The specter of Kunstkamera, and that’s precisely what they called him, spent many long years wandering the dark halls of the museum finding no peace. Just as he’d disappear for a time, compelling his own existence to be forgotten, so he’d reappear. Later he began venturing beyond the confines of the premises. Not very far at first, but with time he ventured ever farther into the city, appearing here or there. True, no destruction came from him—he harmed no one, just frightened them. How they pitied him, this wretched one. Finally they decided something had to be done—they found a skull with no owner and attached it to the skeleton of the French giant. And the giant calmed down. At the very least he no longer appeared to people. Or perhaps it’s just that no one has spoken of it since.
19.
The first time it happened was almost immediately following his birthday, after they’d celebrated Ilka turning five. That night Olya was awoken by a blood-curdling howl that emanated from her son’s room. Olya sprang up and threw herself headlong at the cry. Ilka sat wailing on the bed, crammed into a corner. He couldn’t speak, only trembled.
Olya got him to calm down with some difficulty, remaining nearby until he fell asleep. First thing in the morning her son explained that he’d awoken in the night with the sensation that someone was in the room. He’d focused his eyes on the wall and seen an enormous shadow cast by a strange figure. And he was scared that this person would take him, Ilka, away—but where was a mystery. He was afraid to go to sleep alone for several nights after and asked Mama to sit close by. Olya sat, stroking his head, gazing into the darkness.
20.
“Mama, he’s back.” Ilka sat, pressed into a corner of the bed with a blanket he’d gathered into an enormous heap, which was supposed to barricade him from whatever it was that his eyes were fixed on. “Son, Ilyusha,” Olya perched on the bed and embraced her son, “there’s no one here.”
Ilka pressed against his mother and started to sob, his hand pointing to the wall across from them. “There he is.”
Olya gazed into the dark—and was horror-struck. The enormous figure of a man was suspended midair before her. Olya screamed and covered Ilka’s eyes with her hand. At first the figure didn’t stir, but then it began to sway and, slowly, with seeming difficulty, float in the direction of the bed.
“Don’t move!” Olya yelled. “Don’t move! What do you want?! Why have you come here?!” She was so frightened that she couldn’t figure out what to do. She was only aware that Ilka had stopped crying. “Go away!” screamed Olya. “Please, go away.” Then she began to cry, repeating through tears, “Go away, go away, please, don’t touch him, go away!”
The figure stopped for a moment, hovering in the center of the room. Then it began moving in the direction of the bed again. Olya was crying, shielding her child, but there was nothing else she could do. What could she have done?
Meanwhile, the figure had stopped very close by. The giant floated above the floor, so that he had to bend his head to keep from knocking it against the ceiling. Ilka didn’t stir, only shuddered occasionally. Olya didn’t stir either; she’d stopped crying and it seemed that she’d folded into herself from fear. The figure hung in the air a bit longer, then slowly circled around the bed and stopped again. He extended his fleshless hand and touched Ilka’s head. Ilka noticed nothing; Olya’s hand covered his eyes, and Olya thought that at any moment her heart would burst from her chest. But it didn’t burst. The figure of the giant hung suspended in air another moment, then dissolved. He never appeared again.
After that Ilka began to grow, and everyone knows what people say is the cause.
HOTEL ANGLETERRE
BY VLADIMIR BEREZIN
Hotel Angleterre
Translated by Amy Pieterse
He was staring at the ceiling, his feet up on the desk. It was an absurd habit he’d picked up from the Americans, but had now come to love. The plaster molding overhead had started to crack in the seventh year of the revolution, forming an intricate pattern that seemed to augur something. Whether it augured well or ill was unclear. The longer he stared at it, the more it resembled a man with a sack and bludgeon, or a rider with a sword.
He lived in the middle of an enormous city, in a hotel whose windows were beleaguered with monuments. Nearby was a church that had taken many years to build. Now that it was finished, time sought to undo its fate, and everyone said it would soon be closed down.
In light of all that had already happened in this city, it seemed a new life was in store for the church. And he had heard about life here during the siege and the civil war.
Shpolyansky was the one who had told him. A well-known graphic artist had drawn Shpolyansky right here. In the portrait, one of Shpolyansky’s buttons is loose, hanging by a thread. He had grown bald, and quite suddenly. He talked about the city abandoned by the government in 1918. Demoted as the capital, the city continued to live according to its old habits for a time. Then its most illustrious inhabitants started leaving. It was that old law of nature: when the lid is removed from a pot, the fastest molecules of water begin to escape, and the pot cools down. During the recent war, the city cooled down quickly.
And so he lived in a hotel, built by an unknown architect. The building had undergone reconstruction several times, but one thing didn’t change: the architect was still unknown.
Obscurity seemed to consolidate the mystical power of the place, so nobody was surprised when a famous industrialist—a foreigner, one of the wealthiest people in the empire—died in one of the rooms.
Now the empire was gone, and the golden epaulettes of the capital had been torn from the city. It stood before enemy fire like a demoted officer on the breastwork.
The city was still enormous, but it had been dying for several years.
A crazy old woman had wandered the streets, announcing to all and sundry that there would be three floods, the first one in 1824. One hundred years later, a second flood would occur; and a hundred years after that, a third would submerge the domes of the doomed city once and for all. Then the floodwaters would subside, taking everything with them: the cupolas, the crucifixes, and the buildings themselves. Where the city once stood, there would be flat marshland, overgrown with osier for the rest of time.
And the old woman went up to one of the statues, the one prancing on the square, its back turned to the river. Twirling about in her foul-smelling skirts, she ate something from the palm of her hand. The hotel’s inhabitants watched her in fear, as belief in the prophesy grew within them like grass through pavement.
Grass had indeed sprung up in many streets after the revolution, especially those paved with hexagonal wooden tiles. The grass grew tall, and goats grazed here and there, as they did in the Roman ruins. The goats were especially numerous in the outlying districts.
Shpolyansky told him about those times, and his stories were permeated by a foreboding of flight. Later, Shpolyansky did in fact flee. He escaped across the ice on the Gulf of Finland to a different part of the empire, which had gained independence. Many fled that way, and the first to do so was the father of the revolution himself. Now he was the one they were fleeing. The city was empty, and the grass grew taller.
Shpolyansky spoke feverishly, saying that in the demoted city people’s wounds did not heal and women had stopped menstruating.
All around the hotel, new times were afoot and streets were being renamed. No one knew for certain what the street beneath his feet was called.
Shpolyansky’s friend Dragmanov liked to quote two poems about the large church that was visible from the windows of the hotel.
“This temple serves two kingdoms: above, of brick; below, of marble.” But they rebuilt the church almost immediately, he said, so the words had been changed: “This temple serves three kingdoms: marble, brick, and devastation.”
Dragmanov included these poems in his novel, and the novel seemed very promising. The church had long been a place of central importance to the city. The square derived its name from it,
the massive black church looming through the cold mist. But the man with his feet on the desk in the hotel room couldn’t think about the novel.
He felt changes in the air acutely. And change was definitely on its way. The city that floated past the Angleterre like floodwaters was pliant and soft—always the case before a change of fate. The city was fluid like the dark waters of the river, or the shadowy water of the gulf pulsing beneath the ice.
It will flow for another hundred years, until the prophesy is fulfilled and the bronze horseman rides on the water as though on solid ground, until the waves swallow the Finnish rock beneath him.
And the hotel—a beehive for the masters of these new times—was ideally suited as that point of fracture.
He had just tried out some new sleight of hand, as was his habit. His friends always found his tricks amusing. Once he concentrated on a mug for so long that he actually made it disappear. “Where’s the cup? Where did it go?” his mother had said, perplexed, as she stood in the middle of the room, waving her arms in dismay. Even then, he didn’t share his secret with her. And to think she’s still alive, my old lady; and I too am alive. There is probably a wisp of smoke coming out of the roof of her little hut right now.
In any case, he had performed for her so often that the trick with the mug would have seemed like a childish prank.
Spoons, as it happened, succumbed to mystical practices far better. The world of Russian objects seemed to yield to his manipulations easily, while objects from abroad were less obedient. The same was true of Russian words: the letters seemed to line up neatly one after another, like rye in a field. The Latin alphabet was more stubborn.
A long time ago he had known Latin, but time seemed to have purged him of all languages except for Russian.
Many knew him as Seriozha, but when you’re pushing thirty a nickname is embarrassing. Yet he knew he would never grow up. He simply didn’t know how to get older.
In his hand Seriozha gripped a glass. A bottle of Rykovka vodka that had just skyrocketed in price stood on the desk, its contents lukewarm.
At last, the heavy fretted door creaked. The man in black leather, who had Seriozha’s own face, had come. For a moment, Seriozha was astounded at the plan—indeed, the mirror reflected twins: one in a suit with his feet up, the other in black leather and a Russian peasant shirt.
“We meet at last, Seriozha,” the man in black said with a slight accent.
I wonder how they did it. Makeup? Doesn’t look like it. Probably a mask.
“Your time has come,” the man continued, sitting down at the desk.
The poet sighed to himself: this called for a display of terror; but how much did the interlocutor know about all of this?
He could look the man in the eye, stare him down as he had stared into the eyes of a killer with a knife in hand, the one who had accosted him at Sukharevka. He had given him a certain look, and the killer desisted, slinking away along the wall and dropping his switchblade.
But Seriozha restrained himself. “You remember Ryazan, don’t you? Konstantinovo? Remember when we were kids?” That would be the perfect move. Except that Seriozha had in fact spent his childhood in a completely different place.
Ryazan? Of all the nonsense! He had been born in Constantinople.
* * *
During the second year of the revolution, Seriozha met Morozov, the Schlüsselburg prisoner who had just been released into the world. Captivity seemed only to have preserved the elderly member of the People’s Freedom Party—he was fresh and ruddy, with a formidable snow-white beard. Morozov had dedicated himself to studying errors in historical chronicles. In them he had found references to him—Seriozha. He found out that the copyists had mixed up his documents (if only he knew how much this would cost him), changing “Constantinople” to “Konstantinovo.”
It was here they had strolled, to their left the gloomy bulk of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, the famed church; and to their right, this very hotel, where fates were decided. The old man sought to avenge history, and decided to start with him, the poet.
Underneath their feet grew the sickly grass of the streets and squares of Petrograd.
The old man waited for an answer.
Seriozha smiled, peering into his eyes. Who would ever believe you, old man? Unless maybe one day some academic follows your lead and starts shuffling the deck of centuries and scepters—but no one will believe him either.
He himself could recall in great detail, though, that hot May, five hundred years ago, when the crackling of fire, the yelps of Fatih’s warriors, and the shrieks of the inhabitants surrounded the temple. The doors were torn off their hinges with a thunderous clatter and a crowd of Janissaries broke inside. There were a few who stood out even within the ranks of Fatih’s select band of cutthroats. The boy knew that these warriors who looked like dismounted horsemen were dark angels. Their faces were covered in slashes, as though carved out of wood.
* * *
The sounds of the Liturgy had not yet died away, and one by one the priests entered the stone masonry which parted to let them pass, carrying the holy gifts before them. The youth rushed in after them, but an old monk grabbed him by the arm and led him through a long underground passage toward the sea. They ran past cavernous cisterns, and heavy droplets from the ceiling beat down on their backs.
The monk put him into a fishing boat with two Greeks who watched solemnly as the city burned.
The two were brothers—Yanaki and Stavraki. They took the young boy along the coast, careful not to lose sight of land. He read them Greek and Latin poetry. The sea censored some of his words, filling the boy’s mouth with the salty water of the waves. They soon found themselves in a strange land where the steppe met the water, and the boy took his first breath of foreign air. With each step toward the North, something inside him changed. He felt his soul transforming. His body would remain unchanged forever.
He became the Wandering Russian, a lonely soul attached not to earthly love, but to that of the heavens. Yet he never forgot the wooden horsemen, for it was said of them in the Holy Book: And there was a great battle in heaven—Michael and his angels fought with the dragon. That battle was eternal.
* * *
The visitor in black was mumbling something, looking at him from time to time. He must have thought Seriozha was completely drunk.
The boy who had come by the day before had thought so too. Poetry was what had led him through life; but now he would have to end this phase. He would be mistaken about time, however. The Wandering Russian had been duped. Duped like a little boy whose daddy takes him to the big city. The little boy runs away on the sly and goes to the bazaar, where he is swindled out of all his coins wrapped up in a little scrap of cloth.
Poetry was his destiny; but there would be no poetry here.
Without poetry, eternity means nothing, and everything else is meaningless too. Like the time he fought Celery, the famed poet, and suddenly felt his opponent’s special hatred for him. It was only now that he realized Celery had hated not him, but fate. Fate saw to it that the Wandering Jew, the eternal Jewish poet, was not he, Celery, but the lowly Mosstamp. Celery couldn’t fully comprehend it, but with his sensitive nature he felt fate’s cruelty. It was fate he was fighting, not his comrade and fellow poet.
His fate was that of a man destined to die in his own bed, having known early love and late love, having suffered abuse and praise. But whereas he would die forever, Mosstamp would crawl out from under a mountain of dead bodies during his exile to the Far East, and wander the earth forever.
The man behind the door shuffled his feet awkwardly, anticipating the business at hand, and Seriozha grew very sad. He felt offended by the crudeness of it all. He recalled meeting the Wandering Scotsman at a bar in Berlin. Seriozha immediately recognized him by his wavy hair. They roamed around Berlin all night long. In his cups, the Scotsman showed him Japanese Bartitsu moves. Growing animated, the Scotsman pulled a sword out of his bag, which he waved about lik
e a hay mower on the banks of the Oka. In one fluid motion, Seriozha dove sideways, jabbing a fork he’d stolen from a restaurant into the man’s side. The Scotsman stood there blinking, hiccuping, waiting for the wound to heal.
He eventually admitted defeat and they read poetry until dawn. The Wandering Scotsman read a poem by his friend about the dry heat of Persia and doe-eyed maidens whose arms wound about like snakes. And Seriozha read the Scottish poem about a wayfarer caught out on a winter night, and a northern maiden who takes the stranger in; how she drifts off to sleep between him and the wall of her humble dwelling. In the morning she sews the wayfarer a shirt, knowing that she will never see him again. And Seriozha knew that those lines were about them, about the shelterless life of eternally wandering poets. As they parted ways on a bridge over the Spree, Seriozha gave the Scotsman the illbegotten fork, which the Scotsman put in his sword case. Robert MacLeod, or Burns, as Seriozha usually called him, disappeared with his ungainly sword into the rays of the German sunrise, the wind ruffling his hair.
Now, sitting here in a false trap, Seriozha knew that he could kill both of the Cheka officers (for he had no doubt who they were), pluck them from life like two worm-eaten mushrooms from the soil, leaving only small, nearly invisible indentations in reality. He could carve them out, using, say, a fork. Or a spoon. No, the spoon had disappeared during his extrasensory experiments.
But he didn’t need to do that. He was a poet, and so was moved by a greater aim than the bestial thirst for blood.
He had to leave his place, like a beast must leave its lair, because he had chosen the wrong word to rhyme with revolution.
His visitor produced a grimy book from the depths of his overcoat, and thumbing through the tattered pages began to read some filth aloud. It was probably one of Galya’s tearful letters (usually a mixture of complaints and pleas). It was in bad taste, and embarrassing in the extreme. He allowed himself not to listen any further to these stories of happiness and broken arms, of wooden horsemen.
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