02

Today 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 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 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-ha-ha! 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 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 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 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 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