--------
Translated by Robert Daglish
Lyrical and humorous, deeply national but concerned with the human
condition at large, often about children but mainly for adults, Fazil'
Iskander's writing abounds, like his native Abkhazia, in colour and
contrasts.
It is merriment and toil that make the earth beautiful, Iskander writes
in one of his stories. These qualities are also typical of his characters,
most of them drawn from his fellow countrymen, ever a mixture of gallantry
and guile, humour and hard work.
--------
Let's just talk. Let's talk about things we don't have to talk about,
pleasant things. Let's talk about some of the amusing sides of human nature,
as embodied in people we know. There is nothing more enjoyable than
discussing certain odd habits of our acquaintances. Because, you see,
talking about them makes us aware of our own healthy normality. It implies
that we, too, could indulge in such idiosyncrasies if we liked, but we don't
like because we have no use for them. Or have we?
One of the rather amusing features of human nature is that each of us
tries to live up to an image imposed upon him by other people.
Now here is an example from my own experience.
When I was at school the whole class was one day given the task of
turning a patch of seaside wasteland into a place of cultured rest and
recreation. Strange though it may seem, we actually succeeded.
We planted out the patch with eucalyptus seedlings, using the cluster
method, which was an advanced method for those times. Admittedly, when there
were not many seedlings and too much wasteland left, we began to put only
one seedling in each hole, thus giving the new, progressive method and the
old method the chance to show their worth in free competition.
In a few years a beautiful grove of eucalyptus trees grew up on that
wasteland and it was quite impossible to tell where the clusters and where
the single seedlings had been. Then it was said that the single seedlings,
being in direct proximity to the clusters and envying them with a thoroughly
good sort of envy, had made an effort and caught up.
Be that as it may, when I come back to my hometown nowadays, I
sometimes take it easy in the shade of those now enormous trees and feel
like a sentimental patriarch. Eucalyptus grows very fast, so anyone who
wants to feel like a sentimental patriarch can plant a eucalyptus tree and
live to see its crown towering high above him, its leaves tinkling in the
breeze like the toys on a New Year tree.
But that's not the point. The point is that on that far-off day when we
were reclaiming the wasteland one of the boys drew attention to the way I
held the hand barrow we were using for carrying soil. The P. T. instructor
in charge of us also noticed the way I held the stretcher. Everyone noticed
the way I held the stretcher. Some pretext for amusement had to be found and
found it was. It turned out that I was holding the stretcher like an
Inveterate Idler.
This was the first crystal to form and it started a vigourous process
of crystallisation which I did all I could to assist, so as to become
finally crystallised in the preordained direction.
Now everything contributed to the building of my image. If I sat
through a mathematics test not troubling anyone and calmly waiting for my
neighbour to solve the problem everyone attributed this not to my stupidity
but to sheer idleness. Naturally I made no attempt to disillusion them. When
for Russian composition I would write something straight out of my head
without looking anything up in textbooks and cribs, this was taken as even
more convincing proof of my incorrigible idleness.
In order to preserve my image I deliberately neglected my duties as
monitor. Everyone soon became so used to this that when any other member of
the form forgot to perform his monitorial duties, the teacher, with the
whole form voicing its approval in the background, would make me wipe the
blackboard or carry the physics apparatus into the room.
Further development of my image compelled me to give up homework. But
to maintain the suspense of the situation I had to show reasonable results
in my schoolwork. So every day, as soon as instruction in the humanitarian
subjects began, I would lean forward on my desk and pretend to be dozing. If
the teacher protested, I would say I was ill but did not want to miss the
lesson, so as not to get left behind. In this reclining attitude I would
listen attentively to what the teacher was saying without being diverted by
any of the usual pranks, and try to remember everything he told us. After a
lesson on any new material, if there was still some time left, I would
volunteer to answer questions in advance for the next lesson.
The teachers liked this because it flattered their pedagogical vanity.
It meant that they could explain their subject so well and so clearly that
the pupils were able to take it all in without even referring to the
textbooks.
The teacher would put down a good mark for me in the register, the bell
would ring and everyone would be satisfied. And nobody but I ever realised
that the information I had just memorised was about to romp out of my head
just as the bar romps out of the hands of the weight lifter the moment he
hears the umpire's approving "Up!"
To be perfectly accurate, I had better add that sometimes, when
reclining on my desk pretending to doze, I would actually fall into a doze,
though I could still hear the voice of the teacher. Much later on I
discovered that some people use the same, or almost the same, method for
learning languages. I believe it would not appear too immodest if I were to
say that I am the inventor of this method. I make no mention of the
occasions when I actually fell asleep because they were rare.
After a while rumours concerning this Inveterate Idler reached the ears
of our headmaster and for some reason he decided that it was I who had taken
the telescope that had disappeared six months ago from the geography room. I
don't know why he drew this conclusion. Possibly he reasoned that the very
idea of even a visual reduction of distance would appeal most of all to a
victim of sloth. I cannot think of any other explanation. Luckily, the
telescope was recovered soon afterwards, but from then on people kept an eye
on me, as if I might get up to some trick at any moment.
It soon turned out, however, that I had no such intentions, and that,
on the contrary, I was a very obedient and conscientious slacker. What was
more, slacker though I was, I seemed to be getting quite decent results.
Then they decided to apply to me a method of concentrated education
that was fashionable in those years. The essence of this method was that all
the teachers in the school would suddenly concentrate on one backward pupil
and, taking advantage of his confusion, turn him into a shining example of
scholastic attainment.
It was assumed that other backward pupils, envying him with a
thoroughly Good Envy, would make an effort to rise to his level. Just like
the singly planted eucalyptus seedlings.
The effect of the method depended on the suddenness of the mass attack.
Otherwise the pupil might succeed in slipping out of range or actually
discredit the method itself.
As a rule the experiment achieved its purpose. Before the hurly-burly
caused by the mass attack could disperse, the reformed pupil would take his
place with the best in the class, impudently wearing the smile of a
despoiled virgin.
When this happened, the teachers, envying one another with perhaps not
quite such a Good Envy, would zealously follow his progress in their
markbook, and, of course, each teacher would try to ensure that the
victorious upward curve of scholastic attainment was not broken within the
limits of his subject.
Well, either they piled into me too enthusiastically, or else they
forgot what my own fairly respectable level had been before they started but
when they began to analyse the results of their experiment it turned out
that they had trained me up to the level of a potential medal-winner.
"You could pull off a silver," my class-mistress announced rather
dazedly.
The potential medal-winners were a small ambitious caste of
untouchables. Even the teachers were somewhat afraid of them. It would be
their duty to defend the honour of the school, and to damage the reputation
of a potential medal-winner was equivalent to threatening the honour of the
school. Every potential medal-winner had at some time by his own efforts
achieved distinction in one of the basic subjects and had then been coached
to the necessary degree of perfection in all the rest.
So, with my school diploma sewn into my jacket pocket together with my
money I got into a train and set off for Moscow. At that time the train
journey from Abkhazia to Moscow took three days. I had plenty of time to
think things over, and of all the possible variants for my future education
I chose the philosophical faculty of the university. My choice may have been
decided by the following circumstance.
About two years before this I had exchanged some books with a friend of
mine. I had given him Conan Doyle's The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and
he had given me an odd volume of Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics. I had
already been told that Hegel was simultaneously both a philosopher and a
genius and that, in those far-off years, was a strong enough recommendation
for me.
Since I had not yet heard that Hegel was a difficult author to read, I
understood nearly everything I read. If I came across a paragraph with long,
incomprehensible words, I simply skipped it because the meaning was clear
enough without it. Later on, when studying at the institute, I learned that
besides their rational kernel the works of Hegel contained quite a lot of
idealistic husk. I guessed that just those paragraphs I had skipped were the
husk. My way of reading him had been to open the book at some verse
quotation from Schiller or Goethe, and then read round it, trying to keep as
near to the quotation as possible, like a camel on the edge of an oasis.
Some of Hegel's thoughts surprised me by their high probability of truth.
For instance, he called the fable a servile genre, which sounded true
enough, and I made a point of remembering this so as to avoid that genre in
the future.
Eventually, for some unknown reason I gave up reading that volume.
Perhaps I had used up all the quotations or perhaps it was something else. I
decided that I had far too much time ahead of me and that one day I would
read all the volumes in their proper order. But I still haven't started on
them.
It may well be that this random reading of mine and also a certain lack
of clarity in the actions of mankind on the road to a bright future were
responsible for my choice of the philosophical faculty.
In Moscow, after certain adventures that I shall not relate because I
need them as plots for my stories, I entered not the university but the
Library Institute. When I had been studying there for three years, it dawned
on me that it would be more interesting and more profitable to write one's
own books than deal with other people's, and so I moved to the Literary
Institute, where they teach you how to write.
Since then I have been writing, although, as I now realise, my true
vocation is inventing. In recent years I have felt that people are beginning
to impose on me the role of humourist and involuntarily somehow I am trying
to live up to this imposed image.
No sooner do I make a start on something serious than I see before me
the disappointed face of a reader waiting for me to have done with the
official part, so to speak, and get on with something funny. This means that
I have to change horses in midstream and pretend that I only started by
talking seriously to make it seem all the funnier later on.
Every day, except for the days when I do something else, I shut myself
up in my room, put a sheet of paper into my voracious little "Kolibri" and
write, or pretend to be writing.
Usually my typewriter gives a few desultory taps and then lapses into a
long silence. My family try to look as if they are creating conditions for
my work and I try to look as if I am working. As a matter of fact, while
sitting over my typewriter I am actually inventing something and at the same
time listening for the telephone in the next room so that I can be the first
to run and answer it.
The reason for this is that my daughter is also listening for the
telephone to ring and, if she gets there first, she will cut off the caller
with a blow of her little fist. She thinks this is a kind of game, and she
is not altogether wrong.
Of all my numerous inventions I will mention here only two. An
instrument for stimulating spiritual activity (a kind of electromassage for
the soul), and also the method of "Mother-in-Law Isolation by Shock", based
entirely on Pavlov's doctrine of conditioned and unconditioned reflexes.
The instrument for stimulating spiritual activity outwardly resembles
the conventional electric shaver. The difficulty of using it lies in
determining the exact location of a given person's soul. Apparently the
whereabouts of a man's soul in the organism depends on his character and
inclinations. It may be located in the stomach, in the gall bladder, in the
blind gut and, of course, in the heel. This last fact was known to the
ancient Greeks. Hence the expression "heel of Achilles". The heel being the
part of the body furthest removed from the brain makes communication very
difficult between these two vital internal organs of the human body, that
is, between the soul and the brain, and this in the course of time leads to
an intellectual disease known as Chronic Mental Flatfootedness.
Regrettably, my instrument has not been widely adopted because the
voltages of the systems in general use are not suitable for it.
The method of "Mother-in Law Isolation by Shock" has, on the contrary,
become perhaps a little too widespread thanks to its exceptional simplicity
and practical effectiveness.
To apply this method you must, of course, have a mother-in-law and also
a child. If you have both, there can be no doubt that the upbringing and
particularly the feeding of the child will be in the hands of your
mother-in-law. And since she will put all the overflowing energy of her love
into the process, your child will quickly develop a firm dislike of food.
So, one morning when your mother-in-law seats herself formidably beside
your child and starts plying him (or her) with rice pudding or something of
the kind, you quietly sit down on the other side of the table and watch.
From time to time, in an apparent fit of absent-mindedness you imitate the
actions of your child, opening your mouth when he does and swallowing in
such a way as to emphasise the futility of the whole operation.
Your child will soon begin to notice this. Though unable to grasp their
full meaning, he will feel that your actions are directed against the common
tyrant. He (or she) will look now at you, now at the tyrant. And if your
mother-in-law keeps a stiff upper lip and pretends not to notice anything,
he will call her attention to your behaviour in no uncertain manner.
Your mother-in-law then becomes nervous and starts giving you looks in
which a Freudian hatred is as yet disguised under a mask of pedagogical
reproach. To this you respond with a sad glance and an expression of
complete submission, and also a shrug of the shoulders as if to indicate
that you are not asking for anything, you are just looking, that's all. The
atmosphere becomes tense.
Eventually, after the usual mythological threats or open blackmail,
when the most hated spoonful of all is being thrust down the child's throat,
you will say in a very quiet, uncertain voice:
"If she (or he) doesn't want it, can I finish it?"
Petrified with indignation, your mother-in-law glares at you with the
expression of Tsar Peter looking at his traitor son in the famous painting
by N. N. Ghe. But there is still time for her to stage a come-back, and you
must be ready to prevent this.
"No, only if she doesn't want it," you say, thus explaining that there
is no need for wrath. "She can eat it if she wants it."
At this point your mother-in-law faints. You pick her up quickly, and
carefully--I stress the carefully because some people are rather
rough--carry her to bed. Now you may calmly go about your own affairs until
dinner time.
I must admit that lately I have begun to repent of discovering and
popularising this method. Starkly before me rises the problem of moral
responsibility for letting loose an immature idea among the masses. The
indiscriminate repudiation of mothers-in-law can be attributed only to a
non-historical approach to the whole problem. For do not mothers in-law in
the present period of history play a most progressive role in family life?
As a matter of fact, our mother-in-law is our real wife. It is she who
cooks our meals, she who looks after the house, she who brings up our
children and simultaneously teaches us how to live our lives. And as if this
were not enough, she gives us her own daughter to provide us with all the
honey-sweet pleasures of love. Who is more noble or more self-sacrificing
than she? She is surely our true wife or, at least, the senior wife in our
small but close-knit harem.
Of my other minor discoveries I feel I can mention one. It concerns
humour. I have a number of valuable observations on this subject. I believe
that to possess a good sense of humour one must reach a state of extreme
pessimism, look down into those awful depths, convince oneself that there is
nothing there either, and make one's way quietly back again. Real humour is
the trail we leave on the way back from the abyss.
--------
It was a summer evening and my uncle had guests. When they ran out of
wine, I was sent to the nearest shop for some more, which, as I now realise,
was not altogether the best thing for my upbringing. The errand, it is true,
had first been offered to my brother but he had stubbornly refused knowing
that no one in the next few hours would be likely to punish him for
refusing, and that before tomorrow came he would surely get up to some trick
which he would have to answer for anyway.
So off I went, running barefoot down the warm, unpaved street, bottle
in one hand, money in the other. I clearly remember the quite unusual
feeling of elation that came over me. It could not have been inspired by
anticipation of my forthcoming purchase because in those days I showed no
particular interest in such matters. Even now my interest is moderate
enough.
After all, what is the beauty of wine? Only its power to take the edge
out of our personal worries when we drink with friends, and fortify what we
already have in common. And even if the only thing we have in common is some
worry or trouble, then wine, like art, transforming grief, soothes us and
gives us the strength to go on living and hoping. We experience a renewed
joy in discovering one another, we feel we are all human beings and
together.
To drink with any other aim in view is simply illiterate. Solitary
boozing I would compare with smuggling or some kind of perversion. He who
drinks alone clinks glasses with the devil.
Well, as I was saying, on my way to the shop I was seized by a strange
feeling of excitement. All the time, as I ran, I kept my eyes on the ground,
and now and then I seemed to see a wad of banknotes lying there. It would
pop up in front of me and I would actually stop to make sure whether it was
there or not. I realised I was imagining things but the vision was so real
that I could not help stopping. Having made sure there was no money on the
ground, I only became even more elatedly convinced that I was just about to
find some, and on I flew.
I bounded up the wooden steps of the shop, which stood on a kind of
platform, and thrust the money and the bottle into the shopkeeper's hands.
While he was fetching the wine, I took one last look down, and there I
actually did see a wad of paper money wrapped in a pre-war thirty-ruble
note.
I picked it up, grabbed the bottle and dashed off home, half-dead with
fear and joy.
"I've found some money!" I shouted, running into the room. Our guests
jumped nervously, some of them even resentfully, to their feet. A hubbub
arose. There turned out to be more than a hundred rubles in the packet.
"I'll go as well!" my brother cried, fired belatedly by my success.
"Get going then!" Uncle Yura, a lorry-driver, shouted. "I was the one
who suggested a drink. I'm always lucky over picking things up."
"Particularly your elbow," our imperturbable Auntie Sonya put in slyly.
"Back in the old days, in Labinsk..." Uncle Pasha began. He was always
telling us about his ulcer or about the wonderful life they used to lead in
the Kuban country in the old days. Either he would start off about life on
the Kuban and finish with his ulcer, or the other way round. But Uncle Yura
shouted him down.
"It was my suggestion! I ought to get a cut!" he clamoured. Once he
started there was no stopping him.
"If it was, I didn't hear it," Uncle Pasha retorted gruffly.
"You said yourself a White Cossack slashed your ear with his sabre!"
"That was my left ear and you're sitting on my right," said Uncle
Pasha, delighted to have outwitted Uncle Yura, and with a well-practised
movement of his huge, workman's hand folded his left ear forward. Just above
it there was a cleft large enough to hold a walnut. Everyone respectfully
examined the scar left by the Cossack sabre.
"Yes, it seems only yesterday. We was stationed at Tikhoretsky..."
Uncle Pasha resumed, trying to profit by the general attention, but Uncle
Yura again interrupted him.
"If you don't believe me, let the boy say it himself." Whereupon
everyone looked at me.
In those days I was fond of Uncle Yura, and of everyone else at the
table. I wanted them all to enjoy my success, to feel they had all had a
part in it without any advantage for anyone.
"It was everybody's suggestion," I proclaimed spiritedly.
"I'm not saying it wasn't everybody's suggestion, but who suggested it
first?" Uncle Yura bawled, but his voice was drowned in a joyful burst of
clapping, by which everyone sought to show that Uncle Yura was much too fond
of stealing the limelight.
"Oh, Allah," said Uncle Alikhan, who was the mildest and most peaceable
of men because his job was selling honey-coated almonds, "the boy has found
money and they make all this noise. Wouldn't it be better to drink his
health?"
This caused an even greater hubbub because all the menfolk got up and
wanted to drink my health at once.
"I always knew he'd make a man...."
"May this little glass...."
"Our young people have an open road before them...."
"Here's wishing him a happy childhood...."
"And what a road it is! A first-class highway!"
"For this life," Uncle Fima was the last to proclaim, "we fought like
lions, and the lion's share of us was left lying on the battlefield."
"He'll be a learned man, like you," my aunt interposed, to calm him
down.
"Even more learned," Uncle Fima cried and, having elevated me to this
unprecedented height, he drained his glass. Uncle Fima was the most educated
man in our street and therefore always the first to feel the effect of
drink.
I was jubilant. I wanted to show how fond I was of everyone I wanted to
give them my word of honour as a Young Pioneer that I would find for them,
one and all, everything they had ever lost in life. I may not have thought
in exactly those words, but that was the gist of it. However, I had no time
to voice my thoughts, because mother came in and, deliberately ignoring the
general merriment, plucked me out of the room like a radish out of a
vegetable bed.
She didn't like my attending these festive gatherings at the best of
times, added to which she was offended that I should have run past my own
home with the money I had found.
"You'll be like your father, always doing your best for other people,"
she said as we went down the steps.
"I'll do my best for everyone," I replied.
"It doesn't work out like that," she said sadly, taken up with some
thought of her own.
At that moment we met my brother returning from his search. His face
showed that you can't draw the winning ticket twice over.
"Did you let them see all the money?" he asked as he went by.
"Yes," I replied proudly.
"More fool you," he snapped, and ran away.
None of these minor setbacks, however, could damp the new flame that
burned within me. Already I had decided that nothing would ever go wrong or
get lost in our house any more. If I could find so much money without even
trying, what should I find when I was really on the look-out? The world was
full of treasures, above and below ground; all you had to do was keep your
eyes open and not be too lazy to pick them up.
The next morning, with the money I had found my family bought me a fine
sailor's jacket with an anchor on the sleeve, which I was to wear for many
years to come, and before the day was out the news of my find had spread
round our yard and far beyond its borders. People dropped in to congratulate
us and learn the details of this joyful event. The women eyed me with a
housewife's curiosity, and their glances showed that they would not have
minded adopting me as their own son or, at least, borrowing me for a while.
I told the story of my discovery dozens of times, not forgetting to
mention the sense of anticipation that had preceded it.
"I felt it was going to happen," I would say. "I kept looking at the
ground and saw money lying there."
"Do you feel that now?"
"No, not now," I confessed honestly.
It really was a minor miracle. Now my theory is that the money had been
dropped by some profiteering driver, one of the kind who often stopped at
that shop for a quick drink. When he got on the road again, he must have
realised his loss, and his anxious signals had been correctly decoded by my
excited brain.
That very same day a woman came round from next door and congratulated
my mother, then said she had lost one of her hens.
"Well, what do you expect me to do?" my mother asked severely.
"Ask your son to look for it," said the woman.
"Oh, go along, for goodness sake," mother replied. "The boy found some
money for once and now we shall never have any peace."
They were talking in the corridor and I could hear them through the
door. Overcome by impatience, I opened it.
"I'll find your hen," I said, peeping out cheerfully from behind
mother's back. A day or two before this my ball had rolled into our
neighbour's cellar. When I went to fetch it I had noticed a hen there and,
since no one in our yard had complained of losing a hen, I now realised that
this must be hers. "I feel it's in the cellar next door," I said after a
moment's thought.
"There's no hen down there," came the unexpected retort from the owner
of the cellar. She had been listening to our conversation while hanging out
her washing in the yard.
"It must be," I said.
"No need to go rummaging in there, knocking down the firewood. You'll
only start a fire or something," she blustered.
I took a box of matches and dashed over to the cellar. The door was
locked but there was a hole in the wall on the other side, through which I
crawled.
It was dark inside except for a faint glimmer of light from the hole,
and I had to bend down all the time.
"What's he doing in there?" came a voice from outside.
"Looking for treasure," Sonka, my scatter-brained girlfriend of those
days, replied. "He's found a million."
Striking matches carefully and peering round, I reached the spot where
I had seen the hen before, and there she was again. She had half risen and
was craning her neck, blinking dazedly in my direction. I realised she must
be sitting on some eggs. Townbred fowls usually find a hidden nook to lay
their eggs. It was not difficult to catch her in the darkness. I groped in
the nest she had made for herself with a few wisps of hay, and put the warm
eggs into my pockets. Then I made my way back, not lighting any more matches
because I was now heading for the daylight.
At the sight of the hen, its mistress started clucking with joy, just
like her bird.
"That's not all," I said as I handed it over.
"What else is there?" she asked.
"Here you are," I replied, and started taking the eggs out of my
pockets. For some reason the hen got annoyed at the sight of the eggs,
though I had made no secret of taking them from the cellar. Perhaps she
hadn't noticed what I was doing in the dark. Her mistress put the eggs in
her apron and, tucking the hen under her arm, walked out of the yard.
"Come and see us when the figs are ripe," she shouted from the gate.
From then on I was always on the look-out and often made some quite
unexpected discoveries, with the result that I became known as a kind of
domestic bloodhound. I remember a rather eccentric relative of ours who had
lost his goat and wanted to take me off to his village, so that I could make
a thorough search for it. I was sure of finding the goat, but mother
wouldn't let me go because she was afraid I might get lost in the woods
myself.
I found many other things because I was always searching and because
everyone believed in my powers of detection. At home I would find chips of
wood baked in with the bread, needles left sticking in cushions by our
absent-minded womenfolk, old tax receipts and bonds of the new state loan.
One of our neighbours often lost her spectacles and would call me in to
look for them. I soon found them, if she had not had time to sweep them out
of the room with the litter. But even then I would retrieve them from the
rubbish bin because they were the one thing the cats prowling round it never
touched. But soon she began to lose her spectacles too often and in the end
I advised her to buy a spare pair so that, having lost one pair, she could
look for it with the other. She followed my advice and for a time all went
well, but then she started losing the spare pair, too, so I had twice as
much work to do and was compelled to keep the spare pair hidden in
readiness.
I enjoyed presenting the people around me with things they had lost. I
worked out my own system of search, based on the principle of first seeking
the lost object in the place where it had been, and then in places where it
had not been and never could have been. Much later in life I learned that
this is called the dialectical unity of opposites.
If the people around me stopped losing things I sometimes had to
contrive my discoveries artificially.
In the evenings I would patrol the yard like a warden and hide things
that had been left lying about. Often it was some washing hanging forgotten
on the line. I would toss it up into the branches of a tree and the next
day, when appealed to for help, after a certain amount of thinking and
asking questions about what had been hanging where, as though I were solving
an equation based on the speed and direction of the wind, I would point out
the lost linen to the astonished housewives and recover it from the tree
myself. Of course, I was not so silly as to repeat this trick too often.
Besides, there were far more real losses requiring my attention.
In all this time only one of my finds failed to please its owner. It
happened like this.
There was a girl living in our yard who had recently come of age. Her
name was Lyuba. Nearly all day long she would sit at the window and smile
into the street, arranging her hair this way and that with a little gilded
hair-comb, which I at the time mistakenly took for a gold one. At her elbow
stood a gramophone with its horn turned towards the street, almost always
playing one and the same tune:
Lyuba, Lyuba, Lyuba, my love....
The gramophone was like the looking-glass in Pushkin's fairy-tale; it
talked all the time of its mistress. I was sure of this anyway, and so,
judging by Lyuba's smiling face, was she.
One day that summer, in the rather overgrown little garden by our house
I found Lyuba's comb lying in the grass. I was sure it was her comb because
I had never seen another like it. The same evening I paced about the yard,
waiting for sounds of panic and for someone to come out and ask me to
conduct a search. But Lyuba was not to be seen and there was no sign of
alarm. The next morning I was even more surprised to find no messenger at my
bedside. I could only conclude that someone else must have lost the golden
comb, but I had to make sure that Lyuba's was still in its place. As luck
would have it, she stayed away from the window all day and appeared only in
the evening. And now the gramophone was playing quite a different tune.
I didn't know what song it was but I understood that the gramophone was
no longer talking about her. It was a sad song and, when Lyuba turned her
back to the window, I saw that there was no comb in her hair and realised
that she and the gramophone together were mourning its loss.
Her mother and father were standing at another window leaning
comfortably on the sill.
"Lyuba," I asked, when the song was over, "you haven't lost something,
have you?"
"No," she said with a start of fright, and touched her hair in the very
place where the comb had been before. And for some reason, she blushed so
violently that I could see she knew what I was talking about. The only thing
I didn't know was why she was concealing her loss.
"Didn't you lose this?" I said, and with the air of a conjurer who had
grown rather tired of being gaped at by everyone I produced the golden comb
from my pocket.
"Nasty little spy," she shouted quite unexpectedly and, snatching the
comb away from me, ran into the room. This was a quite meaningless and
foolish insult.
"Silly fool!" I shouted through the window, trying to pursue her with
my voice. "You have to read books to know what a spy is."
I turned to go away but her father called me over. Now he was at the
window alone, Lyuba's mother having run after her daughter into the room.
"What's this all about?" he asked, leaning out of the window.
"She lost her comb herself in the garden, and now she's cross about
it," I said, and took myself off, still not realising what it was all about.
That evening Lyuba got into hot water.
Later on an air force man appeared in their house, and a new record
called "Dear Hometown" began to play.
A week later the air force man left and took Lyuba with him and now her
mother would sit sadly at the window with the gramophone whimpering like a
big faithful dog for its mistress, "Lyuba, Lyuba, my love...."
I continued my quest, venturing further and further into unexplored
territory.
It was particularly rewarding to search the beach after a storm. At
various times I found there a sailor's belt with a buckle, a buckle without
a belt, live cartridges dating from the time of the civil war, sea shells of
all shapes and sizes, and even a dead dolphin. One day I discovered a bottle
tossed up by a storm, but for some reason there was no message in it and I
took it back to the shop.
Quite near town, on the bank of the River Kelasuri I found a whole
creek of gold-bearing sand and spent all day standing knee-deep in the cold
paleblue water, panning for gold. I would scoop up a double handful of sand
and water, then tilt my cupped hands and watch the water run away. Little
golden sparks flashed in my palms, the water tickled my toes, big blobs of
sunlight quivered on the crystal clear bottom of the creek, and I had never
been happier in my whole life.
Later I was told that this was not gold but mica, but the feel of that
cold mountain water, the hot sun, the clear bottom of the creek and the
quiet happiness of the prospector is with me still. One day I made yet
another discovery that I want to describe in more detail.
We used to play a game of seeing who could dive deepest. We would start
at a depth of about two meters and go deeper and deeper until our breath was
spent.
On the day I am speaking of another boy and I were competing in this
way on the Dogs' Beach. The beach still has this name, either because it is
strictly forbidden to let a dog bathe there, or because that is exactly what
people do there with their dogs. Well, anyway, I made my last dive, reached
the bottom, tried to scoop a handful of sand and nearly bumped my nose on a
big square slab, on which I glimpsed what looked like a picture of two
people.
"Ancient stone with a picture on it!" I shouted wildly as I reached the
surface.
"You're kidding," the other boy said, swimming over to me and looking
into my eyes.
"Word of honour!" I insisted. "It's a huge slab with prehistoric
figures on it."
We began diving in turns and nearly every time we saw in the dim
submarine light that white slab with its two blurred figures. Then we dived
together and tried to move it, but it wouldn't budge an inch.
Eventually the cold drove us out of the water, but not before I had
taken careful note of the place where we had been diving. It was exactly
halfway between a buoy and an old pile sticking up out of the sea.
School began a few days later and I told our form-master about my
discovery. He used to take us for geography and history. He was a powerfully
built man with withered legs. A Hercules on crutches. His whole presence
breathed mental vigour and spiritual integrity. In anger he was terrible. We
loved him not only because he had such an interesting way of telling us
about everything, but also because he treated us seriously, without that
casual air of condescension in which youth always detects indifference.
"It must be an ancient Greek stella," he said, after listening
attentively to my story. "That's a splendid discovery."
It was decided that we should go down to the beach after school and, if
possible, lift the stone out of the water. "A stella," I kept repeating to
myself with delight, and the rest of the day's lessons passed in joyful
anticipation of the expedition.
So off we went down to the sea. Our P.T. instructor was sent with us as
labour power. He hadn't wanted to go at first but the headmaster had managed
to talk him into it. There was no one in the school that the P.T. instructor
was afraid of because, as he often told us himself, he could take a job as a
boxing coach any day. We believed that he could knock out the whole
pedagogical council at one blow. Perhaps this was why his face always wore a
somewhat contemptuous expression, which seemed to be aimed at everything
that was done at school, as though he lived in expectation of the day when
his one fatal blow would have to be delivered.
If anyone disobeyed him during a P.T. lesson, he could administer a
mighty finger flick on the forehead, equal in impact to a jump from the
sports ground wall on to the well-trodden school yard. This we all knew from
experience.
We undressed and charged pell-mell into the sea. Only our form-master
was left on the beach. He stood there leaning on his crutches in his
immaculate white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and waited.
There had been a storm the day before and I was afraid the water would
be hazy but it was just as clear and still as before.
Reaching the spot first, I dived to the bottom and saw nothing. This
didn't worry me much because I might not have got my bearings quite right. I
plunged again, and again saw nothing. All round me the whole form was
snorting, squealing and splashing. Most of them were simply playing about,
but some must have been diving to the bottom because they brought up
handfuls of sand and threw them at each other. No one reported sighting any
stone. I swam over to the buoy to see whether it had come adrift, but it was
still firmly anchored in its place.
Soon the P.T. instructor appeared on the scene. He had been slightly
delayed by the need to put on bathing trunks.
"Well, where's the statue?" he asked, puffing as if the water was too
hot for him.
"It should be here," I said, pointing.
He took a deep breath and, executing a powerful somersault, shot into
the depths like a torpedo. He could certainly swim and dive, you had to give
him that. He stayed under for a long time and at last came up, as if
propelled by an underwater explosion.
"You've made the bottom all muddy," he said, snorting loudly and
shaking his head. "Now then, you young skeletons, off you go from here!" he
bawled and, striking the water with the flat of his hand, sent a great jet
of water at the other boys.
"You're not making this up, are you?" he asked me severely, still
puffing and blowing as if the water was too hot for him.
"Do you think I'm crazy?" I said.
"How should I know?" he replied, surveying the surface of the water as
though seeking a suitable hole to dive through. At last he found one and,
having taken a deep breath, plunged again.
This time he reappeared with a chunk of rusty iron from the pile.
"Is this it?" he asked, eyes bulging from the strain.
"Do you think I'm crazy?" I said. "I saw a stone slab with people on
it."
"How should I know?" he repeated and, tossing away the chunk of iron,
made yet another plunge.
Left to myself, I began to think it was time to make for the beach, but
anticipation of the shame I should endure in front of my form-master was
stronger than fear. After all, I had seen it here. It couldn't have floated
away!
This time the P.T. instructor came to the surface, spluttering with
fright.
"What's happened?" I asked, frightened myself, thinking he had been
stung by a sea-horse or something.
"What happened! I forgot to take a deep breath--that's what," he
snorted, mimicking me wrathfully.
"So you forgot and I'm to blame," I said, offended by his tone.
The P.T. instructor was about to retort but before he could do so a
girl's voice said, "What are you looking for?"
I glanced round. A strange girl was swimming cautiously towards us.
"Yesterday," the P.T. instructor began crossly, but he soon melted when
he turned his head. "Well, an ancient Greek statue actually... Perhaps you'd
like to dive with us?"
"I don't know how to dive," she said with a silly smile, as though
inviting him to teach her. Her hair was tied up in a red scarf. The P.T.
instructor gazed at this scarf in silent admiration, as if trying to puzzle
out where she had got it.
"And where are you from yourself?" he asked irrelevantly, having
apparently established where the headscarf had come from.
"From Moscow. Why?" the girl replied, and glanced towards the shore,
striving to make up her mind whether it was dangerous to talk to strange men
at such a depth.
"You're in luck," the P.T. instructor said. "I'll teach you how to
dive."
This time she smiled more boldly. "No, I'd rather watch you."
"Well, if I don't come up again you can consider yourself responsible,"
he said, intercepting her smile with a smile of his own that he enlarged to
positively brazen dimensions.
He did a particularly impressive somersault and plummeted into the
depths. I realised that now he had started gallivanting he wouldn't have any
more time for my stone.
"Did you really see a statue?" the girl asked and, lifting her hand out
of the water, tucked a straying lock of hair under the scarf with her little
finger, which in her foolishness she took to be less wet than the others.
"Not a statue but a stella," I corrected her, watching her shameless
attempts to pretty herself up for the P.T. instructor.
"What is that?" she asked, calmly continuing her efforts.
I decided to take action before the P.T. instructor came up again.
"Don't interfere," I said. "Isn't the sea big enough for you? Go and