(A chapter of a novel)

There used to be a shooting range in the district center of Barysh. It was located at the far end of the station square, where the station platform began and a street leading into town branched off. It was in a narrow, strategically important place, from the point of view of any capitalist-minded person. 

My cousins and I dreamed of growing up and going there to shoot. But when we got old enough to hold a rifle, the nineties broke out. Opportunities for adult shooting enthusiasts expanded considerably, and the shooting range went bankrupt. 

It was later reincarnated into a commercial kiosk. It turned out to be a very successful enterprise, holding a key position in the city in terms of customer traffic. 

It was also the only place where residents could buy things brought from China by their two enterprising countrymen. My father and I spent eight days on the train to visit this kiosk. Four days in each direction. We went in summer, when the train had to wait for several hours in a sandstorm near Kzyl-Orda. The compartments were so hot that it was difficult to breathe, and the passengers sat motionlessly, like doomed sailors at the bottom of the sea in a submarine. A fat fly flew in from the corridor, smelling a melting white melon, its sugary juice dripping from the table. It buzzed in the air unpunished.

In summer we had to walk to the dining car, dodging the dirty feet in the second-class sleepers, stepping over shapeless bags and children crawling about on the floor. 

In winter, the broken windows of the neighboring empty compartments were stuffed with pillows, but it was cold anyway. Until the winter of 1993, I had never thought that trains had to circulate not only in the warm season of vacations. That the boiling water of a winter car became the life-giving water for six unwashed passengers. 

And I’ve seen a lot of trains.

They were not those heated freight cars used for passenger transportation, of course, but still the trains were hugely impacted by those bankrupt times. The atmosphere of friendship and solidarity among passengers was no longer there, the funny stories – of seers-off who didn’t manage to get off the train in time and businessmen who overslept their stations – had run out. As did the strong friendship between strangers, brought together in a confined space for four days by the will of a ticket office employee, those getting off at various stations on the way being seen off with tears. 

Mutual promises were made to visit and write letters. I had been there many times as a child. I was once invited to the Orenburg region for the whole summer. Twice I was proposed as a husband to girls from central Russia who were traveling with us, and one time even to a girl who wasn’t on the train. A girl from Odessa. 

In November of 1993, six passengers on the Almaty-Moscow train were not eager to get to know each other. Dog-eat-dog male mistrust reigned in the train. We were alone with my father in Compartment 2, the goods were shaking in the drawers under the lower bunks. 

We slept on top of it. In the adjacent compartment, two men were drinking vodka all the time, trying to keep warm. The following one had no glass in the window. The frame was clogged with a pillow. 

Another compartment was occupied by a taciturn demobilized soldier, and in the one opposite the toilet, with a half-open window, lay the sixth passenger, coughing away on an unmade bottom bunk. The toilet door slammed in synchrony with the train jerks, fanning the toilet stench across the carriage.

Occasionally, we caught a glimpse of the car attendant’s ghost in a faded, lilac shirt, unbuttoned down to his navel. 

At night we passed Chu. The steppe, covered in irregular patches of snow, unfolded like a huge white and brown camouflage uniform. The train cut it in two like an iron zipper, smashing up snow drifts of cotton lining on either side. My father would go out into the vestibule for a smoke. I was on duty in the compartment. Then I would go into the corridor to look out the window without curtains, resting my chin on the scratched handrail. The glass was so cold that you couldn’t lean your cheek against it. 

We visited the bathroom out of necessity, in utter disgust. 

On the third night of the trip there was a knock on the door of our compartment. 

Two unshaven men occupied the empty top bunks with thick bags that looked as if they were sewn from fish. 

The eerie smell woke me up. A dim compartment light came on. I sat up. This was immediately taken advantage of by the guests. My bedsheet and blanket were unceremoniously pushed back against the wall. The three of us ended up sitting together on my bunk. 

“Dad, what time is it?” I wasn’t quite awake yet. 

Once seated, the new passengers shook hands with my father and me. The one at the table had to stand up to shake my hand. 

“It’s three in the morning,” Dad looked at his watch, “we just passed Aralsk.” 

He knew all the stations on our route by heart; we didn’t even have to go out into the freezing corridor to check the timetable. 

“We got on in Aralsk,” my neighbor confirmed. I don’t remember his voice. The other silently took out a bottle of vodka and a muddy jar filled with white grease with some black speckles. 

“I suggest we drink vodka with caviar.” 

I was silent. My father nodded his head. A distant neighbor deftly spread black caviar with his knife, handing out sandwiches. He finished the loaf we had bought at the station. He handed my father’s cold glass of tea to me and filled the other two with vodka. The mug I had brought from home ended up in his hands. 

“Here’s to welcome companу! To our good luck!” said the new passengers together. 

“Yes,” my father said after a moment.

The caviar was real. All of a sudden, the smell of fish bags was no longer an issue. 

Stressing the last words of each sentence, the neighbor said: 

“We’ll get off at lunchtime tomorrow, but should something happen, no one can know what we’re carrying with us, deal?”

“Shall we have a smoke?” my father asked and took a pack of cigarettes from the table. 

Everybody got up. Realizing they wouldn’t be able to get out of the compartment that way, they sat down again. Then they left the compartment one by one. My father was the last to leave.

“You go to sleep.” He closed the door.

I immediately made my bed again, finished my sandwich, shook off all the crumbs – I was a stickler for cleanliness as a teenager. I lay down facing the wall.

I remembered the soft scuffling and the clinking of the bottle. Some scraps of phrases: “Yes, in Aralsk we can..., we carry...” My father’s voice: “It’s cheap at the bazaar...”

“What is he talking about?” I thought, falling asleep.

On the morning of the fourth day, it turned out that my shoes had been stolen. It was no big deal. My father and I lifted the bunk and pulled out the suitcase. Father straightened up, latching the compartment door shut. Outside the window, trees flashed from left to right. It was a winter day, no sun. Evenly lit by snow and illuminated from above. We were closing in on Barysh. 

The suitcase smelled like China. 

Traveling by train always puts your sense of smell to the test. The lavatory, the vestibule, the corridor in a compartment car, the sleeper car aisle, the dining car, etc.—all reek in completely different ways. Also railroad ties. Even in winter.

I pulled out my new leopard-colored high boots and put them on. They were wooden like medieval stocks. 

“They’ll warm up and soften,” my father said. 

In Barysh, the train stopped for five minutes. We took out our suitcase and bags. I did not see the car attendant. We were escorted out by the steady coughing from the last compartment. 

We took a commuter train and got to Chuvashskaya Reshetka in thirty minutes. My father met several acquaintances. No one was surprised to see us. Everyone knew we were coming. I was used to it since I was a kid. When we would come here on vacations and carry things to my grandfather’s house, the information radiated three houses ahead of us. They greeted us politely and passed us on – we were the guests from Almaty. Edik and Yurik, my cousins, would pop up on the porch. Aunt Lyusya would wait in the distance, along with my grandmother.

As we drove along, I looked out the window at the mud, the patches of dirt under the thawing snow, and black bare trees of the windbreak. I had tried to imagine the countryside at this time of year. 

We got off together with an old man. I used to put grape leaves in his hand-rolled cigarettes on a dare as a child. 

We walked along the road, trying not to step into frozen puddles and avoiding loose lumps of mud, which turned out to be impossible. I quickly got my boots dirty. 

No one looked out of the houses. The village went into hibernation. 

We dragged our stuff into the house and sat down in the kitchen. It turned out that Aunt Lyusya was at work in Barysh, Edik and Yurik were sent to the Ulyanovsk Suvorov School to make their way in the world. The house was warm and cozy. I went to the sauna. By the evening I knew I had caught a cold. 

My father was telling my grandfather the news from Almaty. Grandpa complained about the honey. 

When it got dark, Sashok came back from the stables.  He was another cousin of mine. He was wearing the sneakers from our last delivery. White and dirty. 

This is a miraculous exception. Usually the shoes we bought at the Chinese bazaar in Almaty didn’t last long. They were decorated with spectacular but short-lived materials and fell apart as soon as the Chinese smell vanished. Sashok had been wearing his counterfeit Adidas shoes for the second year, crossing the river daily on his way to and from the stables. That’s how he washed them. The sneakers didn’t fall apart. The Chinese smell dissipated, but the footwear held on. 

Sashok was the face of our advertising campaign. In fact, two people in the village received such sneakers but the only remaining pair was his. The other pairs trampled Barysh, Inza, and Syzran. The jeans lasted much longer.

         Sashok took me out of the kitchen into the corridor, where there was a honey press and shovels. Grandpa’s house was interesting and traditional. A high porch twined with vines in summer. Wooden. The whole house was wooden. Behind the porch is a dark hallway, with access to the yard. Light shone in only through ugly cracks in the wall. Behind the right door was the living room consisting of two combined rooms. A bedroom and a living room. Grandfather’s folding-screen. He would fall asleep yawning behind it. The hall ended with steps leading into the kitchen. As a child, I was fascinated by the yard – it had a canopy with hay stored on top of it. Wild kittens were born and raised there. The mother cat brought them to the kitchen already grown up. They arched their backs, snorting, looking wildly at the steaming electric samovar on the table. At the end of the yard, covered with thick, slippery boards and bird droppings, there was a locked door with many cracks in it. A piglet was inside. Grandma paid a tribute to it every morning – a bucket of steamed milk with two crumbled loaves of white bread. Bread has a special status in the village. Whenever I went in the direction of the store, it was always required to “pick up six loaves or so.”

Bread is both food and fodder. 

It was cold in the hallway. Sashok cut a strip of meat off a skinned rabbit carcass with a knife and offered it to me. We didn’t talk much. He was glued to the stables, and I was indifferent to horses.

One winter, a neighbor, an old woman named Sinka, wife of that old man from the commuter train, asked Sashok to hang a dog that was stealing chickens. An ordinary thing to ask in the village. You have to live in the countryside to understand this. Children were chopping the heads off chickens from the moment they could pick up an ax. And this act was no reason for their growing up too early.

In the evening, Sashok took the dog by the leash, walked it to the woods, and hung it there by that same leash. 

He had dinner at home, then got dressed and returned to the forest. 

He untied the stiffened corpse from the tree, dragged it back to the old woman’s house, its frozen paws stretched wide apart in agony clinging to the branches, and set it on the doorstep. A frosted stiffened leash protruded as if it were the fifth paw.

It’s too bad we didn’t talk much.

By nightfall I had a fever. Grandmother boiled dumplings in the kitchen, and my relatives sat there sweating after the sauna. They poured me a glass of mead, made me drink it, and sent me to bed. 

My grandfather’s pillow smelled the same as it did when I was a child, the screen was the same, as was the clock with cloudy plastic glass. But the village had changed. 

There was nothing to do here in the fall. And worst of all, the attitude toward me, the one who had only come on business, had changed. My vacation came to an end. My last vacation here. 

The shooting range was burned down by ill-wishers from the Barysh market. We stopped bringing goods to Russia.      

I entered the university. 

Translated by Anton Platonov, translation editor Sarah McEleney 

*

1. Barysh is a small town in Russia, located at a distance of 139 km from Ulyanovsk and 2457 km from Almaty,

2. A chapter from the novel “Destination. A Pastoral” released in 2010 and honored by “Russkaya premia” literary prize as “Best short prose”.

Yuriy Serebriansky is a Kazakhstani author of Polish origin, literary translator and cultural researcher. His prose, poetry, and non-fiction have appeared in Kazakh, Russian, Polish, Swiss and American literary journals, and been translated into Kazakh, Polish, English, Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, French and German. In 2010 and 2014, he was awarded the Russkaya Premia literary award; in 2017, his [Kazakhstani Fairy Tales] was recognized as the best bilingual book for a young audience at the Silk Road Book Fair; in 2019, his novel [Black Star], co-written with Bakhytzhan Momyshuly (1941-2012) received the Altyn Kalam literary prize. Editor-in-Chief of Esquire Kazakhstan from 2016 to 2018, he is currently Editor-in-Chief of the Kazakhstani Polish diaspora magazine Ałmatyński Kurier Polonijny, and the prose editor of the Russian literary magazine Literatura. IWP International Writing Program Writer – in – Residency. In 2019, he was one of the instructors for IWP's Between the Lines youth program.  In 2018, he and translator and researcher Anton Platonov co-founded the Literary Translation Laboratory in Almaty, which in October of 2020 published a collection of nine contemporary American stories in Russian translation.  Member of Kazakh PEN and Polish Literary Translators Association (Member – Candidate).  Working on PhD in the field of Sociolinguistics in Warmia and Mazury University in Olsyztyn, Poland. The most recent work, Olga Kobylyanskaya’s classic novel “Valse mélancolique”, translated from Ukrainian language, appears in Literratura magazine June, 2022.

Yuriy Serebriansky. Барыш

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