A Russian Story (6 page)

No sooner had he reached the three birches than a woman in a blindingly white head-scarf appeared out of nowhere and called out to him:

“This way! The General is expecting you.”

He was no longer surprised by the rural tom-toms. But as he was walking from the three birches to the grey-brick house pointed out to him by the woman with the white scarf, it occurred to him: this is it, Ukraine. Here they have always spoken Ukrainian. Even in the days when I was a pupil at a Ukrainian school, but spoke Russian outside school, as everybody else did, and when I studied in Russian at university, and when I started speaking Ukrainian during the great changes. Here Ukrainian has always been the natural form of speech, without any self-awareness or any ideas of nationalism or patriotism. Those who moved away from here into the towns converted to Russian; they had to suffer the cramped conditions of filthy communal living quarters and the extortionate costs of rotten rented flats, but having to forget their native language wasn’t a problem at all. Those who stayed here effortlessly use words which I often have to spend ages searching for in dictionaries.

His first impression of this house was that it was definitely the General’s. Single-storey, but tall. A steep roof — the ceilings must be high in the rooms; look how tall the windows are, and they are high above ground level. Eugene recognised details the General had mentioned in his letter: solid foundations, a good loft. In the bright blue sky above the house, swallows with shining white bellies were swooping wildly. Above one of the windows of the General’s house was a swallow’s nest, from which several wide-open beaks protruded.

“Yesterday one wee swallow chick fell from the nest,” said the woman standing at the entrance to the General’s land, realising what he was looking at. She stood at his side, having materialised again out of nowhere.

“Just go in, he’s waiting for you,” went on the woman. “The entrance is on the other side. Follow the house around and go in. The latch is stiff — give it a good jerk.”

Sure enough, the latch was pretty stiffish. And the floor in the General’s house really did creak badly. Eugene, like everybody else in the village, was already thinking of his relative as the General, rather than as his
honest uncle, beyond reproof
. This is amazing! Beyond the large kitchen one large empty room after another. Only when he reached the third one did he find the old man, sitting in a leather armchair with wooden armrests, next to a table.

The General spoke in Russian. What is more, just like his sister, that is to say Eugene’s mother, he talked in lines from Russian classical literature. To tell the truth, however, he was quite unlike his sister, since apart from a few commonplaces he knew nothing. Of Pushkin’s immortal work, which his mother knew off by heart virtually in its entirety, he knew only the first four lines about the
honest uncle
who demanded to be
respected
.

“Well, do you respect me, Zhenia?” asked the General, with the laugh of a stroke patient.

Eugene shrugged his shoulders.

“I’ve no reason not to respect you.”

“But there’s no reason to respect me either.”

“I am accustomed to take respect for granted.”

“That is very sensible of you.”

They conversed in Russian. That day and the following days as well. The General always responded to his fellow-villagers in Ukrainian though. In Irivka they spoke good Ukrainian and you heard Ukrainian-Russian hybrid speech only when it came to words which were alien to the rural way of life. The General had also picked up good Ukrainian from the villagers. But with his nephew, who he evidently considered a representative of his own world, he conversed in Russian. This happened of its own accord; there were no conscious motivations involved. Eugene did not ask the General why he had become bilingual in the village, rather than converting completely to Ukrainian, the language everyone spoke round here. Instead, he asked how he came to choose this particular house in the village when he retired.

“Because it was the only opportunity to live in a big house. In town they offered me a one-room flat. In a good house, in the centre of the chief town of the region, but just the one room. My wife died of cancer two years before my retirement. It was my fault — I once made her have an abortion, because at the beginning of my army career we lived in terrible conditions. I expected everything to sort itself out later and I thought we would have children. But it didn’t work out; after that she was ill all her life. For other women it turned out all right, but not for her. I had ideas about re-marrying and making a new wife happy, bringing my princess to the big house. In our regiment there was a lieutenant from this village; he visits occasionally — he’s a major now. He told me about this house. I bought it from the local council, not from private owners. I got permission — in those days you had to get permission for everything. But I didn’t get married again after all. It didn’t work out. I courted my wife for a year before we started going out together. This time all the young widows in the village started bringing me apples, honey and milk, they were keen to dig over my garden, when I still had one, to tidy up in the house and beat the carpets. Not only widows, actually, but even unmarried girls. For several years I worked at the local school as a military training officer. There are some excellent girls here — I bequeath them all to you. Your mother wrote that you used to be married to the daughter of a Soviet bigshot.”

“There was even a child.”

“But the child isn’t yours, is it?”

“Mother was very forthcoming in her letters to you, evidently.”

“She just added two or three lines to the Victory Day greetings.”

Eugene liked living in the General’s house. He moved into the other wing. His bedroom was far from that of his
honest uncle, beyond reproof
; he was not ever asked to re-arrange the sick man’s pillows at night.

Eugene went back home briefly for his things. He brought a pile of books. Some of them were a gift from old Mme Nebuvaiko. He was delighted to take with him the bag full of books Lada had returned to him when he came to see the little one. Amongst them there was even the famous two-volume work by Nietzsche with a black cover, published during the
perestroika
period, but previously he hadn’t had time to read these books carefully. Actually, he had acquired the knack of including quotations from them in his articles without delving deeply into the immortal texts. Now he could already see himself in his room, sitting at his desk next to the green lamp, attentively reading a book by Francis Bacon, for example. Or Nietzsche, that’s it, Nietzsche,
The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music
! To absorb these wild ideas you need the true isolation that he would at last now enjoy. And he would continue to learn German! That’s a good thing too! The darker phases of life have a deeper meaning and are much more fruitful than the brighter ones!

Eugene had returned to Kyiv only briefly. He packed his belongings and his books, and went to his mother’s to pick up the CD player he had brought for her from America — she only listened to her crackly vinyl records. And then he set off back to Irivka. He arranged in advance for the old man to meet him off the morning train with his cart and take him to the General’s house. The old man didn’t let him down; he was waiting by the platform. He helped him to load his bags onto the cart and commanded the horse: “Gee-up!” Like Pushkin, I’m off to the great house with a cart-load of books, thought Eugene.

On the drive in front of the General’s house there stood an ancient
Volga
with a metallic deer on the bonnet — the former symbol of Soviet affluence, beyond the reach of many. The car was in working order. One day Eugene and the General got in that
Volga
and drove to a nearby town.

“Is it all right for you to drive?” asked Eugene, alarmed.

“Just let any policeman try stopping the General’s car!” his uncle replied. “We won’t drive on the main road; mind you, they themselves can get away with driving around here drunk, in the nude and without number plates.”

In town they arranged their affairs through a notary, and Eugene obtained the certificate, signed and sealed, giving him inheritance rights.

“I don’t know how to thank you,” muttered Eugene on the return journey, because he had to say something. “It’s a shame my parents have never been to see you.”

“Now you are the most eligible bachelor in all Irivka,” laughed the General. “You’ll see that I’m not just leaving you a big house, I’m leaving you the entire village.”

The General turned out to be indeed
his honest uncle, beyond reproof
. The very next day after their trip to the district council he was taken ill. Volodya, the doctor from the local health centre, hurried round and stayed with him for several hours, while Eugene sat in the north wing at the desk by the green glass lamp which he had taken from the General’s table. Then Volodya solemnly summoned him. Eugene was overwhelmed, not only by the death as such, but because it felt as if he had come here merely to inherit. During these few weeks he had become attached to the General and he had become very involved in the sad story of his life. He felt great sadness when Volodya led him to the General’s bedroom, so that, in accordance with some local custom, Eugene himself could fold the General’s arms across his chest.
And centuries-old notions, And fateful mysteries of death…
Eugene sat on a chair at his dead uncle’s bedside, while Volodya went to the front room to complete the General’s death certificate. It was four o’clock on a summer’s morning and dawn was breaking. Outside the window, the voices of the village women could be heard, getting louder and louder. Goodness knows how, they had already found out all about it.

All the villagers recognised Eugene as the General’s sole legal heir. As his next of kin, he solemnly took the long, slow walk directly behind the hearse, and the whole village followed behind.

But not everything was so straightforward. In the course of the funeral supper it was revealed that the General had actually re-married. And he was not divorced. His second wife, a young librarian employed by the district council, had lived in his house for a short time. She left him back in Soviet times, helping herself to his late first wife’s gold jewellery, and several hundred Soviet roubles in cash which the General had withdrawn from his savings account at her request because she said her mother needed help. After Ukrainian independence, this petty swindler never re-appeared. When you take a long time to make a choice and you are too fastidious, you are bound to make a wrong decision, as was the case with the General. So, as the notary officially informed Eugene, he would have to wait for six months after the General’s death before he could inherit. If the swindler did not turn up within six months, he could inherit the house and do what he liked with it. If she turned up, it would not all be so straightforward for her either. But she could apply to the court, and if she found a decent lawyer she would probably be awarded a share in the house. But nobody was going to actively search for the General’s wife, now his widow.

“The Muscovite!” the women at the wake called her. “They sent her to our district from the Saratov Region.

“What’s this?” wondered Eugene. “A special sort of patriotism? Or a primitive sense of otherness?”

His parents did not come to the funeral, although he sent them a telegram from the local post office, where they opened up especially for him, since the General had not died on a weekday. After the funeral Eugene went home, to bring his parents over for the commemoration dinner on the ninth day. Father and mother debated for a long time whether they should go or not. It was rather awkward to go to pay your respects when you hadn’t ever been to see him when he was alive, his father said. Mother shilly-shallied for a long time, then she also decided not to go.

She tipped out a pile of old photographs on the floor and found several pictures of her elder brother. She recalled how proud she had felt as a seven year old girl on the one or two occasions when her elder brother, a military cadet, collected her from school. She found a wedding photograph of the late General. His young wife was remarkably beautiful. Or perhaps it was just a particularly good photograph? Mother said she would be thinking of her brother at home, rather than in the company of the village women, who she didn’t know. But she would allow Eugene to say she had been taken ill, and actually she did have great difficulty in breathing! So he told his new neighbours how seriously ill his mother was and that his father was unable to leave her and the women sighed in sympathy.

In the house of his late uncle, Eugene found the same photograph which his mother had shown him, and many more besides. Unlike his mother’s photographs, the General’s archive was organised in military fashion. All the photographs were in albums, in strict chronological order with the dates written in pencil. The General’s first wife was very beautiful in other photographs as well, taken when she was older. As the General’s heir, Eugene felt justified in placing a photograph of this woman who had died a long time ago on the table in his wing. There was no photograph of the district librarian in the General’s archive, however. Eugene spent several days delving into someone else’s life, sorting out old documents and belongings. He was gradually entering a different dimension, one in which he had never lived, and the incredible silence of his uncle’s (now actually his own) house with its high ceilings and creaky floorboards conjured up certain weird sensations which he had not previously experienced.

But his day-to-day concerns kept driving these weird sensations out of his mind. Eugene went down into a cellar — not the one adjacent to the house, which was full of old potatoes beginning to go to seed, but the one under the house. Military orderliness ruled there too. Bottles of alcohol stood in rows on the shelves like soldiers on parade. Mostly Soviet brands of cognac. There were also countless jars of pickled gherkins, tomatoes, mushrooms, various salads and seasoned tomatoes. It is unlikely that the General had filled these one-litre and three-litre jars himself. Most probably, they had been brought to him in the summer and autumn by women from the village.