And what about Elsa herself? That’s why people say she’s smart: she made sure to spend the money as quickly as she could, only put away a thousand – for the funeral, and three more – in an interest account, for a headstone, and then went on living as she always had, nice and quiet.
“They can take four thousand if they want it – I don’t care,” is what she says to the neighbors.
And the ring? How do we know about the ring? Well, no one around here knows for sure, but it’s not for nothing they say “the land fills with rumor,” do they?
5. A 1987 law allowed limited private enterprise in the form of cooperatives.
6. A felt boot.
7. The New Economic Policy, put forward by Lenin in March 1921. The policy was tolerant of small enterprise and engendered a short-lived economic revival in post-revolutionary Russia.
Stargorod Vendetta
Things are not what they used to be. Things have lost their gravitas. Their weight. Gone from the Lake are the famous roach, each of which weighed a man’s arm down to his knee; gone from the Monastery Hill is the grove of great pagan oaks, uprooted one day by a sudden hurricane. A single stump remains as a memory, and it is mangled by fire – every summer, weekend lovers of shashlyk and loud music set it alight but can’t burn it down. Gone is the mighty ancient tribe of bogatyr heroes from our land: where is the cunning Alyosha, the iron-armed Dobrynya, the spear-wielding Peresvyet? Who are the new Taras Bulba and his son Ostap? You couldn’t even find a man to match our own Opanas Perebey-Gora,8 who found his way to Stargorod from the provincial Gradizhsk, where in Gogol’s times any kozak could easily trace his lineage to the glorious atamans and colonels of the Sich.9 The Ukrainian famine of ‘33 and the times that followed scattered the last descendants of the free steppes far and wide. Opanas’ family was one of the first to retrace the historic route from the Vikings to the Greeks in the opposite direction, and settled in our lands for good. The father plied his trade as a smith, and the son, thanks to his granite fists, native Ukrainian musicality, and long linen-blond curls, instantly became the ringleader of his Kopanka neighborhood. Even the downtown high-rollers considered it a great honor to be counted among Opanas’ friends. But of his entire retinue, Opanas was most attached to the quiet Vassily Panyushkin. It was their unbreakable bond that led, in the end, to Opanas’ untimely demise.
To be fair, his death was in a way predicted by a roaming Gypsy woman back in the blessed pre-war times. After the fortune teller saw our golden-haired hero, appraised him, and bestowed on him whatever gifts she had to give, she prophesied him a death not of bullet or bayonet, but of common wood, and hearing this, Opanas lost what little fear he ever had in his mighty heart and, armed with his uncommon strength and significant wits, won himself on the fields of the last war the glory of a merciless and elusive partisan. Opanas became the right hand of Vanka Grozny, the Terror of the Krauts, later fought all the way to Berlin with the regular army, and came home unscathed: medals all across his chest and a sack full of lighters, silver spoons and famous Solingen knives, each with a pair of twins emblazoned on the blade, dancing their German gopak.
Opanas died as he had lived his short life: wildly and heroically. One quiet Sunday noon, an NKVD truck arrived in Kopanka to pick up the falsely maligned citizen Panyushkin, Vassily. Opanas, who by that hour, as was his custom, had already imbibed a significant amount of home-brewed mead, reclined in repose under an apple tree next to his smithy. When he heard Maria Panyushkina’s wailing, Opanas Perebey-Gora rose and without bothering to sort things out any further, or perhaps taking the apparitions in blue cockards for the devil’s own minions, picked up his heavy sledge-hammer and went to fight the noontime demons. The NKVD guys were at first taken aback by the sight of the fierce kozak, and even let go of the unresisting Vassily. They shouted a warning, trying to reason with the ferocious descendant of the glorious steppe warriors. But what was their yelp, their serpents’ hiss, their crows’ caws to a partisan full of honey-mead? Opanas struck once, and then again, and the NKVD bastards were dispatched straight into the gaping maws of hell. Their heads burst like ripe pumpkins; their impure blood squirted and poured onto our long-suffering land and stained their well-shined chrome-leather boots. For the third time the sledgehammer rose – and fell into the side of the truck, splinters flying in every direction. The rookie at the wheel, white with fright, hit the gas, and the lopsided truck lurched and got stuck in the Panyushkins’ fence. The lieutenant in charge of the arrest finally recovered his wits, tore at his holster, and whipped out his TT gun so glorified in movies and songs, and fired the entire clip into Opanas. But so great was Opanas’ strength that even shot-through with bullets and blind with pain, he raised his hammer one more time and crashed it again into the wooden side of the trapped truck.
Why did Opanas choose to fight the inanimate truck, the one object on the scene that was truly, when you think about it, innocent? Why did he not lunge, with his last breath, to finish the evil lieutenant? Somehow, he must have seen doom itself in the spasms of the growling, foul-smelling machine; he must have sensed somehow that it wasn’t the scoundrel that shot at him he had to fear – but this, the iron beast that trembled and shook in its rage. Opanas’ last strike threw the driver off his hard seat, and when he fell back, he hit the reverse, the truck jerked again – and its half-shattered wooden back crushed Opanas against the willow tree behind him.
So perished the son of kozaks, Opanas Perebey-Gora – not taken by a bullet, not pierced by the honest bayonet, but buried in a pile of wood that crashed upon him and took out the light. His soul was received by the angels of heaven, but his body was left to the mercy of his enemies and vanished forever in the dungeons of their building as material evidence of his attack. Along with his body disappeared Opanas’ mighty sledgehammer and the primary cause of the battle, the harmless beekeeper Vassily Panyushkin. Thus did the Gypsy woman’s prophecy come true. This transpired in the year one thousand nine hundred and fifty one.
Our province, we must admit, has always lagged behind metropolitan trends. The arrival of postal service and telegraphic communication, which ended both the style and the desirability of epistolary correspondence as a soul-restoring pastime of the eradicated classes, which now delivers Moscow’s orders with lightning speed to the most distant cities and towns of our far-flung empire, stretched the long hand of the law and, in the early fifties, tightened its grip on the throats of all the not-deported-far-enough. Their sympathizers and collaborators could do little in our province to extinguish the old, well-nurtured hatred for the mysterious and ever-scheming Trotskyists.
Grigory Panyushkin, a humble Petrograd priest, was arrested by the Cheka the morning after the attempted assassination of Lenin during the night of September 1, 1918, did his time on the Solovki,10 and upon his return felt no desire to reside in our northern capital. Instead, he settled in Stargorod, where, since he had no chance of ever fulfilling the grain quotas required of independent farmers, he signed up for the Kopanka kolkhoz. In 1941 he went to the front, and vanished there without a trace. The only thing he left behind was his son – the above mentioned Vassily, who plied his partisan trade on the Lake’s Black Shore with his mighty friend, Opanas the smith.