Potboiler

by Jesse Kellerman

  Pfefferkorn named the functionaries he had appointments to see.

  “Imbeciles, all of them. To speak with them is to spit in the ocean. You must allow me—akha.” Fyothor checked the caller. “Excuse me. My wife, again. Tha. Tha. Akha, ontheshki uithkh Dzhikhlishkuiyk, zhvikha thuy bhonyukhaya.” He snapped the phone shut and smiled sheepishly. “I regret that my presence is required at home. Thank you for a most enjoyable evening, my friend. To your health.”

  71.

  Whoever had searched Pfefferkorn’s room had made no effort to hide their work, throwing things around with such vigor that he assumed their real purpose was not to find contraband but to remind him of his vulnerability. If so, they were wasting their time. He already felt useless. He lurched about, picking up shirts, reinserting dresser drawers, smoothing the duvet. The contents of the topmost layer of his wheelie bag were dispersed, but the secret compartments had served their purpose: everything inside was untouched. With amusement he noticed that amid the chaos, the picture of Zhulk above the headboard had been straightened.

  He felt in his pocket for the business card Fyothor had given him. It was printed in Cyrillic on thin paper. There was a name, a phone number, and two words. . “Private tour guide.” Sure, Pfefferkorn thought. He tucked the card toward the back of the room copy of Vassily Nabochka. He uncapped the bottle of water on his nightstand and took a long, silty pull. He felt restless. He wanted to go knocking on doors. How long before he found her? A couple of days, at most. But his hands were tied. He had a script to follow, one both maddeningly constrictive and maddeningly vague. Contact could come at any time—tonight, tomorrow, the next day. He unbuttoned his shirt and reached for the fan.

  It was still dead.

  He lifted the phone and dialed.

  “Monsieur?”

  “Yes, this is Arthur Pfe—Kowalczyk in room forty-four.”

  “Yes, monsieur.”

  “I asked for a new fan.”

  “Yes, monsieur.”

  “The one I have is still broken.”

  “I am sorry, monsieur.”

  “It’s very hot in here. Would you please send up another?”

  “Yes, please, monsieur. Good night.”

  “Eh, hang on there, speedy.”

  “Monsieur?”

  “Have there been any calls for me?”

  “No, please.”

  “I’m expecting one, so put it through, no matter how late it is.”

  “Yes, please. Does monsieur require wake-up?”

  “God, no.”

  “Good night, please, monsieur.”

  He hung up and went into the bathroom to splash water on his naked chest. Across the bedroom, the clanking pipes started up again, loud enough to rattle Zhulk’s picture in its frame. He had no idea how he was going to sleep, unless the fan covered up the sound.

  He shut off the tap and walked to the open window, stroking his moustache and letting the poisonous night air dry him as he gazed out at the squatting skyline. Somewhere out there was Carlotta. He spoke her name and the wind carried it away.

  A memory came to him, unbidden. It must have been soon after Bill and Carlotta got married. Pfefferkorn had just started teaching, and he and Bill were strolling around campus.

  “Promise me something, Yankel.”

  Pfefferkorn waved assent.

  “You haven’t heard what I’m asking yet.” Bill waited for Pfefferkorn to pay attention, then said, “If anything ever happens to me, you’ll look after Carlotta.”

  Pfefferkorn laughed.

  “I’m not kidding,” Bill said. “Promise me.”

  Pfefferkorn smiled at him quizzically. “What could happen to you?”

  “Anything.”

  “Like what.”

  “Anything. I could get in an accident. I could have a heart attack.”

  “At twenty-eight.”

  “I won’t be twenty-eight forever. Two-way deal: I’d do the same for you.”

  “What makes you think I’ll ever get married?”

  “Promise me.”

  “Sure, fine.”

  “Say it.”

  It wasn’t like Bill to be so vehement. Pfefferkorn raised his right hand. “I, Yankel Pfefferkorn, do solemnly swear that in the event you kick the bucket, I’ll look after your wife. Happy?”

  “Very.”

  Did he have any idea then what he had been agreeing to? If he had, would he have still agreed? He decided he would have. It wasn’t for Bill that he was here now.

  Where was his fan?

  “Yes, hello, this is Arthur Pfffkowalczyk in room forty-four. I’m still waiting for my fan.”

  “Yes, monsieur.”

  “Is it coming anytime soon?”

  “Immediately, monsieur.”

  The clanking continued unabated. Zhulk’s picture had rotated almost thirty degrees clockwise. Pfefferkorn took it down, concerned it would fall on him in the middle of the night.

  One consequence of poor infrastructure was an electrical grid that functioned sporadically, and a corresponding lack of light pollution. Having lived in big cities his entire life, he was unused to such brilliant skies, and he watched, dizzily transfixed, as the clouds scudded offstage, and he was treated to a spectacular display of shooting stars.

  72.

  “Rise, citizens of Zlabia.”

  The voice was deafening, right there in the room with him, and Pfefferkorn scrambled out of bed, getting tangled up in the sheets and pitching face-first into the wall. A supernova flared inside his skull. Down he went, cracking his head a second time on the corner of the nightstand.

  “Rise to productivity in the name of national greatness.”

  Through streamers of color and blobs of pain he saw the woman in the majorette hat. She was upside down, grainy, shouting at him in Zlabian.

  “Tuesday, August ninth, will be an auspicious day for the advancement of our collective principles. You are encouraged to enjoy the weather, which will continue to be exceedingly pleasant, with an extremely comfortable high of twenty-two degrees.”

  He couldn’t remember leaving the television on. He pulled himself to his feet and tried to switch it off, to no avail: the woman’s face remained. The mute button was similarly ineffective.

  “Through the generosity and wisdom of our beloved and benevolent Party leaders, the price of root vegetables remains well within reach of all citizens. . . .”

  She began to list other available goods, her voice booming from the screen but also through the walls, floor, and ceiling. He raised the window sash. Loudspeakers crowned all the buildings. Down below, the street traffic had come to a complete standstill, everyone from old women shouldering wicker baskets of root vegetables to young boys driving posses of goats standing at attention. Pfefferkorn looked at the clock. It was five a.m.

  “Remember to bring your allotment card to your neighborhood disbursal station.”

  On-screen, the woman opened a pocket-sized book. The people in the street did likewise.

  “Today’s reading will be the fourth stanza of the fifteenth canto.”

  She proceeded to read aloud a passage from Vassily Nabochka. The people followed along in an undertone, their collective murmur like a gathering storm. The reading ended and everyone put their personal copies away.

  “Rejoice in the lofty heritage that is yours, citizens of Zlabia.”

  Everyone sang the national anthem.

  There was a brief round of applause. Activity resumed. The woman in the majorette hat was replaced by a static image of the West Zlabian flag, backed by accordion music. Pfefferkorn hesitated before reaching to switch it off, half expecting a hand to reach through the screen and slap him on the wrist. His ears were ringing, his head pounding from hangover a
nd impact. He was also sleep-deprived. He distinctly remembered giving up on getting his fan at about one a.m. Between the heat and the pipes, he couldn’t have gotten more than a few precious hours. It was a bad way to start the day. He needed his wits about him. He needed to keep his head in the game. He used the bedsheet to sponge the sweat from his body, got dressed, and went downstairs to find some coffee.

  73.

  He stopped at the front desk. A new clerk was on duty.

  “Good morning, monsieur.”

  “Yes, hi, my name is Arthur. Kowalczyk. In room forty-four.”

  “Yes, monsieur.”

  “I asked last night for a fan.”

  “There is fan in room, monsieur.”

  “It’s broken.”

  “Monsieur, I am regretful.”

  Pfefferkorn waited. The clerk grinned inanely. Pfefferkorn dug out a ten-ruzha note. The clerk took the money with the same practiced motion as his predecessor. He bowed.

  “Monsieur will please to partake of breakfast buffet,” he said unctuously.

  Pfefferkorn stepped inside the restaurant. Intent on finding the coffee urn, he did not notice Fyothor sneaking up from behind to poke him in the ribs.

  “Greetings, friend! How was your night? Yes? And how did you like our morning exhortations? Very inspiring, yes? Although, between you and me—twenty-two, my arse. Already the thermometer is pushing thirty and it’s not even half past six. Twenty ruzhy says we hit forty by noon.”

  They went down the line together. There were two options: last night’s pierogi and a chafing dish of gruel, both dispensed by the indomitable Yelena. There was no coffee, just sour brown tea.

  “You didn’t take any of the sauce,” Fyothor said, waving at Pfefferkorn’s plate as they took the same corner table. “The sauce is what makes the dish.”

  Pfefferkorn, remembering a formula from long ago, said, “Forty degrees—that’s over a hundred, Fahrenheit.”

  “One-oh-five, I think.”

  Pfefferkorn groaned and pushed away his steaming bowl of gruel.

  “But friend, this is delicious.”

  “What is it.”

  “We call this bishyuinyuia khashkh. It is like your oatmeal.”

  “Doesn’t smell like oatmeal.”

  “It is made with root vegetables,” Fyothor said. “And goat’s milk.”

  “Goatmeal,” Pfefferkorn said.

  Fyothor laughed and thumped him on the back. “Akha, good one, friend. To your health.”

  “I’ll stick with tea, thanks.”

  “I understand. But as our most insightful Party leaders say, let nothing go to waste.” Fyothor winked and reached for Pfefferkorn’s shot glass. “To your health. Surely it is fate that we meet again, yes?”

  Pfefferkorn didn’t know what to say to that.

  “I have taken the liberty of making some phone calls on your behalf,” Fyothor said.

  Pfefferkorn was nonplussed. “Is that right.”

  “Take it from me, friend. We say: ‘A man cannot cut his own hair.’”

  Pfefferkorn recognized the adage as having its origin in an episode of Vassily Nabochka wherein the prince attempts to cut his own hair, the moral of the story being: sometimes it’s better to ask for help. Although Fyothor’s interference made him uneasy, Pfefferkorn saw no choice but to play along. Any sensible foreigner looking to do business in West Zlabia would be grateful for an inside track. Declining one would be the fastest way to blow his cover. And Fyothor literally kept him close at hand, taking him around the waist as they rose from the breakfast table.

  “Stick with me, friend, and you will have more shit than you know what to do with.”

  Their first stop was the Ministry of Media Relations. Nobody said a word as they cut to the front of the line. Fyothor entered the co-sub-undersecretary’s office without knocking and launched into a stirring discourse on the importance of fertilizer to the people’s revolution. Here, he said, holding up Pfefferkorn’s arm, was a comrade from overseas who could do much to advance the collective principles by demonstrating to the world at large the innate superiority of West Zlabian goats, proven by science to produce waste with a nitrogen concentration higher than that of any other goats in the northern hemisphere. To substantiate this point he waved an article torn from that morning’s sports section. The co-sub-undersecretary nodded, hmmed, and finally concurred that Pfefferkorn’s was indeed a worthy project. He promised to write a memo to this effect. They toasted to mutual cooperation, and Fyothor and Pfefferkorn departed.

  “That was fast,” Pfefferkorn said. The idea that they might accomplish his stated goal troubled him, as he had no idea what to do if someone actually offered to sell him a large quantity of fertilizer.

  “Akha,” Fyothor said. “The man is an ass. He has forgotten us already.”

  A similar scene played itself out four more times before noon, as they whipped through the Ministry of Fecundity, the Ministry of Objects, the Ministry of Nautical Redistribution, and the Ministry of Resealable Barrels. Everywhere they went, Fyothor was received with kisses, and he was frequently stopped on the street by people wanting to shake his hand. Upon learning that Pfefferkorn was with him, they shook Pfefferkorn’s hand as well. Pfefferkorn felt as though he was back in high school and had somehow fallen in with the star quarterback.

  “You remind me of someone I used to know,” Pfefferkorn said.

  “Yes? This person is a friend of yours, I hope?”

  “He was.”

  Lunch was taken standing, at a stall in the market occupying the Square of the Location of the Conclusion of the Parade of the Commemoration of the Remembrance of the Exalted Memory of the Greatness of the Sacrifices of the Magnificent Martyrs of the Glorious Revolution of the Zlabian People of the Twenty-sixth of May. The heat was ferocious, and many of the vendors had rolled up their goods and retreated to the lobby of the nearby Ministry of Flexible Ductwork. The valiant few that had not were flogging a limited assortment of diseased-looking produce. It seemed that “knobby and covered in dirt” was in season. There was no meat save goat offal that had acquired a thick carpet of flies. While Pfefferkorn wanted to disconnect these nauseating sights from his bowl of stew, there was no denying their common pungency.

  On the East Zlabian side of the square was another market, this one colorful and festive. An accordion band played covers of American Top 40. There were rides. There was Bop-a-Goat. There was a petting zoo. There was a booth where you could get dressed up as a character from Vassily Nabochka and have your picture taken. Above all there was food. Clean booths displayed a rainbow of produce, lacquered pastries, satiny chocolates, fresh fish on ice. Pfefferkorn stared at a sign in Cyrillic for a long time before deciphering it as “FUNNEL CAKE.” It was an awesome display of plenty, making it all the more baffling that the entire scene was devoid of patrons. Indeed, this seemed to be the case as far as he could see into East Zlabia: aside from the accordion band, the vendors, and roving packs of well-equipped soldiers, the place had the eerie tranquility of a film set. Here, no teeming masses filled the sidewalks. Luxury cars were parked but nobody was driving. There were cafés, teahouses, bistros, boutiques—all deserted. The picture was so bizarre that Pfefferkorn was unconsciously drawn forward.

  “Turn away, please?”

  Fyothor had spoken with uncharacteristic urgency and without looking up from his own bowl of stew. It was then that Pfefferkorn noticed a ragtag group of West Zlabian soldiers observing them.

  “Come,” Fyothor said, discarding his half-finished stew. “We will be late.”

  74.

  In fact, they were nowhere near late. Fyothor’s line-jumping had given them three hours to kill before their next appointment, so he had decided to add in a few extra stops.

  “You are a tourist,” he said, kneading Pfefferkorn
’s shoulders tenderly. “You must tour.”

  At the interactive section of the Museum of Goats, Pfefferkorn managed to eke out a half-cup of milk. He was proud of himself until he saw the bucket-plus produced by a four-year-old girl with huge, callused hands. At the Museum of Peace he read an account of the Cold War exactly the opposite of the one he knew. At the Museum of Concrete he learned about the building of the museum itself. By dinnertime, he was ready for cake.

  His room had once again been tossed.

  The picture of Zhulk had been straightened.

  The fan was still kaput.

  “Yes hello, this is Arthur Kowalczyk in room forty-four. Where’s my fan?”

  “Monsieur, fan is in room.”

  “The one I have is broken, so either you didn’t replace it like I asked or somebody’s been buying off the back of the truck.”

  “Monsieur, I am sorry.”

  “I don’t want apologies. I want a new fan.”

  The pipes began to bang.

  “Hello?” Pfefferkorn said. “Are you there?”

  “Yes, monsieur.”

  “I’m tired of calling down. Please send me a fan. A working one. Right away.”

  He hung up before the clerk could reply. He moved around the room, restoring it to order, stripping off his clothes as he went. The banging was getting louder. He began to question his original hypothesis. For one thing, he was fairly certain that what made hot water pipes clank was the temperature differential between the water and the pipe. Hot water caused the cold metal to expand, which in turn caused the characteristic ticking. But it was so hot in West Zlabia that he couldn’t imagine the differential to be more than a few degrees: not enough to produce sound, and certainly not enough to produce the ear-splitting racket he was hearing. Another reason to doubt the hypothesis was that in his experience, clanking pipes tended to speed up and then taper off. The noise coming through his wall was following a different pattern. It was steady and insistent, more indicative of, say, the feral urgency of a headboard knocking against plaster. It would be just his luck, wouldn’t it, to be stuck next to a honeymooning couple.