KVAS. Russia is an old country with strange fermented beverages and barrel staves lying in the mud. I jump from stave to stave to keep my boots from getting dirty, while dogs bark behind fences. At the corner — this city on the Volga where I’ve come to spend a few weeks, these low brick buildings — the same woman as yesterday is pouring out KVAS.
L
LENIN (the swine). “A man’s at the door for you, quite the BRODIAGA,” RUDI murmurs in my ear.
I went out to the lobby. The rain had stopped and the day was still as bright as it had been at six that evening. I recognized my baggage handler’s checked jacket and black cap.
“Dimitri!”
“(It’s Kolia.)” “Kolia!” I turned to the doorman. “He’s a friend.”
“However did you find me? What a surprise! Come in and join us; no one will mind.”
Touched that I hadn’t put him out in the street, he lied, “I’ve been thinking about you all day.”
“Say no more,” I patted his back in an expansive gesture as if I were the owner of many a десятина of land and muzhiks in abundance.
The duchess studied him from behind the nonexistent monocle of her asperity. To the already questionable fact of having agreed to share a table with strangers was now added the inclusion of this personage, who bore a distinct resemblance to the sort of family man who ducks out of the house to fritter away his salary drinking wine next to fences.
Maarif, however, gave no sign of discontent. He had remained silent since his arrival. Now he was watching the general, who ate with ancestral appetite, as if he were just back from a difficult maneuver in the Sea of Barents. Maarif observed him ingesting the lustrous morsel of an anchovy, a small and agile dolphin lost between the general’s crunching mandibles, his wire-rimmed glasses in the foreground shooting off alarming sparks and belying the faint smile on his lips. His thick fingers. Another little fish. A long swig of AQUA VITAE, vodochka. (And the army of workers and peasants clambering over the bars of the Winter Palace, overthrowing the two-headed eagle.) Which was more or less what Maarif said, something like: October was not in vain, the fight to eradicate the weed of insatiable gluttony. The leader of that revolution, comrade. .
At the sudden explosion of the word LENIN, Kolia’s eyes went blank as if a great rage had possessed him. He leapt to his feet and began striking his glass with a fork: “Gentlemen! No, Господа (Gospoda)! And forgive me if I offend anyone by calling you that. Be aware that I cannot speak the word with any degree of assurance, and without a feeling of falsity, but I refuse to insult you with the word товáрищ”—tovarish or comrade—“though perhaps the general. .”
“No, that’s fine. Gospada! As in the old days: Gospada ofitseri!” (Meaning “Señores oficiales!” or “Esteemed officers!”)
a) The IMPERIUM in full-blown identity crisis. The TV had opened up the debate on how to address strangers in the street. There were certain hesitations regarding gospodin—its literal meaning, “master,” sounded offensive to some ears — and, too, over citizen, which conferred the stigma of not being a tovarish: “Release that billy club, citizen, you are under arrest.” Some had opted for судар (sudar)—“sir”—which was far too nineteenth-century, while the simplest people, vendors in the bazaars, had decided to stick with a term that left no room for doubt: мужч
на (muzhina), meaning, simply and plainly, man. Since all these forms of address entrained the insecurity of wearing someone else’s finery, I had seen polite, well-bred people recite each one in sequence, beginning with the stigmatized tovarish and ending with the laughable gentleman. (For years the phrase “Russian gentleman” had been winning all competitions for who could come up with the shortest joke. “Once there was a Russian gentleman. .” And that was it. That was the joke.)
“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.