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

VIII

OF COURSE, THE NEWS wasn’t front-page material (or as they say, “a cover story”), and no one had claimed that it would be; it was just a funny little blurb: midget sues circus that fired him for growing taller. They had their laugh, of course, decided to report it, then switched to other topics—something about Lyudmila Gurchenko. The first day the news appeared on the paper’s website along with a video clip, and the next day it came out in the paper itself—a quarter-pager with the headline, “Growing Pains” (the editor replaced the phrase “Vasya couldn’t hold back his tears” with “‘I’m simply shocked,’ Vasya told our correspondent”). And then the day after that a girl of an indeterminate age showed up at the courthouse and introduced herself to Vasya, but he didn’t catch her name. She said that she worked for Channel One as the special editor of guest selection for the television program Let Them Talk, and she asked if Vasya wanted to earn a little money (three hundred dollars, as he learned later) and go to Moscow for a couple days to be on the show and, well, to become famous, because he must have always wanted to become famous, or else why would he have ever wanted to work for the circus? Vasya didn’t really listen to what the girl was saying—he was far more interested in picturing her naked; for some reason, as of late he had been imagining all the women he met with no clothes on, and his palms had started getting sweaty on a regular basis. To Moscow? Why not? He had heard of Let Them Talk before, and though he wasn’t all that eager to appear on television, he really would love to go to Moscow (“A change of scenery,” Vasya thought to himself); he had never been there before. Before six the next morning the girl ordered a taxi to go to the building where Vasya lived; he walked out of the building’s archway—a normal-sized guy, not tall, really, but no midget either, and the editor even thought that the show’s host Andrei Malakhov might not even believe that Vasya had ever been a midget. They rode in silence, and in half an hour they were at the airport.

The flight to Moscow took an hour and forty minutes. Vasya, as it turned out, had never flown before, and the editor (we call her a girl, but she was really forty-two, named Inna, divorced, with a thirteen-year-old daughter, Olesya) was even worried that Vasya might get sick on takeoff, but the ex-midget fell asleep while the plane was still on the ground, with his head on her shoulder, and she looked at him and for some reason also imagined him with no clothes on. Jumping ahead, just to let you know, that same night in Moscow, in a room at the Altai Hotel, Inna would become the first woman in Vasya’s life, and Vasya would become her first man in the last year and a half. Love is basically amazing, when you get down to it.