“Tell your guys the butcher Grishka said hello, and told you to tell them that the only meat they’ll get from me is a dead ass’s ears.”
He pulled away, but just couldn’t get over how bold and rude his blood enemy was. At home he let off some steam by yelling at his family.
Stepan Kandyba, when he returned to the station, reported the incident, and was immediately dragged over the coals, with much cursing. It was not among his duties to quarrel with the only butcher shop in town. At home, his wife also had some very unpleasant things to say to him. They fought, and as a result, the young Ms. Kandyba put her foot down on the subject of conjugal relations, and banished her spouse to the couch for a week. Ragged and unloved, poor Stepan began to contemplate taking his radar gun out to the highway, but inside him there was a feeling, something like pride, that kept him from breaking his oath for the time being.
On Friday, his boss Terebikhin ordered Stepan to ready a car.
“We need to buy some meat, bro. Let’s go see Grishka at the market.”
Kandyba was in urgent need of meat. A good roast would be just the thing to appease his wife, but the memory of Sunday’s encounter made him deeply uncomfortable. He determined not to go into the store with his boss, but Terebikhin ordered him to follow, and the order, together with the irresistible pull of flesh, both the pieces of it hanging on the butcher’s hook and his own, starved for a woman’s touch, won.
“Aha! Here you are, my friend. You came yourself,” Grigory greeted them from the manager’s office.
“Greetings, Grigory Vasiliyevich!” Terebikhin either forgot all about his officer’s misstep or was pretending that he knew nothing of it.
“I’ve no meat for you.”
“Grisha, my dear, whatever is the matter with you?”
“Ask your lieutenant there why he put a thing on my record.”
Given such an occasion, Grigory told the heart-rending tale of how he was hurrying home, with his wife fresh from the hairdresser’s, and how he was suddenly and rudely stopped, and fined, his pure record violated for nothing.
“Oh, Grisha, he’s new here. What’s the problem? Give me your license. Stepan, fix it!”
While the meat was being carved and weighed and packed for his boss, while soothing, respectful conversation was being had in the butcher shop, Stepan Kandyba sped in the station car to the DMV, clear at the opposite end of the city, to get the hated butcher’s record corrected. He fixed it, and he returned, and he gave the license back to the butcher, and... unable to stand it any longer and blushing like a boy, he asked, with a stutter:
“It’s done, Grigory. Are we... good, then? Could I, by any chance, have some meat?”
Grigory roared with laughter, and his mighty voice bounced off the arched ceiling of the old butcher shop, much like the legendary roar of the heroic Opanas Perebey-Gora, the kind of roar you don’t hear these days.
“Come, come, my friend, I’ll cut you some. But mind you, Terebikhin pays three rubles, but for you it’s five-fifty, so you’d know your place.”
Grigory prodded Stepan to a door, and he went down the stairs into the basement, with a shamed little smile on his face. Behind him, Grigory Panyushkin whistled a prison tune as he walked and played with his heavy dummy – a short-handled butcher’s hatchet, razor-sharp.
A lump of pork was hacked off in a blink. Weighed. Wrapped. An excellent cut from the back side, from the leg’s very pink, tender center. The bill came to 52 rubles. The poor Kandyba had no such money on him, and was forced to request a loan from Terebikhin’s fat wallet.
The entire uncomplicated procedure was accompanied by such nasty snickering (performed by Terebikhin himself, the store’s manager, and Grigory, who snickered while he wiped his glistening blade on his apron) that poor Kandyba cracked: he took his boss home, stopped by the station where he stuffed the meat into the fridge, grabbed the radar gun and went out on the highway.
That night, slightly tipsy from the vodka his wife poured him at dinner, and with his flesh appeased (to his wife’s own satisfaction as well; she, too, was tired of fasting), Stepan Kandyba cried quietly into his pillow next to his wife’s blissful, soft snoring.
On the other end of the city, Grigory Panyushkin tossed and turned in his own hot bed. He should have been happy, he should have been enjoying his victory, but for some reason all he could do was turn from one side to the other and whisper a curse at someone. He finally realized he would not be able to fall asleep, and so he got up, went to his son’s bedroom and stood there for a while, looking down at the sleeping boy. Then he ran his heavy hand gently over the boy’s fuzzy hair and went to the window: the moon hung, large and orange. The sight of it so captivated Grigory that he stayed at the window, not moving, unable to take his eyes off of it.
“Just look at that,” he whispered, utterly mesmerized by the moon’s alien, frightening beauty.
He had never before seen such a moon, even in prison, where such things can claim a man’s attention to a degree that is truly extraordinary.
8. His last name literally means “break a mountain.”
9. Kozak is Ukrainian for Cossack. The Sich refers to the independent military republic that existed on the Dnieper in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
10. The attempted assassination of Lenin in 1918 accelerated the Red Terror. Solovki is Solvetsky Islands, the White Sea monastery that was transformed into one of Soviet Russia’s first political prisons.
11. Ministry of Internal Affairs.
Two-Hats
Take Vanka Grozny – who was he, really? Little old ladies had him for a holy fool, priests all were afraid of him, cops let him be. To be sure, there was something to him, a colorful character, but nothing more. Back during the war, when he was a partisan, people scared kids with his name. “With a name like mine,” he used to say, “what else could I do?” In ‘46 he was still a bit of a hot-blood, straight from the woods, and he whacked one cop who was thieving – just walked straight into the station one day and shot him point-blank with his Luger. “That’s the only way to deal with you,” he said, “bitch.” Given his service record, they only gave him 10 years, but he wasn’t about to become a changed man just because he was sent to a camp in Komi – he started a war with the old cons, and you know how it goes with the real convicts, they’ve got simple ways. They dropped a fir tree on Vanya. He lived, but they had to saw his legs off at the hip.
He rolled back into Stargorod on a cart: beard wider than a shovel, shirt forever unbuttoned, another beard’s worth of hair sticking out on his chest, and in that nest – a copper icon that shined from a mile away (while bumming around the tundra, he managed to learn the Bible almost by heart – he’d rattle off whole chunks of it if the spirit moved him), and a padded vatnik in all weather, a backpack on his back, and two iron-shod pedals in his hands, to push himself around. An invalid of war, and his leg don’t hurt, coz’ it’s chopped off at the root – pay up if you look, that was his gig.
First he set himself up by the telegraph office, and that’s where they started calling him “Two-Hats”: he wore a cap on his head, you see, and had a flop-eared hat for coins on the ground before him – that’s how it was in summer, and the other way around in winter. Then they chased him away from there – you’re not supposed to beg in our country – so he moved over to our Electropower plant. He’d sit there at the gate (and he never begged – people gave him money anyway), speak kindly to some, bicker with others, especially if it were a woman – he was big on trash-talk. And little ol’ ladies – that’s a separate story with him, he took a shine to them. He’d see one going to church past the factory, roll up next to her, and bark – loud, so the whole street could hear: “Rejoice, daughter copulative, the cup shalt reach you too, and drain ye thou shalt and bare yourself drunken!” Or something like that. We’d be standing in the bushes with our cheap port and laughing our heads off, and the old ladies always took it very seriously, bowed to him, and gave him a dime or two. And the thing of it was – we never saw him set foot in church, but if he were going by one, he’d always cross himself. But for priests he had no love whatsoever.