Stargorod: A Novel in Many Voices

Boots and Ballet Slippers

There is a good reason why a boot is featured so prominently on Stargorod’s crest. When the Muscovites, led by Vassily III, arrived to lay siege to Stargorod, the city’s militia, all in leather boots, lined up atop the city walls. Prince Vladimir headed our forces.

“Heck,” said the bast-shod Muscovites, “their last footman’s got leather boots. We ain’t getting far here.”

And they beat their drums, and went back to where they’d come from. Prince Vladimir died soon afterwards, but a city tradition was born: every night, the citizens placed a pair of boots on his grave. Wearing these, the prince, invisible to the human eye, made his nightly rounds about the city, keeping guard and warding off various calamities. In 1917, the powers that be got skimpy and gave the prince a pair of worn-out, threadbare clogs. I don’t need to remind you what happened after that.

Jean Borisovich Protege arrived in Stargorod during perestroika. He went to live in a humble communal apartment, where he soon struck up a friendship with his neighbor, a third-generation boot-maker named Nikifor. Prior to his relocation to Stargorod, Protege had run a small glove-making workshop in Tbilisi. In 1987, as a result of his conversations with Nikifor in the kitchen of that humble communal apartment, the cooperative The Sole was born. It produced boots, ankle-boots, and bootees for both genders. Protege was indefatigable: in the era of barter trading, he conceived and executed incredibly complicated chains of exchange, procuring for his enterprise raw leather, tanning supplies and imported dyes almost for nothing. Nikifor was his one-man Quality Control Department. He didn’t squeeze a boot’s toe with his fingers to see how the leather would crinkle, didn’t drip water on a shoe to see if a stain would remain, didn’t pull on fur lining to see if the pelt would separate – he merely rolled a bulging, blood-shot eye over all that was brought before him, then without fail tossed out any defective goods. By the end of the day, of course, he would get drunk as a cobbler, bragging that it was his way of maintaining the co-op’s good reputation.

Nikifor told Jean about Prince Vladimir – Protege liked everything mystical. A young technologist named Sveta was charged with taking a pair of brand-new boots to the local hero’s grave. Sveta, dreaming of promotion, diligently executed her duty. The boots always disappeared by morning; the prince must have liked them. The Sole’s cheap products were selling like hot cakes. Jean Borisovich began to experiment with styles and colors. His new models found demand as far away as Moscow.

It was passion that became Protege’s undoing. Sveta the technologist also showed great diligence in making eyes at him, and eventually got the aging entrepreneur to marry her. In the interest of her professional education, the young wife demanded to be taken on a tour of shoe-making capitals of the world. Protege took her to Europe. In their absence, there was no one left to take boots to Prince Vladimir’s grave. The 1998 default all but bankrupted The Sole. Jean Borisovich grew feeble overnight, and soon died.

Now in charge, Sveta began by dispatching Nikifor into retirement. Then she erected a grand monument to her departed husband, at the ancient St. Christopher cemetery, next to Prince Vladimir’s chapel. There, on a bench, in quiet, she contemplated the facts, considered the low purchasing power of her fellow citizens, and decided to take a risk. The factory began making cheap shoes out of synthetic leather, innocently pink ballet-slippers, brightly-colored, sexy sandals with strip-tease heels, and moccasins sewn of sturdy, clear plastic. Crystal-studded ankle-straps on acid-green alligator-print thongs; “retro” clogs of quilted black, periwinkle and purple leather on soles carved from local pine; scarlet lacquered soles and silver beading – she pulled out every trick she’d picked up abroad. The Sole’s products glimmered on store shelves like sparkling glass in a kaleidoscope. At the same time, a new female technologist was charged with taking a pair of boots made in the old facility to the prince’s grave. The company turned around and began to turn a profit, which Sveta refused to share with city hall, entrusting her fate to her more exalted patron.

Nikifor founded Quality Control – a civic organization. They promoted native traditions, demonized the West, and accused The Sole of using low-quality materials and violating production standards. The lattermost, unfortunately, happened to be true. Sveta maintained a stony silence in the face of this criticism, until one day a furious Nikifor threw a pair of frivolous blue ballet-slippers onto her oak desk.

“Look – these were found on the prince’s grave!”

The technologist was called in. She arrived, noiseless in her Nike sneakers, and confessed she only wanted to take the best product to the grave.

“And your boots – they’re a throw-back, they suck!” she blurted, choking on tears. The next day, a high-profile city council commission descended upon the factory and discovered that The Sole was putting brand-name labels on their, basically, counterfeit shoes. The city hall wouldn’t take Sveta’s bribe. The factory was bankrupted.

The prince, her patron, took offense at this as incompatible with his medieval moral values, and that’s a shame. The boots you can now buy in Stargorod look a great deal like the departed Jean Borisovich’s products, except that their soles peel off in about a month. Young people prefer to save up and support foreign manufacturers. The girl was right: Protege’s boots were a throw-back.