The Khazar was led out to the great cleansing fire. When bound to the stake he raised his arms to the heavens and cursed: “Woe upon ye, inhabitants of Venice and of all cities! Ye will yet come to know the power of the stolen delights, the seductions of the Prince of this world! And ye will lose your eternal souls!”
Before he perished in the flames, Fish Eye had experienced the rack and a multitude of other contrivances utilized by the Holy Church for the purposes of taming the flesh and saving the souls of sinners who had strayed from the path. But whether the Khazar gave up the secret recipe and whether the Jew who had betrayed him got the secret from the church officials—on that subject nothing is known.
LIFE AFTER DEATH
Do you believe in life after life?
A Western pop singer wails on MTV. I can’t remember her name; if I get curious I can watch the whole clip; eventually a credit will show up at the bottom of the screen giving her name and the titles of the song and of the album it’s from. But I’m not that curious. I’m not much of a connoisseur, frankly. I just listen. I just keep it on out of boredom.
The credit is sure to be there at the end of the clip. Like a label, like a toe tag at the morgue.
“Earthly glory is like a toe tag on a corpse.”
Some Buddhist lama said that, I think. I don’t remember his name either. But I do remember the quote, more or less. I like it. I didn’t even bother to write it down in my special notebook (you have one of those too, don’t you?); it just stuck in my mind. And it’s true. A man dies, and all that’s left is a slab with his name and the high points of his biography: He was born, studied somewhere, got married, won eight Oscars, and then died.
This hag should have kicked the bucket long ago. Or left show business and spent her final days sitting on a bench in front of her house, or puttering around in her garden. Anything but gyrating up there on stage in front of everyone. She’s an old lady, same age as Marilyn Monroe would be now, probably, but Marilyn died at the right time. This one, though, just keeps on singing. Won’t shut up. Dances too.
I can’t wrap my head around that. You’ve already shown what you’ve got, said everything you can say, and earned huge piles of money; why keep on writhing around on stage like a clown? Go over your bank statements, count your money, and enjoy the rest of your life.
I always liked Britney Spears. Now there’s someone who did it right! I recall her debut. A nymphet, a pedophile’s dream, in a school uniform and flimsy little white skirts. She danced on a dock by the sea. Sang words of love, first love, pure, timid, and innocent love. And the planet quivered, pierced through by an ultrasound wave of unprecedented force—the sound of men’s balls buzzing, the whole world over.
She made it big, became a superstar, sold millions of albums, earned millions of dollars, got up on stage with the whole world watching and sucked face with Madonna. And then sent everything to the devil.
Started having babies, eating sandwiches, getting fat, and vandalizing cars in parking lots, pounding on their hoods like a madwoman.
Of course, malevolent critics will remind you, before this she bombed in the movie Crossroads, ruined her personal life, started in on alcohol and drugs. But, hey, up theirs. They’re just jealous.
Do you believe in life after life?
No, Britney isn’t like that old bag, who will cling to the stage till the day she dies. Look at her, a veritable cyborg! After all the plastic surgery, liposuctions, and implants, there’s nothing left of her original body. Like the robot cop from that movie. Robocop, that’s it. Robo-singer.
The Russian stage has its share of this particular brand of mutant. When they come out on stage for the Police Day concert, it’s downright terrifying. These aren’t real people, they’re some sort of pale zombie who’ve risen up from their dank graves, called forth by some voodoo sorcerer who fed them a poisonous powder. Or pills, maybe.
To hell with that kind of career! Everyone has to die someday. Sure, you have to be in the right place at the right time to strike it rich. But you also have to know when to make your exit.
Every year new stars appear on the stage. What happens to the old ones? Nothing—they’re still up there too. If things keep going on like this, there won’t be any room left for the living; all the space will be taken up by walking corpses. The devil should definitely reconsider the terms of his standard contract.
There’s no place for the living among the dead, just as there’s no place for the dead among the living. I learned that from my wise old grandmother.
Do you believe in life after life?
What the hell is this song about, anyway? I can’t get it out of my head. The zombie is howling mournfully. What is she really trying to say? Probably something like.
Do you believe in life after love?
Like, say, her love is over, but she has to go on living. I will survive. So many songs by women can be boiled down to that one idea. But what I hear is:
Do you believe in love after life?
Yes, that’s more like it. And I do believe:
At night I dream of the sky and my star,
People living on water and air,
Free as the wind in the steppe, antelopes,
And that love that comes after the grave.
Love that lasts till death, to the grave, is a fairy tale, an illusion, a lie. Love after the grave, though—that’s real, it gives me hope. Lines from my own song, something I wrote when I was sixteen:
I grew up near an abandoned slaughterhouse.
We played with the bones of murdered animals.
And it must have been there that I realized
That if we are to live, they must die.
I think that I sang that song once, drunk, to a one-eyed old man, shitface drunk himself, on Zayachy Island near the Peter and Paul Fortress. And he shoved a piece of paper into my hand with his phone number on it, told me to call, promised that he would find me a band, would set up an audition, would make me a star.
Of course I didn’t call. People say all kinds of things when they’re drunk.
Or, no, maybe what she means is exactly what she’s saying:
Do you believe in life after life?
If so, it’s clearly autobiographical; the song must be about her experiences after the zombie master hauled her out of the grave.
Though I died too, in a certain sense. I died for the world of advanced capitalism and industrial-trade corporations, the day I walked out of Cold Plus.
The heroes of my favorite books always had “something in reserve” waiting for them before they told everyone to go to hell and set out to pursue their own destinies. Something to “tide them over” for a while.
But when I wrote my resignation and walked out on the company that had fed me, for better or worse, for so many years, I had no savings. Just debts. I stepped into emptiness, pustota.
Jumped without a parachute, as one of my friends put it. He’d been complaining to me about his life for as long as I could remember. He didn’t love his wife, his job was monotonous and boring, and he was stuck out in some provincial town. I suggested he quit, give everything up at once and move away.
He answered, “I’m already too old to jump without a parachute.” Too old. And he wasn’t even thirty!
But I jumped. It wasn’t a big deal, just a completely meaningless little act of protest. The least a man can do if he wants to live his own life. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t scared.
When I quit my job without even picking up my last paycheck, I didn’t have the slightest idea how or on what I would live. All I had in my wallet was small change enough to cover my immediate needs.
But God, or fate, or the devil—one of them anyway, or maybe all of them together—come to a man’s aid when it’s time to make a big decision. The next day I went to the bank, which I hadn’t visited for along time, and learned that some money had been transferred to my account—a commission for this deal I’d made with some Chinese guys for a friend of mine,
using my Cold Plus connections. I took some of it out in cash and went to the supermarket, which was practically empty (it was early and all the usual shoppers were at work). The only people there were stay-at-home wives, retirees, and a couple of young people doing their shopping. I went up and down the aisles and gathered food and drink, four plastic bags full, using up almost all my money.
I left the car outside my building, went up to my apartment, and put all the groceries away neatly on the kitchen shelves and in the refrigerator. Grains on one shelf, save for pasta, which got its own place; processed foods in the freezer; milk products in the fridge door; cheese and butter in the upper rack closest to the freezer; jars of jam and other preserves on the next shelf down; and then finally, on the bottom, fresh vegetables and salad greens. That would last me a week.
Once I’d put everything away, I went into my bedroom and surveyed the familiar disorder. The sight brought a strange sense of relief. Here was something to keep me busy.
First I made the bed. Then I picked up the various objects that were strewn around the room and sorted them out: clean clothes on the cupboard shelves, shirts on hangers. I stuffed my dirty laundry into paper bags: underwear in one, the rest sorted by color.
Then I put on some music and started in on my books. I cleared them all off the shelves, dumped them onto the floor, and started dusting each one individually, then putting them back on the shelves in alphabetical order by author.
The purpose of man’s existence is to create order out of chaos. I’m convinced of it. I’m no longer plagued by the need to find the meaning of life; I know the one and only, universal, correct answer to the question of “why.” Man lives in order to create order out of chaos.
A Sisyphean task, that’s for sure. Across the universe, chaos is growing, expanding every second. This is a principle of physics that follows from the second rule of thermodynamics. The level of entropy increases in any closed system. The time shall come when the entire world will grind to a halt. The stars will go out and the galaxies will disintegrate, leaving no trace. Just dust and stones, flailing in disorder throughout the dead expanse of the cosmos.
But man, himself a chaotic fluctuation of elements, creates his own little world around himself—itself a transitory fluctuation with its own set of rules—and the cheese goes on the upper rack of the refrigerator, and ironed shirts go on hangers in the closet.
Chaos creeps into human existence, into the crannies of a man’s apartment, into the dark alleyways of his life. Chaos has its own rules. But man grabs a broom, picks up an iron, a washrag, a marker and notebook, and he sweeps out chaos, dumps it in black garbage bags, gives everything a name, numbers everything, puts everything in its special place.
And so it will be until the very last day, when this man falls on the field of this cosmic battle, dead but not defeated.
Then others will come, will wash and dress him, will tuck him in his coffin in strict accordance with their rituals, will sing the appropriate hymns, make solemn speeches, and will consign his body to earth, or fire, or water, or air—whatever their traditions require. Man is broken down into his component elements, which are no longer orderly but chaotic—and these elements now return to the cosmos, which is itself just another name for pandemonium.
The only thing that will remain of him will be memory. The Upanishads say: “When my body turns to ash, and the breath of my life flows together with the air of the Universe, O my God, remember everything I did for Thee.”
Because that memory is with God.
And it is called soul.
The soul is nothing more than God’s memory of a man who lived on this earth. And there is no other soul.
Before I know it, my eyes will melt
into darkness.
Will there be something
For My God
To remember?
LIFE AFTER DEATH, CONTINUED
I went to bed content, thinking about the work I still had to do: polish the floors, do the laundry, clean all my shoes and arrange them in the entryway. I slept soundly. And that night marked the end of my Khazaria dreams.
But then the insomnia set in.
I could never sleep during the day. As long as the sun was up, I had to stay busy. I washed, cleaned, sorted, and arranged things in my little apartment. Or I’d go out and wander the streets or go to Esenin Park and walk along the path by the grandly named Okkervil “River.”
Then I started going into the city. I’d put gas in the car and go to exhibits, art shows, and symphony concerts, spend time in cafés. I developed a taste for reading in crowded places. Hoping to stretch my limited resources, I economized wherever I could. Before long I realized that the privilege of being allowed to sit all day at the twenty-four hour buffet in the book megastore on Vosstanie Square, reading without buying anything, only extended so far. You take one title off the shelf and settle down with it in the buffet area; it’s especially convenient at night when there aren’t many customers and there are lots of open spaces at the tables; it doesn’t cost anything just to sit. But occasionally a waitress will turn up at your table and ask, “Will you be ordering anything ELSE?” making it clear by her emphasis of the word “else” and her entire demeanor that if you’re sitting in her buffet reading a book that you don’t intend to buy, then you’d better order some food. Otherwise, perhaps it’s time to think about heading home, sir.
So you order another cup of coffee, a piece of cheesecake, and then some more coffee, and then something else, and ultimately by morning you’ve dropped more money into the buffet than it would have cost you to buy the book.
It’s simpler and cheaper just to take a book along and read it in an ordinary coffee shop, ideally, if there’s a place by the window. There are coffee shops in Petersburg where you can sit for two or even three hours without ordering anything. No one will bother you and no one will notice when you get up and leave.
But it’s better to go up to the counter and get a cup of hot chocolate—when I was little they used to call it cocoa—or a cappuccino. Take a seat, settle in with your book, and read as long as you want. No need to touch the cup; just let it cool down. That’s what I used to do.
If I went during the day, it was hard to find a place to sit. But I could look up from whatever I was reading to admire the flocks of young girls, fresh and dewy-eyed, who’d come from places like Barnaul to get an education in the capital. They sat in the coffee shops, smoking cigarettes and babbling endlessly. They never noticed me. Why should they? Who would be interested in a carelessly dressed, slightly overweight man with a sparse graying reddish-brown moustache and beard? No, I know, you run into all kinds of deviants. But I didn’t need anything from them, and so, by the laws of sympathetic magic, I never had any problems with the girls—didn’t make them nervous, didn’t attract them either. It was as though I simply didn’t exist in their dimension, which was filled with the aroma of Rive Gauche perfume (bought on discount with a girlfriend’s gold card), with nice-looking boys from their school and dreams of a new life—so close at hand, within their grasp: graduation, a job in a big company with potential for advancement, a nice car (some shade of green, and bought on credit, of course), and vacations in Turkey, or, alternatively, Maldives, if she’s lucky enough to catch the eye of a man of means.
Their girlish naïveté didn’t bother me, though I didn’t envy them either. And I never bothered to drink my hot chocolate. Who knows what they put in it.
When I went late at night there would be older people at the tables, sometimes couples, talking, poring over brochures and spreadsheets, or simply sitting in silence, emitting smoke.
Occasionally I would spend the whole night in a twenty-four hour coffee shop. After the nightclubs closed, the clubbers would come in, exhausted, half-awake, but not ready to give up yet. They would drink cups of hot coffee and stare at their surroundings in silence, eyes glassy.
And I would read. And not feel at all abandoned or alone.
Finally,
when (or if) I went home for the night, I would undress slowly, fold my clothes carefully, turn off the light, and go to bed—as though performing some sort of a ritual, particular and prescribed. Order in all things. Nighttime is for sleeping. If a man can’t get to sleep, then he needs to just lie there in bed naked, staring blankly at the ceiling. Not violate the order of things.
What came now instead of dreams were thoughts. And memories. Sometimes from a very very long time ago.
THE DARK TEREK
I remember everything vividly to this day. We would take a trip. To the farm! To Zarechnoye! To Grandma’s! It was always special. The excitement would start the night before, when my dad would make an announcement: Tomorrow we’re going on a trip.
Hurray!
My sister would spend half the night packing all the things a girl needs: all eight dolls; a bag crammed full of paints and books; a separate bag with markers and colored pencils; three dresses, a bathing suit (she has only one, how annoying!), sandals, and belts; a makeup bag with a mirror; some little buckets and trowels, and a rubber duck. And in the morning my mom would get mad and make her leave most of it behind.
I would stand outside next to the car, aloof. Girls! Always dragging all kinds of useless stuff around wherever they go. You need to travel light. Like me: just the clothes I’m wearing and a slingshot in my back pocket.
And my favorite stuffed bear, a head taller than me.
My father called me to help, and—being men together—we loaded the usual gift for Grandma into the trunk: a bag of mixed fodder for her pigs.
Then we piled into the car—a red Moskvich 412—and headed out. My father was a cautious driver. He never even went out on the highway at night. Forty years of driving and not a single accident.
The Maya Pill Page 23