March 11, 1994
Friday
10:00 a.m.
Discharge day turned into a kaleidoscope.
Mandala one: Karabas shifts me onto a wheeled chair. Zhora fusses around:
«Handle him with respect, Kara! Where’s the freight elevator?»
Mandala two: carried into the Durandal’s back seat. Zhora grumbles from the driver’s seat: if they’d wanted to take Peskov out, they’d have fired at his head, not the cylinder-block head. So it was a scare tactic. A signal. That’s good. That the signal made no sense — that’s bad. How do you even read it?
What the hell! I let out a squeak. Zhora didn’t notice:
«Pay attention, student! Yeltsin’s given the order not to squeeze the greyhounds. Our job is to get into the kennel and carve up the Soviet leftovers. Not Chicago in the thirties, but it’s competition all the same! I love a good reshuffling with a few innocent bystanders and higher-ups shot along the way! By the way — I don’t think you got shot at for nothing. It was a warning! Unclear about what. There’s no dirt on Proma.»
«Maybe they mixed me up with someone else?» I mumbled.
«Out of the question. In that case they’d have finished you off for sure, the way Boot finishes off a student at his oral exam. Chicha’s athletes would’ve drawn up the paperwork for five hundred green — a rocket launcher into the Torus, and that’s that! Cheap and effective. When people kill you, they kill you for a reason, and they make sure of it. When they just scratch you, that’s a warning. We need to figure out: who was being warned? And how much is this going to cost?»
The thought that struck me was a simple one: how does Zhorik know Sergei Gavrilovich Boot, one of my strictest professors?
Mandala three, four, five flickered past in the apartment.
Verochka was fussing around everywhere. I’d thought what united us was purely functional sex. I had no idea that in a crisis, she’d get upset, straighten the bedding, fret, and share the fuss with Alina.
Where did this one come from, and why? There’s definitely nothing in it for her here...
Marina didn’t let me finish the thought. Shifted the crowd from bedroom to living room. Yurik, Pasha, Vova, and the rest flickered into view...
I felt like the last emperor. My head kept flipping back to the same thought: «Drop everything and go back to being a night watchman! It was good there!»
By midnight everyone cleared out. I caught my breath in a couple of half-doze stretches, and by dawn I found myself thinking it over.
I should drop it all! Become Romka the watchman, dreaming of a bright future: Roman Peskov graduates from the finest engineering-physics institute on Earth and becomes a specialist in automation and electronics! Acquires a color «Rubin» television, a «Shivaki» video player, and a «Moskvich» the color of ripe cherry. Gets a housing order for a starter flat on the outskirts of Serpukhov, with sober neighbors, ideally. Then the magic he’s dreamed of his whole life finally comes true.
Ba-bam!
Engineer Peskov, noticed for his diligence and good sense, gets promoted. Quality of life improves: a «Sanyo» television, an «AKAI» stereo system, a new «Nine» the color of «dry asphalt,» and a one-room flat in Orekhovo. But that’s not all! After ten or twenty years of hustle, happiness finally arrives!
Pa-ra-pam!!!
Roman Viktorovich, a seasoned executive, becomes co-founder of a firm importing consumer goods. Naturally — a giant «Sony» television with a VCR, a foreign car bigger than a Volga, and a three-room flat ten minutes from the Garden Ring. Ooh, and ah!
My old dreams of a Nobel Prize were empty and false. In reality, I’m built for the life of a scrappy little mutt, hungering after the big dog’s reward.
Turns out that if I’d stepped off the path Zhorik forced on me, after decades of hard work and a couple of lucky breaks, I’d end up with exactly what I already have — an apartment, a Torus, a director’s chair. And decades from now, as a thriving co-founder, I could just as easily get shot. The risk of competitive showdowns is baked into the price of the ticket.
