The delta of this inspired operation allowed Bee Trust to increase its assets and to live high on the hog. The bank’s offices occupied a five-story building in the historical city center, a palace that had originally belonged to some prince or count. Immediately after it acquired the building, the bank hired a Finnish company to completely overhaul and remodel it in the European style. The aged gilding and eighteenth-century plaster moldings were knocked down, the mosaics and frescoes were scraped from the walls, and the decorative columns, crowned with sculptures of ancient heroes and divinities, were dismantled.
Four laid-off museum employees joined forces with a schoolteacher and formed a picket line outside the building to protest the destruction of a monument of historical and cultural value. The demonstrators spread out some pages from the newspaper Pravda on the concrete foundation of the palace fence and set out a bottle of vodka, a can of sprats in tomato sauce, and some spiced smelt and black bread. The protest went on for well over two hours. The intrepid defenders of culture invoked the memory of the palace’s Italian architect and its original owner, a high-ranking general and patron of the arts, a nobleman, and, as legend would have it, a descendent of Khazar royalty. Periodically they would shout out a slogan, demanding that respect be shown to the cultural treasures within. They then turned to one another and indulged in effusive outbursts of mutual esteem.
The protest came to a halt when the bank’s security system summoned the local militia, who proceeded to bundle the exhausted resistance fighters into a Kozel van and truck them off somewhere—most likely to be tortured in some windowless chamber.
The international media ignored the protest; most likely they were preoccupied with covering the meteoric rise of a new pop star—or should we say, pop “idol”?—by the name of Britney Spears.
Whatever the case, in 1998 the Russian government declared bankruptcy; that is, it declined to meet its debt obligations. At that point it was discovered that a critical amount of Bee Trust assets were held in the form of short-term government bonds.
Some time elapsed before everything came crashing down. For over a year the bank continued to occupy its remodeled European palace and maintained its sponsorship of the city hockey team. But the times kept on a-changing. The leading man of the TV drama that is Kremlin politics was replaced; new people moved into city government posts, notably those in charge of disbursing the municipal budget. These people had their own personal banks. Bee Trust was squeezed out.
Actually, the expression “came crashing down” is a little too melodramatic. Yes, Bee Trust, as a legal entity, underwent the bankruptcy and liquidation processes. Yes, bank employees who had become accustomed to an excessively cushy lifestyle lost their jobs. Yes, a few small-account holders—a couple thousand retirees—were ruined. But small stuff, really, in the grand scheme of things.
As for our Young Communist capitalists, they no longer depended exclusively on their bank resources. Each one of them held diversified assets: real estate, large amounts of cash both in hard currency and in accounts in countries with stable banking systems, as well as shares and interests in other branches of business.
One of those branches was import. Previously the Bee Trust group had dealt in the whole spectrum of food products. Now the time had come to break down into narrower areas of specialization. The era when one day you’d buy computers, the next prophylactics, and a week later bananas—all the while transporting non-ferrous metals and timber across the border—was over. Each different business staked out its own territory, with a finite number of players: authorized personnel only. Following the well-established laws of economics, the Russian economy entered the stage of monopoly capitalism.
The Bee Trust group imported all kinds of food products: fresh tropical fruits, vegetables, processed and canned goods, frozen foods, alcoholic beverages. But it didn’t have the capacity or means to maintain a full-scale defense along such a broad front. The big corporations got rid of bit players in the banana and mandarin orange business by flooding the market with cheap product. Decisions as to who would be involved in alcohol sales were made at completely different levels of officialdom, with which the Komsomol capitalists fell out of touch. Processed foods were taken over by mass producers, with different brands competing for market share. Bee Trust was left to choose between two alternatives: canned goods or frozen food.
The canned-goods market at the time was large and seemed promising. So the senior partners of Bee Trust went for tin cans and founded the United Preserves International Corporation, which, in spite of the name, entailed a process of division rather than unification.
Four of the young Komsomol capitalists who had made their fortune on kickbacks from foreign suppliers took up the frozen-food business, which had been rejected by their senior colleagues. They founded a small company and called it Cold Plus.
The subsequent fate of United Preserves International is pure decline and fall stuff. The company collapsed within a few years. Some of its owners perished in internecine struggles; others squirreled away some capital and dispatched it abroad; the rest ended their business careers in poverty and squalor after spending the last of their money acquiring Russian companies producing canned meat and condensed milk.
Cold Plus, on the other hand, took advantage of the expanding market and the increase in demand and swelled up like shit on yeast. Its branches and warehouses multiplied, and Cold Plus swallowed up its small competitors and suppliers. By the time I entered the story, it had become a large and successful corporation, the industry leader in frozen food.
Now, this version of the corporation’s history would be perfect for expansive documentation in some opposition newspaper, one of the ones that are financed by disgraced oligarchies (such as the rats who ran the notorious United Preserves International) or supported by left-wing enthusiasts. But the story is a lot more interesting than that. As I’ve already said, the devil’s in the details. His goaty snout peers out from backstage during this little drama entitled The Cold Plus Corporation: An Arduous Path to the Snowy Peaks.
Because the prime mover behind the introduction of the deep-freeze method was Satan himself. Oh yes. As we know, there are certain regions of hell in which the temperature is maintained at an extremely low level. Satan preserves the fruits of Eden there to this day—just in case.
As part of his campaign to promote the deadly sin of gluttony, Satan arranged for each home to have its own refrigerator, along with a microwave oven. Now each and every sinner can indulge in gluttony twenty-four seven simply by grabbing some food out of the freezer and sticking it in the microwave for a few minutes.
In order to keep each refrigerator full, and to further simplify the life of the glutton, Satan devised a way to freeze every possible comestible on Earth.
And his fantasy expanded beyond mere food. The infernal technology of cryonics began to be promoted as a means of preserving the dead, or just their brains, depending on who you’re talking to. Deep-freeze technology also made blood transfusions and organ transplantation possible on a large scale. But that’s a different story . . .
Let us return to the Bee Trust bank and the Cold Plus Corporation. The few years of the bank’s prosperity were dominated by the contracting führers from the Komsomol. The bank’s very name, along with its twisted motto, stolen from the dollar bill—In God Bee Trust—hints at the true force behind the throne: B[ee] for Beelzebub. There is no doubt where the Komsomol capitalists placed their full faith and credit.
By the year of the great default, the term of their original satanic contract with the Komsomol was running out, and Beelzebub needed to obtain new signatures in fresh blood on his ancient paper. It was then that his young clients in infernal servitude got the brilliant idea of developing the deep-freeze business.
AT THE WAREHOUSE
The department director wasn’t in, so I didn’t have to ask permission to leave. I just mentioned to the girls at the front desk that I was going to the warehouse, and signe
d out at the security desk. Having dispensed with the formalities, I went to the elevator and pressed the down button.
The doors parted, and before my eyes I beheld the Goddess of Sex, Spring, and Fertility, a tanned brunette with a perfectly sculpted bosom and sultry eyes. For a moment I was unable to move, then she asked, “Are you getting in or not?” Her voice sent vibrations down my spine. Well, yes I am. “Hot damn!” I thought, in ecstasy or frustration or some mixture of the two. Most likely the girl was a new hire in one of the other offices in our building. As we rode down, I scrutinized the Rules for Elevator Use on the wall so as to keep from gaping at the goddess’s breasts. At the first floor the girl got out and headed down the hall toward the break room; I went in the opposite direction, to the exit. Whew, made it. At ease.
I got in the car and started the engine, then inserted the theft-proof front panel on the radio and surfed the dial until I hit on some acceptable music. Then I backed out, exited the parking area, and set off along the crowded city streets toward the other side of town, where Cold Plus has its warehouses.
Recently I’ve been choosing stations that play rap, hip-hop, or just kolbasa pop without lyrics. The moment I hear the opening chords of a contemporary Russian pop song, I have an irresistible urge to puke all over the dashboard. I devoted many years to rock and roll and was always its biggest fan and connoisseur, but my brand loyalty exhausted itself and has now ricocheted in the opposite direction.
At first I used to be surprised when I heard about a real rock band putting on a joint concert with some commercialized pop act. Or when it would team up with some plastic pop group and go on tour to raise money for the president—yours, theirs, ours, “Nashists’”—and the party in power. Or when it went out to that stinking lakeside campground to perform for rowdy enthusiasts amassed at the big pro-Kremlin youth brigade’s annual rally.*
Then I realized that it was unfair to Russian rock musicians to expect them to hew exclusively to their aesthetic principles and commit themselves to being engaged citizens. Why should they? They’re not doing anything earthshaking, after all. They’re simply paid by the hour to entertain people—as a rule, slackers in synthetic leather jackets drinking beer out of big PVC bottles. The ones whose parents have better salaries listen to R&B—which no longer signifies “Rhythm and Blues,” by the way; this new music has nothing to do with real Rhythm and Blues—now it means “Rich and Beautiful.”
No ideas in music now—just marketing.
On the whole, pop rock fulfills one social and political function—to take away people’s ability to think. In a country where consumer demand increases as production decreases, where elections offer no real choice, and where no yardstick can measure the abyss that awaits, there’s no need for people who can use their heads. They’re useless, annoying, dangerous.
In an earlier era, they used to ban genetics and cybernetics; now it’s garden-variety formal logic that’s off limits. Because if a person starts thinking about things using simple syllogisms, it’s obvious where it can lead: to revolutionary thoughts. And revolution is a crime. So people need to be protected from logic.
Both the singer Mak$im on the one hand, and the group B-2 on the other, dispense with logical ways of thinking. It’s not that their lyrics make no sense; but any meaning they might have just slips away, no matter how much you concentrate. These days it’s just impossible to figure out who it was that loved whom, and why they broke up, and then, if the song is so sad, then why are the singers all smiling? Rampant postmodernism. And, actually, Mak$im is better than B-2. Because no one needs these things to make sense. They just have to be a little sad, like how you feel after your second glass of vodka, but positive overall, you know, not too heavy. No need to strain your brain.
Modern art doesn’t march at the head of a crowd waving a banner, nor does it thrust its mighty prow through ice-bound seas; it issues no summons, has no regrets, cries no tears. Modern art stands by the side of the road with a bottle of uncarbonated mineral water in its uplifted hand, and when a car pulls over, it leans over and calls into the open window, “Cool drink, anyone?”
Nowadays it’s only the occasional rapper who might come up with some interesting lyrics and some semblance of content. There is no real rock and roll any more, and there hasn’t been for a long time; what we have instead is rap. And kolbasa without lyrics is ideal precisely because there are no words: perfect for driving.
You can of course listen to megahits and oldies. Of course you can. But how many times can you listen to the same ones? I even know all the newer songs by heart. The old ones are just overkill, brainwashing. “Hotel California” is a great song. No question about it. And the first one thousand six hundred eighty-four or so times I heard it I really liked it. Then I was forced to listen to it three thousand more times. At that point I think my enthusiasm dimmed just a bit. Another couple thousand more times, and now my system goes into anaphylactic shock at the first chords.
All the good old rock and roll, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, even Pink Floyd, sets my teeth on edge. It’s no one’s fault. It’s just that rock and roll didn’t count on our longevity. Live hard, die young! But we clung to life and overstayed our welcome.
By the time my thoughts reached that point, I had switched over to the CD player, and Kurt Cobain’s voice filled the speakers. Now there’s someone who did it right.
Nirvana took me as far as the warehouse complex, where I parked in front of the office.
Inside, complete bedlam: Buried in papers, the girl at the front desk was pounding manically on her computer keyboard, correcting invoices. The room was packed full of city delivery drivers, and the noise of their grumbling filled the air. I fought my way through to the girl and asked:
“Where’s the warehouse manager? The deputy manager? Where is everyone?”
“They’re all out at the loading dock. Gone, every last one, the sons of bitches. Leave me alone! Don’t come near me! Don’t ask me anything! Fuck off, all of you!”
“Okay, fine. I’m almost done, I’ll be out of here in a minute—can I use your phone?”
“Fuck you!”
“All right, okay.”
I left the office and lit a cigarette. What was going on out here? Of course there’s always something going wrong with deliveries; there are software breakdowns, and human error, and before you know it you’re reinventing the space shuttle from scratch, piece by piece, all by yourself. But this chaos was way beyond normal. And not a single manager in the office.
I finished my cigarette and tossed the butt into the urn by the door, crossed the road, and entered the warehouse complex. A forty-foot refrigerated container truck stood at the loading dock, with workers swarming around. Everything looked normal there.
But when I climbed up onto the loading dock and approached the container in question, I realized that it was hardly business as usual. In fact nothing was as usual.
The workmen were moving like sleepwalkers, gliding along with a weird kind of grace, tracing slow-motion dance steps. Their eyes were wide open and they radiated an air of perfect bliss. This obvious state of grace was having a markedly deleterious effect on their efficiency, however. I watched one young guy in blue overalls for several minutes. He would pick up a box in the container, carry it to the forklift, set it down there, and then straighten up. Then he would bend down again and pick up the same box and carry it right back into the container. There he would set it down in the row of boxes, straighten up, again bend over, pick up the same box, and carry it back over to the forklift.
The workers took no notice of my presence. I don’t think they’d have noticed Godzilla arriving on the scene, let alone some clerk from the central office.
Trying to avoid colliding with the mesmerized workers, I made my way over to the foreman’s booth and peered in through the window, where I beheld an even more curious and striking scene. The foreman—a genuine Frenchman named Jean whose parents the Unclean Spirit had lured i
nto the USSR via the Comintern and abandoned there to gasp their lives away during the era of reforms—was sitting inside the booth. No shirt, “topless,” if you can apply that term to a man’s hairy chest.
But three females, also topless, were crawling on their hands and knees on the floor around Jean’s feet. I recognized one of them, the deputy warehouse director; the others were apparently administrative assistants or accounting clerks. The women were caressing Jean, and one of them was already undoing his pants. All of this was entertaining enough to watch, of course, and it was tempting to stay and see out the orgy, but I turned and headed for the walk-in freezer in search of the warehouse director.
Sure enough, there he was, wandering around between the racks in the walk-in cooler, wearing a quilted coat and an army cap with earflaps.
I went up to him and said, cautiously, “Good afternoon, Victor Stepanovich. How are things going here? Everything okay?”
“Huh? . . . Ah, it’s Maxim!”
“Maximus.”
“Huh?”
“Nothing, forget it.”
“Is something the matter?”
“The matter?”
“Well, I mean . . . in general . . . it’s just that . . . you’ve . . . you’ve got so much stuff coming in! Where am I supposed to put it all?”
“Have you been unloading potatoes from Holland today?”
“Yes we have! But were can we put them all? Look around you, they’re everywhere! Potatoes here, potatoes there, potatoes everywhere! We’ve got nowhere left!”
Victor Stepanovich gestured wildly at the racks, which were completely empty, and at the empty corners of the walk-in. Then he grabbed me by the sleeve with his right hand and led me to the exit, describing semicircles in the air with his left.
“They’re clogging up the aisles! And the loading dock. Potatoes!”
“Victor Stepanovich!”
The Maya Pill Page 4
