A Caramel Rooster for Christmas
It was Christmas Eve, and Nikolai M was beset by unpleasant thoughts.
In the morning, he found in his mailbox a card from his daughter, who’d run away to live in Germany, only to find out that his daughter and her husband were celebrating Christmas in Morocco this year, instead of visiting him in Stargorod. Then his publisher, who’d been feeding him one excuse after another, finally admitted that, unless a sponsor suddenly materialized out of thin air, they wouldn’t be able to publish Nikolai M’s fundamental study of Stargorod’s history for another year. And really, who cares that St. Christopher’s Monastery, founded by St. Ephrem back in the 11th century, is today, after Ukraine’s independence, the oldest monastery in our country? The day before, he visited both the church and the city council, and neither gave him any money to publish the book.
It is the pinnacle of insanity to believe that we have solid footing. In fact, our history attempts to convince us of the opposite from the very beginning. We thought we were moving forward by walking on hard ground beneath our feet, and all of a sudden we learn that there’s nothing even remotely resembling ground there, and, what’s more – there’s nothing that could be called movement. The democratic transformations – an object of M’s heartfelt faith – fizzled out; the city did not want his work, his daughter did not want him, and the people in the street met his beret and eyeglasses with cold, unfriendly looks. He dreaded even imagining their eyes in times of trouble. In 1611, the crowds hung pharmacist Von Rhode right here, on the midtown wall – they thought he was a Swedish spy. Indeed, the word “neighbor” means nothing in big cities. Perhaps it is still relevant in villages, where everyone knows everyone else, and everybody can still love and hate each other in a true neighborly fashion?
Thus obsessing, M came out onto Bolshaya Square. In the middle, the city had put up its Christmas tree; somewhere nearby children were screaming happily. A Gypsy woman pounced on M, stuck a rooster candy-on-a-stick into his fingers, snatched a hundred rubles from his wallet, and, running away, promised that he would meet his happiness today.
M sat on a bench, unwrapped the rooster from its cellophane wrapper and put it into his mouth. The taste of burnt sugar reminded him how he and his friend Vaska used to slide down ice hills here, in the park by the Stargorod kremlin. Back in the day, the caretakers of the city park made those ice hills especially for the kids. It was also here that the boys snuck to smoke Dymok cigarettes, then hid the rest of the pack in a secret cache, and went home, happy and drenched, sucking on rooster stick-candies just like this to mask their tobacco breath. Or chewing on almonds – which were disgusting and filled your mouth with a sort of perfumey after-taste, but cost less than two roosters.
Eight years ago, Vaska was in a bad accident that killed his wife and daughter, and left him crippled. He drank himself almost to death after that. M suddenly decided to visit him.
Vaska still lived in the same Stalin-era apartment building where M himself was born 45 years ago, in the same communal flat with two other families. He was very happy to see Nikolai, showed him to his room, pulled some canned fish out of the fridge, put out black bread and poured them vodka. Very quickly, however, the joy of their reunion was gone without a trace – Vaska got drunk and broke down crying: two days before he had buried his beloved shepherd dog Rada, the only other soul that loved him. Drunk, restless, in panic, he kept saying he would kill himself. M tried to comfort his school friend, thought of kind, soothing things to say to him, and, in the process of talking him off the ledge, somehow discovered that he had lifted himself out of his earlier despair. They finished the vodka, hugged, and sat there for a while, reminiscing about their childhood. Then Vaska lay down on his threadbare couch and zonked out. Nikolai found a blanket, tucked his friend in, and went home.
He walked and thought that the surest way of conquering one’s own madness was to visit someone who was even madder. So your dog died – get another one; so they didn’t publish your book – write another one. He works for history, after all, and on the historical scale, a year or two don’t mean a hill of beans. When he was climbing the stairs to his apartment, he heard his neighbor Nastya call his name: shyly, she invited him to celebrate Christmas together. He accepted, hurried home, took a shower, put on a suit and a white shirt, and got a bottle of Champagne out of the fridge.
And then he talked, and she listened. It turned out that Nastya used to attend his lectures at the university. She was born in a village. It was hard for her to get out of there, and she did not miss it in the least. Now she was happily working at the museum; she lived alone. Nikolai, without quite realizing it, retold his entire book to her – and Nastya wasn’t bored! There was only one thing he couldn’t understand: how was it that he had never noticed her before?
Everything that is supposed to happen after dinners like that happened. In the morning, M. woke up early, snuck out of bed, dressed and rushed to the square. He was possessed by the need to buy Nastya a rooster on a stick. But the Gypsy woman was not there – instead, there was snow, fluffy and new, and it erased the gloomy city of the day before. Passersby, all to a man, smiled at the bespectacled man in his beret.
M. bought a rose bouquet instead of candy – and that’s exactly what he said to Nastya when he gave it to her, that and many other words. Piling his plate with eggs and breakfast sausage, Nastya asked, “So does this mean that the word ‘neighbor’ is not completely meaningless in big cities?”
The only thing left for M to do was to admit his own stupidity, which he did, promptly and happily.
The Pencil Stub
The pencil stub served me faithfully and reliably for an entire year, just like the man who had given it to me – Parfyon Dmitriyevich Malygin.
I met Parfyon Dmitriyevich in the tap-room at the old market, where I went in the hopes of overhearing a good story. Writing a story a week, I’m here to tell you, is pure madness, but a happy madness nonetheless. I lived it for a year – I forgot everything else, I listened to the human choir around me and stole from it everything that was worth stealing.
Some of it, when written down, inevitably lost its sheen, but I survived, owing much to Parfyon Dmitriyevich, who was always there to critique, edit, and supply a new twist borrowed from one of the ancient newspapers he read in his retirement. Parfyon Dmitriyevich, the son of a geography teacher and the grandson of a village priest persecuted by the Soviets, spent his life as a purveyor of stationery. First on foot, with a suitcase, then in a broken-down GAZ four-wheeler, and by the end of his long career – driving a Gazelle mini-van, he had crisscrossed the entire Stargorod region a million times. He sold simple sets of colored pencils, purple and blue ink, cheap fountain pens, presser feet for sewing machines, graph paper, slide rules, and, closer to the end of his service, markers in colors wildly divergent from the natural hues of the rainbow.
Countless Grandfather Frosts, Snowmaidens, bunny-rabbits and sad crocodiles, posters and certificates of birth came into this world thanks to his labors. Love letters and denunciations, sympathy notes and recipes for blinchiki with mushrooms would not have been preserved and would not have reached their addressees if it hadn’t been for Parfyon Dmitriyevich. And the great volumes of milk and potatoes, pickles and barley that were accounted for in parallel columns on the pages torn from school notebooks, the baseline of a life now long gone? The world does not exist thanks to the atomic bomb, Parfyon Dmitriyevich used to teach me over a shot of vodka, but by the singular grace of stationery that enables people to describe the world around them, to convey its breath to a loved one, a neighbor, or the humblest log hut in Soggy Tundra, where a woman everyone knows only as Ivanovna, once the mistress of a Detective Krotov whom she alone remembers, is living out her days.