Authors: Mikhail Elizarov
More mature now, I took a more sober view of my abilities. My self-confidence had evaporated together with my youth. A week before the exams I found out that the competition for drama was rather high, eight applicants for each place, which was rather strange for our back of beyond.
The competition for the acting department was a bit lower, but I suddenly felt ashamed of my age; at the age of twenty-two I felt like that late developer Lomonosov, smelling of coastal fish, among the crowd of young seventeen-year-old school-leavers.
That left the direction of theatricalized performances and festivals, which had a tolerable level of competition at three applicants per place. They also required a document demonstrating experience of working with a collective. Galoganov’s secretary banged out one of those for me in five minutes flat, and the vice-president appended a positive reference to the note.
I consulted my family. My parents and Vovka said unanimously: “Don’t take any risks—the important thing is to get in. You can change departments afterwards if you like.”
Yet again I let myself be guided by cowardice. The documents were submitted for “performances and festivals”.
But even so I was indescribably happy that summer. The girls applying for the acting faculty were so alluring, perched on long high heels and just barely covered by transparent chiffon that fluttered in draughts, baring their youthful charms to the July heat and the male glances of the entrance committee.
When they heard that I had joined the direction department (I wisely didn’t specify which one), these beauties asked me not to forget about them. They laughed as they said: “You just whistle, young director, and we’ll come flying instantly. You’ll see how affectionately we’ll thank you for a role, dear director…” they promised, laughing and glowing tenderly.
And then, inspired by my summer ecstasy and my eagerness to whistle to those young actresses just as soon as possible, I showed up at home and informed my odious Marina that I was divorcing her.
My wife responded with a howl like a police siren, which, fortunately, zoomed by as quickly as a yellow car with a flashing light. Literally one week later I was once again a bachelor and full of hope. My parents grieved for a while and calmed down, and kind Vovka said that she had never liked Marina anyway.
My memories of the next five years are bitter ones. “Producing folk spectacles” turned out to be much the same as metal studies, only in the field of art. The people studying there were all grownup and ugly—dumpy young women, pushy thirty-year-old guys from the depths of the provinces, directors of small-town clubs who simply needed a diploma to hang on the wall.
Acting skills were limited to the development of diction for the first six months: “Betty bought a bit of butter, but she found the butter bitter, so Betty bought a bit of better butter to make the bitter butter better.” The teacher of stage art taught us to bow and to deliver swingeing slaps to cheeks. The acrobatic classes would have done any rest home proud—forward roll, backward roll, half split, arms out wide.
In directing class we ran through scenes with “justified silence”. These clashes between underwater divers, spies waiting in ambush and married couples who had quarrelled—that is, characters who were logically silent—inevitably turned into series of deaf and dumb convulsions.
For the second time I took up sociology, philosophy and the forever-foreign English language. New things that were added included the incomprehensible subject of pedagogics, cultural studies and literary studies.
After my first session in the dean’s office I learned that I wouldn’t be able to transfer to drama except “on a paid basis”. This news hit me so hard that for the next three years I meekly allowed them to mould me into an entertainer of the masses with a tin bucket on my head and a carrot for a nose.
I should have offered my honest, thunderous repentance to my dream and fled from that den of putrescence, but I suddenly started lying monstrously to myself and everyone else, saying that I was very happy with my studies.
I practised self-deception. Vovka and Slavik had survived the torment of their institute and little Vanya was going to kindergarten. Soon Slavik got a good job in a company that sold office furniture and Vovka fell pregnant again and delighted us all with a second child, Ilya, so she, Slavik and my parents had even more joyful cares to occupy them…
By the fourth year of study the veil had fallen from my eyes. A belated rescue plan was hatched—to switch from the day faculty to the extramural one and immediately get a job in the old student club. I dashed headlong to the alma mater I had derided, but I was too late. No one remembered the creator of the film
Our Beloved Polytech
any longer. The president had retired, Galoganov had been thrown out for embezzlement and the post of club manager had long ago been occupied by a man worthy of it.
Overwhelmed by the panic of an antiquated twenty-six-year-old, I transferred to the extramural faculty and laid siege to every House
of Culture in the city in my search for work. Both the “Builders” and the “Railwaymen” rejected me scornfully. I was given refuge by the local television channel, where I tacked together scripts out of inarticulate raw text. Then I squeezed my way into a smalltime radio channel, where I edited an ignominious comedy programme.
At the age of twenty-seven I was awarded my second degree diploma. In September I took part in a shoddy mass spectacle entitled
Day of the City.
The artistic director turned out to be shrewd and sticky-fingered. We presented the municipal executive committee with an impressive budget for all sorts of folk costumes, round bread loaves and linen towels representing Slavic hospitality and fees for the groups taking part, then made do with less and divided up the remainder among our artistic group.
The petty copecks paid by the television channel and the radio were humiliating. I was short of money. In late December I was invited to play Grandfather Frost and, casting shame aside, I pulled on the cotton-wool beard and eyebrows, flung the sack over my shoulder and set off round the kindergartens. Our pitiful trio—Grandfather Frost, the Snow Maiden and an accordion player—gathered the toddlers together and swiftly taught them to sing ‘A fir tree was born in the forest’ and ‘Merrily we stride together through the wide expanses’. The ones who “sang along together” loudest were handed presents. After the children’s matinees, having parted from the accordionist and now drunk, I fornicated with my Snow Maiden, who was perhaps not especially beautiful, but most amenable.
Thanks to my connections at the institute I was given a part in a New Year’s play for a children’s party, held in a former House of Young Pioneers. Dolled up in flared pants, a pink shirt and a tie, I shouted, “Oh!” in a hoarse voice through a hole in a papier-mâché mask that was supposed to represent a wolf’s jaws every time I saw the rabbit—this one was female—and pursued her clumsily round the stage. “Just you wai-ai-ait!” I growled, planting my feet wide, stumbling and falling flat, like a wardrobe, bruising my knees.
The plot-line had me and Old Lady Shapoklyak playing all sorts of tricks on the positive characters—we stole the trunk with the fairy tales in it, we were exposed, we repented and were forgiven, and then we danced round the beautiful New Year tree with the sticky-handed children.
The humiliation concluded with a modest buffet meal and the lovable rabbit led me away to spend the night in her burrow.
A
ND
THEN
, at the Russian Orthodox Christmas, the notification of Uncle Maxim’s death arrived. The police report informed us that M.D. Vyazintsev had been found dead with multiple contusions and knife wounds. A slip of paper attached indicated the row and sector of my uncle’s burial place in the Second Municipal Cemetery. The letter had reached our foreign parts only after a long delay—a month after the funeral.
We were very upset by this tragic news. My dad pressed his fist against his lips and whispered, “Oh, Maxim, Maxim.” My mum burst into tears—she had always felt sorry for my dissolute uncle. I remembered that seven years earlier she had wanted to invite him to Vovka’s wedding, but Dad tried to dissuade her: “Maxim will get drunk and make a scene.” In the end we didn’t invite him. And now my uncle was gone.
As far as we could tell, no one had found the killer and probably no one had even looked for him. My uncle’s former reputation would have suggested that he had fallen victim to his asocial acquaintances. But that was strange, after all, according to what we had heard; he hadn’t drunk alcohol for many years already. In any event the police had simply written him off and had him cremated. Dad kept planning to go to visit his grave, but the idea never got beyond words.
It’s shameful to admit it, but my uncle Maxim’s death moved on quite quickly from the stage of grief to the routine of receiving the inheritance, in which the main item was a two-room apartment. My
uncle didn’t have any family and we were his only blood relatives. This was worth doing. There was absolutely no hope that I could earn enough for my own living space independently.
When I got married, everyone had assumed that the question of a domicile for me had been resolved. We had immediately given my deceased grandparents’ apartment to Vovka and her husband. My parents had once acquired a dacha plot outside the city, with a little house like the one that Nif-Nif the little pig built. My father kept trying to turn this hovel into a genuine house, but all in vain. A year later I presented my parents with my divorce and returned to my native hearth and home. From May to October my mother and father went away to the dacha, but we spent the winter together, and we were cramped…
But now I could hope to acquire a little pad of my own at last. The only catch was that my uncle had not left a will. And that entailed a whole heap of exhausting bureaucratic formalities.
According to law, if no claim to the inheritance was received within six months of the death, the apartment reverted to the city, and it had to be won back through the courts.
We contacted the state notary’s office for the area where my uncle lived and exchanged letters with the Russian consulate. There were no grounds for refusing us. In March we received a document stating that from 1 June my father, as a blood relative, would come into the inheritance. We only had to pay some outstanding fees or taxes.
The family council decided that I would go to arrange the business.
I was taking on the difficult task of selling my uncle’s apartment. It was anticipated that if a potential buyer were found, my father would come to help me and collect the proceeds, so that he could check everything and make sure we weren’t swindled.
We had serious discussions about the problem of moving the money across the border and even considered the possibility of transporting it in the urn with my uncle’s ashes. Mum immediately spoke up against such a sacrilegious conspiracy and said she had better come with my father, and then, with three of us in the same
train compartment, we would get the money through safely. But in any case my father wanted to bury my uncle’s urn beside my grandfather’s and grandmother’s graves.
We had a letter of attorney drawn up, giving me the right to decide all the legal questions, and I packed for the journey, hoping to have the sale completed in a few short weeks and start patching up my leaky life.
The journey took almost three dreary days. I travelled in a third-class sleeper, so the ticket wasn’t all that expensive. A grey-haired woman who looked like a kindly schoolteacher timidly asked me to swap places with her. I gave up the lower bunk, and the grateful “teacher” plied me with home-made potato pies.
Perched opposite us was a red-cheeked maiden in the collective-farm style. She was travelling with a large bundle wrapped in check cloth, which wouldn’t fit under the seat. During the day the farm girl guarded it vigilantly and at night, just to be sure, she lowered her solid foot, still in its shoe, from the bunk and set it on the bundle.
A sharp-nosed little man, as frisky as a mouse, settled in above the maiden with a small plywood suitcase. The little man drank tea and told the maiden about his difficult lot in life, repeatedly intoning, “When you’re poor, you’re poor.” He had already managed to soften the female conductor’s heart and get a mattress for free, and every now and then he ran to fill up his glass with hot water, because he was carrying his own strong brew with him.
I tried to remain reticent and when the “kindly schoolteacher” asked: “Where are you going to?” I replied curtly: “To visit my uncle”—and then deftly stuck my nose in a book and didn’t allow myself to be drawn into conversation.
On the first night we crossed the border. About a dozen snorers had congregated in the carriage and so I slept badly; even covering my head with the pillow wasn’t much help.
In the morning the train got stuck at the small station of Zhelybino. My window was opposite a memorial plaque screwed
to the peeling station wall: “Here died a valiant death Sergeant Stepan Yakovlevich Gusev, Private First Class Ivan Matveyevich Usikov, Privates Khamir Khafunovich Khazifov, Pavel Kuzmich Fyodorov and Husein Izmailovich Alikperov.” After an hour I had learned this list of the dead off by heart and then the train finally set off again. At midday we passed through Moscow.
It was hot in the carriage. I gazed interminably at the fleeting whirligig of the landscape. The sky blazed bright blue, little lakes glinted brilliantly. When a bird launched itself off a tree and flew into the grass, the wind carried it away, spinning it round like a scrap of paper. Hills of crushed stone sprang up, only to be replaced by sparse green forest with a clearing full of dandelions spreading through it like a hole. A pine forest began, with reddish-brown bogs stretching away behind it: the rotten trunks of birch trees stuck up out of the water. Then a spruce forest started and was broken off by a bridge. On the other side of the river a modern-looking village with three-storey prefabricated apartment blocks was fenced off by poplar trees. After that came an open field, overgrown with weeds, with a rusty goal frame for football and a spotted goat tethered to it.
Looking at the abandoned goal, for some reason I imagined a disaster: children were playing football, the ball flew off onto the rails and a child didn’t notice the train. In keeping with my sad thoughts a cemetery and a gingerbread church appeared.
Station platforms looking like airport landing strips hurtled by so fast that I didn’t have time to read the names. The district towns with their endearing, simple names followed one after another: Pozyrev, Lychevets. The stations there often had only two tracks. While we were standing, local pedlars slouched through the train, offering newspapers and magazines, beer and simple provisions— sunflower seeds, meat pasties, dried fish.
On the third day I was already sick and tired of travelling and was glad when we passed Kolontaysk in the morning. A few hours later the massive grey, watery expanse of the Urmut Reservoir appeared outside the window, followed by the smoking funnels of a nuclear
power station, like chess pieces, and endless stretches of industrial plants, barracks-style buildings with walls of smoke-stained glass.
The old station building was like a high-domed church, and deep inside it faded Soviet frescoes depicted the Socialist happiness of the past.
After tumbling out onto the station platform the passengers were surrounded by taxi drivers clamouring insistently like gypsies to offer their motorized services. I asked the one who looked the least mercenary to me how I could get to Chkalov Street. The driver worked his lips a bit, figuring out the profit in his head, and named a price, but I still couldn’t tell if it was acceptable or not—I was confused by the difference between Russian roubles and Ukrainian hryvnias. In roubles it sounded more expensive.
I apologized, said I didn’t have much money and asked if he could tell me how to get there on public transport. The taxi driver hesitated for a moment before taking pity on me and showing the way. He waved his hand in the direction of a McDonald’s mast with a neon “M” on the top, which was visible beyond the roofs of the buildings.
Skirting round the buildings I saw a trolleybus-turning circle and a route-taxi stop. To be on the safe side I asked a cultured-looking old woman about the central market and she confirmed what the taxi driver had said, that it was five stops away. Then she asked me if I could remember which tree had come into leaf first this year: the alder or the birch? She explained, “If it was the birch, it will be a good, warm summer. But if the alder was first, we’ve had it, it’s going to be rainy and cold.”
I already liked the town because it was filled with festive sunshine, and I could smell the blossoming lilac’s intoxicating scent even through the windows of the trolleybus. Most of the buildings were pre-revolutionary, with large windows, ornate moulding work that had come away in places on the walls and wide front doorways. The atmosphere of modest merchant-class serenity was spoiled by
numerous kiosks with clumsily daubed signs: “Pies”, “Ice Cream”, or “Irina Ltd”. I was delighted to see the Russian letter “y” at the end of so many Russian shop-name signs “Produkty” (“Groceries”), “Soki, Vody” (“Juices, Waters”), “Sigarety” (“Cigarettes”). In my native parts, where Ukrainian
nezalezhnyst
(“independence”) had been raging for almost nine years, this letter had disappeared completely.
The town centre was green and spacious. The intersection of Gagarin Prospect and Komsomol 50th Anniversary Prospect formed a small square, which had a bronze Lenin three metres high. Standing to the right of the statue was an armoured car of Civil War vintage, and to its left was a T-70 World War II tank, as if Lenin were being urged to choose more contemporary military technology but wasn’t taking the hint, stubbornly thrusting out his hand in an attempt to flag down a foreign automobile on the main avenue.
Right beside him was a cosy little park. A granite pedestal with a howitzer gun towered over the flower beds. Below the golden figures “1941–1945” lay wreaths and flowers, evidently left over from the Victory Day celebrations on 9 May. Rising up behind the little park was a cathedral with reddish, samovar-shaped domes and a bell tower with a steeple covered with a dull, mossy-emerald patina.
The trolleybus stopped beside an old brick wall surrounding the cathedral that had grass sprouting through it. I walked along a short little street smothered in lime trees and came out directly opposite the metal fence of the market, at the point where the fish stalls began and there was a smell of riverine scum.
I asked some women with stuffed shopping bags where the number eighteen bus stop was. They explained that it was at the other side of the market, but advised me against taking the bus— “it’s not reliable”—it was better to wait there for the route taxi, which also ran along Chkalov Street.
I found the Trust agency that I needed in the semi-basement of a sleek nine-storey building faced with tiles, between a delicatessen and a hairdresser’s.
The interior was a standard example of a modest “Eurostandard” renovation. The black imitation-leather furniture, white blinds and rambling pot plants inspired a distinct feeling of trust.
There was only one woman ahead of me in the queue, but I was mistaken to feel glad about this—she stayed in the notary’s office right up to the lunch break, so I was forced to spend the best part of another hour browsing through the local newspapers.
By the time the seals had been applied and I had spent more time in the queue to the little window in order to pay the required fee and handed in the receipt to the notary, the day was already declining into evening.
In the delicatessen I bought a bottle of Absolut vodka and a large gift box of chocolates. Who could tell which sex of bureaucratic individual I would encounter at my uncle’s local housing department? I needed gifts to accommodate both possibilities.
The Comintern-era housing complex was a collection of fivestorey, prefabricated slums on the very edge of town. Housing Department Office No. 27 seemed to have disappeared into thin air. Tired and angry, I repeatedly asked local people to help me, but no one knew where it was. Eventually a woman with a garbage pail volunteered to show me the way.
As if in deliberate mockery, the metal doors of the Housing Department Office, with a crookedly attached schedule of water outages for June, were locked with a large metal bar. And there were no encouraging notes such as “Back soon”.
The woman studied the schedule and the hollows under her eyes were instantly flooded with black melancholy. She looked at me reproachfully, as if I were to blame for the imminent outage. As she left, shaking her head, the garbage pail in her hand squeaked pitifully.
At that moment I realized that I now faced either a search for a cheap hotel or a night out on the street. In helpless despair I started pounding on the door, which rumbled like theatrical thunder.
A little old man in a taut singlet, with a tattoo on his skinny
shoulder and grey curls on his chest, stuck his head out of the closest window on the first floor. He swore at me amiably—so that I wouldn’t abuse him in return, and struck up a conversation.
I explained that I had just arrived from out of town, I needed to get into an apartment, otherwise I had a night on the street ahead of me, and the keys were in the housing department office.