The Moscoviad Read Online Free PDF

Then I went to Volodya,
but his coffers were empty too. So I had to get some from the Vietnamese guy,
for twenty-five. That narrow-eyed bastard! I could kill him! But that’s all right,
now we’ll have some, Vanya . . .”
    And he went up
the ladder. At the seventh floor he stopped, took another breather, adjusted
the bottle in his pocket to make sure it wouldn’t fall out. Then made a large
step from the ladder onto the windowsill. But last time it was much easier:
there was something to grab with your hands, something to hang on to. Now there
was just the wall in front of him and the slippery tin-plated windowsill
beneath his feet. You managed to stretch your hand out to him, but were unable
to hold on to his fingers that were slipping out. He lurched with his entire
body, and for a moment balanced above the abyss, like an angel preparing to
take off. Then there was his long echoing cry. And the fall from the seventh
floor. And death.
    And you were
running about, waking someone, calling the ambulance and the cops—all of this
was already of no importance. All of this was like in a dream. Or like in a
banal melodramatic movie.
    Oh Ruslan the
Magnificent, you were saying, how shall I mourn your loss, my brother?! You
were fearless, you were used to being first in everything, you had countless
hours of parachuting experience! All the girls who knew you loved you, and
those who didn’t prostrated themselves at your feet! You radiated light, oh Ruslan
the Handsome, and your muscles were magical! If I were gay I’d do anything to
sleep with you, my brother! What have you done, Ruslan the Victorious, to whom
you abandoned this fucked-up world, where there is such a shortage of perfect
creatures like you?!
    Then you had all
kinds of interviews with various sleuths and bloodhounds who tried to clarify
the circumstances, smelled for things, sneezed, lifted their paws, made
attempts at civic censure. But that doesn’t matter.
    Why do you lock
the front doors, you wanted to ask in response. Why should a young artistic
being, an ex-marine, risk his life in your fucking country for a bottle of
vodka? Why are you so saturated with the stink of unfreedom? Why do you leave
so little freedom that it is enough only for the fall from the seventh floor?
Why are you now grabbing me with such gusto, as if I were the only one guilty
in his death, as if you want me to atone for my sins by jumping at long last
from that very window?
    But these
questions just hung in the air. For the bloodhounds themselves, to whom you
could address these questions, today were no longer able to give an answer. The
empire was changing its snakeskin, was reconsidering the habitual totalitarian
assumptions; it discussed, imitated a change of laws and of the rules of daily
life, it improvised on the topic of the hierarchy of values. The empire toyed
with freedom, thinking that this way it could preserve itself through renewal.
But it wasn’t worth changing the skin. This was the only skin it had. Now,
having crawled out if its skin, the old bitch is in the throes of agony.
    At last everyone
let you be. You proved your right to be guilty. The bloodhounds barked from a
safe distance and powerlessly clanged their fake teeth.
    About three
months later, on a late winter evening, you were typing something at your desk,
when from there, from the outside, something knocked on the window. It can’t be
a snowball, you thought, nor can it be a stone, for who could throw a snowball,
a stone, or a lump of earth to the height of the seventh floor? But when the
fire escape uttered the familiar metallic moan, you suddenly had a sickening
feeling. You came to the window and drew open the curtains. Ruslan was outside
the window.
    “Vanya,” he said
with his lips. “Would you let me in?”
    He was almost the
same as the other time, only pallid yellow in color, with black circles under
his eyes, and a thin red stream coming from the mouth and disappearing
somewhere down his