José Manuel Prieto - Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia

“ Gospada! LENIN. . No, it’s incredible. If I told you that LENIN. . Well. . The great deception, gospada! Have you all heard about the letter that was kept secret from us? Listen: there exists a letter from Marx in which he explained that the Communist experiment could not be carried out in our little Mother Russia. A letter perfidiously concealed from us by the Russian Marxists, by the bolcheviki, may the devil take them! And think about this, gospada! Everything around us was LENIN. A veritable scourge. The Metro, the main avenues, the streets of the most insignificant VILLAGES, the young LENINIST pioneers who went on to swell the ranks of the LENINIST Komsomol. I’m astonished not to find here, at the entrance to this lovely restaurant, a plaque stating that LENIN had lunch here on the afternoon of December 6, 1903, upon his return from exile in Siberia. And the falsehoods we were told about the penuries he supposedly experienced there! Ah, but they never explained how people lived in the VILLAGES during the time of the CZARS. Allow me to inform you: a veritable land of Cockaigne. A golden age when the peasants greased the axles of their wagons with butter. . Ah, well. . I was acquainted with the terrible Siberia of the Gulag. I was born in a forced labor camp and grew up among prisoners of conscience, for I was a real victim of the system, gospoda! I don’t want to spoil your dinner, but think about that. This young man. . When I heard this young fellow say his name. . I. .”

b) Kolia turned out to be one of those philosophical BRODIAGAS who wander about the IMPERIUM. For a short period he had lived at the Nikolaevsky Station (Vronsky and Karenina: the morning mist) where he spent months reading these terrible truths while sipping TEA from the samovar of an out-of-service passenger car. He had descended into the entrails of the deception, penetrating its deepest geological strata, and discovered a vast deposit of busts of LENIN, the caryatids upon which the vault of the IMPERIUM rested. Every day new truths were published about the brief meter and sixty centimeters that LENIN’S body had measured: we had learned of the lover who died of typhus in 1920 (that part we’d suspected: Nadezhda Krupskaya was just too horrible), his dreadful taste in literature. .

“And believe me, gospada, the years I spent in Afghanistan, where I risked my precious life— ta-ta-ta-ta-ta ! Run, Kolia! — chased by desert bedouins. . I’d crossed the border in secret and was carrying a very important dispatch to our man in Kabul. And was constantly chased by those bedouins on their ships of the desert that look slow but in fact are very fast, those camels. . Ah, why fatigue you? Your poor and humble servant successfully got past three enemy blockades, arrived at our embassy in Kabul on the verge of collapse, and managed to say ‘I have an important dispatch from Moscow’ before falling limp against the grille. Then the sentry looked out at me from between the heavy bars and shouted, ‘Show your identification,’ and what he meant was my party card: ‘Demonstrate, in some way, your loyalty to the regime.’ Imagine my amazement, gospada! I who was fighting in defense of little Mother Russia, and here these followers of LENIN, the swine. . In a word, I was taken prisoner by the bedouins and spent five years in captivity. I learned to speak their language. Of course. .”—and he stared fixedly at RUDI, our waiter. “Salaam!” he proffered and made a deep genuflection, for he hated RUDI and therefore didn’t mind humiliating himself with that false demonstration.

“You’re mistaken, Kolia,” I told him. “RUDI is Moldavian, a land of magnificent wines. I don’t see why. .”

But Kolia had recovered his composure. “Yes, well, you’re right. It’s just that those scallywags from the Caucasus have invaded our cities. . But that’s not worth talking about. Instead, let’s toast our glorious army.”

“A toast!” I shouted, too, like a Muscovite.

LIFT. The people of Russia suffer from a compulsion to inventory the cosmos and make everything within it intelligible. The Bolsheviks, fervent adepts of social engineering, loved definitions so exhaustive that they left all meaning entirely dessicated. Every Metro car bore a plaque in minuscule text: “How to make use of the Metropolitan underground rail system.” The elevators (called LIFTS in Russian, too), those “infernal machines,” are also equipped with extensive instructions. Those for the elevator in my building read like this (as I waited for the lift I would read the text again and again, hypnotized): REGULATIONS FOR USAGE OF THEPASSENGER ELEVATOR(Weight Limit: 500 kg or six persons)

This elevator is intended for the transportation of passengers, furniture, and other objects of quotidian use.

To summon the empty car, activate the button located next to its entrance on every floor, on the external side. After the call button has been pressed, wait for the car to arrive.

When the car arrives at the floor from which the call was made, the doors of both the elevator shaft and the car will open automatically.

Enter the elevator or place your cargo inside it without delay. If the doors close too soon, it will be necessary to press the call button again.

After entering or completing the loading of cargo into the car, press the button (situated on the panel in the interior of the car) for the desired floor. The doors will close automatically and the car will begin to move. In case of surcharge, the SURCHARGE light will illuminate on the control panel and the car will not begin to move.

Upon arrival at the desired floor, the doors will open automatically.

Should the elevator function defectively, press the STOP button for an emergency stop.IT IS FORBIDDEN 8. To attempt to accelerate or in any way tamper with the movement of the automatic doors, and to lean against them. 9. To attempt to open the doors when the car is in motion. 10. To attempt to open the doors of a malfunctioning elevator on one’s own. Such a procedure is extremely dangerous. 11. To open the trap door in the roof of the elevator. 12. For preschool children to travel on the elevator without being accompanied by an adult. 13. To load the elevator with flammable liquids or objects of large dimension. 14. To smoke in the elevator.Let us take good care of the elevator. Do not permit mischief by children, vandalism by adolescents, or mistreatment of the elevator by adults!

(I always thought that one piece of chilling advice was missing: When the doors of the elevator open, please ascertain that the floor is there prior to entering .)

More about elevators: “The Angel of the Bridge,” by John Cheever.

LIGHT OF OTHER DAYS, THE. In close-up a movie screen is not the homogenous canvas we imagine from our seats in the ninth row but a sheet of polyvinyl riddled with minuscule orifices almost invisible to the eye. Thus we see only a small percentage of the projected image; a great part of it passes through these tiny orifices and lands in the terrifying void behind the screen. When the brick wall that stands back there reaches a certain level of saturation, a process of spontaneous emission of all the films projected over the years takes place. Since the force of this emission rarely exceeds in energy that of the primary emission — the one from the projector — the phenomenon was only quite recently discovered. In the mid-seventies, Kliuchariov and Alimushkin, two BRODIAGAS who’ve now become famous, chose to spend a cold winter night in an abandoned movie theater on Nevsky Prospekt. At three in the morning, unable to sleep because of the excess of light that flowed across the screen, they discovered a phosphorescent flickering of inverted forms on the polyvinyl. The inexplicable nature of the phenomenon meant that the secret had to be kept for almost two decades. This fortunate interdiction spared us extensive monographs on the lousy movies of the 1930s and the agitprop films of the 1920s. Now, in 1991, titles from 1918 “and on” (that is to say, and earlier) have begun to appear. The face of one beautiful woman in particular persists against the white background.