On either side of the wall – in the male and female halves – there is a platform made out of thick boards in which a series of eight holes has been cut. The effect of another presence is total. First, because of the low partition; second, because if you stand slightly back from the platform, the product of the performer on the other side of the partition is visible in the pit.
As if this weren’t enough, huge holes have been punched in the wall at different levels. Here and there the holes have been boarded up with whatever came to hand. But only here and there. Now I was not born in a palace, and I have visited my share of latrines, and that one is supposed to sit, not stand on a toilet seat, I figured out all by myself at the age of twenty-three, but I never ventured into those monstrous outhouses except in dire need, though on sultry days the stench in their simmering semi-darkness grew somehow languorous, and through the breaches in the partition one could observe the determined squatting and listen to intriguing bits of female conversation. But that was in summer.
As we know, our people are uncommonly careless and sloppy with regard to earth closets. It costs our people nothing, given their disdain for basic aiming skills, to foul the rim of the orifice, soak the floor and leave fingerprints on the wall. The boards absorb everything, everything sticks to them, deliberate sloppiness begets forced sloppiness, and it becomes harder and harder to position oneself over the hole. Puddles further frustrate one’s approach to the sloping grey gutter, especially if one is in soft soles or slippers.
And now, the cold is upon us. Everything that has been absorbed begins to freeze and form layers. By late December, crossing the ice crust to a hole is out of the question. There is less and less room for manoeuvre. The visiting public retreats closer and closer to the door, fouling the floor higgledy-piggledy. The walls (inside only, so far) are caked with tall ice crusts the colour of whey, rising up out of the floor like stalagmites, interspersed with fossilized brown clumps. The hoarfrost on the boards, the yellow newspapers frozen in the ice, the yellow crystals forming under the roof: nothing deters our people – where else can they go? By mid-February, only by standing in the doorway may one celebrate the call of nature in the murk of the fossil world.
This circumstance decidedly alters the daily rhythms of the Pushkin student dorm. People put off going until dusk or after dark. By now the walls are caked even on the outside with turbid ice crusts, by now the expanse around the walls, if not covered with snow, is you can well imagine what.
But now spring arrives. Someone, cursing wildly, is cleaning out all this muck. Who, I don’t know. For half an hour after it has been hosed down the granary looks human, then it begins all over again, and towards evening masturbator Mitrokhin walks in and takes a swift chisel to the rough-hewn wall’s most promising hole. In no time at all, he is convulsing in a corner in response to the rustling behind the partition.
For this granary, then, my girl is calmly about to set out. In haste and confusion, I explain the long way round, unable to imagine how she will get there, and if she does, how she, wafting perfume and mist, will react to the shame, how she will ford the swollen floor in her velvet slippers.
I cannot take her there, for I simply cannot imagine how anyone could take a woman to that place, and so become unwittingly initiated into this utterly secret necessity, into this apotheosis of awkwardness and discouraged dignity.
She goes. I wait. I get it! Walking through the settlement, humiliated by the road to Aunt Dusya’s, appalled by her forty-square-foot burrow – I’m used to it, but she’s seeing it for the first time – by the musty humpbacked bed on which we will, by the table with the caviar sandwiches, red-and-white and sparkling beside the cloudy tumbler in whose putrid water a dirty swollen onion, now limp and splayed, has disgorged the repulsive greenish bud of an onion leaf… seeing all this made her change her mind. She’s gone. She’s just up and gone! She took her purse, didn’t she! True, she left the wine… she brought wine… It never ever occurred to me that anyone would bring wine for my sake. She’s gone! And if she’s not gone, then she’s lost, and if she’s not lost then somebody’s picked her up: as I said, the neighbours might easily think she was a spy. Only recently, loyal and concerned citizens not far from here caught a spy, apparently American. Or even two.
‘Hey, Kalinych, you mother, why’d you block my woodpile with your bicycle? Ain’t you ever gonna be done with that thing?’ the cheerful start of a friendly exchange by the shed can be heard outside the window. I startle, freeze, steal up to the window, and peek through the slit between the gauze curtain and the peeling wood.
A rivulet of tiny ants streams by my eye, skirting a stony tumour of oil paint on Aunt Dusya’s window frame. They stream out of one chink and disappear an inch or so later into another. That’s nothing! At this point, my eyes could make out an amoeba. My ears could pick up ultrasound.
‘Kalinych, you fuck…’ the usual sounds from the vicinity of the shed and then my pounding heart stops as the door, just behind me, opens with a jolt. I jerk round and am amazed to see my girl slip quietly into the room.
‘Here I am,’ she says, and I fasten my sharp eyes on her velvet slippers, especially the delicate line of her pretty dyed-black sole.
‘Where can I wash my hands?’
Oh God! It will never end! I don’t know where Aunt Dusya’s washstand is in the endless corridor or which shard of soap on which of the thirty-three shelves belongs to her or what sort of soap it is. Maybe it’s the marble soap sold by weight and boiled by the Ruzhansky soap-boiler – though boiled out of what? About that in due course. What if the basin under the washstand is full and has to be emptied? And if it’s full, then of what?
‘Unmöglich!’3 I say, because my girl speaks German beautifully and at the time I too could get along in this language fairly well which, incidentally, is largely what drew me to her there, where the tangerine trees bear fruit.
‘Unmöglich, weil ich weiss nicht wo ist der Aunt Dusya’s washstand und Seife!’4 I play the fool, and she, smiling, takes a sparkling perfume bottle from her bag, then some cotton wool, and neatly wipes her fingers with the many magnificent rings, among them a thick band binding her to her spook – not the custom then and also a surprising thing.
She went to the window, glanced through the slit to one side of the curtain, then turned around, undid her dress, took it off, then took off some other mysterious underthings, then took off everything else, and for the first time I saw a woman who had undressed for me.
‘Now you take everything off!’ said this miracle when I went up to her, embraced her and dazedly pressed myself into this unbearably various nakedness so unlike my own uniformity.
‘Wait a moment! Stop! Metal inhibits love!’ And she began to remove the sparkling objects from her neck, from her wrists, from her fingers, from her ears, and put them on the oilcloth-covered table where there soon accrued a small heap of watches, earrings, bracelets, rings – one rolled away under the bed. By her exquisite legs I, like the young Actaeon, found the gossamer ring in the desolation under the bed, and as I pulled my head out, I saw, still on my hands and knees, that the exquisite legs had been tucked up out of my way – taken off the floor: she had sat down on the humpbacked bed, and then lain down. I quietly placed the ring on the oilcloth. The ring clung trustingly to the others, and I just as trustingly entered the land where they kiss strangers sweetly, caress them, enchant them and yet sob, clinging to these strangers – the land of ripening tangerines and dry hot earth, the land of two, along whose damp sandy shores the wanderer Odysseus bends his firm steps towards Calypso languishing in the tangled thickets of her hair.
This was free love. All my previous conquests – hurried, prehensile, greedy and pitiful – were under-love compared with what happened in the land of the tangerine sun. Outside it was getting dark, in the room it was twilight, and this dusk increasingly isolated the land I had entered over and again, always to the sound of muffled laughter, muffled sobs, muffled words, and where I
suddenly sensed moist lips humbly kissing my regal hand.
This was a meeting of two people who, for different reasons, dearly needed each other. A woman who needed me, and I, who needed this woman most in the world. A meeting without shame, or rather outside shame, celebrating with muffled sobs our triumph over the foul surround and over the hero of these out-of-the-way places, the spook; a meeting joining experience of vast Pomeranian beds with the entertaining erotica of Russian suburbs, slaking Mitrokhin’s unbearable reverie, and sanctifying the ancient gesture made by the brazen boys in front of the girls at the rabbits’ wedding.
The weary tangerine sun was already sinking when we heard a polite little cough through the door.
‘Your landlady! She’s been sitting there a long time, I think!’
When we came out of the room, leaving as a token of thanks two whole sandwiches and one almost whole, as well as half a bottle of wine, we found Aunt Dusya slumped on a sack of bran in the now empty corridor. She was dozing and softly grunting. I touched her padded jacket, I had to return the key. She jumped up, grinned slyly and surprised us with this phrase worthy of Sumarokov:5 ‘Love is by nature inherent in people!’
On the benighted street, my girl and I quickly went our separate ways, because she might run into undesirable acquaintances at the Ostankino tram stop, she said, scraping a fleck of red caviar off her teeth.
I walked away from the Pushkin student dorm and, by the last barrack, ran into Nasibullin, a shy and very modest Tatar boy who enrolled voluntarily in a secret service college after school.
‘Good evening!’ he said politely because he always strove to associate his cultivation, diligently acquired thanks to the concern of society, with my own innate cultivation and, by way of continuing this association, he asked shyly: ‘Been to the Dresden show yet?’
‘Na-a-ah!’
‘Go, don’t miss it!’ And to pique my interest he glanced down the dusky alleys, looked terribly embarrassed and said: ‘Lots of naked people!’
Written 1979–80; first published in 1989
Translated by Joanne Turnbull
SERGEI DONATOVICH DOVLATOV (1941–90)
Dovlatov considered his largely autobiographical stories to be untranslatable. He delighted, however, in the Russian translations of Mark Twain, another celebrated storyteller whose best work hinges on the humour in colloquial speech. Tom Sawyer’s mock-casual confession – ‘I stopped to talk with Huckleberry Finn’ – was filled with an ineffable charm for Dovlatov, many of whose own characters – funny, silly, unexpectedly astute, devil-may-care, vulnerable – have the sympathetic, democratic appeal of a Tom or Huck.
Half-Armenian and half-Jewish, Dovlatov was born in Ufa but grew up in Leningrad; in 1962 he was expelled from university, drafted into the Army and sent to the northern Komi republic to serve as a prisoncamp guard. He returned from there ‘like Tolstoy from the Crimea,’ Joseph Brodsky later recalled, ‘with a scroll of stories and a certain look of bemusement’.1
Dovlatov’s efforts to publish his stories in Soviet journals all failed. He worked as a journalist and trained to be a stonecutter (‘the most fitting profession for me after literature’). In 1975 the proofs of his first book were destroyed by the KGB. A year later several of his stories appeared in the West. Dovlatov was expelled from the Union of Journalists and ended up guarding an ice-bound barge on the Neva. In 1978 he emigrated, first to Vienna, then to New York where he published prolifically in both English and Russian.
Dovlatov held that a prose writer (as opposed to a poet, who is inevitably constrained by the demands of metre and rhyme) must wear ‘creative fetters’ to guard against verbiage. His own ‘creative fetter’ was to require that no two words in any one sentence begin with the same letter (an impediment impossible to honour in English, if only because of the articles). His stories combine humour and bitterness, mischief and sentimentality, the impressionism of an anecdote and the factualness of a document. As Brodsky has said, ‘they are written like poems’.
‘The Officer’s Belt’ comes from The Suitcase, a cycle of stories inspired by the contents of the old suitcase that Dovlatov supposedly took with him when he left the Soviet Union: a decent double-breasted suit, a poplin shirt and shoes, a corduroy jacket lined with fake fur, a winter hat of imitation seal, three pairs of Finnish crêpe socks, driving gloves and, finally, a leather officer’s belt.
Joanne Turnbull
THE OFFICER’S BELT
The worst thing for a drunk is coming to in a hospital bed. Not yet fully awake, you mutter, ‘That’s it! I’m going on the wagon! Going on the wagon for good. Not another drop!’
And suddenly you discover a thick gauze bandage on your head. You want to touch the dressings, but it turns out your left arm is in a cast. And so on.
This all happened to me in the summer of 1963 in the south of Komi.
The year before, I’d been drafted into the army. Enlisted as a prisoncamp guard. I completed a twenty-day course for jailers near Sindor…
Still earlier I had spent two years learning to box. I’d entered major competitions. But I don’t remember my trainer ever once saying, ‘That’s it! I don’t have to worry about you any more.’
I did hear it, though, from Instructor Toroptsev at the school for jailers. After only three weeks. And despite the fact that I would be dealing not with boxers, but with recidivists…
I tried to look round. Patches of sunlight shone yellow on the linoleum. The bedside table was crammed with medicines. A wall newspaper hung by the door: LENIN AND PUBLIC HEALTH.
There was a smell of smoke and, oddly enough, seaweed. I was in the medical unit.
My tightly bandaged head ached. I sensed a deep gash over one eyebrow. My left arm was out of commission.
My army tunic was draped over the end of the bed. In the pocket, I thought, there had to be a few cigarettes. For an ashtray I used a jar containing some sort of inky solution. I had to hold the matchbox in my teeth.
Now I could think back over the events of yesterday.
In the morning I’d been crossed off the escort list. I’d gone to the first sergeant.
‘What’s happened? Am I really getting the day off?’
‘More or less,’ said the sergeant, ‘you’re in luck… A prisoner’s gone off his head in barrack 14. Barking like a dog, crowing like a cock… He bit the cook, Aunt Shura… Anyway, take him to the psychiatric hospital at Iosser and you can have the rest of the day off. Sort of a half-holiday.’
‘When do I go?’
‘Soon as you’re ready.’
‘Alone?’
‘You can’t go alone, it’s against regulations. Take Churilin with you, or Gayenko…’
I found Churilin in the tool shop. He was busy with a soldering iron. On the workbench something was crackling and giving off a smell of rosin.
‘I’m doing some welding,’ said Churilin. ‘Very fine work. Take a look.’
I saw a brass buckle with a raised star. The inside of the star had been filled with tin. A belt with a weld like that was a dangerous weapon.
That was the fashion then among our enforcers: leather officers’ belts. They filled the buckles with tin and went to dances. If a fight broke out, the brass buckles flashed overhead…
I said, ‘Get your things together.’
‘What for?’
‘We’re taking some nut to Iosser. A prisoner in barrack 14’s gone bananas. And bitten Aunt Shura to boot.’
‘Good for him,’ said Churilin. ‘Obviously wanted some grub. That Shura sneaks prison butter home. I’ve seen her.’
‘Let’s go,’ I said.
Churilin cooled the buckle under the faucet, then put on the belt: ‘Let’s roll…’
They issued us guns; we went to the guardhouse. Two minutes later an inspector came in with a fat, unshaven prisoner. The prisoner was resisting and screaming:
‘I want a pretty girl, an athlete! A medalist! Give me a medalist! How long do I have to wait?’
> ‘At least six years,’ replied the inspector, without irritation. ‘And that’s if they let you out early. You’re in for grand larceny, you know.’
The prisoner ignored him and went on screaming, ‘C’mon, creeps, gimme a medalist!’
Churilin sized him up, then nudged me with his elbow, ‘Hey, what do you mean he’s nuts? Nothing wrong with him. First he wanted grub, now he wants a broad. A medalist, no less… The guy’s got taste… I wouldn’t say no either…’
The inspector gave me the papers. We went out on to the stoop.
Churilin asked, ‘What’s your name?’
‘Do-re-mi-fat-so,’ said the prisoner.
Then I said to him, ‘If you’re truly crazy, that’s fine by me. And if you’re faking it, that’s OK too. I’m not a doctor. My job is to get you to Iosser. That’s all I care about. On one condition: that you don’t overact. Start biting and I’ll shoot. But you can crow and bark all you like…’
We had a three-mile walk ahead of us. No lumber trucks were going our way. Captain Sokolovsky had taken the camp chief’s car. They said he’d gone to Inta to take some exams.
In short, we’d have to go on foot. The road wound through a settlement to some peat bogs. From there it went past a grove and up to a railroad crossing. Beyond the crossing began the camp watchtowers of Iosser.
Near a store in the settlement Churilin slowed down. I handed him a couple of roubles. You didn’t have to worry about patrols at this hour of the day.
The prisoner clearly approved of our idea. In his joy, he became suddenly expansive, ‘The name’s Tolik…’
Churilin came out with a bottle of vodka. I stuffed it in the pocket of my jodhpurs. Now all we had to do was hold off till we got to the grove.
The prisoner kept remembering his insanity. From time to time he got down on all fours and growled.
Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida (Penguin Classics) Page 48
