“Now, Anatoly, please!” called out the jolliest of all the uncles, raising his glass.
“Spring has come, the trees are in leaf after our long winter,” Anatoly started, and the aunts settled down contentedly, recognizing the beginning of a good long toast when they heard one. “The most fortunate time of year for a wedding.” My mind drifted; I tried to imagine this scene taking place in Mitya’s parents’ apartment, and failed. Finally a change of tone from Anatoly signaled a conclusion. “May your life together be full of light, health, and joy.”
We drank to that and began on the zakuski. This was the second part of the ceremony. More toasts followed in quick succession, John and the rest of the guests outdoing one another in eloquence, the plates of zakuski emptied and were immediately replaced by even larger, fuller plates, and as the hours passed, the ritual repetition of good wishes gave the proceedings a faintly hypnotic air. Every now and then, the cry of Gorko! bitter—went up, which is the customary signal for the bride and groom to kiss. Slava and Lucy blushingly complied, while the most ribald of the uncles timed them on his stopwatch. And whenever there was a lull in the proceedings, the female witness, a determined blond called Ina, fulfilled John’s worst expectations by suggesting a toast na brudershaft, with linked arms.
“Oh, Ina!” everyone exclaimed, in the indulgent tone that meant “What a girl.” We looked on as the two witnesses drained their champagne glasses. John, laughing nervously, attempted to hold her away from him by bracing his arm at right angles to his body, but Ina seized him by the beard and kissed him all the same.
“What a handsome man,” said the elderly aunt sitting next to me. “If I was Ina’s age, I wouldn’t let him get away.” She roared with laughter. “There were no men when I was her age, you see. After the war there were seven women to one man, lucky boys—”
“Did you ever marry?”
“Oh yes, I married just before the war. Vladimir was his name, poor man, Vladimir Aleksandrovich. He was killed at Smolensk. He hadn’t had much of a life… Still, I shouldn’t talk about that here. Thank God those days are over.”
Evening had come; we’d been at the table for five hours at least, and Slava and Lucy were looking pale and overwhelmed. I sympathized; an age seemed to have passed since the morning. But the older generation showed no signs of slowing down.
“Come on, Charlotte!” the aunts suddenly announced. “Come with us! You know how to dance to this modern music.”
Someone put on a tape of the band Showaddywaddy and we danced in the hall—me in the center surrounded by middle-aged ladies. After a time we worked out a little routine that made them laugh so much they had to hold on to their bosoms.
“Don’t stop!” one of them gasped. “I’m just getting started.”
They quietened down a little after three in the morning, but when John and I left to catch the bus back to Voronezh, the aunts were beginning again, as spruce and rosy-cheeked as ever. They had stamina, that generation, and they approached an event such as this one with determination, not with our lightweight, stay-as-long-as-we-feel-like-it attitude. Each wedding party is a victory celebration, in a way, and a reiteration of Kursk’s heroic survival in 1943. Each marriage is a triumph of spring, of immortality. It demands time and application.
Early in May, Mitya and I walked past the shop called Sport and saw shiny fold-up bicycles being unpacked. Despite the fact that there was a constant shortage of bicycles and these were the first in the shop for months, some vestige of central planning had decreed that they should be sold for about fifty cents, or the price of a pot of honey. So I became the owner of a bright green bicycle. And when Mitya took his bike down from its place strapped to the ceiling of his parents’ hall, we started making our own pilgrimages to the countryside.
On Victory Day, a week or so after the wedding of Slava and Lucy, we pedaled out of town with a picnic in a knapsack. The streets were cleared of cars, and bunting was fluttering all the way along Revolution Prospect. Stalls selling vodka and buns had been set up at regular intervals along the sidewalk. Families were strolling down the center of the Prospect hand in hand, wearing their best clothes; their little daughters had ribbons at both ends of their braids. It was still early, but against the walls, the drunks were already lurching at one another and discussing impossibilities. Later on we were going to a jazz concert and other Victory Day festivities, but just for the afternoon, we were heading for the woods. The sky was glittering and cloudless and even in the center of town the smell of the forest could occasionally be detected, a sharp and bosky scent that drew us through the suburbs and along the river to the birch trees.
Our shashlik was a makeshift affair. There’d been no time to marinade the meat, so we bought a small chicken and skewered it, whole, on a stick. The fire is meant to be carefully fostered in a metal drum of some kind, which we didn’t have; also the wood was wet. But Mitya remembered a can of lighter fluid in his bag that produced a leap of flame and foul-smelling black smoke. The chicken, drumsticks outstretched like a martyr, charred slowly in the fumes.
“Now let’s have a drink,” said Mitya, producing a bottle of vodka.
“I thought you said you were going to buy beer.”
“There was only the expensive beer. Anyway, vodka’s better. It’s a holiday today.”
“But we talked about it. We said we weren’t going to drink vodka today, or not until this evening, anyway.”
“Come on, we’re in the woods! It’s so beautiful! Don’t spoil it.” Mitya handed me a glass of vodka. “The first toast is to us. Let’s drink to all our future picnics. To English picnics this summer, maybe.”
I drank the vodka. The less I felt like drinking spirits, the more Mitya insisted on his daily intake. It had got to the stage where he regularly drank so much that the next day he remembered nothing beyond nine o’clock the previous evening: sitting in the hostel until one, walking home and going to bed were all expunged. Out there among the birch trees, I didn’t see the point of having a fight with him: our afternoon would only be ruined. I knew these arguments, anyway: they never came to anything. Mitya would agree absolutely and then go straight out and buy another bottle.
“Don’t worry,” said Mitya. “You worry too much. It’s fine. Listen—I heard this Chinese folk tale on the radio, it’s so good.” He lit a cigarette. “There was a man who lived in the mountains, and when he was very young he put on a pair of iron boots. And he never took them off. He wore them to walk all the way down to the river to collect water and to carry the water back up to his hut. He wore them to till his fields, he wore them to drive his animals to pasture and back again, he even wore them in bed. For twenty years he lived like this, until suddenly he took them off.”
“And then?”
Mitya blew smoke into the air and grinned. “He flew away! He took his iron boots off and just flew up into the air. Don’t you think the meat is cooked by now?”
Against all odds, the chicken was delicious; we ate it with bread and tomatoes—the first fresh tomatoes I’d tasted for months—and I couldn’t help feeling happy.
In the late afternoon we biked back through the woods and parted when we arrived at the central market, me to go back to the hostel, Mitya to go home.
“Meet you at seven outside the concert hall, all right?”
“OK. Don’t drink too much tonight, though, will you? You turn into someone I don’t know.”
He laughed. “Listen to her! You sound like a Russian woman. I won’t, I promise. Just enough.”