Han Ong Reads Lyudmila Ulitskaya

But here the chronology gets a little hazy for me. I don't know whether I had first read the Gesson profile and then found the story or I had already read the story because this story was in fact published in the magazine before the Gesson profile. And then, you know, reading the the the guess in profile after reading the story sort of uh helped bolster my love for for this particular writer and and this particular short story.

A bunch of old women taking a bath. That was just so outre. Um and you know, usually my admiration for a writer as I'm reading him or her is that I'm usually just very quiet in my admiration. The pleasure sensors are being sort of massaged when when I'm happy in a story. But for this particular story and that particular stretch of the story with the old women taking a bath, I just felt like putting the pages down and standing up and applauding.

I don't think I've ever encountered anything like this in in my reading.

At nine o'clock one morning in June, Captain Popov rang the doorbell. No one answered for a long time, but finally he heard the sound of scurrying. Who's there? Who is it? A plaintive female voice said. The door opened a crack, the chain left on. Sivtev and Emilianenko shifted their weight, itching to start. And get out of there as fast as they could. They were incompetent boys. Popov pushed his ID through the crack in the door. He heard more scurrying, and then it finally opened.

The witness, one of their own from the municipal housing office, stomped in first. Does Boris Ivanovich Moratov live here? Popov asked. Morato flashed into the room immediately, a large bearded man of around forty in a blue robe that might have been velvet. We don't make robes like that here, Popov thought with disgust. Where do they get this stuff? Your passport, please, Popov said. Just then Muratov's wife came out in a matching blue robe.

Familiarize yourself with this document, please, Popov said, and held out the search warrant. He wouldn't let Muratov hold it, forcing him to study it from a distance. If I may, Moratov stretched out his hand. Popov snatched the document away. What's there to read? It's a search warrant, I can tell you that myself. I can tell that it's a warrant, but there's no stamp on it. Oh hell. Popov grew angry. It doesn't really matter, does it? A warrant is a warrant. It'll get a stamp, I can assure you.

You can come back when you get the stamp, Boris Ivanovich retorted insolently. I would be a little more polite if I were you. It isn't good for us to get on each other's bad side, if you will please let me do my work. Just a minute, Moratov said, retreating into a little room. Popov knew the layout of the apartment. It was always the same, he thought, the hall, the room behind the hall, then the closet where they kept everything he was looking for.

Moratov returned with a thick yellowed piece of paper on official letterhead bearing the profile of the greatest of all men. It read Letter of Commendation. Moratov thrust the document right under the captain's nose, holding it so close that Popov couldn't read it. Moratov's wife, pale against her blue robe, looked at her husband imploringly. His mother in law, Maria Nikolaevna, poured tea as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening.

Read it from where I hold it, please, Muratov said. From where I hold it. The captain read it, he understood, he walked away and took his boys with him. Moratov threw his salvation document aside. Maria Nikolaevna set a teacup and a sandwich on a plate in front of Boris Ivanovitch. Moratov loved his mother in law in whom he saw traces of his wife Natasha, although the mother was more decisive.

he also saw his mother in law in his wife, the beginnings of plumpness, the future folds along the sides of her mouth, and a soft second chin, Natasha picked the document up off the floor. What is this, Boris? Boris gestured toward the ceiling, they're listening. Well, Natashenka, I got that certificate because in my modeling plant I fabricated the sarcophagus of the leader and teacher of all eras and peoples, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

Take a look at the signature, the powers that be are eternally in my death. Maria Nikolaevna smiled. Natasha placed her white hands on her even whiter neck. What now? she asked meekly. Would you pour me another cup of tea, Maria Nikolaevna? he asked, clinking his cup. Natasha sat down, unable to come to her senses. Moratov embraced his wife. She picked up a pencil and some scrap paper and wrote You're going to be arrested.

I'm going to leave in half an hour, he wrote back. Then he ripped up the paper and set it on fire. He waited for the flames to graze his fingertips and then threw the remains in the ashtray. He picked up a fresh piece of paper and wrote train station and showed it to Natasha and Maria Nikolaevna. Right now, Muratov said. Alone? Natasha asked. Muratov nodded. Then Muratov went into the closet and took out the folder that held what Captain Popov had come for.

He removed a stack of illustrated pages and returned to the kitchen. Muratov took a baking sheet from the oven, placed several pieces of paper on it, and brought a match to them. Maria Nikolaevna grabbed the match out of his hand. How many times have I asked you, Boris Ivanovich, to leave the household duties to me?

Maria Nikolaevna squeezed into the corridor where she lifted up the edge of the worn linoleum. She pushed the drawings under the linoleum and then inserted the edge of the strip back under the threshold. He's lost his mind, he's lost his mind, Natasha said. Her mother pointed at the phone. Like Boris, she was convinced that they were listening. Loudly, she said, Boris, I'm going to make you meet patties for lunch, all right?

Twenty minutes later, Moratov left the house by the back door. He had shaved his beard, but left the mustache. he went through the courtyard which had been flooded by a storm the night before, Broken branches stuck up from an enormous puddle which Boris trudged through, carrying a large shopping bag that held a change of linens, a sweater, his favourite little pillow, and every bit of money that there was in the house.

Sivtev and Emilyanenko, who had been left outside the front door, sat on the bench smoking, trying to decide whether to go and get some beer. Captain Popov came back with the necessary stamp at ten fifteen. Natasha opened the door immediately and said that Moratov had gone to work. Popov threw a fiery glance at his goons.

But he doesn't work. What's his job? His mother in law intervened. He's an artist. He doesn't go to an office, but he works a lot. You saw yourself. He constructed Lenin's sarcophagus. He's been fired since then, Popov said. Maria Nikolaevna rebuffed him, so he went out to look for work. Will he be back for lunch? The captain asked. Of course he will. They'd bought the story about the meat patties. They hadn't dragged their feet bugging the apartments.

He asked me to make him meet, we're expecting him back soon. The captain got to work sorting through mountains of papers. The Samizdat was the stuff that everyone had. Anyway, it wasn't Samisdat Popov had come for. The captain was looking for drawings that were already lying on his desk in the form of photocopies from Stern, the West German magazine. One was a caricature with giant letters that spelled Glory to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

The letters were made out of Bologna, and under the letters was a crowd of people and dogs trying to get up close to them. There was even a price tag hanging from the letters two rubles twenty Copex. Another caricature showed the mausoleum also made out of Bologna, but with linen written in hot dog. Agents had searched for the artist for a long time before uncovering his identity. The final touch was getting the originals or something that resembled them.

Captain Popov stayed until the late evening. He confiscated three sacks of Samisdat, but the drawings were never found. By then Moratov was at the house of an old woman who had been trying to sell green onions and parsley at the Kimri port. All she'd come home with was a traveller who'd missed the last boat Denovo Okatovo. Muratov paid a rubble to spend the night in a small barn, sleeping on a bale of hay covered with a sheet. At dawn, he washed up at the well and took the six AM ferry.

The old woman turned out to be a saint. She never reported him and That evening he was in the distant and inaccessible village of Danilovi Gorky, sitting in an old peasant house that belonged to his friend Nikolai Mikhailovich, who was also an artist. He explained his situation and asked if he could stay either there or in the bathhouse for a period of time posing as a cousin or something of the sort.

Nikolai Mikhailovich shook his head and groaned, but didn't refuse him. That's how Boris Ivanovitch's life on the run began. Danilovi Gorky wasn't so much a village as a tiny settlement of five houses. One was Nikolai Mikhailovich's Another was abandoned, empty since the death of its owner two years earlier. The other three housed summer vacationers along with their year round owners. Hardly any one stayed on for September.

Nikolai Mikhailovich's mother had come from an aristocratic line and his father was a priest who had been executed in nineteen thirty seven. Thus Nikolai was always prepared. He said that it would be safe to stay for the summer while there were plenty of strangers around, but afterward Boris would be dangerously visible. Nikolai Mikhailovich's house was packed with people, children, the elderly, two single female relatives, and some long term house guests.

Everyone did a bit of work, though it wasn't compulsory. They were busy from morning till night, but they were also free. For Boris, country life was a novelty. He was a city man. His grandfather had been a serf who started working at Setin's print shop in 1883, and his father was a skilled proletarian artisan, a true Muscovite. Before his escape, Boris had never even laid eyes on a village.

Suddenly the beauty of the secluded little settlement opened up before him. Then Ilovi Gorky stood on the banks of a large river, among swamps and forests. His hosts, the descendants of an aristocratic family, were also to his liking. They had never known palaces or had a whiff of luxury, having spent half a century between poverty and destitution, exile and prison. Those who'd survived were hardy. They had become so simple that they didn't even know any foreign languages.

Nonetheless, there was still something special about them, even if Boris Ivanovich couldn't quite put his finger on it. Nikolai's daughters stirred kasha on the stove, baked hearth cakes, worked in the garden, and washed the linens in the river. His grandsons caught fish, and his granddaughters and the two aunts Foraged for berries and mushrooms, all of them sketched. sang and put on plays for the little ones.

Soon after Boris's arrival, Nikolai Mikhailovitch's loud and restless cousin Anastasia came to stay for three days. She immediately set her sights on Boris Ivanovitch. He was attempting an easy mark. They lost no time, although their first night together would have lasted longer if the whole family hadn't spent so much time singing at the table. Anastasia was a good singer with a kind of gypsy chic in her voice.

She had small girlish breasts and a long nose, and was not as beautiful as his wife. But Boris remembered her for a long time afterward, She seemed to have purified him completely, picked him down to bone and tendon, and then put him back together. Boris didn't remember ever having had that kind of power and stamina. Anastasia, a doctor, left by boat on the fourth day of their affair, since she had a twenty four hour shift at the hospital where she was the head of her department.

The whole family saw her off, and as they stood on the shore, she sang. Marushenka washed her white feet and waved to them with her handkerchief from the boat. She's so educated, but such a slut, Boris Ivanovitch thought, both impressed and confused. As though he'd read his friend's mind, Nikolai Mikhailovitch told him, That's in Nastyas' blood. Her great grandmother or great great grandmother fooled around with Pushkin,

On Transfiguration Day they all went to church in Cashino, first by ferry, then by bus. The trip was exhausting. Your life is so anti-Soviet, he remarked in admiration. No, Boris, it's just a Soviet, Nikolai Mikhailovich said, laughing. All summer, Boris watched the sun rise and the water lap the sandbank, which was covered in the empty mussel shells and decorative grasses that he had previously seen only on icons.

He hadn't known that they really existed. Moved by everything he saw, he was happy. Everyone foraged for mushrooms in the forest. There weren't many in July, but by August they sprouted up after the sweet rain showers. The days were long, the evenings with their endless tea drinking were pleasant, and the nights passed in an instant. He fell asleep and woke up in the same moment as though nothing had happened.

A month and a half had gone by, and he still had no news from home. He did not seek out ways to get in touch with his wife. He was more comfortable not imagining how worried she was about him, her desires, anxieties, and fears. A relative of Nikolai Mikhailovich's tossed a single postcard from Boris Ivanovich into a Moscow mailbox. The card said everything is fine, don't worry, I love you and miss you.

In August, Nikolai Mikhailovich's wife, the daughter of a famous Russian artist, came to the house with her oldest son Kolya. Her daughters buzzed around her, doting on her as if she were an honored guest, all Mamocha Mamocha, while Kolya, who was thirty years old, tailed his father wherever he went. Boris Ivanovich, who was a virulent opponent of child rearing, began to doubt his belief.

Long ago he had decided that giving birth in this inhumane and shameless state into a meaningless life of poverty and filth should not be done. He had told Natasha that this was his condition for marrying her. Their marriage had lasted for eight years, and the problem wasn't that she wanted children. She lacked a sense of humor, or maybe the way that her husband's mind worked had begun to wear her down.

She cringed at his drawings as they became angrier and more accrid. Compared with other couples, they had been rather well off. He had graduated from the crafts department of the Stroganov School. Because he was a fabricator, he made more money than the real artists at the plant. He got bigger orders for, say, a thousand rubles. Sometimes he worked off the books as an assistant to famous artists.

He helped create the decorative metalwork for various palaces of culture, those for railways or metalworking, no matter the trade, the culture was always socialist. This work filled him with a rage that manifested in increasingly acerbic caricatures of the socialist life, which was allegedly always on the verge of transforming into a communist utopia. His love for drawing had intensified. He was invited to participate in an art show in someone's apartment. Many people admired his drawings.

His first real success depicted the statue worker and a cocko woman made out of bologna. Thanks to his friend Ilia, this bologna made it to West Germany and was published in Stern. After that, Boris grew indifferent to filling his large orders, preferring to spend time sketching. In Danilovigorki, Muratov lost all interest in drawing Bologna.

There was none in the village, and no one missed it. The quiet sketches of gentle nature that Nikolai Mikhailovich's entire clan, young and old, loved to make, were similarly unappealing to Boris Ivanovich. She ended up not drawing anything all summer long.

September was coming and people started preparing to return to the city. They filled pillowcases with mushrooms and put raspberries and wild strawberries in the oven to dry. That year they didn't make jam, there wasn't enough sugar, and besides, jars were tough to transport. They stashed pickles and mushrooms in the cellar and buried the early potatoes. When their departure was imminent, Nikolai Mikhailovich finally asked, So you're set on spending the winter here, Boris Ivanovich?

I'm scared, Nikolai Mikhailovich, not of the police. I'm scared of your stove, your house. These are the kinds of things you have to have known about since childhood. It seems like it's too late for me to learn them. Nikolai Mikhailovitch scratched his meagre beard, fell silent for a moment, and then made a proposal.

Baba Nura's vacationers have left, and she's gotten rather feeble in the past year. You should stay at her place, I'll talk to her. You can help her through the winter. I'll come in December. God willing you'll survive until then. Moratov assigned Nikolai Mikhailovich two tasks in Moscow. The first was to go to Muratov's house sometime, without calling ahead or providing any warning, and give his wife and his mother in law a letter from him, but not tell them where he was.

The second was to meet with Muratov's friend Ilya and say a single word. Forward. Ilya would know what it meant. Before returning to the country in December, he should meet with Ilya again, take the money that Ilya would bring, and give half of it to Moratov's family, the other half he should bring back to Moratov. He did not know how much money there would be, maybe there would be a lot, maybe not very much, maybe nothing at all.

Muratov moved in with Nura, a stooped over old lady with a crooked little face, gnarled fingers, and giant, hideous wrists that she held in front of her chest when she walked. It seemed as if she were always carrying a cup or a pot, her wrists never unbent, and she used her hands as though they were two large claws. In exchange for letting Muratov live with her, she asked not for money but for vodka. The old woman turned out to have a passion for drinking, and was a merry hooligan.

She woke up early in the morning, crawled out of her cot with a loud creak, crossed herself in the holy place in the corner, where there was a large blackened icon, and then tossed back her first thimbleful. At noon she had her second. In the middle of the day she would eat kasha or potatoes. Later, three thimblefuls would serve as a replacement for all other necessary fats, proteins and carbohydrates. Nora went through a bottle a week, a ration she had established years earlier.

In the morning she was barely there, but by evening she was full of life and even did some housework all the while muttering gibberish under her breath. Several years before, the village had got radio and electricity. Nora ignored the electricity, she never turned on the light, going to bed when it got dark, and getting up when the sun rose, but she took a liking to the radio.

When Moratov finally learned how to decipher the old woman's stream of Babel, he discovered that it was a merciless running commentary on the radio programs she listened to in the morning. Listen, lodger, that new Stalin they have today, they praise him so highly he'll be even worse than the old one, she once said to Boris Ivanovitch.

Her three sons, who came of age toward the beginning of the war, had died in combat one after another, the eldest in forty-one, the middle in forty-two, and the youngest in forty-five. And they liberated us from God, she mumbled, peering toward the darkness of her altar, although perhaps he decided to cast us off himself, who can tell?

Some evenings her neighbors would stop by, Marfa and Zinaida, both of them younger than Nura, but just a spitter. They drank Boris Ivanovitch's tea, and Nura bragged to them.

God sent me a goodly lodger, he brings me vodka, puts the tea on, It had been ages since Boris Ivanovich had thought about the Bologna drawings. In the village, mass produced meat products had completely lost their symbolism, like long forgotten relics. The old women here could not afford to take the train to Moscow just to buy Bologna, and they wouldn't have seen an orange as long as they lived. had it not been for Nikolai Mikhailovich bringing them such unheard of curios from time to time.

Moratov started drawing the old women and their surroundings. In the midst of this poverty and squalor, a treasure trove materialized before his eyes. The crooked little potatoes cooked in their skins, the pickles disfigured in their barrels, and all the mushrooms from the little slippery jacks to the ugly milk caps. The queen of the spread was a cloudy bottle of hooch, stopped with a homemade cork. Sometimes if they were lucky it was vodka.

In winter bread wasn't delivered to the store in the larger settlement of Krusilino, which was six kilometers away from Gorki, so the old women took turns baking. Boris Ivanovitch quickly went through all the paper in Nikolai Mikhailovich's house. Then he found ten rolls of wallpaper intended for the attic. The redecorating had been put off for several years before being abandoned entirely.

At first he drew on the back of the paper and then he started drawing on the front, which provided his drawings with a stippled yellow background that made the old women's faces come alive. They were the last people remaining in the village, worn out as their old clothes, humble as the potatoes that were their only food, and free as the clouds.

Drinking cheered them up, they would sing, reminisce and laugh, covering their toothless mouths with their blackened fingers. There were two teeth among the three of them. Toothaches were treated with sage and nettles. Leska, the village shepherd, had been the only one who could extract teeth, and after he died the remaining teeth had fallen out of their own accord. Boris Ivanovich drew his sitters in thin pencil lines, with their amazing conversations flowing out of their mouths in ribbons.

What stories they told? They talked about how before the war the party bosses had showed up to incorporate everyone into a kolcoge, and the people protested and protested, but finally signed up, having nowhere else to turn. Nura's impish eldest son, Nikolai, played a trick on the bosses with some spoiled eggs.

There had been a hen who was so clever at nesting that it was hard to take her eggs away. They would go bad and explode in her hiding spots, and you couldn't get rid of the stink for a month afterward. Nikolai found some unexploded eggs to put into the newcomer's wagon so that they would sit on them with their fattened asses.

You wouldn't believe it, but the very first boss who sat down broke the rotten egg. There was a quiet shooting sound and the stench spread through the whole town. It was so funny. They reminisced about their husbands and fought over unsettled scores. Marfa reminded Zinaida that she'd messed with her men in nineteen twenty six. Zinaida retorted that Leska the shepherd stole milk from other people's cows. Leska happened to be Marfa's brother, and she didn't take kindly to the accusation.

Their argument escalated until Noura sang a dirty little ditty about who snuck into where, and both of the women laughed. Again they cast their minds back to things that had happened long ago but were not forgotten, about the Communites who had starved the village and taken away its men. Periodically they would fall silent and knock back a thimbleful, then they'd laugh and drink some more.

Snow fell and the poverty and dejection of the sodden and stormy autumn months were replaced by a white winter which stayed with Boris Ivanovich as a bright patch, a sunny idylle in his gray life. He spent the few available daylight hours wandering around the village. The swamps had frozen over and you could go farther out on them than before. There was so much snow that it reached over his felt boots.

One day, upon returning home, he found all the old women making a fuss in the front yard. They had decided to undertake a major cleaning on the occasion of the following day's holiday. It's the feast of the presentation of Mary, they told Boris Ivanovitch. Presentation to what or whom they couldn't explain, but they had decided to wash themselves. It had been a long time. The last time they had bathed was for the feast of the intercession when the first snow had fallen.

Nikolai Mikhailovich had the only decent bathhouse. The old women's bathhouses had all fallen apart long ago, but there was so much snow in Nikolai Mikhailovich's yard that it would have taken a day to clear it. They decided to wash Innora's house. Boris Ivanovich wheeled in the tub, brought them water from the well, chopped enough firewood to fill the entire porch, and brought it inside.

In the morning they started heating the water. It got so hot in the house that the little glass panes in the windows wept with condensation, cleaning themselves as well. Everything was ready to go. They had even steamed at the birch switches, and then it occurred to them, where would the lodger go? Even the goat was freezing in the yard. How could they kick him out?

You couldn't hide him in the stove, he'd burn up. The house didn't have separate areas, and there were no walls, only a hiding place behind the stove. He wouldn't dare to look from behind there. Then they laughed. What would this stud want with our old bones? They put Boris Ivanovich behind the stove and strung up a curtain. He sat there with a book, but he didn't read.

The lamp light was hardly brighter than a candle. He could have moved it closer, but instead of reading, he listened to what the old women talked about in the back. At first, they joked about how they'd grown so dry that the dirt didn't stick to them anymore. Then Zenaida said that they had even stopped stinking. When they were young they'd smelled like pussy, but now it was just dust and mold.

Finally the washing began. They moaned and groaned, pouring water and knocking the tubs around. Suddenly one of them slipped, fell with a slap and yawed. Boris Ivanovitch leapt up, ready to help. He peered over the curtain. Zinaida and Marfa were pulling Nora off the floor, spilling over with childlike laughter. Boris Ivanovitch froze.

He'd grown accustomed to their craggy faces, their dark disfigured hands, their stomped out feet, everything that showed through their ancient faded clothing. But now, dear Lord, it was He was seeing their naked bodies for the first time He couldn't take his eyes off them. Their long grey hair flowed over their bumpy spines. Their wrists and feet looked even heavier and more horrible than usual, broken from working the land, gnarled like the roots of old trees.

Their fingers were the same color as the earth they'd been digging up for decades. Their bodies were pale, so white that they were blue like skim milk. Marfa still had her breasts with their dark animal-like nipples, while the other women's seemed to have melted away, leaving behind flaccid, translucent bags that drooped down to their bellies.

Zinaida had long beautiful legs or what remained of them. All of their butts had been rubbed down to flat spots, with only folds of skin left to mark where the cheeks had once been full. I'm telling you, Nora, I can't pick up heavy things any more. Whenever I try, my uterus starts falling out, Marfa said provocatively, with a hint of pride.

Boris Ivanovich saw that there was a grey sack dangling between her legs like a tobacco pouch. He cringed, but couldn't turn away from these three harpy graces. Marfa squatted and nimbly pushed the sack back into her hairless, crinkled lump, into the depths of what had once been a woman's body. Boris Ivanovich was not ignorant. He graduated from art school and had the genes of a master engraver.

In his adolescence, he'd studied Doray's illustrations for the Divine Comedy, keenly interested in the female body. These contorted creatures stirring two meters before him were the living remains of those bodies. It took an effort of imagination to see any vestiges of woman in their twisted bones and hanging flesh. Old age has no gender, Boris Ivanovich thought, growing terrified. What about me? Will this happen to my body? I don't want that. I'd rather go out on my own terms than be nullified.

Suddenly there was a burst of laughter. The old women had caught him staring. Oh your lodger's peeking at the girl, Snorka. Let's beat him with a birch broom so he doesn't get any ideas. Noura squealed. With the stinging nettles, we used to beat the boys who peeked with stinging nettles. Come on, you hags, like I need you. I was just trying to help whoever fell down and you've gotten all excited. With that, he hid behind the curtain

Afterward he spent several days sketching the bath of the white swans, which was what he called the scene on the remaining wallpaper. He was able to draw about twenty versions before he ran out of paper. Just as Boris began to get bored, Nikolai Mikhailovich returned with his son, Kolya, to check on the house and take the reserve stores back to Moscow.

The winter route was arduous. Unable to use the frozen waterway, they had to take the train, the bus, and then travel six more kilometers through the forest on a tractor. Nikolai Mikhailovich brought a large amount of money from Ilya, more than Boris Ivanovich had expected, as well as a letter from his wife. They went to the neighboring village to the store and The shopkeeper Verka, who had a deep respect for Nikolai Mikhailovitch, pulled the forbidden vodka out from under the counter.

Nikolai Mikhailovich had brought two bottles from Moscow, but Boris Ivanovich did not want to miss an opportunity to spend some of his new pile of cash. He had avoided the store fearing the locals. They fit the store's entire shabby stock into two backpacks, a bounty of cookies, Sticky hard candies without wrappers, oil, barley, a packet of dried peas, briquettes of cherry kissle, blocks of processed cheese, and two packets of salt.

Boris Ivanovich kept scanning the shelves for real food. Verka eyed him to see if he was looking for more than groceries. To her dismay his hungry eyes sought out goods and not her the beauty. Straightening his back under the weight of his bag, Nikolai Mikhailovich shook his shoulders to better distribute the weight of their purchases, which made the models give out a pretty clink. Are you staying for a while? Come visit us. Verka propped her round cheek on her beat red fist.

No, Vera, thank you. I don't think I'll be coming back. I'm only here for a day. I haven't even started warming the house. I just chopped some wood. We'll spend the night at Swistunika's and then head back. Well, you should at least tell your friend to come see us, Verka giggled. We're bored, us girls. He's been living here for so long, but he hasn't made any friends at all. It turned out that the country telegraph had been functioning all along. Moratov's presence was known for villages around.

We're leaving tomorrow. You can get to know each other when we come back in the spring, Nikolai Mikhailovitch said. In anticipation of the men's return to Danila Vigorki, Nora had baked potato pies, and then retreated behind the stove. Out of politeness, Zinaida and Marfa weren't around. Maybe we should invite them over, Boris Ivanovich said, having finally decided to leave this fantastical sanctuary where he'd stayed too long.

No, they won't come today. They're well mannered country women. They would never come on the first day I'm back. I don't know why, probably to stay out of the way, or so that they won't seem like they're asking for gifts. They were raised well, not like the women today. Verca, the shopkeeper, steals and parties. She's Zenaida's niece, which means she is supposed to come visit her and bring her presents, but she just doesn't want to.

Zinaida's son has been in prison for the past two years. His wife is a drunk. The grandson drowned last summer, and now all she has left is that slow witted girl Nikolai Mikhailovich gestured dismissively, but what do you need our country dramas for, Ivanovich?

Kolya came in, his arms full of provisions from the cellar. Everything's fine, Dad, nothing froze. The potatoes are in good shape, only I don't think we'll be able to get them to the station in such cold weather. They'll freeze on the way. I would take the cucumbers and mushrooms, but I wouldn't touch the potatoes. The three of them were having a good time being men among men, savouring the pies and other country treats.

To celebrate their reunion, they peeled the potatoes and ate them with oil, but they didn't open the canned goods, deciding to leave them for the old women's Christmas feast. their nativity fast had just begun, but really the women fasted all year round, with the occasional chicken as their sole reprieve.

Around ten that night there was a knock at the door. Nikolai Mikhailovich flew to his feet, shoved Boris's plate and glass into his hands, and pushed him behind the stove where Nura was sleeping. The man at the door was a police officer, Nikolai Svistunov, a distant relative. People in those parts had stopped paying much attention to family ties because it was half Svistunov's and half Yerofev's for three villages around.

Half of the men were named Nikolai. Svistunov threw off his hat and unbuttoned his police coat. Without saying a word, Nikolai Mikhailovich got a clean glass and filled it more than halfway. I came up to see you because I noticed you're not heating your home. There's no light on in there, Svistunov said.

You have to burn wood for three days to heat the house. We just came up here to take a look at our property and pick up some pickles and mushrooms from our cellar. We're going to spend the night here at Nouras and then go back to the city.

There was no road back from Denilo Vigorky, not even a ski run. The only path was the trail that Nikolai and Boris had cleared, which was how the cop had got to the house. Fresh snow had already covered their track. It's more than an hour's walk back, Zvistunov said. Wolves had been spotted in Troitsky that week, and he didn't want to run into any.

So he didn't spend too much time at the old woman's house. He had gone there on his own initiative, checked everyone's documents, verified that they were all people he knew, and that there were no strangers around. However, just for propriety's sake, he asked, Nikolai Mikhailovitch, have you seen any strangers around here? Strangers, the artist asked, No, no strangers, only our own. And so Vistunov stomped back down the narrow forest trail, running into neither stranger nor wolf.

Boris Ivanovitch came out from behind the stove, where Nuro was still sleeping. The man finished a second bottle of vodka, and then had some tea. Boris cleared the table, wiped it off, and placed three stacks of his drawings on it. In one the old women were talking at the table, the second one had still lives with potatoes and pickles alongside nameless objects of unknown utility.

Some kind of little tongs, wooden pincers, miniature shovels, clay knick knacks that were either for drinking or simply toys. The third stack, the largest, had the naked old women, the joints of their legs, their leathery pouches and sacks, their folds and creases. The drawings weren't of an inferno, the women were grinning and chortling. Nikolai Mikhailovitch looked at the drawings for a long time, grumbling and sniffling before finally saying

Boris, I didn't even know what a good draftsman you are. You can't stay here. I don't know how you're planning to survive, but I'm taking these pictures back to Moscow. I'll keep them safe for you until you get back. He smiled, if I can stay safe myself. The next day they parted ways. Nikolai Mikhailovich and his son left for Moscow and Boris Ivanovich for Vologda.

Boris Ivanovich evaded arrest for four years. He got used to the idea that he'd eventually be caught, and so he lived recklessly, gambling with his life. He began in the Valogda region, then for three months he stayed in Tever, at the fidgety, full throated Anastasia's house, Then, having grown completely brazen, he moved closer to Moscow and took up residence at the Dasha of a distant relative.

it occurred to him that perhaps no one was even looking for him. His friend Ilya helped him a great deal. He preserved his entire collection, with the exception of the pieces that went abroad, Everything on the other side was going swimmingly. At the end of 1976, he had a show in Cologne called Russian Nature Laid Bare. The hideous old women frolicked in their frames, they were having a good time. This was when they finally caught him four years after his disappearance.

Boris Ivanovich got off with two years and an absurd charge pornography. It wasn't the anti-Soviet Bologna that got him, or the mausoleum made of Bologna, not even the terrible portrait made out of sausage of the leader holding a cut-off piece of his own ear on the tines of a fork. It was pornography. After doing two years in a camp in Arkangelsk, he emigrated to Europe with his new wife Raika, a little Jewish woman, slippery and solid as a rock, something like Anastasia.

They were living happily in Europe until recently. The beautiful Natasha didn't waste much time either. While Boris was in hiding, she found herself a completely normal engineer with whom she had a daughter of that same breed that Boris Ivanovich had once so admired. Maria Nikolaevna watched over her granddaughter and cooked their meager meals. The new son in law was all right, a decent man, but had nothing on Boris Ivanovich.

All the old women in Danilovi Gorki died long ago. Everything is fine.

in that both are large swathes of people who have undergone um great suffering and yet in both literatures there is a tradition of if you don't laugh you'll cry kind of tone of writing. And I always love that paradoxical sort of balancing act. Comedy. Layered on top of I wouldn't say outright tragedy, but sort of grimness. And greyness.

Apart from what we see through Boris Ivanovich's eyes and so on.

Um there are those kinds of phrasings all throughout the story and all throughout um in my experience Ulitskaya's writing. in the uh novel from which uh this has been excerpted in the big green tent, it's full of those kinds of storytellers, um way of going in and out of the tale.

his cousin Anastasia, the old women each in their turn, and then when Nikolai Mikhailovich's family visits from Moscow, each has their cameo. Everybody is part of the cast.

of the character as it does to Ulitskaya's own sense of optimism in the midst of gloom. So it does become a different story in that it concentrates its energies and its telling on one person and uses that person as a kind of symbol of the oppression of the Russian state. But it continues the comic energy established by the beginning, because you could also say that Boris Ivanovich

sort of s slows down. It's it's a kind of pastoral in a in in in a very odd way, but it's a pastoral that is marked by uh flight from hounding governmental powers. But it feels so I don't want to say that it feels so stakes free, but part of the r the reason why I love the story is again that paradox of a frightful Story or a story that in in another writer's hands could could be frightful, could be um nerves scraping, but in her hands is sort of

lightweight, it becomes an opportunity for b for Boris Ivanovich to sort of get a second beat on life, as it were, to slow down and to be sheltered by good people. It's very you know, it's it's so strange that coming from where she has come from Ulitskaya that her stories are also full of perfidy and and and malefactors, but In this instance, in this particular story, it's full of good people, good humored people, uh stalwart people, you know. It would be a cliche to

characterize them as good country folk, but it in a way they do fall into that. And, you know, she's a robust kind of old fashioned writer who takes as I said, takes into her sweep all of human life as she sees it. But The characters in this story in particular illustrate her oddly optimistic view of human nature. Though in fact, yes, I agree with you that it becomes a different story it continued to sort of expand on that comic vein introduced earlier by by Captain Popov's bumbling.

And you know, Natasha's mother is saying, No, no, no, don't don't do something silly like burn them. I've got this under control, tucking it under the linoleum. It's as though they've planned a course of action and it's just going accordingly. Um Bars doesn't seem to feel any fear. He has a destination, he knows where he's going. And and we get that first hint of sort of moral goodness with the old woman who takes him home to sleep in her barn and then doesn't report you know, doesn't snitch.

So yeah, it's almost as though everything was preordained for Boris.

you know, I love stories of capable people. I just thrilled to that, you know, as opposed to, you know, uh bumbling folk or people prone to mishaps. So this is s sort of thrilling. You know, it's part of the buoyant uh ebullient energy of the story that he is so capable, he probably knew that they were coming for him, and so he had a contingency plan should this uh scenario crop up.

makes life completely different.

But in this place, though that is present in the in the physical surroundings, I mean just to get there is such an odyssey. It is so far out. But The people who live in it, the three old uh women, can in a way be said to in their own way thrive in this setting.

place. You know, that the Boris arrives there and he s sees these shells and decorative grasses that he has only ever seen on icons. He didn't think they were real. And suddenly there's a there's a physical world that he really hasn't witnessed before or been part of.

of what the village has to offer, the the the pickles, the potatoes, which constitute their main uh food. Um so the stillness of his surroundings sort of awaken him to the desire to capture it all on on paper and reawaken his artistic uh temperament and interest. So it's a story of flight. slash a story of awakening at at the same time. So these twin values are sort of ever present in in her cosmology, which is you know, which is very evident in in in this in the story.

he puts his hand to sort of just capturing the world around him because he's a draftsperson. And he says in the story that he loves to draw. And later on, Nikolai Mikhailovich looking over uh his trove of um uh portraits says I didn't realize what a good draftsman you are. So it's that lovely respect from a peer of yours, you know, uh to pay you that compliment. And probably among the reasons

besides a kind of a shrugged shoulder of why Nikolai Mikhailovich agreed to shelter him in the first place. That there is a certain kind of grudging respect from one artist to another and also a fellow understanding of Uh the Pierce transgression could so easily be yours that you are basically in the same boat. So y by offering him succor and uh shelter, you are sort of uh holding one up for for the team. Yeah. You know.

not driven by ideas, really, but driven by observation, by appreciation, by affection. It's a different kind of art for me.

So I I wrote some marginalia on the printed up story uh in the scene of the old women taking a bath, and I say that it's a comedy of physical decrepitude as well as the sheer medical fact of old age. you know, all all in one and I wrote, um, Horror and Ghastliness and Rhapsody. Again. So this is a lovely, lovely you know, it's if we're lucky as as writers, even as skilled writers, we hit on one really good strong note.

Sometimes too. But if you're if you if you if you do what Ulitskaya has done over and over again in the story, if you hit A note that sounds too much. two different emotions at the same time or three different emotions. You're in Nirvana, you know. And and the way she also describes the the women as harpy graces and then later on when um Boris Ivanovich titles his at least mentally titles his drawings. He calls uh the suite of uh paintings the the white swans.

So, you know, it's this sense of yes, it is horrible to be that aged and to have nature sort of betray you in all sorts of ways. But at the same time it's that decrepitude still belongs, still clings to a living, breathing

And yet that at the same time recognizing that Ulitskaya's portraiture isn't cruel. It's just factual. It's it but there's also a strange kind of peevish, impish delight in saying to us, this is what old age does to your body. It will happen to you too. And so we might as well face it.

uh witness that he can put down directly onto paper. So as an artist slash explorer, this is sort of manna from heaven for him.

Um and then he meets Anastasia and they have this sort of incredible sex he's never had before in his life, even though she's not as pretty as as his wife, you know. And he's mystified that someone who's well educated, who's a doctor who's the head of her department could also be the sensual being. You know, he ha he he's never before seen kind of the intellectual side go with the sensual side.

And so he's learning so much in the course of this stay and then we get to a different form of, you know, physical reality and and sensuality, which is these ruined

Uh but it's so telling, again with this sort of double vision that Ulitskaya has, that this occasioned for much joy and the reawakening of his artist's self will also be the occasion for his eventual downfall when he is uh pegged for pornography by the state, uh, for these very images uh which are exhibited in Cologne.

And then he's freed. He's freed from his former marriage. He's freed from I don't know, everything that was kind of holding him in. And You might say it's not an advancement because he's no longer a dissident, right? He's no longer fighting. He's no longer an idealist in that way. He just emigrates. um finds a a woman who's much better for him and emigrates. So, you know, in some ways it's not a success story if what you want is to see your dissident prevailing over, you know, authoritarianism.

What do you think of that ending?

You know, that kind of fierce dissident spirit burns really bright between I don't know what you know, you can sort of bracket it between this age and that age, and after a while it sort of burns out and you sort of have to settle for the compromise of living. And also artists are, you know, part of being an artist is to sort of indulge a kind of siberitic spirit, a kind of spirit of survivalism. So being an artist slash dissident is always a kind of tricky proposition.

you know, the the principled side of of you versus the the sensuous side or or the side that wants good living, you know, or settled living. And this is also part of the way this guy's stories turn out is that her character's fates are dispatched in a paragraph, in having spent, you know, pages and pages with them, suddenly the quirks of their fates are dispatched in a sentence or two and that's just sort of the part of the vagaries of of life.

you know, history happens. It it buoys you up, it it plummets you down. You just have to sort of endure all of the vicissitudes of this, you know, the upping and the downing, and and and come out the other side and you have to live long to see at least some up in that cycle. You know, and I think um for now this is an up. Who knows if he might continue to be from his uh emigre perch a a continuing gadfly of the government, as some people do. Aaron Powell Well

I'm Deborah Triesman. Thanks for listening.