Eugene Ganin
Translated from orinal the Russian
by M.A.Ashot
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Vladimir Lazar - Director & Produser & Publisher
Offis: USA 1-414-665-7212 & 1-415-806-4402
E-mail: waltv 2000@yahoo.com
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PO BOX 16374
San Francisco,
CA 94116-0374
USA
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AN EYE FOR AN EYE
The Novel
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Chapter Three
THE FORTRESS
How are you able to look at the Neva?
How are you able to tread on her spans?
There’s a reason I’m known as a griever
Ever since having passed through your hands.
Sharp as blades are the wings of black angels
The Last Judgement approaches apace
And the sweet blooming berries of bonfires
In the snow, like red roses, shall blaze.
Anna Akhmatova
11.Valery
Leaning so as to rest his back against the massive stone walls of Peter-Paul Fortress, an enraptured Valery savored the elegiac panorama of the Winter Palace. The dark waters of the Neva River rounded the jutting point of Basil’s Island and moved on in their headlong course, a keen reminder of life’s swiftly coursing brevity. The May summertime of Leningrad in 1936 had yet to heat up under the rays of Russia’s northern sun, doling out warmth like a miser: the city’s centrally located strip of beach around the Fortress was still bereft of the multitudes that would flock to it later, to strip and sunbathe.
Valery Rogozhin loved coming here on his days off, to bask for a bit in the sun, and compose poetry. He had dreamt of becoming a poet, and instead he had become a fighter pilot. In the 19th century, it had been the poets who had scanned the heavens; in the 20th, the heavens were scanned by pilots.
His love of poetry had been quite literally instilled in him by his mother, a schoolteacher whose subject was Russian Literature. He had no memories of his father; that father had been lost on one of the battlefields of the first world war, missing in action. Mother never said anything about him, nothing at all; once, only, she had mentioned that he had been a military man, and that his ultimate fate was a complete mystery to her. Not long after, Mother had married for the second time, and Valery acquired a stepfather: an officer of the NKVD charged with conducting investigations into enemies of the state. And it was he who had enrolled his stepson in the aviation club: “ The land of the Soviets needs warriors, not whiners!”
From the very first time, having soared up into the clouds on a training plane, the young poet turned into a true flight enthusiast. He loved the skies; he wanted to fly on and on, endlessly. Composing rhymes fell by the wayside, as a conscious choice on his part. Enrolling in the Communist Youth League, or Komsomol, he embraced the infectious ideology of Lenin and Stalin wholeheartedly, along with everyone else. At the Komsomol meetings, cherry-cheeked ‘ proletarian’ orators would gleefully extol the verses of Demyan the Pauper, or Vladimir Mayakovsky, even as they proposed that “ the books of the bourgeois, Pushkin, should be drowned in the saccharine tears of the enemies of the people.” Along with everyone else, Comrade Valery Rogozin marched along the avenues brandishing red flags and the portraits of international Communist leaders, and demanded at interminable rallies for the “capitalist scum who were the mangy dogs of global imperialism to be crushed.” He adopted with the pure fervor of religious faith an unwavering belief in the victory of a worldwide proletarian revolution: “ Down with diplomatic babytalk! Down with decadent romanticism! Long live Communist youth! Long live the global Communist Revolution for peace, freedom, equality and brotherhood! Let us fan the flames of a worldwide conflagration, in the name of peace, truth, justice, and the happiness of workers and of peasants! Long live the Father of the nations, the great Leader of the oppressed peoples, Comrade Stalin!”
Valera believed in all these contagious slogans and was prepared at any moment to deliver up his own life, heroically, for the sacred ideas of Communism. Although, truthfully, in a tiny secret corner of his consciousness, a doubt stirred timidly:
“But why should we drown the beautiful poetry of Pushkin in the name of the beautiful ideas of worldwide happiness?”
And in fact the matter was settled instantaneously, thanks to a single absolutely brilliant pronouncement by the genius Leader:
“ Pushkin is the Poet of the People! Their champion!”
In a heartbeat, without further official fuss, it became possible again to buy and to own, even in the home, volumes of poetry by Russia’s greatest poet; to read them, to declaim them in public readings, even before large audiences. The same voices that had just been slinging all manner of filth at Pushkin now made up the solid ranks of Pushkin scholars, lifted his portrait high above their own heads, and set about committing his celebrated verse novel, Evgeny Onegin, to memory – in its entirety.
Valery’s heart was relieved. Now he could fuse the romance of literature with the romance of being a fighter pilot.
* * *
12
Lyuba
On a strip of sand between the fortress wall and the Neva, wearing only a swimsuit, Lubushka sat all alone on a small collapsible beach chair, holding a slender volume of poems by her favorite poetess, Anna Akhmatova, She had just turned 19. A student of the Faculty of Philology of Leningrad University, she wanted above all to excel academically, and to love. Being a young girl of strict moral principles, she would not allow herself to fall in love with a man except within the context of marriage; going out with random young men who happened to approach her on a city street was entirely out of the question. Her classmates from the faculty did not attract the young girl’s interest, given that they were virtually all near-sighted and in appearance physically underdeveloped. Having been brought up in a strict, intellectual family of petersburgians, conservatory professors, Lyuba sought solace from the flood of passionate longing natural for her age by taking solitary strolls amidst the abundance of ravishing venues afforded by the Northern Palmyra. Understandably, just as every healthy, beautiful young woman in her coming of age, she dreamt that “ someday, by chance, would come the accidental meeting with her one and only, adored, incomparable prince. He wouldn’t have to arrive mounted on a white steed. The main thing was for him to be intelligent, strong, brave, a loving husband – without harmful habits.”
Lyubov Vasilyevna Zaitseva – Lyubushka, for short – possessed the famous ‘second sight.’ Needless to say, she did not have a fifth eye [?] capable of filling in for an x-ray machine, but even so, she could feel the looks men gave her as she passed, even with the back of her head. Sunning herself on the beach in the very heart of Leningrad, she had spent more than an hour already observing a handsome, well-built young man she had glimpsed out of the corner of one eye. He had been standing all this time in his trunks by the very wall of Peter-Paul Fortress; she was trying with all her might, using her “woman’s fifth eye” to force him to look her way. But for some reason the fifth eye wasn’t working. There were few people out that day on the Neva beach. She, separated from the young man by some thirty metres, sat, got up, walked up and down the edge of the riverbank, waded into the water, making a pretense of contemplating going swimming, but all in vain. He seemed blind to her presence. Every so often, he would bend down to where his belongings were spread out, pick up a little notebook, and jot something down. At other times, his dreamy gaze would drift over to the other side of the Neva, wandering from the Rastrelli landmarks to the Hermitage, and from the steeply arched bridge immortalized in ‘The Queen of Spades’ back. No sooner had she glimpsed Valery, than the thoughts of the chaste young lady began to spin at the furious speed of a propeller on a fighter plane at take-off:
“ Just what do I have to do to get him to take even the slightest notice?”
The temperamental Lyubov Vasilyevna found herself becoming angry:
“ What an insensitive clod! Well, go on! Come on over here already!”
But he remained unperturbed and unaware. Moreover, he picked up his book and immersed himself in the contents, so that even his head was no longer to be seen.
“ Clod!”
When it comes to her most intimate feelings, any woman always keeps her own counsel. If a particular man won’t rise to the bait, the lady will rapidly change tactics.
Lyuba jumped up from her folding beach chair and flung herself headlong into the river. The water scalded her athlete’s body with its intense icy burn; she shrieked briefly and went under, head and all. Valery looked up. He thought the young girl was drowning. Instantly he rushed to her aid. Seconds later, he was by her side. Unceremoniously, even roughly, he flipped her onto her back and grabbing her firmly under the chin with both hands, towed her back to shore. The first interaction with his future wife had been managed to both parties’ satisfaction.
* * *
13
Onega
Mutual love at first sight brought about radical changes in the lives of Valery and Lyubasha. Their lifetimes were now forever divided into before and after the day at the beach by Peter-Paul Fortress. There was a modest wedding in the autumn, and then, in December of 1937, Valery was assigned to a new service post in the city of Petrozavodsk. Lyuba exercised her prerogatives as a married student to transfer into the external diploma program of the University, and left with her husband so that they could have a normal family life. In keeping with custom, nine months later their son, Oleg, was born. The newlyweds could not get enough of their son. Not all women, and not always right away, come around to the realization that their true happiness is to be found in motherhood, when everything else takes second place to her child. This new, all-consuming parental love for the infant at times destroys erotic love, but more often than not it delivers utterly new, powerful feelings of joy both to soul and to body, especially in the woman’s case. Lyubasha bloomed. The garrison life of the wife of a fighter pilot did not seem burdensome to her. Naturally enough, the Karelian capital of Petrozavodsk could not compare to Leningrad – Russia’s second capital city – and yet the small, modest city on the shores of Lake Onega was exceptionally beautiful in its expanses of sky and water, its primeval quiet, its fragrant forests, the splendours of the environs with their wonders of nature, and the light-hearted character and kindness of its populace.
For some reason, Valery and Lyubasha had envisioned this city as some kind of dank accumulation of dozens of industrial smokestacks belching black smoke into the pristine heavens, round the clock. In reality, Petrozavodsk turned out to be a tidy, cozy town, with everything they needed to work and live in comfort. The people of Karelia were strikingly gracious and courteous, in an unusually delicate, well-mannered way, that had been all but lost by denizens of the modern megalopolis.
They were particularly awed by the tiny island of Kizhi, that seemed almost out of place amongst the skerries of the lake. An exquisite thrill came over them both when, pressing closely against each other as they stood on the uppermost deck of an old paddle-wheel steamship, they suddenly beheld, illuminated by the reflections of the summer sun in the never-ending mirror of limpid water, like some startling revelation one would expect from a fairy tale, the twenty-two perfectly hewn wooden domes of the Church of the Transfiguration.
“ God, how I love it here. It’s a heavenly place! Even though, my darling husband, I would find heaven anywhere with you, even in a tent, in any corner of this earth!”
“ I feel good here, too,” Valery replied to his wife. “Look, look, over there! To the right, just follow the railing! Look at that gorgeousness: that’s Ivanov’s Island!”
If they could only have guessed that in just two years, on 27 September 1941, Lyubasha would meet her death on that beautiful island! The enemy was already closing in on Petrozavodsk. Valery was fighting battles in the skies over Old Ladoga, while Lyubasha and their four year old son, Oleg, together with other wives of the Russian fighter pilots of the Besovetsky Aviation Combat Regiment, were being evacuated on the last ship, in an attempt to get them to safety on the opposite side of the lake, as yet unoccupied by the foe. By some strange mythic coincidence, it happened to be the very same steamship that they had sailed on, a thousand years before the war, when they had first caught sight of that wondrous island.
The Messerschmidts had arrived.
The mothers put life vests on their children. The steamship was crammed full of refugees and the most seriously wounded troops. There weren’t enough life preservers and boats for all the passengers. Everyone prayed, even the Communists. But the airplanes were deaf to their prayers. Tracer fire pierced the captain’s bridge: the ship’s engines fell silent.
The second plane took careful aim and dropped its payload. The bomb hit hard: bodies rained down into the waters from the decks.
Lyubasha, wounded, used every last ounce of strength to push her son towards the shores of the island. It was a miracle that she managed it, somehow dragged Oleg onto the sandy beach and collapsed next to him, dying. For a long, long time, Oleg sat next to his dead mother, tugging at her flaxen hair from time to time:
“ Mummy! Mummy, stop sleeping! I’m scared!”
* * *
14
Suomi
Your fir-covered slopes like tresses
Frame the borderlands’ plain landscape.
Make us welcome, O lovely Suomi,
In the necklace of your limpid lakes!
Our tanks crush wide paths in the timberland,
While our planes in the clouds circle high,
And the low slanting rays of the autumn sun
Light our bayonets on fire.
(Red Army song)
* * *
O Finland, O Finland!
Ivan is back for more!
(Army of Finland song)