The Anonymous Novel

by Alessandro Barbero

  XXXII

  The new world

  Moscow, June 1989

  It is no easy undertaking to get into the Rossya Hotel today.

  They have stopped the traffic over the entire length of Razin Street, and the policemen blow on their whistles in unison:

  It doesn’t matter who you are, you’re not going down here…

  The crowd is pressing on the pavements of Gostiny Dvor, and the breathless latecomers are rushing in from Rybny Lane and Chrustalny Alley: We’ve got one, we’ve got one, here’s the ticket! Muscovites are flocking here to enjoy an utterly new spectacle: Will mastiffs fight the bear? Will the gladiators’ blood spill on the circus floor? No, much better than that: naked young women will parade under the spotlights… Of course, it should be said that they will not be completely naked, however much Grant Gukasov insists on deluding himself; in the West, the hopefuls for the Miss World contest display themselves in swimming costumes, and here they will do exactly the same in every small detail.

  A Miss Soviet Union will be elected for the first time in history; we could hardly let the side down! The concert hall at the Rossya has been completely refurbished, festoons of coloured lights shine on the stage in front of the red curtains, crowds of people are stuffing their mouths with hors d’oeuvres at the tables on which carafes of vodka also sparkle, and no one can take their eyes off the thirty-five competitors who have come from every corner of the country. The first selection was yesterday, and today there will be the final! Oleg and the photographer have been sent by their newspaper. Tanya, of course, did not want to come.

  She has no interest in this kind of extravaganza, and besides, she has an important appointment today with Obilin, to hear how far the commission has got in examining her thesis. She simply gave Oleg a half smile, and advised him not to feast his eyes too greedily on the spectacle…

  As luck would have it, the two of them end up at a corner table along with a provincial journalist from Kursk and, bizarrely, a Swedish woman who is the Moscow correspondent for some Bladet or other. What can you do? You certainly can’t see any of the show from there; at the end they elbow their way forward to see the winner taking the curtain call, her arms full of flowers, her eyes watery and all around applause that could bring the house down. The presenter is a TV journalist, fat, smooth and sparkling in his white dinner jacket with black bow tie; the cretin from Ostankino keeps screaming enthusiastically into the microphone: Yuliya, take your leave of this wonderful audience! And Yulechka obediently bows… When Oleg and Grant get back to their table to finish their lunch, they find the Swede explaining how the world works to the man from Kursk, in English; and the latter doesn’t understand a word of it, of course. Look here, the Swede proclaims, don’t you realise that America has landed here today? Are you telling me that the girls who paraded before us today look Russian?

  They were all the same: tall, blonde and smiling, just like the top models you see in the Western magazines! I could only distinguish the Asian girls; perhaps that’s why they seemed better-looking to me. Well, she’s right about this, here in Russia too, we’re witnessing the triumph of the beauty of the boiled sweet: unwrap-me, unwrap-me and find out just how sweet I really am, but it’s all artificial, all caramel and colouring. But when you’re back in your own country, stutters the provincial journalist, putting together all the English he learnt at school, surely you will remember at least one of them? The Swede laughs, takes off her glasses and downs her vodka in a oner: Yes, I will remember one, the girl who came from Baku, what was her name? Yes, that one would be difficult to forget: she managed to always appear naked, even in evening dress or national costume.

  Every time she came on, the photographers were scrambling over each other and, of course, they were all men; the more naked she was, the more the public applauded. Well, who’d have thought, Oleg was surprised, the damn Swede has hit the nail on the head again: that’s just how it was; if victory was attributed on the amount of applause, instead of that absurd jury of “cultural and artistic personalities”, the little Mirza-zade would today be Miss Soviet Union. Perhaps we’ll see her again at the Crazy Horse in a year’s time, or perhaps some wealthy bastard from Baku will carry her off and no one will see her again: she with that little upturned nose with open nostrils ready to snort cocaine or be attached to a ring…

  But the Swedish journalist is still talking. She has not put her glasses back on; she hangs them round her neck on a chain and plays with them, and as she does, she cruelly savages the girl who won, Yuliya Sukhanova: no, she does not like her; she really does not like that sickly sweet. Is Miss USSR beautiful? she asks. Everyone is quiet, waiting for her to answer her own question. Of course she is! she thunders. But do you think this has the slightest importance? Yet more silence. None, absolutely none! The competition is not based on beauty, but money! Didn’t you notice how the public were constantly asked to applaud the sponsors? This little charade cost a million and a half roubles, and whoever organised it is looking for a profit.

  Very soon the winners will be suitably put to use, and that means handsome profits – and in currency too! And don’t mention the quiz on culture; that is just a farce. First they parade almost naked, and then they have to answer a question from the viewers just to demonstrate that they can articulate a few words! I recently saw a television show on cats, and if the cats had known how to speak, they too would probably have been asked a token question.

  Everyone laughs, and then the man from Kursk speaks up in a consequential tone, “I share my colleague’s views, and regret that the competition’s organisers could not come up with some more original ideas. For example,” he says scratching his head, “in the United States, the prizes include university scholarships. Such prizes would not go amiss here in Russia.”

  “Yes of course,” Oleg retorts, “let’s send off Yulechka Sukhanova to study Slavic philology; you can tell that she desires nothing else! In my opinion,” he adds getting heated, “the ‘artistic and cultural personalities’ on the jury were a bit much. What hypocrites! If we’re going to have a competition for who’s best at wiggling their arse, the jury should be made up of long-distance lorry drivers, and please, the poetesses should be left at home!”

  The provincial is speechless, but the Swede, would you believe it, agrees with Oleg, but of course she wants the last word.

  “By the way, the most beautiful woman was not to be found amongst the competitors, but amongst the jury members: it was the poet Irina Skobtseva. Her face reveals everything that she has experienced in life; is it not perhaps life that renders a woman more beautiful?”

  Oleg does not reply, because he has no desire for an argument, but such views disgust him. Life, by which we mean suffering, hard work and drudgery, a husband who drinks, sons killed in war, yes these are the things that leave their mark on a woman’s face, and you find that beautiful! While some fat little whore who does nothing but paint her fingernails and eat cakes all day, and have her man drive her around the place, and screw – well, she just disgusts you. But the woman is insistent; she becomes agitated and needs everyone’s approval. She even takes Oleg by the arm and points to the eighty-year-old Irina Skobtseva who is sitting at the jury table in her pinstripe suit displaying her white hair and face of a sagacious tortoise.

  “Now, is she not beautiful?”

  “Madam, as far as I’m concerned, that’s bullshit,” he says in English, and then returning to Russian, “I like that one.”

  Oleg points to a table behind her and she turns around, and shamelessly puts her glasses back on her nose, examines these neighbours and looks back at him: will she laugh or pull a face? There was really no hope: she pulls a face, as though someone had waved a rank and rotten herring in front of her face, and she even turned up her nose to avoid the smell. You can be sure of it, you’ll not find such people in Sweden. At the table he has pointed to there is a young man with his hair cut very short – what in America they call a crew cut, but what we simply
call a hard-man hairstyle. And everything else about him is in the hard-man style: black shirt, white tie, white blazer, fingers loaded with rings, and in front of him he has a bottle of champagne, a carafe of vodka and an enormous plate of caviar. Next to the hard man sits a girl plastered with cosmetics, whose cigarette is hanging from her mouth, and in front of her she has an ashtray full of cigarette butts red with lipstick. She is wearing a kind of red satin negligee which is showing the white border of her bra. The hard man is spooning in the caviar, and the girl is smoking with a vacant look; then he puts his hand on her shoulder, and she stirs, throws away her fag, takes the glass of vodka he’s handing her and empties it with a single gulp. She coughs and then looks at him with an even more vacant smile; and he puts a spoonful of caviar in her mouth. She chews and a trickle of black liquid escapes her mouth and dirties her lipstick. He laughs, takes out a packet of Dunhill and lights one of them up; he now spoons some more caviar into her mouth and at the same time tells her something. She laughs and practically chokes herself, but still laughing she cleans her mouth with a handkerchief. She takes a swig of champagne, removes the cigarette from his mouth and puffs on it. Four roughlooking henchmen are seated around the table a little distance from these two. They too are wearing garish jackets, but these are too tight for their wrestlers’ shoulders.

  Every now and then, the young man ladles a spoonful of caviar onto one of their plates, and with a nod he gives permission to another of them to fill his glass.

  “And so,” the Swedish journalist enquires, “you like that one better than Irina Skobtseva.”

  Oleg shrugs. That’s it, sister, don’t say any more. I already know that we men are pigs. I like her better, and tonight I’ll dream about her. You can dream about your Irina, if you like nightmares. The man from Kursk leans across the table so everyone can hear him but speaks in a low voice: Do you not know who that is? That’s Dyakonov, there are few traffickers like him in the whole of the Soviet Union. What, Dyakonov? Oleg is unnerved. The Accountant?

  But I know about him. We took the evidence of his crimes to the Prosecutor’s Office. Why isn’t he in prison? Clearly they let him go; that is how it goes… The man from Kursk is well pleased with the effect he has produced; he might be a provincial, but he has staggered the Muscovites. The Swedish woman is rather interested; clearly the molls revolt, but their gangsters don’t.

  “Who’s Dyakonov?”

  “He’s a boss of the mob, madam,” Oleg says in English, and then starts to explain what he knows about this good man and his business interests in Baku, yes: BAH-KOO.

  The Swede is charmed and turns to look at him once more.

  What’s the betting, Oleg frets, that those guys don’t come over and break our bones. Stop Madam, please. Please, his English takes him that far, and then, Quit it, you ugly bitch.

  Someone has a word in her ear; she is momentarily nonplussed and nods that she has understood. But a moment later, she’s at it again, devouring Dyakonov with her eyes. Oleg desperately looks for someone else to attract her attention, someone she might find more interesting than that handsome bandit; somewhere in this circus there must be another beast belonging to our utterly original Soviet bestiary! What a fucking stroke of luck! There, not two tables away, is Artem Tarasov, the millionaire. Look, Madam, that man down there – yeah, that’s it, Oleg urges in English, He’s a millionaire. The very first of our own Soviet millionaires.

  Okay, this is a slight exaggeration, and there must be dozens or hundreds of millionaires by now. In any case, the Swedish woman falls for it; she adjusts her glasses on her nose and, totally absorbed, stares at Tarasov’s face. He’s a good-looking man too, that cannot be denied. Before setting up his cooperative, he was in charge of the laboratory at the Institute of Molecular Biology; there they had invented an instrument which, according to him, could diagnose cancer with a success rate of one hundred per cent – can you believe it? – but the Institute’s director refused to develop it: this is not our job! When Oleg interviewed him less than a month ago, he was sitting in his completely refurbished office in Gorky Street. His table was covered with all kinds of devilish contraptions from the West: computer, fax and God knows what else. He had an American poster on the wall in exactly the spot where they would have had a portrait of Lenin in public offices: it was a chimpanzee dressed in a jacket and tie, and wearing glasses, and the animal is seated at a desk and is on the phone; behind it there is graph showing profits on the increase, and on the desk a photo of the chimpanzee wife at home. A piece of card with the English, I LOVE ARTEM, had been pinned to the poster.

  Yes, he said smugly, I am a millionaire, and why should I hide it? The public are shocked, I know, but we haven’t broken any laws; quite the opposite, the country owes us a great deal. Yes, our cooperative has earned twenty-three million roubles since last November. You know how it is: there are mountains of industrial waste, steel filings and scrap metal; the state enterprises are not able to dispose of them, and those who might be interested in buying them, don’t have the liquidity, as there is no credit here in Russia.

  What we do is sell this raw material abroad, in the West, but not in exchange for currency, please note, but for advanced technologies, especially computers. Then we sell them here, and the Ministry for Foreign Trading Relations takes ten or even twelve per cent of our profits. Everyone buys our computers, even the Institute for Cosmic Research and the Institute of Cybernetics. I could show you the list of our customers. Our prices are half the official ones, and remember that many institutions have to turn to the black market to buy this equipment. You can just imagine what the prices are like there!

  The journalist listens, and in the meantime she knocks down another vodka as though it were water; over there in Sweden, they must also know how to pack it away. I would never have thought, she says shaking her head, that there were millionaires over here. Oh, says Grant, if it comes to that, there have always been millionaires here in Russia. It was not so difficult to become one: they stole everything that wasn’t carefully locked away, and sometime even what was.

  What do you mean? the perplexed Swede interrupts him.

  No, says Oleg, don’t listen to him. He talks shit. Tarasov is a millionaire of our own times; there were never any others like him, but it’s just that they’re now shooting up all over the place like mushrooms. And the law, she asks searching for the right words now her tongue is slightly beginning to slur, does the law permit it? In a manner of speaking, it permits it, but it throws the occasional spanner in the works. You should hear Tarasov when it comes to complaining about the banking system, for example: in the West, he says, an entrepreneur always has his chequebook in his pocket, while here in Russia you can only use cash.

  He says that he recently had to urgently offload 230 railway wagons of phosphates at the port of Riga. The dockers couldn’t do it as they were already working flat out to fulfil the plan. He had to recruit all the loafers in the area and bring along a suitcase full of money to pay them; they didn’t understand any other form of payment! Unimaginable! said the Swedish journalist to suggest, These are things that could only happen amongst you lot! Then she lifted her head with a start, smoothed her short hair back over her head, looked Oleg and Grant in the eye and just came out with it:

  But then he’s a gangster too? How could he make all that money from industrial waste? There’s plenty of that in the West too, and what’s more, nobody wants it… Who knows, sister, Oleg replies, I never got round to asking him if he’s a gangster; but one thing is certain, he’s making some real money: he boasted that he paid ninety thousand roubles as his party membership fee, can you believe it? I have money, he says, and my salary from the cooperative is three million a year, but the problem is that sometimes when I go to the bank to make a withdrawal, the bank doesn’t have the cash.

  Besides, the law prohibits the withdrawal of such sums…

  We really shouldn’t be surprised, Oleg thought to himself, if everyone is losing
their heads over such stories? And people really have started to think that with capitalism money does grow on trees. I was flicking through a newspaper the other day, and not any old newspaper but one of those heralds of democracy that we’re all talking about. There I find a half page of adverts for financial services: business, in other words. Like the rest of this newspaper, these adverts are not aimed at us impoverished Soviets, but at foreigners. The cooperatives are offering amazing opportunities to these people who are amassing at the Union’s borders with their pockets full of dollars: for example, the Technical and Scientific Association “Prognostika” is offering the publishing rights for The Manager’s Guide (in twelve volumes), Dictionary of Administrative Terminology (4,000 entries in seven languages) and Dictionary of Perestroika (more than 4,000 entries in seven languages). And this is how they think it is all going to turn out: the Western manager goes into Prognostika’s office, slams his briefcase down on the table and opens it: it is stuffed with dollar bills. He empties it by the handful and the association’s managers come rushing in – but not them alone, here come the typists and even the janitors and cleaning women. They all quickly fill their pockets with those crisp new banknotes and, after having finally emptied his case of its tiresome load, the Western manager fills it with all twelve volumes of the Manager’s Guide and rushes back out a happy man… But someone runs after him and grabs him by the lapels of his jacket: