Day of the Oprichnik (6 page)

“I don’t have a family,” I interrupt.

She looks at me silently with large, moist eyes. Susanin sings “My time has come!” and crosses himself. The Zemstvo widow lies on the floor. I ask:

“Why are you, a favorite of His Majesty’s family, asking me?”

“His Majesty is terribly angry at the former chairman and all of his assistants. He doesn’t want to hear anything about clemency. But the clerk Koretsky personally wrote that very letter to the French. His Majesty doesn’t want to hear a word about the Koretskys.”

“All the more…What can I do?”

“Andrei Danilovich, the oprichnina is capable of miracles.”

“Madame, the oprichnina creates the Work and Word! of the state.”

“You are one of the leaders of that mighty order.”

“Madame, the oprichnina is not an order, but a brotherhood.”

“Andrei Danilovich! I beseech you! Take pity on an unfortunate woman. In your masculine wars we are the ones who suffer most. And life on earth depends on us.”

Her voice trembles. The Zemstvo woman’s sobs are barely audible behind her. The culture head glances sideways in our direction. What can you do, people ask us to intercede almost every day. But Koretsky and that whole gang of the Public Chambers chairman—they are double-dealers! Better not to even look their way.

“Tell her to leave,” I say.

“Klavdia Lvovna, dear heart…” The ballerina leans over her.

Koretskaya disappears in the dark, sobbing.

“Let’s go outside.” I head toward the door with the illuminated word “Exit.”

Kozlova hurries after me. Silently, we leave the building through the service entrance.

On the square I go to my Mercedov. Kozlova follows me. In daylight the best Giselle in Russia is even more frail and plain. She hides her thin little face in a luxurious arctic fox collar with a short throat wrap. The prima ballerina wears a long, narrow skirt of black silk; under it, pointed black boots with patches of snakeskin peek out. The prima has beautiful eyes—large, gray, anxious.

“If it’s uncomfortable for you, we can speak in my car.” She nods in the direction of a lilac-colored Cadillac.

“Better in mine.” I show my palm to the Mercedov and it obediently opens its glass top.

Even tax collectors don’t make deals in other people’s cars these days. A seedy scrivener from the Trade Department would never sit down in someone else’s car to talk about a
black
petition.

I take my place. She sits to my right in the only seat.

“We’ll take a ride, Uliana Sergeevna,” I say as I start the engine, and drive out of the government parking lot.

“Andrei Danilovich, I’ve been in worried to death all week long…” She takes out a pack of women’s Motherland and lights up. “There’s a sense of doom around this affair. It turns out that I can’t do anything to help my oldest friend. And I have a performance tomorrow.”

“She’s truly dear to you?”

“Terribly. I don’t have any other girlfriends. You know the ways of our theater world…”

“I’ve heard about it.” I drive out of the Borovitsky Gates, turn onto the Great Stone Bridge, and speed down the red lane.

Taking a drag on her cigarette, Kozlova looks at the Whitestone Kremlin and the barely distinguishable snow on it.

“You know, I was very anxious before meeting you.”

“Why?”

“I never thought that asking for others would be so difficult.”

“I agree.”

“And then…last night I had a strange dream: the black bands were still on the main cupola of Uspensky Cathedral and His Majesty was still in mourning for his first wife.”

“Did you know Anastasia Fyodorovna?”

“No. I wasn’t a prima ballerina at the time.”

We reach Yakimanka Street. The Zamoskvoreche neighborhood is noisy and crowded as usual.

“So, I can count on your help?”

“I’m not promising anything, but I can try.”

“How much will it cost?”

“There are standard prices. Zemstvo affairs currently cost a thousand in gold. Departmental—three thousand. But an affair in the Public Chambers…”

“But I’m not asking you to close the case. I’m asking for the widow!”

I slow down as I drive down Ordynka Street. Good Lord, how many Chinese there are here…

“Andrei Danilovich! Don’t torture me!”

“Well…for you…two and a half. And an aquarium.”

“What kind?”

“Well, not a silver one!” I grin.

“When?”

“If they’re sending your friend off the day after tomorrow, then the sooner the better.”

“So, today?”

“You’ve got the right idea.”

“All right. Please drive me home, if it’s not too much trouble. I’ll get my car later…I live on Nezhdanov Street.”

I turn around and race back.

“Andrei Danilovich, what kind of money will you need?”

“Preferably gold pieces of the second minting.”

“All right. I think I’ll be able to get the money together by evening. But the aquarium…You know, I don’t do gold aquariums; we ballerinas aren’t paid as much as it seems…But Lyosha Voroniansky is
sitting
on piles of gold. He’s a great friend of mine. I’ll get it from him.”

Voroniansky is the premier tenor of the Bolshoi Opera, the people’s idol. He not only
sits
on gold, he probably eats off it…I zip across the Great Stone Bridge again, in the red lane. On my right and left cars sit in endless traffic jams. After the Nestor Public Library I pass Vozdvizhenka Street, the university, and turn onto disgraced Nikitskaya Street. The third cleaning has passed and the street has quieted down. Here, even the hawkers and bread peddlers walk fearfully and their cries are timid. The windows of burned-out apartments that have never been restored blacken menacingly. The Zemstvo swine are scared. And for good reason…

I turn onto Nezhdanov Street and stop near the gray artists’ building. It’s fenced off by a three-meter-high wall with a constant ray of light shining upward. That’s all as it should be…

“Wait for me, Andrei Danilovich,” says the prima ballerina as she gets out of the car. She disappears into the lobby.

I call Batya:

“Batya, we’ve got a request for a half-deal.”

“Who is it?”

“The clerk Koretsky.”

“Who’s buying?”

“Kozlova.”

“The ballerina?”

“That’s right. Do we help the widow beat the rap?”

“We can try. We’ll have to share quite a bit to manage it. When’s the money?”

“She’ll have it by evening. And…my heart can feel it, Batya, she’s going to bring an aquarium out to me shortly.”

“That’s great.” Batya winks at me. “If she does—drive straight to the baths.”

“You bet!”

Kozlova is taking a long time. I light a cigarette. I turn on the
clean
teleradio. It allows us to see and hear what our domestic dissenters spend so much time and energy to listen to and watch at night. First I go through the underground: the Free Settlements channel broadcasts lists of people arrested the previous night, and talks about the “true story” behind the Kunitsyn affair. Fools! Who’s persuaded by these “true stories”?…Radio Hope is quiet during the day—they’re catching up on sleep, those late-night SOBs. But the Siberian River Pirate, the voice of runaway prisoners, is wide awake:

“At the request of Vován, Poltorá-Iván, released just three days ago, we’ll play an old convict song.”

A juicy harmonica starts, and a husky young voice sings:

“Two convicts lay flat on their bunk beds

And dreamed of a past that they craved.

The first one was nicknamed Bacillus,

The other one’s handle was Plague.”

This River Pirate, jumping around western Siberia like a flea, has been caught between the nails twice: first the local Secret Department squashed it; then we did. They got away from the department guys, and they hopped away from us using Chinese aquari ums. While negotiations over the ransom were going on, our guys managed to put three newscasters on the rack and dislocate their arms, and like a huge bear Sivolai knocked up the female announcer. But the backbone of the radio station remained whole; it bought a new, horse-drawn studio, and those shackle-fetters began broadcasting once again. Fortunately, His Majesty doesn’t pay much attention to them. Why not let them yowl their prison songs?

“All Siberia howled in sync,

Their fame reached to old Kolymá.

Bacillus he fled the taigá,

While Plague returned to the clink.”

I tune in to the West. It’s the real stronghold of anti-Russian subversion. Like slimy reptiles in a cesspool, enemy voices teem: Freedom for Russia!, Voice of America, Free Europe, Freedom, the German Wave, Russia in Exile, Russian Rome, Russian Berlin, Russian Paris, Russian Brighton Beach, Russian Riviera.

I choose Freedom, the most vehement of the vermin, and I immediately run up against sedition, fresh out of the oven: they have an emigrant poet in the studio, a narrow-chested, dour-eyed Judas, an old acquaintance of ours with a shattered right hand (Poyarok made use of his foot during an interrogation). Straightening his old-fashioned glasses with his mutilated hand, the traitor reads in a quivering, nearly hysterical falsetto:

“Where there’s a pair of Grafs—there’s a paragraph!

Where there’s just a court—no justice is courted!

You’ll ‘do your time,’ without ever hearing ‘time to go,’

Since by rights you’re not arighted!”

The Judas! With a touch of my finger I remove the pale face of the liberal from my sight. These people are like unto vile worms that feed and nourish themselves on carrion. Spineless, twisted, insatiable, blind—that’s why they are kindred with the despicable worm. Liberals differ from the lowly worm only in their mesmerizing, witch-brewed speechifying. Like venom and reeking puss they spew it all about, poisoning humans and God’s very world, defiling its holy purity and simplicity, befouling it as far as the very bluest horizon of the heavenly vault with the reptilian drool of their mockery, jeers, derision, contempt, double-dealing, disbelief, distrust, envy, spite, and shamelessness.

Freedom for Russia! whines about “persecuted will,” the Old Believers’ “Posolon” grumbles about corruption in the top hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church; Russian Paris reads a book by Iosif Bak,
Hysterical Gesticulation as a Way to Survive in Contemporary Russia
; Russian Rome plays some kind of shrill monkeylike jazz; Russian Berlin broadcasts an ideological duel between two irreconcilable bastard-mongrel emigrants; the Voice of America has a program called “Russian Expletives in Exile” with an obscene retelling of the immortal work
Crime and Punishment
:

“The un-fucking-believable blow of the butt-fucking axe hit the goddamn temple of the triply gang-banged old bag, facilitated piss-perfectly by her cunt-sucking short height. She cried out cumly and suddenly collapsed on the jism-covered shit-paneled floor, although that rotten pussy-hole of a hag had time to raise both of her ass-licking hands to her fuckin’ bare-ass pimped-up head.”

An abomination. What else can be said?

Our liberals are dripping with anger and grinding their teeth after His Majesty’s famous Decree 37, which criminalized obscene language in public and private, and made obligatory public corporal punishment the sentence. Most surprising of all is that our people immediately accepted Decree 37 with understanding. There were some show trials, some
drawing and quartering
on the main squares of Russian cities, the whistle of the cattle whip on Sennaya Square, and cries on the Manezh. And in a trice the people stopped using the filthy words that foreigners forced on them in bygone days. Only the intelligentsia has trouble coming to terms with it, and keeps on belching forth foul fumes in kitchens, bedrooms, latrines, elevators, storerooms, back streets, and cars, refusing to part with this putrid polyp on the body of the Russian language, which has poisoned more than one generation of our compatriots. And the loathsome West plays up to our underground foul-mouths.

The Russian Riviera dares—in a brazen, impudent tone—to criticize His Majesty’s order to close the Third Western Pipeline for twenty-four hours. How much anger those European gentlemen have accumulated! For decades they have sucked our gas without thinking of the hardship it brought to our hardworking people. What astonishing news they report! Oh dear, it’s cold in Nice
again
! Gentlemen, you’ll have to get used to eating cold foie gras at least a couple of times a week. Bon appétit! China turned out to be smarter than you…

A knock and ring. That same clerk from the Ambassadorial Department:

“Andrei Danilovich, Korostylev here. The reception for the Albanian ambassador has been postponed until tomorrow at two o’clock.”

“Got it.” I turn off the clerk’s owly mug.

Thank God, because today we’re up to our ears in work. At state receptions for foreign accreditation, the oprichniks now stand next to the ambassadorials. Previously we alone carried the silver vessel holding the water. And a
dozen
ambassadorials stood in attendance in a half-circle. After August 17 His Majesty decided to bring them closer in. Now we hold the vessel jointly with the ambassadorials: Batya and Zhuravlev hold the cup; I, or someone from the right
wing
, holds the towel; the embassy clerk supports the elbow; and the rest stand on the rug or bow. As soon as His Majesty greets the new ambassador with a handshake and takes the credentials, we immediately begin the ritual washing of His Majesty’s hands. Of course, it’s a pity that the ambassadorials have been promoted after the mishaps of August. But—that is His Majesty’s will…

Kozlova finally comes out.

By her eyes I can sense that she has it. I immediately feel a rush of blood, and my heart quickens.

“Andrei Danilovich.” Through the window she hands me a plastic bag from a Chinese takeaway. “The money will be ready before six o’clock. I’ll call.”

I nod. Trying to restrain myself, I toss the bag casually onto the empty seat and close the window. Kozlova leaves. I drive off, turning onto Tverskaya Street. Near the Moscow Municipal Duma I park in the red lot for government cars. I stick my hand in the bag. My fingers touch the cool, smooth sphere. My fingers embrace it gently as I close my eyes: an
aquarium
! It’s been a long time, oh so very long since my fingers have held the sublime globe. Almost four days. How terrible…