Pig: A Thriller (23 page)

             
When Snow got back to the Oil Camp, he gently put Schrödinger down on his bed and the two stared at each other for a time until Snow finally blinked. Satisfied, the cat broke eye contact and began to lick its ass.

             
“What the hell did she call you?” Snow asked himself. “Hell if I can remember. Scrotum? Off my bed, Scrotum, you useless thing.” He shooed the cat off the bed and laid down to sleep. Scrotum found himself a spot on the bureau where the TV used to be. Neither of them was aware enough to notice that Snow’s missing alarm clock was back in the room beside his cot.

“A careful analysis of the process of observation in atomic physics has shown that the subatomic particles have no meaning as isolated entities, but can only be understood as interconnections between the preparation of an experiment and the subsequent measurement.”

--Erwin Schrödinger
 

             
A couple of hours later, Snow was wakened by the harsh shrill of his phone.

             
“Hello,” he said, groggily, after perhaps a dozen rings.

             
“Good. You were asleep,” said the voice on the other end of the phone.

             
“Huh?” responded Snow brilliantly.

             
“Remember: ‘The un-aimed arrow never misses.’”

             
“Let me guess,” Snow groaned. “The Buddha.”

             
“No,” giggled Magda happily. “It’s me, Magda. Goodnight. How’s Schrödinger? Did you remember to give him a hug?”

             
“Who?”

             
The next day, rather than rushing through dinner and heading straight for the vodka bottle in his cabin, for the first time ever, Snow lingered in the canteen after work, which should mean that hell would be freezing soon and fat, pink animals with curly tails would be flying through the sky if you looked up. The usual roughnecks he habitually nodded to were already gone. Snow was staring out the window aimlessly and enjoying an ice cream cone and watching some of the first flakes of the season drifting down. Already, it was getting cold, the nights longer. Even in the winter, Russian enjoyed their ice cream.

Kolya, a lifelong bachelor, also used the canteen. Kolya, also, preferred to sit alone. Kolya felt the same way about solitude the same way some did about Moscow Dynamo or some men did about their testicles. Kolya had never met a silence he didn't like. In the camp, it was said he had the ability to be silent in eleven languages. It was more than just being shy. Kolya held words in the same suspicion with which Woody Hayes viewed the forward pass.

Today, he’d had to share a table with the doctor – Bandar -- and a Westerner from the warehouse everyone called The Oracle because he not only thought he knew every possible fact about every possible topic under the sun, he wasn’t shy about sharing that knowledge. The canteen had been full earlier, the groups faces stamped with gulag expressions: boredom, apathy, bravado, sullen viciousness, and fear, tossing quips around with the crisp efficiency of baseball players warming up, avidly  discussing which of the Seven Deadly Sins each of them were personally adept at. It was almost empty now. Before, Kolya had been unable to escape. Now, Kolya no longer wished to escape. The Oracle, a Smoggie from The People’s Republic of Teesside was telling a joke that Kolya, the dedicated Leninist without a sense of humour, was not about to take lying down. Oilmen were like cats. It was hard to know from the sound of them whether they were fighting or making love.

“A Russian and an American died and went to hell,” The Oracle was saying.  “Satan told them that they each had the choice of spending eternity in American hell or Russian hell. ‘What's the difference?’ they asked. ‘In American hell,’ the Devil explained, ‘you have to eat one shovel of shit per day. In Russian hell, you have to eat two shovels of shit per day.’ Well, the American chose American hell, of course, and the Russian headed for Russian hell.

“Many years later, the two met again. ‘My friend,’ the American said, ‘you made a poor choice. I eat my shovel of shit in the morning and do whatever I want for the rest of the day. That’s it. One shovel of shit per day, no more.’”

“‘No, my friend, it is you who made a poor choice,’ the Russian said. ‘Half of the time in Russian hell there's no shovel, and the other half of the time there's no shit.’”

Doctor Bandar joined The Oracle in a hearty laugh at the expense of the country that supported both of them so well. Back home in Palestine and Wales, both of them would have been on the dole. Here, they were able to live like royalty.

“It wasn’t like that,” Kolya said quietly.

“Like what?” The Oracle asked, wiping tears from his eyes. He and the Doctor had finished their laugh.

“Like you said. It wasn’t Communism that made Russia sick. It was Russia’s sickness that made it Communist. Nobody remembers what Russia was like before Lenin. It was already sick. The country was being led by a couple of German dilettantes who were supposedly divine but somehow couldn’t manage to feed the people. You only ate well if you lived in the countryside. There was no food in the cities. In the cities, the factories were primitive and inefficient and didn’t produce enough to supply the farms. The two sides were squeezing each other to death. Meanwhile, the Orthodox Church and the aristocracy were skimming off what little was left and the Tsar was sending boys to the German front without rifles. You have to remember what it was like before Lenin came to power. Life was stitched together like a factory-made sweater. Bulgarian, at that. One wrong pull at a loose end and the whole thing would have come unravelled. We were born to make
skazka
fact,” the Bolsheviks told the people. And they were. Progress the ordinary people only dreamed of was starting to come true.”

“
Skazka
?” asked the Doctor, who spoke no Russian.

“Fairy tale,” translated The Oracle, who did. “Problem was it wasn’t
skazka
you made fact, it was Kafka.”

“Kafka?” questioned The Doctor.

“A German writer,” answered The Oracle. “Famous for describing existentialism. Like life in the U.S.S.R. What a joke. Four words. Four lies.”

“Right,” snorted Kolya. “Unlike that most altruistic of systems you come from, capitalism. What kind of system takes its being from the words ‘me’ and ‘mine’? Two-year-olds start like that and we spend the next twenty years trying to teach them to stop being sociopaths and share. You know how the great capitalist economist John Maynard Keynes defined capitalism don’t you? ‘Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.’ There’s your joke. Okay, we weren’t successful. At least under Communism we were trying to make things better for everyone.”
             

“Weren’t successful?” repeated The Oracle, as if amazed. “Weren’t successful? You had blood on your fucking hands. The Red Cross could have used the Volga to supply themselves for the next century.”

“Yeah, well, I’d rather have blood on my hands than water, like Pilate. At least we didn’t wash our hands of the care of millions of people like Rockefeller and Carnegie and Dupont.”

“‘The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries,’” quoted The Oracle right back. “Winston Churchill. Given their track records, I’ll take capitalism and the vice, thank you very much. You can keep your little existentialist paradise. In your memories, anyway. It was so wonderful, it couldn’t even survive.”

“Do you even know what existentialism means?” asked Kolya.

“Sure,” shrugged The Oracle. “Life under a bureaucratic thumb is pointless. There’s no way to be happy under a system like Communism. Communism is like life living under one big phone company. That’s existentialism in a nutshell.”

“No,” corrected Kolya. “At least in Soviet schools they taught us what the words we use mean. Existentialism just says that the individual is responsible for his own happiness; that society, bureaucracies, the universe are all indifferent to what happens to you.”

“Like Buddhism,” Snow piped up before he realized what he was doing.

The entire canteen looked up in surprise. If Kolya was said to know how to be silent in eleven languages, Snow was thought to be a deaf mute.

“How many Chicago School economists does it take to change a light bulb?” boomed a voice from the canteen door: Pig, who’d been listening in for the past few minutes. He stroked his moustache like it was a small pet, gold molars only slightly yellower than the rest of his teeth shining through the tobacco stains. His chest was a
taiga
of chest hair, he had a missing ring finger, two bullet scars on his throat and bands of colour tattooed around his forearms that imitated the Asian pit viper: reddish brown, with bulls-eye markings and a dark stripe. All in all, the appearance of a man who had aged but not grown. Some trudge across the Arctic to reach the poles; Pig trudged across the steppe to find a pole dancer. He owned two Beamers, a Mercedes, untold Customs officials and his own Chief of Police. Around the oil camp, it was believed he had magical abilities; he could see through wet T-shirts, get the worm out of the bottom of a tequila bottle and kill inconvenient people simply by pushing them in front of a backhoe.

“None. If  the bulb needed changing, the market would have done it already.

“Isn’t this nice? All the boys playing so nicely in the same sandbox. Even you, Snowball. The
peredoviki
. You never leave your tomb. What happened? You drink all your vodka so soon? Why do Canadians do it doggy style?” he asked, just to show he wasn’t sparing anyone his contempt. So they can both watch the hockey game.”

Snow shrugged, not knowing what to say.

“Hell must have frozen over,” joked Pig. “Here, just to show I’m an equal opportunity offender, I’ll piss off the Red here, too.” Pig nodded at Kolya. “No need to insult only the capitalists.

             
“Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Gorbachev and Yeltsin are all riding a train to the future. The train suddenly breaks down and stops. Lenin springs into action, crying, ‘Organize the villagers to cut wood for ties. The steelworkers will forge tracks. The rail crews will hammer them into the ground. Shoulder to shoulder, we’ll roll on to true Communism!’