“What if we get the private sector in, the ones who knit flowers for the cemetery?”
“Under no circumstances! They knit roses, not carnations, and roses are apolitical,” interrupted Perkhushkov. “You have to understand the difference. In fact, the cemetery is one of our sorest spots and a source of consternation,” said Perkhushkov sadly, “a neglected plot of ideological work, I have to admit. It has a despondent, depressed spirit and a touch of mysticism uncharacteristic of our society: crosses, crypts, and some people even allow themselves to carve pessimistic inscriptions or erect cement angels, which are essentially unmasked subversions of materialism and empiriocriticism. And just think, on the tombstones and gravestones they carve—completely irresponsibly—not only the date of birth, but the date of so-called death, and most of the time neither have been cleared with the proper authorities. It’s just plain cosmopolitanism. That’s why there’s a move now to enter stern reprimands—stern, mind you!—in the dossiers of deceased comrades if mystical figures and unauthorized dates appear on their graves—after all, we can’t allow the Three Sources and Three Spare Parts of Marxism to be obstructed and squandered by a bunch of little cherubims introduced from the outside. And take other problem spots. No need to go far—why right over here, two blocks away, in the old-age home, what goes on there if you just scratch beneath the surface. Gaidukov, Andrei Borisovich: an Honored Worker, medals from armpit to armpit, so many of them that at last November’s holidays they had to add panels to his jacket, thrice laureate of the Blue Sword. He’s completely forgotten himself, hunts rabbits under his bed, shames the authorities. Boiko, Raisa Nikolaevna: you’d think that all the necessary conditions had been provided, they brought her to the political seminars on a hospital bed, camphor—be our guest, an IV—to your health, an oxygen pillow—our pleasure, everything’s right at hand. And then she goes and confuses Jaspers with Kierkegaard, can’t name the seventeen reasons of gradual transformation, and insists that Martin Luther King nailed the April theses to the Berlin Wall! What is this? And Ivanova, Sulamif Semyonovna? Quite understandable if she’d had a bad class origin, but no, she’s a first-generation member of the intelligentsia, a doctoral candidate and everything, and at one time she even invented some kind of syrup for calming the nerves that was very popular at the end of the thirties, so popular that Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin himself congratulated her, stuck a medal on her chest, embraced and kissed her, shook her hands, feet, neck, everything—he greeted her very warmly. This Sulamif became horribly senile—though I suspect it’s not senility but a diversion—and pretends she’s a young, capricious girl, moreover of the most vulgar sort: give her some bouquets of lilac, she says, she’ll wallow around in them, and she wants elves with feather fans to blow zephyrs on her, for example, or—horrors!—siroccos. Can you imagine? This is one of our own Soviet old ladies—and to make such a political error. Friends, honestly now, how could there be siroccos in our country?”
Perkhushkov burst into tears, shaking his head, and Svetlana, drawn to male secretions—even if only tears—like a snake to heat, nestled up against the weakened commissar and set about drying all forty of his eyes with her fair locks, which she had dipped in sugar water for strength and set in strips of the newspaper Red Star the evening before.
And on the whole, said Perkhushkov, plunging into melancholy, how frightening and difficult it is to live on this earth, my friends. What dramas, collisions, hurricanes, tempests, tornadoes, cyclones, anticyclones, typhoons, tsunamis, mistrals, barguzins, khamsins, and North Winds, not to mention shai-tans, occur at every step of our spiritual life. O! Literally this summer, just this August, this very August, Perkhushkov lived through a drama that no pen would dare take up—the Homer has not yet been blinded who could tackle this theme. Hell— Perkhushkov recounted bitterly—was nothing but a party with girls, just an amusement park, to put it mildly, compared to what he went through. That universal fool Dante, who supposedly roamed around the circles of hell with his pal Virgil, would have hanged himself on the spot if he’d had to go through anything like this; he wouldn’t have bothered suffering. From the first to the fourteenth of August—days of mourning, weeks of woe—Perkhushkov suffered the hell of separation from his homeland. Yes. He went to Italy. Yes. He went there in an airplane, and came back—to increase his torment—by train. The result: he went gray overnight (Perkhushkov moved Svetlana aside and showed his gray hair), and bitter wrinkles sprouted over his entire face, ears, and even the nape of his neck.
How to describe it?—after all, Perkhushkov isn’t Homer or Lope de Vega, or even the Pleiades poets. How to describe the loneliness, the feeling of breakdown, the profound, interminable depression? And the oppression which seemed to suffuse the very air? In Italy there’s always a gray, gray sky, Perkhushkov related, low, leaden clouds gather over the flat roofs and press on you heavily, crushing you. The howling wind only slightly enlivens the empty, pitiful streets. Bent low, an old lady will hobble past, a beggar will crawl by waving the bloody stump of a limb wrapped in filthy rags, and then silence descends once again. An occasional snowflake, swirling slowly, falls in the horrifying, stifling atmosphere. Industrial smoke covers the crooked lanes of the cities in black billows so thick that you can’t see farther than your outstretched arm—and there’s nothing to look at anyway. The Italians are a gloomy, morose people, hunchbacked from centuries of excessive labor; they have sunken, consumptive chests and are constantly hawking blood, so that the streets are entirely covered with bloody tubercular spittle. Rarely, oh, so rarely, a weak smile illuminates the pale, haggard face of an Italian, exposing his bloodless, toothless gums—and this happens only if he encounters one of us, a Soviet citizen; then the Italian will stretch out his thin, rag-covered arms and quietly wheeze: “Comrade! Kremlin!”—and again let his weakened limbs fall powerlessly to his side.
In the middle of Italy rises a black, gloomy fortress—the Vatican. A horrible, foul-smelling moat surrounds the fortress on all sides, and only once a year a squeaking drawbridge lowers its rusty chains to let in trucks full of gold. Crows circle the Vatican cawing ominously, and higher up helicopters zoom around, and even higher—Pershing missiles. Once in a while a wheezing laugh sounds from within the fortress walls—it’s the pope of Rome, a dreary old man whom no one has ever seen. He’s well-fed and rich, of course; he has his own fields and flocks, so he eats sausage, fat, and dumplings every day, and pizza on holidays. In the Vatican cellar there’s a harem: hundreds of magnificent girls languish there, including some of our Soviet girls who traded their native expanses for a pottage of lentils. Well, they miscalculated—they’re only given lentils once a year, on International Women’s Day, most of the time they only get gruel. And the piss pots aren’t even emptied every day.
The Vatican guards are terrifying—whoever approaches is shot without warning. A step to the left or right is considered an attempt on the pope’s life. That’s why no one can do anything with him. Well-trained German shepherds and electrified barbed wire complete the oppressive effect.
Rats dart about Italy in such numbers that cars can hardly get through. And anyway, who has the money for cars? Per-khushkov cried bitterly. Only fat cats and the rich! They ride around happy as clams in linguini, drinking wine day and night in luxurious palaces and cathedrals and laughing loudly at simple Italians, who can only clench their gaunt fists powerlessly. The shelves in the stores are empty, and often, constantly even, you see little children—every last one of whom is on crutches, by the way—fighting in the garbage over a piece of bread.