‘Here’s a real-life story for you. There was a Shakespeare scholar called Shitman who worked in the Institute of World Culture. He was getting along just fine, until one day he decided to learn English so that he could read his author and benefactor in the original . . . And he wanted to go to England - “to see London and die” as he put it. He started studying. And after a few lessons he learned what “shit” means in English. Can you imagine it? If he’d been a chemistry teacher, for instance, it wouldn’t have been so awful. But for specialists in the humanities words mean a lot, Derrida pointed that out. It’s hard to serve the cause of the beautiful wearing a decoration like that in your buttonhole. He began to feel as if the people in the British Council were giving him queer looks . . . In fact, just then the British Council couldn’t care less about the local Shakespeare specialists, because they were being screwed by the tax police, but Shitman decided it was their personal attitude to him. As you can understand, my dear, when someone looks for confirmation of his paranoid ideas, he always finds it. Anyway, omitting all the sad details, he went insane in a month.’
By this point I was positively seething with rage. I felt he was trying to insult me, although there were no rational grounds for such an assumption - he couldn’t possibly know my true name. But I remembered that the most important thing was to stay in control. Which I managed to do perfectly well.
‘Really?’ I asked politely.
‘Yes. In the madhouse he wouldn’t talk to anyone, just yelled so the entire hospital could hear him. Sometimes he yelled “same shit, different day”, sometimes “same shite, different night”. He obviously hadn’t wasted his time studying English. In the end they took Shitman away in a car with military number plates - the special services needed him, let’s put it that way. And nobody knows what’s become of him now, or if they do know, they’re not telling. So much for a midsummer night’s dream, my little darling. And they say nothing depends on a name. But it does, and how. If your friend has an obscenity in her name, sooner or later her path leads to only one place. It’s the madhouse for her. And by the way, Shitman was lucky, the special forces found a use for him. You must have heard about our madhouses. You can get a blowjob for a cigarette in there . . .’
Spiritual training using a human irritant is like a game of chance in which everything is staked on the kitty. The winnings are very big. But if you can’t take the heat and you lose control, you lose absolutely everything else too. I could have put up with doing the session on credit, even with his theory of obscene names, if only he hadn’t thrown in that blowjob for a cigarette. I wasn’t prepared for that.
‘Sweetheart!’ Pavel Ivanovich screamed. ‘Sweetheart, what’s wrong? What are you doing, you snake? Militia! Anybody! Help!’
When he started calling for the militia, I came to my senses. But it was too late - Pavel Ivanovich had received three lashes that even Mel Gibson wouldn’t have been ashamed of. And even though those three lashes were only hypnotic, the blood that had started running down his back was real. Of course, I regretted what I’d done, but that always happens a second later than it ought to. And anyway, in my heart I played another cunning trick - knowing I would be overwhelmed by repentance at any moment, and adopting the inner stance of a repentant sinner, I said in a final vengeful, voluptuous whisper:
‘That’s for you from Young Russia, you stupid old fart . . .’
As I review my life now, I find many dark spots in it. But the sense of shame I feel for this is exceptionally keen.
Many shrines in Asia surprise the traveller by the contrast between the bare poverty of their empty rooms and the multilevel splendour of their roofs - with their upturned corners, precious carved dragons and scarlet tiles. The symbolic meaning here is clear: treasure should not be stored up on earth, but in heaven. The walls symbolize this world, the roof symbolizes the next. Look at the building itself and it’s a hovel. But look at the roof and it’s a palace.
I found the contrast between Pavel Ivanovich and his ‘roof’ - the modern Russian term for protection - equally fascinating, even though there was absolutely no spiritual symbolism involved. Pavel Ivanovich was merely a petty philological demon. But the roof over his head . . . But then, all in good time.
The call came two days after the lashing, at eight-thirty in the morning, too early even for a client with special oddities. The number that lit up didn’t mean a thing to me. I’d been up since four o’clock and already managed to get a lot of things done, but just in case I drawled in a sleepy voice:
‘Hello-o. . .’
‘Adele?’ a cheerful voiced asked. ‘I’m ringing about your advert.’
I’d already taken the announcement off the site, but someone could easily have saved it for future reference, clients often do that.
‘Let a girl get some sleep, eh?’
‘Triple rates for short notice. If you’re there in an hour.’
When I heard the words ‘triple rates’, I stopped being difficult and wrote down the address. One of my Latin American sisters told me that the Panamanian general Noriega liked to drink whisky non-stop all night long, and early in the morning he would send for one of the six women who he always had around him to have sex - my sister knew this, because she was one of them. But that’s Panama - cocaine and hot blood. For our latitudes such early morning passion was a little bit strange. But I didn’t sense any danger.
For the sake of speed I took the Metro and in fifty minutes I was already there. The client lived in the quiet centre of town. When I walked into the courtyard of the building I wanted (a tall concrete candle with pretensions to architectural originality), I thought at first that I’d made a mistake and this was the back entrance to some bank.
There were two guards standing by the metal gates in the wall. They looked at me in glum incomprehension and I showed them the piece of paper with the address on it. Then one them of nodded towards an unobtrusive porch with an intercom on it. I walked up to the intercom.
‘Adele?’ the voice in the speaker asked.
‘In person.’
‘Come up to the first floor, the last door,’ said the intercom. ‘You’ll see when you get here.’
The door opened.
It didn’t look much like a block of flats. There wasn’t any lift, or any real stairway either. That is, there was one, but it ended on the first floor, running straight up to a black door with no spy-hole or bell, but with the tiny lens of a TV camera glinting in the wall beside it. As if someone had bought up all the flats from the first floor up and made a single entrance. But that’s a vulgar comparison, owing to the absence of any legitimate culture of large-scale property ownership in Russia. I didn’t have to ring - as soon as I reached the door, it opened.
Standing in the doorway was a solidly built man of about fifty, dressed like a bandit from the nineties. He was wearing an Adidas tracksuit, trainers and gold - a bracelet and a chain.
‘Come in,’ he said, then turned round and walked back down the corridor.
It was a strange place that looked like some kind of business premises. One of the doors in the corridor was half open. Through the gap I could see a nickel-plated metal pole that disappeared down through a circular hole in the floor. But the client closed the door and I didn’t get a good look at anything.
‘Come on in,’ he said, letting me past him.
The bedroom at the end of the corridor looked perfectly civilized, only I didn’t like the smell - it smelled of dog, quite unmistakably, like in some dogs’ love hotel. As well as a bed, the room contained a low coffee table with a drawer and two armchairs. There was a bottle of champagne on the table, with two glasses, and standing beside them was a telephone with a large number of keys and a blue plastic document folder.
‘Where’s the shower?’ I asked.
The man sat in a chair and indicated the one beside it.
‘Wait, there’s no hurry. Let’s get to know each other first.’
He smiled paternally, and I decided I must have got stuck with one of those
soulful
clients. Those men who don’t just want your body for their two hundred bucks, but your soul as well. They’re the ones who really wear you out. To stop a soulful client getting carried away, you have to be morose and unsociable. Let the nice man think the girl’s got adolescent problems. During the period when their personalities are taking shape, teenagers are unsociable and uncommunicative, as every paedophile knows very well. Therefore, that kind of behaviour rapidly inflames a pervert’s lust, which results in a saving of time and is helpful in obtaining better payment for your work. But the important thing here is to shut yourself in the bathroom in good time.
Some foxes who live in America and Europe take a scientific approach to the use of this effect. That is, they think they take a scientific approach, because they prepare by reading the literature that ‘reveals the soul of the modern teenager’. They are particularly fond of reading alleged fifteen-year-old authors who specialize in removing the panties from the inner world of their generation with a shy blush on their cheeks. It’s ridiculous, of course. Teenagers don’t have any common internal dimension - just as people of any other age don’t. Each of them lives in his or her own universe, and these insights into the soul of the young generation are simply the market’s simulacra of freshness for the consumer who’s surfeited with anal sex on video, something like the chemical scent of lily-of-the-valley for toilets. A fox who wants to imitate the behaviour of a modern teenager accurately shouldn’t read those books: instead of making you look like a teenager, they’ll turn you into an old theatrical queer acting out a travesty.
The correct technique is quite different. And like everything that really works, it’s extremely simple:
1. In a conversation you should look off to one side, best of all at a spot on the floor about two metres away.
2. Never answer what people say with more than three words, not counting prepositions and conjunctions.
3. Every tenth utterance, or thereabouts, should break rule number two and be slightly provocative, so that the client doesn’t get the feeling he’s dealing with an imbecile.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked.
‘Adele,’ I said, squinting at the floor.
‘How old are you?’
‘Seventeen.’
‘You sure you’re not lying?’
I shook my head.
‘Where are you from, Adele?’
‘Khabarovsk, in the Far East.’
‘And how are things back in Khabarovsk?’
I shrugged.
‘Okay.’
‘So why did you come here?’
I shrugged again.
‘Just felt like it.’
‘You’re not very talkative.’
‘Can I go to the shower?’
‘Hang on. We have to get to know each other first. What are we, animals?’
‘It’s two hundred dollars an hour.’
‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t it disgust you doing this kind of work, Adele?’
‘I have to eat.’
He picked the folder up off the table, opened it and spent a while looking at it, as if he were checking some kind of instructions. Then he closed it and put it back on the table.
‘And where do you live? Are you renting a place?’ he asked.
‘Uhu.’
‘And how many of you are there in the flat, apart from the madam? Five? Ten?’
‘That depends.’
At this stage the ordinary pervert would already have reached boiling point. And it looked like my employer wasn’t too far away from it either.
‘Are you really seventeen, little girl?’ he asked.
‘Yes, daddy, I am,’ I said, raising my eyes to look at him. ‘Seventeen moments of spring.’
That was a provocative outburst. He snorted in laughter. What I should have done then was to go back to the short, vague phrases. But it turned out he knew how to be provocative as well.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘If that’s the way our chat’s going, it’s time for me to introduce myself.’
An official ID card appeared on the table in front of me, open. I read what was written in it very carefully, then compared the photograph with his face. In the photograph he was wearing a uniform jacket with epaulettes. His name and patronymic were Vladimir Mikhailovich. He was a colonel in the FSB.
‘Call me Mikhalich,’ he said with a smirk. ‘That’s what people who know me well call me. And I hope we’re going to get to know each other very well.’
‘To what do I owe the pleasure, Mikhalich?’ I asked.
‘One of our consultants complained about you. Apparently you upset him. So now you’ll have to recompensate for it. Or recompense for it. Do you know which is right?’
He had a stereotypical appearance: a strong chin, steely eyes, a shock of flaxen hair. But a certain trapezoidal quality in the plebeian proportions of his features made his face look like the West’s cliche of its Cold War opponent. Movie characters of that kind usually drank a glass of vodka and then ate the glass as a snack, muttering through the crunching that it was ‘an old Russian custom’.
‘Fuck it,’ I muttered. ‘A freebee?’
‘Hey,’ he said, offended, ‘don’t you confuse the FSB with the pigs. You’ll get your money all right.’