Oleg Zaionchkovski
Zagul | The Wedding Anniversary. AST Publishers. Moscow 2011. 181 pages |
Awards: | Long listed for the Big Book Award 2011 |
It is Nefedov's wedding
anniversary. Not the first one but not the tenth either. He couldn't say
exactly. Actually, he doesn't even know that today is the day as he
leaves the company as usual. Nevertheless, he heads in precisley the
right direction, straight home, as he has done for decades after
leaving the office. At the moment, anyway. Then he meets his friend who
takes him off for a spin in his resprayed sports car. New colour, new
girlfriend. The eternal bachelor and the well-behaved husband land up
in a sports stadium, which is in fact closed, the only place in their
provincial backwater for an undisturbed celebration with a mate and a
bottle or two.
Nefedov's wife Nadezhda is also back from work as
an archivist in the literature museum, the former home af a classic
writer. The archivist and her staff use original furnishings in an
attempt to conceal from the visitors and from themselves the fact that
the true soul of the museum has been lost: the ominous but stolen
manuscript by the town's most famous resident, an allegedly clairvoyant
pamphlet on Russia's future as a demilitarised zone between China and
Europe.
While their teenage daughter is putting on her makeup
before leaving the house, the wife is preparing the traditional wedding
anniversary roast as a dinner for two. And waiting. When her spouse
arrives home very late from his little escapade it is all too late. So
he leaves again. And that is the start of the big escapade that takes
Nefedov to faraway Moscow. The turbulent paths he travels are
paved
with thousands of memories of his wife, however. And with a real corpse
as well.
When Nefedov returns home some fourty eight hours later
he has observed the wedding anniversary with his yearning memories of
the loveliest moments in his marriage more intensely than the usual
wedding anniversary roast ever did. And he brings with him a wedding
anniversary present the likes of which the provincial museum and his
wife have never seen. Has Nefedov stopped at nothing in order to save a
botched wedding anniversary? The story has not quite reached its happy
ending yet.