Near Zero

by Natan Dubovitsky

translated by Bill Bowler

Translator’s Foreword

Cast of Characters

Table of Contents

Chapter 6: Shest’

Yegor’s mother, strong and healthy to the end, was nonetheless a chronically unhappy person. She lived for unhappiness and adored it. It seemed she could find something to be unhappy about even in paradise.

Her first husband died on their wedding day from an apoplectic stroke at the age of twenty-four. At first, the guests did not realize something bad had happened. They tapped their glasses. Mama stood up for the kiss. The husband stayed seated, staring wide-eyed at the pudding. He stared and stared and, when Mama touched his shoulder, already cold and growing stiff, he fell over onto the witness.

The witness became the second husband and Yegor’s father. The stiff first husband had cracked the witness’s skull, and the witness never recovered. He suddenly became ill and for all three years of marriage was quietly insane, according to the doctors. In the third year of this unhappy marriage, he went seriously crazy, and suffered from dangerous hallucinations, violently and indiscriminately attacking people and pets at home.

The witness’s son, however, grew up balanced, a sober or, more likely, indiscriminate thinker. The one anomaly he inherited was nocturnal sleepwalking with closed eyes. He went looney usually in the spring, under the influence of books or movies. He was a peaceful, tranquil somnambulist and really acted up only once, when in the army, sleepwalking into the armory and loading ten Kalashnikovs. When the sentry ran up and asked, “Why?” the son answered, “I’m not able to know.”

Yegor was forgiven and, after the army, the episodes somehow ceased on their own. His father sank into a clinic for mental disorders. Yegor did not remember him and was never interested in him.

Yegor was not acquainted with his mother’s third husband since she, not wanting, apparently, to impose a stepfather upon her son, met with the third husband somewhere on the side. It even seemed to Yegor that this third one did not exist at all, but was only imagined by his mother to satisfy her need for unhappiness. A most problematic subject emerged from her excessively detailed, implausible stories: a not quite genius, not quite alcoholic, not quite heavy-drinking genius but, in all variants, a sad excuse for a husband, unworthy and all the more frightfully loved.

But the husband was not completely sufficient. Yegor, in his turn, was also used in order to justify his mother’s bad premonitions and gloomy disposition. At first it seemed to Mama that Yegor was not eating enough; then, that he was drinking too much. At school, he always studied the wrong thing in the wrong place. When he tossed aside his studies, it got worse. Then, he took too long to get married (“Are you sick?”). Then he married the wrong one and for some reason delayed having grandsons. When Nastya was born, he began to raise her improperly right from the start, in a spirit of disrespect towards her elders. In short, Mama sang in a minor key in any tonality and on any theme.

When, a year and a half ago, she came to a halt in the happiest of manners, lightly, momentarily and calmly unburdening herself by means of a noble and merciful, first and last infarct, Yegor did not experience the least sympathy. He did not go to the funeral but handed over the ritual fussing to those crawling in from all the genealogical dead-ends: aunties and cousins, brothers-in-law, nieces and grand-nieces, sons-in-law and fiancés, grandmas, grandpas, and even some kind of sister-in-law, all happy to participate and passionate about morgues, cemeteries, crematoria, and funeral repasts.

Discouraged by his own indifference, Yegor accepted condolences, not knowing what kind of face to put on in such cases. According to his thinking, a person is taken from this world by order of higher principles, and there seemed nothing sacred in accompanying the corpse, only some utilitarian purpose. It occurred to him that Mama had a mama, but that was something else again.

Every summer, from the age of two to fifteen, Yegor went to the country to spend time with his grandmother. Mama’s mama was named Antonina Pavlovna, like Chekhov.

The village where she lived flowered in the most central, most transparent part of Russia, where there is no steppe and no taiga, no hills and no plains, no sand and no black earth, where there’s none of this nor that, not two, not one and a half, but just the stuff of Ryazan, just country. Dust and wormwood from the Elder trees. Piles of wood and, indistinguishable from them, little houses and an unfinished church built by feral pilgrims.

A broken tractor lay in a ravine, which those local grumblers Kolya and Sanya had tried to drive across one morning after breakfast. They had raced, not knowing where themselves, yes. And who knows where a poor Russian lad might be taken by his own considerable strength? Only they didn’t get far, missed the bridge and went into the ravine. They left the tractor and went off to nap in the swamp. They were, in a word, well known, classic types.

The little river near the village was small, and the fish in it were small. The tomatoes in the garden were small and half-green. The onions were bitter. The apples were sour. There were boredom and poverty all around. The light from the little huts was dim. Warmth from people was timid, barely perceptible.

But with childlike magnanimity, having loved not what’s better but what’s closer, Yegor loved and still loves to this day all this deep, bottom part of Rus’, her sadness and her wilderness.

His best dreams were always meadows of drying, sunlit clover, where his laughter lost itself among the sparkling bees and dragonflies. And he dreamt of grandma calling him to the house to drink milk, and himself answering with laughter and running off, tiny, sometimes lower than the grass...

Antonina Pavlovna was a hereditary moonshiner, the last mistress of a century long dynasty of local bootleggers. Persecuted from generation to generation for adherence to the forbidden craft, the Samokhodovs themselves (Yegor was a Samokhodov on his mother’s side) were sober people but, at the same time, daring and solitary, apart, not communal, not collective-farm types. Their plum wine remained the most popular in the area under all successive regimes.

They were punished frequently but not fatally, by being sent away but not far, by short jail sentences, bearable fines, or the confiscation of their coils, retorts, and the other crude equipment of these country alchemists. Everyone respected the product, including the authorities.

Nonetheless, the family craft ended with Antonina Pavlovna. Her children and grandchildren dispersed to the cities. Putting her ear to the enormous casks and listening to the living song of the mash, comprehensible only to her, she did not try to reveal to Yegor, for example, the forbidden secrets of bees, honey, alcohol fumes and oils. Although it’s true, she always took him with her to the edge of the garden, to the river, where the paltry but disproportionately productive moonshine factory was set up.

He loved to tend the fire under the boiler and watch how the individual drops of the legendary brew ran down into the bottle. Grandma allowed him to put his pinky finger under the burning drops and take a taste. The taste was not sweet, but mature, alarming and promising, much like the kiss of a girl from an older class. But this was the limit of his co-ownership of the independent industry of his ancestors.

Another time ten years later, having grown much older, but still long before now, in Yegor’s last summer in the country, a local policeman, Uncle Aniskin, took part in their illicit activity.

Aniskin was pathetic, embarrassed by his wrinkled uniform and his epaulets with no stars, his holster with no pistol, and his obvious and unmistakable alcoholism. He helped carry the wood and pour the brew into the boiler, sat quietly until the work was done, drank a couple of glasses with an embarrassed air, and dragged himself back to his motorcycle, around which the neighboring children had crowded. Grandma poured him a bottle of fresh plum wine called “Fire Extinguisher” and thus her career was not once interrupted by judicial harassment.

Antonina Pavlovna had long since buried her husband, Yegor’s grandfather, and lived alone. Aside from cooking Russian aquavit, she supported herself by catching fish, fowl, and small animals, by repairing radios and roofs, by painting icons, and by playing on a trophy mandolin Grandpa had taken from Berlin. Such diverse enterprise should have made her wondrously rich but, alas, she was no exception.

Whatever a Russian peasant does — whether it’s digging in manure, throwing himself into space, sweating at a blast furnace or bleeding at war, let him strike oil or gold, let U.S. bonds turn up under his rake, and in his place a Frenchman would already be rich, or a Chinese person, or a Ukrainian, or even a carefree Berber — capital won’t stick to a Russian. Not a single kopek comes his way, not big money, not small. It won’t stick; and it’s all there, highly liquid assets.

Antonina Pavololvna by temperament was not the wealthy type. Her soul was made modestly, quite naively, of light alone and nothing else. And this light was goodness. Because of the absence of other qualities and shades, there was nothing with which to contrast this goodness, nothing by which to distinguish it, and it showed itself as discrete, untenable, and self-evident. Yegor dwelled in this goodness without noticing it, the way healthy people engage in pure, heartfelt work without noticing it. Yegor lived in this goodness until he outgrew it, until his fate, grown fat over the years, gown coarse and tangled up inside, was no longer found in rural simplicity.

A certain Someone did not appear to Antonina Pavlovna on the road to town. And Yahweh himself did not speak to her in his piercing and importunate tenor from a cloud, nor from storm and darkness, nor from a burning bush that did not consume itself. She did not fast, did not pray, although she painted icons (just to make money) and a not completely religious fig tree grew on her little terrace.

All the same, Yegor did not doubt that she was holy. In confirmation of this, the Lord graciously adorned the ordinary life of Saint Antonina with a slow, lingering and, naturally, martyr’s death: a revolting and extremely serious illness, the very name of which should never be spoken, not to mention the horrifying details of its course, insomuch as it is an insult to man.

Such a malady did the Almighty send to his slave. And He struck down his slave like unto an ancient, tranquil fish and pulled it onto his shore of the Milky Way of the Universe unhurriedly, smoothly, so the hooked soul would not break off or get lost.

For a whole year, He slacked and again tightened the line. And so, the old woman tired of clinging to the pain which came to envelop her. She could not hold on to life, because life was burning white-hot from pain. And the slave lay down, like exorcised pain, and He took her, took her and saved her.

Yegor saw his grandmother at the beginning of the collapse, when the disease was still only courting her, looking over her still normal body, getting settled in more comfortably, preparing the first bite, not yet fatal, almost friendly, getting to know her. These cares that death took, the measured efficiency of the misfortune, Yegor saw in his grandmother’s eyes and asked only, “For what? Why this for her?” And it was not clear who he was asking.

Yegor quit college, the name of which he forgot the moment he enlisted in the Soviet Army. He was already whiling away the poor, everyday life of a young warrior, when he received news of Antonina Pavlovna’s assumption. Dust to dust, it is truly so, amen.

Yegor went to the park where unstable “spirits” like himself hid from the “hardships and privations of military service” and for four hours grieved through his first grownup grief, not out loud, but modestly, as it should be.

Proceed to Chapter 7...

translation © 2019 by Bill Bowler