Nikolai Nikolaevich and Camouflage

Two Novels

Yuz Aleshkovsky, Susanne Fusso, Duffield White

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9780231548458
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Among contemporary Russian writers, Yuz Aleshkovsky stands out for his vivid imagination, his mixing of realism and fantasy, and his virtuosic use of the rich tradition of Russian obscene language. These two novels, written in the 1970s, display Aleshkovsky's linguistic gifts and keen observations of Soviet life.

Nikolai Nikolaevich begins when its titular hero, a pickpocket by trade, is released from prison after World War II and finds a job in a Moscow biological laboratory. Starting out as a kind of janitor, he is soon recruited to provide sperm for strange experiments intended to create life in the Andromeda galaxy. The hero finds himself at the center of the 1948 purge of biological science in the Soviet Union, in a transgressive tale that joins science fiction (and science fact) with gulag slang and a love story. The protagonist and narrator of Camouflage is an alcoholic who claims that he and his gang of friends are just one part of a vast camouflaging operation organized by the Party to hide the Soviet Union's underground military-industrial complex from the CIA's spy satellites. As they pass their time on the streets and share their alcohol-inspired fantasies, they see the stark reality of the Cold War in Russia in the late seventies. Nikolai Nikolaevich and Camouflage introduces English-speaking readers to a master of the comic first-person narrative.

NIKOLAI NIKOLAEVICH

A Science Fiction Story

01

Now listen up. I know this won’t be boring. If you do get bored, it’ll mean you’re a complete dickhead and don’t understand a damned thing about molecular biology or the story of my life. Look at me: I’m a good-looking guy, I’ve got new threads, and I can wiggle my mustache in a cool way. I own a nice car, a “Moskvich” (sure, it’s old, but it runs). My apartment is not a co-op, and my wife will soon have her PhD. The wife, I have to say, is a puzzle—a mystery of impenetrable depths. That sphinx the Arabs have—I saw it once in a short film—is nothing compared to her. There’s nothing in it to figure out, if you really think about it. Well, more about the wife later. Hey, don’t fill your glass all the way, try half-full. That’ll give you a more intellectual sort of high, and your eyes won’t go wandering off in all directions. Have a bite to eat as well. Otherwise, you’ll get bombed and won’t understand a damned thing of what I’m saying.

To make a long story short, I was nineteen when I got out of prison after the war. My aunt wangled me a permit to live in Moscow (her boss at the Passport Bureau was fucking her right on the floor of his office!). My first month in Moscow, I didn’t work. Didn’t feel like it. I spent some time picking pockets on the tram or on the trolleybus—didn’t even have a partner to pass the goods to. For me, it’s an art. See these fingers? Oistrakh can go fuck himself: my fingers are longer.¹ You know, I could tell, just with these fingers, what kind of bills people were carrying—in their wallets or in their pockets. I could feel the color with my fingers. And never made a mistake. So many guys get busted just for the sake of a ruble or an affidavit from the housing office! These idiot amateurs go after a ruble as if it’s a million-dollar banknote. They waste so much energy, balancing on their toes, slowly pulling it out, and then they’re the ones who get their asses hauled off to the cooler (here in the USSR, it doesn’t matter how much you swipe, the important thing is: don’t steal).

So, as I say, I was doing some pickpocketing. I’d gotten the knack of the “Bukashka” trolleybus route and the “Annushka” tram.² But I never stole food ration cards. When they turned up, I’d send them back by mail or toss them into lost and found. I had enough money. I was planning to get married. Out of the blue, my aunt said to me:

“Our neighbor’s taking you on at the institute. You’ll be a lab assistant. Sooner or later, you’re going to get busted. They’re about to increase the jail terms. My man was telling me about it: he has a brother at the Lubyanka, his brother hunts spies and gets everything straight from Beria.”

And it was true. They’d just come out with a decree. Five to twenty-five years for theft. I shit my pants. I knew my luck couldn’t last much longer. I wanted to learn a trade, but I didn’t like working. I just can’t work. That’s all there is to it! For the life of me, I can’t. In the camps, they’d taught us how not to work. But this time around, I knew I’d better go to work with my neighbor at the institute because of the omen: If you shit your pants, you’ll soon get busted.

This neighbor and I used to exchange greetings in the morning. He’d always take a long time sitting on the toilet, rustling his newspaper and laughing. He’d flush and then howl with laughter. Scientists are all so screwed up. It looked to me like he was fucking my aunt too. Anyway, I got the job in his lab. His last name was Kimza—you couldn’t tell his nationality, but you knew he wasn’t a Jew or a Russian. A good-looking guy, but somehow he always seemed tired. He was about thirty.

“Your job,” he said, “will be to carry the chemicals and help set up the experiments. If you want, you can take some courses. What do you say?”

“It makes no difference to us Tatars,” I say, “whether we drag in the ones who are going to be fucked or drag away the ones who’ve been fucked.”

“I do not want to hear any more of your filthy language.”

“Okay.”

02

I’d been working in Kimza’s lab for about a week. They had me dragging all sorts of crap around the lab, and I washed out the beakers. One time, during lunch break, I burned my tongue on some kind of acid and shat blue for about four days! I thought it was cooking salt, but the damned thing turned out to be a chemical of some sort. I didn’t take any sick days, though. I was afraid they’d stick a mine-thrower up my ass like they did in camp when I downed a vial of ink so they wouldn’t send me up north on the next convoy. So, I was working. I was setting up a new lab. Microscopes up to your ass, instruments, motors, and all that stuff. Soon, I’d had it with working so hard. So, just for the hell of it, I lifted a wallet from the boss of the Personnel Department. I did it for the sake of my professional artistry—took it from his side pocket while he was standing in the buffet line. What a fucking big deal they made of it! In about an hour and a half, a plainclothes platoon arrived, and they wouldn’t let anybody leave the institute. A general search of the premises: the only place they didn’t look was up your anus. Why make such a big deal of it? I took the wallet with me down to the toilet to take a shit. I opened the wallet. No money, just papers. Denunciations, that is. There was even a denunciation of my Kimza. It said he was pushing science backward to fuck knows where, and he doesn’t sing or clap at meetings. When he votes, it said, he looks disgusted, and he turns the radio off when it’s playing light music by Soviet composers. His experiments are directed against “Man, which has a proud sound,” and therefore, his work indirectly undermines the economy. Understand what I’m saying? It was smelling like a quarter-century for Kimza. Article 58.¹

I don’t like squealers! So, first I wiped my ass with the statements aimed at the other scientists (according to them, the entire institute had turned into a conspiratorial hornet’s nest—did that include me?). Then I pocketed the denunciation of Kimza, sliced up the wallet with a razor, and tossed the pieces into the toilet. Someone was tugging at the door, yelling and screaming. I opened the door and explained that I’d had it up to here with chemistry, and doors are not teeth, so there was no fucking reason to pull on it like that.

“Look,” I say to Kimza, “a piece of paper about you.”

He reads it, turns pale, thanks me, understands everything, and stuffs the letter right the fuck into the strongest acid he can find. It dissolves right down to nothing more than a fucked grandmother right before our eyes! That’s when they drag me off to the Head of Personnel. I, of course, don’t know a thing.

“Better tailors than you have sewn suits for me,” I say, “and even those fell apart at the seams the first time they were tried on.”

“There’s testimony that you were rubbing up against people from behind in the buffet line. Could it be you were remembering the good old days?”

“Fuck their testimony. Just tell me: was there a lot of money in the wallet?”

“There wasn’t any money at all.”

“Well, then, why would I want to waste my time on shit like that?”

The plainclothesmen laughed (they seemed to relax when they heard my simple language), and they let me go.

Next day, I tell Kimza I’m not going to work there anymore. I tell him it’s against my principles to be a worker. I tell him I’m an artist, dedicated to my craft. I also tell him I love to lie on the couch and devour books. That’s when he looks at me strangely—for a long time. Then, in a roundabout way, he tells me all about the importance to mankind of his biology, and about the research he’s just begun, the likes of which has never been tried before. In a word, it’s an experiment, and I am an indispensable part of it. He says the work will be rewarding and creative. The most interesting thing about it, he says, is that it’s not work, but pure pleasure. On top of that, it’s highly paid. The only thing required, he says, is to approach it without prejudice and with thoughts about the future of mankind (he kept stressing this last point most of all).

“Listen, neighbor,” I say, “don’t fuck with my brains. What the hell are you talking about?”

“You must become a donor.”

“Give blood?”

“No, not blood.”

“What then,” I laugh, “shit or piss?”

“Sperm is what we need, Nikolai, sperm!”

“What’s sperm?”

“The stuff little children come from.”

“What do you mean ‘sperm’? That’s jizz, or jizzum in scientific circles.”

“Okay, call it jizzum. Are you willing to give it up for science? Don’t worry, there’s nothing to be ashamed about here. By the way, complete confidentiality is guaranteed.”

“So why aren’t you donating any yourself?” I asked suspiciously. He frowned.

“Because they might accuse me of nepotism in my chosen object of research. Is it a deal?”

All I could do was sit down on the floor and laugh. Not fucking bad work! I almost pissed my pants, and my appendicitis flared up.

Kimza says, “Stop acting like an idiot. Sit down and listen to why we need your sperm.”

So I stop laughing and listen. It turns out this is Kimza’s plan: First, I beat off and wank off (which are one and the same), then they will put my jizz under a microscope and study it, and after that, they will try to introduce it into the womb of an infertile broad and see if she gets pregnant. At this point, I interrupt, concerning the issue of child-support payments (you knock up five women or so, and there goes your whole paycheck).

“That’s one thing you don’t have to worry about,” he says.

He also has certain top-secret plans for my jizz that he promises to tell me about, just as soon as the experiment gets under way. Would you believe? Just from listening to this, my little snot-nosed one stood right up: “Let’s get started then!”

This wasn’t the first time for me…. In the camps, there’d always be that one person in a hundred who’d hold back, while the other ninety-nine were wanking like a hundred (all you had to do was not feel guilty about it). Sometimes there’d be a guy who’d wank off and then walk around for the next three days like a dead man, suffering from shame. The experience could cripple him for life. I knew this Lyovka Milstein—a real swindler. They’d pound on a rail as the signal to go to sleep, the skin pistons would pick up speed, and Lyovka would grit his teeth, struggle with himself, and then, little by little, quiet down. I would try to make him feel better about it:

“The organism calls,” I’d say. “You must show it respect. It’s not to blame. Don’t be its public prosecutor.”

Okay, so I think it over for a while. I ask Kimza about working conditions. How many times a day do I have to come? What’s the work schedule? What’s the salary scale? And what’s the title for this position in the labor book?

“Orgasm once a day, in the mornings. We’ll register you as a technical consultant. The salary will be the standard state allowance: 820 rubles. The workday is not fixed norm. After orgasm, you can go to the movies.”

03

I don’t let on that I am surprised, even fucking amazed. All I’ll have to do is arrive at work, I’ll wank off, and spend the rest of the day picking pockets on the Annushka tram or the Bukashka trolleybus. If I get busted, there’ll be mitigating circumstances: I work at the institute. So I agree to take the job. That same evening, I drop in on a friend of mine who is an old international-class thief. He was a world-class crook until they locked up the borders with the crack guard Karatsupa and his faithful dog, Ingus.¹

When he hears the news, the thief says to me, “You’re fortunate and lucky, but you’re also selling yourself short. After all, cum is more expensive than black caviar. It’s almost on a par with platinum or radium. You stupid jerk! If I were you, I’d sell my spermatozoa one at a time to these biologists. That’s why they’ve been given microscopes—to count up small items. Sell them by the piece, goddammit! Understand?!”

“I understand. How could I not? I’m an ass, I really am. After all, the spermatozoon is the most delicious thing in the world. And frequent wanking is so injurious to one’s health! Don’t worry,” I say to the international thief, “I’ll up my price gradually. I’m no amateur.”

“Too bad you can’t dilute jizz the way they do sour cream in the store. You could skim off more profit that way.”

“Fuck it!” I say, slapping myself on the forehead. “Of course! Next time I’ll hold back and give them a second coming, I’ll outwit them and overfulfill the plan!”

“I wouldn’t advise doing that,” the thief says, speaking seriously. “Never interrupt sexual relations, even if it’s with Dunyasha the Fist. It’s bad for you. I once had to get rid of a broad because of that. She started howling at me, ‘Do your coming somewhere else!’ ‘How about in your middle ear?’ I asked. ‘I don’t give a damn where you do it, just not in my pussy!’ And would you believe: my goddamned toenails almost stopped growing because of that! I had to get rid of her. Because you’ve always got to come like a man. That’s my advice, and for that, you can treat me to a bottle on payday. Also, get some milk off them on grounds of compensation for damages. Tell them blood donors are normally given some sort of meat to eat after they donate. Don’t be a fucking amateur. Remember: in America, you come five times, and you earn enough to buy a car. Got it?”

04

Well, when I arrive at work the next morning, I try not to laugh. I’m feeling a little ashamed, but, on the other hand, why the hell should I be embarrassed? Why shouldn’t all fucking humanity make use of it?! Maybe it’ll be of some use to people? I take a look, and see they’ve already prepared a little cubicle for me. About 3½ meters square, without windows. There’s fluorescent lighting. It’s warm inside. There’s an ottoman couch in there. And on the chair beside it, a test tube. “This is your workplace, Nikolai,” says Kimza.

“Let’s just agree: no bullshit,” I reply.

Kimza insists that I should not develop an inferiority compass about what I’m doing. On the contrary, he says, I should feel proud.

“Make yourself comfortable and start as soon as I give the order, ‘Attention! Orgasm!’ After orgasm, seal the test tube with a cork.”

“So they won’t run ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Nikolai Nikolaevich
• Camouflage
• Notes
• Series List