PU-239 and Other Russian Fantasies (19 page)

“Yes sir?”

“Vasily Yegorevich, everything’s agreed. The bus will arrive shortly. You have my word and the word of the government of the Russian Federation.”

The line goes dead. They remain in their chairs. The heat of the day still smells like blood. Someone cries out in pain in the other room, probably on television. Vasya and Ira don’t look at each other. Yet the muscles around Vasya’s heart loosen their grip. He becomes aware of
possibilities and potentialities. Is it a breeze that briefly tingles his scalp?

Outside their window an engine mutters and tires gently tear at the asphalt. Trying to hide his anticipation, Vasya slowly rises from the table and steps to the window. A pale yellow bus is parked in front of the building. It’s an army bus, but relatively clean and undented. Its door opens and two soldiers in camouflage uniforms and ski masks step from it, waving their rifles ahead of them as if they are clearing cobwebs. They sweep the guns up and down the scorched, noiseless street. One of the soldiers makes a hand signal and another half dozen, hoisting rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, exit the bus. A soldier looks up at Vasya, only his eyes visible. Vasya nods in acknowledgment. Two armored personnel carriers pull behind the bus. The soldiers pile in and the vehicles take off.

Ira noiselessly joins Vasya at the window.

He turns. The heat of the sun, intensified by the surrounding flatlands, reflected by the concrete landscape, and trapped in the confines of the kitchen, is nothing compared to the warmth of Ira’s smile.

She squeezes his arm and presses against his side. “You’re wonderful,” she says.

Vasya sinks his face into her hair, aware only of its tickle. After several long moments he pulls away.

“Let’s hurry,” he whispers hoarsely. “Let’s not even pack. We don’t have a minute to lose.”

Salt

—Robert Cottrell,
New York Review of Books

 

In a certain city lived a certain merchant with three sons: the first was Fyodor, the second Vassily, and the third Ivan. The merchant gave his first two sons great ships with which to seek their fortunes. The first son, Fyodor, went off to the forests of the north and brought back lumber that the city’s wealthy used to build fine homes and palaces, and they paid him handsomely. The second son, Vassily, went off to the mountains of the south and brought back coal that the city’s multitudes used to heat their homes and shops, and they paid him handsomely as well.

The merchant didn’t expect much from his third son, Ivan, who was not quite right in the head, so he gave him a flimsy vessel made from rotten beams and planks.

With this ship Ivan sailed to the Thrice-Ten Lands, where he came upon a beautiful white mountain embraced by mist. He touched the mountain and brought his finger to his lips. The mountain was made entirely of salt, good Russian salt. Ivan ordered his men to load his ship with as much as it would carry, and they sailed until
they reached a distant kingdom. There he presented himself and a thimble of salt to the king, telling the king that it was good Russian salt, and that he would be pleased to sell him as much of it as he liked.

The king had never heard of salt. He sniffed it suspiciously and declared that it was nothing but white sand. He sent Ivan away. Puzzled, Ivan wandered through the palace until he reached the king’s kitchens, where he witnessed the cooks preparing a meal without the use of salt. When their backs were turned, Ivan opened the pots and tasted the food. It was so bland it was nearly inedible. He withdrew the thimble from his cloak and liberally sprinkled the salt into the pots.

Later that evening the king was served his dinner. At the very moment in which he placed the first morsel in his mouth, a fearful tremor rippled across his face. His queen, grand vizier, and counselors at his side became very still, unable to take a breath. He was a much loved king. As if under a sorcerer’s compulsion, the king slowly chewed the morsel. At last he swallowed it and contemplated the swallow and the effects upon his person.

“Delicious,” he murmured at last, taking pleasure in the way the word’s syllables caressed his tongue and the roof and sides of his mouth.

He consumed the remainder of his meal with a passionate intensity that his courtiers had never witnessed before. They shook their heads in wonder. The king summoned his cooks, who told him that they had prepared his food just as they had in the past and could not explain its change in taste. Then an assistant recalled having seen
Ivan loitering around the kitchen earlier that day. Ivan was brought to the king and freely confessed that he had added salt to the king’s food. “But salt, what is it?” the king asked.

“Sire,” Ivan replied, “salt is a rare substance collected in the tears of the Firebird on the morn of Michaelmas. A small quantity quickens the appetite, invigorates the palate, and excavates from each element of food its true and unalloyed flavor. Unsalted food is merely the shadow cast by real food. As the first grains of salted food touch the tip of the tongue, a man’s salivary glands contract in an exquisite spasm. Can you not feel the ache? The released liquor dissolves each morsel and molecule. In this coupling, the goodness inherent in the food is transferred to our bodies. Salt is the essential ingredient to our lifeblood, to our health, and to our good fortune. It comes from a faraway place, by great difficulty. I have an entire ship of it.”

The king took one last bite from his dish, closing his eyes to shut out the distractions of the court. When he finished, he said, “Then name your price.”

Ivan trembled at his own audacity. “An equal measure of gold, sire.”

The king clapped his hands. “Done,” he cried.

The transaction was completed before dawn. Throughout the night, as torches burned on the pier, the king’s men carried crates of gold ingots and doubloons to Ivan’s ship, to be weighed against similar crates filled with salt that were unloaded by Ivan’s men. In the garish, oily light of the lamps, Ivan stood alongside the king’s
grand vizier, who ensured the preciseness of the exchange. Dawn broke with Ivan’s ship low in the water. The king himself arrived to wish Ivan farewell.

 

The ship sailed for neither a long time nor a short time and was then becalmed on the desert sea. Below deck, sealed within the mossy saltwater damp, Ivan took the dampness into his lungs in shallow, pained breaths. The boards cried out as the ocean thudded against the ship’s hull. Rats skittered overhead, swishing their tails. Sightless in his unlit bunk, he asked himself, am I traveling in a ship, the idea of a ship, or the word for a ship?

Above the deck the righteous sun never moved; through the endless day it remained directly overhead. Ivan leaned over the rail. In the haze, no horizon was visible to separate the atmospheric realm from the watery one. The sea and sky melted into a single pale blue gauze that only barely hid what was behind it. The ship’s hull strained against the gauze, close to tearing through to the truth of things.

The gold seemed to swell in the heat, and the holds were close to bursting. Indeed, one of the cases had broken, letting loose a spill of ducats. For a long time Ivan squatted by the case and passed the gold from one hand to another, trying to feel the weight of its inner substance.

He had once looked upon the gold with pride, eager to show it to his father and brothers, but that pride had now dimmed to a memory. Upon inspection (he was constantly inspecting it, rummaging through the holds, ordering cases brought into the sunlight, tapping a spoon against the ingots), the gold appeared to have taken on a
strange, overbright luster, even an odor that was something like licorice. Yet it was steadfastly inert, stupid in its inertness.

Where resided the virtue in gold? It had little practical use, except for fashioning jewelry, which itself had no intrinsic value but only an arbitrary, assigned value based on ephemeral fashion. The metal had a symbolic use, of course, in trade, in which it took on a value for which men would labor, cheat, debase themselves, and even make war. But this value was also arbitrary, established by unspoken consensus or through some kind of mass hallucination.

Gold was minted into money. In trade men confused money with the items for which it paid, as if the former could somehow absorb the qualities of the latter, which could then be transported in their purses. Money was a
khitraya mekhanika,
a deceitful mechanism, invented by foreigners and Jews.

Wickedness roamed the world. Weathervanes perched atop church crosses, confounding the most profoundly spiritual with the most ludicrously prosaic. Clocks imprisoned time in symbolic walls of hours and minutes. Instrumental music mocked the godly harmonics of the human voice. Representational art depicted Our Savior with full-blooded lips, heaving breasts and sinewy muscles, a carnal being. By making Jesus human, the artists denied His divinity; by denying His divinity, they denied His actuality, making Him yet another symbol with an assigned value.

Ivan had gone through life believing that a great secret, composed of a vast number of small secrets, had been
kept from him and that only he, of all the world’s men, was the victim of this conspiracy. The secret had to do with what was real and what was not. For example, was the conventional sequence of the cardinal numbers—one, two, three, four, etc.—their natural order, or a humanly contrived one?

He saw that men earned their livelihoods through the manipulation of intangibles, mostly figures in ledgers and words in books. They talked to each other in a kind of code, about indentures, stock prices, and warrants. They performed transactions after which they announced themselves satisfied and walked away from the table with nothing added to their pockets. The conspirators knew that there was a falseness at the bottom of their dealings, but they would not concede it to Ivan.

Ivan thought he knew what the real world was: it was a
desyatina
of land, a
pud
of wheat, an
arshin
of fabric. You could break your teeth on the real world, but now, out on a sea as still as glass, he had come to wonder if the land, the wheat, and the fabric were symbols themselves, a chimerical overlay for another world that was even more real.

Ivan paced along the deck of the ship, where the sailors drank vodka and played chess. The men were using the various gold coins that had scattered from the storerooms not for stakes, but as game pieces. They refused to recognize the gold’s assigned worth. For them the coins had been transformed into the ranks of chivalry, another arbitrary designation. Ivan recalled that in his early-morning departure from the city, the king had stood at the edge of
the pier and stretched his arm in farewell. As he had done so, a wan smile had become visible, a watermark just beneath the surface of his face.

Ivan now ordered his men to reverse course, back to the king’s city. At once the wind picked up and the sails billowed and grew taut.

 

They soon reached their destination. Ivan docked his ship in a hidden lagoon and entered the city in disguise. But was this the same city from which he had departed? Its air was suffused with a strange, mellow glow. In his absence, the city’s streets had been paved, the homes that lined the streets had been enlarged and more elaborately ornamented, and the dress of the city’s inhabitants had become refined.

He stopped at an inn and ordered an expensive meal in its gay and bright dining room. The food arrived well salted, perfectly prepared. Ivan sourly noted that the cooks of this kingdom not only used his good Russian salt, but they used it in ways unknown to the cooks of his own land. At every table there were men and women eating and drinking their fill.

Ivan questioned the innkeeper.

“Has your dining hall always been so successful?”

“No sir, it has been so only since we introduced the rare spice salt to our dishes. Despite our high prices, every night we turn away patrons for lack of tables.”

“Are you the only innkeeper in the city?”

“No,” the innkeeper acknowledged. “The others are also using salt in their food.”

“But certainly if you prosper, it must be at their expense.”

“No, they too have few empty places in their halls.”

“How is that possible? How can there be an increased number of patrons dining out at increased cost? How do they afford their meals?”

The innkeeper shrugged. “When we first introduced salt into our cuisine, it was an immediate success, but we all had to work harder to afford it. The increased competition closed some unprofitable businesses; people were forced to change their way of working and doing business. In doing so we have become more prosperous. I’ve bought myself a small coach, which I had never before dreamed of possessing. And there at the next table is the coachmaker.”

“If you prosper and he prospers, then who suffers?”

The innkeeper smiled ruefully. “Not everyone can afford to eat salt, sir. There is poverty, more individual cases of poverty than we are accustomed to. But it is quite evident that our land, taken in its entirety, is much wealthier than before.”

“Has this kingdom made war on another and looted its riches?”

“No, we are at peace.”

“But,” Ivan asked, “if the wealth has not come from the purses of the poor, nor from the coffers of the vanquished, from where has it come? Perhaps you have cheated some innocent traveler?”

“We have made it ourselves, sir.”

“That is not possible,” Ivan replied. “Wealth is a fixed thing, declared to be equal to such-and-such amount of
gold. One man can win, rob, or earn another’s gold, but the sum of the gold held by the two men stays constant. That is simple physics.”