Stargorod: A Novel in Many Voices

Lukeria’s Hill

“And his whole body was covered with camouflage film, and underneath it – wrapped with antennae wires.”

“Come on now, Katka!”

“No, girls, I’m telling you! And when they went to load him up into the truck, this stuff came out of the bullet-holes – in little clumps, like jelly, and some green hairs came out too. They sealed them up in zinc boxes and sent them off to Moscow.”

“Well, I don’t know... it could be true. In America they’ve been keeping a couple of humanoids on ice for years, and that journalist who found out about it disappeared without a trace.”

“Of course he did! They just whacked him quietly, so he wouldn’t go around sticking his nose where it don’t belong.”

A door slams – it’s Ninka from the grocery store.

“Girls, put in your orders – we got in a shipment of sour-cream, who wants some?”

Everyone does, of course.

“What about that thing you promised me? They haven’t brought it yet? Do me a favor, Lukeria Ivanovna, do remember what I asked – when my Andryukha brings some fish, I won’t forget you either.”

Ninka runs out again; Katya and Svetka renew the argument they suddenly remember having.

“I’m telling you, salmon fights with its head! Ask Lukeria Ivanovna.”

“Lukeria Ivanovna, have you heard of this from your Aslan?”

“Leave me alone, girls!”

“Yes, Katya, you leave Lukeria Ivanovna alone now, she is now our Khokhloma painting specialist...”

It goes on like this all day. A habit. No spite. Only their tongues get a bit tired by evening. And their feet. But you can’t compare this to working at the restaurant – there you’re running around in a lather the whole time, it’s mind-numbing, and here you just get a headache sometimes. But you’ve got troichatka to help the headache – doctor Vdovin sends some from the hospital. Not for free, of course, the first leather jacket that ever came went to him.

The consignment store is not the restaurant, not a buffet even, but if you got brains, you can make a living here too. Again, 45 is not 17, you don’t need so much. But still. You need to pay at the garage – for body work and a coat of paint, then you need something for Terebikhin at the Traffic Police – to get the accident off your record... Vitenka, son of a bitch, finally crashed the poor old car. As she goes through her mental to-do list, Lukeria thinks of her Vitenka. The thought makes her smile. It makes her stretch behind her counter. Even though you wouldn’t think there’s much to smile about – Valya’s words are also stuck in her mind. But that’s the kind of woman Lukeria is – these things are not mutually exclusive.

“Here’s what I’ll tell you, girls: no one can replace my Aslan, but when the pickings get slim, Vitenka’s pure gold, it’s worse without him, isn’t it, girls?”

Katya and Sveta smile knowingly: they have husbands and children, too, and it’s quite a load to pull, you don’t have much time for yourself, so all they’ve got are their little smiles, their giggles and jokes, and their dreams and memories of how things were when they were young. It’s quiet at the store – middle of the day, no customers. Lukeria stretches again, intentionally seductively and makes an obscene gesture with her hand. The girls chuckle into their fists. But again without spite or envy – how could anyone be angry with Lukeria?

The woman at the cash register, Terentieva – an almost-retired grandmother – looks up from the till and sighs.

“Lushenka, sweetie-pie, you’ll get into trouble with your appetites. When are you going to settle down, huh?”

The question hangs in the air. The thick sugary silence holds for a bit, and crumbles again – the women move on to the subject of a child’s outfit with a picture of Tom and Jerry on it. For this one item they have received three requests: from the laundry and dry-cleaners, the bakery, and Orsov cafeteria. The bakery wins – the feast of the Trinity is around the corner, and everyone is running short on yeast.

Lukeria drops out of the conversation – she has to think some more. Try as she might to get Valya’s words out of her mind, she can’t stop thinking about what she said about Vitya. Valya, from the campground, stopped by this morning, took her aside, and told her in a whisper that the night before Vitya rented a boat and took a girl from the conservation department at the Museum for a ride to the island. He’s quick like that...

Lukeria goes to the pantry to make lunch for everyone. She’s alone. She can think. She peels potatoes.

✵ ✵ ✵

She came to Stargorod as a 15-year-old from the Lake Country. Having dropped out of the technical school, she went to work at the Riflemen Izba where she spent five years living with the director and by the age of 23 rose from a waitress to the buffet manager. The director procured himself a new one-room apartment and went to jail.

That’s when she found Vassily Antonovich, the head accountant from the conservation department at the museum. Lukeria moved into a three-room apartment, moved her mother in with her from the village, bought her first car and learned to drive – back then, a woman behind a wheel was big news in Stargorod. Vassily Antonovich together with the then Director Syromyatnikov (he was there before Zhorka Pronichev) were building the Bishop’s mansion and the dachas for the Oblast Party Committee. Lukeria, still working at Riflemen Izba, moved her sister and husband to the city and made sure her nephew passed exams into the Polytechnic. A bit later, however, Syromyatnikov turned Vassily Antonovich in: 120 cubic feet of imported lemon-tree lumber destined for the museum’s parquet floors, Finnish floor tiles, cement, brick, and an excavator given to some friendly moonlighters – enough for him and Lukeria to get close to seven years, plus confiscation of their property. They weren’t married, however – and that’s what saved her. A year later, Vassily Antonovich died in prison under circumstances that remained unclear. Lukeria was left with the bank assets and her freedom.

In the meantime, she turned 30. Children were not materializing. Somehow, the restaurant smoke congealed into a former boxer named Stas, who drank like a horse but played the guitar with great flair. Just after their one-year anniversary, he disappeared. Lukeria inherited his guitar, his debts, and his constantly muttering old mother, who scared Lukeria a bit. Lukeria loved her anyway. Four more men flew by barely to be remembered. She must have found them somewhere; she picked them up, dusted them off, cleaned them and gave them a new life, and then they vanished just like Stas, only remarkably faster.

Lukeria, to give her her due, when she crossed onto the far side of 30, did not get fat, like most, but preserved her narrow hips, straight back, and impressive breasts, desired by many. You could not find a bigger optimist among women over 30 in the whole of Stargorod. You could always ask her for a loan; she was always willing to go to the basement to fetch a bottle of vodka late at night after the register’s been closed out, and the head of the Traffic Police himself, lieutenant colonel Terebikhin who once a year, without fail, put on a blow-out for a hundred of his closest friends behind closed doors at Riflemen Izba, invariably greeted her with a peck on the cheek.

Lukeria’s courage would have done a Chechen rebel proud: whenever she interfered to break up a fight, the rabble-rousers in her presence faded and retreated to neutral corners in a blink. On a few very rare occasions, she’d taken a couple punches herself in the heat of the moment, but such perpetrators were forever banished from the Riflemen Izba, and those who owed Lukeria a favor (never few) made it their business to ambush such characters in a dark alley and give them a thorough ass-kicking.

It seemed things would go on like this forever: to her friends, Lukeria announced that she would choose her men herself from now on. The stories with the accountant, whom she had, apparently, loved, and Stas the guitar player whom she loved undeniably, made their impact; the four men that followed were temporary pets, profoundly needy, albeit endowed with the physical stamina Lukeria required. But nothing more.

It was Aslan Dzhioyev, a fiery Ossetian with gold crowns on his teeth and a map of deep scars on his forehead, once his division’s weightlifting champion, who threw everything out of balance. He knew how to live large, but he also knew the price of money, and never wasted any – like a gold prospector who’s hit it big. He could pay for everyone’s food and drink. Or he could let someone else do it. He was persistent and ardent, but gallant. He was like steel. He won Lukeria, as the waitresses whispered, right there in the pantry and she could not resist him.

He was a figure, of course. A king. Aslan didn’t care for jeans; instead, he appeared in English suits that made him look like an heir to the throne. The country girls at the Riflemen Izba coat check, its weary cooks and its independent director – they all smiled as soon as they saw him. No one ever observed an expression of contempt on Aslan’s face. He owned a gas station at a highway exit and a used car consignment business.

Polite and solicitous, but somewhat distant in public, Aslan, whose mountain upbringing did not permit public displays of affection, was at home as loving as a good child, and his filial respectfulness melted even the heart of Lukeria’s bitter old mother, who never called him anything but Aslanchik.

For five years this Ossetian prince became the source of bliss and passion in Lukeria’s life. His half-Ossetian, half-Chechen army confidently moved to acquire Stargorod’s remaining gas stations, then opened the first video-theaters in the city, and was eyeing the Cooptorg and the furniture factory when one dark August night Aslan, on his way to the restaurant, was gunned down by a boar-grade rifle wielded by a Gypsy he had crossed in some affair.

The Gypsy managed to disappear from the scene, and Aslan’s empire, that had appeared to be so solid, cracked and began to disintegrate. What no one could have guessed, and what became clear in the aftermath of the shooting, was that the whole kingdom had been held together by the will of a single man, a brilliant man, one shot with such matter-of-fact impunity right in the center of Stargorod. At a traffic light. With a hunting rifle.

Lukeria heard the news immediately: the restaurant was only beginning to stir to life, and the gallant Ossetian’s life had been cut short not 500 yards from the building. Lukeria took it stoically. She stayed and worked her shift, even after the director offered to personally drive her home. Lukeria refused, and only at the end of the night, after she had closed out, did she jump into her car and leave the restaurant’s parking lot for the unfinished winter dacha Aslan had put in her name.

She crashed ten miles down the Stargorod-Leningrad highway, as she was descending a small hill. Somehow, a low concrete post from the roadside barrier speared the car in the front, and it rolled three times before coming to rest in the ditch. The emergency team on duty made it there, miraculously, just in time – had they come even a bit later, Lukeria would have bled to death. The accident, monstrous in its cruelty, remained deeply wedged in Stargorodians’ collective memory. For a long time afterward, they passed on the detailed accounts of how the emergency team scraped Lukeria from her smashed car. The drive shaft pierced her peritoneum, but to Doctor Vdovin’s amazement (he did the surgery), no vital organs were damaged. Nonetheless, after they had to stitch Lukeria back together like a rag doll, the doctors were convinced she would not live.

Lukeria survived. Her mother nursed her back from the brink of death with herbal remedies known to her alone, thus securing irrevocably her reputation as Stargorod’s resident witch, and six months later, Lukeria took up her post behind the counter of the consignment shop, which her own Aslan had founded not long before. She did not return to the restaurant.

On a somewhat different topic, when the local GB¹⁸ followed the route of Lukeria’s “panicked flight” (as it appeared in their reports) to the unfinished dacha, they extracted a significant sum of money from a secret cache, but Lukeria said she knew nothing about it. No matter how many times they called her in for questioning, she stuck to her story, and they never charged her with anything.

In obvious concern for her mental well-being, people never brought up Aslan to her, but one day Lukeria herself mentioned him, and from then on spoke of him often and without any prompting. She came back to life and even bought a new car – an act that struck Stargorodians as particularly extraordinary. For some reason, no one ever envied her, even though, when you think about it, between her Japanese TV-VHS combo, her new car, and the unfinished dacha she had inherited, there were plenty of grounds for loads of gossip at least, if not a touch of envy.

A year later, Vitenka entered the stage. A painter who had graduated from the Moscow Architectural Institute, he somehow landed in Stargorod, started drinking shortly afterwards, and gradually debased himself to the task of painting signs for the traffic police. That’s where Lukeria Ivanovna picked him up. She dusted him off. She dressed him up. She took him to a mentalist and got him coded against drinking. Then she got him a job at the coop – painting samovars in Khokhloma style.

“Lukeria’s got her second wind,” her former restaurant friends observed admiringly, before shaking their heads and indulging in reminiscences of Lukeria’s wild life, so wide-open to any inquiry and commentary. Usually, this reminiscing ended with the mention of Lukeria’s Hill – as the site of her accident had been baptized, to everyone’s satisfaction. You can be sure that in another hundred years, when spreading Stargorod swallows the tenth mile marker, developers will call the neighborhood they build there Lukeria’s Hill. Once something gets a name around here, it doesn’t go away.

✵ ✵ ✵

Meanwhile, it’s lunch time at the consignment shop. Lukeria has fried a pan of potatoes, but hasn’t come to any conclusions. She fished a few pickled tomatoes out of a jar, stacked them into an attractive pyramid on a plate and began arranging sliced bologna around it; she was so engrossed in her lunch-time ministrations that she began to hum a tune to herself.

The other girls put the “Closed for Lunch” sign in the door, came to the back room and gushed over the beautifully set table. Terentieva, unable to resist the temptation, snatched a tomato and bit into it with great gusto. She was moved by Lukeria’s care, she couldn’t help it, and blurted out her secret: “Lush, just don’t take this personally or anything – Valka said she saw your Vitya yesterday with one of those drafter girls. Said they rode a boat to the islands.”

Lukeria by now has her mouth full, and has to choke on the hot potatoes to answer, with a dismissive wave, “Let him ride his boat wherever he wants – he isn’t going anywhere. And if he does – big deal, I won’t cry for him. We’ll find another one, won’t we, girls?”

The overweight 30-year-old “girls” and Terentieva laugh in chorus, jealous as one.

18. Short for KGB.