Stargorod: A Novel in Many Voices

Stargorod Vendetta

Things are not what they used to be. Things have lost their gravitas. Their weight. Gone from the Lake are the famous roach, each of which weighed a man’s arm down to his knee; gone from the Monastery Hill is the grove of great pagan oaks, uprooted one day by a sudden hurricane. A single stump remains as a memory, and it is mangled by fire – every summer, weekend lovers of shashlyk and loud music set it alight but can’t burn it down. Gone is the mighty ancient tribe of bogatyr heroes from our land: where is the cunning Alyosha, the iron-armed Dobrynya, the spear-wielding Peresvyet? Who are the new Taras Bulba and his son Ostap? You couldn’t even find a man to match our own Opanas Perebey-Gora,⁸ who found his way to Stargorod from the provincial Gradizhsk, where in Gogol’s times any kozak could easily trace his lineage to the glorious atamans and colonels of the Sich.⁹ The Ukrainian famine of ‘33 and the times that followed scattered the last descendants of the free steppes far and wide. Opanas’ family was one of the first to retrace the historic route from the Vikings to the Greeks in the opposite direction, and settled in our lands for good. The father plied his trade as a smith, and the son, thanks to his granite fists, native Ukrainian musicality, and long linen-blond curls, instantly became the ringleader of his Kopanka neighborhood. Even the downtown high-rollers considered it a great honor to be counted among Opanas’ friends. But of his entire retinue, Opanas was most attached to the quiet Vassily Panyushkin. It was their unbreakable bond that led, in the end, to Opanas’ untimely demise.

To be fair, his death was in a way predicted by a roaming Gypsy woman back in the blessed pre-war times. After the fortune teller saw our golden-haired hero, appraised him, and bestowed on him whatever gifts she had to give, she prophesied him a death not of bullet or bayonet, but of common wood, and hearing this, Opanas lost what little fear he ever had in his mighty heart and, armed with his uncommon strength and significant wits, won himself on the fields of the last war the glory of a merciless and elusive partisan. Opanas became the right hand of Vanka Grozny, the Terror of the Krauts, later fought all the way to Berlin with the regular army, and came home unscathed: medals all across his chest and a sack full of lighters, silver spoons and famous Solingen knives, each with a pair of twins emblazoned on the blade, dancing their German gopak.

Opanas died as he had lived his short life: wildly and heroically. One quiet Sunday noon, an NKVD truck arrived in Kopanka to pick up the falsely maligned citizen Panyushkin, Vassily. Opanas, who by that hour, as was his custom, had already imbibed a significant amount of home-brewed mead, reclined in repose under an apple tree next to his smithy. When he heard Maria Panyushkina’s wailing, Opanas Perebey-Gora rose and without bothering to sort things out any further, or perhaps taking the apparitions in blue cockards for the devil’s own minions, picked up his heavy sledge-hammer and went to fight the noontime demons. The NKVD guys were at first taken aback by the sight of the fierce kozak, and even let go of the unresisting Vassily. They shouted a warning, trying to reason with the ferocious descendant of the glorious steppe warriors. But what was their yelp, their serpents’ hiss, their crows’ caws to a partisan full of honey-mead? Opanas struck once, and then again, and the NKVD bastards were dispatched straight into the gaping maws of hell. Their heads burst like ripe pumpkins; their impure blood squirted and poured onto our long-suffering land and stained their well-shined chrome-leather boots. For the third time the sledgehammer rose – and fell into the side of the truck, splinters flying in every direction. The rookie at the wheel, white with fright, hit the gas, and the lopsided truck lurched and got stuck in the Panyushkins’ fence. The lieutenant in charge of the arrest finally recovered his wits, tore at his holster, and whipped out his TT gun so glorified in movies and songs, and fired the entire clip into Opanas. But so great was Opanas’ strength that even shot-through with bullets and blind with pain, he raised his hammer one more time and crashed it again into the wooden side of the trapped truck.

Why did Opanas choose to fight the inanimate truck, the one object on the scene that was truly, when you think about it, innocent? Why did he not lunge, with his last breath, to finish the evil lieutenant? Somehow, he must have seen doom itself in the spasms of the growling, foul-smelling machine; he must have sensed somehow that it wasn’t the scoundrel that shot at him he had to fear – but this, the iron beast that trembled and shook in its rage. Opanas’ last strike threw the driver off his hard seat, and when he fell back, he hit the reverse, the truck jerked again – and its half-shattered wooden back crushed Opanas against the willow tree behind him.

So perished the son of kozaks, Opanas Perebey-Gora – not taken by a bullet, not pierced by the honest bayonet, but buried in a pile of wood that crashed upon him and took out the light. His soul was received by the angels of heaven, but his body was left to the mercy of his enemies and vanished forever in the dungeons of their building as material evidence of his attack. Along with his body disappeared Opanas’ mighty sledgehammer and the primary cause of the battle, the harmless beekeeper Vassily Panyushkin. Thus did the Gypsy woman’s prophecy come true. This transpired in the year one thousand nine hundred and fifty one.

Our province, we must admit, has always lagged behind metropolitan trends. The arrival of postal service and telegraphic communication, which ended both the style and the desirability of epistolary correspondence as a soul-restoring pastime of the eradicated classes, which now delivers Moscow’s orders with lightning speed to the most distant cities and towns of our far-flung empire, stretched the long hand of the law and, in the early fifties, tightened its grip on the throats of all the not-deported-far-enough. Their sympathizers and collaborators could do little in our province to extinguish the old, well-nurtured hatred for the mysterious and ever-scheming Trotskyists.

Grigory Panyushkin, a humble Petrograd priest, was arrested by the Cheka the morning after the attempted assassination of Lenin during the night of September 1, 1918, did his time on the Solovki,¹⁰ and upon his return felt no desire to reside in our northern capital. Instead, he settled in Stargorod, where, since he had no chance of ever fulfilling the grain quotas required of independent farmers, he signed up for the Kopanka kolkhoz. In 1941 he went to the front, and vanished there without a trace. The only thing he left behind was his son – the above mentioned Vassily, who plied his partisan trade on the Lake’s Black Shore with his mighty friend, Opanas the smith.

In his own time, Vassily, before he, too, vanished without a trace in the dungeons of the Stargorod NKVD, also begat a son who was subsequently raised by his mother in complete ignorance of his father, an enemy of the people. Maria Panyushkina lived in an instantly acquired and never abating anxiety vis-a-vis Stargorod’s special organs, so decisive in their actions and so doggedly persistent in tracking down anyone they might have missed. Here it is important to note that the report that drew said organs’ attention to Vassily Panyushkin was written by none other than Stepan Kandyba, a disabled veteran who, in his youth, had served in the Petrograd Cheka and arrested Father Grigory. Kandyba once stopped by the priest’s son’s bee farm, got a good deal on some stolen kolkhoz honey, and became curious about the origins of the beekeeper’s last name. Over a glass of excellent mead, the innocent Vassily happily shared his family’s hard-scrabble story with this total stranger, which prompted Kandyba to look up a few dates, connect the dots, and report his suspicion to his own son, Pyotr Kandyba, a lieutenant of the Stargorod NKVD. Pyotr ordered his father to submit a full, anonymous report in the required format; in due course, it brought about the bloody and heroic battle described above.

Many years passed. The veterans all got their medals; even an Order of the Red Star found its addressee after years of zig-zagging through various offices. The Young Historians Society produced a display titled “Partisan Heroes of Stargorod” and placed it in the large window of the Stargorod Telegraph. Time erases old grudges, heals old wounds, and restores heroes to their rightful place, no matter how long they’ve been forgotten or how much they’ve been despised. Portraits of both Opanas Perebey-Gora and Vassily Panyushkin graced the Young Historians’ display.

As one might expect, they ran out of room before they could post the picture of the Grozny Ivan. But by this time the grave of the old partisan – who had died after being stabbed in the neck with a thief’s fillet after losing his legs in the post-war GULAG, as a result of which misfortune he came to occupy the throne of the local holy fool – was considered by the female population of Stargorod to be a miracle-working and sacred site. Women made pilgrimages to the cemetery because rumor had it that the old man could cure many maladies from beyond the grave. The authorities at the time were only just beginning to shake off their uniformly atheistic proclivities; the pictures of Opanas and Vassily were placed at the very top of the display, where they appeared to claim the status of the partisan movement leaders. The Memorial society awarded Grandma Masha regular food assistance, but the old woman, terrified once and for all by her husband’s arrest and sudden disappearance, refused to accept it, hiding her deeply-seated fear beneath false pride.

Without Memorial’s sausages and other fats, Maria Panyushkina’s life took a turn deeper into poverty, aggravated by the fact that her son Grigory had fallen in with the wrong crowd and managed to land in the local prison with a two-year sentence. One can’t judge the lad too harshly, however: he returned from the army to an old mother sitting on a threadbare couch before an ancient Temp TV, a flee-ridden dog, and the oppressive poverty of living on a single pension. Visiting Grigory in prison, Maria finally told him the story of the bloodbath in her black yard, of Uncle Opanas’ heroic intervention, and of Grigory’s own, unlawfully persecuted father. Somehow, the tale inspired a hope for a new life in her wayward son. The Kandyba family was also mentioned, and firmly fixed in Grigory’s memory. Having found, albeit belatedly, a real father, the boy decided to avenge him, and even applied for parole, which he did not get. Nonetheless, he was a changed man when he came out.

Never having seen anything good from people in uniform, Grigory now had an ancestral bone to pick with them. So, soon after he came out, he won himself new fame in the story with Elsa’s inheritance: Grigory defended the foreign fortune that had befallen Elsa, his neighbor, out of the blue, by fighting off a crooked prison guard who aimed to confiscate the money by pretending to be a KGB officer. The thirst for vengeance dimmed a bit in Grigory’s heart after this incident, since he had the opportunity to whip the crook publicly – in the streets – for his misdeeds, before a large crowd of guffawing locals. But it did not die completely. His success, however, made him popular and some good people got him a job as a meat cutter in at the Stargorod market – a position passionately desired by many but available to almost no one.

Old Maria Panyushkina lived her last days in luxury: Grigory bought her new furniture, acquired a color TV and a VHS player, and married well. Before she died, his mother had a chance to play with her grandson, who was named, naturally, Vasilko. Maria died in dignity and comfort, yet still fearing for her high-flying son and praising the Good Lord daily for not abandoning her and letting her sleep on clean linen sheets in her last days. She died, and her son buried her in the Stargorod cemetery, affixing to her grave a large cross welded of stainless steel.

In the course of all this, he almost forgot his desire for vengeance – he had too much going on: a butcher’s work is hard and stressful, and not only gives, but also claims much in both spiritual energy and nerve cells, which, as we all know, do not regenerate.

In the meantime, a certain lieutenant Stepan Kandyba arrived in Stargorod after graduating from the MVD¹¹ training institute. By sheer accident, he had attended school at the other end of Stargorod and up till this moment, fate had kept his and Grigory Panyushkin’s paths far from crossing. Fate was saving him; fate waited for the proper occasion; fate raised and educated him, fed him and brought him up in the safe harbor of a retired major’s home. Fate then ensured his political literacy in the halls of the MVD institute, and finally returned him to his native city, where it placed him right at the exit from the bridge where you turn to go into the suburbs.

Stepan Kandyba was honest, principled, and did not, unlike many of his fellow officers, accept bribes, for which he was disliked by his superiors and cursed at not only by motorists violating traffic rules but, of late, also by his wife, who was trying to feed and clothe a family of four on the combined income of an honest traffic cop and a typist.

The momentous encounter occurred on a Sunday afternoon. Grigory Panyushkin was in a hurry to get home: he had picked his wife up at the hairdresser’s, and they were worried about their boy being left at home alone for so long. Grigory drove, as always, fast but carefully. At the exit from the bridge, he obeyed the stop sign, but the front wheels of his car edged just beyond the white line.

The violation was duly observed, and a traffic policeman’s wand appeared, ordering Grigory to pull over; a very young lieutenant saluted the shocked Grigory and introduced himself as Stepan Kandyba. A short exchange followed:

“You have got to be kidding me. I drive here twice a day and know all you guys by name.”

“You have violated the rules!”

“Really, pal, are you sure you want to mess with me? It’ll come back to bite you.”

“License and registration, please.”

“You can have those, of course, but you look new to me. What did you say your name was?”

“Inspector Kandyba.”

So transpired the first round of the Stargorod vendetta: the inspector won an easy victory and Grigory got a traffic violation on his record. Grigory threw the license onto his wife’s lap, and said to the lieutenant, quietly but very clearly:

“Tell your guys the butcher Grishka said hello, and told you to tell them that the only meat they’ll get from me is a dead ass’s ears.”

He pulled away, but just couldn’t get over how bold and rude his blood enemy was. At home he let off some steam by yelling at his family.

Stepan Kandyba, when he returned to the station, reported the incident, and was immediately dragged over the coals, with much cursing. It was not among his duties to quarrel with the only butcher shop in town. At home, his wife also had some very unpleasant things to say to him. They fought, and as a result, the young Ms. Kandyba put her foot down on the subject of conjugal relations, and banished her spouse to the couch for a week. Ragged and unloved, poor Stepan began to contemplate taking his radar gun out to the highway, but inside him there was a feeling, something like pride, that kept him from breaking his oath for the time being.

On Friday, his boss Terebikhin ordered Stepan to ready a car.

“We need to buy some meat, bro. Let’s go see Grishka at the market.”

Kandyba was in urgent need of meat. A good roast would be just the thing to appease his wife, but the memory of Sunday’s encounter made him deeply uncomfortable. He determined not to go into the store with his boss, but Terebikhin ordered him to follow, and the order, together with the irresistible pull of flesh, both the pieces of it hanging on the butcher’s hook and his own, starved for a woman’s touch, won.

“Aha! Here you are, my friend. You came yourself,” Grigory greeted them from the manager’s office.

“Greetings, Grigory Vasiliyevich!” Terebikhin either forgot all about his officer’s misstep or was pretending that he knew nothing of it.

“I’ve no meat for you.”

“Grisha, my dear, whatever is the matter with you?”

“Ask your lieutenant there why he put a thing on my record.”

Given such an occasion, Grigory told the heart-rending tale of how he was hurrying home, with his wife fresh from the hairdresser’s, and how he was suddenly and rudely stopped, and fined, his pure record violated for nothing.

“Oh, Grisha, he’s new here. What’s the problem? Give me your license. Stepan, fix it!”

While the meat was being carved and weighed and packed for his boss, while soothing, respectful conversation was being had in the butcher shop, Stepan Kandyba sped in the station car to the DMV, clear at the opposite end of the city, to get the hated butcher’s record corrected. He fixed it, and he returned, and he gave the license back to the butcher, and... unable to stand it any longer and blushing like a boy, he asked, with a stutter:

“It’s done, Grigory. Are we... good, then? Could I, by any chance, have some meat?”

Grigory roared with laughter, and his mighty voice bounced off the arched ceiling of the old butcher shop, much like the legendary roar of the heroic Opanas Perebey-Gora, the kind of roar you don’t hear these days.

“Come, come, my friend, I’ll cut you some. But mind you, Terebikhin pays three rubles, but for you it’s five-fifty, so you’d know your place.”

Grigory prodded Stepan to a door, and he went down the stairs into the basement, with a shamed little smile on his face. Behind him, Grigory Panyushkin whistled a prison tune as he walked and played with his heavy dummy – a short-handled butcher’s hatchet, razor-sharp.

A lump of pork was hacked off in a blink. Weighed. Wrapped. An excellent cut from the back side, from the leg’s very pink, tender center. The bill came to 52 rubles. The poor Kandyba had no such money on him, and was forced to request a loan from Terebikhin’s fat wallet.

The entire uncomplicated procedure was accompanied by such nasty snickering (performed by Terebikhin himself, the store’s manager, and Grigory, who snickered while he wiped his glistening blade on his apron) that poor Kandyba cracked: he took his boss home, stopped by the station where he stuffed the meat into the fridge, grabbed the radar gun and went out on the highway.

That night, slightly tipsy from the vodka his wife poured him at dinner, and with his flesh appeased (to his wife’s own satisfaction as well; she, too, was tired of fasting), Stepan Kandyba cried quietly into his pillow next to his wife’s blissful, soft snoring.

On the other end of the city, Grigory Panyushkin tossed and turned in his own hot bed. He should have been happy, he should have been enjoying his victory, but for some reason all he could do was turn from one side to the other and whisper a curse at someone. He finally realized he would not be able to fall asleep, and so he got up, went to his son’s bedroom and stood there for a while, looking down at the sleeping boy. Then he ran his heavy hand gently over the boy’s fuzzy hair and went to the window: the moon hung, large and orange. The sight of it so captivated Grigory that he stayed at the window, not moving, unable to take his eyes off of it.

“Just look at that,” he whispered, utterly mesmerized by the moon’s alien, frightening beauty.

He had never before seen such a moon, even in prison, where such things can claim a man’s attention to a degree that is truly extraordinary.

8. His last name literally means “break a mountain.”

9. Kozak is Ukrainian for Cossack. The Sich refers to the independent military republic that existed on the Dnieper in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

10. The attempted assassination of Lenin in 1918 accelerated the Red Terror. Solovki is Solvetsky Islands, the White Sea monastery that was transformed into one of Soviet Russia’s first political prisons.

11. Ministry of Internal Affairs.