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

IV

IN THE MORNING the doorbell rang; Marina opened the door. Just as on their first day there, Gennady had come over with some milk. From Auntie Katya, Marina had learned that Gennady was a war veteran on a pension; his parents had lived here, and when he retired from the army, unmarried and good-for-nothing, he moved back to live with them in 1991. His parents died shortly thereafter, and now Gennady lived alone raising chickens and, more importantly, serving as a kind of keeper of the local traditions which had almost completely died out. He contributed to the spread of news and gossip throughout the town, showed visitors the ropes—the way things were done around here—giving instructions to teenagers and drivers parking improperly—in general, he kept the town from turning into a random collection of suburban five-story, Soviet apartment buildings in the middle of the steppe.

For example, this time he had brought not only milk but also an important communication: the director of the institute, an associate member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, Elena Nikolaevna Gorskaya, whose birthday was today, would be pleased to see Mr. Karpov and his wife at her party that night, even though she couldn’t remember Karpov’s grandfather, she had no doubt that his grandson was a fine man who would undoubtedly become a friend of all the employees at the institute.

When Marina relayed this message to her husband, he immediately said that he would not be going to any birthday party, that he was planning an important experiment, and he was not about to sacrifice it for the sake of a bunch of strangers who just wanted to gawk at him. But Marina explained to Karpov that he was an idiot and if he wanted to live here for even a month, then he had to build the right relationships with the locals, both the local dignitaries as well as ordinary people, and if they want to see him, he should meet them halfway, or else they would point the finger at him. For some reason this argument about “pointing the finger” impressed Karpov; he wearily asked if he needed to put on a suit, and Marina began to laugh; in short, the incident was settled.

The path that led from their home to the institute was paved with yellow coquina shell and lined on the left and the right with blue spruce trees planted by the Regional Committee, which indicated that at one time everything at the institute had been well and good. The path was no more than a hundred meters long, it took just a minute and a half to walk it, but the Karpovs, of course, were late all the same. Marina was certain that it was her husband’s fault: he had taken forever in the shower washing off the rat smell; while Karpov thought that Marina had taken too long putting on her make-up. Despite that, neither husband nor wife was mad at the other because, for all intents and purposes, who would care if they were late to a voluntary gathering? It’s not like it’s a plane to catch, after all.

When they walked into the assembly hall of the institute, from the stage of which a fat man in glasses was reading a speech on the scientific achievements of the esteemed Elena Nikolaevna (listening to the mumbling of the fat man, Karpov quickly realized that the director had not achieved anything of particular merit), the audience in the hall—people who clearly knew each other well and had for a long time—of course, immediately shifted their attention to the couple, and Marina felt uncomfortable under the gazes of a hundred and fifty pairs of eyes, with every pair attached to a mouth suffering from a lack of gossip. Marina knew that the next day kind Gennady would tell her everything that the institute’s women thought about her dress and her hair, and Karpov, apparently, also felt something similar, because at one point he took his wife’s hand and gave it a little squeeze, as if to say, “Don’t worry.”

Meanwhile, the fat man relinquished his place on the stage to a Cossack choir which apparently consisted of scientists from the institute, because the caps and tunics they wore did not necessarily go very well with the bespectacled countenances of the singing men, and plus their out-of-tune singing indicated that these Cossacks hadn’t learned to sing at home but rather from going to see a national festival of historical song and dance. They sang to Elena Nikolaevna’s health, but the only phrase distinguishable in their song was her name, which was repeated obsessively in the chorus. The audience clapped more enthusiastically for the Cossacks than for the speaker, who, as Marina had already learned from a conversation between two women sitting behind her, was named Vyacheslav Kirillovich, and he headed up not just any department, but nanotechnology, which in its turn served as a sign of the institute’s progressive nature and its director in particular.

The fact that Elena Nikolaevna was a progressive and modern woman became apparent to Karpov at the banquet in the winter garden after the ceremonial part of the evening (naturally, not everyone was invited, but the Karpovs were dragged there—“You absolutely must!”—by a pretty young blonde girl with huge fake nails—probably a secretary). Not knowing anybody, Karpov and Marina felt uncomfortable and saved themselves by relating some banal tales of life in Moscow, of which they had a lot that they hadn’t shared with anybody before; their stories were of the types of thing that were commonplace in Moscow, but in this winter garden it all sounded like stories of extraterrestrial life; and Marina, who still hadn’t made up her mind whether she liked being an extraterrestrial, reminisced to her husband about Moscow’s taxi drivers and waitresses, colleagues and superiors, about some people she knew who were unfamiliar to Karpov, and even he began to miss that city from which had been so eager to escape just two weeks prior.

Most likely, they could have just slipped away without being noticed, but the evening’s honoree came up to them; she was a woman in her fifties, also a blonde, but whose hair, unlike the other blonde’s, was obviously bleached. They had not seen her in the assembly during the festivities, but here it was somehow immediately apparent to them that she was the most important person in town. Elena Nikolaevna was holding two glasses of champagne. She gave them to Marina and Karpov, leaving herself empty-handed; Karpov undertook to go get her some champagne, but Elena Nikolaevna followed him, and he somehow understood that this whole invitation had been contrived precisely for this moment, for an important and sensitive conversation, and that now he would be hearing something that, though not really of any importance to him, would nevertheless unpleasantly complicate his life.

And so, as he handed a glass of champagne to the director, he himself initiated the conversation—he said that in his childhood, walking around the institute with his grandmother, he had understood that the most awe-inspiring people in the world worked right here in this very building, and that he was now very glad to meet the person in charge of all these awe-inspiring people. In his improvisation, Karpov hadn’t been able to come up with precisely what made those people so inspiring, so he cleverly changed the subject to a touching reminiscence: by the main entrance to the institute, there had been a display board with a sign reading: “Best People,” and once, he, only five years old at the time, had cried because he hadn’t found his grandfather on the board (who, of course, was the best person ever), and he stopped crying only when his grandmother took him inside the building and showed him another board with photos of war veterans, among whom he saw his grandfather. Afterward, as Karpov found out years later, his grandmother had gone to see Professor Pilipenko, the now-deceased former director of the institute, and she had talked him into replacing the “Best People” sign that was traumatizing for little kids with a neutral “Board of Honor.” Elena Nikolaevna laughed politely—politely enough for Karpov to understand that he wouldn’t succeed in small-talking this woman, and, alright then, he would just have to listen to whatever it was that had made her drag him here in the first place.

Elena Nikolaevna started out in general terms. She asked whether Karpov had liked the speech, and, before he could answer, she started talking about Vyacheslav Kirillovich, who, since he had graduated from the Russian State Agricultural University, was not at all familiar with cutting-edge nanotechnologies. She had a problem; all of her correspondence with the Russian Nanotechnology Corporation had to do with the fact that her institute didn’t have a single project, not even any crazy idea that could attract the interest of the corporation that could lead to a source of revenue. That’s why, starting the next month, Vyacheslav Kirillovich’s job title would become more promising—“Deputy Director for Innovations”—and she, as the director, would go to Moscow and start searching for a source of big money in different places; at the current time, innovation was in fashion, and Elena Nikolaevna had the power of persuasion.

“I have a talent for persuasion,” she repeated, “but, alas, not for generating ideas. And you can understand how glad I was to learn that a mysterious genius had shown up in our little town, and had gone ahead and built himself a laboratory and begun doing some kind of brilliant research all by himself without even asking me for any help.”

Karpov had never been called a man of genius, not even by Marina, and though he ought to have been embarrassed by what she said, for some reason he wasn’t—it was clear to him that in the time he’d been here, the talkative Gennady had managed to tell everyone that Karpov was doing some kind of experiments on rats in his shack; but Gennady couldn’t fathom the nature of those experiments, therefore Elena Nikolaevna couldn’t either; and if that were so, then why would she compliment him? Karpov raised his glass for a toast, and said that he was very flattered by praise from such a distinguished person, which he, of course, considered Elena Nikolaevna to be, but he could not understand what she was getting at. They clinked glasses. The director gulped down the champagne like vodka, with a grimace. She smiled:

“I really have no idea what you are doing in there with those rats. It’s fine, do whatever you’d like, even clone them. I can offer you a position as a senior research associate and a proposition—I will be your… ”

“Censor?” Karpov recalled such a moment from Pushkin’s life, but he already understood where the director was heading.

“No, not your censor,” Elena Nikolaevna smiled once again. “Your co-author.”

Her plan was simple: she had to have something when she went to Moscow. She didn’t have that “something,” but Karpov did. She didn’t care why he was occupied with that “something,” but it would be useful for the institute to have an idea—any idea—one that sounded good, whether or not it could be realized, something based on any sort of laboratory experiments. And if she was to be completely honest, the institute had not been doing any scientific work for some time now; instead it had been earning cash by renting out its facilities and land—this gave a steady income, but it was not all that much. But there was big money lying around these days and at that very moment important people in Moscow were determining which establishments to include in a federal target program called “A Well-Fed Russia,” whose mission was to foster innovative technologies in agriculture. There are many agricultural institutes in Russia, and it would be a shame if some slackers from Belgorod or Krasnodar were to get their hands on the government’s millions; because obviously if anyone deserved the money, it was this institute, the one to which Karpov’s deceased granddad had dedicated years of his selfless labor. Karpov didn’t understand what his grandfather had to do with it, but he nodded anyway.

“I’m so glad that you agree,” Elena Nikolaevna whispered fervently. She had already come up with a plan: the next morning Karpov would bring her a description of his work, she would stamp the institute’s seal of approval on it and fly off to Moscow to get the money. Of course she would have to give almost half of it to the official in the ministry in charge of the allotment of funds for the program, but Karpov shouldn’t worry—there would be lots of money, enough for everyone, including him.

Karpov understood about half of what the director was saying. What he did clearly understand was that it had to do with some sort of corrupt scheme; it didn’t really bother him that Elena Nikolaevna was hoping to use his help to rob the state; he had no warm feelings for it anyway, and he wouldn’t even object to this state money going to this particular woman—if it didn’t go to her, someone else would steal it all the same. But the co-authoring proposition had really offended him for some reason. He had no doubts of his invention’s future success, and being a conceited person by nature, for a long time he had pictured himself—if, of course, not as a Nobel Prize-winner (after all, he wasn’t even a scientist, but rather, just an amateur inventor), at least someone who would appear on the front-page of all the world’s major newspapers. And when he pictured this woman by his side on the front page, he got really angry. He wanted to be polite and say that he would definitely think over her enticing offer, but instead, he grumbled, perhaps more rudely than he should have: “No, I am not interested in your offer,” turned and walked away.

Marina was all too happy that they got out of there so quickly—while Karpov had been chatting with Elena Nikolaevna, she had been accosted by some agronomist lady who was for some reason particularly interested in whether Karpov was a faithful husband. Marina answered that yes, he was, but the woman’s obtrusiveness had spoiled her mood.