Suddenly, the nearest bushes shook and a thing, a creature, something so dreadful it could only be called a Beast climbed out. Without idle talk, it struck Sashka on the jaw, knocked him off his feet and went to work on him, saying: “I see you bother this beauty one more time, I’ll bury you right here.” Sashka whimpered in horror and pain and swore to forget Katya forever.
The Beast turned out not as scary as it was in the cartoon Katya watched with little Sveta. It had a pleasant voice and spoke kind words to Katya, comforting her as she wept with relief from the terror she’d survived, and it stroked her hair in a way that sent electric sparks flying all over her body and instantly robbed her of any sense. The Beast saw Katya home, went through her door and told her not to turn on the light. “Shh, keep quiet, lest we wake up the kid.”
The Beast seemed to have paralyzed Katya’s will; she felt no fear whatsoever towards him. Everything happened in a blink, almost like in the cartoon. No – it was better, much better, so much better. No movie could ever hope to match what happened between them.
At dawn, Katya woke and stoked the wood-burning stove – she had to start potatoes boiling in the cast-iron vat for the piglet she kept in the yard. The Beast was sleeping, arms spread wide on the bed, and his linen-blond curly hair gleamed on the pillow. Last night, before they climbed into bed, he told her specifically not to touch the skin he shed on the floor. Katya considered the prohibition, thought about all the trouble that usually ensued in fairy-tales when such orders were disobeyed, and decided not to listen. Be what may! She bundled the whole pile together, threw it into the stove, and added a few logs for a good measure. The flames shot up high, red flashes leaped around the room. Katya made sure the skin couldn’t be saved, then went back to the room, climbed under the blanket and pressed close to her Beast. He mumbled something in his sleep, and put one arm around her shoulder.
And that’s when the bullets began to explode inside the stove.
Lieutenant Ivanets jumped up as if someone had scalded him; a terrified Sveta howled from behind the curtain. Katya prepared to receive her well-deserved death.
Ivanets dashed to the stove, grabbed a pale of water and splashed it onto the fire. Then he grabbed a poker and spread out what was left of his uniform. Seeing that he wouldn’t be able to save any of it, he looked reproachfully at Katya. She, chin held proudly high, explained, “I was afraid that you would turn into a Beast again and leave us.”
At those words, Kolya Ivanets looked at her with awe and, suddenly finding the courage, said, “Now not in a million years!” and stuck his tongue out at Svetka who poked her head out from behind the curtain.
For leaving his post without permission and for negligence in handling his personal weapon Lieutenant Ivanets was discharged from the State Traffic Police.
“I’ve done my turn as a werewolf in uniform – that was plenty,” he declared, returning to Katya’s apartment with a bottle of champagne and a bouquet. “Tomorrow, I’ll submit an application to the fire brigade, the guys promised to find a spot for me.”
“You do know how to handle a fire,” Katya said as she came up to the Beast and kissed him.
Everyone knows since times immemorial that the Beauty got seriously lucky with the Beast – but why is it that those who make it their business to write such stories never bothered to wonder: and what about the Beast?
Bribe
Ivan Nikanorovich Lyapunov took great pride in his ancestor Lyapun, the source of his last name. In 1546, scrivener Lyapun, sent to Bakhchisarai as the head of the tsar’s embassy, refused to pay “the staff duty” to Khan Sakhib-Girey’s murzas. The murzas – Crimean nobles – had the custom of meeting Moscow’s emissaries before the Khan’s palace and throwing their walking staffs under the Russians’ feet; they demanded a significant sum as the price for free passage. This wasn’t merely about having to bribe them: the payee, by virtue of having to buy himself entrance to the palace, acknowledged the supremacy of the Khan and his own lowly position as a payer of tribute – something upon which the Crimean Khans, who traced their lineage to Genghis Khan himself, were keen to insist. The poor Lyapun was stripped naked and paraded around the market with his nostrils and ears sewn shut to shame him before Bakhchisarai’s citizenry, but he did not give in and returned to Moscow never having gained an audience with the Khan or having signed a new treaty. Upon his return, Lyapun was promoted to clerk and sent to Stargorod, where he was destined to beget the famous Lyapunovs.
In the early days of democratization, Ivan Nikanorovich spent two years working as Stargorod’s mayor’s deputy, but he didn’t fit into the system, for he despised bribing as a phenomenon. So he returned to his old position at Stargorod University, where he taught Russian history and was a department chair.
He was just about to deliver his lecture about the relations between the Rus and the Golden Horde one day when an unexpected question made him revise his narrative: a student asked where bribes came from. Ivan Nikanorovich began with the Byzantine Empire, in which the administration was broken up into districts called dioceses (from the Latin dioecesis). Each diocese had its own judge and its own bishop. The judge was responsible for adjudicating civil disputes, and the bishop for keeping the spiritual peace, correcting violations of moral and religious norms. Neither official was ever paid a decent regular salary, as, for instance, judges in the West would later receive from the government, so they had to rely on whatever the parties to the suit could donate to the court for having justice done – and that’s how the bribe was born. No one saw it necessary to set a standard for the donations, so corruption quickly became the norm in the state’s apparatus. Over time, the state weakened and fell – easy prey to bloodthirsty Turks. In the West, where governments inherited Roman law, bribing was seen as a great shame and was punished severely. However, it was Byzantine customs that were imported to Rus along with Eastern Christianity; a prince, for instance, who was expected to act as a judge, received lands “to feed from” – basically, a token maintenance – and how much he charged privately for solving a citizen’s dispute was never discussed. The nobles and the common people traditionally looked the other way.
“Do you mean to say that bribing is in our blood and we can do nothing to root it out?” the student asked.
“I believe it is wrong to give bribes, and that we should fight this,” Lyapunov answered and ended the discussion.
After class, Kostya Stupin came by Ivan Nikanorovich’s office – Kostya was his graduate student and a fourth-generation fisherman from the Lake Country.
“Ivan Nikanorovich, dad sent you some fish,” Kostya said shyly offering the professor a box of smoked zanders.
“Are you offering me a bribe?”
“We caught these together, I smoked them myself, I just wanted to share – try them, it’s from the heart!”
To refuse would have meant to offend the boy. Lyapunov shook his head and took the box.
Later that day he went to visit his mother – she lived in a village, a dozen miles outside of town. His mother loved fish, so the zanders came at a perfect time. He drove through the gathering dusk, having forgotten to fasten his seat belt or to turn on the lights, and thought that he really should not have accepted the fish. At St. Christopher’s Cemetery, something – an apparition with a sergeant’s shoulder-straps jumped out of the bushes and waved the traffic police stick at him; Lyapunov pulled over. The apparition was skinny as a child: it had an almost-bald skull with a bit of thin hair on it, and its big-knuckled fingers ended in razor-sharp nails.