Stargorod: A Novel in Many Voices

The Fourth Dimension

Critic Igumnov has been to America. To Washington, DC itself. And to New York City, too.

The New York subway scared him.

“It’s a prison, a real prison,” he told his listeners back in Moscow. “And blacks. You know, I’m not a racist, unlike the majority of our émigrés, but one does see some really scary black people. Poor, lazy. They have no desire to work – just stand on every corner and beg for quarters, but even a dollar won’t buy you anything decent.”

The listeners sighed devotedly. Igumnov sighed back.

“No, you wouldn’t believe it: Manhattan is the city… it’s the Yellow Devil! It’s really embarrassing even to put it like that – makes me sound exactly like the newspapers, but there are many, so many problems there that we can’t even imagine: everything’s sold on credit, down to a microwave oven – your average American is in debt up to his ears.”

“And what about sausage?”

For some reason, someone always asked this question, although they all knew, sons-of-bitches – and perfectly well – what the answer was.

“It’s not about the sausage, believe me, man does not live on sausage alone,” Igumnov sighed with even deeper concern. “It’s impossible to explain this to you. You have to see and feel it. Sears stores, for example, don’t open unless they have 30,000 different food items on the shelves. And what of it?”

“And what of it?” the listeners echoed, transfixed.

“I swear to you, guys, it’s hard to communicate fully, but… it’s stifling there – there’s no soul. Everything wrapped in plastic, everything standardized. It’s a nightmare.”

The listeners nodded happily. Smiled their inward smiles. Proudly rubbed their hands together. Igumnov would end his story with a short conclusion:

“The one thing they don’t have there, perhaps, is a kind of a fourth dimension.”

And everyone would noisily drink vodka and praise the good man Igumnov. True, every so often there would be someone who’d say openly, with unconcealed sadness, “You’re so full of shit, Igumnov,” but no one listened much, and Igumnov would shake his head ruefully – what’s to be done, you can’t put your head on another man’s shoulders. But he never entered arguments – he nipped them in the bud.

Things went on like this for about a month. Igumnov grew tired. Nothing was keeping him in Moscow: the story he’d promised the American magazine, “Europe or Asia? (A word of praise for Eurasians),” he’d written right away, with fresh impressions, and submitted it by fax. Drinking vodka and telling his American tales was growing old. His six-month stipend to Munich was still being processed. The televised debates from the Party Congress bored him to tears. The newly-minted Slavophiles were disgusting.

“Of course, today we’re all about the roots, even me, with my universal perspective,” he complained to his best friend. “But, you must understand, when they pulled me up, like a village bumpkin, in the late sixties… it was a different time – we were all together against the same thing, and now… No, the middle, the golden middle – the ancients had it right.”

Igumnov deflected as many offers as he could, did not join any parties, kept to unorthodox magazines that occasionally printed his essays, and if the opportunity presented itself, garrulously criticized his employers among literary circles. Still, he was beginning to sense, could sense already, that he was irretrievably sliding to the left.

“You must understand, I can’t very well go to April, April exhausted itself almost as soon as it was born,” he moaned to the same friend.

All this “domestic” fuss grew unspeakably nettlesome. He wanted to rest, he wanted to go home, to the village, close to Stargorod, where, on the site of his mother’s dilapidated hovel, he had finally built, four years ago, a sturdy, five-walled cabin. Lord, how many times did he dream of the Lake over there, in America!

The computer that he had bought with his earnings had yet to find a buyer, but the VHS player had already fetched 7,000. He found a good deal on new tires for his Zaporozhets, filled the trunk with a set of excellent fishing rods and tackle (a gift from an American colleague), kissed his wife and daughters, and set course for Stargorod.

Before he left, he called Piontkovsky and talked him into waiting a bit longer. Piontkovsky was about to receive, through the Literary Fund, a new car, a Model Nine, which prompted him to part with his almost-new Niva. Igumnov had offered to buy the Niva for a very good price – the money from the sale of the computer should be more than enough.

The wife packed, as always, substantially: a case of canned pork, four logs of bologna, little jars of instant coffee and Yugoslavian ham, and about 20 packs of 36-grade tea. The food was meant for the village where people expected Igumnov to bring gifts. There was no family left, and his classmates from school were also, nearly all of them, gone (after the army, following the usual formula, they all went anywhere but home). But not to bring gifts for the neighbors was, for Igumnov, unthinkable. People wouldn’t understand if he came empty-handed; they wouldn’t show it, of course, but they wouldn’t understand.

The Zaporozhets struggled down the last ten miles of dirt road (it’s a good thing we had a dry May) and Igumnov’s native village welcomed him. They unloaded the food, and the case of vodka he bought on the outskirts of Moscow. They embraced.

It was early summer. The beginning of June. Leaves. The infinite Lake. Fish stew on a campfire. Smooth vodka. Talk. His soul relaxed, rested, awash in pure oxygen.

He didn’t fear his American stories here. Quite the opposite – it was impossible not to tell them. His stories were sought after, waited for. People were proud of him. They did not hide their admiration when they inspected the waterproof Seiko on his left wrist, and, of course, they needled him, joked and peppered him with questions.

They listened just as raptly as his Moscow friends. Masking their curiosity with the Russian old-boy spirit, they attentively refilled his glass with his vodka. Shook their heads.

“And what about sausage?”

Oh! That eternally-expected question! Igumnov almost cried – people listened sympathetically.

“Well, what do you expect? – it’s a strange land,” commented tractor-driver Abrosimov on Igumnov’s “fourth dimension,” as it was self-evident, and for some reason, asked again, “So, you’re saying, one can just walk up and buy a wind-up cock like it’s no big deal?”

The whole company roared; the American theme was finished.

After about a week, after they finished all the provisions brought from Moscow, and Igumnov stoically switched to potatoes and fish soup, he began to experience an inextinguishable, tormenting longing. The locals, pretending to work, went on different errands in the mornings and came back only late, around dinnertime, followed by a search for more vodka or modest domestic chores. Increasingly, Igumnov found himself alone. Drinking Stargorod vodka didn’t feel right and it bored him anyway. He was tired of pike soup. And, generally, fits of the familiar Moscow angst caught up with him, even in the country. Caught up and held him in their grip.

Against his instincts, he began to think. He wanted to convince himself that it wasn’t, after all, about sausage. But what was it about? It was easy to talk about “the fourth dimension,” but how could it be quantified? And was that necessary?

Take, for example, our national literature – what’s the measure of quality there? Tradition? And what is this tradition? Western influence, through and through, especially after Peter the Great. And even before Peter… he kept thinking of Sophia Palaiologina and even saw her in a dream.²⁴ His obsession threatened to develop into a mania.

In the article he had sent to America, everything was nice and smooth, things were neatly explained by our geography, multiplied by our history. But this no longer satisfied him. Something mysterious had crawled into his subconscious. The voice of blood? Genes? Collective archetypal memory? The question tormented him; his American article seemed meaningless. On top of everything, the sky began to drizzle, lightly yet hopelessly. Igumnov hastened back to Moscow.

The neighbors brought him a bit of honey for his girls, and smoked some fish. Asked him to keep in touch. To come back sooner rather than later. And to make sure to bring sausage. The kind without fat. Two-ninety per kilo.

And Kolka Zhogin, a big fan of spoon bait, requested some cold-water spoon bait from Munich, along with Japanese fishing line.

Igumnov stepped on the gas.

He had almost made it to the paved road – about two miles from the asphalt – when his Zaporozhets sank into mud. Neither digging nor beech branches jammed under the wheels could extract the little car. After wearing himself out and getting dirty up to his ears, Igumnov relaxed. In about three hours, the co-op’s Kirovets tractor would pass by on its milk delivery run. All he had to do was wait.

Igumnov unfolded his seat, lay back and took a nap. Right before he fell asleep, it occurred to him that the four-wheel-drive Niva would get through the mud no problem, and the thought made him happy.

He dreamt of a large supermarket shelf filled with little plastic lemons containing real lemon juice, for cooking.

He woke up to the drone of the Kirovets.

The big yellow tractor easily pulled the Zaporozhets onto the asphalt. The driver was a bit drunk, and unfamiliar – a wrinkle-faced little man from the neighboring village. Igumnov had no vodka to pay him with, so he promised to settle up next time.

“All right, America,” the driver waved, “I see you don’t know me, must be too proud now, or something. I’m Pashka Bokov, we were in the same class in school.”

Igumnov gasped, mentally, and quickly started a sociable conversation. They talked for half an hour.

“All right America, Godspeed, I have to take this milk places,” said the former classmate as he climbed back behind the wheel.

From there, over the growl of the Kirovets’ engine, Igumnov heard a giggle and the excessively-upbeat, “And don’t forget, when you come back, bring sausage for me, too!”

Igumnov returned to Moscow in dark and rotten spirits. He avoided his friends for a while, but it was not characteristic of him to hide out for long. Things returned to their well-oiled tracks and rolled along. Even with a kind of newly-emboldened abandon.

He still planned to go to Munich, although he changed the theme of his research to the poetics of Gogol’s Mirgorod, which had been his focus before he took up Eurasianism. He bought Piontkovsky’s Niva and sold his Zaporozhets for a good price. He surprised his friends with his new interest in videos. In his free time, he visited his neighbor, and together they watched detective and sci-fi movies.

On those occasions when his colleagues began talking about America, he cut them short with a single, inappropriate question, “Have you heard? They say a joint-venture factory in Saratov has obtained permission to manufacture wind-up polyurethane cocks.”

The colleagues would exchange giddy glances, drop the painful topic and immediately start discussing women.

24. Sophia Palaiologina: Grand Duchess of Moscow, was a niece of the last Byzantine emperor Constantine XI and second wife of Ivan III of Russia. She was also the grandmother of Ivan the Terrible.