 The Russian language suddenly disappeared in the small town of Krasny Tkach - a border town between Ukraine and Russia. A first, the residents thought it might have been the crafty NATO, with its secret psychotropic technologies. Although this theory was flattering, it was quickly discarded as improbable - an international military monster and this humble steppe town.
The place I speak of is located in Ukraine, but its residents will regard you as kamikaze if you dare speak Ukrainian. Sellers of newspapers in Krasny Tkach use special notebooks to write down the names of those who foolishly ask if there are any Ukrainian newspapers.
My short story needs an introduction.
The town was founded in the post-Stalin era. The revolutionary word “red” (krasny) was still quite popular back in the 1960s.
This town was a product of Kremlin strategists. Ukraine’s eastern region was packed with metallurgic pipes, smoky heaps of pit refuse, stinky chemicals and Russian speech. In the north of the region, however, there was an archaic territory with windmills, fruit gardens, wells, horse-drawn transport and the Ukrainian language. Soon, this remote Ukrainian province was also full of the energetic Russian language - mixed with uncensored words and sounds of carpenters’ axes.
Settlers from Russia built the town on the banks of the River Nevinna. Their weaving factory fed them, gradually poisoning the water.
Today, the town is inhabited by descendants of those Russian settlers. They did not notice how their enterprise was made bankrupt by some operators (perhaps, Bandera followers). The penniless factory was soon pointing to the sky with a cold chimney. Its workers only had enough resources to produce Russian balalaikas and ersatz felt boots. They smuggled these goods to their original motherland, which lay behind the third curve of the river.
The town was surrounded by Ukrainian villages. Soon, its dwellers were discussing who might be stealing combines and tractors from their kolkhozes in a terrible Russian-Ukrainian dialect called surzhyk. The poorer these villages became, the lower their women bent over kitchen-gardens. They grew vegetables and sold them at markets. Women from Krasny Tkach were always surprised at the abundance of vegetables in the villages - quietly calculating profits of their neighbors. They frankly complained: “No potato grows in my garden” or “My cabbage fades.”
Anyway, let us return to the beginning of my story. One Sunday night, the town of Krasny Tkach mysteriously lost its major means of communication – the Russian language. The men, women and children woke up and uttered only Ukrainian words and phrases. They were all shocked and surprised! They tried to figure out what went wrong. They brushed their teeth again, but it did not help! The men rushed to their balconies. They smoked nervously and looked silently at one another but said nothing. It meant the spell was ubiquitous.
The Russian-speaking town did not talk for a week. Other nations would have given up, but Russians are far too proud to surrender.
The men only broke silence when they got in car accidents. Witnesses of such events sarcastically remarked that Krasny Tkach residents spoke Ukrainian perfectly.
The women did not bargain at markets but pointed to products they wanted to buy and then squeamishly produced hateful Ukrainian hryvnyas from their wallets.
Some couples continued with their wedding plans. The weddings could not be postponed as many appetizers had already been prepared. Normally festive affairs turned quite boring - with no ambiguous toasts or humorous songs. The local priest refused to bless the newlyweds as Ukrainian was not a recognized canonic language.
By the end of the week, there was a rumor afoot that an English school had opened. With a great feeling of relief, the people ran to it but discovered at the first lesson that the English phonetics were much more difficult that the whole Ukrainian language with its syntax.
Krasny Tkach was frustrated again. The atmosphere grew increasingly tense.
The only local oligarch, who owned all casinos and billiard clubs, ordered his people to stop a car bringing Ukrainian newspapers to the town. In just a few minutes, the fruits of journalists’ labor were thrown from the bridge into the river.
Two neighbors, ex-sailors, mastered the Morse code. They made signal flags to communicate. It was scary and weird to watch.
An ex-convict remembered an old prison tradition and stitched his mouth with white threads to protest against Ukrainian chaos.
An activist, who had recently participated in an election campaign, chained himself to a doorknob of the city hall and demanded that the local deputies recognize Russian as a regional language, in and around Krasny Tkach.
This really made the deputies anxious. Then a high ranking official from the regional capital convened the locals at the village square. The people were complaining about Ukrainian terrorism. The official noticed something very odd - he was the only person speaking Russian. The villagers all spoke with an excellent Ukrainian accent.
He realized there was no time waste and began to act resolutely and rapidly. He called his good Moscow friend, an authoritative psychiatrist, linguist and specialist in anomalies. The scientist intuitively realized that the phenomenon of mass speechlessness could be a notable scientific discovery, but refused to come to Krasny Tkach. He was afraid of being infected with surzhyk and having his career in Moscow ruined.
The crowd paused gloomily. Suddenly, the director of the local ethnographic museum carelessly announced the most important news. It turned out that some local men had recently seen Cossack Mamay. His legendary ghost had been appearing in different corners of Ukraine for three hundred years. People always saw him in one pose. He was sitting on the hill, smoking a pipe and playing his bandura. His steed was chained to the spear stood nearby; his weapons were on the tree. What was really surprising was that his unexpected appearances always caused inexplicable occurrences.
The crowd soon realized what might be causing the ghost of Mamay to visit their town. Someone remembered he appeared soon after a local orator had declared that the Ukrainian language was just slightly more developed than the language of monkeys. He was nicknamed Orator for his love of making bombastic comments on international and Ukrainian news. The official from the center reproachfully shook his head.
“One should be more careful in linguistic issues,” he said in Russian.
The people supported his sage advice. Someone addressed Orator with a joke: “I wish a fly kicked you.”
Orator tried to justify himself and said the monkey comparison was his idea but the rest had been inspired by Russian newspapers, which often focus on the Ukrainian language issue. Some authors claim the Ukrainian language was developed by Poles. Others think it is an underdeveloped dialect of the “great and powerful” Russian language.
The Krasny Tkach dwellers publicly asked the Ukrainian language and its speakers for an apology. A miracle followed: the town could speak Russian again. (The older citizens later compared their joy with the euphoria experienced throughout the Soviet Union after the war.)
Their joy was so great that it required immediate celebration. They decided to restage last week’s boring wedding and fill it with traditional Russian merriness. The people began to chip in for the ceremony. The stingy Oligarch gave ten hryvnyas to pay for the church ritual - in accordance with canonic rules of the Orthodox church of the Moscow Patriarchy.
The committee organizing the wedding decided to invite Ukrainians from the village to their feast. They came accompanied by a traditional trio playing the violin, the small drum and the Ukrainian flute, known as a sopilka.
Having exchanged impressions about the wedding, the most observant men from Krasny Tkach decided that the flutist with a fiery glance and stern eyebrows was Cossack Mamay.
Since that accident, the men from Krasny Tkach stopped telling jokes about lazy and stupid Ukrainians. They were concerned with only one problem: guests from Russia were greedily buying all the fruits and vegetables sold by their lazy village neighbors. This forced local market prices to jump sky high. When saying such inhospitable things, the men looked to the hills and wondered if Cossack Mamay approved of their words.
|
