The Librarian

UNCLE MAXIM

MY UNCLE WAS a doctor by profession. At first his life worked out remarkably well. He graduated from school with a silver medal, second in his class, and went to study at the Medical Institute. After two years of practical work for an institute in Siberia, my uncle was recruited to work in the Arctic.

I remember Uncle Maxim when he was still young. He used to come to visit us and always brought foodstuffs that were in short supply or things that were impossible to buy in the shops—imported anoraks, jumpers and shoes. One time he gave me a Panasonic twin-cassette deck that was the envy of many of my friends for years.

We would sit at the family table—Dad, Mum, me and my sister Vovka… Actually her real name was Natasha, and Vovka was just her nickname at home. When Natasha was born, my father took me, two years old at the time, to the maternity home, promising to show me a real, live Thumbelina there. I stood outside under the window and called, “Mummy, where’s Thumbelina?”—and a half-deaf nurse, as kind-hearted as a St Bernard, who was gathering up the rubbish on the steps, smiled every time I said it and told me, “Don’t shout, little one, they’ll bring out your Vovochka in a moment…”

Well, we would sit there, and Uncle Maxim would tell us all sorts of amazing stories, almost like fairy tales, about the Far North. “In one village a reindeer herder shot himself. They buried him and the next night a murrain broke out among the deer. An old shaman said that they hadn’t buried the suicide properly and he had turned into a demon that was killing the cattle. They dug up the body, buried it again face-down and nailed it down with a walrus tusk. And believe it or not, the murrain stopped immediately…”

Unlike timid Vovka, I enjoyed these frightening stories. My father, it’s true, claimed that my uncle was rather partial to my mum and inclined to boast a bit in order to impress her. I suppose my father was simply envious of Uncle Maxim, who led such a colourful life.

But then my uncle stopped visiting us. I heard from my parents that he wasn’t working with the expeditions any longer and had moved from the romantic tundra deep into the boring heart of Russia. But for me my Uncle Maxim remained the hero of an adventure film, a Siberian “Pathfinder”, for a long time.

As the years passed, my uncle’s halo faded noticeably. “He’s a degenerate” and “He’s a disgrace to the family” my father used to say about him. Apparently while he was in the cold climate my uncle had developed a taste for alcohol, and perhaps the constant availability of surgical spirits—because of his profession—had also played its part, or perhaps he had just fallen in with drinkers.

When his contract ended, my uncle worked as the head of a department in a hospital and tried to write his Ph.D. thesis. He never started a family of his own. Vodka ruined all his plans. First he was demoted to a neighbourhood doctor, and then sacked altogether for his drunkenness. Uncle Maxim rode around in an ambulance for several years, but then they got rid of him too.

In the last fifteen years he had only appeared at our place twice. The first time he arrived on a plane for my grandfather’s funeral, drank heavily at the wake and even had a fight with my father, and the second time was when my grandmother died. My uncle arrived late for the funeral because he was on a bender and there weren’t as many flights as in the old Soviet days, so he had to come by train. My uncle made a trip to the cemetery, stayed with us for a couple of days, quarrelled with my father and went away again.

After my grandfather and grandmother died my father used to say bitterly: “It was Maxim who drove them into their graves!” And he was partly right—the old folks suffered terribly over how badly their son’s life had turned out.

Uncle Maxim only phoned us rarely, and always with the same request—to send him a money order. My father, who had learned from bitter experience, always refused him and one day my uncle called his older brother a “Yid” and disappeared for a very long time.

Then he started calling again, but he didn’t ask for money any longer; he simply asked how we were getting on. There were rumours that he hadn’t drunk for five years. We found out about it from an old army colleague of my uncle’s, a doctor, who stayed with us when he was passing through and handed on some money from my uncle—two hundred dollars that Maxim had once borrowed from my father. My uncle’s army colleague told us that Maxim Danilovich had given up alcohol, but he suspected that my uncle had been sucked into a different kind of quicksand—apparently some religious organization or other, perhaps the Baptists or Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Uncle Maxim himself didn’t tell us anything specific; his voice on the phone was always cheerful, and when my father asked, “Maxim, have you drunk yourself completely out of your mind? Can’t you even be open with your own brother?”—he just laughed and sent greetings to Mum, Vovka and me.