Stargorod: A Novel in Many Voices

Greed

It’s like somebody jinxed the job: no one ever has any luck at Stargorod’s Conservation Bureau. So many directors in the last couple of years, and it’s the same thing every time – they don’t last long. For a while there, we had Pesteryev – everyone had such hopes for him when he came, and then he too went under. Call it what you will, but greed does have a special rotting effect on a Russian soul. Take Pesteryev: you’d think he had everything he could possibly want, why, then, why did he want more? A man is weak, that’s why – weak and pliable, and before you know it, he’s caught up in the infernal machine of greed – smack! and it pins him down. Savvatei Ivanovich Shestokrylov even called Pesteryev, personally, about this very thing.

“Semyon Ivanovich, are you sure you want to build that deck?”

“Yes, why?”

“Well, it doesn’t look good. Why don’t you just rent a party room at a restaurant – that’s nice, and cultured, and not as conspicuous. No one in the oblast can get any lumber, and you’re framing a stage with four-by-sixes – isn’t it a bit too much?”

“When my only son’s getting married? I don’t think so.”

“All right then, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“But that’s just leftovers, Savvatei Ivanovich – I sent the actual lumber shipment over to your dacha. Or have you perchance forgotten about that?”

“I, Pesteryev, never forget anything.”

That’s exactly what Shestokrylov said, right before he hung up. It sounded like he was offended. But Pesteryev did not heed the warning, and finished the deck. Not even a deck – a platform. A whole stage.

Yevgenia, Pesteryev’s wife, went to talk him out of it – he all but killed her (he was drunk): “It’s okay for them, but not for me?!” he yelled. He chased her around the yard for a while, until she left him alone. He didn’t listen to a woman’s intuition either – means he’d gone hard inside, cocky.

And in the old days, when he used to work in the Construction Trust, first as a foreman, then a head engineer, then as a director – he was just a regular guy. With a temper, yes; demanding, yes, but fair, too – bonuses without fail, and union trips to Moscow (where you could get sausage and cheese) for the guys. He looked out for us. It was when he got transferred to the Conservation (he got caught on the bathhouse project, there was something about marble, or the tiles, or maybe both) that he’d gone sour.

Technically, it was a demotion, but then word came from on high that he was to “renovate” dachas for certain people, and Pesteryev rose again. He arranged for his wife to be transferred from the Game Preserve to the District Executive Committee and things picked up steam: he couldn’t get used to living in the city, so he “conserved” a whole mansion for himself out in the suburbs, with gold-leaf everywhere, and had his gates hand-made with lots of curlicues. He had a motorcycle with a sidecar, but rode in the Department’s GAZ whenever he went hunting.

So all right, some guys put up this stage for dancing in front of his house about a month before the wedding. He stocked up on vodka (Yevgenia pulled her strings) – at least ten cases, but in the weeks before the wedding, folks made quite a dent in that supply. And here’s the thing: he’d sell it to some, but not to others, and in the old days, he’d never have turned anyone away, he knew how things stood: you’re a big boss during the day, but at night, if a fellow man’s feeling down, be a good neighbor, especially when you grew up on the same street and everyone here has known you since you were in your momma’s belly. But – he was flying high now.

At work, too, he’d been working his boys to pieces. He quit paying them, only kept promising: “Everyone here gets what he earns. If you do a thousand rubles worth of work in a month – you get a thousand. Do two – get two.” But those were just words. What are you going to do if he’s got a seventeenth century window frame priced at two-fifteen and it takes you two days to cut it and put it in right? The prices, of course, are crap, but in other towns people manage somehow! Instead, he had a stroyotryad – a bunch of construction students on a “summer apprenticeship,” do the entire plan for him, and he paid them proper. They of course, were there from dawn to dusk, just plugging away; a couple of our guys, the younger ones, tried to keep up with them, but dropped it – you’d sooner hurt yourself working like that, without weekends or holidays, but still, that’s just not how we do things around here: he paid them thousands and couldn’t find two hundred for us. He didn’t do it just out of the kindness of his heart, of course – they paid him back, and paid him good. Still, our boys were all feeling down, and how much can a man in a funk do in a day? They kept sighing about our previous boss, Zhorka Pronichev. He used to run things straight out of a restaurant. He’d go get a table in the morning, and just stay there, and that’s where you went when you needed him to sign something. He’d sign a paper, and sometimes would pour you a glass, too. In his days, a man could scare up three hundred a month easy. But Zhorka crashed and burned too – they fired him from his job, booted him out of the Party, and struck him from their lists. He’s now a free contractor – builds houses around the district, free as a bird. “I drink when I want, and I work when I want,” he says.

No, but this Pesteryev with his stage! I bet he just wanted to outdo the Shestokrylovs’ wedding, when they took over the entire Riflemen Izba. He hired the band from the Izba, too, got electricity to the stage, hung it about with colorful little lights, made sure the whole street had something to drink, and somehow commandeered a whole bull-calf at the kolkhoz.

And it all may have turned out all right, if it weren’t for the bride. The girl convinced her newly-wed husband Valerka to take her for a ride in the stroyotryad’s Zhiguli. So he did. Valerka came back without a scratch, the car was totaled, and the newlywed ended up with a broken leg and completely unconscious. They dropped her off at the surgery like a log, where doctors more or less put the leg back together and sealed it in a cast (Vdovin’s handiwork), but the girl wasn’t coming around. The X-rays spelled out the bad news: a fracture at the base of the scull and a hemorrhage into the brain.

Good thing Pesteryev’s a really stubborn man: he brought in a neurosurgeon from St. Petersburg, didn’t spare the expense. The luminary scratched at the X-ray picture with his nail, picked off a bit of mouse shit, and roared so the windows rattled, “You should’ve treated the girl for shock instead of taking pictures with expired film!”

He yelled and yelled at them, then cursed some more, and then moved the girl to his own clinic – brought her back from the other side, only she was left lame for the rest of her life: her leg rotted – they thought they were working on a dead woman, you know, and didn’t try particularly hard.

So the wedding came with a bigger bill than Pesteryev had planned. And then he had to feed the police so they wouldn’t pursue the accident. And the doctors! And the car! He was pulling his hair out. They took the stage apart, and sold his motorcycle (Timofei Andreyevich, a fellow hunter, got himself a good deal), but it wasn’t enough – so he had to go see Shestokrylov, to find a way to give the stroyotryad its Zhiguli back. Savvatei Ivanovich watched him squirm for a bit, raked him over the coals, but did find him a car – took one from the shipment going to the chemical plant.

So all right, the car was taken care of, Valerka was clean and sent off to the army, to serve at the local base, but Pesteryev still had other debts to pay off. And this is where he got caught. And with what! Pennies! He paid the deaf kids’ school three thousand to have the kids fish logs out of the river and cut them up into firewood. Everything on the sly, of course, so word wouldn’t get out – it was kind of embarrassing. But someone did rat on him – there’s always someone. An audit came down from on high, people said Savvatei Ivanovich himself made sure of it. They pulled up the budgets, and they all had Pesteryev’s signature on them – he wrote them up himself. And there you go: he was 104 rubles short!

At the court hearing, he kept bringing up some jumpsuits and boots, that the school was supposed to use for work and then give back to Pesteryev, but then didn’t, so they figured the cost into the budget. The school’s super got a year probation, as he was a veteran, but Pesteryev’s case was looking worse and worse. He could have still gotten away, if he’d kept his big mouth shut, but he just broke down one day. When they were taking him to the courtroom (and he knew by then no one would help him there), he pointed his finger at the whole Executive Committee, to their faces, and called them by name: “You took, and you did, and you, and you!” – and said in court who specifically, and how much, and what for. Naturally, he got two years of forced labor at his place of residence. Could have been a lot worse. He got to stay at home, only had to check in every day, and the work they made him do was building shipping crates at the winery.

He started drinking, of course. Yevgenia is a handsome woman, grand, attractive, but he looked like a dung beetle: black brows, black mustache, and mad eyes on fire. It was tough on her. And just before his time was about to end, somehow he got hit on the ribs with a log unloading train cars, and it bruised his lung. It wasn’t a serious bruise even, but you can’t hide from your fate – sarcoma came and got him. When they laid him out, he looked like an angelic old hermit: all skin and bones, and his white beard. You wouldn’t recognize him.

The last month before he died he lay there at home and just kept groaning: “How long? How long? How long?” Yevgenia took care of him in silence: she’d come, clean his bed, turn him this way and that so he wouldn’t get bedsores, and he’d keep at it: “How long before I die? Is it soon? I’m sick of it, Yevgenia, sick of it!” And she’d just fix his pillow, turn on the radio for him and go to the office.

Valerka came late to the funeral – couldn’t get a ticket. After serving in the highway corps in Voronezh (construction crew, basically), he got packed off to be a lieutenant out in Tajikistan, paving roads for the local goat herders. He came back alone, leaving his wife with the baby. He visited his father’s grave, and then spent the next five days in a drunken stupor with the guys. Then he got up, put his uniform back on, and left.

And Yevgenia soon married Timofei Andreyevich, the hunter. He got her transferred from the Executive Committee back to Fish and Game. People say they live quietly and never fight – Pesteryev, he used to beat her up pretty regularly, especially after he started at Conservation. That job’s cursed, I’m telling you. Maybe someone really put a jinx on it. People say Lukeria’s mother was seen on the night of a full-moon, walking backwards thrice around the Conservation office – right after they gave Lukeria’s then husband seven years for selling the museum’s parquet on the side. True, that was a long time ago, in the early seventies, but women believe it – the old hag’s still alive and is the scariest witch for miles around.