Y.T.

1983

Place names such as Apple, Little Apple, Apple Tree, Upper and Lower Apple, Greater and Lesser Apple and so forth were so common and scattered so densely throughout the province of Zhytomyr as to suggest that the most common tree in the Ukrainian north-west wasn’t the oak, pine or birch but the apple tree. We drew Greater Apple for our food, bed and plunder. Three and a half weeks of kolkhoz life.

Like a caravan of slow black beetles, a dozen moonlighting LAZ coaches, stiflingly hot inside, lurched off from the university student quarters at around ten thirty in the morning. One police escort with flashing lights to the front and another to the rear, our long caravan made for the west. We flew over the Kiev provincial border without even noticing. By lunchtime we were passing the town of Korostishev.

‘Hey, Korostichevski,’ said Nedremailo, standing in the aisle of the bus. He mispronounced Korostishevski’s name so badly and so forcefully it felt like a sharp poke in the shoulder blade. ‘Are we passing through the land of your forefathers?’

Sashka Korostishevski drew aside the dusty curtain and looked out the window. Stretched along the road were shrubs, short little conifers and a herd of wiry cows huddled on the verge and following us with hungry eyes.

Nedremailo paused for a moment then headed off without waiting for an answer.

Vadik Kanyuka, sitting next to Sashka, gave him a shove and said, ‘He wants to swap homelands with you.’

‘What for?’ asked Sashka. Outside the window the shrubs had given way to enormous heaps of rubbish.

‘Not that,’ said Vadik irritably. Sashka wasn’t taking the bait. ‘What are you looking at out there?’

‘I’ve never been here before,’ Sashka drawled. ‘It’s interesting.’

‘Prince Korostishevski makes a ceremonial entrance into the paternal appanage,’ mocked Kanyuka. ‘Cue the pealing of bells, the procession of the cross. Countrymen and countrywomen, shepherds and shepherdesses, old men and old women. The kissing of hands and of feet in stirrups, the right to veto the veche and the right to the first night on the first night…’

‘That would be all right,’ said Korostishevski. ‘A principality of one’s own without any mathematical analysis or differential equations.’

Kurochkin and I were quietly playing cards, a game of Preference. Korostishevski and Kanyuka were sitting in front of us, and we could hear their conversation.

‘Think big, Korostishevski,’ said Kurochkin without looking away from his cards. ‘The days of petty feudal fiefdoms are long gone. Why not conquer a few neighbors, unite them under your iron fist and threaten the Swedes?’

‘And you’re under threat, too, pal,’ said Kanyuka coolly. ‘You’re about to take another trick when you’ve declared misère. Keep up now. Matters of state are being decided without you. Not just any old cook is capable of running a feudal principality, despite what Lenin said.’

The caravan of buses travelled almost as far as Zhytomyr without stopping or other holdups, ticking away the kilometers of the M-17 in orderly fashion. The two buses directly in front of us were the first to break away from the caravan. They turned south for Berdychiv. Soon it was our bus’s turn, and blinking its lights in farewell it headed north off the M-17. Somewhere beyond Chernyakhiv, on the border of the Volodar-Volyn district, lay Greater Apple.

Dusk had fallen by the time we found the village, so it was the next day when we had a look around. It was small, its main street swimming in autumnal mud. Apple orchards circled it to the east and west, and its northern end led to the banks of the mighty Siberian-European ‘River’ Druzhba—oil pipeline of friendship—and just beyond the pipeline began pine forest. But we hadn’t been brought to this backwoods to pump oil. We were here to pick apples—Antonovkas and Simirenkos.

And when you think about it, what else is there for radiophysics students to do in the autumn?

The village’s main thoroughfare, Lenin Street, had been paved back in the 1950s and, although it was still passable, immediately beyond the village it turned into a rusty bog, by turns puddle or battered, broken road. The road went through the apple orchards, dividing them in half. On one side grew Antonovkas; on the other clusters of Simirenko. In Greater Apple everything came in twos, doubled and halved with fruity dualism. We, too, were halved, not by any particular rationale but simply into two brigades. One brigade was entrusted with Antonovkas, the other with Simirenkos. Kurochkin and I got Simirenkos.

‘Reinettes are prized winter apples. What kinds of Reinette do you know?’ We were being addressed by a local agronomist. Or perhaps a storekeeper or orchard manager. That is to say he was a village intellectual, wearing glasses, jacket, peaked cap and moustache (the better to hide his faint, sly smile), and he had decided to show us that we were a bunch of young louts from the capital. We were too lazy to argue with him. We were altogether too lazy.

‘Now remember… No, you’d better write it down. Reinettes include the Baumann, Canadian, Cassel, Champagne, English, Kursk golden…’

‘He’s reciting them in alphabetical order,’ Kurochkin whispered into my ear. ‘He must have memorized them his first year in college and won’t skip a single letter.’

‘Look,’ I said. ‘He’s counting them off on his fingers behind his back. So that he won’t forget.’

‘Landsberg, Orleans—that’s your red saffron—paper—same as Champagne—Pisguda, sery—or grey—and…’ Here the gardener made a fist ‘and the Simirenko.’

Then, behind his back, he stuck out an index finger and began brooding. Something was wrong.

‘And the Simirenko,’ he repeated, ‘is before you.’

Politely Mishka Reingarten reminded the gardener that he had forgotten about the Bergamot. Mishka said, ‘The Bergamot Reinette was invented by Michurin who grafted the bud of an Antonovka seedling to a pear. It’s medium in size, rounded and has a long storage life.’

‘I give him a C,’ pronounced Kurochkin, sentencing the gardener mercilessly.

‘Correct,’ said the gardener. ‘The Bergamot. In all there are twelve varieties of Reinette.’ Then, for some reason, he made a victory sign above his head. ‘How did you know that?’ he asked Mishka.

‘Research,’ said Mishka firmly.

‘How did you know that?’ asked Kurochkin an hour later. Mishka smirked craftily. Mishka often smirked craftily. He was working on a GTE—Global Theory of Everything. Einstein’s theory of relativity fitted within the GTE as a special case. To stop the other students on the course and the residents of the dormitory from disturbing him Mishka worked on his GTE at night. And, so that he would not disturb them, he worked in a cupboard. He would put on a hooded anorak, grab a fat all-purpose notebook with dividers and a reading lamp that he secured to his neck and would spend hours at a stretch in his cupboard. He slept during the day, and he didn’t go to classes at all.

‘Have you ever opened up The Great Soviet Encyclopedia?’ Mishka asked Kurochkin.

‘I suppose so.’

‘At the letter K?’

‘Why would I do that?’ Kurochkin didn’t get it.

‘Have you never even looked up your own last name?’

‘I don’t know—maybe. Kurochkins are as common as muck.’

‘Maybe so. But Reingartens are few and far between. So I was flipping through the encyclopedia looking for other Reingartens—’

‘Misha,’ Kurochkin said politely, ‘I’m talking about apples.’

Mishka sighed heavily. ‘Use your head, Kurochkin. “Reingarten” and “Reinette” are on the same page of the encyclopaedia. Comprenez-vous?’

‘Oui,’ said Kurochkin.

Kanyuka and Korostishevski had been assigned to the Antonovs. I saw them being lectured by another mustachioed gardener about Antonovkas. He also kept his hands behind his back and carefully counted on his fingers. What he was counting I don’t know. Natasha Belokrinitskaya ended up with the Antonovkas. Kurochkin and I acted like nothing had happened.

Greater Apple was a two-party village. Antonovs picked Antonovkas—which they moistened and sent to the confectionery factory in Zhytomyr—and they ate apple- flavored jelly and pastilles. They were proud that their apple was the people’s choice. The Antonovs worked the orchard in three brigades called ‘Antonov the Aviation Builder,’ ‘Maksim Antonovich the Democrat,’ and ‘Antonov-Ovseenko the Unlawfully Repressed.’ The Antonovs always nominated their own candidate for chairman and intrigued in every conceivable way against the Simirenkovs. This included filing complaints against the Simirenkovs with the district and regional committees of the Party. The Antonovs thought the student brigade might call itself ‘Fyodor Antonov the Artist,’ but our ladies reacted with unexpected alacrity, shooting down the artist and giving their brigade the highly original name of ‘Antonovka.’ Touched, the Antonovs appointed Kanyuka as brigadier.

But the Simirenkovs were also serious. Over the past forty years they had given the Antonovs just as good as they got and would offer no quarter in future either. They, too, always had their own candidate for chairman and their own people in the district and the region. Simirenko Reinettes from Greater Apple were sold all over the Soviet Union—from Murmansk in the north all the way to Nakhodka on the Sea of Japan. There was a cock-and-bull story going around Greater Apple that before Khrushchev opted for corn, he had been ready to plant Simirenkos the length and breadth of the country—apparently he had loved them since childhood. But then the Antonovs had sent a courier to Moscow to tell Nikita Sergeyevich that certainly the Simirenko is a good apple, but it can’t withstand mange. They recommended the Antonovka. It was the same old story—the Antonovka was the people’s choice. Nikita Sergeyevich could not have cared less—ever since Lysenko’s day he’d had his fill of Antonovs—so he dashed off a few lines of invective verse to the gardeners and flew to America. But, as history tells us, he came back a changed man and decided to plant corn. Evidently it was all the same to him what the country grew. And there had been the Americans with their corn. So much for the people’s apple and Lysenko.

The Simirenkovs also worked in three brigades: ‘Lev Simirenko’ (the vigilant instructors from the regional committee forbade ‘Levok Platonovych’), ‘Platon Simirenko’ (publisher of the 1860 edition of Taras Shevchenko’s The Bard) and ‘Vladimir Simirenko the Repressed’ (the son of Levok Platonovych, first director of the Institute of Pomology). They were ready to find a fourth Simirenko and a fifth for our brigade, but we were planning to make do with the humble name of Reinette. The Simirenkovs were aggrieved by our lack of discrimination—it scarcely mattered to us which of their precious Reinettes we chose. In order to please them without losing face, we compromised and called ourselves ‘Reinette—S.’ The S was a capital letter, never ever to be written lower-case s, so that, God willing, it wouldn’t be confused with the sery variety… Kurochkin headed up the brigade, and its general management fell to Associate Professor Nedremailo.

At long last assigned to brigades, the brigades given names and schedules drawn up for kitchen duties and visits to the bath house, we were launched into battle against the harvest of this rose-family fruit tree… or that is what ought to have happened, but they were in no hurry to let us loose on the apples. Now it was time for theory. After all, how can you pick apples without knowing how to lay a garden, graft and regraft, properly keep cuttings in winter and shape the crown of a fruit tree? Drawings of seedlings crowded the blackboard along with examples of the right and wrong way to plant and how to prepare the garden for winter. Quotations from Columella on yellowing cardboard signs were stuck to the classroom walls.

The time passed. They fed us, let us bathe once a week and showed us a film every other day. But they wouldn’t let us at the apples. The rains passed, and it was the middle of September, a warm and golden time of year. I regarded the treetops and rooftops of Greater Apple with longing, unable to comprehend what the problem was.

Not that I was itching to get into the orchard and fill wooden crates with apples. But there ought to be a reason for everything. Here I couldn’t see it.

As it turned out, there was a reason. In Greater Apple Antonovkas were harvested in late August and Simirenkos in early October. They needed students in August and in October. Two applications went out to the district. The district replied that they would send students only once, either in August or October. Take your pick. But it was impossible for Greater Apple to pick one or the other—the interests of the Antonovs were blocked mercilessly by the Simirenkovs, and any proposal made by the Simirenkovs was taken by the Antonovs as a personal slight. Yet Greater Apple couldn’t refuse the students. If they refused them once, next time they wouldn’t be offered at all. Which is how we ended up there in September. So as not to upset the Antonovs nor wound the Simirenkovs. But in September there was no work for us in the orchard.

When I heard this story in all its marvelous simplicity I grasped why the village didn’t have a small canning facility of its own, and why—at the loss of time, money, and face—the apples were still being shipped to Zhytomyr the same way as forty years before.

It doesn’t matter where I learned this, and I can’t remember anyway. On the other hand, I distinctly remember how one day in class, languishing from boredom and inactivity, Kurochkin sent Korostishevski a message via pneumatic tube.

Korostishevski read the note and vanished. A reply came in the evening. Not from Korostishevski but Kanyuka.

‘You’re an aggressor,’ I said to Kurochkin once I had read Kanyuka’s letter. ‘So how are you going to reply?’

‘What’s to stop me saying I’ll meet them with tactical nuclear weapons?’

‘And how is the Kurozh Principality going to get hold of nuclear weapons?’

‘How are their knights going to get hold of suitcases?’

‘They’re having their little joke.’

‘Well, so am I.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s not the same thing.’

Kurochkin shrugged. ‘Well, I like it.’

‘I’d better write them myself or you’ll spoil it all.’

And I wrote:

That evening we drew up the Greater Apple Accord and divvied up everything that could be divvied up. Korostishevski claimed Western Europe; Kanyuka took Asia; Kurochkin, Russia; and I fancied the rather barbarous title Khan of the Encampment of Zaporozhye. Then we concluded several further agreements. We applied a common algorithm to determine army size, population growth and technological development. Later on I discovered that the game of Civilization is very similar. But how could we have been playing Civilization in Greater Apple in 1983? We were just playing a game. There was nothing else to do. You can’t just drink vodka all the time. It gets boring.

There were four of us, which made voting awkward. We kept coming to an impasse, two against two. We called in Reingarten for a fifth. Not so much for the game as for an uneven vote. Mishka took Mongolia, named Abakan his capital, dubbed himself Lama Undur Gegen and issued a decree that all of Mongolia should plunge itself into a state of nirvana.

‘Tell me, Alex,’ he would begin, gripping my wrist in a show of urgency, ‘how did you ever come up with such a strange game in the first place? Where did it all come from? Where did you find all these emperors, khans, caliphates? You’re Soviet students. You’re at university in the capital. Who gave you the idea? Go ahead and tell me everything you know. Don’t be afraid. You know you can be straight with me. We’re not going to hurt you.’

What did he want me to say? ‘Where did we get the idea? Someone planted it, Citizen Boss. Your secret agent and informer of many years’ standing, Associate Professor Nedremailo.’ Was that it? And what about the rest of them?

‘Do you remember The Black Book and Shwambraniya? That’s where we got the idea. Lev Kassil…’

‘Of course,’ nodded Sinevusov. ‘So you’ve said.’

I said this to him every day. No less than five times a day.

We were leaving Greater Apple—faces well fed, in fine health and with horticultural theory tucked under our belts—but we hadn’t picked a single fruit. September was drawing to a close, and the rains were beginning. And the denizens of Greater Apple were making ready for the advance on the Simirenkos.

A dull sugary syrup; a cloudy, cloying swill; a sweet dross like that bottled and sold by my current employer—that’s what my memory now dredges up. As different from what really happened as a glass of brown cola named for an apple is different from the apple itself—from the firm, fragrant, fresh apple, its yellow skin shot through with red. This Greater Apple tale harbored masses of nuances, inconsequential subtleties only just perceptible and all but indescribable. It was chock full of details that were insignificant but no less vivid for that. Such as the cottages we stayed in. We didn’t stay in a school or together in a dormitory where we would have been supervised but scattered around the village. Antonovs with Antonovs, Simirenkovs with Simirenkovs. Kurochkin and I got a big room and an old man in a green velvet tunic as our host. I think his name was Petro. He had a wife and children long grown-up whom he regarded with such contempt that they just tried to ignore him. Which wasn’t easy. Petro loafed around the village for days on end in a pair of ossified trousers, a Tyrolean hat so soiled it shone and the green velvet tunic with a pipe in the breast pocket. In the evening we played him at Preference for kopecks while drinking something vile and guffawing at his tall stories. His distant pre-Apple past crept repeatedly into his views and observations. Although his past was his own business. We only listened to the old man and didn’t try to catch him out. Why ruin a good story? A little later, after the Greater Apple Accord had been signed, the countries parceled out and the game under way, Korostishevski and Kanyuka started dropping by. They were Antonovs. Petro didn’t like Antonovs. And he took a dislike to Korostishevski and Kanyuka. Kanyuka interfered in his yarns—clarifying, correcting, asking questions big and small. Just to show what was obvious. The thoroughly embittered Petro managed to sit them down for a game of Preference and stripped them of their shirts—Korostishevski lost seven roubles, and the impudent Kanyuka lost nearly fifteen, all he had. Petro cheated, that was clear, but how he did it we couldn’t figure out. Of all of his children only his youngest daughter didn’t sneer and turn away when he came into the house. She spent the evenings with him in our room, listening to his fables and silently watching Mishka Reingarten. She watched Mishka, and Mishka, like the rest of us, watched Natasha Belokrinitskaya. Was I really supposed to tell Sinevusov about Natasha? How much a trifling, fleeting morning conversation with her meant to each of us, and her attention, and her indifference? Surely without Natasha there never would have been a game. Rather, the game would have ended in Greater Apple. There, that’s enough about Greater Apple, or I’ll never finish the story.