And this barman was none other than Misha Bakaleishchikov.
I lived with them for two weeks, and Larisa Mikhalna nursed me back to health. She smeared me with some special creams. My mother was at the dacha. And in general she didn’t pay much attention, since she was busy with her latest affair.
But Flint’s crew started to respect me after this incident. And they accepted me not as one of the girls, but something like Jim the cabin boy.
In 1937, in the worst fucking time of the Stalin era, a Soviet version of Treasure Island was released. The plot was changed a great deaclass="underline" the heroes were now Irish rebels. For some reason, the action was switched from Scotland to Ireland. They didn’t need treasure, they needed to buy weapons to fight the English imperialists for the freedom of Ireland, their homeland. And the main hero is a girl named Jenny.
This Jenny loves Dr. Livesey. She gets fixed up as a cabin boy on the Hispaniola, after dressing up like one, and now they call her Jim the cabin boy. Some red-headed girl wearing trousers is clearly playing the part. And like all girls playing trouser roles, she’s got short, fat legs and a fat, round butt.
In general, it’s first-class. And the script had to be like that. Because in a romantic society—and under Stalin, society was superromantic—heroes couldn’t love money for the sake of money. They had to love more important things, like freedom, the Fatherland… It was impossible simply to love cold, hard cash.
And, well, it was stupid simply to love cold, hard cash. Even though a lot of people do love it… And one could also love power. Fyoka probably loved the power he wielded over his schooner more than the girls. Many of them loved the game. The process of the game. And of course it was precisely the bucks that the shadow capitalists loved. I don’t believe that any of them loved manufacturing Saxon porcelain or those Japanese kerchiefs…
And there, on this Petersburg pirate schooner of ours, I turned out to be Jim the cabin boy. My idiot’s dream had come true—I was proud and happy.
These scars on my hands were like my initiation—they had accepted me, they had taken me aboard the schooner.
And they had accepted me not for my cunt, but for my bravery and determination. Me and lots of my peers had made a cult of these guys. I was fifteen and they were victorious heroes to me.
Not victors over the KGB, not the Wolves who were victorious over the Louse, but rather the Wolves from Vysotsky.
They’d jumped over the fence, knocked down the flags, victors over the hunters.
Victors over the system.
That’s how it seemed to me then. About the Louse, it’s only now that I understand. But then, when I was fifteen: “The Jolly Roger flaps in the wind.”
And another old song, this time from Jack London:
The wind howls, the sea rages
We corsairs will not surrender
We stand, back to back, by the mast
The two of us—against a thousand!
Now isn’t that super?
Well, so that’s when I started singing. First there, in the Ulster. And later at the Troika. And then in various places…
At the same time we were going to school somewhere, and received our superfluous Soviet diplomas. I had studied for a period at the school of the Ministry of Culture.
There was this young dude who played the Fano in the Ulster… Simply a phenomenal ear. And he was studying engineering. Because his dad wanted him to.
And Misha and I are still friends; well, he helped me to get on board the schooner—my singing is all thanks to him.
All the more so as I was still a minor. And he had been a student at some point in that same institute of the Ministry of Culture, only he was seven years older than me…
We’d run out of pot… And the sun had already started to shine through Pushkin.
Small birds perched on Pushkin’s head: sparrows and pigeons. While large birds flew around: crows and seagulls. And all of them were crying out in their own language. So let’s say the sparrows chirped, while the pigeons squawked melodically. But those large birds were making monstrous sounds, particularly for a person who’d just had a good smoke and wanted some peace. All that wailing and moaning and horror. It seemed astonishing that the language of birds is called “song.” But we still didn’t want to leave the nice little square. We of course had a serious case of the munchies, though we were too lazy to do anything about it, particularly since all the places open at night were so unappetizing. So it made sense to be patient and wait until Prokopych or Freakadelic opened up, right here on the square.
Although it was clear that we wouldn’t make it here in this little square till nine.
Lyokha had some more grass in his little Indian jar…
The seagulls and crows had ascended and flown off to the roof of the Maly Opera…
Misha Bakaleishchikov, the Man from the Past, made his appearance then like a bolt out of the blue.
In late February.
And not from the States, but from London for some reason.
He found me—he’d searched me out specially.
We were sitting in a café—at the Hotel Europe, on that very same square. We were in the midst of a terribly slippery winter thaw—-black ice.
We talked about the Past.
We said to each other, “Give me a cigarette…”
Misha’s wife had left him.
The fifth one or the third.
“It’s because you smoke grass from morning till night!”
In London he had been working at some mythical Russian radio station.
But he vaguely hinted at his close ties to personages out of favor. Either Gusya or Beryozy (a.k.a. Gusinsky or Berezovsky)…
“In general, I can do anything! Well, I can make your any wish come true! What do you want? Do you want me to take you to London tomorrow?”
“I want… London is too easy now. Let me think a minute… In fairy tales they always give you three wishes. And here you’re giving me only one. So that means I need to come up with something really fucking hard…”
“Well, come on, think up something hard. If I make it come true, will you marry me?”
“Why the hell do you want to marry me? I’m forty—”
“Five. I remember. Well, I already married a young one. Sveta, the last one, was young. I’m tired of her. And I never married you . .
“And you always dreamed of it?”
I started laughing. And so did Misha. He’d never dreamed of it. He’s always been married, as long as I’ve known him. First it was the deputy director of the Beryozka store. Then a Finn, a Swede, a famous ballerina, and a famous model. All his marriages facilitated the “machine of social advancement,” as he put it.
In bed, handsome as he inhaled the obligatory cigarette: “You understand, my girl, that I can’t marry you. I long ago turned into a machine of my own social advancement…”
There was a time when I would get excited by the frequent visits of the elegant Bakaleishchikov—driving either a Mazda or a Honda.
Restaurants and cafés, spending the night in expensive hotels, carefree sex of an athletic bent with all kinds of interesting foreign doodads…
I said, “Come on, knock it off, roll us one.”
And he sang me the song from Easy Rider:
Don’t bogart that joint, my friend
Pass it over to me
Don’t bogart that joint, my friend