The Red House. Derek Lambert
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of natural resources. And the fact that the settlers in America were the toughest and bravest people from Europe. And, of course, they avoided the devastation of the last war …’
‘I know,’ Vladimir said, ‘I attended that lecture, too.’
In any case her nagging was unnecessary. He despised the gluttony of living. But when in Rome … Would it do any harm to taste a little of the plunder? A single orgy couldn’t corrupt. A practical experience of decadent extravagance.
He began gently. At a drugstore on Dupont Circle called the People’s Drug—the name soothed his guilt. But even in this humble American mart the horn of plenty sounded loud in Zhukov’s ears. Stationery, perfume, magazines, paperbacks, ice-cream—pills and potions to ease the punishments of gluttony.
But it’s difficult to spend money after a lifetime of frugality, Zhukov discovered. He bought a comb and a tube of pink transparent toothpaste which Valentina might prefer to her tin of powder. So hard to spend and so easy to pay: no abacus, no hour-long queues, no trips from counter to cashier and back.
Shyly he ordered a cream soda from a day-dreaming Negro girl. Slyly added a dollop of ice-cream. Then furtively treated himself to a hotdog, squirting it thick with mustard, burying the punchy-skinned sausage in green relish; swallowing some paper napkin with his first bite.
The waitress said, ‘You go on eatin’ like that and you’re goin’ to be a plenty sick man.’
The schoolboy Zhukov apologized. ‘I didn’t have any breakfast.’ But his accent defeated and bored her. She moved indolently away, gawky limbed and graceful.
But why feel shame, Comrade Zhukov? Aren’t Muscovites the greatest eaters in the world? Stuffing themselves with creamy borsch, fat meats, black bread, cucumbers, potatoes, the gurievskaya kasha that Valentina cooked so well, the salted pig fat on thick bread that peasants still ate, the finest and creamiest ice-cream in the world. I shouldn’t feel shame at eating these synthetic snacks. He prodded the floating ice-cream with disdain. And a coffee, perhaps, to complete the culinary adventure. The girl who wore a blue-black wig slid him a cup and he experimented with the cushion of sugar and tiny pot of cream as if he were in a laboratory.
As he paid at the cash desk he belched.
He urged himself on past stockades of root beer and Coke, hesitated at male cosmetics. Juices of conceit, long corked, spurted. He remembered women at May Day and Revolution anniversary parties paying him compliments capsuled in bubbles of Russian champagne. ‘You are an attractive man, Vladimir Zhukov. Not handsome, perhaps, but you have strong features and a commanding presence. That is what women like.’ The flirtatious heritage of Czarist sophistry still giggling beneath stern Socialist surfaces.
Zhukov bought some hair dressing said to be enriched with protein and headed back to the apartment with his guilty purchases in a brown paper bag under his arm.
So ended the first unspectacular revolt.
The second followed a few days later. Because the lust had not been sated, the experience of decadence not fully assimilated.
In his West German bug Zhukov drove first to Hecht’s on 14th and G where he had been told by colleagues that there was many a bargain to be had and no Russian need feel too badly about distributing his puny allowance there because didn’t the underprivileged and victimized Negroes shop there? They certainly did, Zhukov discovered; and so did many whites who had once shopped at Garfinkels before glimpsing the dark waters of recession beneath the tissue ice of prosperity.
Again he was intoxicated by the profusion of merchandise. Broad silk ties, corduroy and soft suede jackets, fragments of lingerie, shirts which only homosexuals outside the Bolshoi in Moscow would have worn, novelties, Valentine cards already, drapes, perfumes … The disinclination to spend was still strong in him; but his arms were growing longer, his pockets shorter.
In Hechts Vladimir Zhukov, uncomfortably aware of his styleless clothes, bought a wide silver tie lined with blue satin and a broad leather belt with a peace buckle, designed to hold up nothing (except, perhaps, a slumping belly) but which might come in handy for beating a wife. Or vice versa.
The young man who served him confided that the belt might be the basis of a new image for Zhukov. ‘We don’t want to draw attention to the approach of middle-age, do we, sir?’ He withdrew his hand from Zhukov’s sweating nylon shirt with alacrity.
Outside Zhukov observed the droppings of soiled snow—and heard the scrape of old women’s shovels on the sidewalks of Moscow.
He climbed into his stone-coloured Volkswagen and drove to a supermarket. Its cornucopia was the biggest shock of all. Not just the frozen, packaged, price-cut, sliced, chopped, condensed, fortified, concentrated, dehydrated, evaporated, regimented, abundance of it all. No, it was the permutations: the calculating ingenuity of choice: simple selection grated hopefully into shreds that might appeal to different ages, sexes, races, colours, types. An indulgent carve-up of what had once been ordinary shared hunger.
Take olives, for instance. Not particularly favoured by Vladimir Zhukov; nevertheless the pure stony fruit of history, to be eaten with goats’ cheese beside a hill where shepherds rested under the olive trees’ undistinguished branches. Here, in an avenue of cartons and deep-freeze troughs, they rested in specimen bottles: black salad olives, manzanilla olives stuffed with sweet peppers, water, salt and lactic acid, pitted olives, Spanish olives stuffed with pimentos, giant Californian olives …
Influenced as always by old movies, Vladimir Zhukov had always fancied orange juice with his breakfast—prior to coffee and toast and kidneys served from a silver platter. But perhaps he was old-fashioned. Frozen concentrates of lemonade, pink lemonade(!), grape, apple, iced tea, Hawaiian punch, peach, peach and orange. And there at the end of the surgical trough the cold cylinders of pure frozen orange juice.
He walked away with nothing, selectivity battered senseless.
But I will buy some sausage, he thought. The sausage that as a student I used to wolf between dry bread while the vodka bottle circulated. Bologna, liverwurst, salami, turkey salami, blood and tongue, corned beef, chicken loaf, olive loaf, hot Italian loaf …
‘Some sausage, please,’ he said to the scrubbed young man in the chef’s hat.
‘What kind of sausage?’
‘Any kind.’
‘You got to make the choice, buddy. It’s you that’s eating it, not me.’
Zhukov pointed wildly at a gnarled pink forearm of meat.
‘How much do you want?’
Zhukov indicated with his hands—‘About that much’—popped the sausage into his still-empty shopping cart and hurried away to rally his powers of choice beside the mixes—whisky sour, pussycat, daiquiri, gimlet, cranbreaker, bloody Mary and Tom Collins—stacked beside root beer, birch beer, spruce beer, grape soda, black cherry soda …
He rested there, drunk with choice, as Nicolai Grigorenko hove past, his basket-on-wheels stacked high with decadence.
‘Greetings, comrade,’ Zhukov said, sanctimonious about his single tube of sausage.
Grigorenko turned as quickly as a man going for a gun. Alarm, suspicion, menace; then a blush of guilt on his drooping face. But he attacked just the same. ‘What are you doing here, Comrade Zhukov?’
‘Observing the fleshpots of Capitalist degeneracy. And you, comrade?’
The Growler faltered. ‘Just doing a little shopping for one of the counsellors.’ Inspiration assembled slowly. ‘He’s giving a party for some French diplomats. You know how they like to eat,’ he added hopefully.
‘I do indeed, comrade.’ He appraised Grigorenko’s basket of loot. ‘How will the counsellor serve aerosol shaving cream?’
‘That is for the counsellor himself. It is his only weakness.’
‘If American shaving cream is his only weakness