a rich ethnic heritage, that aside from the Russian, Ukrainian and Georgian bloodlines she has Khanty and Mansy ancestors? That her great-grandfather Avksetny Kholin was a shaman in a village above the Polar Circle, and he healed cows and deer, as well as Khanty women of barrenness! In the 1930s, when shamans were persecuted, a dozen Red Army soldiers and three officers arrived at the deer-breeding village, summoned all the shamans and ordered them to board a plane, saying, “We’re going to Moscow to attend the All-Union Shaman’s conference”. The naïve Northern wizards brought their magic drums, tambourines and fur coats aboard the plane. While in mid-air, the officers opened the door and their commander said laughing “You say you can fly? So, fly!” And some thirty shamans were thrown off the plane, along with their drums, tambourines and fur coats... Then the Red Army soldiers and officers closed the door, having accomplished the supreme directive. All of a sudden, they saw in the clouds a bunch of men pursuing the plane. Among them was Toma Stenko’s great-grandfather Avksenty Kholin. The men knocked on the plane’s windows and laughed. The plane sped up high in the sky. The noisy crowd of shamans was left behind. Toma Stenko’s great-grandfather and the rest safely landed in their villages. Avksenty lived forty more years, and together with Toma’s great-grandmother, raised four sons. But do I have to write about it in the preface to her art catalogue? I have no idea. However, there is something of the great- grandfather, the shaman, in his great-granddaughter.
So, I thought it over and decided that if I am supposed to write a preface to the catalogue, I would make a totally schizophrenic story about how I survived the incident of when my beloved wife pursued me with a knife — and I have even come up with the title (The One Who Invented the Globe, or the Night Serenade, Sung by the Voiceless Lover). In Stephen King’s The Shining, the unsuccessful writer types one and the same phrase on three hundred pages, “I can’t write, I can’t write, I can’t write...” So, I want to type on all of the pages of the Toma Stenko story just one phrase, “Gunsmith, make me thirteen bullets, thirteen times I will shoot myself...” This is the line from the poem by Galaktion Tabidze, the Georgian poet. One day he was standing near the wall of my house in Tbilisi, drunk, and weeping. The old poet with a grey tangled beard, resembling God, wept by my window. I stared curiously at him through the window with my wide-open eyes. “Gunsmith, make me thirteen bullets, thirteen times I will shoot myself...” (Galaktion confessed his love to a thirteen-year-old girl). With these stolen words I want to confess my love to the artist Toma Stenko. You think, I don’t feel how tangled my story is? I do feel it... I am writing this in the city of Alma-Ata, where I borrowed several books from an old oak bookcase in the lobby of Mildom Hotel: the third volume of Kurt Vonnegut’s collected novels, prosaic works of Marina Tsvetayeva, Lermontov in his Contemporaries’ Memoirs,
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