Fish- a History of One Migration Read online

  Fish

  A History of One Migration

  by Peter Aleshkovsky

  Translated by Nina Shevchuk-Murray

  Russian Life books

  Russian Life books

  PO Box 567

  Montpelier, VT 05601

  [email protected]

  www.russianlife.com

  Fish: A History of One Migration

  (Ryba: Istoria odnoy migratsii)

  by Peter Aleshkovsky © 2006 Peter Aleshkovsky

  English translation © 2010, Nina Shevchuk-Murray

  Cover image © 2010, Alexander Bityutskikh

  Layout and design © 2010, Russian Information Services, Inc.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form. For information contact the publisher.

  Manufactured in the United States of America.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2010931604

  ISBN: 978-1-880100-62-2

  Table of Contents

  Epigraph

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Part Four

  About the Author

  About the Translator

  Notes

  A RUSSIAN RIDDLE

  “Thieves came and stole the owners,

  and the house left through the windows.”[1]

  one

  . 1 .

  Mom and dad were both geologists. Life had tossed them all over the country before they landed in Tajikistan, in the town of Panjakent. We lived on the Russian-Tatar street named after Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya.[2] Tajiks didn’t care for this street, and, I see now, with good reason. Here, people drank port, prohibited by the Quran, and did not hoard every penny for a raucous tui-pisar, one of life’s biggest celebrations—a son’s circumcision, when custom prescribed that one must treat several hundred guests to plov.[3]

  In three days, they would burn through all the wealth long accumulated for the celebration of a tui-pisar. Consumed like light kindling in a wood stove. Poof-poof-poof, and the fires expired under the huge cast-iron pots, the women wiped the sweat from their brows and set about cleaning their pots of the congealed fat that clings to the dark metal like spring ice to cliffs. I saw ice like that in the Dashtiurdakon Pass, when we went camping with our troop of Young Pioneers.

  Mom was often hired to clean up after such feasts; after Dad’s death, money was always short. Helping out at the feasts came with a bonus: the hosts gave us leftovers, and we would eat nothing but plov for a whole week. To this day, I can’t stand rice fried in cotton oil; just thinking about it gives me heartburn. Tajiks regarded our street’s ragtag gang of Soviet geologists the same way they did the sand swept in by the wind or the tangles of tumbleweed that were always ready to break loose. They tolerated us as one tolerates bad weather. The Russians responded with mutual disdain. To us the Tajiks were rich and lazy bais: they owned their own land.

  Now I understand that, in fact, there was no wealth whatsoever. The truly lavish tui-pisars—put on by the big bosses—were hidden from us; behind the mud duval walls of the old neighborhood they lived a completely different life. Only some of it was on display: big-bellied men, brimming with good spirits, sat out their days in teahouses, like moscato grapes in the sun. Their secrets were hidden behind oily eyes; their narrowed pupils were chilly and small, like pebbles in the glacial Zaravshan River; a hideous light glowed from the cleanly washed skin of their faces—faces that scared me, a girl, more than the pichak knives the men wore at their waists. They said the knives were so sharp, that, with a just few swipes of the blade across their belts, they could use them to shave their heads as their Mohammed had commanded them.

  We, the residents of Kosmodemyanskaya, were always moving, always swinging our arms, always gesticulating, eager to prove something, and did not shy from cursing in public. Our girls braided their hair into two braids; theirs—into more than you could count. We played lapta,[4] volleyball and “shtander-stop,”[5] but not the lamb-bone game “oshichki,” and we didn’t gleefully squeal “Horse!” or “Bull!”—to be heard clear across the school yard—when the tiny polished fragments fell just so. We were swallows at the face of a cliff on the river, and they were not even the eagles in the clouds, but those barely visible shadows of heated air, trembling and taut, that support the eagles’ wings high in the sky.

  The Kosmodemyanskayas would drink any kind of alcohol, but also smoked weed, which made them giggle and whoop and crawl around on all fours—“mule” as they called it, strutting their stuff, exorcising the demons of their souls, prancing and blabbering. The desperate “me, me, me” of the mob, kept in check for so long, would spill onto our street like guts from a slashed sheep’s stomach; it would writhe, extending its neck and straining its shoulders; it would stomp, desperately slapping its hands on its thighs like a goose that flaps his wings to get the gaggle’s attention. Base couplets and the whiny suffering of an accordion were braided into a single rope, tossed into a single pot, gobbled up by the same crew. All this debauchery always ended in a mindless fight, which both affirmed the profane “me” and abused it with profanities; punch someone in the face or be punched in the face—it was all the same. Afterward, shiners were displayed like medals, knocked out teeth signaled a new, higher rank, cracked skulls were healed with port, and bones grew back together like grafts on an apple tree, with bulging, scabby scars.

  The fat Tajiks, the Uzbeks wearing embroidered Shahristani skull-caps,[6] the tribal people from the Pamir Mountains who came—sinewy, dirt-poor, and proud—to the market, and even the savage Turkmen who hid their beautiful daughters under paranjas, none of them ever brawled or drank the stupefying wine. They did not push at the seams of time with their elbows, but rather stepped out of it. They would put a pinch of nasvai behind a cheek and transform themselves into a pile of compressed, sun-dried pahsa, that special mixture of dirt and goat droppings from which they built their homes, mosques,duval walls, and the fortresses and towers of ancient Panjakent. With time, pahsa crumbles to dust, becomes raw material for a new mixture or seeps underground, where it settles imperceptibly into a new cultural stratum.

  The ancient fortress settlement—the main attraction in our regional center—had long been abandoned, and was now being excavated by archaeologists. Some of their digs went deeper than fifteen or twenty feet: large dry wells reaching into the depths of the earth, through layer after layer of departed lives, cut through with pickaxes, shovels and hoes; they were lives of people whose descendants so frightened me when I passed the teahouse on Abulkasym Lahuti Street on my way for a flatbread or cold milk from the store.

  Later, after the geological exploration party had fallen apart, after Father had started drinking and perished stupidly down a deep prospect-hole, and Mom had gone to work as a nurse’s assistant at the city’s maternity hospital, I met and came to love Aunt Gulsuhor and Aunt Leila,[7] Aunt Fatima and Uncle Davron—the young doctor who brought me little gifts of candy. Silly me, only later did I realize that they were all hardworking, honest people, and that even those who sat like totem poles in the teahouse had once worked somewhere to earn their rest. I, a girl from Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya Street with two measly braids was nothing to them; I was dust, both because I was a girl and because I lived on the wrong street, where every night a police car was parked on duty. In that car (at the wheel) sat Uncle Said and (at the radio) Kolya Pervukhin, a sergeant. Kolya was always smoking a cigarette. He watched the poorly-lit street like a guard dog perched in his doghouse, always ready to fly, gun in hand, after the first suspicious shadow, to do whatever it took to catch, throw to the ground, and stomp out the evil that kept
the newcomers—tight in their beds like flies wintering under the wallpaper—from sleeping soundly in the two-floor shanties that lined the street.

  It’s been a long time since I lived on Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya Street in Panjakent. For twenty-seven years I have not woken up to the rooster’s crow and the bleating of the neighbors’ black goat; I have not peered out my window at the nightly gathering of a terrifying dog pack under the streetlamp. Less and less often do I recall the Zaravshan mountain range, bluish-green in the pre-dawn mist, and the dark ribbon of the river below. By eleven o’clock the mountains would fade in the oily smoke of heat, and only their shadow would remain, a mere outline, a hint. They would appear again, dim and purple, before the sunset, after the heat of the day had passed. Then Mom would come home from her shift at the hospital and take a watermelon for the two of us from the haús—a shallow pond in the garden. We’d sit down to dinner, and I would bite into the cold, sugary watermelon flesh, then afterwards count the black seeds on my plate and ecstatically slap my watermelon-stuffed belly with my sticky hand. All this, and much more, rarely surfaces in my memory, but sometimes, when I am falling asleep, the faces of the old people and the men in the teahouse pass through my mind. They gaze toward the vanishing mountains, deep in thoughts not given to a girl’s understanding or feeling. Their faces are like the faces of huge fish suspended in a canal: heavy, silvery carp with tightened cheeks, their lips moving as if lazily repeating a prayer, their tiny eyes looking straight through you, unblinking, eerie and cold like sleeping water.

  Probably this all comes back because I so often stare at the face of Grandma Lisichanskaya, the old lady with whom I have been living as a nurse for the past two and a half years. She only has the use of one arm—her left, has almost completely lost her speech, and recognizes only me. She cannot say my name—Vera—but has learned to repeat words after me. And thank God for that.

  In the mornings I enter her room and look into her dry, upturned face. If her eyes gleam, I say, “Good morning!” Then her mouth opens, a shadow crosses her face, she wrinkles her forehead as if trying to trap the word that has reached her consciousness. In a small voice, she repeats, “Morning.” It is difficult for her to utter two words, but sometimes she does send another one chasing after the first, and it comes out as, “Morning. Morning.” This means that we’re truly having a good morning. We set about our routine. She is weightless, like a small girl, and it is easy to move her around.

  If, however, her gaze is frozen and still, and her eyes look cloudy and vacant, it is pointless to greet her. I immediately come to the bed, change her Pampers, give her a sponge bath, treat her bedsores with buckthorn oil, and begin to rub her back and legs to bring back the blood and warmth.

  If her eyes are closed and her hand lies on top of the blanket like a lash, that’s very bad news: we’re dying again. Her blood pressure can jump from 90 over 60 to 220 over 140; the blood vessels in her head are worn to shreds. Of course, feeding her is out of the question, and on days like these I suckle her on a bottle, like a baby. Reflexively, she moves her lips, and I am happy if she at least manages to get down some juice. I once tried giving her soup that way, but she shut her lips like subway doors and that was it, they were not opening until the next stop.

  I put an oxygen mask on her to help her breathe, and if she starts sweating I run a warm sponge over her almost lifeless body, knowing that my grandma is far, far away, and all I can do is wait and pray. Since I don’t know how to pray properly, I just mumble quickly, “Father-God, do with me what you will, but help Grandma Lisichanskaya today.” After these words, I always cross my forehead and add, “Amen of the Holy Spirit!” Then I put my hand on her head, my warm hand onto her cold little skull (even marble statues are warmer), and hold it steady. Each time it is very different; sometimes it takes a full thirty minutes before I can finally sense a weak pulse. Once I enter its rhythm, I can begin to pick out despair, deathly exhaustion, disappointment, pity, pain. From a medical point of view, there is nothing left inside her to feel pain, yet sometimes this pain overwhelms everything else and is the only thing I hear—it is like the chirr of cicadas overpowering all the other small nocturnal noises. I long ago stopped looking for an explanation; I just hold my hand there as it grows heavy as lead, and, as a distraction, I open a book and silently read. I have learned to turn pages with one hand. At times like these she cannot hear me anyway.

  Grandma is swaddled in her emotions like a cabbage in its leaves. They cover her core, and, in order to reach her, one must free her from everything external and overgrown. While my one hand mechanically leafs through a book, the other seems to be freeing, purifying something deeply hidden. Nothing is happening on the surface, in this room—there is just a mute old woman and a mute hand. I am reading. But we are hard at work, we are inching towards each other, I aim to free her—she aims to be set free. Sometimes she can lie like this for several hours and God knows when she will fall asleep. Gradually, the hellish pain subsides, the helplessness, the hurt, the anger fade along with the distrust, despair, regret, fear, shyness, suspiciousness and endless sorrow, and then there is a moment when I’m suddenly jolted, as if by electricity, and I jerk my hand away. The hand goes numb and turns ice-cold. Grandma’s forehead is warmer, which means everything is well. She has fallen asleep. I go to the bathroom and run hot water over my hand, gradually bring it back to life.

  . 2 .

  We sleep poorly. It is a gift if we have two or three quiet nights a week. Time has abandoned my grandma, has fluttered away and tangled up, like clumpy, freshly-shorn wool before it is made into felt. At night, grandma stares at a point on the ceiling. Mark Grigoriyevich, her son, sent us a nice Italian nightlight that casts a warm orange glow. Its light does not penetrate the darkness at the ceiling or in the corners, but warms the bed and my armchair alongside it. And it reaches the door, on which hangs a picture of a Japanese horse. I like looking at that picture: you can’t tell if the horse is galloping or rearing up. It’s painted with upward brushstrokes. At the bottom the ink is thick and black, but at the edges the lines are grey, and it looks like the animal has light, smoothly brushed hair that gleams in the sun—the model must have been a well-cared-for horse. In Panjakent we had all kinds of horses, and, of course, many donkeys, but only once did I see a horse that was this fast and well-groomed. It would have been better if I hadn’t. For some reason, horses, unlike donkeys, inspired in me a special kind of love, one made of equal parts pity and adoration. At the sight of a horse, a warm feeling bloomed in my chest; my eyes seemed to open wider and follow the animal. Even when it was just the nag pulling the trash barrel, I gazed longingly after it and could not turn away. When I was in the first or second grade, I had a bet with my friend Ninka Surkova that I would dare kiss the face of the first horse we met.

  At stake was an Alyonka chocolate bar. To seal the deal, at Ninka’s insistence, I swore a terrible oath, spinning on my heel, pressing my hand to my forehead and heart, and invoking the promise of sure death to my family, should I break my word. I never swore like that again, and it left me no choice but to kiss a horse, since I had no money to buy a chocolate bar. I wasn’t scared, because I knew I really would kiss any horse out there; I just tried not to dwell on the fact that sometimes they bite you.

  Ninka must have known what she was doing. She led me down a route only she knew, then pretended that we were playing a game in which we were fleeing from someone down backyard alleys, even though the only thing chasing us was the barking of guard dogs. We crept low through the wet morning grass and slipped around the trunks of fruit trees; white and pink petals showered us, and wild barberry scratched us with its long, strong thorns. It was April, the time when everything is blooming and fragrant. I remember a snake slipping into its lair just below our feet; it must have been a harmless rat snake, but Ninka shrieked, “Viper!” and, infected with each other’s madness, we took off running. Low-hanging branches of dry, thorny bushes slammed shut behind us, yet surprisi
ngly we got only a few scratches. We climbed shapeless clay walls like Red partizans, crawled on our bellies across strangers’ orchards, and soon found ourselves in the old city, in the Tajik neighborhoods.

  In a corner, leaning against a mud wall amid thick cherry-plums, stood a shed with a holey roof. The roof was all but stripped of its straw cover, and the thin beams stuck out like the ribs of a cow carcass baked by the sun. Ninka dove into the lopsided doorway; there must have been a gate there once. I followed her into the foul-smelling darkness. Somewhere close a dog barked loudly, but we did not care. In the darkest corner, a horse stood on what was left of the rotten straw. When young, he must have been reddish brown. Now he was completely grey; his tail was tangled and studded with burrs. When we came in, the horse startled, slashed the air with his tail, swept it across his hind legs and fell still again. The tail hung limply; only the ears stood up straight and took aim at us, even though the horse did not turn his head. It was quiet; the flies buzzed angrily.

  “Kiss him!” Ninka ordered.

  I circled the horse on the left, put my hand on his skinny back and ran it along his spine. It left a trace on his coat. The horse was dirty; dust and tiny hairs stuck to my hand. A vein shuddered in his neck, his hind leg jerked, and a hoof thumped on the ground. I did not shy away; instead, I patted his bony back, moved my hand to his neck and rubbed it several times, making a curry-comb with my fingers. I had seen men soothe their horses this way.

  The horse was bridled and tied to the trough. Finally, his head turned towards me. A large, weary eye regarded me; the eyelid twitched. Puss ran in a stream from the corner of his eye down his nose; a thinner stream dripped from the other eye. A clump of flies rose angrily from the horse’s head; a few got trapped in my hair. I did not take my hand back and did not shriek, but my whole body suddenly went stiff. I felt my cheeks ice over. I took the lifeless head in my hands, pulled it towards me, and kissed it, not even closing my eyes. Then I left the shed, picked up a can, and drew water from the irrigation ditch. I found a threadbare rag in the same ditch and washed the horse’s face as best I could. He stood there, all wooden and stiff, his slightly flaring nostrils the only sign of life. I rubbed and rubbed, and tried not to think about the smell and the sticky puss. I kept staring at the dark-red coat that began to shine magically under my wet rag. I must have given orders, too, because twice Ninka ran to refill the can with fresh water, I don’t remember.