Three Moral Tales

I. The Case of Shchaveliev

The whole terrible ordeal in the life of bank clerk Veniamin Shchaveliev began when he turned forty-five and went to renew his passport. At the passport office there was a woman with a deep scowl and a purple chemical perm—as Veniamin remembered later, once he returned home. He also remembered one other thing—after he’d signed his new passport, the woman had handed him another document, which he also signed, more or less automatically. But what that other document was, Veniamin could not remember. A vague disquiet arose in his soul.

What could it have been? Veniamin wondered. He stopped sleeping, stopped eating, and finally went back to the passport office. “What did I sign here? What kind of document did you give me?” he asked the woman with the scowl and the purple perm. The woman just shrugged, saying, “You didn’t sign anything else here, you just signed your new passport, you’re imagining things.” Veniamin brought his fist down on the table: “Tell me, you hag, what kind of document did you slip me?!” The woman shouted that he was insane and chased him from the office.

Veniamin came home and began trying hard to remember, as he was always doing now, what the document had actually been. “Seems like . . . seems like . . .” he muttered to himself, crinkling his forehead, “it was a loan! Of course! It was an enormous loan!” He called all the banks in the city, but no bank could confirm that it had approved him for a loan. And then Veniamin realized, or thought he did, that it was even worse: the document wasn’t paperwork for a loan, it was the deed to his apartment! This newfound clarity even calmed Veniamin down, briefly, and then he set out to take decisive action. He went to the Frunzenskaya District police station, told the cops about the mysterious document, and asked: “May I write a statement saying that I was tricked into providing my signature and this deed to my apartment is not valid?” The cops were at a loss, but Veniamin was so anxious, and his hands were shaking so badly, that they decided to let him make his statement. He wrote it down and headed home with a sense of absolute relief.

At home Veniamin lay down on the couch, in need of a break, turned on the TV, and saw the Patriarch and Putin. He looked absentmindedly at the Patriarch’s vestments, the gold, the beard. And then a thought, horrible and frightening, flashed through his mind like dark lightning. He had finally remembered. The document hadn’t been a loan or even a deed, no. It was a contract with the Devil regarding the sale of his soul. Veniamin dashed around his apartment, howling and tearing out his hair. He had never been a religious man, but now he understood that it was all real: eternal bliss and eternal damnation, God and Satan, and the jolly flames of Hell.

Veniamin stopped going to work, stopped washing and shaving. He wrote a letter to Patriarch Kirill, the Head of the Russian Orthodox Church, saying that he’d made a deal with the Devil, and was kindly requesting that the Patriarch, using his holy powers, declare the agreement void. For a long time, there was no answer to his letter, but one day Veniamin turned on the TV again and saw that the Patriarch was giving a speech. Then he turned suddenly toward Veniamin, looked him right in the eye, and said, “Your deal can’t be declared void. I’ve made one just like it.” Then Veniamin wrote a letter to Putin, obsequious and abject: “I beseech you as our dear Father, our Batman, Transformer, Spiderman Putin, the Crimea is definitely ours, united with Russia through your might and strength, so with your powers of the highest Nietzschean Superman Buddha and Zarathustra over America and Obama, command the Devil to annul his deal with me so that there is no nuclear war.” Putin likewise responded through the TV. “Oh, brother Venya, you can’t get out of that deal, I have one too, so do all our people. And I’ve decreed that from this year forward all citizens must sign this deal when they renew their passports, it’s a kind of reform we’ve passed, there’s a bill about it, it’s crucial for the stability of the country. Or the American bastards will conquer us.”

So what was left for Veniamin to do? He had one more idea, a pretty decent one, thinking back to how he’d gotten out of army service: I’ll pretend to be crazy, he thought, my signature can’t be considered valid, not if I’m declared insane. He called an ambulance and told them, “I’m delirious and hallucinating, it’s acute paranoid schizophrenia, Kandinsky-Clérambault Syndrome, come right away, I haven’t gone to work in six months, I’ve been writing letters to Putin and the Patriarch and they’re talking to me through the TV.” That was how he played it. He was declared insane, institutionalized, and prescribed a bunch of pills. He was no longer fit for society. Not fit for society, sure—and maybe not fit for the Devil either, Veniamin thought slyly. All things considered, living out your life in an asylum for the mentally ill is a small price to pay for getting out of burning in the flames of Hell for all eternity.

On his first night at the asylum, which was the thirtieth of January, Veniamin had a dream. In the dream, he’s walking down a road through the fields of some distant country and coming toward him is an old man with a weathered face, dressed in simple clothing. “What troubles you, sonny?” the man asks in an unknown tongue, but Veniamin understands everything he says. “I’m troubled, Father, because I’ve made a deal with the Devil. But who are you?” “I’m Granddad Vasily. Let us pray together about your misfortune.” Granddad Vasily takes Veniamin by the hand, and they begin to pray together: “King of Kings and Lord of Lords, creator of the fiery ranks . . .” They pray, and then Granddad Vasily says, “Could this, sonny, be the paper you lost?” and takes out a sheet of paper. Veniamin looks and recognizes it: yes, it’s the very same one that he signed back there at the passport office, as though in a trance; he couldn’t remember what it looked like before, but here it is now, with the words I, Veniamin Shchaveliev, sell my soul to our Master the Devil, and here’s the seal of Hell, and the number 666, and his signature at the bottom is melting away before his very eyes, disappearing, now it’s completely gone . . .

II. Mishenka the Contrarian

He denied everything, including the location of the earth below and the sky above. A happy man, Mishenka the Contrarian. He was the most wicked and disobedient boy in his class, back at the end of the forties. He did everything backward, out of spite, and his teacher nicknamed him accordingly: Mishenka the Contrarian. He’d understood early on that things did not work the way adults said they did. His mother would tell him that it’s not good to litter, and in his own mind Misha would flip “not good” to “good” and litter with delight. When he saw someone else littering, he was happy too. When he saw someone crying, he was glad. When he saw someone hurting the weak, he was overjoyed. After all, if things like that don’t make you happy, life can be painful—so unbearably painful—there’s so much violence and injustice and hunger and death everywhere—and Mishenka didn’t want to be in pain, so he swapped things around in his head.

He’d been doing this since he was a little boy, when he saw a German soldier in the occupied village of Obukhovka, and right before his eyes the soldier struck Mishenka’s father. Mishenka had felt several things at once, then—horror, outrage, hate; these things were suffocating him, and he burst out laughing. Soon after, he figured out that the minute he heard some inner voice—maybe his mother’s voice or the voice of general human morality entering into a child’s soul—telling him that something wasn’t good, he could immediately summon another voice, mighty and superhuman, probably belonging to that very same German soldier, and that voice would laugh and tell him, “Rejoice!”

And that’s how Mishenka the Contrarian reeducated himself and learned to see as good everything that people usually understand as evil, and everything that people understand as evil he saw the other way, as good. All his life, he rejoiced at deaths, misfortunes, and the blows of fate, and he grew despondent in those rare moments when something compelled him to tenderness and pity, or when he came across something beautiful or listened to music. He knew that the obverse of beauty and music were pain, loss, and doom, so he couldn’t be happy with these, like other people. He fell in love with a young woman once, but he told her, “You’re going to get old and ugly anyway, and then you’ll die,” and left her. While he had loved her, he’d felt a dull, unremitting, animal ache, but when he left her, he felt better.

Mishenka the Contrarian thought that he’d outsmarted life, which so amply produced causes for suffering and scattered them beneath people’s feet like acorns from an oak tree, while he, in the alchemical vessel of his soul, had transformed all the acorns of suffering into the gold of gladness, and because of this he was happier than other people. A nasty old man, at this very moment he’s hanging out of his bedroom window with a slingshot, shooting at pigeons and cursing toothlessly. He aims at the most beautiful white dove and his aim is true.

III. The Children of the City of Novostradov

—black cloths and organs,—lightning and thunder,—rise and roll;— Waters and sorrows, rise and revive the Floods. For since they subsided,—

oh . . . so boring!

—Rimbaud, translated by John Ashbery, “After the Flood”

In the nineties, all the children in the city of Novostradov were sure that on New Year’s Eve in the year 2000, Ahura Mazda and Ahriman would appear in the sky, and a great war would begin. The children would fight on opposing sides in this war, some for the Dark and others for the Light. After the war, the world as they knew it would end, and planet Earth would merge with its double, the planet Nibiru, which was already drawing closer. If Earth was a haven for technological innovation, Nibiru was home to a highly developed system of magic, and it was populated by elves, dragons, and gnomes. When Earth and Nibiru became one, magic and technology would also merge, and in the new world, harmony would reign.

All the children of Novostradov were also convinced that they had magical powers. Preschoolers in apartment courtyards told each other about Ahura Mazda and Ahriman, the coming war, the merging of the planets, and the fact that they were, all of them, wielders of magic. Kids knew all this since their sandbox days, but it was considered necessary to keep the knowledge secret from adults. Every child believed that they were assisted by several invisible spirits, and every child knew which side they’d be on when the war came, Light or Dark. Kids associated with others of their kind and disliked members of the opposition. If a boy developed a crush on a girl, the first thing he had to find out was whether she was Light or Dark. Sometimes it happened that love brought a child over to the opposing side, and this introduced genuine drama to the children’s lives.

In every other regard, the children of Novostradov did not differ significantly from other children in other cities. They were likewise interested in gum, Snickers, new jeans, cartoons, and Dendy and Sega video games.

On New Year’s Eve, as the year changed to 2000, kids from preschoolers to high school seniors gathered in the streets, waiting for the coming of Ahura Mazda and Ahriman. Lovingly bundled by their mothers in winter scarves, prepared to battle to the death for their god, crowds of children stood and stared expectantly into the sky. A wet snow was falling, grown-ups were uncorking bottles of champagne and setting off fireworks, but Ahura Mazda and Ahriman did not make an appearance.

For another year or so, the children waited: maybe the war would begin after all, and the planet Nibiru, with its elves and gnomes, would approach the Earth. But the war did not begin, and Nibiru did not come near, either. Out of inertia, many children still continued to wait, but some were already beginning to scoff at the idea of Ahura Mazda and Ahriman, and many others simply avoided the subject, as though nothing like that had ever come up. The children were less and less interested in who’d been Dark and who’d been Light, they no longer really mentioned their magical powers, and life now seemed to consist of nothing more than gum, Snickers, jeans, cartoons, and video games.

The kids who had been very young in the year 2000 soon forgot completely about the war, Ahura Mazda and Ahriman, the planet Nibiru, and that New Year’s night. In their minds, all those stories became mixed up with other fairy tales they heard from their parents as children. It was harder for the teens. Some of them started drinking, others got into drugs; the girls buzzed their heads and went hitchhiking around the country. But as time passed, many went back to school, found jobs, started families, had children, divorced. They bought cell phones, made social media accounts. And soon, very soon thereafter, Novostradov no longer differed in any way from other provincial Russian towns with high rates of alcoholism and unemployment.

“Three Moral Tales” is an excerpt from (Th)ings and (Th)oughts by Alla Gorbunova and translated by Elina Alter, out now from Deep Vellum.