The Librarian (6 page)

M
Y
UNCLE
WAS
a doctor by profession. At first his life worked out remarkably well. He graduated from school with a silver medal, second in his class, and went to study at the Medical Institute. After two years of practical work for an institute in Siberia, my uncle was recruited to work in the Arctic.

I remember Uncle Maxim when he was still young. He used to come to visit us and always brought foodstuffs that were in short supply or things that were impossible to buy in the shops—imported anoraks, jumpers and shoes. One time he gave me a Panasonic twin-cassette deck that was the envy of many of my friends for years.

We would sit at the family table—Dad, Mum, me and my sister Vovka… Actually her real name was Natasha, and Vovka was just her nickname at home. When Natasha was born, my father took me, two years old at the time, to the maternity home, promising to show me a real, live Thumbelina there. I stood outside under the window and called, “Mummy, where’s Thumbelina?”—and a half-deaf nurse, as kind-hearted as a St Bernard, who was gathering up the rubbish on the steps, smiled every time I said it and told me, “Don’t shout, little one, they’ll bring out your Vovochka in a moment…”

Well, we would sit there, and Uncle Maxim would tell us all sorts of amazing stories, almost like fairy tales, about the Far North. “In one village a reindeer herder shot himself. They buried him and the next night a murrain broke out among the deer. An old shaman said that they hadn’t buried the suicide properly and he had
turned into a demon that was killing the cattle. They dug up the body, buried it again face-down and nailed it down with a walrus tusk. And believe it or not, the murrain stopped immediately…”

Unlike timid Vovka, I enjoyed these frightening stories. My father, it’s true, claimed that my uncle was rather partial to my mum and inclined to boast a bit in order to impress her. I suppose my father was simply envious of Uncle Maxim, who led such a colourful life.

But then my uncle stopped visiting us. I heard from my parents that he wasn’t working with the expeditions any longer and had moved from the romantic tundra deep into the boring heart of Russia. But for me my Uncle Maxim remained the hero of an adventure film, a Siberian “Pathfinder”, for a long time.

As the years passed, my uncle’s halo faded noticeably. “He’s a degenerate” and “He’s a disgrace to the family” my father used to say about him. Apparently while he was in the cold climate my uncle had developed a taste for alcohol, and perhaps the constant availability of surgical spirits—because of his profession—had also played its part, or perhaps he had just fallen in with drinkers.

When his contract ended, my uncle worked as the head of a department in a hospital and tried to write his Ph.D. thesis. He never started a family of his own. Vodka ruined all his plans. First he was demoted to a neighbourhood doctor, and then sacked altogether for his drunkenness. Uncle Maxim rode around in an ambulance for several years, but then they got rid of him too.

In the last fifteen years he had only appeared at our place twice. The first time he arrived on a plane for my grandfather’s funeral, drank heavily at the wake and even had a fight with my father, and the second time was when my grandmother died. My uncle arrived late for the funeral because he was on a bender and there weren’t as many flights as in the old Soviet days, so he had to come by train. My uncle made a trip to the cemetery, stayed with us for a couple of days, quarrelled with my father and went away again.

After my grandfather and grandmother died my father used to say bitterly: “It was Maxim who drove them into their graves!”
And he was partly right—the old folks suffered terribly over how badly their son’s life had turned out.

Uncle Maxim only phoned us rarely, and always with the same request—to send him a money order. My father, who had learned from bitter experience, always refused him and one day my uncle called his older brother a “Yid” and disappeared for a very long time.

Then he started calling again, but he didn’t ask for money any longer; he simply asked how we were getting on. There were rumours that he hadn’t drunk for five years. We found out about it from an old army colleague of my uncle’s, a doctor, who stayed with us when he was passing through and handed on some money from my uncle—two hundred dollars that Maxim had once borrowed from my father. My uncle’s army colleague told us that Maxim Danilovich had given up alcohol, but he suspected that my uncle had been sucked into a different kind of quicksand—apparently some religious organization or other, perhaps the Baptists or Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Uncle Maxim himself didn’t tell us anything specific; his voice on the phone was always cheerful, and when my father asked, “Maxim, have you drunk yourself completely out of your mind? Can’t you even be open with your own brother?”—he just laughed and sent greetings to Mum, Vovka and me.

I
ONCE USED TO DREAM
of studying at the Medical Institute, so that, like my Uncle Maxim, I too could roam the country in search of romantic adventure. At the time I never even thought about the fact that a doctor’s profession is a stationary one and medical personnel don’t usually travel much.

In the final year of school my plans changed. Everything was turned upside down by a theatre club that was organized at school. Unfortunately it was led by an adventurer who had absolutely no talent. After a year we had been irrecoverably inoculated with every imaginable failing of the actor’s art, but the most terrible thing of all was that each one of us firmly believed in his own genius. Instead of preparing for our future lives and choosing a profession to match our abilities, with a decent and stable income, we started dreaming about art.

In its short existence the club didn’t stage even a single production; all we did was rehearse. Yevgeny Schwartz’s play
An Ordinary Miracle
, which we had arrogantly chosen to stage, never got any farther than the first act, but we already thought of ourselves as stage artistes.

I remember what a terrible state of alarm I threw my father and mother into when I announced that I intended to go to Moscow, no less, and join the Theatrical Institute to become an actor.

I must give my parents due credit, for they did try to rescue their son from the impending catastrophe. The only one who supported me in my vainglorious dreams was Vovka, but only until it
was made clear to her that her brother Alyoshka was not going to end up on the practice stage at the Moscow Art Theatre, but go straight into the army. After this sudden enlightenment, Vovka fell silent and I lost my only ally. My parents had already launched a new educational campaign. Now, to spare my vanity, they started denouncing the nepotism inherent in theatrical institutions: “No one ever gets in there without graft.”

My courage failed me and they cunningly tempted me with a different prospect. My father said that he didn’t want to destroy my dreams, but wouldn’t it be better first to acquire a solid profession in a technical college? And then, five years later, if I still couldn’t live without art, I would be more mature, I would know myself better, and I could go to college to study directing, which already sounded more respectable in itself. I thought about it and agreed to the technical college and a “solid profession”.

To this day that expression reminds me of something rectangular and heavy, resembling simultaneously a silicate brick and a reinforced concrete pillar. I chose the most solid area of all—“Machinery and Technologies for Foundry Engineering”. In the entrance exams in Maths and Physics I made a whole heap of mistakes and got a pretty bad fright, but they pulled me up to a “B”. After an entirely fictitious exam—a composition—I was accepted for the first year of the course.

I wasn’t interested in my studies; every subject was alien to me. But I didn’t skip lectures and for the exams I dutifully copied out heaps of cribs, which they didn’t take away from us.

After the mid-year exams many students were kicked out of the institute, but not out of the Faculty of Mechanics and Metallurgy. They hoisted up our grades as high as they could, and I tried hard not to fall behind too. Doing all those drawings was hard, but even that problem could be solved—for a small reward, students who specialized in perspective geometry would do them for me. My grant was just enough to cover the especially hideous course requirements in the Theory of Machines and Mechanisms—TMM—which had
been known since time immemorial as “This Murders Me”. I lived with my parents and didn’t have the kind of financial problems that students from out of town might face.

It was 1991 and my assessments still contained, as a final flourish from the Soviet age, an examination on the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which I passed with a “B”, and a test on Scientific Atheism.

Of course, I didn’t forget what my true calling was and why I was there—to acquire that “solid specialization”, that indulgence from my parents and myself, so that, with a mechanical engineer’s diploma tucked under my jacket, I could stride fearlessly into the artistic world with a clear conscience.

When they started developing a team at their institute for the Club of the Jolly and Ingenious competition, I dashed to join it. My first trial appearances on stage made it clear that I was “not funny”. Everyone realized it. I attributed this acting failure to my noble, entirely unclown-like stature and dramatic talent. Disappointed, I consoled myself with the thought that my natural gifts were not those of a buffoon in amateur dramatics, but of a serious artiste.

I managed to make up two feeble jokes. One played on the name of Ukrainian vodka with pepper,
horilka
—“In Ukraine they’ve started making vodka for monkeys—Gorillka…”—and the other developed that Russian saying, “There’s no virtue in standing”— “There’s no virtue in standing. Take the weight off. Virtue’s in the backside.” They laughed at the second joke and ditched it. I also reworked the song ‘The Beautiful Distance’ to include the words, “I promise I’ll be cleaner and I’ll shave.”

My hour of stardom arrived when our institute’s team got involved in the municipal festival. Three days before the quarterfinals, it turned out that the competition sections “Greetings” and “Homework” were still not ready. The Jolly and Ingenious were headed for the bottom, taking their captain with them. They laid out witticisms written on scraps of paper like a game of patience
and couldn’t gather them together into a single whole. The mournful prospect of an exit from the festival loomed over us.

The manager of the student club, Dima Galoganov, dropped in to see us. He was a recent graduate of the institute and now a petty bureaucrat. Galoganov sombrely swore to disband the team in the event of failure.

During the castigation I looked through the archive, which contained the rejected dross, jumbled it up together with some lightweight jokes, and suddenly a complete plan of the performance took shape in my mind.

Raking up the pieces of paper and the notebook, I announced that by the next day I would write a complete programme for all the sections. In one night of work I managed to sew those dismal scraps together into a colourful and entirely original performance. One leitmotif was particularly successful, using songs in which the words “go crazy” figured at least in passing: “He’s wearing a camouflage tunic, it’ll make her go crazy”, “I’m going crazy or ascending to a higher plane of lunacy”, “And the postman will go crazy trying to find us”, “I’m going crazy over you”. The moment the singer reached that phrase with “crazy” in it, he suddenly started pulling dumb faces, smiling, gurgling and dribbling. In the final song we really cracked the audience up when our entire line-up started gurgling like idiots. Our team triumphantly won through to the semi-final, and a star of Moscow’s Club of the Jolly and Ingenious who was on the jury said that our performing skills were worthy of a higher league.

The president of the institute congratulated the manager of the student club, Galoganov, on our victory, and Galoganov didn’t forget about me. In three days I had become number one in the team. From being a rank-and-file writer of jokes, I was elevated to a position with obscure contours, within which the functions of a director could be vaguely discerned. Moreover, no one objected to my elevation. On the contrary, I was loudly congratulated and thanked.

I made haste to inform my family about my success and they nodded smugly—“Well, what did we say?”, “Well, well, only a second-year student and already a director…”—and they winked at me cunningly, as if to say, “The best is yet to come.”

My new purpose in life eventually robbed me of my “solid profession”. From the second year I hardly studied at all, but worked on the CJI. I was granted most of my course tests and exams as a gift, thanks to the vice-president for cultural affairs.

My own gift for compilation, which had previously manifested itself in the writing of reports, came in handy in my new position. It was easy for me to design programmes for all the amateur concerts and celebrations devoted to the institute’s anniversaries, and I became an indispensable assistant to our club manager.

A half-hour film about the institute was shot under my supervision. We timed the presentation just right, combining two round dates: the president’s sixtieth birthday and the institute’s sixtieth anniversary, and we said it was a modest gift from the student club.

The film was called
Our Beloved Polytech: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow
, and it was pompously eulogistic. For several years the flattering video was always shown to high-placed guests from the ministry.

The president was very touched by his present and money started being allocated to the club. Following these subsidies Galoganov, who bought himself a new television, a video player and a music centre, really doted on me.

The institute’s petty bureaucracy invited me to its parties as one of its own. Sensing imminent promotion, Galoganov, in his drunken generosity, started predicting more and more frequently that I would be his successor in the post of club manager and was genuinely offended because I wasn’t ecstatic at the prospect.

At the time I couldn’t understand that life had handed me a perfectly tolerable little pattern for a career—a calm, swampy haven. I indignantly rejected these gifts of fate. Instead of consolidating my friendship with Galoganov and the vice-president for
cultural affairs, time after time I informed my benefactors with a condescending smile that I intended to take up art seriously and couldn’t give a damn for a future as a petty functionary in a college.

My parents, of course, tried to change my mind, but I replied harshly that I had promised them a “solid profession” and not a life obliterated by boredom.

Vovka kept quiet, because she had been morally compromised. She was a second-year student then, and I can’t remember which came first—the melon-shaped bulge of her stomach or the words about getting married soon. And so Vovka didn’t butt in with any clever advice, but devoted assiduous efforts to cajoling passing marks for her exams out of her lecturers, in order not to lose a year of study. For our part, we tried to like Vovka’s fiancé Slavik, a member of her study group. This didn’t prove too hard; at the very first viewing the defiler of virtue won us all over with his meek and obliging manner. He seemed really to love Vovka. They soon married and moved into our old folks’ empty apartment. In June Vovka gave birth to a boy, whom they called Ivan.

In two years pride had blinded me. I associated freely with the vice-president of the institute and had my own desk in the office of the club manager. I wasn’t writing any diploma thesis at all. At Galoganov’s request an old diploma work entitled ‘Casting from Lost-Wax Models’ was extracted from the archives and the title page was changed.

What else was there? In summer, at the end of the fourth year, I got married. At that time student marriages had assumed the proportions of an epidemic. My wife was called Marina. She had a rather pleasant appearance, with features so generically regular that she looked like a statistically average model of an attractive girl. That was the way the propaganda posters used to depict the striding ranks of Young Communist League girls, all with that same collective prettiness. After the first day we met, I wouldn’t have recognized her in the street. The only distinctive thing about
Marina was her laugh. It was very melodic and resonant, and she mostly laughed when I flaunted my wit. Eventually I noticed her.

Throughout my polytechnic years I was never short of girlfriends. I was a rather well-known celebrity. Even so, this Marina saw off her rivals pretty quickly, but I didn’t take that seriously at all: I was genuinely amused by the girl’s hunt for a husband.

Marina wasted no time and cranked up the relationship so smartly that six months later I was surprised to learn that people were already talking about us as a soon-to-be family, and the strangest thing of all was that I didn’t feel the slightest desire to correct this evident misunderstanding. Even the vice-president, running along the corridor, congratulated me on my imminent wedding.

My parents were also wholeheartedly in favour. They thought that marriage would make me settle down, forget my stupid dreams and opt for a happy family life instead.

The part of my soul that was infected by the universal wedding fever falsely reassured me that a wife would not be any obstacle to the career of a future stage director. Everything was decided by a phrase uttered by my boss Galoganov: “What are you afraid of? If you don’t like it, you can get divorced.”

Somehow it was that possibility of a future divorce that reassured me, and I proposed to Marina. The wedding was attended by a narrow family circle—Vovka was in her eighth month and charmed everyone at the feast with her impressive stomach. As a wedding gift my father-in-law and mother-in-law gave us an apartment, which, however, they registered in Marina’s name.

Our marriage lasted just over a year. In that relatively short period of time I had learned that my spouse’s weeping, unlike her laughter, was incredibly unpleasant

After receiving my diploma as an engineer, I started assiduously preparing to join a faculty of stage direction. I set out to reconnoitre Moscow. The Russian capital struck me a sly blow with the rouble. It had never even occurred to me that now I was a citizen of a different country and my education would have to be paid for.

This woeful fact immediately put an end to any idea of attending a college in Russia. When I got back, I was able to look my acquaintances in the eye with no shame and say that the only reason Moscow was off the agenda was money. I reproached my parents: you see, I ought to have gone then, five years ago, when the Soviet Union still existed.

What my home city had to offer for the realization of my dream was an institute of culture, a cauldron in which the flayed flesh of all the Muses seethed and bubbled. In among the faculties of music and those offering drilling in leftist decorative and applied arts, the custodians of academic and folk choirs, guardians of orchestras consisting of dombras and balalaikas and mentors of choreographic ensembles, there was a theatre faculty with departments for the art of acting, directing drama and directing theatricalized performances and festivals.