Time to Buy Black Rings

In this stream I’ll be collecting previously published stories and poems by my talented father, the science-fiction writer Yury Nevsky

Yury Nevsky’s Stream

Time to Buy Black Rings

Can you hear it? Do you see it? — and there again, the bracelets of the endless winter have wrapped our wrists, the icy rings of night have adorned our fingers, the cross of black roads has lain across our chest, with the twisted cord of days and blue sorrow. Only the dark fringe of the eyelashes will blink, fine-grained firs will breathe string-like, pine trees — Gypsy needles planted in the coarse cloth of the sky — and the wind, that drifter of snow, will scatter the run and snort of its shaggy-legged little horses…

On the pearly rim of the forest’s eyeball I live, my soul drawn tight with silver threads from the Lord’s beard, it seems. Upper Berezovka — a narrow knife of the valley in snow scabbards stitched with glittering beads — lies far from me, and all its people too: a small handful of lights, the lacework of the veins of chilled little rivers, the glass tubes of roads where our local, respected bus crawls along, the mercury column of warmth inching its way forward. And what’s there?! Where are Kolyma, Magadan, Chukotka, the Kurils? — I am here, unreachable, and even with outstretched arms I can’t reach the serrated edge of the Urals, the cottony snow of the Central Russian belt, the churches and the plains…

Wolves — not wolves, but wildened city dogs — sweep their trail, laying inflammation over the tonsils of the settlement’s outskirts, malicious and predatory fangs breaking the arteries of late-lived lives, the lace of well-trodden paths, the very memory that binds us to human inconsistency. Runaway soldiers or prisoners live in the dachas, empty except for the echo of a July noon, warming their hands by homemade “kozly” stoves, and the dogs won’t touch them, observing professional courtesy; though those men are later found frozen stiff or electrocuted, or they pass out again, poisoned after stuffing themselves with the summer stores of thrifty dacha owners: raspberry jam and mushrooms.

I live at the Government Dacha, I heat the stoves, I keep turning the electricity on. The house, drained by frost, is a huge pink ghost, and the stoves were set up all wrong: there are no old masters anymore. Just two desk books: “Operation of Heating Systems” and “American Country House” (in English), which shorten the evenings into little runs of letters. But the bread doesn’t go stale, and the water doesn’t spoil here, and there are no alien electromagnetic fields — pure grace!...

You know how to split firewood? At first you claw your way onto the frost like a sheep-skin-clad, rough-hewn lump, tapping stupidly at the grinning logs… — and then anger will drive the slow pulsing of the heart — to hell with the fur coat! In a sweater it’s easier to slice the wriggling yellow-mustard resin; the sweater will plaster your back like a bandage — with your shirt-front, with the full weight of the body’s striking mechanism you dive from the slope after the silvery fish of the axe head, continuing the arc, the semicircle, the half-flight of the finest chime of singing steel… And why, you ask, do I split wood in winter? Plain enough — mismanagement… They brought a truck in autumn, dumped it wherever, and that was that.

In earlier times the Government used to come to drink vodka, and for other necessary business too — everything was in order, they even threw up a bathhouse there — a delight! But now the times are different, and it doesn’t suit it somehow. The timber palace chills down wild and lonely, and I along with it, for one and a half rates as stove tender and watchman — not from a good life, clearly. By evening you’re worn out — just like Papa Carlo! On all fours you crawl into the little upstairs room where I live — only to tumble into the little grave of sheltered sleep… Well, at least you won’t choke on carbon monoxide — drafts roam everywhere beneath the floor of the foolish house, blowing everything clean away — tomorrow morning again, back at it, and that’s how I live…

Everything is big, enormous: felt boots, mittens, axe, sheep-skin coat, Great soup, fate, distances, winter — if only I could make it, Lord, to spring! Sometimes you wear yourself out by day, fall asleep, and forget to latch even a tiny hook on the front door; the grease on the barrel of the small-caliber rifle issued by the special office in exchange for your soul freezes in the corner: “Ah, partisans are up to mischief…” Though these men aren’t bad, those guys with wild unwashed hair down to their eyes, in quilted jackets burnt by campfires, all carrying PPSh submachine guns (model of ’43), quick-firing MG-4s, Berdans.

They get sick of sitting in the woods — they head out to the Barguzin Highway, shoot at the wheels of passing cars, stop taxis, siphon gas for their signal fires. They won’t touch the passengers; they’ll gift them a cedar cone or some little inlaid mouthpiece trinket, and then let them go. They burn mysterious signal fires for themselves, clear abandoned logging roads fit for landing a single-engine plane or a glider.

It’s hard to fly to us: the autumn before last, one of their planes crashed after slamming into a crow wedding, a black horde boiling over the forest — they said it was carrying freely convertible currency from Indochina — and there was a fire. The local press ran an insulting article about it, and they got a real dressing-down! And those crows are impossible! The airport is sometimes closed for weeks because of their aerial piracy. A lone motorcyclist can be swallowed by a dense, boiling haze — and then the motorcyclist is gone.

That’s why motorcyclists, if they gather in numbers of more than a hundred, only then do they ride wherever they need to go; well, then they’ll give way — unless it’s to a tank or to the Master of the Highway (a guy who, about three years ago, drunkenly crashed into a bus stop, beat up some kids and all sorts of people, and now his soul keeps racing and racing on a shabby green Ural). A “private taxi” may be empty, but it will never take a passenger onboard — still, it’s scary! A private driver will offer you a ride: hand over fifty rubles…

Once two men in a stolen car gave me a lift, drunk out of their minds; one of them was explaining the road and what he could see ahead to the other on his fingers, in sign-language style. In such a backwater, and he still wasn’t afraid to ask for change (I had a hundred-ruble bill in one note) — they even sobered up a little from such bad manners, from change, though they did scrape it together. There was also this: I stopped a huge logging truck at the Fork, and inside — aliens in red flannel shirts! Everything about them is different: different words and gestures, different things and smells, different business and problems that don’t concern me…

The road of cosmic transformations drew us into a whirl of stars, the flowing folds of the cloak of night, the broken edges of black trees, chunks of craggy clouds — that’s how they send logging trucks racing down the Barguzin Highway, sending them into zero-transport. Old trams are stolen, horses at the racetrack, sold to cosmic antique dealers or to a museum: prestigious, I guess.

That’s why it’s better to get to us in an armored personnel carrier with soldiers, as I once did during the fondly remembered All-Union census. You stray into such a wilderness — and there’s nothing else for you. My faithful great-grandmothers leaf through the calendar of the yellowing century in the worn teeth of ramshackle huts; proto-time sours in splayed-out tubs there, proto-father laughs dimly from black holes woven with Kazimir Malevich’s dynamic lines. The last daguerreotype memory of the Imperial family holds together the pitiful, soaked-through flimsiness of wall-paper walls against relentless atomic decay.

Again, if not with the second old lady then with the third you notice a Japanese refrigerator with software tucked into a cozy corner, a portable boiler-autoclave, silent scooters piled in the entryway, video cameras, night-vision devices. Probably that’s where they store the corpses, sliced up with the Druzhba chainsaw — for magical work, divination, shape-shifting.

Now I also understand the suspiciously athletic young men on midnight buses — all as one, with container-sized bags of incredible volume — and the frequent newspaper and TV notices about one young woman or another disappearing here and there. But the snowdrift is knitting a gray winter sweater, my crooked stoves are burning according to the holy scripture of “Operation of Heating Systems,” the squeaky well-hoist reels in a metal chain of omens and events, drawing me a dissolved fire with icy fragments of stars and reptiles from the very belly of the earth.

The starch-white, blue-tinted, taut nights stand upright; you can see how the frequent silent stitching cuts through the wavering canvas: Korean paratroopers, like Christmas ornaments, descend into the soft breasts of snowy ravines on their urgent reconnaissance missions. Forest patrolmen, if unemployed in winter, shoot them in midair with Nagant revolvers when they happen to catch them, having hidden beforehand in the tangle of taiga deadfall. Otherwise, in the mornings they ride the bus with frost-scorched, tired, but happy faces, in clothes sewn with a strength not of our own. And the poor souls still have no money for tickets: they trade with passengers for bright foreign cigarette packs, tights, cosmetics, or with the kids for chewing gum.

My house stands on a hillock, in a dip between two little hills. From above you can see the cottages of the settlement beyond the road; many stand empty in winter and are lived in only in summer. This area is called Internat, because farther on, beyond the frozen creek, there is the Internat — that’s exactly what it is. Across the way is Maria Ivanovna’s house, where I draw the tastiest earthly water from the well. They have a cheerful little dog, Timka, an extremely prolific cat, Mur, plus an additional shepherd dog, Grandpa Arkady, and two motorcycles. Across the way lives a family, but they’re dark people: I think they make moonshine, or at least breed a computer virus — what can you say about them?

And to the left — there lives Princess Olga in a tidy house, like a sturdy little mossy mushroom. Princess Olga has two children: one in kindergarten, the other in school. Princess Olga keeps her elderly mother alive. In summer the old lady still bustles around the yard, around the household, but in winter she doesn’t show her nose — it must be hard.

Princess Olga carries nunchaku in her handbag: mysterious sticks polished by the warm hands of centuries, joined end to end like two destinies by a rawhide sinew — the ancient weapon of Tibetan wandering monks. She knows how to use them by the secret pattern of a half-erased tattoo of hieroglyphs, and, one must assume, perfectly. When we, the sad people of Upper Berezovka, supporting one another, climb into our beloved bus, I notice the addition of sullen men — one with a bound jaw, another with a nose shifted to the side, another with a frozen dinosaur of a bandaged hand hanging from the strap… — I know whose precious hands are behind it.

Princess Olga ignores the bus; she walks all the way to the city route. I think that’s where she finds pure joy, while we all, our biofields tangled up, flatten our chests and gasp from the reek of yesterday’s local pourings sold in the settlement shop.

Princess Olga gazes into the blue tea of the heavily brewed sky, lightly whitened by the cold milk of the day just being born from the refrigerator of night. She steps naked into the snow — she will be poured over with two buckets of scattered silver, moonlight! The bucket rises in a heavy load, and following the lever-like movement of the arms the dark little smooth stones of the body’s anatomical atlas flow… In an instant the shivering weight of the sky, all the wide snowfields, the dissolved sugar of smiling stars vibrates like an acrobat, and then — she ascends, vertically cast in a pillar of shattered folds of a crystal cloak, boiling around her body in a fog of diamonds and spray!

I see her up close (at that moment I’m walking a path between fences to the distribution panel to switch on the hated electricity) — she notices nothing from our world… Oh, Hosanna! Hallelujah! Goddess Kali! — a rocket in the fire of whirling stars and reptiles, just another nunchaku stick with the dark polish of centuries!.. The lookout at the prow of a Viking yawl, Easter Island’s watch, children’s drawings of Martians, the mermaid-magic of Polesie, chronopes with nadies, the poplar faith of the Old Believers… Everything around me clatters like buckets thrown down in ritual fashion while I run, stumbling in my mind and in the hems of my sheep-skin coat, toward the saving bluntness of the Government Ark.

That’s how it was the first time, and after that — I got used to the Internet’s strange ways: I hooked the latch on the door, wiped out the mismanagement of the small-caliber weapon, laying on a thick polish and shine of Swiss “Gillette” lubricant, magnetized the barrel, set the sights with people who know the murderous craft deep in its woods, and filed the tips of the bullets with a poacher’s cross for a hidden explosive effect. My eye chose the spherical black ring of the target correctly in the flicker of the ear hollows of the city wolves — forest dogs, who had raided the borderlands of my domain with bandit-like stealth; my little rifle tapped cautiously, slicing the devilish shadows that tear at the gray foam of bloody snows.

December and January crept by — all deserters and defectors; the wind, the drifter of snow, and the frost, the ice-keeper that encircles the Cosmos, warmed the gloomy stoves.

She would run up to me in the dark, in a little fur coat with rabbit paws on the monogram of the night’s shirt — she had no face! She needed medicine, lots of medicine, fever reducers and bandage material. I searched the cupboards — who knows, for what need in our pitch-dark kingdom — and gave her what I had. In their house there was visible, awkward movement, and the smell of anxiety drifted out faintly.

The next day I was in town, bought whatever pharmacy remedies I could, remembering the night’s delirium. In the evening I banged their gate, kicked away a stray dog that had rolled up there, and went into the entryway (a wet sigh of a horse nearby could be heard, the frozen clack of hooves stepping, some indestructible spirit of soldiers’ lodgings).

No one in the main room; a mighty spread steams with smoke from the yellowish scraped table: a pile of pies under the tenderness of an embroidered towel, an iron pot with cabbage soup, surely the coldest cabbage, with drops of dark red cranberries and green scouts of crisp cucumbers in a little wooden dugout boat… Why such a disaster?

I called uncertainly to the owners in the dusk of windows and corners, suspiciously shedding their light, stepped aside and went behind a Chinese screen with quietly smiling peacocks — there was a small room there, and there I saw him: he was as if asleep, split open in a mad, suffering sign, shot through and through, with a heavy rail of a bandaged arm laid beside him.

The other, blued-steel and supple hand was fiddling with a sealed Mauser case on the African fuzz of the blanket. AH, IT’S YOU, VLADIMIR OSKAROVICH?! — the winter killer of Eastern Siberia, my old acquaintance from the childhood illustrations by Vereisky to “And Quiet Flows the Don,” from Johanson’s painting “Interrogation of the Communists”…

How could I not remember the beastly cardiogram of these hands on the tip of the cavalry spear’s oscilloscope, which had underlined the thin little tree of my spine? Me, the cornered wolf of nineteen eighteen, in a tunic swollen with blood and death-fermented wine, idiotically bouncing in the middle of the shaggy fields of all civil wars?..

I recognized it all at once, recalling: the silver ornaments of a Cossack saddle with its worn seat, the loop of spurs on glove-crumpled boots, the banana-like bundle of grenades, the crossroads of cartridge railroads, the moonlit stripe of a saber with a twisted regimental strap, and, of course, that scoundrel’s uniform with crosses and chevrons — now tiredly stretched on plastic hangers…

And his head is clamped between the kneecaps of stereo headphones; the little snake of the cord runs and tangles in the glass threads of the beard toward the tape recorder’s bicycle reels. His face — a copper mask of Buddha — is pierced by blue electrical flashes of the eyes: he sees me, he mangles the rusty tin of graveyard words, he squeezes the impossible pear of the Mauser! The headphones split, sliding off the shaken head, and across all of Africa the blanket, across the larch-plank floor, the little copper wheels roll out: “…God Save the Tsar.”

I wrench myself out of the filthy ambush, I tear the blue web of dreams and doubts off myself — Princess Olga will dart far away, coming in with some bucket, all blue from the frost. But I struck the medicinal handful onto the yellowed tabletop with Cain’s seal, broke through every thicket of doors and, wrapping a suffocating scarf of darkness and blizzard around my neck, went, yes! — went into my mortal lot of electricity and alarms. And the wind, with its iron curry-comb, scratched out the tears of civil wars from me, the tears unwept because of that accursed ruin…

All right! I’ll be making dry fuel, slicing open tins of Finnish canned pancakes, prying at the fragrant frozen blocks of black caviar from the Government cellars with a bayonet knife! I’ll heat up the bathhouse — a golden little kernel — and call together all the traveling pilgrims, the women on the road, the women’s club leaders, the pioneer camp counselors, the party hosts and hostesses, the sorceresses… Let the night rise in blue bonfires of their skirts, ties, running sacks — burst open, my sorrow, to the clatter of their heels, sneakers, and little hoofs!

I’ll run off to dance at the Teachers’ Holiday House, hand over the Vintorez and the cap to the cloakroom, take the trophy accordion from a crippled veteran of the Afghan War — and to everyone’s amazement I’ll break into Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven”… they’ll really dance for me! I’ll scare the partisans off the Barguzin Highway, drive them into wild ravines; I’ll set up roadblocks against alien arbitrariness on the roads; I’ll shoot out the insulators on the power lines — free the sorrowing residents from their favorite program “Italian Language, Year 14 of Study”; I’ll carry out a public raid on buses — throw out all the saboteur fare-dodgers: don’t go wandering where you don’t belong!..

I’ll unwind the bracelets of the endless winter, sink the icy black rings into the earthen belly of Mari Ivanovna’s well, rip apart the twisted cord of days’ blue sorrow with the cross of black roads and the endlessness of the eternal Circle: goodbye and good riddance, Heating Season! I’ll settle accounts with you, Princess Winter! Do I care about your children: December and January, your old mother Autumn? I’ll aim the magnetized barrel into the window frame of the half-open second-floor dormer…

By the Adoration of the Magi in the Snowfall — here are your buckets of heavy ionized water, here are the pale sets of dawn… That’s how my iron little soldier of M is traced through the ravines of her legs and the rocky slopes of her knees, her thighs as wide as a spring herder’s song, the secret curls of the hidden little hemp wedge down to the sloping darkness of the belly, to the dip of the partisan airstrip between two symbolic Mount Fujiyamas, where a silvery little one-engine plane rises — kri-… ka…

Oh woman! You are my Upper Berezovka! From the tips of the fingers of Strelka to the armpits of the Kulakov dachas and the Salyut pioneer camp, I love you and, from close range like a telescope, I see all the light little feathers of hairs, the volcanic goosebumps of skin’s chill — let it all be eclipsed by the diamond scatter of rain! I have understood the symmetrically traveled path, here it is — the LINE, here it is — WINTER’S GOLDEN SECTION, THE WORLD SIGN OF IN-YANG: yes and no, even and odd, ice and flame, “M” and “F,” heavenly and earthly…

So the whole world froze in the balance of my finger, keeping the springy explosiveness of the trigger’s sprinter, and I thought: here is a moment equal to Eternity, a second of centuries, a breath of lived life — let the dogs bark, and let the buses leave off-schedule, and at the stops all the residents of sorrow, runaway Martians, otherworldly prisoners, brisk old lady navigators, and grim ski-tour sorcerers keep reaching for one another…

May tea with raspberry jam not go cold in September, may mushrooms and other pickles not sour in the Epiphany cold and clink, may the warm little houses and dances at the Holiday House and Culture House not go dark, may the trophy accordion and the lovely party hosts and hostesses endure. Let December give way to January, then February follows, and March in the end… — I’ll go! I’ll go sift the stale coal, split those impossible logs, because you know the reason — mismanagement, and I’ll heat the silly, useless stoves in the house. Otherwise a little hole will appear in the Universe, and into it everything singular, unhappy, angry, everything that is mine, will drain away, as if pulled in…

There will dash off the ominous stereo-controller of glass Siberia on the apocalyptic coffin with the two horses’ bridles: even and odd, shouting and squealing with a lash of twisted fates in the newly repaired hand; Princess Olga, silently waving ancient nunchaku, will stride to the final stop of the underground bus; old Autumn will sneak in, iodined and in a diver’s mask, on a silent video-bike for night riding, with the Druzhba chainsaw of software tucked under her arm; two little orphan children, December and January, will scurry by in snow-white Yamaha quilted jackets taken from electrocuted runaway soldiers, celebrating their eternal day of Roman Holiday.

And that was exactly how it was: he galloped past, all in the glow of world revolutions and scraps of trampled battalions, like a devil leaping out of Princess Olga’s snuffbox. I was dragging the owner’s bag with kefir through the snow of my biofield, and he was jumping around like a jet-black horse, clanging harnesses, hooves, lezginka steps, teeth, papakhas, crosses and sabers, blazing from all his Mausers into God’s bright world as if it were a penny.

— Hey, you! — I called after his black-winged rush. — Quit this charity house business, come by today — we’ll be heating the bathhouse, we need to carry water, it’s easier to split firewood together… — Yea-aah!.. — he boiled over, spinning on a black skillet and rearing the little horse up like an exclamation mark to affirm his words, then sent the billiard balls of his nimble gallop rolling down the alley of his White Guard business.

And sure enough, he came in the evening: half-drunk, cheerful — and angry. He wanted to hack up kitty Mitka, then crossed himself and thought better of it. He scattered little fur coats and military jerkins, grenades, papakhas everywhere, stacked up a heap of firewood, breaking two of my stubborn axes, and interspersed his military-and-sexual folklore with quotes from Vladimir Solovyov. We harnessed the little horse to the sled and quickly hauled in every container full of water from Mari Ivanna’s stern earthly well. The bathhouse hummed like the Wind Rose, steam wandered and stumbled through the relic groves of our heads.

I scraped him with a circular saw like a horse currycomb, captured long ago from the First Cavalry, washing away the golden sand of his body’s natural tan. I galloped over him with battalions of green bath brooms and every reserve regiment of scalding boiling water. But he too, calling on all the saints and apostles, was strangling me with the iron of Black Hundred hands. And only once — I had been waiting for this — did his heart beat unevenly, touched by a beastly memory of the hardened dark red of a slanting rupture, meteor-like furrowing across my back.

— So who did that to you… like that? — he asked heavily, remembering. — Well… that happened, — I answered, and answered nothing, steaming flatly like freshly laid asphalt.

We both fell gratefully silent about the shaggy fields of all the civil, and perhaps star, wars. We sat right at the edge of Russia’s bread-bearing table, with the little boarding-school ration that had fallen to us. The hangover of the clean night poured in as a cosmic revelation, and in the distance the forest patrolmen still occasionally shot, while someone’s paratroopers squealed thinly.

I made plenty of dry fuel and taught him to eat the mechanical pancakes from Finnish cans; he put down a quarter of moonshine and, pouring it all into 76 faceted shot glasses, knocked them back one after another — I skipped every other one. Olga settled beside us, sorrowful in a womanly kind of joyful way. Our sleeves of pink embroidered shirts and our unruly, uncut forelocks intertwined like Heroes of special troop maneuverability, and we sang ancient Cossack songs.

Princess Winter covered us, crumpled and worried, with an iron age, with the bear-skin wrap of simple accomplishments, and went on her way measuring with a slippery tape the distances to the warm and shaggy little human hearts.

In this stream I’ll be collecting previously published stories and poems by my talented father, the science-fiction writer Yury Nevsky

Yury Nevsky’s Stream