Stargorod: A Novel in Many Voices

Eeny, meeny, miney, moe

“Eeny, meeny, miney, moe, Catch a spider by the toe...”

“Eeny, meeny, miney, moe, Catch a spider by the toe...”

The boy walks back and forth on the veranda.

He walks slowly and sings to himself, under his breath:

“Eeny, meeny, miney, moe, Catch a spider by the toe...”

He’s been doing this for an hour at least. He is wearing nothing but his boxer shorts. It’s hot outside, but he can’t go swimming – Granny scares him with talk of the undertow. The undertow is cold like a sea-dog.

And where the sea-dog lives there are drowned people. The sea-dog eats them. Granny is in the garden, Mom is at work. The boy is some number of years old. He doesn’t know how many exactly. That’s why he is walking and singing:

“Eeny, meeny, miney, moe, Catch a spider by the toe...”

Sometimes, when he comes to “toe” the boy stubs his toe into the floor. Other times he doesn’t, just goes on singing, but he doesn’t stop walking. He walks like this: “eeny” he steps on a floorboard, “meeny” on another, and “miney-moe” he skips over one. Then again: “Catch” is a board, “a spider” is a board, and “by the toe” – skip a board. Sometimes he sings quietly, and sometimes he sings out loud.

Finally, Lyudka can’t take it any more and comes to the veranda door with a slipper in her hand. The boy freezes.

“Will you stop your damn singing, you bastard?”

The boy is silent.

“I’ve had it with you, you hear me? I hear one more peep from you, I’ll bite your head off. I want to sleep.”

Lyudka goes back into the house and slams the door. The boy chuckles, remembers the name Granny calls Lyudka, “heathen.” And – he can’t help himself – begins to sing again:

“Eeny, meeny, miney...”

But Lyudka’s smarter – she hadn’t gone anywhere, she waited behind the door, and now she jumps out and slaps him with his slipper, once, and again!

The boy breaks free, tumbles down the steps into the yard, and yells back at her, angry, through tears:

“You heathen, heathen! You go out God knows where all night, you’re a curse!”

Lyudka doesn’t come down from the porch, preferring to yell back at him from there. She calls him a rickety bastard.

The boy goes out to the street, scratches his butt – the slipper left a mark. Heathen! But you just wait, when you bring one home in the oven we’ll see how you sing! That’s what Granny says. What’s supposed to be in the oven? The boy doesn’t know, but it must be trouble, if Granny keeps talking about it like that.

It’s better not to mess with Granny right now – she’d bite his head off too for her tomatoes and cucumbers.

The boy takes up his complicated song again, but just as he figures out his steps and makes a skip down the street, he stops short again. The mailman has come to the Koldayevs. His horse is grazing untethered, which means Uncle Vova the mailman has come drunk. He’ll be totally drunk when he comes out – the woman Koldayeva makes her own booze.

The boy crawls ahead close to the fence; there, in between acacia bushes, he’s beaten a special path. He is crawling closer to the horse. To Star. First he stares at her, without moving, then finally, slowly, emerges from the bush. Star rolls her eye at the boy, blows air onto his hand, and licks his empty palm. Is anyone listening? The boy looks around to check, then says,

“Star, hare-ware, wonac?”

No, no one’s heard him. Star nods her head in agreement. The boy picks up the reins and climbs onto the cart. Star obediently walks off. She is thirsty, and she pulls the cart to the lake. She goes in deep, until the wheels sink in the mud to the axle. She drinks.

The boy is cut off from the shore. Star stands in the water quietly, waiting for someone to pay attention to her; she moves her ears every so often, and swishes at the flies with her uncombed, burr-studded tail. The boy is scared – there’s water all around him, the cart is stuck. He begins to sing, in a begging, tender voice, “Star, Star, harrico-warico, wo, wac?”

Star doesn’t move, only turns her head now and then to look at the boy with her big, dark eye. She is waiting for help to come.

There’s nothing else to do – the boy resigns himself to his fate and, not letting go of the reins, starts under his breath:

“Eeny, meeny, miney, moe, Catch a spider by the toe...”

Uncle Vova the mailman comes running along the shore, cursing as he runs and swinging his arms like a windmill. But there’s nowhere to hide – the boy’s trapped by the water, and in the water there’s the undertow cold as a sea-dog. Uncle Vova has a long switch. He pulls off his boots and his pants, walks gingerly on the slippery bottom, sways, shakes the switch at the boy. Uncle Vova reaches the cart, grabs the reins from the boy, but loses his balance, slips, and falls into the muddy water. Uncle Vova is very angry. He gets up, and, instead of helping Star, begins whipping the boy with his switch. It hurts a lot.

The boy can’t think straight, dashes around the cart, but there’s nowhere to hide, and he rolls off into the cold water. He runs to the shore, wailing. Undertows or sea-dogs, he’d rather drown!

“You bitch! Bitch!” he yells at the mailman. He picks up a rock but he can’t throw it far enough.

Whimpering, the boy crawls deep into the acacia bushes. His shorts, his belly, his legs – everything is covered with gooey mud. He can’t go home now. Granny will twist his ears, she sure will.

The boy sits in the bushes and rubs spit into his arm where the switch left a red mark. The boy howls in short, small bursts. Then he lies back on the grass – there’s a small patch of green turf in the bushes; here, when the older kids come home from school, they have their headquarters or the trench. Sometimes, they tell scary stories: about the Red Mask, and the dead man, about the White Sheet, and the Black Door, and the Red Boy, and the White Glove, and the Cut-Off Finger, and the Bloody Mary... He is afraid of all of them, but he listens every time, even though he knows the stories by heart. The boy rolls over onto his back, looks at the sky and very soon begins to hum:

“Eeny, meeny, miney, moe, Catch a spider by the toe...”

“Eeny, meeny, miney, moe, Catch a spider by the toe...”

He even begins to drum the beat on his muddy belly. What is this “eeny-meeny-miney-moe” anyway? And where do spiders have toes?