The Moscoviad (16 page)

Something whizzed
right above your head—must have been a bullet.

“I’m asking, how
did you get into the restricted access zone?” the leader is impatient.

“Ask those who
control this access,” you shrug your shoulders with the simple-minded air of a
peasant from a nineteenth-century vaudeville. “I’m telling you about the much
more important and interesting matters. By the way, I now remember! I now
comprise not four, but five levels! Since above the red wine lies the
moonshine, consumed once again on Fonvizin Street! . . .”

“A dead fish of
some kind, comrade captain,” reports the results of the search the bearded guy.

“Okay,” comrade
captain calms down a little. “I am detaining you to clarify the circumstances.
You can lower your hands.”

“May God give you
good health,” you thank him. “And who might you actually be?”

“Captain
Sheludkov, commander of the Farabundo Marti rat extermination detachment,” he
raises his palm to his beret. Is he saluting or something?

“Oh, that’s you!”
you rejoice at such a non-banal encounter, but you don’t have the time to enjoy
it as the bearded guy blindfolds you and pushes at your back with something
very hard and unpleasant.

“Forward march,”
he says.

And nothing
remains for you to do except fulfilling this order. You sense that they are
taking you deeper inside, although what kind of escape can one dream of in your
situation—you are surrounded on all sides by internationalist rat-catchers, and
you first walk through the tunnel, this dead secret branch along which no metro
trains run anymore, then you turn, it seems, into some kind of gate, then you
go down some more steps—down again!—then one of them punches the code and some
wall, built back in the days by the prisoners of tsar Ivan III, opens up, but
you can only guess about all this: the moveable walls, the inscriptions “NO
TRESSPASSING” in medieval-style letters. And from aside all this apparently
looks rather comical: a gang of over-armed weirdoes in heavy, almost
hockey-style armor beneath their spotted fatigues, vigilantly and unremittingly
escorts a ragged and limping drunkard with a huge and, save for the catfish,
empty bag in his hand. But if one bears in mind that according to the Japanese
calendar, you, von F., are indeed a Rat, then the absolute sense of all this
suddenly becomes quite clear. The rat-catchers have caught a rat. Praised be
the rat-catchers, down with the rat!

The fact is, for
about a year now rumors have been spreading around Moscow, fueled by the
tabloids and perhaps by all of the press, that in the depths of the metro there
have appeared giant, shepherd-dog-sized rats. They are pitiless and insane,
they instantly rip everything living to pieces, their teeth are half an inch
thick! They are insatiable in eating and copulation. Endowed with satanic
cunningness and an ability to orient themselves perfectly in the labyrinths of
the metro, these products of ecological cataclysms, these mutants of the
Antichrist, these apocalyptic monsters, or—even worse—beasts that have been
genetically engineered in transatlantic laboratories and viciously introduced
into our underground areas—they have become in essence the masters of Moscow’s
nether regions. Before they only gave signs of themselves at night. Now they
have started appearing even at daytime, and at rather crowded stations, for
instance, the “Barrikadnaya,” sowing panic and deathly fright, and at the
“Begovaya” station they even briefly captured the escalator and controlled it
for some time. They were pressed back into the tunnels only with the help of
powerful laser guns that back in the day stopped the Chinese offensive at the
Far Eastern borders. The metro trains now have to stop frequently and
unexpectedly between stations. The explanation for this is simple: the rat
population grows, and they amass on the tracks in such numbers that the wheels
simply get stuck in the squashed rat bodies. These sacrifices on the part of
the rats, however, are only temporary: the vile creatures adapt to the
situation with increasing success. They have already gnawed to death several
train operators, and a few others have succumbed to madness and have been
isolated from the society in the cages and dungeons of the Snezhnevsky
Psychiatric Institute. But these facts are kept strictly secret, and disclosure
of this secret by a state functionary is punished by sure death: eternal exile
into the Moscow underground. The families of the deceased and demented were
told that the poor souls went missing, probably by taking the wrong tracks and
getting into some unknown cul-de-sacs.

Since a certain
time everything that has to do with the metro rats is surrounded by
extraordinary workplace secrecy. A special subdivision has been created at the
city branch of the KGB, containing several laboratories. They conduct some
scientific experiments with the help of the best scholars, psychics, and
Tibetan monks. Voluntary brigades of Afghan war veterans go through the Moscow
underground at night and pitilessly blow to pieces with their guns anyone they
meet in their path who at least remotely resembles a rat. These are strong and
selfless boys. And now they are chasing you, von F. And thank God that they did
not shoot a few rounds at you at the very beginning, only to cringe somberly
later.

They lead you
silently, having surrounded you on all sides, and you are still trying to chat
them up.

“Hey, guys,” you
say, “I have always admired your bravery and self-sacrifice. You are the only
ones of whom this thoroughly rotten society can be proud. Besides the politburo
members, naturally. Although, on the other hand, if you know nothing else but
spewing snot out of your nostrils and rounds out of your machine guns, if your
muscles are still young, and the brain convolutions are not yet that
convoluted, and if there are no job openings in the riot police, as that
humanitarian institution is far too prestigious, then perhaps indeed the only
thing that remains is to crawl underground and chase rats. But still I’d like
to know, what do your beloved tell you, your girlfriends, wives, and sisters,
when after shooting your due over the course of a hard night shift you wash off
in the bathtub the black clots and the tufts of fur that had stuck on you? Or
when they suddenly feel in your pocket a rolled up chopped off bare tail, a
foot and a half long? Do they love you the same way they did before? In
lovemaking, do they give you the springtime of their bodies as joyously as before?”
And, encouraged by their dumb silence, you continue, “For the heart of the
matter is not in the rats but in the need to exterminate someone. All my life I
tried to prove to myself and to others who, truth be told, did not understand
me, that this world is far too brutal for one to be able to change it for the
better solely with the help of words, but that it is also far too tender for
one to be able to change it by means of bullets. I mean, the other way round.
Well, you understand me. The appearance in the nether world of the metro of the
subspecies of rats previously unknown to science (I mean comparative biology)
is only to be greeted from the point of view of enrichment of being. Although
each rat taken individually, yours truly being no exception, undoubtedly
contains a certain particle of evil and thus becomes its active . . . eh . . .
promoter. And still for some reason I fell extremely sorry for these audacious,
recalcitrant, these unique (you surely would agree) creatures. Although I feel
just as sorry for you too. For you, just like the rats you exterminate, are
perhaps one of the last products of the empire, its swan song. And this is
exactly why there can be no winners or losers in your war, only victims . . .”

You could have
continued developing this senseless mocking monologue for another half an hour
or so, von F., if only they didn’t push you somewhere, abruptly and without
warning, so that you even suddenly fell on the cold and hard surface, most
likely bare cement.

“Bullshit me some
more, you fucking Jean-Paul Sartre,” muttered good-naturedly the youthful
captain Sheludkov, pulling the blindfold off your eyes.

This was a cage.
Fortunately, a fairly spacious one, in the middle of a tight, stuffy and damp
room, lit so poorly that this made one recall the night lights in the army
barracks. From three sides the cage was separated from the world (ha-ha!) by a
crude grate. On the fourth, behind your back, was a wall with a closed door,
behind which something fiercely rustled about and whined, but you couldn’t make
out what it was exactly.

“And generally,
captain, what grounds do you have to treat me as if I were one of your rats?”
you finally remembered about your basic human rights.

“You were
detained in the zone of government communications. This is enough,” he answered
plainly.

“Enough for
what?” you inquired.

“For everything,”
promised the captain. And ordered one of his brave lads to lock the cage from
the outside. Because there was another door there, in the grates. And left,
apparently, to report all of this to someone. To clarify the circumstances.

“An interesting
feature of the empire is that it takes a few hundred years to clarify certain
things. Then everyone is rehabilitated, both the victims and the perpetrators,
but this is already of no importance,” you say and, sighing, doze off, leaning
with your back against the cold metal door behind which something bounces and
scratches.

Perhaps some
three hundred years later archeologists will find your skeleton . . .

But nothing came
of your intention to sleep for three hundred years. Some five minutes later you
felt on your shoulder someone’s kind and heavy hand.

“What the fuck?”
you inquired hoarsely, forcing yourself to lift your leaden eyelids.

In front of you a
man was bowing, his face hard to make out, but dressed in a suit and tie that
were not quite in harmony with the surrounding situation.

“Otto
Wilhelmovych?” he clarified.

This was enough
for you. The was no need to wave in front of your nose a red-trimmed ID,
although he did wave it, in a disciplined fashion.

“I am pleased to
have this meeting with you,” he smiled.

“The joy of human
communication,” you sighed.

“Well, you shouldn’t
put it like this,” he smiled even more heartily. “From now on you can call me .
. . eh . . . Sashko.”

“I won’t,” you
cut him off. “All the same you are no Sashko.”

“Everything is
relative, Mr. von F., I assure you,” he said convincingly. “What difference
does it make what’s the name of this frail body? The main thing is the immortal
soul. But it does not have an earthly name, any human name is too small for it.
In some sense you are no Arthur either . . . No, be seated, be seated . . .”

He had more grounds
to tell you, “keep on lying down,” but his old workplace habits led him to this
inaccuracy.

He sat down in
the middle of the cage on a chair which he must have brought here for himself.

“I’ll have a
smoke here, is that all right?” he inquired politely.

“Please make
yourself at home,” you advised.

He laughed
sincerely.

“I always
appreciated your fine, and somewhat mean, black humor. These hints, these
generalizations, these unexpected parallels and metaphors! Now too you didn’t
just simply use the traditional phrase ‘at home’ pertaining to—I laugh at the
thought of it—a cage. It seems to me that in this way you first and foremost
poked fun at our entire socialist motherland. Isn’t that right, Otto
Wilhelmovych?” he inhaled the smoke fanatically.

“Naturally,” you
nodded. “But this is just between you and me,” you added in a whisper. “Don’t
tell anyone else about it.”

“Well, come on!”
“Sashko” again cheered up. “This is a completely normal thought. I honor good
satire! You know that we are now allowing free expression of satirical
thoughts. As they say, democracy is a beautiful thing, but humanity couldn’t
come up with anything worse than that. So there is not a drop of criminality in
your words. If you were to think up an overthrow by force of the existing state
order, that’s a different matter . . .”

“The non-existing
order,” you corrected him.

He nodded with an
understanding look.

“The situation
with our state order is indeed a difficult one, so I share your worries.” The
cigarette, it seems, was rather damp, since it went out at every other moment
and he had to fetch the matches from his pant pocket again and again. “But
things don’t look completely hopeless. We link all our plans to the gathering
of healthy patriotic forces which so far have been operating in an
uncoordinated, splintered fashion. Fuck it, it will soon be a week since I’ve
been sitting underground, even the cigarettes went damp!”

“And what are you
doing here?” you asked reluctantly.

“We don’t even
know ourselves,” explained “Sashko” trustingly. “Some global-scale event,
someone is meeting here with someone else. And we are, so to speak, on guard.
Along the way we got the information about you being detained. Decided to
entertain a bit an old acquaintance. By the way, what do you think of my
Ukrainian?”

“It leaves a lot
of room for deterioration,” you remarked. “It is too correct, and this
immediately makes your profession obvious . . .”