“The children!” Aunt Lena said from somewhere under her fur.
Grandfather Grishko tossed a red stack at Daniil. He leafed through the crisp bills, half expecting them to crackle and burst into pyrotechnic stars.
“This is my life’s savings, Daniil,” his grandfather said. “I’ve been keeping it for hard times, and hard times have arrived. Take the money. Don’t ask me where I’ve been stashing it. Put it in for heating, bribe someone, anything.”
Daniil mustered a weak thank-you.
Uncle Timko held up his mangled block of wood. “Does this look like a spoon or a toothbrush?”
“Neither.”
“It’s supposed to be both.”
“You’re getting wood chips all over my sheets.”
Uncle Timko ignored him. “Spoon on one end, toothbrush on the other. A basic instrument of survival.”
Four hours later, they finished counting the bills. The sum of Grandfather Grishko’s savings, along with the money the other relatives had scrounged up, turned out to be a hefty 8,752 rubles and 59 kopecks.
Daniil calculated what 8,752 rubles and 59 kopecks could buy. He took the rabid inflation into account, recalled the prices he’d seen at the half-empty state store the week before. Daniil looked from the stacks of bills to the expectant eyes of his family.
“We’ve got enough here to buy one space heater,” he declared. He held up a finger to stop the dreamers in the room. “If I can find one.”
Daniil found another memo on his desk, this one addressed from Sergei Ivanovich:
TO FILL UNFILLABLE STRING-BEAN TRIANGULAR VOID, ENGINEER TRIANGULAR VEGETABLE. DUE FRIDAY.
Daniil rubbed his temples. An irresistible desire to stretch came over him. He wanted his body to fill the office, his arms and legs to stick out of the doors and windows. He wanted to leap and gambol where wild pearwood grew. His great parachute lungs would inflate, sucking up all the air on the planet.
The phone rang.
“Is that a Fudgy Cow on your desk?” Sergei Ivanovich stood in his office, on tiptoe, squinting again.
“Just the wrapper, Sergei Ivanovich.”
“I haven’t had one in months.”
The line filled with a heavy silence.
“I should get back to the triangular vegetable, Sergei Ivanovich.”
“You should.” Sergei Ivanovich kept the receiver pressed to his ear. “Daniil Blinov?”
“Yes, Sergei Ivanovich.”
“Was it good?”
“The candy? A little stale.”
Sergei Ivanovich let out a moan before catching himself. Daniil’s superior glanced at his own superior’s office, to find himself being observed as well. He hung up.
Daniil placed the wrapper in his drawer, beside the T-square and the drawings of the entire Cheburashka gang. He turned to the diagram lying on his desk: a tin can containing exactly seventeen black olives. Seventeen was the maximum capacity, provided the olives were a constant size. The ones in the middle were compacted into little cubes, with barely any space for brine. Good, thought Daniil. No one drinks the brine anyway.
The heater was set to a lavish High. Its amber power light flickered like a campfire. Fourteen figures huddled around the rattling tin box and took turns having the warm air tickle their faces. Some even disrobed down to their sweaters. A bottle of samogon appeared from its hiding place, as did a can of sprats. Daniil felt the warmth spread to his toes, to his chilliest spots. Aunt Lena took off her hood and Daniil noticed that her normally pallid cheeks had gained a lively red. Grandfather Grishko sat on a stool like a king, legs spread, chewing on a piece of vobla jerky he claimed predated the revolution.
A knock came at the door.
Everyone fell quiet. Daniil ignored it.
Another knock.
Aunt Lena poked Daniil’s arm.
Daniil took another swig of home brew, slid off his chair (which Uncle Timko immediately occupied), and opened the door.
Two tall men stood in the dark, narrow hallway before him, holding a coffin.
Daniil teetered where he stood. “Uh, hello.” His relatives crowded behind him. “If you’re here to collect me, I’m not ready yet.”
“We need access to your apartment, Citizen,” the man on the right said.
“Why?” Daniil asked.
The man on the left rolled his eyes at the man on the right. “God dammit, Petya, do we have to give an explanation at every landing?”
“An explanation would be nice,” Daniil said.
“The guy on ten croaked, and the stair landings aren’t wide enough for us to turn the coffin around,” the one named Petya said. “So we need to do it in people’s apartments.”
“Yet somehow you got it all the way up to ten.” Daniil knew the cabinet-size elevator wouldn’t have been an option.
“When the coffin was empty, we could turn it upright.”
“And now you can’t.”
Petya narrowed his eyes at Daniil. “Some might find that disrespectful, Citizen.” In agreement, Baba Olga flicked the back of Daniil’s neck with her stone-hard fingers. Petya said, “Look, this thing isn’t getting any lighter.”
“You aren’t here to collect anyone,” Daniil confirmed.
“As you can see, we’ve already collected. Now let us in.”
Everyone stood aside as the men lumbered in with the coffin, trampling on shoes and scratching the wallpaper.
“Yasha, we’ll have to move the cot to make room,” Petya said.
“Which one?”
“Pink flower sheets.”
“Keep holding on to your end while I set mine down,” Yasha said. “Toasty in here, eh?”
“Yes, mind the heater by your feet,” Daniil chimed in.
“I’ll have to step out on the balcony while you pivot.”
Baba Olga lunged at the men. “No, no, don’t open—”
A panicked brood of hens stormed the room.
Aunt Lena clutched at her chest. “Sweet Saint Nicholas.”
“We’ll have to report this poultry enterprise, Citizens.”
Daniil opened his mouth to tell them the hens must have flown in from another balcony; then everything went dark.
The heater’s rattle ceased. The hens were stunned silent. Through the window, Daniil could see that the neighboring buildings were blacked out as well.
“Electrical shortages,” Yasha said. “Heard about it on the radio. Looks like the blackouts are starting today.”
“I’m setting the coffin down,” Petya said. “I have to set it down, dear God, it’s about to slip out of my hands—”
“Slow, slow—”
A delicate, protracted crunch of tin filled seventeen pairs of ears. Daniil had counted. Seventeen, including the man in the coffin. No one said anything for a few seconds. They did not need to see to know what had been crushed.
“Well, looks like we’re going to be here awhile,” Yasha said. He sat, a shuffle followed, a stale smell of socks wafted through the air. “Wasn’t some jerky going around?”
Daniil’s head whirled. Seventeen humans in a room, arms and legs and fingers and toes laced together. Plus one bay leaf. The crunch of the space heater replayed in his mind. Seventeen olives. Cough cough cough cough. Daniil would die just like this, stuffed and brined with the others, their single coffin stuck in someone else’s bedroom. No one drinks the brine anyway. Already the cold was seeping in. A small clawed foot stepped on his. A little heating problem. A brush of feathers huddled on his feet, shivering. Daniil took a step forward, and the feathers swished past. In the dark he felt for the coffin, yanked out the crumpled space heater from underneath. The corner of the coffin slammed down to the floor. The children screamed.
Daniil stepped onto the balcony, flung the heater over the ledge. For a second he felt weightless, as if he himself were flying through the air. A hollow crash echoed against the walls of the adjacent buildings.
Daniil stepped back inside, sank down on his bunk. Wood chips
scratched between his fingers.
Grandfather Grishko was the first to speak. “Daniil, go down and get it.” The whispered words were slow, grave. “We’ll get it fixed.”
Daniil didn’t know what his grandfather was hoping for, but he would do as he was told. Then he felt the cold steel of his uncle’s mallet and chisel among the wood chips. He grabbed the instruments and descended to the ground floor. A gruff voice offered caramels but Daniil snatched the man’s cigarette lighter instead. Its flame illuminated the red stenciled numbers. Daniil cared for nothing else, but there had to be heating, because heating meant No. 1933 Ivansk existed and he and his family had a place, even in the form of a scribble buried deep in a directory. He would show them, the ones behind the glass partitions, the proof. Daniil positioned the chisel. The first hit formed a long crack in the concrete, but kept the numbers whole.
JIM SHEPARD
Telemachus
FROM Zoetrope
To commemorate Easter Sunday, the captain has spread word of a ship-wide contest for the best news of 1942, the winner to receive a double tot of rum each evening for a week. The contestants have their work cut out for them. Singapore has fallen. The Prince of Wales and the Repulse have been sunk. The Dutch East Indies have fallen. Burma is in a state of collapse. Darwin has been so severely bombed it had to be abandoned as a naval base. The only combatants in the entire Indian Ocean standing between the Japanese Navy and a linkup with the Germans, who are currently having their way in Russia and North Africa, seem to be us. And one Dutch gunboat we came across a week ago with a spirited crew and a crippled rudder.
We are the Telemachus, as our first lieutenant reminds us each morning on the voice-pipe: a T-class submarine—not so grand as a U, but not so dismal as an S. Most of us have served on S’s and are grateful for the difference, even as we register the inferiority of our own boat to every other nation’s. The Royal Navy leads the world in battleships and cruisers, we like to say, and trails the Belgians in submarine design.
In the chaos following Singapore’s surrender we’ve been provided no useful intelligence or patrol orders. A run through the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra ended in a hail of enemy fire on the approaches to Batavia. At our last dry dock the Ceylonese further undermined our morale by invariably gazing out their harborside windows at first light to see if the Japanese had arrived. We have no idea whether we will find any more ports available to us now that we’ve shipped back out to sea. We have no idea whether we will find more torpedoes once we’ve expended our store. “Heads up there, boys,” our captain joked to those of us within earshot of his map table last night. “Is there anything more exhilarating than carrying on alone out on the edge of a doomed world?”
“Sounds like Fisher’s childhood, sir,” Mills responded, and everyone looked at me and laughed.
They view me as a sorry figure even by the standards of their meager histories. As a boy I was a horrid disappointment, pigeon-chested and gap-toothed, and as grandiose as I was untalented. The only activity for which I was any use at all was running, so I ran continually, though naturally not in competitions or road races but just all about the countryside, in fair weather and foul. It brought me not a trace of schoolboy glory, though it did at times alleviate my fury at being so awful at everything else.
The characterization my parents favored for me was out of hand, as in, What does one do when a boy gets out of hand? My stepfather inclined toward the strap; my mother, the reproachful look. Her only brother had been killed in the first war, and her first husband had come to a bad end, as well; and my stepfather never tired of pointing out that a disapproving countenance was her solution to most of life’s challenges. He said about me that by the time I was out of short pants and he was forced to introduce me at pubs or on the street, friends sympathized.
My father had been presumed lost at sea on a bulk cargo ship that had gone missing between Indonesia and New South Wales. When I asked if he had loved me, my mother always replied that it hurt too much to recall such happiness in any detail. When I pressed for particulars nonetheless, she said only that he had been quick to laugh and that no man had possessed a greater capacity to forgive. When I asked my aunts they said they’d barely known the man, and when I asked if he’d been pleased with me, they said they were sure that had been the case, though they also remembered him not much liking children.
My stepfather viewed my running as a method of avoiding achievement or honest labor and marveled at my capacity for sloth. He pressed upon me Engineering Principles for Boys and Elementary Statistics and all sorts of other impressive-looking volumes I refrained from opening. He asked if I was really so incurious about the world of men, and I reassured him that I was very curious about the world of men, and he responded that in such case I must bear in mind that the world of men was the sphere of industry, and I clarified that I meant the adventurous world of men, that arena of tropic seas and volcanic cataclysms and cannibal feasts and polar exploits. He said that if I wanted to grow up a fool I might as well join the navy, which was precisely what I had already resolved to do.
Mills told everyone when he arrived aboard that he’d been one of those posh boys who’d gone to boarding school where at great expense he’d been provided rotten food and insufficient air and exercise, and so submarine duty oddly suited him. His father had been great with speculation and then it had all gone smash and he had hung himself. Mills remembered his mother sitting in the drawing room during the months that followed with all the bills that she didn’t dare to open, since there was no money to pay them, and he remembered thinking that it would be a good thing for her if she had one less mouth to feed. He’d been a chauffeur, a silk-stocking salesman, a shipyard hand, and the second mate of a sailing ship before signing on with Her Majesty’s Navy.
As gunner’s mates we bunk in the torpedo stowage compartment, between the tubes. He calls me “the Monk” because even in our tiny living space I never bother with pictures or photographs. I carry what I want to see in my head. Everything else feels like clutter.
“Our mate here doesn’t know how to take things easy,” he says by way of explanation to our fellow torpedomen. He seems to think he panders to my vagaries with a resigned good humor.
Mills was assigned to us at Harwich as a replacement for a mate we’d lost to carbon monoxide poisoning when a torpedo’s engine had started prematurely in the tube. He asked me confidentially what sort of boat he was joining, and I recounted our most recent patrol, which I described as three weeks of misery that we’d endured without sighting a single enemy ship. We’d run aground and been unsuccessfully bombed by our own air force. We’d damaged our bow in a collision with the dock upon our return. He said that on his most recent patrol they’d surfaced between two startled German destroyers, each so near abeam that their bow wakes had spattered onto the submarine’s deck. He and his captain on their bridge had just gaped up at the Germans above them, since they’d been beneath the elevation of the German guns, and too close to ram without the destroyers ramming one another. He said they’d pitched back down the conning tower ladder with the Germans still shrieking and cursing them. He said they’d mostly worked the arctic reaches out of Murmansk, sinking so much German tonnage that the Russians had presented them with a reindeer.
He said he was pining for a nurse he’d met in the Red Cross who, last he’d heard, had been sent to London and now no doubt was pouring lemonade over the wounded in the East End. Her father upon first meeting him had cordially asked, “And who or what are you?” and her mother, upon his reply, had remarked only that people had been doing dreadful things at sea for as long as she could remember. He said that every time he’d managed to arrange some privacy with the nurse and attempt a liberty with her she’d begged him instead to “do something useful,” though he’d been encouraged by her remark about her father that no man had ever behaved so badly with the ladies and gotten away with it.
Occasionally when he was particularly displeased w
ith the lack of vivacity in my responses he’d say that he didn’t suppose I had any of my own experiences to relate, and I’d assure him I had very few, though I had in fact before I left home conceived an intense and inappropriate fondness for a cousin on my mother’s side. This cousin’s own mother in her house displayed a photograph of herself and my lost father alone under an arbor, peering at one another and smiling, but when I asked about it, the woman appeared faintly stricken and was no more informative than my mother. When I was fourteen and my cousin twelve I lured her into a neighbor’s garden and in my overheated state crowded my face in close to hers, alarming her. Bees drowsed above a flower she’d been examining. She turned to fix her eyes upon my mouth, and when I moved still closer she backed farther away. She was chary around me during our visits afterward but also took my hand under tables in dining rooms and once, having run into me unexpectedly in a hallway, put a finger to my lips. In my fantasies I still imagine an unlikely world in which I would be allowed to marry her and she would want to marry me. In the packet of correspondence I received upon arrival in the Pacific my mother noted that my cousin Margery had let on that I was writing her, at least, and my cousin in her response to my letters asked apropos of nothing if I remembered a day years earlier during which I had acted very odd in the garden beside my home. When off duty I lie in my berth between tubes five and six and wonder what others would make of someone who can conceive of tenderness for only one other being, and a tenderness improper at that.
That hallway encounter occurred the month following my eighteenth birthday, soon after which I served my first sea duty on the HMS Resolution, an elderly battleship that had been hurriedly refitted, and still dreaming of my cousin I stumbled around its great decks on those tasks I was able to execute, grateful for the small mercy of remaining unnoticed. We sailed around the Orkneys in seas so tumultuous that during one gale our captain threw up on my feet. The other excitement about which I was able to write my cousin transpired one calm morning when we all turned out on the quarterdeck to witness the spectacle of the second pilot ever launched from a seaplane catapult. The first had broken his neck from the colossal acceleration. The second had been provided a chock at the back of his head for support.