Potboiler (18 page)

72.

“Rise, citizens of Zlabia.”

The voice was deafening, right there in the room with him, and Pfefferkorn scrambled out of bed, getting tangled up in the sheets and pitching face-first into the wall. A supernova flared inside his skull. Down he went, cracking his head a second time on the corner of the nightstand.

“Rise to productivity in the name of national greatness.”

Through streamers of color and blobs of pain he saw the woman in the majorette hat. She was upside down, grainy, shouting at him in Zlabian.

“Tuesday, August ninth, will be an auspicious day for the advancement of our collective principles. You are encouraged to enjoy the weather, which will continue to be exceedingly pleasant, with an extremely comfortable high of twenty-two degrees.”

He couldn’t remember leaving the television on. He pulled himself to his feet and tried to switch it off, to no avail: the woman’s face remained. The mute button was similarly ineffective.

“Through the generosity and wisdom of our beloved and benevolent Party leaders, the price of root vegetables remains well within reach of all citizens. . . .”

She began to list other available goods, her voice booming from the screen but also through the walls, floor, and ceiling. He raised the window sash. Loudspeakers crowned all the buildings. Down below, the street traffic had come to a complete standstill, everyone from old women shouldering wicker baskets of root vegetables to young boys driving posses of goats standing at attention. Pfefferkorn looked at the clock. It was five a.m.

“Remember to bring your allotment card to your neighborhood disbursal station.”

On-screen, the woman opened a pocket-sized book. The people in the street did likewise.

“Today’s reading will be the fourth stanza of the fifteenth canto.”

She proceeded to read aloud a passage from
Vassily Nabochka
. The people followed along in an undertone, their collective murmur like a gathering storm. The reading ended and everyone put their personal copies away.

“Rejoice in the lofty heritage that is yours, citizens of Zlabia.”

Everyone sang the national anthem.

There was a brief round of applause. Activity resumed. The woman in the majorette hat was replaced by a static image of the West Zlabian flag, backed by accordion music. Pfefferkorn hesitated before reaching to switch it off, half expecting a hand to reach through the screen and slap him on the wrist. His ears were ringing, his head pounding from hangover and impact. He was also sleep-deprived. He distinctly remembered giving up on getting his fan at about one a.m. Between the heat and the pipes, he couldn’t have gotten more than a few precious hours. It was a bad way to start the day. He needed his wits about him. He needed to keep his head in the game. He used the bedsheet to sponge the sweat from his body, got dressed, and went downstairs to find some coffee.

73.

He stopped at the front desk. A new clerk was on duty.

“Good morning, monsieur.”

“Yes, hi, my name is Arthur. Kowalczyk. In room forty-four.”

“Yes, monsieur.”

“I asked last night for a fan.”

“There is fan in room, monsieur.”

“It’s broken.”

“Monsieur, I am regretful.”

Pfefferkorn waited. The clerk grinned inanely. Pfefferkorn dug out a ten-
ruzha
note. The clerk took the money with the same practiced motion as his predecessor. He bowed.

“Monsieur will please to partake of breakfast buffet,” he said unctuously.

Pfefferkorn stepped inside the restaurant. Intent on finding the coffee urn, he did not notice Fyothor sneaking up from behind to poke him in the ribs.

“Greetings, friend! How was your night? Yes? And how did you like our morning exhortations? Very inspiring, yes? Although, between you and me—twenty-two, my arse. Already the thermometer is pushing thirty and it’s not even half past six. Twenty
ruzhy
says we hit forty by noon.”

They went down the line together. There were two options: last night’s pierogi and a chafing dish of gruel, both dispensed by the indomitable Yelena. There was no coffee, just sour brown tea.

“You didn’t take any of the sauce,” Fyothor said, waving at Pfefferkorn’s plate as they took the same corner table. “The sauce is what makes the dish.”

Pfefferkorn, remembering a formula from long ago, said, “Forty degrees—that’s over a hundred, Fahrenheit.”

“One-oh-five, I think.”

Pfefferkorn groaned and pushed away his steaming bowl of gruel.

“But friend, this is delicious.”

“What is it.”

“We call this
bishyuinyuia khashkh
. It is like your oatmeal.”

“Doesn’t smell like oatmeal.”

“It is made with root vegetables,” Fyothor said. “And goat’s milk.”

“Goatmeal,” Pfefferkorn said.

Fyothor laughed and thumped him on the back. “
Akha
, good one, friend. To your health.”

“I’ll stick with tea, thanks.”

“I understand. But as our most insightful Party leaders say, let nothing go to waste.” Fyothor winked and reached for Pfefferkorn’s shot glass. “To your health. Surely it is fate that we meet again, yes?”

Pfefferkorn didn’t know what to say to that.

“I have taken the liberty of making some phone calls on your behalf,” Fyothor said.

Pfefferkorn was nonplussed. “Is that right.”

“Take it from me, friend. We say: ‘A man cannot cut his own hair.’”

Pfefferkorn recognized the adage as having its origin in an episode of
Vassily Nabochka
wherein the prince attempts to cut his own hair, the moral of the story being: sometimes it’s better to ask for help. Although Fyothor’s interference made him uneasy, Pfefferkorn saw no choice but to play along. Any sensible foreigner looking to do business in West Zlabia would be grateful for an inside track. Declining one would be the fastest way to blow his cover. And Fyothor literally kept him close at hand, taking him around the waist as they rose from the breakfast table.

“Stick with me, friend, and you will have more shit than you know what to do with.”

Their first stop was the Ministry of Media Relations. Nobody said a word as they cut to the front of the line. Fyothor entered the co-sub-undersecretary’s office without knocking and launched into a stirring discourse on the importance of fertilizer to the people’s revolution. Here, he said, holding up Pfefferkorn’s arm, was a comrade from overseas who could do much to advance the collective principles by demonstrating to the world at large the innate superiority of West Zlabian goats, proven by science to produce waste with a nitrogen concentration higher than that of any other goats in the northern hemisphere. To substantiate this point he waved an article torn from that morning’s sports section. The co-sub-undersecretary nodded, hmmed, and finally concurred that Pfefferkorn’s was indeed a worthy project. He promised to write a memo to this effect. They toasted to mutual cooperation, and Fyothor and Pfefferkorn departed.

“That was fast,” Pfefferkorn said. The idea that they might accomplish his stated goal troubled him, as he had no idea what to do if someone actually offered to sell him a large quantity of fertilizer.

“Akha,”
Fyothor said. “The man is an ass. He has forgotten us already.”

A similar scene played itself out four more times before noon, as they whipped through the Ministry of Fecundity, the Ministry of Objects, the Ministry of Nautical Redistribution, and the Ministry of Resealable Barrels. Everywhere they went, Fyothor was received with kisses, and he was frequently stopped on the street by people wanting to shake his hand. Upon learning that Pfefferkorn was with him, they shook Pfefferkorn’s hand as well. Pfefferkorn felt as though he was back in high school and had somehow fallen in with the star quarterback.

“You remind me of someone I used to know,” Pfefferkorn said.

“Yes? This person is a friend of yours, I hope?”

“He was.”

Lunch was taken standing, at a stall in the market occupying the Square of the Location of the Conclusion of the Parade of the Commemoration of the Remembrance of the Exalted Memory of the Greatness of the Sacrifices of the Magnificent Martyrs of the Glorious Revolution of the Zlabian People of the Twenty-sixth of May. The heat was ferocious, and many of the vendors had rolled up their goods and retreated to the lobby of the nearby Ministry of Flexible Ductwork. The valiant few that had not were flogging a limited assortment of diseased-looking produce. It seemed that “knobby and covered in dirt” was in season. There was no meat save goat offal that had acquired a thick carpet of flies. While Pfefferkorn wanted to disconnect these nauseating sights from his bowl of stew, there was no denying their common pungency.

On the East Zlabian side of the square was another market, this one colorful and festive. An accordion band played covers of American Top 40. There were rides. There was Bop-a-Goat. There was a petting zoo. There was a booth where you could get dressed up as a character from
Vassily Nabochka
and have your picture taken
.
Above all there was food. Clean booths displayed a rainbow of produce, lacquered pastries, satiny chocolates, fresh fish on ice. Pfefferkorn stared at a sign in Cyrillic for a long time before deciphering it as “
FUNNEL CAKE
.” It was an awesome display of plenty, making it all the more baffling that the entire scene was devoid of patrons. Indeed, this seemed to be the case as far as he could see into East Zlabia: aside from the accordion band, the vendors, and roving packs of well-equipped soldiers, the place had the eerie tranquility of a film set. Here, no teeming masses filled the sidewalks. Luxury cars were parked but nobody was driving. There were cafés, teahouses, bistros, boutiques—all deserted. The picture was so bizarre that Pfefferkorn was unconsciously drawn forward.

“Turn away, please?”

Fyothor had spoken with uncharacteristic urgency and without looking up from his own bowl of stew. It was then that Pfefferkorn noticed a ragtag group of West Zlabian soldiers observing them.

“Come,” Fyothor said, discarding his half-finished stew. “We will be late.”

74.

In fact, they were nowhere near late. Fyothor’s line-jumping had given them three hours to kill before their next appointment, so he had decided to add in a few extra stops.

“You are a tourist,” he said, kneading Pfefferkorn’s shoulders tenderly. “You must
tour
.”

At the interactive section of the Museum of Goats, Pfefferkorn managed to eke out a half-cup of milk. He was proud of himself until he saw the bucket-plus produced by a four-year-old girl with huge, callused hands. At the Museum of Peace he read an account of the Cold War exactly the opposite of the one he knew. At the Museum of Concrete he learned about the building of the museum itself. By dinnertime, he was ready for cake.

His room had once again been tossed.

The picture of Zhulk had been straightened.

The fan was still kaput.

“Yes hello, this is Arthur Kowalczyk in room forty-four. Where’s my fan?”

“Monsieur, fan is in room.”

“The one I have is broken, so either you didn’t replace it like I asked or somebody’s been buying off the back of the truck.”

“Monsieur, I am sorry.”

“I don’t want apologies. I want a new fan.”

The pipes began to bang.

“Hello?” Pfefferkorn said. “Are you there?”

“Yes, monsieur.”

“I’m tired of calling down. Please send me a fan. A working one. Right away.”

He hung up before the clerk could reply. He moved around the room, restoring it to order, stripping off his clothes as he went. The banging was getting louder. He began to question his original hypothesis. For one thing, he was fairly certain that what made hot water pipes clank was the temperature differential between the water and the pipe. Hot water caused the cold metal to expand, which in turn caused the characteristic ticking. But it was so hot in West Zlabia that he couldn’t imagine the differential to be more than a few degrees: not enough to produce sound, and certainly not enough to produce the ear-splitting racket he was hearing. Another reason to doubt the hypothesis was that in his experience, clanking pipes tended to speed up and then taper off. The noise coming through his wall was following a different pattern. It was steady and insistent, more indicative of, say, the feral urgency of a headboard knocking against plaster. It would be just his luck, wouldn’t it, to be stuck next to a honeymooning couple.

He waited for the fan to be delivered, and when it wasn’t, he called again.

“Immediately, monsieur,” the desk clerk said.

The clanking kept on going. Zhulk’s photo was jumping all over the place. Pfefferkorn stood on the bed and took it down. Then he pounded angrily on the wall.

“It’s late,” he said.

The clanking ceased.

At midnight he gave up waiting. He threw back the duvet and lay on the sheet, basking in the silence, aware that five a.m. was just around the bend.

75.

The next morning, following the forecast and public reading, he went straight to the front desk. The clerk from the first day was back on duty. Pfefferkorn made sure to tip him in advance.

“Monsieur will to partake of breakfast buffet.”

“In a minute. First things first. I need to change rooms, please.”

“Monsieur, there is problem?”

“Several. I’ve asked for a new fan at least ten times. How hard could that possibly be? Apparently very hard. So I’d like a new room.”

“Monsieur—”

“And the couple next door to me is making a tremendous amount of noise. They sound like a pair of oversexed gorillas.”

“Monsieur, I am regretful. This is impossible.”

“What is?”

“Rooms cannot be exchanged.”

“Why not?”

“Monsieur, there is no availability.”

Pfefferkorn looked at the back wall, where they hung the keys. “What are you talking about? I can see for myself there aren’t more than ten guests in the whole place.”

“Monsieur, reassignment of rooms requires six months’ notice.”

“You can’t be serious.”

The clerk bowed.

Pfefferkorn took out a ten-
ruzha
note. It disappeared up the clerk’s sleeve but the clerk did not otherwise move. Pfefferkorn gave him another ten
ruzhy
. Still nothing. He gave him ten more and then he threw up his hands and walked across the lobby to the restaurant.

“Friend, good morning. But what is the matter?”

Pfefferkorn explained.

“Akha,”
Fyothor said, knitting his brows, “yes.”

“It’s really true that I can’t get another room for six months?”

“That would be soon, friend.”

“Jesus.”

“Have no fear,” Fyothor said. “Today we are going to have some real fun.”

“I can’t wait.”

They made the rounds. Meeting after meeting ended identically: with promises of memos, sweltering embraces, and
thruynichka
. Between appointments they took in the sights. There were more museums, more memorials. Virtually every street corner featured a sign commemorating some momentous event of the people’s revolution. On the few unclaimed corners, metal plaques had been set into the earth:

THIS SPOT RESERVED FOR FUTURE HISTORICAL EVENTS.

They stood before a seedy-looking building.

HERE THE PEOPLE’S REVOLUTION FOREVER IMPROVED THE LOT OF THE ZLABIAN WOMAN

They entered the strip club and sat down. A waitress pecked Fyothor on the cheek and set down a bottle of
thruynichka.
Techno music beat relentlessly.

“You enjoy breasts?” Fyothor shouted.

“As much as the next fellow,” Pfefferkorn shouted back.

“I come here every day,” Fyothor shouted.

Pfefferkorn nodded.

“It is different from America, yes?” Fyothor shouted.

“I’m not American,” Pfefferkorn shouted back.

It was different: both the patrons and the strippers were in equal states of undress.

“This is our collective principle of equality,” Fyothor shouted. “Every article of clothing the woman removes, the man must do the same. Fair, yes?” He tucked a five-
ruzha
note inside the G-string of a writhing woman and started unbuttoning his shirt. “To your health.”

The highlight of any West Zlabian vacation was a visit to Prince Vassily’s grave. Pfefferkorn, expecting grandeur, was surprised by the spot’s humility. Tucked in among a busy thoroughfare was a small brick plaza, at the center of which stood a raggedy tree.

HERE LIES IN ETERNAL SLUMBER

THE GREAT HERO

FATHER AND REDEEMER OF THE GLORIOUS ZLABIAN PEOPLE

PRINCE VASSILY

“HOW LIKE A ROOT VEGETABLE SWELLS MY HEART TO GAZE UPON THY COUNTENANCE

HOW LIKE AN ORPHANED KID GOAT DOES IT BLEAT FOR THY LOSS”

(canto cxx)
 

Fyothor bowed his head. Pfefferkorn did likewise.

“Next month we celebrate the fifteen-hundredth anniversary of the poem. The festivities will be unforgettable.” Fyothor smiled slyly. “Perhaps you will extend your stay, yes?”

“One day at a time,” Pfefferkorn said.

En route to the Ministry of Double Taxation they passed a throng of people waiting to enter a dilapidated wooden shack.

“The home of our dearly departed leader,” Fyothor said.

Pfefferkorn tried to appear appropriately respectful.

“Come,” Fyothor said, and began bushwhacking to the front of the line.

The interior of the hut was easily twenty degrees hotter than it was outside. The furniture had been cordoned off and easels set up with photographs of Dragomir Zhulk orating, scowling, saluting. People used clunky Soviet-era twin-lens reflex cameras to photograph the desk, still set with Zhulk’s fountain pen, datebook, and a dented tin mug with an inch of tea left at the bottom. A spotlit glass case housed his well-used copy of
Vassily Nabochka
. Soldiers lined the perimeter of the room, using their Kalashnikovs to jab at the visitors and hasten their circuit around the rope protecting the room’s centerpiece: a burlap-lined coffin, inside which Zhulk’s embalmed body lay in state. Pfefferkorn blinked the sweat out of his eyes and stared. He felt himself going tingly and light-headed. Here was a man he had killed.

A soldier shoved him with the butt of his gun and told him to move along.

Out in the street, Fyothor was adamant. “Enough death for one day,” he said.

They skipped their meeting and went back to the strip club.

The schedule repeated itself for several days running. Following a restless night spent sweating into his sheets, banging the wall, and plugging his ears with toilet tissue, Pfefferkorn would be shouted awake at dawn. The woman in the majorette hat would declare that the weather would be pleasant beyond compare, that the price of root vegetables had reached an all-time low, that miraculous advances had been made by the Ministry of Science, that the East Zlabian aggressors had been repelled and were cowering in fear. It was unclear to Pfefferkorn whom these lies were intended to fool. Still, he began to enjoy the pageantry of it. He read along from
Vassily Nabochka
. He sang the anthem lustily while he shaved around his moustache. He had just about forgotten it was fake.

Having established him as a friend of Fyothor’s, Yelena took more of a shine to him. She never gave him more than his ration, but she did it with a hockey linesman’s gappy smile.

He spent close to every waking moment with Fyothor. It was clear enough to Pfefferkorn that he was being watched, but as he didn’t see what he could do about it, he tried to spin it for the best.

“You know all these people and you can’t get me a new hotel room?”

“Some things are beyond even my power, friend.”

In the evenings they would dine together in the restaurant, talking about literature and polishing off several bottles of
thruynichka
. Then Fyothor would head home to his wife and Pfefferkorn would stop by the front desk to check for messages. The clerk would say there were no messages. Pfefferkorn would ask for a new fan. The clerk would promise it immediately.

Up the ancient elevator Pfefferkorn went, down the whispering hallway, past mumbling rooms, rooms full of ghosts, rooms more men had entered than left.

Stretched out on his bed, listening to the honeymooners getting to work, he reflected on the similarities between spying and writing. Both called for stepping into an imagined world and residing there with conviction, nearly to the point of self-delusion. Both were jobs that outsiders thought of as exotic but that were in practice quite tedious. Both tested one’s ability to withstand loneliness, although Pfefferkorn decided that in this respect, spying was harder, because it demanded that the spy resist, at every moment and with all his power, the human instinct to trust. One of life’s minor consolations was the presumption that you could ask most strangers most questions and get an honest answer most of the time. Not always, of course, but often enough. Absent that, conversation became an exhausting, depressing labor, more so in the face of the sort of unflagging cheer Fyothor threw at him. Pfefferkorn felt like he was being forced to stand on one foot for hours on end. He thought of all the faceless men and women doing their duties in hotel rooms the world over. He admired them. He felt for them. He wished them well. Their loneliness was his, and his theirs.

And he thought of Bill. In reevaluating their relationship Pfefferkorn had seen himself as the survivor of a house fire, returning to pick through the ash. There might be one or two scraps of authentic friendship, but they were buried under so much falsehood that it seemed wiser and less pathetic to let them go. But perhaps Paul had been right when he said that it didn’t have to be one or the other. Now that Pfefferkorn was a spy, he understood. He remembered Bill’s copy of his novel, the dense scribblings in the margins. What else could that be but love? He was almost afraid to accept this, because if Bill truly had loved him, the pain he must have endured in deceiving Pfefferkorn all these years was unimaginable. Heroic, even.

The clanking got louder.

Pfefferkorn turned on the television and put the volume way up.

There were three channels. Channel one was the flag. Channel two aired round-the-clock footage of Party rallies and speeches. For entertainment, it was hard to beat channel three. Pfefferkorn watched a soap opera about goatherds. He watched the news, anchored by the woman in the majorette hat. Like the rest of West Zlabia, he was waiting for the game show that came on at nine. The national curriculum included poetic composition, and teachers nominated their best students to appear before a panel of celebrity judges, who would then proceed to tear the poem apart mercilessly, reducing the student to tears and bringing burning shame upon him, his family, and their entire neighborhood. To be humiliated in this way was considered a great honor, and
The Poem, It Is Bad!
was the second most popular show on West Zlabian TV, its ratings topped only by those of the show that followed, a live broadcast of the teacher being flogged.