125 RUS. The Far East novel. Anna Efimenko

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?”

      Chapter 4

      D – Distant geographical names

      I can be called Alexander, I can be Alexei, and maybe even Akim… Naturally, I’m not a Greek. Fortunately or unfortunately, but not a Greek. I didn’t give back a little paper with my usual name, but slightly corrected it, modified it a little bit. There are two heroes who participated in the siege of Troy – Ajax the Lesser, son of Oileus and Ajax the Great, son of Telamon. There are two bays on the Russian island, not one, as I thought before: Ajax the Lesser and Ajax the Great.

      In Homer’s Iliad, both Ajaxes were often in arms together. The only difference was that the Lesser was not as strong as the Great. They both defended the ships, fighting for Patroclus’s body. Ajax the Lesser is peculiar, among other things, with all kinds of atrocities and misdemeanors, such as, for example, raping of Cassandra, violation of an oath, blasphemy. By the will of the great Olympians, Athena and Poseidon, Ajax was swallowed up by the sea. Not far from the cliffs of Capelfis, formidable Athena hit his ship with a thunderbolt, but the hero escaped, clinging onto Whirling Rocks. Poseidon killed him splitting the rock with his trident. The role of Athena was not so significant in the Odyssey: Poseidon drowned the ships, and threw Ajax into the sea, splitting the rock.

      And so he would have fled his doom,

      albeit hated by Athene,

      Had he not let a proud word fall

      in the fatal darkening of his heart.

      He said that in the gods’ despite

      he had escaped the great gulf of the sea;

      And Poseidon heard

      his loud boasting,

      And presently caught up his trident

      into his strong hands,

      And smote the rock Gyraean

      and cleft it in twain.

      And the one part abode in his place,

      but the other fell into the sea,

      The broken piece whereon Aias sat at the first,

      when his heart was darkened.13

      On holiday, Marina gave me a silver fork with a tiny handle engraved with open-work letters, “I’ll save Ajax from Poseidon’s trident”. Looks like when I’m on the Russian

9

“Water please give me water.” (German)

10

A. Rimbaud. Drunken boat. Translated by Oliver Bernard: Arthur Rimbaud, Collected Poems (1962).

11

see ibid.

12

Coats of arms of cities, provinces, regions and settlements of the Russian Empire by P. Winkler.

13

The Odyssey by Homer (translated by S.H.Butcher & A.Lang).