John Vandenberg’s OdysseyJohn Vandenberg inherited his father’s business in a state of neglect. It happened because his father had been ill for a long time and could not run a business fully. He, however, could not bring himself to relinquish the prerogative of taking decisions. His death was neither easy nor fast, but John and his mother were always beside and firmly bore all the weight of taking care of the dying one. After his father’s death John Vandenberg was depressed for a considerable time. His mother, taking John’s favourite cat with her, returned to her daughters in a northern state from which the three of them had left for warm California to change the climate in the beginning of John’s father’s illness. John remained alone trying to fix his ruined business and in his free time participating in car races, squeezing all possible miles out of his car, trying not to think of the transience of life and the senselessness of being. When he finally got his business going and when his old wounds skinned over John Vandenberg discovered that he was 40, that unlike the neighbours’ yards no children’s voices sounded in his, that the latest difficult years had left an imprint of pessimism and reserve on his personality, but educated Californian women of the same circle with him were too demanding and categorical with the list of requirements which a permissible candidate for a husband should meet, and many items of which he, John, did not satisfy. Even before John Vandenberg heard of the possibility of bringing a passable bride from Russia, once, having come to his Post Office Box simultaneously with a family who rented a next door house for the summer and having started a conversation with them John learned that the wife, a modest and lovely woman who hold a little girl’s hand, had just arrived from Russia, and then John really understood that that possibility was realistic, and after several months of his lonely life John decided to go the same way. Being a person of an exact technical profession John precisely understood what his future wife should be. He had had a small and rather negative experience of communicating with women: in his early childhood he had often been left with his alcoholic grandmother who drove him under the bed with her crutch; his parents could not understand long why their child cried and did not wish to visit his grandmother. When they did they stopped taking him there, but even having become an adult, John did not forget his childish fear: he practically did not consume any alcohol and he did not trust people who did. John’s mother, before marrying his father, had worked as a nurse and left her career for the family, but she could never put up with it and even making dinner in the kitchen every time let her children and husband understand how greatly she had sacrificed for them, that’s why John Vandenberg did not wish his future wife to remain a housewife. However, he did not wish her to have the sole meaning of life in work like his ex-girlfriend, immigrant from Thailand, who was not interested either in John’s inner world or the surrounding world in general, but just got up in the morning, hurried to her job to a hairdresser’s, worked, worked, worked, saved earned money, and supported the relationship with John rather to learn English better which was necessary also for a better career. John looked for a sober woman, a woman happy inside and content with her life, a woman who would love cats as he did, who would wish both to work and to have family like his elder sister Karen, a doctor with four children, who was the only one from all women in the world he could ask advice of, share his doubts with and get answers for all the questions. His first experience of communication with women from the former Soviet Union was unlucky: having used the advice of a neighbour’s wife and having entered a marriage agency in her native city in Kazakhstan John was amazed to discover that all the women he had planned to meet looked absolutely different than in their pictures. Instead, the managers of the agency started to send quite young girls to Jim a flock of whom gathered every morning under his apartment’s windows and followed him, tugging at his sleeve and giggling, when he went out to the restaurant. John Vandenberg took his next trip to the city of St. Petersburg where in a big and quite americanized agency he met a young beauty who immediately agreed to come with him to America on a fiancee visa. Astonished and happy that everything worked out so easy, John started to arrange for the documents. But it turned out soon that simultaneously with him another man had arranged for an English visa for John’s fiancee too, and the girl finally left for England, but soon she called John asking him to take her from an English fiance with whom she was unhappy, which John immediately did. But the girl was unhappy and irritated with him also, and soon she disappeared again and since then John lost her traces forever. John Vandenberg has been always interested in history, especially in the aspect of historical events in different countries influencing personalities of people and their lives. After his trip to Kazakhstan and after his painful experience of communication with the St. Petersburg beauty a low opinion of former Soviet Union inhabitants had grown inside him. It seemed to him that endured misfortunes had irreversibly broken personalities and lives of these people, that their dominating consciousness could not stand the fundamental changes that had happened in their country, having converted them into wretched, false and unhappy people. On long reflection John Vandenberg came to the conclusion that living in a country with a normal economy his Russian girlfriend would not date men much older than herself,. her interest in John, or her English fiance, was caused first by the desire to leave her unhappy motherland, and at that point John Vandenberg decided to give up the search for a Russian wife, but having spent a year more in solitude, John went to Russia again. His trips to Russia, having become habitual, bore also a cognitive interest for him: he tried to understand what was really happening with that country, trying to look beyond the front buildings of elegant Nevsky avenue where restored houses-palaces shone with the night lights demonstrating full respectability. John Vandenberg was an observant person, he noticed small cracks which did not quite fit the picture of outward prosperity: closed shops and offices here and there which seemed quite successful in the time of his former visit, the imprint of worry and tiredness in people’s faces, mostly grey and black colours in which the street mob was dressed. John Vandenberg started a new cycle of search for a Russian wife having united his destiny with a small agency with a solid and stable reputation the manager of which, a woman with tired eyes behind glasses introduced him not to cover-beauties, but to ordinary women and girls whom he saw in the streets and in metro. John Vandenberg was amazed to notice that all the women he met expressed sincere interest in him and being a sober person with a real degree of self-esteem John Vandenberg could not understand what was so attractive that they all found in his own self, for what he had got an answer that it was difficult to marry in Russia nowadays, that foreign fiances were in a privileged position because they were few, but there were lots of Russian fiancees. Having realized all pluses and minuses of the situation John Vandenberg understood that the task that he put in front of himself was realistic, but it would not be easy to solve it optimally because as in business when offer exceeded the demand it was even more difficult to find the necessary product. John Vandenberg started a new circle of his searching marathon from the meeting a dainty woman Lilya who came for a date with her little daughter and John was astonished both with Lilya’s fragility and beauty and openness and energy of her mischievous child. But though in the very first evening they talked like close people who endured the same grief -- Lilya’s father also died recently and like John she bore this grief hard, though John sometime stealthily caught Lilya’s eye and her glance was just like he wished the woman in love with him to have, still John met Lilya only three times and then he stopped the meetings. John Vandenberg knew that in the situation of higher offer the most important was not to be in a hurry, and in Lilya’s eyes he saw more often gloomy desperation and anxiety the reasons of which he could not properly understand: for all his questions Lilya unwillingly and unintelligibly answered something about her daughter’s illness, about uncertain situation with work, about problems with the neighbours. John thought that the problems with the neighbours could not be really serious, having telephoned to America John received quite favourable prognosis for the illness Lilya pointed out to from his sister-doctor and in spite of Russian economical situation John saw also smiling and happy people in the streets, that’s why having sensibly decided that there was no reason for him to choose a person with a gloomy and anxious personality for a wife he decided to continue his search. The next girl whom John Vandenberg was ready to entrust his destiny to was brought to the agency by her mother, but the girl herself, though she was a teacher of primary school and though she came to meet John independently, but, still, telling him about her work with children, about games she played with them, about handicraft they made together, she also seemed like a shy child, confused, and happy to let adults enter her world. When John asked her about a possible departure to America, the girl first was frightened, then having screwed up all her courage, agreed. But when her father suddenly found out about everything and upbraided her mother and herself, she, like a truly obedient child, wrote to John that she would never leave her native city. John was not surprised: in the eyes of a girl-teacher he did not see anything except a timid doubt if it was time to join the world of adults as others did. In the eyes of the next girl with whom destiny brought him together and with whom he spent a week in the house of her parents in a small town on the Volga river John read the desire to find something in him, John Vandenberg, which he most likely lacked and a definition for what he even did not know. John could not suppose that it was the melancholy of a Russian who has not found happiness yet, the melancholy because of imperfection of personal life together with the life of the country and life in general. John Vandenberg saw the same melancholy in her eyes when she played a guitar he had given her and sang doleful songs unclear to John by her weak shrilling voice, or when in the evening she drank red wine, a great fan of which she was, or when she negatively shook her head listening to her mother, nodding at John and convincing her daughter in something clever. Living in the city on the Volga river, in a house of ordinary hospitable people John Vandenberg understood much about Russians and Russia. He understood that the majority of these people were notable for generosity and kindness, that they were attentive to another person and to what was inside him, but that they themselves were evasive and reticent. John understood from their stories that for some reason it really happened in Russia that neither high responsibility nor hard work for your own sake and the sake of society did not help you to reach either your own goal or the gratitude of the society, and Russians were so greatly accustomed to it that their favourite expression became “what to do?” pronounced with the same humbleness and a puzzled shrug with raised shoulders as American “there you are”. But if previously John thought that Russian pronounced their “what to do?” with and without any reason, blaming others and circumstances in the absence of personal responsibility, having communicated with the family and friends of a girl from the Volga river, having listened to their stories how Russian provinces lived during socialism and how they lived nowadays, having known Russian proverbs like “horseradish is not sweater than radish” and “wherever to throw everywhere a wedge” John Vandenberg started to understand Russian character better comparing regulated and precise American organization of life with amorphous and unpredictable Russian one. He remembered a fragile woman Lilya, gloomy despair in the eyes of whom he unconditionally condemned, but now it seemed to him that he was too hasty and fast for the decision concerning a woman, lost in a chaos of a big city fighting for her child’s health. Still, it was not in John Vandenberg’s rules to give up his planned goal and he corresponded yet with a girl-astrophysicist who loved stars and dancing alone in an empty room when there was nobody at home, but who had to run with papers as a notary assistant at that only job she had managed to find. He corresponded with a cheerful girl-artist working for the post office and drawing postal boards and advertisement instead of paintings. He corresponded with a beauty-designer, a New Russian’s ex-wife thrown out back to her communal room by her ex-husband after the divorce, hired for a song by him to decorate the interior of the mansion the landlady of which she was before. And with each new woman he had met John Vandenberg’s conception of Russia became fuller and wider , but alas, though many of the girls he met satisfied all the preliminary criteria of his search, he saw just a polite interest in their eyes and, listening to his heart, he did not hear its quickened pounding either. John Vandenberg felt how all his set up criteria to the selection of the future wife decayed and became crooked and despite his logical and practical mind he did not find the answer to the question why it was happening this way and he could just repeat after Russians their favourite “what to do?”. More and more often he recalled a fragile woman Lilya left by him in need and his heart sank of the feeling of guilt and repentance. And finally their new meeting was appointed, and there were roses, a table at the wall, a look at a glass cafe door behind which people dashed back and forth about a night street, and finally, the face which had grown thin, such a dear one, which lit up with a smile even from the door, whirling tea-spoons in the cups of tea, quiet “sorry”, even more quiet “it is OK”, and her words that in a week he would not already find her as having given up her fight she decided to leave for another city to her mother and that she had already bought the ticket. Non-religious John Vandenberg winced and simultaneously thought of God, of all the omens that appeared to him in different moments of life that came true, and he thought of those that had not yet. He also thought that it was so difficult not only to meet happiness, but it was even more difficult to recognize it; then, having asked Lilya to give him her ticket, he tore it to small pieces, stuck them deep into his pocket, took Lilya’s hand and without any arrangement they both got up and went out to the street.
|