Vasilisa and the Sturgeon

This image comes from an old article on strange Russian dating profile photos and has floated around the internet for years.

On Saturday, Vasilisa sat in her cramped kitchen, slicing pears no longer than her thumb. She sweated. When the sun hit her side of the building in the mornings, it was hotter than a Black Sea cabana, even in the winter. In the corner of the kitchen, a small washing machine was half full of old, soapy water because it had broken weeks ago and Vasilisa didn’t have enough for the repairs. She was back to scrubbing her laundry in a small plastic tub and hanging it to dry on a line that stretched across the kitchen ceiling. It was long enough for one bedsheet, three towels, or four pairs of jeans. 

The little pears came from Vasilisa’s dacha. Vasilisa didn’t spend much time there. Olga and Sergei, who lived across the hall, sometimes drove out that way and Vasilisa occasionally tagged along in their Lada. Sergei and Olga had an ancient wooden izba, built entirely without nails, with lacy wooden carvings above all the windows. Morning glories wound their delicate vines around the woven stick fence that surrounded the little house and its gardens. 

Vasilisa’s was just a plain, clapboard thing that leaned sideways and made her feel seasick the moment she stepped inside it. It wasn’t worth repairing, and thanks to Putin’s new law, she couldn’t build a new one, either. The three pear trees on the lot made it a “vegetable farming partnership,” and new residential buildings were forbidden on those. 

The only other thing that grew on the lot was giant hogweed, hairy-stemmed plants with huge leaves and clusters of ugly white flowers that grew to Vasilisa’s eye level. She hated the way they nodded their big flat heads at her, daring her to cut them down. She did try clearing it away once, but blisters from the phototoxic sap spread from the tips of her fingers all the way up to her elbows. For more than a week, her skin was covered in delicate little red bubbles that burned like they were full of snake venom.  

In the end, it would be easier to let the cabin tumble down and the hogweed take over. That’s what Vasilisa would have to let happen, someday. Vasilisa harvested what she could of the pears and let the rest mash into the ground, attracting bees with their sweet decay. 

Vasilisa crammed the pear halves into a jar and poured hot, sugared water over them. As she sealed the jar, she thought of an ad she’d seen online. It was for an American company that sold pears bigger than both her fists and arranged in heaping baskets. This is what Americans did at Christmastime: they sent each other massive baskets of gigantic pears because they were too lazy to grow and harvest their own. She wondered why she’d ever come across an ad like that. She couldn’t afford anything in the catalog, and that company wouldn’t ship to her even if she could. 

After she’d cleaned up the kitchen, Vasilisa locked her two front doors -- first, the fabrikoid door with its cheap leather cover, and then the fortified steel door that sealed her apartment off from the corridor. She walked to the elevator. The elevator’s call button didn’t light up when she pressed it. It hadn’t lit up in years and no one ever came around to fix it. Vasilisa waited while the gears screeched and scraped. When the car arrived on her floor, the doors opened slowly, rattling slightly as she stepped inside. 

It smelled like smoke from a Jin Ling cigarette. Vasilisa never smoked Jin Lings -- some people sold fake ones that looked real, but they were full of rat shit and feathers. Vasilisa only smoked American cigarettes. She didn’t meet many Americans, and when she did, she didn’t like them, but they did make good cigarettes. 

Outside the building, a path of packed dirt cut through the limp grass and across the courtyard that sat in the middle of four tall, gray, plain, rain-streaked apartment blocks. Vasilisa passed the red-and-yellow playground where a teenage couple sat on the swings and sucked on bottles of Baltika. 

When she reached the metro station, the steep escalator was frozen, but people went on using it, ignoring the voice on the loudspeaker that said it was out of order. When Vasilisa reached the bottom, she saw a man standing with one shoe off. The other was stuck in the escalator, helplessly pinched between the steel cleats. 

The train was late and when it arrived, it was too crowded for her to sit. She gripped the leather strap and spread her feet apart to brace against the swaying. Several minutes later, Vasilisa exited the train at Gorkovskaya and walked up Bolshaya Pokrovskaya Street where vendors sold lacquer boxes and matryoshki, and buskers strummed their guitars. A gray sky hovered over the low-slung buildings, muting their palette of beige and dirty-white. 

She hoped to find Andrei there. He liked to spend his Saturdays on Bolshaya Pokrovskaya, singing songs in English and catching a few rubles in his guitar case. It was mostly tourists who tossed the rubles, and there would be fewer of those now that fall was closing in. 

She walked past restaurants serving Chinese food, khachapuri and coffee. They were the kinds of places that didn’t exist when Vasilisa was young, back when Nizhny Novogorod was still closed to anyone who wasn’t a citizen of the USSR. Vasilisa hardly ever ate at those places. She could, maybe, if she smoked Jin Lings instead of Marlboros, but she wasn’t about to make that sacrifice. Besides, how could she possibly sit in a cafe, alone? 

Bolshaya Pokrovskaya meant “big intercession.” There was so much evil in the world, Vasilisa mused. Russia could intercede, could do some good. Usually, it was the Americans who interceded, stomping around where they weren’t wanted, flaunting expensive military toys. But they were terrible at it. If only they had just a little bit of Russia’s ancient wisdom, maybe they wouldn’t make messes everywhere they went. 

She reached the end of Bolshaya Pokrovskaya, where she could see one of the squat, red-brick kremlin towers rising in the distance -- a fat elf, wearing its green cupola like a felt hat. Nizhny Novgorod’s kremlin didn’t have red glowing stars atop each tower like the one in Moscow did. It did not protect a museum full of Fabergé or the red velvet bed where Lenin’s body reposed. It was nothing special, and Bolshaya Pokrovskaya was no Arbat. 

Moscow was six hours from Nizhny Novgorod; Saint Petersburg twelve. While it wasn’t as far-flung as Irkutsk, it could feel that way, sometimes. 

“Vasilisa!” 

Vasilisa turned and saw Andrei on the other side of the street, guitar in hand, his button-down shirt gapping at the collar, showing his protruding clavicle. His thick beard had been blond once upon a time, but now it was mostly gray and slightly stained from tobacco. 

“Let’s take a walk,” he said as he tucked his guitar back into its battered case. They crossed Ulitsa Zelensky S’Yezd and strolled along the path that wound around the perimeter of the fortress. Vasilisa noticed how small Andrei looked next to its high, red-brick walls. She fought the urge to grasp his reedy arm or twist her fingers around his. He might pull away and she’d have to walk back to the metro station, alone. 

“I’m going to Novorossiysk next week,” Andrei said. 

“Novorossiysk? What for?” she asked. Novorossiysk was on the Black Sea and had a concrete shoreline where cranes lifted shipping containers off of the backs of cargo liners. High winds often tore through it, knocking down trees and caving in roofs. It wasn’t anything like Odesa, with its sandy beaches and Potemkin Stairs. Odesa was established by Katherine the Great’s decree, Vasilisa thought, bitterly. Why shouldn’t it belong to Russia? 

“Just for a few days,” he said. “I’m going to try to catch some sturgeon.”

Vasilisa hadn’t been to the Black Sea since high school when her parents took her to Sochi where she sunbathed on pebbles after hiking the damp, misty hills of Krasnaya Polyana. Olga and Sergei went to Crimea every year. Maybe if Putin ever made good on his promise to drive the Nazis out of Ukraine, Crimea wouldn’t cost so much -- because then, Russia would have Odesa and Mariupol and Berdyansk, too. 

She hoped Andrei might say something like, “Come with me,” but when he didn’t she said, “Bring one back for me,” she said. 

On Monday, Vasilisa went to work at the little store near her apartment that sold Fanta and chocolate and bottles of vodka. After a rush in the morning, it was quiet all afternoon, until a young girl came in and grabbed a pineapple Fanta from the refrigerator. She set it on the counter and waited for Vasilisa to tell her the price. 

“Twenty rubles,” Vasilisa said. 

The girl counted twelve rubles and handed them to Vasilisa. Vasilisa’s cheeks flushed. What was this girl doing? Trying to take her for a fool?

“Twenty rubles, girl,” Vasilisa shouted. The girl fumbled with her handbag and counted out the other eight rubles. Vasilisa put the money in her cash register, ripped the receipt from the printer and threw it in the girl’s face. The girl turned and left, looking like she was going to cry. 

Vasilisa sat back on her stool, still fuming. What made people so stupid, thinking they could play tricks and pretend not to hear the real price? She hoped that the little brat wouldn’t ever come back to the store. 

After work, Vasilisa stepped into the elevator. When it opened, the smell of boiled cabbage wafted out. No, it was more than boiled cabbage. Boiled cabbage and sweat. Halfway up, the elevator stalled. Vasilisa pried the doors open and took the stairs the rest of the way, her footsteps echoing against the concrete. As she unlocked her door, she ran into Olga, who invited her in for tea. 

Olga’s kitchen was identical to Vasilisa's. Several pairs of Sergei’s shorts hung from the clothesline. The two women sat drinking tea with lemon and eating miniature sugar-glazed spice cakes. 

“I got a call from my sister today,” Olga said. 

“The one who lives abroad?” Vasilisa asked. She dipped her cake in her tea and watched it darken. 

Olga reached into her pocket for a pack of cigarettes and pulled out an empty box. She crushed it in her fist. Vasilisa reached into her purse and handed a fresh pack to Olga, who tore away the cellophane. 

“She spent forty minutes bragging to me about how beautiful it is in Barcelona.” Olga lit a cigarette and mimicked a high-pitched voice. “‘The buildings are so colorful and there are wrought iron balconies everywhere! You should see the trees on La Rambla. Oh, and the white-sand beaches!’” Olga lowered her voice back to its normal pitch. “It makes me sick.” She took a long drag on her cigarette. 

“And to think, it all started because a man stumbled off a river cruise and into her lap.” Vasilisa said, lighting her own cigarette. Nobody ever visited Nizhny Novgorod unless they were on a boat cruising the Volga river. 

“Alyona always was the lucky one,” Olga said, exhaling a plume of smoke. “What about you? You and Andrei?”

Vasilisa’s cigarette trembled between her fingers. “Andrei is just a friend.” 

Olga rolled her eyes. “Nobody believes that,” she said. “Nobody in all of Nizhny Novgorod believes that.”

“Andrei’s a widower.” 

Olga leaned forward, and in the wan light of the kitchen, Vasilisa noticed the creases around her mouth. Olga’s lipstick had faded to a thin red edge on the outermost part of her lip. 

“So are you,” Olga said. 

Vasilisa stubbed out her cigarette. She didn’t like to be reminded of Taras. He was only thirty-one when he died. He’d had an accident with a train. Everyone said he was drunk, that he’d thrown himself onto the tracks, but it wasn’t true. Vasilisa knew it couldn’t be true. 

Olga drained her teacup and held it out to Vasilisa. 

“Go on,” she said. “Read my fortune. No -- my sister’s fortune.”

Vasilisa turned the cup upside down and spun it around three times before turning it back upright. She squinted. 

“I see a separation,” Vasilisa said, speaking slowly. “Divorce…”

“And a lousy flat in Krasnoyarsk,” Olga laughed, smoke pouring from her nose and mouth. 

When she left Olga’s, Vasilisa thought about how it was when she was young. Back then, Russians didn’t need Europe. There were plenty of places to visit in the USSR. Yerevan! Tashkent! Minsk! Almaty! Please travel, the government said. See the empire in all its glory. We’ve got camels and Roman ruins and snowy riverbanks. To hell with Regensburg, Casablanca, Pompeii and Paris. And to hell with all those people in Kyiv who thought they belonged with the Europeans. 

On Friday, Vasilisa woke up early. Her bed sheets hung in the kitchen. She glanced at the jar of pears and noticed that a gray rug of mold was floating on top of it. Hadn’t she secured the lid? She sighed as she poured out the liquid and dumped the pears into the trash. 

That afternoon, a girl came in and counted out twenty rubles for a bottle of pineapple Fanta. It was until after she left that Vasilisa realized it was the same girl from Monday. Well, at least she’d learned to count. 

In the evening, Andrei called.

“I caught one,” he said.

“You caught a sturgeon?”

“The biggest one you’ve ever seen. You’ve got to come and see it.”

Vasilisa took off her slippers and put on her hard-soled shoes. She locked her two front doors and walked through the rusty playground. Andrei lived in another cluster of tall buildings a few streets over. When she arrived at his building, she buzzed his apartment number and waited. Behind her, she heard the voices of drunk men, laughing and using every swear word in the Russian language. 

Finally, Andrei buzzed her in. The elevator in his building stunk, too, but at least it was faster. 

Andrei opened his door, and the smell hit her immediately. It was as if Andrei had opened a thousand tins of sardines and left them on every surface of his apartment. In the living room, on an old red rug, a sturgeon that was at least five feet long glistened under the electric light. 

“It’s the biggest thing I’ve ever seen,” she said. She immediately clapped her hand over her mouth; she could feel the fish stench reaching down into her throat. 

“It took me nearly twenty minutes to reel him in,” Andrei boasted. “My arms are still sore.”

Vasilisa didn’t ask how he’d managed to get the thing all the way back to Nizhny Novogorod from Novorossiysk, or what he was going to do with it now that he’d dragged it on a twenty-hour road trip with probably not enough ice. 

“You should lay down next to it,” Andrei said. 

“What?” Vasilisa crossed her arms over her chest. Lay down next to that malodorous thing? She glanced down at it and it stared back with a lifeless eye. 

“Lie down next to it. Then I’ll take a picture. It will show everyone how big it is. Come on. Be my sexy model.” 

Vasilisa blushed and lowered herself onto the carpet. The fish’s eye was a puddle of black jelly. She touched its scales: sticky and cold. It had long, sharp whiskers that protruded from its face and strangely tiny fins. Vasilisa stretched her legs and propped herself on her arm. Her red dress blended with the carpet. A slow, lopsided grin spread across Andrei’s face; his white beard made him look like Grandfather Frost. She smiled while Andrei held up his camera and clicked the shutter. 

Author’s note: I chose the name Vasilisa for this character because it’s the name of a princess from Russian folktales. As one writer put it, “Vasilisa is a very ancient Slavic image that idealizes the feminine principle.” This is to contrast Russia’s idealized view of itself with its often bleak reality. 

Even though this story is from the perspective of a Russian, I’ve used the Ukrainian spellings for Odesa and Kyiv. That’s because, in spite of what Vasilisa thinks, she’s in a pro-Ukrainian story. This story should illustrate some of the reasons why Ukrainians do not want their country to become part of Russia. Slava Ukraini.