Or you can try a more humane experiment. Tie a load of about ten kilogrammes, wrapped in a big, soft pillow, to your stomach. Only the load has to be something fragile, and so precious that you would be absolutely distraught if you lost it. Then walk around like that for twenty-four hours. And sleep with this load …
Even like that you can’t get the full comparison, but somehow men who have been through that kind of training start jumping to their feet as if they’ve been scalded when they catch sight of a pregnant woman standing in public transport.
Magic, of course, is not given to us from birth (if we don’t count my daughter, that is) and it’s not as priceless as a child. Magic is merely an additional convenience in life. Just like that damned flashing light on an expensive car … or a Duma deputy’s ID that makes him ‘uncheckable’, brings traffic cops out in red blotches and makes them salute the offender with black hate in their hearts. So surely I would be able to manage without magic for just twenty-four hours?
Although, of course, it would have been good to leave myself the Sphere of Inattention. As the magical version of the flashing light … no, to hell with it!
Mind you, I was very well aware of just why my thoughts kept coming back to that crappy piece of transparent blue plastic that squawked and flashed on the roofs of Mercs and BMWs. I was driving home in the daytime, but I had been rash enough to try it at rush hour (incidentally, after the new mayor of Moscow dedicated a massively broad lane on every major thoroughfare to public transport, rush hour in Moscow had stretched out to fill the whole day and a large part of the night) and the bureaucrats’ cars overtaking me in the oncoming lane had begun to provoke despairing envy and burning hatred simultaneously. I tried to recall if I’d ever seen vehicles with special signals like these in any other country at all – apart, that is, from police cars and ambulances. I could only remember a few odd cases – one in London, one in either Spain or Italy.
But on my right there was an empty lane, separated off by a solid line. For some reason the cars with the flashing lights didn’t enter it, although you’d have thought they had no reason to feel shy. During the half-hour that I spent in a slow-crawling queue, two buses and a couple of cars with black-tinted windows and no number plates drove along the dedicated lane. In one of the cars – a hulking great Lexus SUV – the window on the driver’s side was lowered. The driver was a swarthy young man with a mobile phone in his hand. He was hardly even looking at the road. People like him used to be called ‘individuals of Caucasian nationality’ in the police bulletins, but recently they’d started using the more politically correct expression ‘natives of the Northern Caucasus region’, which in the popular daily vernacular had rapidly been reduced simply to ‘natives’.
It would have been okay if buses and taxis had been driving along the dedicated lane in an unbroken stream, the way they do everywhere else in the world! Then it wouldn’t have been so offensive. It would have been clear that I was paying with my time for the comfort of riding in a car, while people using public transport were granted the right to ride past the traffic jams.
Only there weren’t any buses to be seen. But even so, apart from a few especially self-confident ‘natives’, the drivers didn’t venture into the special lane.
I lit a cigarette. Then I crushed the cigarette into the ashtray and started turning to the right. They weren’t exactly delighted to let me through, but they did it calmly – the jam had given drivers a sense of unity but had not yet driven them berserk. Once I was through the four lines of cars that were driving in three lanes, I turned grimly out onto the dedicated lane and put my foot down.
So what if they have put up speed cameras all over the place now! Let them send me a fine in the post, I don’t give a damn, I’ll just pay it … I moved on at a brisk pace, glancing at the speedometer every now and then to avoid exceeding sixty kilometres an hour. The Lexus loomed up ahead in the distance. Along the side of the road ‘natives of Central Asia’ were picking in relaxed style at the asphalt and the hard autumn ground. For every man with a pick there were three or four standing about aimlessly or observing the slow-flowing river of glittering cars with curiosity. The gastarbeiters were finishing stripping the asphalt off the pavement in order to replace it with paving slabs, after the new fashion. Occasional pedestrians manoeuvred between them, skipping from little islands of surviving asphalt to the more even patches of earth. A young mother shoved her baby-buggy forward with dour intensity, as if she didn’t notice the nightmare all around her. I suddenly imagined a young woman just like her, somewhere near here seventy years earlier, pushing a barrow filled with earth from the anti-tank trenches that were being dug around Moscow with the fascists already at the approaches. But while her grinding labour had been a significant feat of heroism, nowadays this heroic feat had become a meaningless torment.
The line of gastarbeiters came to an end, giving way to dug-up pavement with stacks of sombre grey concrete slabs standing along it like columns. I wondered what had prevented them from laying the slabs along this section of pavement first, and then starting to break up the next one.
There was no answer to that question. But at the end of the mutilated pavement, where it was a bit less muddy, there was a traffic-police patrol car parked, and two young guys in mouse-grey greatcoats waved their striped batons at me gleefully.
I squeezed in close to the kerb, braked to a halt and lowered the window.
‘Senior Sergeant Roman Tarasov!’ the young, ruddy-faced policeman who walked over announced briskly.
‘Common driver Gorodetsky!’ I replied, for some reason just as briskly and even playfully, holding out the documents for the car and my licence.
‘We’re infringing the rules!’ the sergeant said, grinning.
‘Yes, indeed,’ I agreed, not attempting to deny it. ‘I couldn’t bear sitting in that traffic jam any longer.’
‘This lane is the lane for public transport!’ the policeman explained to me, as if he was talking to a child. ‘Can’t you see that, then?’
‘I can,’ I admitted. ‘But I can also see a Lexus that just drove past you. And I haven’t seen a single bus for the last quarter of an hour.’
The sergeant lost a bit of his joie de vivre, but he carried on smiling.
‘A Lexus – that’s a big car, almost like a bus …’ Apparently that was an attempt at a joke. ‘But even if there are no buses, that’s no excuse for infringing the rules!’
‘Agreed, that’s no excuse,’ I said, nodding. ‘But, just the same, why didn’t you stop the Lexus?’
The sergeant looked at me as if I was an idiot.
‘You mean you didn’t see his number plates?’
‘I didn’t,’ I said. ‘But then, there weren’t any to see! By the way, that’s another infringement … and the windows were tinted darker than the standards allow. A whole bunch of infringements.’
‘A whole bunch …’ said the sergeant, wincing as if he had toothache. ‘The lads stopped one of those “bunches” once – and they got thrown out on their ear, lucky not to get taken to court! And do you know how I got this job?’
‘How?’ I asked, beginning to feel rather surprised.
The policeman’s face assumed the expression of mixed caution and squeamishness with which normal people regard someone who’s got a few screws loose.
‘Driving onto the lane for public transport traffic,’ he said drily. ‘Fine: three thousand roubles.’