Stargorod: A Novel in Many Voices

Petrushka

“Petrushka, is the beer here?”

“Mhhhmmh,” he grins and moves his lips trying to say something, but words never come.

“How many thousands do you got there already?”

“Mhhhmmh”

Everyone knows Petrushka counts money. He’s been caught at it more than once – writing columns of numbers on a piece of paper, all in thousands, doing sums.

“Petrushka, what are you going to do with all that cash?”

“Mhhhmmh,” he makes a scooping motion with his hands. It’s all his, all his. He sits in the store’s backroom, stares at the picture of the actress Nemolyayeva pinned to the wall, and counts something on his fingers. He mutters sometimes.

“Watch out, Petrushka, you’ll get to be a millionaire!”

He shakes his head happily.

Why would Oleg take someone like that to work in the store? Well, no one else would come, would they? Petrushka doesn’t know any better – so he went to work for Oleg.

After work, Oleg is building a house. A mansion. Two floors, an underground garage, yellow brick, a fireplace. He’s put a welded iron fence around the plot. And the first thing he did was build a greenhouse. Then he parked his boat next to it. And his UAZ.

The construction crew is Oleg himself, his wife, his wife’s cousin and Petrushka – he’s the runner, the go-there-get-me-that guy. Oleg doesn’t have any children. He makes sugar-coated cranberries. Not himself, of course: he drives around making deals and heads out to the villages to buy cranberries when they are in season.

“Oleg? He won’t touch anything less than a semi! Everyone knows that. But you can’t build all summer from cranberries alone, if you know what I mean.”

They are always at the site. Every Saturday. Every Sunday. They got the roof done, and started on the inside jobs, were laying the parquet floors.

“Of course he’s got parquet floors! You should see his fireplace – Stepanych charged 500 for the work alone.”

“Five hundred? Didn’t I hear he borrowed 25,000 at the bank, though?”

“Twenty-five? Well, let’s see... The brick for the fireplace – it’s the special yellow kind, fire-proof. Then the insert itself, the grate...”

“Mhhhmmh, Mhhhmmh,” Petrushka’s right there, follows the men around. They sort of – wave him off, let’s say, not hard. He stayed down for a bit. But then he got up and walked away like nothing; it’s not the first time for him. He wiped the blood that was coming out of his nose and muttered – was he counting something? He had to have been.

At night, on Monday, Oleg’s house caught on fire. Oleg got there after the firefighters – to see what was left. He lives in town, at his wife’s flat. Out here, on the Lake, this was supposed to be their winter home. The women had to hold him down, or else he would have pulled all his hair out. You would too if your house burned down.

At the other end of the village, in his own house, Petrushka lay on the couch. After his mother died, he moved onto her couch – his other bed is falling apart really. He lay and sniffed at his hands: do they smell of kerosene? He’d sniff, and then snicker, and make small noises, and then cry, sobbing, choking on his tears. He shook his clean-washed finger at someone invisible and kicked the arm-rest.