Stargorod: A Novel in Many Voices

Metamorphoses, or The Art of Instant Transformation

For A. Arkhangelsky

Let me spin a tale for you, a fable like in the old days, one to delight and amuse. Let me sweet-talk you – only give me kindly of your time and do cast your gaze upon this piece of paper I have filled with ink. I promise that you will marvel at the transformations of fates and of the human forms themselves, and at their return, by same miraculous means, back to their original state. I shall begin.

But who am I, you’ll ask. Listen then: our name is the Lyamochkins. I am a Stargorodian, a son of a Stargorodian, and a grandson of a Stargorodian’s grandson, and very few of us remain these days. Captured for a while by Moscow, I studied there at the Moscow State University in the Department of History, pursuing the thoroughly forgotten Lucius Apuleius.²¹ Here in Stargorod I now labor at the local paper, although back then people expected a great future for me, a great future indeed. But that is all in the past; now I am just making regular progress up the career ladder, and Filimonov even let it slip recently that he might make me his Executive Secretary. That would be logical: I am meek and clever. But I am a Stargorodian, born and raised, flesh and blood, I am Lyamochkin who writes his tales sometimes and puts them in his desk drawer – I have a fancy to compile a chronicle of my generation. Thus, first and foremost I beg you not to take offense should you find in my crude prose some folksy turns-of-phrase and foreign words. A shifting dialect does befit, when you think about it, the art of instant transformation, and the latter is my single and most compelling subject. Metamorphoses – or perhaps, fate itself. I do begin. Lend me your ears, reader, and let me please you.

✵ ✵ ✵

It’s not that long ago that they made me head of a department, and Filimonov announces, “Do hustle tomorrow. Tomorrow we are going to pick up comrade Karponos at the railway station. I want you there early. Before. Half-an-hour before the train pulls in.”

All right. I run. I take flight. I curse my fate as I rush, but I obey – though it is Thursday, I’ve got work to do, and instead I must stand here, wait, greet: Karponos is an auditor, come all the way from Moscow to inspect us. Is it good I’ve been included? I don’t know. I really don’t – I rather think it’s bad. Before, I only heard of these meetings in passing, but now that I’ve climbed higher – here I am, they bring me along. And thank God for that. I run. I fly. I curse the day I was born – I’m embarrassed.

But. The sleeping car pulls up. First, a Gut emerges. A Pot. A Cauldron. Everyone’s on the platform now affecting great liveliness, only I’m bent over under the luggage, silent. They do bring me around to shake hands – I’m the last one. The driver takes up a couple suitcases. The Volga rolls away towards the dacha, our van – with its death rattle – hangs back. We’ve got someone else to pick up: the city’s head architect, naturally, Ilya Semyonovich Razkin, then the unions – Boris Borisovich Draftin, the city administration – Bobchinov, district committee – Dobychin, and so on down the list. Filimonov is in charge of the list; our boss rides in the Volga with comrade Karponos. They must be sitting down to dinner already, and we’re still making rounds, still fetching people: Alimzharov – the market, Eaglov – the furniture factory, Patrikeyeva... Wait a second! Who’s this Patrikeyeva? Oh, it’s Patrikeyev – the gathering is men only. Pardon me – he is tiny, small-boned, and a leather coat obscures his shape. He is the bank. Is that all? All. Off we go then – to the pier.

“Where’s the Armenian?”

“Suren Biglyarovich? He’s already on the boat – grilling shashlyk.”

Suren Biglyarovich is our independent retailer.

And here we are at the boat, and it’s moored off the main pier, by the Fishing Guard motor-boats. This way, the tourists won’t notice us, and they’ve got better things to do anyway – it’s summer, it’s Thursday, it’s a beautiful day, who wants to poke around with the Fishing Guard?

We climb the boardwalk. The Boss is right there – a one-man receiving line.

“Lyamochkin? Didn’t your father work at the printing shop?”

“Yes, sir!”

“Look at you now! The new guard. Why don’t you go to the galley, given Suren a hand with the shashlyk.”

Shashlyk. More shashlyk. Onions and tomatoes. Lamb shoulder.

“Sweetie, why vinegar? Marinate in cognac, vinegar ruins it.”

The shashlyk is divine.

“Let’s go, boys!”

We take the food to the deck. It smells! It oozes! Some dill, a salad. Sliced lemon for those who want some.

And the little steamer’s pretty as a picture: blinds are down over the portholes, no one can see in.

I sit off to the side, alone, and gorge quietly on my shashlyk. I’ve eaten too much already, but I keep wanting more – it’s so good! My face and hands are soiled with fat. I keep my mouth shut – I love a good shashlyk.

The toasts wind down – it’s time for the banya. A real Finnish sauna right here on the boat! Now, that’s a wow!

“Come on, come on down everybody – don’t upset your Boss!”

Men shoot the breeze on the benches. Comrade Karponos shares news from the capital; Patrikeyev farts inappropriately. He blushes. Men hoot. I’m embarrassed.

And now we’re back to the deck – in our swimming trunks. “The Pot” is pink as a piglet and steaming. Someone squeals with delight. Someone is talking up the pleasures of Stargorod’s river. Men egg on the fat Razkin – jump, here, overboard, cannon-ball. It’s deep here, the water’s clean. Here, on the Senga, on a channel no one will bother you – you can be sure of that. Once in a great while some idiot sails by, but they rarely come here.

And suddenly – it comes, from around the bend – the stench! A pair of muddy, stinking Stargorodian scows covered in clay dirt – smoky, tarred, fishing nets dangling in oily balls, and on the decks piles of fish guts, rot, fry. The stench! Everyone turns away, only I stare. I know what you have to do to get that fish. The fishermen, as if on command, turn away to hide their alcoholics’ noses, and only the man at the wheel stares back at me, steady and vicious. Not a gleam, not a spark in his eye. I am embarrassed, scared.

✵ ✵ ✵

“Lyamochkin, wake up! Lyamochkin, the day’s over. What are you supposed to say to that, Lyamochkin? You’re supposed to say, ‘And to hell with it!’”

It’s Timofeyev from the Letters Department, the eternal drill sergeant. Lyamochkin stretches, wipes off a bit of spit from the corner of his mouth – less than a drop, really, more a perspiration, the sweet drool of a midday nap. Did anyone notice? And if they did, who cares! He waves, at no one in particular, and heads for the street door. Some dreams, man! Sometimes you don’t want to know where they come from.

Lyamochkin goes straight to the beer stand – to have a mug or two, shoot the breeze, maybe hear a story. In advance, he prudently takes off his tie. He sips his beer. He listens.

“That Potyekha, son of a bitch, did he fuck up today or what! Captain’s on vacation – you ain’t getting no fish. Potyekha’s in charge. Made us haul ass all the way to Senga, the knuckle-dragger, to this side channel – and there’s fish alright, but you ain’t getting it, except maybe with a trammel. Thought I’d sprain something for sure, but we got it all pulled up – and what did we get there? A load of thorny coontails! We dragged right over it – twisted our nets nice and tight.”

“Coontails? Gramps used to say, they fed it to goats after the war.”

“Gramps? You just go on and listen to that old fart – he’s the biggest mouth for miles,” the story-teller says before turning around and sizing up Lyamochkin. The man’s dull eyes are pure beer – not a single spark glows there. The beer pushes him; it pushes him towards Lyamochkin. A fork-like paw shoots out, grabs Lyamochkin’s lapel and reels him in, like a boat’s propeller spooling weed.

“What are you... staring at? Huh?”

“All right, just take it easy, man,” Lyamochkin says. He knows how to deal with these types.

“What are you now? Who’d you think you are? You from around here? I fish, dude, I am a man, you get it? And what are you now?”

Suddenly, Lyamochkin recognizes him – recognizes his eyes, the same eyes he’d seen across the channel – and gets scared. That’s bad, that’s really bad – he cannot be scared now. That’s the worst thing he can do. Lyamochkin makes a step back; he’s in trouble.

✵ ✵ ✵

Filimonov comes to visit him in the hospital. He arrives; he congratulates Lyamochkin on having been approved for the promotion to Executive Secretary, and inconspicuously slips a glass flask of cognac under his pillow.

“So you can celebrate.”

He then proudly places a pair of lemons on the bedside table – greetings from sunny Greece. (“Konstantidi Georgius” read the tiny, bright stickers, the name lettered carefully in minuscule brown script, sharp and dark, as if inked with the pure oak sap. Now, that’s a transformation!)

It’s a shame he doesn’t have his wings here, but it’s all right, he can manage, he’ll just have to try harder. Lyamochkin closes his eyes – and his broken jaw does not hurt anymore: he is far away already, in distant and sunny Greece. This is his personal secret. He flies away light and quick, and returns healthy and full of energy.

But being an Executive Secretary is a dog’s work – you get heckled from all sides, and there’s never a break from it. You’re up to your ears in meetings, strategic planning, reporting, budgeting, schedules, complaints, people ratting on each other, people backstabbing – and it’s all you. Still, Filimonov knew what he was doing when he picked Lyamochkin to be elevated. Lyamochkin took to the job; he began to shine. Carved out his own niche. Spread his roots. Bought himself a new mug for tea, bigger than the old one, and a cast iron ashtray with the image of a hound dog, a set of fountain pens and an electronic Smena watch. Strange as it may sound, everyone came to love him. That is, everyone to the last man. Only his wife at home knows what it’s cost him – how hard it’s been. But it’s always hard. And not everyone knows how to get things done.

Lyamochkin returns to his pantry-sized bedroom, pulls out his old wings from the wardrobe – washed by his wife countless times in a special tub, white swan wings that he inherited from his grandfather, who picked them up for a dime in a tavern somewhere in Galicia in 1915 – puts them on right over his tshirt and flies out the window.

In a suburb of Rome, maybe perched on a pier facing the deserted sea, or perhaps on the deck of an ancient, creaky galley, seated on a spool of rope on the stern, hidden from prying eyes, Lyamochkin unfolds his scroll. Lyamochkin reads; he recites the lines out loud: “Some things are in a haste to become; others – to cease; even in the becoming, a flame is extinguished; change and the flow of things keep the world young exactly as limitless time is eternally young in its every speeding instance. Thus, how could one admire any of a myriad things flowing past in this river any more than another, if one cannot even stand close enough to touch it? It would be the same as to give one’s heart to a fleeting sparrow – a blink, and the bird’s gone, never to be found again...” Lyamochkin contemplates. No, he cannot agree with this... yet he also can. But how could you not love a sparrow? A tweet – and it’s gone!

Yet it stays. It is here. Lyamochkin writes. Another fable, a tidbit of a story, a morsel of news to be fixed in his thick, clothbound notebook. It has room to spare for sparrows, of course, and it’s true: up and down fly the swings of time, but the motion is not the reward, the merit is elsewhere – in the miraculous transformations he re-lives alone.

✵ ✵ ✵

His wife calls him to the table; the family gathers for a late dinner. Ivanov and his wife stop by – they are friends and neighbors. From a fogged-over bottle, Lyamochkin pours thick, lazily flowing vodka infused with the peel of Greek lemons. Then – clink! – and he bites a pickle, crunches it loudly with his teeth. Ivanov tells a joke; the women laugh.

He is at the same paper, the same editorial office still – the unhurried, thoughtful Lyamochkin who can sometimes be as restless as a sparrow in springtime, our Lyamochkin, the irreplaceable one. He is no longer afraid of anything; sometimes he goes to the station to receive important visitors, then rattles all over town in the decrepit editorial van, picking up other banya fans. More often, though, he finds an excuse to stay behind at the office.

And if he doesn’t stay late there, drinking countless cups of tea with the guy responsible for closing the issue, and if he manages to get everything on his list done early, Lyamochkin heads out to the beer stand. To get a mug or two, to shoot the breeze, to hear a story perhaps. He goes there with his tie on; he never takes it off now. He sips his beer, smokes his cigarette, and, unembarrassed about his advancing boldness, looks with a quiet joy at each passerby.

21. Lucius Apuleius (died December 100 BC) was a Roman popularist and tribune.