10.
—…They lived somewhere where the revolution started late and the war came right after. So Grandpa told Dad that behind the city there was this little hill used for execution by firing squad, and they would go there to watch: the Whites, the Reds, the Whites, the Reds, then the Germans, the Partisans, the Germans, the Partisans, each in their turn. Almost every day.
11.
—…She’s probably like forty already, not much older than me, but she has like a grandma name: Musya, Musya. Her name’s actually Mustafa, but you can’t call a girl that, so it’s Musya. Three months ago, I was going home after surgery, Dad was driving me home, and I was still, like, blerg. And then Dad, he wanted to entertain me, and he knows that I love history—him, not so much. So he tells me: did you know your grandfather was responsible for the relocation of the Meskhetian Turks during the war? They were deporting them and relocating them somewhere, Beria wrote to Stalin that they didn’t respect Soviet authority. And your grandpa was involved in this. Dad sees my eyes pop out of my head and quickly says: no, no, he wasn’t the one evicting them from their homes! Somebody else was in charge of that. He was only in charge of the relocation. That’s when I started to think: if ever I meet one of these Turks, I must confess. So Musya and I met in Prague, she was working there as a translator at some mission. We got to talking about where we’re from, who our people are, and she goes: Meskhetians. I tell her: you know, my grandfather resettled you. And she’s like: yeah, well, mine signed off on the lists, so where does that leave us?
12.
—…Great-Grandma didn’t let her husband back into the house after the war, wouldn’t let him in for three days. She knew what day his train was arriving and had been toiling since morning. She worked in the mines, would fall into bed just as she was, wouldn’t wash her hands for three days at a time—that’s how they lived, it was wartime. Now she took a bath, started curling her hair. She had nothing—a single suitcase, but she looked after it well. She always found ways to do things, come up with something elegant, even during all the Soviet crap—like, she would curl her hair on a fork like it was a curling iron: clamp the hair with a cloth, heat the handle, and then twist. That’s how she was. And she got out her pre-war clothes, silk lingerie, a dress, a necklace. She even knew how to look made-up, even though there was nothing. She did her makeup. She started at six that morning, and the train was arriving at five in the evening. And he comes knocking, but she doesn’t open up. Well, the women came running, it was a dorm, everyone knew everything, eight people to a room in bunk beds. Her people, the ones in the room with her, are like: “Raya, open up!” No response. So they broke in. And she was standing in front of the mirror, wearing heels, a scarf on her shoulders, all that. They say to her: “Raya, why won’t you let your husband in?” And she says: “What for?”
13.
—…You don’t have to tell me about this stuff—my uncle, Grandpa’s older brother, has been telling me about it my whole life. Their research institute was being transported somewhere on a barge, away from the Germans, there were like two hundred of them. And all of a sudden planes are flying overhead, usually they’d dock and hide, but this time they see that it’s our guys. Usually they’d dock quickly and run to hide, but this time they stayed put. And suddenly there are bombs, they’re being bombed by their own guys. One woman got knocked out, and he was hit somehow too. He came to in the water, she’s lying on a board, unconscious but still alive. It’s September, the water’s cold, he realizes that he has to swim, so he grabbed on to her board and started pushing both himself and her. He’s pushing and pushing and suddenly he sees that the water’s blocked off, like with a fence, but there’s a way through. He swam to this passage and pushed her through, but on the other side the whole river had been transformed into a fine labyrinth made of all these iron gates, basically, no boat could get through, that’s the whole point, someone unfamiliar wouldn’t be able to get out. Well, he was a mathematician and kind of understood part of it, and he decided—I’ll keep trying until I freeze to death. And he got out, but how he doesn’t remember—all he remembers is that he would leave the woman, swim out to explore, and then come back and push her, and that the going-back part was the scariest. And do you know where it was that they swam out? In Petersburg, during the siege. So you don’t need to tell me about all this stuff.
THE BLIND EYE
TRANSLATED BY GIULIA DOSSI AND ASHLEY MORSE
Moscow, Tel Aviv, Ozolnieki, Berlin, Kiev, Špindlerův Mlýn, Riga, Piter, and more
Sitting on suitcases in the days before her emigration, N. says longingly: “Jesus, just let me get to a different country and start hating a different government.”
Some French teens on an exchange came to the school where my friends work. Between periods they went to chill with a group of kids who had gone out for a smoke, you know, like, “Hey, how ya doin’?” The group was just shooting the breeze and listening to music on a phone. The French teens asked what was playing. “It’s shanson,” the group replied. “What?” asked the French teens. “Shanson,” the group answered. “What?” “Shanson,” the group answered. “Hang on, we’ll explain it to you in a minute…”
“They run that way—everyone follows; they run this way—everyone follows…”
The billboard of a mobile service provider: “We’ve eliminated roaming across Russia!—For those who cheated on the Red Sea with the Black.” Great, keep it up. Next time the Red Sea might not even part.
They started making ice cream in cones flattened on both sides. It’s called a “flat cone.” All you can think about is a tiny memorial plaque on the freezer: “Cone, squashed. 1921–2015. Posthumously rehabilitated.”
K.’s driver is a drunk. K. found this out when he discovered that the driver had like twenty mini bottles of liquor hidden under some random piece of canvas in the garage. It then became clear why the driver was always trying to linger in the garage under some pretext until K. went into the house: he was hitting the bottle. Upon questioning, the driver swore before man and God that he drinks no more than once a day and exactly one mini bottle—which he does only once he’s come back to the garage with his boss after work. He swears that he doesn’t do it for pleasure, but just to take a break—and not because he needs it so bad, but so that his family can’t ask him to drive them anywhere in the evening. He claims that he didn’t used to drink at all, but he couldn’t ever take a break, he was at it twenty hours a day—until a co-worker gave him the recommendation.
An announcement over the loudspeaker on Gordon Beach: “Ladies and gentlemen, lifeguard duty is over for today. I see that the guy in the red trunks is pleased. I’ve seen a lot of people like you. First you’re all happy, then you start screaming ‘Help!’ Good-bye, ladies and gentlemen. God save the guy in the red trunks.”
Now we’re gonna teach you to love Brodsky.
A little Italian greyhound—a super-tiny, gentle little thing, was sitting next to me on the plane. He had gone to get married. According to his owner, “He was such a good boy.” He didn’t get drunk at the wedding, I guess, or get into a fight with the MC, and just kept it together in general.
Because I was missing my cat in Israel, I decided to get a little turtle. I went to the pet store and was like: “Please sell me a turtle.” For some reason the salesman started looking over his shoulder and went to check whether anyone was listening by the door. I decided that it must be some kind of mysterious prank or meme unknown to me, like, someone says: “I want to buy a turtle,” and then his colleague jumps out from behind a door and smacks you on the forehead with a crowbar, I don’t know. I explained to the salesman in all honesty that I didn’t mean anything by it—I actually wanted to buy a turtle. But it turns out that in Israel the sale of turtles is illegal because they’re on the list of protected animals or something. “But wait,” I said, “they run around in the parking lots by the beach, I’m just too weak to catch one myself—I’d rather pay.” Sure, the salesman
said, not all species are rare, but to prevent people from catching and selling the rare ones, any sale of them is illegal. “Wait, wait,” I said, “so for example, if I take a good running start and catch one of the ones in the parking lot, can I actually keep it?”—“Yeah, sure.”—“But I can’t sell it?”—“No.”—“And if I catch two (I don’t know how, but hypothetically)—I can keep them?”—“Of course.”—“What about three?”—“By all means.”—“Fifteen?”—“Well, theoretically someone could report you and animal protection would show up and ask why you have so many turtles.”—“But what if my two turtles reproduce—what should I do then? Can I sell the babies?”—“No.” I realized that all of this reminded me of some eerily similar situation, but I couldn’t figure out exactly which one. By now, of course, I wanted a turtle like crazy—I couldn’t even think about anything else. “Listen up,” I said. “I swear to you, there’s nobody behind the door, but I’m gonna Google it right now, I can get a turtle online, can’t I? Can’t I?” At this point the salesman leaned over and whispered: “Just remember that any ad could be a trap. You show up and bam—the police are waiting for you!” And that was when it hit me! I got it! Keeping turtles in small doses for personal use—that’s fine. But growing and selling—that’s not okay. Only one thing remains unclear: how do you “do a little turtle,” exactly—do you snort? Do you vape?
I have a printout hanging over my bed: “In return for those tears that were shed on this Earth, it pleased our Lord to raise the price of oil to 95 dollars a barrel. O. Tabakov, 2007.” I told Gavrilov about it and Gavrilov went all wide-eyed and said that now everything makes sense. Basically, he says, they’ve run out of tears—and so, since 2007, the Russian Federal government has focused all its efforts on getting citizens to cry enough for 15–20 more bucks a barrel. Or at least 13–14.
I accidentally Googled: “I followed each and every rule and got into the top ten schools.” Christ, how poetic.
Someone gave M. a miniature pig that, naturally, turned out to be just a regular pig. But M. had already come to love the pig and kept it in the house along with her three cats. The pig burrowed in the carpets, gored the designer furniture, and chewed up the towels, but M. still loved it and would explain to her family how sweet it was, especially since her cats were so evil, shameless, lacking any compassion, and unwilling to accept any form of authority. Basically, M. thought the pig could hardly make the existing situation any worse, so she coddled and pampered it, bought it 100 percent cotton towels for healthy eating. Her relatives tried to explain to M. that the pig had enslaved her, but M. replied that it was okay, the pig is very smart and being a slave to a very smart being wasn’t so bad. At a certain moment the pig had grown so big that it could barely fit through the door. Reluctantly, M. put the pig on a diet: no oats, no towels, just goutweed. Then one night, M. heard something like: “Oink, oink!” Then, “Swish, swish!” Then, “Smack!” Then, “Nom, nom, nom,” then “Oink! Oink!” Then, “Swish, swish!” Then, “Smack!” Then, “Nom, nom, nom…” Horrified, M. ran into the kitchen and there was the pig, standing there in front of the fridge, going, “Oink! Oink!” And on top of the fridge are the three cats, tossing down cookies with their paws, just like that: “Swish, swish!” The cookie would land on the pig, “Smack!” the pig would “Nom, nom, nom” it and start again, “Oink! Oink!” At that moment M. understood that the pig had enslaved the cats, too. And for some reason that scared her so badly that no one has seen the pig since.
The first thing two morons do after signing their marriage license is take out their phones and update their Facebook statuses.
In 1994, when poet G.’s son was about to start his mandatory service in the Israeli army, G. the poet was incredibly nervous because his own memories of the Soviet army were predictably bloodcurdling. On the very first day, his son called from the army and told him that the situation was terrible; the officers were humiliating them and he felt that it was all gonna end badly. The next day, his son didn’t call—one of his friends called instead, to say that the son had been punished because he had tried to fight with an officer. G. didn’t sleep all night and the next morning went up to the camp to save his boy. The boy showed up with a bruised cheekbone; G.’s heart sank and blood rushed to his furious eyes. It turned out that on the first day the soldiers were asked to sit on cold stones during a lecture! The soldiers mutinied and prevailed—they were allowed to sit on their helmets. G.’s son slid off his helmet and banged his cheek against a tree. But now, as he put it, “the army will think twice before it tries to humiliate me!”
At a table in a Moscow café, a somewhat tipsy, not-so-young man in a white shirt and red tie bellowed: “Everything’s gonna be fine! Russia has always wallowed in shit and flourished!”
Yermilov found a web service called—well, let’s call it “Toybox”: you sign up on the website and every month they send you some kind of sex toy—a mystery sex toy, in fact. “I believe,” says Yermilov, “that the experience of progress should be more actively applied to life and expanded in every possible way. They should just say it like that: ‘At this time our group of cofounders is working on a platform called ‘Swagbox’ that will deliver people random selections of clothes. Then we’ll launch a revolutionary startup called ‘Pharmabox,’ a weekly delivery of randomly selected powerful prescription drugs.’”
Having just arrived in Israel, O. was told that Tel Aviv is a beautiful, safe, and gentle city where you can be completely at ease walking around alone at night. The only place that should be avoided is the huge old bus station. Only nobody could explain exactly why it was so dangerous; the consensus was just that it was a bad place where people sold drugs. A week later O. told me that she’d been going to the old bus station at night, that the place actually was pretty bad—the drugs were shitty. Once again, folk wisdom proved correct.
Four posts on my newsfeed, one after the other: “I’m getting married on Friday!” “We’re together now!” “I moved to my dream location!” “We got puppies!” Now that’s what I call a pre-war newsfeed.
Hanging out with the Kuznetsovs, their daughter Anna and son Danny, I was saying that in the Czech town of Špindlerův Mlýn, I found a fucking amazing…—I guiltily checked myself: “Oops!” “Linor,” Anna said sweetly, putting her hand on mine, “Me and Danny already know the word ‘found.’”
The guy who replaced my broken cell phone screen in Kiev looked exactly like the new media artist Oleg Pashchenko. Not that he knew who Oleg Pashchenko was, but when we explained, it turned out that the guy’s girlfriend had one of Pashchenko’s works tattooed on her. As always, truth is more shameless than fiction.
The psychologist K. was asked to consult on the case of a girl who, after making even the smallest mistake, would begin to cry, repent, and beg those around her for forgiveness. K. realized that she would need to have a chat with the girl’s mother. “You know,” she says, “it would be great if your daughter knew that she really doesn’t have to be perfect all the time.” “Oh my God, you don’t even know how right you are!” exclaims the mother. “Like, I’ve been telling her the exact same thing, like all the time! I keep saying to her: Olya, you don’t always have to be perfect! Look at me—even I’m not perfect all the time!”
“We in Russia are really getting our asses spiritually stapled,” says Gortsakalian.
S. writes: “I hope that I’m not such an important person in your life that you actually follow my advice, which is why I keep giving it to you…”
When little Vivian learned to answer the question, “What’s your name?” instead of the expected “Vivi,” for some reason she would say, “Vi-vi-vuh!” Her parents didn’t understand where that third syllable came from and invented lots of funny jokes about it, until the moment when the girl tried to reach her entire hand into a bowl of soup and, in response to her father’s shouted admonition, gaily uttered her famous “Vi-vi-vuh!” It was at that moment that her parents began to suspect that their child believed her
name to be “Vivi, fuck!”
Found Life Page 18