Oh, the Russian soul, so unfathomable, so boundless.
Yesaul, Yesaul, Yesaul Ulanov, in the murk the red star rushes onwards. The untamed steppes exhale the scent of wormwood; our eternal Russian, boundless steppes breathing wormwood, the night, and an inebriate yearning from which we cannot wake.
“You don’t know anything about life, Titch,” Tolya continues to instruct me. “You don’t know anything. This BG of yours was the ruin of Russian rock. Think about it, Titch. Rock is fate, it is struggle, it is like a revolution, something people die for. Victor Tsoy died, Sasha Bashlachov died, so why is he, your Grebenshchikov, still alive and kicking?” “Tolya, what are you talking about? He doesn’t sing any more.” “When rock becomes big business you get pop. We live today in an era of pop. But actually, you’re right, rock died a natural death. The era of managers is coming, and managers don’t listen to rock. And this is the era you are going to have to live in!” “What about you?” “Well, what about us? We’ve already seen it all. It’s you I’m sorry for. Where are the young punks who will wipe us off the face of the earth? There are none!” “Nutter,” I shrug and go back to my book.
When I came across Kerouac I was unspeakably happy. I read him and felt his stuff had been written by a mate in the Yakimanka commune I just hadn’t run into yet. Not so improbable, there were plenty of people in the commune I never met. I dreamed of going to America, hitching on American roads, of reaching the mountains, the warm, solitary, misty mountains of California. I dreamed deliriously of meeting Jack, and when I heard he was dead and all this had been written — ohmigod, it couldn’t have been written so long ago — when I heard that, something inside me just collapsed.
Once again, I was trying to live in an echo of the past. The America Jack Kerouac wrote about was long gone. It was killed in Vietnam, burned out by grass. It had become flabby and bourgeois, stuffed its cheeks with hamburgers and gone to Hollywood.
We live at the junction of two eras, friend. From here we can see clearly enough what used to be, but who can tell us what is coming next?
The dashing hussars of my father’s imagination trample the wormwood in a black field. One of his grandfathers was killed in Stalin’s purges and everyone carefully forgot him. Another was ‘expropriated’ as a rich kulak farmer and they fled their home at night in a cart, losing some things and hastening to leave others behind. Who will gather up all the loose ends now and where will they find them? My father had a grandmother who told him how much like her brother he was, a young officer who died in the First World War. He was serving in the Tsar’s Lifeguards. She remembered everything about him and told my father, and my father told me, but there was a lot he didn’t remember. Now it’s all lost, our roots, the traces, but in my father’s mind the dashing hussars still wear jingling spurs and sip golden wine.
What do we know? What have we seen and what have we yet to see? The last times are coming, friend, and all you can do is get blotto on beer. “You don’t know life, Titch. You are infantile and dreadfully boring. You’ve got to change, Titch, it’s time you changed.” Tolya has his back to me and is kneeling by the windowsill with a board in front of him on which he is carefully smoothing the modelling clay for his next picture.
“Who is going to change me?” “Anyone. Why not me! Why not, Titch? Do you want me to make you into a human being in two shakes of a lamb’s tail?” He evidently finds the idea so inspiring that he immediately bounds over to the gallery. “Let’s live together. If you like I’ll shack up with you right now. We can live together and if you don’t like it, we’ll stop. But you might like it! You’ll be a human being and Roma will give us a couple’s discount. How about it, Roma? Will you knock a bit off the rent?” he asks. Roma has a policy of charging couples a bit less than two singles. It’s not that he’s concerned about demographics, he just thinks a couple take up less space, which has some truth in it.
“How about it Roma? A discount?” “Everything has to be consensual.” “Of course it does. No sweat!” Tolya is jubilant. “How about it, Titch? Shall I come up now? We’ll soon make a human being of you!” He clutches at the gallery and puts a foot on the locker. People in the room are laughing.
“Get lost!” I retort, pushing his face away and slamming the door. You sometimes can’t tell when Tolya is joking. I hold the door shut. “Rapunzel, show me your little face. Why are you fearful? I’m not going to eat you.” He tugs at the door but I’m holding on tightly. “Titch, come to me. Hello-o.” He waits. Then, in a different voice, “What is it? Are you offended or what?” There is silence in the room. “That’s just silly.” Silence. I hear him moving away. “Come out, Titch. I won’t touch you, okay? I was only joking! We’re friends, okay? Do you hear? Peace!”
I stay silent and don’t move but let go of the door. I’m on all fours, in the dark, and it’s as warm as a womb in my cubbyhole above the ceiling, in the gallery. So what if you don’t understand me, friend. What’s that to do with me? I hear Tolya sit down heavily by the windowsill. Then I hear him squeezing his plastic bottle. It sits by the foot of the piano, a brown plastic bottle of beer. As he drinks it crackles.
Quietly, very, very slowly and quietly, I grope in the corner for a candle and lighter. Roma tells me off for lighting candles in here. Don’t worry, Roma, I’ll be careful, I really will. I asked him once whether he would take me on the road with him. “No,” replied Roma Jah. “Why not?” I asked surprised. “I won’t be in the way, and I so much want to go to the seaside.” “I understand, Titch, but I’m not going to take you. You have to appreciate, for me the road is the only place I can be alone.”
Yes, Roma, I understand. I light the candle and fix it with a drop of wax to a jam jar lid. I wonder, if Roma were to knock at the door of my gallery whether I would open it. There’s no sound from down below, though.
Curling up like a little animal, I hunch over a book. I don’t read it. Instead I watch the paper swelli under my tears.
The lighted place in the darkness of the steppe is a traffic police post. Yesaul Ulanov cuts his speed. I peep out from behind his shoulder. “They can sniff you out,” the Yesaul mutters, suddenly quiet. “They sense you, the devils.” I can see the sleepy face of a young traffic cop when the Yesaul suddenly rams his foot on the accelerator. The car jerks, roars and takes off like a missile. “Now let’s see what they’re made of!”
A siren wails behind us. I turn to see glaring headlights. “Put yourself in my place, Sergey. What am I going to say to them: ‘Okay, guys, I’m drunk’? What am I going to bribe them with when I have no money? I left my driving licence in Novosibirsk. The last time, just two weeks ago, I forgot it at my brother-in-law’s and had to go back for it. Looks like I’m going to have to do the same again this time …”
He laughs. What is he laughing about? I am scared to look back in case I suddenly see not just headlights but the faces of two cops bellowing through their windscreen. “Let them try,” the Yesaul sniggers. “I’ve got a turbocharger!” I feel better. Looking back I see their lights really are falling behind. “They won’t keep that up for long. I know. This is not the first time I’ve been here. I’m just giving them a bit of fun. What of it? They’re bored. It’s really boring for them at night.”
The sirens can still be heard. The Yesaul starts getting annoyed. “See what they’re after, eh? They want to make some easy money! The kind of people you meet nowadays! No one thinks about other people any more. Me, me, me all the time! They’re wolves, not human beings.” “Come on, Sasha. It’s not like that at all.” “It’s not like that, isn’t it? Well, let me tell you, if that had been my son in my place he wouldn’t have given you a lift. No way! I know that for a fact. It’s obvious from just looking at you that you haven’t got any money, so he wouldn’t have stopped. He’s young — younger than you, I’d say — but the way he is… I can’t think who he’s got it from, the little brute. All he thinks about is money, fancy gear, and picking up skirt… He hasn’t got an idea in his head. What kind of generation is growing up, Sergey, eh? I ask you! Where’s it all going to end? He wouldn’t have given you a lift, and why not? We need to help each other out on the road, am I right? The road is all of us in it together. You help me out, I help you. We’re all harnessed in the same team, aren’t I right?”