What else can we say? Vladik had enough of his wits about him to evade the police, and Ace was gone when Vladik came back for him, so the little mutt’s ultimate fate remains unknown. We only know that Vladik took the loss of his companion very hard and for a while nurtured plans of setting the Academician’s dacha on fire.
It was a rough year for Vladik. Right before his thesis defense, his old grandfather passed away in a veterans’ hospital. Vladik was left without a soul in the world, alone in the two-room apartment in Lyubertsy. His grandfather’s death affected him deeply; that summer, he built a memorial marker on the grave, topped with the Red Star, as is proper for veterans of all Soviet battles. There was no priest, of course, but still, for some reason, Vladik requested prayers to be said for 40 days straight at the church in Vagankovo Cemetery. Vladik defended his thesis and graduated, but only ‘just’ – people said, he drank heavily after his grandfather’s death. He was assigned to the Lyubertsy school,22 and worked there for a few months, but was eventually fired on the grounds of “professional ineptitude,” a charge painfully familiar to any free thinker at the time.
After that, Vladik’s track grows cold. Someone who’d seen him told us that Vladik wanted to volunteer for the war in Afghanistan – he went to the recruitment office, suggesting his own plan of combat operations, but did not pass the medical exam. He somehow survived, year after year; he never worked as a historian. In the early days of perestroika, he was seen at Pushkin Square – alone, surrounded by a mob, arguing with the pressing human mass. People saw him, but were afraid to approach him.
The last person who can be reliably said to have spoken to Vladik Kuznetsov was Kolya Bolshoi, who is now Deputy Facilities Director at the Tretyakov Gallery. If one believes his account, which resulted from a visit to the Church of Assumption, in Vishnyaki (actually, Kolya usually goes to All Saints in Sokolovsk, but his mother-in-law lives in Vishnyaki), Vladik works there as a bell-ringer.
He has grown gaunt and pale; he wears a plain jacket and his apparently indestructible boots, does not shave, has let his hair grow long, and drinks only within reason (by Kolya’s own definition). He is planning to go to the monastery city of Pechora, to learn ancient bell-ringing from its masters.
22. In the Soviet system, university graduates were often assigned to hard-to-fill jobs according to their specialty.
The Real Life
1
“Life, especially for those over 30, hurls forward increasingly fast, as if to match the speed of our day’s new technologies, and one hardly finds a moment to simply approach a stranger and, looking him in the eye, say something non-trivial and pleasant. No, we have no moments like that, and even when we find them, we do something entirely different with them than we imagined. We talk about being charitable and merciful, and many join the recently resurrected societies of Friends of Animals and condemn with righteous rage the cruel dog-catchers. But would they act? Would they do anything, even if the action was humble and inconspicuous? Would I, myself, extend a helping hand to a homeless stranger, or at least to someone lost in this city – say, to that red-faced fellow sitting with his boxes on the park bench?..”
So, or approximately so, reasoned Rafa Stonov, a common office-worker, a road engineer. Rafa had always dreamed of erecting grand, leaping bridges and high-speed tunnels, but so far circumstances had prevented him from building any such thing, keeping him, for the time being, in the employ of the Asphalt and Tar Surfaces Department. To give him credit, he did develop a new method for laying concrete surfaces, and even defended a dissertation about it 12 years ago or so (his method is still being optimized for production at his research institute’s testing facility). But Rafa had faith in progress. He also had faith in humankind. And if occasionally he did fall prey to Russian angst, likely somehow associated with the state of the roads it was his job to inspect, such episodes were no more or less frequent for him than is common. In his dark moments, Rafa would think of something very complex. This feeling cannot be decently explained except perhaps by means of a penetrating joke – but it is likely to be familiar to many of our compatriots: it’s when life suddenly appears utterly unnatural and contrived, and one yearns for something hard to define, glimpsed once, perhaps, in childhood, through a crack in a fence.
That’s why, as he was about to turn homeward during his Saturday walk, in a state of extreme inner anxiety, Rafa had to force himself to look closer at the random, red-faced fellow with his boxes, who had initially inspired in Rafa only aversion, diluted perhaps with small doses of curiosity and empathy.
The fellow, whose clothes and carefully concealed sense of dignity immediately marked him as a non-Muscovite, looked about anxiously, exhibiting all the signs typical of the concussion that results from a sudden encounter with Moscow reality. He would attempt to stand up and grab all his cargo at once, which he could not possibly accomplish, despite his impressive dimensions, broad shoulders, and, even more importantly, his incredibly capacious paws, which called to mind stereotypical pictures of native Siberian bear-hunters, descendants of the peasants who had saved a besieged Moscow in the frigid winter of 1941. When he failed, he would curse fiercely at his load, fall back onto the bench and address the passers-by with the entirely rhetorical question of “So how are we supposed to go on living?”
The passers-by, naturally, gave him a wide berth. All except Rafa, who plucked up his courage and took a seat on the fellow’s bench. The fellow greeted him instantly, “I’m stuck, you see, with my girls here. I’ve got a return for tomorrow and nowhere to spend the night. Help us out, mate, or we’ll perish just like the Swedes at Poltava.”
Rafa smiled without saying much, and did not rush to offer customary Russian hospitality, although a small voice inside him already began to assure him that the fellow was not at all as dangerous as at first he appeared.
“Let me explain the disposition here,” the red-faced man continued, slightly calmer. “I’ve come to the capital on chicken business. You’d be surprised, mate, but we chicken-breeders are a bit off, all to the last man. If I as much as catch a whisper that, say, somewhere in Tallinn someone’s fixin’ to sell some Cochin-chinas, I’m there in a blink. Bukhara, Vladivostok – the money’s no object as they say. So, I got my return ticket well in advance, but now I’m stuck, after the deal went through lightning-quick. You go ahead, look, look into the box – I see you don’t get it, not at all, it’s written all over your face!”
He lifted a small flap cut into one of the boxes, like a window, and Rafa obligingly bent lower to see. A coquettish head popped up, attached to a creature that looked like a cross between a midget heron and a carrier pigeon. The head turned coyly, displaying itself, and hid back inside the box.
“Have you seen anything like this? Have you? In your eyes I can see you have not!” The fellow’s face melted into a boyish smile that scattered the last shreds of Rafa’s hesitation.
“So you’ll put us up for the night, for real? The girls and I are quiet – no worries, guaranteed not to make a mess. I have a bottle with me, just in case, but I don’t drink myself – I quit,” the fellow patted his bulging briefcase as a manner of proof.
Then he rose from the bench, but instantly turned and slapped his hand on his forehead, “What a fool! I forgot – I’m Vovochka.”
Rafa extended his hand and introduced himself informally, “Rafa.”
He did not like his full name, Rafael. Being by education and upbringing a very modern person, he frequently begrudged his parents for giving him the distinction of such an old-fashioned name.