The Moscoviad (2 page)

“So tell me, you
fool, what did you want to advise me?” the king says in an outburst, irritated
by my ambiguous cigar puffing.

“Be patient, Your
Mercy, and kind,” I tell him. “Do not offend even a shitty worthless bug.
Attend church on Sundays, but don’t forget about prayer on weekdays either.
Give Your wealth to the poor, smile to widows and orphans, don’t kill stray
puppies. Think about the good and the beautiful, for instance, about my poetry.
Read my poetry, eat my body, drink my blood. Give me a stipend, say, in German
marks, and send me traveling around the world. Within half a year, Chiarissime,
You will receive from me a panegyric so glorious that it will raise You far
above all other monarchs. Within another half a year the people of Ukraine will
be filled with desire for Your return and, following a successfully conducted
referendum, You will enter Kyiv in a white Cadillac. Truly, truly I tell you:
give me a stipend!”

The blind
bandurist plays on some tune. Below, amidst the evergreen myrtle thickets,
water gurgles and calls to take a trip around the world. The stars in the sky
grow bigger, closer, one can even distinguish on them some strange cities,
fairytale forests, wondrous palaces, columns, towers. Their radiance promises
so much that one wants to jump out of the loggia and, as a poet said, to die a
little.

“For nothing in
the whole world is as superfluous, senseless, and ridiculous as good poetry,
but simultaneously nothing in this world is as necessary, meaningful, and
unavoidable as it, Your All-Ukrainianness. Take a look at the history of all
great nations, and you will become convinced that it is the history of their
poetry. Take a look also at the history of nations that are not great. Of those
that will cease to exist tomorrow. Take a look and tell me: do poets need a
king more than the king needs the poets? Are kings worth anything without
poets? Don’t the kings exist by the grace of God only so that they support
those who are poets by the grace of God?”

The sycamore
trees rustle in the darkening twilight, the candles flicker, monasteries ring
their bells, girls sing while walking. Strange evening birds, or perhaps bats,
fly around the loggia. Sweetly disturbing fragrances waft from the far away
mountains.

The king finishes
his ice-cold champagne, which he drinks from a glass with a tall Masonic stem,
and says, slowly, wisely, weightily,

“And do you know
what’s the Spanish for dick?”

“What, Your
Mercy?” I ask, filled with curiosity.

“Pinga!” cries
the king and claps his hands.

Then two tall
Senegalese men grab me by the shoulders and arms and throw me from the loggia
downward. I am flying—and suddenly I remember that his real last name is Anjou.
My mug all flayed by the evergreen shrubbery, I hear the gray-haired blind
bandura player crying and sobbing.

Grimacing and
spitting, and hating yourself, you recall this dream, while forcing yourself to
do your exercises on the floor. To sell oneself like this! Shamelessly,
insolently, cynically. “Give me a stipend, Your Sovereignness, give me a sti .
. .” What a low and vile lackey spirit, the inner nature of a prostitute!

Finally the
muscles are taken care of. Now it’s time to gather all the stuff necessary for
the shower room and descend triumphantly in the elevator to the dorm’s
underground, where a team of janitors (Sasha, Seryozha, and Aroutiun), blue
from guzzling liquor, have their little closet space, not so much for work but
for leisure purposes. But what’s their place in all this?

In the hallway
you wave your hand at someone unknown (that is, someone you know but can’t
identify, as he is at the far end of the opposite wing of the building, some
two hundred yards from you), the stranger replies with a similar handwave,
probably also without recognizing you, and the mood improves. The wait for the
elevator is not that long, five minutes tops. While going down, you study the
various inscriptions, drawings and scuff marks on its walls and floor—both old
and recent, some brand new, the blood of Yasha the phys. ed. guy whom the
Chechens yesterday beat to a pulp for having a “beeg ass,” or something like
that.

Elevators provide
a special pretext for the dorm populace to show off and do some crazily
original stuff. That the Chechens like destroying their enemies there is known
to everyone, including the district cops. Everyone (except for the district
cops) also knows that three relapsed ex-cons, one of whom is a student in the
poetry seminar, and the other at the seminary, fucked there a talented young
woman playwright from Novokuznetsk. But only a few initiates know what Vasya
Mochalkin, a Yakut writer, did there. So, Vasya Mochalkin, the founder of
Soviet Yakut literature, a fourth year student and an honorary reindeer
herdsman, once filled himself up with booze to the brim and stepped into the
elevator on the first floor. Having pressed the button with the number of the
necessary floor (and for Vasya Mochalkin, essentially, it was of no importance
which floor it was—he was loved and accepted as a brother everywhere), he, to
use some florid verbiage, ascended. However, under the impact of unavoidable
kinetic changes he not so much managed to stay on his feet but rather,
conversely, fell down, or as the poet Yezhevikin would say, fucking fell down.
This happened at nine in the evening, and at nine the following morning Vasya
was still to be found inside the elevator, for having fucking fell down at nine
p.m. he immediately and happily fell asleep and spent the whole night ascending
and descending. At half past midnight, truth be told, the hardly more sober
Belarusian short story writer Yermalaichik tried to drag his friend out of the
elevator so to lay him down somewhere in a proper Christian manner, but the
attempt ended with Vasya vomiting on Yermalaichik’s collar, thus the latter,
having given up all moral qualms, dragged himself over to the room of Alka, the
one with the amputated right breast, and spent the night there. And only in the
morning, around nine thirty, people finally succeeded in shaking Vasya
Mochalkin up. This happened on the first floor, where the fairytale vertical
journey had begun the night before. Having come to his senses after a heavy
reindeer herder’s dream, Vasya finally crawled out of the elevator and stumbled
over to the beer hall on Fonvizin Street to greet the light of the new day.

And now you too,
Otto von F., are on the ground floor. Stepping out of the elevator, you take a
left and go down the stairs, hopefully there will still be enough hot water for
you in the filthy shower stalls with their peeling walls.

In the changing
room, as always, it’s dark, and while you are feeling for the light switch
masked by cobwebs, you see, or rather sense, a pile of old rags stir in the
corner of the “antechamber.” The pile stirs in an increasingly nervous fashion,
more energetically, as if a dozen subway rats, lately so often written about in
the papers, have nested there. But the disheveled bearded mug that appears
above the rags simultaneously with the lights coming on clears all your
biological horrors and doubts: Ivan Novakovsky, nicknamed Novocain, or
according to another version, Vanya Cain, the hounded and lumpenized (that is,
turned into a lump of dirt by the changes) litterateur, publisher and
culturologist, a bum who for the last fifteen or so years has been trying to
sleep illegally in the dorm, for which purpose he even went through a church
wedding in Maryina Roshcha with Vasilisa the epileptic, a legal resident of the
dorm (a fourth year student, seminar of the holy fools), but this marriage
displays undeniable signs of being fake, since Novocain usually makes his home
in the showers or the laundry room. They say Vasilisa used to beat him on the
head with a desk lamp. Others say that it wasn’t a desk lamp but a blowtorch,
which she allegedly rammed into his rectum. Whatever the truth may be, he moves
around in a fucked-up postapoplectic manner. However, he is usually quite
talkative, quotes himself by the stanza, and carries through gestation ever-new
publishing projects.

“Hey man, buy a
poetry collection,” he lifts from the pile of rags his hand of an old
masturbator that holds a gray photocopied brochure. “Excellent poems, Nikolai
Palkin, just one ruble, of which ninety kopecks go to the author.”

You study the
oily softcover. The “Russian Idea” series. Founded 19... NIKOLAI PALKIN. The
Birch Undid Her Braid. Third Rome Publishers. The cover displays a birch tree,
a crossed out Star of David, and a lively two-headed eagle who, it seems, is
about to take off and fly away, scaring the crap out of the surrounding
celestial fauna, angels included, by its mutant monstrous appearance. While
Vanya speaketh uninterruptedly on various subjects, that is, while he goes on
telling quotes and jokes, you manage to read the first stanza:

Mother Russia
bleeds all over . . .

Tell me in the
name of God,

Why Her Eagle is
being tortured

By the Judases
and whores?!

Overcome with
growing delight, you move to the next one:

Tell me now, oh
Baltic lands,

Why you hate our
Holy Rus?

Freeze, Estonia!
Tremble, Lithuania,

Russia’s dick is
coming at you!

But for some
reason the word “dick” is crossed out by hand, with the word “sword” written
above it, which in turn is crossed out as well, and “tank” is written in. You
return the poetry silently to Novocain. You are on your way to washing
yourself, taking care not to step into the slimy cold puddles on the crumbling
floor of the showers. Novakovsky’s head again disappears under the rags as he
goes back, perhaps to reading—or to jerking off.

What a reward it
is that at least here, in this dirty basement, covered with spittle, bits of
soap, and old hair, hot water is in existence, what a high it is, almost
incomprehensible to many peasant and proletarian writers—washing yourself with
soap, brushing your teeth! How one wants to stay here forever! To forget about
everything, close your eyes and give yourself to water as if to a lover. Most
of your poems you create precisely while you are in hot water. For in the hot
water you can be great, kind, a genius and your true self simultaneously. And
may all of them go to hell!

Across the wall,
in the women’s showers, nothing but laughter and giggles. Seems like there are
some forty thousand of them there. Why do they always chatter so loudly when
they wash themselves, those darn lesbians! You cannot decipher even half a word
out of this bird-like chatter—it is as if while bathing, girls acquire a
different language known to them only. The secret language of the primordial
times of matriarchate. Full of haughty condescension towards the lowly male
breed with its billygoat-like needs and desires. Which is why they hate it when
someone from that slavish tribe tries to spy on them—or even worse, secretly
makes his way to them during the sacred bathing ritual. Such things are
punished far too severely, the way the occult punishes those who abuse its
secrets. The poet from Suzdal, Kostya Seroshtanov, your classmate, even wrote a
poem describing how angry girls scalded his boyish prick for spying on them at
the village bathhouse. Not a bad poem by the way, the best in his entire collection.
A poem of remembrance, the retrieval of lost time. For he was in far too much
pain, Kostya Seroshtanov.

But now the
voices behind the wall gradually die down, and with them the noise of the
water. Perhaps the ritual has been exhausted, the magical séance ended, and it
was time to change languages. But someone still remains there, for you still
hear the water running, at least from one faucet.

Then a singing
starts. A lonely female voice and nothing else. A strange, miraculous song, not
one of those that Russian girls sing when overcome with youthful feelings and
springtime dreams. No, this is something else, this is not even a song, but an
ecstatic luxuriance of human voice, the most sophisticated of all musical
instruments (well put, von F., but this is from Lorca). All this—hot water,
music, and your own greatness—brings you to a state of supernatural trance, the
voice behind the wall torments you sweetly, as if it were Philippine massage,
it torments every cell of your body, down to the smallest one, actually, it’s
already time to get out, but you can’t, you can’t! What sort of siren is over
there? Should you block your ears with soap, or what? But the further it goes,
the stronger the sensation that you are caught. The voice does not leave you in
peace, it wounds and beckons you. Finally you realize: you have no other escape
left.

You slide past
the pile of rags under which hides Vanya Cain, destroyed by his tough luck,
into the changing room, water streams off your body, and the heart tries as hard
as it can to jump out of your mouth in some unknown direction. You wrap
yourself in the large fluffy equatorial towel you brought with you from home.
Oh lambada, madonna, quetzalcoatl, popocatepetl! If someone else had told you
you wouldn’t believe . . .

You open the
doors into the subterranean corridor with utmost care (and the voice is audible
even here, what a delicious and tormenting mirage!). It is almost dark, and
nobody there. Then—to the right!—commands from the skull, or rather from
somewhere in the groin, your own private field marshal. To the right, and
leaping, no more than ten leaps down the corridor. You leave wet prints of bare
feet behind you. The janitors’ closet is categorically locked—natch, it’s
Saturday, and what cheap moron would sit here?