Stargorod: A Novel in Many Voices

53:76

The other day I came across a sensational clip on the internet: Koreans have bred carps with human faces. The picture showed a couple of fish with protruding snouts that, with a stretch, could be seen to resemble human features. Just another hybrid, nothing special. They should try coming here, to Stargorod, to catch the Catfish Man – but they ain’t coming, are they? Our news is not big enough for the world-wide web.

Our national television couldn’t care less for real marvels, they just fill the air with scary stories about thieves and cops. Somewhere in Stavropol region, a police captain fired his gun point-blank at an innocent family – the wife now rides around in a wheelchair and the husband got three years for “assault on an officer in the execution of his duty,” but was amnestied right there in the courtroom. The policeman is now a colonel. There’s no help for common folk. Every teenage boy in Stargorod knows this, and that is why they all worship our Sashka Pugachev, the people’s avenger. They write on the District Police Station’s wall, in spray paint: “Greetings from Pugachev! 53:76.” Cadets paint it over the next morning, but the writing seems to bulge from the surface of the wall as if injected with the fashionable collagen that, if one believes the ads, “pushes out the wrinkles from the inside.” The newspapers at first also wrote up a storm about Sashka, but even then they were afraid to tell the whole truth. Here’s what happened.

Sashka, a born and raised Stargorodian who, after fighting in Afghanistan, lost all fear but not his soul, was doing well: he had two sawmills, eight small stores around the city, a construction supplies warehouse and the Lyubava tavern on the highway out of town, serving tender chicken cutlets, stuffed fish from our river and girls in the rooms upstairs. As well, there’s the free gym, two schools’ worth of computers and a city soccer team – all paid for by the man himself. Colonel Erikh Romanovich Mushtabel, the city’s Chief of Police, was a frequent guest at Sashka’s table in Lyubava. He was also the one who “protected” him and, once he got the taste for it, kept pushing for a bigger share of the spoils. They got along fine, however, until Sashka’s love of fishing ruined him.

Mushtabel was also a devout fisherman, and they once made a bet about who could catch a bigger catfish. Each went to his spot: one man went upstream to Pimshin Dip, the other downstream – to the Ferry Dip. Erikh hooked a 53-kilogram beast, but the one Sashka dragged in weighed 76 kilos. Mushtabel took offense and declared war on Pugachev. He found an excuse to close down Sashka’s stores, took away his sawmills, ordered a full inspection of Lyubava and publicly threatened to burn the whorehouse down. So Pugachev decided to go all in, told Mushtabel to meet him at night at the station, rolled in with two AK-47s and let both rip from the hip, right in the doorway. Three guys who just happened to be there went down, four more got wounded, but the Chief was not in his office – he was waiting in an ambush outside. The chase began.

They flew to the river. Pugachev had a chance to call out: “Don’t come to the water, I’ll come for you as a catfish!” – and dove from a tussock into the rapids. The police shone spotlights on the river, opened fire, bullets rained on Pugachev. He swam, then went under. No one ever saw him come up again. They never found the body, although they searched hard.

Mushtabel didn’t give much thought to the curse. He handled the ensuing shit-storm and took over Lyubava, but it burned down soon afterwards, and not a single girl got hurt, as though someone’d warned them. Rumors of Pugachev’s last words spread through the city. Someone spray-painted “53:76 – That’s how we do it!” on Mushtabel’s SUV, and the man just lost it. Plus, right at the same time, fishermen started saying a monster of a catfish had turned up in the river, no less than 200 kilos, tearing nets, letting their catch out, and there was no way to get him. The fishermen were also paying Mushtabel for “protection.”

The colonel became obsessed with the idea of getting this fish – given that his authority in the city was rapidly approaching zero. Exactly what transpired when he went to the river at night, nobody knows, but people said Erikh Romanovich ran home covered in catfish slime, two fingers of his right hand bitten off at the root, his eyes filled with madness. He lost his speech, and could only moo – he pointed at the river and mooed, long and sad, like a terrified calf: “Oo-oooo-oogoooo!” At the hospital, they said he had a stroke, patched the old dog up, but, obviously, that was the end of his service. The colonel came down with hydrophobia: a mere glimpse of the river and he turned hysterical, like a baby. Once out of uniform, he turned into an old, sick man; kind people heap shame on him in the streets, reminding him about Pugachev. His wife didn’t put up with it for long, packed up and moved the family to her Kalmykia – there’s no water there to speak of. The fishing folks arranged for a church procession, prayed to the miracle-fish to get their fishing rights back. Some old man also advised them: if they caught a catfish, even a baby one, to always throw it back. So now you’ll never find catfish cutlets anywhere on the menu in Stargorod – but we do have plenty of perch or zander.

It’s been ten years, and boys still call out at discotheques “53!” and someone always shouts back “76!”

So don’t you start with the Korean human-faced carp. But then, again, if you think about it – Oh, my God...