04

So, 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 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 no-meat 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….

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 boom-boom-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 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 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.