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Read Russia 2nd pass:Layout 1 5/2/12 1:03 AM Page 35
B a s i l e u s / 35
veta Nikolaevna got up out of her armchair with her wet face glittering. The
strength of her blood and her rectitude was apparently so great that tapestryscarlet
spots bled through the satin gloves. At that unerringly divined and
brilliantly enacted moment, she was so exceptionally, agonizingly lovely, that
if Ertel could have seen her, he wouldn’t have been able to sleep for a week.
Although of course, in the logic of things, just such a moment was being prepared
for him in the future. But for now, with a satin index finger that looked
like a goose’s beak, Elizaveta Nikolaevna directed Mr. K out of the ransacked
drawing room into the hallway and from there out into the stairwell. There
was nothing he could do but retreat, giving the cat that showed up under his
feet a kick at the last moment.
After that K seemed to lose his soul. He immediately turned heavier, as
if the very cells of his body had suddenly been packed tightly together and
crumpled up, like berries in a jar, exuding lots of red juice. The very next
day he threw the orphan from Kharkov out of the apartment rented for her,
without even letting her pack her bags; her ejected wardrobe scattered in an
avalanche across the wide stairway and the tearstained orphan, catching her
high heels in her exclusive glad rags—which made her resemble a parachutist
with his parachute dragging along behind him—hammered in vain on the
closed door and swore in vain into her rhinestone-spangled mobile phone:
her sponsor, who had ensconced himself in the kitchen to demolish the
reserves of delicacies, didn’t come out. Soon the unrecognizable K stopped
financing a sports team of handicapped children—on the very eve of a competition
for which the young wheelchair users had been training for six
months, bellowing with the effort. While making his position clear to the
trainer—she was a big, powerful, yellow-haired woman who used to be a
hammer-thrower and could literally carry her darling little children on her
hands—Mr. K blurted out: “Their kind should be drowned at birth to put
them out of their misery!”—and a journalist who happened to be close by
recorded the fateful comment on his dictaphone. And thus ended, almost
before it had begun, Mr. K’s campaign for election to the Moscow Duma.
But K didn’t stop there. The authors to whom he had long ago promised
sponsorship for the publication of several books were treated to a postmodernist
performance in the spirit of Dostoevsky. After inviting a delegation to
his exclusive residence at Nikolina Gora, he received the eminent writers in
the sunny, gilded drawing room, where a fire was blazing fiercely in the elegant
fireplace, despite the warm June weather. As their skin drew tight across