The Moscoviad (5 page)

“Yesterday we
could have made all sorts of plans. Even for a state coup.” You try to resist
it somehow, since you have so much stuff to do, since this swim in the Beer Sea
doesn’t bode well, since it will be yet another defeat sustained by your spirit
in the fight with the temptations and the monsters, the harpies and the furies,
but as always, spineless creature, you know that there’s no escape for you.

“Besides my hair
is still wet.”

“I will lend you
my yarmulke,” says Roytman, and everyone laughs.

“I will lend you
a hat, an umbrella, a policeman’s cap, a tank helmet,” suggests Golitsyn.

“Listen, von F.,
the pipes are burning, let’s go,” adds Horobets temptingly.

“The pipes are
calling,” adds Roytman.

“Then shove them
up yours,” you express your wish in a none too offensive tone.

“You see, it
doesn’t matter to us whether you are coming with us,” reasons Horobets
convincingly, “whether you want beer or not. We only want to protect you from
bad company and harmful influences.”

“Our souls ache
for you,” says Roytman.

“We love you like
our youngest brother,” sighs Golitsyn. “By the way, how do you find virgin
girls in this mess of a place?” he nods at your bed.

So he saw it!
With his old prison educator’s eyes. What could this noble-looking monster
teach those poor guys in the slammer, I wonder?

Instead of an
answer you whistle some sad barcarole.

“There’s no need
to tell us this is the result of a nosebleed,” keeps provoking you Golitsyn.

“Well, to hell
with it. Let’s go,” you say to change the subject.

“But your hair is
wet,” grins Roytman.

“All the same
it’s raining outside.”

And outside it is
indeed raining. The stormclouds that have been hanging over the city like a
heavy cloth finally burst. And rain surrounds you on all sides. A cold rain,
although it’s May. It’s May, but still the air’s so cold, as the poet said.

Lately one has
had to bring one’s own jars while going out for beer. This resembles
life-risking trips to fetch water by the defenders of a besieged medieval
castle. It somehow happened that the empire suddenly didn’t have enough mugs to
go by. Perhaps they took all the beer mugs to the Kremlin, just in case there
is a civil war? And when the rebellious masses will go storm the Kremlin walls,
the Politburo members will pelt them with beer mugs filled with sewage and
shit. Perhaps these very mugs, or rather their absence, provides the ultimate
manifestation of Mother Empire’s unviability?

Whatever the case
may be, you are now ambling under the cold May rain, your bodies covered with
empty jars; cars and trolleys swim by you across the puddles: they appear to be
made not so much for transporting people but for splattering the rare raintime
passerby with dirty streams. This is not May but some sort of eternal autumn.
The bitter hour has come when everything breaks, and nothing fits. Only the
stooping figures of a few chronic alcoholics in front of the seriously
padlocked grocery store number forty symbolize some theoretical possibility of
rebirth and a better future.

You thought, Otto
von F., following the tracks of old-time Galician notions, that a beer hall
must be a cozy and dry cavern on an old cobblestone street, marked by the sign
of a cute little Devil with a round indulgent belly, where the lights and music
are low, and the bartender uses the unfathomable expression, “What would be the
gentleman’s wish?” You hoped your buddies would bring you into some such
amber-saturated paradise that the rain, thunder, boom, pestilence, fear,
putsch, famine cannot reach? Instead you have the beer hall on Fonvizin Street,
an incomprehensible construct, a Lego pyramid, something like a hangar in the
middle of a great Asiatic wasteland overgrown with the first May weeds. A
hangar for the drunks. From here they fly out on patrol missions. And it can
fit a few thousand of them. An entire drunken division with its own generals,
colonels, lieutenants, and newbies, just like you.

The beer hall on
Fonvizin Street is a monster the size of a big city train station, but it is
more like Moscow’s Kiev Station, not the Savyolovo Station: a colossal waiting
area in front of the gates of hell. But that’s not all. There also exists a
parcel of the flatlands that is smaller in acreage; it has no walls. Only
barbed wire plugged into the electric current.

In order to get
here, one must pay a ruble. One’s duty to Beelzebub, whose interests are
represented at the entrance by a criminal-looking young guy in formerly white
clothes. Moreover, each ruble taken by Beelzebub is not something hopelessly
lost. It is returned to you, it is rendered unto you in the form of a fish, a
joyless gray dead fish you’d never consume if you had the right to receive your
beer without it. The fish is the pass for the beer communion, the sacred
stinking symbol preserved perhaps since the days of early Christianity.
Preserved and distorted, for a sacrilegious mass is celebrated here,
apocalyptic entertainment for throats and bladders.

Oh well. The fish
is caught, but this still does not guarantee anything. Beer! For its sake one
must wait in a long, but fortunately very dynamic line, replete with attractive
swearing and fighting. The line that ends in front of an extremely narrow
window. And there, inside it, is where beer lives? Perhaps some beer archbishop
sits there and gives out communion, with a teaspoon, to all the thirsty? No,
von F., beer doesn’t live there. It rumbles inside the vending machines that
stand along the opposite wall of this terrarium. And there, in the window,
something else takes place: the exchange of the paper trash called “rubles” for
the freely convertible twenty-kopeck coins.

“Well I never!”
you want to exclaim, like a character from Soviet Ukrainian prose.

Golitsyn’s face
is stern and decisive. And extremely focused. This is how true masters of their
trade look while carrying out their taxing duties. Surgeons at the operating
table. Sappers clearing minefields. Sky divers at the moment when the parachute
opens and the dynamic kick makes the sling hit them painfully in the balls.
Golitsyn gives short, abrupt commands, as if for flag signing: no dawdling, no
arguing with the locals, prepare a trundle each and watch for the freeing
tables while I, guys, fight at the vending machines.

For there one
indeed has to use force. Every coin thrown into the machine’s slot produces
only a short inexpressive spit in which there’s more foam than any other
desired components. For getting at least a pint, theoretically you need to put
in five coins, and in reality seven or eight. Beet-colored mutants hang around
the vending machines for hours with saliva-coated jars in their hands, fighting
for justice in this most unjust of worlds. It seems to them that the vending
machines do not give out enough beer per serving. That the beer is too watery.
That this isn’t beer. That the people around them have particularly vile mugs.
That it wouldn’t be bad to take some of them and . . .

Meanwhile you are
moving towards the cherished window. Three-ruble bills sweat in your hands in
anticipation of the outcome. Where are you, the cave of wonders, the coin
mountain? How far you still are! How many times you’d still have to snarl
menacingly in response to some guy’s cynical attempts to get into the line
ahead of you, ahead of them, ahead of everyone? No joking here. Too much is at
stake.

And now look
carefully at who is here. Other than the four of you.

And here we have
the society. How their chests are itching, how their throats are burning, how
their eyes are watering! What voices bounce off the plastic ceiling, filling
the space with an endless monotonous humming! Something like a Gregorian chant
for the lost souls. The oratory for the last day.

Back in the days
you had been taught that the Roman Empire fell under the blows of the slaves
and the freedmen. This empire will fall under the blows of the drunks. When all
of them come out on Red Square and, demanding beer, go for the Kremlin. They
will be fired at, but bullets will bounce off their alcohol-saturated,
bulletproof chests. They will sweep everything away.

Especially the
women. They are the true adornment of this blessed place. They wear 1972 bellbottoms
(or perhaps these are the bellbottoms of the coming year, 1992?), with unzipped
flies. They have mangy hair. They are proud of their bruises and swellings.
They smell of the cesspool. Their legs are most likely as hairy as those of the
Queen of Sheba. They might even lie down with dogs, but the present crowd
includes their boyfriends. If they are not poured beer in time, they will tear
this place down together with all the KGB dungeons in the Lubyanka Square (that
is, the Inner City, the City within the city).

Thus the empire
ought to take care of its drunks in a timely fashion. Not fight the windmills
of liberalisms or nationalisms, not hunt down the witch of religiosity or the
ghost of human rights activism, but do just one thing: take care of its faithful
drunks. So that they would always have what to get plastered with. So that they
would love their monstrous women. So that they would produce children that are
just like themselves. And that’s it.

But the empire
betrayed its drunks. And thus doomed itself to disintegration.

For now they
drink va-banque, now each bottle is procured through risk and blood and sweat.
Now for its sake people simply die, for example, by falling from the altitude
of the seventh floor.

And so you have
successfully completed the road to the fair window. And there, on the sacks of
twenty-kopeck silver, sits, it turns out, a sexy enough fury (or houri?), with
eyes full of beer, and like all cheap Moscow girls, she’s a bleached blond. A
girl with pearly hair. Arnold, as always, makes an impression. They even manage
to flirt through the window, although the heavy impatient hangover breath of
Saturday heroes that are pressing from behind weighs on the back of the neck.

“Nice girl,”
stresses Arnold, moving to the side.

“Did you count
the coins?” Roytman asks distrustfully.

“It seems she had
nothing under her robe,” answers Caesar, licking his lips.

You guys have no
less than sixty coins. They say that in the united Germany Soviet people put
them into payphones instead of the ten-pfennig coins. If this is true, then
with the money you have one could call the whole world, including Macao and
Honolulu. But for that one first must cross several borders and somehow make
it, say, to Munich.

Roytman holds in
his hands the plates with the murdered fish. Golitsyn fights for the place
under the vending machine. You and Arnold set out towards him with several
empty liter jars and one three liter one.

One should first
fill up just the three liter one. From it everyone will drink, pouring for themselves
into the empty liter ones. Actually, you didn’t need to drag the jars all the
way here, to the vending machines, but it wouldn’t be prudent to leave them
unattended—this would be a fatal dilettante error. They would disappear
immediately. One would then have to buy empty ones (for the same three rubles)
from a local syphilitic.

The vending
machine, having unhurriedly eaten nearly fifty of your coins, at last squirted
out the desired three liters. Next time you should get much more change, for
what is three liters of beer when it’s raining outside and there is four of
you? Thus you immediately get back into the line to the change window with the
beer sex bomb. Carefully, so that no bastard would elbow him and spill on the
ground the yellow liquid that has been procured with so much effort, Yura
Golitsyn carries the three-liter jar. Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev with a
three-liter jar of beer. A graying writer, full of grace, dignity and poise.

They like
drinking beer “in the fresh air,” that is, under the plastic roof, accompanied
by the noise of the rain and the singing of drunk officers. They only thing
left for you to do is to submit, since you are here for the first time, and
anyway you’re the youngest. Next to them you are a sniveler, a sonny boy, a rookie,
and they dutifully protect you from all the possible dangers that hide here.

Here, for
instance, you can’t look at anyone directly. You can’t stare at anyone too
closely and attentively. This would result in an explosion, a regional
conflict. You need to cultivate a superficial wandering gaze that does not stop
on anything. An indifferent unfixed movable gaze.

Well, Otto von F.
Before you take the first sip, before you plunge into the unknown that leads to
an unforeseeable finale, before you step on the ghostly and tempting shoulder
off the righteous path that you have barely managed to grasp in your dreams last
night, concentrate and recall what you had planned for today.

It seems I had to
meet with Kyrylo. I even have his phone number somewhere on me. It’s rather
important. It’s about publishing in Moscow a progressive Ukrainian newspaper.
Very good. Second, I had to make it to the store with the fairytale name of
“Children’s World.” I planned to buy there gifts for my friends’ children. And
my friends’ children to me are my own children. Wonderful. Third, I would plan
not to forget about one of the women I love. If she has returned yesterday from
the Central Asian republics, today I would get to make love to her. Nice.