by Frank Wynne
A sculptor’s hands and wits are always sharp and decisive, as we know. Suhrob spoke with no hesitation. “You know clock tower at Kiev Station? I bring you the money.”
The money could come or go, but he wanted his peace of mind. From the one thousand dollars he had saved up here and there, and stowed away from his wife for emergencies, Suhrob took four hundred, and set out into the snow once again.
He waited under the clock tower at Kiev Station for half an hour, then gave the two young men the four hundred dollars (“three hundred for tickets, one hundred to buy something for village,” he said), and then he went back to his studio. Interestingly enough, everyone he met on the street looked like an Uzbek to him. Or maybe they were all actually Uzbeks.
Back at his studio, Suhrob kept thinking of that awkward watch he had kept under the clock, and those two innocent boys kept appearing before his eyes. Suhrob suddenly bit his lip. Though his nephew had been wearing the Scottish sweater he had given him that morning, his buddy had been wearing some sort of worn-out old suit and the same flimsy old tracksuit.
To distract himself from them, Suhrob kneaded some clay, wanting to salvage just one thing from the day’s misfortunes. But no matter the circumstances, a hand cannot shape a form on its own—so the clay only dried in his hands, and he could only let it crumble back into teeny-tiny pieces.
When you peel an onion, and you try to dig too deep into the core, past the first layer, and tears come to your eyes—that was the kind of mood Suhrob was in. Had he done the right thing? Or should he have found the boys some little job to do, like all the others, instead of sending them back to where they had come from? He had friends, after all, and he might have found the right kind of place for them, even if it was just as night watchmen or doing this-or-that at the Center for the Arts. There were plenty of Uzbek night watchmen in Moscow. Surely there was room for one or two more.
I wonder if sculptors, as a class, generally maintain a greater distance from their doubts and regrets. When you chip a piece off a rock, it can never go back into place. There’s no use wishing that shape back together again. But why, at his age, was he now, contrary to custom, still tottering back and forth like this? After all, he hadn’t sent his nephew to his death or damnation—he had sent him back to his own motherland, his fatherland! But still Suhrob’s heart felt forged in clay, still his heart, just like that ceramic dish, would not be glued back together …
“Well, now I’m a poet!” he muttered, having a chuckle at what had happened, and in that instant he realized what he should fashion out of the chunk-and-hunk of clay he had been kneading.
The early winter darkness had already started to descend. He was just setting out to add a fresh piece of clay onto the old one when the telephone rang once again.
“Salamalaykum, Uncle, I’m at the airport. This asshole here says that for this kinda money we can’t get a fucking ticket for two more days. He says if we wanna go today he needs another two hundred, and then he can get us tickets, OK? So what do you wanna do, Uncle? Should I send this guy to the clock tower? You gotta help me out, OK?”
Suhrob put down the receiver without answering. His hands were dirty. He’d have to wash them. And it wasn’t just his hands. He had smeared clay onto the phone, too, and the telephone was still beeping nervously. He picked up the receiver again, and now he slammed it down angrily, clay shooting out in all directions, and the receiver, cracked down the middle, finally quieted down.
Suhrob gave his hands a rub and a scrub, then went back to his store of money, took out two hundred dollars, quickly added two hundred more, threw his coat in on top, and again went out into the snow. Curiously enough, this time there was no waiting—an Uzbek man stood lurking under the clock. Suhrob didn’t like the looks of this one too much, either. When he came closer, he caught a whiff of cheap beer coming off of him, winter weather aside. And under the man’s leather jacket, Suhrob thought he could see one of that morning’s Scottish sweaters.
“Who you are?” Suhrob demanded, skipping all the formalities.
“Salamalaykum, Uncle, your nephew sent me. Said you’d give me the cash.”
But Suhrob wasn’t listening. “Hey, kid! Where you get that?”
He poked at the sweater hidden under the man’s jacket, and when the young man slipped away, Suhrob’s thumbs caught on his leather jacket.
“Whoa, fuck off, old man! This is real leather! You trying to wreck it? The fuck you doing? This cost some serious money!”
In an instant Suhrob, just like peeling away a rind, was doing his best to rip off the jacket, as if, following the habits of his craft, he meant to peel away layer upon layer to reach the true core of this young man. But just at that moment a police officer appeared out of nowhere, and his thunderous voice joined in the fray. “Starting trouble here, motherfuckers? I’ve had it up to here with you blackasses!” he roared in Russian.
Never in Suhrob’s life had he had a personal run-in with the police, and for that reason, he set about defeating himself. “I’m just here, Comrade Sergeant, Sir, to pass on some money to my relatives,” he said.
“Comrade Senior Sergeant!” the policeman corrected him. “Money, huh? What money?”
“Right here. My friend is flying to Tashkent, so I wanted to—” started Suhrob, taking out his four hundred dollars.
“So you’re planning a little smuggling, too, motherfucker? Paying for your hashish?” asked the officer, his voice full of menace, and Suhrob finally appreciated the state of affairs. Now this worthless Uzbek here would probably have some grass in his pocket, and the thought made Suhrob sick to his stomach.
“Uncle. Don’t be an idiot. Give him a hundred,” hinted the foul-smelling man, switching back to Uzbek.
Never in his life had Suhrob bribed anyone, but it only took him a single instant, in a fog of fear, to take a hundred dollars from the pile of money and offer it to the policeman.
“What’s this now, motherfucker? Trying to bribe a law enforcement official? In the course of his official duties? You know what that’ll get you?” raged the senior sergeant, until the other Uzbek man took the money that was in Suhrob’s hand, and took the policeman by the elbow.
“All right, boss, let’s have a friendly conversation, just between us,” he said, and led him off to one side.
The police officer grumbled and growled, but he slipped back behind the wall from which he had emerged.
This left Suhrob in an interesting position. Some part of him was begging him to go, but he was too ashamed to try to escape. Would that take care of the money situation? If so, the whole filthy mess would be finished. But what if that Uzbek was working with the police, too? Then disappearing would be a good option. At that thought, Suhrob started to move away from the clock. Slowly but surely he began to take heart. The streetlamps had not yet been lit. Twenty or thirty steps more and he would disappear into the crowd. At the thought, his pace quickened—and then all of a sudden there came a shout in Uzbek.
“Whoa, old man, where you off to?”
Suhrob stopped in his tracks, thinking he would now have to face not just the police, but all the myriad Uzbeks huddling around Kiev Station. But no, it was only that same half-drunk young man approaching him again.
“Uncle, hold up, you need to tell them I gave that jerk-off bastard two hundred. You tell your nephew so he doesn’t blame me.”
Suhrob just nodded, and with no farewell, set off into the blue-black snow, into the snow falling on snow.
*
Once he returned to his studio, his hands and his heart trembled for quite some time, and he took a half-empty bottle of vodka out of the refrigerator, and a tin cup, and drank it down in two gulps, no chaser. The fire started inside him. At that moment, another ring rang out, and Suhrob jumped, startled. It wasn’t the telephone. It was worse: the doorbell. At first Suhrob feared it must be the police, but he quickly realized that the police don’t usually ring the bell—they pound on the door. Then he wondered if the
y’d come back for more money. But there was a second ring, not so much demanding as apologetic. “What will be, will be!” he said, and gripping his tin cup and half bottle of vodka, he headed for the door.
He opened it—and there stood two unfamiliar people. One man, one woman.
“Mr. Soo-rab?” asked the man, in English, and Suhrob’s addled memory recalled that at that very hour an honored guest was supposed to be arriving from the Metropolitan Museum in New York City.
He remembered, and with that tin cup and half bottle of vodka in his hand, Suhrob had no idea how to welcome this respectable pair of people, and he could neither offer a hello nor extend his hand in greeting. He was completely at a loss. But those two were Americans, and they each laughed loudly with a grimace, then patted him on the shoulder and said something in English about how he was taking his inspiration Russian-style. And they entered his studio without any excess formalities.
But here I’ve digressed again on another literary tangent. Didn’t I tell you that, like a good sculptor, we will not be distracted by the skin and shell of events, but will go straight to the core? So I won’t go through the pageantry of Suhrob’s long discussion with this esteemed pair, whom he had been expecting for quite some time, except to mention that Suhrob’s studio smelled so strongly of vodka and those two filthy migrants that there was nothing he could do to cover it up. The more he tried, the more sympathetic the Americans acted, but they must have thought that Russian habits had infected even him, and with their Western arrogance they were keen to excuse him for that. Instead let’s go straight to the point when, at eleven o’clock that night, Suhrob showed them out and went home, wanting nothing more than to return to his faithful Mashenka.
Masha had not heard a thing about the day’s events since that morning. “Did you send off your nephew?” was all she asked.
“I sent him off,” he replied, and he gave a fuller report about his American visitors. They talked over the pageantry of their long discussion, and suddenly Suhrob felt that to those Americans he was just like them: some sort of migrant laborer, a beggar. Hadn’t he tried to ingratiate himself to them, in order to sell his work to them at a higher price? When they said there was no money for art nowadays, didn’t he offer up his uniqueness? With his secret beggary, how was he any better from all those other Uzbeks? Did it make it any better that his customers were Americans instead of Russians??
Thinking those thoughts, Suhrob again could not fall asleep until late at night, and he lay tossing and turning under his blankets. But there’s an element of literature here, too.
The next day … The next day, nothing happened. The telephone did not ring, and the police did not come looking for him. The Americans also chose to stay away. The day after that, too, passed uneventfully. When the third day came, the studio had been tidied up, the broken ceramic pieces and empty vodka bottles had been thrown in the garbage, and a handful of black raisins nestled inside the golden duppi, which sat upside down to serve as a bowl atop the embroidered silk tablecloth. Suhrob took the last two hundred dollars that remained in his stash, meaning to present it to his Mashenka that very evening. And just now, as he paused to listen to his own heart, finally calm, a new sculpture project was taking shape in his imagination. Maybe he’d call it the Guestworker. Something like that.
That evening, returning home, Suhrob gave Masha the two hundred dollars, and the two of them relaxed with an expensive bottle of French wine while they sat watching television. The news showed a story about sixty-eight illegal immigrants from Central Asia being forced by the police out of an old building, scheduled to be torn down, that they had turned into a campsite and guest house. No—and Suhrob looked very closely—his nephew Sangin was not among them, but the sight of those sixty-eight human beings living like dogs set Suhrob’s heart pounding again.
That night, once again, Suhrob could not sleep. He blamed his insomnia on the wine he had drunk, the news he had watched, and also the duplicity with which he had treated his Mashenka; his thoughts raced in all directions and gave him no rest.
Once upon a time in his youth, when he had just come to Moscow, Suhrob too had been forced to spend the night in places unfit for a dog. And he remembered diving into his studies during the day, first human anatomy, then the study of form, then the arts of stone cutting and clay working. He knew that all that suffering had been for the sake of the respected position he enjoyed today. Yet could that position save him, now, from burning in fire and flames like a stone statue? Not a bit! In all his indecision, the fire and flames were consuming him! Was Suhrob, who had measured his life since a very young age in terms of work upon great work, now falling victim to the petty bits and pieces of meaningless, everyday life? Or was he simply consoling himself with those bits and pieces?
You can talk and talk, but isn’t the point to avoid breaking other people’s hearts, fragile as glass? Suhrob thought first of his angelic Mashenka. And Suhrob thought of his sister Farrah, whom he never knew, and her scoundrel of a son, Sangin. What could he do to make them all happy?
He thought and thought, and an idea came to him. He imagined a contraption like a cannon, sitting on the seashore. His younger sister had been placed inside it, and then as if shot from a slingshot she flew off, far over the ocean. She soared in free flight out to sea, and she emerged from the sea foam as a perfect statue, the goddess Aphrodite. Maybe he could sell that contraption to the Americans! It would make him piles of money …
In the morning, when he awoke in the undispersed semi-darkness of winter, he realized that the idea of the catapult machine still haunted him from out of the grogginess of night. Perhaps it had been a dream, but a strong desire to build the thing still lingered. Suhrob didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry when dawn came. By the time he reached his studio, the gloom of that dream still had not dissipated, and he felt unable to apply hand or mind to any sort of work. Again Suhrob was plagued by thoughts about himself and his life. Yet we will not be distracted. We will not go back on our promise: we have agreed to be loyal to the art of sculpture, and we will proceed according to its rules.
It was around noon when the phone rang. An unfamiliar, official-sounding Russian voice asked his name.
“This is Suhrob Surataliyev,” answered Suhrob.
“Are you responsible for the individual known as Sangin Surataliyev?” the voice asked.
“Sorry, I’m just … could you repeat that?” Suhrob was playing for time, out of craftiness or denial. The voice at the other end sounded as if it were buried in paperwork.
Suhrob instantly thought to put down the receiver. That good-for-nothing was subjecting him to one more disaster! But he was unable to keep silent.
“Excuse me, is everything all right?” he asked.
“No, that’s the problem. Nothing is all right!” the voice snapped at him, and then went on aggressively. “What’s all this about? Didn’t you promise my colleagues you’d look after him? Didn’t you tell them you’d watch him and take care of him?”
“Excuse me, but what exactly happened?” interrupted Suhrob impatiently.
“Did you give him money to spend at the casino at the airport? He lost it all, started a fight, and in the middle of the ruckus he named you—”
“What? What money?”
“Are you asking the questions now? I, Sir, am supposed to be interrogating you!”
At that, Suhrob’s spirits began to sink. His knees shook. Feeling weak, he took a seat on the alabaster lap of a statue, and the statue cracked under him. There was no point hiding now.
“I apologize, Comrade—what did you say your name was? Yes, it’s true, I gave Sangin some money to send him back home. He … he’s a scoundrel, a fool …” And all the pain and animosity of Suhrob’s last few days came pouring out. This unfamiliar voice had penetrated right to his boiling-roiling heart. He told him about his visit to Altufyevo, about his studio being turned upside down, about how the expensive Scottish sweaters he had given them were gone, a
long with every last bit of money he had kept from his wife—and they weren’t even really related at all! Suhrob bundled all of this up and released his anger into the phone.
“I have no such relative. Do whatever you like with him!” he declared, concluding his angry lament.
Funny, usually officials demonstrate less patience, but this one maintained complete silence until Suhrob was done speaking. Once Suhrob’s bitter com-plaining was done, the man held to this respectful silence for a time, and then he continued.
“I apologize, but we have nothing left to do with him,” he said. “A skinhead went mad and stabbed him in his jail cell. I was calling to tell you that you may come and collect his body.”
That December night was a snowless one, so far, as if the great sculptor in the sky was just about to tear a statue apart by hand and plaster dust would soon be settling everywhere. Suhrob and Masha were on the road to Domodedovo Airport, and I, too, am ready to depart now from what I agreed to on a whim. That’s enough, I think. Literature is my art. That other profession is a merciless one, hacking at stone, peeling layer upon layer of wood away from the core; and whether he ever reached the heart, the pit, or not, I don’t want to watch Suhrob Surataliyev the sculptor, on a harsh Moscow winter’s night, carrying the corpse of his frozen rascal of a nephew, like a stone statue, from the jail to a waiting hearse. Was this his life’s work, his most heartrendingly perfect statue? Was this the very elemental core of all his searching and striving? The naked, sharp truth is what it was, I say. I want to be done with this type of art, so foreign to me, in which I’ve been nothing but migrant laborer myself. Much better to wrap up in a warm, soft layer of conjecture and invention, don’t you think?
Come, let us start down our own path again. Suhrob Surataliyev’s friends used to tease him by calling him Zurab Tsereteli …
© Hamid Ismailov. By arrangement with the author.
