Nikolai Nikolaevich and Camouflage: Two Novels

They award the city of Tula the “Hero City” title. But this Hero doesn’t have a damned thing to eat. Nothing on the shelves except mackerel, scad fish, canned soup with pickled cucumbers, smoked cheese, and other canned goods. The Tula proletariat has gotten heartburn from this stuff. They’re so sick of their famous gingerbread that they’re coming down with diabetes and stomach worms.¹ Meanwhile, spirits flow like a river in Tula—as they do everywhere in the country. Suddenly, it’s rumored that Lyonya Brezhnev is coming to town for a visit. What’s to be done? The masses’ stomachs have to be stuffed—so they’ll stand quietly at the rally, pass gas, belch, and not blab provocative questions. So they summon Mikoyan to the Politburo. Under Stalin, he was Chief Advisor on Famine and Feeding the Population.²

Brezhnev asks: “How should we handle it, Anastas? How can we feed Tula instantly?” Mikoyan thinks and thinks. Finally he salutes and says: “I’ve figured out what to do. There are no beef reserves in Moscow, New Zealand mutton has been held up in the Indian Ocean by Typhoon Betsy, the pork is too greasy, and there’s not enough of it anyway. So I suggest a historic raid by the Special Select Cavalry Division along the Moscow-Tula highway under the slogan ‘To the Hero-City.’ As soon as the cavalry arrives at the Tula meatpacking plant that’s named after me, they will commence, without delay, the slaughter, processing of carcasses, and production of bologna and salami with the labels ‘Select’ and ‘Special.’ You’ll be able to sling that stuff out onto the shelves for the population as early as tomorrow morning. Upon surrendering their spurs, sabers, and banners, the cavalrymen will be redeployed as worker-operatives charged with protecting Comrade Brezhnev and members of the Regional Party Bureau.”

So, Mikoyan was awarded the “Liberation of Tula” medal for coming up with this idea, and the cavalry division’s little horses set off clip-clopping at a trot along the highway to do their great deeds. They did everything Mikoyan told them to do. That night, the Tula alcoholics awoke to the sound of horses whinnying as if they were being slaughtered. The alkys leaped from their beds, from the roadways, from the grass, from jail cots, thinking it was the beginning of delirium tremens. In the morning, their wives rubbed their eyes in disbelief—just the day before, the shelves in the cold-cuts section at the supermarket had been bare—nothing there but lottery tickets—and now they were full of reddish-purplish sausages that smelled quite natural. The “Select Bologna” was 2.20 rubles a kilo. The “Special Salami” was 2.90 a kilo. It sold out in a flash, like a truckload of firewood during a cold winter.

Then Brezhnev arrived. Everybody had a drink and a bite to eat. They stuffed themselves on the salami, and 117 Tula citizens died from twisted bowels. It doesn’t make me feel any better that the director of the meatpacking plant was subsequently transferred to the Dawn cosmetics company for having ordered his workers to reinforce the ground meat with starch so there’d be enough sausage for everyone. But they went ahead with the rally. I saw it on TV. The people of Tula were standing there flapping their ears, digesting their “Select” and “Special” cavalry division sausage, and listening to Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev’s speech. He told them everything that day: about unparalleled successes, about unprecedented enthusiasm for labor, about bright milestones, about the united national battle to manufacture quality products, about the Middle East, about Angola—about everything.³ The only things he omitted were the heroic problems in the supply of consumer goods most needed by the population. He concluded his speech, “Long live the Soviet Metro, the most beautiful in the world!” And he got the hell out of there. The cavalrymen were transferred to the construction battalion that was working on the new Tula gingerbread museum. That’s what kind of samovars they’re making in Tula these days!

And don’t you try to scare or terrorize me, Fyodor Milashkin. We’re already scared and terrorized enough. And don’t prescribe hypnosis either. Enough! You’ve been hypnotizing us for sixty years now, and to us idiots, it has seemed that we’ve been striding forward toward Communism, that we’ve been transformed into a new type of Man, and that everything Soviet is excellent. Enough. If I have managed to quit drinking after surviving the worst imaginable case of the DTs, if I can heroically quit drinking, and if, now, I can’t wait to lie down next to my wife, Duska, on the cleanest of sheets, then I don’t need any more of your free hypnosis or any of your sleeping pills. You can go stuff yourself with your Amnesiasine, Fartomurozol, or your Politburonol. Nobody’s going to shorten my tongue—it’s not a pant-leg. And as to whether we have bomb factories underground or not, I’ll figure it out on my own. I’ll go out into the country, dig a well, and take a look.

As to your question concerning whether my son Slavka suffers from a hereditary mental deficiency, my response is negative: Before I started drinking, I was a lathe operator of the eighth (highest) rank, and my wife, Duska, was head chef at a factory cafeteria. If she were to go on the BBC and tell about what the Party feeds the People, at the same time as the People has fattened up the Party like a big turkey, there’d be a hell of a lot of noise. You can lock me up, you crocodile, wherever you want. But you can’t stop me from going to Helsinki to receive an award for the fact that, I, Fedya, former alcoholic, am defending the right of a human being to receive, in exchange for his titanic, historically unprecedented labor: meat, butter, milk, vegetables, and fruit, on the grand highway of humanity. I don’t want to do any more camouflaging, and I forbid others to do it as well.

I am now going to work as a team with Sakharov, the ex-father of the nuclear bomb. Let him go to the Politburo and demand rights in the areas of freedom of speech, insane asylums, foreign tourism, etc. I’ll work on the other things: cafeterias, supermarkets, manufactured products, sabotage in the distilling industry, longhaired queers—so many things, you can’t list them all. There’s no end of work to be done. And I’ll have plenty of time—there won’t be a damned thing I have to do, now that I’ve qualified for second-category disability on grounds of persecution mania. I’ll handle issues of deception, humiliation, and mockery of people in the sphere of everyday consumer services. Then I’ll make some generalizations about all this and send it to Pravda as an editorial: “Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country doesn’t make a light bulb’s worth of difference to us.”⁴ Let them try not to publish that.

I’m a person who thinks outside the box. I cannot conceive of a situation in which they produce pure vodka for Podgorny while for me, they produce rotgut that makes my head … Okay, I’ll be quiet. Wait, I’ll be quiet! Don’t call the orderlies. I’ll be quiet. But let me say just one last word: Oh, People! Do not warm your port wine on a bonfire! Oh, People! Eat cod fillet! It’s tasty and nutritious! Down with “Gift of the Sun” fortified wine! Go-oa-l!