July 24, 1993
Saturday
8:00 PM
Smoke filled the restaurant to bursting. I never would have believed such rousing chaos could unfold in a dive tucked away off the beaten cultural track. In the evening, Kalyazinsky Lane looked a hundred times less presentable than by day — genuinely rural, the middle of nowhere. Only the line of foreign cars along the curb gave away the capital-city location.
Inside, the place was boiling and churning.
On stage, backed by a four-piece band, was — no, it couldn’t be! — Veronika Sergeyevna, tearing it up. The table diagonally across from the stage was Chicha’s. He sat at the head of a company of lean men, all dressed alike — leather vests and black shirts with stand-up collars. The men listened reverently to Veronika’s melodic threats: «I’ll give you back everything you ever gave me!»
The male half of the crowd split evenly, fifty-fifty, between businessmen in suits and ties and businessmen in leather vests with no ties. Both groups — everyone, really — sported pagers clipped to their belts. It seemed only the wait staff and I couldn’t claim any connection to modern technology. The hostess led Zhorik and me to the only free table, tucked in the far corner.
I burrowed into the shadows, into inconspicuousness, glad the table was in the corner and dimly lit. Zhorik, ignoring the noise, was mashing buttons on his mobile phone, holding it to his ear, swearing.
A couple of minutes later he summed it up: «Nastya’s babbling nonsense. No signal!» Tossing off, «I’ll be right back! Order me three hundred grams of vodka,» he dashed outside.
When the waitress came over, I ordered, a little tense: «Three hundred grams of vodka, a glass of beer, some kind of appetizer, a couple of Caesar salads, and two veal dishes. Yes, exactly. An entrecote.» Then I remembered to check her name tag. Zhanna.
Ah!
— Zhannochka! Take good care of us!
And smiled. The waitress walked off, not with a mailman’s gait but a peahen’s, and I dragged my chair right up against the wall, further from the light, so that absolutely no one would ever notice me. I felt uneasy.
I was surrounded by cartoonish characters — hulking men with necks like the backs of their own skulls, and Party-apparatus types in herring-colored ties. Onstage they were belting out something familiar, off the television, but I couldn’t place exactly what. The melody hammered at my skull without offering any clue.
A carafe arrived.
Not waiting for Zhorik, just to shake off the tension, I knocked back a shot, chased it with a pickle. Didn’t touch the beer, didn’t feel like it. My soul demanded an alcoholic dive, a peregrine falcon plunging clean over reality. I caught my breath, scanned the room, noted that everyone else was drinking their vodka the same way, in one gulp, like a bullet, meant to hit hard and blow your mind clean out. And they danced the same way too — fervently, single-mindedly, hammering not dust into the floor with their heels but nails into the lid of their own coffins.
A feeling washed over me that life both began and ended right here. Everyone present was a tightrope walker halfway across — one step left, one step right, and there’d be no saving them. Not that anyone was trying to save themselves. Everyone was busy with one thing: breathing it all in, drinking it all down, and then, come morning, stepping out into the square, locking eyes with the enemy, and, hand resting on the grip of a holstered revolver, taking one step forward, kicking up dust with a pointed boot...
Damn it!
I understood Zhorik’s love for Clint Eastwood.
Zhorik pictured himself a lone hero in a hostile world! Exactly! Here, every man was a loner, without fear or reproach. Cool! Swap out everyone’s pagers for Colts and Smith & Wessons, and the Wild West would rise up in full force! A cowboy movie! About a cruel but just world… first to shoot, last to spend a bullet, the town ain’t big enough for two. Every man for himself…
I swept my eyes over the triumphant cowboy crowd, sighed, drank. Ten minutes later I’d settled in, gone cross-eyed, gotten used to the noise, looked around. No familiar faces, not even theoretically familiar ones. All around me were people who’d been beaten down, pickled, and bled dry… people who’d been cast aside, surrounded on four sides by an enemy, yet somehow never beheaded in the end… A foreign place, someone else’s. Senseless, vicious, a hurricane of a place.
