by Ksenia Buksha
translated from the Russian by Anne O. Fisher
The English translations of the excerpts were made possible thanks to the support of the WE EXIST! Foundation
The Detective
“Check out the police station—why’re all eight windows lit? Something definitely, gotta be a big accident in the tunnel, or maybe some hikers came across a mine in the mountains.” “Nah, think bigger—the whole side of the station’s lit up, too. Nice that the station’s up high, from down in town you can tell right away if something big is happening. Remember when the Duma speaker’s son was arrested with a glove box full of cocaine? But now everybody’s been caught and put away, so I’m not sure what to think. This town of ours has been quiet lately, just what you might call surprisingly quiet, our Little Bliss, although it’s gotta be overflowing with guns, the war didn’t end all that long ago.” “But guns—that’s not the main thing. The main thing’s the desire to shoot the guns. And not a single person in Little Bliss has that desire. Except when somebody has a baby, and then they go out on their balcony and fire into the air. So now everybody knows immediately: if there’s shooting, there’s a baby.”
*
Something had happened, and this is what: a young teen, an eighth-grader at the Bliss middle school, had gone missing. His name was Aron, and he’d vanished without a trace, so surprisingly, inexplicably, and instantly that they knew they had to start searching for him just as quickly, or else he might never be found. “Now people, please,” said the detective to everyone, including the volunteers, “don’t go out into the fields, and don’t go into the woods outside of town, either, because those mines out there haven’t gone anywhere. Okay, Dede, tell us what you saw.” Dede was in the same class as the missing Aron, they were good friends, and they’d been kicking the ball around with friends three minutes before Aron’s disappearance. The other soccer players couldn’t add anything substantive to Dede’s statement and were let go, while swarthy, rail-thin Dede, the missing boy’s best friend, sat hunched on a rickety chair, answering the same exact questions for the third time, holding the bag for the rest of them.
*
The name Dede was popular in Little Bliss, mostly because of Dede the Great, whose birthplace this was, but also, that Dede had actually been named in honor of an even more ancient Dede, the local saint. Monks had begun cultivating the valley again after a few centuries of post-Roman abandonment, and they were the ones who called the harsh locale blissful, and who named the river accordingly, and among them was this one guy who had the mind of an eight-year-old boy, with the size to match. Saint Dede’s hagiography proposes that we believe the following: that he made friends with wolves, and preached to grapevines, and that wine didn’t make him drunk, and that bees brought him honey. Saint Dede was responsible for all the little things in the world, due to his size, especially for every sort of small joy, for example, for the pleasures of simple food and moderate drink; for the modest fertility of the Little Bliss valley (it’s all for the best!); for labor resulting in at least some kind of fruit—in short, he was a real positive guy, so it’s no wonder that it was mostly premature babies who were named in his honor, to help them get a foot in the door of this life. We know that Dede the Great was a preemie, too, and he was named Dede, so see? There you have it.
*
Well, so the detective was asking Dede, “When did the sun go down?” “After he disappeared. We noticed almost immediately.” “What about the streetlights?” “No. The streetlights weren’t on.” “That can’t be. And the spotlight at the tunnel probably wasn’t on either, huh?” “No,” replied Dede, lifting his gaze conscientiously to the ceiling. “The spotlight wasn’t on. The streetlights either. I’m sure. Nothing was on.” “That can’t be!” The detective tossed the last remaining sludge of coffee down his throat. “Dede, remember harder.” “I remember. I’m sure. Neither the streetlights nor the spotlight.” “But look—that just doesn’t happen. It’s always on a set schedule, yesterday was the eighteenth of April, sunset was at exactly six thirty PM, the streetlights had to have been on. Which means Aron went missing before that.” “Nuh-uh. We’d just left the school building at six thirty. And I definitely remember that when the ball flew off into the blackberries, cars were driving along the winding part of the road with their headlights on, but there were no streetlights. That’s why it was harder to see the ball.” “What the hell is this crap?” Dede shrugged. “What about the ball? You two crawled into the blackberries to get it, didn’t you?” “Well, yeah. The ball went right in there, where the blackberry bushes are thickest. Aron went in to look for it, and I went in almost right after him, but it was a thicket, and thorny, and it was dark, too, so I crawled back out, but Aron didn’t.” “Could Aron have come out with the ball while you were in there going after him?” “No, I came back out right away, and there’s no other way to come out, the wall of the school’s right there and then on the other side there’s just brush and the cliff over the highway.”
“Tell me this, then, Dede: where did Aron’s backpack go?” “At first we called him a few times. We thought he had his phone with him. Then we hear the phone ringing in his backpack. So I brought the backpack to his house to give it to him. His mom was there, completely sloshed. I gave her the backpack and left.” “There’s no backpack at his place. And his phone’s off.” “It’s off!?” “Does that mean something?” “…” “Come on, out with it.” “It’s just that… Well, Aron was saying he’d be on the news soon.” “On the news? Did he mean on TV? Did he say why he was going to be on TV?” “Nope.” The detective went around the room kicking chairs. The smell of ramen, wisteria, coffee, and gasoline hung in the air. Dede was still sitting the same way, hunched over on the chair. The detective went over and sat down right next to him. “Now don’t you lose hope. You’re best friends, aren’t you?” Dede nodded. “You’re a real good friend. We’ll look for him, and we’ll find him.”
*
The town of Little Bliss, despite its negligible size—a population topping out at ten thousand—is famous throughout Europe, mostly as a symbol of the unbelievable resistance it put up against the joint forces of the imperials and terrorist groups during the five-year war that ended fifteen years ago. But obviously that’s not the only interesting thing about Little Bliss. To start with, the way it’s situated is extraordinarily impactful. It “seems to climb up the side of a valley so steep it defies imagination,” while along the valley floor flows the Bliss River, “the fastest, coldest, and cleanest river in Europe.” Twisting and turning, the river’s rapids foam with “water such a bright blue it looks dyed” and from the Bliss bridge it looks like “a tube of neon, filled with glowing strands tightly woven into thick shining braids.” Overhead beams “the hot sun, shining down on a plethora of lush, multicolored grasses and plants that would be any botanical garden’s pride and joy.”
*
Furthermore, Little Bliss is the central chronotope of the monumental masterpiece of the modernist-slash-conservative chronicler of these parts, Nobel laureate Afon Tertsy (The Tower and the Bridge). Schoolkids trudge their way through all six volumes, moaning and groaning, but what they’ll read is actually not at all for children: it is a narrative that’s epic and smooth as silk; cruel and bloody; loquacious and sneakily persuasive; it is a story about the earth, about war and fate, about the taste of water and the smell of foliage, about the smoke of hearths and arson. With an iron grip the master drags his audience through descriptions of beech groves, rapes, family gatherings, slaughters, yearning, food, and births, pulling readers through his own verbosity as well as the Little Bliss and Dole dialects to arrive at doubtful and incontestable conclusions, and if you’ve lived more than a year in Little Bliss, you get that The Tower and the Bridge knows you better than you know yourself.
*
Few non-natives live here that long, though; this area has never surrendered to anyone, except the day-tripping tourists, primarily Germans, who stop in to Little Bliss exactly once, on their way to or from the sea. They spend money and pass on, never to return to this bliss, though they always see it in their dreams. Christmas and Easter are usually when the Germans dream about Little Bliss. No taxes, no terms and conditions, just the merciless sun, the river glinting as it winds through the rocks, the abrupt pitch-black of night, the scent of wisteria, acacia, oleander, magnolia. The Germans forget their blissful dreams the moment they wake, and they never go to Little Bliss again, just as they never again return to their mother’s womb.
*
But for the people who live in it, Little Bliss isn’t blissful at all. Firstly because they’re surrounded by mines, in the mountains, fields, roads, groves, the sides of the roads. One false step and you’re not even a dead body, you’re half a dead body, or just shreds. Sure, people come and do some demining; sometimes it’s these folks, sometimes those; sometimes it’s the government, sometimes international philanthropies; but to completely demine this whole place would take seven hundred and eighty years. That’s the calculation. Unless some new demining method is invented, of course. And secondly, Little Bliss’s climate is just like its past: extreme and uncompromising. Either searing heat, or chills, mist, and mold. The molds of the Little Bliss valley are unique in that they are astonishingly varied (with a multitude of independent, unrelated origins or modes of being). Some kinds of mold grow in the corners, others on ceilings, some grow outside, some grow inside… So, yes, mines and mold. And that’s why lots of folks in Little Bliss sort of live with their eyes shut—that is, it looks like their eyes are open, but they’re actually not.
*
What all the day-trippers who come to Little Bliss want to see most is the waterfall jumpers. There are always five of them, five jumpers, like five fingers on a hand, except that unlike fingers, the jumpers are identical: stocky and deeply tanned, with caps of the absolute thickest curly hair—typical representatives of “the Blissers” (as opposed to “the Dolers”: pale, mealy, and tall, with the typically Dolean little round chins—but that sort never go out for jumping because their bones aren’t right, consistency’s too soft, they just smash like pancakes against the hard, sharp waters of the Bliss). The waterfall jumpers, footloose and fancy-free in their colorful shorts, spend whole days lounging on the bridge guardrails, setting an example of a life of nonchalance for the daytrippers, who stare at them and spend twice as much as they meant to. The jumpers sit on the guardrails, cadging coins off tourists and jingling them loudly in colorful tea tins, and every forty minutes or so, depending on the quantity of tourists and coins they’ve collected, they take running jumps off that same bridge into the waterfall, because that little bridge crosses the Bliss exactly over the place where the river surges over the edge to fall thirty-six meters straight down, and the bridge itself is already thirty meters above the river at that point, so the resulting height is mind-boggling, and the double tumble, the double risk, feels like an impossible feat, it feels like the human body isn’t capable of withstanding something like that. It’s unbelievable: first of all, the jumpers manage to land in the water, not on the microscopic roofs, the unseen rocks, the thick undergrowth of weeds, or anything else, and secondly they manage to not smash to pieces against that hard swirling water that always looks bluer than the sky, but rather to merge with it, become it, as they are carried down by the waterfall, and then on top of all that they also manage to not freeze in the Bliss’s supercold water, which, though it does soak up the unnatural color of the sky over the Little Bliss valley, never absorbs its warmth.
*
Seems like these carefree circus performers everybody can admire up close and personal just live to hurl themselves down like little rubber balls, with perfect accuracy, even though they don’t even bother looking, several times a day. Many tourists do idly think something like “I wonder what they’re like when they’re not jumping,” of course, but these thoughts somehow fly off, bounce away, turning the jumpers into flat, ideal projected objects, into paper clowns, into pure music. There goes another jumper, plummeting, turning into a little stone, merging with the waterfall as he skims just the right spot on its surface, and now there is is, already bobbing up out of the water way down there, in the foam swirling on the Bliss River’s bright-blue icy waters, and now, another thirty seconds later—you can’t take it any longer than that—he climbs out onto the shore. The tourists, who aren’t so much amazed as spellbound, snap up souvenirs, including the ones that Little Bliss schoolkids display on the bridge’s marble steps. The production and sale of souvenirs is a normal thing for the local kids, and there’s not even that much competition between them, because business will go great as long as it’s a nice warm day, and, as Wikipedia states, there are one hundred and eighty nice warm days a year in the Little Bliss valley. It is true that a lot of the kids’ parents take their money away, because it’s completely inappropriate, it’s absurd, for kids to make that much money, especially in a town where earning money’s not even that easy for adults. Although some kids’ parents don’t take their money away, because they can’t, or because they’re absent, and even if they are around, the parents, that is, then they often have neither the time nor the energy to pay attention to their kids—and they didn’t want to spend their free time cutting down the thickets around the Little Bliss school, either, no matter how hard the school principal begged, and look how that turned out: in the middle of broad daylight—although it was admittedly getting toward sundown—it was in those exact thickets that a whole live boy went missing, the eighth-grader Aron, while he was just kicking the soccer ball around.
*
If it had been during the first few years of the current mayor’s term, then maybe some of the parents would’ve responded to the school director’s request: that’s how high the level of enthusiasm of Little Bliss residents was back then. But over the next several years the mayor, nicknamed Dumpling, “fell into a deep depression,” that is, he developed a fondness for the shot glass. His shaky health had something to do with that, though that’s not the half of it; after all, he’d been a partisan during the war, he’d displayed—well, you could say desperate courage, him and the rest, and they defended the city in spite of everything, in the face of everything, by the end he was just one big bloody mess, so what do you expect, Dumpling may look strong, but he’s not immortal, after all. And while he may’ve been a whirlwind of activity in those first years of his administration, doing so much to rebuild Little Bliss that you couldn’t hardly recognize it—and all the rest of the residents pitched in with a will, too, cleaning, and repairing, and scrubbing, and painting, and demining—lately everything’s also started kind of sagging, too, and peeling, and getting overgrown, and at least no new mines appeared, but the ones that were already there just laid around quietly until some hapless dumbbell stepped on them, because, really, nobody but a dumbbell would get the idea of wading into the bushes and wandering unbeaten paths. And although the flow of tourists picked back up again after the pandemic, it was obvious that it wasn’t the same, it just wasn’t the same.
And that’s why the thicket of overgrown blackberry bushes around the Little Bliss school, the one in which the eighth grader Aron vanished without a trace—along with the school’s worn, scuffed, and peeling soccer ball, but not along with his backpack, and not in possession of his phone—never did get cut back, even though it’d been demined ages ago, and maybe that’s why nobody was able to determine the exact destination or origin of Aron’s disappearance that evening.
*
And that’s why the authenticity of the Little Bliss bridge, even though it was a masterpiece of ancient Roman architecture, was a bit dubious for some, while others doubled down on their conviction. Because during the war, fifteen years ago, the imperials in the mountains had targeted it, raining Grads down onto it, and that’s why there wasn’t a stone of that bridge left standing, but all those stones hasn’t just vanished into thin air, after all, they just fell down into the river, and after the war, the Soros-funded humanitarians came out and put it back together, piece by piece, making the cement with an ancient Roman method (using egg whites and cocaine). The imperials fired ninety rounds at the bridge, they didn’t hold back in shelling this pointless but pretty bridge.
Back then it seemed that the region had good economic prospects and that’s why it was worth fighting for it, but after the war, it turned out that, unfortunately, regardless of how zealously and diligently they’d fought and regardless of how close to miraculous their victory was, it did nothing to stop the total disappearance of any and all prospects and any and all significant economic potential. And as far as the next bridge upstream was concerned, that was where the imperials held their mass executions of partisans. Over three hundred bodies blocked the dam; they weren’t counted until after the war, when it was time to repair the dam. The bodies were not solely those of Blissers, there were also bodies of Doleans who took a stand for Little Bliss’s independence; not all Doleans were for the Empire, far from it, even though they were the minority in Little Bliss.
*
It’s obvious, by the way, that the defenders of the Little Bliss valley and the town itself defended this little spot of earth in defiance of rationality and implacable logic, in defiance of the enemy’s superior strength, in defiance of any politics, these defenders who were the emblem and epitome of insane, pointless courage, these inhabitants of Little Bliss whom John Major himself visited, shouting out of a helicopter with a megaphone, trying to convince them to give up and let the helicopters evacuate them, but who, nevertheless, didn’t blink and didn’t give anything up (the famous retort “We don’t need a way out, we need weapons”) and who really did secure that victory, which can by no means be called pyrrhic, because nothing’s higher than freedom. Nothing’s worth giving freedom up. Obviously these people weren’t thinking about economic potential, they weren’t thinking about anything at all except victory and freedom, victory-freedom, they saw these things as reciprocally conditional, and once the sun of peacetime dawned, once it illuminated the looted, devastated, blood-drenched valley of Bliss, nobody even thought the words, much less uttered them aloud: “It wasn’t worth it.”
Although maybe Arius thought them, up there in heaven, the poet Arius, Little Bliss’s other famous writer and native son, who a century ago “was sent by his father to the business school in the capital, but fell into a melancholy and took up with those cursed poets.”
*
That night the detective thought an earthquake was beginning. He couldn’t quite tell whether he’d woken up or not; he was sleeping right on the couch, he hadn’t gone home; it was neither light nor dark out; the wind moaned in crevices and pipes, stove dampers flapped and vibrated, keys turned in their locks like weathervanes, but that was just his imagination. Triangles and strips of light quivered on the parquet floor as though the police station were a train. But it wasn’t an earthquake at all, it was nothing but the wind—that is, as long as you don’t count the fact that there is an earthquake continually happening underneath Little Bliss, and that’s what makes all the space, time, and thought around here vibrate imperceptibly and delaminate. Suicide, the detective’s dreams whispered. Aron killed himself. A hundred percent. As soon as the detective woke up, he thought: Suicide. That’s probably what it was, alas.
I was seven when the war started; my brother was eleven. We were always getting woken up by the sounds of shooting and explosions, but we grew up in that chaos, we didn’t notice it. I remember how, just before the shelling began, the bright-red rockets would light up the sky, then they’d fall to earth with little parachutes. We’d run to get the rockets and play with the parachutes. We messed around with them, played with them like free toys. We knew what they were for, but the real significance of death didn’t hit us.
*
People killed themselves often in Little Bliss, very often, especially teens. And nobody’s going to know more about that than a detective. He tried it himself, once, thirteen years ago; the war had just ended, and the future detective, still a teen back then, was often resentful, especially of everybody who had it better than him, but also of everybody who had it worse than him—after all, things weren’t really all that bad for him, though his life couldn’t get any crappier.
Mom was a nurse and never talked at home about what she saw in the hospital. I counted it up one time and in five years of war, mom wasn’t home for two years. My brother and I were left to our own devices. It might seem strange, but we spent whole days just playing and wandering around. No homework, no parents to get on our case—it was a kid’s dream. Even though the war was right there, and our town was surrounded, we felt happy and free. When the sirens went off, we didn’t go to the shelters; after all, it meant there’d be no school that day and we could run around outside. We didn’t think about the danger.
*
After the war, the future detective went around bumming Rodopi cigarettes until he had fifty of them. His plan was to smoke them all in one go, one after the other. On the twenty-fifth cigarette the air around him suddenly went splotchy and he couldn’t smoke another cigarette, then or ever. So not only did he not kill himself, he made a valuable investment in his health.
I was twelve the last year of the war, and my brother was sixteen. I remember the last time we had breakfast together. I remember splitting a chocolate bar from American rations with him. I remember his bloody watch. I took it and didn’t wash it for several days. The war is the divide between before and after for most people, but not for me; for me, it’s his death. People say there was a ceasefire that day, but there’s no such word in the imperials’ military regulations. Anyway, the detective considered himself a specialist in suicide prevention. But in Little Bliss, committing suicide was almost a sport, you might say, one that a whole lot of people played, mostly by jumping off the Sky Flyer.
Translator’s note: the literal English translation of both the book title Malenkii rai («Маленький рай») and the fictional town featured in the book, Raiok (Раёк), is “little heaven” or “little paradise.” However, calling the story and the town “Little Heaven” sounded trite, while “Little Paradise” tended to increase weight but decrease irony. Both options also seemed less apt for the book’s allegorical, Borgesian, fairy-tale qualities. So I chose “Little Bliss” instead, which seems more receptive to those qualities, as well as less weighty and more polysemous, and the assonance is a nice bonus.
