Taking Names and Telling Tales

The little village of Klyuchi settled on the shores of the Pustoshka River in the late nineteenth century. The soil wasn’t the richest in those parts, but the vegetable plots never failed, bringing forth potatoes, turnips, carrots, and flax like clockwork, and the cows had plenty of pasture in the flood-meadows alongside the river. The womenfolk bore children, spun, milked the cows, churned butter, and wove unusually lovely striped floor mats that were made nowhere else. The menfolk went to the nearest town for seasonal work – hard workers they were and skilled in the carpenter’s craft. So the village lived on and knew no hardship.

The revolution and the war wiped out almost all the men, and the collective farm destroyed the private farming. In the late twentieth century, the collective farm fell apart too, laying bare more misfortune and wrongdoing than even the revolution had, because people were now left without even the paltry, albeit regular, wages they’d had before. Only thirty-six homes still stood in Klyuchi, compared to four hundred at the start of the last century.

The huts were no less well made than they’d ever been, crafted from local larch-wood, but time had shown no mercy to them either. They went visibly lopsided, and the roofs decayed, and the glass cracked in the windows, which had gone all askew too, so they looked more like diamonds than rectangles.

In the very center of the village was the home of Natalya Mitrofanova – a sturdy hut with windows ornately trimmed with lacey wooden casings, and a brick chimney that puffed out white smoke in winter. Stesha, Natalya’s sleek cow, would be mooing in the barn while two dozen chickens roamed the yard and a piglet, pink with black spots, oinked away in her little shed. Natalya was retired but still a strong old thing who managed all on her own, hiring folk
only to split the firewood or mow the hay.

But Tolya Kryuchkov lived on the far fringes of Klyuchi, close to what had been the collective farm’s granary. He was of an age with Natalya, but his hut had settled into the ground, the roof was mottled, with patches of tar paper showing, and the only other living thing it sheltered was a villainous-looking black cat.

Tolya was maimed, missing fingers on his left hand, but he’d fixed it so he could do simple jobs, helping himself out with a shoulder here, an elbow there. His pension was beggarly, yet he wouldn’t hire on with Natalya, because their families had been at odds from way back. The Mitrofanovs had been riffraff and hard drinkers but came up in the world during the revolution, when they rampaged through the master’s house and lands, looted churches, hollered at rallies, and herded their fellow villagers into the collective farm, sensing that for them there was a living to be made there while doing nothing but yelling themselves hoarse and being generally despicable.

The Kruchkovs, though, were Old Believers, people of the land. They worked nonstop and prayed, kept strictly to the old ways, and never bowed to the new authorities. They flat out refused to join the collective farm and steered clear of the rallies. And for that, they paid the price.

Vaska Mitrofanov, Natalya’s grandfather, didn’t even bother to put anything in writing. He just made a verbal report that this spawn of the illicitly wealthy peasantry, these priest-loving Old Believers, these stubborn individualists were bad-mouthing Soviet power and whatever they were plotting, it wasn’t good. That was all it took. Tolya’s grandfather was shot on the spot, without trial, but his father was tried and transported to the prison camp at Ustvymlag, where he felled timber right up until the war began. He left for the front straightaway, as soon as his release papers arrived, but he never came back. Informed on by a member of military intelligence, he was shot as a traitor, because he was forever praying to God and wouldn’t shave his beard.

The Kryuchkovs’ home was commandeered for “the needs of the collective farm” (it became the head office), and to this very day, whenever Tolya walks by it, he looks away and clenches his right hand, his five-fingered hand, so tightly that the fist turns red. Tolya’s mother, along with Tolya and his sisters were taken in by distant kinfolk who themselves were hard up but had a crust of bread to share and a roof to put over their heads.

When Tolya’s mother died, he decided to return to his native village, so as not to be a burden on his kin. Klyuchi had had a hard time getting on its feet after the war, so broken-backed and hungry it was. It howled aloud, a chorus of woe, yet it slowly but steadily came back to life. And Tolya made his home in an abandoned hut and scraped along as best he could. He was taken on as a tractor driver in no time, though, for all that he was just a little squirt who could hardly clamber up onto the running board.

Natalya’s Grandpa Vasily, being a Party man, had a military exemption, meaning that the front had to make do without him. But her father quickly figured out where he could get by while also indulging the spite he’d been born with. So he signed up with the NKVD, where he got lots of blood on his hands – and not enemy blood, either.

Natalya, her mother, grandmother, and younger brothers were going through hard times too. But she’d been endowed with her grandfather’s knack of knowing who to cozy up to if she wanted to live the high life, and that entailed joining the Komsomol and, in due time, the Party. Where she was everyone’s worst nightmare. She’d call people onto the carpet for tiny offenses, she’d tell them off, she’d talk menacingly about knowing where the bodies were buried. Worse, she wasn’t squeamish about tattling to the appropriate quarters on who’d taken the farm’s milk home for a sick child, who’d picked up frozen potatoes from the farm fields, who hadn’t shown up for the mowing, claiming to be ill, who was brewing moonshine... The long and short of it was that they’d all done something they needed to confess to the authorities, and that might earn them a trip – a trip far, far away.

Natalya probably didn’t even know that her grandfather had hounded the Kryuchkov family to hell and back, but she was wary of Tolya, sensing that he harbored a secret grudge, some secret malice, toward her. Still, worse luck for her, she liked him, a whole lot. And why not, seeing as how nicely he’d filled out. No longer the same skinny little boy, all sharp angles, he was broad in the shoulder now, with strong hands and a ramrod-straight back. His eyes were grey, his lashes thick, his gaze bold and defiant. She’d try it on with him now and then – let’s go dancing, she’d say, or to a movie at the club, but he’d just shrug and never say a word. Natalya wasn’t the timid sort, though. She knew how to have her way, and she wasn’t one to stand on ceremony with the boys. So she went for it, getting ahold of Tolya one time in the hay barn, breathing moonshine fumes into his face, and telling him, straight out, if you don’t want to be mine, you’ll be sorry... But he pushed her away and tacked on a rude name for good measure.

Natalya bit her lip, and in no time at all, a letter – anonymous of course, but written in a round hand the authorities recognized – took flight. “I hereby bring to your attention,” it said, “that Kryuchkov, Anatoly, is a parasite on society, steals wood from the logging site, works illegally on the side, and has fallen into moral decay.”

The first thing they did was drag Tolya before the district committee, where it turned out that he wasn’t one of them at all. He wasn’t even in the Komsomol. They laid into him, but he would have none of it, so Natalya poured more oil on the fire, and they sentenced him, without rhyme or reason, to five years. Give them the man and they’ll make the case, as people used to say.

Tolya served out his time, then he wandered the country, saved his money, and came back home to Klyuchi, though the Klyuchi he’d known was all but gone. He came back missing fingers. The penal colony was no health resort, for sure, but on top of that he was sick, a sick man through and through. And his house was all slanted. Natalya, meanwhile, was in clover, living on her pension, and it was a good one, too. She hadn’t quit writing denunciations, sending up red flags, you might say, to the newspaper or to the prosecutor’s office, but in times like these, who was going to listen to an old pensioner-lady? Still, she was scared of writing anything about Tolya Kryuchkov.

And that’s how they live to this day, pretty much eyeball to eyeball, as it were. Natalya’s afraid of Tolya, because heaven help her if he were to come and burn her house down in revenge, like they used to in the old days. But Tolya never says a word, though he wonders to himself how the earth can bear the weight of people like that. He has granted forgiveness for his mutilated life, but for what happened to his grandfather, and his father and mother – that he will never forgive.