Faithful Ruslan (11 page)

“There’s only one thing I regret,” he said, “and that is that I didn’t make Stalin’s coffin, the dear old monster.”

“Yes,” sighed Stiura, slicing bread, “I guess you’d have made a good job of it.”

“Uh-huh!” he chuckled enthusiastically. “Just imagine getting an official government order for
that
job! There’d have been at least three colonels—no, three generals—at my disposal to get the materials. ‘O.K.,’ I’d have told ’em, ‘I want an unlimited quantity of mahogany by tomorrow. And the same amount of Honduras cedar. Ye-e-es … Don’t forget the teak, either, eight planks of it, and some rosewood.’ And I’d have lined the cover with boxwood.… Or maybe dogwood. No, sandalwood’s better; it has a strong scent, so the old bastard could go on sniffing it for all eternity. The smell
of sandalwood can make you tipsy—even without a bottle. Just so as you stay asleep, old pal, and don’t wake up! The best thing you ever did was sleep. People love you much more now you’re asleep.”

He stared at some vague point in the distance as though looking right through the wall, and his smile was gradually transformed into a fixed mask covering a face that had turned white with anger:

“You did more terrible things than two Hitlers could have dreamed up. God, the fires that must be waiting for you in the next world. You timed it well, old man, cleared off just in time.…”

Pain and nostalgia were in the man’s voice, and Ruslan shared the same feelings in his own way: he, too, pined for a bygone life and longed to get back to it. But he had the patience to wait, without whining in that miserable fashion. Stiura didn’t like the way the Shabby Man whined either:

“See what your silly mooning does for you! What’s the point of all that sort of talk? It’s just hot air; you can’t bring back the past. We have to go on living somehow!”

“As soon as I’ve put this dresser together, I’ll forget it all, as if I’d cut it out of my mind.”

“The dresser can wait. You’d do better to put your own life together. You’re just frittering the time away. Or are you trying to burn yourself up on purpose? After years without touching a drop, you’ve turned into a soak.”

“That’s because I’m making up for all that lost drinking time, Stiura.”

“Well, I wish you’d go and make up for that sort of lost time somewhere else. Think I’d hold on to you? No, I’ll even pay the fare for you to go back to Moscow. Maybe you’ll come to your senses a bit quicker once you get there.”

“But how can I leave my work, Stiura?”

“O.K., I agree—since you’ve started it, you might as well finish it.”

“That’s not the point. If I only do
one
piece of work, I need to do it thoroughly and properly. I want to feel that I haven’t lost my skill. You tell me to go. But who will be waiting for me when I get there?”

“Like you said—you had a wife and children …”

“Yes, and you can add my nephews and nieces and godchildren too. Just think, though, how many years have gone by. I was drafted in 1940 for the Finnish War, but I missed the bus and didn’t get to the front. Should have been demobilized then, but they forgot and made me stay on. Then came the World War, then I was taken prisoner, then prison again when we got home—have I been in a few prison camps in my time! My family were under German occupation, so who knows whether any of them are still alive? Supposing I did go back, and I told them I’d been released under the amnesty—what would it mean to them? A convict’s a convict; they’d never understand that I wasn’t jailed for anything I did wrong. We were all behind bars for one thing—stupidity. Anyone with a bit more brain would have kept out of it. So if you’re born stupid, don’t be a burden to your family—go and live somewhere else. Why should they get into trouble on my account? That’s one thing. There’s another, too: they already think I’m dead. In their hearts they’ve already said goodbye to me. Once in a transit prison, I remember meeting someone who’d been my neighbor—we used to live on the same street before the war. ‘God,’ he said to me, ‘you’re alive! I thought you’d been dead for years.’ They lit candles in church for us—how can we go back now? Who’ll be glad to see us come back
from the dead? It’s a sin, after all, to light a candle in church for someone who’s still alive!”

“Well, why not go to some other district?” asked Stiura, pulling her shawl around her shoulders. “You don’t have to go back to Pervomaisky …”

“But where else would I go, Stiura? Where am I living now, after all? I’m living in ‘some other district’ already!”

Shaking her head, Stiura went out into the kitchen. His eyes followed her with a blazing look as he swiveled around on his stool. After some rattling of dishes she clambered noisily down into the cellar, returning with a plateful of tomatoes and pickled mushrooms garnished with red-currant leaves, and placed a sweating bottle in the middle of the table. The Shabby Man shivered and turned his watery eyes away, but it was obvious that the bottle was the center of attraction, the chief object in the room.

Ruslan already knew that the horrible stuff in that bottle was nicknamed “vodka” (it also had a longer name: “Filthy-stuff-damn-the-man-who-invented-it”), and he could never make up his mind whether the Shabby Man really liked it or not. In the evenings he yearned for it with all his heart, but by morning it made him feel terrible and he hated it. Many times Ruslan had noticed that humans often did things that they didn’t like, and without any compulsion—something that no animal would ever do. It was significant that in Ruslan’s hierarchy the highest rank was held by the masters, who always knew what was good and what was bad; next in order were dogs, while prisoners came last of all. Although they were bipeds, they were still not quite people. None of them, for instance, would dare to give orders to a dog, yet their lives were partly controlled by dogs. In any case, how could they give sensible orders when they were all so stupid?
They were obviously stupid because they kept on thinking there was some sort of better life far away from the camp and beyond the forests—a piece of nonsense that would never enter the head of a guard dog. As if to prove their stupidity, they would run away and wander alone for months, perishing with hunger, instead of staying in camp and eating their favorite food—prison gruel, for a bowl of which they were prepared to slit each other’s throats. And when they did return, looking abashed, they would still go on thinking up new ways to escape. Poor fools! They were never, never happy, wherever they were.

Here, for instance—had the Shabby Man really found a better life here? Ruslan knew perfectly well what it was that kept him and Stiura together—it was the same thing that went on between himself and his various “brides.” True, it wasn’t the worst thing in life, yet even so these two were not really happy together living under one roof. Otherwise why were they often so miserable and why did they quarrel so much, sometimes to the point of shouting at each other? Even here the Shabby Man remained a typical prisoner, in that he often did what he didn’t want to do and his “bride” acted the same way; therefore Ruslan was convinced that when the time came to separate them and take the Shabby Man away to the only place where he could find peace, then he, Ruslan, would feel neither doubt nor pity.

Seated at table, Stiura invited “my two lodgers” to come and eat, but one of them refused without even glancing at the bowl put down for him, while the other one wanted to go on working a bit longer. Yet his work merely consisted of fitting the remaining planks into position, after which he would put them aside again, sit down and smoke a cigarette, purposely delaying his blissful appointment with the bottle.
A curious change had come over him: for no good reason his features glowed with relaxed good humor, yet at the same time he obviously felt a nervous compulsion to fidget and talk unceasingly:

“Well, Stiura, my dear, I was telling you about the Finnish War … M’m, yes. Officially, of course, it wasn’t a war, but a ‘campaign,’ or rather, ‘the campaign against the White Finns.’ Dammit, but Stalin was diabolically clever in his way, the old murderer! It was a stroke of genius to call them ‘White Finns.’ None of us knew whether they were really the aggressors or not, but ‘White Finns’—that was clear: they were ‘Whites,’ and we hadn’t forgotten about the ‘Whites’ since the days of the civil war, so it all seemed quite natural and we knew who we were fighting against. Yet really they were just Finns, the people of Finland. Well, so we beat them … But it was a funny sort of victory. We sure were glad as hell when they asked for peace. And they were clever. They realized that even if we Russians were ready to go on dying for a great cause and for the Beloved Father of All Peoples, the Finns preferred to stay alive. Much better to make peace and save lives—and they didn’t even lose much territory, either. Then, in the World War they played a clever game, too: their troops advanced just as far as the old frontier and no farther, however much Hitler tried to order them to go on. There are some clever people in this world, and we could learn a lesson or two from those ‘White Finns’—I mean from the Finns pure and simple.”

“Just listen to the way you talk,” said Stiura severely. “You shouldn’t have been put in prison, you should have had your tongue cut off—that would have stopped your babbling.”

“I wasn’t put in prison for talking out of turn, Stiura. I was a spy, they said, because I raised my hands in surrender
to the hated enemy. So maybe they should have cut off my hands, but my tongue had nothing to do with it.”

“How can you tell which country’s people are clever and which aren’t?”

“This is how I see it, my dear.” Anger and irritation were seething in his voice. “A person who insists that everyone else should live the way he lives isn’t clever. And a people that thinks the same way isn’t clever either. That people will never be happy, even though they may sing songs from morning till night saying how happy they are.”

Biting her lip, Stiura cast a frightened, sidelong glance at Ruslan, who turned his glittering eyes aside and closed them, pretending to be asleep.

“Evil people are never happy,” she said. “And why aren’t we happy? Do you think it’s because we are evil?”

“We have our share of evil, Stiura. They don’t call us a ‘hard’ people for nothing. But that’s only half the trouble. Other peoples are hard, yet they manage to live well enough. Take yourself, now: you seem to be a nice, kind person, but just think what happens if some little bit of fluff hoists her skirt up higher than you’re used to seeing it or pushes her tits out into the firing position: you’d stop and give her a piece of your mind, wouldn’t you? If you had your way, in fact, you’d have her arrested.”

“Good Lord, she can walk around naked if she wants to! As long as I don’t have to look at her, though.”

“But what if she likes doing it?”

“I don’t care what she likes. Other people have got to like it too. People aren’t fools—they know what’s decent and what isn’t.”

“There you are!” the Shabby Man raised his finger in triumph. “You can learn everything you need to know about
politics by listening to you women talk. Ah, Stiura, all that time I spent in the prison camps wasn’t wasted. Why, you’d never believe the different sorts of people I met when I was inside. Clever, educated people—any number of ’em. I’d still be a dumb old fool to this day if it hadn’t been for them. I remember I shared a ‘sleeping car’ in a camp for two years with a German comrade—you know, he had the lower bunk and I had the top bunk.”

“Yes, I know what a ‘sleeping car’ is.”

“He’d been to all sorts of countries and he told me all about them. Course, he was a Communist through and through, but you can’t change the national character, and this is what I noticed about him: he saw that the people in another country maybe didn’t live the same way he did, but that they lived in a special way, which was
their
way—they had their own kinds of customs, they painted their houses like this or like that, they had their own fashion of singing songs or celebrating weddings. Now, if one of our guys starts talking about where he’s been and what he’s seen, the most important things, according to him, are that they’ve organized a Young Communist movement in one place, or that the revolution’s just around the corner, or in some other place things are hopeless—they haven’t learned Marxism yet and are only at the stage of trade-union struggle. But what
really
bugs him is not the revolution or the Young Communists—it’s that things in these other countries are not exactly like they are back home in Saratov. And if you ask him what else he saw that was interesting, he just looks astonished and yells at you: ‘Well, if you don’t think that’s interesting, what else is there?’ See what I mean?”

As she listened, with her cheek propped on her fist and a frown on her big white face, she suddenly burst out:

“Well, will you sit down at table or are you going to talk your head off all night?”

He moved over to the table and reached swiftly for the bottle. Forcing himself not to hurry, he filled Stiura’s glass up to the level which she showed with her hand and gave himself nearly a full glass.

“That’s rather a lot,” she said, “for the first drink.”

“It all depends on what you’re going to drink to. The first drink is to the Big Amnesty. I waited for my little amnesty, and it came—but the Big One is still to come. That’ll be when they open all the gates and say to everybody, ‘You may go, people! Go wherever you like—and without an escort.’ Well, here’s luck, Stiura.”

With a violent shudder he leaned back and drained the whole glass in one gulp, then breathed hard at the ceiling, his streaming eyes blinking as though he had been hit on the head. Regaining his breath, he dug his fork into the food on the plate, but immediately dropped the fork and hastened to pour out again. Stiura covered her glass with her hand, but when he said, “Go on!” she took away her hand.

Now no longer impatient, he grew relaxed and cheerful, and a sort of game crept into their talk.

“Stiura! Say, Stiura,” he asked, “what sort of a funny name is that? I’ve never heard it before.”

“You’d better marry me,” she replied. “You’ll find out if you take me to the register office. Then you can have all of me.”