“Why are there so many potatoes?”
“Victor Stepanovich!”
“Enough for a whole year! Where can we put them all?”
“Victor Stepanovich! There are no potatoes here! None whatsoever!”
“What do you mean, no potatoes?”
“Where is the box, Victor Stepanovich? The box with the rat poison?”
“Oh, the box, yes . . . Lina called and said something.”
All right. So Lina had called and told them about the box. Who asked her to get involved? Honestly.
“So? Where is it? Is it still sealed?”
“Yes, it is. It’s in the foreman’s booth. But it’s just that . . . it got a little torn.”
“What do you mean, torn??”
“Well, it just . . . kind of slipped off the forklift and got a little torn.” Sure it did. Slipped off the forklift. He could have come up with something more original.
Everything was clear now, just about. It wasn’t rat poison—no, the box had some kind of narcotic in it. Or maybe hallucinogens, LSD or something along those lines. Some potato-dealers, those Dutch. And everyone out here had popped their fill of whatever it was. That’s our guys for you. Call over from the main office and warn them that one of the boxes has rat poison in it, and they immediately want to try some. To hell with them. I’ll just check out the box and its contents and be on my way.
“I see how things are. And I just might not say anything back at the office about what’s going on out here. But I’ve been instructed to bring the box back—the supplier is coming all the way from Holland tomorrow to pick it up.”
Victor Stepanovich said that the box was in the foreman’s booth, and then he turned and trudged back into the walk-in to resume his count of the pallets with their nonexistent potatoes. I went back to the booth and flung open the wooden door.
During my brief absence, Jean and the ladies had made significant progress. Jean’s blue work pants were down by his knees, and the two administrative assistants (or accounting clerks) were hard at work down there, doing the “double helicopter” maneuver. The deputy director was stationed a little higher up, with Jean’s face pressed between the two white mounds of her breasts.
The comradely group didn’t react to my presence, which I can’t say surprised me in the least. I glanced around the booth. A metal cabinet containing work clothes stood against the opposite wall. The cupboard doors were covered with posters of naked women. A rickety table stood against the wall by the window, with some dirty mugs and glasses on it. I glanced under the table and there it was: a torn carton with big letters printed on the outside—PTH IP—followed by some numbers.
I crouched down and carefully slid the box out. Some little pink pills spilled from the tear. I scooped up a handful and took a close look. The pills were round, about the size of a No-Spa tablet, but without the diagonal stripe. Each pill had three letters printed on its surface, the same ones as on the box: PTH. Quite a sophisticated rat poison, with its own logo, evidently aimed at attracting a loyal consumer base—oh, right. Obviously, their rat-poison story wasn’t worth a second thought.
“Right, if you have no objection, we’ll just be on our way.”
No one was listening.
There was a roll of packing tape and a pair of scissors on the windowsill. I quickly patched the tear, picked up the box, and prepared to make my exit. I took a couple of seconds to inspect the additional gallery of glossy whores on the inside of the door, and it suddenly occurred to me that the security guards wouldn’t let me through the front gate without documentation for the box.
Jean was still in his private paradise, in the tender care of what he no doubt imagined to be nubile houris. I couldn’t bring myself to drag him back down to our fallen world, fraught as it is with misery and delusion. Felt sorry for the boy. He would come to before long, and when his vision cleared he would notice the accounting clerks’ bowlegs and bulgy noses and the deputy director’s advanced age and life-scarred, hangdog air.
I rummaged around and soon found what I needed in a drawer of the table next to the metal cupboard: a pen, an invoice form, and an official stamp.
In the same drawer there were some torn condom wrappers—the special kind for anal sex—and then some kind of powder, and a bunch of other junk. I decided to postpone thinking about any of this until later. Elbowing the tea-yellowed mugs on the table to one side, I quickly filled in the invoice—“Samples for the central office, 20 kg.”—scrawled a fancy-looking signature, and stamped the page.
I stuffed the invoice into the side pocket of my jacket and carried the box out of the booth.
On the way out I gave the deputy director a little spank on her generous behind, just for laughs. She didn’t notice.
I passed through security and crossed the road to the parking lot, unlocked the car with the remote, nestled the box gently onto the back, got into the driver’s seat, turned on the music, and started back toward the office.
The office?
* Translator’s note: The reference is to the pro-government youth group Nashi—which means “ours” in Russian—and to its annual rally. The author might well be pointing out the happy accident of this name’s morphological similarity to “Nazi”—and Nashist to “fascist,” for that matter.
ONE MILLION US DOLLARS
No way!
To hell with Cold Plus and its demented Dutchmen. Up Beelzebub’s ass with my boring, monotonous, humiliating job. Straight to the flames of hell with my slavery and beggary. To hell with them!
I inched along in the flow of skittish cars, reviewing on my internal screen the filmstrip of my life, from my very first memories to the present day. A story of almost unrelenting poverty and need.
The few exceptions cluster at the very beginning of the show. Here I am at three or four years of age. I’m wearing a neat little sailor suit and tooling around the playground in an ivory-colored kiddie Cadillac. The car is made of plastic and cheap metal and was assembled in some factory in Hungary, or possibly Poland. It’s pedal-driven; my feet in their light canvas slip-ons propel the car around on the asphalt, a one-kid-power motor under the flimsy hood. My older sister walks along beside me, protecting me and my precious vehicle from thieves and hooligans. The other kids from the apartment building stare at us in mute admiration.
My very first Cadillac, and also my last . . .
Now here I am at five or six. I’m in a little dress coat, with a white dickey and a bow tie on an elastic band around my neck. My handsome father, mustached and decked out in a fine suit, is holding my right hand. My beautiful mother, wearing a fancy dress and with her hair freshly permed, is holding my left hand. We are strolling along the seaside promenade in the resort city of Sochi, a fantastical place where we have access to everything—beaches and swimming pools, amusements and rides, restaurants with their Chicken Tabaka and wondrous Pepsi Cola.
At that time my father had been a man of some authority with a promising career, a government official in the Soviet economic system; my mother was that rarity, a stay-at-home housewife.
Soon afterward, my father’s career collapsed due to an excessive and misplaced adherence to principle. After that he became a low-level employee in the statistics department of some pointless agency, and my mother took a job as a schoolteacher. These scenes in my little filmstrip are gray and melancholy.
Now I am seven. Or eight. No, still seven, that’s right; it’s New Year’s Eve. 1980 will be the year of the Moscow Olympics. I’ve been assigned to play the role of the New Year itself, in the form of a frisky little bear cub. In the store, though, my mother sees the price tag on the bear costume, takes me by the hand, and leads me home without a word. At the pageant I run around inside the circle dance wearing a pair of simple red pedal pushers, with two big cardboard ears attached to my head. Hot tears roll down my cheeks. The first adult tears of my young life.
And my first cardboard ears—I will continue to wear them throughout my life, in one
form or another.
After that everything pretty much continues in exactly the same way, just one thing after another.
My next pair of shoes are mud-colored Speedsters. They look utterly ridiculous, like clown shoes on my feet, which are already too big and flat as it is. But I’m only ten, no more, and it’s not that big a deal at that point in my life. The problem is that my feet hurt. The shoes chafe and cause bloody calluses. Mom says that I’ll get used to it; I have to break them in. But before she can turn away I see the tears in her eyes. Indeed, she was giving me false hope; the strange material that my shoes are made of doesn’t stretch or ease with time; it just dries out and forms hard bumps in random places on the inside.
Now comes a longer story. I have a dream: I want to get a bike. An Eaglet or a Stork. With big wheels, a bright shiny frame, and a heavy chain liberally lubricated with motor oil. And of course with orange and red reflectors on the back fender. I already have the reflectors: I swapped a stamp collection for them with a kid at school. My older sister had been collecting stamps for a long time, since she was small, and now she had no use for them. Probably. I mean, she didn’t even remember them. So I had the reflectors, just no bike. And my parents didn’t have any money to spare. Bikes are expensive—eighty rubles!
I’m no pauper, though. I’m already grown up and I can earn the money all by myself. I’m twelve, almost thirteen. So I manage to get a job over summer vacation at the loading dock at a food processing plant. It’s against Soviet labor law; I’m still considered a child. But they write me into the paperwork as sixteen. And indeed even at twelve I’m tall and broad-shouldered and look, if not quite sixteen, fifteen at least. Or no younger than fourteen, that’s how I look at twelve. So I spend the whole summer lifting and hauling heavy boxes of canned food.
But it’s not so bad, really; since I’m a minor I don’t have to work a full eight-hour day. My shift starts around lunchtime; I can sleep in and have breakfast at home. My coworkers and I have lunch at the plant, eating the same canned food that we’re hauling from the shop to the warehouse. We’re just following the unspoken rule of Socialist production: Eat as much as you want on the job, just don’t take any food offsite except in your stomach.
I go home in the evening. The noise of the kids playing outside doesn’t tempt me. I’m too tired. I don’t have a bike anyway, so I can’t join the others in their races or forays into other neighborhoods. Soon, though—soon I will have my own bike and then I can go out at night and ride around with my friends. I take a shower, making big plans, put on my pajamas, and go to bed. I read in bed until I fall asleep with the book still in my hands.
Just before the beginning of the school year, with summer vacation coming to an end, I quit my job and pick up my pay, in cash, at the payroll office. It’s a small wad of crumpled, greasy one-ruble bills, sassy green threes, and even a few crisp blue fives. Plus a few nickel and copper coins, every minute accounted for down to the last kopeck.
I went home that day solemn and proud. I’d grown up. I became a man that day as I walked home from work, feeling the money in my pocket, the first money I’d ever earned. An initiation, like in tribes of hunters when a boy becomes a man by making his first kill in the forest and bringing it home to his family’s hearth.
I felt nothing like that later, several years later, when for the first time I plunged my jasper root into that moist, quivering crevice, if you will . . . My first time. Nothing poetic, just disgust and a drained, wasted feeling. Thirty seconds, a little friction, and I dispatched my entire arsenal, with its crew of cosmonauts, on a one-way trip into the chasm, that black hole beyond the scarlet petals, never to return. I felt nothing, no communion with a new life, no sense of belonging in a marvelous new world full of potential and bliss. Just disgust and a drained, wasted feeling. Primitive, animal shame.
Because I had become a man long before, that first time I received money for my hard labor and brought it home to my family.
I brought the money home and handed it over to my mother, the bills, that is; the coins remained in my pocket. There had been enough to buy a bike, even with a little left over. I had chosen the bike I wanted long before and had shown it to my mother several times already. It was a blue-frame Stork; they had it in the department store, in the sporting goods section on the first floor.
The next day Mom came into my room and, maintaining a tense silence, without looking at me, started randomly pulling books off my shelf. They were arranged in alphabetical order, side by side. She’d take a few out, wipe nonexistent dust off the clean surface of the shelf, and then put them back, out of order. Without a word. Without looking at me.
“Ma?” I asked.
They weren’t going to get me the bike. A pair of second-hand Italian demi boots had turned up, just perfect for my big sister. A rare find, the right size, but there wasn’t enough money to cover them. I loved my sister, didn’t I?
It was at that moment that I understood what it meant to be a man. No yelling or hysterics; I didn’t get upset and wasn’t even that surprised. I was already grown up, was a man. Work hard, earn money. The money will go somewhere else, not to you and not for you. Work hard, earn money, and turn it over to women. Man’s burden, white or black, doesn’t matter.
My only reaction was to skip meals and shun my family for three days. I sat in my room and stared at the little pile of coins, the sixty, seventy kopecks I had to show for my whole summer’s labor.
Then came adolescence, classmates, weddings, friends in Adidas tracksuits, bleached-out, rolled-up jeans. Me, though—I was big, awkward, blighted with acne, and everything I wore was cheap, gray, and out of fashion. Someone gave my father a bolt of some generic, coarse fabric and took me to the tailor to have a suit made, to make me look more presentable. It was cheaper that way. He did try, my father. But nothing came of it; I don’t remember why.
I like music, everyone does, I know a lot about various groups and musical styles, always have. But back then, when people offered to swap cassettes I didn’t say anything, just kept my mouth shut. I didn’t have a cassette player: Mine was an ancient reel-to-reel, bought long before for my sister.
But then I graduated and enrolled at the Institute. For my first winter as a student I got one of my father’s old coats, taken in at the seams. It had been pretty decent at one time, but the tailoring was shoddy and it hung on me like an old sack. My family also gave me a big hat that looked ridiculous with the short “diplomat” style coat; the fur was supposedly raccoon but looked suspiciously like dog pelt, badly dyed.
The student life is easy. A student is poor by definition. Back then all or nearly all of us were broke. Of course I was dressed worse than everyone else, but we all chipped in what we could for vodka and shared equally, that’s the main thing, and I felt like I belonged.
Next thing you know I’m married to this wonderful girl Lenochka. No wedding, just a quick trip to the registry office. I’m cooking something in the kitchen of our first-story rented apartment and Lenochka is doing something in the other room. “Bring my watch, babe!” I ask. “Where is it?” My wife’s voice rings like a little bell. “On the bedside table!” I answer.
A minute goes by. Lenochka comes into the kitchen, spreads her empty hands, says “I couldn’t find it, Poppy!”* I shake my head in reproach and go into the bedroom myself, with her tagging along. “Here it is!” The watch is right where I said it was, on the “bedside table.”
“Pops, why don’t you label these cardboard boxes so I can tell them apart? Which one do you consider to be the bedside table, which the coffee table, and which the dresser or wardrobe?” Lenochka forces a smile, but a tiny involuntary tear glistens in the corner of one eye. Our room is furnished entirely in empty cardboard banana and apple cartons.
My girl will dump me two years later and marry a guy who makes a living buying up government vouchers. The first thing she’ll do is order some real furniture and a refrigerator for her apartment.
Enoug
h already. The rest is just more of the same. Rare spells of relative solvency and then poverty again, need. Like now, with practically all my money going to monthly interest fees, nothing left to cover gas for my gray Renault, itself bought on credit. Just like the refrigerator, the computer, even the smart phone.
The filmstrip is over.
I thought about the box lying at this very moment on my back seat. Twenty kilos of Dutch pills. Illicit drugs, of course. Wholesale, a batch that big would have to be moved at a rock-bottom price. But even so, it would bring in fifty thousand dollars, minimum.
If it was cocaine, real cocaine, then it would be worth a whole lot more. Pure cocaine would cost one hundred forty a gram, retail. You could find cocaine at eighty a gram, but everyone knows that at that price the powder has been laced with speed or simply ground analgene. Pure cocaine, though, on the market, was one hundred forty a gram.
Each intermediary cranks up the price by a hundred percent or more. So a pusher will sell a gram at seventy dollars, or, say, fifty, to use a round figure. The dealer will charge twenty dollars a gram if the batch is big enough. And if I wanted to push coke to a dealer, I’d offer it to him at ten dollars a gram.
Twenty kilograms would come to two hundred thousand dollars.
But that’s coke. These were some kind of pills, and most likely they wouldn’t sell for that much. And I didn’t even know what the stuff was. Some ecstasy clone, maybe?
I’d have to try some and see. Not just push the pills blind. If it turned out to be crap, my client would beat the shit out of me even before any money changed hands.
All of this was whirling around in my head as I headed back to work. By the time I realized I would have to try the pills myself, I was already on the Obvodny Canal embankment, just down from the Cold Plus office.
I smirked. So long, workplace! And instead of exiting the embankment on the right and heading for the office, I merged into the left lane, crossed the bridge over the Obvodny Canal in the other direction, toward the waterfront, and floored it.
The Maya Pill Page 5
