18. The Fading Away

Это перевод на английский рассказа "Угасание" из сборника "Устная традиция"

The oral tradition faded slowly, like a campfire that had been abandoned. At first the flame weakened, deprived of firewood; then the embers continued to give off heat for a while, slowly cooling, glowing in response to every draft. In the cooling embers, beneath the ashes, there remained places that had not quite gone out. They could still have been blown back to life, the fire restored. If you tossed a little ball of paper onto them, it might produce a thin trickle of smoke. Then all that remained was cold ash and cinders, but even they still gave some idea of the flame that had burned there not long before. After several rains, even the memory of the fire disappeared.

So, my daughters no longer remember the fairy tales and stories I told them for years at bedtime, and their knowledge of Russian has reached the point where any story I tell becomes an ordeal for all of us. An unfamiliar word—and that means most Russian words—has to be explained to them using other words, or translated. And are those words themselves clear, and how accurate is the translation? Out of politeness they still listen to me, but their thoughts are somewhere far away. After a couple of minutes I can see their attention drifting, and there is no point in going on.

They themselves have long since been unable to express any coherent thought in Russian. They are not alone in this. It is the general rule.

Nevertheless, whenever I can, I try to reach them.

Here we are at the Museum of Natural History in New York. A building of imperial proportions, with something of the architecture of a wealthy mansion mixed in. Everything around us is faced with stone, with decorative details everywhere. At the Leningrad APU, such decoration, such stone facing, was called myaso—“meat.”

At the entrance stands an equestrian statue of President and Colonel Theodore Roosevelt. Because it stands on a low pedestal in the middle of the entrance staircase, its superhuman size is immediately apparent.

A good-natured young Indian stands by the stirrup, but in such a position that it is immediately clear who is the important one here. On the other side stands a “black-haired fellow,” as our construction foreman used to call boys like that. The stirrups and horse harness on the monument are not of our type.

Inside the museum there are various exhibits. There is an evolution section, whose most popular attraction is the dinosaur hall, with its enormous skeletons and skulls. A gallery with several levels runs around the skeleton, allowing visitors to walk around and inspect it.

There are also, familiar to me from childhood, models of little pieces of various climatic zones behind glass, with stuffed animals, plants, and painted backdrops. We had ones like these in our local-history museum, back when it was still housed in the former cathedral in the park. Indian and Pacific Northwest totem poles, a canoe with mannequins of Indians at the paddles.

There is an ethnographic section. It attracts my attention more than the others. I spend almost the whole visit there, while the children, having hurried through its displays, go off to look at the other sections. It has a splendid exhibition. India, Japan, China. True, once you get to things you actually know something about, your confidence begins to weaken.

Take Central Asia, for example. Now that is something I have seen. I was there; I looked at plenty of it in my time. Against a backdrop depicting something like the Registan in Samarkand, with a crowded bazaar, mannequins in robes are sitting around.

The robes I saw in real life were quilted in patterns, padded with cotton, tied low around the waist with a scarf, behind which you could make out a knife. Soft Asian-style boots with pointed toes, sometimes worn inside equally narrow-toed galoshes. The faces of everyone, young or old, had been baked by the sun and were deeply wrinkled. The skullcap was of the strictly prescribed pattern for each particular clan.

The people in the museum have light, smooth, young faces, like in a Gillette razor advertisement. The robes on the mannequins look like something I once wore at home, and which you could now buy at the Gap. At the same time, there is neither a knife nor a scarf anywhere to be seen. The woman looks nothing like an Uzbek, Turkmen, or Tajik woman. The necklace around her neck is made of relatively recent English crowns, not silver ones at all—and, on top of that, they are dull.

Of course, this necklace is an imitation. The genuine jewelry I saw was made entirely of silver rubles. Among the rubles I saw some quite old ones, from the time of Pavel I, with the inscription in a frame: “Not unto us, not unto us, but unto Thy name…” Among the smaller coins, alongside poltinas and half-poltinas, I came across Khorezmian, Bukharan, and Persian coins, but I never once saw an English one.

If they are careless about such a small detail, what can one say about the overall composition of the jewelry? They probably reconstructed it from a small photograph in some old magazine. Meanwhile, I have a couple of genuine Turkestan pieces of jewelry lying at home. At first I even wanted to bring them to the museum and show them what people in Turkestan actually wore at the time.

At first I didn't do it out of embarrassment, and because of my poor command of English. Then I realized that explaining anything to an official in America is about the same as explaining to Spielberg, or whoever else they have there in Hollywood, that the Trojan War really lasted ten years, and that the Greeks built the wooden horse only after exhausting every other possibility of taking the city. Whereas in the movie Troy, Briseis walks around with a scrape on her nose for the entire film, a scrape she got on the second day of the siege.

They know better. That's all there is to it. They are the specialists.

In Xinjiang and in Central Asia, an indispensable feature of a bazaar is disorder, dirt, and flies. Flies, actually, are everywhere there are domestic animals. People's clothes there are worn-out, greasy, shabby. People there have a tendency to neglect their appearance, and at the time this was something I found deeply appealing. I saw in it the presence of love and soul, as opposed to the sterile soullessness of my first wife and mother-in-law, who sternly demanded neatness and order from me. That is, in my imagination at the time, soullessness and tidiness went hand in hand.

But in the museum's version of that bazaar—complete order, everything clean, everything neat, like a market for foreigners put together for tourists. The hotel zone in Cancun is about as much like the real Mexico as this exhibit is like the old bazaar in Kulja that I actually knew.

For some reason, the Kazakhs and Kyrgyz, and their yurts, were nowhere to be found in the museum's exhibition.

Or take the section on the peoples of Asia, the Transbaikal region. Buryats, taiga peoples—I am no expert there. But here, in a display case, stands a Cossack, with the label “Russia in Siberia,” obviously a Cossack of the Transbaikal Host. Short, jaunty, all wound up like a spring. One hand is raised to his little mustache, the other rests on his saber, his chest thrust forward. His sly, smiling mug has a distinctly Mongoloid cast to it.

Well, anthropologically, that is correct.

But damn it, for some reason he is dressed in a cherkeska, with cartridge loops, belted with a Caucasian belt with silver ornamentation! Was the cherkeska the uniform of the Transbaikal Host? On the cherkeska is the Order of St. George, Fourth Class—not to be confused with the St. George Cross, by the way—along with medal bars and various insignia. The display case makes it difficult for me to examine the insignia. I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out to be some other Cossack Host instead of the Transbaikal one.

I understand that if they dressed him in a proper gymnastiorka and trousers with a yellow stripe, the display would lose some of its visual appeal. But historically incorrect, as a certain historical personage used to say. This is a museum.

Soft music is playing: Don Cossack songs performed by an ensemble. But why? In that part of Siberia, as I remember seeing on television back in the seventies, the villages still preserved the old Russian polyphonic singing, in which you couldn't make out a single word because every singer was lagging behind the others. That's what they should have played.

Then again, the hell do I know what songs they used to sing in the settlements of the Transbaikal Cossack Host. Nothing remained of those Cossacks.

I call my daughters over.

“Look, this is a Cossack”—I say Cossack, because otherwise they won't understand. “Your great-grandfather was exactly this kind of Cossack, and his ancestors were Cossacks too.”

Well, no, he didn't quite look that spectacular.

But historically incorrect—politically correct.

Another time, in the lobby, we are standing in line at the ticket counter. In the center of the lobby there is a battle between dinosaur skeletons; on the walls are panels with an abundance of gold paint. The panels depict President Roosevelt's achievements, along with their history. Here is the Treaty of Portsmouth, the signing of the agreement. And before that, a bayonet-to-bayonet confrontation between ranks of Russian and Japanese soldiers.

All the soldiers, Russian and Japanese alike, are sturdy, well-fed, tall, like American Marines. Their uniforms fit them perfectly. The Russians wear boots; the Japanese, gaiters. The history of Asia rises up the wall toward the ceiling, and at the very top sits Genghis Khan.

“Look,” I say to my daughters. “Here are Russian soldiers. Your grandfather fought just like that, only in another war, the World War. But he looked exactly the same: uniform, boots, the same kind of rifle.”

My older daughter is a clever girl. She is twelve.

“And which World War?” she asks. “The First or the Second?”

Here it is appropriate to remember that shortly before this, when she was six, her younger sister had asked me whether I had actually lived when dinosaurs were still alive.

What do they take me for? Some kind of Ahasuerus, a contemporary of kerosene lamps, steam locomotives, and gramophones?

“And this,” I say, “this is Genghis Khan. Your great-great-grandmother on your mother's side was the daughter of a sultan of the Kanly Kazakh clan. Usually people who occupied such a position were Chinggisids, descendants of Genghis Khan. So it is possible that you are his descendants too. Besides, your great-great-grandfather, her husband, was a biy, and that was also a considerable position, so it is not impossible that Genghis Khan is your ancestor through that line as well.”

“And who was Genghis Khan?” my older daughter asks.

“Emperor of Asia.”

“Oh! So does that mean I'm a princess?” she rejoices.

Darling, first of all, you don't inherit such things through the female line. And secondly, a princess in Asia is not the same thing as a princess in Europe. There wouldn't have been all that much for you to rejoice about.

I don't tell them that their grandfather, descendant of the daughter of a sultan and a biy, was a vor v zakone—a “thief in law”—which in that country is still, to this day, a fairly respected position.

How could I explain to them what a vor v zakone is? What is the nearest American equivalent? The Godfather? No, I don't think that's quite it. How would Don Corleone have behaved on Kolyma, when the thieves were waging a deadly war against the suki and the administration?

They won that war, by the way.

Would he himself have become a suka? Their grandfather didn't. He was seriously wounded by a suka's knife.

The Jewish section in that Asian peoples' department is tiny, but tastefully done. It is somewhere in a passageway. Just a sparsely illuminated display case, with sad music. Behind the glass are narrow horizontal strips with little shelves. About thirty of them. From top to bottom are countries and localities; from left to right, years. Something like a branching tree laid on its side.

The shelves hold various artifacts—well, perhaps copies of them, or photographs, portraits—and a date is written on a Plexiglas strip.

Suppose we take Mesopotamia, Babylonia, Kurdistan: the date when Jews appeared there, the stages of development of the diaspora, from Nebuchadnezzar to later times, and a fragment of a clay tablet with cuneiform writing, or perhaps a photograph of some wide-eyed relief—I don't remember which anymore. Somewhere there is a silver case resembling a mezuzah.

The Caucasus, Yemen, Iran—God knows when they showed up there. Couldn't they just stay where they were?

And what about me?

Taken together, it is a picture of the dispersal of the Jews throughout Asia. The Exodus from Egypt isn't even at the beginning; they had begun branching out earlier.

The shelves are mounted on a black-and-white wall, with some image in the background—I don't remember what, a menorah, perhaps.

Very, very tastefully done.

It speaks about a small people more vividly than all the fake protocols in the world.

“And another one of your great-great-great-grandfathers might be somewhere here.”

Unfortunately, I have nothing more to say. I know nothing more about him.

If only I knew his family name, I could reconstruct the history of his family from it. Suppose he had been a Levin or a Kogan—oh, then I would have found plenty to tell them about him. Or, for example, Averbukh. Reznik, too. Even Rabinovich—those are surnames that tell you something.

But the only thing I know for certain about his origin is his official designation: “vykrest,” a Jewish convert to Christianity—a word my aunt saw in some old documents when she was a child.