The Moscoviad (7 page)

“Each of us
breathes, drinks, loves, stinks the same way,” announces Yura Golitsyn
something secret.

“Hence we have
been created in order to be together. The world unites in the name of universal
human values,” seconds him Roytman. “And what do we do?”

“It’s easy for
you to spout about this, remembering that just in case you have your own, your
separate state somewhere there, in the Middle East . . .”

“And any state is
a monster, an evil element,” Caesar shakes his Hemingwayesque beard.

“Why do you
nationalists yearn so much to disperse?” asks Golitsyn. “Why all of a sudden
everyone is dying to get divorced? For we have lots of children in common! And
this is the great experience of brotherhood when everyone shares in one single
misfortune. Why, tell me, you nationalists?”

He clearly
punctuates each of the uttered phrases with hiccups.

“If I were a
nationalist I would have answered you,” you say slowly and articulately, even
much too slowly, much too articulately. “But what sort of nationalist am I if
I’m standing here with you drinking beer?”

This is
unbreakable logic. Golitsyn stretches out his hand and squeezes yours for a long
time. He doesn’t have a drop of foolish imperial chauvinism inside him. But he
loves brotherhood very much. Freedom. Equality.

“Last night I
thought there was no God,” informs Roytman sadly.

“Last night?”
Horobets is surprised. “You are required to think this at all times. According
to the statute of the fucking party to which you belong . . .”

“What does party
have to do with it? That’s not the matter. I thought that God, the real God,
not the thought out, invented one, would never allow the existence of nations .
. .”

“As he wouldn’t
allow plague, syphilis, nuclear bombs,” agrees a blue-nosed drunkard who popped
up for a moment by your table and wandered off in some other direction.

“For this is what
prevents humanity from being kind and fair,” continues Roytman. “This is what
makes us narrow and envious, fills us with shit. How much dark energy has
accumulated everywhere only because nations exist . . .”

“And the Jewish
nation too?” winks Horobets.

“Any nation, and
you shouldn’t be trying to catch me!”

“And I’m not
trying to catch you—you have long been caught. For you still haven’t quit your
criminal party. You speak about dark energies and pretend you don’t see their
original source. Why the hell you still haven’t quit? You know how I feel about
you. But how could you not quit it after seeing people’s guts wound on tank
tracks?” Julius Caesar’s eyes are drunk but inquisitive.

“What has the
party got to do with it? There are scoundrels everywhere. Other parties have
their own scoundrels . . .”

“Other parties
don’t ride in tanks,” Golitsyn manages to butt in between two recurrent
hiccups.

“Then they
will—later,” raises his head an officer with little tanks on his uniform tabs
who had been sleeping at the next table.

“I would ban all
parties.”

“Me too.”

“And so would I.”

“And those who
would start creating parties underground you’d probably destroy?” you inquire
sarcastically.

“I’d destroy them
like roaches,” nods a crippled guy with a perforated accordion in his hands.
“I’d destroy them like roaches!” he repeats for some reason.

“Such democrats
they are,” says to this a bald Krishnaite wrapped in a pink sheet.

“Such democrats they
are!” repeats after him a little gray sparrow that jumps around between the
tables and picks at something in the beer puddles.

“We were talking
about something like this yesterday. After the cognac, I think,” you rub your
flaming forehead, as if you kept on forgetting something. “Yesterday we talked
about all this, and the day before yesterday as well. Since we have been
drinking daily for almost two years now, and this awakens our civic activism.
Besides, now there’s freedom of speech. And it turned out that under the
freedom of speech we could only make one and the same speech. But every day.
You, Caesar, for two years have been trying to figure out why Borya wouldn’t
quit the party. You, Yuri, argue that there’s no need to disperse. You,
Roytman, inform us every day about the nonexistence of God. Now, for fuck’s
sake, listen to me at least once. As the youngest, I’ve been silent for two
years. Give me the word. Just this one time.”

“Give the boy the
word!” resolutely demands the crippled guy with an accordion. “Hey you, give
him the word. Do you hear me?!”

“Interesting,
interesting,” raises another head, likewise drunk, the three-headed officer.

“Hey, shut up,
you motherfuckers! Everyone is listening!” exclaims one of the present priests,
overcoming with his baritone the noise of the rain and the roar of the beer
hall. His beard and mustache are quite covered with foam.

“Speak,” whispers
a giant catfish, quietly peeking out from under the raincoat of some
ichthyologist.

And you hear
everything suddenly growing silent. Not only the territory under the plastic
roof separated by the barbed wire, but even the furthest depths of the beer
hall. Only the rain wouldn’t stop. But to hell with it.

You start
speaking, bringing an empty jar to your mouth, and this somewhat strengthens
the sound of your voice, this is a kind of microphone; without it you’d feel
less confident. And you have something to speak about, something to tell them.
Even that blood-covered wretch gathered his remains from the cement floor and,
with his noseless companion supporting him by the arm, he too crawled out here
to better hear and see you.

“I am ready to
embrace everyone,” you voice still quivers because of the agitation, but
already gathers an orator’s strength. “I am ready to stretch my hand out to
everyone on this earth. For, fuck it, all people are created for happiness,
although everyone understands it in his own way. And there is nothing scary or
objectionable in this; I will personally twist off the last balls of someone
who thinks that there is. For there are so few of us, and we are so small
compared to the cold cosmic wasteland to be able to afford the luxury of mutual
hatred or territorial claims. Even more so on party, national or racial
grounds. I say so because I have a right to, because no later than this morning
I had sexual intercourse with a dark-skinned girl in the showers. It was of no
interest to me what was her nationality. Even more so what party she belonged
to. Moreover, it didn’t bother me that the color of her royal skin was
different from mine. Indeed, I liked it that her skin color was different. With
my dick for a few unforgettable minutes I united two distant continents,
cultures, civilizations. I brought them to the common denominator or, forgive
me, inseminator. And thus I can’t bear any hatred towards Russia and the
Russians . . .

“But now, when I
drink acrid beer in the midst of a wasteland surrounded by poles and barbed
wire, when the wind tosses my wet hair in all directions, when around me is one
great Asian, sorry, Eurasian plain, sorry, country, with its own rules and
laws, and this country has a tendency to grow to the west, swallowing small
nations, their languages, customs, beer, swallowing also larger nations,
destroying their chapels and coffeehouses, and most importantly, quiet cozy
bordellos on narrow cobblestone streets, I cannot just sit and watch silently
with my arms crossed, as if I had just swallowed dick. A friend of mine showed
me not so long ago old postcards with the views of my native city. Those cards
were about fifty years old. But I screamed: I’d like to live in this city!
Where is it? What did they do to it?! Where is my right to my beer? This so
damn lame!

“This is why I am
for the full and final separation of Ukraine from Russia! Long live the
unshakeable friendship between the Ukrainian and the Russian people! Believe
me, there is no contradiction between these two phrases. I wish the great
Russian people prosperity and flourish! To your and our beer!”

A tense silence
continues for a moment after the conclusion of your speech, but suddenly it
bursts into fierce, bottomless, limitless applause. It drowns out even the rain
and the wind. All these people have wanted to hear this from you for so long.
At last you clarified everything for them. From now on everything will be well.
And you, bowing in all directions, grab your bag and decisively make it for the
exit, but they stop you, to thank, to shake your hand, to congratulate you on a
good speech, and you see tears in their eyes, and someone even presents you
with that silent prehistoric catfish wrapped in a newspaper, having taken it
from under the raincoat. And when by the exit you pass Beelzebub’s assistant,
he hugs you, and awkwardly, bashfully kisses you somewhere under the left ear,
and his applause follows you for a long time, and from under the pitiful
poplars the two local cutthroats and the old feeble profiteer woman whom they
were beating up a moment ago applaud as well . . .

Your forehead
burns under the cold May rain.

One
million Ukrainians
, they say, live in this
city. Hence Moscow is the largest Ukrainian city in the world. Here every tenth
person has a surname that ends in “enko.” But how to seek them out? For during
the last three hundred years we have become quite similar to these stern
northerners. For some reason new, different Ukrainians started being born:
pig-eyed, with inexpressive round mugs, with colorless hair that exists only in
order to fall out. Evidently, the natural desire of our ancestors to turn into
Great Russians as quickly as possible led to certain adaptive mutations. Our
glorious ancestors intensively tore off themselves the black eyebrows, brown
eyes, lily-white feet, honey-sweet lips and other nationalist paraphernalia.
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The
last seventy years made this process irreversible. It does not take long to
become convinced in this: it is enough to pass through Moscow’s Kiev train
station at night and look at these sleeping obese and poorly dressed people:
from Kherson and Zhytomyr, Vinnytsia and Kirovohrad, some Hookvillesk or
Boontownsk, Transballburg, Leninslutsk, Dzerzhinopricksk and—alas!—from L’viv
as well . . .

It is difficult
for me to imagine Estonians sleeping in train stations in such humiliation
fashion. It is easier for me to imagine, say, the Turkmen in this role. But
this is where the empire’s misfortune lies, in its deciding to combine the
uncombinable, the Estonians with the Turkmen. And where are we, the Ukrainians,
on its map? Somewhere in the middle? This is no consolation.

By now any local
chauvinist would have the right to say, “But we are one people! Even outwardly
we do not differ at all!” And powerless would be my arguments about Pylyp Orlyk
and the Cossack baroque. Or about Wedel and the periwinkle-adorned sword.
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For
he would only nod at these sleeping obese people, pitiful and wretched, and
even unaware that they are pitiful and wretched. He’d only nod.

Hence, Your Royal
Mercy, I believe Your return to Ukraine would be so necessary and saving. Your
aristocratic European image, Your brilliance and Your luster, Your charisma,
Your Divine Anointment can now create a new national myth, a dazzling ideal,
You would shine as a guiding star for all these “enkos” sleeping in the train
stations of Moscow, St. Petersburg, Ashgabat, Sakhalin, Urengoi, Urinerunsk and
Redbuttsk! I impatiently await Your return and triumphant ascendance on the
Kyiv throne. Always and Forever Yours, Otto von F., Ukrainian poet.

This letter to
King Olelko the Second (Dovhoruky-Riurikid) you composed already while sitting
in the bus number 18, somewhere between the stops for 2nd Goncharov Lane and
Yablochkov Street.

Your had boarded
the bus in strict accordance with the instructions. For this is an important
state matter. Waiting at the bus stop, take the ticket out of your pocket/bag
and, having raised it above your head in the stretched right hand, enter the
bus. Once inside it, immediately punch the ticket in the punching machine.
Announce loudly if you are carrying documents for the multiple use of public
transport. Once two pleasant-looking young ladies boarded the bus and said, “We
have monthlies.” In full accordance with the instructions.

At Yablochkov
Street, as always, lots of Vietnamese got on, all of them dressed in Soviet
children’s clothing. They conversed with each other in their high-pitched
voices about something—and suddenly you had to interrupt and quickly finish
composing the letter to His Royal Mercy, as you were shocked to realize you
understood each their word.

“Did you hear,
beloved friend, the monkey sounding its call at dawn in the mountain forests?”
asked one of them.

“Yes, I heard the
monkey crying, and the drum beating, as I sipped wine until the morning in a
cool gazebo beneath the falling plum blossoms,” answered the other.

“And I too
couldn’t fall asleep until the morning, so loud was the rustle of bamboo
beneath my window and the singing of pink flamingos in the lakes . . .”

“Bidding farewell
to a dear friend, a great poet and calligrapher, I invited singers and threw a
parting banquet for him. The singers played the zithers, we teased the singers
with our jade sticks, the singers sang beautifully, tenderly biting our ears.
One of them was a fox, the other a cross-dressed princess. My friend, poet and
calligrapher, left for his mountains only at dawn; our good-byes were lengthy,
and his tears mixed with wine; he took the fox with him and left the
cross-dressed princess for me, but when I returned to my house, I only saw a pink
lotus flower on the bed. Perhaps she did not exist to begin with?”

“And yesterday
the feast of the Wandering Lanterns took place by the Golden Dragon Pagoda.
There I saw the best of the emperor’s concubines lose her fan. They were
carrying her in a walnut palanquin, and the fan fell on the grass. So I could
not fall asleep all night, overcome by the aroma of the fan lost by this beauty
. . .”

“And the bamboo
beneath my window rustled until the morning, and one could hear it growing,
growing from under the nails, bursting through skin . . .”

“In 1970 I
finished off an American just like this—from the distance of twenty yards my
knife went right between his shoulder-blades . . .”

“And where did
you guys hide the body from yesterday?”

“So far it is
still in my room. Tonight, after dark, I’ll drop it with all the other stuff
into the sewer . . .”

“Did he really
want to snatch a case of vodka?”

“He wanted to buy
it for thirty lenins a bottle, and I was selling it for thirty-five. We finally
agreed on thirty-three, and he also wanted to buy a case of beer. But he saw
that I was alone in my room . . . How could he know that I used to knock off
American guys bigger than him. He was drunk, stank of vodka. A big white sack .
. .”

“For what is man
if not a grain of sand, and this world is nothing but suffering, and the
greatest gift it can give us is to take away our being . . .”

“And so teaches
the Buddha, and so taught comrade Ho Chi Minh . . .”

And after these
wise words the entire sleepless thuggish gang got off the bus. One of them was
saying they respected very much the big white brothers. As well as the little
black insects.

The stop for 1st
Dmitrov Passage. Ahead is the wide, rain-covered perspective of Butyrskaya
Street. Behind is the Dmitrov Highway, but there is no point of going there
now, even though that’s where Hotel Molodyozhnaya is, at which hotel
Yezhevikin, according his own accounts, occasionally had the luck of ordering
to his room two girls at once, delegates from the Young Communist League
convention.

Speaking of
which. Love, that is. It seems Galya has already returned from her research
trip. Should I drop by? What the hell for should I wander around this
water-drenched Moscow, being as I am under the influence and running a fever?
Having eaten nothing all morning except for a few fins of the dead fish from
the beer hall on Fonvizin Street? Of course you should call Galya. One of your
loves. The game of passions and fine psychological nuances. Sadomasochistic
études. Scenes from the lives of perverts. The dueling egoisms. The school of
new love. Ugh! . .

The stop for the
trolley bus plant. The trolley bus garden. Not funny.

So where are you
going, von F.? Don’t forget about your friends’ children, about Kyrylo, about
the word you gave.

You see, my dear
pangs of conscience, the things are as follows. There exists a thousand ways to
get to the “Children’s World” store. For instance, without getting off this
bus, not rushing off anywhere, calmly trot along to the fucking Dzerzhinsky
9
monument and, squinting with your right eye at the architectural complex of the
KGB’s Lubyanka headquarters, descend into an underpass and emerge from it in
front of the “Children’s World.” One can use this option, especially since we
are now passing the stop for 46, Butyrskaya Street.

But there also
exist many other, equally interesting options, my dear pangs of conscience,
gangs of conscience. For example. Get off now at the Savyolovo train station.
Phone Kyrylo and tell him I’m running late but will definitely make it to his
place. Then take the metro. Get on the Serpukhov line and take it all the way
to the Borovitskaya station, the one that’s right underneath the Kremlin. From
the Borovitskaya change to the Arbatskaya, but not of the Fili line, but of the
Arbat-Pokrov line, for there exist two different Arbatskaya stations, as well
as two different Smolenskaya stations, for which someone ought to get a good
spanking. But back in the thirties they hoped this would utterly confuse the
British intelligence.

I see. But you
have already passed the Savyolovo train station, my dear. Oh well, go on. I
wonder how would you, drunken piece of crap, make it from the Arbatskaya
station of the Arbat-Pokrov line to the “Children’s World” store?

Why very simply.
From the Arbatskaya I’d get out on the New Arbat, that is, on the avenue named
after that dumbass Kalinin and follow it to the October Concert Hall. Right
next to it, by the way, is the “Melodiya” music store, where I can at last pick
up my Mike Oldfield tape. And then I’d fucking wander off to the right. And
there, in the wonderful little old streets, in this eclectic preserve of the
rotting Moscow art nouveau, somewhere next to the Georgian and Lithuanian
embassies stands a fantastic house with trees growing out of it. And nobody
lives there. Except Galya.

But the
“Children’s World,” von F. You are not even one step closer to it!

Chill, guys! I’ll
stay at Galya’s for an hour, have breakfast, perhaps phone Kyrylo once and make
plans with him for a precise meeting time. Then crossing the Vorovsky and
Herzen Streets, passing by the church where Pushkin was careless enough to get
married, I’d get out on the Boulevard Ring. And there it’s elementary. There I
have an entire tree of options. An entire forest of options. A labyrinth of
options. What have we just passed, by the way? The Sushchovsky Rampart? No, the
Sushchovsky was earlier. Aha, Vadkovsky Lane, which I first though was
Pubicovsky Lane . . .

So, on the
Boulevard Ring you can catch any trolley bus for two stops or simply walk to
the Pushkinskaya metro station on Pushkin Square. And then just one stop to the
Kuznetsky Bridge station. And that’s it. And I get out next to the “Children’s
World,” but from the other side, not from the Dzerzhinsky monument, but from
the Fuckinsky one.

Although now I am
still going past the Butyrki prison. I recall from a poem by Andrukhovych,
“Here the bus takes me daily right by the jail. They teach me to love this
country.” Nice lines, damn it.

But there exists
an even better option. At Pushkin Square there is no need to go down below to
the metro. One can simply wait for the same bus number 18 that is carrying me
now, and trot along to the earlier mentioned monument to I won’t say whom.

Well-well, von
F., may God help you not to get sidetracked from this path. For somehow all
this expedition looks rather doubtful. You now resemble one of Rimbaud’s poems.
But you are not the drunken boat. A boat is too pretty for you. A drunken
bulldozer, that’s who you are.

And there is no
need to breathe so passionately into the back of the neck of the girl in front
of you. She may somehow resemble a prostitute, but she’s still a schoolgirl,
she’s even wearing the white uniform apron. And don’t even think about stalking
her in the subway. Don’t you want to see Galya? Hey, von F., stop it, what’s
with you, where the hell are you going?!

It’s too bad that
the girl ran away. It seemed to me her lips were covered with cherry jam. I
only wanted to lick that jam off, nothing more. There are times in one’s life
when one wants something sweet. A piece of candy, for example.

But I got off
right in time. Mendeleyevskaya metro station. Named after Blok’s father-in-law.
10
Would they name a metro station after my father-in-law? I doubt it. And I no
longer have a father-in-law, actually. Although, it seems, I used to play chess
with him.

Galya grabs the
receiver at once, before the end of the first beep.

“You . . .”

“Me.”

“How are things?”

“You’re back?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll drop by.”

“By my place?”
with as much indifference in the voice as possible.

“I want to see
you!” as much impatience and passion as possible.

“Then stop by . .
.”

“But it looks
like you don’t really want me to? . . .”

“Oh come on, stop
by,” with a sigh and noticeably less indifference in the voice.

“No, really, if
it’s unpleasant for you, I won’t . . .”

“Stop by, I’ll be
waiting!” the indifference in the voice is no more. But so is the conversation.

Short beeps. The
local pay phones know the ways of sophisticated taunting. And no more coins.
And this at the moment when your heart is bleeding.

So Kyrylo will
have to wait for your phone call a little longer. Besides, there’s still plenty
of time. It’s only three.