LIMPOPO
JUDY’S LITTLE grave was dug up last year and a highway was laid down in its place. I didn’t go out to see it: it’s already done, I was told, cars whoosh and zoom by, children sit in the cars eating sandwiches and dogs smile zipping along in the embrace of their mistresses—they come and go in a flash. What would I do there?
In cases like this a condolence letter is usually sent to the near and dear: step lively, so to speak, and get your dear departed ashes out of here, because we’ve got a shock crew on the job, the fires of the five-year plan are burning, and stuff like that. But Judy had no near, no relatives—at least not in our hemisphere—and of dear there was only Lyonechka, and where can you find Lyonechka these days? There is that group of energetic enthusiasts who’ve been looking for him, of course, but more on that later.
Last year was the fifteenth anniversary of Judy’s death, and not knowing anything about the highway, I lit a candle as I always do on that day, set an empty glass out on the table, covered it with a piece of bread, sat down across from it, and drank a toast to her memory with rowanberry cordial. The candle burned, and the mirror watched from the wall, and a snowstorm raged out the window, but nothing danced in the flame or passed across the dark glass or summoned me from the snowflakes. Maybe that wasn’t the right way to remember poor Judy, maybe I should have wrapped myself up in a sheet, lit incense sticks, and beat on a drum until daylight, or shaved my head, spread lion’s fat on my eyebrows, and squatted facing a corner for nine days—who knows how it’s done over there in Africa?
I don’t even remember exactly what her name was: you had to sort of howl in a special way, clack your teeth, and yawn— and you’d said it. You couldn’t write it down on paper in our letters, but, Judy told us, it was really a very sweet, lyrical name, which according to the dictionary meant “a small plant of the liliaceous order with edible tubers”; in the spring they all go off into the hills to dig this stuff up with sharp sticks, and then they bake it in cinders and dance all night until the cold dawn, dance until the huge, crimson sun rises to dance in turn on their faces, black as oil, on the poisonous blue flowers stuck in their wiry hair, and on their dogs’ teeth necklaces.
Whether that’s what they really do over there or not is hard to say now, especially since Lyonechka—in a burst of inspiration further encouraged by Judy’s ear-to-ear smile—wrote tons of poems on the subject (they’re still lying around here somewhere) ; fact and fancy got so mixed up that now, after all these years, you can’t figure out whether shining black people did in fact dance in the hills, joyfully greeting the rising sun, whether a blue river, steaming in the dawn, ever flowed at the foot of those hills, whether the equator curved like a morning rainbow melting in the sky, whether Judy actually did have sixty-four cousins, or whether it was true that her maternal grandfather thought he was a crocodile and would hide among the dry rushes to grab the legs of children and ducks swimming by.
Everything’s possible! Why not? Everything’s exotic over there, but here, nothing but nothing at all ever happens anywhere, anytime, anyhow.
Dances are all well and fine, but Judy apparently managed to grab a scrap of some kind of education somewhere, for she came to us to do a residency (in veterinary school, for heaven’s sake!). We unwound scarves, scarves, and more scarves; wraps, plaid shawls, shawls made of goat yarn with knots and splinters, shawls that were gauzy and orange, with gold threads, shawls of blue linen and striped linen; we unwound; we looked: what was there left of her to reside? There was nothing to reside, much less fight with livestock and swine: horns, tails, hooves, tripe, and abomasum, dung and udders, moo-oooo and baaa-baaaa, horrors! To combat this rough host—only a little pillar of living darkness, a slice of shadow shivering from the cold, with dark brown dog eyes—that was all there was. But Lyonechka was instantly captivated, bewitched, spellbound; moreover, the reasons for this sudden gush of passion were, as were all of Lyonechka’s reasons, purely ideological, a mental tornado, or to put it simply you could say that rationalism was always one of his dominant characteristics.
Well, first of all, he was a poet, and motes of distant countries carried a lot of weight on his poetic scales; second, as a creative individual he was constantly protesting something— exactly what didn’t really matter, the subject of the protest emerged in the process of indignation—and Judy arose like protest incarnate, like a challenge to everything in the world, a scrap of darkness, a coal amidst the snowstorm, tangerine shawls in the fierce Moscow January, almost Candlemas—to quote Lyonechka. As I saw it—nothing special. Third, she was not just black, but black like a stoker, Lyonechka enthused, and stokers were Lyonechka’s favorite heroes—along with custodians, night watchmen, woodsmen, doormen, and more or less anyone who froze in a sheepskin jacket under the cruel stars, or wandered in felt boots squeaking with snow to guard a construction site at night with the bared fangs of its vertical piles, or kept a drowsy watch on the hard chair of an official building, or stood next to pipes wrapped in rags, checking the pressure gauge in the dim light of a boiler. I’m afraid that his notion of a stoker was either unnecessarily romantic or out-dated—stokers, as far as I know, are not at all that black. I knew one once—but we’ll forgive the poet.
Lyonechka admired all these professions as the last bastions of the genuine intelligentsia. Because outside, the times were such—in Lyonechka’s words—that the spiritual elite, no longer able to watch its weak but honest candle crackle and smoke in the foul air of the epoch, had retreated, had turned away, and, accompanied by the hooting of the mob, gone into the basements, the watchmen’s lodges, shacks, cracks, and crevices, in order, having hidden itself, to preserve the last candle, the last tear, the last letter of its dispersed alphabet. Almost no one returned from the cracks: some were lost to drink while others went mad, either on paper or in reality, like Seryozha B., who got a job guarding the attic of a cooperative apartment building and one spring saw heavenly bouquets and silver bushes with sparkling lights in the dark sky beckoning to his ensavaged soul with a portent of the Second Coming, which he went to meet, stepping from the window of the fourteenth floor right into the fresh air, thereby casting a pall on the pure delight of the working classes out to enjoy the holiday fireworks.
Many people flew off into stern, high-minded flights of fancy about pure, princely air, about maidens in green peasant frocks, about dandelions growing next to wooden fences, about radiant waters and faithful steeds, embroidered ribbons and emboldened riders; they sorrowed and saddened, cursed the course of the times and grew significant, golden beards; they hewed birch blocks to carve spoons, bought themselves samovars, grandfather clocks with cuckoos, woven doormats, crosses, and felt boots; they condemned tea and ink, walked with a ponderous gait, would say “A lady, and you stink” to women who smoked, and with a third eye, which opens forth on the forehead after lengthy fasts and mental stoppages, they began to see sorcery and black magic everywhere.