Read Online The Moscoviad by Yuri Andrukhovych - Free Book Online

her nationality. Even more so what party she belonged
to. Moreover, it didn’t bother me that the color of her royal skin was
different from mine. Indeed, I liked it that her skin color was different. With
my dick for a few unforgettable minutes I united two distant continents,
cultures, civilizations. I brought them to the common denominator or, forgive
me, inseminator. And thus I can’t bear any hatred towards Russia and the
Russians . . .
    “But now, when I
drink acrid beer in the midst of a wasteland surrounded by poles and barbed
wire, when the wind tosses my wet hair in all directions, when around me is one
great Asian, sorry, Eurasian plain, sorry, country, with its own rules and
laws, and this country has a tendency to grow to the west, swallowing small
nations, their languages, customs, beer, swallowing also larger nations,
destroying their chapels and coffeehouses, and most importantly, quiet cozy
bordellos on narrow cobblestone streets, I cannot just sit and watch silently
with my arms crossed, as if I had just swallowed dick. A friend of mine showed
me not so long ago old postcards with the views of my native city. Those cards
were about fifty years old. But I screamed: I’d like to live in this city!
Where is it? What did they do to it?! Where is my right to my beer? This so
damn lame!
    “This is why I am
for the full and final separation of Ukraine from Russia! Long live the
unshakeable friendship between the Ukrainian and the Russian people! Believe
me, there is no contradiction between these two phrases. I wish the great
Russian people prosperity and flourish! To your and our beer!”
    A tense silence
continues for a moment after the conclusion of your speech, but suddenly it
bursts into fierce, bottomless, limitless applause. It drowns out even the rain
and the wind. All these people have wanted to hear this from you for so long.
At last you clarified everything for them. From now on everything will be well.
And you, bowing in all directions, grab your bag and decisively make it for the
exit, but they stop you, to thank, to shake your hand, to congratulate you on a
good speech, and you see tears in their eyes, and someone even presents you
with that silent prehistoric catfish wrapped in a newspaper, having taken it
from under the raincoat. And when by the exit you pass Beelzebub’s assistant,
he hugs you, and awkwardly, bashfully kisses you somewhere under the left ear,
and his applause follows you for a long time, and from under the pitiful
poplars the two local cutthroats and the old feeble profiteer woman whom they
were beating up a moment ago applaud as well . . .
    Your forehead
burns under the cold May rain.

 
 
    One million Ukrainians , they say, live in this
city. Hence Moscow is the largest Ukrainian city in the world. Here every tenth
person has a surname that ends in “enko.” But how to seek them out? For during
the last three hundred years we have become quite similar to these stern
northerners. For some reason new, different Ukrainians started being born:
pig-eyed, with inexpressive round mugs, with colorless hair that exists only in
order to fall out. Evidently, the natural desire of our ancestors to turn into
Great Russians as quickly as possible led to certain adaptive mutations. Our
glorious ancestors intensively tore off themselves the black eyebrows, brown
eyes, lily-white feet, honey-sweet lips and other nationalist paraphernalia. 7 The
last seventy years made this process irreversible. It does not take long to
become convinced in this: it is enough to pass through Moscow’s Kiev train
station at night and look at these sleeping obese and poorly dressed people:
from Kherson and Zhytomyr, Vinnytsia and Kirovohrad, some Hookvillesk or
Boontownsk, Transballburg, Leninslutsk, Dzerzhinopricksk and—alas!—from L’viv
as well . . .
    It is difficult
for me to imagine Estonians sleeping in train stations in such humiliation
fashion. It is easier for me to imagine, say, the Turkmen