The Moscoviad (22 page)

“So, you’ve
fucking lost the detainee, you morons?! You think I don’t know anything?! Why
no reports about his escape?! And who hired you, the dumbasses?! To think of it—a
fucking scribbler, and showed you all! . . . Motherfucking professionals!”

“We are looking
for him, comrade . . .” the poor attendant tried to save the situation.

“Look for your
heads, you good-for-nothings! And he might well be walking around Moscow by
now. Find him right away and bring him to me! Personally! Do you understand at
least what’s at stake? Do you? Do you understand this at least, you idiots?”

“We do, comrade .
. .”

“You don’t
understand anything if he’s still not detained! Take note: if you don’t bring
him to me dead or alive, or both dead and alive, on Monday the entire group, to
the last one—to Karabakh! Go rub your bellies against the rocks! Perhaps in the
midst of bullets and shells you’ll get wiser! Is it clear?”

“It is, comrade .
. . And who am I speaking with?”

“With the Lord
God, you fucking idiot! You should recognize, got it? Any other questions?”

“The rats.”

“What’s with
those rats?”

“They are
beginning to devour each other. They are destroying the cables of government
communications. They are getting fiercer every minute. We are afraid that we
may have kept them locked much too long. What are your orders?”

“I order you to
set them loose!”

“From all the
compartments?”

“From all without
exception! Let them warm up, run around a bit . . .”

“Ha-ha-ha,” the
attendant shook with laughter.

“Jokes aside!
Tell the group’s leader that I will personally throw him into a rat cage if you
don’t get me this doggerel-scribbler in an hour! Is it clear?”

“I’ll definitely
tell him!” assured the attendant with joyous readiness.

“Report to me
about the progress of the operation every half an hour!”

“Yes, comrade . .
. Which operation?”

“The
above-mentioned one! Detainment operation, you fool!”

You slammed the
receiver angrily. And where did so much insolence come from? You looked at your
reflection in the smooth black surface of the telephone. A fool indeed—tufts of
hair, red as a fox’s tail, large uneven bald spots, a red potato for a nose.
Fully appropriate for going to a symposium of the dead on our future. Which
symposium, by the way, is going on behind that door over there.

You decided to
kick the door open with your foot—this would definitely be more elegant. But no
one inside the CONFERENCE HALL paid the least bit of attention to this. You
entered, a fool indeed, of no use to anyone, in your long trenchcoat. The
entire otherworldly public was all absorbed in some long speech, delivered from
a podium splattered with blood and feces and lit with candles from below. The
speaker was an exceptionally dashing incognito, who following the old criminal
custom pulled a black stocking over his head, with just one opening for the
mouth.

In general the
room was ruled over by semidarkness. The chairs were placed in the form of an
amphitheater, and seemed to rotate around the lit up podium and table of the
presidium. The hall’s walls also rotated, but in the opposite direction, so
that the present wouldn’t feel dizzy. And on these moving walls there
periodically appeared depictions of various exotic objects, as if in a Chinese
theater of shadows. Destroyed buildings, gallows, tanks, space satellites took
off into the air, swarms of harvest combines resembled herds of prehistoric
giants. The placed smelled of something half-decomposed, but also of cognac.

In the meantime
the speaker’s mouth, which was merely a cavity in the black stocking, hammered
into the moving space of the hall the nails of sharp-toothed phrases. And this
mouth was saying approximately the following,

“We must
recognize that we now stand on the verge of a catastrophe. I repeat: on the
verge. Do we have a chance to turn it away? Is it still possible to save our
great legacy? How much effort, fire, blood, metal is required for this? This is
the set of questions that seriously disturbs us all. Gone are those slow times
when we could permit ourselves retreats, softening, amnesties, relaxation,
rarefaction. No we have no alternatives. That is, we still do, but this is the
last possible one: to be or not to be. Should this Great Power be or not be?
Should there be the Great Power or the Great Chaos? Hierarchy or anarchy. Our
enemies greet our elegant ideas with whistles and heckling. In essence,
everything is falling apart. From sacred relics to tanks. The army is no longer
capable of fulfilling the orders left by our ancestors: it only simulates. It
is too squeamish to kill. This is no longer an army—it is a large gathering of
pacifists and faggots, who are, in essence, the same. We must acknowledge: at
present we don’t have an army. We don’t! However, does the inevitability of the
greatest catastrophe follow from all this? No!”

You sat down on
one of the empty chairs close to the aisle and began rotating together with the
entire amphitheater. How good it was that you had already managed to puke
everything out! Now you could concentrate on the rest. Menacing shadows crawled
around the hall. Among them were severed heads and tongues, spires of pompous
buildings, targeted missiles. The overshadowed audience listed to the speaker
in a determined and engaged fashion: various Santa Clauses, pirates, Indians,
knights, mushrooms, robbers, alcoholics, and other fairytale creatures. But the
greatest in number were the assorted beasts with trunks, snouts, jaws, tails,
and hooves. At times this resembled a holiday show with costume changes at a
kindergarten. Or at a school for the retarded.

The presidium of
this gathering sat to the right of the podium. There were seven of them. And
you recognized them all.

The first to grab
attention was a tall and bony scoundrel dressed up as Ivan the Terrible. Time
and again he shook his Tatar-style beard and unwashed mane while listening to
another nail from Black Stocking’s mouth. He generally made an impression of
someone who had just killed his own son.

Next was someone
who had decided to model his life on comrade Felix Dzerzhinsky. His beard was
no less goat-like than that of “Ivan the Terrible.” Paradoxically, however,
this one in the presidium differed from the Don-Quixote-resembling Dzerzhinsky
monument in being short and stout, and somehow reminiscent of a fading lounge
singer.

The one sitting
next to “Dzerzhinsky” could only be Lenin. And that’s indeed who he was. But
here too a certain comic detail could not be avoided. The matter was that
instead of the usual workman’s cap which brought his appearance closer to the
proletarian-peasant masses, he was wearing the Russian imperial crown, in all
its Byzantine pompousness—but, truth be told, this one was made of
papier-mâché. Otherwise the crown was in no way inferior to the real one.

Next was
Minin-and-Pozharsky. A two-headed type in clothing stylized à la seventeenth
century, partially sitting in an armchair, partially standing nearby, with an
arm on the shoulder of the sitting one. It was hard to tell whether this person
was more of a military leader or a merchant, his character dominated by
nobility or philistinism.
27

Generalissimo
Alexander Suvorov, that is, the guy dressed like him, was, as back during his
life, fidgety and impatient.
28
It seemed as if he were sitting on a red-hot
sheet of metal or on a bed of nails hammered by the speaker in the black
stocking. He was constantly rubbing his hands, clearly wooden, and badly
finished at that, and interrupted the speaker with out-of-place questions.

The clear star of
the entire presidium was a stout lady representing Empress Catherine II. The
robes covering her full-blooded and worn out body could be described as a
stylistic hybrid of a rococo-era ball gown and a banal modern nightgown. This
improvised “Catherine” would have looked excellent if she did not sweat so
profusely, especially her feet. They seemed also to have a tendency to
swell—apparently the consequence of the stormy young days at the palace.

The last in this
chain of the great was someone with a glass eye. In fact, this could have been
Mr. Kryuchkov himself, head of the KGB, dressed as himself so that no one among
the present would think this was actually him. It even seemed that he was the
one managing the entire event. He probably was the shadow leader in this shadowy
kingdom.

Lit from below,
the members of the presidium resembled giant playing cards pulled from some
swindler’s magical pack. But this was a play for mortal stakes. At least so it
seemed to you.

Meanwhile, the
speaker in a stocking kept on doing his thing. Or rather, so did his mouth.

“We must remember
that critical moments always required surgical intervention. The great masters
of State-Building did not stop at removing the most profusely bleeding pieces
of flesh. When future was at stake, cutting was necessary—no matter how high
the costs. This history, ours and yours, is the history of pitiless surgery.
Did you see the writhing in the basements of Ipatiev House of Tsar Nicholas II
and his entire family under the bayonets of the executors? And this was nothing
else but the removal of tonsils. For the State had to live on. The hemophiliac
tsar could no longer catch up with it. Now we have something similar. This sick
body must be cut up from within! We should send everyone home, lower the
curtain. We will grant them their, excuse my vocabulary, cherished
independence. We will teach them to win referendums. For a referendum is an
ideal way to manipulate people while maintaining their illusion of having
chosen their fate on their own. We will teach them to love the State. And this
means—to love violence, deceit, and corruption. We will grant them complete
freedom to drive themselves into the abyss. But at the same we will keep
something for ourselves . . .”

“And what about
Alaska?” “Generalissimo Suvorov” fidgeted on his bony bottom.

“We are always
ready to come to the defense of the local russophone population,” said Black
Stocking clearly and exhaustively, without even blinking an eye (or maybe,
having blinked).

“Don’t dare
forget Alaska,” screamed “Suvorov.”

“Shut up! Du,
Scheissener dumbass!” the German-speaking “Catherine” roared at the
“Generalissimo.”

At the sight of
this “Lenin” started giggling rather maliciously, while “Kryuchkov”
(Kryuchkov?) called the presidium to order.

“Okay, let’s
leave Alaska for the time being,” butted in the all-penetrating “Dzerzhinsky,”
“but you’ve just said a most intriguing phrase: ‘we will keep something for
ourselves.’ What do you have in mind?”

“The future,”
answered Black Stocking. “We preserve not so much a dismembered body but
discreet viable organs. We preserve certain offices, committees, institutions.
We preserve a certain vertical hierarchy in their relations. And a great
natural drive to grow, multiply, and regenerate. The funniest thing is that
these organs (heads, arms, legs, balls) will suddenly act in the interest of
independent republics.”

“Really?” said
“Lenin” with interest.

“That’s the whole
point—not really,” the speaker’s mouth confirmed his doubts. “In reality they
will prepare our future. At the helm of freshly-baked, forgive me, independent
governments there will appear executives tested and appointed by us. Chaos will
generate more chaos. Where this would prove impossible, power will be grabbed
by plain old degenerates. Or political prostitutes, dear Vladimir Ilyich. Or
simply nothings. Everything will drown in gray mediocrity. In monotony. In
vileness. The great wave of entropy that has shattered the Great Empire will
utterly destroy these little, forgive me, independent states as well. All this
will look like a cartoon: these presidents appointed by us, these parliaments
bought by us. These border conflicts of Sunnis and Shiites, Catholics and
Krishnaites, Orthodox Christians and Zen Buddhists. These heroic attempts of
Western bankers to teach madmen about freedom. These hungry petty squabbles,
mutinies and strikes. This mass-production of churches and bordellos. The great
obscenity of directives, constitutions, and declarations. And an
all-encompassing rubbish heap, no, many independent rubbish heaps with absurd
puppets at the helm. This is our program of action. More and more often will
the people look back. And see in their deceived visions the Great State—cosmic,
fiery, all-encompassing, millennial. And this, pardon me, independence of
theirs will look worse and worse in comparison with it. The very idea of
something like this would appear to be . . .”

“Full of shit,”
prompted “Ivan the Terrible.”

“Thank you, I had
something just like this in mind,” the speaker agreed politely. “And then all
of them—I mean the nations—will again desire it, the Great Power. For
everything will be running through their fingers like ocean sand. Everything
will be crumbling. A great menagerie will rule far and wide! And no other
choice! Here I mean not so much political or economic, but rather moral
choice.”

A storm of
applause flooded the room.

“And what about
Poland and Finland?” “Suvorov” leapt out again after the applause died down.