Stargorod: A Novel in Many Voices

Clever Elsa

Really, it’s enough to make us laugh. Picture this: just the other day, these two girls show up at our doorstep, fresh-faced students from the Moscow State University Slavic Department, in Stargorod for the first time; they stayed with us for the night. A friend of mine had arranged this, and sent us a package, much appreciated. They brought the usual things: some sausage without too much fat, three packs of Indian tea, and a whole kilogram of buckwheat. That’s nothing to sneeze at, especially the buckwheat – we’ll do it up with some onions, and a bit of garlic, and some bacon fat, and a tiny drop of oil so it doesn’t burn, and “It’s a treat, for those who know!” as our mother-in-law puts it. The metropolitan maidens enlightened us that, beside familiarizing themselves with Stargorod’s many historical sites, they wished to collect folklore, because... well, suffice it to say that upon hearing their nonsense, my wife and I saw the urgent need to talk them out of this project, because what kind of folklore could the poor things possibly find in our city? They’d just perish, vanish off the face off the earth, and no high-placed friends would help you find them. Long story short, we rerouted them to Kargopol. We hear people there are nicer, and an old lady storyteller lives there – for ten rubles she’ll sing to you about Eruslan Lazarevich until the cows come home. You’ve never heard such folklore.

The girls got excited, bought new tickets, and, basically, we haven’t seen them since. And thank God for that. We know plenty well what Stargorod is like, and they’d never end well here. And this way, they probably wrote long papers, and nice ones too. The girls were smart and cute, not the kind you could let roam Stargorod on their own. Well, “any serious pursuit requires a habit of intellect” as our boiler-room stoker Mikhail Nikanorovich used to say, God rest his soul, you don’t find people like that these days.

There’s hardly any folklore to speak of: our gusli ensemble Russian Skomorokhs and the Birch spoon-players from the Red Proletariat factory spend all their time touring places like Finland and Sweden these days, you hardly even get a chance to hear them at home. So we have to admit that whatever folklore we had is all gone to seed, so to speak. But we do have stories every once in a while.

People around here are for the most part not especially rich; the co-op guys – they’ve made a pretty penny,⁵ and did the Intourist-type moonlighters, but you know their kind – they spend more in one night at the Riflemen Izba than they make in a month. When your money’s quick, it’s work holding on to it. We have our misers, too, of course, who doesn’t? Now, a friend of ours – a lieutenant at the detox that’s housed in the White Monastery on the hill, Anatoly Kretov is his name – told us that he is personally aware (this is through his old connections at the Criminal Unit) of at least two old ladies in town who have 300,000 and 500,000 rubles in their savings accounts respectively. You’d think they’d live a little – and you’d be wrong. Instead, both beg about, look for bottles to turn in for small change, spend their entire days combing through the Victory Park, and haunt the bathhouse. They live in two tiny holes under the merry-go-round on Jolly Hill and pay nobody no mind. Anatoly said they are under secret surveillance – they’ve no family, so it’ll all go back to the government when they croak, but they seem to have plenty of life in them yet...

Or take Stolbyshev, Matvei Semyonovich. You’ve probably heard of him already, only you didn’t know his name and where he came from – we ourselves heard his story in Moscow and Leningrad presented as a genuinely local tale. I wouldn’t be surprised if people in Tver, or, say, Arzamas, soon followed suit and laid their claim on Matvei Semyonovich, but do not let them fool you. We know this for a fact: Stolbyshev is ours, born and raised in Stargorod, and a widely known nut, who’s been to the clinic many times, but was always ultimately let out to return to his usual pursuit – going to the dump to collect various pieces of trash, such as old galoshes, smashed pots, dead birds’ wings, ratchets, padded blankets, and soiled railroad workers’ vests. He wasn’t above picking up a handful of nice dry dirt or some moldy bread crusts either. He dragged all this loot into his tiny room, where he stomped it nice and tight until he packed the entire space up to the ceiling, even blocked out his only window and only left himself a narrow path and a bit of space to set up his cot for the night. The neighbors, finally, caught a whiff of it – you can imagine the smell. Terrible! They sued. They won, of course, and brought in a marshal. This made Matvei Semyonovich very happy: “I’ve been waiting for this for so long,” he said, “I want to make sure the assets are transferred to the government in a proper and legal manner.” By then he’d chained himself to the radiator, so they couldn’t drag him out of his room. “The assets in this room,” he declared, “are worth more than a million! I wish to turn them all over to the government, and in return I would like very little: a room in a first-category retirement home and a military funeral.” And how are you supposed to fight with him, if he’d hidden the key somewhere and you’ve got a court order to clean the place out anyway?

To begin with, they sent for some carriers like they use in field hospitals, and piled stuff on those to take it out. It stank to high heaven – the neighbors rued the day they went to court. But alright, you gotta do what you gotta do. Somewhere in the middle of this cultural layer, so to speak, they came across a giant-sized valenok⁶ with a hole burnt through it, and inside it – 400,000 rubles in hundred- and fifty-ruble bills. They called the Colonel, and began addressing the old man politely as “Grandfather.”

They kept cleaning, and eventually made their way to a couch – they uncovered one in the corner. By this time, obviously, the police sent the neighbors back to their rooms. And in the couch, sewn into the seat were these hefty little sausages: stacks of Imperial ten-ruble coins, a thousand of them altogether. I’ll let you do the math. At the very end, when they cleared the floor, the old man himself showed them a spot under a floorboard where he had hid a small jewelry box, which was filled with pearls and precious stones. We, personally, saw neither the inventory nor the protocol, only know that there was a lot, so much that our Colonel was soon handpicked for a promotion to Moscow. What do you imagine the going rate these days is for a General’s star if the regular 15-kopek-a-glass apple juice sells for twice that much in the co-op? This is what I’m saying.

And the other thing – grandfather’s family did turn up after all, direct heirs, but all they came to say was, “We know nothing, and have no claims.” It might be there was blood on that treasure, or maybe they really just got it all from the old man’s father. Matvei Semyonovich’s father, you now, owned a hardware store back in the NEP⁷ days, and Matvei Semyonovich himself spent most of his life in the kerosene stand in the Old Market – a nice spot to be sure, but not the pearls-and-gems kind of nice! I’ll let you do the math: how long did NEP last? And how long have the new co-ops been around? There, you see the difference? That’s what I’m talking about. There’s more to it, of course: people didn’t start from scratch back then, and they didn’t, old-timers say, use to drink as hard and as deep as they do now, at the Riflemen’s Izba, and the caviar didn’t cost what it does today...

Where do we get all this? From the same Anatoly Kretov, of course – back when this all happened, he had just come back from the army and enlisted as a private in the Criminal Unit, which is how he was able to be personally present at that famous search and property transfer. He only moved to the detox job later: “The criminal life,” he used to say, “is not for me – too nerve-racking.” Well, one can certainly see it that way: he has a family, small children, and they promised him an apartment. Only his nerves are no good anyway; any little thing can start him screaming, and his breath smells of alcohol, like that character in Gogol, you know (and he probably gives the same excuse for it too – that he was born that way).

“You could have snatched a rock for yourself in a blink,” Anatoly once told us. “They all went into a stupor when I pulled out that box.”

But he didn’t take anything. His conscience wouldn’t let him. He turned out to be an honest man, young Criminal Unit officer Anatoly Kretov, and that’s why they made him a sergeant. And honest people don’t make good stories – everyone knows everything about them anyway. One day, maybe, we’ll mention him again – he is an interesting soul, after all, as is any soul, so unique and individual from the moment it comes to this world. But now we’d rather tell you a different story: the one about a dishonest policeman and the clever Elsa.

Listen then:

Elsa Pavlovna Goff came to Stargorod after the war. One way or another, she came to possess a small house on the Right Bank near Kopanka, where our sectarians live. One way or another, she also acquired a son. She went to work as proofreader at the city’s paper, worked there until she retired, and sent her son to the army.

People knew she was German; people also knew she came from somewhere in the Urals or Siberia, or maybe even from Kazakhstan – somewhere far, anyway – but they didn’t pry, and Elsa was German in every way: quiet, neat, her house, albeit decrepit, always painted some happy color, and the gooseberries and raspberries in her orchard, people said, were big as a fist. And her flowers – no one else has such glorious flowerbeds: there were asters – the plain reed kind, and the fancy tubular kind, in yellow, and purple, and red, and some others, terry ones; and chrysanthemums – Betsy, and Golden Star, and Measure, and Slogan, and Sunset (purple with pale white), and Elegy, and Stakhanovite, and Svetlana, and Mariana, and I’m not even going to talk about her sweet peas, and tobaccos, mums, nasturtiums, pansies and lilacs – the plain ones and the Persian ones. You couldn’t possibly count them all. And the apple trees – she had about a dozen of those: late Chinese, early Antonov, Cinnamon, Pippin, Baltic Gold and White Gold – plus a smattering of currants along the fence: black ones to eat, red ones for the jelly – but that’s about it.

Elsa fed herself from her garden, of course, but she never sold much – just a bit here and there, enough to buy tea and sugar, and some potatoes; no one ever held a particular grudge against her, which must mean she was never rich. She didn’t have much time to go to the market anyway: she worked all day, and after work she had her son and her garden to tend. She was just... German, you know? No one envied her, and it was too much trouble competing with her at flowers and stuff. Everyone knew, for example, that she would happily share her seeds or cuttings with her neighbors, and would even come over and show them how to tend her plants, and her little tricks, so that the neighbors came to take a sort of family pride in her and would boast to the downtowners and the folks from the other side of the lake: “Our Elsa – she’s really clever!” But as far as chatting or gossiping went, she never had the time for that; as we say around here, different strokes for different folks.

And so everyone was just getting along fine until one summer a gentleman paid a visit to Kosmodemyanskaya Street. You couldn’t call him anything else – this was an honest-to-goodness capitalist: you would have said so too if you’d seen his trousers, and his jacket, his gold-rimmed glasses, his boots – atop real white India-rubber soles! – and his mustache, oh, his mustache was absolutely not how we do things around here. He went here and there, asked a few questions, and sort of filtered himself through Elsa’s gate. This, then, was her cousin, come all the way from West Germany.

I won’t even waste my breath telling you Elsa was terrified. Put yourself in her shoes: not a peep, not a trace, everything’s forgotten, water under the bridge, and here he is, and it all comes back like in her nightmares: the barge sailing down the Volga, and Kazakhstan... No! And yet – there he is: a living, breathing, flesh-and-blood (and quite well fed) gentleman, and presents his passport issued to one Erik Hoff, and brings out old family photos. Even their family name got passed on, and imagine this – he tracked her down through the Red Cross, bought himself a proper ticket, obtained a tourist visa, and there you have it: “Uncle Peter died in Bonn three years ago. He was ill at the end, didn’t feel well, you know, his mind was... he began to remember Russia a lot, his brother Paul, and you... he made us promise we would find either you or Paul, and...” Basically, she, Frau Elsa-Katarina Hoff was entitled to 10,000 American dollars, her Uncle’s diamond ring, the family silver, and, most importantly, a villa with a lake view and a Mercedes-230 automobile. There was, however, one condition: should she and her family be unwilling to move to Germany, all of the above, except the money and the diamond ring, would be inherited by her German relatives. And before Frau Hoff could even open her mouth, her cousin added that there were quite a few relatives indeed, and it was unlikely that she could ever win a lawsuit over the villa and the lake with the family silver, given that her Uncle was not quite altogether well in his last years.

The clever Elsa happily signed the release, wrapped the cash in piece of cloth and put it in a drawer in another room, and then hid the ring in a different safe place – and hid it well, you won’t ever find it. She poured her newfound relative a cup of coffee with a piece of her famous coffee cake for the road, saw him off to the gate, and rushed back inside.

She locked the door and started thinking.

To the neighbors, of course, she revealed nothing, only said that the German tourist stopped by her place by accident, and kept thinking. And the more she thought, the more she grew scared. It’s a big, terrifying thing, you know – having foreign currency in your own home, and having gotten it from a foreign German person on top of that. But – what are you going to do? – she tormented herself for a week, and then decided to act. She couldn’t stand it anymore. So she went to the bank, showed them a copy of the gift document, certified by a notary, told them everything, and asked to have a foreign currency account opened in her name.

You can imagine the response. They dug around in all their books, called somewhere higher up, leafed through their manuals, never, of course, found anything, and finally said:

“You’re not allowed to have one, in accordance with such-and-such order, issued on such-and-such date, end of story.”

Elsa went home in low spirits. Visions of prison and freight-trains rolling somewhere very far away haunted her. She was scared to be alone in the house, and too afraid to write to her son and, God forbid, get him mixed up in this trouble as well – he had nothing to do with anything, his name and last name were both Russian, and he didn’t even speak a word of German... Which, of course, never stopped anyone before.

She was scared.

And rightly so. They came. Meaning, at first, just like the last time, a single officer came: a field-operations KGB Lieutenant Sidorov. He started off mildly, but later, when she wouldn’t tell him anything, raised his voice and threatened to dig up her old file: “We’ve got everything about you all written down!”

That’s when Elsa confessed, and told him how things were: that her uncle had died, and she had not seen this uncle since she was little, and no one knew where he went and where he lived, so she was shocked to get this inheritance, but she’s a smart woman, she was born here, and she’ll die here, she’s not about to move anywhere from her Motherland, and that’s why she only got ten thousand dollars for giving up her portion of the estate – mind you, she didn’t say anything about the ring – which ten thousand dollars she, as an honest citizen, hurried to put in the bank, but they turned her away.

“You should have called us right away, citizen Hoff. It wasn’t proper to hide this, but alright, no harm done – we were informed anyway. Let’s go ahead and take care of this right away; I’ll come back tomorrow, say, after four, with an accountant. We will accept your dollars with all the proper documentation, of course, and will exchange them for five thousand rubles you’re due according to the current official exchange rate: fifty Central Bank kopeks for one dollar. You did well to refuse the other things: it doesn’t really behoove a Soviet citizen to have property abroad.”

That’s where he slipped – that was too much. Elsa was smart – she smelled a rat, she knew their kind: last time they confiscated even brass tea-glass holders, and now they were turning down a car and a villa just like that? She didn’t let anything show, of course, but she got this sinking feeling inside. She saw her guest off to the gates, saw that he had come in the police car with the flashing light, and began to have some serious doubts.

But – the good Lord was looking out for her: her neighbor, Grishka Panyukhin, her son’s classmate, stopped by to borrow a tenner for a bottle and to ask, among other things, what “that cop from the double” wanted from her.

“What cop, Grishka? From what double?”

“Aunt Elsa, would I lie to you? I just got out of there – spent two years staring at that mug at the gates, I’d know him anywhere.”

“What’s a double, Grisha?”

“The slammer, Aunt Elsa – the city jail.”

“All right, Grisha, I’ll give you a ten, but when are you going to quit drinking?”

She hesitated, digging in her wallet unnecessarily long – trying to decide: to tell or not to tell? Grishka had a good heart, her Andryusha liked him, only Grishka fell in with thieves, and got burned. She couldn’t see another way out – she wouldn’t find anyone else to stand up for her. So she told him.

“Aunt Elsa, are you kidding me? Dollar’s now worth two and a half rubles, and he’s giving you fifty kopeks! Well, that’s a neat trick, you son of a bitch, and where did he get the uniform, Aunt Elsa, he’s just a stinking sergeant, who does he think he is?! Oh, this is good. This is a stroke of luck, this is awesome – so, he’s gotten greedy, he’s too good for what the brothers pay him to sneak things into the slammer, he wants more. All right, let’s play...”

And they made a plan.

The next day, just as they had agreed, a GAZ pulled up to Elsa’s house right after four o’clock, but the “lieutenant” got out of it alone, without the promised accountant.

He came in, apologized dryly that the accountant could not accompany him, put his briefcase on the dining table, pulled some papers out of it and a “Paid” stamp, and arranged it all neatly on the table. Neither did he neglect to produce a stack of banknotes in a white bank wrap – five thousand rubles.

“All right, citizen Hoff, let’s get it done.”

“You’re right about that, let’s get it done. Come on, Katso!” Grishka yelled, jumping out of the wardrobe. From the other room, like a hawk, Katso swooped in – Grishka’s friend, about the size of Aunt Elsa’s wardrobe. The boys knocked the poor “GB officer” down, shook him a bit, and fished his police badge out of his pocket.

“See, Aunt Elsa, and you were scared! Out with him, let’s take it to the street.”

Outside there was a ruckus. Grishka paid a bunch of Gypsy kids to gather a crowd. The boys dragged the fake inspector out of the house, bared his behind, and tethered him face down to a bench. Then they gave him a hundred good lashes, to the crowd’s great amusement – Grishka and Katso did a nice job there. Afterward, they explained the lay of the land to him – to keep mum, or else, they had plenty of witnesses, and they would pack him off to jail at the slightest provocation. Then they kicked him into his car and let him go, only Grishka took his briefcase as “material evidence.” With the five thousand in it.

Later, Katso quietly exchanged Aunt Elsa’s dollars for twenty-five thousand rubles (she gave Grishka the “GB” five on the spot, as they had agreed) and disappeared. No one ever saw him again.

The next morning, Grishka, naturally, woke up famous. People said he even got a laudatory letter from the double. The fake GB-man quit his job in great hurry, and left town – folks wouldn’t let him be. They ragged the girl from the bank who’d dated him for a while for months. Clever Elsa wasted no time either – she put the money to work: put a new foundation under her house, got hot water, raised a heated greenhouse and a garage, bought her son a Dnieper motorcycle and a Sony tape player. Andryusha, however, when he came back from the army, yelled at his mother at first: the dollar, by then, was running between one-to-five and one-to-seven, but cooled off fast – Grishka threw him a couple of welcome parties and they had themselves a grand old time riding the bike around town. They played hard for about six months, and then Andryusha straightened up – his German blood must’ve made itself known – he passed the exams into the Polytechnic and got into books. Grishka also settled down – he now cuts meat at the market.

And what about Elsa herself? That’s why people say she’s smart: she made sure to spend the money as quickly as she could, only put away a thousand – for the funeral, and three more – in an interest account, for a headstone, and then went on living as she always had, nice and quiet.

“They can take four thousand if they want it – I don’t care,” is what she says to the neighbors.

And the ring? How do we know about the ring? Well, no one around here knows for sure, but it’s not for nothing they say “the land fills with rumor,” do they?

5. A 1987 law allowed limited private enterprise in the form of cooperatives.

6. A felt boot.

7. The New Economic Policy, put forward by Lenin in March 1921. The policy was tolerant of small enterprise and engendered a short-lived economic revival in post-revolutionary Russia.