A Hat of Our Time
A found story by:
Anton Antonovich
Hammer Malevich had lived in Moscow for two long years. He was assigned an apartment in a three story building with an attached arcade, and places where wrought-iron grilles may have once been. His was a straight line of a room with a communal bathroom in the hallway.
Hammer Malevich's hands bore the fragmented scars of a window installer—the people that always know, one day, they may be cut; that glass breaks on all men and women of Russia equally. He worked on large windows—glass that was a huge sheet for an office, or the front of a canteen. He worked on all windows, and it showed.
He would often be seen raising scarred, burly fingers to the face of his window in the evening, and the light made the scars dance in the shadows of his room. He would sit and stare at this show for long stretches of time, running through all his most precious memories. He remembered his grandfather, tall and proud with a red cloth tied around the arm of his sheep-skin jacket, his boots scuffed and worn from marching. He remembered his mother as she laughed, and peeled potatoes with a heavy handkerchief over her hair. He remembered the girl he loved on a heavy summer night where they kissed on the old stone bridge.
The place where Hammer Malevich would sit and think was an old ornate desk that he was given for being a model citizen. They said he had the cleanest apartment for blocks around, that he was the hardest worker in the district. And that's just what he was.
As tidy as Hammer Malevich kept things, there was one place in his apartment that he never touched. It was a fireplace, and on top of it was a hearth of crumbling grey stone. The hearth itself was the mantelpiece for his grandfather's Red Army cap. This hat was tall, and felted, with an orderly upward swoop into a direct point. A red enameled star stood at the brim.
The hearth was Hammer's temple. To disturb it would be to move the rock of providence, of sacred tidings. It didn't matter that Hammer thought day and night about replacing the mortar, or setting a new slab in. He thought it looked like it was put together shoddily, and it was. But that didn't change anything; the hearth, even as it hung on by its roots, would remain untouched.
One day the slouching hearth fell out. It happened in the early morning hours, when Hammer Malevich was still asleep in his narrow bed. He didn't notice what had happened until it was morning, and time to get up, to meet his day off.
Now what! he thought. Just look at this mess.
He stubbed his toe on some fallen stone trying to clear the floor. Only after a few moments did he remember what purpose the stone served.
The hat!
He sunk to his knees and grabbed his grandfather's old cap. It was still good as ever—a little crease and some dust aside.
Clever little fellow, he thought, you jumped away before you got yourself crushed. They say that a man's hat soaks up wisdom from its wearer. You've proven it to me today, because my grandfather was a smart man.
The light from Hammer Malevich's window shone into the gap left behind. The fireplace now looked like a grinning mouth complete with blocky teeth. But inside of the darkness was a niche. Something rested within.
Hammer Malevich stepped over the rubble, and reached into the niche. What he pulled out was dusty, and had the smell of museums, or libraries, or antiquities. It smelled like herbs. It was a hat. It was round, and covered with a strange gold and black striped fur. Two tall falcon quills jutted from its side.
What a fine hat, Hammer thought to himself. He put it on, looked at himself in his mirror.
Hammer Malevich's brow suddenly took on a golden glow. In that moment he decided, day off or not, to put up five new windows. He washed and dressed, ran down to the street. Turning the corner, Hammer found some of his comrades from the Window-Hangers Group in the middle of an installation at a bakery. The window was large—too large for any one man to lift. The two window hangers, who were young, could barely handle it with their tender fingers wrapped in cloth, both wary of being sliced into by quick-breaking glass.
"Let me help, comrades," he said. He hefted the window up with his bare hands, carrying it over his head. He set the window, sealed it, and taped it up in two minutes. His brethren looked at him, astonished.
"Hammer Malevich! You are incredible!"
Hammer Malevich hung ten windows that day. The hat, with its golden brim, seemed to give him the strength of twenty men. He dusted his uncut hands and went home for the evening. Only then did he take off his fine new hat, and he put it on his desk, right next to his grandfather's Red Army cap. He sat and watched the scars play over his hands that night, same as always.
Hammer Malevich kept up this kind of pace for two weeks. The head of his building awarded him with a tiny glass window on a chain. The local Komsomol gave him a certificate stating that he was an unwavering brother to Mother Russia, and Father Lenin would have been proud to see his fine work. Hammer could not have been happier. He decided to write to his family in Kazan.
One day, while he was shaving, and combing his short salt-and-pepper hair, he heard a knock at his door. He washed, and with a still-dripping face he went out to the hallway.
It was a tall official in uniform. His glasses shone like twin jewels in the light. His name was Commissar Maxim Belkin. He opened up his jacket with an efficient shove, and held out to Hammer Malevich the letter he had sent to his mother and father in Kazan. He tapped his gloved finger on the grainy photograph of the hat left clipped to the letter, as though proving the contents of a want-ad.
"Comrade Hammer Malevich," the official started, slowly, "we are very interested in how you came about such a fine hat. It seems to be in line with Tatar make... Looks like fine fur… Very rich. Very bourgeois. I only wonder how you, a man of the people, could come to have a thing like that. We usually know you by the work clothes you wear, Comrade. You were never one to have fancy taste."
Hammer Malevich stammered. "Truth be told, comrade Commissar, I only found it when my hearth fell out. It was left in the wall of all things. I only wear it because it's so cold out, you know." He told a half-truth; he wore the hat because it made him feel more alive and happy than he had felt in five years. Because it had given him such strength, and because it reminded him of the stiff-backed warriors he had heard about; the ones that rode out on the Steppes, driving up steam from their breath, splattering white snow and black mud. The ones that pushed back at tyranny, fighting until they ended up dead; a crowd of legs and fingers, stiffened by ice, on some forgotten plain, where those bastard whites had done them in. That was what the hat meant to him.
"The wall, you say? Let me see it," the Commissar said.
So Hammer Malevich took the Commissar inside without argument. He picked the hat up with the tips of his scarred fingers. The Commissar took it from him, and his gloved fingers pinched in on the material.
"You," he said, "are a true friend to Russia, Hammer Malevich, for making such a magnificent discovery—there is no question; this hat is an ancient Tatar headdress from the Golden Horde itself, and it is going into the Tatar museum we plan to open next month in the Tatar Quarter."
"But that's my hat," Hammer Malevich frowned. "Comrade Commissar, be reasonable—can't the museum do with a few swords, a robe, or maybe a stuffed horse?"
"You live in the Motherland of Russia, comrade Hammer Malevich," the Commissar scowled. "That hat, and your life, belongs to the whole of Russia. Unless you want to retract all of your awards, your job, and your apartment, comrade, give me the hat, and I will let you live like the model Soviet citizen you are. Otherwise you can live like the capitalist filth you seem so intent on becoming. Try and pull yourself up by your boot-straps then, comrade Malevich!"
Hammer Malevich was crestfallen. What a fool he was! The Commissar was right; he was showing decadent tendencies—what did one man have that gave him the right to wear such a hat, to lord it over his fellows day in and out?
At least I can go and see it in the museum, Hammer Malevich thought. He had a hard time convincing himself that such a museum was even in the works.
"No, comrade Commissar, you're right. Take the hat," Hammer said. His heart ached. The Commissar turned without a word, and slammed the door behind him. Hammer Malevich's room seemed dark, and empty, as though a great storm had come and went, and left nothing but cold autumn air and the dead leaves that go with it.
Fall came, and the hat changed hands many times by Summer. One day, it was possessed by a Russian Hierarch, the next, a doomed man who would escape from his apartment through a back window on the day of his surprise execution. The hat travelled far—first to Petrograd, then to Odessa, where a tall woman with flaxen hair wore it while she directed the building of a great library with the sweep of her arm, straight like a crane and as direct as a Viking's blade as its bearer sailed over the sea.
Though individuals were helped by this hat, its true powers were always hidden from Mother Russia itself. The Collective's stoic eyes remained blind to its secrets, and it remained a mere gift, or a smuggled prize for the highest bidder. Only after the fact did its former owners realize what great powers they had just given away. Political In-fighting ensued, and the potential tidings of war drummed among those that wanted control of the hat. Sirens blared, and the streets were boiled by the exhaust spewing out the backs of armored trucks.
Then it vanished. Having nothing to fight for, strong hands put away their guns. As if taken by an unseen hand in the night, the hat disappeared from Mother Russia's bosom. Pravda published a story about it entitled: PRICELESS ANTIQUE HEADPIECE LOST! Will the Motherland ever see it again? Hammer Malevich's magical hat had been lost for years; ones that bled out slow like spilled sealant over a window-sill.
Recent evidence, however, points to the hat's whereabouts. The photographs are telling. There are pictures surfacing of a young Austrian composer of great virtue. His music can be heard from every major hall in Vienna—even the lesser known ones. He is known for making music that no one has ever dared to create—the kind no one has ever heard before.
His story is simple: the young man was born an orphan, thin with ribs that stuck out like the rungs of a small barrel. His days were spent staying in, sitting before the battered piano of his orphanage, and he played so much that they say his fingers lengthened by an inch. They say he always covered his head, in case the wind decided to tear his downy hair out. His creations were discovered at the age of sixteen when he played for a couple who had come to look into adoption. The pair immediately took him in, and the entrepreneurial parents struck a line in the music business, deciding to invest in the boy's future.
In every picture, this young man's hair is pushed back underneath his favorite hat; one with a round body, gold and black striped fur, and a pair of tall falcon feathers pinned to the brim.