01

Now 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 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.

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.”