A Russian Story (9 page)

Despite the extreme heat, his hunger and the terror that had just overwhelmed him, Eugene recognised one of the girls. It was she who had brought him the amazing apples a few weeks previously and asked to be shown round the house. At the time, he hadn’t asked her name. The other girl looked much younger, although they were both of the same height.

The girl recognised him too. But he regained his presence of mind, succeeding in concealing the despair he had just succumbed to. He struck up a conversation with the girls just as if nothing had happened. But he confessed to being lost. Could the little ladies show him how to get back home?

“You townies never know how to follow our footpaths,” said the girl he knew, rather arrogantly, while the other one countered her remark, pointing out:

“But townies know lots of other things that we don’t. Have you forgotten that you couldn’t find the college of medicine in Kyiv?”

“A good job I didn’t! I found one nearer to home,” retorted the other girl.

“A good job for me too! I met these young ladies in the middle of a field!” he said, using bland expressions he never liked, just to prevent the girls quarrelling.

The girls laughed disarmingly. Since he was bound for Irivka, they were all going the same way, they said. It turned out that the girls were called Olya and Tanya, that they were twin sisters, fraternal, not identical, that Olya was the one who brought him the apples, that she had been studying for two years at the regional college of medicine and had two more years to go, while Tanya had another year at school, only she went to school in Kobivka, not in Irivka, because her parents were teachers at the Irivka school. She wanted to go on to university, in Kyiv of course. The girls had just been to Kobivka to have their fortunes told.

“Well, and? Did they tell you your true fortunes?”

“They told Olya’s,” replied Tanya.

“What about yours?”

“There isn’t anyone for me to have my fortune told about yet!” replied Tanya; at that Olya started whispering to her sister, trying to tell her something without Eugene hearing, so once again he had to steer the conversation in such a way as to prevent the sisters arguing.

“Forgive me, girls. As you correctly pointed out, I am a townie, so there are lots of things around here I am unfamiliar with, but as far as I am aware fortunes are told at night-time, in the moonlight, not in broad daylight.”

“But our mother won’t let us out at night,” replied the girls.

“So you do what your mother tells you?”

The girls laughed for ages, until they set him off as well.

“Do you do as your mother tells you?” they enquired.

“Sometimes.”

It occurred to Eugene that he was here in this village — this
Idiotivka
, as he sometimes called Irivka in his mind — precisely because he had done as his mother told him.

“Such a big lad,” said Olya, bursting out laughing, and Tanya followed suit. Eugene observed the girls closely. Two fraternal twins should have different colour hair. These two had very similar blonde hair. But Olya looked grown-up; she had all the right attributes, whereas Tanya looked like a child of 12 or 13.

The houses of Irivka came into view ahead of them. He realised that he had skirted round the village at 180 degrees. First through the forest, then across the fields. What sort of warped space is this round here? You keep walking straight ahead all the time, but in the end you find you are not moving in a straight line but following a curve, and a very marked curvature at that.

“Let’s all go to ours for dinner,” said the girls. “Our mum will be absolutely over the moon.”

He was so hungry that it seemed he wouldn’t make it home, and on top of that he would have to peel the potatoes and boil them; he didn’t think he had any bread, and speck is not much good without bread. So he accepted the invitation, although he realised it would mean getting even more deeply involved in the mundane way of life of Irivka.

The moment he crossed the threshold, following the girls, one of his ‘suppliers’ rushed towards him, the one who had dreams about a wedding and about black birds above the General’s house. At first, the hostess froze at the sight of her daughters arriving in the company of an esteemed guest, clapping her hand to her mouth, but then she began to sing out loud, dancing to the song:

Eugene, who had by now recovered from the excessive heat and from the shock, felt like escaping despite his hunger, so as to avoid participating in this crazy spectacle. The girls, meanwhile, filled some large enamel bowls with water from an enormous bath standing out in the sun, added handfuls of soap powder and sat down on stools by the porch to wash their feet, cleaning the soles with little scrubbing brushes. They paid no attention to their mother, who broke off without finishing the folk song, shouting:

“Misha! Misha! Do you know who our visitor is? We’ve been waiting for the girls for ages, telling them off, and now they turn up with a visitor like this! Oh dear me! And all I’ve got is my fasting borshch!”

They laid the table outdoors. Amongst the bowls of borshch appeared pickled gherkins, little bowls of garlic and onion, glasses of moonshine and, naturally, speck.

“Come on, help yourselves, it’s all home-made. You won’t get anything like this in town!”

He was by now used to this byword that accompanied all meals in the village.

“So your mother is unwell?” Eugene was asked by the hostess, whose name was Zoya Mykolayivna.

“Oh no, why do you ask?”

“Well, she didn’t come to the General’s funeral because she was sick.”

Eugene recalled the falsehood that his mother had permitted him. He had already forgotten about this, but the women of Irivka remembered it very well, and so he was obliged to extricate himself from the situation.

“Yes, it’s chronic; she’s ill the whole time. My father and I have got used to it.”

“She doesn’t work then?”

“She works very hard, actually. She has great difficulty walking, but she still goes to work.”

“What sort of work does she do?”

“She’s a teacher of Russian literature.”

Zoya Mykolayivna began clapping her hands, jumping for joy.

“So we’re colleagues then! Both teachers of Russian, and that means foreign literature now! What a shame she was taken ill! She and I would have had a lot to talk about.

“Perhaps she would have enjoyed speaking Russian with you!” said Zoya Mykolayivna’s husband, who had been silent until then. He had a rather strange accent, pronouncing the vowel ‘a’ where in Ukrainian there would have been an unstressed ‘o’.

“You should have kept quiet, Mykhailo Tykhonovych,” shouted the hostess at her husband, and Eugene recalled Volodya’s words about the women of this village and how they hen-pecked their husbands. Was this the Tykhonovych that Volodya would treat even though he was a Muscovite? Zoya Mykolayivna poured second helpings of borshch for the men, and she started telling Eugene if not her entire life story then at least its main stages.

She was born nearby, in Kobivka. But do you know what
kobi
means?
Kobi
means sorcerers. She went to school there too. When she left school she went to the regional teacher training institute. She met Tykhonovych at the railway station. He was so handsome, just out of the army! He wondered whether he should go back to his home in the Pskov region or stay here.

“Should have gone back!” said Tykhonovych.

“Aha! Have you forgotten the fact that your three brothers had become drunkards in that Erokhivka of yours, and that one of them had died?”

“Erokhino, you Ukie! You can’t even pronounce the name of the place correctly!”

“Oh shut up, Tykhonovych, you bloody russki! Stop interrupting me!” said Zoya Mykolayivna, cutting her husband short and turning to her guest again. “You see, this lad, this Mikhail that’s sitting here opposite you, he was handsome when he came out of the army, and he was my heart-throb then, in my young days, so I persuaded him to become a student along with me in the Russian department at the University. He hadn’t intended to become a university student at all; he was thinking of being just an ordinary worker. But we entered the university together; we both failed to make the grade for Russian, but we both got in to take Ukrainian, where the competition wasn’t so stiff.”

“But how did Mykhailo Tykhonovych manage to pass a test in Ukrainian if he had never studied it?” enquired Eugene, crunching on a pickled gherkin.

“Well, he’d just come out of the army, you see! Men like him were not left out on the street in those days; if they wanted to study they would get in somewhere. Besides, friendship of peoples was the watchword then.”

Zoya did well at the education faculty, so she was able to transfer to the Russian department later, while Tykhonovych went on to complete his studies in Ukrainian. And then the girls were born. Two of them at once! Tykhonovych wanted to call them Marusya and Oksana. But Zoya Mykolayivna said: “Over my dead body! They will be called, as in Pushkin, Tatiana and Olga!”

“That’s the six hundred and twenty eighth time they’ve said that,” said Olya with a heavy sigh.

“It might be the six hundred and twenty ninth, so what? I love Pushkin above all else. Whenever I start reading Onegin, I can’t put it down:

You couldn’t tell if it was supposed to be Russian or Ukrainian as Zoya Mykolayivna recited her own version of these lines from the novel in verse. My dear mother should be here, thought Eugene. She is convinced that there is nobody in Ukraine who doesn’t know the Russian language. What a glorious refutation of his mother’s notion this teacher of Russian language in Irivka is! So much effort, and yet she can’t string two words together in Russian!

“Oh you just shut up, Tykhonovych!” Zoya Mykolayivna descended from her exalted poetry to address her husband: “Tanya and Olya are the most beautiful girls’ names in the world!”

“But there are always nine Tanyas and Olyas in every class!”

“What about the Oksanas and Marusyas?”

“Fewer, fewer! This isn’t my first year at the school!”

“I would like to be Maria,” said Olya.

“You would be Oksana!” replied Tanya.

“No, you would be Oksana,” said Olya, getting angry. The girls started to quarrel; what a strange thing to be arguing about! Evidently, the topic of their names was a source of endless quarrels in their family.

“Quiet, girls, quiet!” shouted Zoya Mykolayivna to her daughters. “Quiet! Quiet!”

After repeating “Quiet!” several times, she began to sing this word rather than saying it, then she drew it out:

“Quiet by-y the brook! Da-ark night-ti-ime!”

“The charmed forest is asleep!” Tykhonovych took up the refrain, and as he sang he articulated the Ukrainian words much better than when he spoke. The duet by Zoya Mykolayivna and Mykhailo Tykhonovych sounded wonderful. Eugene even found it enjoyable to listen to them, as had been the case previously too, when the villagers of Irivka had begun to sing spontaneously. Sometimes it is better to sing than to speak.

The relationship between Mykhailo Tykhonovych and Zoya Mykolayivna by no means represented the relations between Russia and Ukraine, in a historical, political or cultural sense. But they bore witness to something. As would become clear, Tykhonovych was not simply a teacher of Ukrainian language and literature at the Irivka secondary school, but he was also the head of the official regional association of teachers of Ukrainian, because he was the only male teacher in these parts. Lada should come here. Only she, after her studies at leading European universities, would be able to distinguish the patriarchal discourse of authority from the post-colonial syndrome.

“Do you know what they call me in Irivka, Eugene?” asked Zoya Mykolayivna, suddenly cutting short her singing. “You’ll never guess. The singing mother-in-law!”

“You aren’t a mother-in-law yet, though!”

“But I have two daughters!”

“Mum, give it a rest! We’re fed up of hearing this!” called out the girls.

“Yes, you should stop banging on about it! You’ll be a granny before you are a mother-in-law,” said Tykhonovych.

“You as well, Dad, shut your mouth! Hold your gob, as they say here in Ukraine! Times are quite different now,” said Olya, continuing some old family debate.

Tykhonovych re-filled the glasses.

“I won’t pour any for you,” he yelled at his daughters, in feigned outrage.

“Look, we don’t need your moonshine anyway,” burst out Olga, who was fond of picking a quarrel with everybody in turn.

After Eugene had dined at the Singing Mother-in-Law’s house, the women started visiting him less frequently, but he had plenty of produce in any case. On the other hand, Tanya and Olya began to visit. The girls came together and their company was more congenial than the visits of the Vegetable Woman and Her who brings the milk. Generally speaking, things got better. Obviously, these women had given up; the Singing Mother-in-Law had won out, they said. Christ! — he thought — they’re matching me with one of these brainless girls! Just what I need after Lada, the intellectual! But which of them should I choose? Olya, although she had an unpleasant disposition, was ten times sexier. But Tanya was quite juvenile.

Time was flying by; it was already the middle of August. How quickly time passed, especially in summer! A rainy period set in. The General’s house shuddered under the downpour, and that was a good thing, because it brought on strange sensations. He was sitting there with no bread, but he had potatoes and a tub of crunchy gherkins which Tykhonovych had brought him on his cart. There was speck and onions. There were the preserves in the cellar; recently he had opened a jar of last year’s tomatoes, because, as he had been told repeatedly, there would be no tomatoes in Irivka this summer. He also had several bars of chocolate and his uncle’s cognac. Let the rain continue, as long as he had supplies.