The Moscoviad (15 page)

But now you find
yourself all alone in this hellhole. You, von F., don’t fully realize yet what
an inescapable trap you’ve gotten into, my sweet. For it seemed to you that you
were limping in the right direction, comrade, but it turns out you weren’t.
This is not the right corridor, and the doors here are different. And all the
doors here are locked, and the walls are sealed, and the dim emergency lights
don’t help much—no, they rather exist only in order to confirm for you,
scatterbrain, that there’s no way out.

Especially since
it’s long past seven, and thus this monstrous edifice above you, this
“Children’s World” is closed until Monday, and only a couple of sad cops wander
about it like ghosts, protecting all this space that surrounds the paper doves.
And even if you manage to get up to the surface, even if you find a way out of
here, you’d still find yourself detained and questioned, and later quite
possibly also take hits into your liver, under your ribs, and so on.

So there exist
two options for you now, dear von F. The first is to survive in this darkness
through some miracle until Monday morning, having first figured out where’s the
exit, and quietly wait next to it. And on Monday morning calmly slip out of it,
whistling, and get the hell out of here (to the dorm, to Kyrylo’s, to Galya’s,
to a concert at the conservatory, to the beer hall on Fonvizin Street: an
endless list of possible options starts here). The other option is grounded in
the recognition of struggle as life’s sense. This second option is a persistent
and exhaustive search for a third option, that is, for some, as yet unknown to
you, way of getting out of here, breaking out of here.

Without
hesitation you choose the second one, you drunken scarecrow. For what else
remains there for you except for the groundless hopes for a miraculous rescue?
And thus you try to be cool, iron-tough, and rational. Although, since your
body temperature is now around 102, this is almost impossible. But give it a
try, love, give it a try.

So. There exists
a basement, in which I now find myself. These are perhaps some auxiliary
premises that belong to the “Children’s World” department store or, say, to the
KGB. Actually, chasing after the poor gypsy, may he rest in hell, you covered
so much time and space that this may very well be the sixteenth century, the
times of Ivan the Terrible. This dungeon may be located underneath anything—the
Kremlin walls, the Assumption Cathedral, the Bolshoy, the Central Telegraph,
the main post office, the Metropole hotel, under the TsUM department store, the
GUM department store, or under any other piece of shit.

By the way.
Looking at things from the point of view of the sewer. It seethes not much
deeper than where I am now. And this is one of its main channels, the river
into which merge the mid-size and small sewage streams. But what can one add to
this? Well, nothing. Some time ago wise people advised me to learn the network
of Moscow’s cloaca—in life, as in literature, anything can come in handy;
moreover, I wanted to describe it in my novel in verse. However, laziness and
preoccupation with womenfolk prevented me from doing this. From all the stuff
related to sewage systems I only recall that there was something they call “the
collector”—although this also pertains to library management.
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After all, a library too is nothing else but a large (bigger or smaller) sewer
of human spirit. A definition that I should note down for my future Nobel
lecture.

Hey, von F., you
cretin, what Nobel lecture are you blabbering about now, what Nobel lecture, my
dear? You are sitting deep underground, drunk, sick, ragged, with a bruised
knee, without money, without your plane ticket, you don’t know how you’ll get
out of here and whether it’s possible to get out of here at all, you are on the
edge of being and nonbeing, von F., and it’s no joke, but you, instead of
slowly trying to get used to the worst option and prepare yourself for death
which will be your liberator, you decide—totally out of the blue—to proceed in
the direction of getting used to the best option and prepare yourself for the
Nobel Prize. You are worth only a bitter laugh, you fool, and that’s all.

Wait, friends,
don’t rush to roll with laughter. One guy here has just gotten his share of
laughing. You know how it ended. So my advice is: don’t. And as far as the
groundless, as you say, dreams about the Nobel Prize, this is only to cheer
myself up. Because it is awarded only to the living. So, in order to live on, I
must think about it. For the dead receive a different prize—from God. The dead
know no shame. The dead can’t care less. The dead don’t hurt. Dead bees don’t
buzz. And I still want to buzz, my sweet, golden friends.

Oh well, our
beloved von F., you have verbalized your half-conscious yearnings rather
convincingly, taking into account your drunken head. It will be interesting to
observe you further. Bitte, sitzen Sie fort, mein Schatz!

I’ll try, my dear
inner voices. Let’s consider things from the point of view of the metro. It
always attracted me by its wild apocalyptic qualities. I would transport
sinners to hell in cars just like this. Everything, beginning with the
turnstiles shocking in their metallic automatism, with the endless
eschatological escalators bearing the fixed figures of the catatonics or the
forever fleeing silhouettes of the paranoiacs, and all the way to the
underground trains themselves, who burst from somewhere out in the darkness,
brake in a frightening fashion at the stations that bear bandit names, only to
take off again somewhere into the night in half a minute, having pinched with
their doors someone’s unlucky arms, butts, and heads.

So, the metro
should also be somewhere close by. Bearing in mind my assumptions, I am now
somewhere between the stations “Dzerzhinskaya”
20
and
“Marx Avenue” (what a company! But what can you do—the traps of totalitarian
past, here almost all of them have names like this). And any of the doors I
come across may open simply into a metro station. Or onto the tracks. I wonder,
how do the metro and the sewage system compare against each other in terms of
depth? What is higher than what? Or do they form a united and indivisible
whole? For imperial architects like jokes like these. They say that there is an
entire branch of the metro that was intended only for Stalin. He rode in a soft
Pullman car, and on both sides were execution chambers with glass walls. From
his compartment’s window the great dreamer could contemplate the balls of his
rivals in love for Leninism being crushed. This secret branch of the metro is
not marked on any of the maps accessible to a common man. Everyone pretends
that it simply doesn’t exist.

Now confess
sincerely, von F., that all this you have just come up with, all by yourself!
The metro tracks that carried Stalin! Execution chambers with transparent
walls! And how about banana plantations for the KGB elite? Or harems with
twelve-year-old concubines for the ancient Kremlin bosses? Swimming pools,
garages, restaurants, airports? Pine forests for cross-country runs on Finnish
skis? Aquariums with dolphins and crocodiles to please the hearts of aging top
brass? Did they have them here?

They had it all,
my friends. The empire was capable of everything. Here rules the aura of
something secret, something banned. Here millions of crimes are buried. All
these abandoned corridors are of great strategic importance. These are the
catacombs from which the empire had emerged and to which it will return when
the skies grow dark. Thus there must be entire cities here, not just harems or
execution chambers. Treasuries for keeping the countless amounts of party
membership fees. Perhaps if one pulls at this stub of wiring here, a cave would
open with diamonds for the proletarian dictatorship. Or a city would suddenly
fly into air, say Maastricht. For the empire was capable of everything. And it
still is now.

Here you’ve been
poking fun at me, mocking me, and I have just discovered an armored door that
opened automatically. Then I ran twelve steps down and found another door,
twice as massive, with a biblical-sounding inscription, “BEFORE OPENING THIS
DOOR, MAKE SURE THAT THE PREVIOUS DOOR IS CLOSED!!!” So, overcoming the pain in
the knee, I had to go back up those twelve steps to make sure. The door was
open. Having made a sigh of relief I again crawled back down and leaned with
full force against this lower door, the one with the inscription.

In front of me
was a tunnel. An actual metro tunnel, with train tracks and a few isolated
lights on the walls. And I happily jumped into it, relieved that I at last
managed to find an exit out of the damned trap. But my poor knee immediately
made itself known by way of a thousand needles that pricked me; besides,
finding myself on the tracks, I realized that I’ve just done something utterly
stupid.

Because you are a
fool, von F., even if you are a rather talented poet. Imagine now that a
speeding metro train is at this moment approaching the station nearest to you.
The car doors open predatorily. The degenerate voice of the tape recording
announces, “This is Dickhead station. Stand back, doors are closing. Next stop
is Herd Square.” And the doors indeed close, the train takes off, picks up its
underground speed and, slicing the darkness with the two powerful headlights,
the train operator suddenly sees in front of him, on the tracks, an absurd
limping figure with a large bag in its hands. “What the fuck,” he manages to
think before the only thing left from you, dumbass, are guts splattered all
over the tracks . . . And the train operator decides that you were probably his
hangoverish hallucination, and, whistling “dontpoursaltovermywounds,” he
successfully guides this monster machine further, to the Herd Square station.
Do you like such a scene, von F.?

And if you don’t,
why the fuck did you jump here? Since it’s almost impossible to escape the
bottom of the Moscow metro. So the only uncertain option that remains for you
is to believe in a five-minute delay due to a strike warning work stoppage and
to run, run as fast as you can, getting the sore knee the hell out of your
head, make your way to the next station, whatever it’s called. So that you
manage to get to the lit and people-filled station platform before the pitiless
chariot of progress runs over your ribs (ha-ha, a powerful formulation, isn’t
it?). And if you succeed, which we doubt, there, at the station some
good-natured guys will pull you up, bring you to your senses, having laid you
down on the cold cement floor under a marble column, and they will call the cop
on duty, officer Bareassenko, and he would take you, say, to the sobering
station where there will be ice-cold water, where there will be a lot of
guiltless men, and where you’d answer the question about the “place of
employment” with something like “Lord God’s office” . . .

And so you put
all of your strength in your feet, von F., and start running, although at every
moment it seems to you that you hear the fatal rumbling behind your back, or
that the killer headlights are already blinding you, so your tired legs can
hardly carry you on. Life in the fast lane, as our American brothers say.
Running for your life. If this pitiful waddling can be called running. If this
vile despicable existence can be called a life. Thus it would be more correct
to say: pitiful out-of-breath waddling for the sake of vile despicable
existence.

Hence when you
suddenly hear the dry, like a shot, exclamation, “Stop! Hands up!”—and you
stop, raising both your hands above your head, along with the bag, you even
sense a certain relief . . .

Here they are,
standing in front of you on the tracks, and they feel you up, cut you up with
flashlights. There are few of them, perhaps only five. But what you manage to
notice through the pitiless light is how excessively they are armed, beyond all
common sense. For each of them carries if not a flame-thrower or a hand-held
machine-gun (the kind that pressed on your back ten years ago during your
service in her majesty the infantry), then at least a couple of unfailing AKS
guns, stuffed with the horrifying bullets with the displaced center of gravity.
You don’t even want to think about the frightening number of hatchets that
stick out of all the possible pockets of their fatigues. And these pockets also
contain grenades, dynamite, and other, latest and fascinating explosives whose
names you have blissfully forgotten!

“Who are you?”
asks one of them, while another, bearded one searches you and, having found in
your bag the sleeping catfish, sniffs at it for a long time.

“My last name is
Kropyva, but dad signed his name Pidopryhora,”
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you answer politely, following the old sobering station habit.

The fighters
burst with rather crushing laughter. Except for the one who asked the question,
probably their leader: he fiercely glances back and forth at them, then at you.

“Wow, he’s
fucking had a lot!” you hear from one of them an idiom that you’ve already heard
somewhere earlier today.

“How did you get
into the zone of the government metro?” the leader brims with strictness.

“How did I get
here?” you repeat pensively and try to concentrate for a minute. “And how did I
get into this world in general? How does each of us get here? For in the
infinity of cosmic nonbeing all of us constitute a surprising example of the
triumph of randomness. Humanity is accidental. Civilization is accidental.
Although, on the other hand, there’s the Divine Providence to take care of it
all, my friends. And it wished that today I would consist of four basic levels.
Please, turn at least one of the lamps off, because I feel like at the Gestapo.
My eyes hurt. Thank you! The first level of my current spirituality consists of
the beer imbibed on Fonvizin Street. The red wine which was consumed there as
well constitutes the second level which is in many ways the determining one . .
.”