Stargorod: A Novel in Many Voices

The Magic Letter

When Misha was little, his Mom always told him: “Don’t you go aiming high, Misha – you’re soft, anyone can squeeze you however they want, and eat you on a bun.” Misha didn’t listen to his mother’s words.

At the institute he did skits with the KVN team,⁸ and caught the eye of Sergey Pavlovich Triflin himself; Triflin brought him into the Stargorod mayoral administration and kept him close. So it came to pass that Misha put on his stone boots. Their agreement was that, when he wore out seven pairs, they’d give him an iron staff. If he then wore down 12 iron staffs and did not err – they’d make him a sheriff. Every night Misha delivered a postman’s bag of cash to Triflin’s safe. He learned his trade on the fly – threatened here, flattered there, but one way or the other delivered what was Caesar’s better than all the other young guns. Soon, they moved him up a floor.

Misha developed the taste for double-breasted blazers with crested buttons and ties with a sparkle, but always half-a-shade dimmer than his master’s. He wore his boots out in two years, put on a pair of Salamander suede zip-ups and kicked it up a notch: you should’ve seen him then, with his iron staff doing toe-loops on the asphalt – only sparks flew! He got an office, too, with a double paneled door and brass handles all carved in curlicues like an iconostasis. Around his seventh staff, Misha got to ride around in the bank’s collectors’ van with two porters to help him, and found a trick for his staff, too: every day the knife grinder at the market worked off a quarter-inch on his wheel for him. The levies were enough to keep Misha in bread-and-butter, but he wasn’t greedy, and his master didn’t mind.

One morning, Triflin gave Misha in his usual pile of paperwork a “Good Luck letter” – you’ve probably seen them: “The original is being kept in Amsterdam, copy this letter five times and send it to good people, Count Blondenquist did the same and won a million, Khrushchev forgot – and was deposed the next morning.”

Misha lost the letter in the daily hustle, and three days later – boom! – a scandal: he was supposed to get it to the Governor himself, who wanted to stitch the letter into the lining of his suit coat that he would wear to his appointment with the President. They flew a copy in from the museum in Amsterdam, barely made it. Triflin didn’t care that Misha had only one more iron staff to wear off – banished him to manage the rotten Boozersk kolkhoz. All the money Misha had saved had to be doled out – the governor’s crew threatened to put him in jail and the Mayor left him to bail himself out.

Misha understood he was punished for violating democratic centralism’s primary principle: he nearly put a higher authority in a bind, and let down his boss. The Magic Letter doesn’t forgive – born in 1264, it’s still doing its work around the world!

At the kolkhoz, Misha made do: loosed a lumber gang into the forest – they mowed it down in a blink – sold all the old machinery for scrap, but there was no way he could raise the kind of cash he had gotten used to in Stargorod.

Misha started to drink.

Fortunately, he still had enough brains to make the move, once he ate his way through the kolkhoz, for the position of the local administration’s Election Commission head – a quiet harbor, but there was no money in it. Misha’s lean years dragged on; the administration forgot about him, so he sat in his middle of nowhere and wracked his brain over how he could remind Them of his existence. Once he read in the paper a quote from Metropolitan Bishop Cyril, who stated that “he would very much like to see the moral condition of our society restore itself, so that, perhaps, one day we could yet see an Orthodox monarchy.” Misha armed himself with this quote and told a bunch of visiting reporters that it’s time to anoint our President to the throne. And that’s when he got fired.

“Why me? All I did was repeat what the Metropolitan said!”

“The Metropolitan can say it, but you can’t. It’s still too early, plus look how wisely he put it: “perhaps, one day, we could yet.” And you just dropped it into their laps like a done deal – what were you thinking? Gone feral in your woods is what you did.”

Misha drank hard then, spent everything he had. Next morning he dug into his wallet for something with which to buy a cure for his hangover, and found the old wrinkled “Good Luck letter.” All these years he’d been carrying his misfortune right under his heart! It was then he remembered his mother’s words. What made him mess with the higher-ups, really? They almost ate him alive.

He went to his cousin in Udomlya and bought from him 50 female rabbits to breed, built a bunch of cages and fenced off his yard, so the rabbits could come out and graze. Raising one rabbit costs 28 lbs of feed, 14 lbs of hay, and 3 rubles’ worth of electricity. Total over four months: 80 rubles. For that you get: fresh meat, almost 6 lbs, equals 400 rubles, liver 50 rubles, fat 50 rubles, pelt 25 rubles, total 525 rubles. You clear 445 rubles from one animal, and an average female rabbit has 40 pups in a single year.

There was only one thing he tried to keep secret – and still it got out somehow: before he got into rabbits, he copied the magic letter five times and sent it to people he knew, and the very first copy went up to the Governor certified mail. Make of it what you will. Misha now is doing just fine, bought a Gazelle van, hired two hobos to look after the rabbits, and drives around without a care in the world, delivering meat to restaurants.

No, it wasn’t his mother’s advice that saved him – ask anyone in Boozersk, they’ll tell you. They’re still mad that Misha, the bastard, kept the Good Luck letter to himself, didn’t share it with his own kind when he should have. So now the guys are all waiting, hoping the letter will make it back to Boozersk somehow. People say it’s got a five-year-cycle and then comes back around. Here’s hoping it’s sooner rather than later – this life will grind anyone down.

8. KVN - Клуб Весёлых и Находчивых – a popular game show that has been on Russian/Soviet TV since the late 1950s, in which teams of contestants compete to answer questions with humor, do extemporaneous improvisations, and present prepared skits.