Monumental Propaganda (35 page)

85

“Can you explain to me why you hate America?” Vanka asked his new friend.

“Not just America,” Jim replied. “I hate the whole world and all mankind. Man thinks he's the crown of creation. In actual fact, he's the most base and deceitful of all the animals—he can't ever be trusted—and the most irrational. Most people spend their time producing weapons and killing their own kind or preparing to kill them. How can beings claim to be rational if they can't even come to terms with each other and live in peace without causing each other suffering? Even the fiercest predator kills its victim to satisfy its own hunger. It's only people who kill each other and subject each other to incredible torment for the sheer pleasure of it. But most of all I hate people who are fit and well. One way or another, they were the ones who sacrificed us, and now they don't feel ashamed to walk and run and jump and play basketball and hug each other and wave their arms about. And when they see me or you, they turn their faces away, because we make them feel uncomfortable. The only people I have any time for are invalids like you and me, and I'd like everyone to be in our place for a month or a couple of weeks at least.”

“But maybe the whole point is,” wrote Vanka, “that people are more unhappy than animals. Unlike all the other creatures, they know that they're going to die.”

“Yes,” Jim agreed, “they are unhappy. But then they should all pity each other, not just themselves.”

“But you don't pity them.”

“That's precisely why I don't pity them. I used to, while I was a fit, healthy young man who studied in college and loved a beautiful girl and played basketball. Now I've earned the right not to pity anybody or love anybody. Apart from people like you and me. I drink to you.”

“What are you drinking?”

“I always drink whiskey.”

“With tonic?” Vanka asked.

“What?” asked Jim. “Whiskey with tonic? Do you seriously think it's possible to drink whiskey with tonic?”

“Why not?”

“Stop right there, my friend. If you drink whiskey with tonic, you'll go way down in my estimation.”

“Why?”

“Because drinking whiskey with tonic is very bad taste. Something they only do in California. Nobody anywhere else ever drinks whiskey with tonic. They drink gin, vodka, vermouth, Campari and anything you like with it, but not whiskey. Whiskey is a noble drink, it's drunk with ice, with soda, with mineral water, with tap water and straight, like I take it. But with tonic . . .”

The next day he sent Gravalya to the supermarket, she brought back whiskey and tonic, and Vanka started drinking,

He drank for an entire week. Mixing whiskey with tonic in various proportions, drinking it, breathing it on to scent-detectors that he'd made himself and making various adjustments that only he understood. A week later the new device was finished and handed over to the client.

86

Vanka didn't watch television very often. But sometimes he took a very keen interest in the news. Usually, a few days after he completed another one of his products, there would be reports from Moscow or St. Petersburg or, more rarely, from other cities about an apartment, automobile or office that had been blown up and somebody or other important who had been killed. That was the way he found out just who he rid mankind of each time. But when it was reported that an explosion had occurred in a bus, a trolley-bus or a railway station, Vanka knew for certain that was someone else's sloppy handiwork.

A week and a half had gone by since he said goodbye to Ivan Ivanich, but nowhere—not even on the radio or in the newspapers—had there been a single report that fitted. Vanka was mystified, until one rainy afternoon a Land Rover jeep came tearing into the yard and Ivan Ivanich tumbled out almost before it had stopped moving, together with a blond guy who looked like some kind of soccer star. Gravalya was away dealing with the supply end of things and Vanka was sitting home with the door unlocked. They burst into the room without knocking and Ivan Ivanich, forgetting his manners, raised his voice from the doorway: “You bastard . . .” and noticed straightaway that something in the corner began rumbling menacingly.

Vanka warned him calmly: “Be careful, there are sensitive devices here. They react very acutely to rudeness and especially to firearms.”

Ivan Ivanich immediately came to his senses and stopped the blond hulk, who was already pulling a metal object out of his pocket.

“So what exactly is the problem?” Vanka asked when his visitors had calmed down.

“As if you didn't know, jerk,” said Ivan Ivanich.

“Less of the familiarity, if you don't mind,” Vanka warned him again. “What happened?”

“That's just it, nothing happened,” said the blond hulk, with a grim, searching look at Vanka. “We planted the bundle behind the safe, connected up the detector. Nothing happens.”

“Mm,” said Vanka thoughtfully. “He hasn't given up drinking by any chance?”

“Aw, come on!” Ivan Ivanich protested heatedly, almost as if he were offended for his boss, then immediately mended his manners. “I mean, of course not. First thing, the moment he arrives, he goes straight to the bar.”

“Ugh.” Vanka scratched his head. “Maybe he's switched to gin? Or vodka?”

“No, definitely not,” Ivan Ivanich protested irritably. “He drinks the same way he always did, whiskey and tonic. And it's always the same brand—Jack Daniel's.”

“Jack Daniel's?” Vanka repeated in amazement. “Why didn't you tell me that before? I thought it was Scotch whiskey, but if it's Jack Daniel's, that's bourbon. If he even drinks that with tonic . . .”

“And why not?” asked the blond thug.

“If our bankers drink garbage like that first thing in the morning, what confidence can anyone have in that kind of bank, and what kind of economy can we have? Okay, bring me a bottle of this Jack, we don't have it around here . . .”

“I've got one in the car,” said Ivan Ivanich. “I'll just go and get it.”

87

A few days later at half past nine in the morning, as always, Andrei Ignatievich Mosolov rode up in his emerald-green Jaguar to the side entrance of the Orion Bank, which, in his capacity as president, he used to launder his modest personal savings. The chauffeur immediately drove the car off to the guarded parking lot, and the president's two personal bodyguards entered the building but stayed downstairs. The president walked up to the second floor alone. He walked past the secretary and into his office. Hung his coat, hat and white muffler on the coat rack. Switched on the computer, opened the bar, tossed four ice cubes into a chunky glass, poured Jack Daniel's over them and added tonic. He'd learned to drink this barbarous concoction when he was living in America and studying at Stanford University. While he mixed his drink, the computer booted up and Mosol went online. He began reading the market reports and became rather concerned. While he was asleep, the equities in which his bank had invested the bulk of its capital had fallen sharply on the Tokyo exchange. Switching to another site, he discovered that the rights to the development of a mineral-water spring in the area of the town of Dolgov had been granted to his competitor Felix Bulkin, whom Andrei Ignatievich knew under the pseudonym of Chuma, or “Plague,” from the days when they ran a scam together on the railroad and earned their first profit from selling fake Royal Polish pure spirits. Although his education was limited to two years in a textile-industry technical college, Plague had proved bright enough to break into big business and compete successfully even with a high-flying economist like Andrei Ignatievich Mosolov. Plague made up for his lack of education with his innately brazen character and his ability to worm or—as he put it—to slip and slide his way in absolutely anywhere.

“Why, you rotten slag!” Andrei Ignatievich exclaimed furiously, addressing his brazen rival. After delivering himself of a few more expressions that he learned in places far away from the London School of Economics, Mosolov dashed over to the safe to take a look at some compromising materials he had on Plague: a few documents, extracts from old court proceedings, videotapes.

Mosol opened the safe, and with the words “I'll show you what for, scumbag,” he stuck his head inside.

The explosion wasn't powerful. The secretary thought it was just a loud pop. But when she glanced into the president's office, all she could see at first was smoke. And then through the smoke she made out the president's head smoldering like a dying firebrand where it had rolled away from his body. The secretary fainted, and afterward she took several months of hypnotherapy for a stammer.

PART FIVE

DANCING ON OUR STREET

88

Times were hard once again for Aglaya, living off a pension that was nowhere near enough. Not even enough to mend the window in her bedroom that was broken by boys playing soccer. She pasted it over with newspaper, but the newspaper tore and the bedroom was cold and drafty. She moved into the sitting room and slept on the sofa bed, leaving it unfolded all the time. The bed was hard, consisting of two convex halves like the twin humps of a camel. During the night Aglaya slipped down into the hollow in the middle and even though she had a warm blanket, she got chilled because there was a wide crack between the two halves of the sofa that let a cold draft through. She began getting headaches that prevented her from sleeping. And when she finally did get to sleep, little creatures—cockroaches, mice and bats—came to visit her, laughing and grinning. Sometimes the beasts looked like members of the Politburo. Sometimes she dreamed of members of the Politburo who looked like the beasts. When they disappeared, she would resurface into a state of wakefulness or semiwakefulness, chilled to the bone whatever the weather, her body covered in goose pimples and coated with cold, sticky sweat.

In the spring she started getting pains under the right side of her ribs. When she could bear it no longer, she called in the doctor. The local general practitioner arrived, aging and melancholy with a sea-skipper's beard branching sideways into two large clumps and wearing a white coat over his old overcoat. He examined her, listened to her chest, took her blood pressure, asked how her appetite was, did she have any nausea, vomiting or belching?

“I don't have any appetite,” she said, “but I've got all the rest.”

“Can you show me your hands?” He turned her palms toward the light and kneaded them with his soft fingers. “Pink palms. Your liver's switched on its cirrhosis alarm signal.”

“What does that mean?” Aglaya asked.

“It means you have to stop drinking immediately and go on a diet: nothing fried or roasted, less salt and fat, more vitamins. If you stick to all that, then you'll live a while longer.”

When the doctor left, she thought for a while, but unable to think of a reason for living any longer, she went out to the shop for some vodka.

89

In the shop she met Divanich wearing a filthy old civilian jacket. He'd grown his hair long like a priest's and woven it into a braid at the back. He was yellow and skinny as a rake, with the jacket dangling loosely on it, and there was not a single tooth in his head. She couldn't remember whether the last time she'd seen him was last year or yesterday, but for some reason she'd thought he was dead.

“I very nearly did die,” Divanich mumbled through his gums. “I was in the hospital. They found growths in my rectum, and if, they told me, you don't have them out, they might turn malignant. Last time when they fixed my hernia the surgeon there was Semyon Zalmanovich Kantselson, an absolutely marvelous doctor. Hands worth their weight in gold. I never used to go to our Russian doctors, always tried to see the Jewish ones. Because a Jewish doctor works like a jeweler. He'll cut off what needs to go, but he won't touch anything else. This time when I get there, the doctor's Ivan Trofimovich Bogdanov. Two meters tall, shoulders way out here, hands all covered in ginger hair and freckles. I thought, He's been demoted from the meat-processing combine. I ask him, ‘Where's Semyon Zalmanovich?' ‘Him,' he says, ‘he's gone to Israel.' ‘What about Raisa Moiseevna?' ‘Raisa Moiseevna went to America, to Chicago. And,' he says, ‘what with our conditions and our pay, I wouldn't mind going to Israel myself, but who'd let me in with a mug like this.' But he did me the operation well enough all the same.”

“For money?” Aglaya asked.

“Where would I get money, Aglastepna? The number of times the government's abandoned us. First they give us Black Tuesday, then they come up with Black Friday. It's what they call a survival test. They want to get rid of all the country's dead weight. It costs the state too much to keep us pensioners, so they want to wipe us all out.”

“Who are they?” Aglaya asked.

“Who else could they be?” said Divanich. “The Yids. They're everywhere. In the government, in the Duma—they're all Yids. Don't you think?”

“Aha,” said Aglaya and nodded, although she had no opinion of her own.

Divanich had come without any money, but with his own glass, which he leased out. The dipsos who were a bit better off would ask for it to drink their bottle, and they'd pour him out a mouthful too. A mouthful here and a mouthful there was all he needed—his system was weak, it didn't require very much. Aglaya gave him a splash too and then trudged off home.

In the yard she skirted automatically around the foreign jeep on tall wheels with its number plates plastered over with mud. For quite a while now there had always been jeeps, Mercedes, Volvos and other foreign makes of automobile belonging to clients of Fireworks Inc. standing in the yard. There was a hulking brute behind the wheel of the automobile that Aglaya saw. As Aglaya walked past, he covered his face with the newspaper
Izvestiya
so that his repulsive features couldn't be seen, just his ears sticking out in opposite directions from behind the edges of the newspaper. But he needn't have bothered. It was a long time since Aglaya had noticed anything she didn't need to see, and what she did notice she immediately forgot.

She walked into the entrance hall and at that moment Vanka Zhukov's door opened. Aglaya caught the smell of nitroglycerine, which she knew from the time when she was a partisan and used to sabotage the railroads. Now the smell merely aroused a vague memory that failed to condense into any distinct image.

Two men came up the stairs from the semibasement, both thin and wiry, wearing long leather coats and peaked leather caps. Between them, each holding one handle, they were carrying a traveling bag, obviously very heavy, that bore the legend COPENHAGEN. As they climbed up, one of them looked Aglaya over closely, and the other gave her a look too, probably wondering whether it was worth bumping off the old dame as a potential witness. But his next thought was that the old dame was blind and deaf and probably wouldn't understand a thing, let alone remember anything. And instead of committing the crime he simply pulled the peak of his cap over his eyes and turned his face away slightly.

Aglaya walked on to her own apartment. First she carried her shopping bag through to the kitchen, but it was dirty and unwelcoming in there, so she decided to eat in the dining room. She spread out the
Dolgov Herald
on the low side table. Then she set out her bottle, a glass, some black bread on a carving board, two hardboiled eggs she'd prepared that morning, some onion and salt. She made herself comfortable and poured herself a third of a glass tumbler of vodka. Looked over at Stalin, smothered in dust and cobwebs. Thought he was looking at her reproachfully. “You stay where you are,” she said, waving her hand at him. The newspaper was lying open in front of her, with the first and fourth pages of text upward. On the first page was news from Moscow: The president had met with the minister of justice and discussed problems of political extremism. The mayor of Moscow had decided to build the tallest skyscraper in the world in the Russian capital. An explosive device had been discovered in a kindergarten, with a mixture of nitrates and TNT. The local reports included one on the preparations for the district administration elections. The power involved wasn't that great, only within the limits of the local district, but just look at the number of people who were desperate to wield it! Aglaya's eyes were dazzled by the sheer number of political parties: communists, socialists, monarchists, liberals, democrats, constitutional democrats, social democrats, liberal democrats, members of the Unions for the Struggle for Freedom, of the Patriotic Forces, gays, whites, greens and all sorts of other tendencies, shades and hues.

Aglaya was not the only one afflicted with this kind of color blindness. The Admiral, confirmed as he grew older in his skeptical view of everything he observed taking place in the world around him, said that all our politicians came from the same incubator: they'd been marked with different-colored inks, but essentially there was no difference.

The final page held the sports news, the astrological forecast and the small ads, over which Aglaya's gaze slid indifferently: “Windows whitewashed and wallpaper hung.” “Opel Kadet auto for sale with spare set of tires.” “The Indian sorcerer Benjamin Ivanov—supreme magic.” “Instant binding and enchantment of your loved one by voodoo zombification. Free your husband completely of mistresses and bring him back home. 100% guaranteed.” “Inexpensive. Dog coats cut, plucked and trimmed.” “I bless apartments and offices, houses, lots, furniture and autos. Father Dionisii, priest.” And in verse: “Doctor Fyodor Pleshakov cures alcoholics. Esperal, implants and programming for you. No more drinking the whole year through.”

Aglaya wondered whether she ought to pay Dr. Pleshakov a visit. But not to drink for a whole year—was that possible? She dropped the idea and carried on reading about a sale of fur and sheepskin coats, getting windows glazed, getting wells drilled, having teeth removed painlessly, having floors sanded down and having your virginity restored (reliable, cheap, confidential).