A Russian Story (5 page)

At that time, in the year his son was born, Eugene happened to experience an unfavourable phase in his life. He had no money: his savings were gradually draining away, with no prospects of their replenishment. He did not have a wife; it was all over with Lada. The other girls had long since drifted away and there were no new ones on the scene. He didn’t even have anywhere to live; his parents continued to view his return home as an unfortunate misunderstanding, and somewhere to sleep only if he was at home by evening. If he returned late, he had to get either his father or his mother off the sofa which he considered his own. The only link to his former proper existence was the anticipation of a year’s scholarship in America. But so far he had received no confirmation. In Kyiv, property prices had soared, so he didn’t know whether he would be able to buy a flat of his own with the money brought back from America, or even whether he would be fortunate enough to receive the scholarship.

And then, out of the blue,
the uncle, a man of the most honest principles,
materialised. Or, according to the classic Ukrainian translation of the immortal Russian novel in verse,
his honest, uncle, beyond reproof.

“You should read this letter,” said his mother, holding out the envelope.

“Just read what the General writes,” said his father.

It was a letter from his mother’s elder brother, a colonel or lieutenant-colonel, who had retired long before the collapse of the Soviet Union and bought a house in some village, where he still lived. All Eugene could remember was that this uncle once came to stay in their house a long time ago, and he had no particular recollection of him. Except that Eugene had been put to bed on a small sofa in the kitchen, as the visitor was given his bedroom. Actually no, he didn’t spend the night with them, apparently. He just visited, staying somewhere else. But for many years now greeting cards sent by him have turned up in their mailbox, on family birthdays and on former Soviet official holidays as well.

“Did you get a birthday card from the General this year too?” his father asked his mother. His parents had some connection with this uncle, but he had absolutely none at all. And now here they are suggesting he should read a letter from this man. From the
General,
as they called him.

“Read it, go on!” says his father.

My dear sister and family,

The years go by and they don’t bring good health — quite the opposite. Yesterday, before the first storm of summer, I felt so bad I thought you would be receiving a letter written in handwriting you couldn’t recognise. But we have a doctor here, Volodya — he’s young, but he’s very good; he’s the one who brought me back to life. So I’m writing to you myself. As you know, of course, my wife died when I was still in the army. God gave us no children. I didn’t re-marry, although there were plenty of interested parties, since I own a big house. In our village only the chairman of the collective farm has a bigger one. I could still get married to any pretty widow in our village even now, but since I didn’t do so fifteen years ago I won’t do it now, that’s for sure. In your invitation to the May Day and Victory Day celebrations you wrote that Eugene was separated and was coming back to live with you. Perhaps he would come over and help me out in the last months of my life? Then I would leave my house to him. He is not the legal heir, as he is considered a distant relative. But in my will he receives everything. My house, where you have never once visited me, is a spacious, solidly built structure. Admittedly, the furniture is old, and the floorboards creak badly, but the house is well-built, the roof doesn’t leak, and there is a big loft and a very good cellar. There are two storehouses outside as well.

I don’t know, of course, whether perhaps Eugene is unable to come here, because he has a job. Let me know if Eugene won’t be coming, in which case I will look for other options.

“There is a toilet in this big house, is there?” enquired Eugene.

“At the moment it’s summer, so that isn’t so important.”

“Won’t he last till the winter, then?”

“Well, perhaps there is a toilet. I think he said there was.”

“There’s a sauna at any rate. He once invited me to come over for a sauna,” Dad recalled.

“Saunas are usually in an outbuilding, I think.” Eugene recalled the local government summer school, financed by the US State Department and based at the Soviet Communist Party sanatorium near Kyiv, where they had a sauna in a separate building. Those were the days!”

“Do go, in any case! For an army man to have written such a long letter means he must be in a bad way!”

“This house will sell, even without a toilet.”

“Go there while the weather is still fine,” trilled Mother.

“Go on, he might snuff it and the house would go to the collective farm,” Dad put in his bit.

“Seems you’re kicking me out!” he shouted at his parents.

“Go back to your mother-in-law’s then!”

“Take the kid for a walk!”

“Give him a bath!”

“Change his nappies!”

“They have Pampers now!” retorted Eugene.

“So much the better! Go back to your child!”

“That’s where you belong!”

“You’ve acknowledged him, haven’t you? So you know very well he’s yours!”

“So why are you sitting around here, miles away from your child?”

“Doing your parents’ heads in!”

“We brought you up; we didn’t dump you on your grandparents!”

“And you give us no peace in our old age!

But if you don’t want to look after your child, go to the village.”

“There’s nothing to keep you in Kyiv, anyway; you just sit around in some coffee-house on the Khreshchatik!”

The fact that his useless parents, who very rarely made it to Kyiv city centre, knew he was accustomed to sitting for ages on a tall stool by the window in a coffee-house, known unofficially as
The Tube
, only occasionally taking his eyes off some book, just went to show that Kyiv was one big village. He really did need to escape from here. But not to some village, for God’s sake!…

There really was no longer anything to keep Eugene in Kyiv. He continued to belong to an organisation that was no longer functioning, one where the employees went just to collect their wages. But they had stopped paying them, so there was no point in going there at all. Besides, since he had broken up with Lada he hadn’t had any luck with the casual jobs he used to be inundated with, giving him more work than he could cope with, so that he sometimes had to share it out. Of course, the majority of his clients used to contact him by phone at Pushkin Street. He had carried out the work pretty well, but it was not very demanding. So the clients wouldn’t have shifted heaven and earth to seek him out. Most likely, they were looking for an alternative translator.

Besides, decent Ukrainian society was gradually beginning to re-organise itself. Nobody fell out with anybody, but they found better, more important, things to do than spending time together. Some found means of earning good money, some went abroad, some settled down with their families. Probably, that spring he was the only one who experienced a resurgence of energy driving him to seek the company of others. Probably, that spring the reserves of energy that drove him to seek the company of others were revived. However, this was rather out of a lack of anywhere to go than out of any burgeoning youthful energy.

Eugene had not expected to inherit from his
honest uncle, beyond reproof.
A common topic of conversation among their circle of acquaintances was a girl who had undertaken to look after her lonely teacher in return for inheriting her house. The teacher had not died yet — it was three years now — and she just tormented her carer, declaring that the girl paid her no attention and that she was just waiting for her to die. So the unfortunate carer (
the sitter
, as she was jokingly nicknamed) was considering tearing up their agreement.

Eugene decided to move to the village anyhow. After all, why not go for a stroll in the country, not entertaining any particular expectations, while the weather was fine? He had been to a pig-farm in America, where they took them on an excursion because the sponsor of the
Public Service Journalists
programme was the leading pig farmer in the region. So why not drop in on a Ukrainian village where Eugene Samarsky had never been before? After all, that was where
the source of Ukrainian speech and spirituality
was to be found — naturally, he uttered these words with an ironic intonation, but he could not find any other way of expressing something like that, and he did not try anyway.

His uncle wrote that the village was a two-hour train journey from Kyiv, getting off at Irivka—Kobivka station. Then it was a five kilometre walk to Irivka. Perhaps someone would pick him up on the way and give him a lift on their cart.

Eugene set off without more ado. If everything turned out as his
honest uncle, beyond reproof
wrote, he would go back home for his suitcase. That uncle in Russian classical literature snuffed it before his heir arrived. The young wastrel received the inheritance, however. First of all, though, he would have to
give assurance of his respect
. How many months would he have to give it for? Until autumn? Until winter? Or, like their
sitter
friend, indefinitely?

He got off at the designated station, binning the
Man and Woman
adult magazine which he had bought for some reason from a disabled person on the train. A woman carrying two large baskets joined together by some twisted old head-scarf got off too. He was just thinking that he ought to give the woman a hand with lifting this heavy burden when she deftly threw the baskets over her shoulder, one on her back, the other in front, and set off smartly towards the dilapidated steps leading from the platform to the scarcely discernible footpath through the grass. In all directions there stretched fields full of flowers and somewhere on the horizon dark streaks of some sort could be seen; it was probably the forest. There were no buildings to right or left of the track, so the IRIVKA KOBIVKA sign on the platform — the last two letters had fallen off — was like something off the set of a drama of the absurd.

The woman with the two baskets was moving on quickly; at any moment she would disappear into the long grass. There was nobody else on the platform. He would have to stop her somehow and ask where Irivka was, as there would be nobody else. The next train was due here in three hours’ time. Eugene was overcome with a sense of cosmic helplessness on the deserted station in the middle of the endless, flourishing plain — once an elderly traditional patriot explained to him, adopting an air of superiority, that fields, steppe, and meadows were quite different things, which a good Ukrainian should not confuse.

“Prairie, pampas, savannah,” he said, continuing the semantic series.

And now he was standing God knows where, not knowing which way to go. There was no returning home, of course, as otherwise it would have been better not to go in the first place. But while he was consulting the tinny train timetable board, the woman with the baskets would disappear, and it was certain that another one would not come along. So he had better catch her up.

“Excuse me, Madam!”

The woman carried on, paying no attention to his shouting. She had evidently never expected to be addressed as
madam
. Somehow he had not felt he could address her, as they do in Kyiv, as
Woman
! Suddenly he remembered an expression from some stage performance:

“My good woman! Stay a while!”

The woman turned round:

“What do you want, son?”

“Er, how do I get to Irivka?”

This path here takes you straight to Irivka. But don’t follow it, son. It’s very dewy. Go that way, towards yonder post — see it? Over there’s the road to Irivka. Follow it, and turn left when you get to the big oak tree. Then there’ll be somebody you can ask.

He took a few steps along the footpath, as he didn’t want to let the only person around out of his sight. But his feet suddenly felt wet, as though he had been wandering around in the rain for a long time. He decided that the warning not to go this way because it was “very dewy” made sense. So he turned back and set off in the direction the woman had shown him. He reached the post, and saw a wide, dusty track which ran perpendicular to the railway line. The optical laws in this rural environment are strange. If you look straight along this path, you can see low white-brick buildings with painted wooden verandas, which were quite invisible from the path across the field.

“I’m in a village, I’m in a Ukrainian village for the first time in my life,” he realised as he walked along the track.

Here he began to come across some people. Occasionally he was overtaken on the track by cyclists, and now out of the blue a cart appeared, drawn by a chestnut horse with a black tail. No cars, he thought. The cyclists rapidly disappeared, but the cart drove alongside him for some time.

“Am I going the right way for Irivka?” he asked the old man driving the cart.

“If you aren’t scared of getting your trousers mucky, get on,” said the man.

After a while, the old man mentioned that Irivka was slightly out of his way — he was going to Kobivka, but from Kobivka to Irivka it was just a stone’s throw. The old man repeated this information several times. Eugene just nodded.

By the big oak he was ready to get off, but the old man said he wanted the part of Irivka that was closer to the field, so it would be more convenient to go via Kobivka. When he asked the old man how he knew where he was going, the reply came:

“Well, you’re going to the General’s, aren’t you?”

To this day he doesn’t know where the old man on the cart got his information from, but his sources were correct.

“He may be a colonel to you, but to us he’s the General,” he said, shortly reining in the horse, so Eugene could easily get off. “And now, see them three birches? Just past there is the turning into the General’s place.”