125 RUS

Chapter 3

C – City of Vladivostok

Vladivostok (founded in 1860) is a city and port in the Far East of Russia, the administrative center of Primorsky Krai, the final destination of the Trans-Siberian Railway. It is located on the coast of the Sea of Japan on the Muravyov-Amursky Peninsula.

(Source: telephone directory)

…The salt on my cheeks, the wind in the disheveled blackness of my hair, the ultramarine disease corrodes my eyes to the very bottom, to the core of the eyeball, and I enjoy every sigh, every slow glance, every step up and down, through countless staircases, climbs and descents of this city. A Panoramic view of the Golden Horn Bay from Eagle’s Nest Hill – I have never seen in my life such beauty before. From a great height, you contemplate the majestic bridges, and the sea surrounding the city, or, conversely, the city that surrounds the sea. Little bit more, and you can spread wings (or gills – they have the chance to be drawn around the neck because of the tropical humidity), drive off mountainous, angular land, steep asphalt curls, winding streets and fly forward, up high, to all four corners of the earth, because the ocean extends only here in all directions. Not warm turquoise, covered in white sand, but a real ocean, wild and untamed, thick, iodous and calcareous, spitting out the curls of seaweeds, which the coastal wind gathers into balls like a tumbleweed.

Military ships are always proudly alert with a sullen look facing the distant shores, ready to face an enemy at any time. They defend our lands in the East. In the East, the sun rises – appearing from the ocean abyss like a red-hot five-rouble coin, a gold medallion, a fireball. Own the East («Vladey-Vostokom’)! A cannon shot is strictly on schedule every midday; military and merchant ships are large and small, different ships being on a raid; Vladivostok was a closed city from 1953 till 1991, only USSR citizens could live there and visit it.

From time immemorial, Vladivostok is called «Haishenwey» in Chinese which means the city at Cape of Trepang or Trepang Bay. Since ancient times there is a legend about the blessed blue trepang that inhabits these waters (people call it sometimes ’sea cucumber’). The Japanese were less poetic – during the Meiji period (1868—1912) they tagged Vladivostok existed in those times Uradzio which meant the salty bay.

I stopped at a hotel near the Sport Embankment, in a room with the Amur Bay view. Ninety percent of the guests are either Chinese, Japanese or Korean. There is a corner with a microwave and a large thermos on nearly every floor as an extra convenience: So, to save money, you don’t need to have a meal at a restaurant every day. When I went down to brew a cup of freeze-dried noodles, a Japanese said to me, «Konnichiwa»⁸, which I answered back with formal and polite bow. The language barrier, which in my case becomes a barrier in the literal sense, because my mouth has not uttered a sound for all my life, has not allowed to get acquainted with Asians. Instead, I made friends with a local barman named Sergei. He is about my age, working shifts on the ground floor, where a porcelain white cat flaunts itself on a bar counter, screwing up its eyes and squeezing a fake bottle of Asahi with its paw – Seryoga calls it a «beer kitten’. My communication with the barman began, as expected, from a sheet of paper on which I wrote the name of the desired drink, and then he smoothly flowed into his story about the latest news in the city at Cape of Trepang, as well as endless monologues about cars. Practically everyone here has Japanese cars with a right-hand drive, most of them are white. This combination of sparkling white cars, marine, and blue sky, coupled with tightly whitened snow-white clouds, seems very harmonious. So, walking along the Ocean Avenue you suddenly realize that the traffic jam on the road is moving only in two directions: to the sea or in the sky. Well, I fancy both directions, which means that this is my city. And I shouldn’t have to waste time in getting my own car (a lifelong dream is finally taking shape).

To the unpleasant: the adventures of my such and such washed belongings did not end. They continue, but, alas, already without me here. As I accidentally took someone else’s suitcase, which was an absolute copy of mine. As soon as I began unzipping such an unusually pliable zip, I already felt something was wrong, but when I found the knots and skeins of leather and jeans items of microscopic size inside, I realized that the luggage was my curse during this journey.

Nevertheless, I’m writing a diary, the paper is patient. I will say this. I won’t be doing anything since I can’t contact the airport and share my troubles. Being a mute person, it is physically impossible, and I have no intention to go back to Artem and the airport.

In this identical suitcase, there was something quite intriguing, in particular – a voice recorder with recordings of people. As far as I could tell, these are patient’s conversations (pleasant voice, an interesting manner of pronouncing words, but sometimes like chewing words) with a psychotherapist. As it can be concluded from the answers of the girl, which resemble just a stream of consciousness, that the doctor uses hypnosis as one of the methods of treatment. I write a personal diary, but the paper is patient, so such a fugitive as your humble servant, is going to listen to all sessions with unconcealed curiosity and write them down in his all-merciful patient notepad: because some of the records I had already listened to are of great value for my modest travel essays. Perhaps it should be illustrated with an example,

«What does Vladivostok mean to you? Why do you speak of it as the only native element?

«There is nothing, there never was anything, never no. Oh, hell, it’s blowing my mind! It’s no good. Lord, why are the words so flat? They are lifeless, they do not have a milliliter of water, and wherever there is water, there is life. When Mira asked me as a joke what kind of dream I had as the most erotic, I answered that the dream was me being a late teen-ager, in the late afternoon, where my friend and I kept drowning each other in the lake with water-lilies like languid flowers along the banks, and one of us happened to be put under water now and then. Damn it, and there was also a time when it grew dark, my parents went out for a visit, I couldn’t stop crying when night came to Vladivostok. And there was an episode at school. I was sharing a desk with a guy who, yes. I sat next to him and drew pictures in a notebook: I drew myself without a face, suddenly, behind my back there was an indestructible army of fish, and my shoes were stuck with seaweed.

And there was another episode, my brother… Oh damn, and this is making my head hurt – Gods, give me the strength to write a story about this! – my brother is in a pale yellow cream shirt, with hair inherited from me and my father – straight, dark, laid on one side – I met him in a dream

at the square of his native town, the town of mines and the airport. The brother raised his hand and said, «I don’t believe we’ve met!» Oh yes, my brother lives under the seabed, he had always lived somewhere under the bitter sea, in Podmorie (under the sea).

Mira and I drove around Podmorie, and her mobile phone slipped out of a crumpled pocket and fell under the sea for fish to have fun. I’ve never been scared to drown. I preferred blue, light blue, emerald, green in the draperies – everything to satisfy the lords of the depths, the guards of musky seas… More downstream the memory: mother and father were standing on the pier near the huge museum cast-iron and salty anchors. Mira was next to me, I saluted to her, pulled out a huge shell, and put it to my ear. Mira looked with her slanting little eyes (eyes full of water, eyes full of life), «What can you hear over there, inside the shell?» I hear the music of a drowned piano, its keys are drunk, they are wooden and swelled, everything gets drunk from the water… Have you ever seen how the ship goes? She sways, all the ships are constantly drunk, all the drunken ships walk staggering – they need it to have hauteur, they face a long way to get back to the ground. While in the lake, for example, intoxication is different, as they are deep and dark, like graves with water lilies on top, in the evenings they are being poured with azure, heaven «farewell».

We will never choke, unless sobbing our hearts out. My stillborn brother lies at the seabed, all in pearls and mother-of-pearl, but I am thrown to the shore by a huge wave, which was called existence. This tsunami is called life, and I lie on the sand, blind with the light, and my shoes are really stuck with seaweed. And I gasp, and whisper, «Water, water, water.» Or as I still remember a little in German, «Wasser bitte gib mich Wasser.»⁹

But life leaves me to die here, in the world under the sun and the moon. Once, fishermen will pack me in their weather-beaten nets so that I can’t scare their babies. They will take me to the heart of the water, and I will fall face down.»

I could hardly breath while I was putting it down. A number of images steadily drawn to something familiar, so very famous… And I remembered it! Hello, Arthur Rimbaud:

 
And from that time on I bathed in the Poem
Of the Sea, star-infused and churned into milk,
Devouring the green azures;
where, entranced in pallid flotsam,
A dreaming drowned man sometimes goes down.¹⁰
 

How could there be so much decadence? I’ve just talked about sparkling cars and almost forgot to say about alabaster-white gulls in open areas – so where did the drowned people with sea kale on shoe soles appear from? Why does Vladivostok seems so gloomy for a girl from the record tapes while I perceive this city as extremely life-affirming? I can’t connect the two perspectives together, the circle closes on some kind of muffled anthropological thoughts, that we all came out of the water, and Rimbaud, as an affectionate song on the radio, continues humming in my mind,

 
Foam of flowers rocked my driftings…¹¹
 

It is necessary to change the subject, and it would be better for me to wind down and write about heraldry. I have already mentioned a roaring tiger on the coat of arms. So, on March 16, 1883, Alexander III approved the coat of arms of Vladivostok, which showed the following: «On the green shield there is a golden tiger, rising on a silver rock, with scarlet eyes and tongue, in the free part to the left there is the coat of arms of the Primorsky Krai. The shield is decorated with a gold crown with three prongs, behind the shield there are two golden anchors, laid crosswise and tied up by St Andrew’s ribbon»¹². Over time, the coat of arms has undergone changes that are quite typical for the changing epochs. Thus, during Soviet times, a sickle and a hammer were added to the two Admiralty anchors, the Amur tiger and the mural crown, and the entire composition was twisted with guard ribbon. And the passion for minimalism prevailed at the beginning of the 21st century, and the tsar of the taiga remained alone, without anchors, towers and everything else. Thumbing through the highways atlas and a map of the Primorsky region, I find another funny detail: The bays are named after the ancient Greek heroes (in fact, they were named after the first ships moored here, which in turn were named as heroes of Homer’s poems). I have already counted three: Ulysses, Patroclus, Diomed. And on the Russian island, there is Ajax Bay, my namesake. Are there more successful coincidences?

My phone is always on, but during my staying in Vladivostok, no one has sent a message to me. Marina, of course, was offended, and my father doesn’t care how I live and where. And I live perfectly well. In these areas, you can not leave bread on the table – it can get damp through the day, but you can breathe the sea, look at the sea and be proud of a small part of the sea that bears your name.

The silence of the hotel room is broken by the sound of a bell signaling the arrival of the elevator to the floor. The Chinese are speaking in their own language. The neighbors have a TV on: Channels, of course, are Asian. I’ve read that there were quite large Japanese, Korean and Chinese communities in Vladivostok until the 30s of the 20th century. By 1939, all of them ceased to exist… But despite the signs with hieroglyphics, Chinese flea markets and architectural exercises such as pagodas, I could hardly call the city Asian. Someone noticed that Vladivostok is a cross between St. Petersburg, Odessa, San Francisco and Istanbul with an exceptional local flavor.

I turn on the recorder and get ready for a new trip to the Pacific coast, having changed the refill in a ballpoint pen and opened a clean page in a notepad.

 
«Why do you want to kill Mira?»
 

Chapter 4

D – Distant geographical names

I can be called Alexander, I can be Alexei, and maybe even Akim… Naturally, I’m not a Greek. Fortunately or unfortunately, but not a Greek. I didn’t give back a little paper with my usual name, but slightly corrected it, modified it a little bit. There are two heroes who participated in the siege of Troy – Ajax the Lesser, son of Oileus and Ajax the Great, son of Telamon. There are two bays on the Russian island, not one, as I thought before: Ajax the Lesser and Ajax the Great.

In Homer’s Iliad, both Ajaxes were often in arms together. The only difference was that the Lesser was not as strong as the Great. They both defended the ships, fighting for Patroclus’s body. Ajax the Lesser is peculiar, among other things, with all kinds of atrocities and misdemeanors, such as, for example, raping of Cassandra, violation of an oath, blasphemy. By the will of the great Olympians, Athena and Poseidon, Ajax was swallowed up by the sea. Not far from the cliffs of Capelfis, formidable Athena hit his ship with a thunderbolt, but the hero escaped, clinging onto Whirling Rocks. Poseidon killed him splitting the rock with his trident. The role of Athena was not so significant in the Odyssey: Poseidon drowned the ships, and threw Ajax into the sea, splitting the rock.

 
And so he would have fled his doom, albeit hated by Athene,
Had he not let a proud word fall in the fatal darkening of his heart.
He said that in the gods’ despite he had escaped the great gulf of the sea;
And Poseidon heard his loud boasting,
And presently caught up his trident into his strong hands,
And smote the rock Gyraean and cleft it in twain.
And the one part abode in his place, but the other fell into the sea,
The broken piece whereon Aias sat at the first, when his heart was darkened.¹³
 

On holiday, Marina gave me a silver fork with a tiny handle engraved with open-work letters, «I’ll save Ajax from Poseidon’s trident». Looks like when I’m on the Russian island and find myself on my name-bearing bay, I’ll have to stick a fork into Poseidon’s eye before he sticks a trident in my ferry. Although I did not anger the sea deities. Moreover, I changed my place of residence. Now I live practically possessed by them, where behind my window there is still nothing but the sea, and all roads and high-rise residential buildings are inconvenient at the level of lateral view and do not attract attention.

In time immemorial my damn father, studying the belongings of his late grandfather, found an entertaining book – Dictionary of Chinese toponyms in the territory of the Soviet Far East published in 1975 compiled by F. V. Soloviev. The introduction says that geographical names are a sick topic in the Far East, since they give food to endless disputes about the owners of these lands – Russia or China.

My damn father kept the dictionary as a true relic, not even allowing me to scan the pages. Arriving in Vladivostok, I solved a long-standing problem within a day: A barman Seryoga sent me the whole book by e-mail, and a couple of hours later, I left the copy center on Aleutskaya street, holding more than a hundred hot freshly printed sheets in a folder.

Now I will return to the penultimate paragraph and give an example. A barman’s friend suggested that we go to the «Turtles» on the weekend. «Where?» «On the Ambavozes,» said Sergei. Opening the precious dictionary, I found the following explanation:

Ambabosa (Turtle) is a lake on the northwest coast of the Ussuri Bay in Primorsky Krai. The name has Chinese origin, formed by the components: baths – the prince; ba – eight; on – the lake; tzu is a suffix. Vannaboztzy means Turtle Lake. Hydronym first appeared on the map in 187 spelled like Uvambaboza. By the end of the XIX century the first part of the name (Wamba) was reinterpreted into Amba meaning Tiger in Tungus-Manchu. Ambapoztzy means Tiger Lake.¹⁴

So turtles, after all? Or tigers? Anyway, «Vanbapoztzy», inconvenient for Russian-speaking citizens, had been gradually transformed into what my fellow said, «Ambavozy.» Though the dictionary gives a very strange interpretation – where it is eight princes or the prince of the eight turned into turtles?

However, the riddles did not end there. Two maids were overheard at the hotel: «It’s cold to swim on Shamora.» «You would rather go to BOMBovozy!» Formed from the two roots well known to the Russian ear, the name Bombovozy is easier to pronounce than Ambavoz, and sounds much more impressive than any Turtles. However, for young people, there is another pronunciation variant like «Bombiki» apart from Turtles, in particular for the females.

Waves are high enough on Ambavozy, as if after a strong storm but the water is warm. Quite near the bay, there are rows of holiday homes. Seryoga’s Dacha (a holiday home) is over there too. While he was arranging some kind of barbeque place in the courtyard together with his girlfriend, I went out to look around. The road went uphill, houses ended at the top and a forest started with a black wall of trees. I went upwards, keeping away from the allotments and closer to the forest, looking at the plum trees and kicking stones under my feet.

In the middle of holiday homes, a lousy stain of a huge burned-out house was rising which made you feel scary while passing it nearby. It stood on high metal stilts so that one could climb down to the very bottom of the structure. That’s what I did. Crawling on my knees through mugwort jungle among partially rotten stilts, I just hurt my hands with fragments of broken glasses. I kept running into the strangest items now and then: a broken comb with a scrap of someone’s hair, a rusty harmonica, twisted tapes of a light-struck film. Beside mugworts, there was also myriads of fairy-mushrooms. It was a culmination of Gothic horror, a miniature of the Castle of Otranto. When I got out of there, I walked around the burned house. The run wild imagination pictured what could be hidden behind the smudged windows and the elaborately carved shutters of the three-storey bulky thing.

The sun was going below the horizon, cuckoo tune was making you feel depressed, the sharpness of vision faded in the evening twilight. I came back to the path leading to the top of the hill, and climbing up, I settled on the edge of the forest sitting tailor-fashion and took out a voice recorder from my breast pocket. I saved for the long-awaited dessert the answer to the question, «Why do you want to kill Mira?» especially looking for a suitable environment. I was looking for something exciting to make blood turn to ice, the cuckoos kept singing, and the burned-out estate full of ghosts made you feel scared with its fragments of old combs. All right, let’s go…

Sometimes she might be called Mirabel or probably Miroslava, or even Mirra, with two rolling «r’s». But it’s easier for me to call her with four letters, which were pinned down in the past before our era, before Christ, on the parent’s car. It was called Mira Daihatsu, it was blue, with three doors and very small. This car was crashed in an accident. Being extremely short, Mira kept smacking me across the head with her short little hands when I was learning to drive. Patting me on the shoulder, challenged me, «Keep steering, my young pianist.» or, «Keep driving, my young pianist.»

She killed everyone who dared to offend me. Yes, yes, she just came and made at point blank. But I won’t tell you about this. Mira hates that I don’t eat, but I always have an answer, «How can you think of food recalling the siege of Leningrad?» Even Mira can’t argue with that.

She still does not confess what she is really after and believes that it’s too early for me to see corpses and blood. But I can still see it. When I put her contact lenses in special containers, through the transparency of the solution, I see the reflected faces of those whom Mira was likened to… When I wash off her flower dress from splashes of someone else’s blood… I am aware of everything. I know that she dyes her hair in red so that the blood of being killed by her is not so noticeable until Mira gets to the bathroom and find peace in the cold silence of the tile.

Once Mira gave me a Hohner harmonica when I was hopped up on blues. She bought this gift in Paris being together with Jean-Baptiste at that time. Mira was so angry that even slapped my face when I dropped the harmonica in a barrel of water at our dacha, it was on Amba…

I stopped the recording. I got up and walked away from the forest edge, trying to move as quickly as possible. Down the hill, skipping along.