At night, on Monday, Oleg’s house caught on fire. Oleg got there after the firefighters – to see what was left. He lives in town, at his wife’s flat. Out here, on the Lake, this was supposed to be their winter home. The women had to hold him down, or else he would have pulled all his hair out. You would too if your house burned down.
At the other end of the village, in his own house, Petrushka lay on the couch. After his mother died, he moved onto her couch – his other bed is falling apart really. He lay and sniffed at his hands: do they smell of kerosene? He’d sniff, and then snicker, and make small noises, and then cry, sobbing, choking on his tears. He shook his clean-washed finger at someone invisible and kicked the arm-rest.
The Man with a Sense of Humor
I’ll tell you where you might’ve seen me: In Riflemen’s Izba – I used to man the bar there with Lukeria, back in ‘79. I moved on to Cooptorg and Zagotskot after that, drank some good cognac there, but got out just in time – boys don’t end well if they stick to those gigs: easy money is sure death for our kind. Did you know Seryoga Kostyurin? The guy was 39 and had kidneys like Andropov – they hooked him up to the machine in Leningrad, and all for nothing. Whatever was in the coffin we buried wasn’t our Seryoga, I’ll tell you that much.
All because why? Because it’s free. How much can a man drink really when it pours faster than from a kitchen faucet? And the nerves? Now you’ll tell me you know some who get along just fine sniffing glue, and paint stripper ain’t stripped anything off them yet, but it’s not about what you drink, and not even how much – it’s about your margin of safety. Take a man who drinks to numb his pain – people say he’s just muffling it, and he’ll pay for it, just not right away. But do you know what kind of reserves the human heart has? How many times it’s made to beat? I’ll tell you – there are enough zeros in that number to put a fence around my place. Twice. And take the liver. Under laboratory conditions, it can handle rat poison, no problem. What does this tell us? It tells us we humans have all kinds of reserves we don’t even know about, and you can’t live without a sense of humor. If you just go at it dead-serious, just for the money – you won’t last.
Trust me, I know, because I did it all. Tatyana, that wife of mine, she’s not the sharpest crayon in the box, but she’s got a heart of gold: she let me try everything. Why? Because she understood this one thing about me: I have to reach out and touch it. Whatever it is. And not just touch it – I’ve always got away clean. Back in the old days, I’d burn through three grand in a single night in Petersburg, and that was when you could still buy caviar at the old price. But I’ve done my share, and at some point that cognac just wouldn’t go down any more. I had a heart murmur, and my liver was acting up, but as soon as I realized I had to quit I felt better. And Seryoga, the poor soul, he snapped. I tried so hard to get him to quit Zagotskot back then, you wouldn’t believe it – I tried everything. But he wouldn’t budge.
“I can’t go back to living with a ruble in my pocket,” he said to me. “And Svetka would never understand.”
Crash and burn, he did. And did he even enjoy drinking all that vodka? Not a bit. He sucked it like a vampire – ‘cuz he couldn’t do otherwise, but it made his heart groan. But God gave us drink to make us merry, isn’t that what they say? You can’t force yourself, not forever. All my old pals – they’re all living the good life, high the whole time, and when you live like that and get depressed – that’s it, man, lights out. There ain’t nothing scarier than that. The stuff that gets into your head, you can’t get away from it, and you can’t drown it either. You know, I’ve paid a thousand rubles for a case of Coke, can you believe that? We were having a good time once, late into the night, and, what do you know, we ran out of stuff to chase our booze down with. We got up. We went looking. We found the barman. At home. Woke him up. That’s what we mean when we say the good life, and who cares if no one took a sip of that Coke after all – that’s not the point. But how do you go on like that? Play harder? Go sit at the table for 48 hours straight playing blackjack? You could of course, but then you sleep it off, and you wake up, and the world’s so black it makes you want to howl like a wolf! And you don’t do it once, or twice, or just for a month. That’s your life – and it’s the same, day in and day out. And I can’t live like that, I’d had it – to hell with the money, I’d rather be free like a bird in the sky, you’re only free when you’re young, am I right? Maybe I’m not. I don’t know.
I just didn’t have it in me anymore. And if you don’t have it in you, it’s time to run. It wasn’t fun. I wasn’t laughing, at least. And I can’t live without laughing; who lives like that – owls and peasants, and let me tell you, if they ever ran into each other, they’d fall over laughing, it’d be like looking into a funhouse mirror, no?
That’s what I’m saying: a sense of humor is essential. It’s the only thing that’s kept me alive. People say I’m easy, travel light – well, that’s because life makes me laugh, and if I get depressed, I don’t get down, I’ve got an answer for that too: change everything, go to a new place, and look – here I am again, alive and well! I know no one can live your life for you, and I’ve always stood up for myself ever since I was a kid, and others... other people also do what’s best for them, they just don’t like admitting it. Anyway, I ran away. Some will tell you that was a stupid thing to do, left as I was without a penny in my pocket, but I got my warning call, and I heard it good and clear.
For Seryoga it was the kidneys, and for me it was my back. Oh man! First it didn’t hurt all that bad – I’d feel better after a hot banya, but you can’t live like a walrus, can you? Then it got worse. I went to see Lukeria’s mother, she’s our resident witch. She rubbed me this way and that, and gave me some herbs to make compresses with, and did her soothsaying thing, and at first it helped, but then the pain came back bad enough to make you howl. This, she said, means it’s not your back that’s hurting – it’s your soul that’s gotten twisted by ill-gotten money. You’ve got to leave it now, easy money’s like a jinx – you’ll never get better while you’re around it. If that’s how it is, I said, why don’t you get your Lukeria out of that restaurant if cash is so bad for you? The old woman took offense and refused to heal me any more, and it was probably for the best, else she’d have healed me straight into the grave. I’m not saying she doesn’t know things – she probably did save Lukeria’s life after the drive shaft had gone through her, and all the doctors gave up – but she just wasn’t the one to help me. Still, I could feel she was right – I knew somehow money wasn’t going to make me happy.
I quit drinking. It still hurt. I left Zagotskot – then I felt a bit better, but then the pain came back again, and wrung me so bad, I couldn’t take a piss. It felt like someone took out my spine, and put in an iron rod instead, and it wouldn’t bend in any direction, and the rest of it is on fire as if a whole bunch of Chingachgooks were skinning me alive. At the time, I got the cash collector’s job at the bank, driving around in an UAZ, and you can just imagine what a back like that can do to a man on our roads. You can sit on a down pillow and wrap a rabbit-hair shawl around your midsection – none of it helps. You’re in hell, literally: you’re sitting in a pool of molten lead and someone’s pouring boiling oil down your spine. I kept mum at home – it didn’t feel right to let Tatyana down, but I was starting to think some dark thoughts. There, Oleg Petrovich, I said to myself, looks like it’s the end of the party for you. But Tatyana’s a good wife: she sized me up, packed me up, and dragged me into the Central Hospital – and you know I did everything to get out of it, I know what these hospitals are like where they have the same pill and the same enema for the whole floor.