The Moscoviad by Yuri Andrukhovych Read Free Book Online Page A

me are my own children. Wonderful. Third, I would plan
not to forget about one of the women I love. If she has returned yesterday from
the Central Asian republics, today I would get to make love to her. Nice.
    Thus the main
thing is that you remember everything. Now drink your beer and listen to the
noise of the rain, to the singing of the drunk officers, to Arnold telling
theater jokes, Roytman telling Jewish jokes, and Golitsyn, prison jokes that
very much resemble the reality . . .
    Somewhere between
the third and the fourth jar, or perhaps between the fifth and the sixth trip
to the restroom, or perhaps right after Yura Golitsyn-Turgenev resolutely
plopped on the table a bottle of something red, saying that “wine after beer
brings good cheer,” my friend, your switch had flipped. The rain outside the
beer hall’s borders showed no signs of abating, even though it was almost two
in the afternoon and, according to all the predictions of witty weathermen,
communist sun should have come out long ago.
    This is a trap,
you finally understood. All of them are forced to drink beer. But no one will
be able to make it out of here. Here some final spectacle of world history is
taking place. The newly arrived grow ever more numerous in number. Some of the
officers who until recently kept the mark and sang so wonderfully are now
asleep. Instead arrive Pharisees and Sadducees, gamblers and bookish types,
murderers, Sodomites, bodybuilders, usurers, dwarves, Orthodox priests in faded
reddish cassocks, circus comedians, voluptuaries, Kazakhs, Krishnaites, Roman
legionaries. You must call Kyrylo.
    “So there is four
of us here,” says Arnold for some reason. “And each of us once knew a woman . .
.”
    “We are four,”
Golitsyn interrupts him, “and we represent at the very least four
nationalities. And do we enjoy drinking any less because of that?”
    “Which four
nationalities, why four?” interjects Roytman nervously.
    “Well, you,
Borya. That’s one. I’m a russkie. Two. He’s from Ukraine. Three. And Horobets
makes four.”
    “And who is
Horobets?” Borya is inquisitive.
    “What’s your
nationality, Horobets?” asks Golitsyn demanding the truth.
    “Now I’ll explain
everything,” Caesar says raising significantly his index finger.
    “Guys, I’ll go
make a phone call,” you say decisively.
    “Just don’t get
fresh with anyone,” warns one of them. “There is now tons of fucking riffraff
here. And I have no idea where you’d find a phone in this place.”
    But you hear all
of this already behind your back. There must be a phone here somewhere!
Otherwise how do they call the cops? For it was from here that Pasha Baistriuk,
the Sakhalin fabulist who was expelled from his first year of studies for the
systematic abuse of other people’s rubbing alcohol, was taken to the district
prison where they kept him for thirty-six hours and where he sang songs from
behind bars, and also shouted right into the cops’ faces, “Do you take us to be
murderers or something?!” And as it turned out, he had no grounds for such
sarcasm, for the three quiet polite boys who were behind bars together with
Pasha indeed were murderers: in the same beer hall, some fifteen minutes after
Pasha’s deportation, they knifed some random unlucky guy. But Pasha Baistriuk
didn’t know this; he was trying to scare yet another lieutenant with his red
Writers’ Union ID with the order of Lenin on the cover, and also performed for
everyone present a song with marvelous imaginative allusions in the text:
    My dad was a
natural plowman,
    And I worked
together with him,
    But some evil men
had attacked us,
    And we have been
left with no ends . . .
    So there. Pasha
was a nice guy, but there must be a phone someplace here, or what? Or do they
call the cops by whistling? Or perhaps through some cosmic communication
channels? In the hall this very moment someone is pummeling someone else in the
mug, and all the others, full of interest, await the