Read Online Day of the Oprichnik by Vladimir Sorokin­ - Free Book Online Page A

they hopped away from us using Chinese aquari ums. While negotiations over the ransom were going on, our guys managed to put three newscasters on the rack and dislocate their arms, and like a huge bear Sivolai knocked up the female announcer. But the backbone of the radio station remained whole; it bought a new, horse-drawn studio, and those shackle-fetters began broadcasting once again. Fortunately, His Majesty doesn’t pay much attention to them. Why not let them yowl their prison songs?
    “All Siberia howled in sync,
    Their fame reached to old Kolymá.
    Bacillus he fled the taigá,
    While Plague returned to the clink.”
    I tune in to the West. It’s the real stronghold of anti-Russian subversion. Like slimy reptiles in a cesspool, enemy voices teem: Freedom for Russia!, Voice of America, Free Europe, Freedom, the German Wave, Russia in Exile, Russian Rome, Russian Berlin, Russian Paris, Russian Brighton Beach, Russian Riviera.
    I choose Freedom, the most vehement of the vermin, and I immediately run up against sedition, fresh out of the oven: they have an emigrant poet in the studio, a narrow-chested, dour-eyed Judas, an old acquaintance of ours with a shattered right hand (Poyarok made use of his foot during an interrogation). Straightening his old-fashioned glasses with his mutilated hand, the traitor reads in a quivering, nearly hysterical falsetto:
    “Where there’s a pair of Grafs—there’s a paragraph!
    Where there’s just a court—no justice is courted!
    You’ll ‘do your time,’ without ever hearing ‘time to go,’
    Since by rights you’re not arighted!”
    The Judas! With a touch of my finger I remove the pale face of the liberal from my sight. These people are like unto vile worms that feed and nourish themselves on carrion. Spineless, twisted, insatiable, blind—that’s why they are kindred with the despicable worm. Liberals differ from the lowly worm only in their mesmerizing, witch-brewed speechifying. Like venom and reeking puss they spew it all about, poisoning humans and God’s very world, defiling its holy purity and simplicity, befouling it as far as the very bluest horizon of the heavenly vault with the reptilian drool of their mockery, jeers, derision, contempt, double-dealing, disbelief, distrust, envy, spite, and shamelessness.
    Freedom for Russia! whines about “persecuted will,” the Old Believers’ “Posolon” grumbles about corruption in the top hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church; Russian Paris reads a book by Iosif Bak, Hysterical Gesticulation as a Way to Survive in Contemporary Russia ; Russian Rome plays some kind of shrill monkeylike jazz; Russian Berlin broadcasts an ideological duel between two irreconcilable bastard-mongrel emigrants; the Voice of America has a program called “Russian Expletives in Exile” with an obscene retelling of the immortal work Crime and Punishment :
    “The un-fucking-believable blow of the butt-fucking axe hit the goddamn temple of the triply gang-banged old bag, facilitated piss-perfectly by her cunt-sucking short height. She cried out cumly and suddenly collapsed on the jism-covered shit-paneled floor, although that rotten pussy-hole of a hag had time to raise both of her ass-licking hands to her fuckin’ bare-ass pimped-up head.”
    An abomination. What else can be said?
    Our liberals are dripping with anger and grinding their teeth after His Majesty’s famous Decree 37, which criminalized obscene language in public and private, and made obligatory public corporal punishment the sentence. Most surprising of all is that our people immediately accepted Decree 37 with understanding. There were some show trials, some drawing and quartering on the main squares of Russian cities, the whistle of the cattle whip on Sennaya Square, and cries on the Manezh. And in a trice the people stopped using the filthy words that foreigners forced on them in bygone days. Only the intelligentsia has trouble coming to terms with it, and keeps on