“Fancy seeing you here!” the driver said, still laughing. “Well, come on. Get in and let’s go.” “Let’s go,” Grand agreed and opened the rear door. Before I could say anything I was bundled in along with our rucksacks and the car roared off. The driver turned to Grand and they continued laughing. He didn’t look at the road.
“Hey, guys, it’s great to meet you! We’ll travel along together all the way to where I live, all the way to Omsk. You guys from Omsk? No? I am. I’m from Omsk. I’ve got a house there, kiddies, and the wife waiting for me. ‘I’ve a wee wife a-waiting and she’s waiting just for me…’ She’s been waiting three days for me and I didn’t come back. I went to see my brother-in-law in Novosibirsk and I’ve been away for three days now. I had a wild time, guys, a really wild time. A man’s gotta do… But now it’s time to go home, if we make it, touch wood, eh guys? Isn’t that right, eh? ‘I’ll be back home soon, back to my sources. Kiss the wife and tend the horses.’” He laughed again but by now I was silent. Grand gave a kind of nervous chuckle.
“What’s your name, man?” our driver asked. “Sergey,” Grand said. “And I’m Sasha. Call me Sash! How about you, Seryozha, do you know what a yesaul is? You’ve probably forgotten the meaning of the word. Anyway, Seryozha, a yesaul is a guy like me. Yesaul Ulanov, Captain of the Cossacks.”
I’d worked out by now that they didn’t know each other. May the powers of light protect us! Just as well the road here was running through steppe, flat, long, no side roads. Fly while you can! And we were flying.
“Whaddya say, Seryozha, how about we sing?” Yesaul Ulanov barked. “‘Oh, boundless steppes of Russia…’”
I pressed myself down in the rear seat between the rucksacks. I didn’t sleep. I kept an eye open.
I’m back on Yakimanka and Tolya is in a bad mood as he surfs the Internet, clicking his mouse and grumbling, pre-empting any desire others might have to make a nuisance of themselves. “Managers, Managers. The only people this country seems to need are managers.” “Are you looking for a new job, Tolya?” I enquire from my gallery. “No, I’m studying the demand for new employees. I’m studying Russia.”
Tolya works for a mobile phone company and is well paid by the standards of our commune, but he is an eternal oppositionist. I shrug my shoulders and get back to my book. “Managers, managers… nothing but bloody managers.” I hear him squeezing a plastic beer bottle.
Yakimanka, Yakimanka. On Yakimanka old Artemiy sits night and day by the central heating radiator, rolling his own cigarettes from tobacco so rough you have to take a deep breath before you run into the kitchen and back out again. I had always supposed he was Roma’s grandfather, but nothing of the sort. Artemiy has different grandchildren who come every quarter to pay Roma his rent of forty bucks a month so the old man can smoke his tobacco and sit by the central heating radiator.
“Isn’t that a bit stiff, Roma?” Tolya asked him. “The old geezer takes up no space at all. You’re turning bourgeois.” “They don’t bring him any food,” landlord Roma retorts. “Half the money they give me goes on feeding him.” “That poor old man only gets half?!” Tolya taunts him. “Oh, Roma, you sticky-fingered bourgeois!”
Old Artemiy, our commune’s scarecrow, a symbol of times before any of us were around, sits in the kitchen, slobbering on pieces of newspaper and rolling his smokes with dirty, arthritic fingers. He inhales with a look of concentration on his face.
“Heh-heh,” he laughs, squinting at me. “Khe-khe-khe,” his laughter changes into a smoker’s cough.
What does our Old Artemiy know, what does he remember? What nook of forgotten history is preserved in that bald head of his, that skull with the skin stretched taut over it? I tried to find out one time, but the old man said nothing and only bared his toothless gums from behind his smokescreen. “Hehheh, girlie. I know why you keep asking all these questions,” he finally wheezed. “Khe-Khe, girlie, I know everything. You’re one of our blue bloods. If things had turned out different you’d have been living here on your own and we would be running errands for you. Khe-Khe-Khe.” “You can’t get anything out of him, just a load of nonsense,” I growled, retreating from the kitchen in confusion. He chucked a few bricks after me: “Our lady countess, for Christ’s sake! Khe-Khe-Khe!”
“Well, Titch, you walked into that, eh? He’s got you sussed.” Tolya laughed an evil laugh. “I’ve long had my doubts about you. I guessed as much! You’re a member of the bourgeoisie, Titch, there’s a class enemy skulking inside you to this day. Now you and your blue blood have been exposed once and for all!” “Oh, give over.” I am Titch, a well-intentioned daughter of our latest Time of Troubles. What’s my lineage got to do with anything?
We took off in a screech of rubber, like racers, with the wind whistling in our ears, a round red car eating up the expanses of the steppe at a hundred and forty kilometres an hour. “‘From behind a distant is-land like a sho-oal of fearsome sha-arks…’ Why aren’t you joining in, Seryozha? Show me some respect!” bawls Yesaul Ulanov. I shudder and raise myself up a little. The same darkness surrounds us and the bleak expanse of Russia judders and rushes beneath us. “… there come sai-ailing with the cur-rent Stenka Ra-zin’s painted barques.” “I’d rather you told me about the Cossacks, and kept your eyes on the road in the meantime,” Grand suggests.
“Ekh, the road, the dust, the mist!” the Yesaul intoned. “What are the Cossacks, Seryozha my brother? What were the Cossacks for Russia and what are they for our Russia today, I ask you? They are everything! The only link left holding Russia together as a nation. From olden times and up till now, to our own days. What is there of the past that is truly alive? From that great, great distance what is alive, I ask you? Nothing! Only the Cossacks remain. That’s who we are — the Cossacks! We‘ve been there from time immemorial, from aeons ago. It was we took Siberia with Yermak Timofeyevich, raised fortresses, kept the frontiers inviolable, drove off the Tatar scum, drove off the German scum, and held these lands against all comers. Without the Cossacks there would be no Siberia, without the Cossacks there would be no Russia either. That’s what I have to tell you, Seryozha. What have you to say to that? Can you deny it? If you deny it, speak out, man!” “Times change, Sasha.”
“I am not Sasha to you. To you I am Yesaul Alexander Nikiforovich Ulanov, understand? They change, do they? Well… Of course they do. But we were the Cossacks, and as the Cossacks still we stand: for Rus, for the Fatherland, for the Holy Orthodox Church! Hurrah! Do you know how long the Cossacks have been guarding the borders of Russia? For all eternity, and we still are! Yes, Sergey, you can take it from me, we’ll yet defend our Russia, our mother, to the last man any time, any time she needs us! ‘From behind a distant is-land like a sho-oal of fearsome sha-arks…’. Come on, Sergey, sing along! ‘There come sai-ailing with the cur-rent Stenka Ra-zin’s painted barques.’ Come on, now the chorus! ‘There come sai-ailing with the cur-rent Stenka Ra-zin’s painted barques’.”
The red ball flies along the highway like a bullet fired from a gun. I’m cringing at the bottom of it, looking up at the sky where a big, blazing star is hard on our heels.