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Overview
Day after day the Russian asylum-seekers sit across from the interpreter and Peter—the Swiss officers who guard the gates to paradise—and tell of the atrocities they've suffered, or that they've invented, or heard from someone else. These stories of escape, war, and violence intermingle with the interpreter's own reading: a history of an ancient Persian war; letters sent to his son "Nebuchadnezzasaurus," ruler of a distant, imaginary childhood empire; and the diaries of a Russian singer who lived through Russia’s wars and revolutions in the early part of the twentieth century, and eventually saw the Soviet Union's dissolution.
Mikhail Shishkin's Maidenhair is an instant classic of Russian literature. It bravely takes on the eternal questions—of truth and fiction, of time and timelessness, of love and war, of Death and the Word—and is a movingly luminescent expression of the pain of life and its uncountable joys.
Mikhail Shishkin is one of Russia's most prominent and respected contemporary writers. When Maidenhair was published in 2005, it was awarded both the National Bestseller Prize and the Big Book Prize.
Marian Schwartz is a prize-winning translator of Russian. The winner of a Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Heldt Translation Prize, Schwartz has translated classic literary works by Nina Berberova, Yuri Olesha, and Mikhail Bulgakov.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781934824368 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Letter |
| Publication date: | 10/23/2012 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 506 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.10(d) |
About the Author
Marian Schwartz is a prize-winning translator of Russian. The winner of a Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Heldt Translation Prize, Schwartz has translated classic literary works by Nina Berberova, Yuri Olesha, and Mikhail Bulgakov.
Read an Excerpt
Maidenhair
By Mikhail Shishkin
OPEN LETTER
Copyright © 2007 Librairie Arthème FayardAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-934824-36-8
Chapter One
Darius and Parysatis had two sons, the elder Artaxerxes and the younger Cyrus.Interviews start at eight in the morning. Everyone's still sleepy, crumpled, and sullen—employees, interpreters, policemen, and refugees alike. Rather, they still need to become refugees. For now they're just GS. That's what these people are called here. Gesuchsteller.
He's brought in. First name. Last name. Date of birth. Thick lips. Pimply. Clearly older than sixteen.
Question: Briefly describe the reasons why you are requesting asylum in Switzerland.
Answer: I lived in an orphanage since I was ten. Our director raped me. I ran away. At the bus stop I met drivers taking trucks across the border. One took me out.
Question: Why didn't you go to the police and file a statement against your director?
Answer: They would have killed me.
Question: Who are "they"?
Answer: They're all in it together. Our director took me, another kid, and two girls, put us in a car, and drove us to a dacha. Not his dacha, I don't know whose. That's where they all got together, all the bosses, the police chief, too. They were drinking and made us drink, too. Then they put us in different rooms. A big dacha.
Question: Have you cited all the reasons why you are requesting asylum?
Answer: Yes.
Question: Describe your route. What country did you arrive from, and where did you cross the border of Switzerland?
Answer: I don't know. I was riding in a truck and they put boxes around me. They gave me two plastic bottles—one with water, the other for piss—and they only let me out at night. They dropped me off right here around the corner. I don't even know what the town's called. They told me where to go to turn myself in.
Question: Have you ever engaged in political or religious activity?
Answer: No.
Question: Have you ever been tried or investigated?
Answer: No.
Question: Have you ever sought asylum in other countries?
Answer: No.
Question: Do you have legal representation in Switzerland?
Answer: No.
Question: Do you consent to expert analysis to determine your age from your bone tissue?
Answer: What?
During breaks you can have coffee in the interpreters' room. This side looks out on a construction site. They're putting up a new building for a refugee intake center.
My white plastic cup keeps sparking right in my hands. In fact, the whole room is lit up by reflected sparks. A welder has set himself up right outside the window.
There's no one here. I can read quietly for ten minutes.
And so, Darius and Parysatis had two sons, the elder Artaxerxes and the younger Cyrus. When Darius was taken ill and felt the approach of death, he demanded both sons come to him. At the time the elder son was nearby, but Darius had sent for Cyrus to another province, over which he had been placed as satrap.
The pages of the book are f lashing in the reflected sparks, too. It hurts to read. After each f lash, the page goes dark.
You close your eyes and it penetrates your eyelids, too.
Peter peeks in the door. Herr Fischer. Master of fates. He winks: it's time. And a spark lights him up, too, like a camera f lash. That's how he'll be imprinted, with one squinting eye.
Question: Do you understand the interpreter?
Answer: Yes.
Question: Your last name?
Answer: ***.
Question: First name?
Answer: ***.
Question: How old are you?
Answer: Sixteen.
Question: Do you have a passport or other document attesting to your identity?
Answer: No.
Question: You must have a birth certificate. Where is it?
Answer: It burned up. Everything burned up. They set fire to our house.
Question: What is your father's name?
Answer: *** ***. He died a long time ago. I don't remember him at all.
Question: The cause of your father's death?
Answer: I don't know. He was sick a lot. He drank.
Question: Give me your mother's first name, last name, and maiden name.
Answer: ***. I don't know her maiden name. They killed her.
Question: Who killed your mother—when, and under what circumstances?
Answer: Chechens.
Question: When?
Answer: Just this summer, in August.
Question: On what date?
Answer: I don't remember exactly. The nineteenth, I think, or maybe the twentieth. I don't remember.
Question: How did they kill her?
Answer: They shot her.
Question: Name your last place of residence before your departure.
Answer: ***. It's a small village near Shali.
Question: Give me the exact address: street, house number.
Answer: There is no address there. There's just one street and our house. It's gone. They burned it down. And there's nothing left of the village, either.
Question: Do you have relatives in Russia? Brothers? Sisters?
Answer: I had a brother. Older. They killed him.
Question: Who killed your brother—when, and under what circumstances?
Answer: Chechens. At the same time. They were killed together.
Question: Do you have other relatives in Russia?
Answer: There's no one else left.
Question: Do you have relatives in third countries?
Answer: No.
Question: In Switzerland?
Answer: No.
Question: What is your nationality?
Answer: Russian.
Question: Confession?
Answer: What?
Question: Religion?
Answer: Yes.
Question: Orthodox?
Answer: Yes. I just didn't understand.
Question: Briefly describe the reasons why you are requesting asylum in Switzerland.
Answer: Chechens kept coming over and telling my brother to go into the mountains with them to fight the Russians. Otherwise they'd kill him. My mother hid him. That day I was coming home and I heard shouts through the open window. I hid in the bushes by the shed and saw a Chechen in our room hitting my brother with his rifle butt. There were a few of them there, and they all had submachine guns. I couldn't see my brother. He was lying on the floor. Then my mother lunged at them with a knife. The kitchen knife we use to peel potatoes. One of them shoved her up against the wall, put his AK to her head, and fired. Then they went out, poured a canister of gasoline over the house, and lit it. They stood around in a circle and watched it burn. My brother was still alive and I heard him screaming. I was afraid they'd see me and kill me, too.
Question: Don't stop. Tell us what happened then.
Answer: Then they left. And I sat there until dark. I didn't know what to do or where to go. Then I went to the Russian post on the road to Shali. I thought the soldiers would help me somehow. But they were afraid of everyone themselves and drove me away. I wanted to explain to them what happened, but they fired in the air to make me go away. Then I spent the night outside in a destroyed house. Then I started making my way to Russia. And from there to here. I don't want to live there.
Question: Have you cited all the reasons why you're requesting asylum?
Answer: Yes.
Question: Describe your route. What countries did you travel through and by what means of transport?
Answer: Different ones. Commuter trains and regular ones. Through Belarus, Poland, and Germany.
Question: Did you have money to buy tickets?
Answer: How could I? I just rode. Avoided the conductors. In Belarus they caught me and threw me off the train while it was moving. Good thing it was still going slowly and there was a slope. I fell well and didn't break anything. I just tore the skin on my leg on some broken glass. Right here. I spent the night in the train station and some woman gave me a band-aid.
Question: What documents did you present upon crossing borders?
Answer: None. I walked at night.
Question: Where and how did you cross the border of Switzerland?
Answer: Here, in, what's it ...
Question: Kreuzlingen.
Answer: Yes. I just walked past the police. They only check cars.
Question: What funds did you use to support yourself ?
Answer: None.
Question: What does that mean? You stole?
Answer: Different ways. Sometimes yes. What was I supposed to do? I get hungry.
Question: Have you ever engaged in political or religious activity?
Answer: No.
Question: Have you ever been tried or investigated?
Answer: No.
Question: Have you ever sought asylum in other countries?
Answer: No.
Question: Do you have legal representation in Switzerland?
Answer: No.
No one says anything while the printer is printing out the interrogation transcript.
The guy picks at his dirty black nails. His jacket and filthy jeans stink of tobacco and piss.
Leaning back and rocking on his chair, Peter looks out the window. The birds are chasing down a plane.
I draw crosses and squares on a pad, divide them into triangles with diagonal lines, and fill them in to create relief.
There are photographs on the walls around us—the master of fates is crazy about fishing. Here he is in Alaska holding a big old fish by the gills, and over there it's something Caribbean with a big hook poking out of its huge gullet.
Over my head is a map of the world. All stuck with pins with multicolored heads. Black ones are stuck into Africa, yellow ones poke out of Asia. The white heads are the Balkans, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Russia, and the Caucasus. After this interview one more pin will be added.
Acupuncture.
The printer falls silent and blinks red. It's out of paper.
My good Nebuchadnezzasaurus!
You have already received my hasty note with my promise of details to come. Here they are.
After a day spent in a place with bars on the windows, I came home. I ate macaroni. I read your letter, which made me so happy. I began looking out the window. The wind was driving the twilight. The rain fell and fell. A red umbrella lay on the lawn, like a slit in the grass pelt.
But I don't want to get ahead of myself.
It is not every day, truly, that the postman spoils us with missives from foreign lands! Especially one like this! Amid the bills and ads—unexpected joy. Your letter. In which you describe in detail your Nebuchadnezzasaurus realm, its glorious geographic past, the ebbs and f lows of its history, the ways of its flora, the habits of its fauna, its volcanoes, laws, and catapults, and the cannibalistic inclinations of its populace. It turns out, you even have both vampires and draculas! And so, this means, you are emperorizing. I am flattered.
True, your writing abounds in grammatical errors, but really, what does that matter? You can learn to correct your mistakes, but you may never send me a missive like this again. Emperors grow up so quickly and forget about their empires.
I cannot get my fill of the map you included of your island homeland, the painstaking labor of your inspired imperial cartographers. And you know, I just may pin it up here on the wall. I'll look at it and try to guess where you are there right now, among those mountains, deserts, lakes, felt-tip bushes, and capitals. What have you been up to? Have you already moved from your summer residence to your Autumn Palace? Or are you already asleep? Your unsinkable navy guards your sleep. There go the triremes and submarines in file around your island.
What a glorious name for a benevolent sovereign! And in multicolored letters! I even have a few guesses as to where you got the idea, but I will keep them to myself.
In your missive, you ask me to inform you about our distant power, which is as yet unknown to your geographers and explorers. How could I fail to answer your question!
What shall I tell you about our empire? It is promised, hospitable, skyscrapered. You can gallop for three years without galloping all the way across. For number of mosquitoes per capita during the sleepless hours, it has no equal. For fun, the squirrels run along my fence.
Our map abounds in white patches when snow falls. The borders are so far away no one even knows what the empire borders on: some say the horizon; according to other sources, the final cadenza of the angels' trumpets. We know for a fact that it is located somewhere to the north of the Hellenes, along the coastline of the ocean of air where our unsinkable cloud fleet sails in file.
There is still flora, but all that's left of the fauna are the tops of those trees that resemble schools of fry. The wind frightens them.
The flag is a chameleon, every law has a loophole, and I personally have no knowledge of any volcanoes.
The main question that has occupied imperial minds for more than a generation is this: Who are we and why are we here? The answer to it, for all the apparent obviousness, is muddled: in profile, Hyperboreans; en face, Sarmatians—in short, either Orochs or Tungus. And each is a fiddle. I mean riddle.
The beliefs are primitive but not without a certain poeticism. Some are convinced that the world is an enormous elk cow whose fur is the forest, the parasites in its fur are the taiga beasts, and the insects hovering around it are the birds. Such is the universe's mistress. When the elk cow rubs up against a tree, everything living dies.
In short, in this empire, which someone has deemed the best in the world, your humble servant—do you care if I'm not a chief?—well, I'm no chief. How can I explain to you, my good Nebuchadnezzasaurus, what we do here? All right, let me try this. After all, even these fry out the window, who form a school and have no inkling that it's just the wind, are convinced that someone is waiting for each of them, remembers them, knows their face—every last vein and freckle. And there's no convincing them otherwise. And here each of the celestial beasts pushes forward, two by two: blunderers and glowerers, truthseekers and householders, lefties and righties, mobsters and taxidermists. And no one understands anyone. And so I serve. An interpreter in the chancellery for refugees in the defense ministry of paradise.
And each person wants to explain something. He hopes they'll hear him out. But here we are with Peter. I'm interpreting the questions and answers, and Peter is taking notes and nodding, as if to say, Of course I believe you. He doesn't believe anyone. Some woman comes and says, "I'm a simple shepherdess, a foundling, I don't know my parents, I was raised by an ordinary goatherd, poor Drias." And so the hoodwinking begins. The trees are in fruit; the plains in grain; there are willows on hills, herds in meadows, and everywhere the crickets' gentle chirp and the sweet scent of fruit. Pirates lie in wait, the enemy at the gates. Well-groomed nails blaze up in the lighter's f lame. "After all, I grew up in the country and never so much as heard the word 'love.' I pictured her IUD looking something like a couch spring. Oh, my Daphnis! They separated us, ill-starred that we were! It was one showdown after another. First the Tyre gang attacks, then the Methymna hosts insist on their rights. Daphnis accompanied me like a guard when I went to see clients. A hairstyle affects how your day goes—and your life as a result. But do you see what they did to my teeth? My teeth weren't all that great to begin with. But that's from my mama. She used to tell me how she would f lake plaster off the stove when she was a child and eat it. She wasn't getting enough calcium. And when I was carrying Yanochka, I'd walk off with the teachers' chalk at the institute and gnaw on it. Love is like the moon: if it's not waxing, it's waning, but it's the same as the last time, always the same." Peter: "That's it?" She: "That's it." "Well then, madam," he proposes, "your fingerprints." "What for?" She's dumbfounded. "You've been tracked down in our imperial-wide card file." And he knees her up the ass. But she's already shouting from the elevator, "You aren't human beings; you're still cold clay. They've sculpted you but they haven't breathed a soul into you!"
Whereas another couldn't string two words together properly at all. And his diction was like a water faucet's. I agonize, trying to sort out what he's gushing about, while Peter, still at his desk, is laying out pencils and toothpicks in a row, as if on parade, as if he were the desk marshal reviewing a parade. We're on the clock. No one is in any hurry. Peter likes order. And this GS is muttering something about open sesame and shouting for someone to get the door. He's babbling about white circles on gates, then red ones. He starts assuring us that he was sitting by himself in the wineskin, not touching anyone, not bothering anyone, but he got the boiling oil treatment. "There," he shouts, "you see? Is that really right? Boiling oil on a live person?" But all that's necessary to refuse the rogue is to find discrepancies in his statements. Peter gets a little book off his caseload shelf and things start moving. "Tell me, dear man, how many kilometers from your Bagdadovka to the capitals? What is the piaster's rate of exchange against the dollar? What national holidays are celebrated in the country that abandoned you besides the Immaculate Conception and the first snowman? What color are the streetcars and wineskins? And how much is a Borodinsky loaf?"
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Maidenhair by Mikhail Shishkin Copyright © 2007 by Librairie Arthème Fayard . Excerpted by permission of OPEN LETTER. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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