Near Zero
by Natan Dubovitsky
translated by Bill Bowler
Yegor Samokhodov was happy as a youth in the Russian heartland but now, in Moscow, in middle age, he is estranged from his wife and daughter, and his low-paying job as an assistant editor is going nowhere. Looking for a way out, he joins a criminal gang, the Brotherhood of the Black Book. The Brotherhood is involved in forgery, theft of intellectual property, black-marketeering, intimidation, extortion, bribery, murder, etc.
Yegor’s girlfriend, Crybaby, invites him to a private screening of her new film, although she cannot attend. Yegor goes, hoping she may show up, and is horrified to discover he is watching a snuff movie where Crybaby is slowly murdered. After the screening, Yegor finds that Crybaby has disappeared. He sets out to Kazakhstan, to find and kill her murderer, the film director Albert Mamaev.
The story is set against a panoramic backdrop of Russia during and after the collapse of the USSR. Yegor’s quest brings him into contact with a cast of characters from a broad spectrum of Russian life, culture, history, politics and government.
| Translator’s Foreword | Cast of Characters | Table of Contents |
Chapter 10: Desyat’
The space was not quite a warehouse, not quite an office, not quite a hotel room. It was also something of an exhibition hall. Everything that could be imagined for the complete happiness of a well-read, half-cultured, unexpectedly five-time consecutive lottery winner, non-head engineer of a not-large factory, was piled up in the approximately one-hundred square meter space and boastfully sought the eye: Euro-renovation of Hungarian-Turkish quality; electronic equipment from Mitsubishi and Akai; Italianate furniture from Armenia; beer in cans; Amaretto liquor; “Rothman’s” cigarettes; pistachios in bags dyed with poisonous coloring. And some kind of little boxes with foreign labels, some Xeroxed, with money poking out.
Fedor Ivanovich silently poured liquor into cognac snifters, dumped someone’s lipstick-stained cigarette butts out of an ashtray onto his hand, sprinkled the nuts in their place, and delicately left the room. Chernenko and Yegor settled into armchairs.
“What do you think? Why did they let us go?” asked Chernenko, getting a little drunk.
“They mistook me for someone important in their gang and got scared when they thought they recognized me,” Yegor answered.
“That’s almost it, but not all. At first they were scared, but then, in order to justify their fright, speaking scientifically, they rationalized it and decided that you were the right-hand man of Uncle Akhmet, the most authoritative thief from Balashikha.”
“What do you think they were afraid of?”
“There’s something in your eyes, in your facial expression, in the whole way you carry yourself there’s something of...” After an extended pause, the Chief slowly and deliberately continued, “You’re calm inside, always calm, even when you’re frightened or happy. With such inner peace, you can crawl into a fire to save stupid children and old folks, or you could work as a stoker in a concentration camp.
“This imperturbable inner peace is considered indifference by primitive people. And Anton Pavlich told us to fear the indifferent. So they fear you. I have noticed it in you for some time and, today, in practice so to speak, it worked. This is not just my personal impression but a fact, a strength.
“Your indifference is not from weakness or dullness but precisely the opposite; it’s from an excess of thought and desire. You are indifferent and imperturbable because nothing around you is on your scale. It’s all petty and unreal. Only something grandiose can get your attention. Perhaps something so great that the whole world would seem small by comparison. And these fellows in sweatpants saw it in your eyes. They saw how tiny they were, and they became afraid.”
“But I was scared,” objected Yegor.
“No, no, that’s just your surface, not you. And because of this, I propose we work together.”
“On what?”
“On the big questions. Will you hear me out?”
“I’m ready.”
“I don’t know if this is good news or bad, but Communism is finished. For almost forty years, people doubted that Stalin had died. They didn’t believe it. They all thought he was only pretending to be dead, had hidden himself in a closet and was peering out through the crack to see how scared we were of him. He was giggling and sharpening his little Georgian dagger.
“But now his corpse has been found under the staircase and in a puddle of piss. Plus, he’s been spit on. So we’re no longer afraid. The lackeys are happy; the master has croaked. The only problem is, aside from lackeys, there’s no one else home.
“Three hundred million lackeys are now at large. These important-looking fellows from the Central Committee who still hold meetings in wings of the Tsar’s palace, they already know: they have no power. They just haven’t told us about it yet. They’re embarrassed. But they’ll soon come apart. And then it will begin.
“In a normal country, a civil war would break out, but we have no citizens, and a lackey war is not so much worse as more repellant, more demeaning than civil war. The lackeys will start dividing up the household junk. Some will make themselves warriors of Islam, some will become journalists, some financiers. Lackeys grown feral in freedom are absurd and bloodthirsty. They will live meanly, kill meanly, die meanly, and divide it up and divide it up.
“I intend to participate in this unpleasant enterprise. It’s important to gather up as much money as possible and, most importantly, to gather up those things that bring money. Well, we won’t be able to touch oil or vodka. We simply don’t know much about those areas, although they are the best there are in our economy. So we will amuse ourselves with what is lower but closer. Books, Yegor, books. That’s our fate, the fate of the peaceful angels of high literature—”
“Drink up, Igor Fedorovich, for God’s sake, drink up,” interjected Yegor, with a sticky bottle at the ready.
“For your information” — reflexively drinking up and staring through the floor into somewhere beyond tomorrow, Igor Fedorovich continued his prophecy — “something has long been rotten in our godforsaken industry: illegal reprints, samizdat, machinations with crap work, hackwork on dissertations for Caucasian shishkabobers and carnation wearers, dubbing movies...
“Management knows, but they close their eyes. The police and KGB don’t touch them. There’s been an arrangement for some time not to go after the intelligentsia. So the intelligentsia steals, intelligently and modestly. Indeed, the intelligentsia is supposed to be self-sacrificing and modest. And as a sign of protest, they steal, undermine, so to speak, and suck out the superstructure. Gangsters and komsomoltsy — Boy Scouts — devour the foundation; and the superstructure, of course, is devoured by us, the proletariat of mental labor.
“From all these illicit reprints hidden from the authorities by the publishers, from all the details of fake dissertations, book black-marketeers and greedy literary scholars, I am now forming an organization which in polite society would be called a mafia, but in ours, I don’t know what to call it.
“The goal is to consolidate and take control of the whole illegal publishing business, all the illegal publishing and printing houses in the country, as far as possible, and then to buy up the legal ones.”
“All of them?”
“Well, OK, the majority. Make enough money, preferably in foreign currency, to buy up all these goodies in a couple of years when privatization kicks in, and it definitely will. We will found the greatest publishing house, legal, private, and we’ll... influence politics, get real power...”
“We’ll be magnates. We’ll shine like the sun!” roared Yegor.
“We can designate three lines of business. The first is almost legal: the transfer of all the currently public equipment and employees into our private company. We’ll print books, including textbooks, on the basis of private enterprise and sell them. These days the reading public is ready to explode. Some want Nietzsche, Platonov, Nabokov; others want Hammet, Chase, King. Our own homegrown best-sellers will also appear. It’s going to be a big business.
“The second line of business is completely illegal: the black market in books, illicit reprints, unlicensed textbooks, publication without clearing authorial rights. Intellectual piracy, so to speak. It includes a straight-up racket: coerced control of printing houses, specialized magazines, and so forth.”
“Kiss me, Igor. Give me a kiss,” Yegor cried out but, fortunately, he did not know how to kiss a man and so did not.
“The third line of business is neither this nor that. Legal, but not completely, and slightly indecent. I’m not sure how it will go, but we must try it. Literary fraud and fabrications. Lost appendices to King Lear which have apparently been found. Sensations.
“All we need is that someone compose them in Old English and new Russian. Fabricated Nostradamus. The Gospel of someone or other... I don’t know... of Ann, of Caiaphas. Intellectual provocations for highly educated suckers. Pseudoscientific theories. Friedrich Engels was a woman, the mistress of Marx’s wife. And other such nonsense. Printed possibly in limited editions, although we’ll have to see. In general, a boutique for fake pearls.
“And also, it seems to me, there are going to be a lot of new wealthy men and political figures, and some of them will want the reputation of being intellectual, creative people with great talent. They’ll have young bimbos who want to be singers and movie actresses. And we’ll be there with lyrics and screenplays.
“There will be some leader who wants to go into history as a poet, as well as a statesman. Or a playwright. A regular Beaumarchais, a modern Griboyedov. And we’ll have a whole stable of poets and orators, competent, but monstrously needy, weak and vain because of their alcoholism. We’ll buy up their little wares, their little poems and playlets that no one needs, not even them.
“We’ll buy them cheap, for throwaway prices. And we’ll sell them to the politician, the banker or his little bimbo for piles of money that A. Tolstoy or Yevtushenko never dreamed of. And to boot, we’ll publish expensive editions under the banker’s name and at his expense. For our poor poets, it’s a whole career. That banker is going to have to keep playing the poet and keep publishing someone else’s poems as his own. He’ll be a steady customer. Like a drug addict. And Yegor, the organization of this third, most interesting line of business, I want to propose to—”
“I’m in!”
“—you. If you agree, then the first order of business—”
“What? What needs to be done?”
“—is the necessity of killing our host here, Fedor Ivanovich.”
“Without question.”
“I mean right now. To close the deal, so to speak—”
“Doesn’t matter. But I need a firearm. I couldn’t smother or stab him.”
“Here’s a pistol. Fedor Ivanovich, Fedor Ivanovich, could you come in here for a minute?”
The little old man came in with a tray. First, the tea service flew off in all directions, then the heart. One teacup remained whole, and blood of a gloomy red color flowed into it from the hole in Fedor Ivanovich, as if from a samovar.
Strangely, the old codger did not fall at once, but stood and stood, for quite some time, probably a who-o-o-le second, or even a second and a half. And all this time the shot echo-o-o-ed like a horro-o-o-or. And then the deceased keeled over, morphed into something like a pile of rags and lay in a pile not stretched out on the parquet but folded modestly.
Yegor emptied the clip. Bullets from the Makarov flew in all directions, since Yegor was no longer firing at Fedor Ivanovich but somewhere into the amazed darkness of his own malaise.
One floor up, in apartment number fifty — a bad apartment from which once every six months the cops sent whole families of pickpockets and safecrackers to Siberia and into which, the following week, new pickpockets and safecrackers from God knows where would settle in — in apartment fifty, a bunch of brothers-in-law were sitting around the table, family-like, slurping cheap wine. One of them wiggled his ears and barked out:
“Are they shooting or something? Are they murdering someone?”
“Let them murder. They have it coming,” barked another.
“Who has it coming?”
“All of them. Pour the wine.”
“Congratulations, brother,” said the Chief, walking up to Yegor, who was emptied and heated up, like the pistol. The Chief pulled a pair of scissors from his pocket and ran them across Yegor’s head a couple of times. “You are now tonsured for your new service, taken from the mortal world for the sake of eternal war, and accepted into the organization. Now you may know its name: the Brotherhood of the Black Book. You are now a Black Booker. Keep the pistol. Get cartridges from the kitchen cabinet. Pour the wine.”
translation © 2019 by Bill Bowler
