The Suitcase

by Sergei Dovlatov

  “Seven hundred and twenty.”

  “Nylon crêpe?” Rymar demanded.

  “Synthetic,” Ilona replied. “Sixty copecks the pair. Total, four hundred thirty-two roubles.”

  Here I have to make a small mathematical digression. Crêpe socks were in fashion then. Soviet industry did not manufacture them, so you could buy them only on the black market. A pair of Finnish socks cost six roubles. The Finns were offering them for one tenth that amount. Nine hundred per cent pure profit…

  Fred took out his wallet and counted out the money.

  “Here,” he said, “an extra twenty roubles. Leave the goods right in the shopping bags.”

  “We have to drink to the peaceful resolution of the Suez crisis! To the annexation of Lotharingia!” said Rymar.

  Ilona shifted the money to her left hand. She picked up her glass, which was filled to the brim.

  “Let’s ball these Finns,” Rymar whispered, “in the name of international unity.”

  Fred turned to me. “See what I have to work with?”

  I felt anxious and scared. I wanted to leave as quickly as possible.

  “Who’s your favourite artist?” Rymar asked Ilona.

  And he put his hand on her back.

  “Maybe Mantere,”* Ilona said, moving away.

  Rymar lifted his brows in reproach, as if his aesthetic sense had been offended.

  Fred said to me, “The women have to be seen off and the driver given seven roubles. I’d send Rymar, but he’ll filch part of the money.”

  “Me?!” Rymar was incensed. “With my crystal-clear honesty?”

  When I got back, there were coloured cellophane packages everywhere. Rymar looked slightly crazed.

  “Piastres, krona, dollars,” he mumbled, “francs…”

  Suddenly he calmed down and took out a notebook and felt-tip pen. He made some calculations and said, “Exactly seven hundred and twenty pairs. The Finns are an honest people. That’s what you get with an underdeveloped state.”

  “Multiply by three,” Fred told him.

  “Why by three?”

  “The socks will go for three roubles if we sell them wholesale. Fifteen hundred plus of pure profit.”

  Rymar immediately arrived at the precise figure. “One thousand seven hundred twenty-eight roubles.” Madness and practicality coexisted in him.

  “Five hundred something for each of us,” Fred added.

  “Five hundred seventy-six,” Rymar specified.

  Later Fred and I were in a shashlik restaurant. The oilcloth on the table was sticky. The air was filled with a greasy fog. People floated past like fish in an aquarium.

  Fred looked distracted and gloomy. I said, “That much money in five minutes!”

  I had to say something.

  “You still have to wait forty minutes to get some greasy pies cooked in margarine,” Fred replied.

  Then I asked, “What do you need me for?”

  “I don’t trust Rymar. Not because Rymar might cheat a client, though that’s not out of the question. And not because Rymar can stick a client with old certificates instead of money. And not even because he tends to put his hands on the clients. But because Rymar is stupid. What destroys fools? A longing for Art and Beauty, and Rymar has this longing. Despite his historical limitations, he wants a Japanese portable radio. Rymar goes to the hard-currency store and hands the cashier forty dollars. With his face! Even in the most ordinary grocery store, when he hands the cashier a rouble, the cashier is sure the rouble’s stolen. And here he has forty dollars! A clear violation of the hard-currency regulations. Sooner or later he’ll wind up in jail.”

  “What about me?”

  “You won’t. You’ll have other problems.”

  I didn’t ask which ones.

  Taking his leave, Fred added, “You’ll get your share on Thursday.”

  I went home feeling a strange mixture of anxiety and elation. There must be some vile power in crazy money.

  I didn’t tell Asya about my adventure. I wanted to amaze her. To turn suddenly into a rich and expansive man.

  Meanwhile, things were growing worse with her. I kept asking her questions. Even when I was putting down her friends, I used the interrogative form: “Don’t you think that Arik Shulman is a jerk?” I wanted to compromise Shulman in Asya’s eyes and achieved just the opposite, of course.

  I’ll tell you, running ahead of my story, that we broke up in the fall. For sooner or later a person who keeps asking questions is going to learn to give answers…

  Fred called on Thursday. “A catastrophe!”

  I thought Rymar had been arrested.

  “Worse,” said Fred. “Go into the nearest clothing store.”

  “Why?”

  “All the stores are flooded with crêpe socks. Soviet crêpe socks. Eighty copecks a pair. Quality no worse than the Finnish ones. The same synthetic shit.”

  “What can we do?”

  “Nothing. What could we do? Who would have expected a low blow like this from a socialist economy? Who can I give Finnish socks to now? They won’t take them for a rouble now! I know our damned industry. First they screw around for twenty years and then – bam! And all the stores are filled with some crap or other. Once they get a production line going, that’s it. They’ll stamp out millions of those crêpe socks a minute.”

  We divided up the socks. Each of us got two hundred forty pairs. Two hundred forty pairs of identical, ugly, pea-green-coloured socks. The only consolation was the “Made in Finland” label.

  After that, many things happened. The operation with the Italian raincoats. The resale of six German stereos. A brawl in the Cosmos Hotel over a case of American cigarettes. Carrying a load of Japanese cameras and fleeing a police squad. And lots of other things.

  I paid off my debts. Bought myself some decent clothes. Changed departments at college. Met the girl I eventually married. Went to the Baltics for a month when Rymar and Fred were arrested. Began my feeble literary attempts. Became a father. Got into trouble with the authorities. Lost my job. Spent a month in Kalyayevo Prison.

  And only one thing did not change: for twenty years I paraded around in pea-coloured socks. I gave them to all my friends. Wrapped Christmas ornaments in them. Dusted with them. Stuck them into the cracks of window frames. And still the number of those lousy socks barely diminished.

  And so I left, leaving a pile of Finnish crêpe socks in the empty apartment. I shoved three pairs in my suitcase.

  They reminded me of my criminal youth, my first love and my old friends. Fred served his two years and then was killed in a motorcycle accident on his Chezet. Rymar served one year and now works as a dispatcher in a meat-packing plant. Asya emigrated and teaches lexicology at Stanford – which is a strange comment on American scholarship.

  The Nomenklatura Half-boots

  I MUST BEGIN WITH A CONFESSION. I practically stole these shoes…

  Two hundred years ago the historian Nikolai Karamzin* visited France. Russian émigrés there asked him, “What’s happening back at home, in two words?”

  Karamzin didn’t even need two words. “Stealing,” he replied.

  And they really are stealing. On a broader scale every year.

  People carry off beef carcasses from meat-packing plants. Carders from textile factories. Lenses from photographic firms. They swipe everything – tiles, gypsum, polyethylene, electric motors, bolts, screws, radio tubes, thread, glass.

  Often this takes on a metaphysical character. I’m talking about completely mysterious thefts without any rational goal. That can happen only in the Russian state, I’m convinced.

  I knew a refined, noble and educated man who stole a pail of concrete from his job. Along the way the concrete set, of course. The thief threw away the rock-hard lump not far from his house. Another friend broke into a propaganda office and removed the ballot box. He brought it home and promptly lost all interest in it. A third friend stole a fire extinguisher. A fourth stole a bust of Paul Ro
beson* from his boss’s office. A fifth, the poster column from Shkapin Street. And a sixth, a lectern from an amateur theatre club.

  I, as you will see, acted much more practically: I stole good-quality Soviet shoes, intended for export. Of course, I didn’t steal them from a store. Soviet stores don’t carry shoes like that. I swiped them from the chairman of the Leningrad City Executive Committee – otherwise known as the mayor of Leningrad. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

  After the army, I took a job with a factory newsletter. I spent three years there. I realized that ideological work was not for me. I wanted something more direct, posing fewer moral doubts.

  I remembered that I had attended art school a long time before (the same one, incidentally, which graduated the famous artist Shemyakin).* I had retained a few skills.

  Friends with pull got me into a DPI, a decorative and applied arts studio. I became an apprentice stone-cutter. I decided to “find myself” in monumental sculpture.

  Alas, monumental sculpture is a very conservative genre. The cause is the monumentality itself. You can secretly write novels and symphonies. You can secretly experiment on canvas. But just try to hide a twelve-foot-high sculpture!

  For work like that you need a roomy studio. Significant support systems. A whole staff of assistants, moulders and loaders. In short, you need official recognition. And that means total dependability. And no experimentation…

  Once I visited the studio of a famous sculptor. His unfinished works loomed in the corners. I quickly recognized Yuri Gagarin, Mayakovsky, Fidel Castro.* I looked closer and froze – they were all naked. I mean, absolutely naked. With conscientiously modelled buttocks, sexual organs and muscles. I felt a chill of fear.

  “Nothing unusual,” the sculptor explained. “We’re realists. First we do the anatomy, then the clothes…”

  But our sculptors are rich. They get paid most for depictions of Lenin. Even Karl Marx’s labour-intensive beard doesn’t pay as well.

  There’s a monument to Lenin in every city, in every regional centre. Commissions of that sort are inexhaustible. An experienced sculptor can do Lenin blind – that is, blindfolded. Though curious things do happen.

  Once, for instance, in the central square of Chelyabinsk, opposite the city hall, they were going to erect a monument to Lenin. A major rally was organized. About fifteen hundred people showed up. Solemn music played. Orators gave speeches.

  The statue was covered with grey cloth.

  And then the moment of truth. To the sound of a drum-roll, the bureaucrats of the local executive committee pulled down the cloth.

  Lenin was depicted in his familiar pose – a tourist hitching a ride on the highway. His right arm pointed the way to the future. His left was in the pocket of his open coat.

  The music stopped. In the ensuing silence someone laughed. A minute later, the whole crowd was laughing.

  Only one man did not laugh: the Leningrad sculptor Viktor Dryzhakov. The look of horror on his face was gradually replaced with a grimace of indifference and resignation.

  What had happened? The poor sculptor had given Lenin two caps, one on the leader’s head, the other one clutched in his fist.

  The bureaucrats hurriedly wrapped the rejected statue in grey cloth.

  In the morning the statue was unveiled once more to the crowds. The extra cap had been removed overnight…

  We have been sidetracked once again.

  Monuments are born this way: the sculptor makes a clay model. The moulder casts it in plaster. Then the stone-cutters take over.

  There is the plaster figure. And there is the formless hunk of marble. Everything extra has to be removed. The plaster prototype must be copied with absolute accuracy.

  There are special machines for that, called dotters. They make thousands of chips in the stone. In this way the contours of the future monument are determined.

  Then the stone-cutter arms himself with a small perforator. He removes crude layers of marble. Picks up the hammer and chisel. All that’s left is the finishing stage, the filigree, very demanding work.

  The stone-cutter works on the marble surface. One wrong move and it’s the end. Because the structure of marble is like that of wood. Marble has fragile layers, hard spots, cracks. There are structural clots, something like knots in wood. Many traces of other ores are mixed in. And so on. In general, this is exacting and difficult work.

  I was put into a team of stone-cutters. There were three of us. The foreman’s name was Osip Likhachev. His helper and friend was called Viktor Tsypin. Both were masters of their craft and, of course, confirmed drunkards.

  Likhachev drank daily, while Tsypin suffered from chronic binges. Which did not keep Likhachev from having an occasional binge or Tsypin from having hair-of-the-dog at any opportunity.

  Likhachev was grim, severe and taciturn. He said nothing for hours and then suddenly pronounced brief and completely unexpected speeches. His monologues were continuations of complex inner thoughts. He would exclaim, turning sharply to whoever happened by, “And you say capitalism, America, Europe! Private property!… The lowliest darkie has a car!… But the dollar, let me tell you, is falling!”

  “That means it has somewhere to fall,” Tsypin responded merrily. “That’s not so bad. But your shitty rouble has nowhere to fall.”

  But Likhachev, plunged once more into silence, did not react.

  Tsypin, on the contrary, was talkative and friendly. He liked arguing.

  “The car’s not the point,” he said. “I like cars myself… The point is that under capitalism you have freedom. If you want to, you can drink from morning till night. If you want to, you can slave away around the clock. No ideological education. No socialist morality. Magazines with naked babes wherever you look… And then there’s the politics. Let’s say you don’t like some minister – fine. You write to the editor: the minister is full of shit! You can spit in any president’s kisser. To say nothing of the vice-president’s… But a car isn’t such a rare thing here, you know. I’ve had a Zaporozhets since 1960, and so what?”

  And Tsypin had indeed bought himself a Zaporozhets. However, since he was a chronic drunkard, he didn’t drive it for months at a time. In November the car was covered with snow. The Zaporozhets turned into a small snow hill. The neighbourhood kids were always around it.

  In the spring the snow melted. The Zaporozhets was as flat as a sports car. Its roof had been squashed by the kids’ sleds.

  Tsypin seemed almost relieved. “I have to be sober at the wheel. But I can get home drunk in a taxi…”

  Those were my teachers.

  In due time we received a commission, a rather lucrative rush job. We were supposed to hack out a relief depiction of the great writer and scientist Mikhail Lomonosov* for a new metro station. The sculptor Chudnovsky quickly prepared the model. The moulders cast it in plaster. We came to take a look at this business.

  Lomonosov was shown in a suspicious-looking robe. In his right hand he held a rolled paper. In his left, the globe. The paper, as I understood it, symbolized creativity, and the globe, science.

  Lomonosov himself looked well fed, feminine and unkempt. He resembled a pig. In the Stalin years, that’s how they depicted capitalists. Apparently, Chudnovsky wanted to reaffirm the primacy of the material over the spiritual.

  But I liked the globe. Even though for some reason it showed the American side to the viewers.

  The sculptor had diligently modelled miniature Cordilleras, Appalachians and Guiana Highlands. He hadn’t forgotten the lakes and rivers, either – Huron, Titicaca, Manitoba…

  It looked rather strange. I doubt that such a detailed map of the Americas had existed in Lomonosov’s era. I mentioned this to Chudnovsky. The sculptor grew angry.

  “You talk like a tenth-grader! My sculpture isn’t a visual aid! Before you is Bach’s Sixth Invention, captured in marble. Rather, in plaster… The latest thing in metaphysical syntheticism!”

  “Short and sweet,” said Tsypin.


  “Don’t argue,” Likhachev whispered. “What’s it to you?”

  Unexpectedly, Chudnovsky softened. “Maybe you’re right. Nevertheless, we’ll leave it as is. Every work must have a minimal dose of the absurd…”

  We started work. First we worked at the studio. Then it turned out that it was a bigger rush. The station was going to be opened during the November holidays.

  We had to finish up on-site. That is, underground.

  Lomonosovskaya Station was in its completion stage. Stoneworkers, electricians and plasterers were at work. Innumerable compressors created a fiendish din. It smelt of burnt rubber and wet lye. Bonfires burned in metal barrels.

  Our model was carefully lowered underground. It was set up on enormous oak scaffolds. A four-ton marble slab was suspended next to it on chains. You could make out Lomonosov’s approximate contours on it. The most delicate part of the work lay ahead.

  And here an unexpected complication arose. The escalators were not working yet. To go up for vodka meant climbing six hundred steps.

  The first day, Likhachev announced, “You go. You’re the youngest.”

  I’d never known that the metro was so deep, especially in Leningrad, where the soil is damp and friable. Twice I had to stop to catch my breath. The Stolichnaya I brought back was consumed in a minute.

  I had to go up again. I was still the youngest. That day I went up six times. My knees hurt.

  The next day we tried a different plan. To wit, we brought six bottles with us. But it didn’t help: our supplies attracted the attention of the men around us. Electricians, welders, painters and plasterers came by. In ten minutes the vodka was gone. And I went upstairs again.

  By the third day my teachers had decided to quit drinking. Temporarily, of course. But the other men were still at it, and they treated us generously.

  On the fourth day, Likhachev announced, “I’m no punk! I can’t drink on other people’s money any more! Who’s the youngest among us, boys?”

  And I went upstairs again. It was easier this time. My legs must have become stronger.

  So basically it was Likhachev and Tsypin who did the work. Lomonosov’s image was getting clearer. And, I must add, more repulsive.