“It’s not about the money,” frowned Marina, but the man in the green raincoat was already smiling and handing Artur the bottle.
We walked the rest of the way in silence, withdrawn into ourselves as after a quarrel. When we reached the dacha, we saw several people in felt hats smoking on the porch. Most had piercings in their lips. Artur stayed outside with them and Marina and I walked up some creaking steps onto a wooden veranda where a big kitchen table stood, laden with shot glasses. There was an old stove and a small refrigerator, and the floor was strewn with bast mats of indeterminate origin and purpose. Small groups of guests sat or lay on the mats, chattering enthusiastically without paying us the slightest attention. I was already scoping out which group to join when a hulking red-haired guy flew up to Marina, hoisted her high into the air, and shouted:
“Power Saw is here!”
That was weird. What was up with the nickname? I was about to ask, but Marina had already started introducing me around as her friend.
“She’s a Chechen!” howled Artur, bursting in.
“I am not a Chechen,” I ventured to clarify.
“Circassian, then?” speculated an effete, rail-thin brunet in a shapeless knit sweater.
“Yuri, prominent public figure,” the redhead introduced him.
Yuri declaimed:
“Yonder where the Terek flows,
I saw a Circassian girl,
Her eyes pierced my heart…”
“At least you’re close,” I waved my hand.
“I’m from around there.” “I served in the army in the Caucasus, was even wounded,” Yuri declared pretentiously.
We had somehow gotten separated from Marina and the redhead, and had settled down on a bast mat like the other guests.
“It was in the nineties … You won’t believe it, I was a Russian officer, but I sympathized with the natives, their love of freedom.”
“You must be mixing up the nineteen-nineties with the nineteenth century,” I laughed. What a bullshitter.
That hit the mark. The brunet raised a glass of cranberry liqueur to his red lips and shot me a glance out of the corner of his eye.
“You’re sitting there giggling, but right here and now you have the opportunity to convey the hopes and dreams of the Caucasian people to the Russian elite,” he murmured. By “elite” he meant himself, clearly.
“Such grand statements. The hopes and dreams of the Caucasian people? They’re no different from what everyone else wants. A functioning system.”
“Of laws?”
“Among other things. Of course, everyone has their own idea of what an ideal law is.”
“You know, there’s something aristocratic about you …” He took my hand and kissed it impulsively. “Imagine what big news it would be if we got married.”
“Why ‘big news?’”
“A prominent public figure and a Chechen.”
“Dagestani.”
“Even worse! Though I suspect you’re a virgin …”
His directness made me laugh. The interrogation continued.
“So do they keep you under guard, monitor you? A gynecological exam every month?”
What?! I could have said something, but checked myself; it was safer just to play along.
“Yes, they do monitor me.”
“Do your brothers keep you on a tight leash?”
“Very tight.” Let him believe it—though my brother had let me go out with Marina tonight, no questions asked.
Yuri sighed and leaned back. I glanced around. It was a young crowd, but mismatched. A couple of half-grown boys in light linen jackets sat on the kitchen table, flapping their feet back and forth and toasting each other with cans of energy drink. Artur sat next to them gesticulating, with a bottle pressed between his thighs—the same one that he had bought from the guy at the station. Marina sat apart with the redheaded hulk and a motionless doll-faced, chestnut-haired girl in an old-fashioned flared skirt. People darted in and out of the kitchen. One guy, a man with a bald spot and a sparse ponytail, made his way toward us, maneuvering around plates of snacks that had been set out on the floor.
“Yuri, Yuri,” he whispered, sinking to his knees and seizing skinny Yuri by the shoulders with both hands, “can you believe it? Kichin is here.”
“And?” Yuri smacked his lips.
“He’s completely without scruples. Every literate Internet user dreams of beating him up, the swine. A complete sell-out and ass-kisser. Goes around everywhere waving banners. He denounced me to the authorities, told them about my dual citizenship. I would have declared it formally in any case, but he beat me to it.” The ponytailed guy rattled on.
“He doesn’t scare me!” Yuri chopped the air with his hand.
“He doesn’t scare me either, he’s basically a quiet guy, he’ll just curl up in a corner and sit there with a glass of vodka. But he’s got an entourage, ultra-leftists, and they’re completely out of control.”
Right on cue, a bunch of newcomers appeared on the veranda: a pallid, slightly cross-eyed youth with disheveled brown hair and two sedate-looking fellows in denim jackets and bright T-shirts printed with a hammer-and-sickle design.
“They look pretty safe to me,” I noted.
“Excuse me?” the ponytailed guy addressed me.
“Patya.”
“A fine specimen, an Amazon from the mountains,” interjected the imaginative Yuri, kissing my hand again.
Artur appeared on my other side with a full glass.
“Patya, why aren’t you partaking? What did I buy all this wine for? It’s really good.”
I took the glass. The bottle made the rounds. I saw that Marina also poured some for herself. Outside the windows, twilight was setting in.
At this point the girl in the flared skirt suddenly came to life, strode out to the middle of the veranda, and proposed loudly:
“Let’s call up some spirits! It’s so much fun, you’ll see!”
“Isn’t it dangerous?” Yuri hesitated.
“Come on, let’s do it!” shouted one of the leftist guys in a bass voice.
Other voices, the leftists, maybe, or the redheaded hulk, were already proposing to summon the spirit of Stalin. The guys in linen jackets had produced a big piece of paper and were writing some letters on it. The girl who had instigated the whole thing, and one of the guests who’d been smoking on the porch, prowled the veranda in quest of an old bowl to use in the séance.
“This is so stupid,” the guy with the ponytail complained. “Let Kichin conjure up his own Stalin!”
“Come on, it could be interesting.” Yuri wiggled his brows. He had already progressed from cranberry liqueur to Artur’s wine.
Marina took charge. “We need to sit in a circle and join hands.” She caught my eyes, winked and beckoned, and I went over to her.
“It’s about to begin,” she whispered into my ear. “They’ll ask about Russia’s destiny, about who will be in power and whether there will be a revolution, and then they’ll move on to the meaning of life. They’ll get into a big argument and start screaming and yelling.”
“What’s the point?”
“Just for laughs, why else? By the way, why haven’t you said something to the host?”
“Who’s the host?”
Marina pointed to a tanned, slightly horse-faced young man who was sitting on a mat and observing the proceedings. I don’t know how I could have missed him, especially since we were already acquainted. His name was Rinat. He was a Bashkir, or maybe a Tatar, and once he’d given me and Marina a ride home from work. At the time, I had thought that he might be interested in her. Seemed like a decent enough guy.
“I’ll go say hello,” I said, with some relief. I had no desire to go back to Yuri.
“If the spirit reveals itself, I will confess to it,” Artur snickered as I walked past.
“Wouldn’t be a bad idea in your case. Not here though, but in church,” said the guy the ponytailed man had called Kichin. “I’m n
ot about to be a part of this Satanic stuff.”
“So go and rat on everyone who is a part of it!” the man with the ponytail shouted, groping around in the refrigerator. It wasn’t clear how he’d been able to hear anything from over there, and why he kept changing his mind about the enterprise: now anti-, now suddenly pro-.
Kichin said nothing.
“That’s right, don’t answer.” Yuri walked over toward him, bending his sharp knees like Pinocchio. “No need to fan the flames, it just plays into the hands of Russia’s enemies.”
“Whose side are you on, Yuri?” growled the ponytailed guy, slamming the refrigerator door.
“Easy, easy!” Marina was taking it seriously. “You can ruin everything! Spirits are touchy, they are easily offended.”
Rinat stood up and greeted me. He got straight to the point:
“I knew you’d come. Let’s go somewhere quiet.”
We left the veranda, entered a narrow hallway and walked past a bathroom with no door—just hinges on the frame—and a steel gas water heater with protruding pipes. Rinat started up a stairway without looking back. I followed.
At the top, we found ourselves in a dark little room with ancient, mildewed wallpaper. A cold woodstove stood forlornly against one wall, faced by a faded blue sofa of 1970s vintage.
We sat down on the sofa and stared wordlessly at the stove. Rinat was holding a glass of Artur’s wine.
He finally spoke. “Why do they say in vino veritas?”
“Because it’s bitter?”
“Because when you drink, you can be seen in your true light,” Rinat answered quietly.
“I don’t know about that …”
Shouts came from below:
“It moved! It moved!”
“You, now,” continued Rinat, still gazing at the stove, “I know you inside and out.”
“Because of the wine?”
“No, because of a dream. I had a dream. But first we need to raise a toast.”
He looked at me, and his equine face was completely open and vulnerable, with its blue-gray irises glimmering in the gray evening light. We clinked our glasses together. Then he took my glass, leaned over and set both glasses down deliberately on the floor, straightened up again, took me in his arms and began just as deliberately to ease me backwards onto the sofa. A chilling, numb terror crawled over my skin, but my head was completely empty. I sank back and lay staring up at the ceiling. Rinat pressed down on me from above and lay there, also motionless except for his calm, deep breathing. It was as though he was asleep. It occurred to me that someone could come up the stairs, see us, and start a rumor, but the fear subsided. A strange feeling of cosmic calm came over me. From afar, I felt the shallow trembling of my body.
“I couldn’t do anything just now,” Rinat said suddenly.
“Do what?”
“Anything with you. It’s always like that when I feel something. If my feelings are not involved, then no problem.”
“What made you decide,” I asked, in a languid voice that I myself didn’t recognize, “that something needed to be done with me?”
“I’m telling you, I had a dream. I dreamed that I was at home in my village, in the Volga region. I go outside, it’s just after sunrise, and I see a big nest in one of the trees. And a demon cub is peering out of the nest. Its top half is like a little girl, but underneath it has a goat’s body. When it sees me, this half-girl, half-animal climbs out of the nest, springs down from the tree, and slithers downward into the earth like a snake. So I pick up a stick from the ground and start poking it into the hole that the creature had made. I need to get it to come out. Then the girl-demon creeps up out of another hole and says: ‘Hit the fence with the stick three times, and your wish will come true.’ So I took the stick, hit the fence with it three times, and wished for you to come to the dacha today. And my wish came true.”
I felt uneasy, but didn’t move and just lay there under Rinat, looking out the dirty window at the rain rustling the leaves in the darkness that had descended on us.
“When I hit the fence, the neighbor’s front door opened, and the neighbor came out onto her porch and started looking around, trying to figure out where the noise had come from. She didn’t see me, though I was standing right there. And at that moment I understood beyond the shadow of a doubt that it was not a dream, that I really was in my village. I think that if I’d called my neighbor later and asked if she’d heard any knocking at dawn that morning and had come out onto the porch she would have said yes.”
“Why didn’t you make a different wish?” I heard myself ask the question. My voice was surprisingly confident.
“I don’t know. Most likely your mountain spirits overpowered my river ones.”
My head spun. Against my will, I felt myself beginning to believe the bizarre things he was saying. Below, the red-haired guy’s bass cut through the din of indistinguishable voices.
“If you believe all this mysticism, why aren’t you down there with the rest of them?” I asked.
“Because they are just communing with their own fears, and that’s of no interest to me.”
“But you invited all of them over …”
“Just so that you would come. That’s the only reason.”
The dread that had come over my invisibly trembling legs finally found its way to my consciousness. I started to extract myself from under Rinat. He made no attempt to restrain me. But instead of going down to join the others, I retrieved my glass from the floor and sat up. Rinat watched from the other corner of the sofa.
“Do you like Yuri?” he asked suddenly.
“No. I mean yes, he’s nice, but he’s so full of himself. He makes himself out to be some kind of god.
“Is there something wrong with that?”
“Well, yes, pride is considered to be a sin.”
“Might Yuri simply have drunk some wine and come to know the truth?”
Now I knew for sure that Rinat was crazy, so I didn’t try to argue.
“Unlike us, he doesn’t try to distinguish himself from God. We all ought to strive for that,” he explained.
“Meaning?”
“You know the fable about the poet who began to cry out in ecstasy, ‘I am God! I am God!’ His students decided that the poet had been possessed by Satan, and attacked him with their knives. But instead of wounding their teacher, they ended up stabbing themselves.”
“Why?”
“Because the poet had lost his individuality. He became one with God and turned into a mirror. The knives intended for him turned back upon the students themselves.”
“Would you also like to lose your individuality?” I asked.
“I cannot, although I am trying with all my might.”
He also reached for his glass and took a sip. Then he scrutinized me and muttered:
“Hair …”
“What?”
“Your hair is covering your face. Get rid of it, get rid of the hair!” His mumbling grew louder and louder and then he was shouting.
Terrified, I sprang up from the sofa, shaking the short locks back from my forehead.
“Free yourself of it. Hair is multitude. Multitude hides the face of the One.”
“Come on, Rinat.” I was offended. “That’s just stark raving mad.”
I fled down the stairs. My heart pounded in my chest. I sensed that Rinat was coming after me and feared that he would try to murder me.
Downstairs, I groped for the door to the veranda, but it refused to yield. A wave of sheer panic came over me.
“Open up! Open up!” I wailed, desperately jiggling the rusty door handle.
“It’s Patya.” I heard Marina’s voice.
“Don’t believe it, don’t let it in!” shouted one of the men, probably Artur. “It’s just pretending to be Patya, it’s not her!”
“Yes, the spirit is trying to trick us,” the others chimed in.
“Please,” I begged, “Don’t go crazy on me, I’m scared!”
/> “Right, guys, it’s not Patya, she wouldn’t have yelled like that. That’s not like her.” Marina’s voice again.
All of them, I knew, were clustered around the door, gripping onto the handle on the other side, and my yanking on it was only spurring them on.
“Patya,” Rinat called from behind. My heart plunged to my heels. I pressed my back to the wall and buried my face in my hands. But Rinat did not touch me. I heard him walk past and clap his palm against the door several times. The people on the other side groaned and howled.
“They’re scared, all of them,” he said quietly.
I composed myself and lowered my palms. Rinat’s equine face was suspended motionless in the air opposite me. It was hard to distinguish its features in the darkness, but from the faint tobacco smell I surmised that he was holding an unlit cigarette between his lips.
“It’s not knocking anymore,” remarked a voice from the other side.
“No, there’s someone there,” said another.
“All right, guys, let’s not let things get out of hand,” came Yuri’s voice.
“There’s a door on the other side. Let’s go around through the garden,” whispered Rinat.
“Let’s,” I agreed, and entrusted my hand to him. He would not let me stumble.
My terror had faded away, leaving a feeling of light amusement. And we walked down the hallway into the evening rain.
2: A LIST OF BRIDES
The train traced a line through the hot, humid steppe. Insects stuck to the windows of the economy class car, and sleeplessness tormented the passengers. Just after dawn, a new stop was announced. Women and children dragged bags stuffed with junk down the aisle and jostled one another at the exit doors. A tall traveler with duffle bag slung over his shoulder occupied the newly vacated place next to Marat. His proud face and long black curls looked familiar.
Marat immediately recalled his nickname from high school, Rusik-the-Nail. It was somehow connected with a shoemaker, though he couldn’t recall all the details. When they were twelve or so, they used to taunt an old man who had a shoe-repair booth right on the main street, the long, broad tract onto which people’s gates opened out, which was grandly known as the Avenue. When it rained, the Avenue swelled up and became a muddy ditch, and the residents would slosh along in galoshes and on stilts.
Bride and Groom Page 2
