New Man.
He was seamlessly handsome, like a layperson’s vision of success: a suit the color of night, sewn with burgundy tracers, a glossy parting, a face and manicured hands straight out of a fashion magazine. Pants cut exactly to fit. His cuffs, smile and collar a dazzling white. The name is also bright – Eugene Valerianovich Golovachev[1]. He is a witty, beautiful orator, and the ladies he calls are nearly always free that evening. Briefings on Mondays, on Wednesdays he goes to shooting practice, wild parties at Fridays. By the age of thirty, he had everything that the son of Soviet engineers should to be allowed to have, without stretching the often malleable laws beyond breaking point. That such a wonderful man was Eugene Valerianovich. Yet his ship has now sailed, as they say.
Dji at sixty has just a plot of land and an old tractor. The wrinkles of this weathered man are embossed and rigid, like tarnished bronze. The color has leached from his pale eyes. And Dji himself looks colorless – if you printed out a photo of him, you’d think the colored ink was running low. All color has long been absorbed by gray dust on the skin that has piled into large pores, into the folds of the flannel checkered shirt, into the parched hair of the head. Dji is a renowned marksman, but can barely talk, just mutter incoherently and wave his arms. Neighbors politely nod in response to his speeches, praise the weather and rush to finish the conversation as soon as possible. Dji does not regret the lives torn to ragged shreds by him.
The last time Golovachev was seen in the office in October. For ten meteoric years he climbed from a seller to the manager, ran a shopping mall for six months, and then disappeared in a day. He was remembered by one desperate act. Nothing else been remembered, a man like any man: parting, face, hands. Just one of many who get there early, and leaves late.
He drove to the office around eight in the morning. The guard at the entrance raised the barrier, and while Golovachev’s car was smoothly rolling along the parking lot, the second guard was already dragging the metal barrier from the best parking space. In the corporation there were more than a dozen shopping malls, but Golovachev managed the largest, the most profitable; the first on the route from the subway. He carefully observed his dominion each morning – walked around the endless rows of the glass stalls. He checked whether everything was in order, whether the employees were in place, whether the seals were intact on the goods. Finding everything in order, he went up to the office.
In front of his door was the morning bustle: tenants, advertising agents. Tenants are patiently sitting, synchronously turning their necks with every swoosh of the front door. Golovachev is needed by everyone.
Nobody needs Dji. He comes to work when he likes: five o’clock on a summer’s morning, and he can stay in the house until lunchtime during the long winter. The journey to the job is not that long – just a couple of steps from the modest porch to the tractor. His house seems almost tiny against the backdrop of endless fields bracketing his modest holding. In the spring, the land has been whipped to churning froth with plowing, and the house undulates on long black waves, shimmering like a two-story mirage in the viscous streams of air, flowing from the warm womb of the disrupted land. In the evenings, Dji does not hurry anywhere, but sits on a fallen tree, staring into the void, as if a little of it has flowed into the calm, transparent eyes.
Golovachev bustles importantly into the office, gives a perfunctory nod to the tenants, and immediately expels the director of the debtor’s office which did not paid the rent on time “And what are you sitting on?” the supplicant from a South Asian country wrings his hands in a pleading gesture, like a priest on an Egyptian fresco, but Golovachev has already entered the office, leaving the secretary, Olenka to ask, “Is there anything urgent?”
Olenka – a big soft-faced lady, three years before retirement – brings a folder of papers and coffee to the office. Golovachev pour the coffee, casually thumbs through the papers, and asks Olenka about the business of the day. While Olenka is talking, Eugene Valerianovich is circling the calendar for the ninth of July, asking the secretary to call his comrades. High-ranking friends, in contrast, he calls personally. These are, however, busy, because they are, of course, high-ranking. Golovachev dictates a witty telephone message into the phone.
“And by the way, I saw you in my dreams today.”
“Should I write this, too?” The girl on the other end of the wire has a sense of humor.
“Ah, joker, I dreamed of you personally,” Golovachev added a hint of chocolate to his elegant voice.
“My boss does not recommend that I share my dreams with other men.”
“How can I win your favor?” Golovachev was not embarrassed for a second.
“Kill the monster, rescue the princess and do not distract me during working hours,” the girl at the other end pressed the disconnect key with a long finger which has a white scar across the two phalanges.
Golovachev also hangs up, dreamily looks out the window, and then returns to his papers.
“Has he not paid it yet?” Eugene Valerianovich has a poor memory for names, but Olenka realizes that the conversation is about the debtor who was so desperate to took Eugene’s attention.
“Of course not!” he brusquely answers Olenka. “They have the whole store sealed. They cannot sell and get the money. He is asking for at least part of the goods to return to pay off their debts. Maybe you’ll regret it?”
“And who will regret us?” Golovachev replied with the stock phrase of the owner and the president of the company Adam Pavlovich. Even his neck stretched forward and the set of his mouth became hard, imitating the leader.
An hour later, the first tenant is allowed to the office. He dithers at the door, settles on the edge of the chair and immediately hides his hand behind the protruding lapel of his jacket.
“It’s hard, Valery Eugeneevich,” the petitioner sighs, placing his hand on his heart.
“Eugene Valerianovich,” corrects Golovachev.
The petitioner is embarrassed, skips the carefully prepared speech and passes immediately to the finale.
“We would have to lower our rent, twenty percent.”
“I understand,” Golovachev answered.
That summer, rental rates surpassed ten dollars per square meter per day.
“So, are we agreed?” The petitioner extracts a bulging envelope from his inner pocket.
“What have you got there?” Golovachev asked severely. “Money?”
“Money,” whispers the visitor.
“How much?” whispered the owner of the office in reply.
“Five.”
“That’s wonderful,” Golovachev pressed the intercom. “Five thousand will go to the cashier as a prepayment for the summer, and you will always pay for three months in advance.”
“What do you mean?” The applicant turned pale, his hand shook as he tried to return the envelope in his pocket. “There are no sales. Not at all.”
“You heard? Conduct our friend to the checkout.”
“I heard it, Eugene Valerianovich,” the assistant said in response, and, abruptly turning to the guest: “Come, I’ll see you off.”
Meanwhile, Golovachev dialed the number of the security chief.
“I wish you good health, Comrade Colonel.”
“And you be healthy,” the timbre of the civil servant always carries a hint of menace.
“There is one person who walked in here, he just offered money for nothing,” Golovachev reported.
“A lot of?”
“Yes nonsense – five grand, but you should warn our colleagues.”
“Well done, sonny.” The chief of the security services is sixty, and he calls all the leading youngsters “sons.“
Eugene Valerianovich put down the phone and asked for more coffee. Golovachev did call the colonel as a precaution, in case of attempted entrapment.
Eugene Valerianovich still remembers the whole thing, a brightly cold day in May, right after his ascension to general manager, a charming, understatedly muscular man came to the office with a oily, three-bracket smile under the man’s cold eyes, and offered money. Golovachev did not even touch the enticing green wad, he merely promised to think about it, and thought a week before reporting the incident to the Corporate Security Department.
The same evening Golovachev was invited to take a ride. He was requested politely: two large, trim men approached, pushed on his shoulders and pressed the newly-appointed manager into the back seat of an unobtrusively bulky car. They sat on each side of Golovachev, the car started. From Among the Golovachev recognized only the formerly smiling man, though now without a bulging envelope or broad grin to offer him.
“Where are we going?” Eugene Valerianovich asked guardedly.
“An educational trip, to the historic landmarks of our great capital,” answered one of the men.
“With some unexpected surprises at the end,” added the other, smiling.
The guards kept silent the rest of the way, with a glazed look – like robots drained of power.
The first stop on the tour was the cemetery. The car stopped at the fence, the men pulled the slack Golovachev out of car and led him inside the cemetery through the small gate.
“Let’s take a walk?” suggested one of them.
Eugene Valerianovich walked by himself without having to be dragged, but if the escorts were not supporting him by the elbows, he would probably have sank into the waterlogged grass.
The rangy men stopped suddenly, as though they had seen something in the light of the torch, and exclaimed tragically:
“What a pointless death!”
“But his boss warned him,” the other man added the cautionary epitaph, wagging his thick finger mockingly.
Several more times the walk deviated from the path to stand by fresh graves to tell Golovachev an instructive story about the recently deceased. By a strange coincidence, each of the departed had left this mortal realm when trying to appropriate the money that had not belonged to them.
“And this, guess whose resting place it will be?” – a heavy hand nudged Golovachev a couple of steps forward, and he found himself in front the infinitely black pit with a mound of freshly dug earth to the side.
“Height one hundred and seventy two centimeters?” enquired one of them judiciously.
“One hundred and seventy,” corrected Golovachev.
“So it will be a little big…” the attendant seemed disappointed.
“Check the data,” the other man shone a flashlight at the wooden cross with brass plate, with the letters ‘Golovachev Eugen Valerianovich 1966-1998’ burning themselves into his worried mind. “Any questions?”
“About what?” Golovachev finally shock himself out of this dread.
“You’ve been thinking for long enough now,” the first admonished, and propelled Golovachev into the abyss. He prepared for a long fall, but almost immediately buried his face in the soft ground. It hurt, a bit, although the six-foot drop was far from the chasm his mind had created. He did not stir, he merely waited for what was to come. From above came the sound of a shovel, and a scattering of earth fell on his neck. A cold lump crept over the collar of his shirt and flowed as slippery mud over his sweaty neck.
“And now, a surprise,” a voice rang out with a ghastly cheerfulness, and the shovel creaked again into the earth.
“Since you, idiot, still had the intelligence to call the right person, you’ve won the two-way trip.”
Golovachev clearly imagined that the smiling man was bursting at his cheeks with self-satisfied schadenfreude.
“Here’s your return ticket,” another voice said, as the tossed shovel slammed painfully against the manager’s thigh. “Do not be late for work.”
Then silence. The would-be assassins padded away, without even the sound of their footsteps squelching off the soaked earth. Golovachev moved his legs, his hand, his neck; his muscles ached, but the body reluctantly obeyed. His fingers clasped the cold shovel at his feet, and used it to laboriously clamber upright, shaking his head like a dog to rid himself of the dirt. Moving his hands over the sticky walls, he rose to his full height – the top edge of the earth was somewhere at chin level. He saw neighboring fences and crosses jutting sullenly out of the sodden earth. The night was moonless, the wind waved a distant solitary lantern forlornly, and crosses with fences jostled around Golovachev in a barbaric dance of death.
The fear bubble expanded to bursting point once more: his heart began to flicker disturbingly, his intestines twisted into a painful knot, and his leg muscles felt like rubber. Golovachev sat down at the bottom of the grave again. His cramped stomach made sitting painful, however, so he lay on his back, rubbed his bruised ribs with his hand, and tried to breathe air back into his tight chest. He wanted to exhale the pain, but instead heard his own animal wail. As if understanding his distress, the mournful howls of nearby dogs provided a Greek chorus to his tragedy. Golovachev lay there for a long time. The rectangle of the sky slowly cleared, and the stars shone brightly – unusually brightly for the metropolitan sky.
Golovachev got up, tried to jump out of the pit, gripping the edge with his hands, but slipped. After several failed attempts, He used the shovel as a prop, pushed himself up with one agonized leg, squeezed out and slithered onto the grass like a primordial birth. He got up, caught his breath, leaning on a nearby sapling, went to the wooden cross and saw on it a completely different name. He scratched the brass plate, and there were sticky lumps left on his finger from the double-sided scotch tape that had affixed the fake plate bearing his title.
This latter-day Lazarus picked up the shovel to smash the cross, found he did not dare, and instead swung with full force at the mound of earth beside the grave. This he beat again and again, imagining he was pummeling the face of one of the smirking guides, and then his general director.
He gasped at the metallic taste where he had inadvertently bitten his tongue, picked up the cheap brass plate with his own name from the ground, tossed it aside, reluctantly picked it up again, then meandered aimlessly around the cemetery until he found the gate, got to the highway, and flagged down a slightly spooked taxi.
He stripped himself of his soiled attire before even getting to the door to his apartment and stuffed all his clothes to the garbage chute – he did not want to bring his burial outfit into the house. He opened the door and padded into the shower. He scrubbed his neck for a long time, getting rid of the sensation of cold lumps slithering worm-like across it. He was not merely ridding himself of the dirt, but the memory of the fear of the second toss of the earth, scraping away the claustrophobic recollection of the horror of being smothered by the mass of soil growing on his back under the rhythmic creaking of the shovel.
He did not trust himself to drive, so called a taxi. He got to work on time, as recommended by the smiling gravedigger. By nine the CEO called for him. The CEO was about fifty, and was educated by the Young Communists organization. He was boring, but very clever; young, but bloated, he would use crude profanity in the presence of unfamiliar ladies, but he was as capable of polite speech as any in front of any officials.
“Happy birthday, Golovachev,” the general pointed out to his subordinate a fully filled glass. A slice of rye bread lay upon the glass.
“It’s too early, Adam Pavlovich,” said Golovachev.
“The most important thing is that it’s not too late.” The CEO picked up the expensive vodka from his tidy desk and poured two fingers. “Drink!”
Golovachev grabbed his glass – imagining how it would feel to throw the vodka into the fat, clean-shaven director’s face. The CEO waited for a pause, examining his vodka in the harsh strip light, but at the corner of his eye he carefully observed the subordinate.
“Drink,” the boss directed once more.
Golovachev submissively took a small sip.
“To the bottom,” the boss ordered, “otherwise there will be no health.”
The manager drained the vodka in several large swigs, trying not to cough as the fiery liquid burned his throat.
“Well done, good boy!” The director patronizingly patted him on the shoulder, called the receptionist, and the girl brought snacks to the office. She bent down to put the tray on the table, and Golovachev noticed her long pale fingers.
“And where did you get this adorable scar?” Golovachev asked quickly. In a state of sobriety, he would not have allowed himself such a liberty.
“From the Tooth Fairy,” the director bluntly dismissed her, and when the girl left the office, asked boastfully “Do you like her?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t even think about her!” snarled the CEO. And added added thoughtfully, more to himself “She is impregnable…Well, I will wait for the coming corporate party and perhaps savor this delicate dish,” his porcine features twisting into an entitled grin.
Golovachev’s fingers grew sticky from the sickly snacks curdling in his stomach. The CEO pointed to the napkins.
“Thank you, Adam Pavlovich.”
“Not at all. Education in our glorious country is free. Go home, have a rest, and see you tomorrow. Did you take your car?”
“No.”
“Very wise. My driver will give you a lift.”
“Thank you, Adam Pavlovich,” he repeated, relieved. Golovachev’s hate was transformed into a tipsy feeling of camaraderie, and, throughout the journey, he admitted to the driver his love of strong leadership.
In October, they celebrated the company’s anniversary. The event was held on the eve of the Great October Revolution[2], and ironically informally called the “Great October Corporate Party”. It was celebrated on a grand scale for three days. Honored guests, an expensive country hotel, glamourous popstars, and all the tenuous trappings of success.
The year of the Default[3] was, however, over, and small business was dying out, half of the stores in the shopping mall were sealed shut – traders were not able to pay their rent in US dollars, which exchange rate jumped almost four times in a single week of the August. On the eve of the departure, the CEO gathered the top managers and told them about the dire financial performance. But no one was going to cancel the corporate fun.
“Where will we get the money?” the chief accountant fretted.
“I agreed with the grey wholesalers, on Monday they will buy all the goods from the sealed stores.”
“Those goods do not belong to us,” the cautious lawyer reminded him.
“Under the contract we have the right to sell the goods of tenants to cover the debt.”
“But we cannot keep an amount exceeding the debt,” the lawyer persisted.
“And who will prove that the goods were for a large sum? We did not sign any documents.”
“They will complain,” insisted the lawyer.
“To whom can they complain? Let them pitch up back at their home countries and to try to complain there.” The CEO stood up, signaling that the discussion was over.
The corporate party gathered around two hundred guests. The leaders of the large tenant firms served their vassal duty and kept themselves in a separate group around the managers responsible for them. At another table, filled with mineral water, sat the personal drivers, fixed smiles on their bored features. The right to arrive by private transport was awarded only to the VIPs. The rest were driven in by buses, and it was almost impossible for them to leave the event before the appointed time. Golovachev was, however, allowed to drive himself on that day – the next morning he was on duty at the shopping mall.
Colleagues raised toasts, shouted “hip-hip hurrah!” They giggled at trifles, they gossiped, bargained for small handouts from the drunk leadership, and arranged clandestine meetings. Everyone was eating, laughing unnaturally, posing for the official photographer – any other photography at the event was categorically forbidden. All cameras and mobile phones were banned. This was the only time of the year when managers were allowed to turn off their phones and leave the short leash of mobile communication behind.
The execution of the order was personally monitored by the security chief. The colonel looked sober, although he did not miss his toast. Standing at the entrance, he told some anecdote from military life. Golovachev forced himself to listen.
“May I stand with you?” The girl was squeezed into the group. She was in a closed gray dress, with a long, sheathed lace, hem and trimmed with the same lace wide sleeves to the elbows. Golovachev did not immediately recognize Adam Pavlovich’s assistant. Without her heavy office make-up, without heels, in simple attire, and her formally severe expression replaced by a smile – she looked almost childlike. The outfit was inexpensive, perhaps sewn from something old. The girl’s hands seemed fragile in the wide sleeves outfit. Above the right wrist, Golovachev noticed the white imprints of fingers, as though clasped by an unwanted hand.
“Do us a favor, stay with us” implored Eugene Valerianovich to the girl.
But the girl saw something behind his shoulder and hurriedly left the conversation. At that moment, the colonel grabbed Golovachev’s elbow and pulled him toward. Straight through their group, the CEO marched. He was pretty drunk, with eyes full of malicious stubbornness, and he moved with his head jutting forward, like a myopic warthog.
“The boss on the Autumn Hunt,” said one of the office wits.
The colonel laid siege to the joker.
“Let him relax. The old horse does not spoil the furrow.” muttered one dismissively.
“But it does not plow very well either,” another voice finalized the joke, the meaning of which Eugene Golovachev has never understood.
“I feel sorry for the girl,” sighed the accountant. “She does not have any chance.”
The rest of the guests did not notice the CEO’s coarse references to his botched mating ritual. The light in the hall was muffled – a celebrity arrived. The singer was very late and for couple seconds of he could not catch us his own phonogram with his mouth.
It was about ten in the evening, the corporate orgy of consumption was in full swing, everyone turned their faces to the stage, and when the artist repeated the refrain for the tenth time, the audience began stamping their feet in time. The infernal aspects of the unedifying scene was intensified by jagged flashes of a stroboscope, the sulfurous smell of fireworks, the writhing bodies, the claustrophobia, and by the contorted mouths.
The colonel dragged Golovachev into the quiet hall and painfully poked his index finger into the Golovachev’s chest. This guest was regarded by the officer as a sign of exceptional trust.
“Could you do me a small favor” he asked, “Comrade Guard.”
“I’m at your attention, Comrade Colonel,” Golovachev replied.
“You are on duty tomorrow, and on Monday the goods of the filed tenants will be sold.”
“That’s right, my general” he beamed, smug with power.
“So, please take audio system from the seventeenth module and bring it to my office. I mean the old model with really high quality. According to the specifications, it’s worth ten grand, but those dirty dealers[4] will pick it up for a penny.”
“The only obstacle, great marshal, is the seal on the door,” Golovachev answered. He was not surprised, the security chief was a fanatical music lover and even played the piano himself.
“Do not pretend to be more foolish then you already are. The sealing tool will be in your possession all day tomorrow. Don’t you know how to restore a seal?”
“Do not tell me, I know,” he replied despondently. “And if the guard does not listen? Maybe write a note for them?”
The officer looked at Golovachev as if he was a small child.
“He will listen. If not, then just say to him ‘The Motherland hears, the Motherland knows.”
“I’ll whisper it, Comrade Colonel of Security.”
“Whatever, you’ve got it,” the officer grinned wryly. “And keep in mind that for jokers we also have a special trip.”
Golovachev originally intended to leave the party just before midnight, but left the fun an hour earlier than planned. He walked quickly along the avenue of the expansive county hotel, carefully listening for the sound of soft footsteps behind him. The year was decayed by brown leaves from the woods reminiscent of the grave smell of prepared earth. He sat in the car, adjusted the rearview mirror to a more comfortable angle, and drove up to the gate.
“Have not you taken anything which does not belong to you?” the gateman joked sleepily and shone a flashlight at Golovachev’s car, then into his face, and then casually rifled the beam around the salon.
“I do not know what to do with my own belongings,” said Golovachev, whose entire rear seat of the car was littered with hunting detritus.
“If it’s superfluous, I’ll take it off your hands,” the guard grinned, and the gates went to the sides.
On duty once more, Golovachev arrived an hour before the opening of the pavilion. Since August, three security guards had guarded the parking lot to drive away the desperate tenants. Debtors were not allowed to approach managers, nobody read long tearful petitions, and foreigners did not dare to complain to the police.
The South Asian supplicant, who now knew his pleas had fallen on deaf ears no longer bothered Golovachev – they have understood each other for a long time.
“I need to pick up some of the goods to pay off my debts,” persuaded the debtor during their last conversation.
“Everyone needs it,” Eugene Valerianovich retorted.
“It will be very bad for me,” the director explained, and ran his hand across his throat to show what would happen to him if he did not settle with the creditors.
“And who is now in a good position?” Golovachev was uncomfortable, realizing that it was very dangerous for the tenant’s wife – the ugly Muscovite, who did the book-keeping. And three of their children will suffer, of course. Since that conversation, Golovachev did not see director, although he had had a chance to talk on the phone.
Having stepped on duty after the ‘October Co-operative’, Eugene Valerianovich did not encounter any more annoying tenants. But the whole parking lot was full of long trucks.
Golovachev went to the central reception hall, where there was a duty guard officer and ordered the guard to open all sealed shops. The guard did not believe it and repeatedly asked “Allow the taking of goods from the listed stores?”
“Yes, that’s comprehensible, I would have thought,” Golovachev confirmed.
“But they are …”
“They closed the debt and put out additional guarantees. Do what I told you immediately.”
“May I ask for a written order…” the guard was an experienced bureaucrat.
“Here’s the order, here’s the signature: Letting the goods go…”
The guard was still hesitant.
“The Motherland hears, the Motherland knows,” chanted Eugene Valerianovich like a mantra, a line from the once popular and very patriotic Soviet song.
“Okay, I hear you,” the shift chief affirmed tonelessly, and headed for the exit.
Eugene Valerianovich saw the security guard’s uncertainty, he knew that he would try to call the CEO personally. But Golovachev also knew well that in the next couple of days nobody would be able to get the CEO on the phone. The decree on the prohibition of mobile communications during the corporate party was issued by the CEO himself, he kept this sacrosanct and severely punished his subordinates for any violation of the established procedure.
Malign tongues had claimed that the director had forbidden mobile communication because of a jealous wife who had not been taken to the corporate parties, and had harassed her loving spouse with constant phone calls. And it would be nice if she just called her husband. Instead, armed with an internal telephone directory, the companion to the director’s life called all the employees; from Chinese whispers she imagined a truly epic – if not entirely groundless – mosaic of events and then created a terrible mess for her husband.
There was the case when an intern once unadvisedly gave the CEO’s wife the address of the corporate party. She spent a lot of money for the taxi. That, perhaps, was the only corporate party which all the employees of the company remembered with pleasure. Neither the invited popstars, nor performers had ever given such an enchanting show – with chases, screams, small brawls, simmering anger and thrown objects.
An hour after the start of his shift, Golovachev personally went to see how his order had been executed. He pressed the guard chief, and he finally gave the command to the floors. Immediately, all came running. Removal men jumped from the trucks, rusted forklifts moved out bulging pallets and in another hour the shops emptied like aquariums from which water was released.
Golovachev went to his office, took out a screwdriver, unscrewed an old plate from his door and hung a cheap brass one with the letters ‘Golovachev Eugene Valerianovich: 1966 – 1998’, which he saved from his cemetery adventure. He ran down the stairs, took the emergency exit and asked the taxi driver to go to the airport.
The next life Eugene Golovashchyov lived was spent in Germany. First, as a student at a business university, then as a highly paid bank clerk. A new name was acquired in advance and legally, then the passport was replaced he changed the spelling of his name from French transcriptions[5] to English ones. The life of this new German clerk also broke off abruptly: he simply got up from behind his partition, opened the door to the street and pushed hard to overcome the puddle which is impossible in Dresden. He soon landed on the other side of the ocean.
Dji he became, only in Canada. His neighbors were too lazy to pronounce the difficult long name Eugene, so Dji it was. “Just call a spade a spade,”, the new settler from the Old World muttered resignedly, putting the diesel on his tractor to order. Dji bought a gun for hunting, taking aim at a white-tailed deer which had wandered over to the garden behind the house. The deer squinted at Dji with the moist, surprised eye of the quarry, and Dji no longer aimed at live targets ever again. Shooting at beer cans seemed a more worthy occupation for a man who has been on the run for nearly half a lifetime.
There is no escape from Canada. Wherever you look, there is only the horizon. You cannot escape from the horizon.
“And where do you want to go, Dji?” asked his wife, the traces of a scar still visible on her now withered fingers. “The harvest is almost complete, the children will come for Thanksgiving, in your last picture the girl can already be distinguished from the peach.”[6]
Hard wrinkles are not easily smoothed out, but from the warmth of the woman’s hands, his mask of sadness melts into a smile of relief.
“What news from across the ocean, my princess?”
“Our sewer rat of a former boss has now become a fat-cat, it seems, in the Ministry of State Property.”
“I’m not worthy of you, I did not kill the monster,” Dji says.
“You have fulfilled all the conditions, the princess has escaped, and the true ogre vanquished,” his wife reassures him. “I personally saw his epitaph on the office door.”
And Gee smiles wider, trying to catch a deft finger in his weather-beaten lips, and hides his unshaven face in soft female hands.
About the other disrupted lives, he does not even remember.
[1] In Russian, the full name includes first name, family name and middle name, which is the Father’s name. First name and middle name are usually used in formal communication.
[2] “Bolshevik” (Later Communists) Revolt in Russia, in 2017.
[3] The Russian financial crisis (also called the Ruble crisis or the Russian Flu) hit Russia on 17 August, 1998. It resulted in the Russian government and the Russian Central Bank, devaluing the ruble and defaulting on its debt.
[4] At the end of last century, most of the electrical goods had been imported and sold in Russia through dubious and borderline illegal means.
[5] The rules for spelling Cyrillic names in international documents, including the passports, were changed in Russia around the mid-90s. The French transcription rules have been changed to the English transcription, so same names in the new passports would be written very differently, especially for the letters which are not found in the English alphabet.
[6] Reference to the famous Russian artwork “The Girl with the Peaches” by Valentin Serov. Here is used as a joke, Dji started to study the fine arts with some initial success.