NINE

by Svetlana Alexiyevich

  Sometimes, though, a Uraler would survive an encounter with the Stone Maiden. Never again did a man like that venture beyond the city limits or have anything to do with the gem business, and according to rumors he couldn't see himself in mirrors, as a result of which he lost his feeling of self and would restlessly finger his own face, squeezing the solid parts hard and grabbing the soft flesh into thick folds. Whenever anyone addressed him, the poor man would immediately get distracted with verifying his own presence and the presence on his person of appropriate clothing. The pause, which was accompanied by a survey of his buttons and a bow to his own trousers, was brief but so unpleasant to his interlocutor that a former rock hound who sincerely promised himself to henceforth lead only an ordinary, licit life could never get a career going at all. In individual cases, the Stone Maiden's lover would run off with his girlfriend, taking none of his possessions along, and laying out his money — sometimes wads of dollars in rubber bands — neatly in that same obvious place where his last letter would have lain had he killed himself. Experienced cops who had studied the m.o. of these kinds of disappearances called this the «post office.»

  Like any real Uraler, at the appropriate time young Krylov took off into the mountains. He came to know what it was like to hike with a knapsack that gets heavier with every kilometer and smells more and more of canvas and sweat, exactly as if you were carrying an extra body of your own on your back. He found out what it was like to hammer test holes using someone's great-grandfather's chisels and hammers, and then chop the cold chunks up in the sun, with stone chips flying like sharp stars. Young Krylov had some minor success as well: at home he assembled the standard assortment of samples wrapped in newspaper, and he even managed to sell a few pieces. He had one good find in the old tailings of an emerald mine that had been bought up whole by some Russian-Japanese firm and was lazily guarded by porky he-men in jigsaw-puzzle camouflage.

  Krylov had the good fortune to dig up eight intact six-faceted bottles stuck in the ore, and in their white and green veins he was thrilled to glimpse live zones of transparency. The impression created was so strong that even while fleeing from the rangers through the booming pine forest, which resounded with their yelling and shooting, like an iron fence struck by a stick, Krylov continued to feel exaltation at this transparent substance.

  It didn't take him long to realize that his luck was pretty poor, worse than average, and the industry, though it didn't reject him altogether, would never feed him. It wasn't that he'd had no encounters with the mountain spirits, either. Like many others, he'd had occasion to see lesser phenomena in campfires, when the fire, after crumbling the fragile blazing coals like wafers, suddenly seemed to rear up on tiptoe and start dancing, turning the team's faces into a flickering movie. Later, in the ash-gray fire ring, they would find characteristic «bruises»: solid patches of dark purple from which experienced prospectors found gold-bearing sand within a twenty-meter radius. Once, Krylov even observed a flying saucer — not such a rarity really: something elliptical literally galloped across the night sky covered with a thin ripple of soapy clouds, and then disappeared behind a high-tension tower, drowning in the tower's luminance like a spoon in cream. But even apart from what the spirits did, among the rock hounds, Krylov felt like he belonged.

  There was something of the little boy — more infantile than his student years would lead you to expect — about the way he latched onto those tough but good-natured afficionados who in their collective subconscious clung to the notion that only someone who has a conscience gets a gem. The secretive, quick-off-the-mark rock hounds found a modus vivendi that threaded between the authorities and the thugs without yielding to the economic attraction of either side. The authorities, focused on the big picture, preferred to turn a blind eye to small-time evil and even permitted one modest private firm to organize monthly mineral shows — whose true turnover might have amazed the tax collectors — at a House of Culture on the edge of town. In turn, the thugs, with their limited, stubby nerves, which were too small and short, like a teenager's clothing, nonetheless had an inkling that somewhere in the forest lay real, unearthed money. This, of course, made the thugs sit up: they had divided up turf with their fists down to the very last stall and suddenly discovered around them an irritatingly inaccessible terra incognita. But even they, with their identical heads as tough and hard as boxing gloves, realized that no matter how many times they descended upon nature, which scared them with its cold uniformity in all four directions, they weren't going to find any gems. The few attempts to put the business under their control ended in failure. The rock hounds wouldn't subscribe to any of the extortion schemes the thugs understood, and the most zealous seller of protection, the ferocious general called the Wheel, was discovered one day beneath a prominent pine that looked like a hanger dangling wet winter caps, right at the cross-over from the Northern tract — without any traces of violence but without any signs of life, either. The autopsy showed that the small heart under his uninjured ribs had literally split in two, like an apricot. The perpetrators, naturally, were never found.

  Krylov was drawn to the rock hounds. He realized that the gap between the millstones that ground the electorate into an endless stream off lour had to be defended not only by an economic conspiracy but also by a sustained spiritual effort, a constant churning of energy in the shared inner space and personal dues paid to the corporate moral capital. When he joined the rock hounds, Krylov for the first time in his life felt that he was joining something that was already in place. For a while at least he could simply be without taking responsibility for the perimeter of this strict little world of men. At the same time, Krylov observed substantial differences among the rock hounds. One man, for the sake of a single find, would process a full measure of stone and subsoil to the point that at night, eyes shut, he would still see the shovel taking dig after endless dig, letting the dark clumps fan out as they fell; another could pass through a ditch someone had labored over like a slave and then abandoned, kick over a scratched rock that was sending him mysterious signals, and discover a crystal of enviable purity.

  Krylov realized, of course, that he would never be like these men, and that his place in rock hunting was always going to be well down the ladder. At the same time, something told Krylov that in fact he had landed right where he needed to be. He was very important to the community. He just didn't know yet in what way.

  NATALIA SMIRNOVA

  THE WOMEN AND THE SHOEMAKERS

  NINA

  Translated by Kathleen Cook.

  THE WOMEN AND THE SHOEMAKERS

  «Of course he will,» said the chemist, clicking his tongue.

  «Parties in restaurants, masked balls, champagne. He'll have the time of his life, believe me.»

  «But I'm sure he won't be led astray,» Charles objected.

  (Flaubert, Madame Bovary)

  Our idea of the literary hero is quite different today from that of earlier times. For writers then it implied above all deviation from the norm, hostility to society, even to a pathological extent. Their heroes were strange, unusual people, maniacally obsessed, out of place in real life, doomed to heroism.

  «The poor creature should have bought herself a sewing machine!» a sympathetic reader once said of Madame Bovary in a mixture of real life and fantasy. To which her more sophisticated companion replied: «Then she wouldn't have been the heroine of the novel.»

  Does this mean then that being a hero involves the destruction of life as a natural order of things; that the author is bound to cripple a perfectly adequate existence, that the novel is, in fact, a mutilated life resplendent with gaping mortal wounds?

  What would have happened to Flaubert's novel if Emma Bovary had in fact ignored the author, refused to give herself up to carnal passion, and bought a sewing machine instead?

  And could we possibly imagine a heroine, or simply a protagonist, to whom nothing very much has ever happened? Caught fast in a cocoon-like quiet equanimity, she has ne
ver been truely happy, although real misfortunes have passed her by. Her service, if she can be said to have performed one, could only be that she represents the norm with which true heroes clash, a wall to bang their heads against interminably, or, you might say, the amorphous grey anonymity that provides a background for them. To serve, just serve, to have no meaning, to stand in the common ranks, to assert nothing, to deny nothing, to keep out of the big picture, never to speak on a platform or lead anyone into battle — the most ordinary existence, which can hardly be to anyone's credit.

  Our heroine lived in an old wooden house with aspidistras but no running water, her small daughter, her husband and her elderly mother-in-law. The girl's father, heroine's husband and mother-in-law's son was a thick-set lecher, who would make a pass at any woman, even the ones in calico overalls who swept up leaves at the steam-baths. His cheerful nonchalance suggested that he viewed this existence as the norm, the natural order of things. His mother and wife would wait patiently throughout his long absences, and it is quite possible that their life would have continued in this pattern of enforced waiting and joyless meetings, had he not one day, in a blind moment induced by a rather special woman, thrown his wife out of the house and given her a parting smack on the backside to boot.

  He hadn't meant to insult her, just whacked her like a ball — clear off, you're in the way. Yet strangely enough, this slap, which was not a serious blow, just a token, so to say, became a kind of «moment of truth» for our heroine, as if the curtain had been raised prematurely revealing the naked hulk of an unfinished stage-set on which the beauty of life was to be played out. She was not afraid of the bare wooden crossbeams still smelling of pine, the mechanism of the intersecting joints, cogwheels, hooks, blocks, ropes and pulleys suddenly exposed to view, but gone suddenly and forever was the young girl's dreaminess with its fragile wings, the blind trust in life and expectation of surprises. All that remained was the way she walked, which made people behind her call «Hey, miss!» then apologise «Sorry, madam» when they caught sight of her face.

  Two years went by. The mother-in-law was allocated an apartment with running water in place of the old wooden house, took the aspidistras with her and found her daughter-in-law and the little girl in their hostel. They went to live with this white-haired old woman who was trying to redress the wrongs of the past, but without the husband, now enamoured and lured away by a woman with an almost masculine voice and a rudimentary beard.

  They rarely left their cosy apartment with the aspidistras, bought a sewing machine with an overlock, and a tailor's dummy, and began to make leather berets, handbags, fashionable coats of long-haired wool, and even wedding dresses for which the mother-in-law made pink and cream flowers, light as puff-pastry, and long satin gloves with pointed triangular finger tips or oval ones like grapes. The old woman could never sew without showing off her stitching and pleating skills. All three of them were remarkably well dressed, and that was the only remarkable thing about them. The needle's eye had launched them into the world. Through it they saw and sensed reality. And through it, in turn, reality scrutinised them, bestowing its modest joys and blessings.

  The new apartment was near a shoe factory, and the faces of the local residents bore all manner of blemishes and bruises, from a tobacco yellow to a purplish-black, in which they took pride like badges of distinction, the women even more than the men. Theirs was a tense, proud life, with ecstatic singing, raucous shouts, unruly family brawls that spilled out into the street and attracted rings of onlookers who surveyed the unsightly bloody consequences with a deferential distaste.

  Among the shoemakers was an artist whose apartment was packed with unsold pictures. Quite a few people were willing to buy, swap or simply take advantage of his weaknesses and wheedle them out of him, these cruel, masterly pictures, but that wasn't how it usually turned out. For a start the artist would make his client stay for a drink in his studio, stinking of urine and tobacco, with cockroaches scuttling from behind the pictures and long, muddled conversations punctuated by belches and heavy drinking, all this in vast quantities and with the best of intentions. Then suddenly he'd turn nasty, fly into a rage and start a fight that should have ended in hugs, but did not usually get that far, because the art-lovers, unlike their author, soon capitulated.

  Watching this life from the sidelines one might have thought the shoemakers had read and learnt by heart the founder of Socialist Realism and were simply acting out the script to the letter. But this was hardly the case. Most likely the founder himself had actually hit upon the bitter truth, namely the deep-seated attraction for heroic art, however shabby its attire.

  The local fool Boriska was always going up to people in the street, even children and old ladies with dogs, asking them if they felt like a drink. Hearing the occasional no, he would blush and mutter in a barely audible whisper, to his own amazement, «And I never drink.»

  When our heroine and the old woman decided to replace the plumbing in the bathroom and lavatory whose terrible roars and gurgles seemed to harmonise with the street noises outside, they were forced into a closer acquaintance with the shoemakers than they might have wished.

  «Third floor! That'll be three grand for you, ma!» they announced, blotches glistening gleefully. In the fetching and carrying that ensued some vital parts went missing on the way, such as pipes, taps and even for some obscure reason the cistern lid, although who could possibly have wanted to pinch that. But disappear it did, in transit into the dark jungle of the shoemakers' mysterious realm.

  In their innocence the women phoned the shop, which dispatched a team of young, loud-mouthed, skinhead loaders now suspected of stealing. They made short work of the crafty shoemakers, without wasting any words or any time on words.

  From among the group of suddenly alert but still contemptuous shoemakers they picked out the ringleader and grabbed him by the jacket so deftly that only the collar remained forlornly embracing his scrawny neck. The snide yells of the mob ceased instantly, and they produced the missing parts, laying them silently at the victors' feet like captured banners on a public square.

  Yet all the same these silenced men radiated arrogance, the superiority of tradition over upstarts and pretenders, backed by the universal cry: «Can you possibly understand, dear Sir, what it means when a man has nowhere to go?» And the founder of Socialist Realism together with many other men of letters would certainly have understood and loved them for it. And the more silent and depressed they were, the more obviously serious and important they seemed; after all it was not for nothing that the double-headed eagle, the emblem of the medieval shoemakers, survived to become the standard of a whole state. And although they never took part in opinion polls and didn't give a damn about elections, they were capable of creating a fair amount of mayhem in private life, and life as we know, is always private.

  «Ladies!» cried one of the upstart loaders fervently from the porch platform as they were departing. «Fancy asking that lot to help you. They're all dickheads! Be sure to call us next time.» The women didn't know how to thank them.

  In spring when everybody was dressed up to the nines like butterflies, their business was going so well that they were able to buy a plot of land and plant marrows and strawberries. But just when things were looking so good, the mother-in-law suddenly went down with flu and died shortly afterwards of complications leading to heart failure. Our heroine finished off the collar of the man's silk shirt that her mother-in-law had been making, so that every tiny stitch was as even and neat as possible. But she could not lose the sense of naked loss. It was as if she had been robbed of all her possessions at the railway station before setting off on a long journey.

  When some people die the sense of loss dominates all other feelings, even long, deep feminine grief, and lingers on achingly, as a solitary street lamp destroys the peace of night with its dull glow.

  At the funeral our heroine caught sight of her husband. He was peeping out from behind an enormous woman, a new one,
without a beard this time, but still out of the ordinary. He had his arm respectfully round her waist and winked at her, pleased with himself as usual. The shoemakers crowded the cemetery with their usual air of self-importance. No one was going to keep them out — they knew the rules. They all stood silently around the grave with nobody to make a speech. Then out of the trees a man came forward, wiping his tears and told them the old woman had once been a care-worker at an orphanage and had helped him get up in the world. But it was obvious from his tattered coat and scruffy haircut that she had done nothing of the sort and he was as forlorn and destitute as ever. After this the rain in the cemetery seemed like the beginning of a universal deluge, and beneath its steady downpour it was irrelevant who had made or not made what of whom.

  At the table when they had all warmed up, the orphan turned out to be a man in an expensive sweater with the limpid wandering eyes of a womaniser, which shifted gently from our heroine to her fifteen-year-old daughter, not looking them straight in the eye, but somewhat lower, as if approving the finish of their skin. The shoemakers behaved quite peacefully at the funeral dinner, knocking back their drinks unobtrusively, and even downing the fruit punch, little fingers crooked daintily. One of them was indignantly assuring his neighbour that he never pissed inside the house entrance. He would rather get it frost-bitten than piss in the entrance. Nobody had thought of accusing him of this so the impassioned fervour with which he kept defending himself was hard to understand.

  A week after the funeral our heroine sat her daughter down at the sewing machine, and the girl pressed the pedal, singing happily like a bird, as if she had been born to it. She had no friends and seldom went out except to school and her dancing class, as if her needle eye was very narrow with no need of broader impressions, anything new or unknown, and her girlish trust in life encompassed everything she did, never demanding, always satisfied, as if it fed on air.