I
The sunflowers look so bright, so bright. They stand silently, looking together. They had been doing something secret, something forbidden; at the sound of the old man’s footsteps they straightened up, and now they look and keep silent. Like a group of children. If the bee has a language and can tell another of its affairs and understand it, if the crane forms a flock and puts its commanding queen in front, if the mare grazes and, as she grazes, grows angry with the foal straying away, and the foal understands—then every creature of God beneath this sky has its own human language. How the forest advances: it sends the bushes ahead, the bushes go, and it follows them. A juniper bush has clung to the bare slope of Mount Kaputler and calls the forest in the ravine upwards. Ah, it will call and call, then dry out, because people and livestock have multiplied and block the forest’s way.
The story seems to be coming along; it will probably be a good story. At any rate, I like that last paragraph. And my weariness, the story and the expensive packet of cigarettes I have emptied are worth one another. So the juniper tree calls the forest from the ravine up to it, for them to advance together as far as…
I went to wash, and the cold water, the soap and the rough towel were a generous reward, as was the girl with firm breasts when I came out of the washroom. Wearing a sailor’s striped shirt without a bra, she was coming to wash; narrowing her short-sighted eyes, she recognised me and smiled faintly, either for me or for the healthy, kindly dawn. Whether we are close or not, she nevertheless exists for me in one of the rooms along this same corridor; I nevertheless exist for her.
My trousers are tailored exactly to fit me, and my legs are strong. The broad leather belt needs its buckle fastened in the last holes—but the story is turning out well. A week’s break afterwards will restore my strength. The roughly handsome sweater is warm and easy to move in. Before giving birth Hasmik had managed to finish knitting it after all, and the play of her fingers grew a little stiffer. There is money for a taxi; if they do not pay the stipend today, there is enough to live on today and tomorrow.
Eldar Guramishvili had boiled Siberian khinkali and brought two bottles of soured milk from the shop. Eldar is not writing now, but he will certainly start work soon; you can tell from his jealous care for me.
‘What is your old man doing?’
‘Walking about the garden, thinking that when the dogs fight, the dill bed gets trampled.’
‘Is that what he thought about tonight?’
‘No. He will be fathering serfs all the same; the descendants of Tomo’s Avetik marry in vain.’
‘A bitter old fellow.’
‘He knows his own interests. Others afterwards; himself first.’
‘Serfdom was abolished a hundred years ago. Whose serfs do they manage to become?’
‘To widows, fatherless children and the cares of the whole village.’
‘Hmm,’ he smiled. ‘Was your grandfather called Avetik?’
‘Almost.’
‘Eat, eat.’
With butter and red pepper, the khinkali went down easily, not with difficulty. Like Hemingway, we wiped up the melted butter with bread and ate it; the plates were clean. We opened the bottles and drank the cold soured milk in two draughts, and that fatty coolness was immensely pleasant after smoking all night.
‘What is the name of the girl in room 150 or 151?’
‘Which one, the Kazakh or the short-sighted one?’
‘The short-sighted one.’
‘The Kazakh is a beauty,’ he said.
‘So that the Mongolian Siberian plague should not kneel like a camel at the gates of his flourishing Cilicia, the painter-poet-lawgiver-general, commander Smbat Gundstabl, sent his mounted retinue trotting on an embassy through Derbent–Astrakhan–Kazakhstan–Jahandamdarasi to the feet of Great Mangu Khan: “My Cilicia is your dependable ally.”’
‘What is this Cilicia?’
‘Great Mangu does not know what Cilicia is; you do. We held out there another three or four hundred years.’
‘Then what? Great Mangu’s mask looked at him, and your Smbat did not understand whether he was being looked at or not, yes? He signalled to have him impaled, and your poet did not understand whether he had pleased him or not, yes?’
‘Yes, but he had pleased him, and Great Mangu had signalled for a foal to be slaughtered for the guest, for a girl to be given to him.’
The lift was occupied; fastening our clothes, we hurried downstairs and quickly looked over the letters table. He found Hasmik’s letter and gave it to me—“Our little puppy, oh God, is a good little puppy: he strains, turns red, lets out gas and smiles”—and we went outside. We bought newspapers at the kiosk and waited for a taxi. It was a dry cold; the soured milk inside us had not yet warmed.
‘In a southern desert, a high pedestal; on the pedestal, a large tomato. “Glory to you, tomato: with a Christian’s radiant faith you lay yourself on the altar of the world.”’
I liked that; I saw the shiny red tomato. ‘What is that?’ I asked.
‘We do not erect monuments to trifles, so I shall make a high pedestal for the state of Chomali, go to the Sahara, thrust my tall pedestal up into the raging sun, with a tomato on top—a red tomato—let it shine across the starving country.’
He is always frivolous, and I love his frivolity. With his gifts as a painter and sculptor he could have carved a gravestone a day for some honoured deceased person in their Kutaisi and hewn himself a citadel of solid stone in the centre of Tiflis; all the money he has is the rouble in his pocket, all the clothing he has is the one pair of trousers he wears. His screenplay about an unsuccessful painter was just about to become famous, bringing him six thousand roubles for the time being; he glanced askance at himself and the director: “We, of course, are worthy and successful, mocking the worthless failures.” Watching his face, his childless wife waits for an imperceptible grimace so that she can leave, clasping her unhappiness, and make room in that house for someone fertile, someone who would fill it with children’s soft crying, their guileless laughter and wet little trousers—with life. Whether Eldar drinks or, in the gloom of a hangover, decides never to touch liquor again, that is what his wife thinks. Eldar has buried himself in books on yoga; from the corner of her eye she watches to see whether her husband has found anything in those books about conception and infertility. Now, among her friends, the girls at work and the crowds of women in theatres, she searches for the good woman with whom her husband would be happy and light-hearted; from the distance of her own barren unhappiness she would gaze with radiant tears at that woman, her husband, the child.
‘Eldar,’ I said at the feast celebrating my son’s birth, ‘perhaps you should get divorced after all?’
‘Of course,’ he said ironically, ‘we have made so many people happy by now that we can afford to make one person unhappy.’
Our turn for the taxi came, and at that moment tall Viktor Makarov burst out of the hostel. He appeared at precisely the right time and raised his hand to ask us to wait just as we had opened the car door, but we could also have failed to understand his request. His magnificent, enormous stature calls for ceremonial slowness, yet Viktor makes that proud frame scurry and bow—for the time being, bow.
‘Shall we make him run a little?’
‘Drive, let him run after us a little.’
‘He is your friend—isn’t that awkward?’ the driver asked doubtfully.
‘We will be running after him plenty; drive. He is a Siberian.’
With one blow of his open hand his grandfather once killed the village headman—a single slap, all at once—and now he is a Siberian. By God’s good fortune, the dead man was the headman, so it can be considered a revolution and need not be kept quiet: it can be related with a measured mixture of irony and seriousness, without giving the grandfather’s slap too much meaning, but without allowing him to be considered merely a murderer. A revolution is a revolution, but one must move to the European part of the country, more precisely to Moscow. That cannot be done with a slap, not with a slap alone; it takes years of work as heavy as the step of a man in chains to reel back the road the grandfather travelled all at once, in a single march. There is already money for a log cabin near the city, enough for a cooperative flat in the city, but in that case what is the state for, for whom does it build, and whose ideologists are we?
He must have understood that we had stopped the car to make him run, but he did not stop and wave us away: the money for the cooperative must not be reduced by even the slender strip of a rouble note. Looking through the newspapers, Eldar asked:
‘Is he running?’
‘He is running. He has started smiling.’
He reached us, bent his enormous frame, fitted his broad back into the cramped car with a smile, and was still smiling like an old woman who had caught the trolleybus.
‘We noticed you late, honestly,’ I said.
‘It will be easier to pay with three of us,’ Eldar said for him.
‘Let us go, boss, drive to the House of Cinema.’
The driver waited for more information.
‘The House of Cinema, boss,’ I said. ‘The Vaksberg company’s House of Cinema.’
‘You do not know what the House of Cinema is? You do not know Vaksberg? Joe, he does not know what the House of Cinema is.’
‘He does not know anything, El.’
‘He is a Muscovite and does not know what the House of Cinema is, Joe.’
‘He is the wrong Muscovite, El; Mike should have been a Muscovite in his place.’
‘They are joking,’ Makarov explained. ‘From the Presnya side, towards the beginning of Vorovsky Street.’
‘Cognac or whisky, El?’
‘Did you bring your cognac?’
‘It is always with me, El. Cognac or whisky?’
‘Vodka,’ he said over the newspaper.
The term “locust” denotes not a biological category but a way of life, a condition. Centuries ago the name was given to those fearsome swarms that form a herd-like union of various more or less related grasshopper species and periodically move towards distant countries. The word “herd” may seem an exaggeration here; but if we consider even the weight of a single swarm—the weight of a quarter of the world’s population—and its appetite—one tonne of locusts devours ten tonnes of green vegetation; a swarm in South America devoured twenty thousand tobacco plants in just twenty seconds; in Morocco in 1962 locusts destroyed seven thousand tonnes of oranges in five days, the annual consumption of a country the size of France—then, taking that bottomless appetite and that weight into account, the proper name for locusts becomes not a swarm, but only a herd.
In 1915 the twenty-seven-year-old scientist B. P. Uvarov investigated in the North Caucasus and gave a brilliant explanation of the problem of locusts becoming gregarious, of forming herds; subsequent studies in the tropics confirmed it. It emerged that locusts live in two forms, solitary and gregarious, and those forms are entirely unlike one another in appearance, internal structure and modes of reproduction. A solitary locust, if its environment lacks, so to speak, the flowing pull of the herd, the herd’s migratory enchantment, is not inclined to approach its fellows, become a member of a group, a part of a group, a group; in that case it retains, with small differences of individual shading, all its kind’s characteristics of colour and form, internal structure and reproduction. With gregarious locusts it is the reverse: they gather in dense groups, constantly rubbing against one another with antennae, legs and bodies, and these contacts put them all into a state of heightened motor activity, stirring the migratory instinct. Before your eyes the solitary locust becomes gregarious: the shades peculiar to its kind, locality and individuality vanish; it darkens, turns orange-black, its back curves near the nape, its wings lengthen, and thanks to its dark colour its temperature rises by five to eight degrees. Then the herd is ready to take off. The locust rises into the sky against the wind and, once at a height of six hundred to a thousand metres, turns its head and gives itself to the wind. Once, towards noon, recalled V. Williams, then the entomologist of the agricultural experimental plots at Amani in Tanganyika, we were warned by telephone that the “Arab scourge” was approaching. “Now we shall see what entomologists are for,” the terrified manager told Williams. He had not yet realised that even if the world’s entire army of entomologists had been at Amani, not a single leaf would have been saved in that flourishing garden of the great desert. In less than an hour the east darkened. Expanding and growing heavy, the dreadful cloud occupied the sky. The sun went dark. The first locusts struck the garden’s leaves like hail, battered the tin roofs. A murky whirlwind circled over the village; the rustle of wings deafened the people. The first branches snapped with a crack. The ground seethed, but the east was still black: the end of the herd was still not visible. After that, for nine hours the black locusts would stream rustling across the whole sky and pour down on Amani. The next day the herd departed, leaving a dead desert where the land had flowered…
An excerpt is published here. You can download the complete version (PDF).