Читать книгу 125 RUS. The Far East novel - Анна Ефименко - Страница 6

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 Wasse.”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 20^th 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?”