Monumental Propaganda (31 page)

74

It would have been better if they'd jailed him.

As soon as Vanka arrived back in Dolgov, he was drafted into the army and sent off to a place where the return address was “Field Post” and letters bore the stamp “Inspected by the Military Censor.” Vanka's first letter to Gravalya began with the words “Greetings from Afghanistan.” The word “Greetings” and the word “from” had been left, but the third word had been thoroughly bleached out. But since the military censors were Soviet censors, which meant they were not exactly overzealous in performing their professional duties, the censor's inspection overlooked Vanka's account in the middle of the letter about how he was helping Afghani peasants to build roads and bring in the harvest. In actual fact, of course, Vanka was involved in work of a quite different nature. Bearing in mind his special education and interests, the army authorities posted him to a special unit that was effectively a small factory for producing explosive devices required for subversive activities.

Gravalya was unaware of these details, but rumors of the zinc coffins coming back from Afghanistan did reach her and she lived in a constant state of fearful anticipation. The sight of the postman made her clutch at her heart. She was right to be worried. The war was apparently already over and the last general had already crossed the bridge from Afghan to Soviet territory when a notification arrived stating that Ivan Zhukov had died the death of the brave while carrying out his international duty. Gravalya wept twice. The first time when the notification arrived and the second when they brought the zinc coffin.

But after she'd wept a bit, she demanded that the coffin be opened. She said she could feel in her heart that Vanka wasn't inside. They dismissed that out of hand, but they did explain patiently that the coffin could not be opened for fear of severe psychological trauma. The body was supposedly in such terrible condition that a single glance at it might trigger a heart attack or a nervous breakdown. Gravalya insisted, but they ignored her requests. Without the coffin being opened, the dead man was interred on the Avenue of Glory with music and full military honors, including a farewell salute of rattling machine-gun fire.

By the way, Sanka Zherdyk came down from Moscow for the funeral. He had already graduated from the school of journalism, but he was making his career in a different area—as the head of a department in some Komsomol district committee. He delivered a long speech over the coffin and spoke so touchingly about what a pure-hearted, honest and talented man his friend Vanka Zhukov was that everyone sobbed.

Into the ground above the grave they stuck a temporary sheet of plywood, on which it stated that here lay Ivan Zhukov, born 1964, who perished heroically in the course of a military mission.

But the people who had refused to allow Gravalya to open the coffin hadn't realized who they were dealing with. She dug the grave up herself at night and found the badly decomposed corpse of an elderly Eastern gentleman in a turban with a long beard down to his waist. Gravalya carried the coffin under her arm to the district committee of the CPSU and set it down on the porch. There was a lot of fuss about the case in the town. Some people regarded the old woman's actions as sacrilegious and demanded that she be punished in exemplary fashion. Others, in contrast, called her a heroic defender of human rights and even compared her with Mary Magdalene and Marfa Posadnitsa. Some people were encouraged by what had happened to hope that perhaps someone else had been buried by mistake instead of their children, and an epidemic of nocturnal grave digging swept through the district.

At this very time a letter arrived from Tashkent from Vanka Zhukov himself, although not written by his own hand, saying that he was alive but he had been blown up by a mine of his own construction and lost both legs, one arm and one eye, as well as all hearing in one ear, but might be able to hear with the other using a hearing aid.

Gravalya leapt up and down for joy. They told her: “Are you crazy? He's a total cripple now!” The old granny wouldn't listen: better a cripple than a corpse. But when Vanka arrived home (after spending more than a year lying in hospital) and she saw him on his improvised buggy with no legs, one arm and one eye, with a face turned blue all over by the gun-powder that had eaten its way into his skin and steel teeth set random and crooked in his mouth, Gravalya couldn't even cry; she simply fainted and didn't come around for several days. When she eventually did, she gazed at her grandson with bright, lucid eyes and said to him: “Never mind, Vanka, we'll get them for this.”

If only someone had taken his granny's words seriously then.

75

Aglaya continued her somnambulistic existence: she lost track of the passage of time, she didn't know what had happened yesterday, what had happened five years ago and what was happening around her today. She only noticed specific, individual symptoms of global changes: vodka was sold starting from eleven o'clock, then from two o'clock, then from five o'clock, and then around the clock.

From time to time when she switched on the television, she would see the funeral of someone important on Red Square. One was being buried and another one was giving a speech. She closed her eyes and opened them again: now the one who had just been speaking was being buried and the one who was speaking was being supported under the arms. She closed her eyes, opened them and heard the words
perestroika
and
glasnost.
The screen showed meetings, banners, posters, the people chanting: “Boris! Boris!” Boris threw his Party card down on the table, fired a tank gun at the White House and market relations came into being. The postwoman arrived and brought her pension—three hundred thousand rubles. Aglaya thought: that's not bad! She was afraid to go out on the street with the big notes, so she collected together three rubles and sixty-two kopecks in small change, dashed to the shop for a bottle and they said to her: “Hey, Ma, are you in your right mind or what? Why? I'll tell you why! Vodka doesn't cost three rubles sixty-two kopecks, it costs twentyfive thousand rubles. Brought back down to reality, she felt scared. She bought vodka every day and she was used to shifting prices, but this time it was like her memory had totally misplaced several years. She ran home to get the money she needed, and on her way to the shop she called in to the district Party committee to find out when all this disorder was going to end. But at the spot where she expected to find the district committee, she found the Wheel of Fortune casino with the erotic show “Night Flight.” She stopped a boy riding past on a bicycle and asked if he knew where the district committee of the CPSU had moved to. He asked her what corporation she meant, and when he couldn't understand her question a second time, he rode off. Then she met Gravalya in the street, who explained to her that in the last few years there had been a total restoration of capitalism. The CPSU had been disbanded. Lenin would soon be removed from the Mausoleum and the tsar's family would be buried with full honors in St. Petersburg. In Leningrad, Aglaya corrected her. But it turned out there was no more Leningrad; it was St. Petersburg.

Aglaya went out in the street, exchanged a privatization voucher for a bottle of vodka and withdrew into hibernation again.

76

In the middle of the nineties the company Fireworks Inc. was registered in Dolgov to manufacture Bengal fire, firecrackers, jumping crackers, skyrockets and other, similar goods.

The company was located in a semibasement apartment in house number 1-a on Komsomol Cul-de-Sac, and its personnel consisted of two people: Ivan Zhukov, the president, and Valentina Zhukova, the vice president and executive director.

Responsibilities were divided in a natural manner between the partners in the company. The president handled the creative side of the work and the vice president did everything else. Gravalya obtained the necessary materials and helped her grandson assemble all these things that they produced, while not neglecting her responsibilities as a nurse, which were considerable. In good weather she carried him outside “for an airing” and sat him, muffled in a rug, on the bench between the two old women. At home she washed him and in the early days put him on his potty. With time he learned to use the toilet, the washbasin and most things else for himself, and that was very important—now Gravalya could leave him on his own. And sometimes she had to leave him for a long time: to get some of the components for the products manufactured by the company, his granny had to “go riding,” as she put it, as far as Moscow. She proved to be a very competent materials supply manager and fairly soon she built up an entire network of basic suppliers. She got some stuff from the blasters in the local stone quarry, something else from a sergeant she knew in the forces of the Ministry of the Interior who was in charge of a munitions depot, and she even bought some things at the pharmacy on Vanka's instructions.

When they set up their business, our entrepreneurs weren't counting on any great success; they expected the demand for their goods would be limited to the period between celebrations for the New Year according to the new and the old calendars. And at first that's how it was. But soon bigger customers appeared, customers for all seasons. Municipal authorities and then various organizations, large and small, began taking an interest in special effects for inclusion in their festive functions. Some “New Russians” wanted to mark their own birthdays and family events with multicolored fire and deafening thunder. And so Fireworks Inc. did pretty good business from the very beginning.

The living conditions of the partners also improved.

Until just recently Gravalya and Vanka had lived in a single semibasement room, but their neighbor had died, and the Zhukovs had been given permission to occupy the entire apartment. At long last. Before that, all the grandmother's efforts to improve their living conditions had come to nothing, which had only fed her thirst for vengeance. First she had been put on a waiting list that moved far too slowly. Then they told her that the quota for state apartments had expired along with Soviet power. Now, they said, we have capitalism and you can buy anything with money, even an apartment. Gravalya had tried to make the manager feel ashamed. She reminded him that Vanka was a Group One war invalid who lived on his pension. To which the manager replied: “It wasn't I who sent your grandson to Afghanistan.” Next, she said that if she had a grenade at that moment she would set it off right there in that office without a second thought. And when she got home, she repeated the threat she had uttered once before: “Never mind, Vanka, we'll get them for this.” And she said the same thing again when she rejected the one-room fourth-floor apartment they were offered without any elevator or balcony. But now, thank God, life was a bit easier. Now they at least had a separate apartment, even if it was in the semibasement. It was still a bit cramped, of course. Because everything was in there together: living space, workshop, materials store and product store. It was cramped, but life was manageable. Especially with the telephone that Vanka was actually given as a disabled war veteran. Which made his life richer and more varied. Especially after he acquired a computer and got hooked on the Internet.

77

Gravalya did everything for Vanka. She nursed him, washed him, washed his clothes, took him outside for his “airings” and even brought him home girls for money so he wouldn't miss out at least on that joy of life. At first Vanka felt ashamed of Gravalya's procurement activities, but later it stopped bothering him and one day he told her after supper: “I'm lucky I have you, Gravalya. With you I feel almost like a human being.”

She nodded and sighed: “But you've still got to learn how to get along without me somehow. I'm going to die soon. How are you going to live without me?”

“There's no way I can,” Vanka said, unconcerned. “When you die, I'll follow you. There's nothing to keep me here in this world on my own.”

“Perish the thought!” said Gravalya with a sweep of her arm. “You're still young yet, you've got to live out your time.”

“What for?” Vanka asked.

“Because,” she said angrily. “If you've been given a life, then whatever state you're in, you've got to carry it through to the end.”

“Who says I've got to?” he sighed.

“He does!” She pointed up at the ceiling.

“He does?” Vanka queried, growing angry himself. “Then tell me, why did he make my life like this? Why did he turn me into a helpless cripple? What did I ever do to him? Print samizdat?”

“Don't tempt God's mercy,” Gravalya said in fright. “It was done to you by bad people, and we'll get them for it yet. God had nothing to do with it. God is merciful.”

“No, Granny, I don't believe it. He's cruel. I remember when the spooks pounded us to pieces down in the Kandahar ravine and there were wounded men with their arms and legs torn off lying all around, men with their stomachs ripped open and their eyes smashed out, and the screaming in the air was more frightening than when they were bombarding us with their rockets. I thought then: Here's the Earth flying through space with our voices wailing so loud that if God exists and he is like a man and he can hear us but he can't put an end to our suffering, then it would be better if he destroyed the entire planet and all of us along with it.”

Gravalya's reply was interrupted by a gentle knock at the door. Before either the granny or her grandson had time to respond, the door opened and a middle-aged man of average height with a massive neck appeared in the doorway, wearing a black coat and looking like either a bandit or a deputy to the State Duma.

After inquiring whether this was Fireworks Inc., the visitor expressed a desire to have a word with someone from the management.

“We're both top management,” said Vanka, struggling to shake himself out of the state he'd been in during the conversation with Gravalya. “I'm the president and Valentina Petrovna is the vice president and executive director.”

The visitor scrutinized Vanka, his granny and the surroundings with a dubious expression.

“So you manufacture all sorts of fireworks right here?”

“Firecrackers, jumping crackers, skyrockets, cherry bombs,” said Gravalya. “What is it you need?”

“What I need is something like a cherry bomb,” said the visitor.

“How many?” asked Granny Valya.

“One,” said the visitor.

“We don't take orders for individual items,” Vanka interjected.

“One big one.”

“How do you mean?” Vanka asked again.

“I mean a big one,” the visitor said with a smile. “Big enough, for instance, to blow an armored Mercedes to pieces. Preferably, tiny little pieces.”

“A terrorist attack?” Vanka asked cautiously.

“Is the armor thick?” Gravalya inquired.

“We don't do that kind of work,” Vanka cautioned her.

“About four millimeters,” said the visitor. “Maybe five.”

“A thousand a millimeter,” Gravalya quoted. “Five thousand altogether.”

“Rubles?” the visitor inquired.

“Baubles,” the granny responded. “Books.”

“Not books, but bucks,” Vanka corrected her.

“Ah come on, guys,” said the client, trying to haggle. “Five grand in bucks—that's too much. All I need in TNT equivalent is about two hundred grams, maybe three hundred—”

“If it doesn't suit, that's okay,” Gravalya said with a shrug. “Go to someone else. There's a blaster called Vaska works down in the stone quarry. He'll sell you a saucepan full of dynamite for a thousand rubles. Only it'll be the kind that doesn't go off when it ought to or explodes in your hands. But we provide a guarantee. This is a sound firm. That's not a head there on his shoulders,” she said, pointing to Vanka, “it's an entire Federal Council.”

The visitor carried on sighing and haggling for a long time, and eventually they settled on four thousand, half paid in advance.

When the visitor left, Vanka asked: “Gravalya, have you decided to become a terrorist now?”

“Not a terrorist, an avenging angel,” said Gravalya. “I told you we'd get them for it.”

“Get who?” asked Vanka. “Do you know who he is, this guy in the Mercedes? Maybe he's a good man.”

“The good people ride in buses, Vanka—we won't touch them.”

In this way the Zhukovs, granny and grandson, took their first step along the path of terror, and soon the fame of Fireworks Inc. spread far and wide. Very many people knew about it. Everyone, in fact, who had any interest in their kind of products. With the possible exception of the public prosecutor's office, the police and the security services.