Fardwor, Russia!: A Fantastical Tale of Life Under Putin

XXVI

I WANTED TO GO on and write further about how the clock outside the window struck noon and the man in the office, having turned his attention from his papers, looked out the window and looked not at the clock but at the red star with golden streaks that crowned the clock tower and smiled, flaring his nostrils. But if I wrote that, the story would become unacceptable, because I have no idea what went on in that office or if its owner really did smile—and, excuse me, but I wouldn’t like to make anything up, so I had better just skip ahead a few weeks.

Karpov, if you’re interested, spent all these weeks locked in an apartment on Dzerzhinsky Street a minute’s walk from the hotel that the Syrians had built when Karpov was a kid. No one asked him anything, no one talked to him at all, once every two days a woman would come and silently hand him a bag of food—sausages, pelmeny, bread—and then leave; and the rest of the time Karpov was left to himself. No phone, much less a computer, in the apartment; the books on the shelves were uninteresting—Choose Your Enemy, Hour of the Owl, I’ve Been Ordered to Kill You, and so on—and the television wasn’t much good, and the only thing that Karpov might have been entertained by was Russian Radio, which, if listened to for long enough, could plaster an idiotic smile on the face of even the unhappiest man.

So much for Karpov. His wife Marina, of course, was expecting his call; but she had continued to live at her mom’s, not wanting to call Karpov yet, and she was right, because if she heard that his mobile number was not in service and no one was answering their home number, she would have gotten worried, and worrying generates cellulite, as the writer Alexander Terekhov would say. In other words, there was nothing interesting going on with Marina either; in general, if anything interesting was going on with anyone, it was only with the ataman Filimonenko, who, from any point of view, was “not so pleasant”—his comrades in the Cossack circle and the meat business had buried him in a closed coffin, trying not to look at each other, because no one had died such a horrible death in this region since the Civil War (when Foma Shpak, the famous kombedovets, had been sawed in half with a double-handled saw by anarchists). According to the version of the story spread on the Internet by the secret services, the ataman had been sliced up by some Caucasians who also, among other things, cut out his heart, possibly for some ritual purposes. The ataman’s death led to a big gathering of people on Krepostnaya (formerly known as Komsomolskaya) Hill in the regional center, and people were even ready to take revenge on the Caucasians in the next marketplace over, but proper respect should be given to the leader of the local “Slavic Union,” who kept the promise that he had personally given to the head of the regional police the day before, and appealed to the citizens to keep calm, “because Ramzan is standing at the entrance to the city, only waiting for us to make the first move so they can cut us up like pigs.” The people, of course, were upset that they couldn’t go to the marketplace, but Ramzan is an argument you can’t do anything about.

There is no point in blaming the FSB and the cops for spreading the rumors about the circumstances surrounding Filimonenko’s death; they manipulated the nationalistic sentiments in the region, there was no other way, because if people were to find out what really happened, nobody would believe any of it. It would be enough to say that even the local police officer who shot Galustyan when he, having disemboweled the ataman (cats who run away, as a rule, always come back home), and swallowed his heart, liver, and lungs, and had started in on Nikolai Georgievich’s right leg—even the cop who shot Galustyan (his last name was very police-esque—Evsyukov) was recovering now in a regional psycho-neurological hospital—he lost his mind immediately after the predator died; doctors found him kissing the dead Galustyan on the nose, and even now they still cannot vouch for the officer’s mental state.

But, as has been said before, this has nothing to do with the further course of events, because the plot of this story, having flown from the south to the north, made a few circles over Moscow, in particular up and around the Kremlin, moved northwest from the Russian capital and settled in the nice assisted living facility Soyuz, which had built by some federal corporation (not Olympstroi, in case you were wondering) in a former pioneer camp near the Novorizhskoe Highway that had been formally closed under quarantine for the swine flu by personal order of the Russian general health officer, Gennady Onishchenko.