Stargorod: A Novel in Many Voices

The Hourglass

Until he was old enough to start school, Seryoga Kuznetsov lived with his grandfather in the village, while his Mom, having lost her husband, was trying to fix her personal life in town. Seryoga and his grandfather together mowed grass for the rabbits and fed the chickens. The grandfather also had an hourglass: two bulbs of murky glass welded into a copper frame etched with a symbol that looked like a hut on crooked stilts. Grandfather brought the thing back from the Japanese war. The sand trickled from the top to the bottom so slowly that it seemed it didn’t move at all. Playing with the hourglass was strictly prohibited.

In the evenings, after supper, grandfather would settle onto a little bench in front of his house, light a pipe and pronounce – as if it were a spell: “If you could turn back the clock, would things take the same course?” Leaving this question without an answer, he would send a thick ring of smoke up into the air, where it would melt and vanish. It was great fun living in the village; days there went on forever and did not end until sleep got the best of you.

Sergei graduated valedictorian of his class, to spite his mother – so she’d have one less fault to find with him. He also acted in the school theater, which he joined when he was in the ninth grade and was head over heels in love with Nastya K. When Nastya recited Katherine’s monologue from The Thunderstorm – the one that begins with “Why is it people cannot fly?” – it took Sergei’s breath away and it seemed to him that the very next instant a gust of wind would snatch his beloved from him and take her away forever. On their prom night, he took Nastya for a long walk along the riverfront and told her he loved her.

“You’re going to Moscow next,” she said, “and I want to live my life here, to make a difference in Stargorod. And, also, I don’t love you.”

He ran away to the village after that. His grandfather had died by then, the house stood vacant. Sergei did not sleep; he smoked and drank strong tea. The sand in the hourglass at the head of grandfather’s bed seemed to trickle down faster now than it did back when he was a child, but Sergei didn’t really notice it. He was thinking about Nastya. He promised himself that he would achieve anything he ever wanted, including winning her over.

Kuznetsov went to Moscow State University. After he graduated, he stopped in Stargorod to take care of his mother’s funeral, and then flew on to France for an internship, and from there to Japan. He had no family left. He took grandfather’s hourglass with him everywhere he went, but never showed it to anyone. How would he have explained that the sand now trickled down from the top bulb even faster, but the lower bulb always remained only half-full? He himself, for some reason, never felt any urge to solve this puzzle. But he did notice that as soon as he would turn the hourglass over, he started feeling apathetic, everything he was doing went wrong, and his heart lost its rhythm and beat unevenly, with starts and stops, as if struggling for oxygen.

To keep in working shape, Sergey worked out every morning, and then studied like crazy. In the nineties, time took off at a gallop, the country was desperately short of professionals with international experience, and Sergey did not miss his chance. At 24, he defended his doctoral dissertation in Economics and went to work for a very large and important company. Soon he became the youngest and most promising of the company’s department heads. He was also one of the most desirable bachelors around, but he paid no attention to women.

He worked hard and did well, and one day he was offered the task of supervising the construction of the phosphate plant in Stargorod. The position came with the kind of authority in his native city that was comparable only to the governor’s. Kuznetsov never forgot the promise he had made to himself. A trusted friend told him that Nastya, after school, graduated from the Pedagogical Institute, got married, had a son, got divorced and was now teaching math at their old school.

The first thing he did when he got to Stargorod was go and see her. Nastya was happy to see him, served him Lipton tea with strawberry jam, interrogated him about Japan and France and glanced, on the sly, at the one hundred roses he brought and she had put in an enameled bucket on a stool in the corner where she always set up her Christmas tree. Sergey suddenly realized that the woman sitting across the table from him did not in the least resemble the heroine of The Thunderstorm he had fallen in love with. The window was open; outside, the evening was muggy and hot. Nastya asked him for computers for the school. Then, she started ranting about the new Unified State Exam, and, once she really got into it, no longer listened to him when he told her about educational systems in France and Japan. After he’d been there an hour, Sergey took his leave. At the door, Nastya gave him a peck on the cheek.

The riverfront, where he had once confessed his love, was brightly illuminated. Sergey drove along slowly and looked at the oily surface of the river that reflected the streetlamps. A Japanese professor explained to him once that the hieroglyph on the hourglass’s frame meant “time.” Kuznetsov remembered his grandfather and what he used to say, arranged his fingers just so, and stuck his hand out the car window, at someone out there, in the night. At home, he automatically glanced at his hourglass: the sand poured down thick and fast, but there was never any more of it in the bottom bulb. Sergey opened his day planner, wrote down “Computers” on the 8:30 line, and turned off the light. He slept fitfully and twisted his sheet into a rope as he used to do some nights in the village, when he was little.