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

XX

AN OLD WATCHMAN was on duty at the entrance to the institute—Karpov knew him from sight, they had run into each other somewhere in town, but he didn’t know his name; and, having given the old man’s hand a squeeze—here, ultimately, everyone was related somehow—he casually asked, jutting his chin upward:

“Is she in her office?”

“Nah,” the old man answered. “She has visitors.”

“Shall I wait?” But the old man, waving his hand to the side, said that it might be a long wait and that the director was actually showing the visitors around the exhibition hall, and Karpov could go straight there—he, at any rate, didn’t mind the old man.

The exhibition hall was a cramped room that was arranged something like a Soviet-era military propaganda room. The display stands, portraits, graphs and sheaves of some types of grain likely indicated accomplishments from the institute’s past. Past the display stands and sheaves of grain, accompanied by a retinue made up of a dozen people, Elena Nikolaevna floated arm-in-arm with a short, thickset man, as wide as he was tall, who resembled a bulldog, whom Karpov recognized as the presidential envoy in this federal region. Another man might have turned around and left, but Karpov was not afraid of bureaucrats, and it seemed to him that moment might just turn out to be the right time for the conversation that he had thought up earlier that day. Nodding at the director (she apparently didn’t recognize him—that is, of course she did, but she didn’t let on, and Karpov considered such a reaction to be indirect evidence linking Elena Nikolaevna to the burning of the barn), he joined the tail of the retinue and began to listen to what the hostess was talking about with her guest.

The conversation (to be more precise, Elena Nikolaevna’s monologue, the envoy only nodded) revolved around the newest advancements in agricultural science.

“This,” Elena Nikolaevna said, “is our pride and joy, branched wheat. There is one stalk, you see, but five or six ears; it’s very economical.”

The envoy nodded.

“And this,” she said, gesturing in the direction of tables painstakingly detailed with magic markers showing two glued-on, Xeroxed pictures of some kinds of birds—a diagram that illustrated how with the right diet a jay can turn into a cuckoo. “Now don’t be surprised, I wouldn’t believe it myself if not for the work of our scientists. It’s all very simple. We are what we eat. A cuckoo eats these, you know, furry worms. A jay doesn’t eat them, but if we force it to—voila!” Elena Nikolaevna’s finger traced an arc in the air and touched the bird on the right.

“That’s funny,” the envoy said, speaking for the first time. “But what does this mean to us from a practical point of view?”

“The principle is what is important!” Elena Nikolaevna started to ramble. “What’s important is that if we want to get a specific result, we must want to get this result. A cuckoo and a jay—yes, this is a meaningful experiment whose application is most relevant for grains. One can produce rye using wheat, and moreover different types of rye can be produced using different types of wheat, and with those types of wheat you can produce oats, and oats can beget wild oats.”

The envoy nodded.

“And this,” Elena Nikolaevna said, pointing at a bottle with something black in it, “is a petroleum-based growth agent, PGA: a unique nutritional supplement, especially if you don’t forget about our main source of wealth, oil, one that can produce fantastic results in livestock production.”

Karpov thought that it was a shame that his granddad hadn’t lived to see this, but the envoy, most likely, didn’t think anything at all, because glancing somewhere past Elena Nikolaevna, he said:

“Everything is great, but I’ll tell you frankly—I don’t see any innovations here. Import substitution… yes, from the perspective of import substitution you deserve the highest praise; but you see, at one point we too excelled at import substitution. Maybe we were even too excellent at it. But, alas, I just don’t see any innovations.” It was then that Karpov realized that his time had come.

“Excuse me.” Parting the crowd, he walked up to the bottle of his grandfather’s PGA. The envoy, the director and their entourage all stared at Karpov, and Karpov eagerly started to explain that this was a nice exhibit and, of course, interesting enough, but not complete, and that its most important accomplishment was, unfortunately, lacking, but that he’d tell them all about it, if they didn’t mind. Not giving time for them to answer, Karpov told them all about the rats and the piglets and calves, remaining silent only about the midgets. The growth cycle lasted seven days, he had documented proof. Russia would become well-fed. The four I’s (Innovations, Investments, Institutes, Infrastructure) would be covered, with another two to boot: Ivan Ilyin (Karpov had read the papers and knew that the envoy had a weakness for the fascist-philosopher’s works).

“Ivan Ilyin, is this the name of your serum?” The envoy perked up and now addressed Elena Nikolaevna: “You have introduced me to your colleague, but I seem to have forgotten his name.”

“This is Doctor Karpov, our pride,” Elena Nikolaevna Gorskaya exhaled. After half an hour, a letter to the Economic Ministry with a positive endorsement penned by the envoy was on her table, and at the table before a cup of coffee and a plate of stale Danish cookies sat the institute’s newest senior research associate, Karpov.