The Moscoviad (6 page)

Thus the main
thing is that you remember everything. Now drink your beer and listen to the
noise of the rain, to the singing of the drunk officers, to Arnold telling
theater jokes, Roytman telling Jewish jokes, and Golitsyn, prison jokes that
very much resemble the reality . . .

Somewhere between
the third and the fourth jar, or perhaps between the fifth and the sixth trip
to the restroom, or perhaps right after Yura Golitsyn-Turgenev resolutely
plopped on the table a bottle of something red, saying that “wine after beer
brings good cheer,” my friend, your switch had flipped. The rain outside the
beer hall’s borders showed no signs of abating, even though it was almost two
in the afternoon and, according to all the predictions of witty weathermen,
communist sun should have come out long ago.

This is a trap,
you finally understood. All of them are forced to drink beer. But no one will
be able to make it out of here. Here some final spectacle of world history is
taking place. The newly arrived grow ever more numerous in number. Some of the
officers who until recently kept the mark and sang so wonderfully are now
asleep. Instead arrive Pharisees and Sadducees, gamblers and bookish types,
murderers, Sodomites, bodybuilders, usurers, dwarves, Orthodox priests in faded
reddish cassocks, circus comedians, voluptuaries, Kazakhs, Krishnaites, Roman
legionaries. You must call Kyrylo.

“So there is four
of us here,” says Arnold for some reason. “And each of us once knew a woman . .
.”

“We are four,”
Golitsyn interrupts him, “and we represent at the very least four
nationalities. And do we enjoy drinking any less because of that?”

“Which four
nationalities, why four?” interjects Roytman nervously.

“Well, you,
Borya. That’s one. I’m a russkie. Two. He’s from Ukraine. Three. And Horobets
makes four.”

“And who is
Horobets?” Borya is inquisitive.

“What’s your
nationality, Horobets?” asks Golitsyn demanding the truth.

“Now I’ll explain
everything,” Caesar says raising significantly his index finger.

“Guys, I’ll go
make a phone call,” you say decisively.

“Just don’t get
fresh with anyone,” warns one of them. “There is now tons of fucking riffraff
here. And I have no idea where you’d find a phone in this place.”

But you hear all
of this already behind your back. There must be a phone here somewhere!
Otherwise how do they call the cops? For it was from here that Pasha Baistriuk,
the Sakhalin fabulist who was expelled from his first year of studies for the
systematic abuse of other people’s rubbing alcohol, was taken to the district
prison where they kept him for thirty-six hours and where he sang songs from
behind bars, and also shouted right into the cops’ faces, “Do you take us to be
murderers or something?!” And as it turned out, he had no grounds for such
sarcasm, for the three quiet polite boys who were behind bars together with
Pasha indeed were murderers: in the same beer hall, some fifteen minutes after
Pasha’s deportation, they knifed some random unlucky guy. But Pasha Baistriuk
didn’t know this; he was trying to scare yet another lieutenant with his red
Writers’ Union ID with the order of Lenin on the cover, and also performed for
everyone present a song with marvelous imaginative allusions in the text:

My dad was a
natural plowman,

And I worked
together with him,

But some evil men
had attacked us,

And we have been
left with no ends . . .

So there. Pasha
was a nice guy, but there must be a phone someplace here, or what? Or do they
call the cops by whistling? Or perhaps through some cosmic communication
channels? In the hall this very moment someone is pummeling someone else in the
mug, and all the others, full of interest, await the outcome. Give it to him,
yes, give him some more! Good grief, how many of them have packed the place!
One can’t get through. Except along the wall leading to that strumpet from the
window. Which is closed, because she is on lunch break.

You carefully
knock on the wooden window frame.

“And the firmament
speaks of His hands’ deeds,” says to this a worn out wandering grandpa that
made himself at home nearby, jar in his hand. Some alcoholic theologian.

Nothings stirs
behinds the window shutters, so you force your way out of the hall to look for
a phone by the entrance. There it’s also closed, and Beelzebub’s agent in
charge of the dead fish has disappeared somewhere. Perhaps all of them have
left this place, abandoning their several thousand visitors to their own
devices. While they went to pray for their own sins, awaiting the trumpets of
the last day. For nearby is the church of Unexpected Joy. Named as if it were a
bordello. And meanwhile across the street, under the sad poplars that do not
protect at all from the thick rain, two local cutthroats fight an old crone,
trying to grab her old shopping bag. Evidently she came here to resell some
vodka but this wasn’t her lucky day. The larger fish eat the smaller ones.

You return to the
hall. The fighting is already over, and the loser is plastered over the cement
floor while some noseless lady wipes his wet mouth with a piece of newspaper. A
few other bastards stand above them and argue how to stop the dark-red
excretion. The winner is among them as well, evidently a close buddy, brother,
neighbor, in other words, a great friend of the one who was beaten.

You return to the
window and knock again—a little more firmly and insistently this time. But no
sound comes from there, just like before, only the already familiar grandpa,
smiling cunningly, throws in another quote:

“Knock at the
door, and it will open. For it opens for the one who knocks.”

And truly, the
old scoundrel knows what he’s talking about, because nearby there is also a
door to which you simply didn’t pay attention earlier. You push it in and find
yourself in the auxiliary premises, packed with empty cardboard boxes and also
with egg cartons for some reason. You follow the sound of human voices and
finally find all of them: the fish vendor, the barelegged robe-wearing lass,
and two or three other previously unseen bubbas from the local personnel. They
sit, and smoke, and drink beer—out of mugs, by the way—and also have an open
bottle of white for variety’s sake. The family lunches by the house.

“I am frightfully
sorry,” you say as politely as possible, “could I make a phone call from here?”

They give you a
rather drunken but peaceful stare, someone even nods, it seems, and you go to
the phone that stands on the nearby table. Meanwhile they keep on talking, all
at once, about something extremely intimate, for the blond repeats several
times, “So I gave it to him, big fucking deal!” and her partners, while not
really outraged by that, do not seem to approve of it either, and Beelzebub’s
assistant declares in a mentoring tone,

“You rat, next
time you think who you give it to, ‘cause they can hit us . . .”

“What am I, a
little fucking girl?” the rat nervously puffs smoke.

There are long
beeps on the other side of the phone chord, but after the fifth you hear
Kyrylo’s brisk hello.

“Kyrylo, it’s me,
Otto.”

“Oh, very good!”
After socializing with the diaspora, Kyrylo has learned to rejoice at every
opportunity. “When will you be at my place?”

“By the way, I
told him, ‘Do whatever you like, but I won’t take it in the mouth, get it?’”
the “rat” tells her friends, so you have to ask Kyrylo the second time.

“When will I be
at your place? You see, it’s raining. My hair is wet, I have recently showered.
And outdoors it’s raining, and there’s no end to it in sight. This rain sucks
the soul out of me. Besides I can’t get out of here.”

“Out of where?”
Kyrylo doesn’t understand.

“Then I brought
Sashka and showed him, ‘See what this pig has done: he tore my panties to
pieces, what shall I wear now? . . .’”

“Where can’t you
get out of?” Kyrylo yearns for the truth.

“Well, from the
dorm, actually,” you finally get an answer out. “You see, it’s raining so hard,
one can’t get out . . .”

“A shot?” one of
the bubbas asks you, pouring half a glass of the white stuff.

“Thanks, chief.”

“What?” Kyrylo
shouts into the receiver.

“Listen,
Nastyona,” the fish vendor instructs the “rat,” “if this motherfucker shows up
again, you’ll tell Vasilyok, understand?”

“Natch,” Nastyona
puffs out smoke, “I’ll bite off his dick all by myself . . .”

“Kyrylo, I’ll
call you back in half an hour, all right?”

“Okay, fine! But
not later than that, please. I’ve got tons of stuff to do.”

“Agreed.”

You hang up, and
take the glass they have offered you in your hand.

“Thanks, guys. To
your glorious future.”

They remain
silent and look at you. And when this liquid is already partly in your
esophagus, you start comprehending that this is no vodka, but biting, merciless
moonshine. But it’s too late. It went down somehow. With tears.

“Listen, my
friend, do you need a girl for the night?” asks one of them.

You wipe your
mustache with your sleeve and look at Nastyona’s sharp little teeth.

“Thanks, guys,
I’m afraid I’m terribly busy . . .”

“Wanna take some
eggs?” offers the fish guy. “I can deliver a large shipment. Wholesale.”

“Thanks, thanks a
lot,” you repeat and get out.

Getting out of
the labyrinths of auxiliary premises, you stumble over these same empty boxes
scattered everywhere. Things are now jumping in your eyes even more merrily.

When I am drunk,
as I look at the others I think it is actually all of them who are drunk. I
notice lots of annoying imprecision and awkwardness in movements. Especially in
walking. But actually, I’m not that far from the truth. Everyone is drunk here,
not just me. This happened because of the rain. We are all very unhappy.

Unhappy pitiful
degenerates with uncoordinated movements.

But it is I who
am to blame. I conjured up this rain, having performed this morning, in the
shower, a magical act with a dark-skinned priestess. I got what I deserved. I
am proud of this.

You approach the
table where your literary brethren have just refilled the three-liter jar yet
again.

“And so I’m a
half-breed,” finishes Julius Caesar his long and convoluted tale about his
ethnicity.

It’s high time to
get out of here. The conversation with your buddies has reached a hopeless dead
end. No one has the slightest idea what he wants to say, but everyone is saying
something. This is rather a conversation of four imbeciles that simply enjoy
pronouncing certain words—beautiful, sublime, and also lowly and vile. They
rejoice at the sound. The words don’t hold together, each of them lives out its
own drunken life. For each of you is a wordsmith. A smith of discrete words.

And the rain, the
rain that doesn’t abate, and the faces, the faces, there’s more and more of
them, they reproduce by division and swim around you like fish, flat deepwater
fish from the bottom of the blackest oceans.

But the gates
have already been opened, and you are standing in the draft, in the fierce
Asiatic wind that blows foam off the tables and jars. This state still produces
something. For example, flying foam with an acrid nauseating smell.

You feel sick,
von F. You feel cold. And a little nauseous. It’s high time to get out of here.
“Children’s World” is waiting, Kyrylo is waiting, Ukraine is waiting, tired of
getting by without its own newspaper in Moscow, and you here wag your foolish
tongue about the sacred necessity for everyone to follow his or her own path.
For what unites you with the Uzbek guy across the wall, except for the wall?
With the Uzbek guy who always cooks pilaf and then lures with its rich smell
many a hungry female student. And stuffs her with pilaf, like a scarecrow with
straw, and she goes numb, becomes a scarecrow, and then he roasts her, and
pilaf come out of her mouth, nose and ears. And you, von F., will never learn
how to cook pilaf. And what unites you with Khudaidurdyev, somber and fat like
a eunuch, for which reason some call him “the skinny Durdyev,” a Turkmeni who
every evening, at nine o’clock, suddenly appears in his tracksuit pants in
front of the TV, since he apparently cannot live without the evening news? And
what unites you with Yezhevikin who enters all rooms without knocking, since he
considers himself master of this entire land, from the Carpathians to the
Pacific Ocean? And what unites you with Blagolepov, whose father-in-law is a
KGB general—but despite this Blagolepov writes spiritual verse about St.
Sergius of Radonezh, follows yoga breathing techniques and calls himself
Roerich’s disciple, although in reality everyone’s convinced he’s a stool pigeon?
And what unites you with Shura Gorokhov who searches for the universal sign of
being and hence forgets to return the money he had borrowed? And what unites
you with Oleg the Sexopathologist who has learned French only for the sake of
being able to read
War and Peace
in the original? And what did unite you with
Pasha Baistriuk? And what unites you with each of them and all the others?