SKUNK: A LIFE

1

Not too many years ago, but then not just yesterday, when Stargorod still abounded in witty and merry folk, an agreeable group of men of various ages, banished from the street by the bitterest of frosts, gathered in the box room of a little vegetable store, which, before the advent of historical materialism, had served the city as a guardhouse on the main Petersburg road. The small storage room had been walled off with thick alder plywood and contained a crudely constructed pine table and benches painted with brown ship minium. The one window was behind a grating and etched with a merry tracery of frost. An iron stove, made out of a fifty-gallon gas drum, hissed in the corner.

It was warm, cosy and close. Having made themselves at home and thrown off their coats and padded jackets, they decided to de-energise the principle premises an hour before closing time, bolt the door and unwind with the marvelous rotgut port from the shop stock, the pickles in brine and the sauerkraut out of a barrel.

Three women sellers were receiving five suitors, lonely hearts sapped by the severe winter cold. The women were unmarried. One of them - who had been around - was the manager Anna Ivanovna, another, younger, thirtyish, was the songster and joker Raisa, and another, the altogether young, eighteen-year-old Zoika Fertov with an eight-month belly and therefore not, strictly, in the running.

True, one old man (in his late forties) - a little scrawny guy or "runt" - quick-witted and merry, suggested to Zoika outright after the first glass that she let him stick his herring in halfway, but the pregnant girl's guardian angel Anna Ivanovna shut the mischief-maker up in a motherly fashion, and everyone appreciated the humor, howling with laughter.

Fairly soon in one of the corners a conversation got going about politics among three good-for-nothing old men; two lucky fops who were younger nestled next to Anna Ivanovna and Raisa.

Another round downed to the invaluable toast - "Not the last, God willing!" - instantly created that marvelous mood so dear to simple Russian people. A half hour or so later, the women's end of the table was striking up "Oh, Frost, Frost..." The scene of the political debate was now different: the feeblest of the debators slept, his nose buried in the table; the second, having stepped outside to relieve himself, was lost in admiration of the moon and unable to break out of his trance: rocking slightly to and fro and trying to button his already buttoned fly, he vented his rapture to the store mutt cowering in its kennel; the "runt", as the steadiest one and still with a semblance of hope, persisted in refilling the pregnant Zoika's glass while stubbornly and humorlessly snuffling: "Zoi, say Zoi, you're not expecting a baby elephant, are you?" "Oh, go fuck yourself, you ahhh..." the addled Zoika replied. But he kept repeating the silly question with the importunity of a well-oiled machine so that finally Zoika felt compelled to ask what a baby elephant had to do with it.

"Hey, feel between my legs, I'm expecting a baby elephant," the old man cackled, pleased with his own joke, and thrusting a hand up Zoika's skirt. But he was too late to enjoy his search: Zoika's dress and the bench under her were soaked.

"Zoi, did you wet your pants?" the mischief-maker inquired, suddenly sympathetic.

Zoika shook her head: she barely understood what was happening to her. The person pawing her was so repulsive that she swung a furious arm across the table, knocking glasses and bottles onto the floor, and screamed her universal: "Oh, go fuck yourself, you ahhh..."

The sound of glass shattering startled Anna Ivanovna out of her state of tender emotion, she was just about to start barking in her captain's bass, but something in Zoika's face stopped her.

"Honey, what's wro-o-o-ng?" the manager asked.

"She wet her pants," the harassing runt sniffed the air and stuck out his lower lip sadly.

"Shut up, you mother..." Anna Ivanovna went round the table, felt Zoika's head for some reason, whispered in her ear and began giving her cold water to drink. When it became clear that the pain was down below, and that it wasn't going away, but on the contrary, kept coming over the girl, Anna Ivanovna's doubts vanished: "You dumb prick," she snapped, throwing the harasser a threatening look. "Her waters broke!"

They all began to collect their things.

2

The same group took Zoika to the hospital. It wasn't far to go, maybe four blocks, but the bitter cold dispelled her drunkenness, and only in the reception area did the sugary, purely port-induced sluggishness came over her again. They turned the laboring girl over to the foul-mouthed attendant and set off straightaway for Raisa's apartment - to finish drinking.

Zoika was very unlucky. It was a difficult birth, with a breech delivery. Fortunately, Professor Rakhlin from Leningrad, who occasionally came to Stargorod to give advanced courses, stayed late in the delivery room and performed a masterly demonstration of the Tsovyanov method.

Zoika, pie-eyed from the port, barely responded to the pain. Indeed, it didn't matter to her: she didn't want the child. The first time she'd had a miscarriage; the second time, on Raisa's advice, she jumped from the top of a shed, coming down full force on her heels, and nearly croaked from the pain and bleeding. This time she had carried the baby out of her own stupidity, she had missed the last cut-off date, which is why she picked up on the end of the professor's lecture and was even glad - in cases of breech deliveries, the child is often born dead or dies in the first two to three days - but when she heard the baby cry, she resigned herself. She somehow felt sure that this one was meant to live.

And that is exactly what happened. The little blueish child, born in the early hours of January the fourteenth, survived and was taken to church during a fierce frost when he was five days old by Zoika's mother who insisted on observing the fundamental Christian rite. The boy was named after the granny's father, Daniel, and given the patronymic traditional for fatherless children, Ivanovich.

3

Daniel Ivanovich's childhood was not an untroubled one. To Zoika, at eighteen merry years of age, the baby boy was nothing but a burden which is why when her milk ran out - and it did so disastrously fast, in the third month, after yet another major bender - she took to feeding him with extreme recklessness: she would oversleep and miss getting the rationed formula, or she would spill the precious milligrams all over the table because she was tight, or she would simply forget to stick the dingy nipple into the howling mouth. But in spite of everything the little boy grew, and grew used to sucking his thumb instead of a nipple, a bad habit he retained in later life. The little greedy mouth eventually became bent - slightly down to the right - in pursuit of the thumb, the little eyes, usually intent at that tender age upon the angels embroidered on the canopy stirring over the cradle, shone watchfully, and the little jug ears pricked up even then at the least sound, giving the command to howl or to cower, depending on the situation. If, for instance, his mother came home drunk and not alone, the little one would first let out a despairing squeak to remind her of his existence and then, sensing that no one meant to tend to him for a while, he would settle down to wait, he would start working on his thumb or fish out the chewed-up, sausage-shaped wad of bread wrapped in cheesecloth and suck the sour life juices out of it. But before going to bed, his mother would usually silence his jackdaw's gullet with a baby bottle, he would eat his fill for the night and quiet down or listen to the rustling on the daybed, to the affectionate cursing of the current caller, while tugging at his diaper with tiny fingers. He never knew the prison of swaddling bands: his mother had heard somewhere that loose diapers developed masculine independence.

In the morning, around ten o'clock, his granny would appear, having milked the goat and journeyed into the city from her lakeside village. As soon as he heard her heavy footsteps in the hall, the baby would begin to fuss and yell in anticipation of the warm milk and bath in the battered aluminum basin.

Afterwards, smeared with shiny vaseline and freshly diapered, he would drop right off - sink into the saving abyss of sleep, conserving his strength for the half-starving afternoon when his granny, having cooed and cooed over him, would disappear. She was afraid of her daughter. That girl could flatten her if she felt like it. Sighing heavily and reproaching only herself, the fool who managed to raise such a callous person, his granny preferred to be out of her sight.

But once she lingered: between cleaning up the apartment, making lunch and doing the wash, she forgot to check the time. The little boy, imperious and uninhibited with his granny, wet himself and immediately began to wail, and she, all aglow with loving fondness, set her "golden one" down on the table. The cold current of air made him want to go again and he let fly a shining jet; his granny, catching it in her hands, laughed and said, "God's dew, just God's dew!", and kissed her wet hands. Then she put him back in his crib and went to fetch clean diapers. Here Zoika burst into the apartment like a vicious she-wolf and, shoving her mother aside, took charge of her son herself, lisping endearments and shaking her drunken head. She wanted to look good in front of the buoy-keeper pacing out in the hall, to show him what a caring mother she was: she hadn't yet lost hope then of finding a permanent mate, and the buoy-keeper was comparatively young, under thirty. But somehow she went about it all wrong, and besides the boy was still wet, drenched with "God's dew"; the thin little body slipped out of her hands and fell on the floor. Daniel landed smack on his rump, his little legs clattering like icicles on the floor boards, and began squealing, flapping, and of course the blame was lumped entirely on the old woman, for not drying him off, for being careless, and besides, besides, besides.

Not one little bone so much as cracked, the bruises on the banged buttocks were gone within a week, but evidently, as his granny said, some blood vessel had been nipped: his legs did not grow properly after that. They were noticeably short and bowed, like the legs of a cavalry man.

After that incident, his granny finally made up her mind and one fine day she stole her grandson and took him back to her village. Zoika couldn't get him there: the old women in the village would stick up for his granny, and Zoika who was scared of nothing was scared, strangely enough, of having a bad reputation. Besides, this state of affairs suited her: having yelled for the sake of appearances, she took to visiting now and again on Sundays, and then stopped coming at all, dropping in only occasionally to cadge another tenner "till payday".

The little fellow began to improve on his granny's grub, but the crusty rash on his face did not go away for a long time; as for his greedy appetite (one of the things in which his granny took pride) and his habit of sucking his thumb, these endured for years to come.

Devouring whatever he was given or what hadn't been put away, he was, by the age of five, still a very small and strangely silent child. The neighbor's one-year-olds were markedly stronger, but, oddly enough, not hardier. Despite his bent duck's legs, he could run faster than other boys his age, he climbed easily up sheds and over old boats along the shore, he raced around on a rusty scooter or romped in the dust with the shaggy village dogs, yet he was not a leader, in groups he always hung back as if he were listening for something. His little body grew, became supple, but looked squat because of his puny legs (his feet were small, his shoes all hand-me-downs), and his flattish face with the crooked mouth, darting bright eyes and little jug ears went perfectly with his nickname, "Ferret" - derived, of course, from Fertov, his surname.

His granny worshipped him, stuffed him with all sorts of candy and gingerbread, pancakes and pies, but spent little time with him as was her wont: she would disappear into the vegetable garden or the shed to milk her goat, or forage for food in the city, or stand through the hours-long prayer services - his granny was devout. He grew up at will, mostly out of doors, imitating his canine friends rather than grown-ups in whom he had, so far, no interest whatsoever.

4

Occasionally his granny would take him to church. Sometimes it was a Sunday, sometimes it was a weekday, he regarded these visits the same as the routine forays into the city for food. It was always warm and dark in the big, red-brick cathedral, and while she went on her rounds, kissing the icons in turn, he would hang about the candle booth where he invariably received heaps of candies, cookies, and poppy-seed rolls. Having observed the ritual and bowed to everyone, his granny would retrieve him from the booth and lead him to the "children's" icons - to Artemy Verkolsky, killed by lightning as a boy, and Ioann and Iakov of Manyuzh. Each time someone standing nearby would tell him their stories: he knew by heart how the blessed Artemy, "terrified by the miraculous appearance of the Divine power in the form of great thunder and lightening had breathed his last", and how the five-year-old Ioann, playing tipcat, had accidentally hit his brother with the bat and killed him, and then, fearing his mother's wrath, had hidden inside the stove where he suffocated from the smoke. He listened to the old women, darting impatient glances and searching for a dark corner in which to hide and quietly nibble the gifts received at the candle booth. His constant watchfulness and complete indifference to the stories were taken for attentiveness. The women would go on and on about little children while he, having given the icons a quick peck, would melt into the shadows and, eyes shining from the semi-darkness of a side-chapel, silently study this far from ordinary crowd of people. Tucked away, inconspicuous, tiny, like a little frog under a snag, he could hear the roar of the deacon, the cadence of the liturgy. Thanks to his fresh young mind, he easily memorized the incomprehensible words without even trying to grasp their meaning.

When his granny brought him to the priest for confession, he stood there dutifully, dutifully placed his head under the stole, dutifully went to communion, he dauntlessly did all that was expected of him. His granny's friends patted him tenderly on the head and brought him a goblet of warm watered wine, taking his preternatural self-possession for a humility rare among children.

Having kissed the cross at the end of the service, many went around the church fence to the edge of the river. The church stood, as was the custom, on a high wind-swept knoll from which the city was supposed to have emanated. This district - with its wooden marketplace, fishermen's wharf, workshops, its prerevolutionary buildings and assembly halls, now cut up into labyrinthine communal apartments - was known as the Hill, or Slavonic Hill, or simply Slavno. And in Stargorod, there were no ruffians cockier and more dangerous than the young inhabitants of this proletarianly overpopulated district unburdened by superfluous property. They were called "Slavno folks" or simply "slavnos".

From the high hill one could see the city, the kremlin with its gap-toothed wall, and the two monasteries jutting out on both banks of the river - sovereigns and guardians of the water ways since long ago. Now they were occupied by Vocational School No.6 and the local polytechnic.

Once upon a time, a monastery, founded by Saint Andronicus "of the Romans", had stood on top of the hill. The ancient cells had crumbled, and on that holy place the city Duma had built a red-brick five-domed giant which survived the post-revolutionary destruction and was the only one of Stargorod's churches to have gone on celebrating the Lord. On the riverbank, beneath the church, on a small spit of land unlapped by water, a sacred stone lay: large, smooth, roundish, blue-green with occasional flecks of red, clearly not of local origin. It resembled neither the native porous red limestone used to build the old churches and kremlin towers, nor the morainal boulders from the fields used for house foundations and also to make steam in the Russian bath houses and to pave the old carriage ways.

The stone was strange, miraculous and holy. Legend had it that the monk Andronicus had sailed the stone all the way from Rome, standing on it, "as if on a wooden raft". And the stone lay on the shore "where it struck", just barely above the level of the water, it did not become covered with moss, or mermaid's green weed-hair, and did not grow into the ground, but seemed to rest firmly and solidly upon it.

It was to this stone that the procession of old women would pick their way after the service. They would descend by a steep, tumble-down stairway, holding onto the railing, resting on the benches on the landings. Under the new regime, the stone was not granted a fence, but despite all the prohibitions, the women went on sticking tapers into the loose soil and lighting them; at Easter they left painted eggs, strewed the ground with crosses of rice and millet, soon eaten by city sparrows.

His granny would cross herself, kneel down and kiss the stone, she made Daniel repeat the ritual after her. Then came the usual exchange of rhetorical phrases: "Saint Andronicus saw Rome's lawlessness and set sail in this marvellous way for our Orthodox land." "That is so true, my dear, who has ever seen such beauty? In church yesterday, the father's words, I tell you, they warmed the cockles of my heart. I cried so, for joy: I stood there, and the tears just rolled down my cheeks, but in my soul I felt so pure, so pure..." "Yes, our father, he is so kind..."

Daniel would stand in silence, stare at the fast-flowing river, and not even listen to them. The stone effused the tart, sweetish smell of new-mown hay, cool river vapors rose from the water. His downcast gaze, his stern concentrated silence, the fruit of his eternal self-possession, filled the supplicants with tenderness, and served as his granny's greatest reward.

His self-possession was indeed unchildlike: he never cried, for instance, no matter how badly he hurt himself, he didn't fight much with other boys, he endured their insolence and rudeness, he never ran away when scolded but just stood there staring sullenly at his feet. Only once, when they called his mother names, he attacked a strapping six-year-old, jumped on his back and sank his teeth right into his nape. The older boys pulled them apart, but the rumor went around that he was "rabid", and from then on nobody dared fool with him.

...Five-and-a-half years old, one day in July, he had stayed outside playing until late, grown hungry and gone home. His granny was lying on the floor in the kitchen, her legs twisted in an unnatural way. A corner of the kitchen table, his granny's temple and the linoleum around her head were caked with blood. A rag was lying there next to a bucket of water: his granny had been washing the floor and slipped and hit her temple against the sharp corner. Her head was thrown back, her frozen stare fixed on some point above, on the peeling wallpaper.

He circled the body, touched a cold fingernail, pressed one cheek, froze for an instant, sniffing, but there was no smell, he listened and, not hearing the sound of breathing, stepped over her head, took a hunk of bread from the table and a liter-jar of fresh milk, climbed onto the couch, drank the milk and ate the bread. After that he began to examine the dead woman, silently studying her face, her hands, her dirty bare feet, the black cracks on her soles. Then he switched his gaze to the wall, to the same patch of wallpaper the old woman scrutinized with glassy eyes. He sat there like that, without turning off the light, without moving, till morning.

The 100-watt bulb in the kitchen grew hotter as darkness fell, it filled everything with warmth and bright unblinking light. He could no longer make out the pattern on the wallpaper; like a blind man, he sensed the remote presence of objects only by the skin of his face. The closed kitchen door cut him off from the rest of the house, yet gave him peace, and the dead body seemed natural, as natural as a stool or an iron on a cold stove.

He was found like this the next morning by a neighbor who used to buy milk from his granny: he was sitting on the couch in the kitchen alongside the stiff old woman, huddled but evidently not frightened, and invariably sucking his thumb. His eyes, watering and swollen from sleeplessness, had not lost their brilliance. The neighbor came in and tiptoed across the patchwork rug. The little boy probably did not hear her steps but he felt the air move and, like a small animal, started in fright. From the trembling fingers stroking his hair and face, he sensed the mute woman's horror, turned his head towards her and said: "My granny died." Then he took his thumb out of his mouth, sanked down onto the couch and fell fast asleep.

The villagers would recall the incident, casting sidelong looks at the house Zoika sold for a song. Their concern did not bother Daniel: he moved back to the city to live.