So all right – let’s say he’s a devil, that don’t make it right. Shurka got to thinking. And the more she thought, the scarier it got. She tried to remember what her mother told her about devils – and it was all scary! He, meanwhile, was telling her how he flew in the sky, and flew to visit her.
“You, Shurka, are a witch. You’ve got some mighty spell on me, I tell you that,” he’d say, and she’d feel happy. And then scared again – in the morning. When she couldn’t stand it anymore, she went to see the priest one Sunday. The priest, Father Amvrosy, listened to her, but she could tell he wasn’t paying attention. Clearly, he didn’t believe her. He’s heard enough of those stories. Father Amvrosy used to be Metropolitan’s sub-deacon. There were great hopes for him. But when the Metropolitan died, they shipped Father Amvrosy off to Stargorod, and that’s the end of any career: you just sit here, reading books and listening to old ladies and stupid girls. He absolved her, and told her to do a hundred bows, and read Our Father and Hail Mary before bed. Shurka took offense at him too. This was not what she came for.
She stopped going to church. But waited. Every night – she waited. Then she’d hear the nettles rustle – that’s him, walking through the vegetable patch.
“I can’t go in the street, Shurka. If someone sees me, they’ll go mute.”
“Why didn’t I go mute?”
“You’re special.”
And then he’d tell her such things – her head would spin!
About three months went by. Shurka noticed things were not as they were supposed to be with her. She went to see an old lady – she took one look and said, “You, my dear, are pregnant. Who’d you get it from?”
“The devil,” Shurka said.
“I’ll show you the devil, you little bitch! Don’t you sin in my house. Out with it – who was it?”
Shurka told the old lady everything. As she knew it. The old lady didn’t believe her, but just in case gave her a little icon of St. Nikita the Exorcist and some holy water.
“When he comes next, sprinkle some on him. If he’s a man – he’ll marry you, and if not...”
“Then what?”
“Then I really don’t know. You go now.”
At night, Shurka was afraid to sprinkle him at first, but told him everything. He just laughed: “That won’t hurt me!” It’s his own fault then: she sprinkled him later on the sly.
The next morning she went out into the mudroom and found one of the breakers flipped in the breaker box. She flipped it back. And got to thinking.
The next night she left the door open – he didn’t come. He didn’t come the night after that either. Or the one after.
Whether it was the holy water, or the icon, or maybe it really couldn’t hurt him – who knows. But he never came again.
Shurka had her baby. The neighborhood filled with rumors – women kept asking, but didn’t get a single peep out of her. They shamed her, didn’t believe her, but she stuck to the same tune – the devil came to see me. So they didn’t believe her and didn’t believe her – until they finally did. Shurka, in the meantime, changed radically – kept away from people. Stopped saying hello. Moved from the officers’ cafeteria to work at the technical school.
The cafeteria was soon closed anyway: they dismantled the military airfield, handed the buildings over to the city, and transferred all the soldiers to Motovikha.
Things only got worse from there. Shurka Zaikina got herself a black cat and some piebald chickens, and raised her son a little bastard. He kept apart from the other kids ever since he was little; he was always by her side, doing chores at home, or in the garden, and got all A’s in school. After school, he passed the exams into the Leningrad Shipbuilding Institute. He’s a big boss there now, and comes to visit his mother in a black Volga. Doesn’t say hello to anyone either. His wife too – she’s either Jewish or French. And our reader at church said that the Antichrist will come from the French – it’s from a book that scientists dug up in Palestine, it says so right there.
Alexandra Konstantinovna for the most part stays at home. She limps around her orchard and drinks tea. Tanka says that the cucumbers and tomatoes in Shurka’s greenhouse ripen faster than anyone else’s in the whole neighborhood.
“And she’s too skimpy to share. And I wouldn’t take any from a witch anyway, I’d be scared.”
“No,” Tanka admits, “I’ve taken plants she’d offered me, but they don’t come out right. She must have a spell on them.”
“Of course she does – wouldn’t you?”
So Zaikina stays in her kitchen and drinks tea with gingerbread, and the neighborhood kids nail all kinds of iron things, horseshoes and such, to her gate. When her son comes to visit, he takes them all off, but she never does. She’s a proud old lady – her pension’s a pittance, so she sells produce in the market, but other than that, she just keeps drinking her tea and lumbers around in her garden.
“Did you see Zaikin the other day? Had a trunkful of jellies again, he did!”
“And where, pray tell, does she get all that sugar on her pension?”
“Like you don’t know. He’s a boss – so he must be stealing somewhere. Everyone does.”
16. The political officer embedded with a military unit; a white-collar job responsible for keeping the troops ideologically sound.
Petrushka
“Petrushka, is the beer here?”
“Mhhhmmh,” he grins and moves his lips trying to say something, but words never come.
“How many thousands do you got there already?”
“Mhhhmmh”
Everyone knows Petrushka counts money. He’s been caught at it more than once – writing columns of numbers on a piece of paper, all in thousands, doing sums.
“Petrushka, what are you going to do with all that cash?”
“Mhhhmmh,” he makes a scooping motion with his hands. It’s all his, all his. He sits in the store’s backroom, stares at the picture of the actress Nemolyayeva pinned to the wall, and counts something on his fingers. He mutters sometimes.
“Watch out, Petrushka, you’ll get to be a millionaire!”
He shakes his head happily.
Why would Oleg take someone like that to work in the store? Well, no one else would come, would they? Petrushka doesn’t know any better – so he went to work for Oleg.
After work, Oleg is building a house. A mansion. Two floors, an underground garage, yellow brick, a fireplace. He’s put a welded iron fence around the plot. And the first thing he did was build a greenhouse. Then he parked his boat next to it. And his UAZ.
The construction crew is Oleg himself, his wife, his wife’s cousin and Petrushka – he’s the runner, the go-there-get-me-that guy. Oleg doesn’t have any children. He makes sugar-coated cranberries. Not himself, of course: he drives around making deals and heads out to the villages to buy cranberries when they are in season.
“Oleg? He won’t touch anything less than a semi! Everyone knows that. But you can’t build all summer from cranberries alone, if you know what I mean.”
They are always at the site. Every Saturday. Every Sunday. They got the roof done, and started on the inside jobs, were laying the parquet floors.
“Of course he’s got parquet floors! You should see his fireplace – Stepanych charged 500 for the work alone.”
“Five hundred? Didn’t I hear he borrowed 25,000 at the bank, though?”
“Twenty-five? Well, let’s see... The brick for the fireplace – it’s the special yellow kind, fire-proof. Then the insert itself, the grate...”
“Mhhhmmh, Mhhhmmh,” Petrushka’s right there, follows the men around. They sort of – wave him off, let’s say, not hard. He stayed down for a bit. But then he got up and walked away like nothing; it’s not the first time for him. He wiped the blood that was coming out of his nose and muttered – was he counting something? He had to have been.