Герман Садулаев - The Maya Pill

Ni Guan continued:

Tsin Chi continued:

…Outside the window, the rain stopped, then started again, and the northern wind hurled handfuls of ocean water against the glass. Ni and Tsin lay naked on the narrow sofa bed, clinging to each other and smoking Great Wall cigarettes, tossing the butts into an empty Pepsi can.

“Ni!”

“Tsin?”

“Those things you couldn’t tell me about, why you can’t get married, do they have to do with some violation of the Party’s demographic program?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have an illegitimate child? Maybe two or three?”

“Ten. Like a sailor with a girl and a baby in every port. No, of course not.”

“So there’s no kid?”

“There is one, but it’s not mine.”

“Oh!”

Tsin asked no more questions. She snuffed out her half-smoked cigarette, propped herself up onto her onto her elbow, and looked out the window.

“When I was a kid I lived out in the country. There was a poster on the biggest building in the town, which was the school: ‘Fewer children—more pigs!’ I saw that poster every day. And when I learned to read it was the first thing that I read all by myself. It scared me. I’m still scared. Sometimes I have nightmares: I’m in labor, surrounded by doctors. I’m screaming and straining, but then it’s over. The baby cries, but something’s wrong. The doctor in his white coat holds the baby up for me to see, and it’s a piglet. It just gets worse from there. Everyone congratulates me—it turns out there are sixteen piglets in my farrow and that they’re going to send me to Beijing and put me on exhibit at the big agricultural exposition. I also have this other recurring dream: I’m in the maternity hospital, and there are rows of basinets with babies in them, and then these butchers come in with knives, and they chop the babies into pieces and throw them into a big plastic bag, and I see that the babies are pigs. And one of the butchers says that suckling pig is really tasty with sweet-and-sour sauce. It was only when I got older that I wondered what the slogan meant. People think that it means you need to have fewer babies and work harder on the farm, raising pigs and other animals for meat. But it could mean something else, that it’s the babies who eat up the pigs—all those babies will grow up and eat meat, or else eat all the food meant for the pigs, which means, either way, that the more children there are, the fewer pigs. Which means that the Party and the country need pigs more than they need children.”

“You’re quite an impressionable girl,” said Ni.

But said nothing about the big poster in his own hometown that read “One more baby, one more grave!” He’d had nightmares too. One where all the children in his class are lined up a row, holding shovels, digging their own graves. And when they look up he sees that their eyes are glazed over, that they’re already dead. And the skin peels off their bodies in long strips that fall to the ground and mix with the dirt. And he realizes that he is also one of those children digging their graves, and that he, too, is dead.

Semipyatnitsky had lunch in a café on the first floor of his office building, a place he called the Barf Bar. A plate of dubious-looking beef with undercooked rice. He didn’t go to the Harbin today; too hot—24 degrees Celsius!—to drag himself all that way. The heat was unusual for St. Petersburg, and particularly unbearable due to high humidity and all the fumes and automobile exhaust filling the air. Anyway, the mere thought of sweet-and-sour pork made him sick.

He spent the second half of his lunch hour at his desk. To avoid work-related distractions, Maximus cranked up his MP3 player and put on his earphones. B.G.—Boris Grebenshikov.

In Chinese erotic poetry the “jasper root” served as the conventional metaphor for the male organ. Maximus could have written entire volumes of hermeneutics, interpreting the songs of Grebenshikov’s band Aquarium. Though there’s already a commentary along these lines in Ilya Stogoff’s novel Macho Men Don’t Cry , which hit the seventies generation with the force of revelation.

It’s about life in our day and age, though the meaning is eternal, as always with B.G. To live and strive… for what? For whom? For the children. But what will those children be striving for? Where will they be going? And what could be more cruel: to be fruitful and multiply, to create a new being who will not be able to find his own way, and to abandon him without a single indicator of the right path? Just a stone where three roads meet: Whichever way you choose will cost you dearly…

The song went on, and Maximus listened. Then lunch break was over, and Semipyatnitsky tuned back in to his work.

The warehouse was refusing to accept two containers of shrimp from Canada.

Maximus listened patiently to fifteen minutes of telephone hysterics from the warehouse director: There’s no place to put the shrimp, the warehouse is already crammed full of shrimp. Then he hung up and issued an order to his assistant:

“Sasha, have the containers sent from the port to the warehouse. Today.”

“But how? There’s no space at the warehouse!”

“There’s plenty of space. They probably took too many shrimp pills and started hallucinating.”

“Meaning?”

“Forget about it. They’ll figure something out—they’ll find a place and unload them there. It’s not the first time.”

Maximus never indulged the warehouse workers. So they always wanted to rough him up when they ran into him at company get-togethers. They would come at him foaming at the mouth, fists clenched, but their aggression would dissipate when it came into contact with his indifference. And this time Semipyatnitsky recalled vividly what he had seen during his unannounced visit, when he’d gone to retrieve the Dutch pills. This relieved him of the last shreds of whatever sympathy he might have had for the blue-collar Cold Plus employees.

The working day began to wane. Maximus ducked into the restroom and gulped down a couple of the pink pills. There were still a few left in his jacket pocket. It wasn’t that he particularly needed to get high; rather, a sort of spirit of adventure had come over him, an irresistible desire to test their effects one more time, to see how they would work with another person. That is, how they would work on another person.

All things considered, and given the way things had been going lately, he was surprised not to find the goddess of sex from the next office over in the elevator waiting for him. She wasn’t in the lobby on the first floor either. Maximus went outside and lit a cigarette near the front door. He was sure that she would turn up.