The Breadcrumb Messiah of Novi Babushkinsk
By Shawn Bell
In his delirium Tigran Safaryan relived it, over and over: the moment he first saw her. The fever made his remembrances uncannily vivid. How overwhelming the citrus explosion of the pilfered tangerines! How merry, the smile in her periwinkle eyes as she caught him in the act! He thought they’d all been chased off, the Yurt Dwellers, leaving their cherished orchard behind, but as it turned out, Elvira had become attached to the little valley hidden away from the town behind the first ridge of the mountains. He remembered the music of her laugh, overcome by amusement at the mortification on his face; picking a couple tender fruits was no capital offense in Abkhazia, a land where wasted tangerines rotted on the branch. He remembered the warmth with which she offered him a cup of tea. He remembered the panic that washed over him, how he stuttered and apologized and finally beat as swift and graceless a retreat as ever was beat. She had been beautiful, in short, and he had been terrified by her.
Yes, in his delirium, he lived it over and over again, this humiliating first encounter, and not the second one, when things had gone rather better for him. One asks precious little from the dreaming mind, much less the fevered mind, by way of evident rhyme and reason; for reasons beyond our ken, the mind of Tigran Safaryan wished to dwell upon its terror before her beauty.
It wasn’t as though his terror before beautiful women had somehow dissipated by the time of their second meeting. But at least that meeting took place on his terms, when he had had ample opportunity to prepare himself before crossing the road to speak to her. What’s more, it took place more or less at the high-water mark of his pride, during those numbered days when his hubris had seemed to him to have been an instance of cleverly calculated daring. What man couldn’t speak to a beautiful woman when Raisa Sergeievna and her lot had been kicking him back monthly profits in the hundreds of thousands of rubles, when he was being feted as the man who had built Pharmacy Hill? How temporary that had all proven to be! How mad his hopes, how fevered his dreams!
If not for his father’s death, Tigran would have been content to continue on in the dreamlike haze that was his life. He’d have happily continued drifting into middle age in the apartment over the family store in the Abkhazian coal town where he was born and raised. He’d have had no responsibilities but to man the cash register every morning and to help the delivery man unload his truck. He’d have spent his afternoons as he had since childhood, wandering the half-forgotten footpaths of the green mountains that ringed the town on three sides, impervious to rain, snow, or beating sun. Every few months, he’d have scraped together five thousand rubles to go to a brothel he knew in Gagra.
Of course, it hadn’t always been like that. Gugut Safaryan had been a driven man who demanded hard work from himself and those around him, and he’d made sure that even his youngest and most disappointing son did something with his life. He and his seemingly immortal companion, a rooster called Smyelost’ the Indestructible, had ruled the home with iron discipline, and Tigran tried his best not to think back to the afternoons he had spent in a holy terror, running in circles in their little courtyard with the vicious rooster in hot pursuit, as his father looked down from the apartment with a drink in his hand, chuckling and cheering on the rooster while occasionally shouting to the boy that he’d never amount to anything if he couldn’t stand up to a bird one tenth his size, for God’s sake. It was no use telling his father that Smyelost’ had survived being hit by a car, as well as two separate dog attacks; to Gugut Safaryan, his youngest son had begun to show unpromising signs from the earliest age.
There was no question of bringing home grades lower than 4s; even 4s were unsatisfactory, and from the age of about ten, Tigran was given responsibilities around the store, and for a few summers in his teens, his father sent him to relatives in Lebanon in the hopes that he’d pick up the Arabic language (which he hadn’t). Somehow, though, this constant pressure never translated into the development of internal motivation the way it had with his sister and two brothers. Without the relentless pressure that his father brought to bear, Tigran would never have dared to go to Russia (though the Adler Pharmacological Institute was just across the border, only three or so hours north), nor suffered through the four miserable years of his degree. He hadn’t even wanted to be a pharmacist! The problem was that he hadn’t really wanted to be anything, and seeing as being nothing wasn’t an option, his father had figured that once they had a pharmacist in the family, they could turn their little store into a real business. However, after the first stroke, the old man had lost his edge. For the last ten years of his life, he hadn’t had the energy to berate his son into registering for the exam, while Tigran’s mom didn’t mind a bit if he drifted along; she was happy that at least one of the kids had stayed close.
But when his father died, the unthinkable had happened: Tigran displayed signs of life. In the presence of his ailing mother and his ambitious, older siblings, he declared that, at long last, he would put his degree to use. He would pass his boards and turn his father’s undistinguished little corner store into a pharmacy, just as the old man had wanted him to. He didn’t know what made him do it. Probably just a burst of sentimentality. In any case, he’d said what he would do, and as such there was nothing for him to do, but to do it.
It is often said that the price floors set by the Moscow Pharmacological Society are an example of cartelization and rent-seeking. Quite often, it is set alongside the other imperfections of the Russian state as an example of blatant corruption. However, these observers fail to account for local conditions. They fail to understand the peculiar post-Soviet phenomenon which puts any pharmacy which does not tie its prices to those suggested by the cartel (adjusted for local purchasing power) at risk of utter annihilation. Tigran Safaryan, on the other hand, knew very well what he was getting into. If his father had been around, he’d never have allowed it to occur. But the young pharmacist, with all the endemic hubris of youth, decided to ride the whirlwind; ignoring the pricing directives of the Society, he simply priced his wares so as to attract business, blithely imagining that he could bear up to whatever Nature threw at him in return.
At 4 a.m. on the day of his grand opening they began to arrive, and by 5:30, when he came downstairs to open up (rushing out of the courtyard and slamming the gate shut behind him to keep the ever-ferocious rooster at bay), they were there in numbers. They pushed carts full of apples and newspapers, carried sacks of hazelnuts over their poor, bent shoulders, or giant jars of their neighbor’s cousin’s fig jam to be exchanged for cheese. They shuffled and coughed and muttered prayers, counting handfuls of kopeks (some of which were Soviet) and keeping an eye out for the slightest hint of malfeasance regarding the order of the queue. They stood in disgruntled union, all speaking past each other about their respective ailments and remedies and their thoroughgoing disdain for doctors, whom they nonetheless visited religiously, for medicine was their lives’ center. It was what they did, shuffling between appointments in far-flung locales and making ample use of their free access to public transport, and when they caught wind of good prices, the babushkas tied up their headscarves and went, convenience be damned.
How they get their news is a mystery of science. For world affairs, they have state television. For local affairs and sales in particular, they have their local papers. But how the graying hordes received word of a low priced Armenian pharmacy, traveling from as far afield as Krasnodar, well across the border into Russia proper? Such questions are not to be answered, but marveled at. Even more mysterious is the matter of why.
Why, for God’s sake, do they set off before sunrise, taking three busses and four hours to get a marginally advantageous price at a pharmacy or the wait in a rather shorter line a public clinic? Why are they perpetually aggrieved to find out that others of their kind have decided on the same destination (often resulting in a line that is not significantly shorter than whatever pharmacy or clinic they last tried)? And why, dear God, why do they insist on lugging those liter jars of fruit preserves along with them everywhere they go? Some might answer that this is all an indictment of the Russian pension system, the implication being that if not for poverty, these ladies would gladly pay somewhat higher prices at pharmacies in their own neighborhood, that if not for woeful underfunding of the public healthcare system, they would gladly patronize their local clinic. Others take a more psychological turn, theorizing that the ubiquitous line-standing and veritable odysseys in pursuit of basic products during the Soviet period somehow acclimated Homo Sovieticus to such behavior. Was it perhaps a sign of a Sisyphean happiness? Did the persistence of the babushkas, like Camus’ version of the mythic character, indicate that despite all outer appearance of unabated irritation, the seemingly thankless quest for marginally cheaper medicine to be obtained with a minimal wait was one undertaken because it made them happy? Or is there something else that drives them on?
I, for one, answer such insoluble quandaries with yet more quandaries of my own. Why do the birds sing sweetly in the hedges? Why do the river-fish jump at sunset, their scales catching the golden gleam of the fiery orb as if by design? Why does the cat piss in my slippers, when there is a whole world that is not my slippers where he could have chosen to piss? I submit to you that such things are ultimately religious questions.
In other words, babushkas do babushka things, and as far as I’m concerned, that’s answer enough.
As concerns the fate of the young pharmacist, however, the crucial point is that by lowering his prices beneath those advised by the post-Soviet pharmaceutical cartel, Tigran Safaryan secured himself a constant flow of customers. In terms of his technical knowhow, the young pharmacist proved himself capable indeed. More surprising was the ease with which the ancient Armenian art of petty commerce came to him, as if it had been lying dormant in his blood somewhere. Other necessary talents, specific to the post-Soviet pharmacist, however, came to him much less naturally. How, for example, was one to tactfully turn down a spoonful of homemade jam when one had already tasted enough jam to make one’s stomach ache? How best to retain one’s dignity while deescalating a situation in which one found oneself being referred to as an “Armenian pig-Jew”? How ought one to detect and politely evade a client’s clever attempts to turn a simple request for an anti-inflammatory ointment into an hour-long jeremiad touching on the new generation’s vulgarity and lack of gratitude, the neighbor lady who brazenly steals the client’s tomatoes, the whole spiel always culminating in the usual hagiography of the Brotherhood of Nations, the Culmination of Human Endeavor, the good old USSR brought tragically low by wickedness and perfidy or (perhaps) as a divine punishment for our sins? And yet, Tigran Safaryan surmounted these challenges, and soon enough, his low prices made it so that the lines ran all the way down what was not yet called Pharmacy Hill.
To the local babuchestvo, and in particular to Raisa Sergeievna, its most prominent (i.e. truculent) member, this was an outrage. For how many years had they piled onto the bus to Sukhum, where the closest pharmacy was to be found! And now, as soon as their long hoped-for local shop had finally opened, they found it clogged up to the point of non-usability by outsiders from as far away as Rostov! Why, in the Soviet Union, each micro-region was mandated to have its own school, hospital, gymnasium, shops, as well as a pharmacy! And all of it free!
Raisa Sergeievna was one of the few for whom the Soviet Union had fulfilled its promises. Those years had not taught her to patiently tolerate, because she had not had to do so. That is, even though her paper money had been just as useless as everyone else’s, seeing as there were very few goods to purchase, her position as a personnel officer had made her the Soviet analog of a rich person. Her wealth had been reckoned in favors. Waiting lists skipped. Vacations in Prague and Yugoslavia. The car, still puttering along after nearly forty years, and posing a non-negligible menace to passersby whenever Raisa Sergeievna got behind the wheel. The apartment on Gagarin Square looking out over Leninskiy Prospekt, which she’d had to sell after inflation had eaten away the value of her pension. For this, she blamed Kruschev, that kukuruznik, as well as the senile collector of automobiles who followed after him. Perhaps her most withering scorn was reserved for the traitor Gorbachev, though the mere mention of Yeltsin was enough to make her sigh. And even though they had finally gotten a man, a real Russian man, in power, the old woman felt that it was too little too late. The puppets and pederasts of the Anglo-Saxons had won the earthly war, though in certain limited domains, the forces of good might still win a battle here and there.
Now, she suffered from emphysema, persistent numbness and tingling in her extremities, chronic gastrointestinal difficulties alternately retentive and expulsive, and a foot fungus that had stubbornly resisted all treatment since 1997. Her husband, a good, uncomplaining Soviet worker, had drifted off into alcoholism and died with the fall of his country. His loss, as well as the loss of her job in the Soviet apparatus, the loss of her Moscow address and all the social cache appertaining thereto had filled her with an unrelenting bitterness, even though she had come to appreciate the advantages of a quieter life in Abkhazia. And now, after years of waiting, when the Armenian’s son had finally opened his pharmacy, which promised to save her any number of trips to Sukhum, she found her hopes scuppered by the arrival of these carpetbaggers!? No. It simply would not do.
Thus, at the rather pitiful local market, with her friends (or subalterns) gathered around her, Raisa Sergeievna laid out her clever plan. All being recipients of Russian state pensions which more than covered the low cost of living in Abkhazia, her inner circle certainly had more than enough surplus cash between to be able to open up a pharmacy of their own. And what they lacked (a licensed pharmacist), Raisa Sergeievna was hopeful of obtaining by offering a percentage to the Armenian, who would of course be too greedy to say no.
And so it was: Tigran hired some local youths to man the store and keep the ethnic Abkhaz mafia off his back, and for a time, the local babushkas were able to enjoy conveniently located, cheaply priced pharmaceuticals without having to stand in hour lines. This state persisted until, as dictated by the laws of economics (and babushkas), these favorable conditions enticed yet more carpetbagging grannies from Abkhazia, Georgia, and Russia to swarm them. At this point, a third store was opened, and then a fourth, one after another on a narrow mountain road in an otherwise insignificant town, and so, Pharmacy Hill was born, Tigran’s pride burgeoned, and Raisa Sergeievna and her band became, without even realizing it, capitalist exploiters.
The dying Abkhazian coal town boomed. Instead of dreaming of Russian passports, the youth dreamed of attending pharmacy school. The transportation sector flourished, with Nowrez Khutaba buying three extra marshrutkas (and hiring four additional drivers) to handle the increase in traffic from both borders. Tigran was beloved, no longer a swindling Armenian outsider but a golden boy, a savior to their community. The only one who didn’t respect him was the irrepressible Smyelost’ the Indestructible. The pharmacist thought it a little ridiculous that he, a man of stature, still had to run through his own courtyard to avoid being pecked and scratched by a geriatric bird, and if it weren’t for his mother, he’d have put the rooster in a soup. In everyone else’s eyes, however, and indeed in his own, Tigran Safaryan had become a bona fide success, and that was who he felt himself to be when he saw her for the second time, in a colorful, flowing dress, selling little bags of bird-feed to the grannies in the line.
It was really quite a shrewd business model. The queue of grumbling grannies was a captive audience, and the thirty ruble baggies were very much in their price range. Minus the price of the plastic bags, the money was pure profit; the girl picked up stale bread from the town bakery for free and crumbled it up herself. Most importantly of all, for the old ladies, feeding the pigeons was not so much a form of idle amusement as a religious duty, for by common conception, the birds were not mere birds, but the winged and feathered souls of those of the departed neither virtuous enough for paradise nor villainous enough for the fire. Seeing the opportunity to add a good deed to their respective resumes (and hopefully avoid ending up winged and feathered themselves), the babushkas saw to it that the girl sold out every day (except for Raisa Sergeievna, who made a point of bringing her own breadcrumbs from home). The pharmacist watched her for about a week before finally working up the courage to cross the street and talk to her one afternoon as she was packing up her things for the day.
“Lots of business?”
“Yeah, plenty. You?”
“Phew—more than I can handle. It’s all I can do to keep aspirin in stock. And God forbid one of the delivery trucks gets delayed—you should see how they get when I have to explain that they’ll have to come back another day. Then it’s all Gorbachev, shortage, dirty Armenian… but I don’t take it too personal. They’re just trying to get their medicine, after all.”
She smiled sunnily at him and for a moment; the flower of courage bloomed in Tigran’s heart. “Would you like a cup of tea?” he hesitantly continued.
She made a doubtful face. “Well, I do have to get to the baker before five… but I could come in for a few minutes. Sure! Why not!” She shouldered her sack, waved away his attempt to carry it for her, and the two of them walked into Pharmacy 1. He showed her into the back room, where he had his plastic kettle set up among the shelves of medicine jars under fluorescent lights.
“Tea? Coffee?”
“Oh, certainly not coffee. What sort of tea do you have?”
When he showed her the carton of cheap, bagged black tea, she shook her head. “I’m sorry, it’s nothing personal, it’s just that… caffeine is a dynamic substance. It has bad effects on my energy field. But hot water would be nice. Hot water and conversation.” She smiled again, with a note of apology around her eyes.
“… Um, sure, one hot water. I guess that means you won’t want these either….” and he indicated the bowl of chocolate he’d been about to put out on the table.
She paused. “You know, I shouldn’t. According to The Diet, I really shouldn’t; sugar’s in the same category as caffeine: dynamic and non-living. But I will. I’ve never been able to say no to sweets.”
As the pharmacist filled the kettle from the tap, Elvira looked around the room. She felt the chill of the bright, white, slightly flickering fluorescent lights, felt the orderliness of the rows of jars pressing in on her, and she shivered. “This is a horrible room. How do you stand it?”
Tigran didn’t know what she meant. “I don’t know. I just work here.”
“But don’t you know that every room you’re in changes you? Every moment you spend has its effect. Everything you do. And you, you sit in this horrible room and measure out these horrible pills, these poisons—I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t talk like that. I don’t know anything. I’m sure what you’re doing is right.”
“Don’t you believe in medicine?”
“Sure I do. Like I said, I don’t know much. Sometimes I speak without thinking. Of course medicine is important and good. But….”
“But what?”
“I look at those people. Those poor old women. My grandmother was like that—I lived with her as a girl, up until she died. Her whole life became new pains, new pills, new worries, new doctors—she changed doctors all the time, ended up hating him every time—new pharmacies with better prices. New clinics with shorter lines. New routes to the pharmacies and the clinics. The pension office. The insurance office. I don’t know. Sometimes I feel like it hurts more than it helps. All that medicine.”
“That’s just what getting old is, no?”
“Maybe. What do I know? But was it always like that?”
“No—people just died. They suffered, they had no medicine, and they died. Is that better?”
“You’re probably right. It just seemed like this is… a mismatch. Where what she was going out into the world and looking for wasn’t, like, liver pills so much as it was some kind of connection. Meaning. Something to do. I mean, she had me, and I had her, and that’s way more than a lot of people have. But still, her friends were gone. My mom and my uncle…well, they had problems. In the Kuzbass, there wasn’t really anything to be a part of. At least the doctor was someone who had to listen to her. See her. At least a little bit. And then they’d scribble some notes, give out another prescription, and send her out into the cold world.”
Tigran felt rather attacked, though it wasn’t as though Elvira could have possibly known just how much of his job was devoted to shrugging off old ladies attempting to tell him their stories. “Well, hell, what are we supposed to do? Turn pharmacies and hospitals into social hour for lonely old ladies? I mean, you’re probably right about them just wanting connection. Most of these old bats will talk for hours straight if you give them a chance. But Christ, what are we supposed to do? We can’t do everything! ‘Push them back out into the cold world.’ Give me a break. What the hell else are we supposed to do? All we can do is keep them healthy enough that they can live their lives. Find what they’re looking for. But that’s up to them and the people in their lives, not me!”
“… Independently….” said Elvira, airily, as though lost in thought.
“How about what you do? Does that help? Does that make things better?”
She thought for a moment before responding. “Well, yeah, maybe. I think it does help. Even if just a little. Give them some breadcrumbs, let them feed the birds, and for a moment they’re looking at something outside of themselves. Outside of their arthritis and their unanswered letters to the pension fund and the healthy young man on the bus who didn’t offer her his seat. They think about the pigeons and how they’re helping them. That’s better, I think.”
“And the pigeons?”
“What about the pigeons?”
“Is it good for the pigeons, what you do?”
“I guess I hadn’t thought about the pigeons much.”
They sipped from their respective mugs for a while, and the girl reached for another piece of candy.
Tigran spoke again. “You said it gets them out of themselves. Thinking about something else. But I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t think they even see the pigeons. You know what they say about them, right?”
“That they’re the souls of the dead?” The girl smiled faintly. Her teeth were crooked and somewhat chocolate-stained. “Yeah, my granny used to say that.”
“So they look at the world, but before they can even see it, it becomes something inside their heads. If that makes sense.” Tigran was taken aback by these ideas he didn’t know he had, but the girl nodded at him seriously, which allowed him to continue. “So they don’t get out of their heads at all. And maybe none of us do, really. I don’t know. And then in the meantime, feeding the birds just makes there be more birds. More than can feed themselves.”
The girl chewed the other half of the chocolate and took a thoughtful sip of steaming water. “It’s an interesting thing, with the pigeons. Whether it’s good for them. How feeding them makes it so there’s too many of them. So they can’t feed themselves. I wonder if that’s why God made sinners. People who can’t do the right thing. Just can’t quite manage it, even if they try. Maybe that helps Him feel like someone needs Him.” She laughed. “Poor old God. He’s just another lonely old babushka feeding the pigeons, even if it makes there be more and more birds that need feeding.”
They had tea a lot after that. He even got a package of some non-caffeinated herbal stuff that conformed to her dietary requirements. It wasn’t as though their every conversation was of this ethereal sort. Often enough, he would feel her getting bored with his utter amorphousness. But sometimes he’d find the right thing to say to get her talking, and he’d listen raptly, always in the hopes of gleaning new details to fill out his mental picture of her. After her grandmother’s death had forced her back into the hive of drunken despair and occasional violence that was her mother’s life, she simply hadn’t been able to bear it, and by sixteen she had moved in with a thirty-something year-old yoga instructor and pothead, who had at least been calm and gentle with her. Her time in the Emirates and Kuwait had been truly miserable, but she’d retained enough presence of mind during her time as a quasi-prostitute to squirrel away enough money to live well for two and a half years, traveling across south Asia from India to Vietnam where she’d ended up meeting Seryozha, spiritual leader of the Yurt Dwellers, which had brought her here, to the foothills of the Caucausus.
What a golden time that first year in Abkhazia had been, all of them living in communion, every night spent in ecstatic dance and yogic bliss. And the agricultural element had turned out successfully, the long untended tangerine orchard from which Tigran had been pilfering on the occasion of their first encounter quickly reviving to its former productivity. But at the end of the season, as they were loading the crates of tangerines onto a truck to the border, their landlord had ridden up with a police escort and the support of his cousin in Parliament, whereupon it was revealed that in Abkhazia, a contract with a non-Abkhaz was nothing but ink on paper. The landlord had taken their harvest, the police had roughed up those of the Yurt Dwellers who had had the temerity to object, and in the end Seryozha and co had had to go get jobs. As for Elvira, she had felt life pulling her to stay there, and so she had, alone in her yurt in the valley behind the ridge. She told the pharmacist that she was quite content that way.
Tigran had only traveled as far as Adler, just over the border a few hours to the north. To him, Elvira’s life seemed a delightful adventure, and he envied her bravery. Somehow, he heard none of the pain disguised behind the breezy tone with which she narrated.
* * *
The souls of the dead formed an ever-growing horde. How they get their news is just as mysterious as how the babushkas do, but it is a matter of immutable natural law that whenever grannies and baggies of breadcrumbs come together, the gray-feathered masses of the dead are never far away. They swarmed on Pharmacy Hill, cooing and defecating, staining the street white with their excrement, covering the most favored grannies like feathered coats. Some number were daily smashed and smeared under the wheels of passing automobiles, but by far the great majority of casualties was due to the predators that followed after them from whence they came. Falcons swooped, feral dogs ripped and tore, cats cleverly picked their spots to pounce, and though the babushkas wielded their canes to fend off those that would torment the souls of the departed sinners, they could not stop it all. Soon, Pharmacy Hill was strewn with the ravished corpses of the unfortunate members of the flock. And yet, so plentiful was the orgy of breadcrumbs that the souls of the dead amassed in ever greater numbers, ignoring the depredations visited upon them. There, amid the blood and excrement and torn, rotting flesh, where human-avian contact occurred at a much higher rate than usual, a fearsome pestilence was born. It was not discovered until the neighboring schoolchildren began to sicken and die.
With the arrival of the army, it was announced that a strict quarantine was to be imposed, with violators subject to indefinite confinement. The strong-willed Raisa Sergeievna, however, was not deterred. She knew that it was her moment to spring into action. And by the same mysterious means whereby grannies receive their news, she called upon her like to assemble by moonlight in the abandoned railroad station, where once upon a time the trains had set forth to carry coal from the mountains to the furnaces.
They stood there, shuffling, coughing, and muttering prayers. From somewhere, tea and cake were produced, and for a time, there was a sound of munching.
“Comrades!” A hush, as Raisa Sergeievna’s deep, harsh voice rang out. “There is a serious matter to be discussed. If I may have the floor, I shall lay out the facts. Then, we may discuss it as suits us. Any objections?” The same pin-drop silence obtained. “Very good. Then the question is this: how could this happen? How could an objectively good and even godly action lead to a terrible result? As is well known, giving succor to the souls of the wandering dead is not just good—it is incumbent upon us as a sacred duty. And yet, it’s just as clear that the Lord has rewarded our effort with a terrible punishment!
“Let us dismiss out of hand the objections of the blockheaded linear-materialists, who would simply say that the gathering of many birds in one place leads somehow, inexorably and yet utterly meaninglessly, to pestilence. Nihilists! We, on the other hand, know very well that there is an order in all things. And furthermore, having been lucky to obtain fine Marxist-Leninist education in our youth, we know very well that this order is not linear, but dialectical! From our thesis—charity to the souls of sinners—was produced a tragic synthesis, namely that of pestilence. The reason for this must be sought in the antithesis! We can derive it by algebra, by historical analysis, and no doubt by many other means besides, but comrades, I am of the opinion that we have no need of such complex methods as all that, however—the answer is clear already, by means of what antithesis our pure and godly thesis was transformed into this foul pox!
“I won’t delay us with further speechifying: it’s the girl who is responsible, that Hindoo, that yoga-sectarian! It was she that handled every crumb of bread that was distributed—though I’ll state for the record that I, for one, was not taken in, and succored the souls of the dead with my own bread. She fooled us with her pretty smile, but often indeed is evil cloaked in beauty. If you wish to know the truth, just look at the company she kept! God knows what they were doing down there in their tents, those marijuana smokers and pederasts! Yes, there’s not a doubt in my mind that it is with her that the corruption originated! Whether it was a curse she whispered or simply the sin branded into her heart, but I tell you certainly that that idolater has convinced the souls of the dead to lose their faith in God!”
Much disorder followed, with crosstalk and general uproar. One anonymous voice was heard for a moment above the rest, exclaiming that whatever the proper Marxist-Leninist line on the matter, she simply couldn’t and wouldn’t believe that Elvira was anything but an utter darling, undeserving of such slander; she reminded the speaker of her own granddaughter, with her dimpled cheeks and respectful manner in addressing her elders. Another voice rose amid the clamor to declare that as far as she was concerned, the bird-feed seller had always seemed like a little whore.
“Are you calling my granddaughter a whore?!” the first voice shrieked, incensed, and though the second voice tried its best over the din to apologize for any offense caused, all it took were a few volleys of mutual insult for the second voice to end up stridently shrieking that not only was the first voice’s granddaughter a whore, but that she had learned to be a whore by imitating her mother and grandmother. The entire gathering descended into chaos. Canes were brandished, and there was a serious possibility of the outbreak of mutual combat. To Raisa Sergeievna, it was clear that the rupture was irreparable. Furious though she was with the schismatics who had denied her interpretation of the situation, she decided to cut her losses.
“Enough!” she bellowed. “The majority of you who see the truth, follow me! And to the rest of you, good riddance!” And the Majoritarians, numbering rather less than half of the assembled grannies, shuffled off into the night.
It was nearly daylight by the time they made it up to the first ridge of the mountains that ringed the town. They limped and hobbled more markedly than usual, and Feodosia Borisovna had been reckoned as a casualty of war after tumbling down a gorge into a merciless thicket of thorn bushes where she still lay, very much alive, but beyond any of the rest of their abilities to go down and help her out. Tired as they were, they retained their unity of purpose, glaring with undisguised bitterness down into the valley where Elvira’s yurt was located.
Then they limped down the rugged path into the valley and gathered at the flap of the yurt, with ragged breathing and aching backs. They braced themselves for combat, knowing that even though they were several dozen and the girl was one, she could very well outrun them if they weren’t careful. Most likely, if sufficiently motivated, she could charge at them and send them scattering like bowling pins. They prepared their most frightening facial expressions, stretched their arms for more limber cane-brandishing, and as they did so there was a moment of silence where perhaps the shadow of doubt crossed some number of their hearts.
Then from inside the yurt, there was a sudden, percussive barrage of coughing. The Majoritarians startled, their hearts pounding, before realizing what they were hearing, whereupon Raisa Sergeievna carefully poked her head through the flap.
Curled up on her mat, the girl was coughing blood, and when she turned her head toward the door, she was haggard, with sunken eyes and the beginnings of the pestilence’s telltale rash. Young as she was, she was still very much within the demographic which was most at risk from this new malady, whereas the old ladies, who had proven all but impervious to it, breathed a sigh of relief at finding their quarry so weakened. With their canes and their snarls, they goaded the girl to her feet, and forced her to walk ahead of them, up over the ridge and down into the town. And though she collapsed on several occasions, and stopped to hack and heave on others, Elvira obeyed them without a word, as though she felt that the punishment they wished to mete out to her was indeed her due.
However, once the grannies began to assemble the cross on which they would crucify her in the town square, the banging of their hammers alerted the soldiers in the municipal building and, concerned as they were about catching the dread disease, they were not the sorts of men to tolerate a lynching right in front of their posts. They marched out in full hazmat gear and warned the grannies back with guns raised, before picking up the shivering girl and putting her to bed in the holding cell that in normal times was used a few times a year to let the town’s drunks dry out in.
But if the soldiers thought that the situation would calm down of its own accord, they were spectacularly wrong; the Majoritarians remained on the town square in defiance of the curfew, assembled around the cross they’d built, howling intermingled obscenities and prayers. The soldiers shouted at them over the intercom to disperse, but this was not just ineffective but counter-productive, for their amplified commands added to the noise, which drew the rest of the townspeople out into the street. They, like the babushkas, were ready for a fight after having been locked in their homes, with nothing to do but watch as the disease carried away their community’s youngest members. And though in other circumstances, their anger might have lighted upon the Armenian pharmacist who had once been their golden boy, or the out-of-town babushkas who had attracted the pigeons in the first place, given the fact that the focal point of popular anger was already defined, they were more than happy to condemn the girl as well. The villagers joined the mob, pressing up against the line of soldiers, young conscripts mostly, when Tigran arrived, drawn like the others by all the rest of them and by the uproar. He wandered confusedly through the crowd, and until it happened, it never occurred to him that its rage might turn on him as well.
“Hey, that’s the money-grubbing Armenian who works with her!” In an instant, they were pressing against him from all sides, babushkas and townspeople, yelling contradictory questions and demands which he could hardly understand, let alone answer.
“I don’t work with anyone! I’m just a pharmacist! I don’t even know her!”
“Lies! I live on Pharmacy Hill! I’ve seen them together! They have tea every day! I bet he knows how she’s done it!”
“Well, sure, we’ve had tea… she’s there every day, across the street; I was just being polite. With people like that, you have to look out. Drifters. Druggies. Better to ‘make friends’ so you can keep an eye on them—but really, really, I don’t know her at all!”
“Listen, Armenian, we know she’s tempted you with her whorish charms. But you need to tell us what she told you! She’s not a Christian, but you are, aren’t you? These Hindoos, these Hare Kriskos, they’re all in the service of the devil! Just tell us how she killed the children!”
“I tell you, I don’t know her. Maybe she’s a sectarian. Whatever you say. But I never heard anything. I’m just a pharmacist, keeping people safe from disease!”
And as he finished, he heard the crowing of a rooster, piercing, unabating, and he knew somehow that it was Smyelost’ the Indestructible, knew it, even though Smyelost’ was more than a kilometer away, knew it in the bone-deep, pre-rational way that admits of no doubt. His hands contracted with the all-consuming desire to squeeze the life out of his father’s pet, as revenge for revealing him for the coward he was, but instead he ran from the mob and wept.
* * *
The riot escalated the spread of the pestilence. Children, the most vulnerable, were locked away in their rooms, yet deaths continued in the little Abkhazian town. And indeed, despite the timely quarantine, deaths were being reported all along the Black Sea Coast, from Krasnodar past Batumi and into Turkey. The city’s only medical professional, a mere pharmacist, was more than out of his depth, but there was no question of transferring the sick to the capital of Sukhum, and the scheduled delivery trucks had long since ceased to run. He gave out what he had to the desperate parents of the town, who looked at him with the utmost contempt, and by the time he locked up for the night, he was in a state of desolation. When he saw them there, waiting for him like a gang of schoolyard bullies, he knew what they would want—it was coincidentally what he wanted as well. Tigran Safaryan handed over the keys of the pharmacy to Raisa Sergeievna and the Majoritarians and did what he now felt he had always been fated to do: he gave up.
Tigran walked the mountain paths, which he knew well enough to walk by moonlight, and soon enough he found himself on the ridge, looking down on the Valley of the Yurt Dwellers. He could see a bit of the garish fabric of her dwelling as it waved in and out of a moonbeam through the trees, and it filled him with horror to think of her sick, locked up, even if it was for her own protection. He abraded himself for having lacked the courage to be forward with his desires. But the lack of courage was no new phenomenon; after, he had denied her before the mob, proving himself to be exactly the sort of coward that Smyelost’ had always judged him to be. And worst of all, Tigran had a sneaking suspicion that it was all his fault. If he had only resisted the greed that made him give in to Raisa Sergeievna’s scheme to open a second pharmacy! If he had only priced his wares in line with the levels set by the Pharmacological Society! If he had only remained the same contented nonentity he’d always been! With his father dead, that last would have been easier than ever.
He’d never wanted to be a pharmacist, much less a golden boy. He’d been perfectly happy drifting into his mid thirties working at his father’s store, wandering the mountain trails, looking down at the yurts that belonged to people who really did live and admiring them from afar. And yet, hadn’t he been full of regret for his unlived life whenever Elvira told him of her adventures?
Ah, Elvira, he thought, and his heart ached for her periwinkle eyes.
“Elvira,” he whispered. “Elvira!” he called.
“Yes, Elvira, our granddaughter, is lost!” came a chorus of voices from below, singing in ghostly unison.
“Who’s there?”
“Elvira, who knew the Truth. For though man lives not by bread alone, the mere crumbs of bread that she gave did nourish us.”
“I said ‘who’s there’!”
“’Tis we, the sad Minority,” responded the Chorus, “too late to save our favored girl from the vengeance of the Wicked One.”
“What Wicked One?”
“Raisa Sergeievna—her heart so full of pride, that our favored girl’s deep-seeing eyes offended her.”
“They say she’s sick. Maybe even dying.”
“O woe to us, to hear these accursed tidings!”
“I just wish there was something I could do! I tried to go down to city hall, just to see if they’d let me in to sit with her. I think they’d have let me in, but just as I was starting to win the soldier over to my side, she came over, that horrible old ghoul, and shouted until he did what she said.”
“Fiery is the hatred that Raisa Sergeievna bears. She will show no mercy to our granddaughter, our shining girl of flaxen hair.”
“Why does she hate Elvira so much?”
“Because she cannot admit to the Great Truth of Life!”
“Which is?”
“That God is a babushka! Sprinkling breadcrumbs to feed his beloved creations, who flock to him and cover his body like a feathered coat. Our warmth brings warmth to his cold body. Our dumb and uncomprehending coos and clucks bring joy to his grandmotherly heart. And it is for this that he created us, for in himself he was too perfect: self-contained, all-powerful, independent, and cold, so cold! And lo, God created sin and weakness in the form of so many superfluous and utterly reliant creatures for him to feed, for without sin and weakness, there is no Love! But Raisa Sergeievna will never admit this. She will cling unto death to her heresy: that she gives succor to the souls of the departed sinners for their benefit, and not for her own.”
By dawn, their preparations were complete, and the pharmacist took a running leap off the sheer cliff overlooking the town. His stomach dropped for a second, before the babushkas’ handiwork caught him, a magnificent glider of old newspapers stuck together with fig preserves, all hung on a frame built from the willingly sacrificed walkers and canes of the Minority. Tigran swept smoothly and noiselessly over the thickly forested slopes, passing in and out of fogs, and once brushing with the tips of his toes against the canopy of a great linden. It was a clear, red dawn, and in the distance, he could see the Black Sea, framed by green, vine-hung mountains, a ruined Byzantine church visible on one distant peak. Down below in the newly declared independent city-state of Novi Babushkinsk, life was already occurring despite the early hour. Outside of town, in an isolated mountain pass, Raisa Sergeievna exchanged the pharmacy’s supplies of tramadol and hydrocodone for a truckload of weapons and ammunition personally guaranteed by the Chechen babushka who was selling them. Anfisa Nikolaevna captured live ants with tweezers and deposited them in a jar; when she had enough, she would add Kalmyk tea and allow the mixture to steep for a full month before using it in her joints. Jelena Genrikovna lectured a crowd of restive villagers on the many benefits of fresh human urine while Olga Genaddyevna passed around shot glasses of kerosene which had to be gargled with a prayer before any patients were admitted to the pharmacy for a consultation. A hawk circled and dove, snatching one of the innumerable pigeons that swarmed again on Pharmacy Hill, ever since the Majoritarians judged that, the Hindoo-yoga-satanist slut having been apprehended, they might safely return to giving succor to the souls of the departed sinners, as the Lord had ordained. The soldiers had given up on enforcing the curfew; they were young, healthy men, and as such were at great risk of the disease. All around the town, all around the quasi-country of Abkhazia, all around the countries of the surrounding region and increasingly of the world, the pestilence spread, and the afflicted, heretofore young and healthy, bewailed their fate to the pitiless skies.
As gracefully as a lifelong hang glider pilot, the pharmacist landed on the roof of the municipal hall. It was a hulking Soviet rectangle, with bullet holes and artillery craters all up and down its facade. Tigran himself was too young to remember the war with the Georgians; it had ended when he was a little boy, though he’d grown up in the wreckage it left behind. The soldiers posted on the roof drew their weapons and shouted commands, but the pharmacist, without fear or hesitation, walked past them. He’d felt as though he were in a dream since the Minority had told him how it would happen.
The second through sixth stories of the building had been abandoned since the war, and the interior had been stripped of everything but concrete and trash left behind by vagrants and teenage adventurers. On the still-occupied first floor, into which all the city’s municipal functions had been compressed with the gradual contraction of the dying town, the soldiers had been informed by radio of his approach. Once again, the pharmacist faced raised weapons and shouted commands, and once again they roused not the least scintilla of fear in him. Is this what courage was? He raised one hand in a sign of peace and asked in a glacially unhurried voice where Elvira was. To the young soldiers, there was not a chance of refusing to obey him; they directed him down some halls and through some rooms, informing that the door to her cell wasn’t locked, and when he walked off, no one followed him.
There in a blank, gray concrete room he found her, shrunken on the floor, curled around herself and vibrating with fever, her extremities blackened with gangrene and her face mottled with suppurating lesions. This too had been foretold to him, and with the maximum possible degree of composure, the pharmacist did as the Minority had told him, slicing and squeezing an onion to collect a few drops of its juice for her nostrils and forcing a swallow of pepper vodka down her throat. Then he sat down beside her and waited.
For three days and three nights, he sat there as she hovered between life and death, and soon enough, as had been foretold, the pharmacist felt the disease begin to take hold of him as well. On the third day, when her fever broke and her sweat began to pour, Tigran Safaryan wept, though not with relief. He knew that though this meant that Elvira had survived the disease, the fever had cost her her mind and her body. For as long as he could, he held out against his own illness so as to stay with her, but finally, he knew that he had to do as had been ordained. As he unwrapped Leona Nikoforovna’s insulin needle, he wept his farewell. Then he withdrew a minute quantity of her blood and injected it into his radial vein, before lying down beside her and entering the dream-world of which she had become a permanent resident.
And in his delirium, Tigran Safaryan relived it, over and over: the moment he first saw her. The fever made his remembrances uncannily vivid. How overwhelming the citrus explosion of the pilfered tangerines! How merry, the smile in her periwinkle eyes as she caught him in the act! He thought they’d all been chased off, the Yurt Dwellers, leaving their cherished orchard behind, but as it turned out, Elvira had become attached to the little valley hidden away from the town behind the first ridge of the mountains. He remembered the music of her laugh, overcome by amusement at the mortification on his face; picking a couple tender fruits was no capital offense in Abkhazia, a land where wasted tangerines rotted on the branch. He remembered the warmth with which she offered him a cup of tea. He remembered the panic that washed over him, how he stuttered and apologized and finally beat as swift and graceless a retreat as ever was beat. She had been beautiful, in short, and he had been terrified by her.
Beside him, in her own delirium, Elvira relived her first morning selling breadcrumbs, when a stocky, rough-voiced granny had strutted up and told her it was shameful to profit from others’ performance of their religious duties.
“Just think of me as one of the pigeons you’re tossing some breadcrumbs to,” Elvira had chirped in response. A bit cheeky, perhaps, but no great violation of decorum. They looked each other in the eyes, and Raisa Sergeievna’s face grew hard and hateful, while Elvira’s betrayed incomprehension but no shame at all. Neither humiliation nor supplication was to be glimpsed in her clear, periwinkle eyes or in the easy uprightness of her posture. It was as though a pigeon, a cringing, purgatorial sinner, were to look into the face of the Lord with an expression not of utter objection, but with the clear-hearted certainty that in the Great Chain of Being, even the lowly likes of it had its role to play.
“If the pigeons were like you, I’d let them starve,” Raisa Sergeievna finally choked out, before turning abruptly and strutting away with unimpeachable dignity.
And as they lay in their parallel dreams, the pharmacist and the Yurt Dweller, Smyelost’ the Indestructible crowed one final time before pitching suddenly over and dying, though Tigran Safaryan did not hear him. But this was no great loss, for the path he was ordained to walk was one on which one’s mere personal courage—smyelost’—had precious little currency. For only by the boundless grace of the babushka God would he prove capable of performing the labor that had been ordained for him. Only the grace of God would sustain him as he wandered the pestilential Earth, telling of the Breadcrumb Messiah, and sharing, with anyone who would accept it, the gift of her precious blood.
Shawn Bell is one of the hosts of the Antelope Hill Book Club podcast. To read more of his stories, buy his book Post-, which can be found on our website.