And this one, the one with the beard in the park, tells me he wasn’t invited.
And if you had been, would you have shot Yeltsin?
Who gets to be invited? What did you have to write to be invited, so you could shoot Yeltsin?
What do you write, and who needs it, if everything keeps going along just as it is, predetermined by the powers that be?
Sometimes I wanted to become a writer myself. Yeltsin must have needed supporters, and he must have invited new ones to the Kremlin, and I would be one of them—with a handgun in my pants under my belt—and do you think I wouldn’t reach for it at the sound of “Dear Fellow Russians,” and that I wouldn’t do it?
Oh, for that I would write! I would write anything just to be invited!
As for the handgun: I kept it in the bathroom, behind the pipes under the sink.
Tamara didn’t know.
Though I told her a million times that he deserved a bullet in his stomach, and she sort of agreed.
Yemelianych I didn’t betray, and I didn’t betray the organization that was behind him.
The investigation went another route.
Gosha, Arthur, Grigorian, Udilov, some Vanyusha, Kuropatkin, and seven more…
I added the writer with the beard too.
It was the morning of the sixth of June. I was still at home. In my mind I was getting ready for the evening’s exploit. But I didn’t think about fame and glory.
At nine o’clock I was supposed to get a call. Nine, nine fifteen, he didn’t call. Why didn’t Yemelianych call?
At nine thirty I called him.
He didn’t pick up for a long time. Finally he did. I heard a familiar voice, but I realized that Yemelianych was drunk as a skunk. I couldn’t believe my ears. How could this be? Yeltsin was already landing! What is your problem? How could you do this? Relax. Chill. Everything has changed. What do you mean, changed? Why? There’s not going to be a performance, says Yemelianych. The Golden Cockerel is dead. The opera, I mean. (Or the ballet?)
I screamed something about betrayal.
Cool it, Yemelianych said, get ahold of yourself. There will still be another chance. Just not today.
I was stir crazy the whole morning.
The grocery store underneath us was closed for fumigation. They had been spraying for cockroaches since opening that day, and the salesgirls were dismissed early. Tamara came home smelling of chemicals.
On Moskovsky Prospect, I forgot to say, there’s a lot of traffic. It’s always noisy. In the two years I shared the place with Tamara I learned to live with it.
I was in the room. I remember (although I’m not supposed to remember) that I busied myself watering the plants. Cacti, to be exact. Tamara was taking a shower. Then suddenly it went quiet outside our windows. Though there was still sound coming from the bathroom—the shower. But outside it was quiet. The traffic had stopped.
That could only mean one thing. They were clearing the road for Yeltsin. He had flown in already, and would soon be at our crossing. I knew he was flying in. Of course I knew. According to our original plan, I was supposed to take him out at the opera (or was it a ballet?).
But now the ballet was canceled. (Or was it the opera?)
The Golden Cockerel, Yemelianych said.
Anyway, I’m at the window. All is quiet on Moskovsky. Cops are posted on the far side of the road. No traffic at all. They’re waiting. And here comes a cop’s Mercedes (or bigger than a Mercedes?) to make sure everything’s ready for the president’s cortege to roll on through. They always check everything beforehand.
All the same I had to get the gun and head outside. A voice inside commanded me. And another voice inside said: Don’t grab the gun, just go outside and take a look, the gun won’t work, you know that.
All the same I decided to take the handgun. But Tamara was in the shower.
Tamara bolted the door when she took a shower. She had started to do that in April. She thought that if the shower made a noise it would turn me on—like I’d be out of control. It wasn’t like that. Well, not the way she imagined, anyway.
See, we had this one nearly inexplicable episode a couple of months before.
Since then she had started to lock me out.
But I was talking about something. What does the bathroom have to do with it?
Oh, yeah, so I remembered about the hiding place, and ran to the bathroom and banged on the door. I shouted, Open up!
Again? Tamara yelled (pretending to be mad). Get lost! Calm down!
Open up, Tamara! There’s not a second to lose!
Get lost! I won’t open up!
But she didn’t know I had a gun hidden behind the pipes.
What if she had known?
What did she know, anyway? What was she thinking? She didn’t know a thing about me. She didn’t know I wanted to kill Yeltsin. And that the hiding place was in the bathroom.
And if I was really so turned on by the sound of the shower, wouldn’t I have broken down the door? After that time in April I had a lot of opportunities to break into the bathroom when she was in the shower, but I never smashed the bolt. Plus, she was provoking me (I realized it later on) on purpose.
Anyway.
I would have smashed the bolt, if a voice inside me hadn’t stopped me—a second one, not the first. Calm down, it said. Go outside and act all cool and casual. The gun won’t be of any use to you. The plan has changed. Go outside and take a look. Just hang out there. Until he passes by.
I ran outside in my bedroom slippers, so as not to waste another second.
I ran out of the building but slowed down to a normal pace in the courtyard. I walked out onto the sidewalk. Yeltsin hadn’t passed by yet. There were people strolling down the sidewalk. Just as they always did. A few people stopped and looked into the distance. Far away, behind the Obvodny Canal, the Triumphal Gate was visible, a memorial to the war with Napoleon.
Usually, when government dignitaries were passing through, they closed the streets at least ten minutes beforehand, so there was still time.
From the Fontanka Embankment side, they had blocked off traffic. There were cars waiting there. I couldn’t see them from where I was, though.
It was strange to gaze across the empty street. The emptiness was alarming, somehow. There wasn’t a single parked car. They had towed them all away.
Another police car whizzed by. It turned from Moskovsky to the Fontanka—to the left, that is. There was plenty of room there.
It was no secret that Yeltsin would drive along that route. It was the only route.
I peered up at the roof of the Railroad Engineering Institute. Were there snipers anywhere?
There didn’t seem to be.
My situation was this: On my right hand over the Fontanka River was the Obukhovsky Bridge. Across the street was a park, a traffic light, and a cop’s sentry box. A historical site—a tall milestone in the shape of a marble obelisk—in the eighteenth century the city boundary followed along the Fontanka here.