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

XV

WHEN KARPOV CAME HOME and found only charred remains where his shack had once stood, he was, of course, surprised—but just surprised, nothing more. He didn’t sit down in the ashes, holding his head in his hands, repeating, “Why, oh why?” Though, of course, it would be interesting to know who burned down the shack and why, but it wasn’t as though he was about to sit in the ashes, clutching his head in his hands. He strolled around the ruins, and then went back to the house. He sat at the computer and was about to write on Twitter—“I hate them, these holy Russian peasants!”—but he thought better of it, went on checking his mail, and found out that he and Marina were no longer friends on Facebook.

One time, about five years ago, he and Marina got back from some kind of party, both slightly drunk or, even, perhaps, Marina was slightly drunk while Karpov was really drunk, and there had been a half-bottle of whiskey at home, and they decided to stay up a little longer; Marina drank a bit and then fell asleep, saying, “Sorry, that’s it for me”—while Karpov poured the rest of the whiskey into his glass, put the glass down on the computer table, and it suddenly dawned on him (drunks have this thing: they come up with something and it seems so amazing, “God, how cool and awesome is this!”) that the blue glass with brownish liquid in it against the background of the white plastic of the computer was all so beautiful, and he, before drinking, took a picture of the glass, posted the photo to LiveJournal, then looked at his results—and it seemed like it really had come out so beautiful, but then, seeing his whiskey glass on the computer monitor, he somehow all of a sudden realized that he didn’t need to finish the glass, he could let it stay to the morning, by this point Karpov was drunk enough to go to sleep peacefully, but the way he was going, he’d drink some more and start to puke and be ashamed of himself.

In the morning, of course, he poured the contents of the glass down the kitchen sink, but the story itself of the photograph on LiveJournal that had kept him from getting totally wasted made a lasting impression on Karpov; he often recalled this episode later, referring to himself as a member of the blog culture, and likely he was actually quite proud of it. And now, seeing that Marina had unfriended him on Facebook—well, it was only then, looking at it through the monitor, that Karpov finally realized it was over, that Marina had left him.

He hadn’t heard her leave, he was sleeping, and when he woke up, he saw a note on the sheet next to him, in which Marina wrote that he was dear to her and generally “of the ultimate essence,” but she couldn’t live with him anymore because she had fallen in love with somebody else (when he read this he thought to himself, “Who is this somebody else, and could she have found that somebody else around here?”) and now she was flying to Moscow with Mefody Magomedov, she was asking him not to miss her and, better yet, to forget about her completely and to find himself another good woman who would agree to share with him all of the joys of his discoveries, and that she didn’t want to share them with him anymore because she deserved more, and it’s not her fault that Karpov is too self-absorbed to give her that “more.” She must have put a great effort into writing it. Karpov smiled; he really didn’t believe that Marina could leave him and decided that if that’s the way it had to be, then he could go back to sleep for another hour and a half.

Meanwhile at that very moment the merciless Falcon 7X was carrying Marina off to the north with her companion—a handsome brunette of medium height, in whom the former midget Mefody Arkadievich Magomedov would have been unrecognizable, even to his deceased mother (who had been killed in 1993 as a result of an assassination: an unknown assailant had thrown a hand grenade through the open window of her car; they buried her in a closed casket, and the killer has never been found). Mefody was wearing light-colored trousers and a t-shirt with “Lucky” printed on it; he and Marina had gone to the regional shopping center to buy some clothes the day before, and then, in a café on the main boulevard, he made his declaration—of course, Marina wasn’t to blame for being the only woman around Mefody at the moment when he first felt himself to be a full-bodied man, but he really had fallen in love with her, and she herself, though she knew that it wasn’t good to dump Karpov, and in fact she was still in love with him, she also understood that another chance like this wouldn’t come her way again (when she thought about it, instead of the word “chance,” she thought of the words “social elevator”; for some reason she, just like Karpov, switched on an inner official complete with bureaucratic terminology in moments of great excitement) and that Karpov, when he calmed down, would of course forgive her. At some point in the future, she would be driving by in a Jaguar and would extend a hand, and he’d understand that he’d never be a stranger to her.

So she had thought yesterday, but today she was met at the Vnukovo-3 airport by a morose man with light eyes in a nice suit—our old friend Slava—who, of course, kept the promise he had given Mefody two weeks ago not to tell a living soul where and why Mefody had flown away.