In the tap-room at the old market, Parfyon Malygin shared a cheburek and a fifth with me and gave me the gift of soulful conversation and a simple magical pencil stub.
“You’re going to tell me they don’t make them like this anymore, aren’t you?” I prodded.
“Of course they don’t!” he said and stamped the table conclusively with his glass. “You’ll see what I mean, when it’s time.”
He went on to talk about the Truth of Life, which has much in common with the truth of fairy tales, and about the newspaper fairy tales that have nothing whatsoever to do with life. He spoke simply; we were instantly fast friends. I went to visit him many times over my year of writing a story a week, and read him the stories that seemed to spool from under the hard, sharp tip of his magical pencil almost against my will. Parfyon listened, sometimes grunting in protest, sometimes nodding in agreement, but most often he would interrupt and start on a story of his own, which led to another, and then the third, and that’s how we spent our evenings. He was ill for the entire year and sat there behind his enormous writing desk, huddled in an ancient wool blanket, his bare feet stuck inside soft valenki.
“Take speech, words,” he would begin meaningfully and fix me with his soft eyes bleached to the color of blotting paper. “Words are magic,” he would declare, hold a solemn pause, and then burst out in giggles like a proper girl who’s just heard a dirty joke.
He was fading, slowly and quietly – he knew this, but did not complain. Every day, he would shrivel another quarter of an inch – a fact recorded by pencil lines on the bathroom doorframe.
Two days ago, when I first had the idea for a Christmas story, the last in the series, I went to get his advice. The pencil he’d given me had turned into a meager stump by then, and secretly I was praying that perhaps he’d find me another one somewhere in his stocks – the prospect of life without the assistance of magic frightened me.
Parfyon Dmitriyevich looked at me with his characteristic smile:
“Will the story have miracles in it?”
“Of course.”
“Well, good then – and Merry Christmas!”
His eyes gleamed, the blanket emitted a strange rustle, and his head suddenly disappeared from behind the desk. I called his name; he didn’t answer. I went around the desk: the valenki were there on the floor, and the blanket pooled around them, empty. When I lifted the blanket, I found a brand new pencil – the new shape into which my dear friend changed himself. I left the apartment on tiptoe, slinking along the walls like a thief. At home, I read the letters impressed on the penciclass="underline" “Travels.”
“Enough of your stories, try another genre, don’t bore your reader, you can’t just spin tales out of thin air all your life,” Malygin used to tell me.
Having crisscrossed the Stargorod terrain a million times, Parfyon was trying to push me out the door and into the wide world beyond.
I, too, felt like trying something new, and so I listened to my friend’s wish. I packed quickly, threw a bunch of socks and shirts into my backpack, and topped it with a spare pair of pants. I put my new pencil carefully into a sturdy pencil case. I opened the door. It was snowing; the weather was beautiful. I started my car, let the engine warm up, and drove out of the yard.
Ahead of me spread a vast land, no better or worse than the Stargorod country, a land where life glowed quietly, awaiting the great magical holiday. Someone would be selling stationery out there too. I’ll buy myself a school notebook and write in it, and if my fingers get cold, I’ll hold them in the breath of the world and warm them.
About the Author
Peter Aleshkovsky was born in 1957 and graduated some two decades later from Moscow State University. He worked for several years as an archaeologist in Central Asia and as a historical preservationist in the Russian North before turning full-time to literature in the mid-1990s. He has authored a dozen books and first attained literary success with Stargorod, followed by the works Seagulls; Skunk: A Life (translated into English by Glas); Vladimir Chigrintsev, The Institute of Dreams and The Other Side of the Moon. Aleshkovsky has thrice been short-listed for the Russian Booker Prize, most recently in 2006, for Fish: A History of One Migration, which was published in 2010 by Russian Life Books.
About the Translator
Translator Nina Shevchuk-Murray was born and raised in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv. She holds degrees in English linguistics and Creative Writing. She translates both poetry and prose from the Russian and Ukrainian languages. Her translations and original poetry have been published in a number of literary magazines. With Ladette Randolph, she co-edited the anthology of Nebraska non-fiction The Big Empty (U of NE Press, 2007). Her translation of Peter Aleshkovsky’s novel, Fish: A History of One Migration, was long-listed for the Rossica Translation Prize. In 2012, her translation of Oksana Zabuzhko’s Museum of Abandoned Secrets (AmazonCrossing) was released.