Yet it stays. It is here. Lyamochkin writes. Another fable, a tidbit of a story, a morsel of news to be fixed in his thick, clothbound notebook. It has room to spare for sparrows, of course, and it’s true: up and down fly the swings of time, but the motion is not the reward, the merit is elsewhere – in the miraculous transformations he re-lives alone.
✵ ✵ ✵
His wife calls him to the table; the family gathers for a late dinner. Ivanov and his wife stop by – they are friends and neighbors. From a fogged-over bottle, Lyamochkin pours thick, lazily flowing vodka infused with the peel of Greek lemons. Then – clink! – and he bites a pickle, crunches it loudly with his teeth. Ivanov tells a joke; the women laugh.
He is at the same paper, the same editorial office still – the unhurried, thoughtful Lyamochkin who can sometimes be as restless as a sparrow in springtime, our Lyamochkin, the irreplaceable one. He is no longer afraid of anything; sometimes he goes to the station to receive important visitors, then rattles all over town in the decrepit editorial van, picking up other banya fans. More often, though, he finds an excuse to stay behind at the office.
And if he doesn’t stay late there, drinking countless cups of tea with the guy responsible for closing the issue, and if he manages to get everything on his list done early, Lyamochkin heads out to the beer stand. To get a mug or two, to shoot the breeze, to hear a story perhaps. He goes there with his tie on; he never takes it off now. He sips his beer, smokes his cigarette, and, unembarrassed about his advancing boldness, looks with a quiet joy at each passerby.
21. Lucius Apuleius (died December 100 BC) was a Roman popularist and tribune.
Vladik Kuznetsov
Stargorodians are a special tribe. While it is unlikely that anyone has ever taken it upon themselves to determine the exact number of emigrants from Stargorod, it is well known that Moscow and Leningrad are constantly receiving large numbers of former Stargorodians, and one can reasonably believe this process to have begun long before the Great October Revolution. Later, the flow of Stargorodians increased quite a bit in the aftermath of the Great Patriotic War, which significantly curtailed our ancient town’s native population. But it feels unseemly to talk about it; after all, the whole country knew of Stargorodians’ heroism – among the likes of Lyonya Golikov and Marat Kasey, young pioneers everywhere revered Billyakhut Maxuddinova, whose deeds on the Black Shore of the lake won her first a Hero of the Soviet Union star and later an honorable seat at the Professional Unions’ Association of the Russian Federation.
Indeed, we should not talk about those whose faces are familiar to every schoolchild; let us rather turn to the unknown and the forgotten. Their name is legion, and restoring their memory is an honorable pursuit, undertaken, in particular, by the Red Scouts of School No. 2 of Stargorod’s Left-bank district. Their displays present for public consumption much that is instructive and curious; hence we shall refer any members of the public who find themselves at leisure and with an interest in local history to the modest, cottonwood-shaded building of the school on Vera Zasulich street.
We, however, shall tell a tale of another hero – a hero of our own time.
The old man Kuznetsov was still young when he broke away from the despicable world of Stargorod’s pre-revolutionary stockyards into which he’d been born, and signed up for the Red Army. From that distant but romantic period of his life, he retained for the rest of his days a special affection for the color green, discipline and the principle of unitary authority as embodied in the chain of command. Kuznetsov retired into the rank of an infantry Colonel, felt no desire to return to his forgotten hometown of Stargorod, and instead was perfectly happy to settle in the small town of Lyubertsy, where the garrison allotted him an apartment, to be used in perpetuity by Kuznetsov and his descendants. History has not preserved any information as to the whereabouts of the old man’s only daughter, Svetlana, lost to the immense expanse of our land; one could well have doubted the very fact of said daughter’s existence, were it not for little Vladik, left in his grandparents’ care. Grandmother Kuznetsova died a mere three weeks before her grandson’s high school graduation, and was buried in the Lyubertsy town cemetery without a church service – something her husband, the old Red Army veteran insisted upon. Vladik, who was considered a wunderkind in the school, was deeply affected by his grandmother’s death, but nonetheless graduated with the Gold Medal which, combined with his unimpeachable proletarian pedigree, gave him a free pass to the alma mater – the History Department at Moscow State University named for Mikhail Lomonosov.
Much like the provincial boy who lent his name to the university, Vladik Kuznetsov arrived at the department in humble attire: he wore sturdy green pants that looked like they’d been re-cut from his grandfather’s, an army-issue officer’s shirt without shoulder straps but with two capacious pockets filled with sharpened pencils, a fountain pen with regulation black ink, a thick plastic comb and a military-discount railway pass for the Moscow-Lyubertsy line. Unlike his more comfortable local classmates, Vladik lived on his 55-ruble stipend (which included a 15-ruble bonus for his perfect grades) and had a crystal clear idea of what he wanted. While the snobs around him debauched themselves in decadent luxury and skipped classes, instead laying siege to the One-Armed Man pub, Vladik methodically studied Latin and prepared to write his thesis on Cato the Elder and his tract De Agri Cultura.
Many readers, of course, will be familiar with this work as well as the biography of its author, a luminary of Ancient Rome. For those whom circumstances have prevented, thus far, from reading Cornelius Nepos’ Excellentium Imperatorum Vitae or Plutarch’s Lives, we offer here the plain but exhaustive entry from the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (2nd edition, v. 20, p. 383):
Cato, Marcus Porcius (not to be confused with Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis, commonly known as Cato the Younger) (234-149 BC) – one of the great Roman politicians and writers. He came from a wealthy plebeian family, from the city of Tusculum. In 199 BC was elected Aedile, in 198 BC – Praetor to Spain where he suppressed an uprising of the local tribes. During the war with the Syrian King Antioch III, C. secured for his countrymen the victory in the 191 BC battle at Thermopylae (not to be confused with the one fought by King Leonid and 300 Spartans). In 184 BC, he was elected Censor. Once in a Senatorial position, C. defended the aristocracy and its privileges; he held significant real estate and liquid assets. C. became the voice of those nobles who had made the transition to new forms of estate management by organizing large, slave-labor-based latifundia aimed at producing surplus for the marketplace. All his actions aimed at promoting an active foreign policy and the expansion of the Roman conquests. C. advocated for destroying Carthage – Rome’s major trade competitor. Being, at the same time, a representative of conservative views, he introduced strict anti-luxury laws and fought the growing influence of the Greek culture.
C. is also a major figure of Ancient Roman prose. He was fluent in Greek and well acquainted with Greek culture, in particular the works of Thucydides and Xenophon. C.’s most significant work was The Origins, which relates the history not only of Rome but also of other Latin cities. Of his many speeches, only fragments have survived. The tract De Agri Cultura is another complete work; it contains fundamental information about contemporary economy and agriculture.