Stargorod: A Novel in Many Voices

The Mermaid

Katya Puck became Katya Kholodtsova after she married a man named Nikolai. He studied at the same drama school Katya entered after she ran away from Sakhalin. After her parents died, she was placed in an orphanage there, where she grew up reading books and dreaming of playing Ophelia.

By the time Katya joined Stargorod’s theater company, she was alone. She starred in children’s parties; her cropped hair and petite build doomed her to travesti roles. She spent the next five years playing principal boys, squirrels, and Thumbelina.

For five years, nothing changed in the one-room apartment the city had found for her: there were the same bookshelves with the same books, the same vanity, the same bed, and in the corner – a large wardrobe of Belorussian provenance. The model was called Sakhalin and Katya had bought the thing purely for its name. At nights, Katya thought about her Sakhalin childhood, when she still believed in miracles. On the island’s beaches, after the storms, the sea leaves pieces of raw carnelian – a semi-precious gemstone; she remembered how, when she held the stones up to the sun, she could see through them.

One night she was so homesick, she decided to hide from her longing inside her wardrobe. Katya stepped into the thing – and suddenly found herself on a Sakhalin beach – on the shore of the Tartar Strait, at the foot of the Aniv lighthouse. She didn’t feel in the least alarmed and walked toward the town – her favorite Aunt Lida Puck lived there. The aunt welcomed her with open arms, fed her a feast and put her to bed. In the morning, Aunt Lida gave Katya a gallon bucket of caviar, for the trip back.

The theater paid little; Katya climbed back into her room through the wardrobe and took the caviar to the market. In the fish rows, she saw Nodar – he was standing there, eating sunflower seeds. Katya fell in love at first sight. Nodar began selling her caviar for her.

He would wash down a bite of a caviar sandwich with sweet coffee and teach Katya about life, “One grain of caviar is nothing; a bucket of it is money. Money – that’s freedom, and you keep talking about some miracle of art, phew, no one pays for that. I can’t go through the wardrobe – I’m not allowed – but you can. There you go – that’s your miracle right there. Now I’ll eat the last piece of this sandwich and then I’ll want a piece of you – isn’t that a miracle, too?”

Nodar was wild, but passionate; Katya loved him.

In the meantime, the theater got a new director. He was young, and he staged Hamlet. Katya played Ophelia. Overnight, she became famous; she was even elected into the city’s Cultural Council. Nodar stayed with Katya for a year, and then began disappearing for a week or two at a time. He told her he was busy expanding his business, but someone in the theater crowd started saying that he had gotten together with Lilya, the bartender from the Lyubava. At first, Katya didn’t believe the rumor. She did, however, sit for long stretches of time at the beach. When she went through her wardrobe she’d hug herself in her sable fur-coat and linger, no longer hurrying to see her aunt. A very long time ago, back at the orphanage, she and her friend Alya used to read to each other their favorite story – Andersen’s The Little Mermaid – at night. It made them feel warm inside, and wanting to cry.

In Stargorod, meanwhile, things changed again. The young director got an offer from the capital and left. His replacement put on a production of Ostrovsky’s The Storm; it didn’t have a part for Katya. Katya threw a fit in the dressing room, which prompted a jealous colleague to mock her: “Well, you’re not gonna jump off a cliff over this, are you? Your caviar will feed you.”

That evening, Nodar came home drunk, groped her and swore he loved her. Katya threw him out. Then she found an axe and chopped the wardrobe to pieces.

The next morning she got called to a meeting of the city’s Cultural Council. The Mayor told them the Transportation Ministry decided to build a bypass, which meant a death sentence for Stargorod, which lived and died with the federal highway that went through it. A PR expert flown in from Moscow told them to come up with a local attraction immediately, something like the Mouse Museum they have in Mousino.

Not long after that, Stargorod celebrated its Founding Day. Katya played Thumbelina in the open-air production on the park’s playground. In the crowd, she could see Nodar with the bartender; they were hugging each other, and did not look at her. After the show, Katya walked through the strolling public to the canal. She climbed one of the granite slabs that lined the embankment and leapt into the water.

Katya turned into a mermaid. We know this to be a fact because one famous photographer, when, for reasons unknown, he found himself in Stargorod, captured on film something that looked very much like an undine floating on the moonlit surface of the river. The uncanny picture was reprinted all over the world. Now, people reserve rooms in our hotels well in advance and at nights, packs of tourists stalk the embankments in the hopes of seeing the mermaid. Katya, however, is not very kind to them; in the past three years she’s only showed herself twice.

A group of Japanese scientists offered to pay the city big money for the permission to study the phenomenon.

“How could we sell Katya – after she’s saved our city?” the Mayor said, shaking his head. And then asked his deputy: “What’s that Nodar character up to these days, anyway?”

“Selling nails in the market. Lilya broke up with him.”

“Serves him right!”

The Stargorod Herald ran a story saying that the Moscow PR consultant got paid three million rubles for hyping the mermaid brand, but who believes a rag like that?

The decaying waterfront has been restored, covered with new granite and lined with wrought-iron streetlamps. People in Stargorod feel very proud about Katya; girls throw pieces of paper with their heart’s desires written on them into the river. Some, they say, get what they wish for.