Nikolai Nikolaevich and Camouflage: Two Novels

To tell you the truth, brother, our district cop went a little crazy over those ’80 Olympics. He totally lost it, starting with balconies. He issued an order against hanging clothes out to dry on balconies. Dangling linen might be interpreted by the secret American satellites as white flags signaling the surrender of our ideological positions. And then, some fine morning, we might awaken to the clanking of the treads of the enemy’s tanks on our Great Atomic Avenue. “If any of you hangs out a bedsheet or even white undies,” he said, “I’ll look at it as surrendering to the enemy, and I’ll shoot you between the eyes without investigation or trial—screw your grandmother to a Tula samovar if I don’t.¹ Just the other day, Headquarters issued me a box of ammunition for this. Disssmisssed!”

Our precinct cop loved that little word. He would even shout it out at night in his sleep. Want to know why he was always on his high horse? Because he always drank alone, never with the People. He shunned the masses, he was camouflaging as an individualist—a teetotaler. But we knew he never went on duty without first loading up with a quarter-liter of alcohol. And where do you think he carried the alcohol they were bribing him with at the nuclear institute? He’d pour it into his holster! Yes! Really! Sometimes you’d see him sneak around the corner looking depressed and angry, he’d slide his holster off his belt, throw back his head, and suck the holster dry. Not a drop spilled on the ground. He even managed to drink up the lab alcohol they were using to polish the H-bombs for Lenin’s birthday.

The first sign that he was losing it was when he started barking in his sleep. Teterin was living on the other side of the wall from him, and he heard the whole thing. He’d bark and bark, sometimes with a whining undertone and sometimes, especially when there was a full moon, it would end in a sickening howl. It was impossible to sleep when he was barking and howling, but we didn’t have the right to complain about it. He’d say, “My barking is part of a special ops assignment, so don’t you go showing your fangs at me, scum! And my howling has a government function. Without it, you guys would’ve long ago become slaves of capitalism and of the New York mafia.”

That’s how he’d talk to us … Don’t interrupt, I’m not going to move on from this until I’ve told you the whole, soul-wrenching truth about our crazy district cop. Don’t order me around! I’m not your Warsaw Pact! If I were to bark out the order, “Atten-shun!” right now, you would have to stretch your hands at your sides and go on standing there all the way to the Second Coming. Not until then would they say “At ease!” to you. Understand?

In the end, our cop’s wife became totally exhausted by her husband’s barking and howling. She just couldn’t take it any longer, so she resorted to stuffing his mug at night. She’d use a dirty sock, or a foot wrap, or his boxer shorts—and he’d sleep like a log until morning. And he didn’t guess a thing. So his neighbor Teterin and his wife and kids got a break from the noise. Everything would have been fine if, in the morning, he didn’t start wondering about the unwashed sock or the stinking foot wrap or the rotten underpants that would be all wet—sometimes chewed to pieces. He couldn’t figure it out. His wife usually set the alarm separately for herself, so she’d get up early before he woke up, she’d fish the stuffing out of his mouth, and dry it out on the radiator. All was well until, for some reason, the alarm stopped working (even though it was stamped with the seal of quality). On that morning, while rubbing his drunken pupils open, he discovered that his gullet was plugged. He couldn’t groan, couldn’t mumble, couldn’t squeeze out more than a wheeze. Choking with indignation, he tore the gag out of his mouth and got right down to biting his wife. He was drawing blood before she ran out naked into the street. We rescued her.

From then on, she wouldn’t put out for the cop until he’d stuck a bulldog muzzle onto his drunken mug for the night. He loved his wife. That’s why he put the muzzle on. Love for a broad, brother, can drive a man not only to heroic feats like that, but to even more astounding acts. And he stopped howling. Sure, he’d bark sometimes after the October Revolution holiday (I personally consider that normal for a holiday hangover). But that’s not the important thing. The problem was that the viper got into the habit of appling us like a beast. He made our lives miserable, the Asmodeus. You ask why I say “appling” instead of “hassling”? Because “appling” means hassling us in the apple orchard behind Zinka’s booth when we’d gather there in the mornings.² Whenever we’d have port or sterno or beer or rotgut wine left over at the end of a night’s binge, some of us would bury it under the old apple trees in the orchard. We’d bury it, and then dig it up in the morning, have a hair of the dog to cure our hangovers, and then go underground to sort uranium atoms.

It must have made a strange picture when the CIA developed their shots of us—a bunch of camouflagers crawling around on all fours under the apple trees, hunting for a bottle that one of them, the bastard, can’t remember where he’s stashed. We once dug up the whole orchard, perforated the whole area with sticks and knives, and still couldn’t find the quarter-liter of vodka and the beer we were looking for. Not nowhere. And our hearts were close to cutting out on us, they didn’t want to keep on ticking unless we could get our blood vessels to expand. And in our heads: a literal end of the world was taking place, a Last Judgment, a grueling hell, anguish and darkness, terrible grief. Finally, when it seemed we would never get out of that orchard, when it seemed we were all going to die at our posts, and definitely never be resurrected, I stumbled upon a white bottle cap under a faded autumn burdock. I pulled the tin cap off the vodka bottle with my teeth, cutting my lip in the process. And with those same teeth, I opened the bottle of Zhiguli beer. It was a wonder where we got the strength: Our hands were shaking like those of the balalaika players from the Academician Kurchatov Folk Orchestra.³ But finally, wretched souls that we were, we each took a sip of salvation out of that cold little bottle…. Oh! Glory be to you, oh Lord! Forgive us and have mercy upon us who are saved! Saved this time round, for it is not known what the future will bring. How can we know what our fates will be tomorrow—we cannot….

To boost the thermal coefficients of the vodka and the beer, we kindled a bonfire. We mixed the vodka and beer together in an empty champagne bottle with a neck covered in gold foil. And then, my dear Comrade Lieutenant General, after our salvation, good old Daddy High himself touched and blessed our innards with his holy fatherly hand. Getting high! Our bodies grew younger instantly, thoughts appeared in our heads that, only a few minutes before, had been cloudy, dull, and sickly. The whole world, including our damned Staroporokhov, began to fall into line before our eyes, and our souls yearned for something … it’s hard to say what … something high-minded, real, active, useful to the State and to the People, something altruistic, decisive, Party-minded, and most important, pure … In a word, to have another drink, and after that: down the escalator to our menial second job—writing the ominous “Death to Capitalism” slogan in red paint on the missiles.

No sooner did we recover from the terrible strains of our nighttime camouflaging than we saw a man running out of our building toward the orchard. He’s running barefoot, even though the autumn grass is still covered with night frost. And he’s wearing blue long johns and a lilac undershirt. It’s our precinct cop. Some of us prepare to clear out fast to avoid a fine, but I issue the command: “Don’t run! A cop in long johns must be engaged in camouflage, there’s not going to be a problem. At ease at your posts—just hide the vodka.” He comes running up to us, the beast, all out of breath. His mug is purple, he’s about to choke. I’m familiar with such faces. They are caused by a fatal narrowing of the blood vessels—of many years duration, of course—you’re right about that, brother-general. “Brothers!” he gasps entreatingly, “Save me! There’s not a drop to drink at home! I’m dying! I swear to God I am! Just give me a sip of beer, or some cologne if you’ve got it! Save me! My feet … my hands … are getting paralyzed! I’ll even drink some hand lotion if you’ve got it!”

His forehead’s covered in sweat. His breathing’s uneven. He’s twitching all over. His little eyes are roaming. A familiar picture. You feel sorry for a man in such a state. He’s helpless and sick, and at such moments, his whole fortuitous life depends on a shot of lousy vodka, or half a glass of any sort of Soviet rotgut. “If you’ll help me, I’ll never forget it, brothers! Pour me a shot! I can’t breathe! My chest’s bursting! My temples are on fire!”

“There isn’t any,” I say—a cruel lie. “We’ve finished it off to the last fucking drop, without salt. Store it up on your own, you son of a bitch. Here you are, trying to bum a glass from us camouflagers, when every day you drag the stuff home from the store by the bagload, you shit. How did you get so smashed, oh comrade antialcoholism-warrior?”

“I was celebrating the holiday,” he said. “I lost my pistol on Monday. I thought I was done for—the end. I thought about climbing into the noose. My pension down the drain, maybe even goodbye freedom. But it was found, brothers, my gun was found. Turns out I dropped it in the warehouse when I was tally-hoing the manager. I was so happy it was found I went on a binge. Help!”

Teterin asks, “How did you drop it? Were you standing on your head?” (As an engineer-inventor, he likes digging down to the core of things, finding out how they work.) “I don’t remember. Sonka sometimes does it in ways that make my head spin, like after a ride on the merry-go-round … just one swig! I’m dying … You’ve got your fire going—that means you were warming up port wine.”

“No way,” I think to myself, “You’re not going to get a single swallow, scum. Aren’t you the one who’s always putting out our fires, scattering them around? Isn’t it you who’s always slapping us with fines for sharing a bottle in public? And who was it who used to collar us like mad dogs and drag us to the detox tank? It was you, you scum. And the main thing is: you’re a saboteur if not a spy, who’s been tearing the mask off our Party’s camouflaging operation. You have set yourself above the Party!

“Yes,” I say out loud, “you’ve set yourself above the Party, and that’s why you bark and howl at night. We don’t have a single drop for you. Go sell your pistol and use the proceeds to treat your hangover.”

Our cop is turning blue, and his fingertips are white and motionless. At that point, I got really scared, but I thought it would be a pity to waste even one drop of vodka on the vermin. “Hold on a second,” I say to Teterin. “Don’t take a leak in the bushes. Pour some into this glass.” Of course, I say this quietly so the cop won’t hear (but his ears might have been plugged up already by predeath hangover deafness). Teterin unbuttons his pants and pours me a whole glass of piss, right up to the rim—his first draft of the morning (Teterin’s blood vessels were so constricted from drinking that sometimes—pardon me, brother—sometimes he couldn’t take a leak until he’d first taken care of his hangover).

“Have a drink,” I say to the cop, “drink up while it’s still hot, it’s at least 25 proof.” Would you believe it, General, our cop tossed off that glass in one gulp, didn’t spill a drop (he just sighed, tore off a burdock leaf, sniffed it, and wiped that farewell-to-life teardrop from his cheek).

“God, that feels good. I’ll never forget that. I’m coming back to life, brothers.”

“Taste good?” I ask.

“A little salty and smells a bit of bedbugs. Still, I feel much better.”

“It’s beer and cognac that Teterin mixed together yesterday. Would you like some more?”

“I wouldn’t mind another. And I’ll bring some dough. I wouldn’t want to be a freeloader.”

“Go ahead, bring some, we can use it at eleven.”

He did bring five rubles when he came back, already dressed in his uniform. So, for all the mean and vicious things the cop had done to us, Teterin poured him out another little glassful. The cop had come back completely smashed, feeling happy and singing, “Oh, how I love the Lenin Hills. How I love to meet the dawn with my darling there …” He’d brought snacks: sausage, onions, tomatoes, some sort of pirozhki, and a cold soupbone all covered in meat and tasty-looking gristle.⁴ He downed the second glass of Teterin’s piss in one go and started in on his favorite topic: the Olympic Games and alcoholism, mixed with hooliganism.

You’re wrong, my dear military general, if you don’t believe it’s possible to treat a hangover with piss. But that doesn’t mean you have to. I personally saved the life of my camouflager Kozhinov that way. The man was dying right before our eyes. We could see he wasn’t going to make it to eleven o’clock, no way. There were about forty minutes to go before the self-serve beer hall would open, and he just laid himself down right there on Lenin Prospect, breathing his last. His blue tongue was hanging out, his eyes were crossed, he had turned gray and was barely breathing. Teterin, as usual, started reasoning theoretically about how, if we were as high as we were that morning, there must be some residual alcohol in our blood and in our urine. It must contain alcohol. And although it had been diluted with all kinds of nonalcoholic drinks, like water, it still could be used in an emergency, which is exactly what this was. We had to save Kozhinov. He was already starting the death rattle. We always had our glasses handy. So we poured him a full glass, and blew off the foam in proper fashion. He gulped it down, stopped twitching, and five minutes later, he was as chipper as a little bird. He’d completely revived. And he never figured out what it was he’d drunk.

But let’s return to our precinct cop. The booze got to him, and he started giving us all kinds of crap about the preparations for the Games. “We,” he said, “have received a secret order to uproot, by the year 1980, the ulcers of alcoholism, hooliganism, whoring, black-marketeering, hard currency, and so forth, out of Staroporokhov. Our guests,” he said, “are foreigners, and a half-million horde of them is preparing to surge into our city, overwhelm us, and mock our ways. We must make them see, wherever they go, an unconditional yearning toward Communism and ideological conscientiousness. It will be suggested, or rather ordered, that, during the Games, all citizens not yet evicted from the city must dress properly and eat better. When riding the metro, trams, buses, and trolleys (as well as when walking), they must read Comrade Brezhnev’s books with a special expression on their faces. To shed a tear while reading is permitted, but laughing is strictly forbidden, because there’s nothing funny in author Brezhnev’s great trilogy.

“It will also be forbidden to form lines outside supermarkets and department stores. A line more than fifteen snouts long will be looked upon as a group harboring criminal intent, and will be subject to dispersal and fines. Citizens from outlying areas who sneak surreptitiously into the city to supply their families with meat, butter, and fish will be removed summarily from their respective means of public transport and deported under armed guard to their places of residence. Residence permits for the city of Moscow and its suburbs will, as of yesterday, be granted exclusively to citizens born of parents in possession of such permits. All others, including those who have scheduled business trips, will be obligated to consider themselves personae non gratae. And you drunkards are just such personae. For the struggle against you, thousands of young men and women are being trained to come out onto the streets of our great city during the Games. Their assignments are: to monitor contacts between the athletes and our rotten intelligentsia (as well as other tainted citizens), to foil you drunks when you try to cash in your empty bottles to tourists from all over the world, to make it easier for great friends of the Soviet Union of the Angela Davis variety to disregard the shadier aspects of reality here, and to pick up the leaflets, tracts, Bibles, and works by Akhmatova, Bulgakov, Sakharov, Grigorenko, and other enemies of the state that the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists has scattered around the city.⁵ Primary attention will be given to keeping the territory of the USSR clear of every line written by its most hardened enemy, who has bought himself an ancient fortress with bodyguards in America, from which he fulminates vile attacks against his superpower motherland.⁶

“That’s what we have been ordered to do in order to utterly cut off all contacts between our Soviet (or rather, anti-Soviet) citizens, and foreign tourists. It is no secret that most of these foreign tourists have already been alerted to their forthcoming assignments, and their travel has been booked by the CIA. Of course, on the basis of pictures already in our possession, all of these hostile snouts will get what’s coming to them, and will be duly registered by the responsible authorities. So, in general, my advice to you is to go deep onto the wagon before it’s too late, and you can come back off right after the Games. And stop bitching all the time about how the working class can’t afford the prices at the farmers’ market, or about how food is getting scarcer even in Staroporokhov, or about all that other anti-Soviet stuff and slander.

“We’ve got fruit and veg in this country! We do! We’re just saving them up for the Games. That’s why they’re not for sale in the provincial stores or in the capitals of the republics. You damned antelopes! You can’t imagine how much food the athletes and foreign tourists will devour during the Olympic Games! A lot! For example, if an athlete has to eat two kilos of meat in a week to win the bronze in the long jump, then, to win gold in the triple jump, he’ll correspondingly need six kilos a week. And if you take into account how many types of sports will be represented at the Games and how many medals will be won by representatives of the capitalist camp and the socialist camp, it adds up to many tens of thousands of head of cattle (to say nothing of chickens, geese, ducks, and other delicacies).

“Think about it. If the whole Soviet nation were to rush out now and buy up the livestock that’s putting on weight in the fields on a daily basis, what would be left by the time the Games begin? All that would be left would be cans of pearl barley in rotten tomato sauce (or, as we call it, ‘Tourist’s Breakfast’). We’ve been counting on these amazing ‘breakfasts’ to feed our own tourists. And what about the foreign tourist? How will he be fed? He, after all, will have received his assignment from the CIA to gobble, gobble, and gobble some more—to create a food deficit in our cafés and restaurants. The foreign tourist wants nothing more than to see us shamed. But we will say to him: ‘Stuff your face, my dear. Stuff your face until you bust your gut! That steak or grilled, spatchcocked chicken isn’t enough for you? Well then, have another! Go for broke, as we say. Have an extra helping. Lap it up! Yes, we may have economized on stuffing ourselves for the last five years, and perhaps many cities have forgotten the smell of sausage or the taste of butter, but we will feed you as much as you can eat! Gobble it up! You won’t be able to eat through everything we’ve got in the course of two weeks, even if, after your soup-salad-meat entrée‒fish entrée‒ice cream‒cheese-fruit-dessert-and-coffee, you go to the john, give your spying self an enema, and go back for more!’ This is what our Party will say to these ladies and gentlemen foreign tourists: ‘You have miscalculated, ladies and gentlemen!’ it will say, ‘your appetite is doomed to fail!’”

In conclusion, our cop exhorts us: “When you’re guzzling port wine in entranceways, don’t bitch about how the situation with fruit and vegetables has never been worse in our country. Don’t forget about the hordes of foreign tourists who are preparing to invade the cafeterias, cafés, and other distribution points of the People’s Food Supply.”

Teterin interrupts at this point, saying he’s just invented a new brand of canned food called “Foreign Tourist’s Breakfast,” and will dedicate his invention to the Games. His idea is to stuff the cans full of red and black caviar, with a little plastic sign on the top of the can that says, “Eat your pineapples, pig out on grouse—your final day is near, bourgeois scum.”⁷ So the Party will kill two birds with one stone: Feed the foreigner breakfast and put him in a rotten mood for the rest of the day.

“You’re an alcoholic persona, Teterin, that’s the sort of person you are,” the cop says. That’s the moment when I say fearlessly to the cop:

“So, officer, when you sober up, you get nasty? You’re the real persona around here because your ideas go against the party line on camouflaging. Are you so dense you can’t understand the main purpose of the Olympic Games? I’m not talking about its purpose for sports, I’m talking about its secret political purpose.”

“So, what is it?”

“Pour him another, Teterin, if you have the urge,” I say, “But don’t go in the bushes, or that broad in the window will see you.”

By the time he’d drunk his second glass of Teterin’s piss earlier that day, the cop was completely plastered (that’s why he’d just lost control of his tongue so badly). So now, after drinking yet another half a glass without suspecting a thing, he got on his high horse and lit into me: “I’ll show you your secret task, schizo! I’ll get you registered for your shots right away! You can loll around the nuthouse for a while, the orderlies will crack your ribs a bit, you can spend some time chewing on the sleeve of your gray hospital gown, and then you can bite your own tongue off for the words you’ve just spoken! Understand?”

I reply, “Me? I at least understand everything I’ve accomplished. While you, idiot, go around barking and howling at night and sleeping in a muzzle so you won’t bite your wife! While you’re copulating with the warehouse manager right on the sacks and boxes, you lose your government-issue pistol because you keep your weapon under your shirt, while you fill your holster with booze! You’re grazing in a fat, profitable place right there, in the warehouse where the fruit and veg that should be for the people is being hoarded for the Olympics! And you don’t see or hear the main thing. Bend your pig’s ear to the ground, you son of a bitch!” And while I’m saying this, I actually do bend his head down to the ground: “Hear that? The new underground projects are already under way. Right here on the site of our orchard, they’re already planning to build a stadium. And you know what they’re building below the stadium, you drunken stag? They’re building a central Red Square, complete with Kremlin, Lobnoe mesto, Lenin’s Tomb, GUM, and everything.⁸ See? If we hit the enemy with all our H-bombs, we’ll wipe him off the face of the earth, and he will do the same to us. But nobody will ever wipe us off the face of our underground. No way. The CIA doesn’t have the strength to do that yet.

“So it’s entirely possible that we’ll have to meet the first day of Communism below ground. It may be a little boring to live our lives on the inside like that. But, on the other hand, maybe it’s time: we’ve done our living on the outside, and we’ve accomplished enough. The devil knows what we people have created out here on the Earth’s surface. We’ve just about finished off the animals, wasted the meadows, polluted the water in the rivers, chopped down the woods and fouled them up, and stunk up the air so it’s like a john or a barracks out there. Enough’s enough. But you, it turns out, don’t understand our camouflaging task. You don’t understand that we, together with the whole Soviet people, are using the Olympic Games to distract that nosy Pentagon from what’s going on underground.

“It’s not for the sake of an epic, present-day sporting event that we’ve been storing up meat and cod fillet for the enemy foreign tourists. It’s for the sake of our bright future! There, beneath the earth, we will one day turn on the lights, we’ll switch on the fans to make the air rush in from outside. We’ll sit down at long tables, we’ll fill our glasses with the purest Special Moscow vodka, we’ll knock it back and chase it down with deep-fried fish and puree of new potatoes. And then, after a second glass, we’ll start in on the lamb chops…. Of course, then we’ll hug each other, and sing, ‘There’s nobody in the whole wide world / Who can laugh and love better than we do!’ And our Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev will lead us in singing: ‘We will sternly knit our brows / If the enemy tries to break us.’⁹ That will be the ultimate victory of Communism, and not a dog’s cock.

“Don’t get up from the ground, keep listening! A vast construction project is underway down there next to the nuclear missile shops. It’s huge! There’s no way the Pentagon or the CIA or the FBI or the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists can imagine the unprecedented scope of that project. So, come on over and visit us, dear ladies and gentlemen! Lift your weights, do your vaults, with and without poles, toss your volleyballs over nets, do your somersaults, swim, run around like headless chickens, poke each other with your sabers and rapiers. Meanwhile, down below, we’ll just continue to churn out our bright future and manufacture your doom.

“This, you precinct snout, is how you should understand everything they’re saying on the radio, or showing on TV, or writing in the newspapers. It’s not we camouflagers, perishing on the front lines of national camouflage, who are the enemies of the Party and the Government. It’s you! Why, you ask? It’s because you—you who got so upset about losing your gun while you were roasting the assistant warehouse manager without even taking off your uniform and shoulder-belt—you do not understand what you stand to lose when the enemy hits us with his rockets. Let me tell you. You’ll lose everything—mind, honor, and the conscience of our age, to say nothing of that cap of yours with its insignia. And now, take it easy, don’t overstrain yourself: it’s time for us to go to work. Today, I’m standing guard to honor the elections to the local Soviets, and I’m pledging my brigade to polish ten rockets (not three, as the plan stipulates) with vegetable oil, and to pour the uranium-238 out of six old bombs into one big new one. And tomorrow we’ll all go out, hung-over, and do our volunteer work—building a new nuthouse, with a secret jail, underneath the Olympic running track, as well as a book crematorium where the Party has resolved to burn a vast quantity of anti-Soviet and religious propaganda.”