Calligraphy Lesson Read online

  Calligraphy Lesson is the first English-language collection of short stories by Mikhail Shishkin, the most acclaimed contemporary author in Russia. Spanning his entire writing career, from his first published story, “Calligraphy Lesson,” which heralded an entirely new voice in post-Soviet Russian literature and won him Russia’s prestigious Debut Prize in 1993, to creative essays reflecting on the transcendent importance of language, to the newest story, “Nabokov’s Inkblot,” written in 2013 for dramatic adaptation by a theater in Zurich. A master prose writer and unique stylist, Shishkin is heir to the greatest Russian writers, such as Tolstoy, Bunin, and Pasternak, and is the living embodiment of the combination of style and content that has made Russian literature so unique and universally popular for over two centuries. Shishkin’s breathtakingly beautiful writing style comes across perfectly in these stories, where he experiments with the forms and ideas that are worked into his grand novels while exploring entirely new literary territory in the space between fiction and creative nonfiction as he reflects on the most important and universal themes in life: love, happiness, art, death, resurrection…

  More praise for Mikhail Shishkin:

  “Often sings with powerfully estranged, original observations… minutiae and grand philosophy collide on every page.”—BORIS FISHMAN, The New York Times Book Review

  “Shishkin is interested in what is most precious and singular in classic Russian fiction: the passionate inquiry into what, in Maidenhair, is called the ‘soul, quintessence, pollen.’”—SAM SACKS, The Wall Street Journal

  “Mikhail Shishkin is the Ian McEwan of Russia. A prize-winning writer who enjoys stunning commercial and critical success…His latest novel [The Light and the Dark]…is striking proof that great Russian literature didn’t die with Dostoevsky.”—Monocle Magazine

  “[Shishkin] manages to engage Russia’s literary heritage while at the same time creating something new and altogether original.”—World Literature Today

  “Shishkin has been described as the heir apparent of the great Russian novelists, and indeed, there are times when he seems to have taken the best from each of them.” —The Quarterly Conversation

  “As an extraordinary prose stylist, Shishkin has license to be unconventional… Maidenhair is likely a work of genius.”—World Literature Today

  Deep Vellum Publishing

  2919 Commerce St. #159, Dallas, Texas 75226

  deepvellum.org · @deepvellum

  Copyright © 2015 by Mikhail Shishkin

  Published by arrangement with the author and the BGS Agency.

  English translation copyrights:

  “Calligraphy Lesson” © 2007 by Marian Schwartz

  “The Half-Belt Overcoat” © 2012 by Leo Shtutin

  “Of Saucepans and Star-Showers” © 2013 by Leo Shtutin

  “Nabokov’s Inkblot” © 2014 by Mariya Bashkatova

  “In a Boat Scratched on a Wall,” “The Blind Musician,” and “Language Saved” © 2015 by Marian Schwartz

  “The Bell Tower of San Marco” © 2015 by Sylvia Maizell

  Some stories were published previously:

  “The Half-Belt Overcoat” in Read Russia: An Anthology of New Voices (May 2012)

  “Calligraphy Lesson” in Words Without Borders (July 2007)

  “Nabokov’s Inkblot” in New England Review (Volume 34, Nos. 3–4, 2014)

  “Of Saucepans and Star-Showers” in Spolia (March 2013)

  “In a Boat Scratched on a Wall” originally appeared in slightly different form as “Mikhail Shishkin: A revolution for Russia’s words” in the Independent (March 22, 2013)

  First edition, 2015. All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 978-1-941920-02-2 (ebook)

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER: 2015935163

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  The publication of this book was made possible with the support of the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation’s Transcript program to support the translation of Russian literature.

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  Cover design & typesetting by Anna Zylicz · annazylicz.com

  Text set in Bembo, a typeface modeled on typefaces cut by Francesco Griffo for Aldo Manuzio’s printing of De Aetna in 1495 in Venice.

  Deep Vellum titles are published under the fiscal sponsorship of The Writer’s Garret, a nationally recognized nonprofit literary arts organization.

  Distributed by Consortium Book Sales & Distribution.

  Contents

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  THE HALF-BELT OVERCOAT

  Translated by Leo Shtutin

  CALLIGRAPHY LESSON

  Translated by Marian Schwartz

  THE BLIND MUSICIAN

  Translated by Marian Schwartz

  LANGUAGE SAVED

  Translated by Marian Schwartz

  NABOKOV’S INKBLOT

  Translated by Mariya Bashkatova

  OF SAUCEPANS AND STAR-SHOWERS

  Translated by Leo Shtutin

  THE BELL TOWER OF SAN MARCO

  Translated by Sylvia Maizell

  IN A BOAT SCRATCHED ON A WALL

  Translated by Marian Schwartz

  The Half-Belt Overcoat

  There’s a famous police photograph of Robert Walser, taken at the place of his death: winter, a white incline, tracks in deep snow, a man fallen supine, arms outstretched. His old man’s hat flung to the side. That’s how he was found by children on their Christmas walk.

  He described his own death in a story published half a century before his final Christmas. The protagonist of this brief little tale is a lost soul, inconspicuous, needed by no one—and yet, to make things worse, also a genius and master of the world. He wearies of being unneeded and escapes from his troubles like this: he buries the world in a snowstorm and lays himself down in a drift.

  Foreknowledge of one’s own death is not, however, the privilege of the writer. It’s just that it’s easy to catch him red-handed—in the literal sense: the hand records whatever is revealed to him at a particular juncture. Such breakthroughs happen in every person’s life. Holes in matter. Points of transmission. In such moments the composer comes by his melody, the poet his lines, the lover his love, the prophet his God.

  In that instant you encounter what everyday existence holds asunder: the visible and the invisible, the worldly and the sacred.

  You begin to breathe in time with a space in which all things occur simultaneously—those that have been and those yet to be.

  Reality has been playing hide-and-seek with you, hiding behind the past and the future like a child who’s squeezed himself in under the fur coats hanging in the hallway, and now jumps out at you, sweaty, happy, bursting with laughter: here I am! How’d you manage that—went right past and didn’t see me! Now you’re it!

  To see your own death in such a moment is nothing, for there arises in all its glorious patency the knowledge that I was never born, but have always been. Suddenly comes the realization that there’s no need to cling on to life, because I am life. And it is not I who can sense the smell of mulch exuding from the forest’s mouth, it is the universe sniffing its own scent with my nostrils.

  If you can measure your life by anything at all, it’s probably by the number of such encounters allotted to you.

  I remember very well how I experienced that for the first time. My twelfth year. The smell of peat bogs burning around Moscow. The hazy country mornings of seventy-two. A charred aftertaste to everything, even the hot strawberries from the garden-bed. Mum went on holiday to a rest home on the upper Volga, and took me with her. One of my first trips away.

  It rained incessantly, we lived in a damp, mosquito-infested little house, and at first I was bored, nightly film screenings notwithstanding, but after a while the weather improved, we got a new canteen
neighbour, Uncle Vitya, and our life took a turn for the better. We swam with him, took motorboat rides on the Volga, went on forest rambles. Sinewy and gold-toothed, Uncle Vitya made Mum laugh no end with his stories. I didn’t get half of his jokes, but the way he told them made it impossible not to laugh. I took a great liking to Mum’s new acquaintance. What’s more, I was bowled over by the fact that he worked in a recording van—a “Tonwagen.” No doubt I was already spellbound by words.

  There I go, presumptuously calling that teenager myself, though I’m not at all sure whether he’d agree to acknowledge himself in me as I am now: grey-haired, advanced in life, a sickly bore with a brazenly protruding belly. He’d be very surprised: can that really be me? I don’t know that I could find anything to answer. Not likely. We may be namesakes—but so what?

  Among Uncle Vitya’s stories I somehow remember one about how, skating on the river as a child, he and other boys would sometimes happen upon frogs frozen into the ice. If you peed on them they’d come to life and start moving. And another one about the war. He told us about the penals1 whose only hope was to get wounded. Redeem your guilt with blood and you’d have your decorations and rank restored. And so they’d resort to self-infliction, shooting themselves in the arm or foot through a loaf of bread so there’d be no gunpowder traces in the wound.

  It had never occurred to me that Mum liked to dance, but now she’d be out dancing with Uncle Vitya every evening.

  One day Mum started speaking to me in a strange voice. If Uncle Vitya ever asked me about Dad, she implored, I should tell him that he was dead.

  “But he’s not dead,” I said, surprised. “He just moved away.”

  She pressed my head to her breast:

  “But you’re my clever boy and you understand everything.”

  I understood nothing, but nodded all the same.

  And I began waiting for Uncle Vitya to ask me about Dad.

  It was strange to see Mum rouging and powdering herself, making up her eyes, painting her lips, spraying perfume on her neck, and doing her nails—I’d be hit by the sharp smell of nail varnish. I had never known her like this before.

  Mum was a teacher, she taught Russian language and literature, and by that time she’d already become head of School No. 59 on the Arbat. Ever since year one I’d commuted with her across the whole city—initially from Presnia, where we lived in a communal apartment, and later from Matveyevskaya, where we were given a two-room flat in a new housing development.

  Naturally, she wanted to keep her child close by, at her school, but this made life much more complicated for me. Her role model was some retired maths teacher. His son had been in his class, and he knew the subject better than anyone else, but when his father called him up to the blackboard all he’d ever say was “Sit down, C”—even if his son had got the problem correct. I had to go through something similar when our class was being divided into English and German sets. I wanted to go in the English set—and with good reason, because German was a kind of punishment for those who weren’t doing well: do badly, went the threat, and it’ll be the German set for you. I was doing well, but Mum put me exactly where I didn’t want to be. So none of the other parents could reproach her for anything. School came first for her, things personal and domestic second.

  Her generation had grown up under the slogan “The Motherland is Calling!”

  Perhaps, if I hadn’t got into a university with a military chair after finishing school,2 she would equally have sent me off to Afghanistan not only with sorrow but also with a sense of having fulfilled her mother’s duty to the nation. I don’t know. Incidentally, it would seem that I am to this day a reserve officer of the nonexistent army of that nonexistent nation. I did, after all, once swear an oath in a military camp near Kovrov to defend the soon-to-disintegrate motherland till the last drop of my blood. We had to kiss the red standard, I remember, so I brought it to my lips—and got a great whiff of smoked fish. No doubt our commanders had been tucking into some beer and fish and wiping their hands on the velvet cloth.

  While still at school I didn’t realize, of course, how hard it must have been for Mum and all our teachers: they were faced with the insoluble problem of teaching children to tell the truth whilst initiating them into a world of lies. The written law requires that truth be told, but the unwritten dictates that if you do, you’ll be facing the music later.

  They taught us lies they themselves didn’t believe because they loved and wanted to save us. Of course, they were afraid of wrongly spoken words, but they were afraid for us even more than they were for themselves. The country, after all, was in the grip of a deadly word game. You needed to say the right words and not say the wrong ones. The line had never been drawn, but inside everyone sensed where it lay. Our teachers were trying to save truth-loving youths from folly, to inject them with a life-giving dose of fear. You might feel a little momentary sting, but then you’d have immunity for life.

  We may have been badly taught in chemistry or English, but at least we got illustrative lessons in the difficult art of survival—how to say one thing, and think and do another.

  The gods of the grownups were long dead, but we had to venerate them during idolatrous rituals. School taught us children of slaves the meaning of submission. If you want to achieve anything, you have to learn how to pronounce the dead words of a dead language, in which that dead life stagnated and rotted away.

  Generally, what does it mean to be a good teacher?

  Clearly, a good teacher under any regime must cultivate in his pupils those qualities which will help them later in life, and will not teach them to go against the current, because they’re going to need a completely different type of knowledge: the knowledge of the traffic laws in this particular life. Veer into the oncoming lane and you’re heading for a crash. You need to reverse and merge into the mainstream flow. If you want to get somewhere in this life, earn a decent wage, provide for your family and children, you have to blend into the mainstream: you’re the boss—I’m the fool, I’m the boss, you’re the fool, honour and profit lie not in one sack, who keeps company with wolves will learn to howl.

  A bad teacher, meanwhile, will instruct his charges to live by a different law, the law of the conservation of human dignity. By and large this is a road to marginalisation at best, and to jail or suicide at worst. Unless they just shoot you.

  Does this mean that bad teachers were good, and good ones bad? Then again, it’s always been like that in Russia: the right on the left, the left on the right. It’s an age-old question, and one that still hasn’t been answered: if you love your Motherland, should you wish her victory or defeat? It’s still not completely clear where the Motherland ends and the regime begins, so entangled have they become.

  Take hockey, for instance. On both sides of the barbed wire, USSR–Canada matches were regarded as the symbolic clash of two systems. By the end of Soviet power we were supporting the Canadians against the Soviets. But in seventy-two, the year of the epoch-making Summit Series, the teenager I obstinately refer to as myself still inhabited an unshadowed, prelapsarian world—and supported “our lads.”

  It really was a strange old nation. Hockey victories prolonged the regime’s life, while defeats shortened it. You couldn’t tell from close up that that Paul Henderson goal, scored from the goalmouth 34 seconds before the end of the final game, not only changed the outcome of the series, but became the point of no return for the entire world empire created by the moustachio’d despot. From that moment on, its disintegration became only a matter of time.

  It’s curious that a man who struck at the very heart of my country should accept his fate in an eminently Russian manner: first he turned to drink, having ditched hockey, and then became a proselytiser.

  Hockey has found its way into these pages because our school happened to stand just opposite the Canadian embassy. In front of it would park incredible foreign limousines that had turned into our Starokonnyushenny Lane straight from American movies.
You could press up against the window and take a good look at the dashboard—the number 220 on the speedometer was especially impressive—and we boys in our mousy-grey uniforms would heatedly debate the merits of Mustangs over Cadillacs or those of Chevrolets over Fords till a policeman leapt out of the booth outside the embassy gates and sent us packing.

  A reception for the Canadian hockey players was held in the embassy. Word of the Canadians’ arrival spread instantly, and we crowded on the opposite pavement, trying to get a look at our idols. These were our gods, come down from television’s ice rink, and it was strange to see them in suits and ties. In the first-floor windows of the Arbat townhouse, flung open on that warm September day in seventy-two, we caught glimpses of Phil Esposito, “Bullyboy” Cashman and brothers Frank and Pete Mahovlich. In response to our adoring screams they peered out of the windows, smiled, waved, gave us thumbs up—all as if to say, Well, fellas, ain’t life just dandy!

  So many years have passed, yet still I can see, vividly as ever, the toothless grin of Bobby Clarke, who’d leaned out of the window and thrown us a badge. Other players, too, began throwing badges and sticks of chewing gum. Even some biscuits. It all really kicked off then! Try as I might to catch something, anything, I was shouldered aside by those with more luck on their side. I would have ended up empty-handed. But then the miraculous happened. Bobby Clarke, who was almost lying on the windowsill, began jabbing his finger in my direction. I couldn’t believe my eyes. He was looking at me, and threw me some gum. I caught it! He laughed and gave me another thumbs up—you did good, son! It was then that we were driven off by the police. I shared the gum with my friends, but the wrapper I held on to for ages. Need I mention that it was the best-tasting gum I’ve ever had in my life?

  The next day Mum came into our class. She had her strict face on. Mum knew how to be strict, and when she was the whole school was afraid of her.

  She began saying that our behaviour had brought shame and dishonour upon the school and the whole country as well. We’d been photographed by foreign correspondents, and now the whole world would see how we’d debased ourselves by fighting over their chewing gum.