HEAVENLY FLAME
THIS KOROBEINIKOV, he would come over to the dacha from the neighboring sanatorium. They operated on him there for an ulcer. That’s what doctors always say: for an ulcer. After all, you don’t just go cutting someone open without rhyme or reason, although I know a lot of people think it’d be interesting to get opened up, so they can take a look and see what’s in there just in case. But you can’t go and do that for no reason. So they give a reason to cut—an ulcer, let’s say—and then it’s up to God; our citizen goes and dies for some entirely different reason, and the doctors had nothing to do with it.
So anyway, Korobeinikov would come visit the dacha from his sanatorium. It’s a nice walk, not hard, a couple of kilometers among hills, through a little birch forest. It’s August; the birds aren’t singing anymore, but it’s pure bliss all the same. The weather’s dry, the leaves are turning yellow and dropping off, here and there a mushroom sticks up. Korobeinikov would pick the mushroom and bring it to the house.
You can’t make anything with one mushroom, but it was still a gift. An offering to the house. Olga Mikhailovna would stand on the porch, watching him come from behind the high-spiked birch-trunk fence, and say, “Here comes Korobeinikov, he’s got a mushroom.” And her words made everyone feel good, kind of peaceful, like in childhood: the sun shines serenely; the seasons slip by serenely; serenely, with no shouting or panic, autumn draws near. A nice man is coming, carrying a bit of nature. How sweet.
Who knows how or why he got into the habit of going over to their place, why he became attached to them. But they were glad to have him. Having company in the country—it’s not like having company in the city. There’s a pleasant lack of obligation. In the city a guest won’t just drop in, he’ll phone first to say, I’d like to come by and visit you. The hostess will glance quickly at the floor: is there a lot of dust?—she’ll do a mental check: is the bed still unmade?—she’ll give a nervous thought to the refrigerator shelves—all in all, it makes for tension. Stress. But in the country none of that matters: what to sit on, what to drink, or from what cups. And it’s no disaster if you leave a guest alone for five minutes—in the city that’s a cardinal sin, but not in the country. It’s a different type of hospitality. The guest lounges in a wicker armchair, has a smoke, or just sits quietly, gazing out the window at the view, at the sky, and there’s a sunset playing through all its colors—it’ll give off a red or lilac stripe, then a golden crust will flare on a cloud, or everything will be tinged with a frosty green or lemon—a star will sparkle—Better than television.
Then the hostess returns carrying a teapot under a padded-cotton cozy, she slices a loaf of pound cake, turns on the light. Moths fly in from the garden, flutter about. Small talk, this and that, everyone laughs, argues, sits around, sighs. Korobeinikov would be better off not smoking, what with his ulcer, but he smokes, launches into his discussions of mysterious phenomena. He believes in aliens, in little green men; he’s concerned about giant spiders, and triangles in the Nazca desert. In the newspaper Labor he read that a flying saucer came and hovered over the city of Sverdlovsk, that the sky near Leningrad shone with a strange light and no one knew why. This disturbs him. It disturbs Olga Mikhailovna too: she’s always wanted to meet little green men; she has plans for them. Korobeinikov says that in South America the little green men took this woman Dolores up with them in their saucer, gave her a ride, showed her a bird’s-eye view of the earth, then set her down—in the city of Boston. Dolores, a simple peasant woman, was completely bewildered—she didn’t know the language, didn’t know where to go. She’s got sixteen children at home howling to eat, and here she is, gadding about the city of Boston like a chicken, while her husband, José, also a simple peasant, doesn’t have a clue what’s going on either, and is so furious he’s sharpening his switchblade and threatening to take care of his faithless wife— just let her cross the threshold of their house! Olga Mikhailovna both believes and doesn’t believe, but she’s extremely annoyed: she would have figured things out just fine over there in the city of Boston, what with her common sense and clear thinking; she would have known what was what right away— these little green men are forever picking up the wrong people. Everyone laughs and gives Olga Mikhailovna instructions about what to bring them from Boston if the same thing ever happens to her. Olga Mikhailovna’s husband says just let her try; he’ll sharpen his switchblade, too, he won’t stand for any of these little men. Someone says aliens only take people to Boston if they’re from South America; anyone from the Moscow suburbs, it stands to reason, they’d take somewhere like Tyumen or the Matochkin Strait, and what would Olga Mikhailovna do in that case? Olga Mikhailovna’s husband says this is all nonsense—as if Labor was any authority!—and that there’s no such thing as aliens, it’s all meteors with megahertz. What hertz? Well, he couldn’t say for sure, he’s no astronomer, but they’ve all got megahertz. Oh, there goes Olga Mikhailovna’s husband again with his cheap materialism—he’s always reducing the dreams of progressive mankind to some little turd. One witty fellow immediately starts punning. “Whatever hertz, a person blurtz.” Who hertz where, comrades? Korobeinikov’s ulcer hertz, but he feels good here at this dacha; everything is so relaxed that he somehow forgets about his pain. One hour of time spent with pleasant people, a single hour an evening, is worth all the medicines they cram down him at the sanatorium.
Korobeinikov savors one last cigarette: he taps it against the table; he kneads the hollow cardboard tip, lights a match; the pale flame illuminates his yellowish face, the fat lenses of his glasses, a bulging forehead with locks of thick black hair. Korobeinikov has extraordinary hair: the man is nearly sixty years old, and look what a mane he’s got! Everyone else already has bald spots of various shapes, except for the young people, of course. Olga Mikhailovna’s husband, glancing at Korobeinikov, runs his hand over his own balding head with chagrin—oh well, to each his own. At least I don’t have an ulcer.
But now it’s dark outside the window—in August it gets dark early—and time for Korobeinikov to go. He’s expected for supper at the sanatorium: his piece of baked cheese pie with its beggarly puddle of sour cream has already grown cold, and the tea urn, too, and the lights have been turned out. He’ll sit in the half-empty cafeteria, deep in thought, brushing crumbs off the tablecloth, staring at his shaggy reflection in the black win-dowpanes, listening closely to the mustard-hot pain somewhere inside him—to the pain that awakens with the darkness and drones, drones like a distant transformer.
Dolores—that is, Olga Mikhailovna—walks Korobeinikov out to the porch, and everyone else stands up as well, nodding and shaking his hand: It’s not too cold for you? Maybe you should take a jacket? No? Are you sure now? He will carefully step down from the porch, his glasses glinting, he’ll turn on a pocket flashlight, the bright circle will play at his feet, catching a bit of the green grass, the fence spikes, the trampled path, the startled, white tree trunks. Korobeinikov directs the beam to the skies, but the weak light scatters and the skies remain just as dark as ever; only the top branches and the crows’ nests are lit for a moment. Playful, he turns the flashlight back toward the porch, and then nothing can be seen in the night but a white star where Korobeinikov had been standing.