«What's this about fish? I can't swim a stroke,» said Liza.
«But remember what I told you, Mama — buy a mask, I said.»
«What sort of mask?»
«For staying underwater. They have them in sporting goods shops,» Liza's son explained.
«Don't buy a mask; buy port wine,» was Belyaev's advice, «This calls for a drink!»
When the Belyaevs realized that no one was in favor of this idea, they resolutely refused to live at the bottom of a lake: «We have rheumatism, I'm telling you, and a touch of lumbago.»
«I mustn't drink — I'm a nursing mother,» Masha explained.
Masha was still nursing her seven-month-old daughter. Up to that time she had not had a single photograph made, remembering Alena's words that infants shouldn't be photographed until they were six months old — some old superstition.
«It's time to photograph her.»
«Will you photograph mine too?» Liza asked. «Tomorrow's May Day.»
Down the river swiftly floats
a cow dressed in an overcoat…
came a snippet of song from the Belyaevs' room.
«They must have found a nip somewhere after all,» Masha surmised.
Paper shirts for us —
It's gone from bad to wuss
«Well, at least one good thing came out of all this — he taught me how to take pictures,» said Masha.
That night she went to sleep to the accompaniment of the ditties, and in the morning she awoke to more of the same.
Reach out and touch me, hand or foot
From the other side of town.
Call me, baby, on the phone.
Or perhaps the loudspeaker had already been set up on the street? She dressed her daughter in a white outfit and spent a long time taking her picture against the backdrop of the May Day parade. She ran out an entire roll of film and developed it that very evening, impatient to see what she had gotten. In the first photo, Masha's daughter was smiling in Liza's arms, coquettishly revealing her naked gums. On the right were the flags and the flowers, on the left the black outlines of their very own barracks.
«Here we are on Lake Jolly,» Liza said. «That photo should be sent to Moscow.»
«And I'll send it!» Masha promised.
«Well, just watch out,» Liza warned.
Along the River Dunderpote
My sweetheart rows his little boat…
issued from the Belyaevs; their celebration was going full blast.
Even on ordinary days, however, the Belyaevs often celebrated. So, when one hot night in July Masha heard a knock on the door, she thought first of them. With the heavy rocking horse in readiness, she opened the door. On an earlier occasion the only thing that had saved her from the Belyaevs was their fear of the cast iron horse. On the threshold, however, stood a policeman.
«Comrade Golubova? Maria? Or Lydia?»
This is it, Masha guessed, and she dropped the rocking horse.
«Does Lydia Golubova live here?» the policeman asked again, picking up the rocking horse.
«Out on the… I mean… she's away on a business trip,» Masha managed.
«Get ready, you're coming with us,» the policeman barked, grabbing the rocking horse and putting it in a laundry basket which he had carried out into the corridor. «Make it snappy.»
Masha peered into the corridor of the barracks: there was hustle and bustle there, armed soldiers, someone had broken a glass salad bowl and a young lieutenant was gluing it back together. Two firemen were helping Granny Anya carry a bed out while Granny Tanya was carried out lying on her sofa and crossing herself.
The Belyaevs were still bawling out their ditties: «Sticky-wicky, Grampa's wishin' — too bad Gramma's gone out fishin'.»
«Silence! You're disturbing the lieutenant,» the policeman yelled sternly.
First I fell for a lieutenant,
Then a captain I ensnared,
Kept on mounting higher, higher,
Till a goatherd's bed I shared.
«Are we having an earthquake?» Masha asked.
«How could there be an earthquake here?» answered a cadet and began piling her daughter's toys into the stroller.
It took them half an hour to carry out all the belongings. Only the lieutenant was holding up the eviction — he was still trying to resuscitate the salad bowl.
On the street stood lots of trucks loaded with boats. Some men with a few days' beard — recruited from the drunk tank, no doubt — were unloading the boats and hastily piling furniture and dishes into the trucks. The residents of the barracks were standing on the trucks' platforms receiving their belongings. Soldiers with walkie-talkies scurried here and there.
«Did you get the gunpowder? Where are the paratroopers?»
«Be here any minute now.»
«Gonna demo Pirogov Street too?»
«Idiot! Put the dynamite here. This is the sensitive spot.»
«Children should all go in the cabs.» A truck marked «Live Fish» pulled up, followed by two ambulances. An aroma of roses drifted by. Masha followed her nose to the source and spied a truck for transporting livestock. Behind the wooden lattices some men from the South, probably marketplace workers, sat hugging immense armfuls of roses. Their faces were animated and indignant. But at this point the landing of some helicopters almost flattened them, and the Southerners began obediently unloading the flowers. The helicopters gained altitude and also began ejecting some bud-like objects which blossomed out and turned into courageous parachutists.
Caaall me, baby, on thephoooone…
Masha turned toward the voices and saw the Belyaevs fighting with a paratrooper, yanking the pocket out of his spotted overalls together with the flask it contained. The paratrooper adroitly outmaneuvered them.
«Comrade commander, may I retaliate?»
«I'll show you — all you wanna do is punch somebody in the nose. What we have here is a peaceful resettlement of residents to peaceful apartments and at the same time a drill in evacuation techniques.»
«Are we going to get apartments?» Liza asked. «Oh, Masha, look!»
The lieutenant with the salad bowl, who had never flagged in his task, was speedily gluing in the last piece of glass. The sergeant chalked the number «1» on their truck and muttered a grumpy aside, «What's he doing with that silly dish?»
«I dare say the Moscow Commission will want everything just so,» the lieutenant replied stiffly for reasons known only to him.
«Let's get moving,» came the order, and the truck Masha was riding in tore swiftly ahead, spinning her around and throwing her left and right among her things. Through the cab's rear window she could see her daughter sitting on Liza's lap, drooling intently. Dogs commented on the resettlement with a respectable hoarse bark. Some tights were flapping in the wind. Masha had not managed to tuck them in properly. Just as she bent over to unhook them from the side, the truck lurched over a railroad track, and Masha flew out with the tights.
As she fell to the ground, her instant inventory confirmed that everything was in the right place, although some superficial bumps appeared — on her elbow, for example. The tights were still flapping in the wind like the banner of some obscure liberation movement. The driver of the second truck saw her fall and stopped. «The doctors will be coming in the middle of the column.»
«Yes, but my baby's in the first truck.»
«Well, climb on up.»
They took them to a new twelve-story building and began getting them settled. Masha was given a separate two-room apartment. And what an apartment! With a balcony and a pantry. Two women were still wallpapering the entry hall. Liza and her children moved into a neighboring apartment. Suddenly an explosion rang out, followed by two more. Masha ran out onto the balcony.
«What's that?»
«They're excavating,» a policeman answered politely from the roadway.
And so it was that by noon, in place of the Levanevsky Settlement, there lapped the waters of Lake Jolly. In the
clear water a goldfish played, flashing its golden sides. Masha could see a whole school of fish like it. She wanted to touch them, but the cast prevented her from dipping her right hand into the water. They had put the cast on her at the hospital because some sort of «toma» had sprung up on her elbow due to the injury. The cast gleamed brightly white, out of harmony with the gay clothing of the promenaders.
The brand new black asphalt was still elastic beneath her heels, and the smell of it wrought havoc with the aroma of the roses in enormous vases that stood on marble pedestals. From a loudspeaker jumped the strains of a merry tune.
Unexpectedly, a man threw off his clothes and leapt into the water, drowning out the loudspeaker with his song.
Fishies swimming on the bottom…
Don't even try — you'll never catch one.
Belyaev — for that was who it was — wailed at the top of his lungs in a surprisingly unintoxicated voice. Masha did not recognize his face immediately: the customary iridescent bags under his eyes had disappeared. All at once he dove, and in the depths Masha could make out a corner of the barracks with some knocked-out windows through which Belyaev slipped, right after the goldfish.
Just then a boat was launched from the opposite shore. In it was a lady accompanied by a gentleman. The lady trailed her hand in the water, her shapely torso reclining. As they swept past her, Masha recognized Alena.
ANASTASIA GOSTEVA
CLOSED AMERICAS
Translated by Subhi Sherwell.
He was sitting on the corner of Jampath Lane and the Tibetan Market, where flowed the invisible boundary, separating the world of importunate and hysterical Indian bartering from the realm of the unhurried and solid Tibetan enterprise; between the Indians fleecing the wide-eyed, gullible tourists, brown and oily Indians who might almost have been moulded out of whole lumps of cannabis, and the Tibetans, hewn from a sandalwood tree in a few sharp, sure strokes by a certain notorious carpenter from Galilee.
He was sitting there in a white Punjab kaftan and a white turban, a curious hybrid of a felt doll and the spermatozoon from that Woody Allen film, which had grown into a big albino otter with black whiskers. There was probably some business we should have been attending to. Dealings in Delhi (I personally found this pun quite amusing). We had only a vague recollection of what these dealings were, but we knew for certain that it was precisely their existence (the dealings, I mean) that was dragging our bodies down into this cesspit. What if they had… well, who knows how many shadowy vistas would have opened out before us? All right, enough of that… So we found ourselves inevitably drawn towards this otter, all the while trying to avoid making eye contact with all and sundry, so as not to bring about this all and sundry's premature death by getting up their hopes for a gigantic hypothetical sale.
There he was, sitting on the corner deep in thought, on a folding stool covered with stripy cloth… and we'll never know what he was thinking, the bastard. And what infuriates me most of all, is that we'll never know what the whole lot of them were thinking about. We're only wasting time discussing such rubbish. We weren't even…
…intending to stop. I wasn't at any rate. He rushed out and intercepted us, brandishing a little leather folder. He wasn't particularly convincing with that little folder of his there on the corner of Jampath Lane and the Tibetan Market. And now he'd metamorphosed from an otter into a university trade union organizer on the day when everyone's travel cards were being handed out. We found ourselves in a sealed-off bullet-proof glass gutter, a gusting north-westerly wind, veering to northerly, salty ocean water with a moderate concentration of iodine, slow current but it swept us under the hill and we were unable to stop. He floated alongside, gurgling and spluttering with the novelty of it all, and waving his folder about upwards and sideways like the saintly worker leading the May Day march on the famous poster. I wondered why he wasn't melting. What had they mixed into him? Taku said nothing. I suspected that he didn't really burden himself with thought processes. Which was exactly what I needed. The man of my life. Sometimes he said: «oh-la-la,» and he had a funny Japanese accent when he said that «oh-la-la.» It made me smile. The trade-union organizer flung open his little folder and waved some photographs of a sadhu wearing orange robes and coloured wreaths. Taku lit a cigarette.
The ground we were now standing on was rough, porous and ochre-grey. It was cracked, like an almond cookie, little clumps of scorched grass stuck out and different insects, beetles and spiders were crawling about. There was a smell of warm manure. For some reason I could only breathe through one nostril. Probably the right one. I'm always getting my left and right confused. Taku didn't distinguish between them at all. He was absolutely supple. When he grew tired he'd lean his elbow out onto the air or sit down on it and take a breather. I hadn't noticed how the trade-union organizer had pulled out a low stone urn with small yellow flowers and seated Taku on its edge. «Have you ever had your fortune told before? Tell me? Where? Here in India? I'll do it for you now…» Taku yawned. He yawned just like Mowgli. Yawned like a man who had grown up in the wild among beasts that didn't yawn, didn't smile, and who was now trying these new mimes out on his face. «Now you listen to what I'm telling you, I can read your thoughts, I can tell your fortune, I'm a brilliant yogi.» He quickly drew three horizontal lines and three vertical ones on a scrap of paper to make a grid of nine squares. «Give me a number between two and seven.» Taku looked him in the eye lazily… the fakir drew a clumsy figure of three in one of the squares. Taku stubbed out his cigarette on the sole of his Grinders and sluggishly threw away the butt… All around us the hawkers buzzed and careened, diving in front of people, clattering and jangling with their hypnotic eyes… «Where're you from? Japan? Give me a name of a flower and an animal»… this was all turning into a cheap farce… «daisy, elephant»… and I stood there on the corner of Jampath Lane and the Tibetan Market, on the almond cookie cracking in the intense heat, and like some idiot I thought about immortality… that it was such a strange thing… you can't become immortal, either you're born immortal or not… we can never know for certain, you only know that you're probably not mortal, and you constantly flounder in the gap, as in parachute riggings, plastered in the air, and you've always got to confirm your immortality, but no matter what you do, even if you think it only has a focused, localized meaning, it is at once both in your future and your past, because you were born immortal, and you're just in a fleeting moment. And then you suddenly become a curious exception to the world at large and submit to the laws of quantum physics. I often think such rubbish…
The fakir drew a «d» and an «e» in two of the empty squares, twirled his moustache and a dry wind twirled Taku's golden, sunburnt hair, and the fakir asked «when were you born?»… he asked «can you speak?»… Taku glanced at me calmly and smirked… he was unencumbered, he looked at himself all the time in the mirror, straightened out his hair, spruced himself up, and I looked at him, and it brought us closer… the otter lost his patience and jabbered quickly… «look over here, I'm writing down three letters, LMC, love, marriage, change, you'll get married in September, you'll return to India in two year time, you'll…» Taku got up and walked towards a vortex of delicate spinning iron rods with large spikes, and among the rods lots of eyes would appear and disappear, appear and disappear, appear and dis-… And music was playing, a silvery-blue siren song, and sparks danced to it and the music was also whirling round in the vortex, and the iron rods now turned into lianas, brown, beige, ashen, leopard-skinned, they slithered and flowed and revolved and pulsed and changed their hue… and they asked me «what do you want?» and I said «to write» «and what would you give to do that?» «anything» «anything?» «yes» «would you go without children?»… I looked at my stomach, gelatinous and transparent and bulging, and inside it in some sort of a spacesuit someone was living, and he was preparing to leave… and I cried out «no»… I thought I cried out, maybe that was just the way it seemed, you can never say anything for certain… «No» I
said «to write and love» I twisted myself up into the vertical funnel… the otter grabbed back my arm… «You have a big heart»… and I imagined my own heart taking up all the free space inside me, and the other organs, all the little livers and spleens and stomachs, pressing themselves up against my skin trying to fight their way through to my arms and legs, trying to get an audience with my brain to explain the whole situation… «Oh I can tell from your palm, you had a great love once, but you split up, and he broke your heart»… now the little livers and spleens and stomachs hunched over my heart in sorrow and tried to glue it back together with Superglue… and Lou Reed sang about a perfect day when he could be somebody else, somebody new… and I made a wry face… the folder slipped off his lap and the pictures scattered in the yellow dust… «but in July there'll come a change of fortunes, in July you'll meet an American, and you'll fall in love, and you'll marry him in 1999, and… gimme some money» «I don't have any» «You do» «I don't» «I see in your eyes that you do».
«And I see in yours that you can't see»… he said «This will lie heavily on your conscience»… now he looked like a soft-boiled semolina dumpling… I replied «But I don't have a conscience» and he…
…I stood up and followed Taku. We gathered our things. We were heading for Nepal. I forgot all about the yogi. I took Taku by the hand and we walked along dusty grey-green streets, our unsteady feet shuffling through piles of rubbish, past shops and shanties, zoos and banks, along the ocean shore and beneath the benumbed Indian sky, and by our side the slopes of the Himalayas soared up, and grey monkeys swung on the railings of bridges, and street urchins tugged at our clothes and grinning Indians yelled after us «Halloo, sweet lady and chocolate man!» and the stars burned brightly overhead, as they had a thousand years before and would a thousand years hence… and they cried out «How are Juan Matus and his wife Dona Juanita, and their darling student Don Carlos?» and I replied «They're well thank you, but Carlos Castaneda lives on the roof, and Carlson Castaneda lives on all of our „roofs“… and I sensed that I was trembling all over…»
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