Алексей Никитин - Y.T.

‘What for?’ asked Sashka. Outside the window the shrubs had given way to enormous heaps of rubbish.

‘Not that,’ said Vadik irritably. Sashka wasn’t taking the bait. ‘What are you looking at out there?’

‘I’ve never been here before,’ Sashka drawled. ‘It’s interesting.’

‘Prince Korostishevski makes a ceremonial entrance into the paternal appanage,’ mocked Kanyuka. ‘Cue the pealing of bells, the procession of the cross. Countrymen and countrywomen, shepherds and shepherdesses, old men and old women. The kissing of hands and of feet in stirrups, the right to veto the veche and the right to the first night on the first night…’

‘That would be all right,’ said Korostishevski. ‘A principality of one’s own without any mathematical analysis or differential equations.’

Kurochkin and I were quietly playing cards, a game of Preference. Korostishevski and Kanyuka were sitting in front of us, and we could hear their conversation.

‘Think big, Korostishevski,’ said Kurochkin without looking away from his cards. ‘The days of petty feudal fiefdoms are long gone. Why not conquer a few neighbors, unite them under your iron fist and threaten the Swedes?’

‘And you’re under threat, too, pal,’ said Kanyuka coolly. ‘You’re about to take another trick when you’ve declared misère. Keep up now. Matters of state are being decided without you. Not just any old cook is capable of running a feudal principality, despite what Lenin said.’

The caravan of buses travelled almost as far as Zhytomyr without stopping or other holdups, ticking away the kilometers of the M-17 in orderly fashion. The two buses directly in front of us were the first to break away from the caravan. They turned south for Berdychiv. Soon it was our bus’s turn, and blinking its lights in farewell it headed north off the M-17. Somewhere beyond Chernyakhiv, on the border of the Volodar-Volyn district, lay Greater Apple.

Dusk had fallen by the time we found the village, so it was the next day when we had a look around. It was small, its main street swimming in autumnal mud. Apple orchards circled it to the east and west, and its northern end led to the banks of the mighty Siberian-European ‘River’ Druzhba—oil pipeline of friendship—and just beyond the pipeline began pine forest. But we hadn’t been brought to this backwoods to pump oil. We were here to pick apples—Antonovkas and Simirenkos.

And when you think about it, what else is there for radiophysics students to do in the autumn?

The village’s main thoroughfare, Lenin Street, had been paved back in the 1950s and, although it was still passable, immediately beyond the village it turned into a rusty bog, by turns puddle or battered, broken road. The road went through the apple orchards, dividing them in half. On one side grew Antonovkas; on the other clusters of Simirenko. In Greater Apple everything came in twos, doubled and halved with fruity dualism. We, too, were halved, not by any particular rationale but simply into two brigades. One brigade was entrusted with Antonovkas, the other with Simirenkos. Kurochkin and I got Simirenkos.

‘Reinettes are prized winter apples. What kinds of Reinette do you know?’ We were being addressed by a local agronomist. Or perhaps a storekeeper or orchard manager. That is to say he was a village intellectual, wearing glasses, jacket, peaked cap and moustache (the better to hide his faint, sly smile), and he had decided to show us that we were a bunch of young louts from the capital. We were too lazy to argue with him. We were altogether too lazy.

‘Now remember… No, you’d better write it down. Reinettes include the Baumann, Canadian, Cassel, Champagne, English, Kursk golden…’

‘He’s reciting them in alphabetical order,’ Kurochkin whispered into my ear. ‘He must have memorized them his first year in college and won’t skip a single letter.’

‘Look,’ I said. ‘He’s counting them off on his fingers behind his back. So that he won’t forget.’

‘Landsberg, Orleans—that’s your red saffron—paper—same as Champagne—Pisguda, sery—or grey—and…’ Here the gardener made a fist ‘and the Simirenko.’

Then, behind his back, he stuck out an index finger and began brooding. Something was wrong.

‘And the Simirenko,’ he repeated, ‘is before you.’

Politely Mishka Reingarten reminded the gardener that he had forgotten about the Bergamot. Mishka said, ‘The Bergamot Reinette was invented by Michurin who grafted the bud of an Antonovka seedling to a pear. It’s medium in size, rounded and has a long storage life.’

‘I give him a C,’ pronounced Kurochkin, sentencing the gardener mercilessly.

‘Correct,’ said the gardener. ‘The Bergamot. In all there are twelve varieties of Reinette.’ Then, for some reason, he made a victory sign above his head. ‘How did you know that?’ he asked Mishka.

‘Research,’ said Mishka firmly.

‘How did you know that?’ asked Kurochkin an hour later. Mishka smirked craftily. Mishka often smirked craftily. He was working on a GTE—Global Theory of Everything. Einstein’s theory of relativity fitted within the GTE as a special case. To stop the other students on the course and the residents of the dormitory from disturbing him Mishka worked on his GTE at night. And, so that he would not disturb them, he worked in a cupboard. He would put on a hooded anorak, grab a fat all-purpose notebook with dividers and a reading lamp that he secured to his neck and would spend hours at a stretch in his cupboard. He slept during the day, and he didn’t go to classes at all.

‘Have you ever opened up The Great Soviet Encyclopedia ?’ Mishka asked Kurochkin.

‘I suppose so.’

‘At the letter K?’

‘Why would I do that?’ Kurochkin didn’t get it.

‘Have you never even looked up your own last name?’

‘I don’t know—maybe. Kurochkins are as common as muck.’

‘Maybe so. But Reingartens are few and far between. So I was flipping through the encyclopedia looking for other Reingartens—’

‘Misha,’ Kurochkin said politely, ‘I’m talking about apples.’

Mishka sighed heavily. ‘Use your head, Kurochkin. “Reingarten” and “Reinette” are on the same page of the encyclopaedia. Comprenez-vous?’

‘Oui,’ said Kurochkin.

Kanyuka and Korostishevski had been assigned to the Antonovs. I saw them being lectured by another mustachioed gardener about Antonovkas. He also kept his hands behind his back and carefully counted on his fingers. What he was counting I don’t know. Natasha Belokrinitskaya ended up with the Antonovkas. Kurochkin and I acted like nothing had happened.

Greater Apple was a two-party village. Antonovs picked Antonovkas—which they moistened and sent to the confectionery factory in Zhytomyr—and they ate apple- flavored jelly and pastilles. They were proud that their apple was the people’s choice. The Antonovs worked the orchard in three brigades called ‘Antonov the Aviation Builder,’ ‘Maksim Antonovich the Democrat,’ and ‘Antonov-Ovseenko the Unlawfully Repressed.’ The Antonovs always nominated their own candidate for chairman and intrigued in every conceivable way against the Simirenkovs. This included filing complaints against the Simirenkovs with the district and regional committees of the Party. The Antonovs thought the student brigade might call itself ‘Fyodor Antonov the Artist,’ but our ladies reacted with unexpected alacrity, shooting down the artist and giving their brigade the highly original name of ‘Antonovka.’ Touched, the Antonovs appointed Kanyuka as brigadier.

But the Simirenkovs were also serious. Over the past forty years they had given the Antonovs just as good as they got and would offer no quarter in future either. They, too, always had their own candidate for chairman and their own people in the district and the region. Simirenko Reinettes from Greater Apple were sold all over the Soviet Union—from Murmansk in the north all the way to Nakhodka on the Sea of Japan. There was a cock-and-bull story going around Greater Apple that before Khrushchev opted for corn, he had been ready to plant Simirenkos the length and breadth of the country—apparently he had loved them since childhood. But then the Antonovs had sent a courier to Moscow to tell Nikita Sergeyevich that certainly the Simirenko is a good apple, but it can’t withstand mange. They recommended the Antonovka. It was the same old story—the Antonovka was the people’s choice. Nikita Sergeyevich could not have cared less—ever since Lysenko’s day he’d had his fill of Antonovs—so he dashed off a few lines of invective verse to the gardeners and flew to America. But, as history tells us, he came back a changed man and decided to plant corn. Evidently it was all the same to him what the country grew. And there had been the Americans with their corn. So much for the people’s apple and Lysenko.