READ RUSSIA PRIZE 2020 shortlisted titles - excerpts
One time, though, he suddenly stared at her. She felt that gaze without looking up. “Is everything all right?” she asked. “Is the food salted enough?” Ignatov didn’t answer, he just looked. She slipped out and took a breath. As she walked down the path, she sensed that gaze on her neck, in the place where the hair starts to grow. She’s started wearing a headscarf to go to Ignatov’s. And he’s started looking at her. Now the air isn’t even water, it’s becoming honey. Zuleikha is in that honey, gliding, tensing all her muscles and stretching her sinews, but everything’s moving slowly, like in a dream. Try as she might, she cannot possibly move any faster; she wouldn’t be able to even if there was a re. She walks out the door, tired, as if she’s been chopping firewood, and she needs something to drink.
She knows what’s happening because Murtaza had looked at her that way many years ago, when the youthful Zuleikha had just come into his house as his wife. Her husband’s killer is looking at her with her husband’s gaze.
If only she didn’t have to go to Ignatov’s, then she could stay out of his sight. But how could she get out of it? She couldn’t send Achkenazi to him with plates. And so she goes, slowly climbing up the path, opening the heavy door, inhaling deeply, and then ducking into the thick, viscous honey. She senses herself, all of her, gradually turning to honey. Her hands, which place the pot on the table and seem to ow along it, her feet, which stride along the floor and seem to stick to it, and her head, which wants to drive her right out of this place but softens, fusing and melting under her very, very tightly tied headscarf.
Her husband’s killer is looking at her with her husband’s gaze and she’s turning to honey. This is agonizing, unbearable, and horrendously shameful. It’s as if all her past and present shame has merged, absorbing everything she hasn’t felt shameful enough about during this mad year: the many nights spent side by side with unknown people, unknown men, in the darkness of dungeons and the crowdedness of the railroad car; her pregnancy, borne in front of others from the first months until the end; and giving birth around people. In order to somehow escape that shame and overcome the improper thoughts, Zuleikha often imagines a large black tent made of thick, crudely dressed sheepskins and resembling Bashkir yurts. The tent covers Ignatov and the commandant’s headquarters like a solid lid, and when the door curtain is drawn at the entrance, everything carnal, shameful, and ugly remains there, inside. Zuleikha leaps on a large Argamak horse, digs him sharply with her bare heels, and speeds away without looking back.
From ‘The Bronze Horseman’:
I love you, Peter’s grand creation,
I love your stern and stately face,
The Neva in majestic motion,
Its stretching shoreline’s granite grace
And railings of ornate cast-iron,
I love your meditative night
And moonless gleam so bright that I can
Read and write without a light,
The streets with not a soul in sight,
The slumbering mass of every building,
The brilliant Admiralty spire
Clear to the eye, and, not admitting
Darkness to the golden sky,
One twilight hurries to relieve another,
Allowing night a mere half-hour.
I love your stubborn winter’s rigour,
Your motionless sharp air and frost,
The sledges running on the river,
Girls’ faces brighter than the rose,
The glitter and the din of balls,
The goblet’s overflowing foam
When the carousing hour falls
And the punch’s pale blue flame.
I love the warlike animation
Upon the playing field of Mars,
The ranks of infantry and horse
Meticulously in formation,
The colours swaying in harmony,
Tattered from their victory,
The glint of bronzen helmets holed
In battles recent and of old.
I love, O martial capital,
The thunder of your citadel
When the empress of the north
Gives the imperial house a son,
Or one more victory is won,
Or when the Neva carries off
Its cracked blue ice towards the sea,
Scenting the coming spring in glee.
Peter’s glorious city, stand
Unyielding as the Russian land,
Let the conquered element
Find respite with you in the end;
Let the Finnish waters curb
Their profitless hostility,
Their age-old malice not disturb
Peter through all eternity!
A time of rare catastrophe
Is vivid in the memory still . . .
And it is what, my friends, shall give
The matter of my narrative.
Sad is the tale I have to tell.
On his arrival he is possessed by a spirit of profligacy and buys ridiculous, expensive gifts for his friends and family. And on the plane back to Russia, before it even leaves the ground, he commits an act that will make him feel ashamed.
Here’s how it plays out. The plane is stuffed with passengers, and he’s seated at the window next to the emergency exit—a rare, valuable seat, with more legroom, which he reserved in advance. Beside him slumps a middle-aged gentleman who weighs around 170 kilograms; you see that kind of obesity only in America. What’s more, he’s completely drunk, and drenched in sweat; his hot flanks extend far over the edges of his seat. It’s clear that this situation won’t improve during the flight to Moscow.
He scrambles out past the mountain of flesh and, without even thinking of what he’ll say, wends his way to the stewardess and informs her that his neighbor is drunk. In his view, that constitutes a threat to the safety of everyone on board: in the event of an emergency, would the man be able to help his fellow passengers climb out the exit?
“Sir, would you like to be reseated?” the stewardess asks the fat man. “No?” She asks him to speak up. “Well, then we’ll just have to call the police. You’ll fly to Moscow in the same seat, at the same time, but tomorrow.”
Now he feels the need to intervene, to vouch for his neighbor . . . Having freed himself from the mound of flesh, he has a clearer sense of what he has wrought. Maybe the fellow had simply been nervous before the flight—many people are afraid to fly; he himself has had to resort to alcohol, though in smaller doses. But both parties ignore him, and as soon as the fat man hears the word police, he gets up and trudges after the stewardess to the back of the cabin.
He feels ashamed. He’s behaved like an American. Oh, well, what’s done is done—this isn’t a matter of life and death.
A woman takes the place of the fat drunk. She’s about forty-five, rather young-looking, freckled. Her hand brushes against his on the armrest, and he feels a pleasant chill through her shirt. Very nice.
Now he’ll take a sleeping pill, they’ll bring him some wine, and he’ll doze off and wake up in Moscow. But they don’t bring him wine.
“But how will you help your fellow passengers in the event of an emergency?” The beverage cart is operated by that same stewardess: it turns out that not all Americans approve of snitching.
Let’s see if the pills work with juice. They would have, if it weren’t for his new neighbor. She finishes her Diet Pepsi, rattles the ice in her cup, and talks, talks, talks.
She’s from New York, going to Russia for the first time. She wants to know more about the country; he’s supposed to enlighten her. Half-asleep, he mutters various inanities, but the neighbor is insatiable. She changes the subject to America, then to the whole world, and finally—to herself. The conversation on the plane with a random fellow traveler is a popular genre. It substitutes for psychoanalysis, for confession. She recently broke up with her lover: he used to bribe her with expensive gifts—the last straw was the Jaguar.
“How would you like it if a woman gave you a Jaguar?”
He’d have to think about that, yes . . .He closes his eyes, and she prattles on—about her ex-boyfriend’s disgusting habits, the restaurants he took her to, the cigars he smoked.
Oh, he has an idea: this ought to stem her eloquent tide.
“A woman is only a woman,” he says in English, “but a good Cigar is a Smoke.”
But the neighbor just nods, unperturbed: “Kipling.”
She knows the poem. She studied “creative writing” at Princeton.
Anyway, this Kipling used to buy her cars, but he refused to have children. The radical measure of sterilization is fairly common in the United States. Kipling had a vasectomy, and now she herself is too old to conceive.
That’s why she’s flying to Russia—to adopt a girl. Russia, Kazakhstan, Romania—the few places left where you can find an orphan of European descent. He looks at his neighbor with new eyes.
She extends her hand: “My name is Jean.”
He gives Jean his name and sees a slight change in her expression. A half smile—not mysterious, exactly. Will she say it? Of course she’ll say it. No, she keeps mum.
“Tell me—it was your dog’s name, wasn’t it? Your cat’s?”
“My hamster’s,” Jean confesses.
How sweet. They both laugh.
She tells him about the process of adoption. There will be a court hearing. She shows him a photo of the little girl, eleven months old. There’s a lawyer waiting in Moscow. They’ll travel to Novosibirsk together. Everything has been arranged, even a Russian nanny. Why a Russian nanny? “What do you mean, why? The girl’s only heard Russian her whole life.”
There’s one thing Jean hasn’t arranged. She asks him to fill out her customs declaration, and it turns out one can’t bring in more than ten thousand dollars on one’s person. Jean brought a bigger sum with her. Well, there are two options: either hide the money deeper, or entrust some of it to him. He’d wait for her at the glass doors; he has no luggage.
“Of course I trust you . . .” she says, somewhat abstractedly.
So she doesn’t trust him, but she really has no other choice. He takes her money: Don’t worry, Jean. That’s the end of their conversation. They both need sleep.
The plane flies over Tver. There are no clouds. He lets her look out the window: See the wretchedness? He’s no longer with Jean. When he exits the plane and the customs inspectors ask, “What are you traveling with?” he’ll wave his hand and say: “All kinds of crap.” They’ll smile the best they can—one of ours, on you go. Jean and he will say their goodbyes at the glass doors; friendships struck up in airplanes don’t usually develop, but they’ll exchange phone numbers, addresses. He’ll get in his car and his mind will again turn to his father. For some reason, car trips give him a fleeting sense of reunion. He’ll drive into the city—which is aggressive, barbaric on weekdays, and not so bad, more or less familiar on weekends—and make his way to Manezhnaya Square. A decade ago, the traffic around the square was two-way, now it’s one-way—he’ll have to tell his father about that too.
Bach had left Berlin deeply dispirited. He had so longed for his weeks of leave—for peace and quiet, for time to talk with his friends, to sit and read in the evenings, to speak freely to his mother about his innermost thoughts and feelings. He had wanted to tell her about the unimaginable cruelty of war, about how it felt to live every hour in total subordination to the coarse, brutal will of a stranger. This, he had wanted to say, was a greater torment than the fear of death.
Instead, he hadn’t known what to do with himself when he got home. He had felt depressed and unsettled. He had felt irritated when he talked to people and he had been unable to read more than a few pages at a time. Like the concert hall, the books all smelled of mothballs.
As he left Berlin on his way east, he felt a sense of relief, even though he had no desire to go to the front and didn’t in the least wish to see either his soldiers or his fellow officers.
He had returned to his motor infantry regiment on 26 June, two days before the start of the summer offensive. Now, on the quiet bank of the Don, he felt as if that had been only a few days ago. Since the offensive began, he had lost all sense of days, weeks and months. Time had become a hot, dense, motley lump, a confusion of hoarse screams, dust, howling shells, smoke and fire, marches by day and by night, warm vodka and cold tinned food, fractured thoughts, the cries of geese, the clink of glasses, the rattle of sub-machine guns, glimpses of white kerchiefs, the whistle of Messerschmitts, anguish, the smell of petrol, drunken swagger and drunken laughter, the fear of death, and the screeching horns of trucks and armoured personnel carriers.
There was the war, a huge smoking steppe sun—and a few distinct pictures: a bent apple tree laden with apples, a dark sky pierced by bright southern stars, the glimmer of streams, the moon shining over blue steppe grass.
This morning Bach had come back to himself. He was looking forward to these three or four days of rest before the final breakthrough that would take them to the banks of the Volga. Calm, sleepy, still able to enjoy the cool touch of the water, he looked at the bright green reeds and his slim, tanned hands and thought about his weeks in Berlin. He needed to link these two opposite worlds—worlds separated by an abyss yet existing side by side in the cramped space of a man’s heart.
He rose to his full height and stamped his foot against the ground. He felt as if he were kicking the sky. Behind him lay thousands of kilometres of a strange land. For years he had thought himself robbed, spiritually beggared, one of the last Mohicans of German freedom of thought. But why had he set such store by his former way of being? Had he really ever been so spiritually rich? Now, as the smoke and dust of the last few weeks yielded to this clear awareness of an alien sky and a vast, equally alien but now-conquered land underfoot, he felt in every cell of his body the sombre power of the cause in which he was implicated. He could feel, it seemed, with his skin, with his whole body the furthest reaches of this alien land he had crossed. Perhaps he was stronger now than in the days when he glanced anxiously at the door as he whispered his secret thoughts. Had he truly understood what the great minds of the past would have made of the present day? Were those great minds now aligned with this resounding, triumphant force or were they on the side of those whispering old men and women who smelled of mothballs? And was it even possible that there was a smell of mothballs about the whole nineteenth century, the century whose faithful son he had considered himself to be? Perhaps those who had known the charm and poetry of the eighteenth century had looked on his beloved nineteenth century as cynical and atrocious?
Bach looked round; he could hear approaching footsteps. The duty telephonist hurried up to him and said, “Lieutenant, the battalion commander’s on the phone. He wants to speak to you.”
The telephonist glanced at the river and let out a barely audible whistle. So much for his chance of a swim in the river—he had already understood from his friend, the battalion telephonist, that their halt was now over. They were to prepare to move on.
And who is “everyone”? I ask you.
Decrepit brains, deplorable antiquities.
These enemies of free expression,
unearthing their ideas from an old stock of
faded headlines: Surrender of Ochakov,
Crimea pacified—the past is their obsession.
The composite Grumbler, hoarsely and off-key,
singing one tune only: How it used to be,
failing to observe about himself,
that he is old and sitting on the shelf.
Show us these great men, where do they keep state,
these fathers of our country we’re to emulate?
Are these the robber barons, profiteers, and crooks
protected from the law by friend and relative,
whose money flows like water through a sieve
to furnish palaces, import French cooks,
worshipped by their clientele in exile,
who hope to see, never mind how vile,
the old regime restored?…
…These are the men no others can replace!
These are the men we’re told we must revere!
These are our judges and our arbiters!
But just suppose a young man should appear
who has no use for rank, or office, who prefers
to study, to engage with men long dead,
to learn the best of what’s been thought and said,
or, more, is urged by promptings of the heart
to the creation of enduring art,
they raise the hue and cry: Help! Fire!
He’s a dreamer, dreams are dangerous!
Uniforms! that’s what they admire!
How many used to hide, behind
their epaulettes and braid, a vacant mind!
Is that the path cut out for us?
We’re known for our good manners far and wide,
for tactfulness, and rules of thumb that guide
our conduct—take, for instance, the long-held tradition
that holds a son is heir to the position
of his father: He may be a sorry sort,
but with two thousand serfs, he’ll find a bride,
whereas a man, by wide report
spirited, but eaten up by pride,
isn’t of our ilk, as one might say.
We value gentle birth and, add to that,
hospitality: the welcome mat
is always out, no one’s turned away;
the uninvited, too, especially foreign
visitors—scoundrels, honest men,
who cares: the table’s set for everyone.
A Muscovite’s not hard to recognize:
we bear a special stamp. Take youth, our sons
and grandsons: how we rail against them: then, surprise!
They turn fifteen, and teach their teachers.
And take our elders, how worked up they get
when they critique their fellow creatures,
men of ancient lineage, men in debt
to no one, and when judging the administration,
God forbid that anyone should eavesdrop!
Not that they are keen on innovation!
Horrors, no! They rage until they’re fit to drop,
discuss, debate, then close up shop
and home they go to dinner. Men like these
could run the country, sir, their brilliance strikes you dumb!
And mark my words, the time will come
when we shall need their expertise.
As for the ladies—try to hold them down.
They lay down laws that they themselves ignore.
A game of cards erupts into a war.
I know. I had a wife once of my own.
She could have strategized the French retreat
or occupied a Senate seat.
Irena Vlasevna! Lukerya Alexevna!
Tatiana Yurevna! Pulcheria Andrevna!
As for their daughters! How they turn one’s head!
The King of Prussia, on a visit, was astounded!
Because they’re pretty? No. Because they’re so well bred.
And really! Where can girls to equal them be found?
They know the art of dressing to a T,
wear yards of velvet, silk, and organdy.
They’ll sing you French romances, hit with ease
the topmost notes in all the melodies;
short on words, how eloquent their faces are.
They cling to uniforms, for love of land and tsar.
No, there can be no surer fact than this:
Moscow is a city that is—sui generis.
