Happiness is Possible (13 page)

A couple of kilometres away from me — that is, from my housing development — lie the so-called sprinkling beds. Those to whom this term seems overly poetic call them sedimentation tanks or sewage works. Basically, the whole place is one mega-cesspit, into which the faecal matter of the megalopolis flows. Not all of it, of course, but a substantial part, including my own. These beds are located to the north-east and I recall their existence when the wind blows from that direction. In former times, thanks be to God, the north-easterly was an infrequent visitor to our parts, but just recently I have noticed that the pattern of Moscow's winds has become less favourable to me, evidently owing to the general changes in the climate of our planet. For the last forty-eight hours I have been regaled continuously by the wind from the beds, which brings neither warmth nor rain, nothing but a ubiquitously intrusive aroma, from which even tightly closed windows offer no salvation.

My only consolation is the historical awareness that this smell has accompanied humankind down through the ages. Our forebears used to fight it by burning newspapers in the privy, and then they invented air fresheners. Of course, in this particular case the privy is too large: all the air fresheners in the world, together with the combined print runs of all Moscow's tabloid newspapers, would not be enough to freshen it. It's a well-known fact that at times of national disaster, during various upheavals and disturbances, this smell has matured and intensified to a fetid stench. Today, however, it is not so very terrible, making itself felt more as an ineluctable ambient olfactory presence. Who can put a number on the ineluctable presences that impinge on our other senses? Television advertisements, for instance – they swamp you completely, but you put up with it.

Anyway, I don't foresee any national disasters today; I'll just have to be patient and wait for the wind to change. And, for lack of anything else to do, analyse the associations that the north-easterly arouses in my memory. For me personally, it brings reminiscences of my childhood. You are already aware that my childhood was spent outside Moscow, in the small town of Vaskovo, where my parents had a little house of their own. These days we would have been called individual owner-developers, but at that time, together with the inhabitants of hundreds of similar houses in Vaskovo, we were officially termed ‘citizens living in the private sector'. I don't even know which sounds better. Everything we had was private, i.e., individual, including our own sprinkling beds, although we didn't use that term. On every plot of land, in its most shady, overgrown corner, there was a special catchment pit and above it a structure of wooden planks with the requisite supply of old newspapers.

See how long I've been alive, if I can remember ancient times like that. But long before my birth, before the formation of any of these misfortunate ‘sectors', even before the appearance of newspapers, Vaskovo already existed, and Vaskovites lived there. And very definitely, since they lived, to the extent of their natural capacity they produced waste and bestowed it on the earth. Calculate the amount of this waste produced by the many generations of Vaskovites, and it will be clear that the little town should have drowned in it long ago. Why, then, has this not happened? Why, in the hundreds of years of its existence, has Vaskovo not become mired in its own, to put it crudely, faecal matter? The person we have to thank for this, of course, is none other than the man with the bucket, a member of one of the most ancient professions. The sludge man is one name by which he is known, although earlier he was called something different. It is of him that I shall speak.

The Mongol Tatars were obliged to roam from place to place and constantly fight for territory because they repeatedly defiled their own camps. They were good warriors, but poor sludge men, and consequently failed to establish a stable state. The Vaskovites won the historical competition because they chose to follow a different path. They found a peasant who had no land and gave him a horse, a cart with a barrel and, most importantly, a bucket on a stick. Having equipped him in this fashion, the Vaskovites charged him with riding round the farms and scooping out the accumulated contents of the cesspits. That is why to this very day these pits are referred to in Russian as ‘scoop pits'. And the man was called a ‘scooper' (amended behind his back to ‘shit-scooper').

I encountered this scooper with a bucket on a stick in my early childhood. Later they gave him a truck instead of a horse and cart, and the bucket was only retained as a measure of last resort, since the truck basically sucked everything out itself. For those who might not recognise the truck from the smell, they wrote ‘sewage truck' on it. The scooper was similarly renamed a ‘sewage operative', although they still called him the same as ever behind his back.

I realise, of course, that the scooper I saw in my childhood was a distant descendant of the first one who was drafted in to spite the Mongolian Tatars. But I simply can't understand how the Vaskovo scoopers could have had any descendants – as far as I know, they were all unmarried. For obvious reasons, young girls and not-so-young women shunned them, and men avoided shaking their hands in greeting. Such is the reverse side of this most essential, but thankless job.

The wind from the sprinkling beds . . . I remember how the jealous protectors of private property in Vaskovo used to drive us rascally little apple-scrumpers away. Many of us caught shot-gun blasts of salt on our nether regions for raiding other people's plots. But we used to take a cruel revenge: we would get hold of a packet of yeast from somewhere and secretly tip it . . . where? Why, of course, into our assailant's sewage pit! If you have somebody you truly hate, and he has a sewage pit, do the same thing to him. I assure you, the effect will exceed all your expectations: the product will gush out of the privy like torrents of lava and there won't be enough sewage teams in the entire district to deal with it.

Now that I've told you that, I have an uneasy feeling. Am I not being imprudent, inadvertently providing a lead to some potential terrorist? And what if someone gets it into his head to empty a dump-truck of yeast into Moscow's sprinkling beds? From a distance they look less like beds of any kind than paddy fields or large square ponds. The surface area of these ponds is quite vast. I don't know what their depth is, but I think it is also more than ample. I'd like to believe that children don't play anywhere near them – it's dangerous, after all. I remember something that happened to me once, when the other lads and I were playing ‘Cossacks and Bandits'. I holed up on someone else's plot of land and jumped into this pit. Yes, you've guessed: it turned out to be a cesspit. I guessed too, when it was already too late. The owners had moved the privy somewhere else and left the old pit uncovered, perhaps even with malice aforethought. It was a deep pit and I couldn't get out of it on my own. My howls attracted quite a lot of people, but no one was in a hurry to pull me out. Someone even suggested sending for the scooper. Of course, it ended with my mother running up, squeezing her nose shut and dragging me, her treasure, out, as she had dragged me out of various other greater and lesser scrapes. She drove me home with a switch, like a goat . . .

Not the most cheerful of memories, although when I come to think about it . . .

Anyway, falling into a village cesspit is not the end of the world. If you fall into a municipal one, they'll never find you, even with frogmen. And what frogman would even go in there?

Or perhaps they do actually exist: special frogmen for diving in the product. I think they live in that housing estate built beside the sprinkling beds. The estate is also visible from my bank of the River Moscow. It's called the ‘sewage operatives' settlement' and only scoopers and their wives live there. And, perhaps, those special shit-divers. I can make out some kind of infrastructure in the settlement – schools and kindergartens – so, unlike the Vaskovo scoopers, the modern-day scoopers of the capital are family people and they raise children. There you have the advantage of the big city: here everyone can find a mate from within their own profession in order to continue the family line. But the sewerage operatives and their women almost never leave their settlement, because people are reluctant to allow them into the metro or a trolleybus. And, to be quite honest, there's no point in them going anywhere: after all, there's no need any more to go driving round the courtyards of the city with a bucket. Things are arranged in Moscow so that the product flows to the same place from everywhere – all you have to do is filter it and mix it.

I wouldn't like to think that the sewerage operatives live in a ghetto, but tell me honestly: have you, for instance, ever been to their settlement? How familiar are you with their needs and their aspirations? About as familiar as I am. We only ever mention these people – and then with an unkind word – when there's a north-easterly blowing. That's the way you and I are constituted: we remember about the plumber when our toilet gets blocked, about the militiaman when someone nicks our purse, about the doctor . . . Ah, what am I saying – we only even remember ourselves when something starts to hurt. We have no time for it . . . From morning until evening we're busy with what is known nowadays as self-realisation, and meanwhile our organs are working away inside us, protecting, cleaning, carrying on with their modest work, which may not always be fragrant, but is very necessary.

Our memory and our feelings are also, as a rule, entombed under the bushel of urgent daily cares. Something special has to happen for them to be aroused. The north-easterly might start to blow, your ex-wife might call . . . But if both of these things happen simultaneously, accept that this is the end – no more self-realisation for you today.

‘Hello, darling, how are you getting on?'

‘There's a north-easterly, darling.'

‘My God! I remember . . .'

And do you remember how happy we were in the balmy southerly? How we listened to the rain in the westerly, warming each other with our bodies? Do you remember how once, in defiance of all the winds that blow, we set sail together on the billowing waves of life? You and me, our little crew of two . . . It was amusing: our first quarrels, those stupid quarrels over trifles and those tempestuous, tearful reconciliations. Then the elements subsided and we were becalmed. You and I drifted for many long years, until you gathered up your goods and chattels and disembarked. On a foreign shore . . .

But then, maybe it's for the best. I won't drift very far, I'll wait for you, lying here at anchor. If you should decide you want to take a short cruise, bobbing about on the waves again – I'm at your service.

‘You want to come over darling? Then come . . .'

Come, if the north-easterly doesn't bother you.

Lev Naumovich Lebed lived to see the triumph of justice after all. Not universal justice, but historical justice of a kind, although, of course, only with respect to his own self. But even that is good, and he hadn't really been counting on anything more . . . My apologies for being so impulsive and running ahead of myself with this announcement so soon after the conclusion of the previous narrative. It's just that I'd like those of you for whom personal justice remains an unrealised dream to read this little story without sadness. Let my main character be your representative, as it were.

Now from the beginning.

Lev Naumovich Lebed is a senior researcher at the Pochechuev memorial estate museum, a literary scholar, a Jew and a Russian intellectual – delete as appropriate, as it says in the questionnaires. His views are generally liberal, but after taking a drink or two he proclaims himself a Kropotkinite anarchist. Sometimes he even hints that he is something of a Slavophile, but I think that is basically bravado on his part.

The above thumbnail sketch of Lev Naumovich is correct as of the present historical moment and was similarly correct on all points a quarter of a century ago. If you did not know how circumstances have changed in Russia during those years and all the extraordinary events that have taken place involving Lebed, talking to him for a while might give you the impression that no such events had ever happened. However, the events did occur, and he has returned to his former views and pursuits only quite recently, thanks to the triumph of justice to which I have already alluded above.

Lebed is twenty-two years older than me, so I can only judge how his journey in life began from what he himself told me. He told the story well. For instance, I learned from Lev Naumovich that in the past he had performed actions of great moral courage. When he ran foul of ideological coercion, either in his scholarly work or simply in the course of everyday life, Lebed fearlessly confronted the Party system of those times, taking great risks in the process.

When I made his acquaintance, which was around the time of the Moscow Olympics, the Party system and ideological coercion were still the same as ever, but Lev Naumovich was taking considerably fewer risks. The only way in which I observed him oppose the regime was by not attending the May Day and November celebrations. Afterwards he fobbed off the local Party committee with explanatory notes, in which he cited a cold and other non-political reasons. I personally cannot testify to any other conflicts that Lebed had with the system. Of course, like all Soviet citizens, he suffered from the shortage of gourmet delicacies and the lack of reliable information about what was happening in the world. But the gourmet problem was not very high on Lev Naumovich's list of priorities, owing to his miserly museum salary, and he solved the information problem himself by listening to foreign voices on the radio.

Lebed had two genuine misfortunes: he had no formal place of residence and his wife suffered from epilepsy. However, while the Soviet regime could certainly be blamed for the first woe, it was definitely not responsible for the second. And it wasn't exactly that he didn't have any formal place of residence at all, but he was registered in the town of A. This is an old, interesting town, but unfortunately it is located beyond the limits of the Moscow region, while Lebed wanted very much to be registered within that region, preferably in Moscow itself. The fact was that Lev Naumovich felt a strange, irresistible attraction to the capital; and apart from that Moscow was where all the major libraries required for literary research were located.

As for his wife's illness, Lebed's greatest tribulations did not derive from the convulsive fits that his wife had once or twice a year, or even her periods of temporary mental aberration, which occurred far more frequently. Lev Naumovich's wife suffered or, rather, he suffered from fits of sudden aggression on her part. Galina, as she was called, was also a highly educated philologist, but in fits of irrational passion she beat Lebed like some simple peasant woman. These fits of hers could not, however, be attributed entirely to her epilepsy.

We met, as I have already said, shortly before the Moscow Olympics. Being a student at the time, I had decided to earn a bit of money during the holidays and taken a job as a guide at the aforementioned memorial museum of the writer Pochechuev. This museum is located close to my Vaskovo and is, by the way, quite well known. When my fellow-townsfolk have to explain to someone what sort of place Vaskovo is and where it is, they say: ‘Well, it's near the Pochechuev Museum'. Literate members of the public immediately understand – after all, Russia is a country with a special regard for writers.

There I was, reciting the text of my guided tour for a man who bore a distinct physical similarity to the poet Pushkin – that was Lev Naumovich – when a short woman walked up, glanced briefly at me and remarked:

‘Well, look at that, they've taken on another young blockhead.'

Then she turned to ‘Pushkin' and added:

‘Lev, the director wants to see you.'

That year there were endless pre-Olympic meetings taking place in the Pochechuev museum.

The short woman was Galina, Lev Naumovich's wife, who held the responsible post of senior curator at the museum, although she was not officially registered to reside in the Moscow region – like her husband, as you recall. In those days this was an explicit breach of the regulations, but in Soviet times regulations were honoured mostly in the breach, so it was impossible to tell which violators the authorities hadn't got around to dealing with yet and which they were deliberately turning a blind eye to.

Despite the difference in our ages, the illegally resident museum couple and I became friends quite quickly. We found common ground in our rejection of socialist reality, and I also proved useful to them on the domestic front. The board of the museum, valuing the Lebeds' erudition, had allocated them a poky little hut to live in, a hut located in the memorial park zone under its own jurisdiction – which was yet another violation of every possible rule and regulation. God only knows who used to live in that hut before the Lebeds and where that someone had got to, but it was in need of capital refurbishment. On my first visit to the philologists I fixed their gate for them, and then something else, and in this way I became a welcome guest in their home. That was when I learned a few things about Lev Naumovich's past, his relationship with Prince Kropotkin and the fact that Galina beat him.

The first time it happened right in front of me, I must admit that I was shocked.

One day for some reason, I don't remember what, possibly simply because a batch of fortified wine had been delivered to the Pochechuevo village shop, Lev Naumovich and I sat down together in his little kitchen to have a drink, two men together. Where Galina was at that moment is not important; what is important is that she appeared before we could even cut the metal cap off the bottle of Agdam. Slamming the gate, which I had mended only recently, and then the front door, Galina set the hut shaking with her heavy footsteps as she strode through into the kitchen.

‘Come outside, I want a word,' she ordered Lev Naumovich.

I almost panicked, thinking that Galina was furious about our imbibing at that hour of the day, but it turned out that the Azerbaijani wine was not to blame. I realised that, because I could observe what happened next through the small window. This window was open, and it looked out into the yard, which was where Galina had taken Lev Naumovich although, owing to this same window, she needn't really have bothered. And this was what she had led him out there for: the moment he stepped down off the porch she clouted him – a resounding and, presumably, painful slap to the side of his head.

‘Feel that, did you?' Galina asked sternly. ‘That's for your whoring!'

That was what she said: ‘whoring'. I froze at the window.

Lev Naumovich came back into the kitchen, massaging the left side of his face

‘Sorry,' he muttered, hiding his eyes. ‘Galya's not herself today. Well, what can you do, she's not a well woman . . .'

I think that on that occasion I beat a hasty retreat, but later I became accustomed to the strong expressions that Galina occasionally uttered and the slaps that she sometimes bestowed on Lev Naumovich. Well, you can't really blame someone who's slightly off her trolley. Especially since, apart from her illness, there were other, more objective reasons for those clouts.

In general, though, scenes like the one described above didn't occur very regularly, otherwise, of course, I wouldn't have enjoyed going to visit them. On the contrary, in fact, we spent most of the time in pleasant conversation accompanied by generally modest libations. The leading role in these conversations was taken, of course, by Lev Naumovich, a genuinely interesting raconteur. He spoke about his young days at university, jazz and literature, which, as a philologist, he understood very well. And also, of course, about the ideas of Kropotkinism. Naturally, in this ideological context he frequently lamented that our country was too large and too centralised. Lebed also had personal reasons to complain about Russia's great distances: he had measured them out in person in his quest to improve his formal residential status. The distance from Siberia (where Lev Naumovich began his career in the job assigned to him after graduating from university) to Moscow couldn't possibly be covered in a single leap, so Lebed had advanced in a series of tactical rushes. From province to province, from city to city, sacrificing good jobs, friends, square metres of floor space . . . the best years of Lev Naumovich's life had been spent in reaching the town of A., which didn't even belong to the Moscow region. ‘I'm a migratory bird, like a swan,' he used to say, not without a certain irony, and it was true.

But our discussions were not restricted to abstract subjects. Our minds were also exercised by the current political situation. In particular, in those days, everyone was talking about the forthcoming Olympics. I don't know about other Soviet citizens, but we Muscovites and residents of the Moscow region were all expecting something, only our expectations were confused and uncertain. In simple terms, we were simultaneously hopeful of receiving an appetising addition to our diet and fearful of repression. To some extent our uncertain expectations materialised: Finnish salami appeared in Moscow and mass deportations began: Individuals of No Fixed Abode (INFAs), gypsies and other elements not engaged in gainful employment or involved in sport. The importation of salami into the Moscow region was apparently not envisaged, but the plan for the ‘purges' was handed down to us as well.

Lev Naumovich's response to the deportation campaign was nervous but dignified. ‘They won't exile me any further than A.,' he declared courageously: the undesirable elements were being moved out past the so-called ‘101st kilometre', and the town of A. lay immediately beyond that fateful line.

However, the Vaskovo authorities failed to spot Lev Naumovich. They reported to higher authorities that there were no INFAs or gypsies in Vaskovo and dispatched to the 101st kilometre only a few individuals with suspended jail sentences or who had failed to pay the municipal charges on their flats. These malicious defaulters happened to include among their number the museum's stoker, an alcoholic called Matveev. When he found out about his sentence, Matveev was very upset. He staggered around the museum, drunk the whole day long, sharing his grief with the employees. ‘Have you heard?' he asked, accosting every person he met. ‘Have you heard about my troubles, brother? Now then . . .'

Eventually he got to Lebed.

‘Have you heard, Naumich? I've got terrible problems . . . They're evicting me, moving me out beyond the 101st kilometre, they're moving me to bloody A.!'

‘You don't say? To bloody A.?' said Lebed, interested. ‘Why the blackguards . . . Only I can't see that it's any great calamity for you personally, Matveev. What difference does it make to you where you do your boozing?'

‘Of course it makes a difference!' said the stoker, offended. ‘What kind of place are they going to move me into? Some kind of rotten communal flat, so I can feed the bedbugs?'

‘No, you don't want to go into a communal flat! You know, I've just had a good idea about all this . . . Why don't we take a stroll to the shop?'

Lebed's idea, naturally, was not to get drunk with the stoker. The treat was necessary to persuade him to accept a mutually advantageous exchange. As you know, the Lebeds were registered in the town of A., to which Matveev had just been exiled, and where the Lebeds had a small flat. Nothing special, a little dump of a place in a barracks-style building, with no gas or hot water supply, but without any bedbugs, because bedbugs have no interest in places where there are no people. The way Lev Naumovich figured things was this: Why shouldn't he and Matveev simply swap their living spaces? Of course, in the process the stoker would lose his Moscow region registration, but then Lebed would acquire it. And as he had already quite justly remarked, what difference did it make where Matveev did his boozing?

The plan seemed foolproof, but the stoker didn't accept it immediately. He changed his mind several times, became difficult and started demanding money. Sometimes he suddenly broke into swearing, in the way that alcoholics do, and made gratuitous references to Lev Naumovich's racial origins. Lebed incurred substantial expenditure by making several trips a day to the shop with him and even started to resemble his opposite number in negotiations. The siege continued for almost a week. Eventually Matveev surrendered, signed the necessary papers, gathered up his foul-reeking bits and pieces and departed tearfully for his place of exile.

And so, without even being aware of it, in their pre-Olympic frenzy the Soviet authorities helped Lev Naumovich to move one step closer to Moscow – the library and cultural centre of our excessively centralised country. However, Lebed still had one other problem in his life – his wife's mental illness. In speaking earlier of Galina's condition and the sudden fits of rage that it engendered, I mentioned another possible reason for these fits. Without in any way attempting to excuse Lev Naumovich, let me say that in this connection I find the expression
whoring
too strong. In Lev Naumovich's case the French term
adultère
would be more appropriate, although it doesn't translate as anything good either. In any case, people don't get slapped across the face for
adultère
or, if they do, then not as hard as Galina did it.