He reads without pauses, but steadily, as if reading a newspaper for a blind man. The student tries to write it down, can’t keep up, fidgets, and finally throws his pencil down on his notebook.
“No, it’s just too hard! It’s impossible.”
“Nothing of the sort, young man, just the common shorthand of seventeenth century scribes.”
“But these are hieroglyphs – they don’t even look like letters!”
“Of course they are hieroglyphs, and rather beautiful ones. You’ll get used to them, don’t worry, it’s just a matter of practice. Let’s go again from the beginning...”
Ogorodnikov reads again, slowly now, making sure the student can write everything down. Finally, it is done.
“Thank you, thank you so much! I have just one more little text here, could you...”
“I’m afraid I can’t, young man, I do have other things to do, you know,” he says, looking haughty now and walks away from the student’s desk, shuffles steadily back to his corner. He thinks, if the boy really wants to know, he’ll figure it out – he’s got enough written down to compare, to decipher the shorthand and start reading. And if he can’t – he shouldn’t be here anyway.
A minute later he is back at his own desk, working again.
Pavel Anatolyevich Ogorodnikov – a small fortress of a man – sits behind a big solid desk. Look at him: his over-sleeves, and his boots, and his glasses in their impossible black frame, and his briefcase of the kind no one carries anymore – everything about him is fundamentally permanent. Could this be why the archive’s girls, who forever dream of happy, romantic love, dote on him so movingly at lunch? He chews his sandwich, stirs the tea in his glass with an aluminum spoon, and when they ask him, tells them one of his peculiar stories, like the one about coronet Savelyev who was so desperately in love with the merchant’s daughter Pilgina that he shot himself in the White Tower when she turned him down. The girls listen, unblinking, hanging on his every word. Who would have thought such things were possible? Pavel Anatolyevich does.
Then they go back to their respective corners. The girls scurry between the stacks and the reading room, pushing carts loaded with case folders, books and microfilm boxes, chat with rare visitors; he works. “Feed inventory for the 4th Royal Guard Uhlan division quartered in Anninskaya Sloboda,” another one – from the following year, “The case of Coronet Sergeyev’s lost rapier,” “Note by widow Vechtomova about her degraded situation due to the non-payment of her dead husband’s pension,” and more things like that, gray and trifling, a litany of complaints, cowering petitions, the usual fervent Russian begging laced with despair and abandonment. And all of it local, Stargorodian. The city, the town but a tiny dot on a large map, yet there are so many cases, so many files have piled on in the stacks and there is no one but Pavel Anatolyevich to take up the tedious work of sorting through them.
The work day is over. Pavel Anatolyevich neatly collects his pens, pencils, erasers, his penknife and his razors, dusts off his desk and nods his goodbye to the girls as they dash out ahead of him. He pulls on his heavy coat, seals himself behind its massive buttons, and steps out to the gallery of St. Jacob and Anna’s little church that’s “on the gorges.” A long time ago there was a grove of trees here. Later, when the plague came – a cemetery with a tiny temporary wooden chapel, and later still they built the five-domed church. He does not walk past the brewery, oh no – he is walking down the non-existent rows of the Klykov merchant family, past the old fish market, over the three-span oak bridge with heavy breakwaters, and on through Potters’ Corner. And if someone should think that this little man in his coat is oblivious to the charms of spring, if someone should judge that “the briefcase guy” does not breathe as fully and joyfully as the judge himself, the judge would be wrong, very wrong indeed. Although sometimes it is true that one’s own joy can make one completely blind to the world, and the joy of others seems all but repulsive, and one does not want to share this momentary, private bliss with anyone else, well then, there’s nothing wrong with that, is there?
Pavel Anatolyevich has gotten hungry. Against his will, he stumbles into the wonderful prose of life – he begins to daydream about the hot borsch and the potato pancakes with mushroom sauce that his wife makes so well. He enjoys an affectionate home, where the best of dinner is always set aside to wait for him.
His gaze is still distant, aloof, his eyes almost haughty in their refusal to focus on the quotidian.
Metamorphoses, or The Art of Instant Transformation
For A. Arkhangelsky
Let me spin a tale for you, a fable like in the old days, one to delight and amuse. Let me sweet-talk you – only give me kindly of your time and do cast your gaze upon this piece of paper I have filled with ink. I promise that you will marvel at the transformations of fates and of the human forms themselves, and at their return, by same miraculous means, back to their original state. I shall begin.
But who am I, you’ll ask. Listen then: our name is the Lyamochkins. I am a Stargorodian, a son of a Stargorodian, and a grandson of a Stargorodian’s grandson, and very few of us remain these days. Captured for a while by Moscow, I studied there at the Moscow State University in the Department of History, pursuing the thoroughly forgotten Lucius Apuleius.21 Here in Stargorod I now labor at the local paper, although back then people expected a great future for me, a great future indeed. But that is all in the past; now I am just making regular progress up the career ladder, and Filimonov even let it slip recently that he might make me his Executive Secretary. That would be logicaclass="underline" I am meek and clever. But I am a Stargorodian, born and raised, flesh and blood, I am Lyamochkin who writes his tales sometimes and puts them in his desk drawer – I have a fancy to compile a chronicle of my generation. Thus, first and foremost I beg you not to take offense should you find in my crude prose some folksy turns-of-phrase and foreign words. A shifting dialect does befit, when you think about it, the art of instant transformation, and the latter is my single and most compelling subject. Metamorphoses – or perhaps, fate itself. I do begin. Lend me your ears, reader, and let me please you.
✵ ✵ ✵
It’s not that long ago that they made me head of a department, and Filimonov announces, “Do hustle tomorrow. Tomorrow we are going to pick up comrade Karponos at the railway station. I want you there early. Before. Half-an-hour before the train pulls in.”
All right. I run. I take flight. I curse my fate as I rush, but I obey – though it is Thursday, I’ve got work to do, and instead I must stand here, wait, greet: Karponos is an auditor, come all the way from Moscow to inspect us. Is it good I’ve been included? I don’t know. I really don’t – I rather think it’s bad. Before, I only heard of these meetings in passing, but now that I’ve climbed higher – here I am, they bring me along. And thank God for that. I run. I fly. I curse the day I was born – I’m embarrassed.
But. The sleeping car pulls up. First, a Gut emerges. A Pot. A Cauldron. Everyone’s on the platform now affecting great liveliness, only I’m bent over under the luggage, silent. They do bring me around to shake hands – I’m the last one. The driver takes up a couple suitcases. The Volga rolls away towards the dacha, our van – with its death rattle – hangs back. We’ve got someone else to pick up: the city’s head architect, naturally, Ilya Semyonovich Razkin, then the unions – Boris Borisovich Draftin, the city administration – Bobchinov, district committee – Dobychin, and so on down the list. Filimonov is in charge of the list; our boss rides in the Volga with comrade Karponos. They must be sitting down to dinner already, and we’re still making rounds, still fetching people: Alimzharov – the market, Eaglov – the furniture factory, Patrikeyeva... Wait a second! Who’s this Patrikeyeva? Oh, it’s Patrikeyev – the gathering is men only. Pardon me – he is tiny, small-boned, and a leather coat obscures his shape. He is the bank. Is that all? All. Off we go then – to the pier.