Sorokin, Vladimir - Day of the Oprichnik

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.