Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia by Jose Manuel Prieto Page B

back in an expansive gesture as if I were the owner of many a десятина of land and muzhiks in abundance.
    The duchess studied him from behind the nonexistent monocle of her asperity. To the already questionable fact of having agreed to share a table with strangers was now added the inclusion of this personage, who bore a distinct resemblance to the sort of family man who ducks out of the house to fritter away his salary drinking wine next to fences.
    Maarif, however, gave no sign of discontent. He had remained silent since his arrival. Now he was watching the general, who ate with ancestral appetite, as if he were just back from a difficult maneuver in the Sea of Barents. Maarif observed him ingesting the lustrous morsel of an anchovy, a small and agile dolphin lost between the general’scrunching mandibles, his wire-rimmed glasses in the foreground shooting off alarming sparks and belying the faint smile on his lips. His thick fingers. Another little fish. A long swig of A QUA VITAE , vodochka . (And the army of workers and peasants clambering over the bars of the Winter Palace, overthrowing the two-headed eagle.) Which was more or less what Maarif said, something like: October was not in vain, the fight to eradicate the weed of insatiable gluttony. The leader of that revolution, comrade . . .
    At the sudden explosion of the word L ENIN , Kolia’s eyes went blank as if a great rage had possessed him. He leapt to his feet and began striking his glass with a fork: “ Gentlemen! No, Господа ( Gospoda )! And forgive me if I offend anyone by calling you that. Be aware that I cannot speak the word with any degree of assurance, and without a feeling of falsity, but I refuse to insult you with the word товáрищ”— tovarish or comrade — “though perhaps the general . . .”
    “No, that’s fine. Gospada! As in the old days: Gospada ofitseri!” (Meaning “ Señores oficiales! ” or “Esteemed officers!”)
    a) The IMPERIUM in full-blown identity crisis. The TV had opened up the debate on how to address strangers in the street. There were certain hesitations regarding gospodin— its literal meaning, “master,” sounded offensive to some ears—and, too, over citizen, which conferred the stigma of not being a tovarish: “ Release that billy club, citizen, you are under arrest.” Some had opted for судар ( sudar ) — “sir”—which was far too nineteenth-century, while the simplest people, vendors in the bazaars, had decided to stick with a term that left no room for doubt: мужчна ( muzhina ), meaning, simply and plainly, man. Since all these forms of address entrained the insecurity of wearing someone else’s finery, I had seen polite, well-bred people recite each one in sequence, beginning with the stigmatized tovarish and ending with the laughable gentleman. (For years the phrase “Russian gentleman ”had been winning all competitions for who could come up with the shortest joke. “Once there was a Russian gentleman . . . ”And that was it. That was the joke.)
    “ Gospada! L ENIN . . . No, it’s incredible. If I told you that L ENIN . . . Well . . . The great deception, gospada! Have you all heard about the letter that was kept secret from us? Listen: there exists a letter from Marx in which he explained that the Communist experiment could not be carried out in our little Mother Russia. A letter perfidiously concealed from us by the Russian Marxists, by the bolcheviki, may the devil take them! And think about this, gospada! Everything around us was L ENIN . A veritable scourge. The Metro, the main avenues, the streets of the most insignificant VILLAGES , the young L ENINIST pioneers who went on to swell the ranks of the L ENINIST Komsomol. I’m astonished not to find here, at the entrance to this lovely restaurant, a plaque stating that L ENIN had lunch here on the afternoon of December 6, 1903, upon his return from exile in Siberia. And the falsehoods we were told about