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Deborah Treisman

This is the New Yorker Fiction Podcast

from the New Yorker Magazine.

I'm Debra Treisman, fiction Editor at the New Yorker. Each month we invite a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss. This month we're going to hear the Fugitive by Lyudmila Ulitskaya, which was translated from the Russian by Bela Shayevich and appeared in the New Yorker in May of 2014.

Han Ong

A month and a half had gone by and he still had no news from home. He did not seek out ways to get in touch with his wife. He was more comfortable not imagining how worried she was about him, her desires, anxieties and fears.

Deborah Treisman

The story was chosen by Han Ong, who is the author of numerous plays and the novels Fixer Chow and the Disinherited. Hi Han.

Han Ong

Hey Deborah.

Deborah Treisman

So I think you somewhat surprised yourself by choosing to read a story by Lyudmila Ulitskaya today. Why was that?

Han Ong

Well, I was trawling through the fiction archives looking for a story to read for the podcast, and I sort of set myself a parameter of going back 15 years through the fiction archives and then scrolling through to the present day, and I'd happen upon this story, which I remember really loving when I first read it. And that was pretty quick into my search. And so that was that.

The decision was made. I'd been so floored by the story

when I first read it, and I

don't remember when I'd read it, if

I'd read it when it was first

published or much later. I chose it also in conjunction with the wonderful profile that M. Gessen had

published in the magazine of Olitskaya.

But here the chronology gets a little hazy for me.

I don't know whether I'd first read

the Gessen profile and then found the

story or had already read the story because this story was in fact published in the magazine before the Gessen profile. And then, you know, reading the Gessen

profile after reading the story sort of

helped bolster my love for this particular

writer in this particular short story.

Deborah Treisman

What is it that is at the heart of your love for her?

Han Ong

Well, two things I love her as a writer, and I love her as a person of conscience in her native Russia. So I'm full of admiration.

I'm always looking for how should an

artist be in this day and age of incipient fascism and all of that.

So I'm always looking for role models, if you will, or who to model myself after in terms of trying to

be an artist living in a crueler

and crueler society and how to overcome

the usual artist feelings of inutility and impotence.

Deborah Treisman

Yeah, I mean, Ulitskaya had started off as a geneticist and then lost that job due to an act of so called sedition.

Han Ong

Yes.

The lab was shut down.

I think it was because they'd entrusted a typist, an office typist, with samizdat to put down on record. And then the typist had turned them in. And so in the profile it says that Olitskaya and her colleagues had got off relatively easy. They were detained for 24 hours and then they were released. But they lost their job as a consequence of having been turned in.

Deborah Treisman

Right. She was translating an unpublishable novel and didn't want to type it all herself. Right, Right. This particular story does focus around a dissident artist. When you first read it, what was your immediate reaction to it?

Han Ong

There were a couple of things that stood out to me. First of all, I think I am as a reader partial to the kind of skullduggery that is involved in trying to skirt the impositions of a cruel regime, which can also be be a kind of parental despotism. So the spy story elements in it are very thrilling for me. So that's one.

And then the other one, which we

can talk about at length later on, is there is a description of a bunch of old women taking a bath that was just so outre. And usually my admiration for a writer as I'm reading him or her, is that I'm usually just very quiet in my admiration.

The pleasure sensors are being sort of

massaged when I'm happy in a story. But for this particular story, in that

particular stretch of the story with the

old women taking a bath, I just felt like putting the pages down and standing up and applauding. I don't think I've ever encountered anything like this in my reading.

Deborah Treisman

Well, I think we actually now have to let listeners get to the bath scene, which comes fairly late in the story. So we'll talk some more after the reading. And now here's Han Ong reading the

Fugitive by Lyudmila Ulitskaya Translated from the Russian by Belisjevich

Han Ong

The Fugitive At 9 o' clock one morning in June, Captain Popov rang the doorbell. No one answered for a long time, but finally he heard the sound of scurrying. Who's there? Who is it? A plaintive female voice said. The door opened a crack. The chain left on. Siv, Sev, and Emelianenko shifted their weight, itching to start, finish, and get out of there as fast as they could. They were incompetent boys. Popov pushed his ID through the crack in the door. He heard more scurrying, and then it finally opened. The witness, one of their own from the Municipal Housing Office, stomped in first. Does Boris Ivanovich Moratov live here? Popov asked. Moratov flashed into the room immediately, a large bearded man of around 40, in a blue robe that might have been velvet. We don't make robes like that here, Popov thought with disgust. Where do they get this stuff? Your passport, please, popov said. Just then Muratov's wife came out in a matching blue robe. Familiarize yourself with this document, please, popov said, and held out the search warrant. He wouldn't let Muratov hold it, forcing him to study it from a distance. If I may, Muratov stretched out his hand. Popov snatched the document away. What's there to read? It's a search warrant. I can tell you that myself. I can tell that it's a warrant, but there's no stamp on it. Oh, hell. Popov grew angry. It doesn't really matter, does it? A warrant is a warrant. It'll get a stamp, I can assure you. You can come back when you get the stamp, boris Ivanovich retorted insolently. I would be a little more polite

if I were you.

It isn't good for us to get on each other's bad side. If you will please let me do my work. Just a minute, moratov said, retreating into a little room. Popov knew the layout of the apartment. It was always the same, he thought. The hall, the room behind the hall, then the closet where they kept everything he was looking for. Moratov returned with a thick, yellowed piece of paper on official letterhead bearing the profile of the greatest of all men. It read Letter of Commendation. Moratov thrust the document right under the captain's nose, holding it so closed that Popov couldn't read it. Muratov's wife, pale against her blue robe, looked at her husband imploringly. His mother in law, Maria Nikolaevna, poured tea as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening. Read it from where I hold it, please, muratov said. From where I hold it. The captain read it. He understood. He walked away and took his boys with him. Muratov threw his salvation document aside. Maria Nikolaevna set a teacup and a sandwich on a plate in front of Boris Ivanovitch. Muratov loved his mother in law, in whom he saw traces of his wife, Natasha, although the mother was more decisive. He also saw his mother in law in his wife, the beginnings of plumpness, the future folds along the sides of her mouth, and a soft second chin. Natasha picked the document up off the floor. What is this, Boris? Boris gestured toward the ceiling. They're listening. Well, Natashenka. I got that certificate because in my modeling plant I fabricated the sarcophagus of the leader and teacher of all eras and peoples, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Take a look at the signature. The powers that be are eternally in my debt. Maria Nikolaevna smiled. Natasha placed her white hands on her even wider neck. What now? She asked meekly. Would you pour me another cup of tea, Maria Nikolaevna? He asked, clinking his cup. Natasha sat down, unable to come to her senses. Muratov embraced his wife. She picked up a pencil and some scrap paper and wrote. You're going to be arrested. I'm going to leave in half an

hour, he wrote back.

Then he ripped up the paper and set it on fire. He waited for the flames to graze his fingertips and then threw the remains in the ashtray. He picked up a fresh piece of paper and wrote train station and showed it to Natasha and Maria Nikolaevna. Right now, Muratov said. Alone? Natasha asked. Muratov nodded. Then Muratov went into the closet and took out the folder that held what Captain Popov had come for. He removed a stack of illustrated pages and returned to the kitchen. Muratov took a baking sheet from the oven, placed several pieces of paper on it, and brought a match to them. Maria Nikolaevna grabbed the match out of his hand. How many times have I asked you, Boris Ivanovich, to leave the household duties to me? Maria Nikolaevna squeezed into the corridor where she lifted up the edge of the worn linoleum. She pushed the drawings under the linoleum and then inserted the edge of the strip back under the threshold. He's lost his mind. He's lost his mind, natasha said. Her mother pointed at the phone. Like Boris, she was convinced that they were listening loudly. She said, boris, I'm going to make you meat patties for lunch.

All right.

20 minutes later, Moratov left the house by the back door. He had shaved his beard but left the mustache. He went through the courtyard, which had been flooded by a storm the night before. Broken branches stuck up from an enormous puddle, which Boris trudged through carrying a large shopping bag that held a change of linens, a sweater, his favorite little pillow, and every bit of money that there was in the house. Sivtev and Emelianenko, who had been left outside the front door, sat on the bench smoking, trying to decide whether to go and get some beer. Captain Popov came back with the necessary stamp at 1015. Natasha opened the door immediately and said that Muratov had gone to work. Popov threw a fiery glance at his goons. But he doesn't work. What's his job? His mother in law intervened. He's an artist. He doesn't go to an office, but he works a lot. You saw yourself. He constructed Lenin's sarcophagus. He's been fired since then. Popov said Maria Nikolaevna rebuffed him, so he went out to look for work. Will he be back for lunch? The captain asked. Of course he will. They'd bought the story about the meat patties. They hadn't dragged their feet bugging the apartment. He asked me to make him meet. We're expecting him back soon. The captain got to work sorting through mountains of papers. The samizdat was the stuff that everyone had. Anyway, it wasn't samizdat Popov had come for. The captain was looking for drawings that were already lying on his desk in the form of photocopies from Stern, the West German magazine. One was a caricature with giant letters that spelled Glory to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The letters were made out of bologna, and under the letters was a crowd of people and dogs trying to get up close to them. There was even a price tag hanging from the letters. 2 rubles, 20 kopecks. Another caricature showed the mausoleum, also made out of bologna, but with Lenin written in hot dogs. Agents had searched for the artist for a long time before uncovering his identity. The final touch was getting the originals, or something that resembled them. Captain Popov stayed until the late evening. He confiscated three sacks of samizdat, but the drawings were never found. By then, Muratov was at the house of an old woman who had been trying to sell green onions and parsley at the Kimri port. All she'd come home with was a traveler who'd missed the last boat. De Novo Okatovo Muratov paid a ruble to spend the night in a small barn, sleeping on a bale of hay covered with a sheet. At dawn he washed up at the well and took the 6am ferry. The old woman turned out to be a saint. She never reported him. That evening he was in the distant and inaccessible village of Danilovi Gorky, sitting in an old peasant house that belonged to his friend Nikolai Mikhailovich, who was also an artist. He explained his situation and asked if he could stay either there or in the bathhouse for a period of time, posing as a cousin or something of the sort. Nikolai Mikhailovich shook his head and groaned, but didn't refuse him. That's how Boris Ivanovich's life on the run began. Danilovi Gorky wasn't so much a village as a tiny settlement of five houses. One was Nikolai Mikhailovich', another was abandoned, empty since the death of its owner two years earlier. The other three housed summer vacationers along with their year round owners. Hardly anyone stayed on for September. Nikolai Mikhailovich's mother had come from an aristocratic line and his father was a priest who had been executed in 1937. Thus Nikolai was always prepared. He said that it would be safe to stay for the summer while there were plenty of strangers around. But afterward, Boris would be dangerously visible. Nikolai Mikhailovich's house was packed with people, children, the elderly, two single female relatives and some long term houseguests. Everyone did a bit of work, though it wasn't compulsory. They were busy from morning till night, but they were also free. For Boris, country life was a novelty. He was a city man. His grandfather had been a serf who started working at Seton's print shop in 1883. And his father was a skilled proletarian. Artisana, true Muscovite. Before his escape, Boris had never even laid eyes on a village. Suddenly the beauty of the secluded little settlement opened up before him. Danilovi Gorki stood on the banks of a large river among swamps and forests. His hosts, the descendants of an aristocratic family, were also to his liking. They had never known palaces or had a whiff of luxury, having spent half a century between poverty and destitution, exile and prison. Those who'd survived were hardy. They had become so simple that they didn't even know any foreign languages. Nonetheless, there was still something special about them, even if Boris Ivanovitch couldn't quite put his finger on it. Nikolai's daughters stirred kasha on the stove, baked hearth cakes, worked in the garden and washed the linens in the river. His Grandsons caught fish and his granddaughters and the two aunts foraged for berries and mushrooms. All of them sketched, sang and put on plays for the little ones. Soon after Boris arrival, Nikolai Mikhailovich's loud and restless cousin Anastasia came to stay for three days. She immediately set her sights on Boris Ivanovich. He was attempting an easy mark. They lost no time, although their first night together would have lasted longer if the whole family hadn't spent so much time singing at the table. Anastasia was a good singer, with a kind of gypsy chic in her voice. She had small, girlish breasts and a long nose and was not as beautiful as his wife, but Boris remembered her for a long time afterward. She seemed to have purified him completely, picked him down to bone and tendon and then put him back together. Boris didn't remember ever having had that kind of power and stamina. Anastasia, a doctor, left by boat on the fourth day of their affair, since she had a 24 hour shift at the hospital where she was the head of her department. The whole family saw her off, and as they stood on the shore she sang. Maruschenko washed her white feet and waved to them with her handkerchief from the boat. She's so educated, but such a slut. Boris Ivanovitch thought, both impressed and confused, as though he'd read his friend's mind. Nikolai Mikhailovich told him that's in Nastya's blood. Her great grandmother, or great great grandmother fooled around with Pushkin on Transfiguration Day. They all went to church in Casino, first by ferry, then by bus. The trip was exhausting. Your life is so anti Soviet, he remarked in admiration. No, Boris, it's just a Soviet, Nikolai Mikhailovich said, laughing. All summer, Boris watched the sun rise and the water lap the sandbank, which was covered in the empty mussel shells and decorative grasses that he had previously seen only on icons. He hadn't known that they really existed. Moved by everything he saw, he was happy. Everyone foraged for mushrooms in the forest. There weren't many in July, but by August they sprouted up. After the sweet rain showers, the days were long, the evenings with their endless tea drinking, were pleasant, and the nights passed in an instant. He fell asleep and woke up in the same moment, as though nothing had happened. A month and a half had gone by and he still had no news from home. He did not seek out ways to get in touch with his wife. He was more comfortable not imagining how worried she was about him, her desires, anxieties and fears. A relative of Nikolai Mikhailovich's tossed a single postcard from Boris Ivanovich into a Moscow mailbox. The card said, everything is fine. Don't worry. I love you and miss you. In August, Nikolay Mikhailovich's wife, the daughter of a famous Russian artist, came to the house with her oldest son, Kolya. Her daughters buzzed around her, doting on her as if she were an honored guest. All mamochka, mamochka. While Kolya, who was 30 years old, tailed his father wherever he went. Boris Ivanovich, who was a virulent opponent of child rearing, began to doubt his beliefs. Long ago, he had decided that giving birth in this inhumane and shameless state into a meaningless life of poverty and filth should not be done. He had told Natasha that this was his condition for marrying her. Their marriage had lasted for eight years, and the problem wasn't that she wanted children. She lacked a sense of humor. Or maybe the way that her husband's mind worked had begun to wear her down. She cringed at his drawings as they became angrier and more acrid. Compared with other couples, they had been rather well off. He had graduated from the crafts department of the Stroganoff school. Because he was a fabricator, he made more money than the real artists at the plant. He got bigger orders for, say, 1,000 rubles. Sometimes he worked off the books as an assistant to famous artists. He helped create the decorative metalwork for various palaces of culture, those for railways or metalworking. No matter the trade, the culture was always socialist. This work filled him with a rage that manifested in increasingly acerbic caricatures of the socialist life, which was allegedly always on the verge of transforming into a communist utopia. His love for drawing had intensified. He was invited to participate in an art show in someone's apartment. Many people admired his drawings. His first real success depicted the statue worker and a kolkoj woman made out of Bologna. Thanks to his friend Ilya, the this bologna made it to West Germany and was published in Stern. After that, Boris grew indifferent to filling his large orders, preferring to spend time sketching in Danilovi Gorky, Muratov lost all interest in drawing Bologna. There was none in the village, and no one missed it. The quiet sketches of gentle nature that Nikolai Mikhailovich's entire clan, young and old, loved to make were similarly unappealing to Boris Ivanovich. He ended up not drawing anything all summer long. September was coming, and people started preparing to return to the city. They filled pillowcases with mushrooms and put raspberries and wild strawberries in the oven to dry. That Year they didn't make jam, there wasn't enough sugar, and besides, the jars were tough to transport. They stashed pickles and mushrooms in the cellar and buried the early potatoes. When their departure was imminent, Nikolai Mikhailovich finally asked, so you're set on spending the winter here, Boris Ivanovich? I'm scared, Nikolai Mikhailovich. Not of the police. I'm scared of your stove, your house. These are the kinds of things you have to have known about since childhood. It seems like it's too late for me to learn them. Nikolai Mikhailovich scratched his meager beard, fell silent for a moment, and then made a proposal. Baba Noura's vacationers have left and she's gotten rather feeble in the past year. You should stay at her place. I'll talk to her. You can help her through the winter. I'll come in December. God willing. You'll survive until then. Muratov assigned Nikolai Mikhailovich two tasks in Moscow. The first was to go to Muratov's house sometime, without calling ahead or providing any warning, and give his wife and his mother in law a letter from him, but not tell them where he was. The second was to meet with Muratov's friend Ilya and say a single word, forward. Ilya would know what it meant. Before returning to the country in December, he should meet with Ilya again, take the money that Ilya would bring, and give half of it to Muratov's family. The other half he should bring back to Muratov. He did not know how much money there would be. Maybe there would be a lot, maybe not very much, maybe nothing at all. Muratov moved in with Noura, a stooped over old lady with a crooked little face, gnarled fingers and giant hideous wrists that she held in front of her chest. When she walked, it seemed as if she were always carrying a cup or a pot. Her wrists never unbent, and she used her hands as though they were two large claws. In exchange for letting Muratov live with her, she asked not for money, but for vodka. The old woman turned out to have a passion for drinking and and was a merry hooligan. She woke up early in the morning, crawled out of her cot with a loud creak, crossed herself in the holy place in the corner where there was a large blackened icon, and then tossed back her first thimbleful. At noon she had her second. In the middle of the day she would eat kasha or potatoes. Later, three thimblefuls would serve as a replacement for all other necessary fats, proteins, and carbohydrates. Nora went through a bottle a week, a ration she had established years earlier. In the morning she was barely there, but by evening she was full of life and even did some housework, all the while muttering gibberish under her breath. Several years before, the village had got radio and electricity. Noora ignored the electricity. She never turned on the light, going to bed when it got dark and getting up when the sun. But she took a liking to the radio. When Muratov finally learned how to decipher the old woman's stream of Babel, he discovered that it was a merciless running commentary on the radio programs she listened to in the morning. Listen, lodger, that new Stalin they have today, they praise him so highly, he'll be even worse than the old one, she once said to Boris Ivanovich. Why is that? The old one took everything, and now this one is picking at the leftovers. Oh, they liberated us from everything, those dearies. First they freed me from my land, then from my husband, my children, my cow and my chickens. Now they'll liberate me from vodka, and I'll finally be completely free. Nora's husband had perished in 1930 during collectivization. Her three sons, who came of age toward the beginning of the war, had died in combat one after another, the eldest in 41, the middle in 42, and the youngest in 45. And they liberated us from God, she mumbled, peering toward the darkness of her altar, although perhaps he decided to cast us off himself. Who can tell? Some evenings her neighbors would stop by Marfa and Zinada, both of them younger than Noura but just a spitter. They drank Boris Ivanovich's tea, and Noura bragged to God, sent me a goodly lodger. He brings me vodka, puts the tea on. It had been ages since Boris Ivanovitch had thought about the bologna drawings in the village. Mass produced meat products had completely lost their symbolism, like long forgotten relics. The old women here could not afford to take the train to Moscow just to buy bologna, and they wouldn't have seen an orange as long as they lived had it not been for Nikolai Mikhailovich bringing them such unheard of curios. From time to time, Moratov started drawing the old women and their surroundings. In the midst of this poverty and squalor, a treasure trove materialized before his eyes. The crooked little potatoes cooked in their skins, the pickles disfigured in their barrels, and all the mushrooms, from the little slippery jacks to the ugly milk caps. The queen of the Spread was a cloudy bottle of hooch stopped with a homemade cork. Sometimes, if they were lucky, it was vodka. In winter, bread wasn't delivered to the store in the larger settlement of Krushilino, which was 6km away from Gorky. So the old women took turns baking. Boris Ivanovich quickly went through all the paper in Nikolay Mikhailovich's house. Then he found 10 rolls of wallpaper intended for the attic. The redecorating had been put off for several years before being abandoned entirely. At first he drew on the back of the paper, and then he started drawing on the front, which provided his drawings with a stippled yellow background that made the old women's faces come alive. They were the last people remaining in the village, worn out as their old clothes, humble as the potatoes that were their only food, and free as the clouds. Drinking cheered them up. They would sing, reminisce, and laugh, covering their toothless mouths with their blackened fingers. There were two teeth among the three of them. Toothaches were treated with sage and nettles. Leshke, the village shepherd, had been the only one who could extract teeth, and after he died, the remaining teeth had fallen out of their own accord. Boris Ivanovitch drew his sitters in thin pencil lines, with their amazing conversations flowing out of their mouths in ribbons. What stories they told. They talked about how, before the war, the party bosses had showed up to incorporate everyone into a col kage, and the people protested and protested, but finally signed up, having nowhere else to turn. Noora's impish eldest son, Nikolai, played a trick on the bausses with some spoiled eggs. There had been a hen who was so clever at nesting that it was hard to take her eggs away. They would go bad and explode in her hiding spots, and you couldn't get rid of the stink for a month. Afterward. Nikolai found some unexploded eggs to put into the newcomer's wagon so that they would sit on them with their fattened asses. You wouldn't believe it, but the very first boss who sat down broke the rotten egg. There was a quiet shooting sound, and the stench spread through the whole town. It was so funny. They reminisced about their husbands and fought over unsettled scores. Marfa reminded Zinada that she'd messed with her men in 1926. Zinaida retorted that Leshka the shepherd stole milk from other people's cows. Leshka happened to be Marfa's brother, and she didn't take kindly to the accusation. Their argument escalated until Noora sang a dirty little ditty about who snuck into where, and both of the women laughed again. They cast their minds back to things that had happened long ago, but were not forgotten, about the Communists who had starved the village and taken away its men. Periodically they would fall silent and knock back a thimbleful. Then they'd laugh and drink some more. Snow fell, and the poverty and dejection of the sodden and stormy autumn months were replaced by a white winter which stayed with Boris Ivanovich as a bright patch, a sunny idyll in his gray life. He spent the few available daylight hours wandering around the village. The swamps had frozen over, and you could go farther out on them than before. There was so much snow that it reached over his felt boots. One day upon returning home, he found all the old women making a fuss in the front yard. They had decided to undertake a major cleaning on the occasion of the following day's holiday. It's the Feast of the Presentation of Mary, they told Boris Ivanovitch. Presentation to what or whom they couldn't explain. But they had decided to wash themselves. It had been a long time. The last time they had bathed was for the Feast of the Intercession, when the first snow had fallen. Nikolai Mikhailovich had the only decent bathhouse. The old women's bath houses had all fallen apart long ago. But there was so much snow in Nikolai Mikhailovich's yard that it would have taken a day to clear it. They decided to wash Inura's house. Boris Ivanovich wheeled in the tub, brought them water from the well, chopped enough firewood to fill the entire porch, and brought it inside. In the morning they started heating the water. It got so hot in the house that the little glass panes in the windows were wept with condensation. Cleaning themselves as well. Everything was ready to go. They had even steamed the birch switches. And then it occurred to them. Where would the lodger go? Even the goat was freezing in the yard. How could they kick him out? You couldn't hide him in the stove. He'd burn up. The house didn't have separate areas and there were no walls, only a hiding place behind the stove. He wouldn't dare to look from behind there. Then they laughed. What would this stud want with our old bones? They put Boris Ivanovich behind the stove and strung up a curtain. He sat there with a book, but he didn't read. The lamplight was hardly brighter than a candle. He could have moved it closer, but instead of reading, he listened to what the old women talked about in the bath. At first they joked about how they'd grown so dry that the dirt didn't stick to them anymore. Then Zinada said that they had even stopped stinking. When they were young they'd smelled like pussy, but now it was just dust and mold. Finally, the washing began. They moaned and groaned, pouring water and knocking the tubs around. Suddenly one of them slipped, fell with a slap, and yawped. Boris Ivanovich leapt up, ready to help. He peered over the curtain. Zinaida and Marfa were pulling Nora off the floor, spilling over with childlike laughter. Boris Ivanovich froze. He'd grown accustomed to their craggy faces, their dark, disfigured hands, their stomped out feet, everything that showed through their ancient, faded clothing. But now, dear Lord, he was seeing their naked bodies for the first time. He couldn't take his eyes off them. Their long gray hair flowed over their bumpy spines. Their wrists and feet looked even heavier and more horrible than usual. Broken from working, the land gnarled like the roots of old trees. Their fingers were the same color as the earth they'd been digging up for decades. Their bodies were pale, so white that they were blue like. Like skim milk. Marfa still had her breasts with their dark, animal like nipples, while the other women's seemed to have melted away, leaving behind flaccid translucent bags that drooped down to their bellies. Zinada had long, beautiful legs, or what remained of them. All of their butts had been rubbed down to flat spots, with only folds of skin left to mark where the cheeks had once been full. I'm telling you, Noura, I can't pick up heavy things anymore. Whenever I try, my uterus starts falling out, marfa said provocatively, with a hint of pride. Boris Ivanovich saw that there was a gray sack dangling between her legs like a tobacco pouch. He cringed, but couldn't turn away from these three harpy graces. Marfa squatted and nimbly pushed the sack back into her hairless, crinkled lump, into the depths of what had once been a woman's body. Boris Ivanovich was not ignorant. He'd graduated from art school and had the genes of a master engraver. In his adolescence he'd studied Dore's illustrations for the Divine Comedy, keenly interested in the female body. These contorted creatures stirring 2 meters before him were the living remains of those bodies. It took an effort of imagination to see any vestiges of woman in their twisted bones and hanging flesh. Old age has no gender, Boris Ivanovich thought, growing terrified. What about me? Will this happen to my body?

I don't want that.

I'd rather go out on my own terms than be nullified. Suddenly there was a burst of laughter. The old women had caught him staring. Oh, your lodger's peeking at the girls. Noorka, let's beat him with a birch broom so he doesn't get any ideas. Noora squealed with the stinging nettles. We used to beat the boys who peeked with stinging nettles. Come on, you hags like I need you. I was just trying to help whoever fell down, and you've gotten all excited. With that, he hid behind the curtain. Afterward, he spent several days sketching the bath of the white swans, which was what he called the scene. On the remaining wallpaper. He was able to draw about 20 versions before he ran out of paper. Just as Boris began to get bored, Nikolai Mikhailovich returned with his son Kolya to check on the house and take the reserve stores back to Moscow. The winter route was arduous. Unable to use the frozen waterway, they had to take the train, the bus, and then travel six more kilometers through the forest on a tractor. Nikolai Mikhailovich brought a large amount of money from Ilya, more than Boris Ivanovich had expected, as well as a letter from his wife. They went to the neighboring village, to the store. The shopkeeper, vrka, who had a deep respect for Nikolai Mikhailovich, pulled the forbidden vodka out from under the counter. Nikolai Mikhailovich had brought two bottles from Moscow, but Boris Ivanovich did not want to miss an opportunity to spend some of his new pile of cash. He had avoided the store, fearing the locals. They fit the store's entire shabby stock into two backpacks, a bounty of cookies, sticky hard candies without wrappers, oil, barley, a packet of dried peas, briquettes of cherry kissel, blocks of processed cheese, and two packets of salt. Boris Ivanovich kept scanning the shelves for real food. Verka eyed him to see if he was looking for more than groceries. To her dismay, his hungry eyes sought out goods and not her. The beauty. Straightening his back under the weight of his bag, Nikolai Mikhailovich shook his shoulders

to better distribute the weight of their

purchases, which made the models give out a pretty clink. Are you staying for a while? Come visit us. VRKA propped her round cheek on her beet red fist. No, Vera, thank you.

I don't think I'll be coming back.

I'm only here for a day. I haven't even started warming the house. I just chopped some wood. We'll spend the night at Svishtunika's. And then head back. Well, you should at least tell your friend to come see us. Verka giggled. We're bored, us girls. He's been living here for so long, but he hasn't made any friends at all. It turned out that the country telegraph had been functioning all along. Muratov's presence was known for villages around we're leaving tomorrow.

Deborah Treisman

You.

Han Ong

You can get to know each other when we come back in the spring, nikolai Mikhailovich said in anticipation of the men's return to danilovigorki. Nora had baked potato pies and then retreated behind the stove out of politeness. Zinada and Marfa weren't around. Maybe we should invite them over, boris Ivanovitch said, having finally decided to leave this fantastical sanctuary where he'd stayed too long. No, they won't come today. They're well mannered countrywomen. They would never come on the first day I'm back. I don't know why. Probably to stay out of the way, or so that they won't seem like they're asking for gifts. They were raised well, not like the women today. Vrka, the shopkeeper, steals and parties. She's Zinaida's niece, which means she is supposed to come visit her and bring her presents, but. But she just doesn't want to. Zinada's son has been in prison for the past two years. His wife is a drunk, the grandson drowned last summer, and now all she has left is that slow witted girl. Nikolai Mikhailovich gestured dismissively. But what do you need? Our country dramas for Ivanovich Kolya came in, his arms full of provisions from the cellar. Everything's fine, dad. Nothing froze. The potatoes are in good shape, only I don't think we'll be able to get them to the station in such cold weather. They'll freeze on the way. I would take the cucumbers and mushrooms, but I wouldn't touch the potatoes. The three of them were having a good time, being men among men, savoring the pies and other country treats to celebrate their reunion. They peeled the potatoes and ate them with oil, but they didn't open the canned goods, deciding to leave them for the old women's Christmas feast. Their nativity fast had just begun, but really the women fasted all year round, with the occasional chicken as their sole reprieve. Around 10 that night there was a knock at the door. Nikolai Mikhailovich flew to his feet, shoved Boris's plate and glass into his hands, and pushed him behind the stove where Noura was Sleeping. The man at the door was a police officer, Nikolai Svistunov, a distant relative. People in those parts had stopped paying much attention to family ties because it

was half Svistunov's and half Yerofeev's for

three villages around half of the men were named. Nikolai Svistunov threw off his hat and unbuttoned his police coat without saying a word. Nikolai Mikhailovich got a clean glass and filled it more than half way. I came up to see you because I noticed you're not heating your home. There's no light on in there, sviztunov said. You have to burn wood for three days to heat the house. We just came up here to take a look at our property and pick up some pickles and mushrooms from our cellar. We're going to spend the night here at Noura's and then go back to the city. There was no road back from Danilovi Gorki, not even a ski run. The only path was the trail that Nikolai and Boris had cleared, which was how the cop had got to the house. Fresh snow had already covered their tracks. It's more than an hour's walk back, svestunov said. Wolves had been spotted in Troitsky that week, and he didn't want to run into any, so he didn't spend too much time at the old woman's house. He had gone there on his own initiative, checked everyone's documents, verified that they were all people he knew and the that there were no strangers around. However, just for propriety's sake, he asked Nikolai Mikhailovich, have you seen any strangers around here? Strangers? The artist asked. No, no strangers. Only our own. And so Svistunov stomped back down the narrow forest trail, running into neither stranger nor wolf. Boris Ivanovitch came out from behind the stove where Noura was still sleeping. The man finished a second bottle of vodka and then had some tea. Boris cleared the table, wiped it off, and placed three stacks of his drawings on it. In one, the old women were talking at the table. The second one had still lives with potatoes and pickles alongside nameless objects of unknown utility. Some kind of little tongs, wooden pincers, miniature shovels, clay knick knacks that were either for drinking or simply toys. The third stack, the largest, had the naked old women, the joints of their legs, their leathery pouches and sacks, their folds and creases. The drawings weren't of an inferno. The women were grinning and chortling. Nikolai Mikhailovich looked at the drawings for a long time. Grumbling and sniffling before finally saying, Boris, I don't even know what a good draftsman you are. You can't stay here. I don't know how you're planning to survive, but I'm taking these pictures back to Moscow. I'll keep them safe for you until you get back. He smiled. If I can stay safe myself. The next day they parted ways. Nikolay Mikhailovich and his son left for Moscow, and Boris Ivanovich for Vologda. Boris Ivanovich evaded arrest for four years. He got used to the idea that he'd eventually be caught, and so he lived recklessly gambling with his life. He began in the Vologda region. Then for three months he stayed in

Tver at the fidgety, full throated Anastasia's house.

Then, having grown completely brazen, he moved closer to Moscow and took up residence at the dasha of a distant relative. It occurred to him that perhaps no one was even looking for him. His friend Ilya helped him a great deal. He preserved his entire collection, with the exception of the pieces that went abroad. Everything on the other side was going swimmingly. At the end of 1976 he had a show in Cologne called Russian Nature laid bare. The hideous old women frolicked in their frames. They were having a good time. This was when they finally caught him. Four years after his disappearance, Boris Ivanovich got off with two years and an absurd charge. Pornography. It wasn't the anti Soviet bologna that got him, or the mausoleum made of bologna. Not even the terrible portrait made out of sausage of the leader holding a cut off piece of his own ear on the tines of a fork. It was pornography. After doing two years in a camp in Arkhangelsk, he emigrated to Europe with his new wife Raike, a little Jewish woman, slippery and solid as a rock, something like Anastasia. They were living happily in Europe until recently. The beautiful Natasha didn't waste much time either. While Boris was in hiding, she found herself a completely normal engineer with whom she had a daughter of that same breed that Boris Ivanovich had once so admired. Maria Nikolaevna watched over her granddaughter and cooked their meager meals. The new son in law was all right, a decent man, but had nothing on Boris Ivanovich. All the old women in Danilovi Gorky died long ago. Everything is fine.

Deborah Treisman

That was Ha Nong reading the Fugitive by Lyudmila Ulitskaya. Translated from the Russian by Belisjevich. The story appeared in the New Yorker in May of 2014 and was included in a translation by Polly Gannon. In Ulitskaya's novel the Big Green Tent, which was published by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux in 2015.

Comprehensive, witty, speculative, critical, insightful, profound, wide ranging. Hopefully doesn't take itself too, too seriously.

David Remnick

I'm David Remnick, and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, my colleagues and I try to make sense of what's happening in this chaotic world. I hope you'll join us for the New Yorker Radio Hour. Wherever you listen to podcasts, the thoughtful,

Deborah Treisman

exquisite, just, you know, So ahan. The story, when you first read it, feels almost like a kind of light hearted romp. It's so pleasurable to read, it's so funny. And then you step back and you look at each detail and see just how kind of miserable and bleak a lot of it is. And it obviously, you know, doesn't paint a beautiful picture of life in the Soviet Union. If you had to say, you know, what's going on here? Would you call this realism? Would you call it satire? How would you classify this story?

Han Ong

I think among the reasons why the

story is so wonderful is because though it does in fact detail a lot of what you talk about, the privations of Russian life of that era, the

tone is so ebullient.

And the ebullience doesn't come to me,

at least does not come at the

cost of the grimness. You know, I don't know if I'm making a wrong generalization in saying that this might be typically Russian. You know, it also is in some odd ways kind of Chinese in that both are large swathes of people who have undergone great suffering.

And yet in both literatures, there is

a tradition of if you don't laugh, you'll cry kind of tone of writing. And I always love that paradoxical sort of balancing act of comedy layered on top of, I wouldn't say outright tragedy,

but sort of grimness and grayness.

Deborah Treisman

Yeah, I think a lot of that comes also from just the narrative voice. You know, it's not a first person story, it's third person. And we never have an identified story narrator because we jump around. We start in the KGB policeman's eyes, but there's a tone in the narration that is almost evidence of a character speaking, do you know what I mean? That there's someone there with a sense of humor who's using exclamation marks and pointing out things that are funny or interesting, apart from what we see through Boris Ivanovich's eyes and so on.

Han Ong

Yeah, I would say that there are locutions there that put me in mind of a tale as opposed to a story. Although once the story does get going,

it is in fact a proper story. But there are locutions there. For example, the way the story ends.

You know, all the old women in

Danilo Vygorki died long ago.

Everything is fine. You know, that is a kind of tale locution or construct, and it comes

at the tail end of the story.

There are those kinds of phrasings all throughout the story and all throughout. In my experience, Ulitskaya's writings in the novel from which this has been excerpted

in the Big Green Tent.

It's full of those kinds of storyteller's way of going in and out of the tale.

Deborah Treisman

Do you think that that is Ulitskaya herself, or do you think that she has in mind a person telling this story?

Han Ong

My take on it is that it is Ulitskaya herself, that this is her style. She just launches into the story, and every so often she might be aware of herself telling the story. And maybe that is responsible for these locutions and phrasings.

Deborah Treisman

Yeah. Why do you think she starts us off in the mind of Popov? So you start the story and you sort of feel like, oh, we're in a police story, procedural, in a sense. Here they are knocking on the door, they're about to search the apartment, and then it becomes something quite different.

Han Ong

My take on it is that Ulitskaya's methodology as a storyteller is that she wants to sweep all of life in her storytelling way. So it's just as legitimate and feasible to start in the KGB captain's viewpoint and to incorporate his two stooges along with him as it would have been to start with the hero of the story with. With Boris Ivanovich. So I just think it's that kind of sweep that takes in Captain Popov at the start, Nikolai Mikhailovich, his cousin Anastasia, the old women each in their turn. And then when Nikolai Mikhailovich's family visits from Moscow, each has their cameo. Everybody is part of the cast.

Deborah Treisman

Well, so we have this almost comic scene with the KGB and his KGB captain and his stooges, as you said. And then off goes Boris kind of scurrying out the back door and plowing through puddles and gets himself out and free. And then we're plunged into a completely different world. He's out in rural Russia, which is new to him as well. And I feel like the story at that moment becomes a different story in a way.

Han Ong

It is a story of flight then. So, you know, it's a Story of flight. But for such an emergency scenario, it's amazing how entertaining and light it is, as if Boris Ivanovich was going on another adventure. I think it speaks to both the survival instinct, the survival optimism of the character, as it does to Olitskaya's own sense of optimism in the midst of gloom. So it does become a different story in that it concentrates its energies and its telling on one person and uses that person as a kind of symbol of the oppression of the Russian state. But it continues the comic energy established by the beginning. Because you could also say that Boris

Ivanovich sort of slows down.

It's a kind of pastoral in a very odd way, but it's a pastoral that is marked by flight from hounding governmental powers. But it feels so. I don't want to say that it feels so stakes free. But part of the reason why I love the story is again that paradox of a frightful story, or a story that in another writer's hands could be frightful, could be nerves scraping, but in her hands, a sort of lightweight. It becomes an opportunity for Boris Ivanovich

to sort of get a second beat on life, as it were, to slow

down and to be sheltered by good people.

It's so strange that, coming from where

she has come from, Olitskaya, that her

stories are also full of perfidy and malefactors.

But in this instance, in this particular story, it's full of good people, good humored people, stalwart people. It would be a cliche to characterize them as good country folk, but in

a way they do fall into that.

And, you know, she's a robust kind of old fashioned writer who takes, as I said, takes into her suite, all

of human life as she sees it.

But the characters in this story in particular illustrate her oddly optimistic view of human nature. Though, in fact, yes, I agree with you that it becomes a different story. It continues to sort of expand on that comic vein introduced earlier by Captain Popov's bumbling.

Deborah Treisman

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, it's amazing in the moment, you know, after the captain leaves and they're writing on pieces of paper to communicate and so on, the only person in that scene who seems afraid is Boris wife. Boris is like, I'll be going in a half hour, and seems fully prepared. He takes his favorite little pillow and you know, Natasha's mother is saying, no, no, no, don't do something silly like burn them. I've got this under control. Tucking it under the linoleum. It's as though they've planned a course of action, and it's just going accordingly. And Boris doesn't seem to feel any fear. He has a destination, he knows where he's going. And we get that first hint of sort of moral goodness with the old woman who takes him home to sleep in her barn and then doesn't report, you know, doesn't snitch. So, yeah, it's almost as though everything was preordained for Boris.

Han Ong

Well, the way I look at it, I'm partial to stories where the hero is intrepid and he is so intrepid, and so is his mother in law. You know, they're both seemingly well practiced in the art of, as I called it earlier, skulduggery. You know, I love stories of capable people. I just thrill to that, you know, as opposed to, you know, bumbling folk or people prone to mishaps. So this is sort of thrilling, you know, it's part of the buoyant, ebullient energy of the story that he is so capable, he probably knew that they

were coming for him, and so he

had a contingency plan should this scenario crop up.

Deborah Treisman

And then he gets there and, you know. NIKOLAI groans but he doesn't say, no, you can't stay. You know, I suppose because he goes back and forth between city and country, he's kind of prepared for both eventualities because even in the country house later, when a policeman comes to the door, he's instantly cleared the glass and the plate and shoved Boris with them behind the stove. He knows exactly what to do.

Han Ong

Well, it says earlier in the story that he comes from a family where

either the father or the grandfather was a priest who was killed in the 1930s. So he is well prepared.

So I think a lot of Russians of a certain ilk have probably run rehearsals in their mind about what to do in case of X, in case of Y. Catastrophe is always looming around the corner. Snitches and the hounds of a regime are always, you know, sniffing around. So it's par for the course for this set of characters.

Deborah Treisman

Yeah, but then he gets to this

place where it's not that it's untouched

by Soviet authoritarianism, but it is, as Baba Noura says, it is free. They have their freedom. They've been liberated from so many things, including their families. But it describes her as free as a cloud. You know, they are free because there's nothing left to take from them. And they're living a life which really isn't under surveillance. And having that daily sort of sense of paranoia not be there makes Life completely different.

Han Ong

Except I would argue that it is, because when Boris and Nikolai go to the grocery, is it the grocery? It says that Vera has known about Boris's presence in the village for some time. And the phraseology, I think, is that the country telegraph had been at work all along.

Deborah Treisman

Right. But it hasn't reached the people who actually want to find Boris.

Han Ong

Right.

Deborah Treisman

It's just they know it. They all know it, because they're talking amongst themselves, but they're on his side.

Han Ong

Right. You could say that this might be a kind of optimistic gloss that Olitskaya puts on the grim reality, because in the interview she did that ran with the story, she says that Danilovi Gorky is in fact a real place. And she paints such a drab picture of it being a remnant of its former vital green self. But in this place, though, that is present in the physical surroundings, I mean, just to get there is such an odyssey. It is so far out. But the people who live in it, the three old women, can in a way, be said to, in their own way, thrive in this setting.

Deborah Treisman

Yeah, they're survivors, in a sense, because

they have had everything taken from them. They are living on very little, and yet they take some pleasure in life. And one senses that there wouldn't be that same kind of pleasure in Moscow if one were living on these meager rations there. So there's something in this village that makes it sort of out of time, that makes these women survive. And also what we have is just the very physical, tactile nature of this place. You know, that Boris arrives there and he sees these shells and decorative grasses that he has only ever seen on icons. He didn't think they were real. And suddenly there's a physical world that he really hasn't witnessed before or been part of. And that alone completely changes him.

Han Ong

Yes. Besides a story of flight, I think we could also call this a story of awakening for Boris, because it says at one point that he had stopped drawing. And then life in the village and the sights of the village sort of

reawaken in him the desire to draw again.

And he does three kinds of drawings. One is of the old women in

their daily life, and then one is

of still lives, of what the vil has to offer, the pickles, the potatoes, which constitute their main food. So the stillness of his surroundings sort of awaken him to the desire to capture it all on paper and reawaken his artistic temperament and interest. So it's a story of flight, a

story of awakening at the same time.

So these Twin values are sort of ever present in her cosmology, which is

very evident in the story.

Deborah Treisman

Yeah. Well, let's talk about his art and how it changes.

Han Ong

Oh, yes. Let me say that also among the attractions I forgot to mention when you asked earlier about why I was so attracted to the story and why I was so taken by it, is the fact that the main reason he's being hounded is because of these sacrilegious portraits of worshippers and public monuments made of Bologna. So the impish good humor is there. So that's the art of his that we know from the beginning. And then later on, he puts his hand to sort of just capturing the world around him because he's a draftsperson, and he says in the story that

he loves to draw.

And later on, Nikolai Mikhailovich, looking over his trove of portraits, says, I didn't

realize what a good draftsman you are.

So it's that lovely respect from a peer of yours, you know, to pay you that compliment. And probably among the reasons, besides a kind of a shrugged shoulder of why

Nikolai Mikhailovich agreed to shelter him in the first place, that there is a

certain kind of grudging respect from one artist to another, and also a fellow understanding of the peer's transgression could so easily be yours that you are basically in the same boat. So by offering him succor and shelter, you are sort of holding one up

Deborah Treisman

for the team, endangering himself as well.

Han Ong

Yes, that's part of the compact of being a good fellow, a good sort of artist peer.

So that's another model of how an

artist should be in this day and age, which heartens me when I come

across it in this story.

Deborah Treisman

What's interesting to me is that in the change in his art, is drawing Communist leaders made of hot dogs. It's a gimmick, Right?

It's political art.

It's caricature. It's probably not particularly deep. It's an act of dissidence and protest, but it's probably not great art. Right?

Han Ong

I wouldn't know how to answer that, because from how the drawings are described, they could be or couldn't be. I think you probably would need to judge how scaled the artist's hand is. For me, the equivalent would be someone like an AI Weiwei. And I'm thinking in particular about AI Weiwei's series of middle finger photographs, where he photographs in the foreground, his own middle finger posed right in front of these monuments of Chinese history. So I think it could be very flat and one Note, the critique could be very, very easy and simple. And it's one of those. It might be one of those artworks where you don't need to go back for a second viewing. You get it in one look, you know.

Deborah Treisman

I mean, I think as with AI Weiwei, it's the purpose is sending a message. And Boris Ivanovitch's drawings were published basically as political cartoons in Stern, you know, in a newspaper. It's not publishing artworks for their beauty, it's publishing political cartoons. So for me, there's just a radical switch that's flipped for him in terms of what kind of art he's making at the end. And these masterpieces, not driven by opinion, not driven by ideas really, but driven by observation, by appreciation, by affection. It's a different kind of art for me.

Han Ong

Yeah, I take your point, Deborah. The move from cartoon to still lifes and then to portraiture, you know. Yes, I see your point.

Deborah Treisman

I mean, he loves looking at these decrepit old ladies, you know, he loves to see and the way they're described. Even, you know, her hands that are kind of clenched like claws, always holding a cup, look like they're holding a cup.

Han Ong

Just masterful, masterful physical descriptions. I mean, I see them so vividly. I see them so clearly with averted eyes,

Deborah Treisman

I mean, particularly in the uterus moment. But there' swhat he's seeing is life. He's seeing humanity. He's not seeing politics.

Han Ong

Right. It's probably the thrill of the explorer coming upon a landscape that has never been seen before or that has been so rarely committed to film or to canvas, that he thrills at the opportunity presents him as an artist, as a true artist, alive to the possibility of capture once again. So in this sense it's parallel to what I earlier described as Ulitskaya, sort of hunger for the capture of all

life on our pages.

So I wrote some marginalia on the printed up story in the scene of the old women taking a bath. And I say that it's a comedy of physical decrepitude as well as the sheer medical fact of old age, you know, all in one. And I wrote Horror and Ghastliness and Rhapsody again. So this is a lovely, lovely. You know, if we're lucky as writers, even as skilled writers, we hit on one really good, strong note, sometimes two. But if you do what Olitskaya has done over and over again in the story, if you hit a note that sounds two different emotions at the same time, or three different emotions, you're in nirvana. And the way she also describes the women as harpy graces. And then later on, when Boris Ivanovich titles his, at least mentally titles his drawings, he calls the suite of paintings the White Swans. So, you know, it's a sense of, yes, it is horrible to be that aged and to have nature sort of betray you in all sorts of ways, but at the same time, that decrepitude still belongs, still clings to a living, breathing person, you know, a person who subsists largely on vodka and gossip and infighting and ditties and slangy colloquialism, you know, low down language, you know.

Deborah Treisman

Yeah. I think what happens when Boris Ivanovich gets to the village is he's coming from a place that feels sterile, right. And he's entering this world that's absolutely sensual, even if, you know, visceral and sensual and tactile. And it's a radical change for him, you know, it makes everything else seem pallid somehow.

Han Ong

Yeah. Well, looping back to when I said earlier on that the first thing I wanted to do when I got to this section was put down the pages and stand up and applaud is that, you know, I have so rarely seen this kind of nakedness in fiction.

But let it not be said that

my admiration for this section is just pure admiration, because I was horrified, too. I was reacting from my vantage point, younger than these characters whose body has yet to go to see the way theirs has, and yet at the same time, recognizing that Olitskaya's portraiture isn't cruel, it's just factual. But there's also a strange kind of peevish, impish delight in saying to us, this is what old age does to your body. It will happen to you, too. And so we might as well face it.

Deborah Treisman

I mean, it's so unusual. And that's why we're trying to find explanations for it, because you don't get this kind of honesty about the. The physical nature of aging very often. You really don't. You don't see it in artworks that often. So when you are confronted with it, and especially when it's described with such glee, there's something sort of magical and grotesque about it. And what do you think it does to Boris?

Han Ong

Well, I think he is our proxy in the story for our own reactions. He is both disgusted by the sight as well as energized by it. You know, as I said, he sees in these women's bodies an opportunity to sort of portray something that probably, you know, being an artist and knowledgeable about art history, he probably knows that there's scant portrayal of this in art history. And now here's his opportunity, firsthand sort of witness that he can put down directly onto paper. So as an artist slash explorer, this

is sort of mana from heaven for him.

Deborah Treisman

Yeah, I mean, it's sort of the culmination of this, you know, what I see as a kind of journey into reclaiming or finding his own sensuality, I suppose, because, you know, in the beginning we have Natasha. She's beautiful. He doesn't actually like her all that much, it seems. And then he meets Anastasia and they have this sort of incredible sex he's never had before in his life, even

though she's not as pretty as.

As his wife. And he's mystified that someone who's well educated, who's a doctor, who's the head of her department, could also be the sensual being he's never before seen. Kind of the intellectual side go with the sensual side. And so he's learning so much in the course of this stay. And then we get to a different form of physical reality and sensuality, which is these ruined bodies that are still somehow you know, carrying on having fun.

Han Ong

Yeah. And I don't know how instructive it is or what it says that he makes these drawings on top of wallpaper. So, you know, that is sort of an evocative visual image. But I don't quite know what it says, what realm it ushers his art into, what new realm? Or maybe he's just making do. This is just part of the illustration of Russian ingenuity, you know, improvis, skills and virtuosity. But it's so telling, again, with this sort of double vision that Ulitskaya has, that this occasion for much joy and the reawakening of his artist self will also be the occasion for his eventual downfall when he is pegged for pornography by the state for these very images which are exhibited in Cologne.

Deborah Treisman

I mean, that's telling to me too,

because obviously it's not pornography. That's not the spirit in which it was drawn. You know, it's like saying, I don't know, Botticelli is pornography or something. But the Russian state has so little imagination. They can't see the beauty in it. They can't see what it is. They just have to, you know, pin a label on it. But then he goes off and he does his two years in the camp, we don't hear anything about it. And then he's freed. He's freed from his former marriage. He's freed from. I don't know everything that was kind

of holding him in.

And you might say it's not an

advancement because he's no longer a dissident, right? He's no longer fighting, he's no longer

an idealist in that way. He just emigrates, finds a woman who much better for him and emigrates. So in some ways it's not a success story. If what you want is to see your dissident prevailing over authoritarianism. What do you think of that ending?

Han Ong

Well, at the simplest level, he lives. He gets to live. So in that way, it's a victory. But that kind of outcome is very typical in Russian history and also very typical in Oleskaya's stories, being reflective of. Of Russian history in that you take small victories where you can. And also, I think the dissident spirit, although there are in fact people who persist to their 90s and remain dissident in spirit and in act, you know,

that kind of fierce dissident spirit burns

really bright between, I don't know what, you know, you can sort of bracket it between this age and that age,

and after a while it sort of

burns out and you sort of have

to settle for the compromise of living.

And also, artists are, you know, part of being an artist is to sort of indulge a kind of sybaritic spirit, a kind of spirit of survivalism. So being an artist dissident is always

a kind of tricky proposition.

You know, the principled side of you versus the sensuous side or the side that wants good living, you know, or settled living. And this is also part of the way Ola Skye's stories turn out is that her characters fates are dispatched in a paragraph, having spent pages and pages with them. Suddenly the quirks of their fates are dispatched in a sentence or two. And that's just sort of part of the vagaries of life. History happens. It buoys you up, it plummets you down. You just have to sort of endure all of the vicissitudes of this, the upping and the downing, and come out the other side. And you have to live long to see at least some up in that cycle. And I think for now, this is an up. Who knows if he might continue to be from his emigre perch, a continuing gadfly of the government, as some people do.

Deborah Treisman

Well, there's something slightly mystifying to me

in that paragraph where, you know, she

says that he emigrates to Europe with his new wife, and she says they were living happily in Europe until recently. So we don't know what happened recently. We don't know if they're no longer living, if they're no longer in Europe or they're no longer happy.

Han Ong

Or it could mean until recently. Could also mean that's how far the story takes us. They were living happily in Europe until recently, which is at the close of the story, or as far as I've heard, they were living happily. That could also be one of its. Last I heard was last I heard. Exactly. Last I heard they were living happily and also hooray for Natasha, who has remarried and had a daughter. Hooray for her.

Deborah Treisman

And you know, except that her poor mother, she misses Boris Ivanovich because this is just a very ordinary engineer.

Han Ong

Yes,

Deborah Treisman

she was on his side, hiding his drawings from the start.

Han Ong

It must have been fun to be the mother in law of such a rapscallion and a kind of an interesting character as opposed to just like a. Well, he's described as a decent man, which could be construed as a kind of, you know, slight put down. Well, relative to Boris Ivanovitch.

Deborah Treisman

Right, right. No buoyancy there.

Han Ong

No buoyancy.

Deborah Treisman

Well, thank you very much, Han.

Han Ong

Thank you. Deborah

Deborah Treisman

Lyudmila Olitskaya, a winner of the Russian Booker Prize and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature, among others, is the author of more than 15 books of fiction, including the novels Jacob's Ladder and the Big Green Text Kent, and the collections the Body of the Soul and Sonetchka, a novella and stories. In 2024, Russia labeled her a foreign

agent for opposing the war in Ukraine.

Han Ong is the author of numerous plays and the novels the Disinherited and Fixer Chow, which was first published in 2001 and will be reissued this July by Outsider Editions. Hong has been publishing fiction in the New Yorker since 2019. You can download more than 220 previous episodes of the New Yorker Fiction Podcast or subscribe to the podcast for free in Apple Podcasts. On the Writer's Voice podcast you can hear short stories from the magazine read by their authors. You can find the Writer's Voice and other New Yorker podcasts on your podcast app. Tell us what you thought of this program on our Facebook page or rate and review us in Apple Podcasts. This episode of the New York Worker Fiction Podcast was produced by John Lemay.

I'm Deborah Treisman.

Thanks for listening.

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