Nikolai Nikolaevich and Camouflage

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NIKOLAI NIKOLAEVICH AND CAMOUFLAGE

RU S S I A N L I BR A RY

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The Russian Library at Columbia University Press publishes an expansive selection of Russian literature in English translation, concentrating on works previously unavailable in English and those ripe for new translations. Works of premodern, modern, and contemporary literature are featured, including recent writing. The series seeks to demonstrate the breadth, surprising variety, and global importance of the Russian literary tradition and includes not only novels but also short stories, plays, poetry, memoirs, creative nonfiction, and works of mixed or fluid genre.

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Editorial Board:

Rosamund Bartlett Peter B. Kaufman Oliver Ready

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Mark Lipovetsky

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Caryl Emerson

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Dmitry Bak

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Vsevolod Bagno

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Stephanie Sandler

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■□■

For a list of books in the series, see page 203

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OO LS WW TT LS VE E O V NNO

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d ate l s n eld T ra Duffi te i by Wh by d ite sso d E Fu ne n a s Su

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EVICH KOLA AI NI

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NIKOL

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Columbia University Press  New York

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Translation copyright © 2019 Duffield White and Susanne Fusso All rights reserved

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Published with the support of Read Russia, Inc., and the Institute of Literary Translation, Russia Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Aleshkovskii, IUz, author. | Fusso, Susanne, editor. | Container of (expression): Aleshkovskii, IUz. Nikolai Nikolaevich.

English (White) | Container of (expression): Aleshkovskii, IUz. Maskirovka. English (White) Title: Nikolai Nikolaevich and Camouflage : two novels / Yuz Aleshkovsky ; translated by Duffield White ; edited by Susanne Fusso.

Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2019. | Series: Russian library Identifiers: LCCN 2018043952 (print) | LCCN 2018047140 (e-book) | ISBN 9780231548458 (electronic) | ISBN 9780231189668 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231189675 (pbk.)

Classification: LCC PG3478.L443 (e-book) | LCC PG3478.L443 A2 2019 (print) | DDC 891.73/44—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018043952

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Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich Book design: Lisa Hamm

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CONTENTS

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CAMOUFLAGE

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NIKOLAI NIKOLAEVICH

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Introduction by Susanne Fusso ix

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Acknowledgments vii

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Notes 187

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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he translator and editor would like to thank Yuz Aleshkovsky for granting permission to translate these two ground-breaking novels, and for being constantly available for clarifications and explanations of context. We have long enjoyed the supreme privilege of being Yuz’s colleagues and friends, and we are delighted to have been able to play a role in bringing these works to the English-speaking readership. We also thank Irina Aleshkovsky for her invaluable help with questions of translation and interpretation. We are grateful to Priscilla Meyer, Professor of Russian, Emerita, for bringing Yuz and Irina to Wesleyan and making Aleshkovsky’s work part of our curriculum. Sergei Bunaev provided helpful answers to translation queries. Thanks to Yuz for introducing us to his Moscow friends (Andrei Bitov, Olga Shamborant, Sergei Bocharov, the Fingerovs, the Goreliks, and the Lebedevs), who helped us understand the pleasures of being Nikolai Nikolaevich’s original audience. And thanks to William White for accurately transcribing the translator’s first attempts to speak Aleshkovsky’s wit in English.

Acknowledgments

We thank Christine Dunbar of Columbia University Press for her cheerful encouragement and for her hard work in shepherding these novels to publication. Oliver Ready, of the Editorial Board for the Russian Library series, offered detailed comments that helped us greatly improve the introduction and the translation itself. Two anonymous readers also provided excellent suggestions that we have endeavored to incorporate. Allan Berlind, Professor of Biology, Emeritus, at Wesleyan, read the introduction and notes with an eye to the discussion of Soviet genetics, and we are grateful for his assistance. All remaining errors are of course our own.

Thanks also to Victoria Smolkin, Associate Professor of History at Wesleyan, for suggestions on sources about Soviet science. We would also like to thank Jean Findley, Lisa Hamm, Ben Kolstad, and Leslie Kriesel for their expert work on the editing, design, and production of the book.

Wesleyan University has provided generous support in the form of sabbatical time and research grants. We thank in particular Marc Eisner, Dean of Social Sciences, and Joyce Jacobsen, Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost.

Our students in courses on twentieth-century Russian literature have reacted enthusiastically to Aleshkovsky’s novels, and to his living presence, and we thank them for their responsiveness to this translation in its earlier versions.

Duffield White would like to thank his wife, Isabel Guy, for her love and support and for sharing her love of literature. Susanne Fusso thanks her husband, Joseph M. Siry, Professor of Art History and William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of the Humanities at Wesleyan, for his love and support and for listening to long disquisitions on the subtleties of Russian obscenity.

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INTRODUCTION

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SUSANNE FUSSO

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I was a good-time Charlie, an idler, a lazybones, a gambler, a crook, a hooligan, a scoundrel, a smoker, a street urchin, a bicyclist, a soccer

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player, a glutton, although I always helped my mother around the

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house, I was rapturously interested in the mystery of procreation and the relations between the sexes, the organization of the Universe,

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the origin of the species of plants and animals and the nature of social

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injustices, and I also managed to read the great works of Pushkin, Dumas, Jules Verne, and Mayne Reid. Perhaps it is precisely for this

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reason that I never in my life sold anyone out or betrayed them.

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Although of course I managed to perpetrate umpteen little dirty tricks and peccadillos.

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▶ Yuz Aleshkovsky, “Autobiographical Information”

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uz Aleshkovsky was born in Siberia in 1929, the year of Stalin’s “Great Turn” toward industrialization and collectivization. Raised in Moscow, where he recalls that he became acquainted with street obscenities much earlier than he learned about the fairy tales most children read, he endured some of the key experiences of the Soviet century—wartime evacuation,

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imprisonment in Siberia (on a petty criminal charge), liberation upon the mass amnesties that followed Stalin’s death in 1953, and the ideological totalitarianism that forced some of Russia’s best literary talents into writing “for the desk drawer,” i.e., with no hope of publication.1 The paradox of the unfreedom of official literary life in the Soviet Union is that it engendered literature of a breathtaking freedom of form and language, of which Aleshkovsky’s works are a prime example. By 1979, Aleshkovsky realized that his personal freedom was in peril, and he and his wife, Irina, left the Soviet Union. In the same year, Priscilla Meyer, a scholar of Soviet-era Russian literature and professor of Russian at Wesleyan University, invited them to settle in Middletown, Connecticut, where Aleshkovsky has been a precious literary and cultural resource for students and faculty of Wesleyan University ever since, and where his wife Irina is a beloved professor of Russian language and film. Aleshkovsky received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fiction in 1987 and the Pushkin Prize of the Alfred Toepfer Foundation in 2001 for his entire body of work. Two of his novels and one novella have been published in English: Kangaroo (1986), a tragicomedy narrated by a man accused of “the vicious rape and murder of an aged kangaroo in the Moscow Zoo on a night between July 14, 1789, and January 9, 1905”; The Hand; or, The Confession of an Executioner (1989), the monologue of a vengeful Soviet security police agent, which Oliver Ready has called “a 300-page outburst of bile, traumatic recollection, and historical speculation”; and A Ring in a Case (1995), a fantastic tale that captures the absurdity of the early post-Soviet period.2 This volume is the first published English translation of Nikolai Nikolaevich, Aleshkovsky’s debut work of prose, as well as Camouflage (Maskirovka). The original Russian texts of both works appeared first in print in a single

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volume published by Ardis in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1980, after Aleshkovsky had left the Soviet Union for the West.3 Nikolai Nikolaevich (written in 1970) and Camouflage (written in 1977) focus on two historical eras: the immediate postwar years just before and after Stalin’s death (Nikolai Nikolaevich) and the Brezhnev era, later labeled by Mikhail Gorbachev “the period of stagnation” (Camouflage). The “science fiction” novel Nikolai Nikolaevich is a monologue spoken to a drinking companion by the titular hero.

A pickpocket by trade, Nikolai Nikolaevich is released from prison after World War II and finds a job in a Moscow biological laboratory.

He begins as a kind of janitor but is soon recruited to provide sperm for strange experiments intended to create life in the Andromeda galaxy. The uneducated but preternaturally perceptive hero eventually finds himself at the center of the 1948 purge of biological science in the Soviet Union. The novel is not just a science fiction (and science fact) tale, but also a Bildungsroman and a love story.

Nikolai Nikolaevich was first circulated as samizdat (“self-publishing,” usually typescripts with multiple carbon copies passed from hand to hand among trusted friends). Aleshkovsky says that copies of it, as well as his songs, the most famous of which is popularly known as “Comrade Stalin” (1959), “spread through Russia like a pandemic of flu.” He gave a copy of the manuscript to Ardis publisher Carl Proffer in Moscow, with the injunction that it not be published until Aleshkovsky was in the United States, because he felt that gaining fame in the West was not worth risking the loss of his freedom in the Soviet Union. Despite the wide distribution of Nikolai Nikolaevich and his songs, Aleshkovsky believes that he escaped arrest because “critically thinking KGB men” read his “phantasmagorical works and had a good laugh.”4 Introduction

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Nikolai Nikolaevich is perhaps best known as an example of Aleshkovsky’s virtuosic deployment of the rich tradition of Russian obscene language, known as mat. The word mat is derived from the Russian word for “mother,” probably because some of its most taboo expressions involve the speaker copulating with the addressee’s mother. (The common expression “Yob tvoyu mat,” often translated as “Fuck your mother,” literally means “I fucked your mother.”) In an excellent introduction to mat published in The New Yorker, the writer Victor Erofeyev describes the political significance of Russian obscenity: “Mat expresses aggression, but in a country that has suffered from a chronic lack of freedom it also plays the role of a language of dissidence, of protest against official ideology, both political and religious.”5 Although Russian literature of the fin de siècle and early Soviet period could be quite frank about sexual matters, by the 1930s, with the establishment of socialist realism as the only acceptable writing style, the language of official literature became sanitized. Russian mat had always been to some extent an underground phenomenon, transmitted orally (notably in obscene folktales or the humorous couplets known as chastushki) or in unpublished manuscripts (the works of the eighteenth-century writer Ivan Semyonovich Barkov or Alexander Pushkin’s erotic tales). Aleshkovsky’s incorporation of mat into literature was a perfect expression of the taboo-breaking ethos of samizdat. As his friend, the major writer Andrei Bitov, wrote, “The use of Soviet phraseology in his pages sounds far more indecent and obscene than vulgar slang and thieves’ argot. But the noble crystals of mat, the only natural and inherent part of the Russian language that has been preserved in Soviet language, continue to send us the light of human speech, like extinguished stars in the darkness of a planetarium.”6

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Mark Lipovetsky has linked Aleshkovsky’s challenge to Soviet official language to Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of carnival: The poetics of the lower bodily stratum, the “slum naturalism,” the eccentricity of plot and style, the reliance on coarse language, the

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blasphemous defamation of official dogmas and symbols of truth, the comic grotesque and in general “unrestrained carnival word— familiar, cynically frank, eccentric, eulogistic-abusive” (Bakhtin)—

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all of the most important components of the carnivalesque tradi-

tion, including the drama of confrontation with “that one-sided and

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gloomy official seriousness which is dogmatic and hostile to evolution and change” (Bakhtin), appear in Aleshkovsky’s fiction with

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exceptional precision and in an utterly natural, unmannered style.7

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This is no mere coincidence—Aleshkovsky was close friends with scholars like Sergei Bocharov, who were instrumental in reintroducing the works of Bakhtin to a broad public in the 1960s, and he also knew Bakhtin personally.8 Priscilla Meyer sees Aleshkovsky’s use of mat as serving “an incantatory, purifying purpose, purging the corrupt language that is forced upon every Soviet citizen.”9 The plot of Nikolai Nikolaevich is particularly transgressive, since it deals with masturbation, a subject that even today in the West, not to speak of the puritanical official culture of the Soviet Union, bears a lingering burden of shame and embarrassment.

In his Writer’s Diary for 1873, in a feuilleton called “Little Pictures,” Fyodor Dostoevsky describes listening to a group of drunken workmen on the street and realizing that the language of obscenity is the perfect language for a drunk person, whose physical ability to articulate is impaired but whose “flow of thoughts and sensations” Introduction

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has increased along with his intoxication (a perfect description of many of Aleshkovsky’s narrators). Listening to the workmen, Dostoevsky realizes that their language can be encapsulated in one word: “Purely and simply, it is one noun not found in the dictionary, so that the entire language consists of but one word that can be pronounced with remarkable ease.” Listening to the workmen, he “realized that it was possible to express all thoughts, sensations, and even entire, profound propositions using only this one noun which, besides, has very few syllables.”10 In fact, the word that Dostoevsky has in mind, khui, the vulgar term for the penis, has only one syllable and is spelled with only three letters in Cyrillic. Dostoevsky clearly exaggerates when he claims that the workmen are carrying on a complex conversation using only this one unadorned word. But it is undeniable that Russian mat is in general a more flexible and multifarious linguistic tool than are English obscenities, although the deployment of obscenity in present-day hip-hop discourse is probably the closest approximation to the richness of mat. Jesse Sheidlower has assembled an impressive lexicon of the permutations of the English word “fuck.” But in Russian, not only is khui only one of several deeply taboo words on which mat is founded, but these nouns can be endlessly varied by the use of prefixes and suffixes to create a panoply of verbs, adverbs, and adjectives with connotations ranging from positive to negative. The word khui can also be combined with various prepositions to create cogent twoword mat idioms.11 This translation attempts to capture the rhythm and verve of the demotic speech of Aleshkovsky’s narrator, but the predominance of “fuck” in English obscenity cannot be wished away. English simply has no precise equivalent for the richness of Russian mat.

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Yet another layer of language in Nikolai Nikolaevich is the narrator’s deployment of criminals’ and prison slang (fenia or blatnoi iazyk), which is very much in character for a pickpocket recently released from a prison camp. Some of these words are derived from Yiddish. According to tradition, the use of Yiddish originated with Jewish criminal gangs as a language that would be incomprehensible to police, and it came to be used by non-Jewish Russian criminals as well. Nikolai uses the words ksiva (from the Yiddish ksiveh, translated here as “papers,” chapter 2) and tsimes (tsimmes, a sweet stew, translated here as “the most delicious thing in the world,” chapter 3). The most important of these words in Nikolai Nikolaevich is fraer (freier, translated here as “amateur”).

Although this word is often translated as “sucker,” it in fact refers to “a free person,” a person who has never served time. Nikolai and other criminals see themselves as set apart from the amateurs by their experience, worldview, and not least of all, language. For many of the educated Russian readers of Nikolai Nikolaevich, both the obscenities and the prison slang would require glossing, which Nikolai sometimes provides himself in the space of a single sentence. (The original Ardis edition included a few explanatory footnotes for the slang, but by no means enough to render the text fully comprehensible to the uninitiated.)

Just as important as mat and prison slang for the texture of Nikolai Nikolaevich is its engagement with the tragedy of twentieth-century Russian biology. Starting in the late 1920s, the peasant agrobiologist Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (1898–1976) made claims for a native Russian form of biology based on the work of Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin (1855–1935) in hybridization. In broad terms, Lysenkoism claimed to be materialist, as opposed to the supposedly Introduction

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idealist theories of Western genetics as represented by Gregor Mendel, August Weismann, and T. H. Morgan. Lysenko rejected the methods of experimental science in favor of getting "practical" agricultural results. The story of Lysenkoism is a long and complicated one that has been widely studied by historians of science and of Stalinism.12 The episode in the saga that is crucial for Nikolai Nikolaevich is the postwar triumph of Lysenkoism, supported personally by Stalin, and the rout of the geneticists at the 1948 meeting of the Lenin All-Union Agricultural Academy. At this meeting, as Ethan Pollock writes, “Practical science was equated with the ability to transform nature. One of the speakers, a director of a cattle-breeding station, was fearful of the results of Mendelism-Morganism, which he said was ‘reactionary to the core since it is bound to lower the role of Soviet man into a passive appendage of nature, a placid contemplator of nature who humbly waits for gifts and favors from her.’ In contrast, Michurinism was the ‘great transformer of nature.’ ”13 In the aftermath of the 1948 meeting, the Central Committee of the Communist Party acted to replace supporters of "Mendelism-Morganism" in research institutions and other venues of scientific enterprise.

Although Aleshkovsky invents a fanciful research program for the scientists who employ Nikolai Nikolaevich, the destruction of their laboratory has its roots in Soviet reality.14 Aleshkovsky says, “I know important biologists who were driven mad by Lysenkoism and by the strange hatred the ignoramuses in power had for the bases of modern genetics and microbiology, which held back the growth of this science for decades.”15 Oliver Ready, the author of one of the best analyses of Aleshkovsky’s work, writes, “Nikolai Nikolaevich . . . deals in equivocation

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and paradox, leaving the reader uncertain as to the exact balance in his speech of idiocy and cunning, affected simple-mindedness and true ignorance.”16 The same can certainly be said of Camouflage, in which equivocation and paradox are the very essence of the plot. For most of the novel, we are left in doubt, not only about the narrator’s sanity but also about the nature of the story that he is telling to a man he addresses as his brother, the General. The narrator, Fedya Milashkin, claims to be “a camouflager of the eighth (highest) rank” (chapter 1), part of a vast team engaged in creating a simulacrum of depressing Soviet reality for the benefit of American spy satellites flying overhead. According to him, the drunks, prostitutes, and people standing in line for scarce food products are performing an elaborate charade to deceive the Pentagon, while underground, in sparkling laboratories, scientists and technicians are hard at work on nuclear bombs, which are transported in vans labeled “MEAT” and “EAT COD FILLET.” But throughout the novel, the reader is left unable to decide: Is this a science fiction tale or a realistic picture of Soviet life in the 1970s? Is the city of Staroporokhov (“Old Dusty”) a godforsaken provincial town, a mythic conception like Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin’s Glupov (“Stupidtown”), or is it Moscow itself (as becomes more and more likely as the tale goes on)?

Like most of Aleshkovsky’s works, including Nikolai Nikolaevich, Camouflage is a monologue by a narrator with a strongly marked linguistic profile. If Nikolai Nikolaevich’s speech reflects his experience as a criminal and former camp inmate, Fedya Milashkin’s speech, although also rich in mat, is far more steeped in the clichés and rhetoric of Marxism-Leninism-Brezhnevism, as filtered through the Soviet mass media. Nikolai Nikolaevich is the Soviet version of a social drinker, while Milashkin is an out-and-out alcoholic, so the Introduction

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peculiar slang of drinkers plays a more prominent role in Camouflage, while prison slang is virtually absent (Milashkin’s experience with imprisonment is limited to stays in the drunk tank).

While Nikolai Nikolaevich deals with the tragic derailment of Soviet biological science by blind ideology, Camouflage, written seven years later, grapples with bread-and-butter issues in the most literal sense. The novel centers on the bitter realization that a revolution in the name of the People has devolved into a system in which those at the top enjoy a luxurious life while the People starve and descend into mindless drunkenness. In a deliriously imagined meeting of the Politburo (the ruling group of the Central Committee of the Communist Party), KGB director Yuri Andropov proposes prohibition, to which Premier Aleksei Kosygin replies, “Are you all crazy? Prohibition would bring an immediate halt to the construction of the Baikal-Amur Railway and all our other youth-initiative construction projects! You can’t buck people up just with slogans. . . .

People in the provinces have nothing to eat, so let them at least get drunk” (chapter 10). Perhaps the most pointed satirical thrust of Camouflage is what Ready calls “a critical view of Russian drinking habits as an instrument of state oppression.”17 The drunkenness and resulting impotence of the men of Staroporokhov, as well as the genetic defects appearing in their children, lead the women to stage a protest that goes well beyond Lysistrata (and will not be spoiled in this introduction). Milashkin’s wife, Duska, the ringleader of the women’s rebellion, goes to the heart of the novel’s morality in her speech to her interrogators: “You see, Comrade Prosecutors, we too want to sleep with our husbands like normal broads, just for fun and for pleasure, and to have babies. And we don’t want to feel ashamed when we compare our babies’ brains and appearances

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to those in other countries. Let Kosygin know: we’re going to stand up for ourselves!” Referring to the frantic preparations for the 1980 Olympics to be held in Moscow, Duska continues, “We . . . don’t give a damn about your stadiums! The Dotsenkos’ daughter can hardly walk. She has eight toes on each foot. Do you expect her to set new records at your 1980 Olympics? And the Dolidzes’ little Givi—he’s got a crooked vertebra—are you going to send him out on the ice to do double toe loops?” (chapter 9).

Lipovetsky discusses the “epic scope” of Aleshkovsky’s grotesque plots, which intersect with and interpret the major landmarks of the Soviet story: “All of Aleshkovsky’s characters are highly historical.”18 Aleshkovsky’s son, Aleksei, echoes this statement when he writes that his father aspires to the laurels of Oswald Spengler or Arnold J. Toynbee, historians whose works have broad civilizational ambitions: “The object of his study is not fates or characters, not the general and not the typical; the object of his study is Soviet power, the civilization of horror. His books are an encyclopedia of Soviet life, the image of which has become the novella Camouflage—a devastating metaphor of lies.”19 Aleksei Aleshkovsky is paraphrasing Vissarion Belinsky’s 1845 characterization of Pushkin’s novel in verse, Eugene Onegin, as “an encyclopedia of Russian life.” Belinsky also called Pushkin’s novel “an act of consciousness for Russian society”—a label that applies just as well to Camouflage, which cuts through the illusions of propaganda (whether emanating from Soviet television or the Voice of America) to the essence of the Soviet experience.20 The “unprintable” language in which Aleshkovsky couches his artistic engagement with the fate of Russia in the twentieth century is an indispensable part of his mission—to return a voice to a suffering nation. Joseph Brodsky compares Aleshkovsky to Mozart in the Introduction

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way he is able to hear and capture Russian speech; Lev Loseff says that he “does not encrust his prose with vulgarisms, the way writers of the past did to create portraits of the common people; he saddles the powerful element of the common people’s speech. . . . He seldom uses indecent speech to describe sexual phenomena, rather it is an oceanic eros out of which myths arise.”21 We may return to Dostoevsky for an answer to the charge of indecency. He responded to a critic of his feuilleton about the cursing tradesmen by asserting that there is really nothing obscene about the Russian people’s use of obscenity. The common people who bought up copies of the journal in order to laugh at his feuilleton “did not laugh for the sake of the abomination, not from love of that and the art of it; their laughter was extremely simple-hearted and not depraved; healthy, though coarse; entirely unlike the laughter of some of those who spread filth in our society or in our literature. The People use profanity to no purpose and often when talking about things that are not at all indecent. Our People are not corrupt and are even very pure, despite the fact that they are unquestionably the greatest users of profanity in the whole world.”22 There is a healthy dose of romanticization here, but Dostoevsky’s words are applicable to both Nikolai Nikolaevich and Fedya Milashkin, whose “unprintable” language, ultimately the instrument of loyalty, faithfulness, and love, is juxtaposed with the truly obscene persecutions of the Soviet state.

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A NOTE ON THE TE XT This translation is based on the original publication, Nikolai Nikolaevich & Maskirovka (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1980), checked

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against Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh (Collected Works in Three Volumes), vol. 1 (Moscow: NNN, 1996). In the notes, we have used a slightly modified Library of Congress transliteration.

In the text, we have used the somewhat inconsistent principle of “what looks good to an English-speaking reader.”

Russian names consist of a first name, a patronymic, and a last name. The patronymic is formed from the father’s first name plus the suffix “-ovich”/“-evich” for men or “-ovna”/“-evna” for women.

Russian also uses a wide array of diminutives for the first name.

“Nikolaevich” is not Nikolai’s last name, but his patronymic (his father also was named Nikolai). He is sometimes referred to by the diminutives “Kolya” or “Kolenka.” We never learn Milashkin’s patronymic. His formal first name is Fyodor, but he is more often called by the nickname “Fedya.”

The Soviet secret police were founded in 1917 by Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky and given the official title “All-Russian Emergency Commission for the Struggle with Counter-Revolution and Sabotage,” most often referred to by its shortened name, “Cheka.” The agency was given various names over the course of the twentieth century, but continued to be called “the Cheka” in colloquial speech. In 1954, it became the Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security), better known as the KGB.

Introduction

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NIKOLAI NIKOLAEVICH AND CAMOUFLAGE

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NIKOLAI NIKOLAEVICH

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A Science Fiction Story

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ow listen up. I know this won’t be boring. If you do get bored, it’ll mean you’re a complete dickhead and don’t understand a damned thing about molecular biology or the story of my life. Look at me: I’m a good-looking guy, I’ve got new threads, and I can wiggle my mustache in a cool way. I own a nice car, a “Moskvich” (sure, it’s old, but it runs). My apartment is not a co-op, and my wife will soon have her PhD. The wife, I have to say, is a puzzle—a mystery of impenetrable depths. That sphinx the Arabs have—I saw it once in a short film—is nothing compared to her.

There’s nothing in it to figure out, if you really think about it. Well, more about the wife later. Hey, don’t fill your glass all the way, try half-full. That’ll give you a more intellectual sort of high, and your eyes won’t go wandering off in all directions. Have a bite to eat as well. Otherwise, you’ll get bombed and won’t understand a damned thing of what I’m saying.

To make a long story short, I was nineteen when I got out of prison after the war. My aunt wangled me a permit to live in Moscow (her boss at the Passport Bureau was fucking her right on the floor of his office!). My first month in Moscow, I didn’t work. Didn’t feel

Nikolai Nikolaevich

like it. I spent some time picking pockets on the tram or on the trolleybus—didn’t even have a partner to pass the goods to. For me, it’s an art. See these fingers? Oistrakh can go fuck himself: my fingers are longer.1 You know, I could tell, just with these fingers, what kind of bills people were carrying—in their wallets or in their pockets.

I could feel the color with my fingers. And never made a mistake.

So many guys get busted just for the sake of a ruble or an affidavit from the housing office! These idiot amateurs go after a ruble as if it’s a million-dollar banknote. They waste so much energy, balancing on their toes, slowly pulling it out, and then they’re the ones who get their asses hauled off to the cooler (here in the USSR, it doesn’t matter how much you swipe, the important thing is: don’t steal).

So, as I say, I was doing some pickpocketing. I’d gotten the knack of the “Bukashka” trolleybus route and the “Annushka” tram.2 But I never stole food ration cards. When they turned up, I’d send them back by mail or toss them into lost and found. I had enough money.

I was planning to get married. Out of the blue, my aunt said to me: “Our neighbor’s taking you on at the institute. You’ll be a lab assistant. Sooner or later, you’re going to get busted. They’re about to increase the jail terms. My man was telling me about it: he has a brother at the Lubyanka, his brother hunts spies and gets everything straight from Beria.”

And it was true. They’d just come out with a decree. Five to twenty-five years for theft. I shit my pants. I knew my luck couldn’t last much longer. I wanted to learn a trade, but I didn’t like working.

I just can’t work. That’s all there is to it! For the life of me, I can’t. In the camps, they’d taught us how not to work. But this time around, I knew I’d better go to work with my neighbor at the institute because of the omen: If you shit your pants, you’ll soon get busted.

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This neighbor and I used to exchange greetings in the morning.

He’d always take a long time sitting on the toilet, rustling his newspaper and laughing. He’d flush and then howl with laughter.

Scientists are all so screwed up. It looked to me like he was fucking my aunt too. Anyway, I got the job in his lab. His last name was Kimza—you couldn’t tell his nationality, but you knew he wasn’t a Jew or a Russian. A good-looking guy, but somehow he always seemed tired. He was about thirty.

“Your job,” he said, “will be to carry the chemicals and help set up the experiments. If you want, you can take some courses. What do you say?”

“It makes no difference to us Tatars,” I say, “whether we drag in the ones who are going to be fucked or drag away the ones who’ve been fucked.”

“I do not want to hear any more of your filthy language.”

“Okay.”

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’d been working in Kimza’s lab for about a week. They had me dragging all sorts of crap around the lab, and I washed out the beakers. One time, during lunch break, I burned my tongue on some kind of acid and shat blue for about four days! I thought it was cooking salt, but the damned thing turned out to be a chemical of some sort. I didn’t take any sick days, though. I was afraid they’d stick a mine-thrower up my ass like they did in camp when I downed a vial of ink so they wouldn’t send me up north on the next convoy. So, I was working. I was setting up a new lab. Microscopes up to your ass, instruments, motors, and all that stuff. Soon, I’d had it with working so hard. So, just for the hell of it, I lifted a wallet from the boss of the Personnel Department. I did it for the sake of my professional artistry—took it from his side pocket while he was standing in the buffet line. What a fucking big deal they made of it! In about an hour and a half, a plainclothes platoon arrived, and they wouldn’t let anybody leave the institute. A general search of the premises: the only place they didn’t look was up your anus. Why make such a big deal of it? I took the wallet with me down to the toilet to take a shit.

I opened the wallet. No money, just papers. Denunciations, that is.

Nikolai Nikolaevich

There was even a denunciation of my Kimza. It said he was pushing science backward to fuck knows where, and he doesn’t sing or clap at meetings. When he votes, it said, he looks disgusted, and he turns the radio off when it’s playing light music by Soviet composers. His experiments are directed against “Man, which has a proud sound,” and therefore, his work indirectly undermines the economy.

Understand what I’m saying? It was smelling like a quarter-century for Kimza. Article 58.1 I don’t like squealers! So, first I wiped my ass with the statements aimed at the other scientists (according to them, the entire institute had turned into a conspiratorial hornet’s nest—did that include me?). Then I pocketed the denunciation of Kimza, sliced up the wallet with a razor, and tossed the pieces into the toilet.

Someone was tugging at the door, yelling and screaming. I opened the door and explained that I’d had it up to here with chemistry, and doors are not teeth, so there was no fucking reason to pull on it like that.

“Look,” I say to Kimza, “a piece of paper about you.”

He reads it, turns pale, thanks me, understands everything, and stuffs the letter right the fuck into the strongest acid he can find. It dissolves right down to nothing more than a fucked grandmother right before our eyes! That’s when they drag me off to the Head of Personnel. I, of course, don’t know a thing.

“Better tailors than you have sewn suits for me,” I say, “and even those fell apart at the seams the first time they were tried on.”

“There’s testimony that you were rubbing up against people from behind in the buffet line. Could it be you were remembering the good old days?”

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“Fuck their testimony. Just tell me: was there a lot of money in the wallet?”

“There wasn’t any money at all.”

“Well, then, why would I want to waste my time on shit like that?”

The plainclothesmen laughed (they seemed to relax when they heard my simple language), and they let me go.

Next day, I tell Kimza I’m not going to work there anymore. I tell him it’s against my principles to be a worker. I tell him I’m an artist, dedicated to my craft. I also tell him I love to lie on the couch and devour books. That’s when he looks at me strangely—for a long time.

Then, in a roundabout way, he tells me all about the importance to mankind of his biology, and about the research he’s just begun, the likes of which has never been tried before. In a word, it’s an experiment, and I am an indispensable part of it. He says the work will be rewarding and creative. The most interesting thing about it, he says, is that it’s not work, but pure pleasure. On top of that, it’s highly paid.

The only thing required, he says, is to approach it without prejudice and with thoughts about the future of mankind (he kept stressing this last point most of all).

“Listen, neighbor,” I say, “don’t fuck with my brains. What the hell are you talking about?”

“You must become a donor.”

“Give blood?”

“No, not blood.”

“What then,” I laugh, “shit or piss?”

“Sperm is what we need, Nikolai, sperm!”

“What’s sperm?”

“The stuff little children come from.”

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Nikolai Nikolaevich

“What do you mean ‘sperm’? That’s jizz, or jizzum in scientific circles.”

“Okay, call it jizzum. Are you willing to give it up for science?

Don’t worry, there’s nothing to be ashamed about here. By the way, complete confidentiality is guaranteed.”

“So why aren’t you donating any yourself?” I asked suspiciously.

He frowned.

“Because they might accuse me of nepotism in my chosen object of research. Is it a deal?”

All I could do was sit down on the floor and laugh. Not fucking bad work! I almost pissed my pants, and my appendicitis flared up.

Kimza says, “Stop acting like an idiot. Sit down and listen to why we need your sperm.”

So I stop laughing and listen. It turns out this is Kimza’s plan: First, I beat off and wank off (which are one and the same), then they will put my jizz under a microscope and study it, and after that, they will try to introduce it into the womb of an infertile broad and see if she gets pregnant. At this point, I interrupt, concerning the issue of child-support payments (you knock up five women or so, and there goes your whole paycheck).

“That’s one thing you don’t have to worry about,” he says.

He also has certain top-secret plans for my jizz that he promises to tell me about, just as soon as the experiment gets under way.

Would you believe? Just from listening to this, my little snot-nosed one stood right up: “Let’s get started then!”

This wasn’t the first time for me. . . . In the camps, there’d always be that one person in a hundred who’d hold back, while the other ninety-nine were wanking like a hundred (all you had to do was not feel guilty about it). Sometimes there’d be a guy who’d wank off and

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then walk around for the next three days like a dead man, suffering from shame. The experience could cripple him for life. I knew this Lyovka Milstein—a real swindler. They’d pound on a rail as the signal to go to sleep, the skin pistons would pick up speed, and Lyovka would grit his teeth, struggle with himself, and then, little by little, quiet down. I would try to make him feel better about it: “The organism calls,” I’d say. “You must show it respect. It’s not to blame. Don’t be its public prosecutor.”

Okay, so I think it over for a while. I ask Kimza about working conditions. How many times a day do I have to come? What’s the work schedule? What’s the salary scale? And what’s the title for this position in the labor book?

“Orgasm once a day, in the mornings. We’ll register you as a technical consultant. The salary will be the standard state allowance: 820 rubles. The workday is not fixed norm. After orgasm, you can go to the movies.”

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don’t let on that I am surprised, even fucking amazed. All I’ll have to do is arrive at work, I’ll wank off, and spend the rest of the day picking pockets on the Annushka tram or the Bukashka trolleybus. If I get busted, there’ll be mitigating circumstances: I work at the institute. So I agree to take the job. That same evening, I drop in on a friend of mine who is an old internationalclass thief. He was a world-class crook until they locked up the borders with the crack guard Karatsupa and his faithful dog, Ingus.1 When he hears the news, the thief says to me, “You’re fortunate and lucky, but you’re also selling yourself short. After all, cum is more expensive than black caviar. It’s almost on a par with platinum or radium. You stupid jerk! If I were you, I’d sell my spermatozoa one at a time to these biologists. That’s why they’ve been given microscopes—to count up small items. Sell them by the piece, goddammit! Understand?!”

“I understand. How could I not? I’m an ass, I really am. After all, the spermatozoon is the most delicious thing in the world. And frequent wanking is so injurious to one’s health! Don’t worry,” I say to the international thief, “I’ll up my price gradually. I’m no amateur.”

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“Too bad you can’t dilute jizz the way they do sour cream in the store. You could skim off more profit that way.”

“Fuck it!” I say, slapping myself on the forehead. “Of course! Next time I’ll hold back and give them a second coming, I’ll outwit them and overfulfill the plan!”

“I wouldn’t advise doing that,” the thief says, speaking seriously.

“Never interrupt sexual relations, even if it’s with Dunyasha the Fist.

It’s bad for you. I once had to get rid of a broad because of that. She started howling at me, ‘Do your coming somewhere else!’ ‘How about in your middle ear?’ I asked. ‘I don’t give a damn where you do it, just not in my pussy!’ And would you believe: my goddamned toenails almost stopped growing because of that! I had to get rid of her. Because you’ve always got to come like a man. That’s my advice, and for that, you can treat me to a bottle on payday. Also, get some milk off them on grounds of compensation for damages. Tell them blood donors are normally given some sort of meat to eat after they donate. Don’t be a fucking amateur. Remember: in America, you come five times, and you earn enough to buy a car. Got it?”

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ell, when I arrive at work the next morning, I try not to laugh. I’m feeling a little ashamed, but, on the other hand, why the hell should I be embarrassed?

Why shouldn’t all fucking humanity make use of it?! Maybe it’ll be of some use to people? I take a look, and see they’ve already prepared a little cubicle for me. About 3½ meters square, without windows.

There’s fluorescent lighting. It’s warm inside. There’s an ottoman couch in there. And on the chair beside it, a test tube. “This is your workplace, Nikolai,” says Kimza.

“Let’s just agree: no bullshit,” I reply.

Kimza insists that I should not develop an inferiority compass about what I’m doing. On the contrary, he says, I should feel proud.

“Make yourself comfortable and start as soon as I give the order, ‘Attention! Orgasm!’ After orgasm, seal the test tube with a cork.”

“So they won’t run all over the place?”

“Work quickly and without losses! Didn’t you read the sign?”1 I locked the door, lay down, thought for a while, and remembered the time when a friend and I escaped to the women’s camp

Nikolai Nikolaevich

and fucked our way right through all the lady thieves. The ones we didn’t manage to get to (mostly fascists and amateurs)—they ripped off our underpants, tore them into little pieces, and passed them around among themselves so they’d at least have our manly aroma to keep them company under their little government-issue blankets.

As I remembered this, my snot-nosed one started moving his head around in all directions like a cobra hearkening to a flute. I’d been doing so little fucking at the time that I came right away—a whole half-test-tube full.

“The whole Milky Way,” as my bunkmate in prison used to say.

Astronomy was his specialty. A friend ratted on him for saying, fuck planet Earth up the ass if all this outrageous shit takes place on it.

Forgive me, I got carried away.

So I brought the test tube to Kimza.

“Ah,” he said, “let’s have a look.”

He smeared some of it onto a little slide, and then shoved the rest into some sort of ice-covered apparatus that was giving off steam.

After he looked into the microscope, Kimza just stared at me as if he’d won the lottery.

“Nikolai,” he said, “you are a ‘Superman’! Superhuman! Unbelievable! Don’t ask me why. You’ll understand later. I’ll teach you what you need to know about biology.”

“Can I have a look?”

“Another time. Run along now. See you tomorrow.”

Well, that’s when I say to him politely that in America, they pay a much higher price for sperm. I also say: “From now on I need to be fed my fill after every orgasm. Otherwise I’ll only be able to come on a weekly basis. All of science will have to stop: my jizz will run out!”

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“Well,” he says, “what would you like in the way of snacks?

Remember it’s tough to get groceries these days. The whole country is starving, except for our leaders and heads of supermarkets.”

“Two hundred grams of meat,” I say. “Bread and butter. Maybe also a glass of sunflower seeds. And some strong tea.”

“Why sunflower seeds?” Kimza asks. I tell him, when I get bored while wanking, I can snack on sunflower seeds with my other hand.

“There will be no sunflower seeds,” says Kimza, getting angry.

“But I’ll work on getting the meat. My boss is an academicianvegetarian—I’ll get his meat ration coupon. He attaches great importance to you.”

“They’ve got to raise my salary. You aren’t paying for this out of your own pocket, are you?”

“We’ll raise your salary. I’m organizing the laboratory. I’ll hike up the rates for your position, and we’ll give you a raise. We will pay you well for that jizz of yours. That’s wicked stuff you’ve got there, Nikolai! Now run along, or these spermatozoa I’m holding are going to croak. Just tell the doorman that you’re going out to pick up the order for the oscilloscope.”

“Don’t you worry, I’m a master at cover-up.”

After that, when I’d walk around the institute, my conscience would start to bother me for the first time in my life. All those doctors, scholars, and lab workers—slaving away! And all I had to do was wank off to my heart’s content, and I’d be done for the day.

I get to go home. Somehow it made me feel awkward. On the other hand, I could see that my jizz was needed not only by science, but by the whole country as well. I’m getting paid by the job. The only problem was that I’d feel drowsy after orgasm. Even too lazy for pocket-picking!

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So I headed out to a bar to drink and stuff myself on crayfish and crackers. By the way, do you know you can get an erection just from drinking beer? After five mugs of beer, all you have to do is think about a woman and not about taking a piss. But if you take a piss, you lose it. I know what you’re going to ask next. You want to know how you can do without pissing? You have to be able to instill selfdiscipline. For example, there are people in India who can go for a month or more without taking a shit, and their piss is transformed into sweat and tears. I suppose if you look at this in scientific or our biogolical terms, you could say the excrement, that is, the shit of these Indian philosophers, becomes transformed into smell. Take alcohol, for example. If you don’t put a cork in it, it goes flat. Spirits go flat right away, but shit takes a long time. There’s a completely different molecule in it (in shit, that is). That bastard really stinks. And let’s not even talk about the shit atom. That bitch probably wouldn’t split even in a synchrophasatron. By the way, I’ll have to ask Kimza what would happen if the shit atom did split. There’d probably be a worldwide stink rising up to the clouds. . . . Hey, drink up!

This stuff is as pure as it gets. They give me two liters a month so I can disinfect my balls before orgasm. But then, since I am a true Soviet citizen, I’ve introduced economizing measures. Here’s how it was. One time, when Kimza was handing out alcohol to everyone but me, I thought to myself: “Well, fuck this!” And I scraped some mud from my shoes into my test tube of jizz (I’m no amateur), and Kimza immediately sounded the alarm: “Why aren’t these spermatozoa sterile? Why are they so grimy? Is it so difficult for the donor to wash his hands?”

“During the experiment, it’s not the hands that need washing; it’s the penis—the instrument of production. It spends most of its time

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in our pants, not in a vacuum. And God knows where it’s been in any twenty-four-hour period.”

“How much do you need?” Kimza frowned.

“Two liters,” I say.

“That’s a little much. Three hundred grams should do the trick.”

But I argue that before I take hold of my dick, I have to wipe off all the fingers on both hands—since I do switch hands. And the groin area needs to be sterilized as well!

“Very well, we’ll order a liter a month.”

“What?” I put my foot down. “That’s not going to do the job. A liter is fine for an off-duty dick in recumbent position, for example, a soggy dick that’s just come out of the cold Black Sea waters at Gagry.

But for an upright dick, you need three times as much. I’m asking in good conscience! Hell, I’m giving up the most valuable stuff I have for the people’s sake. In America I’d already have a summer house at a health resort, and I’d own a Lincoln Continental and other property. I want you to know I’m no Chichikov, these aren’t dead souls I’m selling to the government. These are my own fresh, native sperm.

So don’t try to skimp on me. I’m a man! Pickle me in alcohol, and I sure as hell won’t drink it. What do you shitheads think, I’m going to preserve my dick in alcohol while I’m still alive? Bastards! If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t be defending your dissertations, you’d be defending your asses in an emergency meeting at the Director’s office. My dick is supporting all of you!! Our institute has a bad reputation, there’s no order here at all—not like it is in prison or in the cooler.2 I’ve never squealed in my life, but if you snakes put the squeeze on my spirits, I’ll squeal to the Party Committee, the Local Committee, and the Trade Union!!”

“All right, two liters,” says Kimza, “and not a gram more!!”

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And he gives the command, “Attention—Orgasm!!”

So, as you can see, my friend, I was all set in the alcohol department. I’d rationalized the whole procedure—I’d sterilize my dick when it was limp, not erect, and that way I’d get a bonus. To your health! Eat up, my friend! The sturgeon and red caviar I reserved specially for you today. So that’s the way it is. By the way, I don’t much like black caviar. It gives me a diathesis. My ass breaks out in spots, and it itches. It’s awful, you have to drink calcium, and that scummy stuff is really bitter. So that’s the way it is. Back then, I never would have dreamed of snacks like these.

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o: mornings I’d go to the institute, I’d punch in, and I wouldn’t do any screwing around with the Mashas (because I didn’t want to get my personal fill of fucking and disappoint the lab with my sperm count, or, as they say these days, “be a cock-tease”). After I’d settled in, I presented Kimza with an ultimatum.

“You expend only ordinary energy at work, while I expend the most important kind. After I come, I can barely stand up, and there’s a tugging feeling in the pit of my stomach. Maybe I’ve got another fifteen years to live if I’m lucky, and all you sons of bitches do is loaf around!”

Meanwhile Kimza’s experiments had gotten off to a great start.

Sometimes he would even joke about erecting a monument to my dick—with a wind-up mechanism attached—so it could rise with the first rays of the sun. In ancient times there really were such monuments, but later they took them down. People got embarrassed. Why? Really, if you think about it, my friend, the penis is the most important thing. It’s more important than the brain. A million years ago we didn’t think with our brains, we thought with our

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dicks. Brains have evolved only recently. If this weren’t so, a rocket wouldn’t look like a dick. It would look like an asshole, and nothing would come out of it but a smelly rumbling. That’s not what you need to make it to the moon. But why bother talking about it. Just remember what I’m saying, you’ll see! When the brain runs out of room to evolve in, there’ll be one big final fuck-up. Nobody will be able to get it up, not even fools like you and me. All anyone will be able to do is kick the bucket, and they’ll have to turn the maternity wards and newlywed salons into funeral homes and flower shops.

On all the streets, there’ll be wood-shavings crunching underfoot.

Carpenters will be busy. Okay! Why the fuck are you bugging your eyes? Don’t worry—it will be a long time coming. In fact, there’s not even going to be an absolute final fuck-up. I’ll tell you more about that later. . . .

So I say to Kimza: “Give me a raise. I need new threads, and televisions are going on sale soon. If you don’t give me a raise, I’m going to have to go back to picking pockets, or learn how to drive the Bukashka trolley. If you want to, pay me out of your own pocket. I’ll make a private deal with you to get you the sperm. Two and a half thousand rubles is what I’m asking.”

“Okay. We’ll let two of our cleaning ladies go, and put you down as having more than one position.”

“Fuck that floor work.”

“You’ll just be listed as a cleaning lady. Other lab workers will do the cleaning. Is that clear?”

“That’s okay, then.”

“Your appetites have grown, I must say.”

“What are you saying, whore? You want me to get married?”

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“No, no! Keep cool. Really, I wouldn’t mind giving you ten thou.

And if I should receive the Nobel Prize, I’ll pay you off properly, but these are difficult and worrisome times in our science.1 God willing, we’ll complete our experiment! Tomorrow we will begin the crucial phase!”

Well, I was overjoyed! Twenty-four hundred rubles! You can’t earn that on the bus, let alone on the Bukashka trolley.

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set off for the planetarium to celebrate. Of course, first I have a drink as is required. I love doing this: You sit down in a soft chair feeling a light buzz, the lecturer tells all sorts of tall tales about life on other planets and moons, and you just sit there feeling sleepy. The sky appears above your noggin, and you can see all the stars and planets that you can’t see in our country.1 The Southern Cross, for example: to see that, you’d have to cross a border, and if you did, they’d nail you on the spot with Article 58, which I need like a pussy needs an alarm clock. Then you can see the little stars and the various constellations blinking up above you, and the sky becomes completely dark, quietly revolving. You’re sitting in the easy chair with a light buzz, and it seems like you’re the only one on the whole earth. At this moment, there’s not a fucking thing that you, wretched creature, could possibly be in need of. Then suddenly it begins to get light. You can’t see the Milky Way anymore, and the sky turns pink along the edges. Smart-assed apparatus! Then the clock chimes: bim-bom. I’ve let six o’clock slip by me. Wouldn’t it be great if it were morning and time to go to work again! I think to myself: Thank God

Nikolai Nikolaevich

I don’t have to sleep on those prison beds and gag on that prison soup, and then run off to the guard post like a goner.

Next, I stop in at a bar and have some more to drink to celebrate my raise. Then, I go over to the former international thief ’s house, but there’s nothing spending the night in his cupboard that’s worth eating, so I’ve got to run to the supermarket. The thief has also been doing some drinking. He envies me, praises me, and warns me not to blab: otherwise, some prick student will smell me out.

“Watch out for volunteers,” he says, “they’re up to our asses and beyond.”

I get soused too and oversleep at the thief ’s place. So, next morning I’m fucking hurrying to get to work on time, and my head feels like a basket with fried nails rattling around in it. When I get to the lab, Kimza really sets the dogs on me: “You’re holding up the most important experiment! ‘Attention!

Orgasm!!’ ” I notice there’s a new instrument in the lab, giving off steam. An academician in a black cap is running around it, rubbing his pink hands together. I lock myself in my little cubicle and turn on the fluorescent light. My hand is trembling, no matter how hard I bang away on the balalaika, I can’t come. I’m wanking away, sweating up a storm, when Kimza knocks on my door. He thinks I’ve passed out from a hangover.

“Why are you withholding orgasm? This is an outrage!”

I no longer had the strength to lift my hands. I was starting to get really scared. I think to myself: “That’s it! I’m finished! They’ll can me, the bastards, without severance pay. The jizz is gone. My jizz has run out!” I open the door and call Kimza.

“Do whatever you want, I have a dry hard-on. I just can’t come.”

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The academician pokes his head in and says: “What’s the matter, my boy, are you unable to ejaculate any spermatozoa?”

I was so fucking tired! I wanted to resign on the spot, voluntarily.

But suddenly a young research associate named Vlada Yurevna gives the order to Kimza and the academician: “Colleagues, please do not disturb the recipient” (me, that is). She comes in and closes the door.

“Turn away, please,” she says, and she turns off the fluorescent light. Then, dear buddy, with her own little hand, she takes hold of me so sincerely—by my rude, boorish, stubborn bastard, by my penis . . . and everything in me tightens up, as if someone’s pounding diamond tacks into my spine with a silver hammer and dipping me, head to toe, in a bathtub of draft beer. Red crayfish are crawling along the foam, and there’s dark crackers floating next to them.

That’s how fucking pleasurable it was! I don’t even know how much time went by, but, suddenly, I could feel I was about to come, and I couldn’t hold back for the life of me. I gritted my teeth, bent backwards, and screamed. . . . Later, Kimza told me I screamed for about twenty seconds. The test tubes even started ringing, my sound wave burned out the light bulb on the oscilloscope, and I fell off a cliff into unconsciousness.

When I finally open my eyes, the light is on, and all the buttons on my fly are done up. Inside my head, it’s as cold and quiet as if it’s been stuffed with soft cheese and raisins (which I like a lot). Not a trace of hangover. I exit my cubicle into the lab, and everyone’s shushing me.

The academician, working on the instrument that’s giving off steam, seems to be performing some sort of magic ritual and singing: “in place of the heart—a flaming motor . . .”2 How can you not respect yourself at a moment like this? Well, I did!

Nikolai Nikolaevich

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Nikolai Nikolaevich

Suddenly something snapped, they opened something up, they unscrewed the nuts on the top of the instrument, and the academician shouted, “Hurrah!” Then he ran over and shook my hand: “You, my boy, may be on your way to becoming the progenitor of a newly engendered human tribe on another planet! Every one of your spermatozoa will play its part in it! In a single thermos—a whole People!

In two thermoses—a whole Nation! Or maybe it’s the other way round! The devil himself wouldn’t be able to make sense of these Stalinist formulae.3 I congratulate you! I wish you success!” And off he ran.

I don’t understand what the fuck is going on. Vlada Yurevna is looking at me as if she isn’t the one who just jerked me off. It turns out, this is what happened after I came. First, they immersed my wicked little jizz in various liquid gases, then they fucking froze it all the way down to almost nothing, to a rock, and then they thawed it out again. After it was thawed, they took a look to see: Are the little flagellates still alive? Have the genes reshuffled? At first, they had trouble adjusting the temperature and the gas, but finally they got it just right. The next step? Well, they didn’t have rockets yet, but Kimza’s dream was to launch my jizz to Andromeda. In general, I try not to get too involved in this: I’m waiting to see how it will all turn out. Understand? Don’t sit there with that big mouth of yours hanging open. You still haven’t heard the most important part. Their idea was to send my sperm to the Andromeda galaxy in a glass test tube that would be like an impregnated belly. Nine months later, just like that, there’d be little Nikolai Nikolaeviches on planet Andromeda!

A hundred or so would be born right away, and they’d fucking well adapt fast to their new surroundings. You don’t believe this could happen? Well, dickhead, try buying a live carp, freeze it, and throw

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it into the bathtub. You’ll see: it’ll come back to life. A-a-a! Gotcha!

Careful you don’t fall over from amazement! That’s when the academician came back. . . . No, that’s not right: first I say: “Just let me take a little look out of the corner of my eye at these spermatozoa.” I put my headlights to the microscope. I look, and I can just barely see them. I can just make out that they really are either a People or a Nation; and every little spermatozoon is a Nikolai Nikolaevich! I think to myself: There should be a woman for each one of them, but science hasn’t thought that far yet. Okay, this is when the academician comes over to me and says: “Nikolai, my boy, try to get hold of yourself! Please don’t bellow, and don’t roar during orgasm. There’s already a rumor spreading that we’re conducting vivisections here at the institute. Don’t you know what difficult times we’re living in? We geneticists are five minutes short of being enemies of the people. Yes! Not friends, but enemies.

You must get a grip on yourself! It’s difficult, I know, but you must.

Try gnashing your teeth instead.”

“That I can’t do. When you gnash your teeth, you get tapeworms in your intestines.”

“Who told you that, my dear boy?”

“Mommy used to tell me that.”

“Kimza! Toss this idea out to Lepeshinskaya.4 Her boys should try gritting their teeth and see if they get spontaneous generation of tapeworms in their rectums. According to the theory of probability, success is guaranteed. Even better: shove prosthetic teeth up their asses. . . . Charlatans! Barbarians! Parasites! Enemies of the people!”

At this point, the academician starts coughing. His eyes bulge, he turns white as a sheet, and he starts to shake as if he’s about to flop onto the floor. I grab hold of him: “Don’t shit your pants, Pops,” I say, Nikolai Nikolaevich

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Nikolai Nikolaevich

“fuck it all up the ass, spit on the sun as if it’s an iron, and smooth out the wrinkles with your left hand.” The academician begins to laugh and kisses me.

“Thanks for the good, living word. I won’t shit my pants. I won’t.

Lepishinskaya’s gang won’t live so long. Let those who are unjust shit their pants!” (He added this in Latin.)

At this point, Kimza fetched some alcohol from the safe. I brought out a snack from my donor’s allowance, and we all drank to the success of science. The academician got drunk and started shouting that now it wouldn’t be so terrible if there were a worldwide catastrophe.

If there were a complete fuck-up and everything started mutating, then my sperm would be there to generate a new, healthy human species on another planet, and the intellect, that will come with time, if humanity even needs it at all—because really, my friend, what the fuck is the intellect for? What’s the point of intelligence? If only you could have seen how those academicians were devouring one another whole, without salt, the bastards (although they did spit out the buttons).

What’s the international situation? A total fuck-up! That’s what it is! You can bet that wild beasts—lions, jackals, even sharks—don’t have an international situation, but human beings do, and it’s all on account of our intelligence. All right, excuse the lecture. Drink up! Radiation, that fucking whore! Do you know how many of us have become impotent on account of radiation? It’s a good thing I’m immune to her—the damned bitch!

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arrive at work the next day, or, I mean, the day after Sunday.

I lie down on the little sofa inside my cubicle . . . but I can’t get my dick to stand up. I grind away, grind away, but it just won’t stand up. It’s really gotten out of hand, gotten spoiled, the little snake! The problem is simple: all day Sunday I dreamed about Vlada Yurevna. I fantasized about her, held erotic séances, fell in love with her—I couldn’t fucking resist. But now it’s time to start work. Kimza roars senselessly, “Attention, comrades, orgasm!” I’m getting nervous again. Vlada Yurevna explains to me that some sort of dynamic stereotype has formed in my head, so she will have to intervene again. I almost come just hearing her say this. Then she sits down right next to me, my friend, and with her little fingers she takes hold of it. Ahhhhhhh!! I close my eyes and go flying off to the netherworld. . . . I grit my teeth (to hell with the tapeworms). Again, someone’s pounding diamond nails into my spine with a silver hammer . . . one after the other. Ahhhhh! So fucking good! So fucking good! So fucking good! And it’s not blood that’s flowing through my veins anymore—it’s music. Would you believe it, the nails on my hands and feet start to itch so badly, I’m like a cat in heat. I just

Nikolai Nikolaevich

want to scratch and scratch, and rip everything to bits. Have you ever been hit by an electric current? Three hundred eighty volts, amps up to your dick and beyond, alternating current? I’ve been hit like that. But that’s shit compared to what happens when your orgasm is in the hands of Vlada Yurevna. Twenty flashes of lightning strike you between the major hemispheres (not of the ass, you idiot, of the brain). And that’s it! All that’s left of you after that is golden steam: you’ve evaporated into quivering droplets. It’s scary to think that all twenty of your pink lightning bolts have dissipated forever. It turns out, I’ve been roaring again, I’ve fallen off into the abyss. Kimza bursts in. He’s rabid, all white, foaming at the mouth, stammering, he can’t come out with anything that makes any sense. Vlada says to him, as she’s wiping her hands off with alcohol: “We will pursue our experiments to the end, Anatoly Magomedovich. Do not abandon the scholarly bearing that suits you so well.

If Nikolai screams during orgasm, it means his psychic parameters have been sharply altered, and the braking mechanisms are out of control. This is the underlying problem. What’s needed, I believe, is an isolation vacuum chamber. You must order the latest electronic instruments to go with it.”

You should have seen her when she said this: her soft, strawberryblond hair, her peaceful green eyes, and no whorishness on her face.

The bitch is a complete mystery, that’s all there is to it. Meanwhile, Kimza’s jaw is trembling. He looks like he’s spent the night in the doghouse. If he’d had a Mauser, he would have made a sieve out of me. I know I’m not wrong about that! I’m no amateur. I’ve been coming on stealthily like a Magadan lynx, and I think to myself, fuck work, since I’m in love and a second stag has appeared on the blue horizon.

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“And you, Nikolai,” Vlada Yurevna says to me, “I ask you please to abstain from drink, not a single gram for the next two weeks—lest time be wasted during masturbation. We have so little time. They’re about to break up the lab.” My darling Vlada says this, and leaves the room. Then I say to Kimza: “Why were you so pissed off? If it irritates you so much, I’ll stick a gag in my mouth.”

“Can’t you manage without a gag?”

“Why don’t you give it a try yourself,” I say.

Again he turns white, but doesn’t say anything. Meanwhile I was making Napoleonic plans. Why not find out where Vlada Yurevna lives? I wait for her at the bus stop, keep my distance as people are getting off. It’s dark. She’s walking along beneath the streetlights in a caped black overcoat. Her legs are like the columns on the Bolshoi Theatre—so damned white, well proportioned, and tapering beautifully at the bottom. I’ve already got a hard-on that’s like a new felt boot. . . . I’m wearing no coat and a crappy little cap I bought at the Dubinsky Market. Somehow, I manage to bend my dick over to the left. I keep my hand in my pocket. I’m limping slightly. She’s just gone into the entranceway. I look: she’s slowly climbing the stairs.

Her little knees are visible every step she takes. The fifth floor . . . she’s gone . . . and I can still see her in my mind’s eye: her leg and her knee—oh, what a knee, my friend! Suddenly a cop comes up to me and asks: “What are you staring at there, wise guy?”

“What do you mean? Looking isn’t allowed?”

“Take your hand out of your pocket! Make it snappy!”

“Get lost! Did I pour salt on your dick or something?”

Nikolai Nikolaevich

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Nikolai Nikolaevich

And I think to myself: how can I take my hand out of my pocket?

It will be so embarrassing.

“Hands up!” the cop screams. I laugh. “I said hands up!” And (this is really true) he pulls out a pistol and puts the muzzle between my horns. I get scared, put my hands up, and my dick sticks out like I have a Maxim machine gun in my pocket.

The cop gasps, shifts the muzzle so it’s pointing at my heart, and grabs hold of my dick. “What’s this?” he asks.

“Squeeze it a little harder and report it to your boss. Satisfied?”

“Do you have your documents?” he says, putting his gun back into its holster.

“Nope, just a penis.”

“Why . . . why do you have . . . a hard-on . . . out here on the street?”

“I’m in love. So I have a hard-on.”

“Go home, you fool. You look as ugly as a tree stump. Did you see something or somebody?”

The cop cranes his neck around to see if, by chance, there’s a naked dame’s ass in the window, and then he walks away, disappointed. I sit down on the curb across the street and gaze up at Vlada Yurevna’s house. I feel like I’ve been driven crazy by a sack full of bedbugs.

Love, my friend, is worse than ten years in prison. This fucker is much scarier. You’re in it for life, and you have to serve out the full term. Oh, how I was suffering! It was if someone was shoving spikes under my fingernails. And don’t think the only thing on my mind was fucking. I just wanted to go on looking at her face, pure white without whorishness, her strawberry-blond hair, her green eyes.

And her hands! Nobody has hands like hers anymore. What could you compare them to? Well, imagine this: you’re standing barefoot on an iceberg, seven winds are blowing into your seven little holes

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(men have seven, blockhead, while women have eight. There’s only one hole more, but so much more dangerous!). A cold draft is blowing in your soul, and your life seems like someone else’s green snot (make that phlegm). You’re surrounded by a convoy of guards in white sheepskin coats, munching on roast leg of lamb (they’re burning their tongues while you’re freezing). You’re trembling, you little shit? Have a drink! Okay. Suddenly, that all just disappears—no guards, no someone else’s roast leg of lamb. Instead, there’s warm sand and palm trees, may your heart be transplanted into me. And under the palms, there are chocolate brown babes. And one of them, the fairest of all, comes over, and, free of charge, massages a whole jar of pink cream onto your balls. Not shaving cream. It’s what they put in chocolate éclairs. Pleasant? More than pleasant! You’ve been transported so quickly from one environment to another! It’s like getting transferred from the cooler to the hospital—you can’t believe it’s happening. You scream from fear, and bam, you’ve fainted again.

Don’t worry, I know it’ll happen to you too someday. You’ll come across a chick like Vlada Yurevna, and you’ll pass out. You’re hotblooded: there’s quicksilver in the head of your dick. So what are you lacking? A little warmth!! You need your own legitimate ration of warmth. So why the fuck are you asking me questions about fainting?

What do you think I am, a professor? You keep asking me, “Why? Why?” Fuck off! Stretch those brains of yours for a change! Actually, it’s rare for guys to pass out. It’s more common for women. What sort of women? Ordinary ones. Working women. Not just asphaltlayers, asshole! This includes cashiers and bookkeepers, women who work in the dry cleaners (the ones who take our puke-covered clothes), nursery school teachers, salesgirls (especially the ones who sell things like fruits and vegetables and ice cream in the winter), Nikolai Nikolaevich

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Nikolai Nikolaevich

and broads from construction sites, from meat-packing plants, and from all sorts of factories and workshops. What’s it like for them?

Well, she gets so fucking tired at work, all she wants to do when she gets home is grab something to eat and hit the sack. She’s freezing, her ass hurts from sitting, her hands ache, and her eyes hurt (if she’s a draftswoman). So what’s the real secret? When the husband or the lover fucks an ordinary broad like that, the sweet thing is transferred to another planet (I’ve chewed this one over with you more than once, you congenital blockhead). When a pilot changes altitude too quickly, he also feels faint. It’s the same for cosmonauts, until they’ve pulled themselves out of our stinking atmosphere. What it is, is an overload. Knock this into your stupid head. When you’re fucking, and you come, you can experience overloads that are incomprehensible to the mind and intolerable to the body. At that moment, every fucking bit of her goes up in flames—all her troubles, her aching bones, the overdue rent, that stocking that some cunt ripped on the bus (to replace them costs five rubles, which is one and a half days’ work). Let me emphasize this one more time, everything is forgotten—everything that is so fucking hard on our ordinary working girl in the course of her day.

On the other hand, take something like billionairesses. Not only do they not pass out, they can’t even come—I’ll tell you that officially. Let’s analyze why. And you, you doubting Thomas, may you get a dick up your dumb-ass! I’m going to hit you right between the horns with my logic. Have you ever heard of Mussolini’s film La Dolce Vita? It shows what I’m talking about.1 Or have you read about the lives of movie stars? They get married five times on average. Do you think a woman would run from her husband if he could bring her out into outer space? If she’s dying from happiness when he’s

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on top of her? Not on your life! Yes, our little lives are constructed in such a smart-ass way. Let’s say, for example, you’re a billionairess who’s served cockatoo for dinner every night, along with stuffed fruit drops and aardvark kebab. Let’s say you have lackeys strutting around the house in bathing trunks, and a wardrobe of fur coats like the ones in our consignment stores. And let’s say you have three cars downstairs, and in each one there’s a chauffeur, each with his tool hanging down to his knees (just call—and he’ll come running and give you a fuck). With all that superabundance, you won’t pass out. You won’t even come at all! You’ve gotten spoiled. And that’s where we get hooliganism that leads to bloodshed and light bodily injury. Sometimes the injuries are serious. She can’t come, so she starts biting the billionaire, and he, the little bastard, doesn’t scream about it: he likes it. Then he himself begins to bite her, growling with pleasure. Well, they get so sick and tired of each other, they both want to puke. Divorce. Either that, or the billionaire goes and watches some broad undress to music. Why does he watch? Here’s why. If you’re a normal guy, and a broad undresses in front of your nose (tosses her dress to the left, her slip to the right, panties in another direction, and whips off her bra), and if, while this is happening, there’s a blue spotlight shining directly on her concentrated cunt, and a pink one on her tits—I don’t know about you, pal, but I swear—may your heart be transplanted into me if I’m lying—I would run right up over all their heads onto the stage and, while the police would be twisting my arms, beating me over the head with a club, blowing a damned whistle, and spraying gas in my eyes, I’d be banging away at that striptease until I'd come. After I'd come, then you could go ahead and take me to court in a black Ford. In their court, I’d make my final statement: Nikolai Nikolaevich

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Nikolai Nikolaevich

“Since I’ve been caught red-handed, I confess: yes, I fucked her!

And rightly so! Don’t get undressed right in front of me; you’re not my wife! I’m at your service for custody pending trial!”

This is how a healthy Russian man, who’s opposed to depravity, would act. Why do multimillionaires go to see striptease? Because they know it’s okay not to fuck the broad. They’re happy the law forbids them to climb up on stage. But a normal, healthy guy just wouldn’t go there because his balls would swell up so much from watching the show he’d have to walk bowlegged all the way home to the Motherland. Well, is this all clear to you now? And how do I know all this? Well, back in ʼ44, I was screwing this woman in camp. She was the wife of the director of a firewood depot. Since it was so damned hard to get firewood during the war, he was able to scrounge millions. And she, the millionaire’s wife, bit off half his dick—without extenuating circumstances. They put her in the camp, but he was given medical treatment and told: “Get yourself to the front. You’re leading a debauched life, scum, while the whole nation is shedding its blood!”

So, as you see, all those millions can backfire on you. Are there any questions? Yes, I have screwed a cashier, and a dry cleaner, and a cook. You’d be better off asking me which profession I haven’t screwed. Maybe the only exception is the driver on the Annushka tram. I’ve screwed state functionaries, not just working women.

Yes, I have. And they all passed out—repeatedly. Why don’t you believe in these fainting spells? Logic has never spent the night in your head! I’ll prove it. Have you ever noticed that liquid ammonia is often sold out in the pharmacies? Well, why do you think this is so? No. People don’t drink it, they smell it—it helps when you’ve fainted. And when does this happen? During orgasm!! Maybe

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you’ve noticed that sometimes you can’t find cotton wool in a single drugstore? It means that all the women in those neighborhoods are starting their periods on the same day. That’s just the way it happens according to probability theory. You just have to analyze these things. Remember when you couldn’t get razor blades anywhere?

That was because the Chinese were hurling pubic crabs at us across the Amur River.2 You had to shave right up to your eyebrows, and I sure as hell wasn’t about to shave my beard with the same blade I used for my balls. That’s why the stores were all sold out of blades.

In a word, you have to learn to think logically. And don’t clog up my brain with any more of your shit questions! Pour me some mineral water. You’re so slow you give me heartburn. I say this, but I love you just the same. Anyway, where did we leave off? Oh, yes. I fell in love. I fucking fell in love up to my ears.

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he next day, Kimza watched me like a wolf and didn’t talk to me. But Vlada Yurevna asked me in her gypsy voice: “Do you think you can do it by yourself today? I’ll set up the instruments.”

“Of course,” I say.

I lock myself in my cubicle and wait for the command: “Attention—Orgasm!” I think about Vlada Yurevna and get a hardon right away. Just then she knocks, shoves a book through the door, and advises me: “You must think of masturbation as work—you must utterly exclude the sexual element as such. Would old man Vasya be able to do his work in the morgue if he sobbed at the sight of every corpse?” Her logic convinces me. But I can’t help wondering: What would life be like if I excluded the sexual element? I wouldn’t be able to get a hard-on! However, I have faith in her. So I wank with one hand and read my book with the other. Kimza, the scum, my rival stag, knocks twice, telling me to hurry up. I tell him to go suck cock, I’m not his Mamlakat Mamayeva, I’m not left-handed, and I can’t work with both hands.1 The book I’m reading is Far from Moscow.

It’s interesting. You know, I worked on that same pipeline myself.2

Nikolai Nikolaevich

What strange twists fate takes! I carry my test tube of jizm over to Vlada Yurevna.

“Thank you,” she says. “Don’t leave, Nikolai. It’s time for you to become privy to the very essence of our experiments. Anatoly Magomedovich has given me permission to explain it to you. Today, in this device, we will bombard your spermatozoa with neutrons and irradiate them with gamma rays. Then, over here, in this apparatus, the IM-1, observation of the developing fetus will begin. And this is a uterus—but an artificial one. We are investigating the mutations and genetic makeup of embryos, under acute conditions of cosmic irradiation, with the goal of developing a more highly resistant human individual.”

Yes, my mug was just hanging open, like yours is now. I didn’t understand a thing she was saying, but I watched. They smeared my jizz onto a thin piece of glass and put it into some sort of chamber.

Then Kimza shouted: “Discharge!” And I felt scared and sorry for my jizz. Imagine! The neutrons that were bearing down on my own little Nikolai Nikolaevich sperm were going so fast—like they’re getting fucked up the ass! And they were whopping little Nikolai right between the horns. His little tail was knocked sideways! You’d have to be a sadist to feel good about such a thing! I clenched my teeth— any more of this, and I’d have to knock the shit out of the whole lab! Next, they extracted some of the jizz and looked at it under a microscope. It doesn’t know whether it’s dead or alive, and they shove it into a gas medium to stimulate activity. Then they separated one spermatozoon from its relatives and placed it into the artificial uterus. Oh Lord, I think, where have we strayed when we resort to such complexities? Who thought up this science? I’d be better off picking pockets on the Bukashka trolleybus or the Annushka tram.

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What really got to me was the artificial uterus. There were all sorts of hoses hanging out of it, and wires. It was shiny. Its indicator arrows were darting back and forth. It was blinking its little lights, the bitch!

And four women lab assistants were running around it on tiptoe, each one with a uterus that was nicer than anything you could imagine—no matter how big your brain is. That’s where they put little Nikolai Nikolaevich! What if he comes out of there in nine months with his right eye knocked out by a neutron, with crooked legs and one back shorter than the other? And what if instead of an ass, he has a pouch, like a kangaroo’s? Well? I could see this shit was really getting to me. At this point, Vlada Yurevna asked: “Were you thinking about something, Nikolai?”

“Well, yes. I’m doing some thinking on my own about progress.”

I say this with both headlights fixed on her. My heart’s pounding, my legs are giving way under me, I’m short of breath. It’s love! Calamity!

That same evening I grab some alcohol and snacks and go for a consultation with the international thief.

“It’s thus and so,” I say, “so what should I do?”

“With that tarpaulin mug of yours, you shouldn’t try to crash the genuine-leather crowd. You’ll contract a hernia and your bare ass will get knocked up onto their painted fence. Forget love, remember your Mama.”

“Go suck cock at low speed,” I say.

“Good answer. Well put! If they’d give us answers like that in the State Welfare Department, we wouldn’t have such a problem with bureaucratic logjams. They’re taking forever to get me my pension.

They don’t have a kopeck’s worth of patriotic feeling.”

I knew the thief was angling for a disability pension. You could see he was starting to think, and that was getting him depressed.

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Nikolai Nikolaevich

So I took off for home. My soul felt rotten. I was thinking to myself: “Maybe it’s time to do some time and hibernate for the winter in Taganka—sit out this entire love affair.”3 I didn’t have the strength for it. It didn’t occur to me to question whether Vlada Yurevna had a husband. I didn’t give a shit about that! My eyes were popping out of my head, and remember, this wasn’t a sexual problem I was having.

Try to think on a higher plane.

I didn’t sleep the whole night. I paced back and forth, pouring water over my head from the faucet. I even knocked on Kimza’s door. But he didn’t let me in. Maybe he was asleep? I couldn’t wait for morning to come. As if out of spite, my clock stopped. So I came running into work late the next morning, and everybody in the lab was congratulating Vlada Yurevna for something. She was shaking hands with people, holding a bouquet of flowers, nodding her head like a princess. And when she saw me from her position on high, she came over to me and gave me a little flower. Kimza, I noticed, was weeping quietly, tears streaming down his face.

“Nikolai,” she says, “this is a holiday for you too, in a way.” My jaw just drops. It turns out: Vlada Yurevna has gotten pregnant from me—the first ever artificial pregnancy (I don’t remember whether it was first in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic or first in the whole world). “How? How?” you ask. God, what an idiot you are. If your ears were horns, the only thing you could hang on them would be crusty undies. A hat would be too great an honor.

Have you ever gone on a hunger strike? I did once. They had to feed me artificially through my ass. Those citizen-bosses had a hard time with it! Just when they’d get the tube full of cream of wheat inserted, I’d fart; and they’d be covered from head to toe. They’d kick me in the ribs with their boots and stomp on my stomach to release the

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gases, and, again, they’d shove some sort of kasha or a soup course— I don’t remember which—up the tube. And, again, I’d suck in and scream at them: “Get away or I’ll hit you again!” And then I’d blow them away. Where I got the farts from, I can’t imagine. Maybe from voluntarism. Or maybe from my soul of steel.4 Would you believe: they transferred me from the Kazan Prison to Taganka—just what I’d been aiming for. So I lost a little weight—that’s all.

In short, Kimza had inserted a tube into Vlada Yurevna, and my Nikolai Nikolaevich had danced his way along this tube to his rightful place. That’s the kind of weird bitch of a situation I suddenly find myself in. I don’t know how to act or what to say. I feel like I’m about to go crazy. I should be feeling happy, like the future papa. I should be hugging and kissing the mother of my own child. But instead I feel sad. I think to myself, “Biology, you motherfucker, if only I’d lived a hundred years ago, before you were around!” I feel like I’m about to go crazy, I look at Vlada Yurevna. There she is, just one step separates us, but there’s no way to step across. Not a single vein is trembling in Vlada’s face, not so much as a capillary. A sphinx. A mystery. She seems to possess some secret knowledge that the rest of us will never unlock, even if we put a jackhammer to our temples.

As I’m trying to get my psychics under control, Vlada says to me, “Don’t be upset, Nikolai, don’t you worry about a thing. If all goes well, you will name him. I can understand what you’re going through. . . . This is all a bit sad. But science is science.”

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o keep from crying, I go into my little cubicle, lie down, and daydream about Vlada Yurevna (prison bunks had gotten me used to this manner of arousal). I masturbate and read Far from Moscow. Suddenly there’s a commotion in the lab outside my door. I jerk off quick into my test tube, and take it with me as I leave my cubicle. Damned if there isn’t an entire fucking delegation standing out there: the Deputy Director, the Party Committee, the Head of Personnel, and a bunch of people who aren’t from biology. They’re reading out an official order to Kimza. The laboratory is to be eliminated. He and Vlada Yurevna are to be fired.

The lab assistants will be transferred to being cleaning ladies, and I will be put on trial. Can you fucking believe it? The charges are misrepresentation, absenteeism, and engaging in onanism, not in keeping with the normal duties of a technical consultant. They’re stripping me of the money I got from being registered as a cleaning lady, and they’re freezing my wages until the trial. So there I stand with jizz in hand, and there I remain standing. I twitch my eyelashes, wondering which article they’ll nail me with, and in no time at all, I’ve come up with the answer: Article 109—abuse of official

Nikolai Nikolaevich

position, section 1. The Deputy Director continues to read out the charges—something about sabotage in the biological sciences, and about how Lysenko has unmasked the saboteurs on grounds of imperialism-Mendelism and Cosmopolitanism.1 I try to sniff out what’s going on. It’s beginning to smell like my own fate is weighing heavily upon me: my fate smells raw, like moist autumn leaves lying on top of a pile of year-old dog shit.

“There he is! Look at him!” says the Deputy Director, poking his finger at me. “Look what kind of helpers our godforsaken scholars have stooped to hire. They so like to present themselves as representatives of pure science! Pure science should be done with clean hands, ladies and gentlemen, Mendelist-Morganists!”

My jaw just drops when I hear this. This is the final fuck-up, I think. Now, on top of my own fate, I can smell the stink of other people’s politics. Right then, I decide to have a deaf-and-dumb fit. I don’t know this Mendel guy. So, when they take me in for the lineup, I’ll say, “This is the first time I’ve seen him, and friends like these I exterminate with Politania, the way I do with crotchcrabs.” As for Morganism, I’ll tell the investigating prosecutor I’ve never set foot in a morgue and never will, so I wouldn’t know who’s fucked the corpses and who hasn’t. Try anything else, but you bastards aren’t going to nail me for Morganism! They hit you with more time for that than for live rape! Don’t ask me why, pal, ask the prosecutor, since you only have one convolution, and it’s in your ass, not your brain, and it’s not even a convolution, just a straight line. Stop interrupting, you shameful lout. Have another snort and listen.

This is when the academician comes running in, screaming: “You are the ones who are the obscurantists!” Then the Deputy Director

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grabs a crowbar from the boilerman, takes a full swing at the artificial cunt, and smashes it to bits. He says, “No use squandering the people’s finances on such wasteful contraptions!” And he rips the jizz out of my hands, the snake, and tosses it out the window. I conclude from this that he’s no longer the Deputy Director, he’s Director of the whole fucking institute! And I’m right. Kimza suddenly starts to laugh. So does the academician. Vlada Yurevna begins to smile, and the whole premises fills up with a huge crowd of people—up to your prick. The academician roars: “Monkeys! Troglodytes! You should be ashamed of your own genes!”

But the Deputy Director cuts him off: “I beg your pardon. We don’t have those. We have cells, not genes! Do you acknowledge your mistakes?”

Then they composed a welcoming speech for a certain person, subscribed to a state bond, and dragged me off to a meeting of the Academic Council.2 That’s when another sort of fate began for me— they were cleaning the dog shit out from under the autumn leaves.

I was digging it out myself with my own hands. But let me tell it from the beginning. First, they sat me down at a conference table and grilled me. They said they’d ask me some questions, and the more truth I told, the better it’d be for me in my position as simple intelligentsia victim of the saboteurs of biology. The Deputy Director began with the question: “What was the relationship between Kimza and Vlada Yurevna Molodina? Did he write her dissertation; and were they ever left alone?”

But I’ve got to tell it in the order it happened, so I’ll act out the whole interrogation: “Their relationship was scientific. They didn’t get it on in my presence.”

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Nikolai Nikolaevich

“Is it true that the academician said Lepeshinskaya’s coworkers only pollute the air?”

“I don’t remember. Everyone pollutes the air. Some come right out with it, others do it on the sly.”

“Have you allowed yourself to make insulting analogies with reference to Mamlakat Mamayeva?”

“No, never. I’ve admired her since childhood. I have her portrait.”

(I realize immediately that one of the lab assistants has squealed. It has to be Valya—that bitch!).

“Kimza promised you part of the Nobel Prize, didn’t he?”

“No.” “Who made the gloomy prognosis with regard to the future of our planet?”

“I don’t remember.”

“How did you react to the bombardment of your sperm with protons, neutrons, and electrons?”

“Compassionately.”

“Did Kimza promise to make you the progenitor of a future human race?”

“Why the fuck would I need that?” I yell. “Are you trying to make me out to be the prime suspect here?”

“Don’t curse. We understand that you’ve been victimized. What did the academician say about Stalin’s definition of ‘nation’?”

“In my opinion, all nationalities are fine as long as they don’t give false testimony in court. It doesn’t matter whether they’re kikes or Tatars.”

“Why did you scream repeatedly? Was it painful for you?”

“On the contrary, it was pleasant.”

“Did they ever suggest that you undergo vivisection?”

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“No, not once.”

“Do you know what vivisection is?”

“First time I’ve heard of it.”

“What exactly was your . . . your occupation?”

“My job was to wank off and donate my sperm. I don’t know any more than that. I acted upon the command: ‘Attention—Orgasm!’

Whenever I heard that command, I switched on the skin piston.”

“What was your coworkers’ attitude to Mendel?”

“Exceptionally bad. Nelya even said that during the war, the Mendels gave bribes to the Uzbeks in Tashkent, so the Uzbeks were sent instead of them to some place called Auschwitz. And she said they were lazy. They don’t wage war, but are happy to give themselves up to be killed.”

“Who advocated Morganism?”

At this point, I realize they’ve arrived at the most important part of the interrogation, and I recall what Vlada Yurevna said: “What would happen, Nikolai, if old man Vasya were to sob over every corpse in the morgue?” So I quickly try to cover up, saying, “What’s Morganism?”

“You’re better off not knowing. Who spoke respectfully of the Cosmopolitans?”

“Who are they? That’s the first time I’ve heard of them.”

“They’re degenerates! People for whom borders do not exist.”

Fuck, I think, I’ll have to warn the international thief about this tonight.

“How long was your workday, and how much alcohol did you receive for your work activity?”

Well, I think to myself, it’s time to take extreme measures. Time to fake a fit. So I start to tremble, hold my breath until I turn blue.

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Nikolai Nikolaevich

Then I run to the other end of the table and heave a whole bottle of ink right into the Deputy Director’s mug (the bottle’s shaped like a globe). I fucking heave it, and go straight into my epileptic fit routine. I fall down, growl, and make myself foam at the mouth. I start kicking with my legs and manage to smash the Head of Personnel in the balls. Someone yells: “Pull his tongue out of his mouth or he’ll choke! Shove something metal between his teeth!!”

Then someone shoves a pocket watch between my teeth. I move my jaw, and it stops ticking. I roll my eyes senselessly. My epilepsy was first class, good enough for the Maly Theatre. Idiot that I am, I overdid it and smashed the back of my head against the table leg.

Little by little, I quieted down. Next thing I know, they’re holding a meeting in a circle around me about how to keep from airing their dirty laundry in public (giving the West food for propaganda). They call an ambulance.

“This I never expected from my ex-wife,” says the Deputy Director (whose whole mug and shirt are covered with ink), “although I did guess correctly about her affair with Kimza. She’s nothing but a petty pervert. As of today, we are divorced.”

When I heard him say that, I almost jumped right up off the floor—but I managed to restrain myself. Meanwhile (you can call the ambulance when you’re dying and it won’t show up), I thrashed around for a while longer, and then I quieted down, saying: “Waterr-r! Where am I?” For some reason, I’m spitting ink myself, and violet foam is oozing from my lips. I stagger around as if I’m hurting all over. To calm me down, they promise they’ll find work for me, and they get me some water. Then they ask me to write up a statement about Kimza, and to remember whether or not he brought a camera to the experiments (the ambulance never did come). In general, they’re shitting their pants, all on account of me.

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s soon as I’m out the door of the institute, I grab a taxi and take off for Vlada Yurevna’s place. My head is pounding and I’m thinking, “Holy shit! She’s his wife!!

Holy shit! The four-eyed bastard! Too bad that inkwell was shaped like a globe and our planet Earth is not a square cube! How I wish I’d smashed him with the sharp corner, the louse, from the temple to the hypothalamus! How can he spread around such garbage about the best woman in the world? ‘Petty pervert’!”

As we’re approaching her building, I’m thinking, “Damn them all,” and I say to the driver: “Stay here and wait.” I find her apartment on my own, and I ring the bell. Vlada Yurevna herself opens the door. Thank you, oh Lord!

“Nikolai, why is your face all covered in ink?”

“Your former husband interrogated me. But I didn’t break.

I didn’t betray anyone.”

“Ah, so he’s already managed to publicly repudiate me—the Mendelist-Morganist? Come in. As for me, I’m about to leave. I’ve already packed.”

Nikolai Nikolaevich

In short, I don’t hold back, and I say: “Let’s go to my place—don’t get me wrong—I live alone, but I can hang out at my friend’s place, and you can make yourself at home at my place!”

“Okay, let’s go,” she says, “but you know, you and Tolya (Kimza) live in the same communal apartment . . .”

“Well, what of it?” I yell, already clutching her suitcase by the throat.

I was living alone at the time. They’d collared my aunt about six months earlier. You may remember, the Passport Office was fucking her, and through him, she was arranging residence permits for people—for big money. But she got busted. One of the people she registered turned out to be a spy. And these scum are not like the rest of us, who go down the long road of interrogation not remembering a thing. He broke down and squealed on my aunt. “Grandpa grabbed the radish, grandma grabbed grandpa . . .” as the folktale goes. So my aunt squealed on her man, and he spilled the beans. They shook the apple tree, and all the people who’d gotten their residence permits through her were evicted (by the way, I send my aunt parcels every month, and money too: I’ll be damned if I’ll ever leave her in need).

So there we are, Vlada and I, riding along in the taxi, she’s wiping the ink off my face with some cotton, and I’ve got a hard-on from happiness. This was the first time anyone had ever looked after my cleanliness (they loved me unwashed on their pullout beds. I’d always been a romantic, always en route—as they say nowadays).

Vlada tells me her story in the taxi. She and Kimza were going together even before the war, while they were still students. But he didn’t want to break her hymen before she got her diploma (that I could understand: there was a war going on!). Then Kimza was sent to a secret research lab to make a bomb or something. Two years

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later, he came back—irradiated from his balls to his eyeballs. You can understand that with a weenie like that, a guy can only ice-fish for perch (and even they aren’t biting). It was a real tragedy. They both wanted to take poison. But then Molodin, the Deputy Director, somehow persuaded her not to: “Hell, is it really worth hanging yourself?” he asked. Kimza gave his consent, and Vlada took off with Molodin. Why is Vlada telling me all this now? It’s so I’ll be courteous and sympathetic toward Kimza. So I’ll stop cursing. She tells me she would have liked to go and live in Kimza’s room, but she was afraid he might start drinking from melancholy (which he’d actually already begun to do). We arrived at my place and unloaded her things. And I’m thinking to myself like a tram conductor: time to put the brakes on. So I gather up my stuff and say to Vlada Yurevna: “I’ll go live at my friend’s place. Make yourself at home here. Everything’s paid for.” And I set off for the international thief ’s place.

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brought along some alcohol. They’ve shut down the lab.

Tomorrow I won’t be wanking—which means tonight I can get soused. So the thief and I start drinking. And I warn him to be more careful when he tells stories about border-hopping on express trains before 1930—they could nail him for Cosmopolitanism. When he hears this, my poor old international thief gets depressed to the point of tears. After all, he knows three languages: Polish, German, and Finnish, along with four thieves’ dialects! It’s true that only police and prostitutes can understand him when he speaks these languages, but he could be so useful to his mother country! He could steal the blueprints from a safe at “Ford.” Or he could rob a diplomat to get his bling and his diplomatic notes. “Do you know, you rube, how many embassies I shook down when I was abroad?” he asked. “In Berlin, I ripped off the Greeks and the Japanese, and in Prague—I’m a bitch if I’m lying—I robbed the Germans and the Czechoslovaks. But in Moscow, not a one! Only abroad. You know, whenever they have a reception or a general pig-out at their embassies, these ambassadors become as trusting as little children.

In Berlin, I hooked up with this immigrant named Fedenka—he was

Nikolai Nikolaevich

Krupp’s chauffeur. We would drive up to the embassy in a Mercedes Benzchik. I’d be dressed in a dinner jacket and a derby—all neat and proper. In my black leather slippers, I’d enter up the carpeted staircase. And, just following my nose, I’d amble into the hall where they’d lay out the snacks (the most important thing in our work is to maintain control of the appetite and the craving for drink).

Meanwhile the ambassadors are in there stuffing their faces, both cheeks at once. On the table—roast piglets, Soviet special sausages, pheasants with colored feathers lying around on plates, piled high as your pecker—if you don’t believe me, lock me up and throw away the key. Try holding back at a time like that—your saliva is flowing like a camel’s, your stomach’s acting up. In those days, Berlin had nothing in the way of real food. Everything was black and crusty.

But work is work—if I’d wanted to do simple pickpocketing, I could have done that back in Moscow. So I pick out the ambassador with the reddest, fattest neck. (The thin ones are harder to work on, as soon as you get near them, they flinch like an unbroken horse and squint their eyes—the scum!) I make my move on the one with the red neck just when he’s gnawing on a bone from a suckling pig or a pheasant. He’s gnawing away and moaning, as if the pleasure of eating has given him an orgasm. His eyes are bugging out beneath the crystal chandelier—the asshole. If you were to declare war on his native government, he still wouldn’t be able to tear himself away from that bone. So, as I politely reach for the champagne with my left hand, with my right I snatch, let’s say, a gold watch or a wallet full of foreign currency. What’s he doing, meanwhile? He’s occupied exclusively with that bone. Now you need all the willpower you can muster to pull yourself away from that table full of real food. I pull myself away. Fedenka is already on the lookout for me

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at the entrance. The lackey who’s standing there hands me my hat.

I’ve learned how to gab in German: so, eins, zwei, I give him my name. Another lackey yells: ‘Limousine for the State Secretary of the Embassy of Genitalia!’ Fedenka pulls up in his Mercedes, and we drive away for dinner in style. Back then we were brazen in our work.

Why not? I was undermining enemy diplomacy, not even pausing for the appetizers.” (At this point, the thief begins to sing the tune “Clouds are gathering gloomily over the border”).1 As I listen to him, I become lost in thought. If only he’d just keep on talking! I advise him to apply for a job with the Cheka.2 He says he’s already written to them, and their response was that he should wait for them to call him (I don’t believe him). Then I ask him whether he knows what Morganism is, and I tell him the story of how they want to pin that on me. That got the thief all fired up and made him forget about his embassies and his expresses. “Let’s go,” he says, “we’ll bust in on the scene of the crime and catch them redhanded! Let’s go to the morgue!” I was feeling such love and sorrow that I agreed to go along. We had another drink to buck ourselves up, and set off.

This morgue is located in the courtyard behind our institute. It’s a winterized dacha. The bottom halves of the windows are smeared over with white paint like in a bathhouse. Some sort of fluorescent lamp gives off its anemic light in the three last windows. We stand on tiptoe and try to get a look inside. There’s nobody there but dead corpses. They’re lying there naked—about six corpses— water’s dripping from their cement beds—they’ve just been washed.

A black hose is dangling in the passageway, swaying its head from side to side like a snake, water gushing out of it. (Looks like old man Vasya forgot to turn it off.) You can’t tell which corpse is a guy and Nikolai Nikolaevich

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which is a broad (at this point, it doesn’t matter which is which).

My legs buckle from fear and weakness. There’s nothing scarier for me, a pickpocket, than to see a person naked, without pockets.

At the beach, I never know what to do with my hands. At the bathhouse, I get a sense of what it’s like to be unemployed. But even if they’re naked and pocket-less at the bathhouse, at least they’re alive.

Here, they’re dead. Complete pessimism.

I want to leave, but the international thief has glued himself to the window—you can’t tear him away. So I burn his calf with a cigarette, and the bonehead immediately lets go. I ask him why the hell his trap is open so wide—there isn’t anything here that’s of any goddamn interest. But he insisted that it was the opposite for him. He said that no matter what, he could always imagine himself in Monte Carlo at the casino—where he once managed to steal the little shovel from the dealer who rakes the money off the table (he doesn’t know why the fuck he stole the shovel). Or he can always imagine himself in the bedroom of the Japanese ambassador in Copenhagen, or in Casablanca (where, on a bet, he fucked a whole brothel, had nineteen orgasms, and won five dollars). Or he can even imagine himself in Carlsbad, taking a mud bath. Any place you like, he can imagine himself there. “But at the morgue,” he says, “even if you threatened to lock me up for a century, or chop the head of my dick into little pieces on the surface of an Imperial five-kopeck coin, I can’t imagine what it’s like. It’s a puzzle. I look at it, and I just can’t imagine it. And it’s better not to try. It will never be too late to cross that border! Until then, to hell with getting depressed!”

We drank some more. . . . We’re sitting there in the bushes like lunatics, getting soused. I start to cry, and since I’m picking at a cavity with a match, I start to howl like the Frunze factory whistle.3 The

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international thief thinks I must have shat my pants because of the corpses. He thinks my nerves are shot, but I have only one thing on my mind. I say to him, “I fuck death, understand?” And he says, “You might fuck her, but she won’t get off you, she’ll go right on spurring you with her thighbones.” Finally, I can’t hold back any longer: I break down and tell him how, without any help from me, my sperm has been transferred into Vlada Yurevna’s organism, and that she’s gotten pregnant artificially, for the first time in history. What should I do? Maybe she’ll have an abortion so I can knock her up again, on my own. Do I go to the maternity ward with a food parcel and a bouquet of flowers I’ve stolen from Gorky Park? How am I going to pick this child up in my arms and sing it a lullaby? I can feel my inferiority compass is getting the better of me. Why did they think this up— the bastards? Why couldn’t I just fuck her myself? With my own fresh little sperm? And why should I have to miss an orgasm? I’ll be damned if I’m a machine! Thank God my balls are welded on, not bolted. I think Deputy Director Molodin did the right thing when he smashed that little artificial cunt with a crowbar. All that was left of it was a wet place—little Nikolai Nikolaevich, fucked by neutrons. It pains me to think about it. What’s to be done?

The thief just listens and laughs. “There was precedent for this in Vorkuta,” he says. “There was this small fry there, dragging out his five years (just one more to go), and this broad comes to visit him with a two-year-old kid. When he sees her, he kicks her out of the guardhouse. He chews her out: ‘Good-for-nothing-so-and-so, prostitute! They’re trying to rehabilitate me here, while you’re just fucking anybody that comes along! And now you’re asking for alimony, blackmailer!’ Even the head of the camp secret police was indignant with her: ‘We don’t fucking tolerate this kind of bum rap, Comrade Nikolai Nikolaevich

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Lyapina. We’re on the side of the prisoner, we know this couldn’t be his kid. We know you couldn’t have had a single fuck’s worth of a visit with your husband in the past four years because your husband is a fascist asshole, a gambler, a refusenik, and a saboteur. So get the fuck out of here!’ The broad was in tears. She tries to convince them that Lyapin visited her during an authorized family visit and that he knocked her up while crooning sweet words to her. When he hears this, Lyapin starts screaming: ‘Guard! Blow her away point blank!

The bitch should count her money before she leaves the cash register! Otherwise, it’s blackmail!’ At which point, the broad just left.

But in fact that asshole Lyapin did escape from camp whenever he felt the urge. I was the only one who knew about it. Back then, they weren’t even bothering to count us. It was forty-five below zero— not a fucking thing to eat, and nowhere to run to. But Lyapin would run. And they’d never catch him. He’d escape, fuck like a spider, and then sneak back in again. A truly great talent! He even escaped from Majdanek, not just from Vorkuta.4 He used to say, ‘I escape to get laid, since I don’t respect wanking on principle.’ ” The thief finished his story: “A man like that—all the intelligence services would be fighting to recruit him. I’m shit compared to him.”

We went on shooting the breeze for a long time that night (and nobody came to the morgue to get laid).

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n the morning, I go home to crash . . . Hey, drink up, pal, the end is near, the most interesting part is just beginning—but first I’m going to run and take a piss. Okay, you go first. I can manage, I’m a little older. Okay, then. It’s good, isn’t it, when you piss and it doesn’t sting? Or if, for example, you eat and you don’t feel constipated? Or if a broad brings you a glass of water when you’re hung over and you just feel like bowing down and kissing her feet?

It’s hard to tell sometimes which is better—the water or the broad.

She’s a mystery, and so is water. After all, the Lord put it together molecule-by-molecule—or rather, atom-by-atom: two hydrogen and one oxygen. And if there’s one extra atom, it’s all fucked up—no getting rid of your hangover. It’s a miracle! Or take air, for example.

Have you ever thought about it? You might say: Why the hell pay any attention to air if it’s not visible? But think how many gases are in it! A heap of them! And they’re all transparent—just so that you, blockhead, can see beyond your nose—lowly creature that you are, ungrateful to your Creator, myopic asshole! “It’s invisible!” We people need to think a little more about what isn’t visible. About air, about water, about love, and about death. Then we’ll live joyously

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and gratefully. It’ll be more than life—may I rot in hell—it’ll be total amnesty!

I go home in the morning to crash, and I see Vlada Yurevna lying on my sleeper couch, all pale. Kimza’s sitting next to her, checking her pulse. What’s going on? Miscarriage! My little Nikolai Nikolaevich didn’t pull through, and Kimza won’t get the world record for his science. And it’s all happened on the basis of nerves. Deputy Director Molodin figured out that Vlada was at Kimza’s, and he came over to plead guilty. On account of his official position, see, he just had to get a divorce. But, he said, they could go on living together as before—in the sense of getting laid. If she didn’t agree to this, he threatened to expose her for sexually corrupting an underdeveloped criminal (that is, me), and for the fact that, through me, she and Kimza planned to create a million lowbrow criminals in outer space.

That’s how I understood what happened. When he heard this, Kimza butted him in the stomach with his head and then beat the shit out of him with my aunt’s rubber douche syringe. Vlada had miscarried while the thief and I were getting drunk at the morgue!

From then on, I did things for Vlada as if she were my own, and I was her faithful servant. Those days, the stores were up to their asses in caviar and crabs. So in the morning, I’d do a round of pocketpicking on the Bukashka, and then go to the Eliseev market and buy something like real food. Twice a night, I’d take Vlada’s shit-pan to the can because it was really dangerous to walk along our big corridor. The problem was that our neighbor, Arkan Ivanych Jamais, was coming on to broads who lived there when they were on the communal toilet. He’d spy through the little window—he’d look, but never touch. He was fucked up, sexually speaking. He’d just listen to them pissing and spy on them. He’d also inform the police about

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what was going on in the apartment—especially about Kimza—how he’d sit on the pot and guffaw. So they dragged Kimza down to the Cheka. They wanted to know what was so funny. Kimza told them: “It always seems funny to me, Citizen Officer, that I, a human being, king of nature, with my great knowledge of the world, must always sit on a communal toilet like some sort of orangutan whenever I need to take a shit.” That’s how Kimza told off the Cheka.

To make a long story short, I nursed Vlada Yurevna through her illness. She was beginning to walk around again, and I was feeling like a hungry bird with a cold cock—jerked off at work, and fucked among friends. Would you believe: One of my balls ached for a week and got swollen. So I head over to the Grand Hotel to give it a squeeze and see what’s wrong with it (there was a full-length mirror in the hotel lobby). I go up to the mirror, take it out, and, fuck your mother, if it isn’t technicolored! A grayish-brownish-crimson color.

The doorman comes running right over—he has a gray beard and a nose the color of my balls. He hisses into my ear, and pokes me in the ribs: “Ugly mug! Scoundrel! Get the fuck out of here!! Do you want three years? Cover yourself up! Can’t you see over there—France herself is staring at you!”

I look and see that there’s an old broad standing on the stairs.

She’s all made up so that her cheeks are drooping, her mouth is wide open, and she’s pointing her camera at me. The doorman grabs me under the arm and drags me straight to the exit. He’s still hissing: “Provincial prick! You’d do better at a museum! Is that what you came to Moscow for?!”

I lifted a ten-ruble note from his inside pocket and handed it to him as a tip for the impromptu monologue. He smiled at me—the louse. “Come again, dear guest,” he said, “You’re always welcome!”

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That’s the state I was in. But I’m the sort of guy who decides to take action in situations where another guy would say it’s time to stick his dick to his temple and finish off his earthly existence with suicide. I was sleeping on the floor. But one day I just can’t take it any longer, so I rip my underwear into little pieces (burning my bridges behind me). I go down on my knees, bury my face in Vlada’s blanket, and say: “I can’t take this torture any more—have mercy on me or castrate me.” And what does she say? She doesn’t even seem surprised: She says she’d be happy to sleep with me, but nothing would come of it. She’s frigid. Don’t confuse that, asshole, with “fried fish.”

She says she can’t have an orgasm—and she doesn’t care anymore that she can’t—that’s how she’s been living with the Deputy Director.

Whenever he’d climb on top of her, she would just turn her mug away and feel sick to her stomach. But a husband is a husband—even if he does climb on top of you just once a month. So there I was, on my knees, with my face in her blanket, and I’m shaking. She says to me: “You would be better off sleeping with a fish, Nikolai. Women like me are an insult to men. Don’t think I begrudge it, though. Please, lie down next to me, take off your slippers.”

Well, I think to myself: Kolya-Nikolai, you can’t just shit water now, no way. Come on, let’s drink up! A lot of it I don’t remember clearly. I know I never would have resigned myself to just gazing at her, petting her, sucking on her. . . . I can’t remember exactly how I began—I recall that I was sawing away at her, remembering things the international thief had told me. He’d taught me that every woman is like a sleeping beauty: You have to knock hard against her crystal coffin with your dick so it will shatter into tiny crystals, and so that one of those crystal slivers sticks in the woman’s heart while another meditates on the head of your dick. So, I got hold of myself.

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And then suddenly I’m feeling such a powerful fucking force in me that I’m no longer knocking my magic wand in with a silver hammer.

I’m using a malachite sledgehammer instead. It’s not a dick I have now, it’s a laser. Believe it or not, it feels like it’s not just the two of us who are here together, but some third person as well—not me, not her (but on the other hand, it is just us). It was weird, a nightmare. I tell you, it was really scary. And I start to wonder: What if my one and only just ricochets off her crystal coffin? What if it just can’t handle this frigidity problem (fuck frigidity, may it put a chill into our landlady)?

There’s a whole lot I can’t remember clearly now—but I know I did finally figure out that I shouldn’t be chiseling away at Vlada with a pneumatic drill. I should be fashioning something delicately instead. Did you ever see that Chinese egg (the one that was a gift to Stalin)?1 Inside the egg, there’s another, and inside that one, there are ten more. And they’re all different, and all beautiful, and none have any cracks in them. I saw it once. I realized I had to fuck Vlada subtly and intricately, as if I were a jeweler. But she really was just like a fish—breathing evenly, feeling no pleasure. “You see, Nikolai?” she says, “see what I mean?” I’m almost crying over my sleeping beauty—but my pecker doesn’t lose heart (I’ll always respect it for that, and will do whatever I can to make things nice for it). Just when I’d finally begun to lose faith in my sausage, I began to hear something, sense something!

“Oh, Nikolai! This can’t be! This can’t be true! It can’t! It can’t!”

She’s getting louder and louder: she’s breathing like a “Felix Dzerzhinsky” steam locomotive on an upgrade, and doesn’t let up, not for a second!!

“Kolya, my own, this can’t be! You hear? It can’t!”

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And I’m chopping away as hard as I can, like they chop firewood in the movie Communist (you should see that flick, you really should).2 On behalf of all the guys on this earth and on all other inhabited worlds, I’m chopping and chopping and whispering in Vlada’s ear: “It can be! It can! It can!” And suddenly she bites into my lips and starts screaming: “No-o-o-ooo!” At that moment, I just pass out. When I regain consciousness, her eyes are closed, she’s pale, her cheeks are burning, she looks about ten years younger (that’s how much older than me she was). She’s passed out. I freak out. It looks like she’s not breathing. So I climb off her and run, just as I am, to fetch some water from the kitchen. I’ve forgotten I’m not wearing anything, and I bump into Arkan Ivanych Jamais. I walk right into him from behind with my wet dick, the shameful squealer. And he gets all excited: “I’ll have you arrested—you criminal, you nonentity!” he says. And I think to myself, “I—a nonentity? I, who just saved a woman from eternal frigidity?” I give him another whack on the ass with my dick and say we’ll talk more about it in the morning, and I run back with the water. I put a washcloth on Vlada’s forehead and some cotton wool with smelling salts under her nose. She opens her eyes and looks at me as if she doesn’t recognize me. But what she says is, “It seems you are my own.” I lie down beside her, hug her, and think: This is it—now the only thing that can separate us is a nuclear brawl—no other sort of disaster could do it—including my getting busted on the tram Annushka or the trolleybus Bukashka.

In the morning, Kimza comes to our place with a bottle in his hand, drunk and sobbing, he kisses me, calls me his alter ego, and laughs.

So I leave him alone for a while with Vlada. They have a talk, and he calms down. But whenever he gets drunk, he still always calls me his alter ego.

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We go on living. Everything’s fine. Twice I stole a whole paycheck from the Deputy Director. Kimza dragged his microscope home from the lab with all kinds of chemical compounds, so he could continue with his experiments: “Science,” he said, “is not a pedestrian— you can’t fucking stop it with a whistle. Nikolai, you’re going to have to wank off occasionally so we don’t lose time with our experiments.”

“Who’s going to pay me?” I ask. “The Revolutionary Red Cross?”

“We’re going to forge ahead with our experiments,” Vlada says, “and we’ll need sperm at least once a week.”

Well, I don’t mind giving up my jizz. There’ll always be enough of that good stuff to go around. By the way, I’m going to stop talking to you about love for a while. You probably wouldn’t remember it anyway. That’s why a human tries to fuck as often as possible—to remember, to jolt his brains yet again with that spark. One thing I will tell you, though, is that every night, and, at first, even during the day, Vlada and I were just knocked off our feet when we came together. Whoever regained consciousness first would shove smelling salts under the other’s nose. When I’d wake up, I’d ask her, “Well, what do you think, Vlada Yurevna, can this be true?

“No,” she’d say, “it can’t be. It just can’t be. Such a beautiful moment is not for humans. And please don’t use that terrible Russian word ‘finish’ when you mean ‘come.’ You make it sound as if there’s an end, when it’s infinity you’re talking about. It’s as if you’re asking me to kill somebody.” My response to this was: “It’s hard to tell the difference between killing and giving birth.” The other things we talked about, you don’t need to know. They’re intimacies.

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ut time moves on . . . They unmasked the Morganists, the Cosmopolitans were disenfranchised, Lysenko got his medal.1 Kimza managed to wangle a pension. Vlada Yurevna started working as head nurse at the Sklifosovsky Hospital, and I also started there as an orderly. Those were hard times. They surrounded me like a lynx on the Bukashka trolleybus, and on the Annushka tram, a rumor spread that an invisible pickpocket had turned up (I even heard one walrus-prick joking about it, saying maybe that’s why our money’s become invisible). Things were bad.

And Arkan Ivanych Jamais started ratting on us again. He squeezed out a report saying that Vlada Yurevna was living at my place without a residence permit, and that sexual banditry was flourishing in the apartment: people running around at night with naked dicks.

What a little slut he was! But you couldn’t touch him; they’d arrest you if you did. How I wanted to split him apart—all the way down to his asshole, so he’d fall into little bits and pieces. In the mornings, he’d come running into the kitchen, carrying the newspapers, and chewing his politics out loud:

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“Latin America is seething, Greece is seething, even Indonesia’s seething!” All this seething makes him tremble with excitement— any minute he’ll have an orgasm–the miserable little bitch. “It’s a crisis of the world capitalist system! Did you hear about it, Nikolai?!”

And every day, he brings two new broads to the apartment. He’s a ladies’ hairdresser. And on account of him, the viper, I get my ass hauled down to Number 38 Petrovka!2 The major says: “Confess at once—you practice onanism?”

For the first time in my life, I go ahead and confess: “Yes, I do.

However, there’s no article forbidding it—I know the criminal code by heart.”

His eyes pop out: “Why do you do it?”

“It’s habit—I’ve been hanging out in prison since I was twelve.”

“We have been informed that you and your neighbor examine it under a microscope.”

“Yes, we do.”

“Why, with what purpose?”

“It’s interesting. Have you ever seen it yourself?”

“I’m asking the questions here. What’s interesting about it?”

“Come on over sometime and have a little look.” That made him think a little.

He let me go finally. They would never have given him a warrant for my arrest anyway. “But you, Arkan Ivanych Jamais,” I think to myself, “I’m going to stick such a pair of rabbit ears on you that you’ll be farting soap bubbles from the balcony of your apartment. Just give me time. I’ll boil you and Indonesia into a wicked brew!”

At the time, Vlada Yurevna and I were working the same shift. I’d carry the stretchers, and sometimes I rode in the ambulance. After a while, something strange happened to me. I got so I just couldn’t

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steal anymore. I just couldn’t. Had I gotten sick? Maybe apathy had fucked my brains. At first I couldn’t figure it out, but finally I did: I was starting to feel sorry for people—two-legged people like myself. There wasn’t anything I didn’t see on the job. I saw people who’d been knifed, people who’d been shot, and people who’d been tossed from the ninth floor. I saw people who’d had acid spilled on them or had concussions. One dickhead had swallowed a shaving brush. Another had eaten a quarter-liter vodka bottle. A third told his broad, “If you screw around, I’ll pull your legs right out of your ass.” And he did pull one out, but the neighbors stopped him from getting the other. I carried her on a stretcher. I saw the way guys like me fall under cars and guzzle half-liters of vodka mixed with eau de cologne—to the point of blindness! So many of them drown while drunk, or scald themselves. People suffer such fucking torments!

I thought to myself: If all these things can happen to a person, one after another—they cut him up, punch out his liver, slash his eyes with a razor, and pull his legs out of his ass—how can I, shameful creature that I am, a wall-eyed good-for-nothing, how can I rob this person blind? It can’t go on like this!”

So I quit. That made me feel better. I even started going to the bathhouse. Around this time, Arkan Ivanych Jamais got sick with a lung inflammation, and asked Vlada Yurevna for some injections and a whole series of vitamins in exchange for money. That gave me an idea: By that time, I was a pro at giving injections myself. And you’d really have to admit that Arkan Ivanych Jamais was a human freak. He was covered all over with reddish-gray, thick hair—from his heels to his ears. You couldn’t give him an injection in the ass without shaving it. So I tortured him: didn’t use any soap, scraped him down. Lie down, I say, and stop seething. By then, I’d learned Nikolai Nikolaevich

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some biology at the lab, so I’d figured out that Arkan was the one who was the sexual bandit, not me. There was too much strength in Arkan Ivanych Jamais’s balls. Way too much! That’s why you got yourself a job working as a women’s hairdresser, bitch! And that’s why you spy on how your neighbors commit lawful sexual intercourse—you syphilitic leper! And that’s why you bring two unkempt broads home with you every day and never stop talking about politics, practically having an orgasm about how the colonies are seething, you wretch! You’re up to your ass in surplus hormones, you carbuncle! In brief, I managed to get my hands on some testosterone medication or some other kind of sex hormone. And for a whole month, I gave Arkan Ivanych Jamais daily injections that gradually transformed him (no joking) from a man into a woman.

I conducted scientific observations. I watched how his movements gradually became more delicate, he began to purr, he forgot to check the mail every other day, the scum. He didn’t roar on the telephone, as he used to, and the shaved patch on his ass didn’t grow back—so you could see the hormone was having its effect on his hair.

He’d say to me: “Kolenka, my kitty, why don’t you shave all of me—I want to be naked.”

“Fuck that, I’m not shaving you for free.”

“I’ll pay you, I promise.”

“Two hundred rubles.”

He gives me the money. I squeeze three tubes of shaving cream onto him, and use up two packets of razors, giving him a whole-body shave (since I’ve quit stealing, no harm in earning myself an extra kopeck). Arkan Ivanych Jamais began to look definitely better. His face became whiter, he filled out in the hips. When he walked along the corridor, he’d wiggle his shoulders like a prostitute and squint

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his eyes—a goddamned born-again! When he peeled potatoes, he’d sing, “I’m on fire—I don’t know why-y-y!”3 I got a little scared! So I rummaged through the criminal code to see whether there was an article there that covered turning a man into a woman. I didn’t find one, which made me think they’d nail me for serious bodily injury.

In the end, he was coming on to me: “Why don’t you rub my back; give me a massage—I’ll pay you the highest rate.” I probably took about five thousand in old money off him. One night, he ambushed me in the corridor, grabbed me by the balls, and dragged me into his bedroom. I socked him in the eye and he calmed down. Now he’s moved from the ladies’ hairdressers to the men’s.

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hen Stalin kicked the bucket.1 When I got the news, I headed over to the international thief ’s house. He was living on Pushkin Street. We hung out his window checking out the crowds—God, what a lot of people! My hands started to itch, even though I’d sworn off. It was like kasha out there! Everybody squeezed together—I could have gotten rich for life in that kasha. If only Stalin had died five years earlier! For pickpockets like me, such good fortune comes only once in a hundred years or so. As he looked down at the crowd, the international thief remembered pickpocketing back in ʼ96 at Khodynka, during Tsar Nikolai’s coronation.2 He was just a little kid then, but he managed to steal three hundred gold rubles off some amateurs.

After we had a drink, he cursed out Stalin: “Anyone else wouldn’t even keep his own prison cell in the shape Stalin kept the whole country. He was a real mob boss.” Believe it or not, I had no urge to touch Stalin’s body at the funeral.

I see you’re getting a little sleepy. No way! You’ve got me started, so now you’ll have to listen to the end. We’ll brew up some strong tea. The end is near. Getting close to present days. But if you open

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your big trap, scum, and leak what you’ve heard here, to anyone at all, I’ll eat you up and won’t even do an analysis of my shit afterward—fuck me in the nose if I’m lying. Understand? Drink up.

Don’t think I’m insulting you. I’m not mean, just nervous: There’s not another like me in the world—I’ll bet you a hundred rubles to one. There you sit: drinking, snacking on caviar, putting down a can of crabs like it’s government issue! You don’t seem to think the cured sturgeon’s worth a damn. But all this high-quality food comes to me special order—for important work as scientific subject and object. Oh, well. To your health! If you want, I’ll set you up with a job in the Drosophila lab. No, those flies won’t give you an erection—you’re thinking of champagne flies. They’re not breeding them yet at our lab. And an erection is when you get a hardon—you ignorant lout. How am I supposed to know why you get an erection from champagne? Who do you think I am—Trotsky?

You bastard—I hope I never have to come before a public prosecutor like you—the case would go on for a year. I wouldn’t survive to the first transit camp. Just be quiet and listen, wretch!

Next came the period of the general amnesty. My aunt wrote that she’d been twirling dick in a shirt with the warden, Yurka. She’d left the camp and was living with him. And they’d yanked Kimza back into the Academy of Sciences Institute, telling him: Take back the laboratory—we’re chasing Molodin the fuck out of here. Well, well, that’s how Nikita turned things around!3 Kimza, of course, pulled Vlada and me back up with him. And I began to live the really good life. Each month, I raked in five hundred to six hundred rubles in new money. Not the old stuff, asshole. That’s the kind of price Kimza was getting for my jizz. I assured Vlada that there would be enough sperm for her, plus two research institutes. And some complicated

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experiments got under way. The lab began to concern itself with sexology. Wanking is nothing! That’s trivial. They hung measuring devices on me—sensor wires—and soon there was no free space left on my dick.

I sit there all hooked up with wires, I keep an eye on all the instruments and the various screens. And when I come, the little arrows run around and blink some message. It’s interesting. Kimza screams: “Attention—Orgasm!” and records my biocurrents in a notebook.

He’s made some significant discoveries—that there’s an enormous hidden energy in me during orgasm. And if you harness it, as they say, it’ll be more effective than the atomic bomb in helping people to achieve their civic goals. Understand?

They set up various experiments. In one, as soon as I become aroused, a little electric train with a little motor starts running around a track. It starts slow, and then gets going faster and faster. When I interrupt masturbation, the little train comes to a standstill—as if rooted to the spot. When I start up again, it gets going again. They bought it at Children’s World (those scum have figured out what sells, but what if they find out what it’s being used for?). Okay. As soon as I’d announce to Kimza, “Ready for orgasm,” that little electric train would just about jump off the track. It would run around in little circles, and then take a long time to stop. The academician (the same one as before) would run over to take a look.

He was in awe: “There’s so much yet to be discovered in humanity!” he’d say. They eventually worked out the formula for the energy I was producing and passed it on to the engineers, so they’d have something to hook their horns into. For them, the biggest problem was how to store this sort of energy, keep it from getting lost, understand? The damned stuff runs all over your body and escapes into Nikolai Nikolaevich

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the atmosphere—doesn’t even stay in your memory. It’s worse than thermonuclear plasma.

The academician said: “Carry on with your experiments, my friends. Man can solve even this problem, as long as the Lysenkos don’t interfere.”

I agreed and said: “They should have exterminated Lysenko a long time ago with Politania.”

“What’s Politania?” he asked.

“It’s cream for crotch-crabs.”

“What sort of creature is that?”

I explained it as well as I could. The academician was amazed. He said: “No matter what sort of shit humanity lives in, no matter what nasty animals bite him, he keeps reaching for the stars, the stars— the audacious, magnificent bastard.”

My answer to this was: “If the crabs get the best of you, then it won’t be the stars you’ll be reaching for—you’ll get your ass down to the pharmacy as fast as you can, and you won’t be too shy to ask for Politania.”

In short, those days I was raking in a tidy sum. I sure as hell wasn’t the Dniepr Hydroelectric Station—putting out energy for free. If you want that little electric train to run, I have to be paid for my second job. I see you’ve got your trap wide open again, and of course, you’re wondering how this energy can be put to military uses. Well, what have you come up with? Uh huh. You say a whole infantry division lies down in the trenches, jerks off, and an electric current runs along the barbed wire, interrupting the enemy’s attack. Have I understood you correctly? All the soldiers are connected to each other in alternating or direct current. Well, what happens if there’s a short? You haven’t thought it through

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adequately, have you? If there’s a short, the general will have to go looking around for a fuse to replace the one that’s burned out.

And while he’s sticking in a homemade fuse, the fascists will arrive.

And that’ll be the end of the whole fucking division. You’d make as good an engineer as my ass would make a drama club! Now I once asked the old academician: “What would happen if all of male humanity began jerking off on command, and they all came at the same second? The orgasm would be comradely, as they say, and group-based as well. What would happen?”

That kind little old man looked at me and said: “It’s hard to predict. Such highly rhythmic action requires the most intense selfdiscipline plus collective consciousness, plus, to be sure, a unified sense of goal. As long as the world is divided into two camps, it can’t happen. When there is one world, my boy, then we’ll see. Then we’ll do some ‘jerking off,’ ha ha ha, as you permitted yourself to say. But if, my dear dreamer, one considers the question seriously, one would have to say that an experiment carried out on such a global scale might lead to a very sad end—since the mass of pleasure obtained would be equal to plus-minus infinity.”

And you, you blind intestine, you managed to think up an army division with circuit breakers. What you have to realize is that technology is not a penis—it never stands still—not even for a second.

We will not always be obtaining our sexual energy manually as we do now. This method will remain only on the most backward collective farms—the little peasant will go out into the dark of night to take a piss: He’ll be beating away on his skin piston with one hand, while in his other hand he’ll be holding a flashlight to light up the path to the outhouse. Note that he won’t be pissing from the porch any longer because culture will have progressed beyond that.

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In the period of general amnesty, we started a new bunch of experiments. For these, I demanded another two thousand for piecework.

I reminded Kimza of the energy crisis: “We’ll soon be out of coal and oil. You can’t get to the stars on firewood, and anyway, there’ve been articles lately about how the taiga’s disappearing into shit.” You want to know in general terms what sort of experiments we were doing then? Well, they’d shove two electrodes into my head. How? God, you’re such a bonehead—I could fuck your fourteenth chromosome doggy-style. You want to know how they can fuck a man’s brains with electrodes, which, according to your data, are used to weld the metal grave-fences at the Vagankov cemetery? Are you completely screwed up, or are you just pretending? I could make a chamber pot out of your stupid skull—all I’d have to do is plug up the holes. Keep your pants on, and I’ll tell you.

In one experiment, they whacked two electrodes into the back of my head—they were thinner than the hair on your crotch, and made out of pure gold. I would sit myself down in a soft easy chair with wires running from the electrodes to this apparatus, then Kimza would order me to think about soccer. I got a hard-on as soon as I did—something that never happened to me at Luzhniki Stadium.

I realized right away that what was giving me this high had nothing to do with soccer. Kimza would yell to the lab assistants to tie my hands down, so I wouldn’t wank, and, would you believe, I’d have an orgasm anyway. We won!

Looking back on it now, it might seem that success came easily to our lab. But really, we suffered agonies. They kept poking all over my skull, looking for the brain cell that’s exclusively in charge of fucking. But they just couldn’t find it, the whores! What didn’t they do to me those days?! Sometimes my legs would be twitching all over,

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other times, I’d break down and cry; other times, I’d be whinnying like a horse. Once I jumped up and hit Kimza between his horns with a giant enema syringe, I broke about ten retorts, and I kissed Vlada Yurevna in front of everybody. They had to call in the janitors to tie me down.

No matter what we did, we just couldn’t find the cell—as if it just didn’t exist at all. I introduced the hypothesis that maybe this brain cell isn’t in the head at all, but has made itself at home in the head of the penis. They considered this hypothesis for a while, but it didn’t receive a prick’s worth of support. Again they went to work on my head, and, by Women’s Day, they had fucked me up, down, and sideways.4 My left cheek was smiling at my ears, I’d lost the use of one hand and a leg. Since everything in the lab was being done in such a rush, they kept pulling out the electrode and forgetting where to stick it back in. They’d poke around, poke around, and then stick it in the wrong place again. All of Women’s Day, I was temporarily laid up like a fucking paralytic. I didn’t even get a chance to pamper Vlada Yurevna—she had to feed me with a spoon. And the academician reprimanded Kimza. What the fuck could we do.

After the holiday, they smelted me down. Only then did they finally locate the fucking little cell. That’s when they started using remote control on my psychics. The academician told me at a closed session: “I’m going to show you to my colleagues, Nikolai.” Next thing I knew, they’d shoved about ten of those electrodes into me, into different centers of feeling, and brought me out on stage. Kimza’s at the remote controls. I’m performing pretty well. I laugh, I cry, I babble nonstop. Suddenly I have a tantrum, and just as suddenly I get all sweet and friendly. And then—I’ll be a bitch, I didn’t want to do it—I unbutton my fly, take out my rough horny thing, and Nikolai Nikolaevich

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start pissing all over the front row. I walk along the front of the stage, pissing, and all the time I’m thinking: That’s it, I’ve had it. They’re going to slap me in the cooler for this (one of our guys in camp got three years for pissing off the balcony into the orchestra section at the club). Or, I think, they’ll sack me. But when I finish pissing, you wouldn’t believe the stormy applause these scientists gave me—they thought I was experimentalizing my feature number! Soon after that, I bought a car, a motorboat, and half a house on the Volga. Whenever I’d get time off, I’d go fishing. The best thing in life, I tell you, is to fuck your beloved woman in a birch forest, and forget about all that damned biology (may it rot in the grave wearing sandals).

May it rot, I say, because here’s what they thought up next: Kimza discovered that during orgasm, I emit or radiate (who the fuck knows which) elemental particles. An explosion of enormous energy occurs in my brain, and that’s why we pass out. To observe this, they want to lock me up in a magnetic room for fifteen days and nights (it’s called a “Wilson chamber”).5 At first, I’m stubborn and refuse, but then Kimza says, “If we catch any quarks on you, the Nobel Prize is guaranteed.” So I agree to it. A man can get used to any kind of work.

Any other questions? Oh, yes, by this time, the international thief is working at our lab—I arranged that myself. They’re experimenting with him on how to cure impotence and he’s earning pretty good money. What else do you need to know? What are quarks? They’re the most basic particles from which everything is made. Our next goal is to catch quarks during orgasm and show up the Americans.

This is top secret, understand? Because the country that discovers quarks first can obliterate the whole world at once, and rebuild it again from those very same quarks. Let’s drink to science!

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o, stop! I don’t want to drink to science. I have a great spiritual grudge against science. I am grateful, of course, for the good fortune of meeting Vlada Yurevna, I’m grateful for the fact that I quit stealing, and grateful for the comfort of my idiotic little job in our socialist camp. Thanks! But, when you come right down to it, do I personally need this science? Do you really need it? Look—there goes an old, half-destitute woman down the street, dragging her withered leg behind her. Does she need science? Yes, she does! But she needs a leg-reviving science, not a science that sticks electrodes up your ass. Why don’t you run up to her for curiosity’s sake, give her some money, and say: “Grandma, I have this friend. Want to know how he makes his living? In a secret institute . . . How can I put it politely?” Tell her this way: your friend’s job is to grab his pee-pee, shake it by the ears, and hand over the stuff from which teenagers are made. Run and tell her, and I’ll sit here and wait to hear what she says. Tell her that science has condemned your friend to do that. Go ahead and run, Pal! Ru-u-u-n!

Your legs haven’t withered away, have they? What was the little old lady’s response? Don’t lie, because I’ll check out what she said.

Nikolai Nikolaevich

That’s right, she gave the right answer. So I’m a fool, and God, I hope, will forgive me. Maybe I truly know not what I do? I can’t understand whether I know or know not. But I must understand before Judgment Day. That won’t be any People’s Court, where a person can play the fool and pretend he’s deaf and dumb.1 On Judgment Day, when the archangels start to break you down (they’re People’s Judges), great gushes of truth will fly out of you in all directions so people in the next cycle of history will understand they should not repeat your mistakes. If you happen to see that old woman again, give her financial support—I’ll pay you back—and find out from her: What should a person do if he can’t figure out whether he knows or knows not what he’s doing. Ask her. On the other hand, why should I feel tormented, like a dark forest over a river, when our academician himself doesn’t understand fuck-all (after all, he’s the one with the star burning in his forehead).2 I’ll tell you, all in good time, about the heart-to-heart I had with the academician. For now, just stretch out on the sofa like a Persian shah and listen. If you interrupt me again with your stupid questions, I’ll pour cognac all over you and the sofa and set fire to both. The sofa will be okay, but you’ll certainly do some dancing.

We had this lab-assistant-informer in our lab. She squealed on people because she was niece of the Head of Personnel and dreamed of a career in science later on. These days, what else does a stupid person like this need in order to have such a career, besides a willingness to squeal? They need to discover some consistent pattern in the data, otherwise, you can squeal on anyone (even your mommy and daddy), and your chances of seeing a job after the institute are as likely as seeing your own brains. I know, the saying used to be: “as likely as seeing your own ears,” but they’ve discovered that you

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can see your own ears in a mirror. Try seeing your brains. No, don’t get up from the sofa. Don’t go tearing off to look in the mirror, you blockhead! The problem is: How do you find a consistent pattern in anything? Hold on, and I’ll tell you how.

This young maiden, the lab assistant and squealer, was named Polenka. A flat-assed heifer. Once she came up to me and said: “Nikolai Nikolaevich, I noticed that certain books have a positive effect on your erection, and others have a negative effect—sometimes delaying orgasm fifteen to twenty minutes from the time masturbationization begins. Would you be willing to help me conduct some experiments designed to reveal the consistent pattern in such phenomena? What’s my hypothesis? Well, what do people have in mind when they say a book they’re reading is interesting or not interesting? They’re unconsciously ascertaining the presence of an element of excitement in the upper nervous system—or the inhibition thereof, in the case of a lack of interest. Right? So let’s stop your disorderly reading, so that everything will happen according to Pavlov’s theories.3 I can pay you extra money for your participation in the experiment. The list of literature has already been compiled. Well?”

“Go ahead,” I say, “I’ve come to enjoy reading books—but there’s so much shit being written these days. It’ll probably slow me down.”

“Nikolai Nikolaevich, your penis is terribly sensitive to aesthetic phenomena. This is the first time I’ve encountered anything like it.”

“Have you encountered many?” I ask, smiling.

Polenka was offended. “Let’s just agree not to talk about things that have no relation to the experiment.”

“Fine. What shall we start with?”

“I really like Yury German’s books about Cheka agents. I’ve loved them since childhood. Really exciting books! Here’s a novel about Nikolai Nikolaevich

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Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky. I’ll fasten sensors to your penis— one for temperature, the other for kinetics. Your job is to read and await erection.”

“Sensors get in the way.”

“It can’t be done without sensors. I need a graphic readout of all indicators.”

“All right, give me your Yury German and his Cheka agents.”

This conversation took place just before one of our most crucial experiments. Kimza had just received an order from the Director of the Institute and the Party Committee (they, in turn, had received this order from the Central Committee—practically from Suslov himself).4 The order was to inseminate some guy’s wife, at any cost.

The guy was either some sort of influential politician from the Swedish Social Democrats, or he was an American billionaire who was a big friend of the Soviet Union (Kimza explained it all to me, but I’ve forgotten which it was). Anyway, the Central Committee had sniffed out the research we’d done after Nikita rehabilitated us, and they’d decided to warm their hands over our fire. They needed foreign currency, after all. The foreign Communist parties were all sitting out there like baby birds in their nests—with their beaks wide open, wanting something to eat. So get your two-veined dick moving, Nikolai Nikolaevich, and inseminate. Serve the cosmos! Provide information that will help cure impotence among nuclear physicists and secretaries of regional party committees.

So they bring into the laboratory either the wife of the Swedish Social Democrat or the wife of the American friend—I don’t remember which. They sit her down in a special chair and order me to begin. The lab has been warned that upon the command “Attention—Orgasm!” everyone must take his place. The woman being

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inseminated by the Soviet Union relaxes and smiles. It’s time to turn off Levitan’s voice on the radio. . . . Stop the jokes, wipe your hands, walk on tiptoes, and realize the importance of the moment!5 Picture this scene. The Swedish lady is sitting there, relaxed and smiling, blissfully preparing herself for insemination. The lab assistants are standing at attention next to her opened womb. Her husband (I’m guessing it was the friend of the Soviet Union) is downstairs in the foyer, nervously picking at a bouquet of roses. And here I am, messing around reading about a bunch of “angelic” little Cheka agents! I get scared! People from the Central Committee are observing the insemination. Suslov himself is spying on us. The State Bank is all ready to count the foreign currency. And I’m thinking to myself: Any minute, Kolya, they’re going to pick you up and drive you down to Lubyanka for sabotage. So I ring the bell, and Kimza and Polenka come in (Vlada wasn’t there that day—she’d been called over to the Academy of Sciences).

“Misfire,” I say to Kimza, “it just won’t stand up for me.”

“What are you thinking about? You’re supposed to be at work!” he hisses.

“I’m thinking about the Civil War and Red Terror,” I answer, truthfully.

“You jackass! You want us all to get hauled off to a monastery!6 Start over again, and try—the devil take you and your thoughts— try thinking about something more pleasant.” Just then, Kimza cast a look at Polenka and changed the last phrase to “something less significant—think about ballet on ice, think about ‘Snow Fantasy.’ ” “Ice,” I say, “doesn’t arouse me. Neither does snow.”

“Then think about a woman’s bathhouse! Don’t you understand what a critical moment this is? They could liquidate our whole Nikolai Nikolaevich

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frigging laboratory! Try to imagine that you’re working as an attendant at the women’s bathhouse!”

“Okay, okay. Just stop hissing at me.”

“Hurry up!”

“Hurry?” I say, “Rex and Fido can come like that. I’m not a dog, I’m a man! And a Soviet man at that, which means that my nerves are shot, historically speaking.”

“You’ve read too many books, you stupid idiot! Get down to business!”

Kimza leaves. Polenka is neither dead nor alive. She thanks me for not squealing on her, and she slips me a volume of stories by Maupassant.

“Read this,” she says, “it’s very interesting.”

And believe it or not, it got hard right away, like a fire hose on a frosty day—you couldn’t unbend it. Got it up on the very first page, and I’m a fast reader (sometimes the prosecutor would take a whole month, day and night, to write up my case, and I could read it and sign it in ten minutes). So I’m reading Maupassant, and I don’t understand a thing, but I get a sense the plot is leading up to fucking.7 The husband goes away for the day on a business trip and orders Jeanette not to be bored while he’s away. Well, she’s a complete fool and an obedient wife. If Maurice has ordered me not to be bored, she thinks, well then, I won’t be. I love him and I can’t disobey him. At that moment, a chimney sweep walks down the street. She speaks to him softly, leaning out the window so far her tits almost fall right out onto the Paris street: “Pierre, dear, stop in and clean my chimney.”

Well, Pierre stops in and cleans her chimney. That’s his job. What an amazing writer this Maupassant is! I didn’t guess anything until

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after the husband comes back from his business trip. He arrives home, and the next morning, he says to his wife, Jeanette: “Jeanette, I’m covered in soot—all the way down to our dear little friend. What’s going on?” Even though she’s a complete fool, she figures out what to do (at such moments, my friend, there are no fools).

“Have you been sleeping, my kitty, with a beautiful Negress?”

Oh, what a good laugh they had over her joke. They hold onto their bellies laughing, and Maurice climbs back up on top of his wife, Jeanette. And when he’s leaving for work the next morning, feeling completely satisfied with himself, he says: “Please, little bird, invite the chimney sweep over. Our chimney needs fixing.”

Unfortunately, that’s where the story ended, but I was in good form. So I picked up the test tube in my other hand (I could already hear Kimza yelling “Attention—Orgasm!”) and I got that lady pregnant instantly. My Nikolai Nikolaevich settled down and took charge there in her fallopian tube, and the lady delivered safely right in our clinic. I’ve seen the kid. A nice guy. He’s about twenty years old now.

The only trouble is, he picks pockets, even though his mommy and daddy are rich. Takes after me. Kimza told me. Maybe he was joking.

Anyway, I decided this lady couldn’t have been American because Swedish Social Democrats are afraid to have relations with our dissidents. I figured it out logically.

Right after this, Polenka realized what was what, and slipped me one little book after another for her experiments. What didn’t I read in the course of that whole experimental year? Polenka came up with so much data, she couldn’t make any sense of it. Given that she lacked a research director, there was no way she could reach any conclusions about a consistent pattern. She just didn’t have it in her. So she went and told the academician about her work, Nikolai Nikolaevich

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including a list of the books I had read. The list had three columns: “Erection,” “Half-erect,” and “Absence of Erection.” In the first column, since you’re interested, were the following authors and books: A Hunter’s Sketches by Turgenev, Gogol’s Viy and A May Night, Othello (the part where the black man gets jealous), The Golden Ass (which is all about fucking), How the Steel Was Tempered, The Three Musketeers, Oblomov, Chukovsky’s Buzzy-Wuzzy Fly (what got me excited was when the little spider dragged the fly into the corner), Love of Life by Jack London (Lenin loved that writer), Napoleon (written by some academician), Chekhov’s The Steppe, Pushkin’s poems: “Frost and Sun—a Marvelous Day” and “The Tale of the Sleeping Beauty,” Kon-Tiki, Popular Astronomy, The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food, and (here’s what’s really strange) a little book from tsarist times, How to Mend Your Own Shoes, which gave me such an incredible erection I couldn’t come down for a long time.8 I remember it was pleasant to read Anna Karenina. Although when I thought about the end of the book, it wasn’t just that I couldn’t get it up, but somehow I just felt like laying my dick down on the tracks and letting the tram Annushka run over it and end the matter once and for all (too bad they moved the Annushka tram out of Moscow). I remember that a book of memoirs was in that first category, but I don’t remember whose. I’ve always liked reading memoirs, and I’ve noticed that the people I find disgusting never leave any memoirs behind—rotten bastards like Hitler, Stalin, Dzerzhinsky, my first prosecutor Cheburdenko, Beria, our house manager Shpokov, and other worthless types.

In the end, even I couldn’t understand the results we were getting.

My erections were not being caused exclusively by the fuck scenes— if only that were so! But no, even Maupassant affected me in various

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ways. Sometimes the effect was depressingly inhibiting, sometimes arousing to the point of frenzy. The same with Lev Tolstoy, not to mention Dostoevsky. Even though in books like The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot, everybody goes crazy from fucking and loving, still, when reading them, my senses faded, I became lost in thought, and started feeling really sad. But no sooner did I lay my hands on The Baron Munchausen than it stood up like a bayonet—always ready for battle!

I’d get half an erection from the books of Katayev, Kaverin, Trifonov, Katharine Susannah Prichard, James Aldridge, Theodore Dreiser, Henri Barbusse, Maxim Gorky. I got the same results from Quiet Flows the Don, from André Stil, from Luka Mudishchev, from stories about the cosmonauts in space, and from two journals, Health and Knowledge Is Power. I can’t list all the titles. And there wouldn’t be any point, anyway—maybe later you’ll understand why.

Want to know the books that left it flaccid as a frozen earlobe— not at all like a battle-ax? I’ll answer briefly: works as different from one another as night and day—ranging from Socialist Realism (that’s what Polenka called it) to the most unexpected books. What can Siberia, by Georgi Markov, have in common with Don Quixote?

It’s a sin even to compare the two. But I didn’t get any sort of erection from either one—even though Siberia just about made me puke, while Don Quixote made me cry like a baby for three weeks, both at work and at home. Or take any work by Zakrutkin-SemushkinPrilezhaev-Voskresenskaya-Safronov-Gribachov-Chakovsky (don’t confuse this idiot with the author of Buzzy-Wuzzy Fly). Or take any Kremlin Clock by any Simonov or Dzhambul—you’d never be able to list them all, and they’re all alike, no matter how fucking hard they try (especially Simonov).9 They’re all the same, I repeat, and if you Nikolai Nikolaevich

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read twenty pages of any one of them, you’ll feel like someone’s pulling your soul out of your body with pliers, emptying you out. Sometimes it’s because of their inability to think up anything interesting; sometimes it’s such bullshit, it makes your eyes bug out. Mainly, it’s that they try to lie in such a way that we readers and the Central Committee will think: Goodness, what a nice life we have here in our Soviet land! Or, goodness, how conscientiously our workers and peasants are working! Their shift isn’t even over yet, and they’re already sighing, “If only it were morning so we could be off to work again.” Stinking shit-pans! You can’t lead me around by the nose like that! I’ve seen life in all parts of the Soviet Union! But to hell with them! There’s no reason anyone should get an erection from the crap they write! So why did our experiments put them in the same category as Don Quixote, or Gulliver’s Travels, or The Captain’s Daughter, or Dead Souls, and lots of other books? That’s what was incomprehensible and strange. . . .

Finally, Polenka had to fess up to the academician. He looked through the data from our experiments, verified the statistics, collated them himself, and said to Polenka, in my presence: “You do possess scientific curiosity. So why weren’t you able to get any results? I’ll be brief. Real literature has a relationship not to Nikolai Nikolaevich’s penis, but to his spirit—although your human subject is quite phenomenally susceptible to arousal. He sometimes gets an erection from hearing the two words ‘women’s toilet,’ to say nothing of Maupassant. Isn’t that true, Kolya?”

My eyes just bugged out—I was so amazed at his shrewdness.

What was he doing, I wondered, spying on me?

“Well, Polenka, you didn’t bring your work to completion, and you didn’t uncover any consistent pattern in the data. But you are

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capable and curious, and you don’t have scruples about the methods you use, so a wonderful career in science awaits you. Are you yourself interested in literature?”

“So-so,” said Polenka.

“That’s very bad. Remember: literature relates to the human spirit, not to Nikolai Nikolaevich’s prick. And you, Kolya, have made me happy. Man is not as simple-minded and low as he sometimes seems. Even in you, you bum, there’s a divine spark! There is!” Then, after ordering Polenka to leave the room so she wouldn’t eavesdrop, the academician said to me: “You must be getting pretty tired of this work?”

“Yes,” I said, “it’s about time to hang it up. After reading Don Quixote, jerking off has become difficult and even scary. What am I doing sitting here at a time when we should be continuing the war against windmills?”

“I understand you, Kolya, I understand. However, there’s an even worse torment weighing on my soul, though it’s a sin to even compare the two. You simply jerk off, to use your expression. And what do we do? Answer me.”

“Jacking off? Is that it?” I ask, not thinking, as I should have, and the academician almost hit the ceiling. “That’s absolutely right! That’s it—jacking off! Jack-ing off! Absolutely jacking off. All of Soviet and world science, Kolya, is nothing but jacking off—ninety percent of it! And Marxism-Leninism? It’s obvious onanism. Yours at least is harmless. But how much blood has been spilled by MarxismLeninism—just in its laboratory (that is, in Russia)? An entire oceanful! An ocean! And have we ever produced any beneficial, useful jizz? Not a drop. Everything all around us is jacking off!

The Party jerks off. The government engages in onanism. Science is Nikolai Nikolaevich

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masturbating, and it seems to everyone that, any minute, some crippled Kimza will start yelling: ‘Attention—Orgasm!’ and things will get easier, the bright future will begin. That’s Communism.

Well, Kolya, you have done your jerking off and goofing off, and now it’s time to stop. But the man in you, Kolya, hasn’t died—just as humanity has not perished from the jacking off of Soviet Power.

The time will come, I hope, when even Soviet Power too will ‘hang it up,’ as you say, hang it up and begin to occupy itself with real business. ‘Enough jerking off,’ it’ll say. We’ve jerked ourselves dry, and now it’s time to undertake a living and worthy deed. Eventually, God willing, we’ll be able to look back upon these many years of jerking off with a smile. What would you like to do now, Nikolai— other than onanism?”

And you know, when I thought about it, I had to ask myself: What else could I possibly do—having sat out half my life in prison camps, and having jerked off for so many years at the institute? I thought it over, and then I remembered how, for some odd reason, I got an erection like a bayonet from that old beat-up book that had come out in tsarist times under the title How to Mend Your Own Shoes.

“I’m going to work as a shoemaker,” I say, “I like that sort of simple work, and I’m not going to use foul language anymore. I’m sick of it.”

“Smart boy! Smart boy! Our shoemakers have practically become extinct. Nobody knows how to nail a heel-plate on properly—we’ve done so much jerking off during these last sixty years. Go, Kolya, go and mend shoes. You have my blessing.”

“How will you get along without me?”

“We’ll manage,” he said, “Let youth do the wanking. You can’t do science in white gloves. In my own time, I wanked, even though I was married, and I had no compunctions about it. And what did

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I achieve, Kolya? Did the secret of life become more understandable to me? No, it didn’t. Just the opposite! I’ll tell you a secret, Kolya” (the academician started whispering his painful secret into my ear), “I think my lifelong work in science has not been in vain, because, thank God, I understand that the secret of life has remained absolutely incomprehensible to me, and I’m certain that nobody will ever understand it. Yes, indeed! Nobody! Just to achieve that understanding—it’s been worth living through all these terrible years. Give me a call. I’ll come to your place to get my shoes repaired. And I’ll send my friends.”

At that moment, the monitor lit up: “Prepare for orgasm.” The academician left. And you know what I’m going to do tomorrow, my friend? You’re never going to guess, you drunken idiot. I’m going to go to work tomorrow, gather all my books, turn on the signal “Ready for work,” and slip away quietly. I’ll slip out and imagine how Kimza will yell for the whole lab to hear, “Attention—Orgasm!” and there’ll be nobody there to come. Kimza will walk into my little cubicle, look around, and see my note: “I’ve hung it up. Let Fidel Castro do the wanking, since he has nothing better to do. Signed Nikolai Nikolaevich.”

Kimza will rush over to Vlada Yurevna. “What are we to do, Vlada? Science will stop now because of your Kolenka.” And Vlada Yurevna will give the same answer this time as she gave so many times in the past when I couldn’t come, no matter how hard I tried: “Science won’t stop, Anatoly Magomedovich. This lab has accumulated a lot of raw data. Let’s get to work on the data.”

Moscow, 1970

Nikolai Nikolaevich

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A Medical History

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CAMOUFLAGE

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ou may be a lieutenant general, Grisha, but you’re still my brother. So if you don’t believe me and can’t stop laughing so hard your epaulets shake and your medals jangle, then in my book, you’re no better than a dog’s cock, even if you are a general. Yes! This happened on our Bonus Day (they say Karl Marx himself thought it up, but this was hidden from the working class during the cult of personality).1 Don’t pull a face with that general’s mug of yours when I say “cult of personality.” We know why that cult has become so dear to your heart. You know yourself that you’re a parasite—you with your salary, your dacha, your own limo, dammit, as well as cod fillet. Do I have to spell it out for you—that you’re a parasite, if all you do all day is yell “Ten-shun!” at people? Please! Nobody’s getting ready to attack you! Nobody!

Who the hell needs you? America? America can’t even take care of itself! And even if, let’s say, it did defeat you, what would it do with you and one-sixth of the whole world?2 Why should it burden itself with all our drunks, riffraff, thieves, and Party-military idiots? That makes no sense! China, you say? Weren’t you the sons of bitches who taught the Chinese to drive our tanks and fit their slanty eyes

Camouflage

to our gun sights? Not you? Then be quiet, and listen to how they fucked your brother in the ass. No, I’m not talking about in the “triangle” (Directorship/Trade-Union Committee/Party Committee) or the Sports Lottery—I mean “fucked” in the literal sense.3 And no, I don’t know where the cops were when it happened— what a stupid question!

So, Bonus Day, may it rot. I was on my way down to our underground accounting department to get my bonus. Don’t pretend you don’t know why accounting is underground. You know what’s going on, even though this isn’t your territory. But to give you a better grasp of the details of life here, I’ll let you in on a few military secrets. We who are working above ground are struggling to make this city of ours, Staroporokhov, dear Old Dusty, look like the dirtiest, most amoral, and most deceitful city in the whole country.

In a word, we are camouflaging, while down below, they’re making hydrogen bombs (our comrade foreigner is clueless, of course).

I myself am a camouflager of the eighth (highest) rank. My work is alcoholism. I’m a brigade leader. When it’s payday, my brigade gets drunk, spreads out through the city, smashing the mugs of fellow citizens (who are also camouflagers by profession). My job as boss is to sprawl on the bench beside Lenin’s statue and snooze all night.

Right after I finished training and went to work in this sphere, my wife, Duska, and I started having problems. Since I was always at work, and since, at work, I naturally had to drink nonstop from payday to payday, there was never time to fuck Duska. Mornings, members of my brigade were busy using the hair of the dog to cure our hangovers. Then there were always meetings, self-criticism sessions, and so forth. Social obligations also took up a lot of time. I would’ve quit my job as boss a long time ago if it weren’t for one son of a bitch

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in the brigade. I’ve yet to settle accounts with him. But more about him later.

So, I was having trouble with my wife. And I wasn’t the only one—it’s been Hades itself at home for all my alcoholics. Horror.

Darkness . . . We are the shock-workers of communist labor.4 Meanwhile, our kids are turning out like ping-pong balls at the SportsLottery draw. Something’s always not right: retarded growth, slow reactions, negative reflexes, rickets, chromosomes missing, born deaf or one-eyed or six-fingered, or with the left hand on the right and the right hand on the left. You can’t even list all the problems. Teterin set the record: his little Igor has two tongues, and both can talk.

Don’t act so surprised, brother: your job guarding the Berlin Wall and reeducating the Czechs is nothing compared to the job we’re doing—camouflaging the nation from the Pentagon’s eyes. I repeat: don’t act so surprised. Our electronics guys have it all figured out— they’ve done the calculations and written the program. Just when an American satellite is about to fly over Staroporokhov, lines form outside our food stores, making it look like they’re selling meat, butter, and sausage. A bus bangs down the street, hitting every fucking pothole, young pioneers come marching by, singing songs about Lenin, “who is eternally alive.” Georgians are out there on the street selling carnations, hookers run around buying themselves imported sheepskin coats. Fights break out in the parks. The bathhouses are steaming, and, of course, the theaters and dance halls are busy. In a word, the full appearance of reality! Camouflage, brother! Camouflage!

Some mornings, if I wake up a little more rested and sober than usual after the night shift, I have myself a bowl of cabbage soup with garlic and sour cream, and go out for a stroll along our Frunze Embankment. I sit myself down on a little hill overlooking the Camouflage

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Pushka River, look around at our humped roadways and louse-gray houses, and I’m able to see the general shabbiness, the wretchedness of my fellow citizens and their miserable kids. And my heart swells with pride. We’ve accomplished so much in these few years!

So fucking much! So many camouflage projects brought to completion: hospitals, schools, nursery schools, movie theaters (where they show such crap you want to run home to your television, but there’s nothing but camouflage on TV either).

But I digress. A lot has been accomplished in recent years. Take the new pool, for example: it’s an ocean, not a swimming pool.

Three guys from my brigade have already drowned there while on duty. Spies, diplomats, even CIA guys drop by the pool for a swim.

America’s top-secret satellites fly over. And what do those snoops get for all their efforts? The Pentagon can suck its own green snot if it wants to, but they’ll never figure out that nuclear reactors have been installed beneath the pool. Or that the water from the pool cools the reactors (and it is filtered and then recycled back into the pool).

Understand? Now that’s camouflage! But the swimming pool’s nothing. Take our stadium, for example. The Party Committee in charge of assembling the first hydrogen bombs is located right below it. Let’s say, there’s a game going on up above. The camouflager-fans are yelling, “Goal! Goal!” Meanwhile, down below, there’s a Party Committee meeting in session. They’re adopting resolutions to increase work quotas in honor of the Sixtieth Anniversary of Soviet Power, thereby exceeding the plan by eight new, top-quality bombs.

The Pentagon just doesn’t have the technical capability it would take to listen in on speeches at the Party Committee when our boys in the stadium up above are yelling, “Goal! Goal!” (This is no Watergate Hotel you’re listening in on, scum!)

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So, I sit there on that little hill overlooking the Pushka River admiring our little city of Staroporokhov—feeling good about my part in it. They’re writing all sorts of stuff about our city in their stinking foreign newspapers. And all the “voices” are always scolding it, and the German “waves” never stop droning on and on about how bad the roads are—how there’s no meat, no milk, and no cod fillet in the stores.5 They say our doctors only have time for one patient out of six (the other five just get worse or kick the bucket).

They say our wages are low, religion is being wiped out, our shoes are crap, and our used cars are more expensive than new ones. They talk about how one of our guys is being put in prison while another one is being deported. They say we buy our wheat from America, we’re jerry-building the Baikal-Amur Railway, we show no interest in the elections for People’s Justices, and everywhere, everybody is stealing.6 They say we don’t even look like a self-respecting people anymore, we’ve let ourselves go, and all we do is drink, drink, drink, and not just for camouflage.

As I sit there on my little hill, I think to myself, yes, this is all true.

And maybe for us, it’s a thousand times worse because we’re seeing it with our own eyes. Yes, our shoes are crap. We do drink all day and night. But while this is what it’s like above ground, down below, in spacious workshops, labs, test chambers, explodariums, and Party Committee rooms—all flooded in fuck-ass fluorescent light—the finest Soviet people, dressed in snow-white gowns, are forging an atomic-hydrogen shield for our motherland (or an atomic-hydrogen sword, if we decide to fuck your ass first, Mr. Imperialist Snake).

Yes, our underground services know their stuff, and so do we, the ground crews—we’re no fools. We too overfulfill our quotas and never forget to suggest rationalizing measures. As far as target Camouflage

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figures are concerned, brother, my own brigade is already drinking at 1999 levels (liters per person, that is). What we’re working on now is rationalization. Once, for example, after we’d all gotten smashed together at a union meeting, Teterin—the one whose little Igor was born with two tongues—proposed lowering the quality of our vodka. We all applauded. We had always thought Teterin was as dumb as they come—his job was to lie around drunk at the gas station where foreign-tourist-spies fill up. But then, all of a sudden, when he put his mind to it, he came up with an idea worthy of an engineer-technocrat. Until then, no mind had thought that far, even though the idea was sitting there, right on the surface of our Staroporokhov reality. There was even an article about Teterin in The Higher Truth titled, “An Idea: Simple and Elegant.”

The son of a bitch brought about what might be called a revolution in the distillery industry. The chemists quickly applied his suggestion to real life. First, they lowered the alcohol content of vodka.

They didn’t do it overnight, by the way, but worked on it over the course of several years. The damn booze didn’t give in easily, it didn’t want to go bad, but the chemists finally had their way. In the end it was hundreds of times cheaper for the government to produce the stuff, while we, moonshiner-camouflagers, were getting all the more smashed. Our hangovers made us meaner than ever, and our kids were being born with warped mugs and rotten genes. Consequently the camouflage coefficient rose that much higher. That, brother, is how things stand in Staroporokhov, in a word. Forget everything I’ve told you, otherwise, they might dump me, without trial, into the reactor, like they did with Pronkin, and then you’d have to fish your brother out, molecule by molecule. Now that I’ve gotten started, I’m not going to hold back. I’m going to lay it all out for you.

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oday I have overtime leave, so let’s take a walk to the cemetery. We can reminisce about our old folks, sit by their graves, and then go to the café where my wife, Duska, is manager. She’ll set a table for us right in her office. Take my word for it, our bellies will like what they see—no camouflage!

Herring—the real thing—from the Danube! When they skin it, the fat on it is so delicate, it melts before your eyes just from the warmth and the electric light. Real mother-of-pearl! Then we’ll dig into the solyanka—also the real thing—not for working-class stiffs.

There are steamed kidneys in it, and sausage, and lean meat, and capers. Everything that’s supposed to be there is there—even olives.

And, of course, there’s shashlyk.1 You don’t get chow like that in the Kremlin. Lamb! The real stuff! Duska soaks it in dry red wine, with green onions, herbs, pepper—you’ll go crazy over it. Real shashlyk!

Shashlyk like it’s supposed to be! You don’t even have to chew—it goes straight to your stomach and makes itself at home there.

By the way, the slogger-workers, the camouflagers—that is, the People—they know what’s up. How can they not know when all they get is rotten eelpout-and-shark-meat-kebab, pan-fried in

Camouflage

vegetable oil that’s already been used to overfry a thousand doughnuts. The People know everything. They know, by the way, that the shashlyk you and I are about to eat, or the shashlyk that’s being eaten in the Kremlin, is top secret, while their solyanka-swill, their yellowed herring, and their homemade cutlets—that have less frozen meat in them than a hungry bedbug has blood in it—they know that’s camouflage. See, brother, if our People were not so politically aware and literate, this kind of chow would, of course, make them kick up their hooves and create another October Revolution— a real one this time. But the People are as wise as the serpent, they understand what the main task of the Party and the Government is, they work to forge a nuclear shield and sword, they don’t give a shit about the quality of the food, or the fact that cod fillet has disappeared. The People are fed not by bread alone, not like you generals and your cuntocracy. . . .

After lunch, let’s go to the cemetery. Our folks were lucky: They were buried in a real cemetery like human beings. Nowadays, they burn people. But they don’t burn the flowers and the bouquets we put into the coffins at the very end. Those are resold by the old ladies at the Quiet Market. I once bought a bouquet like that for Women’s Day.2 It smelled a little sad, but it was still fresh and sassy (after all, it had made it back from the other side). I asked the broad who sold it, “Tell me, whore, can you make a living from this stuff? “Thank you kindly,” she says, “we do a bit of camouflaging on the side.” I gnashed my teeth, wanted to punch her in the face and drag her off to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

But it was time for the Pentagon’s satellite to fly past, so I dropped down in the row where they sell potatoes, tucked the flowers under my cheek, and fell asleep. Yes brother, our old folks were lucky. If it

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hadn’t been for Vukov, the concrete layer, that lazy-scum-bastard, the Party would never have banned cemeteries, I swear they wouldn’t.

Our Party Organizer said at the rally when they announced the new cemetery ban, “Calm down, Comrades, it is historically inevitable that the Party will bury you all!”

What did that vermin Vukov do? Let me tell you: once we were sitting in the underground palace at a gala concert celebrating Camouflage Workers’ Day, and just at the moment our great comedian Raikin was up there on stage saying to our diva, Zykina, “Ooh-haha! Death to Capitalism,” a coffin with a body in it came crashing through the ceiling and almost hit the two of them. We all cracked up laughing, and clapped so loud you couldn’t hear Raikin’s satire on the shortcomings of the economy, or Zykina belting out “Rrrussia!

Rrruussia!”3 The corpse itself spilled out of the coffin onto the stage, and lay there looking absurd in its black suit, barefoot and lost (note: there wasn’t a single little flower in the coffin).

At that moment, Teterin yelled “Pa-paaa,” clambered onto the stage, shoved Raikin and Zykina the fuck out of the way, grabbed the corpse by its armpits, and bellowed into the microphone, “Comrades! It’s my Papa!” We started clapping again, roaring with laughter, and I’m thinking: that’s a hell of an act they’ve put together for our Camouflage Workers’ Day. Meanwhile, dirt mixed with skeletons kept pouring down from the ceiling and piled up on the stage. That’s when everybody understood: it’s a construction disaster! They called in the experts, and, in the end, Vukov was found guilty. The bastard had forgotten to put reinforcing wire into the concrete for the ceiling because he was using the wire to make fences at the cemetery. He was moonlighting at the cemetery while his main job was to build the ceiling down below. So the whole Camouflage

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cemetery dropped right onto the stage. And Teterin had to rebury his papa. Everything happens to him in twos: funerals, wakes, and his son Igor’s tongues.

But Teterin’s a bastard himself, and, if it weren’t for him, I’d never have been turned into a queer. Don’t worry, brother, we’ll get to that later. You’ll find out what happened. Just hold on, hold on, my brother the general! To live a life is not the same as crossing the Czech border, as my buddy Vasya likes to say (he’s a tank driver like you).4 Damn them—those tanks of yours! No matter how hard we twist our brains, the boys in our brigade cannot figure out why you had to go and grab fucking Czechoslovakia! Why do it if it isn’t trying to grab us first! And why didn’t you attack China, slice it to pieces with your lasers? Why? We sit around reading the papers every day before our shift begins, so we know it’s the Chinks who are our mortal enemies. And they’re having such a hullabaloo of their own—there’s no comparison with the Czechs. Also, the Chinks’ camouflage is cooler than ours: word has it that under every town and every peasant hut, they’ve got either a factory like mine or a prison lab where they’re banging out H-bombs by hand. They’re not fussy about the technology, as long as they have something to kick our ass with.

So why do your generals and the Politburo allow such fuck-ups?

Are they crazy? Are they so fucking constipated after their banquets 365 days a year they don’t understand that the Chinese have a population, not of 800 million, but twice that? Can’t they understand that this other half is busy working underground on bombs and missiles? Their Sorge hero-spies are sending them telegraphs every day in Morse code: “Fuckup . . . Fuckup . . . Fuckup. . . .”5 Are they itching for a Third World War? Are the sons of bitches missing their old war movies? Of course, why should Brezhnev care? All he

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has to do is step out onto Lenin’s Tomb, flap his eyebrows, clear his throat, down a glass of cognac, drop a tear into the microphone, and whine—just the way our beloved pockmarked Uncle Joe used to do: “Dear brothers and sisters, children and grandchildren! In this most fucked-up critical hour for our Motherland, I am addressing you, my friends! The enemy has treacherously crossed the border at the river and cut off construction on the Baikal-Amur Railway! Death to the Chinese aggressors! Into each life a little rain must fall! Dizziness will be ours!”6 I can see in your eyes, brother, this is exactly what you want. My pal Naum (he’s a Jew, so he writes poetry) is right: “A poet wants to die in his homeland, a general at war.” So why don’t you go climb the Ostankino TV Tower, have a few drinks in their revolving restaurant, have a bite to eat, wage war on those damn waiters, then smash the window with a champagne bottle and fly down, flapping your epaulets like wings. Just don’t drag me and my brigade—by the way, I will never reveal to you how many men are in it, that’s a holy mystery for me—into it. We’ve had all we can take. We’ve all hit sixty already. We’ve lived through the Civil War, the famines, collectivization, the purges, the Führer, Stalin, Nikita hiking the prices, and now taxicab fares are up too, double what they were! Just between the two of us, brother, Kosygin’s gotten too big for his boots. All right, so they say he married Zykina.7 So he didn’t miss that one, the old goat: he grabbed that turkey-hen and he can keep snuffling out of both nostrils! But why’d he have to mess with the taxis? Let’s say, for example, you finish your shift like my pal Pasov way across town: it’s late at night, public transport is closed down dead, your hands and feet are aching and shaking (and they’ll go on shaking until 11 the next morning when the stores open), and all you’ve got in your Camouflage

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pockets is two rubles. In the old days, two rubles was enough to get you home, tip included, and even have something left over for a beer.

And what do we observe today? The taxi driver throws you out when you’re halfway home, and you have to hoof it the rest of the way on your own two feet. . . . You’re practically crawling on all fours—that’s how well you’ve fulfilled your own camouflaging quota.

And it hasn’t been for yourself that you’ve been working your butt off to pull the fucking wool over the Pentagon’s eyes, it’s been for that same Kosygin. So why double the fares on the taxis? Why not invent some cheaper bombs? Why not call your physicists and engineers to account so they’ll spin their brains faster? The other day, I asked the Party Organizer: “Can I, as brigade leader, walk into the Quiet Market and tell the people there that Kosygin is an old goat? Can I ask where the cod fillet is, and say ‘hands off the taxi-cabs’?” The PartOrg replied, “Go ahead and yell your head off. The Yanks are at this very moment eavesdropping from their satellites. So tell them whatever you like. It would even work wonders as far as camouflage objectives are concerned. Did you know that we’ve just signed an agreement in Helsinki? So go ahead and yell, set up a democracy and freedom of speech. We’ll decide later what to do with you.”8 All right. So I arrive at the Quiet Market. It’s a rough territory.

The diplomatic corps buy their groceries there because food from our state stores gives them gastritis, heartburn, and stones in their stomachs. “How much is your beef?” I ask. “Six rubles,” says the woman from the collective farm. Her job is camouflage too, but it’s a super-secret sort. The brigade and I have wracked our brains, and we still can’t figure out why the Party and the Government sometimes sell meat to the People at three times cheaper prices than some red-faced bitch at the market does. Why is that? I understand that

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the diplomatic corps hangs out at the market. But aren’t there more Russians than CIA spies in Staroporokhov? Are collective farmers really so above it all that they can dictate prices not only to us, but to Politburo members as well? This, my lieutenant-general brother, is no longer the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. It’s highway robbery.

It’s robbing the very people who stormed the Winter Palace and handed over that beauty of a building to all the District, Regional, City, and Republic Party Secretaries, and to other assholes as well, for their personal use.

This is what happens when, for cab fare, people have to fork over two new rubles instead of one old one. And stop interrupting me, stop rushing me. Since we’ve finally been reunited, I’m going to tell you my whole story to the end. Dictatorship of the proletariat!

If you rubbed Marx-Engels-Lenin’s beards and snouts in the parsley that costs twenty or thirty kopecks per skinny little sprig at the Quiet Market, or in the onions, carrots, and other veggies that cost about the same, surely they’d think: “No, comrades! To hell with these revolutions we’ve been having! Let’s lower the prices and stuff the supermarkets full of food.” That’s what they’d think, and then they’d go fishing in our Pushka River. Karl Marx would drop his lure into an ice-hole and say to Engels, “How are they biting, Fedya?”

And Engels would say, “Not so good, Kolya, and it’s lonely here too.

Very lonely.” And then Engels would ask our forever-living cod fillet: “Hey, Vlad, are they biting?” And Lenin would answer, “Look, you Left Opportunists: we Bolsheviks intend to pollute the environment to the extent it serves the proletariat of all nations.”9

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hat’s how things are at our Quiet Market, Comrade Lieutenant General, but whining, grumbling, yearning for justice, and other non-Party sentiments do, eventually, with difficulty, exit the soul. Eventually, you lie yourself down quietly in the cabbage-sauerkraut row and say to yourself: “To hell with you, Diplomatic Corps, go ahead and buy your veal, ‘Duchess’ pears, cucumbers, and tomatoes in the middle of the winter. Go ahead and stuff yourselves, while I can’t even allow myself a sprig of dill! You know what we’ve got beneath the market? You don’t! It’s Quality Control. That’s where they reject the defective bombs and put the seal of quality on the warheads.

So, while you’re splurging on our best produce, we’re marching toward The Victory of Communism.”

You ask, brother general, why do I devote so much time to the market? I repeat: The Quiet Market is one of my strategic objectives.

I also moonlight there to make some extra cash. We camouflaging alcoholics have no other option. Sometimes, when you’re heading out to work, you find you’ve got no supplies. You can’t stop the production process, so you have to spend your own money to pay

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for the vodka, cologne, kerosene, Red Dye No. 10, or that damned “Gift of the Sun” fortified wine. And almost always, our guys don’t have anything in our pockets. Our women take it all for alimony, and so on. By the way, Kosygin never issues us any overalls. His Zykina changes her dress after every number, as if her songs get her dirty, but we have to work in our own clothes. My Duska used to say to me, “Bastard! Wino! All I do is run to the cleaners for you!” And I’d say to her, “Cool it, Duska. I’m not your Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev. I’ve only got one suit, while he has two hundred million. And I wear my clothes not just at home, or when I’m on duty, but also at Party meetings.” So that’s why I do a bit of moonlighting at the Market, while my main post is on that little bench next to Lenin. That, by the way, is where they gang-raped me and made a queer out of me.

Let’s get back to what happened on that Bonus Day. That was the day they awarded us the title of Communist Labor Brigade, and gave us a pennant and a couple of banners right there on the stage of the Palace of Congresses. They’d fixed the ceiling by then, so corpses and skeletons wouldn’t smack onto the stage. Right there, on the stage of the Palace of Congresses, some dressed-up jerk—Chief Wage Freeze Engineer—handed us all envelopes with little pictures of doves carrying slogans in their beaks that said: “The People and the Party are One!” “Glory to the Party!” “The Communist Party of the Soviet Union will attain the Victory of Communist Labor!”

In response, I tossed off a little speech of my own, casting my eyes upward now and then as I spoke.

According to my calculations, our relatives’ graves had to be right there above the podium, and that, somehow, made me feel dreary in my soul. I felt ashamed to be making speeches in that place. In short: sick at heart. Couldn’t they build their Palace of

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Congresses somewhere other than under a cemetery? Let’s say under a drunk-tank or a zoo? Somehow all our big building projects always get screwed up: idiots are always in charge. . . .1 So I babbled something from the podium, challenging Shultsov’s brigade to a competition on fulfillment of quotas (their job is collecting empty bottles and returning them to the stores). “Dear Comrades,” I say, “this will be true Communist Labor. Some will guzzle more so that others can return more.” The Party Organizer applauded me personally. Why else was that such a special day?

It was the day the Americans launched eight new satellites, all at once. So, everyone in Staroporokhov was working without a break. One satellite would fly over, and right behind it, another one. The Party Organizer said to us, “Do like they do at the Bolshoi-Maly Theater, boys! Make camouflage!”2 In general, everything came to a head that day. First, we had our Bonus Day, which, as the Party Organizer said, mirrors Marx’s concept of surplus value. Then the hydrogen-bomb-makers had their rally. And then the Pentagon and the CIA, with their new flock of satellites. To celebrate, we split one bottle behind Manka’s beer stand, another behind Anka’s, and one more behind Zinka’s. At some point, Teterin yelled out, “They’re coming! One from behind the moon! And the other from behind the lunar orb!” Petya got out his transistor radio with its antijamming device, and, on Radio Liberty, we could hear some guy (who was both a coward and a traitor) pontificating: “In this soulless atmosphere, poisoned by the deceitful propaganda of dead ideas, a turbid wave of alcoholism has inundated all strata of the population.” I said to my team, “This is damned good camouflage we’re doing, boys! The satellites haven’t even completed their flyover, and the Voices are already Camouflage

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broadcasting about us! Thanks, boys! Now, to your posts!” I went to my post too (can’t remember how), and I remember thinking: “Yes, they have powerful technology! The bitch is powerful, but she’s stupid. She can’t see beyond the rotten façade of our shortcomings to the most important thing.”

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o, I’m lying on the bench near Lenin, and I’m looking up at the sky, not feeling the least bit self-conscious about how exposed I am. Go ahead, scum, shoot your photographs, pierce me and my brigade with your infrared rays! We’ve done our bit, we’ve taken the brunt of the blow upon ourselves. Meanwhile, our physicists and theoreticians sit down below with their titanium foreheads, their brains working out how to make the bombs smaller and the explosions bigger, and how to make it simpler and easier to transport the bombs from one place to another. You, brother, may be a lieutenant general four times over, but you don’t know a damn thing about camouflaging atom bombs or hydrogen bombs. I’m going to tell you how they do it, and you’re not going to rat on me either, because President Podgorny just signed a new law that says whoever listens to a military secret will be shot, but the one who spills it will be taken off his job and put on disability. It’s a wise law.

Here’s how they move the bombs. The little old atomic nukes are moved around on Thursdays only, in the simplest of ways.

A truck with the MEAT logo drives down underground, they load it up with a troika of bombs, and it makes its way ever so quietly out

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onto the streets of Staroporokhov, past our grocery stores, cafeterias, cafés, and restaurants, past our kiosks selling shashlyk made of doughnuts—all the way to the freight depot. Porters lug the bombs onto the dining cars, and they’re off to their strategic destinations.

Our big-brains have this figured out pretty well: Thursdays are nomeat days—no food in the dining cars, and, in general, no meat at all in Staroporokhov—so why make the trucks just stand around?1 Hydrogen nukes, on the other hand, are transported in a completely different way. Not supposed to jiggle them. Maybe you’ve seen those imported wagons with the rubber tires standing outside the District Heating Board? The ones hitched up to big old workhorses, who stand there, stamping their feet? Well that’s not really a DHB those wagons are standing next to, even if the "voices" do insist we don’t have central heating everywhere yet. What it is, is a freight elevator that goes down to the main assembly shop. They bring a bomb up on the elevator, load it onto one of those carts, pile birch firewood all around it, and tie a rope around it. A Colonel-driver whispers, “Forward march!” to the horses, and the bomb drives off, sitting pretty. It’s as soft as a feather bed on those tires, bought in America. The Colonel-driver pretends he’s nodding off drunk, barely touching the reins. That’s how they transport the bombs. But I still haven’t figured out what they’re carrying in those trucks with the signs that say, “EAT COD FILLET! TASTY! NUTRITIOUS!” I swear I don’t know. Those must be the game-winning superbombs designed to split the globe into two halves that will fly into space alongside one another. One half will be ours, the other half the Americans’. And we’ll make China into a satellite, like the moon.

Maybe then there’ll finally be cod fillet for sale in the stores! But that’s only a dream, General, my personal dream. . . .

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To come to the point, suddenly I’m rubbing my eyes open from a strange, terrible pain in my rear passageway—a burning and aching feeling. Naturally, my head’s splitting too. It’s not dawn yet, or maybe there’s just a little light in the sky. I moan, raise my head, and hear a voice above me: “Lie still, Milashkin, we’re taking measurements.”

Besides the burning and the pain, I can also feel a breeze wafting over the surface of my ass. Meaning I’m naked? Right. My pants have been pulled down to my heels. My Party Card is in place, its edge is sticking into my chest. I can’t feel my wallet. I glance to the left. A woman in plainclothes, with tape measure in hand, shouts, “Eight meters from Lenin to the victim’s anus. Ten to the curb. And forty to Marx-Engels.” The guy holding the other end of the tape doesn’t put it down. Instead, he shoves it right up my ass, while the broad keeps circling around me and reading out distances in meters. I try to figure what kind of new camouflage project they’re working on, but I can’t. A photographer comes up, takes some shots, and blinds me with his flash. It’s early, but the cops have already cordoned off a whole stinking crowd of gawkers. I make another convulsive movement, I’m ashamed and in pain.

“Take it easy, Milashkin, we don’t need your prints. We need his.”

“Who’s his?”

“The guy who raped you. Unless you, yourself, so to speak, did it yourself?”

“Are you crazy?” I say.

“All right, just lie there quietly,” they say. My heart is going boomboom-boom, my head’s splitting, hangover’s grief has risen to my throat, my ass is burning and aching. Someone has just scraped something off my ass, looked at it through a magnifying glass, and then smeared something onto me (later, in the bathhouse, I can just Camouflage

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barely wash it off). Finally, the broad says, “Two long hairs found on the victim’s lower back!” Right away, a rumor spreads through the crowd that there’ve been a lot of longhaired guys around lately— queers and drug addicts—and it would take a bunch of dissidents and Zionists to commit a savage act like that right next to Lenin! No one else would do it.

But I just kept on believing that some special sort of camouflaging must have been going on in connection with the simultaneous launch of the eight Pentagon satellites. I had faith that the Party Organizer would reveal its higher meaning to me—all in good time.

I kept on believing, despite the shame, my work-related hangover, the pain, and a shadow of doubt. I couldn’t keep from asking: “Are we doing the right thing, or not? Is this, perhaps, too radical a measure of camouflaging—to screw a Communist and a brigade leader of Communist Labor when he’s at his combat post? What if, later on, at the next Party Congress, you call it an act of voluntarism?2 Sure, you’d be rehabilitating my ass. But would that make it any easier for me? The deed’s already done! They stuck it in, didn’t they (even if they did yank it right back out)?”

I lie there on the bench, shivering, trying to shake off my revisionist thoughts. I ask myself, “What have I done, after all? People have made far greater sacrifices than this, they’ve sat out twenty fucking years in the camps, they’ve been beaten, tortured, humiliated, spat upon, but they still kept on believing that IT was not far away, not far away! And I? What a bastard I am. I’ve gone limp all over from one lousy fuck. It happened in my sleep, after all. I didn’t even make a peep—as if I was under general anesthetic. On the other hand, given that I’m the one who’s suffered the pain and humiliation, why can’t they tell me, the People, why this or that or the other homosexualistic

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measure had to be taken? Maybe when they do explain it to me, I’ll be able to subject myself willingly to the blow once again. Despair.

“Pull up your pants, Milashkin!” I got dressed. Somehow or other I got up onto my feet. “What are you grinning at?” I say to the crowd.

They’re laughing, the bastards. “Into the squad car, please, Milashkin.” I’m amazed at this turn of events, but I go anyway. Every step I take makes my eyes bug out—that’s how much it burns and hurts. A great sense of grievance against the Party is accumulating in my soul.

No, I cannot approve of what has just happened! I’ll scribble a letter to the Central Committee. . . . Then things took their natural course: an investigation, a trial. Fifteen days without a drink, and I’m feeling a quiet lightness in my head—something I haven’t felt in years—and a desire to down a glass the way I used to in my youth.

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eanwhile, brother, life goes on in Staroporokhov.

My fellow countrymen are camouflaging as before.

The barber doesn’t want to give me a shave. People in the tram stare at each other like wolves, hiding everything human.

Trucks speed by with their signs that say “MEAT” and “EAT COD FILLET.” When I show up at home, I’m greeted with, “The queer’s here!” (That’s my paralytic mother-in-law speaking.) She says, “Go ahead, Duska, feed your queer!” and I say, “Shut up, you damn witch, or I’ll stick that shit-pan on your head so you can sail all the way to the crematorium covered in shit.”

I look and see my wife, Duska, sitting in the kitchen, crying.

I try to comfort her: “It’s just the way it is, Duska. My job puts me in harm’s way, it’s dangerous, it’s needed by the Party, and therefore, by the People. We are united and unprecedentedly monolithic as never before. What’s the point of crying? Cosmonauts are sometimes away from home for months. Jail is not the cosmos, you can’t get lost there. And I’ll receive insurance money for the trauma to my anal passageway. What is there to cry about, Duska? I love you, don’t I? You’re my wife, aren’t you?” “What sort of a wife am I to

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you?” she says. “When was the last time you slept with me? You don’t remember, do you, you lout? They’ve arrested your son, you drunken viper!” “What do you mean, arrested?” “Just what I said: They came and took him away. They found samizdat or something and a little book by Sakharov.” “Which Sakharov?” “The one who invented the bomb.”1 Aha, brother, I see that your military jowls have knotted. I know that you and your cuntocracy of generals would tear Sakharov apart atom by atom if you had your way. I know that. He’s very dangerous for you right now. If the Party listens to him, almost all of you will be fucked. “Enough fooling around,” they’ll say. “Go take it easy in some aviation job, or in the Merchant Marine. Go drive a tractor across the fields if you want, but no more driving your tanks around in foreign countries.” I understand it’s tough for you, General. But that’s not what I’m talking about right now, not about disarmament.

Let Sakharov do the thinking about that. I just want to make sense of my own life. I’m hitting the bottle here above ground, I’m camouflaging the nuclear bomb production that’s going on underground, I’ve been so busy I haven’t fucked my wife for the last six months in a row. Meanwhile, they’re raping me in the so-called anus, while I’m on duty. They’ve thrown me in jail, and they’ve arrested my son Slavka for being acquainted with Academician Sakharov. What’s going on here? It’s just a vicious circle. So I say to Duska, “Stop your crying. I won’t be able to make sense of this until I get myself half a liter. I’ll be back in a flash.”

The first thing I do is drop by the PartOrg office. And he attacks me, right away, like a wolfhound: “Party card on the table! Your son is an anti-Soviet element! You’ll never work as a brigade leader again! You’re fired. There’ve never been queers in the Party before,

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aren’t any now, and never will be!” I just threw my Party card right in his mug, thinking, “To hell with being brigade leader. Camouflagers are in demand everywhere.” I take a look up at the ceiling—the Party office is below ground, there’s a grocery store directly above, and my whole brigade must be up there right now. It’s five minutes to eleven.

You can hear the roar, the stamping of feet. The People are restless.

Our soul burns with a blue flame. I take the escalator up. I’ve handed in my notice. There’s just one thing on my mind: I’ve got to figure this out, figure it out, figure it out.

And my conclusion is that I’ve been raped naturally, not in accordance with any camouflaging scheme. If it had been done for the sake of camouflage, they wouldn’t have fired me. Isn’t that right, General? But if it was rape, then who did it? That is the question!

Standing there outside the store are the People, my little brigade.

They’ve all come to cure their hangovers. I’m the only one who’s come just for a drink. But what’s this? Guskov isn’t here, and neither are Dolidze or Dotsenko. They’re my shock troops, my rabble-rousers, my rationalizers! My hair stands on end when I learn that, the night before, Guskov and Dolidze were savagely violated while on duty at their posts—one in the lobby of the Vityaz Co-op, the other behind the Lada beer hall. And Dotsenko was raped in Gorky Park, right inside one of the cabins on the big Ferris wheel—the Devil’s Wheel. They screwed him, and then turned the wheel so he spent the night at the top. In the morning, when kids and tourists came for their rides, they spun the wheel again, opened the cabin, and the kids started yelling, “Miss! Miss! There’s an old guy asleep here with no pants on!”

People, naturally, have gotten worked up about it. Epstein, who’s read a lot of books, says it’s the work of a maniac—the Spectre of Camouflage

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Communism—who’s been wandering the streets of Staroporokhov.2 Frolov butts in and says, “It’s not the maniac, it’s the cognac.” I say, “That doesn’t change the fact that our personhood is in great danger. No use trying to guess whether it’s dissidents or Zionists who’re banging us at night. The important thing is to catch the guy and lynch him. They won’t punish us for it if we do. Even though I’ve left the Party, I still consider myself a Communist. The police are so busy camouflaging, they’ll never solve these bloody crimes. So let’s have a drink and go track him down ourselves.”

Would you believe it, Grisha? Not one of them answered my call! The doors opened, and the whole brigade burst into the store like water through the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station. People have become apolitical. More than that: indifferent. But you should have seen my little brigade, you should have seen it! It’s a motley crew.

The ones in front are the ones that look like old, torn rubles—you can’t wash their eyes out with laundry detergent, they’re full of pus like the eyes of stray dogs, but they wag their tails and keep looking at the Kremlin clock. Behind them come the more decent-looking public, blowing dust and stray little DT devils off their sleeves, running their hands through their hair, buttoning their jackets, like actors preparing for their big entrance on stage. And in back stand the obfuscators—not camouflagers—reading their books and newspapers, pretending they’ve come to buy vegetable oil, not vodka or dry white wine or sterno. It’s as if they’re saying: “We’re not with you guys, we just happened by. We have Lenin’s birthday to celebrate tonight.”

Sons of bitches! I don’t like them—and that’s why I hike up their target figures. How many mugs do I have in my brigade? I can’t tell you exactly—a secret is a secret—but I can say that my brigade is

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many millions strong! We even have a writer in the group. He always stands off to the side, and he’s the one guy who doesn’t look at the Kremlin clock. He knows one thing for sure: He knows that time moves inexorably toward eleven o’clock, and nobody can stop it.

Except if the Pentagon hawks, at three minutes to eleven, should suddenly decide to bang Staroporokhov with a pair of megatons. If that were to happen, naturally, hair of the dog would no longer be, as they say, historically inevitable. The writer is not wearing a hat. His collar’s up. He stands there, erect and motionless, like he’s part of an honor guard. He seems to be thinking, but I’ve heard he’s suffering from the kind of sadness that bends people over, crumples them, and stomps on them in ways we can’t even imagine. . . .

So the raggedy crowd barges in at the front, and the others cram themselves in behind. I appoint a People’s Control so no scumbag will shove himself in out of turn. The writer always comes in last, walking very, very slowly, as if it takes a great effort just to make his way to the counter. You can sense immediately that unknown forces are reining him in, holding him back, getting on his nerves. But he, the writer, overcomes these dark forces. Like a horse pulling a load uphill, he just keeps pushing on, pushing ahead, not looking to the side. He’s not paying any attention to us, all he wants is to get to the counter. It’s not for us to shove him out of the line, we let him go the whole way, out of turn. Go ahead, pal, have a drink, keep up the camouflage, you’re all out of breath. . . .

I buy a bottle at the counter, and that reminds me that I’d promised Duska I’d be right back. But the camouflagers won’t let me go. “It wouldn’t be right,” they say, “for the boss to go home to his woman during this, our most difficult hour. Four of our comrades have already fallen victim to the greatest moral monstrosity of all Camouflage

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times and nations. That we should fall so low! We winos, who are doing work that’s important for the State and the Party, are being fucked nightly. They don’t even pull our pants back up when they’re done! There will be no peace for us until we get our hands on this longhaired, active queer, and pull his legs out of his ass—may he ride around in a wheelchair when we’re done.”

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never made it home to Duska, of course. I was busy with meetings. Still trying to figure out what was going on. I went round to visit Teterin. His two-tongued Igor sang a song for us, “May there always be papa!”1 A clever kid! Suddenly I heard the German shortwave broadcasting news about my Slavka: They’ve picked him up, arrested him, and thirty writers have already petitioned Brezhnev to let him go. Brezhnev came on the Soviet news and answered, “We’ll swap Milashkin for a cruise missile.” I could only think, “Now that’s camouflage! First class!”

I don’t remember how I got home that night. And the next morning, I didn’t go to my post—my soul was so full of confusion, sadness, and darkness. It was still hard to walk: My ass still burned and itched (even though it had been fifteen days since the moment of rape). And I just couldn’t understand how my Slavka had managed to get his hands on all those books and turned himself into a dissident and Zionist. When did it happen? Haven’t I always been there for him? We used to watch hockey together. And now they’ve picked him up, arrested him, and made him show his passport.2 Dammit! Dammit!

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Some people helped me onto the tram. “Comrades!” I said, “I’ve just been expelled from the Party! Can I ride home without my Party card?” The people were silent. Not a word. Not a glance.

Camouflage. So I jumped off the tram before it stopped, took out my penis—sorry, General—and showed it to the sky. Some volunteer police approached me and asked, “What’s the matter with you?

Are you crazy?” I said, “I’m presenting it to the American Apollos.

Let them know!” The volunteer cops could relate to this. Didn’t beat me up. Meanwhile, a single thought kept drilling into my head (my soul, that is): They’ve picked him up, arrested him, picked him up, arrested him.

I thought to myself: I’ll make the rounds of our outposts one last time, like Napoleon. And from then on, until the day I die, I’ll spend my nights at home. But what do I see as I make my rounds? Our dear Staroporokhov has become deserted, desolate. My camouflagers are nowhere to be seen—not out behind the beer kiosks, not behind the greasy spoons. None in the square by Dzerzhinsky. None in the boiler rooms, none at the maternity clinic where they’re doing repairs. None in the ditches, none in the bushes! There aren’t any of my camouflagers anywhere. Their posts have been abandoned!

You’ve lost it, you beasts! Panicked! Your own anuses have become more valuable to you than national defense.

I put my ear to the ground, and I can hear a roar from below: drills screeching, the crackle of welding, the bang, bang, bang—that’s uranium 235 they’re tamping into bombs—and the Party Organizer is giving a speech: “That vile academician, who’s gotten it into his head that he’s the great folk hero, Taras Bulba, should know that the great Soviet people, led by their Politburo—the most peace-loving in the

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world—will not let Sakharov slay his own progeny!3 Everybody donate a day’s work on Saturday!”

“Well, okay,” I think to myself, “even though everything’s in order underground, up here, the posts have been abandoned!” And suddenly I sobered up. Completely. And I decide: “I’m going to nab you, reptile, I’m going to catch you” (it’s just too bad I don’t have a little whistle like militiamen do).

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’m on my way to Lenin, listening to the BBC on the way. All they talk about is my Slavka. I feel hurt. He could’ve talked it over with his father, couldn’t he? (By the way, General, you’re going to be demoted because of Slavka, or they’ll force you into retirement.) I look around, and see that Staroporokhov’s dead, except for the theoretical physicists who are coming up out of the underground, on their way home from work. But they’re not marching in step. We’ve all been forbidden to do that: We even signed a pledge—because when we go on a binge, marching in step might cause what’s called a “resonance,” and that could cause the roof to collapse, God forbid, if that were to happen over the detonator shop, or the place where they dry the deuterium. When I arrive at my post, I take a skeptical look at the memorable bench next to Ilyich. I’m sober, but I sway back and forth on purpose to lure the longhaired queer. I lie face down and cover my head with the side of my coat the way orphans do. My jacket stinks of the drunk-tank, the disinfecting bath, and jail—the inhuman government-issue-stench of my wretched life. I think: What have I done with my life? It’s cold, autumn leaves are falling from the branches, they nuzzle up to me

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like live birds (they’re cold too). I’m so far gone I’ve forgotten there’s plant life on earth (also birds, goats, cats, and dogs). Where the hell have I been living these past six months while working so hard at camouflaging? I’ve been living on a dead planet, and they’ve been issuing us rotgut alcohol before each shift. Lenin, too, stands above me, solitary, glimmering white.1 He’s camouflaged too.

Beneath the coat of primer and the whitewash, there’s Stalin.

That’s right. One of our sly dogs got a prize for that. You guessed it— that very same Teterin. He once stood up at a Politburo session and said, “Are you nuts? Why waste material on a new statue? It wouldn’t take long to make the head bald, cut back the nose, pull the forehead out wider, and then tack on a beard and mustache! Nothing to it! They both have stately bodies, they’re wearing overcoats with identical Party tunics. And on top of that, they’re pointing in the same direction—toward Communism. Why worry about it?” “Well, Teterin,” Kosygin says, “I’d take you on as my deputy, but I can see you’re way too smart. You’d sell me out, wouldn’t you, you bastard!

Admit it, you’d sell me out!” And Teterin (he’s like that) says, “You bet I would,” and he’s been in my brigade ever since. . . .

So I’m lying there next to Lenin. The most important thing, I tell myself, is not to drift off (I’m normally a sound sleeper). I turn over and look up at the sky. The vipers up there are awake too. They’re flying. I don’t worry so much at night—at least then you can see the filthy satellites, stuffed with their CIA devices. But during the day, it’s scary, really scary. We know they’re flying over, but we can’t see them. What can you say? We lag behind in cloud-seeding technology. We can’t see the satellites. The daytime shift is the hardest. In the daytime, I feel like I’m blind, totally blind. I try not to think about Slavka, or about Duska. Start thinking about them, and you can go

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nuts. Here, I’ve sacrificed my whole family, including that paralytic bitch of a mother-in-law, for the good of the cause. And for that I’ve been expelled from the party and fucked in the ass by an unidentified person of the male sex.

I roll back onto my stomach again, and then, suddenly. . . . Quiet, brother, quiet! I can hear footsteps. Rustling in the bushes. Someone’s trying to sneak up on me. So I wind my emergency cord more tightly around my wrist (like our famous spy, Sorge, with his potassium cyanide, I keep this cord with me at all times to hang myself in the event of exposure). And I’ve thought up a little trap, just like an engineer. I’ve made a big noose out of the cord and inserted it inside my pants, encircling my ass. The end of the cord is in my hand. As soon as he sticks it in, I’ll yank: “Ah-ha,” I’ll say, “gotcha, little snake!” I’ll drag him by his criminal penis straight to the KGB. That’s what I’ll do if he turns out to be a dissident Zionist. If he’s just a regular longhaired queer, a fucking Tchaikovsky, I’ll take him to the cops.

Sure, I’m making myself take the brunt of the blow here, but there’s no other way to catch this snake red-handed. Otherwise, he’ll just deny everything: “Yeah,” he’ll say, “I took his pants off. I thought he was about to shit in them. That’s how it is with these winos.” And that’ll be the end of it! He’ll have his alibi, and I’ll be left with nothing more than a prick’s ears. So, I wrap the cord more tightly around my fist, and all of a sudden I can feel a surge of energy flowing into me, that hypes me up, like a carefree young guy in a reconnaissance platoon at the front. I wait fearlessly. What will be, will be! The main thing is, don’t let him stick it in all the way. After all, I’m still hurting from the first time. I have to be ready to tighten the noose the moment his penis has penetrated just a centimeter or two—no more Camouflage

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than that. To lure him on, I snore a little louder, mumble something, sniff, and drool.

“Tup-tup-tup”—steps coming closer. By the way, General, I listened to this bastard’s cautious movements with great interest, as if I were an outsider. After all, it wasn’t only me that this snake ruined the last time. Yet here he was: coming onto me a second time, even though a person can get fifteen years for that. Suddenly he fell silent.

I got scared for some reason, and I’m thinking to myself: What would make a person rape winos who are sound asleep? What? Maybe he’s a freak? Maybe he has bad breath, so women won’t put out for him?

But that couldn’t be it! Judging by the trauma I suffered last time, he was quite a stud and had what it takes to seduce some rich cafeteria manager or one of the attendants at the Sanduny Baths.2 And how can it be that Staroporokhov lacks the social preconditions for alcoholism or paid-for-fucking (in other words, prostitution), and we have no unemployment, and our rats don’t eat babies like they do in the bankrupt city of New York, and we don’t have an oil crisis, a gas crisis, or a firewood crisis—yet longhaired queers are roaming the streets here as if we’re in Scandinavia? Could it be that Nature herself has started transforming guys into broads, and vice versa? Take that, Supreme Soviet!

Grisha! Hush! Hush! He’s moving again, I can hear him unzipping his fly as he walks toward me, the scum. He’s thought of everything!

A zipper fly! No buttons! Zzzzhick! Believe me, brother, it was very strange to sense, all of a sudden, that he wanted me. Me—Fyodor Milashkin! For a second I grew weak, went soft all over, like a broad.

That’s right! That’s how broads are when they put out for us: “I’ve gone all weak, darling, all soft, while you’re all ready to go! If you’re going to behave like that, I’m not going out with you anymore!

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You’re too fast and too rough!” I still can’t see him, even though I’ve opened my left eye just a bit. . . . Lenin is “glimmering white in the distance.” Now the guy’s right behind me, he’s taken the final step . . .

I’m snoring . . . he’s breathing heavily too . . . Here it comes! Here it comes! I drive away my fear by vowing to myself that I will dedicate the elimination of this queer to the Sixtieth Anniversary of Soviet Power. I will! I will!

He pulls my coat over my head. He must be in a hurry. I’ve already loosened my belt on purpose beforehand, so it’s easy for him to pull my pants down and slide them off. I’m waiting, my heart’s about to stop, my ears are ringing, my blood pressure has shot up. I’m cold, a breeze makes its way freely over my body up to my shoulder blades, there’s a smell of Vaseline. That’s all for the best, I think to myself. If only I don’t start screaming too early. Come on, do it, you snake! . . . Ow, Grisha, brother of mine, Comrade Lieutenant General, ow! And at that moment I yank the cord, “Ah ha!” I roar.

I can feel I’ve collared the penis right by the throat. I leap to my feet, and nearly faint away: All of a sudden I’m the one who’s facing jail, not him! Ten years, minimum, for me! Farewell, freedom, the end of my screwed-up life has arrived! The guy’s taken off, running, and his torn-off penis has been left dangling behind in its noose. Have you ever seen anything like that in wartime, General, or while you were invading Czechoslovakia? Disaster! Why the hell did I have to pull so hard? Why? So, I take off after him, no time to think! I’m not running, I’m flying. “Stop!” I yell, “Hold on! Let’s settle this amicably!” He just keeps running, not looking back. I’m thinking, as I run: Maybe I should duck into an alley, drop his cock into a trash bin, or into the Pushka River, and then nobody’d ever be able to figure out who tore Camouflage

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it off. It would be impossible to prove that I’d done it. “Stop! Stop!”

I yell. I’m flying, and the penis is dragging along behind me, and I’m scared to look back. On the other hand, if you think about it: if they’re transplanting hearts, why not penises? Surgery is free in our country, and it’s the best in the world.

Suddenly, near the Dzerzhinsky statue, he stumbles and falls, and that’s when I come running up, all out of breath, and jump on top of him. He’s got the shakes, jerking from side to side like he’s having an epileptic fit or something. Sure enough, he is longhaired, and soft all over. I twist his arms, I turn him over . . . And, I’ll be fucked if it isn’t Duska! My Duska! It was her I was chasing! And she just cracks up, can’t stop laughing . . . Only now do I remember that time when I was lying on that little bench, asleep at my post, and I had the following dream.

It’s so dark I can’t see myself, I don’t know where I am. A stony path stretches away in front of me, shining in the moonlight, covered in dust, with potholes. In other words, it’s a highway. And I can hear the pounding of horses’ hooves in the distance, clanging, clattering, and grinding. Closer and closer it comes. How can you escape?

It will crush you, close in on you, it will scatter you to all sides (although it still feels as if there is no me in this space). It’s rushing along! Flying! It’s a troika! Karl Marx is the shaft horse, Engels is the right-hand out-runner, and on the left is Lenin! Their hooves beat against the pavement, sending off sparks. Marx’s white mane flutters against his shoulders! He has taken the bit in his teeth, chest pushed proudly forward, head bent, rushing with all his might, exhaling fire and smoke from his nostrils, eyes goggling. The out-runners strain to keep up, bursting their harnesses. And Stalin, the driver, sits on the coachman’s seat of the old carriage in his full marshal’s uniform, pipe

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in his teeth, lashing all three horses with the reins: a whack to Marx, a whack to Engels, and then one to Lenin. The troika rushes on insanely. And all nations and states stand aside and let it pass.3 And there I am, a fleshless shadow in the pitch darkness! The troika gallops on, ever onward! Calamity! Trouble ahead! But at that moment, all of a sudden, my Duska runs out onto the stony path: “Whoa!” she shouts, grabs Marx by the bridle, and reins him in. Engels says, “Not fucking bad dialectics!” Lenin squints his Tatar eye, and Stalin is tossed right out of the cart into the ditch: “Whoa!”

Back when I dreamed this dream, I had awakened to hear, “From Lenin to the victim’s anus—eight meters, ten to the pavement. Forty to Marx-Engels.” That’s how it was then. But now Duska is lying beneath me, laughing, as she used to laugh, long, long ago, in the country, in the fields, when we were on vacation. She laughs, but I’m serious, I give you my word, I suddenly feel love and I’m unhappy that Duska’s wearing pants. . . . It’s all just like it was out in that field in the country when we were on vacation. How sweet it is to love your wife. What a sweetness all of a sudden (the only thing that can compare is Starka Vodka, Export Brand)!

“Fedya,” my Duska whispers, “Fedya . . . is it you, Fedya? Who did you give me up for? Love me, Fedya . . . I’ll die for you!” For me too, it’s as good as it was the first time! Go ahead, CIA, take your pictures, and put them on the president’s desk in the morning with a caption: “Sector 45: next to the Dzerzhinsky statue, Fedka Milashkin is fucking his beloved wife, Duska, his pale blue eye shut with pleasure.”

That’s how good it was!

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owever, dear brother, as our comedian Arkady Raikin used to say, peace exists only in our dreams.1 Suddenly, I hear someone saying, “Citizen! Get up immediately!”

“Fuck!” I say to myself, and I stand up. It’s the gentlemen from the local volunteer police. Three of them. They’re already reading me my rights. I ask them officially, “Did we sign the Helsinki Accords, or didn’t we? We did. It contains a section called ‘reunification of the family.’ Here’s the thing. I know my rights. See that secret Saturn satellite up there? It’s checking: Are we enforcing what we signed in Helsinki, or are we trying to pull the wool over their eyes? Don’t interfere in the reunification of me and my beloved Duska!” The senior volunteer cop asks me sarcastically, “Then why do you need that homemade member made of politburon?” Meanwhile, Duska, pale with shame, is pulling up her pants. The second volunteer cop starts shoving me, roughing me up. “We didn’t sign anything about that in Helsinki!” he says. And the third one politely invites us to come along quietly to the precinct in connection with sexual crimes among sleeping alcoholics. Again I cite my Helsinki rights, but they come back at me again with: “What are you doing with a politburon

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member?” So I say, “Why don’t you tell me where the cod fillet has disappeared to? And why have the collective farmers declared a cold war on the Party and the People? They’re selling potatoes at seven rubles a bucket, the cannibals! If you can explain that, then I’ll tell you what the politburon member is for.”

Duska throws herself at my feet, “Fedya, what’s wrong with you, you want to sit in jail too? We’ll go quietly. I’ll tell them the whole story, they’ll release us, and you can come home to bed. You’ve turned black from drunkenness, Fedya. Let’s go!”

“All right,” I say, “Let’s go, but I want the record to note that I’ve never used the word ‘cock’ during this whole interview. I’ve consistently used the word ‘member’ exclusively.” That’s how they wrote it down at the police station.

That’s when all hell broke loose: the prosecutors arrived, the Cheka, our Party Organizer, and the rest of the gang. For three straight days and nights they interrogated us, Duska and me, first one, then the other. About five times they interrogated us together to try to show up the contradictions in our testimony. But I’m no fool, I’m a former member of the Party. On our way to the precinct, I had managed to coach Duska on what to say: “Remember one thing,” I say, “You bought that cock at the Quiet Market, in the row where they used to sell potatoes. You bought it from a Negro who’d just had his pocket picked, so he couldn’t pay for his cottage cheese. He asked ten rubles for it. You paid him three rubles, twenty kopecks.

And that’s all you say. As for the rest, talk your way out of it as best you can. But when we get home, I’m going to give you a good thrashing. That was not right, what you did. I’m still barely able to walk. My asshole isn’t made of iron, you know!”

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By the way, the gang who prosecuted me didn’t give a damn about me, or my shame, or my trauma. All they wanted to know was who smuggled that piece of high-tech politburon polymer out of their top-secret lab, where it had been locked in a safe, and only the Head of Polymers had the keys. Their thinking was, as I understood it from the interrogations: If the Pentagon manages to get hold of a piece of politburon—even one the size of a cork from a bottle of “Gift of the Sun” fortified wine—our whole strategic advantage will be fucked all to shit. After they interrogated Duska, they drove her around to receptions at the African embassies and lectures at the Friendshipwith-Lumumba University—so she could make an identification from among the Negroes.2 She was more or less sure about two of them. But one turned out to be a military attaché from the Ivory Coast, and he had an alibi: On the day in question, he had been photographing the steam locomotive aboard which Forever-Alive-Lenin had arrived in Staroporokhov (right after he’d kicked the bucket in Gorki).3 The other suspect had spent that same day standing in line for olive oil (he never got any either: it was sold out before his turn came). All the people in line could confirm his story. To my great surprise, they couldn’t find the Negro they were looking for.

They made Duska sign under oath that if she ever saw him again, she’d immediately call the Lubyanka (they even gave her three twokopeck coins for the pay phone).4 Meanwhile, our Party Secretary tried to establish the connection between the theft of the politburon and Sakharov. And the prosecutors tried to find an article in the code that would fit Duska’s case.

She took the blame for everything onto herself, that noble broad. In fact, this is what really happened leading up to the night I was raped.

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Duska and Ella, Teterin’s broad—the one who gave birth to twotongued Igor—were having a few drinks, and got to thinking what to do about us, their husbands. We spend our days and nights camouflaging, we’re destroying our families. So they started coming up with a plot. They decided to give us a fright. At first it was just for laughs: “If you guys don’t want to fuck us, if you’re going to spend your nights in the gutter, then we’re going to stick it to your hairy asses.”

It turned out it was Teterin who’d carved the thing out of stolen politburon in order to sell it to single broads. And I was their first victim. But even in this case, Teterin outwitted everyone! Later I found out that he too woke up one morning in a cage full of watermelons with his anus raped and bare.5 But he just pulled up his pants and headed home as if nothing had happened. His asshole was hurting, but, as you can understand, he didn’t want to mention it to his Ella.

He was careful how he walked, he didn’t complain to the cops, and he quit drinking for a day. He quit, and then he proposed to his wife, “Let’s have another kid. Maybe we’ll get one with just one tongue.”

Ella was happy. So she passed that politburon cock on to Dolidze’s and Dotsenko’s wives, and they used it to screw their husbands.

When my other camouflagers heard the news, they pissed their pants and began spending nights at home. Their women were satisfied. What the Americans made of it—I don’t know. The whole city emptied out! You couldn’t see a soul at night—everybody was afraid of the perverts. Out on the streets, all you could see were the green lights on the taxicabs, blinking like the eyes of hungry wolves. The prosecutors kept trying to find an article in the code they could apply to Duska’s case, but none fit. It turned out that our Soviet Criminal Code (which is hopelessly behind the times) had not foreseen the rape of a person, male or female, by means of an artificial penis.

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e have some attorneys in my brigade, so we arranged a legal consultation behind Manka’s beer kiosk. First we spent a couple of days getting our minds around the situation. Then we worked out a plan for Duska’s defense, fabricated mitigating circumstances, and, in case it came to trial, we tidied up the main line of Duska’s testimony. Meanwhile, the prosecutors keep dragging her in for more questioning: “We’re going to put you in prison in any case,” they say. “There’s no way a crime that’s already known in the West can go unpunished here! You, Duska, have created a precedent. Because of you, foreign tourists, corrupted by their sexual revolution, are camping out at night next to Lenin, Dzerzhinsky, and Marx-Engels. They pull down their pants and wait until morning, but they can’t get no satisfaction. Come clean, Duska.

Who smuggled that piece of politburon for you? Confess: Who was the unidentified person who carried the material from the underground, removed all that was superfluous in the manner of Phidias, and turned it into the crime weapon—a penis? Better confess now, or we nail you for bestiality.”1

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But Duska kept harping on the same string: “If our own dear Communist Party and our own dear Soviet government are not going to do anything more than just talk about fighting alcoholism, but in fact, they are increasing the production of vodka, dry wine, and sterno, if Kosygin is going to fight inflation by boosting prices on booze and freezing salaries, if he doesn’t give a shit about the fact that rotgut-induced, two-tongued monsters are being born, or that by the year 2000 we’ll be number one in the world in facial deformity per thousand citizens—to say nothing of being number three in rattiness—then you should know that these things are important to us broads. We care about these things! Take my momma, for example (that’s her tender name for that paralyzed bitch who’s drifting on her shit-pan to the crematorium like Thor Heyerdahl on his raft).2 You know what my momma told me? She told me, ‘There was a time, daughter, when my spouse—that is, your daddy, may he rest in peace—would climb on top of me, and no sooner was he up there than I would already be dreaming sweet dreams about the baby we were going to have. I could actually see that little baby who . . . oh, this is good . . . whom . . . oh wonderful, Sanechka . . . who . . . oh, my darling . . . I’m dying . . . dying . . . oh, now! . . . just a second, this is it . . . oh, it’s coming . . . I could just see the little baby that my spouse Sanya was plugging into me, and it was so rosy and plump: a little chick with tiny little hands and feet and eyes and nose, with a gorgeous little peepee in working order, with a darling little bottom— that’s you, Duska, you, my beauty. And why has God punished you so? Why is that asshole eighth-rank husband of yours not fucking you? It’s because he’s fallen in love with that tin-eyed witch whose name is Moscow Special Vodka—the Special Peppered Kuban variety. Dump him, Duska!’

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“You see, Comrade Prosecutors, we too want to sleep with our husbands like normal broads, just for fun and for pleasure, and to have babies. And we don’t want to feel ashamed when we compare our babies’ brains and appearances to those in other countries. Let Kosygin know: We’re going to stand up for ourselves! May the earth burn beneath the feet of our alcoholic husbands! We won’t give them a moment of peace! If we can’t get our hands on a politburon cock, then let it be made of cork! If not cork, then tar. We’ll find something to ram up their asses, no matter what, and we’ll spice it with pepper so it’ll burn for a week (although there’s no pepper in the stores any more either).

“You’ve driven our men nuts with your camouflage! We’ll put them back on their feet again! We won’t let them read your newspapers about bombs and missiles and wars and bloody imperialists and this unprecedented enthusiasm for volunteer work on Saturdays.

I personally am not going to work Saturdays any longer! Go find yourselves some other idiot to contribute free labor. All that money, all those billions saved from our free labor—it shouldn’t be going into building cancer wards and stadiums! Spend it on hospitals for our damned, unhappy, alcoholic husbands. We, their wives, don’t give a damn about your stadiums! The Dotsenkos’ daughter can hardly walk. She has eight toes on each foot. Do you expect her to set new records at your 1980 Olympics? And the Dolidzes’ little Givi— he’s got a crooked vertebra—are you going to send him out on the ice to do double toe loops? Pass this on to Kosygin!”3

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he prosecutors thought about it for a while, and decided they had no other option but to report what Duska said to Kosygin. He called a Politburo meeting right after the Blue Light television variety show where Zykina sang.1 That day, we were sitting out behind Zinka’s kiosk. We found some kindling— birch bark, maple leaves—and got a bonfire going. “Just like Tashkent!” Teterin said (shaking like the Tashkent earthquake).2 We warmed up a bottle of port wine on the fire, and just before it came to a boil, we took turns swigging the hot pestilence straight from the bottle. That revived us some as we huddled around the fire. Suddenly Teterin stopped shaking, slapped us on the shoulders, his gaze hardened, and he began to speak: “I was summoned to the Politburo yesterday. I made a report on the raison d’être of new dry-cleaning establishments in our country— the so-called American-style dry cleaners. But, before it was my turn to speak, they discussed Duska: whether to bring her to trial or not. Brezhnev said, ‘This is a strategic question, dear Comrades, from the point of view of future success in our camouflage effort.’ ”

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By the way, he was speaking without notes. Teterin himself noticed that, and he never lies in such situations.

“And then that old consumptive Suslov, who hasn’t had an erection since 1938, disagreed. . . . ‘We’ve been asleep at the switch. Our border guards and customs officials have overlooked the extent to which the sexual revolution has crossed our borders. So there you have the fruits of your goddamned détente! You got yourselves into this mess and now you’ll have to get yourselves out. I propose that we intensify ideological work among the population by drawing on the support of our retired Party members, they’re not doing anything anyway, other than sitting around chewing the fat on our park benches.’

“Then Andropov took the floor: ‘This is what we should do: let’s try prohibition. Let’s withhold between 3.82 and 4.12 rubles a month from every alcoholic’s pay—that’s how much half a liter of vodka costs—and earmark it for building alcoholism treatment centers with compulsory morning calisthenics. As for Duska, we’ll stick her in a psychiatric hospital. She has usurped the functions of our security organs!’3 “Then, all of a sudden, Kosygin bangs his fucking fist on the table and lights into them all (with those bags under his eyes): ‘Are you all crazy? Prohibition would bring an immediate halt to the construction of the Baikal-Amur Railway and all our other youth-initiative construction projects! You can’t buck people up just with slogans, Suslov! People in the provinces have nothing to eat, so let them at least get drunk. Later on, when we build Communist society, our sufferings and privations will be compensated, with interest. Our State Bank solemnly guarantees this.’

“Then that little guy Kirilenko (also with bags under his eyes, bloated from caviar) gives his report: ‘Our undercover agent,

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code-name Little Falcon, has become a naturalized citizen on the island of Lesbos, and she’s reporting that this business of women identifying themselves as men—which started there before Christ—continues. And she’s asking in code: “What’s to be done with Duska?”ʼ4 “ ‘It’s a disaster!’ Podgorny says. ‘The People sharply reduced their drinking after all these rapes of men. In their sobriety they’re beginning to think in a different way. They’re retreating into religion.

But the most terrible thing for us today, Comrade Communists, is that the People are starting to seek answers to the Eternal Questions not in constant drunkenness, but in monitoring the intimate lives of their leaders. The People are conceiving an illegitimate social envy of the system that supplies us with fancy-grade sausage marked with the seal of quality. What will come next?’ ” In general, little brother General, the whole Politburo agreed to announce yet another all-people’s, extraordinary, unpaid-labor weekend and to close down the Beriozka stores that sell high-quality stuff without any camouflage at all, for special coupons. Close them down immediately so those fucking stores won’t be eyesores that destroy the People’s faith in our classless society or their faith in the idea that everybody from big to small, from Brezhnev to Teterin the wino, is as simple and modest as Lenin was.

“And now,” Brezhnev says, “Let’s take a look at the recording of the bio-currents in Lenin’s brain—the one our glorious microphysicists have recorded with the help of their radio-telescope that’s the biggest in the world.”5 At this point, Teterin said he could see green snakes running around and commas dancing on the screen. “ ‘It’s been half a century since the man kicked the bucket, but his brain, unlike ours, keeps mulling things over. It mulls things over, Camouflage

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and, as we say, knocks together a résumé of what our Party activity should be. It says: “You’re on the right track, dear Comrades!

Keep up the good work of acting without principles in your struggle against Imperialism and Zionism!” Now let’s take a vote on whether we should go ahead with the Corvalán exchange, one for one, since that whore Pinochet, the fucker, has sensed our weakness at Helsinki. New treacherous tactics have been adopted by the enemies of peace and progress: in the past, they used to shoot their Communists between the eyes, apply psychological stress to the point of death in their torture chambers, dissolve them in various acids, and so on. Our Party had no problem with that: paint those people as martyrs and be done with them. Now it’s a horse of a different color: “How about if we give you Corvalán,” they say, “and you give us Bukovsky?”’6 “‘Personally, I’ve lost the habit of haggling: it’s been a long time since I bought veal, carnations, or potatoes at the Quiet Market.

I propose that we give them Bukovsky, but we should be extra careful at the swap: Don’t let them stick us with some other blockhead instead of Corvalán. And that guy should be warned not to shoot off his mouth about “human rights violations in the USSR,” or we send him back, under armed guard, all the way to Chile—he can blather there all he wants.’

“Brezhnev asks, ‘Okay, who’s against the motion?’ Suslov whispers (on account of his TB), ‘I am.’ ‘Me, too,’ Kosygin barks. ‘Stalin wouldn’t do that,’ Suslov explains, ‘Stalin had no problem getting to Trotsky.7 And eliminating Corvalán would be nothing compared to that! The positive political effect of his forced liquidation would be huge! Plus, there’s the matter of precedent. It’s the precedents that are always the big problems. What if reactionary regimes in all these

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countries start arresting their Communist General Secretaries, and provoke us to swap them for dissidents and Zionists? What would we do then? Khrushchev drained our Emergency Reserve of political prisoners, and only now, after a superhuman effort, are we back on track. By bits and pieces we’ve put things back together—and now this! Corvalán has been doing his time in excellent living conditions: they aren’t torturing him, they allow him visitors, they’ve granted him interviews once a week. So let him sit in jail and serve the cause of peace and social progress in an objective manner. Logic suggests that prison is time, and time, comrades, is on our side. I am against the motion.’

“At this point, Kosygin says, ‘I myself propose that we act according to Leninist principles and agree to a far-reaching compromise: let’s swap Duska for Corvalán. The ranks of women queers are swelling in our country at an unprecedented tempo. In order to meet their demand for members, they’re ripping off the most precious plastics, like politburon and partburon, as well as attachments for the artificial penises made of such superstrong alloys as Sovietium, Podgornium, and K-G-Benium. Moreover, out on the collective farms, women are using in-season vegetables for this purpose: carrots, cucumbers, ears of corn, and radishes (of the Glory-to-Astronaut-Tereshkova variety) as well as horseradishes of the Komsomol-Member-of-LongStanding variety, cabbage stalks, and so on.8 All varieties of sausage have also disappeared from stores in the black-soil zone, and in other zones as well. The People feel it is their right to ask us Communists, “Where is our sausage?” How do we answer that? Raising prices on unavailable foods and products was a correct political move, but it did not yield the desired political result. Raising taxicab fares is no panacea for all our problems, although there has been a significant Camouflage

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decrease in people running back and forth from the provinces to the cities in search of hard-to-find goods. Economies have been achieved in gasoline consumption, and, correspondingly, we’re observing a sharp rise in oil exports to NATO countries. The Corvalán/Duska swap will improve our balance of trade while also partially eliminating problems in the supply of vegetables and bananas to our population. Now let me address the main aspect of this whole problem: Duska’s inglorious initiative has led to a catastrophic overstocking of warehouses, stores, and restaurants with unsold articles of wine and vodka. There are train jams at our main railroad hubs, inflation is on the rise, most of our internal banking is in thrombosis. There’s an increasing danger that a second opposition party may form spontaneously with a political platform that will stoop to the lowest forms of social demagoguery. The very concept of global camouflaging of the USSR’s surface territory is now in jeopardy! In this context, the “Onward to Communism” slogan will look ridiculous even to those idiots in the Communist Parties in fraternal nations. I propose that we charge our Ministry of Foreign Trade with the task of exchanging the persons in question in some neutral country. This business has already gone too far. My Zykina declared just yesterday: “If you were a drunk, Alyokha, now I’d know what to do with you!”’ ”

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e dismantled some Arabian-orange crates, threw them on the fire, and warmed up another bottle.

It went down well, and Teterin kept rattling off his recitation of those Politburo speeches. As I listened to him rattling it off, I thought to myself: Will we get through this or not? And how will it end? I was also thinking: “Ah, Duska, who would have thought we would sink so low?” And I was feeling guilty about my imprisoned son, Slavka. If it weren’t for me and my multimillion-strong team, and all these artist-types who work at home—poets, composers, painters, and actors—Slavka wouldn’t have written his book The Development of Alcoholism in Russia, or published it in the fucking West. And he wouldn’t be serving time underground in a Lubyanka jail cell either. He’d be sipping cheap port wine in some entranceway, and tearing some broads’ pants off right there.

Meanwhile, Teterin never broke stride: “So Andropov says, ‘We’re not going to swap Duska. She’s not going anywhere without her husband and her son. My mole, who’s working inside the bloodstained Chilean Gestapo, reports that Corvalán’s natural death is imminent. Should we be taking risks in such a delicate matter?’

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Brezhnev answers him, ‘We should! Those Latin Americans are hardy people. According to my sources, that Uruguayan, Arismendi, went months without eating or sleeping.1 After torture sessions, his blood’s clotting capacity was near zero. Yet he survived. Because the blood formula for Communists remains mystery number one, baffling our enemies and the international cartels. Let’s swap this bandit Bukovsky for Corvalán. Screw Bukovsky: he won’t make it long after living on gruel in Andropov’s prisons!’ ” There was thunderous applause. All rose, then sat down again, and gave the floor to Teterin.

Teterin slowly poured himself some Crimean Madeira from a crystal pitcher with a golden lid. He knocked back a glass—and then began to recite his own speech to the Politburo. “ ‘As a freelance counterintelligence operative, I have uncovered the following about the so-called American-style dry-cleaners. It all began one morning when I woke up at home after my night shift, and wanted to go out and get a drink to cure my hangover. But I gradually realized that none of my clothes were in the house. No pants, no coat, no flannel shirt—I couldn’t find them anywhere. I would’ve put on my wife Ella’s rags, which I’d often done before, but she’d removed them as well, the stinking bitch. I found a note stuck to the toilet door-handle that read, “Bastard! Wino! Your stuff is at the cleaners, stay home and be damned.” So that’s how it is? Okay! So I decide to pull the drapes off one of the windows (as I’d done once before).

I figured I’d be able to wrap myself up in the curtain and proceed to the Seagull Cleaners to tear my rags out of the seagull’s beak. But then I discover the curtains have already been taken down. All right, bitch, I think, I’m going to stage you a Stalingrad Battle for Moscow.2 But Elka has already dealt me an even deadlier blow: I can’t find a

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single sheet or pillowcase or tablecloth in the house. Surrounded!

Surrounded! The enemies’ mugs are already grinning in the windows.

They have horns on their heads and worms in their ears. I burst into the john like a Cossack infantryman, and Kissinger is sitting there wiping his glasses. I bash him with a loudspeaker, flush the toilet, Kissinger’s disappeared, only a piece of the toilet bowl has broken off. I’m sweating red, green, and gray, and there’s a grain of sand in every drop of sweat. I jump into the bathtub, AAAAA! Kissinger is lying naked in the bathtub, cold and slippery . . . AAAA! I dump all the dishes out of the cupboard onto him, but he’s looking at me from out of the television and he says, “Never fear, Teterin, I’m Valentin Zorin!” AAAA!’3 “At this point, the Politburo gave me a stormy ovation. . . . ‘I throw the television off the balcony right onto a Zhiguli, one of a whole mess of cars down there that belong to crooks, collective farmers, and profiteers. I seem to feel a little better after that, but then, suddenly, the wallpaper sprouts ears, and there’s a smell coming out of those ears . . . It’s hard to breathe . . . The stench grabs me by the throat . . . Jumbo-size macaroni are advancing toward me from the kitchen shelf, with vermicelli at the ready. Centipedes sprinkle down from the chandelier, while Kissinger clatters knives and forks on the bathroom tiles. What’s to be done? Half past ten! Just half an hour until the liquor store opens! I won’t go there naked! I did that once, and they arrested me (illegally too, because, as I walked, I kept yelling, “Don’t look! Don’t look, citizens!”). But then I remember: Ah-ha! There’s a veneer dresser with a mirror in the foyer. So I cut holes in the sides of the dresser for my arms, and one in the back for my eyes. I knock out the bottom. On the top shelf, I put a baldLenin ruble coin from my stash, I get in, walk out the door, and Camouflage

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push the button for the elevator. My balls are covered, so it’s okay.

Fine. I make my way slowly down the street. My little Igor runs after me, singing, “May there always be papa.” No problem, except for a splinter in my left nut. The reflection from the mirror scares away the little DT devils as I walk, and that’s how I make it to the store.

I’ve made it, glory be to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union!

Having refueled, and feeling better, I go to the cleaners. “Come on, you bastards,” I say, “Give me my threads. I’m Teterin, I lost the receipt.” Strangely enough, they hand me my things. So I leave them the dresser: Let them use it in place of the urn as a wastebasket for old newspapers. “ ‘Want to know what I learned from all this? I learned that those Americans are no fools. Once again, they’ve pulled a fast one on us!

We’ve been allocating all these resources to espionage, to round-theclock camouflaging, and meanwhile, they’ve reduced all this sort of work to nothing with their superfast dry-cleaning machines. As soon as our rags go into the machines, sensors and transmitters are sewn into them, and the rest is just a matter of technology. Their satellites fly over, pick up the signals, and the CIA keeps track—not only of our plans, but of every detail in our intimate lives as well. It’s fine for you members of the Politburo. You don’t have to worry: Your women don’t bring your rags to “American-style” dry cleaners like our wives do. So, I’m walking along the street, and suddenly our boss Milashkin starts yelling at us: “They’re flying over! They’re flying over! One’s over Anka’s beer-stand now, another’s over Manka’s!”

And just then, I hear something: something’s buzzing in my fly and in my armpits. The buzzing is me. I’m emitting signals like a satellite: “Beep. . . . Beep. . . . Beep.” So, what’s our plan? I say: Shut down the fucking dry cleaners! Or else insert jamming devices into our rags so

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that when they come after us with their buzzing, we jam them with crackling and scraping noises like we do with Radio Liberty.’ “ ‘All right, Teterin,’ Kosygin says, ‘We’ll come up with something to deal with it. One head’s good, twelve’s even better.’

“The Politburo is like a liquor store, it closes at seven. ‘So,’ I say, ‘I’d better be going then, or I’ll be late.’ We all start kissing each other—three kisses per person, like we’re at the airport seeing Brezhnev off somewhere. Nobody kisses Suslov, though: he’s got TB, and the doctors have prohibited it. So Podgorny says to Suslov: ‘Don’t get upset, Suslov. You’ve got your Collected Works in two volumes coming out next week, and we’ll be selling them to the public for coupons instead of Hound of the Baskervilles.’ What a guy that Suslov is! About to kick the bucket any minute! He should be lolling on the beach in the Crimea, guzzling port wine, glass after glass, gratis. And instead he drags himself to the Central Committee every day on the tram—a modest person, like Lenin.”

Suddenly, brother, Teterin wheezed and collapsed into the fire— we didn’t manage to catch him before he fell. He scorched himself a bit. We pissed on him, according to the old method, so he wouldn’t get blisters on his face. He started crying and calling for his son.

“Forgive me, Little Igor, forgive me for drinking away my eighth chromosome, and for your extra tongue! I’ll make it up to you. I’ll bear you a sister, a beauty, a kindergarten princess. And I’ll enroll you in a special bilingual school, an Anglo-French one. Forgive me!

I’ll go on the wagon, I promise, I swear I will!”

We talked about a lot of things that night, brother. Our local precinct cop dropped by, his face crumpled (he must have been wearing his muzzle at night to keep from biting his wife in bed). He chewed us out about the fire: “Do you realize where you’ve kindled your fire?

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Do you understand that you’re all going to be destroyed in the years leading up to the Olympics? Do you realize what’s going on? Why are you playing with fire, when the Rossiya is burning?”4 “What do you mean, it’s burning?”

“It’s burning! It started from the top!”

“A-A-A-A-!” Teterin howled, and grabbed his head. “I’m bu-u-uu-rning?” And he plopped right into the Pushka River! They didn’t find his body until a month later, in the Suez Canal.

“Do you realize where you’ve kindled your fire?” At this point, I scattered the pieces of smoldering wood and stomped out the embers. And suddenly I collapsed and started crying—just like a little kid does when he realizes that a great danger has just barely been averted, thank God! It turned out that one of our ready-response strategic missiles was positioned right below us: If we’d thrown a few more boards onto our fire, goodbye World War II, hello World War III. We would’ve been the ones scattered around, not those smoldering pieces of orange crate. The rocket would’ve set off on its course, the response would have come from over there, and that would’ve been it! All that’d be left on earth would be empty bottles. There’d be no places left where you could return bottles for a refund. And most important: who would be left to take the bottles and give you your refund?

As this horrible vision of devastation flashed through my suddenly sober mind (if only such visions would glimmer more often in your generals’ and marshals’ brains), I started crying even louder and more sincerely. But the cop just went on yelling at us: “We’ll stamp you out, scumbags! By the time we get to the ʼ80 Olympics, there’ll be nobody left here but athletes. We’ll scorch out the ulcer of alcoholism with the Olympic torch, you prostitutes.”

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o tell you the truth, brother, our district cop went a little crazy over those ʼ80 Olympics. He totally lost it, starting with balconies. He issued an order against hanging clothes out to dry on balconies. Dangling linen might be interpreted by the secret American satellites as white flags signaling the surrender of our ideological positions. And then, some fine morning, we might awaken to the clanking of the treads of the enemy’s tanks on our Great Atomic Avenue. “If any of you hangs out a bedsheet or even white undies,” he said, “I’ll look at it as surrendering to the enemy, and I’ll shoot you between the eyes without investigation or trial—screw your grandmother to a Tula samovar if I don’t.1 Just the other day, Headquarters issued me a box of ammunition for this. Disssmisssed!”

Our precinct cop loved that little word. He would even shout it out at night in his sleep. Want to know why he was always on his high horse? Because he always drank alone, never with the People.

He shunned the masses, he was camouflaging as an individualist—a teetotaler. But we knew he never went on duty without first loading up with a quarter-liter of alcohol. And where do you think he carried

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the alcohol they were bribing him with at the nuclear institute? He’d pour it into his holster! Yes! Really! Sometimes you’d see him sneak around the corner looking depressed and angry, he’d slide his holster off his belt, throw back his head, and suck the holster dry. Not a drop spilled on the ground. He even managed to drink up the lab alcohol they were using to polish the H-bombs for Lenin’s birthday.

The first sign that he was losing it was when he started barking in his sleep. Teterin was living on the other side of the wall from him, and he heard the whole thing. He’d bark and bark, sometimes with a whining undertone and sometimes, especially when there was a full moon, it would end in a sickening howl. It was impossible to sleep when he was barking and howling, but we didn’t have the right to complain about it. He’d say, “My barking is part of a special ops assignment, so don’t you go showing your fangs at me, scum! And my howling has a government function. Without it, you guys would’ve long ago become slaves of capitalism and of the New York mafia.”

That’s how he’d talk to us . . . Don’t interrupt, I’m not going to move on from this until I’ve told you the whole, soul-wrenching truth about our crazy district cop. Don’t order me around! I’m not your Warsaw Pact! If I were to bark out the order, “Atten-shun!” right now, you would have to stretch your hands at your sides and go on standing there all the way to the Second Coming. Not until then would they say “At ease!” to you. Understand?

In the end, our cop’s wife became totally exhausted by her husband’s barking and howling. She just couldn’t take it any longer, so she resorted to stuffing his mug at night. She’d use a dirty sock, or a foot wrap, or his boxer shorts—and he’d sleep like a log until morning. And he didn’t guess a thing. So his neighbor Teterin and his wife and kids got a break from the noise. Everything would have been fine

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if, in the morning, he didn’t start wondering about the unwashed sock or the stinking foot wrap or the rotten underpants that would be all wet—sometimes chewed to pieces. He couldn’t figure it out.

His wife usually set the alarm separately for herself, so she’d get up early before he woke up, she’d fish the stuffing out of his mouth, and dry it out on the radiator. All was well until, for some reason, the alarm stopped working (even though it was stamped with the seal of quality). On that morning, while rubbing his drunken pupils open, he discovered that his gullet was plugged. He couldn’t groan, couldn’t mumble, couldn’t squeeze out more than a wheeze. Choking with indignation, he tore the gag out of his mouth and got right down to biting his wife. He was drawing blood before she ran out naked into the street. We rescued her.

From then on, she wouldn’t put out for the cop until he’d stuck a bulldog muzzle onto his drunken mug for the night. He loved his wife. That’s why he put the muzzle on. Love for a broad, brother, can drive a man not only to heroic feats like that, but to even more astounding acts. And he stopped howling. Sure, he’d bark sometimes after the October Revolution holiday (I personally consider that normal for a holiday hangover). But that’s not the important thing.

The problem was that the viper got into the habit of appling us like a beast. He made our lives miserable, the Asmodeus. You ask why I say “appling” instead of “hassling”? Because “appling” means hassling us in the apple orchard behind Zinka’s booth when we’d gather there in the mornings.2 Whenever we’d have port or sterno or beer or rotgut wine left over at the end of a night’s binge, some of us would bury it under the old apple trees in the orchard. We’d bury it, and then dig it up in the morning, have a hair of the dog to cure our hangovers, and then go underground to sort uranium atoms.

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It must have made a strange picture when the CIA developed their shots of us—a bunch of camouflagers crawling around on all fours under the apple trees, hunting for a bottle that one of them, the bastard, can’t remember where he’s stashed. We once dug up the whole orchard, perforated the whole area with sticks and knives, and still couldn’t find the quarter-liter of vodka and the beer we were looking for. Not nowhere. And our hearts were close to cutting out on us, they didn’t want to keep on ticking unless we could get our blood vessels to expand. And in our heads: a literal end of the world was taking place, a Last Judgment, a grueling hell, anguish and darkness, terrible grief. Finally, when it seemed we would never get out of that orchard, when it seemed we were all going to die at our posts, and definitely never be resurrected, I stumbled upon a white bottle cap under a faded autumn burdock. I pulled the tin cap off the vodka bottle with my teeth, cutting my lip in the process. And with those same teeth, I opened the bottle of Zhiguli beer. It was a wonder where we got the strength: Our hands were shaking like those of the balalaika players from the Academician Kurchatov Folk Orchestra.3 But finally, wretched souls that we were, we each took a sip of salvation out of that cold little bottle. . . . Oh! Glory be to you, oh Lord!

Forgive us and have mercy upon us who are saved! Saved this time round, for it is not known what the future will bring. How can we know what our fates will be tomorrow—we cannot. . . .

To boost the thermal coefficients of the vodka and the beer, we kindled a bonfire. We mixed the vodka and beer together in an empty champagne bottle with a neck covered in gold foil. And then, my dear Comrade Lieutenant General, after our salvation, good old Daddy High himself touched and blessed our innards with his holy fatherly hand. Getting high! Our bodies grew younger instantly,

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thoughts appeared in our heads that, only a few minutes before, had been cloudy, dull, and sickly. The whole world, including our damned Staroporokhov, began to fall into line before our eyes, and our souls yearned for something . . . it’s hard to say what . . . something high-minded, real, active, useful to the State and to the People, something altruistic, decisive, Party-minded, and most important, pure . . . In a word, to have another drink, and after that: down the escalator to our menial second job—writing the ominous “Death to Capitalism” slogan in red paint on the missiles.

No sooner did we recover from the terrible strains of our nighttime camouflaging than we saw a man running out of our building toward the orchard. He’s running barefoot, even though the autumn grass is still covered with night frost. And he’s wearing blue long johns and a lilac undershirt. It’s our precinct cop. Some of us prepare to clear out fast to avoid a fine, but I issue the command: “Don’t run!

A cop in long johns must be engaged in camouflage, there’s not going to be a problem. At ease at your posts—just hide the vodka.” He comes running up to us, the beast, all out of breath. His mug is purple, he’s about to choke. I’m familiar with such faces. They are caused by a fatal narrowing of the blood vessels—of many years duration, of course—you’re right about that, brother-general. “Brothers!” he gasps entreatingly, “Save me! There’s not a drop to drink at home!

I’m dying! I swear to God I am! Just give me a sip of beer, or some cologne if you’ve got it! Save me! My feet . . . my hands . . . are getting paralyzed! I’ll even drink some hand lotion if you’ve got it!”

His forehead’s covered in sweat. His breathing’s uneven. He’s twitching all over. His little eyes are roaming. A familiar picture. You feel sorry for a man in such a state. He’s helpless and sick, and at such moments, his whole fortuitous life depends on a shot of lousy Camouflage

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vodka, or half a glass of any sort of Soviet rotgut. “If you’ll help me, I’ll never forget it, brothers! Pour me a shot! I can’t breathe! My chest’s bursting! My temples are on fire!”

“There isn’t any,” I say—a cruel lie. “We’ve finished it off to the last fucking drop, without salt. Store it up on your own, you son of a bitch. Here you are, trying to bum a glass from us camouflagers, when every day you drag the stuff home from the store by the bagload, you shit. How did you get so smashed, oh comrade antialcoholism-warrior?”

“I was celebrating the holiday,” he said. “I lost my pistol on Monday. I thought I was done for—the end. I thought about climbing into the noose. My pension down the drain, maybe even goodbye freedom. But it was found, brothers, my gun was found. Turns out I dropped it in the warehouse when I was tally-hoing the manager.

I was so happy it was found I went on a binge. Help!”

Teterin asks, “How did you drop it? Were you standing on your head?” (As an engineer-inventor, he likes digging down to the core of things, finding out how they work.) “I don’t remember. Sonka sometimes does it in ways that make my head spin, like after a ride on the merry-go-round . . . just one swig! I’m dying . . . You’ve got your fire going—that means you were warming up port wine.”

“No way,” I think to myself, “You’re not going to get a single swallow, scum. Aren’t you the one who’s always putting out our fires, scattering them around? Isn’t it you who’s always slapping us with fines for sharing a bottle in public? And who was it who used to collar us like mad dogs and drag us to the detox tank? It was you, you scum.

And the main thing is: you’re a saboteur if not a spy, who’s been tearing the mask off our Party’s camouflaging operation. You have set yourself above the Party!

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“Yes,” I say out loud, “you’ve set yourself above the Party, and that’s why you bark and howl at night. We don’t have a single drop for you. Go sell your pistol and use the proceeds to treat your hangover.”

Our cop is turning blue, and his fingertips are white and motionless. At that point, I got really scared, but I thought it would be a pity to waste even one drop of vodka on the vermin. “Hold on a second,” I say to Teterin. “Don’t take a leak in the bushes. Pour some into this glass.” Of course, I say this quietly so the cop won’t hear (but his ears might have been plugged up already by predeath hangover deafness). Teterin unbuttons his pants and pours me a whole glass of piss, right up to the rim—his first draft of the morning (Teterin’s blood vessels were so constricted from drinking that sometimes— pardon me, brother—sometimes he couldn’t take a leak until he’d first taken care of his hangover).

“Have a drink,” I say to the cop, “drink up while it’s still hot, it’s at least 25 proof.” Would you believe it, General, our cop tossed off that glass in one gulp, didn’t spill a drop (he just sighed, tore off a burdock leaf, sniffed it, and wiped that farewell-to-life teardrop from his cheek).

“God, that feels good. I’ll never forget that. I’m coming back to life, brothers.”

“Taste good?” I ask.

“A little salty and smells a bit of bedbugs. Still, I feel much better.”

“It’s beer and cognac that Teterin mixed together yesterday.

Would you like some more?” ”I wouldn’t mind another. And I’ll bring some dough. I wouldn’t want to be a freeloader.”

“Go ahead, bring some, we can use it at eleven.”

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He did bring five rubles when he came back, already dressed in his uniform. So, for all the mean and vicious things the cop had done to us, Teterin poured him out another little glassful. The cop had come back completely smashed, feeling happy and singing, “Oh, how I love the Lenin Hills. How I love to meet the dawn with my darling there . . .” He’d brought snacks: sausage, onions, tomatoes, some sort of pirozhki, and a cold soupbone all covered in meat and tasty-looking gristle.4 He downed the second glass of Teterin’s piss in one go and started in on his favorite topic: the Olympic Games and alcoholism, mixed with hooliganism.

You’re wrong, my dear military general, if you don’t believe it’s possible to treat a hangover with piss. But that doesn’t mean you have to. I personally saved the life of my camouflager Kozhinov that way. The man was dying right before our eyes. We could see he wasn’t going to make it to eleven o’clock, no way. There were about forty minutes to go before the self-serve beer hall would open, and he just laid himself down right there on Lenin Prospect, breathing his last. His blue tongue was hanging out, his eyes were crossed, he had turned gray and was barely breathing. Teterin, as usual, started reasoning theoretically about how, if we were as high as we were that morning, there must be some residual alcohol in our blood and in our urine. It must contain alcohol. And although it had been diluted with all kinds of nonalcoholic drinks, like water, it still could be used in an emergency, which is exactly what this was. We had to save Kozhinov. He was already starting the death rattle. We always had our glasses handy. So we poured him a full glass, and blew off the foam in proper fashion. He gulped it down, stopped twitching, and five minutes later, he was as chipper as a little bird. He’d completely revived. And he never figured out what it was he’d drunk.

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But let’s return to our precinct cop. The booze got to him, and he started giving us all kinds of crap about the preparations for the Games. “We,” he said, “have received a secret order to uproot, by the year 1980, the ulcers of alcoholism, hooliganism, whoring, blackmarketeering, hard currency, and so forth, out of Staroporokhov.

Our guests,” he said, “are foreigners, and a half-million horde of them is preparing to surge into our city, overwhelm us, and mock our ways. We must make them see, wherever they go, an unconditional yearning toward Communism and ideological conscientiousness. It will be suggested, or rather ordered, that, during the Games, all citizens not yet evicted from the city must dress properly and eat better. When riding the metro, trams, buses, and trolleys (as well as when walking), they must read Comrade Brezhnev’s books with a special expression on their faces. To shed a tear while reading is permitted, but laughing is strictly forbidden, because there’s nothing funny in author Brezhnev’s great trilogy.

“It will also be forbidden to form lines outside supermarkets and department stores. A line more than fifteen snouts long will be looked upon as a group harboring criminal intent, and will be subject to dispersal and fines. Citizens from outlying areas who sneak surreptitiously into the city to supply their families with meat, butter, and fish will be removed summarily from their respective means of public transport and deported under armed guard to their places of residence. Residence permits for the city of Moscow and its suburbs will, as of yesterday, be granted exclusively to citizens born of parents in possession of such permits. All others, including those who have scheduled business trips, will be obligated to consider themselves personae non gratae. And you drunkards are just such personae. For the struggle against you, thousands of young men and women are Camouflage

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being trained to come out onto the streets of our great city during the Games. Their assignments are: to monitor contacts between the athletes and our rotten intelligentsia (as well as other tainted citizens), to foil you drunks when you try to cash in your empty bottles to tourists from all over the world, to make it easier for great friends of the Soviet Union of the Angela Davis variety to disregard the shadier aspects of reality here, and to pick up the leaflets, tracts, Bibles, and works by Akhmatova, Bulgakov, Sakharov, Grigorenko, and other enemies of the state that the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists has scattered around the city.5 Primary attention will be given to keeping the territory of the USSR clear of every line written by its most hardened enemy, who has bought himself an ancient fortress with bodyguards in America, from which he fulminates vile attacks against his superpower motherland.6 “That’s what we have been ordered to do in order to utterly cut off all contacts between our Soviet (or rather, anti-Soviet) citizens, and foreign tourists. It is no secret that most of these foreign tourists have already been alerted to their forthcoming assignments, and their travel has been booked by the CIA. Of course, on the basis of pictures already in our possession, all of these hostile snouts will get what’s coming to them, and will be duly registered by the responsible authorities. So, in general, my advice to you is to go deep onto the wagon before it’s too late, and you can come back off right after the Games. And stop bitching all the time about how the working class can’t afford the prices at the farmers’ market, or about how food is getting scarcer even in Staroporokhov, or about all that other antiSoviet stuff and slander.

“We’ve got fruit and veg in this country! We do! We’re just saving them up for the Games. That’s why they’re not for sale in the

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provincial stores or in the capitals of the republics. You damned antelopes! You can’t imagine how much food the athletes and foreign tourists will devour during the Olympic Games! A lot! For example, if an athlete has to eat two kilos of meat in a week to win the bronze in the long jump, then, to win gold in the triple jump, he’ll correspondingly need six kilos a week. And if you take into account how many types of sports will be represented at the Games and how many medals will be won by representatives of the capitalist camp and the socialist camp, it adds up to many tens of thousands of head of cattle (to say nothing of chickens, geese, ducks, and other delicacies).

“Think about it. If the whole Soviet nation were to rush out now and buy up the livestock that’s putting on weight in the fields on a daily basis, what would be left by the time the Games begin? All that would be left would be cans of pearl barley in rotten tomato sauce (or, as we call it, ‘Tourist’s Breakfast’). We’ve been counting on these amazing ‘breakfasts’ to feed our own tourists. And what about the foreign tourist? How will he be fed? He, after all, will have received his assignment from the CIA to gobble, gobble, and gobble some more—to create a food deficit in our cafés and restaurants. The foreign tourist wants nothing more than to see us shamed. But we will say to him: ‘Stuff your face, my dear. Stuff your face until you bust your gut! That steak or grilled, spatchcocked chicken isn’t enough for you? Well then, have another! Go for broke, as we say. Have an extra helping. Lap it up! Yes, we may have economized on stuffing ourselves for the last five years, and perhaps many cities have forgotten the smell of sausage or the taste of butter, but we will feed you as much as you can eat! Gobble it up! You won’t be able to eat through everything we’ve got in the course of two weeks, even if, after your Camouflage

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soup-salad-meat entrée‒fish entrée‒ice cream‒cheese-fruit-dessertand-coffee, you go to the john, give your spying self an enema, and go back for more!’ This is what our Party will say to these ladies and gentlemen foreign tourists: ‘You have miscalculated, ladies and gentlemen!’ it will say, ‘your appetite is doomed to fail!’ ” In conclusion, our cop exhorts us: “When you’re guzzling port wine in entranceways, don’t bitch about how the situation with fruit and vegetables has never been worse in our country. Don’t forget about the hordes of foreign tourists who are preparing to invade the cafeterias, cafés, and other distribution points of the People’s Food Supply.”

Teterin interrupts at this point, saying he’s just invented a new brand of canned food called “Foreign Tourist’s Breakfast,” and will dedicate his invention to the Games. His idea is to stuff the cans full of red and black caviar, with a little plastic sign on the top of the can that says, “Eat your pineapples, pig out on grouse—your final day is near, bourgeois scum.”7 So the Party will kill two birds with one stone: Feed the foreigner breakfast and put him in a rotten mood for the rest of the day.

“You’re an alcoholic persona, Teterin, that’s the sort of person you are,” the cop says. That’s the moment when I say fearlessly to the cop: “So, officer, when you sober up, you get nasty? You’re the real persona around here because your ideas go against the party line on camouflaging. Are you so dense you can’t understand the main purpose of the Olympic Games? I’m not talking about its purpose for sports, I’m talking about its secret political purpose.”

“So, what is it?”

“Pour him another, Teterin, if you have the urge,” I say, “But don’t go in the bushes, or that broad in the window will see you.”

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By the time he’d drunk his second glass of Teterin’s piss earlier that day, the cop was completely plastered (that’s why he’d just lost control of his tongue so badly). So now, after drinking yet another half a glass without suspecting a thing, he got on his high horse and lit into me: “I’ll show you your secret task, schizo! I’ll get you registered for your shots right away! You can loll around the nuthouse for a while, the orderlies will crack your ribs a bit, you can spend some time chewing on the sleeve of your gray hospital gown, and then you can bite your own tongue off for the words you’ve just spoken! Understand?”

I reply, “Me? I at least understand everything I’ve accomplished.

While you, idiot, go around barking and howling at night and sleeping in a muzzle so you won’t bite your wife! While you’re copulating with the warehouse manager right on the sacks and boxes, you lose your government-issue pistol because you keep your weapon under your shirt, while you fill your holster with booze! You’re grazing in a fat, profitable place right there, in the warehouse where the fruit and veg that should be for the people is being hoarded for the Olympics! And you don’t see or hear the main thing. Bend your pig’s ear to the ground, you son of a bitch!” And while I’m saying this, I actually do bend his head down to the ground: “Hear that? The new underground projects are already under way. Right here on the site of our orchard, they’re already planning to build a stadium. And you know what they’re building below the stadium, you drunken stag? They’re building a central Red Square, complete with Kremlin, Lobnoe mesto, Lenin’s Tomb, GUM, and everything.8 See? If we hit the enemy with all our H-bombs, we’ll wipe him off the face of the earth, and he will do the same to us. But nobody will ever wipe us off the face of our underground. No way. The CIA doesn’t have the strength to do that yet.

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“So it’s entirely possible that we’ll have to meet the first day of Communism below ground. It may be a little boring to live our lives on the inside like that. But, on the other hand, maybe it’s time: we’ve done our living on the outside, and we’ve accomplished enough. The devil knows what we people have created out here on the Earth’s surface. We’ve just about finished off the animals, wasted the meadows, polluted the water in the rivers, chopped down the woods and fouled them up, and stunk up the air so it’s like a john or a barracks out there. Enough’s enough. But you, it turns out, don’t understand our camouflaging task. You don’t understand that we, together with the whole Soviet people, are using the Olympic Games to distract that nosy Pentagon from what’s going on underground.

“It’s not for the sake of an epic, present-day sporting event that we’ve been storing up meat and cod fillet for the enemy foreign tourists. It’s for the sake of our bright future! There, beneath the earth, we will one day turn on the lights, we’ll switch on the fans to make the air rush in from outside. We’ll sit down at long tables, we’ll fill our glasses with the purest Special Moscow vodka, we’ll knock it back and chase it down with deep-fried fish and puree of new potatoes.

And then, after a second glass, we’ll start in on the lamb chops. . . . Of course, then we’ll hug each other, and sing, ‘There’s nobody in the whole wide world / Who can laugh and love better than we do!’ And our Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev will lead us in singing: ‘We will sternly knit our brows / If the enemy tries to break us.’9 That will be the ultimate victory of Communism, and not a dog’s cock.

“Don’t get up from the ground, keep listening! A vast construction project is underway down there next to the nuclear missile shops. It’s huge! There’s no way the Pentagon or the CIA or the FBI or the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists can imagine the

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unprecedented scope of that project. So, come on over and visit us, dear ladies and gentlemen! Lift your weights, do your vaults, with and without poles, toss your volleyballs over nets, do your somersaults, swim, run around like headless chickens, poke each other with your sabers and rapiers. Meanwhile, down below, we’ll just continue to churn out our bright future and manufacture your doom.

“This, you precinct snout, is how you should understand everything they’re saying on the radio, or showing on TV, or writing in the newspapers. It’s not we camouflagers, perishing on the front lines of national camouflage, who are the enemies of the Party and the Government. It’s you! Why, you ask? It’s because you—you who got so upset about losing your gun while you were roasting the assistant warehouse manager without even taking off your uniform and shoulder-belt—you do not understand what you stand to lose when the enemy hits us with his rockets. Let me tell you. You’ll lose everything—mind, honor, and the conscience of our age, to say nothing of that cap of yours with its insignia. And now, take it easy, don’t overstrain yourself: it’s time for us to go to work. Today, I’m standing guard to honor the elections to the local Soviets, and I’m pledging my brigade to polish ten rockets (not three, as the plan stipulates) with vegetable oil, and to pour the uranium-238 out of six old bombs into one big new one. And tomorrow we’ll all go out, hung-over, and do our volunteer work—building a new nuthouse, with a secret jail, underneath the Olympic running track, as well as a book crematorium where the Party has resolved to burn a vast quantity of antiSoviet and religious propaganda.”

That’s the sort of conversation I had with our damned cop.

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n the same day we lit our bonfire on top of the missile launchpad, I ran over to the Dzerzhinsky statue, got on all fours, and started banging a bottle of Zubrovka on the asphalt so Slavka could hear me.1 And from underground came an answering “tap-tap, tap-tap.” There’s an underground prison down there, and they’ve extended the Metro right up to its gates (the Helsinki accords now strictly forbid the aboveground transfer of prisoners). “Slavka!” I call out, “Slavka! I’m going to quit drinking any minute now. They’ve chased me out of the Party—they’ve run my ass right out of there. Momma and I have brought you a fish fillet with fried potatoes and cucumber. Slavka!”

I don’t remember anything after that. Please, brother, don’t go on about how you’re not a lieutenant general, and you’re not my brother at all. Don’t tell me you’re just my attending physician. If you do, you’re shit, and I don’t want to talk to you. If you really are the person you say you are, then write me a prescription. I’m sleeping badly, and all I can hear in my brain is Levitan’s voice droning on: “From Lenin to the victim’s asshole—eight meters, ten to Marx and Engels, and forty to the street.” He gives me no peace.

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Jam Levitan’s voice like you jam “Radio Liberty. . . .” Hey! It’s gone silent! Maybe Levitan just died? He is really old, after all. Or maybe he died a long time ago, and maybe, in the Lubyanka, before he died, they extracted from him all his most important dispatches—all the way up to 1991—and recorded them on tape.2 He didn’t manage to keep it secret, the parasite!

So it turns out I’m in an insane asylum? That’s fantastic. Fantastic! Fantastic with butter on it. And it turns out there never was any camouflaging, it turns out that’s a figment of my . . . help me out here . . . a figment of my sick imagination? You mean they don’t really transport hydrogen bombs in convoys of trucks marked “MEAT” and “EAT COD FILLET”? Well, then, what are they carrying in those trucks if there’s no meat within ten kilometers of Moscow, and if you can’t find fish fillet anywhere in Moscow in a month of Sundays? What are they hauling in those trucks? Where’s the logic here? You’re not saying? You’re right. My Duska says, “Enough camouflage, Fedya, it’s time for you to grow up, become a man. Don’t read the newspapers, don’t go to meetings, to hell with the radio and TV. They’ve exhausted themselves with their lying, Fedya. They’ve gone bonkers, they’re farting peas at us. And in the place where truth used to be, a prick is growing. We women, we can see better than our leaders what’s happening to you damn men. You’re following those old goats straight into the meat-packing plant!”

By the way, Doctor-General, Paramedic-Lieutenant-Marshal, Brother-Orderly, it’s a good thing we’re not brothers. It’s great! Let me tell you the whole truth! It’s about how my little cousin, also named Fedya, died in Tula from twisted bowels.

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hey award the city of Tula the “Hero City” title. But this Hero doesn’t have a damned thing to eat. Nothing on the shelves except mackerel, scad fish, canned soup with pickled cucumbers, smoked cheese, and other canned goods. The Tula proletariat has gotten heartburn from this stuff. They’re so sick of their famous gingerbread that they’re coming down with diabetes and stomach worms.1 Meanwhile, spirits flow like a river in Tula— as they do everywhere in the country. Suddenly, it’s rumored that Lyonya Brezhnev is coming to town for a visit. What’s to be done?

The masses’ stomachs have to be stuffed—so they’ll stand quietly at the rally, pass gas, belch, and not blab provocative questions. So they summon Mikoyan to the Politburo. Under Stalin, he was Chief Advisor on Famine and Feeding the Population.2 Brezhnev asks: “How should we handle it, Anastas? How can we feed Tula instantly?” Mikoyan thinks and thinks. Finally he salutes and says: “I’ve figured out what to do. There are no beef reserves in Moscow, New Zealand mutton has been held up in the Indian Ocean by Typhoon Betsy, the pork is too greasy, and there’s not

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enough of it anyway. So I suggest a historic raid by the Special Select Cavalry Division along the Moscow-Tula highway under the slogan ‘To the Hero-City.’ As soon as the cavalry arrives at the Tula meatpacking plant that’s named after me, they will commence, without delay, the slaughter, processing of carcasses, and production of bologna and salami with the labels ‘Select’ and ‘Special.’ You’ll be able to sling that stuff out onto the shelves for the population as early as tomorrow morning. Upon surrendering their spurs, sabers, and banners, the cavalrymen will be redeployed as worker-operatives charged with protecting Comrade Brezhnev and members of the Regional Party Bureau.”

So, Mikoyan was awarded the “Liberation of Tula” medal for coming up with this idea, and the cavalry division’s little horses set off clip-clopping at a trot along the highway to do their great deeds.

They did everything Mikoyan told them to do. That night, the Tula alcoholics awoke to the sound of horses whinnying as if they were being slaughtered. The alkys leaped from their beds, from the roadways, from the grass, from jail cots, thinking it was the beginning of delirium tremens. In the morning, their wives rubbed their eyes in disbelief—just the day before, the shelves in the cold-cuts section at the supermarket had been bare—nothing there but lottery tickets—and now they were full of reddish-purplish sausages that smelled quite natural. The “Select Bologna” was 2.20 rubles a kilo.

The “Special Salami” was 2.90 a kilo. It sold out in a flash, like a truckload of firewood during a cold winter.

Then Brezhnev arrived. Everybody had a drink and a bite to eat.

They stuffed themselves on the salami, and 117 Tula citizens died from twisted bowels. It doesn’t make me feel any better that the director of the meatpacking plant was subsequently transferred to the Dawn

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cosmetics company for having ordered his workers to reinforce the ground meat with starch so there’d be enough sausage for everyone.

But they went ahead with the rally. I saw it on TV. The people of Tula were standing there flapping their ears, digesting their “Select” and “Special” cavalry division sausage, and listening to Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev’s speech. He told them everything that day: about unparalleled successes, about unprecedented enthusiasm for labor, about bright milestones, about the united national battle to manufacture quality products, about the Middle East, about Angola—about everything.3 The only things he omitted were the heroic problems in the supply of consumer goods most needed by the population. He concluded his speech, “Long live the Soviet Metro, the most beautiful in the world!” And he got the hell out of there. The cavalrymen were transferred to the construction battalion that was working on the new Tula gingerbread museum. That’s what kind of samovars they’re making in Tula these days!

And don’t you try to scare or terrorize me, Fyodor Milashkin.

We’re already scared and terrorized enough. And don’t prescribe hypnosis either. Enough! You’ve been hypnotizing us for sixty years now, and to us idiots, it has seemed that we’ve been striding forward toward Communism, that we’ve been transformed into a new type of Man, and that everything Soviet is excellent. Enough. If I have managed to quit drinking after surviving the worst imaginable case of the DTs, if I can heroically quit drinking, and if, now, I can’t wait to lie down next to my wife, Duska, on the cleanest of sheets, then I don’t need any more of your free hypnosis or any of your sleeping pills.

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or not, I’ll figure it out on my own. I’ll go out into the country, dig a well, and take a look.

As to your question concerning whether my son Slavka suffers from a hereditary mental deficiency, my response is negative: Before I started drinking, I was a lathe operator of the eighth (highest) rank, and my wife, Duska, was head chef at a factory cafeteria. If she were to go on the BBC and tell about what the Party feeds the People, at the same time as the People has fattened up the Party like a big turkey, there’d be a hell of a lot of noise. You can lock me up, you crocodile, wherever you want. But you can’t stop me from going to Helsinki to receive an award for the fact that, I, Fedya, former alcoholic, am defending the right of a human being to receive, in exchange for his titanic, historically unprecedented labor: meat, butter, milk, vegetables, and fruit, on the grand highway of humanity. I don’t want to do any more camouflaging, and I forbid others to do it as well.

I am now going to work as a team with Sakharov, the ex-father of the nuclear bomb. Let him go to the Politburo and demand rights in the areas of freedom of speech, insane asylums, foreign tourism, etc.

I’ll work on the other things: cafeterias, supermarkets, manufactured products, sabotage in the distilling industry, longhaired queers—so many things, you can’t list them all. There’s no end of work to be done. And I’ll have plenty of time—there won’t be a damned thing I have to do, now that I’ve qualified for second-category disability on grounds of persecution mania. I’ll handle issues of deception, humiliation, and mockery of people in the sphere of everyday consumer services. Then I’ll make some generalizations about all this and send it to Pravda as an editorial: “Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country doesn’t make a light bulb’s worth of difference to us.”4 Let them try not to publish that.

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I’m a person who thinks outside the box. I cannot conceive of a situation in which they produce pure vodka for Podgorny while for me, they produce rotgut that makes my head . . . Okay, I’ll be quiet.

Wait, I’ll be quiet! Don’t call the orderlies. I’ll be quiet. But let me say just one last word: Oh, People! Do not warm your port wine on a bonfire! Oh, People! Eat cod fillet! It’s tasty and nutritious! Down with “Gift of the Sun” fortified wine! Go-oa-l!

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Moscow, 1977

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INTRODUCTION

1. Yuz Aleshkovsky (Iuz Aleshkovskii), “Avtobiograficheskaia spravka (Autobio-

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graphical Information),” in his Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh (Collected Works in Three Volumes), vol. 1 (Moscow: NNN, 1996), 13.

2. Kangaroo, translated by Tamara Glenny (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1986), 23; The Hand; or, The Confession of an Executioner, translated by Susan Brownsberger (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1989); A Ring in a Case, translated by Jane Ann Miller (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995). Oliver Ready, Persisting in Folly: Russian Writers in Search of Wisdom, 1963–2013 (Oxford, UK: Peter Lang, 2017), 147.

3. Yuz Aleshkovsky (Iuz Aleshkovskii), Nikolai Nikolaevich & Maskirovka (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1980).

4. Personal communication, June 2017. In an earlier interview given to John Glad, Aleshkovsky identified his appreciative audience not as KGB men, but as members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party ( John Glad, Besedy v izgnanii: Russkoe literaturnoe zarubezh’e [Conversations in Exile: The Russian Literary Abroad] [Moscow: Knizhnaia palata, 1991], 116). On the culture of samizdat, see Ann Komaromi, Uncensored: Samizdat Novels and the Quest for Autonomy in Soviet Dissidence (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015).

5. Victor Erofeyev, “Dirty Words,” The New Yorker, September 15, 2003, 45.

6. Andrei Bitov, “Pamiatnik literatury kak zhanr (A Monument of Literature as a Genre),” in Iuz! Chteniia po sluchaiu 80-letiia Iuza Aleshkovskogo (Yuz! A Conference on the Occasion of Yuz Aleshkovsky's Eightieth Birthday), ed. Priscilla Meyer and Aleksandra Sviridova, 2nd expanded edition (Moscow: Tri kvadrata, 2005; expanded edition Middletown, CT, 2010), 59–90, 81.

7. Mark Lipovetsky, Russian Postmodernist Fiction: Dialogue with Chaos, ed. Eliot Borenstein (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), 117.

Notes 8. Lev Loseff noted that Bakhtin was amused by Aleshkovsky’s impromptu rhyming couplet, “A niz material'no-telesnyi / U nei byl uzhasno prelestnyi” (“Her lower bodily-material stratum / Was extremely charming”), Lev Loseff (Lev Losev), “Iuz!,” in Meyer and Sviridova, Iuz!, 174.

9. Priscilla Meyer, “Skaz in the Work of Juz Aleškovskij,” Slavic and East European Journal, vol. 28, no. 4 (Winter 1984): 460.

10. Fyodor Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary, translated and annotated by Kenneth Lantz (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1994), 1: 257.

11. Jesse Sheidlower, ed., The F-Word (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009).

Victor Erofeyev defines the “cornerstones of mat” as “khui,” “pizda” (“cunt”), “blyad” (“whore”), and “ebat” (“to fuck,” “Dirty Words,” 42). All these “cornerstones” form the fabric of Nikolai Nikolaevich and Camouflage.

12. See in particular Zhores A. Medvedev, The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko, trans. I. Michael Lerner (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969); David Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970); Nikolai Krementsov, Stalinist Science (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); and Ethan Pollock, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 41–71.

13. Pollock, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars, 61.

14. Priscilla Meyer points out that Aleshkovsky’s “science-fiction” tale presages in vitro fertilization (personal communication, June 2017).

15. Personal communication, June 2017. We would like to thank Allan Berlind, professor of biology emeritus, Wesleyan University, for reviewing the discussion of Lysenkoism here. Any errors are of course our own.

16. Ready, Persisting in Folly, 142. The chapter on Aleshkovsky is “Not to Reason Why: Life against mind in the fiction of Yuz Aleshkovsky (Nikolai Nikolaevich, The Hand),” 119–177. For a reading of The Hand and Kangaroo that places Aleshkovsky in a broader Cold War context of both Russian and American literature, see Derek C. Maus, Unvarnishing Reality: Subversive Russian and American Cold War Satire (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2011).

17. Ready, Persisting in Folly, 148.

18. Lipovetsky, Dialogue with Chaos, 119, emphasis in original.

19. Aleksei Aleshkovsky, “Telemak—Odisseiu (Telemachus to Odysseus)” in Meyer and Sviridova, Iuz!, 224. For Russophone readers, this essay is highly recommended for the vivid flavor that it gives of the elder Aleshkovsky’s brilliance as a conversational improviser, as well as for a sober and touching description of an unconventional father-son relationship.

20. V. G. Belinsky, “Sochineniia Aleksandra Pushkina, Stat’ia deviataia (The Works of Aleksandr Pushkin, Article Nine)” (1845), in his Sochineniia Aleksandra Pushkina (The Works of Aleksandr Pushkin), ed. K. I. Tiun’kin (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1985), 426.

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21. Joseph Brodsky (Iosif Brodskii), “On vyshel iz tiuremnogo vatnika (He emerged from a quilted prison jacket),” in Meyer and Sviridova, Iuz!, 57; Lev Loseff (Lev Losev), “Iuz!” in Meyer and Sviridova, Iuz!, 176.

22. Dostoevsky, Writer’s Diary, 1: 267, emphasis in original.

NIKOL AI NIKOL AEVICH

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1. This is a reference to David Oistrakh (1908–1974), one of the most important violinists of the twentieth century, who was awarded the Stalin Prize in 1942.

2. The “B” (nicknamed “Bukashka,” or “Bug”) trolleybus ran along the Garden Ring Road. In the 1930s, this trolleybus replaced a tram, which had replaced a horsedrawn tram that had run since 1912. The “A” (nicknamed “Annushka”) tram route was established in Moscow in 1911. Over the course of the twentieth century, its route was gradually reduced to almost nothing, as referenced later in the novel. At times in the novel as published, the “B” is referred to as a “tram,” but Aleshkovsky says that this is a mistake, and references should consistently be to the “A” tram and the “B” trolleybus (personal communication, June 2017).

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1. “Man, which has a proud sound” is a reference to Maxim Gorky’s 1902 play The Lower Depths, in which the character Satin says, “Ma-a-a-n! That’s magnificent! That sounds . . . proud! Ma-a-a-n! One must respect man!” As Donald Fanger has written about the significance of this Gorky quotation for the new order in the Soviet Union, “Amid a widespread, if inchoate, feeling that an age was ending, Gorky offered a bracing vision of the new and beautiful world that could and should replace it, to be brought about by the harnessing of individual and collective will, the transformative power of culture, and the application of technology” (“Maxim Gorky: Brief Life of a Great Enigma, 1868–1936,” Harvard Magazine, July–August 2008, https://harvardmagazine.com/2008/07/maxim-gorky.html, accessed Feb. 17, 2018).

Article 58 of the penal code dealt with counterrevolutionary activity.

CHAP TER 3 1. Nikita Fiodorovich Karatsupa (1910–1994), renowned border guard and Hero of the Soviet Union, who, beginning in the 1930s, worked with a corps of trained dogs, including one named Indus, who appeared with him in photographs.

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Notes Karatsupa had a series of dogs with the same name, which was changed in the 1950s from Indus (meaning “Hindu”) to Ingus so as not to offend sensibilities in India, with which the Soviet Union had established friendly relations.

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1. Signs reading “Work Quickly and Without Losses” were hung in laboratories and workplaces throughout the Soviet Union—part of the ubiquitous barrage of signs and posters instructing Soviet citizens how to live.

2. Chichikov, the hero of Nikolai Gogol’s 1842 novel Dead Souls, visits a series of landowners, buying their serfs (“souls”) who have died since the last census, amassing human “property” on paper, which he plans to mortgage fraudulently. “There’s no order here at all” evokes the “Varangian legend,” according to which the indigenous peoples of the Russian territory summoned the Varangians (Vikings) to rule over them in the ninth century, saying, “Our land is great and abundant, but there is no order in it.”

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1. In the early 1950s, not long after Nikolai and Kimza are having this discussion, Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins produced X-ray photographs that helped James Watson and Francis Crick to come up with their three-dimensional doublehelix model of the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) molecule, for which they, along with Maurice Wilkins, received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1962.

In the 1970s, the original readers of Nikolai Nikolaevich could appreciate the ironic pathos of this reference to the Nobel Prize: If not for Trofim Denisovich Lysenko’s success (which depended on Stalin’s support) in suppressing genetic research in the Soviet Union from the late 1930s all the way to the mid-1960s, Russian researchers like Kimza might have received the Nobel Prize for their work on DNA.

CHAP TER 6

1. Victoria Smolkin-Rothrock has described the founding of the Moscow Planetarium in 1929, placing it in the context of the Soviet “science enlightenment” project: “The Planetarium’s location, next to the Moscow Zoo, was emblematic of the didactic vision planned for the space: a visitor, with the guidance of educational lectures, could physically and intellectually follow the path of evolution and uncover the material nature of the universe. Underscoring the ideological

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significance and transformative potential of the planetarium, the constructivist Aleksey Gan described it as ‘an optical scientific theater’ whose primary function was to ‘foster a love for science in the viewer.’ In this new ‘mechanized’ theater the workings of the universe would be revealed to the masses; the experience enlightens the viewer and ‘helps him forge within himself a scientific understanding of the world and rid himself of the fetishism of a savage, of priestly prejudices, and of the civilized Europeans’ pseudo-scientific worldview.’ ” “Cosmic Enlightenment: Scientific Atheism and the Soviet Conquest of Space,” in James T. Andrews and Asif A. Siddiqi, eds., Into the Cosmos: Space Exploration and Soviet Culture (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014, p. 174).

2. The academician is singing “The March of the Aviators” (1923), music by Yulii Abramovich Khait, words by Pavel Davidovich German: “We were born in order to make a fairy tale come true, / To overcome space and expanses, / Reason has given us steel arms—wings, / And in place of the heart—a flaming motor.” It was the official anthem of the Soviet air force.

3. In Marxism and the National Question (1913), Stalin defined “nation” (natsiia) as “a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological makeup manifested in a common culture.” Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org /reference/archive/stalin/works/1913/03.htm, accessed November 10, 2018.

4. Olga Borisovna Lepeshinskaia (1871–1963), was a biologist who won the Stalin Prize in 1950. David Joravsky calls her “an elderly physician who had been arguing since the early 1930s that she could grow cells from bits of egg yolk and other noncellular globs of matter.” The Lysenko Affair (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 211.

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1. Federico Fellini’s film La Dolce Vita (1960) depicts the decadent life of rich people, intellectuals, and the bourgeoisie in Rome. Nikolai Nikolaevich is of course confusing Fellini with the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.

2. The Amur River between China and the Soviet Union was the site of a serious border conflict in 1969.

CHAP TER 8 1. Mamlakat Akberdyevna Nakhangova (sometimes called Mamaeva, 1924–2003) was honored with the Lenin Prize in 1935 for her heroic efforts in the cotton harvest in Tajikistan.

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2. Far from Moscow (1948), by Vasilii Nikolaevich Azhaev, depicts the building of an oil pipeline in the Far East at the beginning of the Great Fatherland War (i.e., World War II). It received the Stalin Prize in 1949. Nikolai Nikolaevich’s remark that he “worked on that same pipeline” reminds the reader that the construction workers were prisoners, a fact elided in Azhaev’s novel (Azhaev himself first went to the Far East as a political prisoner in 1935).

3. Taganka is the nickname for the Taganskaia Prison, established in Moscow in 1804 and located near Taganskaia Square. It was demolished in 1958.

4. Nikolai Nikolaevich’s “soul of steel” is an apparent reference to the classic socialist-realist novel How the Steel Was Tempered (1934) by Nikolai Alekseevich Ostrovskii.

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1. Joravsky writes of Lysenko, “Far from submitting to the verdict of the scientific community, he used political power to create an opposing camp, an army of people who would unquestioningly recognize the truth of anything he said. . . .

[G]enetics was totally rejected as Mendelism, or Weismanism (after August Weismann), or Morganism (after T. H. Morgan), or some hyphenated combination of those eponymic pejoratives” (Lysenko Affair, 209–210). Gregor Mendel (1822– 1884) is recognized as the founder of modern genetics. The American scientist T. H. Morgan (1866–1945) won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1933 for his study of the role of the chromosome in heredity. “Cosmopolitanism” was used against Jewish intellectuals in the postwar anti-Semitic campaign, but it also extended to scientists who made contact with Western colleagues. As Ethan Pollock writes, “Mendelism-Morganism was also considered pseudoscientific because it emanated from abroad. . . . By 1948 . . . being associated with foreign science was clearly a sign of weakness and error. If the Soviet Union had created the best conditions for science, it only followed that international science was likely tainted by ‘bourgeois’ and ‘capitalist’ assumptions.” Ethan Pollock, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006, 61).

2. The “welcoming speech” may refer to a hoped-for visit from Stalin (the “certain person”).

CHAP TER 11 1. The international thief is singing “The Three Tankmen” (1939), with music by the Pokrass brothers and lyrics by Boris Laskin. The song was the unofficial anthem of Soviet border and tank forces. After contributing numerous classics to the Soviet

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popular-song tradition, one of the Pokrass brothers, Samuil, had emigrated to Hollywood in the 1920s, where he wrote songs such as “Come and Get Your Happiness,” sung by Shirley Temple in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1938).

2. Feliks Edmundovich Dzerzhinskii (1877–1926) founded the secret police, known as the Cheka (a shortened acronym for the All-Russian Emergency Commission for the Struggle with Counter-Revolution and Sabotage), in 1917. Long after the name for the secret police had changed multiple times, it was still referred to colloquially as the Cheka.

3. Mikhail Vasilievich Frunze (1885–1925) was a Bolshevik leader who played an important role in the Revolution and Civil War. He died after an operation, under somewhat suspicious circumstances. Many institutions and streets were named after him, including a cotton factory in Moscow.

4. Majdanek was a Nazi concentration and extermination camp near Lublin, operated during the German occupation of Poland. Vorkuta was the site of a Soviet forced-labor camp above the Arctic Circle.

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1. Stalin was given over a million gifts during his rule over the Soviet Union. Among gifts from the People’s Republic of China, the Russian version of Wikipedia mentions a vase intricately carved from a single piece of jade, and a grain of rice with a portrait of Stalin engraved on it.

2. Communist is a 1957 socialist-realist film directed by Yulii Raizman.

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1. Trofim Denisovich Lysenko received the last of his three Stalin Prizes in 1949.

2. The Moscow criminal investigation department was at 38 Petrovka.

3. Arkan Ivanych Jamais is singing “Aniuta’s Song,” from the popular Soviet musical comedy Jolly Fellows (1934), performed in the film by Liubov Orlova. The composer is Isaak Dunaevskii.

CHAP TER 14 1. Stalin died on March 5, 1953.

2. During festivities after the coronation of Nicholas II in May 1896, more than thirteen hundred people were crushed in a human stampede in Khodynka Field in Moscow.

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3. Mass amnesty of political prisoners began after Stalin’s death. After Nikita Khrushchev’s speech on Stalin’s “cult of personality,” rehabilitation of political prisoners began.

4. The Russian Women’s Day holiday was first celebrated on March 8, 1917, and had its origin in socialist labor movements. It was declared an international holiday by the United Nations in 1975. The custom in the Soviet Union was for men to “pamper” their wives and other female relatives on this day, bringing them flowers and doing the cooking (while on every other day, women were expected to work outside the home and handle all the household tasks as well).

5. A Wilson chamber, named for Scottish physicist C. T. R. Wilson (1869–1959), is a particle detector, now better known as a cloud chamber. Wilson won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1927.

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1. The People’s Court was the lowest level of the Soviet judiciary, with an elected People’s Judge and two People’s Assessors, who typically lacked legal training.

2. The “star burning in his forehead” is a reference to Alexander Pushkin’s 1832 Tale of Tsar Saltan.

3. Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849–1936) was the first Russian Nobel laureate, who won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1904 for his work on classical conditioning.

4. Mikhail Andreevich Suslov (1902–1982) was a high Soviet official and ideologue, a protégé of Stalin who managed to remain powerful in the Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev eras.

5. Iurii Borisovich Levitan (1914–1983) was a Soviet radio personality. He announced the death of Stalin to the nation.

6. The idiom “You’ll get us into a monastery” means “You’ll get us in big trouble,” but since one of the harshest Soviet prisons was located in the Solovetskii Monastery from 1926 to 1939, Kimza’s idiom should not be taken only metaphorically.

7. Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893) wrote many stories with an erotic undercurrent, but the story described by Nikolai Nikolaevich is not one of them. It was invented

by Aleshkovsky (personal communication, June 2017).

8. Most of the works Nikolai Nikolaevich mentions here are well known. Buzzy Wuzzy Fly (1924) is a children’s poem by Kornei Ivanovich Chukovskii (1882– 1969), an important critic and writer of children’s literature. The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food, first published in 1939, was the most widely distributed cookbook in the Soviet Union.

9. Aleksandr Borisovich Chakovskii (1913–1994) was a hard-line Communist novelist and editor of the Literary Gazette from 1962 to 1988. The Kremlin Clock is a 1939

play by Nikolai Fiodorovich Pogodin (1900–1962), not by Konstantin Mikhailovich Simonov (1915–1979).

C A MOUFL AGE CHAP TER 1

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1. At a closed session of the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, Nikita Khrushchev gave a speech called “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences,” condemning the near-deification of Joseph Stalin and the abuses of his regime.

2. One Sixth of the World (Shestaia chast’ mira, 1926) was a silent film by Dziga Vertov showing the vast geographical and ethnic diversity of the Soviet Union by means of documentary footage. The title phrase became a common epithet for the Soviet Union.

3. In order to receive certain privileges, such as vacations, employees in Soviet enterprises had to receive references from the “triangle” of Directorship, Local TradeUnion Committee, and Party Committee. The Sports Lottery (Sportloto) was established in the Soviet Union in 1964 and was extremely popular. Much of its proceeds went to support Soviet athletics (hence its name). This ties in with the theme of the 1980 Olympics, which will become important later in the novel.

4. Shock-worker (udarnik) was a term used since the 1930s for workers who displayed exemplary performance, particularly during the first Five-Year Plans. By the 1950s, it was regulated to be an official title awarded for exceptional work.

5. During the Cold War, the radio broadcasts by the Voice of America and Deutsche Welle (German Waves) were an important source of news and cultural programming for many Soviet citizens who were wary of the Soviet media. Both those who used these sources (as well as Radio Liberty) and those who regarded them as pernicious propaganda often referred to them in general as “voices.”

6. The Baikal-Amur Railway was a major construction project of the 1970s, planned as a strategic alternative to the Trans-Siberian Railway to avoid the border with the People’s Republic of China, with which Soviet relations were strained.

CHAP TER 2

1. Solyanka is a piquant Russian soup made with meat, fish, or mushrooms. Shashlyk is a dish originating in the Caucasus, consisting of chunks of meat (usually lamb) roasted on a grill. (The translator and editor can attest to the fact that solyanka and shashlyk are dishes that Yuz Aleshkovsky himself prepares to perfection.)

2. The Russian Women’s Day holiday was first celebrated on March 8, 1917, and had its origins in socialist labor movements. It was declared an international holiday

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by the United Nations in 1975. The custom in the Soviet Union was for men to “pamper” their wives and other female relatives on this day, bringing them flowers and doing the cooking (while on every other day, women were expected to work outside the home and handle all the household tasks as well).

Arkadii Isaakovich Raikin (1911–1987) was an important Soviet actor and comedian who specialized in sketches that gently satirized the shortcomings of Soviet life. He received many honors, including the Lenin Prize. Liudmila Georgievna Zykina (1929–2009) was a singer who, like Raikin, received many official awards and honors. One of her most popular numbers was “Song About Russia,” composed by Mikhail Chistov and Marina Lunina.

A famous Russian proverb is, “To live a life is not like crossing a field.” On August 20, 1968, Warsaw Pact troops led by the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia to put an end to the reforms known as the “Prague Spring.”

Richard Sorge (1895–1944) was a Soviet military intelligence officer executed by the Japanese. In the 1960s, his image was burnished as a “hero-spy” by the KGB, and he was named a Hero of the Soviet Union in 1964.

Leonid Il'ich Brezhnev (1906–1982) was general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1964 until his death.

Joseph Stalin’s face was marked by traces of a bout of smallpox that he had survived in his childhood. Lenin’s Tomb in Red Square was used as a reviewing stand and rostrum for military parades. The word dizziness alludes to Stalin’s 1930 article “Dizzy with Success: Concerning Questions of the Collective Farm Movement.”

Brezhnev’s nonsensical speech reflects the popular perception of his incoherence in his later years, which was the subject of numerous jokes.

In 1962, retail prices were raised “by as much as 35 percent for meat and poultry products and by up to 25 percent for butter and milk,” leading to public protests. William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York: Norton, 2003, 518–523. Zykina was rumored to have had an affair with Aleksei Nikolaevich Kosygin (1904–1980), premier of the Soviet Union from 1964 until just before his death.

The 1975 Helsinki Accords were an attempt to improve relations between the Communist bloc and the West. They called for respect for human rights. Although they were nonbinding, they were used by Soviet dissidents in the following years as support for their demands for greater freedoms.

Lenin calls Marx and Engels “recallists” (otzovisty), a term for one of the factions of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) after the 1905 Revolution.

The recallists demanded that the RSDLP cease participation in legal state institutions and recall its delegates from the Duma. The narrator has transformed the first names of Marx and Engels, Karl and Friedrich, into the common Russian names Kolya (short for Nikolai) and Fedya (short for Fyodor).

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1. This Palace of Congresses, located underneath a cemetery, alludes to the Palace of Congresses in the Kremlin in Moscow, a modernist building opened in 1961, nearly half of which is underground.

2. The Bolshoi (Big) and Malyi (Small) are two separate theaters in Moscow, founded in 1776 and 1806, respectively.

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1. In 1932, Anastas Ivanovich Mikoyan (1895–1978), the People’s Commissar for Provisions, introduced the “Fish Day” or “Meatless Day” because of shortages of meat. It was revived in 1976, with Thursdays designated as days on which no meat would be served in public restaurants and cafeterias. In his role as administrator of food provisioning, Mikoyan initiated the writing of a cookbook called The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food, mentioned in Chapter 15 of Nikolai Nikolaevich.

2. Khrushchev’s erratic, personally motivated policy decisions, labeled voluntarism, were cited as a factor in his ouster in 1964.

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1. For more about samizdat, see the Introduction. Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov (1921–1989) was a nuclear physicist who was centrally involved in the development of the Soviet nuclear weapons program. He later became a dissident and advocate for human rights, and he was sent into internal exile from 1980 to 1986.

He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975.

2. The Communist Manifesto begins, “A spectre haunts Europe—the spectre of communism” (The Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ed.

D. Ryazanoff, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul [New York: Russell & Russell, 1963], p. 25).

CHAP TER 6

1. The children’s song “May There Always Be Sunshine,” a plea for peace on earth, includes the line “May there always be mama,” not “papa.” It was sung at meetings of the Young Pioneers and other official gatherings.

2. The lines “They’ve picked him up, arrested him, and made him show his passport,” which rhyme in Russian, are from the folk song “The Roast Chicken.” The song

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dates to 1918 and may reflect the repressions of the post-Revolutionary period, but it ultimately became a children’s song.

3. In Nikolai Gogol’s novella Taras Bulba (1835, revised 1842), the Cossack hero slays his own son, who has betrayed his people after falling in love with a Polish woman.

Just before shooting his son, Taras says, “You are my progeny—and I will kill you!”

Here, Taras is being compared to Sakharov, who developed the nuclear bomb and then called for disarmament.

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1. The phrase about Lenin, “solitary, glimmering white [beleet Lenin odinokii],” is a play on an 1832 poem by Mikhail Lermontov, “A Solitary Sail Glimmers White” [“Beleet parus odinokii”].

2. The Sanduny Baths is a beautifully ornate bathhouse in central Moscow, founded in 1808. It can be seen in several films, including The State Councillor (2005).

3. The “stony path” evokes Lermontov’s 1841 poem “I Go Out Alone onto the Road” (“Vykhozhu odin ia na dorogu”). The troika alludes to the ending of Nikolai Gogol’s 1842 novel Dead Souls, in which a “bird-troika” symbolizing Russia takes flight, causing astonishment and fear in other nations.

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1. “Peace exists only in our dreams” is a line from Aleksandr Blok’s 1908 poem “On the Field of Kulikovo (Na pole Kulikovom).” It has become a commonplace phrase meaning “No rest for the weary.”

2. The University of the Friendship of Peoples was founded in Moscow in 1960 and named after Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba in 1961. It was open to students from developing countries, many of them from Africa.

3. Lenin died in January 1924 at Gorki (now Gorki Leninskie), his country estate near Moscow. His body was transported by train to Moscow for his funeral.

4. The Lubyanka is the headquarters of the secret police in Moscow.

5. At Russian open-air markets, watermelons (which are smaller and more spherical than American watermelons) are stored in large cages.

CHAP TER 9 1. According to legend, the Greek sculptor Phidias said that he created his works by taking a block of marble and removing everything that was superfluous.

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2. Thor Heyerdahl (1914–2002) was a Norwegian explorer who sailed a hand-built raft from South America to French Polynesia in 1947.

3. Moscow and Los Angeles competed to host the 1980 Summer Olympics, and the decision was made in favor of Moscow in October 1974. This led to feverish preparations on the part of the Soviet Union. Camouflage was written before the Olympics took place in 1980, when the United States led a boycott of the Games to pressure the Soviet Union to withdraw from Afghanistan, which it had invaded in 1979.

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1. Blue Light was a variety show that appeared on Soviet television from 1962 to 1985, usually on holidays. The title derives from the expression “na ogonyok” (literally “to the light”), which means to drop in when you see the lights in someone’s house. Goluboi ogonyok (“Pale-Blue Light”) refers to the blue light that emanates from a black-and-white television set.

2. There was a major earthquake in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, in 1966.

3. Mikhail Andreevich Suslov (1902–1982) was a high Soviet official and ideologue, a protégé of Stalin who managed to remain powerful in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras. Suslov had tuberculosis in his childhood. Iurii Vladimirovich Andropov (1914–1984) headed the KGB from 1967 to 1982 and succeeded Brezhnev as general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from November 1982 until his death in February 1984. The misuse of psychiatric hospitals for punishing dissent was persistent and widespread in the Soviet Union.

4. Andrei Pavlovich Kirilenko (1906–1990) was a member of the Politburo from 1962 to 1982. Nikolai Viktorovich Podgorny (1903–1983) was chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet from 1965 to 1977.

5. Beginning in 1964, state-run “Beriozka” [little birch] stores began selling goods that were impossible to find in regular Soviet stores, usually for hard currency.

Some privileged Soviet citizens could shop in these stores using special coupons.

After Lenin’s death in 1924, his brain was removed and preserved in formaldehyde, and it was subjected to various scientific studies over the ensuing years.

6. Luis Alberto Corvalán Lepe (1916–2010) was general secretary of the Communist Party of Chile. He was arrested in 1973 after a military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet, and in 1976, he was exchanged for dissident Vladimir Konstantinovich Bukovsky. Bukovsky (b. 1942) was one of the founders of the dissident movement. He was arrested multiple times and was active in publicizing the abuse of psychiatry in the punishment of dissidents in the USSR. After being exchanged with Corvalán, he settled in the United Kingdom.

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7. After losing his power struggle with Stalin, Leon Trotsky was deported in 1929 and eventually settled in Mexico. He was assassinated there by an agent of the NKVD in August 1940, on orders from Stalin.

8. In 1963, Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova (b. 1937) became the first woman in space. She remains the only woman to have completed a solo space flight. Part of the joke in this sentence is that the word for horseradish, khren, is often used as a euphemism for the penis, because it shares its first letter and its monosyllabic form with khui, the vulgar word for the penis.

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1. Rodney Arismendi (1913–1989) was general secretary of the Communist Party of Uruguay; he was imprisoned in 1973 and then exiled to the Soviet Union.

2. Teterin appears to be conflating the Battle of Stalingrad (1942–1943) with the Battle for Moscow (1941–1942).

3. Henry Kissinger (b. 1923) was U.S. secretary of state from 1973 to 1977. He was a proponent of détente with the Soviet Union but also engaged in geopolitical competition with the Russians on multiple fronts. Valentin Sergeevich Zorin (1925–2016) was a ubiquitous journalist and commentator on Soviet television, considered an expert on the United States. Like Kissinger, he wore large, horn-rimmed glasses.

4. An entire neighborhood in Moscow was demolished to make way for the building of the luxury hotel Rossiya in 1964–1967. In February 1977, there was a devastating fire in the hotel that killed forty-two people. The building was demolished in 2006, and the Zaryadye Park was opened on the site in 2017.

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CHAP TER 12

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1. The city of Tula has been the center of the manufacture of samovars since the eighteenth century.

2. In the original text, there is a play on the words utrirovat [to exaggerate] and tretirovat [to treat badly], because the beginning of the word utrirovat evokes utro [morning], and the cop is hassling the brigade in the mornings.

3. Igor Vasilievich Kurchatov (1903–1960) was a nuclear physicist, a pioneer of the Soviet atomic bomb program. Many institutions and geographical points are named for him, but it seems incongruous for a balalaika orchestra to take his name.

4. The policeman is singing a 1949 song by Iurii Miliutin and Evgenii Dolmatovsky, in which the refrain is “Hope of the world, heart of all Russia, / Moscow—the capital, my Moscow!” Pirozhki are a traditional Russian dish consisting of small pastries filled with meat, mushrooms, or cabbage.

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5. The poet Anna Akhmatova and the novelist and playwright Mikhail Bulgakov are two of the major Russian writers of the twentieth century, both of whom suffered censorship and repression by the Soviet state. Piotr Grigorievich Grigorenko (1907–1987) was a major-general turned dissident, one of Bukovsky’s associates.

He lived his final years in the United States. The National Alliance of Russian Solidarists was a Russian émigré group formed to combat communism, particularly the Soviet variety. During the Cold War, its headquarters were in Germany, and it engaged in publishing samizdat literature and smuggling it back into the Soviet Union.

6. This appears to refer to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008), a novelist and dissident who was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974 and eventually settled on a farm in Vermont. He returned to Russia in 1994. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970.

7. “Eat your pineapples” is a 1917 couplet by Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930). He claimed to have written it before the October Revolution.

8. Lobnoe mesto is an ancient stone slab in Red Square. Legend has it that it was a place of public execution in the early modern era, but this appears not to have been the case. GUM was the State Universal Store (Gosudarstvennyi universal'nyi magazin, now Glavnyi universal'nyi magazin or Main Universal Store), located in a prerevolutionary structure near Red Square.

9. These lines are from the 1936 “Song of the Motherland” by Isaak Dunaevskii and Vasily Lebedev-Kumach, one of the most famous “mass songs” of the Soviet era.

The humor in the second quotation, “We will sternly knit our brows,” is that Brezhnev’s bushy eyebrows were often the subject of irreverent jokes.

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1. Zubrovka is a vodka flavored with an herb sometimes called bison grass.

2. Iurii Borisovich Levitan (1914–1983) was a Soviet radio personality. He announced the death of Stalin to the nation. Aleshkovsky’s prescience at setting the end date for Levitan’s dispatches at 1991, the year the Soviet Union was dissolved, is impressive.

CHAP TER 14

1. Hero-City status was given to twelve cities in the Soviet Union for their role in defending the nation in World War II. Tula was awarded this accolade in 1976. It is known not only for samovars, but also for a kind of fancy gingerbread in rectangular form with embossed writing on top. Tula gingerbread is mentioned as early as the seventeenth century.

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2. From 1930 to 1934, Anastas Ivanovich Mikoyan was People’s Commissar for Provisions. From 1934 to 1938, he was People’s Commissar for the Food Industry.

During his tenure as People’s Commissar for Provisions, there was a major famine in the Soviet Union in 1932–1934, which was exacerbated (and to some extent caused) by the government’s policy of forced collectivization.

3. The Angola crisis of 1974–1975 was a proxy Cold War conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union.

4. This is an untranslatable pun on Lenin’s slogan “Communism is Soviet power plus electrification of the whole country” and the expression “nam do lampochki” (we don’t give a damn), which includes a diminutive of the word for lamp that is also the word for light bulb.

THE RUSSIAN LIBRARY

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Between Dog and Wolf by Sasha Sokolov, translated by Alexander Boguslawski Strolls with Pushkin by Andrei Sinyavsky, translated by Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy and Slava I. Yastremski Fourteen Little Red Huts and Other Plays by Andrei Platonov, translated by Robert Chandler, Jesse Irwin, and Susan Larsen Rapture: A Novel by Iliazd, translated by Thomas J. Kitson City Folk and Country Folk by Sofia Khvoshchinskaya, translated by Nora Seligman Favorov Writings from the Golden Age of Russian Poetry by Konstantin Batyushkov, presented and translated by Peter France Found Life: Poems, Stories, Comics, a Play, and an Interview by Linor Goralik, edited by Ainsley Morse, Maria Vassileva, and Maya Vinokur Sisters of the Cross by Alexei Remizov, translated by Roger John Keys and Brian Murphy Sentimental Tales by Mikhail Zoshchenko, translated by Boris Dralyuk Redemption by Friedrich Gorenstein, translated by Andrew Bromfield The Man Who Couldn’t Die: The Tale of an Authentic Human Being

by Olga Slavnikova, translated by Marian Schwartz Necropolis by Vladislav Khodasevich, translated by Sarah Vitali

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