The Maya Pill

THE DUTCH VISITORS

At six thirty in the morning in a semi-vacant, meagerly furnished cage of a room, an efficiency apartment on the seventh floor of a big prefab building on Dybenko Street, in Vseyoly—such being the name of this bedroom suburb of the Venice of the North, the Northern Palmira, Athens, Babylon, and Itil all rolled together—whose windows look out on an identical prefab building with walls that had once been sky blue in color like the Cabriolet in the movie Knocking on Heaven’s Door, but are now faded and peeling, at six thirty A.M., when all is silent except for the loud cawing of crows, and people still have that preoccupied and sullen morning look about them, the air suddenly fills with music.

A six-piece audio system, complete with subwoofer and surround sound, screeches and lets out a howl that rends the silence of the morning like a burglar’s penknife slicing through an old woman’s soiled mattress in quest of family heirlooms and cash set aside from her pension to pay for her funeral; yes, a mighty chorus erupts, emitting a great gush of vocal sound:

In a corner of the room, on the cold north side, on ancient lumpy linoleum that bears the traces not only of the passage of time but the effects of the unique non-Euclidean geometry of the epoch of advanced Socialism, is strewn a disorderly pile of blankets, on which a man lies sprawled like some Parisian bum. He stirs, rolls over, and leaps abruptly to his feet.

Leaps to his feet and immediately doubles over, clutching his aching side with one hand; with the other hand he rubs his face, blotchy from sleep, its features blurred and indistinct, physiognomy dubious at best. Hunched over, bowlegged, he totters with uneven, splayed steps out of his room into the minuscule foyer, whose entire square footage is taken up with two pairs of shoes, proceeds into the bathroom, stops in front of the dim mirror, and straightens up, relatively speaking.

Behold Maximus Semipyatnitsky, leading import specialist, microchip in the great mainframe processor of economic globalization, irresponsible tenant and debtor, signatory of loan number 17593876/LD-8367, and also of loan number 84989874-XXVI, and also of loan number GHM02057585485433498, though, as concerns the latter, already long since in arrears. Also, too, holder of a bank account containing a measly one thousand rubles, longing in vain for a royalty transfer from Portugal, an honorarium payment from the journal Eurasian Literature, and a disbursement from the Denis Davydov Prize Committee; writer, novice in perpetuity, forever young, of whose youth, however, his own bones and joints (not to mention his worn-out internal organs, first and foremost, his liver, et cetera) are unfortunately unaware.

“Aina me,” thought Semipyatnitsky. “Aina me tulm bylat sheikel rastan. Karan du khalim chovichi duon sakhyz patalakon gydy, chevataro mukham khyn dez laol, kemam du kan terekat. Faran kulguz etu, faran bumolchi khotamor. Serkel. Buvakhi posturanzhi paiteli, vongaa du karam serkel.”

Semipyatnitsky turned the blue-handled faucet, filled his cupped palms with water, and, snorting like a horse, splashed his flat face. The cold water rinsed off the remains of sleep, and Semipyatnitsky instantly forgot the language in which he had just been thinking.

“What the devil?” Semipyatnitsky opined.

The abracadabra still remained, in the form of a jumble of sounds rattling around in his head, but their sense had evaporated. All Maximus could recall, or maybe he knew it from somewhere already, was that serkel meant “white house.” What house had he recalled that morning, why it was white, and what any of it had to do with Maximus Semipyatnitsky, leading import specialist, and all the rest of it, see above, remained a mystery.

The moon was waxing. During the time of the waning moon, Maximus’s facial hair grew slowly and reluctantly. He could shave every other day. But the moon was waxing, and the bristle had sprouted overnight and was prickling his palms as they washed his face. Any other morning he could yield to sloth and skip shaving; he could just scrape off the one longish strand of hair that sprouted out of a papilloma on his left cheek, but leave the stubble on for a Bruce Willis look. Cold Plus was not all that picky about how the staff in the Import Department looked; they really didn’t care. But today Maximus was supposed to meet the Dutch partners, and he needed to make an effort.

Maximus turned the red faucet, filled the sink with hot water, lathered his face with shaving cream, and mowed even rows into his chin and cheeks with a plastic disposable razor. When he was finished, he brushed his teeth meticulously, turned on the water in the shower, slipped off his boxers and tossed them directly into the basket under the sink, then stepped into the shower, sliding the plastic curtain closed behind him to protect the floor from spatters.

The Red Banner Chorus, which served as his standard wake-up call, continued to roar in the other room, their song now punctuated by the thumps of the neighbors banging angrily on the hot water pipes. Shower over, Maximus wrapped the towel around his dripping waist, went back into his room, and turned off the music. The whole building was awake now.

Maximus had gotten up earlier than usual so that he could pick up the Dutch visitors and get them to the office on time. Yesterday he’d been told that there were three of them and that they had checked into the Corinthia Nevsky Palace Hotel. Maximus immediately objected: He could fit three people in his car, but where was he supposed to put their luggage? The trunk could hold only one suitcase. But he had no choice; no one else could do the job. He’d have to figure something out when he got there.

Maximus dressed and boiled some water in the electric teapot, mixed a cup of instant coffee in his thermos, added some sugar and twisted on the lid, checked the contents of his briefcase, and crammed the coffee in along with everything else. Finally he slipped on his shoes, set the burglar alarm, and went out, locking both doors behind him.

The elevator arrived immediately. Maximus rode down to the first floor and stepped outside. The fresh air energized him, bringing on a light, celebratory mood. Such is the effect of morning sometimes: All that has come before remains in the past, out there beyond the dark Styx of the night, a million light years away, beyond the galaxy of sleep. A new day has arrived; everything will be different now. Yesterday’s failures will be successes today; whatever caused the sorrows of the past will no longer stand in your way. Quite the opposite: What you’ve been waiting for so long will finally come to pass, roaring in on an express train from the Province of Joy, tumbling exuberantly into your life with an armload of red roses and fistfuls of greenbacks.

Such is the effect, sometimes, of a new day.

Or could it be the effect of the pink pill that Maximus had swallowed just after brushing his teeth?

In his inspired state of mind Maximus cranked up the radio, pulled out of the parking lot, and started off in the direction of the hotel, periodically lifting the thermos of coffee from the cupholder between the two front seats to take a sip.

If you’ve ever stayed in the Nevsky Palace Hotel in Petersburg you know that it’s located right on Nevsky Prospect, just before it crosses Liteyny. It was too early for there to be much traffic, and Maximus made it to the hotel in under thirty minutes. But there were no parking spots left on Nevsky. As he passed the hotel on the opposite side of the street, Maximus spotted an open space right in front of the entrance, but by the time he U-turned at the stoplight and wheeled back, it had been already taken by a long, sleek white limousine.

“What the devil?” For the second time that morning Maximus blurted out the name of the unclean spirit, and slipped his automobile in between the limousine and a bus stop. He waited ten minutes, until it was precisely the time he’d agreed to meet the Dutch visitors, then clicked on his hazards, got out, locked the car, and made his way into the hotel lobby.

They weren’t down yet. Maximus paced back and forth by the glass doors, checking at the end of each lap to be sure his car was all right. A bus could come along and crush his tiny vehicle at any moment. Or else the demonic hordes of the traffic police could summon their hellish tow truck, every driver’s nightmare, and drag his darling off to the impoundment lot… from which it would be about as difficult to retrieve as to extract a soul from Hades after it had made its descent.

At last three thin, young-looking men appeared at the front desk and began to check out. Maximus recognized them immediately and tried to catch their eye, smiling, moving closer, holding out his right hand:

“Good morning!” he said in his best English. “My name is Maximus, I’m taking you from here to our office.”

“Oh, great! Hello, I’m Peter. You wrote me several e-mails.”

“Yeah, nice to meet you, Peter.”

“Nice to meet you too, Maximus. Here are my two colleagues, Nick and Joseph.”

“Hello, Nick! Nice to meet you, Joseph.”

The two silent Dutch colleagues smiled broadly at him, baring their glistening white metal-and-ceramic-capped teeth.

“My car is right here, near the entrance. The only problem is your luggage. I’m afraid my car is too small for three big suitcases, if you have any.”

“Ah, no worry. See, these bags are all we have.”

“Oh, fantastic! You are traveling light!”

“It’s true.”

The Dutchmen were indeed traveling light, just three small carry-ons. Maximus tucked the bags in his minuscule trunk, hustled his guests into the car, and set off. The three visitors spent the entire trip to the office chattering loudly in their own language, which Maximus didn’t understand. They only reverted to English when they had one of the standard tourist questions for their driver:

“Do you always have traffic like this?”

“What you see now we call the open road. Real traffic will start in couple of hours.”

“Oh, horrible! Nick and Joseph have to fly back to Europe this evening.”

“They’d better plan to leave extra time before departure. And you?”

“Me? I’m going to Moscow. I have a ticket for the train tonight.”

That meant that the two dumber ones would go back to Europe today, and Petya would head for Moscow on the night train. Which one of them would take the pills? How would they do it, and where would they take them? Well, thought Maximus, everything will become clear at the office.

Three people would be meeting with the Dutch visitors: the Import Director, Diana Anatolyevna—whose acquaintance we’ve already made; the Commerce Director; and someone from Marketing. Maximus was not invited. Management decided what, how much, and how, to import; all the Import Department did was carry out the orders that came down from Management, whatever it took.

They called Maximus only after the meeting in the conference room was over, and for the obvious reason.

Diana Anatolyevna dialed Maximus’s number on the internal line and asked:

“Semipyatnitsky, where’s that box with the rat poison?”

“I’ll bring it right away, Diana Anatolyevna.”

“That’s not necessary. Just tell me where it is and the secretaries can bring it.”

“No, I can do it, it’s no problem at all, Diana Anatolyevna.”

Maximus had given up on the idea of pilfering the pills and starting his own drug-dealing business. But he still wanted to know what sort of pills they were and what the Dutch guys intended to do with the box. As he carried it into the room, Maximus was hoping to learn which of the three visitors would take charge of it.

The Dutch didn’t disappoint. While Maximus was in the room, Peter immediately took out a large opaque bag with string handles and dropped the box inside, smiling happily.

Maximus resolved to demonstrate an even greater sense of company spirit and asked the Import Director, “Diana Anatolyevna, is someone taking our guests to the airport?”

“Yes, Maximus, we’ve already reserved a taxi. But Peter will be leaving later, he’s taking the night train to Moscow.”

“Really? So he’ll be here by himself? Does he have anything to do until then?”

Maximus made it seem as though he hadn’t known that Peter was leaving separately from his colleagues. It looked as though he was trying to come up with a pretext to slip out of the office for a while. And maybe get some extra money to cover entertainment expenses.

The Import Director intercepted his feeble scheming.

“Don’t worry, the guys from Commerce will take Peter around to some supermarkets to see how the merchandising is going. I’m sure that you have more important work to do than drive them around town.”

“Yes, Diana Anatolyevna, you’re right. I’m up to my ears in work. May I go now?”

“Of course, thank you very much.”

“All right… well, if anything comes up and our esteemed partner could use my help…”

Maximus turned to Peter and switched back to English:

“Do you have my mobile number?”

“Yeah.”

“After you finish with inspections of retail, please call me. This evening I’ll be at your disposal.”

“Oh, how nice! Sure, I’ll call you.”

Diana Anatolyevna exchanged quizzical glances with the Commerce Director. On his own initiative, Semipyatnitsky was volunteering to devote his free time to hosting the company’s partner. It wasn’t like him. Maximus had never shown any particular zeal for Cold Plus—he just clocked in, did his work, and left the moment the little hand reached six; on the weekends he either turned off his cell phone or simply ignored calls from the office.

DON’T GET SHAT ON

A computer game. Maximus thought it up, put together a description, and some guy from IT made it a reality—virtual, anyway.

It operates on a very simple principle, like all those other rudimentary games for computers and smart phones and the like, where the goal is to gather pieces of fruit or, perhaps, dodge flying balls.

The theme, though, is what’s original. The interface, as Maximus designed it, consists of eight outhouses arrayed across the lower part of the screen, on what is supposed to represent the ground, with bombs falling down from the “sky.” The player uses the cursor to move his avatar back and forth from right to left. When he presses Enter, for example, the avatar goes into one of the outhouses; pushing Shift makes him drop his pants and sit on the toilet; Page Down elicits a big number two.

The challenge of the game is that the bombs fall in random patterns onto one of the eight outhouses. If a bomb lands on an outhouse while your avatar is inside, that’s the end, and you receive the following message: “Game Over. You got shat on, Loser!” If the avatar manages to complete his business successfully, though, and run out of the outhouse before it gets bombed to smithereens (Page Up: He gets up and pulls up his trousers; Escape: He gets out), he earns a point, which flashes in the lower left of the screen. The inscription appears: “Congratulations, Shitter! One Point!”

The graphics are pretty simple. The avatar has a beard and is wearing camouflage combat fatigues. The outhouses have a rustic look to them. The musical accompaniment is a MIDI file playing some patriotic tripe or other. (Go ahead and search for patriotic tripe on YouTube. We’ll wait.) When a bomb hits one of the outhouses there’s a hissing sound and an explosion, and every successful shit comes with a sort of ineffable creaking sound.

The game has a few different levels. On the first and most elementary, the bombs fall one at a time, and it’s a simple enough matter to get your guy to shit successfully, gain a point, and move him to the next outhouse. As the levels advance, however, the bombs fall faster and faster, and the player has to gauge the intervals correctly and make lightning-fast decisions about where to shit next.

In order to move up to a higher level, the player has to accumulate eight points—one for each outhouse. An hour after closing time, when the aggrieved-looking janitress came to empty Maximus’s trash basket, he had advanced to level three. Once he even managed to get to level four. The game had six levels in all, but it took a great deal of focus and diligent practice to get past four.

Maximus’s cell phone rang, interrupting his game: The ringtone was a polyphonic version of the melody of the Russian (Soviet) National Anthem. It was Peter calling to report that he was free and back at his hotel. Semipyatnitsky gathered his things, went down to the parking lot, got in his car, and headed along the embankment to Nevsky Prospect.

The evening traffic had dissipated, and the road was relatively clear. Maximus drove in the middle lane, his favorite, without undue haste. Vicious jeeps and arrogant sedans whizzed by on both sides. Go ahead, thought Semipyatnitsky, torture yourselves, pedal to the metal, what you don’t know is that the traffic police are lurking around every corner, brandishing their bristly clubs. Semipyatnitsky liked that bit about the bristly clubs, and he smiled to himself.

When Maximus drove up, Peter was waiting on the street outside the hotel. He was holding only a small overnight bag; apparently he had left the box of pills in his room. On his way over, Maximus had thought about trying to sneak into Peter’s brain, as he had done with Ni Guan. But he resolved to utilize the traditional, tried and true Russian method to get information: Ply his guest with vodka. Once drunk, Peter would readily reveal whatever secrets he was keeping locked up in his Dutch brain. There wasn’t much time before Peter’s train, not a minute to lose.

Semipyatnitsky offered to show Peter St. Petersburg’s most famous feature, the monument to Peter the Great, who had opened the window to Europe. Maximus himself had always felt that it would have been better for the tsar to install actual doors, so that people wouldn’t have to keep climbing to Europe through a window, but he withheld this insight from his guest.

They arrived at the Bronze Horseman. Peter naturally asked Maximus to take a few photos of him with the statue in the background, and then Maximus, as though the idea had just occurred to him, suggested casually that they stop into the bar across the street. And his guest, with an equally spontaneous air, agreed.

If you know Petersburg, then you know that this bar can be none other than the Tribunal. Yes, that’s the one, where girls—some plump and unattractive, others gangly and awkward—sit on tall revolving stools at the bar, casting welcoming glances at the foreign tourists who come in. Somewhere nearby sits their so-called mamka, a bulky woman of forty-five or thereabouts, who hasn’t changed her makeup since the age of twenty, when she herself was sitting on a stool just like those she now oversees, back at the Intourist Hotel bar.

Ultimately, everyone has a right to a career. You may be just a simple low-level manager today, but before you know it twenty-five years will go by, and you’ll become a respected supervisor yourself, applying all those sensitive leadership skills you’ve picked up, mentoring the youngsters in sales. In honor of your lost youth and of the thorny path you followed to the top, you’ll wear the very same bright-yellow necktie as when you began; jabbing at it with your gnarled finger, you’ll harangue your subordinates: “Listen, guys, I wasn’t born a supervisor, I started out just like you, and you too—at least some of you, the very best—will also get promoted someday, if you work with diligence and enthusiasm.”

But yes—the Tribunal, where couples who drop in off the street and drunken Finns alike listen to live music in the smaller room on the left, or gyrate to disco music on the dance floor to the right, or else stare in silence at the strippers hired from the White Breeze Agency: shockingly beautiful, exquisite, and inaccessible, as though their heavenly bodies had descended to earth from some heavenly body.

Of course, everything is relative, including the inaccessibility of celestial strippers.

Maximus and Peter claimed a table near a small podium with a pole rising from the center, where with twitching fingers a blonde girl toyed with a thin string around her hips, which was evidently supposed to be standing in for an undergarment, but fell far short.

Maximus watched the show, but his heart wasn’t in it. He’d just been to Omsk, Russia’s sex capital, where in one joint he’d recruited all seven dancers for a private session, with two more summoned in for an encore, and your basic run-of-the-mill stripper had no more appeal for him. After the sincere and remarkably accessible Omsk girls, none of the beauties from Moscow, Petersburg, Minsk, or any other city could measure up.

The Omsk strippers had finished Maximus off right in his pants; he hadn’t made it past the third one, who straddled his lap, grinding and gyrating rhythmically on his priapal bulge; he came and immediately panicked that she would call in the bouncer to throw him out, pervert that he was, but all she did was smile as though she’d just aced an exam. “Why did I hold back?” wondered Maximus at the time. And proceeded to climax five more times in that one night.

The icy beauties of St. Petersburg had no such power over Maximus.

But Peter stared at the stripper’s legs and licked his arid chops.

Maximus ordered a carafe of Absolut. They refrained from excess conversation. Semipyatnitsky kept pouring the vodka. Peter downed his shots before the ice could melt, frowning and staring at the podium as girl after girl stepped up with each new song.

“Do you like Russian girls?” Maximus asked politely in English.

But rather than responding with equal politeness, making observations about the exceptional beauty of Russian girls, etc., Peter got right to the point:

“Yeah. Could you arrange for her to visit my hotel? If you know what I mean…”

“Nothing is impossible, dear Peter. Nothing is impossible in this fucking world. But some things are costly. Very costly. That’s the truth.”

“How much?” he asked impatiently.

Maximus had noticed a grim-looking guy near the podium, who was obviously with the girls; he shrugged, got up, and went over to him. Now, the White Breeze girls aren’t prostitutes. They get paid two or three hundred dollars a dance, and have no particular need to put out for just anybody. They earn more than enough for their tuition and sports car payments. But if the money is good…

In a couple of minutes Maximus came back and reported:

“Six hundred.”

“What?”

“Euros. Per hour.”

“This is… ridiculous!”

“Whatever.”

Baffled, Peter looked away from the podium and surveyed his surroundings. Maximus understood his surprise: It’s a basic principle of business that goods ought to be cheaper in their country of origin. Russian girls are exported to bordellos all over Europe, where they cost a hundred or a hundred fifty euros at most. Once you take away customs fees and transportation and operational expenses, the price in Russia ought to be half that at most. But no, it turns out that Russian girls are more expensive in Russia than in Europe. At least the ones with a good shelf life.

Maximus hastened to comfort his foreign colleague:

“See, they’re not professionals. Just dancers. It’s like a side business for them. They don’t do it too often, only when they get a really good offer.”

“Really…”

“Sure. But you could get another girl for fifty Euros or something. Look over there.”

“You mean…”

“Yeah, those.”

“No, they’re ugly.”

“You think so?”

“I do! In Thailand I could get a super model for fifty euros! Not an animal like that… Maybe we can negotiate? I’m ready to pay fifty euros, but I want one of the dancers.”

Maximus caught himself looking at Peter as though he were a complete idiot. He said nothing and just shook his head.

Their carafe was already half-empty, and Maximus decided that it was time to redirect the conversation to the matter at hand, which would also serve as a handy distraction from the question of the girls’ fee.

“Peter, I hope we’re good friends now.”

“Sure we are!”

“In Russia we ask each other after each bottle of vodka, Do you respect me?”

“Yes, I do! But why are you asking this strange question?”

“It’s a kind of ritual. Say it in Russian: ‘Ty menia uvazhaesh?’”

“Ty… menya…”

“Uvazhaesh? Do you respect me?”

“Ty mena uvadjaesh?”

“Great! And yes, I respect you: Ya tebia uvazhaiu.”

“Ya… teba… uvadjaiu…”

“So that means you’re respecting me and I’m respecting you. We’re respecting each other. Therefore we’re drinking together. Let’s drink!”

“Cheers!”

Maximus and Peter drank another glass of vodka each.

“That being the case, I’m sure you wouldn’t want to fuck over your friend, whom you respect, Peter.”

“Never, I’ll never do that, Maximus!”

“So, please, tell me about the pills.”

“What pills?”

“Those pills, Peter, pink pills in the box I brought you today, fucking pink pills.”

“Fucking pills?”

“Yes, fucking pills!”

“Fucking pills?”

“Come on, talk to your friend about the pills!”

“Fucking pills! Fuck those pills! It’s a fucking business!”

“No kidding, drug dealing is…”

“What…?”

Peter even sobered up slightly, glanced right, then left, and lifted his index finger to his lips, making the international sign for “let’s keep it between us.”

“No, Maximus. No drugs. Drugs are not our business. Our business is potatoes.”

“Then why are you smuggling pills…”

“The pills are potatoes.”

“What does that mean?”

“The fucking pills are fucking potato pills. Our business. Haven’t you seen the ads? PTH-IP. Positive Thinking—Illusory Potatoes. That is what our pills are. First you have to think positive. To be a happy consumer. Then you can dream of particular goods.”

It was Maximus’s turn to be flabbergasted. Peter explained, speaking enthusiastically and loudly:

“Can you believe that we really grow these millions of tons of potatoes for feeding the entire world in our little country? Imagine—how could it be possible? Have you ever been to Holland? We have no space for farms. But we’re great at chemistry.”

“You mean, we’re swallowing these pills and hallucinating potatoes?”

“Hallucinating, yes. But you don’t have to swallow them… it’s a complicated process… sometimes it’s enough to smell… or hear a commercial… radio waves… though pills are best. I’m not much into details. I’m just a salesman. Our engineers know better… you think of eating potatoes… and you even get fat because of it… then you buy another pill to lose weight… and again… full circle… that’s our business… and everyone does it, in Europe.”

“Everyone?”

“Sure, some people are selling the illusion of cars, others are selling the illusion of designer clothes, or drinks… You drink but only get thirstier. Everything is like that. We produce ideas, thoughts, illusions. Ever since Marx and Freud. And now we can concentrate ideas into pills. For easier transportation and consumption.”

He fell silent and let his forehead drop to the sticky tabletop. Maximus stared in stunned silence into the space above the heads of the drinkers and dancers. He’d always suspected something along those lines. But still, what Peter had said filled him with anguish and spite.

Semipyatnitsky shook Peter awake and told him it was time to go to the train station. The foreigner obediently got out his credit card. Maximus didn’t bother to protest and used Peter’s card to pay for the vodka, even signed the slip for him. The waiter averted his eyes tactfully, an act that earned him a reward to the tune of one hundred rubles, cash, from Maximus’s own wallet.

Rather than get behind the wheel in his state, Semipyatnitsky flagged down a cab and settled Peter in the back seat. The latter quickly came to his senses once he’d lowered the window and taken a few breaths of fresh air. Maximus asked whether he needed to stop by the hotel to pick up his things.

“No,” answered Peter. “I’ve already checked out.”

When they got to the station, Maximus, with poorly concealed spite, said to his newfound friend.

“You know what, Peter? Next time, why don’t you get a girl for fifty euros and not worry about any six-hundred-euro girls? I’ll tell you a secret: There’s no difference!”

“Why not?”

“I’ll explain. Have you ever heard anyone talk about the ‘mysterious Russian soul’?”

“I think I’ve heard something of the sort…”

“Let me tell you about this mystery of ours. The fact is, you can never fuck a Russian girl.”

“No, I’ve fucked them many times…”

“You didn’t. It was a dream. Every Russian girl learns the knack from her mother. She takes your money and you fuck yourself while dreaming about Russian girl. So what’s the difference, after all? Why pay a lot of money for it?”

“Ah…”

“That’s not all. You can just save your money and fuck yourself alone in your hotel room for free, there’s no need to invite a Russian girl in and pay even five euros. All you’ll be doing is masturbating either way. Don’t let Russians cheat you.”

“This is… shocking to me…”

“Yes, my friend. You can never really fuck Russia. Only in your dreams…”

THE FALL OF KHAZARIA

The victorious host made its way homeward, flowed across the Khazar steppe in the direction of Itil-City…

Dissipating into smaller rivulets along the way. Meet a widow and set up house; build a mud hut and march no more. A man gets tired of war. The generals, all Murzlas, had galloped off ahead on their spirited steeds, changing horses when their mounts got tired, hastening to the city to pick up their medals from the Khagan, along with deeds to conquered lands for pillage. But the common soldiers just dragged themselves along—what’s the rush? They’d already spent more time marching than fighting. They spent four springs on the march. They stopped, took breaks: Hunt down steppe gophers, shake the apples off a tree, catch fish in the river using your trousers as a trap. There was nothing else to eat.

And the process dissipated even more.

Only a few made it back to Itil.

And with them Saat. No interest in widows, gophers. Maybe he figured they would give him back one of his mares now that the war was over.

They arrived at the city walls. No welcoming ceremonies, no laurel wreaths and flute bands playing music, no sweet congratulatory speeches. Initially the people inside even refused to open the gates. They shouted, “What are you, a band of gypsies?” The march home had run them ragged: They were filthy, covered in rags, bedraggled.

Of course they were. Four years of war will do that to you. But then good people let them in. Maybe they thought, What’s the point of them dying out there in the steppe, they might come in handy for cleaning the slop ditches or hauling stones to pave our courtyards.

The horde entered Itil, and—holy shit!—you wouldn’t recognize it; it had become a completely different town. Not a single Khazar left.

A feral people, a mass of black and yellow.

Little shops piled up everywhere, one on top of the other, daytime for trade, nighttime for dancing—the bad kind. And their language, it’d destroy your tongue. Sort of like Khazar, but strange, the sounds all twisted. And who was maintaining order? You could get clubbed in the back of the head just walking down the street. Chechmek sotnyas prancing around everywhere. Executive and judicial branches all rolled up in one. Their chief, the one who kissed the Khagan’s ring, now stood on every street corner, embracing the Khagan. Statues, that is.

The Khagan himself was nowhere to be seen. Voiced his will through the Chechmek. People were whispering: There’s no Khagan, only the word itself remains: Khaganate! But no Khagan.

Maybe there had never been one.

What about the Murzlas? Where were they?

Gone, gone to the lands beyond the sea, gone to the places where they’d taken all that grain, poured it into their own barns and bins. Grain makes the man.

Abandoned the Khazar land.

So they weren’t Khazars after all, but a different people, nomadic.

Saat made his way home to his tent, and there were new people living there, children running and crawling like kittens in the yard, howling. Guess he wasn’t going to get back his mare. Home full of strangers. Who needed him now? And where could he go?

Saat sat on a hill, mourned.

The falling star?

Passed him by.

WASTELAND

The events of the previous day—the Dutch pills and the trip into Ni Guan’s head—had shaken Maximus out of his usual dazed state, his preoccupation with the mundane: his commute to work every morning, his beer drinking and TV every night. The mind-body interface in his brain had shifted, something had changed forever. And there was something alarming in that change.

The day after his excursion with Peter was Saturday, and he didn’t have to be at work. Semipyatnitsky slept until noon. Just before awakening he had the next dream in his Khazaria series, a sad little installment.

Maximus took a shower, boiled himself four eggs for breakfast (lunch?), and decided to take a drive. Somewhere, anywhere. One of his magazines had an article in it about an archaeological site, a three- or four-hour drive away. Though of course he had to figure out where he’d left the car.

Maximus dressed, went out, and hailed a taxi heading downtown. He found the car right where he had left it the night before, near the Tribunal. Untouched by thieves, hooligans, or the tow truck. A good omen. And Semipyatnitsky headed north.

The Murmansk Highway begins just after Vesyoly. At the city line the driver encounters a row of Cyclopean bulletin boards advertising the Mega Mart. After that the road broadens out into a divided highway with a tree-lined median, but that lasts only as far as Sinyavino. The road that continues on to Murmansk after Sinyavino bears little resemblance to a national highway. Resembles it even less than that string on the stripper’s hips resembled panties. Narrow, just one lane going each way, no stripe down the middle. Nightmarish pavement, nothing but potholes. Maximus clutched the wheel, shuddering as trucks roared past his window a mere arm’s distance away, pondering the sobering truth that this transport artery was the only road linking an entire oblast to the rest of Russia. Other than that there was one railroad line and a seaport that iced up every winter. That was all. Considering the high cost of railway tariffs it was clear that most of Murmansk oblast was supplied by truck transport using this one narrow, pitted road. And there are so many other regions like this in Russia, essentially cut off from the capitals! And no one cares. Not until one of them rises up and demands its independence or one of their neighbors starts to show too much interest. There was that incident where the Finns claimed a village, and the president offered them the ears of a dead donkey instead. But we’re talking about an entire oblast here. Do we really need to keep it? Well, if so, you’d think they’d at least put down a decent road.

It’s only on the map that we’re one big united country, all one color. But the land isn’t a map, it’s forests and rivers, fields and ravines. And for one place to be united with another, you need a road.

Centuries ago people on the flatlands settled along rivers, mostly because the rivers served as highways linking one world to another. You can’t get far traveling through the great slumbering forest or across the vast empty steppe, especially if you’re hauling goods for trade. The Varangians, those bandits and traders who founded the Russian state, had traveled by river, if you buy that theory about the Norse origins of Rus, that is.

Semipyatnitsky had no intention of going all the way to Murmansk. His destination was the village of Staraya Ladoga, Russia’s first capital, the place where the Varangians had begun their expansion onto the Central European highlands. He wanted to see that landscape for himself, to feel what those energetic Norse adventurers had felt so long ago. To unwind the scroll of the country’s history back to zero. To understand how and why things had turned out the way they had.

The road was long. Nothing on either side. Semipyatnitsky recalled a phrase from a guidebook for tourists: “Some ten percent of Russian territory is densely populated; twenty percent is relatively civilized, and seventy percent is virgin land.” Tselina, in Russian. The land is a young girl. A virgin, you say? But what if she’s an embittered widow, an old trollop?

What do we need all this space for? For nothing—all that emptiness just gets in the way. We cross it in haste and in shame as we travel from one oasis to another in our busy lives. Indeed, if Moscow were closer to St. Petersburg, and Rostov-on-Don to Moscow, with Novosibirsk nearby, it would be a lot easier to govern and supply. You can see why the tsar unloaded Alaska in exchange for a couple of glass beads: He knew that the cord binding it to Russia would unravel.

Yes, in the big cities people fight to the death for every square meter; the buildings cram in closer and closer together and rise higher and higher, grasping at the last remaining breathable air, reaching up to the heavens. Along Russia’s horizontal axis, however, the only things that grow and multiply are cemeteries and wasteland: pustosh. You could cover four or five cities with the palm of your hand, and all the rest of Russia is one giant empty wasteland.

And it’s all the same: above and below, outside and inside. Above the scorched, burned-out land is an empty sky, devoid of color. And inside your heart too: nothing there, just parched, wretched emptiness: pustota.

Wasteland, pustosh. The word entered Semipyatnitsky’s head and surrounded itself with other thoughts. An ancient word, conveying an exact meaning: pustosh, wasteland, not pustota, emptiness. Emptiness entails something Buddhist, a vacuum, there is something postmodern and pretensions about it. But pustosh is primordial. Like a pagan divinity: Mokosh… Pustosh… God of Emptiness.

Emptiness, though, pustota… is just emptiness. It is and always has been, from the beginning. And will remain so, permanently. Emptiness is cold, no way out. Wise: Chinese, Hindu. Eternal, indifferent.

Whereas pustosh is warm and melancholy. It contains the past, what’s gone by. In what is now pustosh, grain used to be harvested, great households stood, gardens and lush orchards grew and flourished. Then everything burned to the ground. Weeds grew tall and covered the arid soil. It’s abandoned now: no one there, just an old wino digging a hole in the earth. Planting sunflowers, maybe, on a whim, or digging a grave for his dead dog.

Then there’s pustinya, desert. That’s different too. Pustinya is sand, wind, a white camel, the Prophet on her back—peace be unto Him—she’s taking him from Mecca to Medina, or is it from Medina to Mecca, whatever, bearing Him on her back, and along with Him, salvation to all mankind.

Maybe it’s a bad thing that the land is so empty, but emptiness is necessary, because emptiness is a space that can be filled. Though everyone’s emptiness is different.

For the Chinese, the entire world is emptiness, pustota. Sewing Dolce and Gabbana labels onto trousers in some basement sweatshop, stealing the design for a concept car from Toyota—nothing is sacred. It’s all emptiness, and emptiness is Tao. Emptiness is the inner essence of things. And any form is simply a label pasted on emptiness, predetermining the way our untrustworthy senses will perceive it. So what’s the point of copyright, of defending someone’s asinine trademarks?

For the Arab, the whole world is a desert. Pustinya. And he couldn’t give a damn that there are other people living on the globe who’ve built great cities and roads, who have something that they consider to be civilization and culture. No, they’re all savages, heathens. The Arab rides alone in all his glory, regal and handsome on that white camel, a sack of petrodollars in one hand and an Kalashnikov automatic in the other, bearing either the Prophet’s teachings—peace be unto him—or salvation through death, take your choice, O infidels who wander in the darkness.

Whereas your European hates emptiness in whatever form. He covers it with construction projects, divides it into plots, parcels them out, maps everything, and presto, no more emptiness! Or so it seems. But no, it’s emptiness nonetheless: pustota.

For a Russian, though, wherever you make your home is wasteland. Pustosh is the Russian natural landscape. And any other terrain a Russian finds beneath his feet inevitably turns into that same wasteland which is so dear to his heart. Even his apartment becomes pustosh.

Because when you find yourself in a wasteland, it’s only natural that your thoughts turn to the futility of life.

There they are, the remains of empires, the bygone glory of kingdoms, and what now? Futility. From wasteland we emerged, into wasteland we shall return, empty on the inside, on the outside empty too.

At that point it might seem fitting to try and free yourself from the trammels of the material world, but such a quest requires emptiness, pustota. Sitting on pustosh, though, you think: What are all paths? Many have trod and fallen, many have plummeted into the abyss. That too, futility!

But “even if I do not fall into the abyss, the poison will still find me,” sings the bard.[14] And pours the poison into the glass himself. It is all one path, all Tao, and this glass is Tao, Russian style. He drinks. And imagines himself wandering on roads paved with diamonds, then plummeting into the black abyss…

They say that this is Russia’s unique path. The Russian path to God. Through wasteland…

And so it is. For any road leads to God.

Maximus recalled something he’d read in Blavatsky or Roerich, a verse they claimed was translated from the Upanishads or something like that: All mountain roads lead to God, who lives on the mountain tops…

The Romans thought that all roads led to Rome…

And the Bhaktivedanta Swami used to tell his disciples that if they got on the train to Calcutta, they would never reach Bombay.

Funny, and true. But perhaps there is another truth: Any road leads to God.

Though it has two ends.

Semipyatnitsky drove slowly, trying to protect his car’s suspension from the road’s abundant potholes and ruts. He came to a fork in the road, with a 24/7 fish market, a café, a hotel, and a highway patrol station, and headed to the right, onto the road to Staraya Ladoga. When he reached the village, it was already dark.

The white nights retained their calendar rights; the sun still set late and its whitish light lingered in the pale sky long after the clock indicated darkness. But in this strange time, when night came on, it came suddenly. A dark hood would descend without warning, covering the entire world, blocking out even the stars. And when dawn glimmered early and drove the night away, it left the night even darker in memory.

The village nestled along the banks of the Volkhov River. Maximus drove down the right bank until he reached a hotel on the small town square. The square was deserted. Maximus parked, entered the hotel through a dark doorway, and climbed a stairway with carved wooden banisters to the second floor. The door into the hotel lobby was closed and Maximus pressed the buzzer to summon the desk clerk.

The clerk told him that a room would cost 1,500 rubles, but that there were no vacancies. The rooms were reserved a month in advance: A lot of visitors, tourists as well as pilgrims, were coming to visit the monastery and churches of Staraya Ladoga.

Semipyatnitsky drove on to the very end of the village, then turned and headed back the way he’d come. He took a secondary road and followed it to the monastery gate. The gate was locked and the monastery was dark. In front of the gate was a convenient paved parking area, enough for a few dozen vehicles. A couple of cars drowsed there; around a third, a group of young people had gathered. The car’s windows were open, and its speakers were blaring a song to the entire town—something about a girl, a student, a sweet piece of candy—violating the spiritual grandeur of the place. Maximus spat and drove away in annoyance, retracing his steps.

The second road on the right was narrow and led up a steep hill. On top, in a grassy clearing, stood an old chapel, or maybe it was a church—religious architecture not being one of Maximus’s strong points. A cat, evidently the church’s caretaker, appeared and meowed a loud greeting. Maximus regretted that he hadn’t picked up some smoked fish at the market he’d passed on the way. All he had in the trunk was a milk chocolate bar. The cat demonstrated an admirable lack of fastidiousness and accepted his gift gratefully. She ate the treat, and then, meowing loudly, led Semipyatnitsky on a tour of the grounds, showing him a hill that sloped down to the river and a mowed lawn behind the church. Maximus took a liking to the animal; he had a soft spot for cats anyway, and this one projected an air of reverence and spiritual dignity.

Maximus stroked the vociferous cat one more time, delivered an eloquent and verbose farewell, got in his car, and descended cautiously back to the highway. He was now quite close to the entrance to Staraya Ladoga, with its cupola-shaped hills rising over a bend in the river.

THE KURGANS OF STARAYA LADOGA

Their proper name is mounds, sopki, from the Russian word meaning to pour or pile up… The word kurgan came later; it’s Turkish.

Semipyatnitsky left his car by the side of the road, which was practically deserted except for the occasional vehicle passing by every half hour or so, the great eyes of its headlights blazing as it rounded the curve. He walked out onto the grass and followed a clay path up to the top of one of the bigger mounds. And looked out onto the world.

His breath caught in his chest, his head spun. The grandeur of the landscape that opened out before him blinded and paralyzed him. The Volkhov’s dark, motionless, glossy surface reflected the newly risen moon and stars in the infinite expanse of the sky, making the river itself seem billions of light years deep. Gentle, warm spots of light twinkled from the dachas and cottages on the opposite shore. A light breeze stirred the trees and bushes, like puffs of down on a black swan whose wings rustled, barely audibly, in the summer night.

For a few minutes, maybe more, Maximus couldn’t move, then he sank down onto the grassy earth. He closed his eyes, unable to bear the beauty. And when he opened them again…

Remembering that moment later, Maximus was inclined to explain his vision as a drug flashback of some kind. That can happen. You go for days, weeks, or even months without taking anything, and then suddenly, completely unexpectedly and in the most unlikely time and place, you’re back where you had been back then. Maximus hadn’t taken any of the pink pills that day, but evidently there was enough of the drug left in his system to bring on a hefty hallucination.

When he opened his eyes, Maximus saw the same landscape. But it was also not the same. The Volkhov was broader, the water came up to the very base of the kurgan. The contours of the trees and the lights from the other shore looked different too. But most importantly…

People. Throngs of them, even now, in the middle of the night. A sailboat glided down the river; fishing boats rocked gently near the shores. Sounds wafted up from all directions: people laughing and talking, voices singing, the splash of rigging, the occasional knock of hammer against anvil. Maximus looked first to one side, then to the other, then back again. No hint of pustosh now: All the land was in use. In the town, stone mansions crowded up to the water’s edge, and beyond them wooden buildings, settlements and farmsteads stretching all the way to the horizon. Even the open fields showed signs of human habitation: waves of ripening rye and dark patches in the grass where flocks of livestock grazed. A caravan of ox carts moved along the well-trodden, smooth surface of the road, accompanied by a convoy of horsemen, their swords and armor gleaming in the white light of the moon. Everything was vibrant and alive, and everything was of this place.

Maximus fell onto the grass, roaring with laughter, then leaped to his feet and shouted in what he thought was a booming, resonant voice, though in fact what came from his dry throat was a hoarse croak:

“So this is what you are, O Russian land, your true origin and essence! Not sad wasteland, not pustosh, but fertile, rich Gardarika!”

KHAGAN

Saat resumed his life on the steppe in the same place he’d lived before. New people were living there, yes. They had him groom the horses and muck out the corrals, and in exchange they gave him food to eat and mare’s milk to drink. Now and then they would take a whip and give him a beating, for not working hard enough or just because they felt like it. And afterward they would send him away, into the steppe. But why go to the trouble of finding another place? A man always feels most at home and free in the place where he was born and lived most of his life. At home even the switches are sweet, the whippings tender, and hunger is like one of the family.

Where is there to go, anyway? Man is not a bird who can fly away and seek warmth and food in some distant land. If he were a star, he could just twinkle in the sky, high above it all. But Saat was a man. He would go on sending roots deep into his native earth, deeper and deeper with every passing year, until his time came and he would lie down on the ground at last and take his rest. And the land would cover him. Land of his birth, native land.

But a new sorrow befell Khazaria: The Khagan died. You’d think, what difference would that make to an ordinary herdsman? Saat had never even seen the Khagan in person. Maybe the Khagan died a natural death. People of all walks of life die of natural causes. Or maybe he’d outlived his preordained time. That’s what the old women said, whispering, with dull eyes. Or maybe he was done away with, according to custom.

In the old days, when there was a bad harvest, they would take the Khagan out into the fields during the plowing and stab him to death right there, to make grain grow in the next season. And when there was an excess of grain, they would pile up stones and bury the Khagan alive. When the Chechmeks set fires in Itil, they burned the Khagan at the stake. And if their foes triumphed in battle, they would cut the Khagan to pieces with their sabers. Short is the lifespan of the Khagan, from one misfortune to the next. And there is so much misfortune in my homeland; all of our history is woven from it, like a wanderer’s ragged garment, all rips and tears, held together by mere threads.

But the people are not given to know that. Eternal is the Khagan, no more need be said. There is one Khagan; and there can be no other. He rules for thousands upon thousands of years. The Khagan is not a private individual; he is an immortal figure, and his role in our land is akin to a heavenly duty.

Saat lay exhausted, covered in horseshit, in the tall steppeland grass. Lay there on his back after the day’s work was done, as was his custom, and stared up at the sky. Suddenly above him there appeared a multitude of faces, a throng of officials!

“Are you Saat, son of Nattukh, herdsman of horses?” they asked. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Even if you could find some woodcarvers to whittle changes into the plank of wood that served as your passport, still your face would give you away, anyone could tell who you were.

“The Great Bek has commanded that you be brought to the palace. It is an important matter of State!”

O how Saat wept! A matter of State—everyone knows what that means: shootings and hangings. Or beheadings, or drownings in the river, or boilings in a copper kettle, after the pulling out of veins and tearing off of fingernails.

Saat knew of no sins staining his soul. He had not wealth enough, nor power, for great sins. Nor even enough strength for a small sin, like flirting. But who is ever taken to the gallows for sinning? Sin is awash in silver and gold and has been from the beginnings of time. When they say that “virtue abhors a vacuum,” “an empty place must fill with holiness,” it’s just words; it must, in fact, not be filled; it’s the emptiness that makes it holy. But if there’s a place of execution, then there indeed “nature abhors a vacuum”: That emptiness must be filled. Verily, it will not stay empty long! And if not, then what need is there for law and rulers? Judges cast their ivory dice, and if they wind up with the number on your passport board, then you are designated the guilty man, the sinner. Lo, Saat’s number tumbled out onto the table. Such is divine providence!

So thought Saat.

The officials took him gently under the arms, bundled him in soft cloth, stuffed a soft piece of bread, no crust, into his mouth, laid him crosswise across a saddle, and bore him away from his home. Saat saw nothing, heard nothing, and made no sound, until the great bolts of the fortress gate thundered sevenfold and clattered open and he found himself standing, unswaddled, in a great hall. Saat had eaten the bread; no point in dying on an empty stomach.

Saat opened his eyes and beheld, ten paces before him, two golden thrones. The officials stepped back, forming two rows along the walls on either side of the great hall, and stood motionless, heads bowed.

On one of the thrones sat the Great Bek, white of face, black of hair, yellow of teeth, beaming a broad smile of welcome. The Great Bek’s robe was embroidered with peacocks in gold thread and adorned with rubies. A great belly had the Great Bek, it rested on his thighs. Must eat a lot, thought Saat. And why not? He holds all of Khazaria in his mouth, like a soft piece of bread!

The Great Bek arose from his shiny throne, descended from the podium, went down on his knees, and knelt on the floor in front of Saat. The officials along the walls immediately all dropped to their knees, and their weapons made a great clattering noise on the floor!

And the Great Bek spoke:

“Glory and honor to you, Saat, son of Nattukh! Following the Khazar custom, having duly meditated at the fire, having made offerings to our sorcerers and sacrifices to our gods, we, the Great Bek and Executive of Khazaria, have determined that there is no better Khagan for our realm than yourself. For you are of the generation of Ashin, son of the Khagan, uncle of the Khagan and brother of the Khagan, and you are the one to raise the golden kamcha and take your place on the throne of Ashin, at our left side.”

A great trembling overcame the son of Nattukh. But he managed to speak nonetheless: “Allow me, O Great Bek, defender of the peoples, sharp saber in the scabbard of Khazaria, heavenly light, Khagan’s equal, to speak a word in my defense! Spare my life, poor herdsman that I am, and order that my passport board be reread carefully, for this is all a simple misunderstanding! I am a widow’s son, a poor beggar! How could the blood of Ashin be flowing in me?”

The Great Bek laughed. “Do you know your own father, Saat, that you can speak thus?”

Saat was puzzled at this. “I never saw my father with my own eyes, no, but my mother spoke of the herdsman Nattukh. And my mother was an honorable woman, she only ever knew one man. And that man, her husband, died of the belly sickness when I still slumbered curled up in her womb. And my mother died too, when I was seven springs from birth. And I grew up thus, an orphan.”

“Know, Saat, that your father was the Khagan, and his brother before him was Khagan as well, and after him the son of his brother became the Khagan, and all of you are scions of the ancient Khan Ashin. But do not judge your father, for so it is ordained: The Khagan is taken from his family and they are told that he has died. The doctors carve a death certificate and return it to the family in place of a body, saying that the corpse has been requisitioned for medical study. They give the widow and orphans a copper coin, and this satisfies them. And the court’s legend keepers devise a different biography and a different genealogy, in accordance with legend.”

Saat raised his hands aloft and clutched his head. If the Great Bek wasn’t just making all of this up for his own amusement, then this was a great secret indeed! But Saat’s heart would not be still, and he spoke again:

“Great Bek! Sun in the night of history! How am I to govern a great realm, when I have not been taught? I have not known a noble education, I have not even been to trade school! Governing is a great and intricate science!”

“Who said you had to govern? To govern, issue judgment, gather tribute, make war—that is my, the Bek’s, task. You will sit by my side on this as yet empty throne, and you will keep silent. On your right I shall sit and receive ambassadors and warriors and give commands in your name. Such is our way! Yours it is to taste ripe fruits, to listen to marvelous melodies, and to visit the harem, where your wives await, seven tens of them, each one shaming the next with her beauty!”

Joy flooded over Saat, and he began to believe in his good fortune. But fear came as well: “Great Bek! I am not accustomed to such a life—how will I manage? For are not palaces the Khagan’s cradle, must he not from his infancy partake of the very best, so that it will be second nature to him? Will I not bring dishonor on myself? I have eaten only hard crusts and water from the streams and steppe grasses! My only loves were the horses! And how can I wear brocades, when my only garments have been of the coarsest cloth?”

The Great Bek grew solemn. And spoke. “It is not true that Khagans multiply in palaces. The Khagan must know how to braid a horse’s tail, must spend nights outside beneath the cold sky, must know hunger and need, must march against the enemy bearing only a sling and with no armor covering his chest. Otherwise how can he be a martyr for the Khazar land? For this is our way in Khazaria: There is the Great Bek with his warriors, and they are the zealous benefactors—they govern. And then there is the Khagan, he does not govern, but suffers day and night, prays and weeps for his homeland! And this sustains Khazaria. Rise, then, Khagan, and take your place on the shining throne! And pray that the heavens will not witness our lawlessness, and that misfortune will pass us by. And if misfortune does strike, then do not complain. For you will be the first to die; you will die a martyr’s death, washing away our sins with your tears, like salt rinsing a stain away from a white tablecloth! Such is your destiny!”

Saat nodded. To take on suffering, was this anything new for him? And to know that it is for the sake of his native land!

Then Great Bek asked: “Tell me, Saat—only be honest—what did you think of during those dark nights, as you tossed and turned on the cold steppe, with your empty belly grumbling and your exhausted muscles aching from the day’s unbearable labor?”

Saat went numb and replied truthfully: “I pondered, Great Bek, the fate of Khazaria. How to ensure that the simple people would labor without thieving, that the doctors would heal without quackery, that teachers would teach with wise words and not with damp birch rods, that those in high positions would not forget their duties and obligations before society, that our warriors would be so strong that the very sight of them and their valor would keep foes far from the borders of Khazaria, that wealth would grow within from our industries and trade relations, doubling every year, that we should have peace and prosperity among ourselves, and should live in loving respect with our neighbors… This I pondered day and night, miserable, foolish herdsman that I am!”

The Great Bek did not laugh at Saat’s thoughts, but folded his hands piously and expressed his approval: “Spoken like the true Khagan! Proof indeed that you are seed of Ashin, blood of the Khagans! Even as you starve, to be thinking of the economy of the land, of doubling the country’s wealth!

“O, Saat, son of Nattukh! Only the Khagan, the Khagan, blood, mind, and spirit, is concerned with this! Know now that the Murzlas, whose task it is to gather wealth for the realm, care only for their own bins of grain! The warlords share the spoils. Even I myself, the Great Bek, concern myself with intrigues, with maintaining my own power and position. This is what power means to us. And the simple people are no saints either: One poor man dreams of swindling another for a kopeck, the farmer cares only for his field; his neighbor’s melons can wither on the vine as far as he is concerned! Each is concerned only with his own personal well-being and pleasure! Only the Khagan can, forgetting about himself, give thought to the country and the people as a whole! By this is the true Khagan to be recognized!”

THE CHINESE QUESTION

“I hate my life.”

Maximus heard the words and awoke. Awoke and realized that it was he who had spoken. Not that he’d awakened with the thought; rather, the thought awoke first and woke Semipyatnitsky in turn.

“I hate my life. I hate my job.”

The words whirled in his head like a mantra. And occasionally they spoke themselves aloud, without Maximus’s help. But that didn’t make any of it any easier.

The night before, after he came down from his flashback on the hill, Maximus had set back for home. He drove for a long time along the dark night road, drove slowly, peering out into the darkness ahead, verifying the route by lights near and far, proceeding hesitantly like a blind man tapping the untrustworthy sidewalk before him with his white cane; the path ahead hides so many unwelcome surprises, so many steep curbs and open manholes. Maximus arrived at his apartment just before dawn. And only got up again with the greatest reluctance, a half-hour later than usual.

It takes a long time to get to work by car during rush hour. And Semipyatnitsky had had enough driving yesterday. So he set off on foot and took public transit.

When he descended into the metro, Semipyatnitsky noticed that there were a lot fewer people around than there used to be before he’d gotten a car and stopped using the train. Even in the morning rush hour the crowd was sparse, like hairs in a Khazar’s beard.

The crowds had migrated onto the surface, where they now idled in tin boxes clogging up the streets leading from St. Petersburg’s residential suburbs to the commercial center. Within just a couple of years, all the luckless commuters had moved from trams and metro cars into automobiles, used and new, bought on credit. Every eighteen-year-old chick has her own car nowadays: If she’s poor, her car is a Daewoo Matiz; if the girl has a rich Dad—or Daddy, which is not at all the same thing—she can aspire to a huge SUV, a monster that takes up half the road. And only after she’s had enough of playing tank driver, and has overcome her childish fears, does she acquire a tiny, predatory little convertible—thereby holding traffic up more than ever, as it turns out.

And if the girl is still carless, well, that only means that she’s still taking driving lessons and working to get her license, without the least doubt that she is on the verge of becoming a full-fledged driver.

The workplace is overflowing with young women from universities out in Barnaul who have come to the big city with the conscious goal of career advancement, and the subconscious goal of finding a good husband (and isn’t that the best way to advance your career anyhow?). Subconscious because, ultimately, what else do you need a diploma and work experience for, really, if not to burst into tears and throw it back in your husband’s face in response to some incautious statement on his part about the grocery bill: “I’m not just some run-of-the-mill trade-school girl! I have a higher education! And if I hadn’t devoted my whole life to you, I would have become the CFO of some big corporation long ago, and would now be earning more than you do! I had real potential! How dare you get on my case about these petty expenses, you ingrate!” (Of course, some girls get the short end of the stick: They actually do have to become executives and make more money than men, which puts a damper on this particular attack. But their time, too, will come…) And so now here they are in the northern capital, where they spend half the workday scrolling through car ads on the Internet and discussing the pros and cons of all the different models with their friends.

At one point Maximus had tried to cool the acquisitional zeal of his young female colleagues, asking them where they thought they were going to get enough money to buy and maintain an automobile. Blondes and brunettes alike performed the same arithmetical operation, which was shockingly simple: Loan payments are 12,000 rubles a month, right? And I earn 16,000, right? That’ll cover it. And there will even be some left over. Hm… maybe I should look into a more expensive model?

In vain did Semipyatnitsky remind them that there is more to owning a car than just the loan payments; what were they going to put in their refrigerators, for one? And a car wouldn’t relieve them of the desire to dress in the latest fashions each season. Or did they think they would drive naked? Though that of course would be interesting…

An automobile, over and above its purchase price, necessitates endless expenditures for fuel, insurance, parking, and repair. Maximus came up with an apt metaphor, one that every woman was bound to understand. It was like adding another person to your life. Like having a baby. So now everything—food, drink, shoes, medical care, housing—had to cover two. Not to mention all the time and worry. Maximus watched the girls’ eyes go all moist, and realized that his example had hit a little too close to home, and that now they would be all the more eager to become car owners.

The real reason a girl suddenly wants a car the moment she hits puberty is that she can’t have a baby yet. That’s what she really wants, but she has to suppress that desire. She has to work on an equal basis with men. In exchange for her sacrifice, the modern economy offers her the option of buying a car—a cute little Tamagotchi on wheels that she can love like her firstborn.

Thus is the maternal instinct exploited for the expansion of the automobile industry.

Maximus thought that the underpopulation crisis could be solved by banning auto purchases by women and denying them drivers’ licenses. There would be nothing left for them to do but have babies.

Maximus often pondered issues of global importance. He was quite sure that if he were the Khagan he could fix everything that was wrong in the country. Not just the country—the whole world!

Clinging onto the overhead strap in the metro car, Semipyatnitsky found himself empathizing with the Chinese. It’s even worse over there. Thanks to the wise and flexible leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, everyone’s standard of living has improved. It’s not so obvious in the provinces, but in the capital, Beijing, and other big cities the changes are striking. The problem is that prosperity has brought along with it Western ideas about the good life, which decree that everyone must have his or her own car. And if there are one and a half billion of those car-hungry people?

A thick cloud of exhaust hovers in the air over Beijing, visible even from outer space, and it will never clear.

And where are you going to come up with enough fuel to supply all of China?

Even if the government of the People’s Republic manages to buy up all the oil deposits and refineries in Africa, it still won’t be enough.

Semipyatnitsky had watched a show on the Euronews channel about the Chinese automobile crisis.

This problem, like many others, Semipyatnitsky believed, required a solution not patterned after the American notion that “bigger and faster,” ever-increasing growth would save the day—this was already leading civilization into a dead end—but rather a Completely Different Principle (CDP). And he had come up with what he considered to be a very good one.

Long before the advent of the pseudo-science of marketing people like Philip Kotler, the writer Mark Twain (or was it O. Henry?) taught that if there was no demand, then demand must be created. And he’d written a great short novel in which a young man, a diplomat representing the United States of America on some tropical island, comes up against what would seem to be an impossible challenge: The inhabitants of the island go barefoot year ’round. His fiancée’s father is obsessed with the idea of starting a shoe business, and has had an entire shipload of footwear delivered to the tropical paradise. So as not to disappoint his future father-in-law, the diplomat, American to the marrow, comes up with an elegant solution: He buys up tons of prickly thorn seed pods from farmers on the continent and secretly, overnight, with the help of some friends, strews them all over the island’s lawns and pathways. He then follows up with a PR campaign teaching the islanders that these prickly pods, which they have never seen before, are in fact a swarm of poisonous insects that has flown in from across the ocean. And the only way to protect themselves is to wear shoes at all times…

The reverse theorem must also be true. Call it anti-marketing, a theory devised by Maximus Semipyatnitsky, mid-level manager, writer on the side.

If demand cannot be satisfied, it must be destroyed.

What do we need cars for? I’ve already dealt with the female side of the problem; let’s talk about men now. If we discard the nonessential, quasi-religious views propagated by aggressive advertisers, automobiles serve one basic purpose: driving people around. Primarily to and from work.

Every morning employees flood out of the residential districts to their offices, and every evening they head back home. Sociologists call this phenomenon “pendulum migration” and consider it to be one of the most serious problems facing modern society.

But why go to the office in the first place? Who even needs an office?

Ninety percent of office work can be done anywhere, any place that has Internet and phone connections—at home for example. And even the remaining ten percent—briefings and business meetings—can be conducted virtually, using modern technology, from any distance.

People also use cars to do their shopping, though. But this problem will disappear on its own when, as Semipyatnitsky predicts in another as yet uncompleted book, everyone leaves their apartments and houses to live in the malls full time.

Semipyatnitsky hurried from the metro station toward the office, his head teeming with these profound thoughts on the ways of the corporate world. They weren’t at all abstract; on the contrary, they were utterly practical. You see, the Cold Plus corporation had made a unilateral wager with its employees: “I bet you can’t make it to work by nine A.M.!” If an employee loses, he has to pay a fine. His paycheck will be docked, without right of appeal. If the employee wins, his reward is that nothing will happen to him.

“So what demon chases me out of the house every morning, makes me dash out onto the street, rushing all the while, in a lather like a race horse, to reach a stuffy, crowded workplace on time, when I could do everything, make those calls and send those e-mails, from home?”

Maximus blurted this out loud, having lost control of himself yet again, while standing at the crosswalk waiting for the green “walk” light.

At that precise moment Maximus heard a malicious cackling just behind his left shoulder. Semipyatnitsky turned and saw a spry-looking old man of indeterminate age and curious appearance behind him. The old man was garbed in an ill-fitting blue double-breasted jacket, green trousers, and red shoes with pointed toes. A venomous-looking yellow necktie completed the picture.

“Late for work, young man?”

The forced sympathy in the old man’s voice surpassed the heaviest sarcasm. Maximus’s glance slid across a large round badge pinned to his new acquaintance’s chest, identifying him as a sidewalk marketing specialist. Fiery red letters against a white background spelled out a bold invitation: “Get rich quick: Ask me how.”

“You don’t have to go, you know. That is, you brought this on yourself. Going to the office, sitting at the computer, putting up with a stupid boss… But you can still change everything. And right now you have a unique opportunity! We have a special offer, just for you.”

“O God!” thought Semipyatnitsky. The old man seemed to twitch momentarily, though Maximus might have just imagined it. All in all, the encounter was a surprise, if a mild one. It had been several years since he’d encountered this particular brand of street salesman; not so long ago they had thronged the sidewalks, accosting naïve passersby, besetting them with get-rich-quick schemes and fleecing them for easy cash.

Maximus smirked and interrupted the peddler of illusions:

“You’re right, it is a unique opportunity. I didn’t expect to run into you. I must confess, I had assumed that your type had gone extinct, had died of starvation and disillusionment, leaving your bodies draped on top of stacks of boxes of miracle powders in communal apartments that in the Soviet days used to belong to distant aunts with heart diseases, and which you acquired, along with the job title of supreme supervisor, in exchange for the powder. Do you know how we used to deal with your brand of so-called businessmen back then? Ask me if I want to lose weight, and I’ll tell you where you can go.”

Contrary to Semipyatnitsky’s expectations, the geezer didn’t take offense. He smiled even more broadly, exposing a row of fake yellow fangs, and emitted a stream of words:

“Oh no, it’s not at all what you think! This is a completely new system! And yet it’s as old as the world itself, and has truly passed the test of time! Success is guaranteed; all you have to do is decide! No gimmicks whatsoever, it’s all completely legal and legitimate! All I need from you is your signature on this splendid contract!”

The old man reached into his leather briefcase and produced a few sheets of paper, covered with fine print and held together with a metallic green paper clip. Maximus could have sworn that the man hadn’t been holding a leather briefcase a second before. He cast a nervous, hopeful glance at the stoplight. It was still red.

“This is the longest light I’ve ever…” muttered Maximus, baffled, to himself.

“I know, you’re about to ask: ‘What about the deposit?’” the agent rattled on. “I have great news for you! No initial expenditures are required! Absolutely no material investments on your part. You won’t believe me—you’ll ask, ‘How can that be? Is it really possible?’ And I will answer, ‘Yes!’ But only here and now, and only through our company! What you will provide is absolutely without material substance; in a certain sense, it doesn’t even exist! You have it, but you’re not using it—you don’t even notice it! And what will you get in return? Completely tangible, material things! Those very things that you’re striving to acquire by going to work every day and performing hard labor that will bring you nothing in return. All we need from you is sound, air, an empty concept, fluff! Thinner than a hair! And even that, I repeat, absolutely nonmaterial investment is not required up front—no! And not in installments, either! Only later, only at the very end, when you’ve already fully savored all the riches that our contract will provide you!”

Maximus’s head was spinning; he felt numb all over. The huckster clearly was taking advantage of his weakened state.

“Well, what do you say? I see you’re ready! Just sign here and here. Use this pen!”

A syringe sprang out of the old man’s jacket sleeve, and he poked it into Maximus’s free hand, drawing a tiny drop of blood.

“Oh, how clumsy! Please forgive me!” chirped the old man.

The syringe instantly mutated into a massive pen with fake gilding, and wedged itself between Semipyatnitsky’s writing fingers.

But the pain brought Maximus to his senses. Stunned, he stared at the tiny red spot on his hand and then raised his head and shrieked to the people standing next to him at the crosswalk, involuntary witnesses to Semipyatnitsky’s conversation with the street hawker.

“Help! This maniac stabbed my hand! He’s probably spreading AIDS!”

The crowd recoiled. A few girls, who had evidently heard urban myths about men who went around spreading the virus by sticking needles into people in nightclubs, started screaming at the top of their voices.

At that moment a beat-up Gazelle municipal passenger van emerged from the line of vehicles on the street and squealed to a halt right in the middle of the crosswalk’s zebra stripes.

“Oh here’s my ride!” announced the old man joyfully, as though nothing had happened. “So pleasant to chat with you! Bye! Until we meet again!”

And with that he sprang through the open door into the empty back of the van. The briefcase was gone; instead, he was clutching a shopping bag against his belly, crammed full of red vegetables that looked something like turnips. The turnips were shaped like human hearts and were throbbing, or at least it looked that way to Maximus. But the door slid shut and the van lurched into motion. The driver, a brunet with a long hook-nose, cast a brief venomous glance Semipyatnitsky’s way.

One eye was green, the other was made of glass.

The Gazelle merged back into traffic and disappeared. The walk light flashed green, and Maximus joined the crowd walking briskly across the street. The pedestrians jostled one another carelessly, as though they had forgotten that one of them had perhaps just been infected with an incurable, highly contagious disease.

The gilded pen was gone, and there was no sign on Maximus’s hand of the red spot. But he wondered: How do one-eyed men get chauffeur’s licenses and jobs driving passenger vans? It doesn’t exactly fill you with faith in public transportation, does it?

WHAT DO STRAWBERRIES HAVE TO DO WITH IT?

That morning, the usual spirit of liveliness reigned in the office…

The words came naturally, or, rather, they arose spontaneously and appeared on the monitor of Maximus’s inner consciousness.

“Now that’s a nice turn of phrase!” he thought. “‘The spirit of liveliness reigned.’”

The fact that somebody was writing down every detail of his life, day after day, evidently didn’t surprise or trouble Semipyatnitsky. His only concern was that the author’s style be up to snuff, and that he acted in a professional manner.

Maximus lowered himself onto the chair in front of his computer, turned it on, and gathered up several sheets of paper from the desk, going through them while giving himself over to abstract and mournful thoughts.

First Pelevin, now this Herbalife devil, it’s like something out of Bulgakov… what next? Gogol? Quite the eclectic mix. Or, as they say these days, fusion. Yes, Maximus, your life is profoundly derivative—you can find every detail in Franz Kafka, who, by the way, was the favorite writer of Vladislav (Aslanbek) Surkov (Dudaev), who had such a friendly chat with you that time in an office in the Kremlin.

Semipyatnitsky recalled his dreams of Khazaria, especially the last one, and he asked himself: Who would be our present-day Khagan and who would be our Bek? Surkov the Khagan, and Putin the Bek? Or the reverse: Putin the Khagan and Surkov the Bek? A fat red line of letters appeared and began scrolling across the internal monitor of Maximus’s consciousness, interrupting these musings:

“You idiot! Weren’t you told in no uncertain terms that you are the Khagan? What does Dudaev have to do with it?”

“All right, but who’s the Bek, then?” Maximus tried to make his little contribution.

“The Cat in the Hat!”

His Inner Author was obviously not interested in having a constructive dialogue. Maximus would have to get to work. Begin, as always, by sorting the mail and purging spam. Today’s spam contained messages that seemed particularly deranged. Maximus read:

But what really caught Maximus’s eye was the footnote at the end:

The next message was an insurance ad, aggressively infernal in tone:

And another one, an offer from a hard-currency broker:

But the next message was the most interesting of all:

Maximus smirked maliciously and dispatched the entire batch of spam into the trash.

There was a short message from Peter, writing from Holland, in English as usual. It had a businesslike, even dry, tone: “Hi Maximus! It was great to meet you in Saint Petersburg. Hope our conversation and disputes will help us strengthen our companies’ business relationships. Best regards, Peter.”

The letter’s tone gave Semipyatnitsky the impression that Peter was biting his own elbows out of fear that he’d said too much when he was in St. Petersburg, terrified that Maximus would get him in trouble.

The PS, though, adopted a more personal and friendly tone: “PS I took your kind advice, thank you! Now I have (you know what) for free (or almost free).”

Maximus opened the database and examined the purchase figures for Dutch frozen potatoes. Volume was growing fifteen to twenty percent per year. The peak came in summer, when the sidewalk cafés were open and serving French fries, which came over from Europe already cleaned and sliced into strips, crinkle style.

Lina was sitting in a stupor, staring at her phone. Obviously the aftereffects of whatever she’d been doing the night before.

Semipyatnitsky risked an attempt to rouse her.

“Lina!”

The girl shuddered and gave a grunt.

“Everything all right?”

“Yes.”

“Strange. You look like the ‘before’ picture in an anti-drug campaign. You have that overdose look. Or, worse, like after you got laid for the first time after losing your virginity on graduation night sixteen years ago… when was that again, a couple of weeks ago, was it?”

“Tatar bastard.” But her heart wasn’t really in it.

“Khazar,” corrected Maximus, as usual.

“So what did you want?”

“Oh, I wanted to ask you something. About the potatoes.”

“So?”

“Lina, look at these numbers: We import up to thirty tons from a single supplier. And we’re not even the biggest importer of Dutch frozen potatoes. And that’s not counting potatoes imported fresh and sold in supermarkets year ’round. And, think about it, Holland exports to other countries too. Off the top of my head, that would have to come to millions of tons of potatoes every year. It says here that in 1997 Holland produced eight million tons of potatoes. That’s their official statistic. Here in the Black Earth Region two hundred centners per hectare is considered a good yield. But the Dutch supposedly get seven hundred. How do they do it? All right, maybe it has to do with different weight standards. A Russian centner is equal to one hundred kilograms or 0.1 ton, but a German centner is one hundred pfunds, or fifty kilograms, or 0.05 ton. That means that their yield is still 350 centners per hectare—I mean, according to our standard. To get, say, seven million tons of potatoes, you need to plant two hundred thousand hectares. That is, two thousand square kilometers just for potatoes. The territory of the Netherlands is just short of forty-two thousand square kilometers—all right, accounting for rivers and lakes, canals, roads, and cities, there’s enough for that volume of potatoes. But only if all that land is used just for potatoes! But the area also exports all kinds of other agricultural products, from beef to tulips! So where do they grow all that? Where do all those Dutch potatoes come from?”

“Was all that meant for me?”

“Don’t act dumb. You know it was.”

“All right. Okay.”

“My dad was an agronomist.”

“I see.”

“What do you mean, ‘I see’? Answer the question. How can they manage to grow all that in one tiny country?”

“What makes you so sure they grow them all within their own borders?”

Maximus froze. Did Lina know about the pills? And here she was acting like it was no big deal.

But Lina was on a different track:

“Were you born yesterday? The Dutch and other European vegetables, fruits, and berries are imported from China—everyone knows that!”

“Everyone-everyone?”

“Of course! Even our clients! And our clients’ clients, everyone knows. Apparently you’re the only one who doesn’t.”

“But why do they import the Chinese vegetables into Europe?”

“What do you mean, ‘why’? Europe is where they put on the labels.”

“You mean they can’t do that in China?”

“They can, and some already do. They sell Italian strawberries straight from China. But we don’t want to encourage that.”

“Why not?”

“Maximus, are you pulling my leg?”

Lina was completely awake now. Why was Semipyatnitsky interested in these details all of a sudden? He never used to care. But she was basically a decent, patient, person, so she explained it to him decently, patiently:

“It’s risky, because then you’d have the market flooded with counterfeit labels on counterfeit strawberries.”

“So Italian strawberries grow in China too?”

“Yes.”

“What about Chinese strawberries?”

“Where else would they grow?”

“So what’s the difference?”

“Maximus, what is this, Stupid Questions Day? What’s the difference in what? It’s one thing for an Italian name-brand product to go for five dollars a kilo—it doesn’t matter if it’s produced in China. But it’s something else entirely when someone tries to sell you ordinary Chinese strawberries for four dollars, when the actual price is two dollars, simply because they come in a nice cellophane pack with a fake Italian label!”

“But it’s the same strawberries!”

“What do strawberries have to do with it?”

Semipyatnitsky lapsed into eloquent silence. Lina started tapping on her keyboard, filling out a new order for potatoes.

Maximus had the overwhelming urge to confide in someone. But who? Then he recalled the letters on his inner monitor.

He slid open his desk drawer and felt around for his pack of cigarettes and lighter. He draped his smart-card lanyard around his neck and headed outside for a smoke. And a conversation with himself.

“Mr. Author, are you there?”

“No.”

“Good. Let’s work this out.”

“All right. Work what out?”

“You know what.”

“I do. But formulating the question is half the answer.”

“I don’t need half an answer. Half an answer is worse than no answer at all.”

“Well put!”

“I can put it even better! Is there anything at all in the world that’s actually real? Or is it all just pills and hallucinations? And what exactly is a hallucination, anyway? Is it when we see something that doesn’t actually exist, or when what we see does exist, but we don’t see it as it really is? So we think that we’re eating potatoes, but there aren’t really any potatoes at all… we’re just taking some pill? Or we think that we’re eating Dutch potatoes, and we are indeed eating potatoes, but they’re actually Chinese, and the only thing Dutch about them are the labels and the drug. And what are we actually buying and eating, anyway, potatoes or labels?”

“I see… All of your questions boil down to the subject of a famous dispute that took place in medieval India, involving three different philosophical schools, whose names… well, will mean nothing to you. There were two basic questions. The first was whether the world was real. The second was whether our conception of the world was real.

“According to the first school, the world wasn’t real, since it lacked any substantial foundation. The world is based on indivisible particles that cannot be weighed or measured. Under the Karmic law of cause and effect—that is, relative and in reaction to living beings’ sinful actions—atoms join together into compounds, which give the appearance of substantiality. So our conception of the world as material is equally unreal. We have been taught that consciousness is a feature of highly organized matter, but the philosophers of the first school believed that matter was a feature of primitively organized consciousness. When a living creature breaks the chain of illusion, the world itself—and its conceptions about the world—cease to exist for it. In other words, there are no potatoes, and no pills either.

“Adherents to the second school, however, held that the world was indeed real, based in real substance, that is to say Brahma. In essence, they said, Brahma was the only reality. As for our conception of the world as something existing within time and space and occurring in a variety of forms, for them it did not correspond to reality. They cited the example of the rope and the snake: When a man in the dark assumes that a rope is a poisonous snake, his conceptions are illusory, though the rope itself exists. An enlightened individual is not distracted when it comes to reality, and sees everything as it is, as all Brahma. That is, all potatoes and no pills.

“Theoretically speaking, there is another answer to these basic questions: that the world is unreal, and that only our conceptions about it are real. According to that scheme, there are no potatoes, only hallucinogenic pills. But the adherents to this way of thinking were physically annihilated long before this particular dispute began. They were given the opportunity to drink a lethal dose of an elixir made from poisonous mushrooms, after having been told that it was divine nectar. They agreed, and everyone present witnessed a quintessentially physical spectacle: philosophers turning blue and dying in horrible torment.”

“What about the third school?”

“What ‘third school’?”

“You said that there were three philosophical schools participating in the dispute. You set forth the positions of two schools, then mentioned another one that did not take part in the dispute. What did the philosophers of this third school have to say?”

“Oh, them… Well, they said that all of that was of course very interesting. And that under different circumstances they would have participated in those debates with the greatest of pleasure. But when a house is burning is not the time to go through all of its architectural specifications—it’s the time to take foot in hand, so to speak, reason in heart, make a break for it, and start living.”

“What do you mean?”

“Dance and sing. And pray to God to release us from our entrapment in physical matter.”

“So then what? How did it end?”

“It didn’t, really. Like all disputes. Both the main schools, and the other group, the ones who were poisoned before they had a chance to participate, are taught in university courses on the history of Indian philosophy. While the third group, to this day…”

“What?”

“They sing and dance.”

“Why did you tell me all of this?”

“That’s funny. I knew why until you asked. Lina is right, today really is Stupid Questions Day.”

Maximus lit up another cigarette—his fourth. It made the inside of his mouth taste bitter, and he tossed it away after a couple of puffs.

The inner author continued:

“I would put it this way: The material world is real. And our conceptions of the world are also real. But the world is made in China, and our conceptions of the world are made in Holland.”

“But why?”

“What do you mean, why? To crank up the profit margin!”

“But why does the world made in China have any need for conceptions about it being made in Holland?”

“Because this conception of the world is made in Holland.”

NACH DRACHTEN

The northern sun peered out from behind the shroud of clouds on the horizon and shone into a little house on the outskirts of the town of Drachten, in the Netherlands. Its gentle rays slid across the cheap Swedish furniture and, observing maximum courtesy, brushed the rumpled face lying there on a green pillow. Peter Nils awoke.

“Ah, shit,” Mr. Nils cursed, not without pleasure, in English, and stretched out on the orthopedic mattress of the sleeper sofa.

By the way, it’s incorrect to call the Netherlands “Holland,” as some people do, and we’ve been doing. The provinces of Holland are just a part of the Netherlands, which also includes Friesland. Frieslanders consider themselves to be a different national group and have their own language, which is a close relative to English. Nils was a Frieslander. And he swore only in English.

Peter Nils was an export manager, responsible for deliveries to Russia by the Frozen French Fries (or FFF) company. People who know their way around frozen food call the company “Triple F.” Triple F is the industry leader for the production and sale of frozen French fries in the Netherlands. According to its own official history, the company traces its roots to the distant, glorious past, to a time even before the Norman Conquest, when pirates invaded and occupied the British Isles. A furore Normannorum libera nos Domine![15]

As the venerable Bede writes in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People: “IN the year of our Lord 449, Martian being made emperor with Valentinian, and the forty-sixth from Augustus, ruled the empire seven years. Then the nation of the Angles, or Saxons, being invited by the aforesaid king, arrived in Britain with three long ships, and had a place assigned them to reside in by the same king, in the eastern part of the island, that they might thus appear to be fighting for their country, whilst their real intentions were to enslave it. Accordingly they engaged with the enemy, who were come from the north to give battle, and obtained the victory; which, being known at home in their own country, as also the fertility of the country, and the cowardice of the Britons, a more considerable fleet was quickly sent over, bringing a still greater number of men, which, being added to the former, made up an invincible army. The newcomers received of the Britons a place to inhabit, upon condition that they should wage war against their enemies for the peace and security of the country, whilst the Britons agreed to furnish them with pay. Those who came over were of the three most powerful nations of Germany: Saxons, Angles, and Jutes. The two first commanders are said to have been Hengist and Horsa. Of whom Horsa, being afterwards slain in battle by the Britons, was buried in the eastern parts of Kent, where a monument, bearing his name, is still in existence. They were the sons of Victgilsus, whose father was Vecta, son of Woden; from whose stock the royal race of many provinces deduce their original.”

The founders of the Triple F Company traced their genealogy either from Hengist or from Horsa, one of them, anyway, thus their start-up capital originated in British war booty.

The Bede continues his account of the feats of the continental invaders on the isles:

“…In a short time, swarms of the aforesaid nations came over into the island, and they began to increase so much, that they became terrible to the natives themselves who had invited them. Then, having on a sudden entered into league with the Picts, whom they had by this time repelled by the force of their arms, they began to turn their weapons against their confederates. At first, they obliged them to furnish a greater quantity of provisions; and, seeking an occasion to quarrel, protested, that unless more plentiful supplies were brought them, they would break the confederacy, and ravage all the island; nor were they backward in putting their threats in execution. In short, the fire kindled by the hands of these pagans proved God’s just revenge for the crimes of the people; not unlike that which, being once lighted by the Chaldeans, consumed the walls and city of Jerusalem. For the barbarous conquerors acting here in the same manner, or rather the just Judge ordaining that they should so act, they plundered all the neighbouring cities and country, spread the conflagration from the eastern to the western sea, without any opposition, and covered almost every part of the devoted island. Public as well as private structures were overturned; the priests were everywhere slain before the altars; the prelates and the people, without any respect of persons, were destroyed with fire and sword; nor was there any to bury those who had been thus cruelly slaughtered.

WHEN the victorious army, having destroyed and dispersed the natives, had returned home to their own settlements…”

According to Triple F’s official version, it was from these victorious warriors, who returned to the continent with their rich booty, that the Frieslander family who founded the frozen potato company in the twentieth century traced their genealogy.

Historians working on contract for the company left unmentioned the fact that the Vergistus branch of the family on the continent had fallen into decline as early as the twelfth century. The last daughter, heiress to the blood of the noble plunderers, was taken to wife by a fugitive merchant from Khazaria entirely without dowry, like the lowest peasant. For a sack of silver, which made its way into the pocket of the suzerain, the merchant acquired his wife’s family name and established himself in Europe as a nobleman. Soon thereafter his wife died from a sudden infectious illness, and the newly ennobled merchant married a woman of his own tribe, and in the veins of their offspring there flowed not a single drop of English blood.

In Russian translation, Triple F could very well come across as analogous to “Triple H,” conveying both a Russian expletive and the names the company’s founding fathers: Hengist, Horsa, and Hazars.

The management of Triple F, as in many other corporations, had long understood that it was not at all necessary to maintain a headquarters in the capital city with its crowding and high real-estate prices. No, you didn’t need to be in a capital in order to stay connected to businesses the world over. Doesn’t the Internet work just as well out in the country, not to mention the telephone? Triple F chose the sleepy little town of Drachten as the site for their central office, 140 kilometers northeast of Amsterdam.

In Drachten, medieval brick buildings stand side by side with modern glass and concrete structures, and the population (not counting immigrant workers) is under 50,000. In the early 2000s Drachten became world famous when the town government took down all its traffic signals and street signs. From then on, the town’s 20,000 automobiles, along with bicycles and pedestrian traffic, were regulated exclusively by mutual courtesy and deference. And from that time on there hasn’t been a single traffic jam or serious accident with human casualties.

Peter Nils, himself a pureblood Frieslander with an MBA, easily got a job in the central office of Triple F and had been with the same employer for several years.

That morning, which was utterly ordinary in all respects, he went into the kitchen, kissed his wife—a somewhat angular and dry lady, who was getting ready to leave for her own job at a telecommunications company—tousled his pudgy son’s hair as the boy headed out the door on his way to school, and, after a breakfast of vitamin-enriched corn flakes with skim milk, backed his blue Toyota out of the garage and headed for the office.

The trip along the anarchical streets took no more than fifteen minutes, even factoring in the long interval that Peter spent waiting as a little old lady with a white cane crossed the roadway. Nils left his car in the convenient parking lot and proceeded up to the company’s floor, where he entered his tiny but private cubicle, which was partitioned off by a translucent, soundproof glass wall from the rest of the office, where the lower-level employees worked.

Nils quickly sorted through his e-mail and sent a few notes to each of the company’s business partners, including a short message to Maximus, his Russian colleague at Cold Plus. Nils indulged in a moment’s silence, recalling his adventures in St. Petersburg. He’d probably told Maximus a little too much about the pills. But no matter, that was better than letting him know the real truth about what Triple F was selling.

Nils went through his e-mail, signed some shipping documents and held a five-minute briefing for his staff. Having dispensed with his regular morning routine, Peter closed his office door, sank down on the chair in front of his monitor and entered a web address into his browser: www.i-xxx.com.

SEX WITHOUT BORDERS

The site’s welcome page was plastered with photographs of half-naked models and invitations to enter virtual sex video chat rooms. Uninhibited Latin American, Nigerian, Thai, even Aleut girls were available to talk to you in real time. Nils was a member; he typed in his password and clicked on the banner for the “Russian Girls” room.

An auburn-haired girl with a clipped-on hair extension, wearing a skimpy slip, sat on a sofa in front of her computer, fanning herself with an out-of-date issue of Liza magazine. She looked bored.

Noticing that a member had logged on, she perked up, bared a mouthful of even, white teeth, and waved seductively into her webcam. There was picture, but no sound. Smiling, she began typing her own brand of broken English into the chat box:

Hi cowboy! What’s your name?

Peter typed in his answer: My name is Peter. I’m from the Netherlands. Let’s talk!

Sure Peter! With all my pleasure… What do you want me… to tell about?

The girl cast an anxious glance at the clock displayed in the lower right corner of her screen. Every hour of commercial chat cost the “member” fifty euros. The girls got forty percent of the final tally. But her contract specified that unless she can keep the client online for at least ten minutes, she gets nothing.

My name is Tanya. I’m 19 years old. And I like to talk with guys about desires… Also I like to show my body…

To keep Peter’s attention, the girl somewhat abruptly lowered the left strap of her slip, exposing half of her breast.

That’s nice. U R beautiful.

Nils scooted his chair back slightly, loosened his belt and slipped his hand through his fly.

I don’t have much experience in love and sex. Indeed, I’m just a little girl, you see. Do you like foolish little girls like me?

The girl lowered the other strap and exposed the upper part of her breasts down to the edge of her bra, which, modest girl that she was, she evidently never removed, even in the tanning booth.

Yeah, baby, go on!

I think that you are very handsome. Oh, let me imagine, you are a big man with great gadget. And you know how to do all these nasty things with girls.

Yessss, I do, baby.

Can you teach me? Please, say to me, how can I give pleasure to you?

The model hitched up her slip, and the edge of her white panties peeked out from underneath.

Tell me about your country.

Sorry?

Tell me about Russia, baby.

Oh… Russia, yes…

The girl hesitated. She hadn’t encountered this particular perversion before. She was usually asked to spread her legs and expose herself, to get down on all fours and poke various objects into her various orifices, but no one had ever asked her to talk about Russia. But she quickly collected herself, and began searching her memory for tidbits from her school textbooks or training manuals for tour guides and translators. Yes, she had taken English in night school when she’d been planning a career as a tour guide. Her original idea had been to take foreigners on excursions around the Golden Ring… But offering tours around her own body had turned out to be far more profitable.

Russia is a great country. We have many forests, lakes, rivers… Yeah, deep rivers. And fields with smooth grass, very smooth, just like my skin…

Tanya started to improvise, running her hand up and down her breasts as she spoke. Peter’s grip on his cock tightened and he began to stroke it slowly.

And what about people?

People are nice and friendly. But you are better, I’m sure!

The girl was afraid he’d get jealous of the male Russian population.

Actually, there are not so many people in our country. Most part of territory is a virgin land.

Virgin?

Virgin land. Ever waiting for strong man like you.

To fuck it?

Yeah, to fuck it over! That is our history. In the very beginning, as it is said in ancient chronicle, people of Russia approached men from West and said “Our land is large and plentiful, but without order. Come and possess us.” So it is now. We got oil and gas, wood, furs, caviar, and also plenty of lonely girls. We got many resources. But we have lack of fuckers like you.

U got me now, baby!

I feel it! And I’m horny!

Sing! Sing a Russian song, baby!

The apple and pear trees are in bloom,

Mists have come over the river…

Oh, yeah! How about poetry? Do you know any Russian poetry?

I think I do…

Let me have it!

Tatyana’s Letter to Onegin:

I’m writing you this declaration—

What more can I in candor say?

It may be now your inclination

To scorn me and to turn away…

Ah, shit! I’m coming! Who’s your daddy?

My daddy?

Who is your daddy, fucking Russia?

You. U R my daddy!!!

Peter came into a napkin he had had the foresight to stick into his pants and immediately clicked exit. The session was over. Nine minutes and change.

Nils tossed the napkin with his slimy unborn offspring into the trash can. Then he took a second napkin from the desk, carefully wiped his hands, and tossed it away after the first one. He sat limply at his desk for a couple of minutes, eyes closed. Visions arose into his consciousness: golden fields of wheat, oil rigs, mountains of diamonds, piles of bearskins, a castle with rows of severed heads adorning its walls, and, of course, forestfuls of graceful, supple birches. He pictured himself riding along a cobblestone road through Russian pastoral landscapes, encased in glittering steel armor and wearing a helmet with a splendid plume on top. Russian serfs, notably female, lined both sides of the roadway, all of them on their hands and knees, and one of them, a maiden of striking beauty, came out into the middle of the road to greet him, her master, with a silver tray bearing a loaf of fragrant, freshly baked bread, a salt cellar, and a small bowl filled with pure cocaine.

Peter took a moment to savor his dream, then turned back to his work.

He had to deal with a Russian complaint that had come in the night before concerning the quality of a shipment of frozen potatoes. The Russians had gotten picky lately. They used to accept anything, so long as the label said “Product of the Netherlands,” and never used to complain. Now they’d started spelling everything out meticulously in their contracts, and when the shipments arrived they would bring a surveyor along; they would fish around in the cartons, break the seals, and would call in some expert at the slightest suspicion; before you knew it, they’d be lodging a complaint.

It was the oil that had spoiled them. First oil, then gas. And the throngs of beautiful girls whom the Russians themselves could screw for nothing, but who would charge foreigners just for looking. It wouldn’t last forever, though. Their own Russian expert, a member of the Academy of Sciences, said that the known oil reserves would only last five or six more years. And, in the meantime, the Russians had forgotten how to plow their land and grow their own food. The time would come, he said, when they would crawl to the Netherlands on their knees for a piece of rotten potato and would beg the Dutch to buy their own daughters.

But all that was just poetry. Prose required that the complaint be forwarded to the supplier, in China. Triple F actually purchased its Dutch potatoes from a different Dutch company, but they were still delivered directly from the Chinese port of Qingdao.

Nils had long suspected that the unscrupulous Asians had been pasting fake labels on their own low-grade potatoes, substituting them for the name-brand product, licensed and monitored by a European company, that they had been contracted to supply. Nils had already written his Dutch partner about the complaint. But today he decided to speak directly with the Chinese export manager, a guy named Ni Guan. This Ni Guan dealt with direct exports to Russia, apparently through that same company, Cold Plus. The Chinese sold frozen fish straight to the Russians, but their potatoes went through European packaging plants. Russia was the ultimate purchaser, and Ni also handled the potatoes accounts. And, really, they didn’t devote sufficient attention to the quality of their deliveries, figuring—based on their previous experience with the Russian consumer—that Russians weren’t picky and would eat anything. But the times were a-changing. The Russian purchasers were bringing their European partners to heel; in their turn the Europeans would have to train the Asians.

JASPER ROOT

The time difference between Qingdao and St. Petersburg is five hours. Between Qingdao and Drachten, seven hours. Ni Guan was about ready to leave work when the phone on his desk rang. The secretary reported that Peter Nils from the Frozen French Fries company was on the line, and she connected them.

His European customer had a complaint about potatoes; the official version had arrived by fax an hour before. Ni listened patiently without interrupting, taking notes on a scrap of paper, as the Dutch representative berated him. Ni promised that the problem would be solved to their satisfaction, and that in the future his company would pay special attention to the quality of goods being sent to the Netherlands.

Ni-Eddie hung up, gathered his cell phone, apartment keys, and wallet into a plastic bag and left the office. On the way down in the elevator, all he could think about was some hot rice or noodles. It had been another busy day at work; Eddie hadn’t even had time for lunch.

On the first floor, he was surprised to see his young colleague Tsin Chi—Cindy—waiting for him at the door to the elevator. Ni gave her a polite smile and bowed his head slightly to convey bye, see you tomorrow, poka. In addition to a couple of Chinese dialects, Ni also knew English well, could communicate tolerably in Russian, and had recently started learning German.

But Cindy blocked his way. She stared directly into her boss’s eyes and didn’t say a word.

“Comrade Tsin?”

“Yes, my lord?”

“Did… you have something you wanted to ask me?”

“Yes, sir, I did. I wanted to ask why you’ve been avoiding me. Maybe I’m not pretty enough for you? Maybe you’re holding out for a supermodel off the cover of Playboy, and nothing less will do? Maybe I should sign up for a photo session and bring you a dirty magazine with my photos in it, so that you’ll notice me as a woman?”

Tsin’s voice was a little too loud for the lobby, and Ni glanced around uneasily. The elevator doors parted and a crowd of coworkers poured out. Comrade Luan, the department head, walked by. Ni bowed to him, and his boss gave a barely detectable nod in return.

“Let’s talk somewhere else. I’m starving—you must have seen that I didn’t have time for lunch. We can have dinner together. Follow me.”

Eddie made for the exit. Cindy waited a moment, then followed him out.

There were a number of restaurants around the business complex, but Eddie didn’t want to run into anyone from the company. Why fuel gossip? He crossed the street to the bus stop and boarded one headed for the entertainment district by the shore. Cindy got on after him. The bus started off and merged into the heavy traffic creeping out of town.

A half-hour later the high-tech buildings of the business district were behind them, and they found themselves in a little Chinese version of Europe, complete with red-tile-roofed houses and neatly kept gardens.

Qingdao, translated from Chinese, means “green island.” Indeed, this part of the city, viewed from the ocean side, looks like one big park, with German-style mansions scattered about. In 1898 China sold Qingdao to Germany, along with the right to build a railroad and develop mineral deposits within a fifteen-kilometer zone on both sides of the tracks. Coal-mining activity and the port spurred development, and the town grew and flourished. The Europeans introduced electricity and founded a university—the one where Ni Guan got his degree.

After the Germans left, history hurled Qingdao into chaos: The Japanese occupied the city, then Chinese revolutionaries took over, then the Japanese occupied it again, and then China again, the Kuomintang, and again Chinese revolutionaries.

With the Chinese industrial boom, Qingdao became the major shipping port of the eastern province of Shandun, with an annual turnover of over two hundred million tons. Skyscrapers rose and filled with businesses. In the free economic zone of Qingdao, capitalism began to develop at a fantastic pace, under sensitive supervision by communist warships with large-caliber weaponry: The port of Qingdao is the home base for the People’s Republic of China’s North Sea Fleet.

The German colonists were gone, but they left behind those red-tile-roofed mansions and the best beer in all of China: Qingdao (Tsingtao). Ni was giving this beer some serious consideration.

They got off the bus and went into a small establishment that served German food—that is to say, Bavarian sausages and Chinese beer. Ni and Tsin sat down and gave their order to a deferential young waiter, then lit up a couple of Great Wall cigarettes—made in China from Chinese tobacco at a factory licensed by a multinational corporation. Ni smoked the strong kind; Tsin’s were light, thin, menthol cigarettes, made for ladies.

The restaurant’s radio played gently in the background, Chinese pop. The song was about a girl’s love for her fiancé, a sailor who was heading out to sea. Despite the melancholy lyrics, the melody and rhythm were fairly upbeat, as though the girl had no real intention of pacing the shore in solitude while her betrothed plowed the briny depths.

Ni sat silently; only after he’d finished off a couple of sausages and a half liter of cold Qingdao did he finally speak:

“Tsin, for a long time now I have been wanting to tell you what a wonderful girl you are, and how much I like you, but…”

“But what? Is there someone else?”

Tsin hadn’t touched her sausages and had just been staring at Ni the whole time, which made it a little awkward for him to eat.

“No, I don’t have anyone else.”

“So, what, you’re gay?”

Ni nearly spit out his mouthful of beer. His face flushed bright red.

“Comrade Tsin! What are you talking about?”

“Don’t call me comrade, here. Here I’m just a girl who wants to find her way into your bed. So the question, given the circumstances, is perfectly normal.”

Her candor shocked Eddie. Though he himself had been wanting to have this conversation, in a sense.

“No, that’s not it. That is, it’s not that I’m gay… it’s something else… I’m not gay… shit!”

Cindy brightened and slapped Eddie gently on the arm.

“Right, boss, I get it. You’re not gay. So wouldn’t this be a good time for us to drink out of the same glass like they do in Europe, so we can officially be friends?”

Without waiting for an answer, Tsin took her glass and entwined her arm with Ni’s. They drank and Tsin leaned across the table for a kiss.

“No!”

Ni put his empty glass down on the table, leaned away, and looked around to see if there was anyone nearby who might know him.

“You see, Tsin,” he said, “there are certain things that I just can’t tell you about. It’s about my family. I couldn’t get married just now.”

“What did you say?”

“I’m not free. For the next few years I can’t allow myself to marry and have children, I mean, a child. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.

Ni’s confession made no impression on Tsin.

“So?”

“What do you mean, ‘so’?”

“What do you mean, ‘what do I mean’?”

Eddie was confused. He would have thought it would all be obvious to Cindy, who was, after all, a clever young lady.

“I can’t marry you, so we can’t date, or be together.”

“Who told you that?”

Ni was utterly and sincerely baffled at this. Then Tsin’s shoulders began to quiver. She covered her mouth with her hand and laughed silently.

When she recovered, she bent her head over the table and said, a little too loudly:

“Eddie, I don’t want to marry you. I don’t want to marry anyone right now, if you must know. I just want someone to sleep with. That’s all, get it? Tingi-tingi, chpok-chpok, like in the movies. You watch porn, don’t you? Of course you do, everyone does. Or even better, like in Japanese anime. I want you to lay me out on your bed, spread my legs out wide, and fuck me hard. I want you to lean me up against the windowsill and screw me there. I want you to screw me on the floor, pressing my head into the tatami. I want you to flatten me up against the wall and lift up my left leg. I want…”

“Enough!”

With trembling hands, Ni got out his wallet, counted out some bills, tossed them on the table, and stood up. But Tsin took his hand and stared into his eyes.

Ni Guan felt his resolve weaken. He was going to have to give in.

“I live alone.” Cindy raised her hand. The waiter appeared.

“Call us a cab, please.”

The Qingdao weather report came on the radio: 23.5 degrees Celsius, overcast, a north wind, four meters per second, humidity 94.1%. When Eddie and Cindy left the café, a light rain was falling. The cab arrived. Cindy tipped the waiter, who had accompanied them out, and gave the driver her address.

They rode the whole way without a word. Cindy pressed up against Eddie but refrained from any improper touching. She sat demurely with her hip pressed against his, holding his hand. Ni’s eyes clouded over. The mere touch of the girl’s narrow, warm palm filled him with desire.

The taxi took its time, driving through the entertainment district and the residential area of the city with its blocks of nondescript, identical high-rise apartment buildings. The driver honked apathetically, steering through the thick crowd of cars, motorcycles, bikes, and pedestrians.

At the entrance to Cindy’s building a gray-haired woman stared mutely at them as they walked in. “From the apartment executive committee, no doubt,” thought Ni. “She’ll file a report. To hell with her!”

Tsin unlocked her door and they tumbled into a tiny room. The only furnishings were a small sofa bed, a nightstand, and a wooden bookshelf nailed into the wall.

Ni picked up a book at random. Lyrics by Wang Wei, a Chinese poet from the Tang dynasty period.

Ni opened the book and read aloud:

Tsin continued, reciting from memory:

Ni Guan continued:

Tsin Chi continued:

…Outside the window, the rain stopped, then started again, and the northern wind hurled handfuls of ocean water against the glass. Ni and Tsin lay naked on the narrow sofa bed, clinging to each other and smoking Great Wall cigarettes, tossing the butts into an empty Pepsi can.

“Ni!”

“Tsin?”

“Those things you couldn’t tell me about, why you can’t get married, do they have to do with some violation of the Party’s demographic program?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have an illegitimate child? Maybe two or three?”

“Ten. Like a sailor with a girl and a baby in every port. No, of course not.”

“So there’s no kid?”

“There is one, but it’s not mine.”

“Oh!”

Tsin asked no more questions. She snuffed out her half-smoked cigarette, propped herself up onto her onto her elbow, and looked out the window.

“When I was a kid I lived out in the country. There was a poster on the biggest building in the town, which was the school: ‘Fewer children—more pigs!’ I saw that poster every day. And when I learned to read it was the first thing that I read all by myself. It scared me. I’m still scared. Sometimes I have nightmares: I’m in labor, surrounded by doctors. I’m screaming and straining, but then it’s over. The baby cries, but something’s wrong. The doctor in his white coat holds the baby up for me to see, and it’s a piglet. It just gets worse from there. Everyone congratulates me—it turns out there are sixteen piglets in my farrow and that they’re going to send me to Beijing and put me on exhibit at the big agricultural exposition. I also have this other recurring dream: I’m in the maternity hospital, and there are rows of basinets with babies in them, and then these butchers come in with knives, and they chop the babies into pieces and throw them into a big plastic bag, and I see that the babies are pigs. And one of the butchers says that suckling pig is really tasty with sweet-and-sour sauce. It was only when I got older that I wondered what the slogan meant. People think that it means you need to have fewer babies and work harder on the farm, raising pigs and other animals for meat. But it could mean something else, that it’s the babies who eat up the pigs—all those babies will grow up and eat meat, or else eat all the food meant for the pigs, which means, either way, that the more children there are, the fewer pigs. Which means that the Party and the country need pigs more than they need children.”

“You’re quite an impressionable girl,” said Ni.

But said nothing about the big poster in his own hometown that read “One more baby, one more grave!” He’d had nightmares too. One where all the children in his class are lined up a row, holding shovels, digging their own graves. And when they look up he sees that their eyes are glazed over, that they’re already dead. And the skin peels off their bodies in long strips that fall to the ground and mix with the dirt. And he realizes that he is also one of those children digging their graves, and that he, too, is dead.

LOVE, RUSSIAN STYLE

Semipyatnitsky had lunch in a café on the first floor of his office building, a place he called the Barf Bar. A plate of dubious-looking beef with undercooked rice. He didn’t go to the Harbin today; too hot—24 degrees Celsius!—to drag himself all that way. The heat was unusual for St. Petersburg, and particularly unbearable due to high humidity and all the fumes and automobile exhaust filling the air. Anyway, the mere thought of sweet-and-sour pork made him sick.

He spent the second half of his lunch hour at his desk. To avoid work-related distractions, Maximus cranked up his MP3 player and put on his earphones. B.G.—Boris Grebenshikov.

In Chinese erotic poetry the “jasper root” served as the conventional metaphor for the male organ. Maximus could have written entire volumes of hermeneutics, interpreting the songs of Grebenshikov’s band Aquarium. Though there’s already a commentary along these lines in Ilya Stogoff’s novel Macho Men Don’t Cry, which hit the seventies generation with the force of revelation.

It’s about life in our day and age, though the meaning is eternal, as always with B.G. To live and strive… for what? For whom? For the children. But what will those children be striving for? Where will they be going? And what could be more cruel: to be fruitful and multiply, to create a new being who will not be able to find his own way, and to abandon him without a single indicator of the right path? Just a stone where three roads meet: Whichever way you choose will cost you dearly…

The song went on, and Maximus listened. Then lunch break was over, and Semipyatnitsky tuned back in to his work.

The warehouse was refusing to accept two containers of shrimp from Canada.

Maximus listened patiently to fifteen minutes of telephone hysterics from the warehouse director: There’s no place to put the shrimp, the warehouse is already crammed full of shrimp. Then he hung up and issued an order to his assistant:

“Sasha, have the containers sent from the port to the warehouse. Today.”

“But how? There’s no space at the warehouse!”

“There’s plenty of space. They probably took too many shrimp pills and started hallucinating.”

“Meaning?”

“Forget about it. They’ll figure something out—they’ll find a place and unload them there. It’s not the first time.”

Maximus never indulged the warehouse workers. So they always wanted to rough him up when they ran into him at company get-togethers. They would come at him foaming at the mouth, fists clenched, but their aggression would dissipate when it came into contact with his indifference. And this time Semipyatnitsky recalled vividly what he had seen during his unannounced visit, when he’d gone to retrieve the Dutch pills. This relieved him of the last shreds of whatever sympathy he might have had for the blue-collar Cold Plus employees.

The working day began to wane. Maximus ducked into the restroom and gulped down a couple of the pink pills. There were still a few left in his jacket pocket. It wasn’t that he particularly needed to get high; rather, a sort of spirit of adventure had come over him, an irresistible desire to test their effects one more time, to see how they would work with another person. That is, how they would work on another person.

All things considered, and given the way things had been going lately, he was surprised not to find the goddess of sex from the next office over in the elevator waiting for him. She wasn’t in the lobby on the first floor either. Maximus went outside and lit a cigarette near the front door. He was sure that she would turn up.

Sure enough, five minutes later, there she was, coming out the door. She had a preoccupied air about her, a look of distress, which in no way diminished her allure.

“Greetings, Sweetie!”

Maximus was startled by his own lack of self-consciousness. The drug hadn’t had time to take effect yet. It had to be psychosomatic: The mere thought of the pills’ imminent effect dissolved all his inhibitions.

That was how he used to pick up girls, in his distant, lost youth. Maximus had only two phrases in his repertoire: “Greetings, Sweetie!” and “Got any plans for tonight?” But as he had pointed out at the time, when a friend made fun of his tactics, why bother to think up anything original when these worked just fine? Not every time, objected his friend. Maximus responded that there’s only one absolutely guaranteed method to get a woman into your bed—just grab her and give her the cross-thigh flip.

The girl gave Semipyatnitsky a surprised look and smiled oh so slightly.

“Greetings yourself.”

“Not feeling so well today?”

“I have a headache.”

Maximus reached into his pocket, got out a couple of the pills, and held them out to her.

“These work pretty well. I use them myself.”

The girl hesitated, but took one nonetheless.

“Take two. The dose is two. Go ahead—you can take them without water.”

The goddess complied.

“My car is over there. Let’s go.”

“I live pretty far away, in Prosvet, on Enlightenment Prospect.”

“You’re right, that’s pretty far. Let’s find some place closer.”

When a man has absolute confidence in what he’s saying and doing, Maximus reflected, there isn’t a woman alive who won’t give in. The goddess climbed into the car. Maximus started the engine and backed out of his parking space.

“What’s your name, my beauty?”

“Maya.”

Maximus gave an approving nod. That’s about what he’d been expecting. Maya had been the name of his first, unrequited love, a girl he’d met in Young Pioneer Camp, when he was little. Not that little, actually. Meaning, if things had worked out differently and if he had been a bit surer of himself at the time, something might have come of it. So this love of his had remained in his memory as an unrealized desire, along with the sensation of his first fully conscious erection.

Maya is also the name of the Hindu goddess of material nature, of illusion embodied.

“Maximus Semipyatnitsky. Descendent of the ancient Khazar race, heir of the Great Khagans. Writer of genius. And leading specialist in the Import Department of Cold Plus Company. Though the latter is nothing more than an embarrassing stumble along my world-historical path.”

“What an honor for a girl as simple and modest as myself!”

The goddess had perked up, and it showed. Girls like to be amused.

“Are you from Barnaul?”

“No, from Karaganda.”

“I thought it was something like that.”

“Why? Do I look like some simple country girl?”

“No. You look beautiful. And only girls from the country are beautiful anymore. Have you ever been to Ireland?”

“No.”

“Me neither. So let’s go to an Irish pub.”

Maximus parked in a cozy alley near the pub he had in mind. He figured he could drink his fill and then call a cab.

“The best cocktail here is called the Irish Flag. See, it’s got three different-colored layers. No, don’t stir it. Just drink.”

Five pairs of cocktails made their way down the hatch smoothly, encountering no obstacles.

“Now tell me a story!”

“What can I tell you, O Khazar writer of genius?”

“Whatever suits the occasion. How about how your stepfather raped you? We wouldn’t want to violate the conventions of pseudo-psychological novels and movies.”

“But my stepfather didn’t rape me! I don’t even have a stepfather! Just a mom and a dad, and, sorry to disappoint you, they were absolutely normal people.”

“The main thing is to not disappoint the reader.”

“What reader?”

“Hasn’t it ever seemed to you that your life is being narrated, bit by bit? Don’t you ever see a computer monitor inside your head full of sentences lighting up all by themselves?”

“Oh, I get it… I can see there’s no fooling you. It was my grandfather.”

“It was your grandfather what?”

“My grandfather was my first lover, if you can call it that.”

“Details. We need details. Every last one.”

“I know. That’s where the devil is, in the details.”

“How’d you know?”

“I read it somewhere.”

The girl adopted an appropriately reflective pose, lit a cigarette, affected a nervous air, and began her story:

“When I was really little, I used to spend a lot of time with my grandpa. My parents worked. My grandpa really loved me and used to spoil me. He used to take me in his lap and kiss me. At first there was nothing unusual about it—it was just a kid and her grandfather, like all children and their grandparents: He’d kiss me on the forehead or the cheeks. Sometimes on my tummy. But later, when I was seven or eight, he started to kiss me down there, lower. A lot lower. And it wasn’t just simple kissing. He tried to poke his tongue in, as far as it would go. And his rough cheeks and chin used to scratch the insides of my thighs. But I put up with it. I really loved my grandpa. He never asked me not to tell, but I knew that it wasn’t the kind of thing you talked about. So it was our little secret. I got older, started going through puberty. And our one-on-one sessions continued. We came up with our own special code names for it. Not the usual stuff—honeybees and flowers and other clichés. No, he would say: ‘I’m most inclined to partake of water from the crystal spring.’ Or: ‘A ray of moonlight is thrusting through the clouds.’ He was an artist at heart, my grandfather—he had a thing for classical Chinese poetry. For the first few years I was only putting up with it all, but with time I began to experience certain sensations, and came to enjoy our sessions. I was fairly shy as a child, didn’t have a lot of friends. I would just hurry home from school and go to Grandpa’s. I’d come in without a word and curl up in a threadbare old armchair. And he would cheerfully ask me about how my day at school had gone, and would sit down on the floor in front of me, lift my skirt, and lower my panties and toss them on the floor. Then he would direct his attention to the ‘spring.’ He would spend a long time down there, a half hour, sometimes a whole hour. If no one interrupted us. And no one would. My parents came back late from work, and my grandmother had died long before—I don’t remember her at all. He would lick his way around my inner parts, which were as yet completely hairless, and I would stroke his gray head. Just like a grownup. He never did anything else with me. I don’t know why—maybe he couldn’t get it up, or maybe he was afraid to hurt or frighten me. But he never asked me to… well, you know.”

“So how did it all end?”

“It didn’t, really. He just died. For me this was, and remains, the greatest loss of my life. I remember his body in the coffin in our apartment, in the same room that used to be his, and where the two of us used to do what we did together… The hearse came—they closed the coffin and took my grandfather to the cemetery. There, in front of the freshly dug grave, they lifted the coffin lid so that his relatives could say their last good-byes. But apparently they’d done a bad job of securing his chin… they’d had to bring the coffin down four flights of stairs… and the ride in the hearse had involved a fair bit of jostling. Anyway, when they opened the coffin, I saw his face—I was standing right there, closer than anyone else… his jaw had shifted to one side, and his long, violet-colored tongue was dangling out of his mouth. The same tongue that… well. My legs gave way under me and I fainted. Everyone thought that it was from grief or from horror at the sight of him, but that wasn’t it at all.”

The air over their table filled with silence. The goddess lifted her glass and downed her sixth cocktail in a single swig.

“So, you think I’m some kind of pervert?” she asked after a minute.

“I think that the worst perversion is to be what they call a ‘normal person,’” Maximus replied. “To get up every morning, shave or put on your makeup, go to the office, work all day long, fill your refrigerator and empty it again, spend your nights in front of the TV. People who live that way are the real sickos. That is what I think.”

Maximus lifted his own sixth cocktail and, like the goddess, downed it in one swig.

Outside the bar, Maximus embraced Maya tenderly, and she laid her head trustfully on his shoulder. The excess of emotion overflowing inside him brought Maximus close to tears. It occurred to him that in Russia, true love was actually pity. Perhaps that’s where the Russian soul most reveals its essentially feminine nature. They say that it’s when a woman feels pity that she truly loves. Though admittedly it’s only Russians who say that. Or maybe all love is really made up of pity, compassion. What else can a single, lonely soul, trapped in the cage of the material world and suffering a multitude of sorrows, feel toward another soul like itself? And don’t the Hindus say that all souls are by nature female?

Then, out of the middle of nowhere, he remembered the classic anecdote about Lieutenant Rzhevsky.

Lieutenant Rzhevsky goes into the officers’ club and says: “Gentlemen! What has Russia come to? I was walking down the street just now, and this little girl comes up to me, age twelve or so, a perfect little blue-eyed angel, but skinny as a toothpick and all in rags, and she says: ‘Uncle, give me a piece of bread, and I’ll do anything you want me to!’ And just imagine, gentlemen, I did—I fucked her and cried, fucked her and cried!”

That’s so disgusting, thought Semipyatnitsky. But it’s still pity, isn’t it. Pity and love. Love, Russian style.

FOREIGN POLICY

And Saat began his new life as the Khagan. First, as the Great Bek had instructed, he had to visit the harem. And in the harem there were ten sevens of women, one from each of seventy different tribes, the seventy peoples that Great Khazaria had united together on the bright path, just as it says in the Khazar national anthem. The Khagan’s couriers had gone out into the towns and villages, the forests and encampments, and requisitioned these women, selecting them in accordance with the ideal anthropological standard that had been set for each tribe. Only the most beautiful were brought to the Khagan’s palace.

At first Saat thought that he would try out a different bedroom each night: that is, one wife per night. But when he sat down and clicked the pearly beads of his silver abacus, he realized that that this wasn’t going to work. At that rate each noble princess would experience the bliss of love only four times a year. Or maybe five, for the ones early in the rotation, and if it was a leap year. The girls would get lonely. So he would have to steel his flesh and sacrifice himself on the altar of the state. Saat resolved to visit four wives every night.

A monumental labor. Every third night or so, of course, the demon in him would fully savor the pleasures of the flesh. But then he wouldn’t be able to stand any more, could not bear to look upon any more, any more breasts or thighs, any more heavy-lidded eyes! And when he again smelled their perfume, or that fishy smell between their legs, he would just get disgusted and feel like throwing up.

But this wasn’t about his pleasure: It was a matter of state. This much Saat learned on the first morning. He dragged himself on rubbery legs back to his gilded bed with its swan-down mattress, hoping to sleep it off until sunset. But a delegation appeared in his room unbidden, four scribes holding waxed slates, and the Bek himself at their head. They arranged themselves around the room, each on a special seat that had been prepared for him, styluses at ready, all ears. And the Great Bek spoke:

“Tell me, O Khagan, how it went with your wives. State first their name, then their tribe of origin and ID number. And spare us no detail!”

Saat hesitated, but the Great Bek encouraged him: “Bear in mind this is not an intimate, personal matter. These are noble maidens serving the welfare of the realm.”

So Saat then told them everything, keeping no secrets; he told how and how many; he told of contortions and positions, of breasts and thighs, of loud moans and passionate climaxes; he told of women who lay still and unresponsive like logs, and of those who craved all manner of debauchery or asked to be whipped, who summoned maidservants to watch, who ordered him to crawl about on all fours and to drink amber-colored urine; he told of the one who said she wanted the stag to drink deeply of her spring, who stroked his hair and called him Grandpa.

Saat told them everything, and the scribes wrote it all down, scratching it into their slates, and the Great Bek rested his head in his hand and thought various thoughts.

Afterward the Great Bek studied the scribes’ slates. He then summoned his ministers and warriors and issued instructions:

“Number One’s people are restless, they must be tamed. Take away their bread and beer—that will make them scrawnier and less likely to cause trouble. Number Two’s people are strong and hostile—bring in some border troops and have them needle away at them with small-scale banditry: Have them beat the men and ravish the maidens, though not so much as to cause any harm to the economy or to the glory of Khazaria in the land beyond the hills. Number Three’s people are lethargic, sleeping even when awake—send our musicians and actors forth to the bazaars, have them play loudly on their flutes and entertain the masses day and night. That may awaken them. As for Number Four’s people: Leave everything as it is. It’s best not to touch them—or you’ll cause a stink on both sides from the River Itil all the way to the Khazar Sea.”

The Bek departed with the scribes and the new Khagan collapsed on his bed, deeply moved: Great is the wisdom of tradition! What better way to get to know a country than by fucking all its crevasses? And to use for that purpose a sweet, noble girl. And by knowing the peoples of the realm in this way, it is easy to maintain power, and to preserve the unity of the mighty Khaganate.

PROSPECT OF ENLIGHTENMENT

Early the next morning Maximus sat at the open window of an apartment on Enlightenment Prospect, greedily gulping in the fresh air, which hadn’t yet become saturated with poisonous exhaust. Maya lay on the sofa bed, having kicked off the covers, with her arms, legs, hair, and breasts splayed every which way across the sheets.

Maximus looked over at her and felt that he no longer felt anything. Not love, not passion, not even pity. Well, maybe a touch of pity remained, but it was mixed with scorn, not love.

So, thought Maximus, does this mean that there’s no such thing as love? It’s all just pills?

How did we survive before, before the Dutch came up with their drug?

Or were the pills something like insulin—get hooked on them, and before you know it your heart loses the ability to process its own emotions without a fresh dose?

Or have the pills always been with us, just in some other form?

Maybe the girl was in fact beautiful. Yes, sure she was, even very much so. But it was a strange, deathly beauty! The beauty of a corpse. For she would be just as beautiful if she were to die right this minute. Maybe even more beautiful—a little pallor would add the perfect finishing touch.

Beauty is the promise of happiness. Semipyatnitsky had long known this maxim, and had even quoted it somewhere in one of his stories. But now he saw that the promise had become a lie. Everything is mere illusion, and beauty is the delusion that there is happiness to be had tomorrow, when you make it your own. But once you do, it all empties out. And you understand that possessing it wasn’t the point; that it’s impossible, in fact. The girl, fine; you can possess her in a social or physical sense, but not her beauty. Because beauty isn’t something that belongs to her alone. Beauty is from some other, celestial plane. Only there can beauty, and perfection, and happiness be realized.

Four used condoms, full of semen, lay in a little pile on the doily on the table. And all the temptations of the flesh, all possible aesthetic achievements, even the great works of art from the portrait of Mona Lisa to the verses of Igor Severianin, from the architecture of Versailles to the music of the Beatles, appeared to Maximus in his present state like just so many used rubbers.

Maya’s head slipped off the pillow and gave out a refined, whistling snore. Maximus dressed and left the apartment. The door slammed behind him.

When he came out the front of the building, he found himself surrounded on all sides by identical concrete towers, rising like great cliffs pitted with rows and rows of identical, nest-like apartments. Whenever he found himself in the northern suburbs, Maximus felt as though he’d landed in some strange and alien place—if not a different planet, then at least an unfamiliar city.

Yes, the Cyclopean hulks of the buildings loomed up and blocked the sky. People emerged from the front doors of the towers and merged together to form a great stream, flowing toward the only point of egress, prosvet, sliver of light, sliver of dawn, Prospect of Enlightenment. They resembled the throngs of souls on Judgment Day, destined either to be borne up to Paradise or hurled on a downward spiral through the circles of Hell.

Must be heading for the metro.

Maximus lit up a cigarette and joined the crowd.