The Senility of Vladimir P (7 page)

Sheremetev nodded.

‘Have I had lunch?'

‘No, Vladimir Vladimirovich.'

‘You told me there was chicken. Is that right?'

‘No.'

‘I was looking forward to chicken. Have you ever had chicken Georgian style? We should go to Suliko. What a restaurant! They have a special room upstairs – they open it only for me. The boys and I went there to celebrate the war in South Ossetia.' Vladimir laughed. ‘We stuck it to the Georgians, then we ate their food! Eh? Those fucking Shvillis! Get the boys together. Monarov, Luschkin, the whole gang. Let's go tonight.'

‘I'll see what I can do,' said Sheremetev.

‘What is this, I'll see what I can do? Do it! Go! Now!'

‘Certainly, Vladimir Vladimirovich. At once.'

Sheremetev went to the dressing room and put away some clothes that had been returned from being laundered, then came back in and quietly continued tidying up. Vladimir was having a conversation with a sofa. He broke off when he noticed Sheremetev.

‘Was I waiting for something?' he demanded.

‘I don't think so, Vladimir Vladimirovich.'

Vladimir frowned. ‘Oh,' he said. ‘Then you can go.' He turned to the sofa. ‘What are you talking about when you say Merkel was upset? That's nothing. If I wanted to upset her, I'd bring the dog!'

One day followed the
next, and still there was no chicken. Stepanin lived in a state of constant anxiety, wondering what to expect. Deep in his heart, he knew that his plan was limited, if not fatally flawed. Barkovskaya could survive without fricassee, and if she could survive without it, what had he achieved but depriving everyone else of poultry dishes? With each day that passed, the cook became more tense. What if the chickens were just the start? What if Barkovskaya found another cousin who could supply meat, one to supply fish, one who was a dry goods merchant? Would he order nothing? Would the inhabitants of the dacha exist on water alone? And what if Barkovskaya had a cousin at the water board?

At night he lay in bed with his lover, staring anxiously into the darkness as she slept beside him. By day, he began to look like a hunted animal, glancing here and there as he moved, as if bracing for the fall of whatever blow Barkovskaya was preparing for him. The apprehension showed in the quality of his food. The seasoning was variable, the flavours in the sauces not quite in harmony. The curses coming out of the kitchen were louder than ever.

Then Barkovskaya made her move. One morning, up drove a van to the dacha and out of it emerged the cousin and his helper, a two-hundred-centimetre Kazakh with a brow like a piece of granite, and proceeded to deliver four dozen chickens, ten ducks and a brace of pheasants.

‘I didn't order any of this!' cried Stepanin as they pushed their way into the kitchen.

‘The housekeeper did,' replied the cousin, as if she was just another customer and there was no family relationship between them. He and his helper dumped the birds on the steel work surface. ‘Best quality.'

‘I don't want them!' yelled Stepanin.

‘Well, you've got them,' said the cousin, as the Kazakh stared stonily down at him.

Stepanin gazed angrily at the birds after the pair had left. Then he had an idea. He called Eleyekov. Naturally, the cars were unavailable, but it was possible the Range Rover would be free in the afternoon for an hour if the price was right.

That afternoon, Stepanin threw the chickens, ducks and pheasants into the back of the Range Rover and had Eleyekov's son drive him to a certain restaurant in town. When he came back, the Range Rover was empty but his pockets were full.

Two days later, Barkovskaya's cousin turned up with another delivery. This time, when Stepanin called up Eleyekov, the driver told him that both cars were off the road. Indefinitely. Having seen them head off down the drive in perfect working order at eight that morning, Stepanin knew there was a deeper message in what Eleyekov was saying, and it had nothing to do with the cars or the state of their mechanics.

‘What's happening, Vadik?' he said to the driver. ‘Tell me straight, what's going on?'

There was a silence on the phone.

‘Vadik?' said Stepanin. ‘Level with me.'

‘Listen,' said Eleyekov reluctantly. ‘We can't do it, alright?'

‘Why not?'

Eleyekov coughed.

‘
Why not
?
'

‘Look, Barkovskaya had a word with me.'

‘What did she say?'

‘She said I can't do it.'

‘I'll pay you.'

‘It's not that. If I want to keep my job, I can't do it. It's as simple as that. I'd like to help you, Vitya, but I'm not going to lose my job for you.'

Stepanin nodded bitterly to himself.

‘I'd like to help, but I just can't. And I'd suggest . . . Put it like this: anyone else who helps you out with this will discover pretty soon that they're not wanted around here.'

‘What fuckery!' yelled Stepanin. ‘Fuckery with a cock on top!'

‘Vitya, come to an arrangement with her. She doesn't want everything, just a piece.'

‘And she doesn't already have a piece? She's getting exactly as much as Pinskaya got. Why should she get more?'

‘Be sensible.'

‘She can't get rid of me, you know. My situation isn't like yours. I don't answer to her.'

‘Vitya, all I'm saying, is you've got to be reasonable.'

‘
Sh
e
'
s
the one not being reasonable. For three years, it worked with Pinskaya. A good Russian arrangement. She had her share, I had mine, everyone was happy. Now this bitch comes along and decides it's going to be different. Did she talk to me, Vadik? Did she even ask me once?'

‘Would you have said yes?' replied the driver. ‘Look, if it's any consolation, Vitya, she's getting a cut from me too, more than Pinskaya got.'

‘How much?'

‘Thirty percent.'

‘Well, she can fire you, Vadik. She can't touch me.'

‘But she pays the bills, right? Whoever you buy your provisions from, if she won't pay them, they won't bring them.'

‘That's why I have to fight this thing.'

Eleyekov sighed. ‘Listen, I don't like her any more than you do. Thirty percent, she's costing me.'

‘That's what you tell me, Vadik. Don't tell me you don't know how to water the wine.'

Eleyekov conceded the point with a shrug. ‘Well, it won't be nothing. Do you think I'm happy about it? But the reality is the reality. Vitya, come on, let's have chicken on the table again. I love the way you do chicken wings with that hot sauce of yours.' The driver licked his lips. ‘Come on, Vitya. Sort it out with the old bat. I'm sure you can come to an arrangement.'

Stepanin slammed down the phone and went back into the kitchen, fuming. The chicken carcases lay on the bench. For a moment he wondered how much poison you would need to put in a fricassee to kill someone.

One of the potwashers walked past.

‘You!' he shouted. ‘Get rid of these!'

‘These, Chef? They just arrived.'

‘Get rid of them.'

‘Where?'

‘I don't know where. Dig a fucking hole in the garden for all I care!'

So that was what the potwasher did – just what the chef said, as he was always being ordered to do. He went behind the dacha and dug a hole and threw the carcases in.

The next day more chickens arrived. And the day after that, more. Stepanin wouldn't touch them. Each morning, the potwashers went outside, enlarged the hole, and threw the chickens in. And each night, the foxes came and took them out, leaving the area behind the dacha littered with chewed chicken carcases, where they began to rot in the grass.

Just as the ugly
plastic tunnels of the greenhouses had destroyed the beauty of the dacha's grounds, now the stench rising out of the chicken pit sullied the air around it. Inside, it was the tension between Stepanin and Barkovskaya that poisoned the atmosphere. The cook's moods were fouler, the housekeeper's words laced with threat. From the kitchen came the sounds of pots crashing as the cook marauded through his domain. Barkovskaya stalked the corridors of the house, sending maids and attendants scurrying. But through it all, Vladimir's days continued as before. Apart from the disappearance of Stepanin's chicken dishes from his menu, nothing changed. Each day, Sheremetev showered and dressed him, took him for a walk, fed him his meals, undressed him at night, gave him his tablets and put him to bed. The days were timeless, proceeding one after the other as carbon copies, enlivened only by the suspense of wondering when Vladimir's next outburst might erupt. For Sheremetev, their very unchange­ability was a kind of refuge from the increasingly toxic environment around him.

But Sheremetev was not entirely cut off from the outside world. In theory, he had one day off a week, and sometimes he took it. A relief nurse called Vera would come to take his place, and he would catch the train to Moscow, usually to visit his brother, Oleg, and his wife and son, who lived near the Dmitrovskaya metro station. And when he didn't take his day off, there was always the phone.

One afternoon, not long after the chickens began to be thrown into the pit behind the dacha, Sheremetev got a call from Oleg. His brother's voice on the phone was cryptic – something was wrong, but Oleg wouldn't say what. Try as Sheremetev might, he couldn't get Oleg to divulge any details. All Oleg would say was that the situation was serious and he needed to speak to him. Could he come to the dacha the next day? Sheremetev told him to come that night if he could, but Oleg couldn't.

Overnight, Sheremetev tortured himself, wondering what it might be. Was someone ill? Was it money trouble? Legal trouble? Why didn't Oleg want to talk about it on the phone?

Oleg worked as a mathematics teacher at a state secondary school where his wife, Nina, was a secretary. He was just two years Sheremetev's junior, and they had always been close. Like Sheremetev, he was a small man, although not quite so diminutive as his brother, and with a better head of hair, but otherwise they were like two peas from the same pod. At school they had been known as the Pinto twins, after a character in a then-popular children's comic who was knee-high in size to everyone else. Oleg would get into fights and then call on Sheremetev to rescue him. Not being a big boy, but loyal to his role as elder brother, rather than fighting hand to hand, Sheremetev developed an unusual tactic of putting his head down, letting out a bloodcurdling yell and charging at his brother's tormentors to butt them in the midriff, hopefully knocking them flat on their behinds. The sheer surprise factor made it a deceptively successful approach, at least when first used, although most of the boys who had been its target once or twice learned to sidestep and watch him go tumbling past.

Officially, neither Sheremetev nor any other members of the staff were supposed to have visitors at the dacha, but the rule was bendable for the more senior personnel. Artur, the head of the security detail, was happy to be accommodating as long as his men were told who to expect. Sheremetev therefore left word with the security man stationed in the entrance hall of the dacha that his brother would be coming, and at three the next afternoon Sheremetev got a call to say that Oleg had arrived. He put the baby monitor in his pocket and hurried down, leaving Vladimir in front of the television in his sitting room watching the only station that he ever wanted to watch, a history channel that filled its schedule with repetitive documentaries about his glorious decades in office.

Sheremetev greeted his brother anxiously, trying to see in his face a hint of what was worrying him, then led him quickly to a small sitting room that the staff used on the ground floor.

‘Something smells here,' said Oleg. ‘I noticed it as I was coming up the drive outside.'

‘Chickens,' said Sheremetev. ‘Behind the house.'

Oleg looked at him in bemusement.

‘Don't ask.' Sheremetev closed the door behind them. ‘So? What is it?'

‘Pavel,' replied his brother.

Sheremetev gasped. ‘Pavel? What's wrong? Is he ill?'

‘He's in jail.'

Sheremetev slumped in a chair. Pavel, Oleg and Nina's only child, wasn't exactly like a son to him – after all, Sheremetev had his own son, Vasily – but he sometimes wished he was. While Vasya was streetwise, cocksure and cunning, Pasha was sensitive, thoughtful and caring. Not that Sheremetev didn't love his own son as a father should, it was only that he might have found the task of loving him easier if he had turned out more like his cousin.

‘What's he done?' asked Sheremetev.

Oleg drew a stapled pair of pages out of a pocket and wordlessly handed them to his brother. Sheremetev read the title.

In Honour of Konstantin Mikhailovich Lebedev on the Day he Received the Blessing of our ex-Master and Czar

‘It's a blog,' said Oleg. ‘Something Pasha wrote on the internet.' Oleg sighed. ‘There were photos of Lebedev with the ex-president in the papers.'

‘I know,' said Sheremetev. ‘I was there when they were taken.'

‘Obviously Pasha wasn't impressed. He doesn't like either of them, it seems. Seeing them both together was the last straw for him.'

Sheremetev looked at the page again.

In Honour of Konstantin Mikhailovich Lebedev on the Day he Received the Blessing of our ex-Master and Czar

Yesterday, our new president, Konstantin Mikhailovich Lebedev, met with our ex-Master and pres . . . I was about to say president, but he was really our Czar. The old Czar Vladimir gave the new one, Czar Konstantin, his blessing. And what could be more apt? One presidential term may have lapsed since Vladimir Vladimirovich went into retirement (and who can doubt, if the rumours about his mind are right, that it is only his senility that got him dislodged from the Kremlin, and if not for the merciful degeneration of his mind we would still have him with us?), and the useful fool Gena Sverkov may have been the official successor, but the truth is that it is Konstantin Mikhailovich who is his true heir.

Who in Russia is a bigger crook than our new president, a bigger taker of bribes, a bigger buyer of votes? These, ladies and gentlemen, are the skills of a president in the new Russia. And where, I ask you, did Konstantin Mikhailovich learn these necessary skills? Where, I ask, did he learn his craft? Who was his role model and his mentor, if not the old Czar himself?

So as Konstantin Mikhailovich evolves into the next despot to oppress us (and despite his warm words today, oppress us he will, mark my words, just like the bear in the story), is it really him we should blame? Or should we go back and point the finger where the blame lies? Would such a man as Konstantin Mikhailovich even be possible if not for Vladimir Vladimirovich? As clouds are the precondition for rain, so Vladimir Vladimirovich is the precondition for Konstantin Mikhailovich, the rabid pup of the mad old war dog. In other countries, he would have been strangled at birth. Only in the Russia that Vladimir Vladimirovich made could such a creature live to manhood, let alone flourish.

Officially, our old Czar has retired to enjoy the richly deserved leisure of his old age. Unofficially, we know he is senile, and had become such an embarrassment that his own henchmen had him removed. But I ask you, when did this senility begin? Was it at his last presidency, or the one before that, or the one before that? Or was it at the very first? Was he demented already, a superannuated spy who could only look back in fondness to the days of the Soviet empire and its police state, a 48-year-old with the mind, even then, of a 90-year-old?

Who could have invented such a man? Is he the spirit of the Cheka, the personification of a hundred-year thirst for power rising out of the Lubyanka? Or is he a piece of fiction? Perhaps he's our anti-self, the projection of our basest and most debauched desires?

Imagine what he could have done. He could have been a new George Washington – and not least by exiting the stage after two terms, instead of hanging on like a frog on a windowpane. There was time, there was opportunity, there was a great will for a better society rising out of the people when Boris Nikolayevich handed Russia to him on a plate, and he could have done wonders. He could have given us the rule of law – impartially applied to everyone, no matter how great or how small. He could have given us freedom of speech, democracy, civic responsibility. He could have given us a flourishing economy, honest entrepreneurship, reward for merit. He could have given us mutually advantageous ties with our old national allies and friendship with our old foes. The moment in history was his! And instead, what did we get, what ideas came out of the paranoid little mind that returned from Germany and wheedled its way up the slippery slope to find itself sitting in the right place at the right time to lead Russia?

I ask you, what did we get?

Corruption on a scale that would have made even the Romanovs blush. Brutality that would have made even Stalin smile.

A deal with the swindlers who had stolen Russia's wealth – keep quiet and you can keep your criminal fortunes. A deal with the rest of us – keep quiet and you'll get a bit more bread. And circuses as well, ladies and gentlemen. The Winter Olympics. The World Cup. Remember those? Events that cost five times as much to stage as they would in any other country, because in reality they weren't events at all, but schemes to transfer wealth from the state into the pockets of Czar Vladimir and his courtiers.

A yearning for an empire we should never have had and which never brought anything but death and destruction to those who were our subjects. And out of that yearning, things that were as bad as anything the empire had ever done. The killing of journalists. Genocide of the Chechens. Suppression inside the country. Provocation of everyone outside it. Proxies and invasions and death to our neighbours. And billions of dollars for the Czar himself. Dachas and palaces and yachts and jets and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars, a filthy flood of stinking money pouring over his head, rising up to his neck, a sewer of wealth so deep and so wide that no matter what he did, how he tried to hide it, all of Russia could smell the stench and hear it gushing past.

And I ask you, what did we, the people, get?

A state where you couldn't find the mafia because it had turned into the government, and you couldn't find the government because it had turned into the mafia. A hollow economy of oil and gas and arms sales and nothing else.

A society of bribe-takers, head-kickers, liars and embezzlers. A country where you keep your mouth shut and support the president or the tax police come knocking, faces masked and Kalshnikovs in hand. A place in which an honest, hard-working Russian woman can die of kidney failure while others less ill than her, less needy of treatment, the liars, bribe-takers and embezzlers, get treatment instead of her just because they can slip a few hundred dollars into the pockets of the white coat of the doctors, as much bribe-takers and embezzlers as their patients.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the Russia that this monstrous invention of the Cheka, Vladimir Vladimirovich, built. Whatever is left of his mind, as death comes closer to him, does he ever stop to imagine what Russia might be like if he had chosen the other way? Or does he think, even now, with what is left of his mind, that he can take his blood-soaked billions with him?

Hail, Konstantin Mikhailovich, our new Czar! Worthy successor! Here is Russia for you to rape, ravage and pillage. Do with her as you will. We submit. For whatever you do, you can do no worse that Vladimir Vladimirovich, our crucifier.

Sheremetev was stunned, equally impressed and appalled by what he had read. ‘I didn't know Pasha could write like that,' he murmured.

Oleg shrugged helplessly, his expression also torn between pride and horror.

Sheremetev glanced over the pages again, his gaze resting on a phrase here and there.

. . . the rabid pup of the mad old war dog . . . a 48-year-old with the mind, even then, of a 90-year-old . . . this monstrous invention of the Cheka . . . our crucifier . . .

‘They took him two days ago,' said Oleg. ‘Accused him of theft.'

Sheremetev looked up in disbelief. ‘Theft? Pasha?'

‘You remember that stuff he stole from the hospital for Karinka?'

‘Olik, that was six years ago! He was fourteen! Can they still prosecute him for that?'

‘The lawyer says they use all kinds of trumped-up charges. They could charge him with sedition or insulting the president, but if possible, they like to use other things. That way, the human rights organisations in the west don't know why he's really being prosecuted and they don't protest. Normally, they would have prosecuted him over tax evasion, but Pasha's never earned a kopeck in his life.' Oleg smiled bitterly. ‘I used to tease him about that.'

Sheremetev handed the pages back. ‘Do you agree with this, Olik, this stuff he wrote?'

‘What difference does it make? Even if you agree with it, you don't
write
it.' Oleg sighed. ‘You know what Pasha's like. He's young. He's impulsive. He hasn't learned there are things you can think but you can't say.'

Sheremetev was silent. Oleg's words reminded him of the stories his parents used to tell him about growing up in the Soviet Union of Brezhnev and his successors, when there were the things you could think, and the things you could say. Thank goodness those days are gone and you'll never have to live like that, they used to say to him.

‘What are they going to do with him?' he asked quietly.