Tales of the Fatherland is a collection of surprising and thought-provoking stories that allow you to look inside the Russian soul. Glukhovsky takes us on a bizarre journey: we get behind the scenes of the Russian elections, we discover the mechanism of issuing draconian sentences, we follow the absurd paths of promotion of party apparatchiks, we end up in the middle of an ethnic conflict in the army that threatens to annihilate the Caucasus, we move to the dark Norilsk shrouded in sulfur fog, and then to the nouveau riche Rublevka to meet a certain charming teddy bear… And all this in the poetics of magical realism.
Elevator
?–?I wanted to pay the bill. For gas. One hundred and ninety rubles,’ Valerik clarified, covering his mouth with his hand just in case, although the cashier was sitting behind thick glass.
It was hard for him to stay on his feet. He was terribly thirsty.
A half-empty bottle of Nine stared at him from under the counter, invitingly, dreamily, all sweaty. Valerik stroked the beer invisible to the cashier with his calloused fingers and silently asked her to wait. It’s a savings account though. Office! There must still be something sacred in this world.
?–? Two hundred?… I can’t spend it. You will take the lottery ticket, said the cashier, looking sternly at Valerik through the bulletproof glass.
There was no questioning or apologetic tone in her voice. NO. On the contrary, there was a threat in it: just don’t try to jump, drunk.
She was wrong. Valerik was not an alcoholic. He was a lonely man, unfulfilled for reasons beyond his control, deprived of female love and all other passions except football, neglected and somewhat sad. His trousers were creased but smeared with egg yolk and sardine oil, his jacket, on the contrary, wrinkled, but he had it, didn’t he? he had! Valerik fought the cruel current of life as best he could and used cologne, but sometimes the current was stronger and he also used it internally. All things considered, you couldn’t call Valerik fallen, oh no! At least in decline.
to be indignant. Slam your fist on the tabletop!
Working people are cheated! There’s a pile of small change there with her, she just shook it out of the old woman. She’s just following a plan: to sell the population a thousand lottery tickets a day. Take a little more money from people and push a little more hope for a miracle that will vanish immediately, even before you walk away from the register: scratch lottery, rub the card with a coin and finally accept your hopeless fate.
How much longer?!
?–? Please, Valerik mumbled.
The cashier gave him a winning smile, as if to say, please, how mediocre you are, and along with the paid bill she dropped a ticket with a grim tricolor flag into the crack under the glass. Deprived of prospects, just like Valerik’s youth. You have. live.
Valerik took the scratch card, turned it over in his hands, put his hand into a holey pocket and found there the key to the apartment that had miraculously not been lost. He scratched squares with it…
?–? Do you want to live here? the cashier asked sternly.
Behind him, the pregnant madame pushed Valerico belly towards the exit. Valerik sighed sadly, did not finish scratching, took his rightful beer and trudged home.
It was only in the kitchen that he placed a lottery ticket on an oilcloth with sunflowers, returned to the hall for the keys and finally scratched out the remaining fields.
Two cars, one sun, some two caricatured rubber babies, one, I believe, a radio and three token bundles of dollars. Valerik turned the lottery inside out and read it. He turned again and looked at the pictures. He began to sweat. He turned back to the rules page. He turned on the tap, which roared with rusty water, drank, wet his neck, and looked again at the scratched fields.
Everything pointed to the fact that he had won a million rubles.
Valerik went to the window, tore off the foam that had stuck to the cracks, opened one sash and breathed in the rancid Novokuznet air. He started counting. It turned out that he now has enough money to live nine years – counting on his current salary.
From such undeserved happiness, Valerik was overcome with fear.
* * *
Nine years? It’s funny!
Together with wealth Valerik fell temptations, the existence of which he did not even dare to dream of.
Car. Bigger flat. Trip. Restaurant. prostitutes.
Suddenly, it seemed to him that his well-being was at stake. The financial crisis had only just let up, but Walerik, who had taken an immediate interest in business news, expected the inevitable repetition. The money had to be protected. They had to be hidden.
And Valerik began to search the newspapers for offers of timeshares, financial pyramids and mutual funds. The prospects made him dizzy, but he was still a little ticked. Unable to make a choice and not trusting the banks, Valerik tossed and turned for half the night on a plastic bag with a million rubles and could not fall asleep. Wasted.
The outcome was unexpected, but at the same time quite expected: Walerik and his commercial fell into the hands of fraudsters. At a stinking fruit and vegetable market, a man with a jet-black mustache recognized him from a newspaper photo and slapped him on the back.
?–?Listen, bro! You haven’t spent your melon yet, have you?
Valerik belched, pulled his head into the shell of his crusted jacket, and was about to flee sideways into a perpendicular alley with bear’s garlic and other weeds, but the mustachioed man smiled with a grace that only mustachioed men can exude and gripped Valerik tighter.
?–?In short, there is action, he winked conspiratorially at Valerik. – In city Hall. I can get you in there. They had a warm seat. In housing and communal services.
Valerik didn’t understand any of this, but the man obviously wanted someone to fill the vacancy as soon as possible, so he pressed on. He explained that if Valerik paid nine hundred and eighty thousand to certain forces, he could take the post of deputy director for one of the districts of Novokuznetsk. Now, right now.
Valerik, of course, did not believe it. To sell seats? No, the world can’t be that simple. But Valerik was so exhausted by having to decide the fate of the unfortunate million that he agreed, and like an overripe apple he fell into the skillful hands of a mustachioed man.
?–? Now, I’ll just run home – he sighed softly, thinking involuntarily that with the remaining twenty thousand rubles he would feel much more at ease and calmer.
?-?NO! What are you, bro! I don’t need to bring it! – The mustache seemed to be scared. “Do you know where the city hall is?” take it there. You enter through the fourth entrance, through security, there will be this elevator. Put the money inside and press the first floor. And leave a note there: that you want such and such a position.
?-?And that’s it?
?-?And that’s it! The mustached man smiled at him, bit a crispy apple with his golden teeth and disappeared.
Still under his spell, Valerik hurried home, grabbed his bag from under the stained mattress, and headed for the town hall. The actual entrance was quickly found – so desperately gloomy that the reform of the Department of Housing and Utilities wanted to start with it. There was no security guard on site, but there was an elevator. It was rotten, with melted, weeping buttons, and of course filled with an unmistakable stench.
Valerik counted out his twenty thousand change, put it in his breast pocket, inserted the note with the request, as if pressing a prayer into the Wailing Wall, made the sign of the cross over the bag as appropriate, and pressed the button for the first floor, jumping timidly out of the cabin at the last moment. The elevator snapped its jaws, devouring its prey, and languidly ascended.
So Valerik said goodbye to the money.
* * *
Three days after handing over the bag, there was still no news, and Valerik had somehow come to terms with it: after all, this is what a Russian man expects from fate, and when suddenly, contrary to all rules, his life begins to fall into place for him, he is usually overcome by inexplicable anxiety.
On the fourth day, they called Walerik and asked him to come to the office. Valerik took an emergency suitcase, already packed just in case, with a change of underwear, a bar of gray soap, a spoon, a mug and a bag of porridge, and got on the bus.
At the office, he was taken to the head of the department, his passport was taken, and then he was asked to come in. Cursing himself for his gullibility, Valerik finally scraped the dried egg yolk off his leg, told himself that there was no use crying over spilled milk, and entered the study.
The head of the department was a heavy and overworked man – and he constantly shifted his weight from his left buttock to his right and back again, as if he were not sitting in a leather chair but in a hot frying pan with fat, and he was getting hotter and hotter.
The meeting turned out to be surprisingly brief and formal.
?–?Congratulations, sir, of course, the headmaster said listlessly, but we have a lot of work ahead of us. You’ve got a month to look around, and from the next one you’ll be putting half a half in the elevator.
?–?Half of what? Walera asked stupidly.
?–? A million. Every month,” the tired prefect explained patiently.
?–?But where do I get them? Valera was surprised.
?–?From serfdom. And from where? The head of the department was surprised. – The farm is entrusted to you. Well, take it from him.
?–?I can’t… Walera hiccupped, feeling his head boil and his hands freeze.
?–?If there is no half in the second month’s balance sheet, the prefect sighed with the empathy of Pontius Pilate, we will sue you for financial crimes. The management demands to clean up the ranks. Didn’t you read in the chronicle of accidents about your predecessor?
Valera shook his heavy head.
?–?Come on, go, the prefect said sadly. “The homeland is counting on you.”
* * *
For the first week Walera stayed in a stupor and managed to break free from the vodka whirlpool only in the middle of the next one, accidentally finding the aforementioned chronicle of accidents in an old newspaper. After reading this, he went to the public bath, collected all the alcohol-containing liquids in the house and took them to the dumpster; you could say he gave it to charity.
He shook himself.
And he went to inspect municipal facilities in Osiedle Nowobajdajewskie, an austere block of flats inhabited by descendants of coal miners.
Everything was wrong in Novobaidayivka, and Valera saw it especially clearly with a hangover. There was no hot water, there was blood and urine up to the ankles in the stairwells, and guys with shaven hairdos pulled themselves up on yellow gas pipes in the backyards of the eight-story blocks.
(…)
Continued in Dmitry Glukhovsky’s book “Opowieści o Ojczyzny”, which will be published in the translation of Paweł Podmiotko by Insignis publishing house on February 22, 2023
Stories about the homeland mat. press
Source: Gazeta
Bruce is a talented author and journalist with a passion for entertainment . He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he has established himself as a respected voice in the industry.
