Michael Aliprandini

Michael Aliprandini currently lives in Arlington, Virginia. He works as an ESL teacher and freelance writer and has spent most of his professional life abroad, in Russia, Turkey, Ethiopia, and Italy.

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TICKLING STALIN

I address myself to students of foreign languages: “et
venio in campos et lata praetoria memoriae, ubi sunt
thesauri innumerabilium imaginum de cuiuscemodi rebus
sensis invectarum” (St. Augustine, The Confessions,
X,8). In other words, kidnapping the old woman taught
me far more than the respectable methods of Maximilian
Delphinius Berlitz ever could. Kidnapping her goat
was a boon I couldn’t have foreseen.

Citizen! I hailed her as I strode through the
summer-high field. She was enjoying a spread of
lightly pickled cucumbers and black bread while her
goat, tethered nearby, ripped the grass down to the
dark earth.—Citizen, you will prepare me a pot of cold
borscht.

What? she enounced, a single word shot like a
fascist-seeking bullet, and not because she’d failed
to comprehend my peculiar accent and deviant Russian
grammar.

Or else I’ll bite your bottom, I said. Let’s move.
You’ll see that the tongue can indeed get you to Kiev.
She wrapped up her modest feast and clipped a leash to
the goat.—I go nowhere without Zinka, not even to
Kiev.

When we passed the tractor parked at field’s edge and
the woman didn’t try to alert the snoozing driver, I
knew she was going to be a docile hostage. Such
taciturn acquiescence, writ large in the annals of the
national history, had always frustrated me. After all,
I didn’t require an automaton but a life-force of
impact and entertainment.

I gave her a pair of safety glasses, blacked out with
permanent marker, and marched us along the disused
tracks to my apartment. She swayed, I hooked
arms.—Last week 4,137 Muscovites were arrested for
public drunkenness. 1,303 were detained overnight.
Were you one of them?

You’ve made me blind.

You shall see, I said. You shall see.

Yesterday the elevator had smelled like carcass and
wet fur; now it smelled of gasoline. The latest rash
of graffiti—a phallic cult had tagged our barren
Brezhnev suburb—didn’t seem to embarrass her. Zinka
showed alarm by butting the elevator doors.
***
While she was chopping and muttering in the kitchen
and the goat was pacing the concrete balcony, I
telephoned my friend.—Len, big developments here.
Dubbed, muscle-bound action heroes are no longer my
teachers. I’ve turned off TV and taken the proverbial
goat by the leash. Remember what I told you about
creating situations that make a strong impression on
the senses? Like my dream about Stalin?...Weren’t you
listening? And about overlaying them with
Russian?...Because I’ve kidnapped a babushka and her
goat and she’d be a perfect specimen for your
coffee-table book. She has the hugest hands you’ve
ever seen on a woman, and she’s built like an APC.
That’s an Armored Personnel Carrier if you care to
know. She was a sharpshooter in the war and takes
responsibility for forty-two German corpses…Typical
babushka clothes. Flowered headscarf, clunky shoes.
Her nylons are classic. They’re really thick and
bunched up at the ankles…I don’t know yet if she has
varicose calves, but you’ll be in time for borscht and
a stellar photo-op if you hurry. I have to attend to
the lovely Zinka.

Zinka kept scratching her hooves on the windowsill and
rattling the double-pane.—Will Lenin give her
indigestion? I asked, pulling a tome from a shelf full
of classics that no one bothered with anymore, now
that they had so many down-and-dirty diversions.—Or is
Gogol more nourishing?

I admit that I had to look up indigestion and
nourishing, but they were at once laid into my well
hedged Russian exchequer, which already included such
treasures as ‘I am the plague’ and ‘I’m Russian, don’t
hit me,’ in the event that I was accosted by
nationalist baddies. More pallid expressions, however
useful—those for inquiring after the price of a
cabbage, for buying a long-distance train ticket, for
analyzing the weather—were never insinuated so
poignantly in memory.

I chucked a copy of Gogol onto the balcony. The woman
gasped and crossed herself with three fingers. There
are miracles yet to be countenanced.
***
At last the soup had cooled. I set out bowls, spoons,
and a container of sour cream. The borscht looked
gorgeous, chilly maroon broth floating with grated
beet and a hardboiled egg. But she refused to touch
it. I ordered her to slurp it down, it was delicious,
hers was the best borscht I’d ever eaten, but she
pushed the bowl away and fixed me with her
anti-fascist gaze. I knew then what the doomed Germans
must have intuited, their bowels as suddenly slippery
as seconds in an hourglass.

She reached onto the shelf for a can of aerosol, shook
it twice, and with deft swooping motions and a soft
seethe, sprayed our bowls and the contents of the
perspiring pot. A ticklish mist tumbled against my
face.—Speechless now, aren’t you? she said, she who
was helping me incarnate the breathy soul of so many
words and expressions, the very codes of human life.

I could have thrown her out of the window, and Zinka
too, but I already possessed the words for scream,
fall, infarct, splatter, murder, pronounced dead, also
the spiritual vagrancies which may or may not attend
thereafter, and in any case, the aroma of beets
crossed with the whistling stink of cockroach poison
made for a more inspired conceit. Speechless I was
not.

Though it might be assumed that we had reached the end
of her acquiescence, she put on the blackened glasses
of her own accord and accepted an escort down to the
corner of the busy street. I spun her three times,
then leaned in whispering.—What is Russia without you?
Without its old women, thick of thigh and big of
spirit, the center would never hold.
I ran away, up onto my balcony, from where I could
still see her, leash in hand, glasses on, like a blind
woman confronting the uncertain. And then there was
Len, racing to capture my two edifying victims in a
series of silver-gelatin prints. She only moved off
along the street when Zinka began tugging at the
leash, in search of better fodder. I kicked the gnawed
copy of Gogol into the courtyard.

In the end, one minor pleasure was denied me. The
following week’s crime report for the Moscow
metropolitan area made no reference to the kidnapping.
I had too much work ahead of me to worry over
publicity, however. With the image and the tongue I
would raise edifices ever more spacious. In them would
dwell the words made flesh. Among them I would dwell.