As Yura found out: Vlad, Pasha, and a couple of employees were clearing a truck through customs. Having handed in the paperwork, they sat down in the Sierra in the parking lot, and that’s when the heavies came over with questions: “Who are you? What are you doing here? How you gonna pay for parking?”
They couldn’t come up with a sensible answer. “Vlad Trading Company” usually solved its problems through Pasha, whose grandfather served in the Ministry of Security. Problems would end the moment Pasha handed the source of the trouble a phone with Grandpa on the line.
That day, calls to Grandpa’s work and home phones just rang and rang. “The old colonel took off whoring,” Yurok explained.
Pasha kept a notebook with the phone numbers of every possible mistress in the office safe, but the watchman was fast asleep. Pasha got to the notebook too late.
In the meantime, one of the thugs borrowed five rubles off the director for a phone call. By gangster logic, this meant Vladislav Arkadyevich had already paid the gang and was now obligated to keep paying on their every order. What happened after that, the story didn’t say. One thing became clear: Pasha’s grandfather had backed out of the whole business. Giving advice was one thing; getting his hands dirty and actually solving problems was another.
Yurik’s conclusion: “You won’t get a kopeck. Best case, you get a couple of shots to the ribs and the jaw from Pasha. Worst case — no foreplay, straight to the ass.”
And he capped it off with a little rhyme, made up at the office that same day: “Vadik got bought for pocket change,* and screwed right then, at close range.”
After tea and buns, I went back to my room and collapsed onto the bed, empty of thought, empty of feeling.
The lying-around ended with me pounding my head against the pillow. “Damn it! Damn it! Damn it!” I was working myself into hysterics. “I’m so sick of this! What I wouldn’t give to be in Valerka’s place?! Live it up for a year, a month, and then get blown to bits! Lucky bastard!”
Something cracked inside my head.
I rolled onto my back… thought I might go out of my mind. I needed some air.
I put on my pyramid jeans, a t-shirt, and a shirt. Left the dorm. Past the morgue and the psychiatric hospital, I made it to the Kashirskaya metro station.
An hour later I was strolling the boulevards, pondering the meaning of life.
It seemed I was a loser by the simple fact of my birth, like Mumu from Turgenev’s story. I’d never crawl out of my own wretchedness. Never swim free of it.
The thought struck me on Pushkin Square, where I sat down on a bench by the fountain.
Wow! The girls strolling around there! The boys striding by! The cars gleaming! The life bubbling over! It felt like — just reach out your hand and there! — that limousine would be yours! That girl would be yours! That whole dazzling world — just reach out your hand — would be yours!!!
I was ready to tear tendons, mine or anyone else’s, to land at the center of the good fortune that had rained down on the lucky ones. I craved being master of my own life. I ground my teeth with the desire to command rivers of money, hurricanes of passion, mountains of bodies. Me, me, me…
…ah, how shameful and small my squeaky little “me” looked against the weighty, coarse, vivid “MEEE!” erupting from the owners of fat wallets.
I watched fortune’s darlings: entrepreneurs in linen jackets, racketeers in tracksuits, gilded youth in silk. Exhibits from the show titled “A Life Well Lived.”
I pondered my prospects of taking a place among them. Best case, in twenty years.
That’s a long wait! I wanted a chance to fall my way and — oop! — I’m driving a brand-new “eight”… oop, money in my pocket, no idea where to spend it!..
Empty dreams of the future. In the present I was Nobody, and my name was Nothing. Time to come back to reality.
I went down into the metro, got into a carriage, sat on a bench, and sank into thought.
No. There was no thought. There was only bewilderment. What was I doing here? Why was I here?
* The rhyme “Vadik got bought for pocket change,* and screwed right then, at close range” was composed by MEPhI student Roman Romanov in the late 1980s.
