A Russian Story (7 page)

All the drawers in the General’s desk were full of exercise books containing his notes. The General had attempted to make sense of his life, assiduously recording events which were especially relevant to him. Perhaps the main reason for leaving the house to his nephew, a university graduate — and the General might not have realised it himself — was that someone would read the uncle’s notes and find a way of turning them into someone’s legacy, albeit their own. So that the reams of paper containing his writings over so many years would not end up in the stove, since in Irivka, where in winter they burned wood, the papers would naturally find their way into the fire, as naturally as spring follows winter. One day, Eugene decided to delve into this archive. He might find something in it. But he put off this irksome task until better times.

For the time being, he laid Nietzsche’s two-volume work on the table in the north wing, together with Milan Kundera’s
Immortality
, a two-volume work by Francis Bacon and several issues of the Ukrainian contemporary affairs journal
Suchasnist
. And also a bilingual edition of
Eugene Onegin
comprising the original and a Ukrainian translation, which he had bought for ten coupons from some old lady in the Kyiv flea market. He inserted the
Egmont Overture
disc into the CD player. It was impossible to read to Beethoven. To Vivaldi or Mozart you could read, write, and eat, even though they are great composers. But they are not so jealous; you don’t have to commit yourself to them totally, whereas Beethoven was probably the first to disallow this. If you ate while listening to Beethoven, you were sure to start feeling sick. On the other hand, while listening to Beethoven, as is the case with other great German composers, you could easily engage in some physical activity such as tidying the house or moving furniture around, which he started doing while
Egmont
was on. Eugene decided to note down this little ‘musicological’ discovery, but he would do it some other time.

Eugene was not bored in the village.

He did not live the life of a villager. He did not dig the garden, he did not go haymaking, he had no chickens, ducks or turkeys to feed, he had no cows to milk and he didn’t have to queue up for bread. However, at home he had vegetables and bread, and something to spread on it. So his way of life could be categorised as that of a gentleman of leisure. But he did not enjoy the way his life had turned out in his uncle’s house. In the morning they would bring him milk, which he didn’t drink, as “our home-produced milk, straight from the cow, not what you get in the town” made him feel violently sick. So he used to pass on the milk to another woman, the one who brought him vegetables; once, she brought him a chicken. The ‘vegetable’ woman didn’t have a cow, and she was glad of this exchange in kind. But the one who brought the milk learned of its fate and she reacted in a rather strange way. She did not stop bringing her unwanted product; instead, on her next visit she emptied her litre jug into an enormous glass and said to Eugene:

“Just get this down you straight away, while I watch! You turn your nose up at it because you’ve never drunk home-produced milk.”

He had to come out with some nonsense about having suffered from an allergy to milk as a child, which in adulthood had developed into some even worse affliction. So milk was a no-no. His mother had once bought fresh milk for him from a woman in the village, but it made him more ill than that bought in the shop.

“You are starving in the town! You are not getting paid! So be glad you are in the village and that everything is provided,” said She who brings the milk, defending her position — as Eugene described her way of thinking.

“Folk are poor in the town,” said another of his suppliers, the Vegetable Woman, in her support. “They pay for things that we find lying about at our feet.”

“What’s more, they spend over three quarters of their income on them,” said Eugene, in defence of their rural pride. “But why do you bring me cabbages and carrots? You could sell them at the market, you know!”

“I’d sooner bury them than sell them for the hundred thousand I get for them in town,” said the Vegetable Woman, offended.

At that time, denominations of hundreds of thousands and millions were in circulation. Eugene left Ukraine before the
hryvna
was introduced. Since they brought it in after he had left, it was a long time before he even saw the currency some patriots were so proud of.

But at that time the hundreds of thousands of coupons were spent very economically. In the uncle’s cellar there were lots of old potatoes, which shortly before his arrival the neighbours had transferred into dry boxes. So he had enough to boil or fry for his dinner until September, until they dug up some more. There were his uncle’s preserves from the cellar as well. But there were also salads from the fresh heads of cabbages which the women brought him, covered in drops of dew. But it demanded a lot of effort, sometimes superhuman efforts, to stop them chopping up the salad in his own kitchen.

These women ruled his life. They came one after another, so many that he couldn’t remember their names, entering his house without knocking, bringing cabbages and carrots, speck and eggs, cows’ milk and goats’ milk, as though to the altar of some pagan god, whose role he did not want to assume. The
honest uncle, beyond reproof
had left him a heavy legacy, and actually he had honestly forewarned him of it.

The women told him there wouldn’t be any tomatoes that year, but there would be enough cucumbers and marrows. They said a coypu had gnawed through the wire mesh of the cage at the head teacher’s and escaped, while the two rabbits belonging to the deputy head had died, so it wasn’t certain whether she would have enough fur to make a fur coat, though unfortunately she had already come to an arrangement with the furrier. They said that the director of the collective farm had ordered all the Irivka secondary school teachers to weed twenty rows of beetroot each, justifying himself by saying that they always came to the collective farm for help when they needed it. Eugene’s women, the majority of whom were teachers themselves, were incensed at the decision of the collective farm administration. They said that when their children were old enough they would be taking them to school, not to the collective farm. The women also said there was a new foreign language teacher, the woman who was trying to sit next to you at the wake, on your right, do you remember, Zhenia?

“Sitting next to me there was some talkative woman with a fine head of grey hair…”

“That’s the head teacher at our school, Hanna Petrivna; what, don’t you know her yet, Zhenia?”

“I admit that I don’t.”

“And you know that new English woman, the rather sexy one who came to the wake in a low-cut dress, well, she went all the way to Kyiv yesterday to have an abortion! And now Hanna Petrivna doesn’t know how she can keep her on in her job at the school.”

“Hasn’t Hanna Petrivna ever had an abortion then?”

“God forbid, Zhenia! Hanna Petrivna is married! Her husband is an inspector with the traffic police. She has two sons, and the elder one is getting married in the autumn. And this Angela… what’s her name… is only in her first year with us. What will happen now? If she is dismissed, where will we find another English teacher?”

If the Irivka women limited themselves to passing on the village news, one could stomach that somehow. But they wanted greater recompense for their gifts. They wanted to know his every step, at least within the bounds of the General’s house, which, according to some quaint decrees, they considered their common property.

“How did you sleep last night? Did you hear what I said? How did you sleep?”

He had to mutter something; otherwise the Irivka woman would keep repeating her enquiry again and again. In response to his “Well, I slept rather badly; there were thunderclaps, but it didn’t actually rain” she recounted how she had slept badly too, then she had fallen asleep in the small hours and had a dream about a wedding in the General’s house, and the table was laid in the garden, although the late General had sawn up all the tables and benches and even dug up all the wooden posts, and black birds were circling above the young couple, but they were not crows, they were enormous birds of some sort, like eagles… Her eyes were wide and bulging as she retold the dream, and the tone of her voice was like something from a horror film.

One day he was brought a basket of early-ripened apples by a very young girl. He was struck not so much by her beauty, although she was certainly a very attractive little thing, as by a certain naïve directness, verging on idiocy. This child, unlike the other young Irivka women, rushed into the kitchen. The older women would hurriedly pass through the kitchen and the sitting room, rushing into the study and the bedroom, and if he was not to be found in his uncle’s south wing they went looking for him in the north wing. But this young girl shifted from one foot to another, waiting for him to emerge and holding the rather heavy basket with both hands.

“What can I do for you, my dear?” he asked.

The girl offered him the basket of apples and he thanked her for this further gift. She asked if she might have a look round. He gave her a brief tour of the General’s house and she asked how many square metres this and that room measured, noted that there were two stoves, and regretted that although there was a toilet inside the house it was out of order. Well, to repair the sewerage system he would have to call for a qualified plumber, as a village handyman would not manage it. And it would not come cheap.

On the bottom shelf of the sideboard there stood a large soup tureen belonging to an English dinner service his uncle had been given as a retirement present. This was where Eugene put the apples the girl had brought; for sure, nobody had ever used it for soup. He had never come across such fragrant, sweet early-ripening apples before.

Volodya sometimes visited him in the evening. He was the only person in Irivka he was pleased to see. They sat at the round table; he opened the glass doors of the sideboard to take out crystal glasses and one of his uncle’s cognacs. He found Volodya’s physical presence quite congenial. He liked to observe the doctor’s youthful features and to hear him talk, although Volodya rarely expressed an original thought. On one occasion Eugene attempted to discuss the topic of nationalism with him, but he got no reaction:

“Well, what if I am called out to Tykhonovych — God forbid — am I not supposed to help him?” Tykhonovych was some Russian who had moved to their village because he married a local woman, and he was a ‘good Russian man’.

“Oh no, that’s not what I mean at all,” said Eugene, noting Volodya’s naivety about nationalism; however, he still found him pleasant company.

Volodya came round the evening of the day when the girl had visited in the morning.

“They’ve got some sort of Michurin apple tree, unique in the village,” confirmed Volodya, who somehow knew who the girl was that called on Eugene.

“Tell me, why are they eating apples a month before the Feast of the Transfiguration?” asked Eugene, all of a sudden demonstrating a knowledge of rural rituals.

“Well, who knows those rules these days? When they opened the Church of St. Panteleimon here, the teachers didn’t know which hand to cross themselves with! My mother showed those women how to do it; she had never been a Party member, you see. As for those apples, you have to eat them as soon as possible, because if you leave them for a while they get just as bitter as the rest of them. This is a heathen apple tree, you could say. They know this, and they keep giving them away to everybody,” laughed Volodya. He went on to explain that knowledge of the local mythology was very useful to him in his work as a rural doctor. This local mythology had been preserved in Irivka, and in neighbouring Kobivka as well, under the previous regime, because the old government, unlike their treatment of the church, did not frown on rituals concerning the giving away of apples, or the folding of a deceased person’s arms across the chest. Even the communists in the village adhered to local superstitions.

“You’re drinking cognac from a small goblet, not moonshine from a tumbler.”

“Well, I can drink moonshine if it’s offered… It all depends what other people are drinking.”

“But what do you prefer?”

“Your late uncle asked me that too. If there are just the two of you sitting together, cognac is better. If you are mingling in a crowd, moonshine is better.”

That day — he thought of it as the day of the July apples — Eugene told Volodya sincerely how impressed he was with his discretion. He said he didn’t interfere in other people’s business, only crossing someone’s threshold when he was welcome. Eugene would never forget how he had once started intensively reading the heart-rending lines of
The Antichrist
and Volodya, sensing the strange mood the new owner of the house was in, said he would come round again some other time. That was so different from the way the women behaved every morning, giving him no respite. Volodya was embarrassed and, unlike the girl that morning, he blushed.

“All the men are like that here,” said the young doctor, “whereas the women are very assertive.”

Then Eugene told Volodya all about the early-morning forays by the Irivka women into his house. About the cabbage they insisted on chopping up for him, and about the milk, and about how the women always wanted to know how he had slept last night.

“Well, let me tell you something! Has any man ever brought you carrots or a lump of lard? It’s always the women. They’re all the same in Irivka. They dominate the men and tell them what to do. And they treat you like a child, Zhenia!”

They probably treated the late General as a child as well. His marriage to the district librarian, a
Muscovite
at that, was something of a rebellion by a scolded child against a bevy of ferocious nannies. Nothing good came of it either, and the nannies howled in chorus: “See what you get when you don’t do what sensible women tell you!”