Page 29 - WTP Vol.X#1

Town Day, the way Slava explained it to me, was like a rolling carnival. There were the men dressed like the famous 19th Century Roman Gorachev, who declaimed his poems from a platform in front of the monument to him, one-upping each other like hype men at a hip hop concert, and who in the end threw off their ruffled poet shirts and grappled in front of the crowd. “There was a time when the wrestling was more spontaneous,” Slava explained, “but it’s better now that everyone knows what to expect.”
After that, we walked down a couple blocks to where local girls, the same age as my students, danced har- vest dances in traditional garb, swinging their long threshing skirts like they were on stage at the Moulin Rouge, and then there was a mock ceremony as the fairest of them was married to a scarecrow made
out of potatoes lashed together with wire and string. “And then they burn both of them in a ritual sacri- fice?” I asked, and Slava smiled and punched my arm.
“Don’t let anyone else hear you say that,” he warned. After that, he led me to a performance by the coun- try’s most accomplished musician on the region’s indigenous instrument, a broom handle mounted on a wash tub and lashed with a single string you could, I guess, pluck or rub, changing keys by the use of a series of capos. It was hypnotic, but we’d also been drinking moonshine and mead, sold in generous ladlefuls from mobile carts, all afternoon, so I almost fell asleep.
Later, Slava took me to a communal meal, where a great flank of beef turned on a slow spit over hot coals as a local chef went at it with a saber, carv-
ing gobbets of meat into chafing dishes that locals approached with commemorative skewers to make their own kebabs. Slava helped me get some meat on my stake, and we sat on a low stone wall to eat while streams of people walked toward home and the trol- ley trundled past.
“You know this is the original wall of the town?” Slava said, swinging his legs even though it was only about three feet above the ground. “This was the outer edge of the original settlement. It used to be sixteen feet tall.”
“What happened,” I asked, and tried to eat my meat without wiping my face with grease.
“Trash happened, I guess. The whole town’s just taller, somehow.” He twirled his saber and looked
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“Ifigured, as long as we were working on it, I’d
keep seeing him, and he’d recognize that the benefits of running away were less than those of staying close by.”
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