Stargorod: A Novel in Many Voices

Victory

I, for one, have great respect for the Tatars. One – they don’t ever touch moonshine or port, because it’s death to the liver; two – when they get a mind to do something, they don’t let up until they get it done; and three – they’re loyal, and always stand up for one another. Kind of like the Chechens almost, only Chechens are more headstrong and as far as being afraid goes – they don’t even know what that means: you know their mothers hold babies above mountain gorges by their heels, just hanging there, to teach them bravery. But that’s Chechens, and we’re talking about Tatars here; they’re a proud people, you know, but it’s a special kind of pride they have – not showy like the Chechens’, but quiet. You, for example – you ever been to a banya with them? Oh that’s a whole other story. We used to have this one nut – a total egghead, boys said he used to work for Aleksei Tolstoy in the archives somewhere, until he lost his marbles, and they sent him to pasture to Stargorod. So this loon, his thing was – he was always cold. He’d go into the steam room, climb to the very top birth and just stand there, and sort of weave about, and make these mincing steps in place – like a tiny dog that’s wanting to pee – and there was no way anyone could drag him down. He’d dance up there for a while, and then – flop! – and get a ride to Doctor Vdovin in the emergency van. So this one day, a Tatar came in with his son, and our Dancing Pete’s been hanging out on his perch since the start of the shift. When the old Tatar went to work on his son, our guys all split from the steam room, but the loon stayed. Then the old man got done with his kid, and sent him out to the predbannik, and set the steam room to his own liking – and that’s when our egghead couldn’t take it anymore: I tell you, he howled like the factory siren, and shot down from his birth like an eagle – whoosh! – straight through the showers and into the pool. A good fright can make you do just about anything: he gulped a lungful of ice water, went all goggle-eyed, and, as he was, glasses and all, plopped there at the bottom like a damned flounder – took three of us to get him out of there. But now, whenever we think he’d had enough steam for the day, one of the guys just shouts, “Hey, you up there, I see your Tatar coming!” and he shoots out of the steam-room like a bullet. ‘Cuz, you know, he could croak on us any day, standing up there, Doctor Vdovin said so himself – he’d have a heart attack and wouldn’t even know what hit him.

So, what I’m saying is, Tatars are special, and I personally can totally see things their way. But then, on the other hand, life is life, and you can’t do anything about that either. The Tatars, by the way, had their women in line longer then everyone else, but they’ve given up now, too. The old guard – those still hold strong, but with the young ones – there was trouble. Take Ravil Nigmattulin with his Gulnara. This all happened right before I retired from taxi-driving, and Ravil – we called him Igoryok – only just came to the trade. Ravil’s not exactly a tall guy, but sturdy, you know – big bones, shoulders like a pair of tires. Only a fool doesn’t like good food, and then you sit behind the wheel all day long – Ravil started getting fat, and the guys talked him into taking up body-building. He was made for it, too – he was such a softie, a real teddy bear. He got hooked up with Tolya Kazak, the one with the striped pants, and started lifting in Tolya’s gym. It was only later I figure out that getting fat wasn’t the whole story.

As far as drinking went, he never really did any. Very rarely, once in a great while he’d have a glass with us on payday – he was afraid of his Gulnara, and I’m here to tell you, that’s how you spoil a woman. And I’m not just saying so – I was there.

This one time, the guys were parked at the railway station, and I just came to shoot the breeze with them – I was already retired, and had gone to work at the banya, been sitting here ever since – when all of a sudden, we heard a fight. We went to take a look: here’s this one massive dude cleaning up private cabbies like puppies – he’d grab one by the scruff with one hand and slam him on the head with the other, like hammering nails, and go for the next. They’re beating on him, but he pays them no mind, just works them over like that: grab, slam, toss, grab, slam, toss. Guys, I yelled, they’re beating up our Ravil – let’s go help him! I knew he wasn’t the kind of guy to get himself into a bind over nothing. I knew it: someone crossed him – asked three times the meter rate when Ravil wanted a ride home, and it’s not kosher to rip off your own, folks supposed to look out for each other, any one of us’d give a brother two meters if he could, but you don’t ask, it’s a matter of honor... But these young punks – they’re wolves, never mind they park with us; they have their own rules, especially at night, so they just told him to pay up or beat it.

Long story short, we extricated our Igoryok from the pile, and I took him home – we lived on the same street. But here’s the thing: the boy was wasted, drunk as a fish, I’ve never seen him like this.

When I got him to his gate, Ravil pulled on my sleeve – he wanted to sit down on a bench outside, and you couldn’t get away from him if you wanted to, he had an arm like a crankshaft. So we both sat down. Being drunk, he started talking. Turns out, Gulnara works at the furniture factory, and they just made her a section head. So he was out of options: try as he might, fight as he might with other drivers to get the fattest cats, he had no chance of catching up with her. No equality in his family. And for a Tatar – that’s worse than a knife under the ribs. Plus, the neighbors started talking that Gulnara had fallen in with some bad women. She, of course, told him that she was late all the time closing out and settling accounts, but he was like: “I don’t buy that!” I set him straight: my mother-in-law’s sister’s daughter works at a store, and is forever stuck there till late with the books, they have to – if they get audited, and something’s not right, it’s her head on the plate. But this was now, and the day before he decided to teach her a lesson: when she came home late again, Ravil locked the door and wouldn’t let her on. She must have heard him inside, though, because she cried a little, whined a bit, and then went ahead and yelled: “Help! He’s raping me!” That’s no joke – Ravil ran out of the house. That’s when she, the fox, snuck in, and locked the door on him – let him sit outside or go sleep in the woodshed.

So alright. He went to the garage, borrowed about two hundred from the guys, bought everyone drinks, drank himself, and now was ready to come home. Only he was afraid to go in: “Brother,” he said, “I’m afraid I’ll kill her.”

“Don’t you worry about a thing,” I told him. “She is afraid of you herself, and loves you a lot, and respects you, too. Want me to prove it?” Man, you should’ve seen him – he started kissing me, slobbered all over, such a teddy-bear. I told him to wait there on the bench, and he couldn’t be happier: he just rolled his head back and zonked out. And thank God, I thought – I needed him out of my way at the moment. Women, you know, they are all the same, but the Tatars are even more so – she bought into it right off the bat.

First, I knocked on her window – nice and polite. She peeked out.

“Gulnara, open up.”

“Who is this?”

“Mikhal Mikhalych from the taxi garage.”

“Oh, it’s you! Has something happened?”

“Did you or did you not lock your man out of the house?”

She’s just standing there, looking. Then I see her face turned stony. That’s a good sign.

“Do you know where he is right now?” I asked.

“What happened, Mikhal Mikhalych?”

“You heard of Nelka and Lyubasha? (and everyone in town has) So. That’s where he went, your Ravil, and borrowed two hundred rubles from them, to party with their whole crowd, I barely pulled him out of there. Mind you, they let me have it on my word alone – if you wait till tomorrow, it’ll be two-fifty, not two hundred even. You know those girls – he’s not the first one to get on their hook, and generally speaking, I thought it might not look good if people start talking.”

“Oy, Mikhal Mikhalych, how could I ever thank you?”

“You,” I said, “just run and fetch me the money.”

“Oy, one second.”

She dashed off. Brought the money.

“Are you sure this is enough?”

“Sure, sure, don’t you worry now. Just, next time, think twice about it.”

“But he’s the one who started it, being jealous and such.”

“If he’s jealous, he loves you. You be nicer to him, softer. You girls are all the same – takes a man to teach you how to handle one.”

“Oy, thank you, Mikhal Mikhalych, I’ll never forget it.”

The two of us went out to the bench, and lifted Ravil up to lead him home. You should’ve seen her leading him in – she rubbed him behind the ear, like a bull-calf, and whispered something to him in their own language, and he just shook his head and smiled in his sleep. Finally we got him to bed. Gulnara, bless her heart, gave me another bottle as a present she was so moved. And ever since then, she always says hello to me whenever she sees me – and she’s a big boss now, a director, her earrings alone could buy a Zhiguli.

My Ravil, though, soon quit taxi driving (of course, I gave him his two hundred back the next morning, and we had a good laugh about it) and became a butcher. No sooner did he get ahead in the meat business (and he, by the way, always sold me meat at the government price) as Gulnara outran him again: she got promoted to deputy assistant director. Of a furniture store – a man’s job, really, which only made it worse. That’s when Ravil challenged this one out-of-town guy to arm-wrestle, right here, in my banya. The other guy warned him that he was the Arm-wrestling Champion of Sverdlovsk, but Ravil wouldn’t listen – he’s a real game cock. He gave it his best, squeezed as hard as he could – and got hurt. He tore a ligament. Vdovin referred him to a surgeon and banned him from weight-lifting, and Ravil switched to isometrics and working only on the muscle definition. That’s tricky business, I’ll tell you – if you quit suddenly, you just turn into mush. Long story short, it took six months and three surgeries and a whole ton of money. Finally, they patched his arm back together; it wasn’t going to atrophy, but his old strength was gone for good.

And the amazing thing was – through all of this, he didn’t turn to drinking. A bear of a man! He went to work at the gas station, with the coop guys, and you know what kind of business that is – I don’t have to tell you how they run things. I ran into him once, told him, “Ravilka, quit messing with this bullshit, you’ll get in trouble.” And he says: “Don’t I know it, Uncle Misha, but a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do,” and his eyes were so sad – a teddy-bear, a real teddy-bear. “You,” I said to him, “can’t ever catch up with the furniture factory. Your only chances are to go apprentice yourself with the Isors¹⁹ with their gems and enamel, but they’re kind of like you, Tatars – they only teach their own. Or you have to start a construction co-op, and you don’t have the education for that, so I’d say you’re better off just to make peace with it and enjoy the ride.”

He didn’t listen. Instead, life gave him a checkmate. Gulnara eventually made the director and he... he became a sort of a hero.

When the Chechens and the Ossetians came to town and went after the gas stations, Ravil put up a good fight: there were three guys with broken spines on his count, one with a cracked skull (Ravil pulled his hammer number on him with his left fist – he’s had time to adjust), and one he dispatched all the way to his brave mountain ancestors. They kept their gas station, but Ravil wound up in court.

I went to his hearing. The room was packed. Chechens on one side, locals on the other. Both sent for lawyers from Moscow, and both, of course, bought the judge and the prosecutors well in advance. Still, no matter how you sliced it, Ravil got five years – they called it self-defense, because the Chechen came at him with knives. A lot of other things came up at that hearing, and a lot of them got swept back under the rug – you know, the way it always goes, we have cases like that about every two years. Folks, of course, were all behind Ravil, except the reporters. Those are forever after the same thing: “Mafia Brought to Justice!” Make you laugh. And the Chechens, by the way, later bought that gas station anyway.

When they took Ravil away, Gulnara started to wail, but he just shushed at her, like: “Quiet, the boys will take care of you.” She choked back her tears.

I saw the way she looked at him when they took him away – the same as back then, when she was leading him up the steps to the porch, but he – oh no! – he went out proud, like a big bear. He finally beat her, that he did. You don’t worry about guys like that in the camps: they’ll make him a barrack boss for his biceps alone, and then there’s his legend – how he worked over those Chechens. And then there is Gulnara’s money – on the inside, money is everything.

19. Armenian Assyrians.