01

You 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 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 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 Sports-Lottery 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 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!)

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 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.