July 24, 1993
Saturday
9:30 PM
The band stepped off for a break; the din and the toasts from every table hammered at my skull. God! If only I could rewind ten years and see the ordinary Soviet citizens who were now shouting each other down.
Who were these people who’d thrown themselves at the barricades of change, adapted to the new winds, and become today’s masters of life? Ordinary Soviet people. They went to work when the alarm clock rang, marked occasions with aspic and Olivier salad, dug their garden beds at the dacha, strolled with their kids through the park, ate popsicles on a stick… Everyone was the same. One biography for the whole country — born, studied, worked, retired. The people seemed like a monolith, topped with a bow of Party elite, with a rind of antisocial elements, like Chicha, along the edges.
Then came perestroika, and it tore the monolith apart, crushed it into rubble, into gravel, into sand. The mold and the bow were untouched, everything else ground to dust! No country, no people, everyone surviving on their own.
I remembered the empty corridors of VychMekh. The scientists were gone. Tenants roamed the building, cooking up their little businesses. Where had the junior researchers, the candidates and doctors of science gone, the ones who never managed to turn cowboy? Sitting on church steps begging? Collecting scrap metal and empty bottles? Surely they couldn’t have just evaporated? Looks like they did. Yesterday you’re a candidate of sciences, today you’re a private cabbie, hustling fares in a beat-up Moskvich, same as my father.
I don’t want to end up like Dad. I need to pull a Stetson down over my eyebrows, strap on a gun belt with a holster so a Colt Cloverleaf sits ready at hand, and walk out onto a street where the dusty old world stands off to one side, tail between its legs!
Whew!
I knocked back a shot, chewed some salad, fixed my eyes on the table where Zhorik and Timofey, the digger from before, had just walked up. Both shook hands with Chicha and his crew. Exchanged a few words for a couple of minutes. Shook hands again...
Timofey left the restaurant, Zhorik sat down next to me. We clinked glasses, drank, poked at the meat. Zhorik chewed a piece, swallowed, and concluded the kitchen couldn’t handle the crowd. The meat was cooked badly, more like a shoe sole than an entrecote. Needed to sort it out with Nastya, this wasn’t right.
Zhorik’s worries didn’t touch me. My mind was wrapped in a fog condensed out of the vodka I’d drunk. My body got carried off to the dance floor, where the ladies were showing off. Hm, the dance floor was full of women, pleasant to look at, spirited, curvy, limber. Dancing, laughing, making eyes. And there I was among them, shuffling my feet… not for long.
— Hey, student. How much have you had?
I shrugged, turned my gaze to Zhorik, who’d hauled me off the dance floor back to the table and was shaking a half-empty carafe. Right, of course. While waiting, he hadn’t wasted time. Had been hitting the carafe out of sheer nerves.
Zhorik shook his head, muttered something about baboon dancing… Looked like I’d set a record, getting plastered into a full vegetable in half an hour.
Vadim came over. Apologized for being late, sat a girl down beside him. Not Nadya.
