Nodar was wild, but passionate; Katya loved him.
In the meantime, the theater got a new director. He was young, and he staged Hamlet. Katya played Ophelia. Overnight, she became famous; she was even elected into the city’s Cultural Council. Nodar stayed with Katya for a year, and then began disappearing for a week or two at a time. He told her he was busy expanding his business, but someone in the theater crowd started saying that he had gotten together with Lilya, the bartender from the Lyubava. At first, Katya didn’t believe the rumor. She did, however, sit for long stretches of time at the beach. When she went through her wardrobe she’d hug herself in her sable fur-coat and linger, no longer hurrying to see her aunt. A very long time ago, back at the orphanage, she and her friend Alya used to read to each other their favorite story – Andersen’s The Little Mermaid – at night. It made them feel warm inside, and wanting to cry.
In Stargorod, meanwhile, things changed again. The young director got an offer from the capital and left. His replacement put on a production of Ostrovsky’s The Storm; it didn’t have a part for Katya. Katya threw a fit in the dressing room, which prompted a jealous colleague to mock her: “Well, you’re not gonna jump off a cliff over this, are you? Your caviar will feed you.”
That evening, Nodar came home drunk, groped her and swore he loved her. Katya threw him out. Then she found an axe and chopped the wardrobe to pieces.
The next morning she got called to a meeting of the city’s Cultural Council. The Mayor told them the Transportation Ministry decided to build a bypass, which meant a death sentence for Stargorod, which lived and died with the federal highway that went through it. A PR expert flown in from Moscow told them to come up with a local attraction immediately, something like the Mouse Museum they have in Mousino.
Not long after that, Stargorod celebrated its Founding Day. Katya played Thumbelina in the open-air production on the park’s playground. In the crowd, she could see Nodar with the bartender; they were hugging each other, and did not look at her. After the show, Katya walked through the strolling public to the canal. She climbed one of the granite slabs that lined the embankment and leapt into the water.
Katya turned into a mermaid. We know this to be a fact because one famous photographer, when, for reasons unknown, he found himself in Stargorod, captured on film something that looked very much like an undine floating on the moonlit surface of the river. The uncanny picture was reprinted all over the world. Now, people reserve rooms in our hotels well in advance and at nights, packs of tourists stalk the embankments in the hopes of seeing the mermaid. Katya, however, is not very kind to them; in the past three years she’s only showed herself twice.
A group of Japanese scientists offered to pay the city big money for the permission to study the phenomenon.
“How could we sell Katya – after she’s saved our city?” the Mayor said, shaking his head. And then asked his deputy: “What’s that Nodar character up to these days, anyway?”
“Selling nails in the market. Lilya broke up with him.”
“Serves him right!”
The Stargorod Herald ran a story saying that the Moscow PR consultant got paid three million rubles for hyping the mermaid brand, but who believes a rag like that?
The decaying waterfront has been restored, covered with new granite and lined with wrought-iron streetlamps. People in Stargorod feel very proud about Katya; girls throw pieces of paper with their heart’s desires written on them into the river. Some, they say, get what they wish for.
Happiness
Until he turned 40, Genka hunted herring all over the northern seas, and with great success. Misfortune struck out of the blue: while he was at sea, his wife left him, and a nefarious scheme, of the kind that had come to be common in his industry, came to light on shore. The skipper lost his boat. On top of that, his mother became gravely ill. Genka found a job at the Angler tackle store in Murmansk. He perused the manufacturers’ literature as meticulously as he used to study navigation charts, and became an irreplaceable expert in fishing and angling equipment. On weekends, he’d get away to one of the local bodies of water, and over the next ten years became so familiar with them that he was bored.
For his 50th birthday, Genka gave himself a present – a trip to The Three Rivers resort, on a lake about 10 miles from Stargorod. Genka managed to book himself early in the season, a fact which later caused him great pride. For the next five years, he vacationed only and exclusively at The Three Rivers; he came three times a year and among the regulars earned himself the nickname Murmansk Genka, which distinguished him from the crowd of the common show-offs who came to swim and entertain their women. The regulars – retired special forces, GRU officers, military contractors and manufacturers – were decidedly more important and richer than Genka, but his tackle was just as good. He always left his room before dawn and came back by nightfall, having missed both lunch and dinner, and even when no one else had a single bite that day, Genka always managed to bring back a respectable catch. He was made to fish just like a bird dog is made to hunt.
After dinner, the company usually gathered in the fireplace den, around the pool table. Genka would sit by himself, eyes wandering over the rooms’ walls: he played poorly and didn’t like losing. He drank little, and when he did, he would confess he could only think of coming back to The Three Rivers. It was Genka, by the way, who caught the record-setting 10.4-kilo pikeperch. He was well respected; men came to ask for his advice about equipment and ordered the newest and hottest items from him, which he sold to them at cost. There was only one thing that really irked him: the entire den was lined with photos of men with their trophies. His photo, however, was for reasons unknown missing, even though he broke Sashka Pugachev’s record the very first year he came, when he reeled in a 79-kilo catfish. A year later, Kasym and his buddy Beard pulled out an 84-kilo beast from Babka’s Dip and were instantly rewarded with three framed pictures right by the door.
Genka no longer had any friends in Murmansk; the vision of The Three Rivers sustained him – wind in his hair, the breaking waves at the lakeshore, the herons in the reeds, the quiet inlets and the deep, deep sloughs where the catfish sleep under the willows. Genka dreamt of catching a record-breaking 100-kilo fish; he knew where and how he would hunt for it, but he never told anyone of his dreams, afraid to jinx them. When he stood behind the counter in the Murmansk store, or took out his ill mother’s bedpan, he would close his eyes and revel in the visions of his future glory.
Genka believed in his luck. Life, however, threw another banana peel under his feet. First, his mother died. Genka took care of the funeral, and felt out of sorts. He looked unwell – dark circles under the eyes, ghostly pale skin – and the store’s owner sent him to see a doctor he knew at the district hospital. The doctor found leukemia.
“People live decades with this diagnosis,” the doctor told Genka, and then ratted him out to the store’s owner. The owner fired Genka on the spot, albeit with a 25,000-ruble bonus.
The fired Genka went home, and as he walked, for some reason, he no longer thought about his record-breaking catfish. With nothing particular in mind, he wandered into a mall, saw a cell-phone-card vending machine, paid, for no reason he could identify, for more airtime, pushed the button for “Beeline,” and pulled out the receipt. He had no one and nowhere to call. Suddenly, among the familiar logos of service providers, he spotted a symbol he’d never seen before: a salmon leaping out of the water over a round sun. Under the logo, the unfussy serious-looking letters read: “Happiness.” Genka fed a bill to the vending machine and pushed the button; the machine smoothly pulled in his money, growled, and returned a receipt which said: “Payment received, thank you!”