05

Meanwhile, 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 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, 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 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 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 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.”