The Moscoviad (24 page)

“A deed, my dear
Arthur, a deed,” “Sashko” rustled nearby, spitting out his own mustache.

“Will you pray
for me?”

He only laughed
in response. He laughed with his entire body, throwing his head back. You
reached with your hand under his unbuttoned jacket. A sweaty shirt, folds of
fat at the waist. The pistol was right there, at home—where they usually carry
them in movies.

“Really?”
“Sashko” interrupted his laughter in mid-air, as it were, and stared at you
distrustfully.

“Now you’re gonna
have a deed,” you said, hiding the pistol in the raincoat’s wide pocket.

“Do you know how
to use it?”

“I did shoot
before. At targets. At the training sessions for army reservists,” you answered
and moved down the aisle closer to the presidium. But then remembered your bag,
and came back for it. And then walked down once again.

I want my bag to
be with me at such a moment. I want my soul to be with me. My emptiness to be
with me.

Your feet seemed
to glide over the steps. The hall rotated, the amphitheater kept moving,
occasionally you grabbed the back of a chair, a snout or a coxcomb of some
mask. A few shouts reached you from the balcony, but this was something
different than before. Something new was going on there—some fuss, panic,
pushing and shoving, although no one below was paying attention to it just yet.
You stopped. You raised your hand.

“Attention!” you
said as loudly as you could, but still it seemed your voice was far too soft.

But the invisible
mechanisms stopped. The secret axles stopped rotating. The chairs and balconies
stopped, uttering a rusty squeak while braking. Silence ruled over the hall.

Only up above,
from the balconies, came isolated and ever more piercing screams. But in the
semidarkness one couldn’t see what was going on there. Perhaps they found an
instigator and were now pummeling him in the ribs. This did not stop you.

“Attention!” you
began one more time, at once surprised that a human voice could tremble this
much. “I want to say that I have a terrible headache. It’s just that I had a
rather bad day today . . . No, this isn’t what I wanted to say . . .”

The presidium was
listening to you. Up close they did not resemble that much the characters they
were representing. Something else came across, something weightier and not at
all cartoonish. Perhaps the eyes. Or maybe all this was your hallucination—the
hallucination of a fool with a red potato instead of a nose.

“I’d like to
say,” you began one more time, “that I have never had to kill someone ever
before. Even household animals. That’s how it happened. Thus I’d like you to
excuse me for doing something incorrectly. But I have no other way. I am doing
this in the name of your own people, whom I wish nothing but good . . .”

Someone behind
you uttered a loud cough—”Sashko,” it seems.

“I respect the
great Russian literature. The humanistic traditions. The tradition of carrying
God inside you, of searching for God. Of humiliating God. And despite all this,
I will do what I will. That is, no. Not in the name of any nation. And not in
the name of one particular nation. In my own name. For my head hurts too much,
and all this must be finished. One more time—attention! I’ll try to do it as
quickly as possible . . .”

The speech, of
course, was a failure. But the shots from your pistol rang out evenly and
confidently. You decided to finish them all—methodically and consistently,
bullet after a bullet, shot after a shot, body after a body—remembering that
you don’t have much time or the right to miss. You shot surprisingly on target,
and from the balconies resounded ever more screams and curses. You shot like an
“A” student, beautiful in your mercilessness, and from the balconies and boxes,
and ever from the walls where the imperial march of shadows had stopped,
enormous strategic rats, repulsive, abysmal, set loose in fulfillment of your
own order, jumped onto the frightened heads and necks of the audience. You
finished off the entire presidium, but there wasn’t a single drop of blood—only
musty sawdust flowed from their perforated skulls and chests, and mechanical
eyes blinked noiselessly. And they fell one after the other, following the
order of your shots—dummies, as it turned out, and only then you understood
what horrified you so much when you came closer.

What scared me
was that all of them were symbols.

They were lying
down around the presidium table—all as one, including the crumbling
“Catherine,” and only the monument to Minin-and-Pozharsky remained in its
place. Sawdust still flowed from some of them, roaches and various artificial
devices spilled from the others. All this looked rather repulsive.

You looked behind
you. Rats ruled over the CONFERENCE HALL, instantly tearing to pieces those
whom they were able to reach. Tens of masks huddled by the doors, getting into
each other’s way, pushing and shoving with their elbows and phalluses, clawing,
stomping their hooves, crawling towards the exit, although this was no exit—the
doors were simply painted on the wall. You noticed one of the biggest rats, a
rat king, a hierarch as large as a sizeable dog, go at some poor thing in a
black stocking. But you couldn’t ascertain whether this was the recent speaker,
since instead of a mouth he only had a black cavity from which a heavy and
thick fluid oozed onto the steps.

“Sashko” sat
motionlessly in the middle of the hall. He had something above him—a light halo
or God knows what. He gazed at you with the look of a major who had been
demoted to a captain. Or perhaps with a look of unearthly love. Who is he? A
guardian angel, severe and demanding, and slightly drunk? What’s he hiding
under his plain-clothed shell—could it be sweat-soaked, stiff, and hurting
wings? Could he be a messenger from God—the One of Whom you sometimes thought
badly but in Whom you have never stopped believing? It’s the right time to
remember about Him, it really is.

What remained for
you to do was to tear off the mask of a fool. And then hit your right temple.
At least sawdust will not spill out of your body. Since you are real. Since you
are no dummy, Otto. But there’s no other way out of here.

An unarmed angel
with an empty holster at his side is already hovering above you.

Farewell,
everyone who’s been waiting for me! In the end, I did write a few passable
poems. And in general I wasn’t that bad of a guy.

The bullet
entered the temple. And only then you heard the sound of a shot.

The square in
front of Moscow’s Kiev train station, Your Royal Mercy, was flooded. The
daylong rain that had not stopped for one minute caused a great eruption of
waters. Filled to the brim with sand, ashes, roses, papers, pigeon feathers,
masks, dead rats and other refuse, the sewage system could no longer absorb
anything else. The universal flood became more and more apparent. Moscow no
longer existed.

Having made my
way out of the metro, I found myself waist-deep in rainwater. Staying above the
surface only thanks to my willpower and my bag, I somehow made it to the train
tracks. For I remember about the existence of the train number forty-one. It
departs Moscow around midnight.

It is now a few
minutes to midnight. It leaves Moscow to arrive in Kyiv.

The only thing I
could offer the train conductor was a heavy and still half-alive catfish—God
only knows what it was doing inside my bag and how it got there. I must have
received it as a gift at some official event. Thus I got my rightful
third-level bunk (but You don’t know anyway what that is, Your Majesty) in a
third-class car (in these some three quarters of Your hapless people travel in
search of the meaning of life), spread on the above-mentioned bunk my raincoat
and with the last effort squeezed my poor exhausted body in the narrow space
between the bunk and the car’s ceiling. Here I will lie most likely all the way
to Kyiv, hiding from inspectors, smugglers, and border guards. Here I finally
fell asleep. This happened when the train started moving. And it continues up
till now.

I am extremely
sick, Your Serenity. I have a horrible fever, the kind that by the morning
covers one’s lips with painful sores. My knee is swollen—I must have slipped
and fallen somewhere dancing. I have tons of alcohol in my blood. More actually
than blood itself. Besides, I have a bullet in my skull. Less than an hour ago
I apparently killed myself, sending into my head a bullet from a pistol of
Soviet make, probably a Makarov. And now this wonderful, stuffy train full of sluggish
bodies carries me away from Moscow. For one should not hang around too long in
the place where one has killed oneself. One should definitely go somewhere.

And I am going
home, Your Dignity. There exists such a country, where Your subjects live. I understand
that for You, born somewhere in tropical Africa, at the Villa Ucraina, used to
various Spains and Switzerlands, it is hard to imagine something like this. But
it is true, Your Mercy—such a country does actually exist. It was not invented
for You by Your advisers, astrologers, and chaplains. For the most whimsical,
the craziest (human!) imagination must retreat in the face of this country’s
reality. It is too painfully real. And is not protected from the East in any
way, not even with mountains.

If Someone Who
Distributes Geography sought my advice at the right time, now everything would
have looked differently. But He placed our country right where He wanted. And
we should be thankful for this.

And for making us
soft and sluggish, patient, lazy, kind, for making us indifferent, envious, and
trusting, for making us cunning, timid, quarrelsome, making us careless,
obedient, musical—let us thank Him, for it could have been worse. He gave us
good-looking girls. And not-so-good-looking ones too. He gave us
incomprehensible poets and tongue-tied priests. And gave us a distant king.

Sometimes we
dream of Europe. At night we come to the banks of the Danube. We seem to recall
something: warm seas, marble gates, hot stones, southern vines, lonely towers.
But this doesn’t last long.

This is what it
is mostly like, Your people. Neither You nor I, Your Mercy, have a different
one. One day it will love both You and me. And for now it travels in stiff
Muscovite train cars. Or sleeps at train stations—dull, gray, and slow. And
what happens to it next, I don’t know. But I’d like to, very much.

Since tonight I
am not running away but coming back. Angry, empty, and with a bullet in my
skull to top it all off. Why the hell would anyone need me? I don’t know that
either. I only know that now almost all of us are like this. And what remains
for us is the most persuasive of all hopes, passed on to us from our glorious
ancestors—that it will work out somehow. The main thing is to survive until
tomorrow. To make it to the station called Kyiv. And not to fucking fall off
this bunk on which I am now completing my unsuccessful round-the-word journey.

Yuri Andrukhovych
(b. 1960) is one of the leading Ukrainian authors
writing today. A co-founder of the Bu-ba-bu poetic movement, a major cultural
force in Ukraine in the late 1980s—early 1990s, he published his first book of
poetry in 1985, and since then has published three more poetry collections,
five novels, as well as short stories, essays, and numerous translations,
including an anthology of Beat and New York School poets (2006).
The Moscoviad
is his second novel, originally published in
Ukrainian in 1993. The awards he has received to date include the Herder Prize
(2001), the Erich Maria Remarque Peace Prize (2005), the Leipzig Book Fair
Prize for European Understanding (2006), and the Angelus Prize (also 2006).
Andrukhovych’s writing has been translated into more than a dozen languages.

Vitaly Chernetsky
, a native of Ukraine, teaches Slavic and East
European literature and film at Miami University. He is the author of a
critical study,
Mapping Postcommunist
Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization
(2007), and a co-editor of the anthology
Crossing Centuries: The New Generation in Russian
Poetry
(2000). His translations from
Russian and Ukrainian have appeared in the journals boundary 2, Five Fingers
Review, Mantis, Talisman, and Two Lines, and such anthologies as Contemporary
Russian Poetry, New European Poets, Out of the Blue, and The Poetry of Men’s
Lives.