Stargorod Read online

  Cover: Torzhok, the Cathedral of the Transfigured Saviour

  and the Church of the Entry into Jerusalem, 1910.

  From the expeditionary photography files of Prokudin-Gorsky,

  collected in the US Library of Congress

  This book is an original translation of

  Институт Сновидений/Старгород, copyright © 2009, Peter Aleshkovsky.

  English translation copyright © 2013, Russian Information Services, Inc.

  Copyright to all work in this volume is governed by U.S. and international copyright laws. All rights reserved. Work may not be reproduced in any manner without the expressed, written permission of the copyright holder. For permission to reproduce selections from this book, contact the publisher at the address below.

  ISBN 978-1-880100-80-6

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2013935581

  Russian Information Services, Inc.

  PO Box 567

  Montpelier, VT 05601-0567

  www.russianlife.com

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  Table of Contents

  Author’s Preface

  1990

  Above the Fray

  Twenty Years

  Sour Cream

  The Living Well of the Desert

  Iron Logic

  Blessed are...

  Mashenka

  Clever Elsa

  Stargorod Vendetta

  Two-Hats

  A Miracle and a Vision

  The Magic Letter

  Eeny, meeny, miney, moe

  Petty Officer

  Star

  Devil’s Bride

  Petrushka

  The Man with a Sense of Humor

  Lukeria’s Hill

  Greed

  Victory

  Lady Macbeth

  Fortress

  Metamorphoses, or The Art of Instant Transformation

  Vladik Kuznetsov

  The Real Life

  Ox and Mother Love

  The Fourth Dimension

  2010

  A Change of Consciousness

  The Horizontal and The Vertical

  53:76

  Pickle and Little Dragon

  The Holy Monkey

  Wings

  Cat and Dregs

  How a Soldier Saved Himself from the Army

  Boots and Ballet Slippers

  Winds of Change

  The Cursed Place

  Demons Possess Us

  Medici

  Candy

  The Mermaid

  Happiness

  The Hourglass

  Goats and Sheep

  Our Progress

  Kindness

  Kambiz

  Reptile

  Karaoke

  The Magic Letter

  Stone Soup

  Beauty and the Beast

  Bribe

  Institute of Dreams

  A Caramel Rooster for Christmas

  The Pencil Stub

  Author’s Preface

  Stargorod and The Institute of Dreams (two books published separately in Russia, but joined together in this English volume) are two parts of one whole. For me, they are not collections of short stories, but a single world; a single expansive story, woven by a great multitude of voices. This is why the book is subtitled as “A Novel in Many Voices.” The world around us always speaks in voices, in many tongues, but it is always talking about the same things. A writer’s task, then, is to create his own world, one in which all of those he loves and hates could live and suffer. Without a world of his own, a writer becomes a journalist – and that’s a completely different, although in its own way also wonderful, profession.

  I was not the first to use the name Stargorod. I stole it from one of the best Russian writers, Nikolai Leskov, who lived in the nineteenth century. Leskov, in turn, was also borrowing, in part, from Nikolai Gogol. Gogol, a truly titanic figure in Russian fiction, wrote a collection of short stories he titled “Mirgorod,” after a real town. Gogol’s Mirgorod, however, is vastly more than an aging smattering of buildings under the hot Ukrainian sun. The first part of the name, Mir, means “community,” “all of us” – it is a force that holds people together as a part of a larger world, that makes them a sliver of the universe that reflects, like a shard of the broken mirror, all the small but telling features of humanity.

  Nikolai Gogol is the giant on whose shoulders most of our literature stands. All of us who write in Russian continue to draw from him, and this continuity is important as long as everyone contributes something to the map he had laid out. Sometimes, the new is what takes one far and wide from one’s point of departure. But the road is vastly more important than the mile markers or the signposts along its sides, and only a walking man draws breath deeply and freely. After Leskov, the brothers Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, writing in the 1920s, populated Stargorod with their own extravagant characters. So, as you can see, all I did was follow my predecessors’ good advice. Stargorod – which in Russian means “an old town” – a place that is by definition on the margins, on the far edges of the known world, is a sort of a Russian Yoknapatawpha County, a place where the nation’s metaphysical essence is held longest, if not in perpetuity. Stargorod is Russia’s test pit, to borrow a term of my earlier profession – archeology – which concerns itself with digging up all kinds of old towns and burial places.

  Twenty years separate the two parts of my book – enough time for an empire to collapse and for things to take what seemed like a most radical turn. “Twenty years after” is also the title Alexandre Dumas, père, chose for one of his D’Artagnan romances – books we read compulsively back in the days when Russia was called USSR and lived behind a concrete wall that effectively separated our country from the rest of the world. A particularly inquisitive reader will find this and many more allusions in my book, along with inside jokes, shameless quotations and stolen plots. To steal, for a writer, means to take a thing and think about it anew, to homestead on land someone else discovered and to argue with the discoverer all along. But hasn’t this been a human preoccupation since times immemorial? From the day a Stone Age hunter committed breath-taking images of horses and bison, birds and skiers, and spear-wielding hunters to a cave wall coloring their bodies with sacred ocher or etching them into the face of the rock with his stone chisel? I challenge anyone to step up and tell me that this older predecessor of mine (and no less of a giant) merely recorded his everyday life – that’s laughable! No, sir, I say – that’s no everyday life. It is a life seen anew.

  This, I believe, is the task of any art. What about telling a story, you say? A story is a must – without it, the reader falls asleep along the way, and will never travel the full length of the road. The road must be shared with a good company of like-minded people – and that is precisely the kind of journey I invite you to take in these pages. Happy travels!

  Peter Aleshkovsky

  Moscow, Fall 2012

  1990

  Stargorod is emphatically not big. It is located at The Lake. There is a chemical plant, the State Bearings Factory No. 4, a brick factory, an agricultural machinery plant, a furniture factory, a kremlin and a great number of old churches and monasteries. Renovation efforts are ongoing.

  A Guide to Stargorod

  Sad! I feel sad beforehand! But let us return to the story.

  Nikolai Gogol, “Old World Landowners”

  Above the Fray

  The sun is high. Tourists cruise by, like fish, in schools. In couples. Half-naked metropolitan tourists and foreign tourists, with hairy legs, in foreign shorts, in streaky, bleached denim, in bright, sexy T-shirts.

  Pishchutin ignores the species known as “tourist.” Today is his
day off. He has come to the riverfront promenade. To rest. To think. He thinks a lot, and then spends his evenings writing into the small hours. Pishchutin is a writer.

  He is dressed in a navy blue, velvet suit: Pishchutin abhors modern populism. He may have just one suit in his wardrobe, but this suit is fashioned from serious fabric – Finnish velvet, real Finnish velvet from the discarded curtain of the local theater.

  Out of the corner of his eye Pishchutin notices people noticing him. He knows that the extraordinary figure he cuts draws attention. He understands the people, and he pities them – they are wasting their lives, with no thought for the eternal. He forgives them. He tries to love them. But he doesn’t always succeed. Because still, they are the unwashed masses. Small souls. Sometimes at night he cries at his desk, unable to write – his pen is merciless, but he is not.

  He has a gold-tipped pen from China – these are the most comfortable, easy on the hand. After all, what is Russian literature? It is love, plus pity for the oppressed and the aggrieved, plus the fierce chastisement of the plebeians and the burgers. The real literature is all in the past, and it is aristocratic. The task today is to bring it back. One could spend a life at such a task. This is why a writer must be above the fray, above the crowd.

  Pishchutin takes a seat in a terrace café. Today he will have some champagne. But the waiter does not come – he is a local, that eyesore; he knows Pishchutin, and one must be patient and wait with a disinterested attitude. Patience is the most important thing in life. A real writer is always lonely and poor in the beginning. Sometimes, his entire life.

  Now, when his fame comes, then he’ll donate to the church and orphanages. And, of course, he must donate something to the City Parks department; it’s intolerable how dirty the city is. The riverfront is the only place they care to maintain; they make a Disneyland out of it for the foreign tourists. For shame. He’ll have to give them a hundred thousand or so.

  The calculations consume Pishchutin. In half an hour he orders a bottle of champagne, casually, and a bar of chocolate. He drinks slowly. He enjoys the drink. He nibbles on the chocolate delicately and rolls it around inside his mouth, submerged in champagne. But he maintains a disinterested attitude.

  He sits, one hand with an intentionally cultivated long pinkie nail draped at his side. He tries not to look at the tourists.

  Not to yield to the moment, not to relax – to think, think through the myriad plots and stories he has in his head. It is amazing what imagination can do. What his imagination can do. It’s too bad he won’t live long enough to write everything down, everything that daily presents itself to his gaze. He must work, work!

  Today is off, comp time for tomorrow’s working Saturday, followed by Sunday. Today he is looking for the plot, he finds it and polishes it. Tomorrow, after a trip to the market (he needs potatoes; life is prosaic), he will sit down to write the story he will conceive today.

  But plots, too many plots swirl and flit about him, like tourists.

  Champagne disappears irretrievably, like time (that’s a great simile – he must remember it!), but he mustn’t drain the bottle. He’ll leave some at the bottom. And he won’t finish his chocolate.

  No, life is beautiful, like his trusty Finnish velvet. It sparkles, full of stories, and his soul catches its breath, and pities, pities them all…

  “Are you crying, pops?” asks an overly-friendly tourist, but Pishchutin wipes his tears and proudly turns away.

  “Leave him alone – he’s our local nut, a planner from the museum. He always comes here, once a month, like clockwork: drinks, cries a little and leaves,” the waiter explains as if Pishchutin weren’t sitting right there.

  And that’s when Pishchutin rises, puts money on the napkin – with a 70-kopek tip – and leaves.

  He walks along the waterfront; he does not see the crowd. He mutters: waiter… tourists… knife… policeman, no, better a retired colonel… and he sees it all so clearly, it is all so alive to him that he cannot stand it anymore and again begins to cry.

  “Again, again,” whispers Pishchutin, stunned. “I wanted to take revenge, to satirize, but I instead I pitied them… again tragedy comes instead of laughter.”

  Where does this come from? Where? It is a mystery. He does not know. He walks home, not seeing the tourists, or the crowds that hurry home from the bus stop, past the empty stores. He walks, almost to the other end of the city, to his five-story cinder-block apartment building.

  He has a small, one-room flat. A closet stuffed with manuscripts, and a large ledger where he records the stories, novellas, and novels that he has sent out to various magazines. He likes order. He cannot take the humiliation of sending someone the same thing twice – that’s why he needs records. He keeps them accurately and he does not despair.

  He is not married. He is only 52 and there are so many unwritten stories ahead of him. And the Fame, too, somewhere out there, in the distance, where he cannot yet hear the call of its trumpet.

  Twenty Years

  “Would you believe it, it was only at his funeral that I learned he used to be the school’s star, 20 years ago. He danced! Can you believe that? He was an officer, you know, he’d seen fire. I can’t even picture it – him, dancing, with his military posture. The school was famous then, not like now, the students from those old classes went places! Sashenka Stroyev sails a merchant vessel on international routes, he’s a Captain; Lenochka Korneva married a Moscow diplomat, last year she sent me Teacher’s Day greetings from Prague; Lyoshenka Stepanov is the party organization secretary at the Kirov plant. Pavlik Boldin – he’s in outer space somewhere, all I know is he prepares our Soyuz rockets for launch. Those old classes don’t forget – they come to their reunions every 10 years; it’s the newer crop that don’t care for the school that much… I only knew him after he’d already started drinking. Sometimes he even showed up tipsy to teach, and the kids didn’t pay him any mind, did whatever they wanted. He buried his first wife 10 years earlier – his son now teaches, also geography, in School No. 2. It was at the funeral that the thought really struck me, for the first time perhaps: here was a man, and now he’s gone – and nothing is different. Of course, in those last years he only kept his job because of the School District Head, Kirill Georgiyevich – he used to be our principal. They started together. They retired from the army together and took the entry exams for the Leningrad Pedagogical Institute at the same time; when they graduated, they got their assignments together. Only Kirill Georgiyevich had the party streak in him, and the other one wasn’t a real fighter. Whenever I chaired the party meetings, he’d always sit in the corner, quietly, but if there was any task to be done, he’d wrinkle his face like so, and sigh – but would complete it conscientiously, with military precision. Eventually, I only charged him with political information sessions for the teachers, but soon he wiggled his way out of that, too. He’d started drinking by then, but I don’t think it was a regular thing yet. But I’ll tell you a secret – Kirill Georgiyevich himself goes on binges as well. The ladies and I worried that he’d lose it after the funeral. And he’d just come out of the hospital, his heart is worthless. They were friends, he and the old geography teacher, you know, real, wartime friends. And another student of his, Sashenka – he cried. His widow stood there like a rock. If you think about it – what’s she got left? They couldn’t have children. Just lived, you know. And the school – it was the school, of course, that did him in. He always carried a big load; he had to work. His second wife is a restoration technician – you know what they make, something between 105 and 120. But to imagine him – an officer! I wouldn’t have believed it. Women couldn’t keep their hands off him, apparently, he was their pet. I never knew him to be like that in all my ten years at the school…”

  All this suddenly surfaced in Yegorshin’s memory after Taisiya Petrovna’s own funeral, 20 years after that of the geography teacher she’d been talking about. The former officer. In the late sixties, Taisiya Petrovna was at the
peak of her glory: children would follow her anywhere, and the teachers adored her, too, although she taught high school history and was, at the time, the secretary of the school’s party organization. Of course, she had a lot more energy then: she regularly led field trips to historic battlefields, or excursions around the city – and always gave it her all. And her trivia contests! Her Do You Know Your Native Land? was even broadcast on national radio. When they had that prize of a trip to Bulgaria, to the Golden Sands, she was the first choice, of course. But she was strict. She could beat parents into submission like no one else, and vetted the candidates for the parent advisory group herself – all for the betterment of the school, of course. And her husband hadn’t left her yet, then. And her mother was alive – she babysat the kids. Now her son serves up North on a submarine, based next to Murmansk; her daughter’s got two of her own and lives with her husband close to the chemical plant – he is the senior nitrates engineer. They all came to the funeral together. There were people from the School District and the District Party Committee too, but the teachers all felt like strangers. Yegorshin was the only one from the school who had been her student. There was something so absurd about her death: she died of pneumonia. Who dies of that anymore? It was a grim funeral, too solemn, morose. And all because there wasn’t anyone left who knew her when she was young.

  Yegorshin sat in the empty teachers’ lounge – he had a break between classes. Next door, the leader of the pioneers and a young history teacher were putting together a poster for the “Memorial” society. Yegorshin could understand why they didn’t like Taisiya Petrovna.

  Then the bell rang and children filled the room:

  “Alexander Alexandrovich, what time is our rehearsal today?”

  Yegorshin directed the school’s musical theater.

  Turyansky himself, when he came to Stargorod on tour, watched one of their shows. And liked it. Afterwards, they spent the night in the Yegorshins’ kitchen, drinking vodka and singing.