Oleg Kashin - Fardwor, Russia!

They talked for a long time. Then they were silent. Karpov tore a piece of paper from his notebook and wrote down a list of foods that Vasya needed to eat after the injection. Then Vasya and Karpov went into the bathroom together, and though Marina couldn’t see Karpov massage the rubbing alcohol onto Vasya’s arm and jab a syringe half-full of yellowish liquid into his vein, he really did, honest.

When Karpov and the midget came out of the bathroom, the barmaid gave them a judgmental look. After all, the south has always been the most conservative part of the country.

AND IT’S PROBABLY for the best that right after that trip to the city Karpov became violently ill—he caught a cold, didn’t tend to it, and was bedridden with pneumonia for three days. And if he hadn’t become bedridden, he probably would have distracted us from following the fate of the midget Vasya, which was, without a doubt, worth following.

At first no one noticed anything—Vasya still rode his pony every night, playing his violin, singing his stupid song. You couldn’t tell his height—ninety-three centimeters or, let’s say, ninety-five centimeters—from afar. They say that it’s the same with pregnant women: you look at her—she seems the same as usual, just like yesterday, and then just like that—a huge stomach; how did it happen?

The same thing happened with Vasya. He went on riding his pony every night, but then one night a military man in the audience, pretending that he was speaking only to his female companion, but loud enough for everyone to hear, said: “In my unit, we have about two hundred midgets like him, but they’re even shorter than this guy”—and he tacked on a few swear words. Vasya, of course, didn’t fall from his pony, but he was upset—as of that morning his height had grown already to 121 cm, while yesterday it was 119 cm, and how tall he would be the next day he could only guess.

But height wasn’t the whole problem, people had just laughed at the military blabbermouth and forgotten about it by the next day; but what to do with his voice? It had cost Vasya a lot of effort over the past few days to maintain his childish tenor when he sang. You might have assumed that with every centimeter gained in height, his voice would crack like a teenager’s, but Vasya hadn’t thought of this, and Karpov hadn’t mentioned it. Taking his last turn around the ring on his pony, Vasya thought that he had a right to be furious at Karpov, but he couldn’t make himself be furious, because even though his circus career was right there and then going up his pony’s ass, the transformation itself, which the midget was going through, exhilarated him. But not even that was enough—the word “exhilarated” used to describe this miracle would sound offensive. Generally speaking, Vasya didn’t have the most impressive vocabulary, and the midget knew that, but he also knew that there are no such words in Russian or any other language that could describe what was actually happening to him.

But it’s Vasya we’re talking about here, a pathetic circus midget, who couldn’t even remember his parents, or who it was who had taught him to drink or when that happened, or even how he had ended up in the circus after leaving the orphanage. As for me, I have a much richer vocabulary than this midget, therefore, I, unlike him, can say exactly what was happening to him—a downfall. Yes, a horrible downfall at that moment when he, having jumped off the pony, took out his violin and started singing the Rybak song about loving and fighting with his girl in a voice even more wretched than the night Karpov first saw him—hoarse, and nearly masculine.

To provoke jeering and booing in such a circus is in itself a kind of heroic deed, and the day when the audience’s jeers and shouts drove Vasya back behind the curtain may very well have been the most important day in the history of this particular cultural institution. When the noise behind his back had stopped, Vasya, walking along by the pathetic trained cow’s cage, suddenly realized that he had never been so happy, and the dumb, happy expression on his face lingered even in the office of the circus director, who had decided to stay at work that night later than usual in order to wrap up some unfinished business (and there will be a lot more unfortunate coincidences in this story). He did not lack intelligence, this Sergei Nikolaevich Kozlov, director of the municipal cultural institution, the City Circus. He clearly understood the artistic value of the troupe entrusted to him, and he even felt sincerely sorry for those people, especially children, who for some mysterious reason came to the circus seeking entertainment. Sergei Nikolaevich didn’t have any illusions, and he generally valued his position for the opportunity it gave him to rent out the circus facilities and to run his own personal gambling parlor with slot machines in the basement of the building. When gambling was banned by the government and he had to order a new sign for the gambling parlor, “Internet-Café,” the trained cow had gone without decent food for a month, and Sergei Nikolaevich felt sorry for the cow too.

In general, he was not only smart, but he could be kind; but when Vasya entered his office that night, Sergei Nikolaevich took a minute to decide what kind of person he should be that day: smart or kind. If he was to be kind, that meant he would also have be curious and sympathetic, and then he would, of course, have to ask the midget what had happened to him and why he had grown so much in the last few days. But that’s if he was kind; the smart person inside Sergei Nikolaevich sighed and immediately came to the conclusion that such a tall midget would not be able to amaze the audience anymore. Not that Sergei Nikolaevich was so concerned with profits from the circus—no, he was just afraid of scandal, because any scandal could end up drawing unwelcome attention from the municipal cultural department, which was fully capable of sending a new director into this office, forcing Sergei Nikolaevich into early retirement.

All the inner turmoil between the smart Sergei Nikolaevich and the kind Sergei Nikolaevich took no more than a minute to play itself out—plenty of time to erase the happy smile from Vasya’s face, giving him time to prepare himself psychologically for whatever the director might ask him. And the question, when it came, was quite philosophical and rhetorical:

“So what the fuck is up with you growing?”

Sergei Nikolaevich didn’t really care about the answer. He didn’t even care about the circumstances surrounding Vasya’s growth and the fact that he was still growing (and this was the question that Vasya feared the most, because Karpov had asked him not to tell anyone about the injection, and the midget hadn’t yet come up with an alternative explanation for his growth). His only concern was whether or not Vasya understood that if “Clown (Midget)” was written on his professional résumé, then he needed to remain a midget, and if he didn’t want to remain a midget, then why the hell was he still working in the circus? Having expressed this basically simple and correct idea to Vasya, Sergei Nikolaevich announced that he was officially letting him go, and that Vasya need not come in to work the next day.

Of course Vasya had expected something like this, and so he was surprised at himself that instead of a simple “Thank you” or some sort of rude reply, he said that he wouldn’t let it end like this and that he would be suing Sergei Nikolaevich and his circus. Most likely, Karpov’s injection not only made arms and legs grow, but also his self-esteem, or something like that. And, of course, Karpov hadn’t warned Vasya about this either.

OF COURSE, THE NEWS wasn’t front-page material (or as they say, “a cover story”), and no one had claimed that it would be; it was just a funny little blurb: midget sues circus that fired him for growing taller. They had their laugh, of course, decided to report it, then switched to other topics—something about Lyudmila Gurchenko. The first day the news appeared on the paper’s website along with a video clip, and the next day it came out in the paper itself—a quarter-pager with the headline, “Growing Pains” (the editor replaced the phrase “Vasya couldn’t hold back his tears” with “‘I’m simply shocked,’ Vasya told our correspondent”). And then the day after that a girl of an indeterminate age showed up at the courthouse and introduced herself to Vasya, but he didn’t catch her name. She said that she worked for Channel One as the special editor of guest selection for the television program Let Them Talk , and she asked if Vasya wanted to earn a little money (three hundred dollars, as he learned later) and go to Moscow for a couple days to be on the show and, well, to become famous, because he must have always wanted to become famous, or else why would he have ever wanted to work for the circus? Vasya didn’t really listen to what the girl was saying—he was far more interested in picturing her naked; for some reason, as of late he had been imagining all the women he met with no clothes on, and his palms had started getting sweaty on a regular basis. To Moscow? Why not? He had heard of Let Them Talk before, and though he wasn’t all that eager to appear on television, he really would love to go to Moscow (“A change of scenery,” Vasya thought to himself); he had never been there before. Before six the next morning the girl ordered a taxi to go to the building where Vasya lived; he walked out of the building’s archway—a normal-sized guy, not tall, really, but no midget either, and the editor even thought that the show’s host Andrei Malakhov might not even believe that Vasya had ever been a midget. They rode in silence, and in half an hour they were at the airport.