Fardwor, Russia!

V

KARPOV KEPT DISAPPEARING into his shack from morning to night, and Marina had already gotten used to having no entertainment except for television and the Internet (yes, she herself had called the cable guy, who had come from a local provider and set up cable internet in their apartment), since it didn’t look like any more options were about to become available. But one day Karpov came in from the shack around 5:00 p.m. in an excessively good mood and bearing a bottle of champagne. Marina immediately knew that something important and good had happened and, hopefully, since this important and good thing had happened, they could finally return to Moscow and Karpov would become rich and famous, and she would be the wife of “the one and only Karpov,” which suited her just fine; for as had been written, “The great man stared through the window, but her entire world ended with the border of his broad Greek tunic.”

But it turned out that all the fuss just about some small victory that didn’t affect Marina’s life at all—Karpov had finally managed to regulate his serum so that once his test rats reached adult size they would stop growing before they turned into enormous monsters.

“What now?” Marina asked.

“Now…” her husband paused in thought. “Now I need a midget.”

Of course, experiments on people in Russia are forbidden by law, as in any civilized country, but Karpov didn’t see this as an obstacle to performing a miracle, and turning a midget into a normally-sized person, of course, can be considered a real miracle, and as long as Marina didn’t rat out Karpov to the cops, then she needn’t be afraid of anything—no one would find out how the test midget grew, and the midget himself would be happy. They got online and started scouring the Internet for midgets, and within a minute, on some local message-board for young parents, they found a fascinating discussion about a new show at the city circus—all those young parents without exception advised one another not to bring their children to this new show under any circumstances, because there was no spectacle more sad and boring. The clowns weren’t funny, the trained cows and cats were boring, and most shameful of all was the midget Vasya, who did impersonations of popular Norwegian singer Alexander Rybak, but the way he performed them made you wish he’d never done them in the first place.

Karpov immediately called the circus and found out that the next show would take place the next day.

“Shall we go meet Vasya?” he asked Marina. Marina kissed her husband—she had wanted to go to the city with Karpov for some fun for some time now.