Sashka, a born and raised Stargorodian who, after fighting in Afghanistan, lost all fear but not his soul, was doing welclass="underline" he had two sawmills, eight small stores around the city, a construction supplies warehouse and the Lyubava tavern on the highway out of town, serving tender chicken cutlets, stuffed fish from our river and girls in the rooms upstairs. As well, there’s the free gym, two schools’ worth of computers and a city soccer team – all paid for by the man himself. Colonel Erikh Romanovich Mushtabel, the city’s Chief of Police, was a frequent guest at Sashka’s table in Lyubava. He was also the one who “protected” him and, once he got the taste for it, kept pushing for a bigger share of the spoils. They got along fine, however, until Sashka’s love of fishing ruined him.
Mushtabel was also a devout fisherman, and they once made a bet about who could catch a bigger catfish. Each went to his spot: one man went upstream to Pimshin Dip, the other downstream – to the Ferry Dip. Erikh hooked a 53-kilogram beast, but the one Sashka dragged in weighed 76 kilos. Mushtabel took offense and declared war on Pugachev. He found an excuse to close down Sashka’s stores, took away his sawmills, ordered a full inspection of Lyubava and publicly threatened to burn the whorehouse down. So Pugachev decided to go all in, told Mushtabel to meet him at night at the station, rolled in with two AK-47s and let both rip from the hip, right in the doorway. Three guys who just happened to be there went down, four more got wounded, but the Chief was not in his office – he was waiting in an ambush outside. The chase began.
They flew to the river. Pugachev had a chance to call out: “Don’t come to the water, I’ll come for you as a catfish!” – and dove from a tussock into the rapids. The police shone spotlights on the river, opened fire, bullets rained on Pugachev. He swam, then went under. No one ever saw him come up again. They never found the body, although they searched hard.
Mushtabel didn’t give much thought to the curse. He handled the ensuing shit-storm and took over Lyubava, but it burned down soon afterwards, and not a single girl got hurt, as though someone’d warned them. Rumors of Pugachev’s last words spread through the city. Someone spray-painted “53:76 – That’s how we do it!” on Mushtabel’s SUV, and the man just lost it. Plus, right at the same time, fishermen started saying a monster of a catfish had turned up in the river, no less than 200 kilos, tearing nets, letting their catch out, and there was no way to get him. The fishermen were also paying Mushtabel for “protection.”
The colonel became obsessed with the idea of getting this fish – given that his authority in the city was rapidly approaching zero. Exactly what transpired when he went to the river at night, nobody knows, but people said Erikh Romanovich ran home covered in catfish slime, two fingers of his right hand bitten off at the root, his eyes filled with madness. He lost his speech, and could only moo – he pointed at the river and mooed, long and sad, like a terrified calf: “Oo-oooo-oogoooo!” At the hospital, they said he had a stroke, patched the old dog up, but, obviously, that was the end of his service. The colonel came down with hydrophobia: a mere glimpse of the river and he turned hysterical, like a baby. Once out of uniform, he turned into an old, sick man; kind people heap shame on him in the streets, reminding him about Pugachev. His wife didn’t put up with it for long, packed up and moved the family to her Kalmykia – there’s no water there to speak of. The fishing folks arranged for a church procession, prayed to the miracle-fish to get their fishing rights back. Some old man also advised them: if they caught a catfish, even a baby one, to always throw it back. So now you’ll never find catfish cutlets anywhere on the menu in Stargorod – but we do have plenty of perch or zander.
It’s been ten years, and boys still call out at discotheques “53!” and someone always shouts back “76!”
So don’t you start with the Korean human-faced carp. But then, again, if you think about it – Oh, my God...
Pickle and Little Dragon
In the time before memory, in what would become the Stargorod district, there lived a people called the Komsi. They worked only so hard, drank themselves silly on braga,2 and then soaked for weeks in banyas which in their tongue they called “saunas.” When the hard-working Slavs arrived, they easily crushed the Komsi. The Komsi did not resist and, legend has it, retreated quietly beneath the earth.
Stargorodians who today live in the region are pure-blood Russians and visit banyas only on Saturdays. Having lost their jobs after the collapse of the kolkhozes, they drink cheap moonshine and swear that even if liquor turned to stone, they would gnaw on that rock – they have discovered no better medicine for their boredom.
It is said that moonshine kills 40,000 each year in our country. This horrific figure was pronounced by Putin himself, who proposed that the state take charge of alcohol production, so that it might be of the highest quality. Fortunately the Duma hit the brakes, and the plan was scrapped. We remember too well the two bottle limits of ‘87, and don’t want to go back there.
Once the villagers polished off all the foreign alcohol known as Royal, they turned to a domestic product called Little Dragon, an oily, green, glowing beverage. I was assured that, if you stare long and hard into your glass, the liquid will congeal into a furious yellow snake that will spin on the surface of your drink like a resinous shard of pine wood in a spring puddle. The villagers drank Little Dragon without looking in the glass. Some lost their minds; others were carried straight to the churchyard. But the engine of history runs on accidents: thanks to a miraculous confluence of events, the villagers have stopped consuming this poison.
Kolya Piklov, whose nickname was Pickle, downed a glass in the morning and then added two more at lunchtime, right there in the field, at which point he lost all interest in plowing, since he had a three-liter bottle of Little Dragon at home.
Pickle hopped behind the wheel of his Belarus tractor and rolled out onto the road. The next instant he was rammed by a new Audi A-8 that three goons were delivering to their commander, Anton Bes, the district’s chief bootlegger.3 Abandoning the tractor, Pickle fled as far as his legs could carry him, which was Bald Mountain, some ten kilometers from the village. There he sat down on a stump and began to think.
For ruining such an expensive foreign car, the Stargorodian thugs would definitely leash him up like a dog. Pickle became frightened and began to cry bitterly. Suddenly, he saw before him a snotty old woman in birch-bark shoes, who said, “Kiss me.”
Since he had been a boy, Pickle had heard of a Komsi sorceress who, coming across a traveler, asked for a kiss. Those who did not show respect simply disappeared. So, without much ado, he gave her a peck on the cheek.