Offended Sensibilities, page 1
From political fictionalist Alisa Ganieva: a neo-noir portrait of a legal system in which everything is broken and no one is innocent.
Offended Sensibilities chronicles a series of scandals in a provincial Russian town. As the intrigue unfolds, local government and business leaders are caught in the sticky moral and legal web of recent Russian legislation, including a notorious blasphemy law banning forms of expression that offend the sensibilities of religious believers.
With this novel, Ganieva moves beyond Dagestan, the setting of her previous books published in English by Deep Vellum: The Mountain and the Wall and Bride and Groom. In Offended Sensibilities, Ganieva addresses nationalism, Orthodox fervor, sexuality, and political corruption. Suffused with a light touch and at times rollicking sense of humor, this timely, entertaining, and thought-provoking novel can be read as an allegory for the political, social, religious, and cultural climate in Russia today.
Offended
Sensibilities
Alisa Ganieva
TRANSLATED BY CAROL APOLLONIO
DEEP VELLUM PUBLISHING
DALLAS, TEXAS
Deep Vellum Publishing
3000 Commerce St., Dallas, Texas 75226
deepvellum.org • @deepvellum
Deep Vellum is a 501c3 nonprofit literary arts organization founded in 2013 with the mission to bring the world into conversation through literature.
Translation copyright © 2022 by Carol Apollonio
Copyright © 2018 by Alisa Ganieva
Originally published as Оскорбленные чувства by Издательство ACT in Moscow, Russia, in 2018
First US Edition, 2022
Support for this publication has been provided in part by the Mikhail Prokhorov Fund’s Transcript Program to support the translation of Russian literature.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Ganieva, Alisa, 1985- author. | Flath, Carol A. (Carol Apollonio), translator.
Title: Offended sensibilities / Alisa Ganieva ; translated by Carol Apollonio.
Other titles: Oskorblennye chuvstva. English
Description: First US edition. | Dallas, Texas : Deep Vellum, 2022.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022029006 | ISBN 9781646052233 (trade paperback) | ISBN
9781646052493 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Political fiction. | Novels.
Classification: LCC PG3491.94.A554 O7513 2022 | DDC
891.73/5--dc23/eng/20220622
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022029006
ISBN (TPB) 978-1-64605-223-3
ISBN (Ebook) 978-1-64605-249-3
Cover design by Emily Mahon
Interior layout and typesetting by KGT
PRINTED IN CANADA
It’s indisputable that we no longer have that reverential and awed attitude toward denunciation that existed before.
—Aleksander Zinoviev, Homo Sovieticus
Eagle-eyed, observant.
—Fedor Sologub, The Petty Demon
CHAPTER 1
A MAN WAS RUNNING, LURCHING AWKWARDLY in the drizzling rain. “Drunk,” thought Nikolai, braking at the red light, “look at him staggering.” Dusk had drawn a veil over the streetlights, which flickered uncertainly on their aluminum posts. The mercury in the bulbs must be running low. Ivan the Terrible, Nikolai suddenly recalled, was poisoned by a mercury salve he used to treat his syphilis. He rubbed his feet with it. Or maybe someone else did?
Down by the river,
On the other shore,
Marusenka washed her feet so white.
Where were you all night,
Who were you with,
Mar …
A great hand slapped palm-down against the wet driver’s-side window. Nikolai lowered the glass. Same guy. Expensive jacket, gold ring on his finger. He looked upset, but still, a man of substance. Tipsy, maybe, but not a complete boozer.
The man nervously wiped the rain off his face. “Give me a ride, brother!” he pleaded in an unexpectedly low bass voice.
“Do I look like a taxi driver?” snorted Nikolai, offended.
“Please, friend, I really need a ride! I’ll pay!”
“Was something not clear? I’m not your personal chauffeur!”
The light turned green, and the cars behind them blared their horns. But the strange man collapsed against the car heavily, like a sea lion, and Nikolai couldn’t budge.
“Hey, bug off!” he yelled, but the stranger reached in and waved a bulging wallet under his nose. The wallet smelled of fresh calfskin. The man started tossing handfuls of five-hundred-ruble bills into the car. The banknotes rained down on Nikolai’s shoulders and his potbelly and scattered on the floor under the seat. The cars behind them kept honking angrily.
“What the hell is your problem?” grumbled the bewildered Nikolai. He hesitated, then unlocked the back door. The man, panting heavily, clambered in and collapsed onto the back seat. The door slammed, and the car heaved forward with a groan.
Nikolai adjusted the rearview mirror, provoking a gentle clatter from the string of beads hanging there.
Beads in your hand; broads in your head … flashed through Nikolai’s mind, unbidden. The passenger’s reflection stared anxiously out the rain-spattered window.
“Where are you headed?” Nikolai asked sternly.
The man started. “What about you?”
“To Central Street.”
“Me, too. But can you go the long way around?”
“What, are you running away from someone?”
The man didn’t answer, just continued panting, taking short, rapid breaths. Strange—he didn’t smell of alcohol. Nikolai focused on the wet road ahead and let his mind wander. He had read somewhere that at any given minute seven percent of the world’s population was drunk. What does that add up to? Nikolai furrowed his brow and tried to do the math. Fifty million? If this wheezing guy really was soused, he ought to reek of alcohol. Maybe the herbal sachet that his wife had hung at the windshield had muffled out the smell. Essential oils. She’d sewn it herself. The seam was uneven.
His wife said that since they’d bought the car used, it was tainted with the energy of its former owners. They needed to perform a ritual cleansing. You light a candle using a paper banknote—as little as a hundred rubles (the amount is not the point; the main thing is to be sure that it burns completely)—and hold it over the hood, shouting, “Paid for success!” Walk clockwise around the car, making twelve complete circuits, then extinguish the flame, toss the stub into a vacant lot, and you’re good to go.
Nikolai breathed in the lavender aroma through his nostrils.
“Did you know?” he addressed the passenger, politely now. “A colleague told me recently that ants communicate through smell; have you heard that?”
“What? Huh?” The man stirred in the back seat.
“Ants, I’m telling you. They have pheromones. If an ant dies, the pheromones remain on his body, and the whole ant clan spends a week just hanging out with him, shooting the breeze, can you picture it? Until the biochemistry wears off. They think he’s still alive. It works the other way around, too. If you sprinkle a living ant with the smell of carrion, it’s as though he’s already decomposing, and that’s the end for him. They haul him off to the ant cemetery.” Nikolai chuckled. “Poor little bastard, he resists, tries to scurry back to the anthill, but they just grab him again and drag him back to be buried. How about that? Can you imagine?”
The passenger nodded; he seemed to be following. But he kept wheezing, and his hand convulsively clutched at the chest of his stylish jacket.
“I didn’t know that ants had cemeteries.”
“They could even have their own ant wheelbarrows; it wouldn’t surprise me a bit,” chortled Nikolai. He was in a good mood now; he’d managed to pick up a passenger just like that, without even trying. “Why didn’t you just call an Uber?”
The man darkened.
“Uber-Buber … so people can keep track of my comings and goings? No, I’ve had enough of that.”
“Who’s following you?”
But the rider clammed up again.
“Everyone is afraid of something,” mused Nikolai aloud. “Some are afraid they’ll leave their phone at home. My daughter is like that. There’s even a name for it, I’ve forgotten, something-phobia. People are afraid of microbes. Of getting old. Moles, airplanes, gold, blindness. Getting cancer, stepping in dog shit. Getting married. Falling in love. Farting in public. Being onstage in front of a crowd. Doctors, their mother-in-law, their reflection in the mirror. Lice, radiation, AIDS, terrorists. To go to sleep and never wake up. A hair in their food. Clowns, computers, drafts. Bad breath. Empty rooms. Tunnels, heights, water, money, medicines. The evil eye …”
“What do you do for a living?” the passenger interjected.
“I work for a construction company. What about you?”
“A construction company? Which one?”
“You, too?” Nikolai again adjusted the mirror, trying to get a look at the man’s face.
But instead of answering the man peered out again into the rainy darkness.
“Where are we?”
“Just like you asked. We’re about to get on the bypass, and from there we’ll go to Central Street.”
The man seemed calmer. He turned from the window and confided, “About things people are afraid of … I have gotten scared of my telephone recently. Eyes everywhere, you know what I mean?”
It seeme
Nikolai recalled some funny old propaganda posters:
On the phone, be quiet and wise.
Blabbermouths attract the spies.
The enemy is vicious, mean, and hard.
Never let down your guard.
His mother-in-law had come running from the clinic, all in a lather. It had come to light that some patients’ test samples—urine and feces—had been sent to a commercial medical lab. And from there they had supposedly gone straight to foreign agents to be used in some kind of monstrous sabotage plot. What it was exactly, no one could explain coherently, but government officials had already gone over the entire lab with a fine-toothed comb. And the whole thing had started when an alert citizen had conveyed a single piece of information to the right people.
Where people are alerted
Nothing can be subverted.
Nikolai replayed in his head his mother-in-law’s alarmed, birdlike gestures. He was a long way from retirement. And this was no joking matter—buckwheat kasha and black bread. He recalled a joke Stepan, one of his coworkers in General Contracting, had told him the day before:
“Information. What’s your question?”
“Hello, dear, can you give me the phone number of where they pay the pensions?”
“I’m sorry, we don’t give out international numbers.”
Nikolai had guffawed and the office hag Belyaeva had shot him a nasty look. Like, just what are you trying to say?
Nikolai had lucked into his job; he’d gotten it through a friend. Procurement. They handled large orders from the mayor’s office and the government administration. Recently they’d completed an ice arena for the big sports festival. Cameras flashed; red ribbons fluttered in the breeze; lush speeches flowed like rivers. Then one of the arena’s walls started leaking—the joints hadn’t been sealed properly. All the big shots blamed it on the subcontractor. Stepan joked, “We should have done it like the Chinese when they built their Great Wall. Mixed boiled rice in with the cement.”
Nikolai didn’t like rice, but word on the street was that some of the metal roof tiles had been spotted on the new roof of the boss’s country house. Marina Semyonova was the general director. Young blood, meticulously groomed hands. Nikolai had seen her in the flesh just once, at the New Year’s bash. But her portrait hung in the lobby. The work of the trendy artist Ernest Pogodin, in oil. Sable fur coat, a sassy squint. Light brushwork, lacquer coating, and scumble. A gargantuan gold frame. Discounts for the artist’s regular clients.
The car lurched along the black, pitted road, its wheels bouncing across gaping potholes and sloshing through puddles. Nikolai cursed. Last year’s asphalt; they’d paved during a snowstorm, mixing the asphalt in with the mud in a mad rush to complete it by the deadline and put it down on paper as done. And now behold: gullies and a sea of mud.
“How much longer?” the passenger asked hoarsely.
“You’re the one who sent me on a wild goose chase, now all of a sudden it’s ‘how much longer?’ We’re almost there,” Nikolai shot back across his shoulder.
The rain started pouring down, thick and greedy, whipping the car roof insolently, like a man’s palms slapping his woman’s fleshy sides. The windshield wipers drummed out an insistent tachycardic rhythm. The wooden residential barracks on either side had disappeared, and they were now driving past a solid concrete wall—that classic Soviet “PO-2” type: concrete slabs with a pattern of convex rhombuses. It was impossible to read the graffiti in the darkness, but Nikolai remembered a couple of the largest inscriptions, which had been there for years. A sprawling advertisement: “Toastmaster, Accordionist” with a phone number and a slanting, half-effaced exclamation: “Russia for sad people!”
“All right, here’s where we turn; it’s right around the corner. How are you back there?” Nikolai called to the passenger, who was slumped over on the seat; he seemed to be drifting off and just wheezed indistinctly.
“That’s all I need, for him to blow chunks back there,” thought Nikolai. The road surface under the wheels had become downright crumbly, and the car roared, churning a puddle into filthy froth.
“We’re skidding!” yelled Nikolai, slamming the brake down as far as it would go. Again and again. The tire scraped against the jagged edge of the asphalt, and the vehicle’s bulky nose lurched upward; the car shuddered and groaned but could not take hold, and slid back down into the watery mess. Not enough power, just barely. Now if the passenger would just get out for a second …
Nikolai turned around. The man was half lying on the seat, slumped against the side door, out cold by the looks of it.
“Hey, man!” Nikolai called him. “We’re stuck! Get out!” Silence. No reaction.
“Macaroni-baloney-rigatoni …” muttered Nikolai through his teeth. He pulled up the collar of his raincoat and started climbing out carefully, into the seething, sopping unknown.
His leg plunged immediately into cold water up to the knee. Nikolai cursed even louder and began to carefully make his way around the submerged trunk of the car, trying to step in the shallower places. “This bozo in the back is completely wasted; he won’t lift a finger. But I can’t do it myself, someone will have to pull over and give me a push,” thought Nikolai, hunching over and shivering from the cold. Of course there was no one at all on the road, just one ugly eighteen-wheeler that thundered by, drenching him with a great gray wave.
When he reached the opposite-side back door, Nikolai rapped his knuckles a couple of times on the window glass, but his traveling companion didn’t move a muscle. His nose pressed against the window, forming a shapeless white blob.
“Come on,” bleated Nikolai. He jerked on the handle and flung the door open.
The man tumbled out of the car and crumpled limply to the ground at Nikolai’s feet. His forehead knocked against the curved edge of a curb that jutted out of the puddle; his arms were crushed in an unnatural position under the weight of his torso. His feet in their elegant polished leather ankle boots were submerged in the black water. The man did not stir.
“Hey, listen!” gulping convulsively, Nikolai yelled in a shrill voice that was not his own. “You playing some kind of game with me?”
He squatted down and shook the man by the shoulder. His body was completely inert. Down his forehead ran a thin bloody line that the rain diluted and rinsed off. One motionless eye fixed a frozen stare on the road, on which raindrops danced. The second eye looked downward. Nikolai’s teeth chattered shallowly. He placed his fingertips on the man’s Adam’s apple and slid them down one side to the soft hollow of his neck. He waited. No pulse. It dawned on him that his cell phone must have a flashlight. The main thing was not to attract attention from cars passing by. Though there weren’t any cars on the road in any case. It was the weekend, an out-of-the-way part of town. No lights. Not a living soul.
He turned on the flashlight and directed a beam of light into the man’s eye, the one looking upward. No reaction. In spite of the cold, drops of sweat trickled down Nikolai’s chest. He had to do something. Call the police? Of course they would immediately suspect him of murder. No way. Rummage around in the man’s jacket, find a passport, a cell phone? The man ought to have a wallet, with credit cards in it … No, don’t leave any fingerprints.
Run—that’s all he could do! Nikolai grabbed the man by the collar of his leather jacket and tugged him upward onto the thing that could, with some imagination, be called a sidewalk, and over to the wall. The wet jacket, which had become completely slick and almost liquid, like tar, slithered out of his clenched hands. His heart thumped in its bony cage. “Faster, faster!” Nikolai repeated to himself. After releasing the corpse, he slapped his raincoat pockets—to make sure that everything was in place, that he hadn’t dropped anything in the puddle. He rushed back to the driver’s side. Jumped in, closed the door, gripped the wheel, exhaled. And set the car in motion.
