred to people who came out of the region where Ghengis’ hordes moved, a region that the ancients thought of as ‘hellish.’ I was fixated on this idea because it came to me suddenly, in the form of a clear image.

  Nobody knows exactly how an image arises. An image is something different from an observation, a memory, a figment of the imagination, or the coalescence of several details. An image is a concept that springs forth fully formed, and not only is it completely clear, it is also completely convincing. An image can be audio, visual, or verbal, but it is not a hallucination. An artistic image emerges along with its material embodiment – you hear the melody on a piano, you see the courtyard of a place you have never been, you write the page of book that has not yet been written. I can’t describe the difference between an image and a figment of the imagination, but you know it when you see it.

  When an image appears to you, it is worth pondering. As soon as I had an image of Hell, I thought: nothing in the world is so awful that only the devil could invent it. After all, what does the devil have in his arsenal? Boiling tar and sulfuric gas chambers, hooks to hang people from their ribs, the eternally futile labors of Sisyphus and the eternally unfulfilled thirst of Tantalus. All of this actually existed. There were even worse things – Asian torture by rats and European torture by electric shock. It all existed. Human beings invented all of it. If you coolly and calmly continue this train of thought, it leads inevitably, step by step, down the road to a well-known address, marked by a sign: “Fascism.” In the course of the centuries the wording has change
d – sometimes the sign reads “Hell,” or “Tartarus,” but it is always some version of the same thing. Time goes by, the scourge of fascism is forgotten, and eventually children think that mass graves and ovens in which millions of people were gassed alive are fabricated tales. Now imagine that the film reels that captured bulldozers scraping the naked corpses into heaps have decayed completely. What is left one thousand years from now? Legends of hell and torture chambers. By then, nobody will believe that the torturers were biologically indistinguishable from people. They will invent the notion of a devil, not for the first time, and claim that devils come out of hell. Of course, there were never any visitors from hell. There were only ordinary people who lost their human essence. A sclerosis of the soul, which always takes the form of racism – that is, the idea that a human being from a different tribe is not a human being at all.

  Enough. It makes you sick to think about it, and it is repulsive to write about.

  This is my farewell to you, dear teacher, hence such a long letter. I remember you all the way back to the war, with your gloomy good-naturedness, your willingness to hear new ideas, no matter whose, your ability to give a person an advance based on their humanity, without rushing to collect the profit. Even during wartime, of all the people who happened to see the woman’s photograph, you were the only one who didn’t interrogate me about who she was, and you were the only person I would have liked to tell. That woman doesn’t exist. She is an image. When we were boys, my artist friend Kostya Yakushev and another guy – a physicist named Alyosha Anosov – created that picture out of several hundred photographs of beautiful women. First we put together two negatives and reshot them to get a single picture. Then we reshot that picture with a composite of two more to get a composite of four. And so on in geometric progression, until the composite ceased to change or improve. We ended up with a strange, fantastically beautiful, but somehow ominous, almost lifeless face. Kostya took it with him. First the face started to appear to him everywhere, in the streets and in his sleep. After 24 hours he brought the photo back. You have seen that face. “I touched something on it,” he said, “I don’t know what, or how it happened. In any case, I retook the picture…” The face had not changed, it was the same woman, but she had somehow come alive. It was then that we understood the essence of art: not a sum of parts, but a leap into some new quality – and we longed for it. We all understood: we will never meet this woman, but we are doomed to keep trying to find her. Also, we realized then how hard it is to experiment on real people.

  I am saying farewell, dear teacher. Science is really not for me. If I understand myself correctly, my real calling is art. That is why I am leaving. All I needed was to find a point of departure – a qualitative leap into a different way of thinking. At that point, I figured out simultaneously where we should search for the devil, and how thought will work differently in humans of the future. All talent is essentially the ability to apprehend the truth in a qualitative leap. Leonardo da Vinci was the first normal person of the future – so far ahead of his time that to this day he is considered an enigma.

  Do you want to know how I arrived at my idea? All of us sense that people could be better than they are. But what does it mean to be “better”? It means a better fit with the conditions that determine our existence. Our relationship to other people is the fundamental determining condition of our existence, yet our relationships are constantly distorted by lusts and desires. Once I watched as three thousand people listened to an old man, who sat with his back to the audience. Those people were completely different at that moment than I had known them before. They were listening to the old man play Bach on an organ. I remember thinking that if people can be like this now, some day they will be like this all the time. If I have to become a musician, or an artist, or a poet – in short, an organist of some sort – capable of ruffling people’s souls until the way they appear in the moment of creative apprehension becomes their hereditary state, then I want to become that instigator. Then I would gladly give up clowning, because clowning is only the beginning. Clowns make people laugh, whereas jesters incite battles. Clowns always let people hang onto to the last thread of their human dignity. The dignity that consists in our capacity for tenderness.

  24. Good Luck, Clown, On The Rest Of Your Journey

  We had opened the letter, but it didn’t help us with anything. There was no clue as to who the “devil” might be. Instead, there was a third envelope. He certainly knew what he was doing with this little game of giving away one thing at a time. We felt lucky enough just to find out that for all his fantasizing, nothing good was predicted for us; the only thing we would find underground was something disgusting. But what would it be? A live fascist, who had lurked down there for five thousand years in order to meet us now? Interesting… what had he been feeding on for all this time? Brrrrr, don’t even start fantasizing… Too bad we didn’t take the rifles with us.

  “Vladimir Andreyevich… there it is,” said Bidenko.

  An indistinct figure loomed ahead.

  Everything that happened after that was like a bad dream… In fact, it was a nightmare. Only in a nightmare is it possible to fall into a foul cesspool up to your chest, which happened right after I stepped onto something crusty that covered the even ground right before the exit. If it hadn’t been for my safety belt and Bidenko’s efforts, I would have drowned in that cursed pit. Smeared with some kind of filth, we made our way back to firm ground. When we looked up, a monstrous creature materialized through the dim light right in front of us.

  It stood in front of us without moving, although you could hardly call this thing immobile. Sulfuric fumes swirled around it like a veil. A sickly halo rose and fell behind his head, which made its hair stand on end. Did I say “head”? That’s not exactly right. It constantly shifted its shape inside the contours of a black silhouette. Its horrible snout doubled, and its hands stretched out and grew longer. You couldn’t get a good look at it through the vapors and flickering light, which made its eyes burn like red needles. It was silent.

  I fumbled in my pocket for the starting pistol. There is nothing I can defend myself with – this is it, the place where sinners go… I thought, absurdly, maybe this really is an alien…

  Paralyzed with fear, I raised my pathetic little pistol – our instincts are stronger than we are.

  The monster also raised its arm. It reached forward and lengthened out, just like a tentacle. At the end of the tentacle I could see the enormous muzzle of a gun. There was no escape.

  “Lie down!” screamed Pasha, breaking our stupor.

  I threw myself face down to the ground just in time – not bad at my age.

  A deafening shot rang out. Then nothing but silence and semi-darkness.

  Someone snatched me by the ankle. I screamed and lost consciousness.

  I woke up in the cold.

  The huge black silhouette hovering over me obscured the stars.

  “It’s me, Vladimir Andreyevich,” said Pasha.

  I felt my heart resume beating.

  “I’m ok,” I said. “Thank you, Pasha.”

  I imagined how he must have dragged me back out through all those circles of hell.

  We rested for a while on the sand. Pasha helped me get up, and we made our way back to the truck.

  He got the best of us, Soda-Sun.

  “When did you figure it out?” I asked Pasha.

  “When the lamp broke.”

  “Me too. Well, let’s open the letter. Interesting to see what…”

  We opened the last envelope and read it by the light of the truck’s headlights.

  A person has to at least occasionally stand up for himself. Because other than one’s self, there is nobody else upon whom you can rely. Remember how Alexander Grin put it in one of his adventure novels, ‘I am flying, I am rushing along a dark road…’

  I am flying, I am rushing, I am searching for the New Man, the one who we all resemble when we listen to a song. Poets are alwa
ys partly clowns, but serious clowning around is like a rooster crowing at dawn – it’s a signal. Scholars, wish us light for our journey.

  By the way, I completely forgot: what did you find there? Don’t be upset, dear Vladimir Andreyevich, in you there is less of the devil than in anyone else. It’s just that you found the world’s first mirror. That’s all. Maybe it was crooked.

  Soda-Sun.

  Good luck, Clown, on the rest of your journey.

  First Russian publication: 1961

  Translation by Yvonne Howell

  * * *

  1. Salut is a very informal greeting that conveys a breezy familiarity with French slang, whereas alaikum conveys respect for the traditional Arabic greeting “peace be upon you” (salaam alaikum).

  2. Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) was a Swedish scientist who became an influential mystic, theologian, and interpreter of spiritual destiny, in books such as Heaven and Hell (1758), his account of the afterlife. Jakob Boehme (1575-1624) was an influential German mystic and theologian.

  3. A merlon is the solid upright section of a battlement or parapet in medieval architecture or fortifications, sometimes pierced by a narrow slit through to which to observe the enemy. A crenel is the space between two merlons. These features together give the Kremlin walls their “toothed” appearance.

  4. “The Lay of Prince Igor” is an epic poem that was probably composed in the late twelfth century, and fixed in written form as early as the thirteenth century. As such, it is by far the most important and renowned example of medieval Slavonic language, and it occupies a place comparable to the “Song of Roland” or “Song of the Niederlungen” in Slavic national mythology. Therefore it has also been the object of endless controversies over authorship. Here, Soda-Sun seems to reconcile both the scholarly supposition of the author’s Carpathian identity and the patriotic theory that this great work of art was composed by someone of noble lineage.