“You see?”
“Listen!” the count jumps up. “Stop fooling around! I don’t have time for jokes! I’ve lost almost everything! But I swear to God—everything will be returned! Everything will be returned!”
Batya sighs and stands up, leaning on Ivan:
“You’re just like Job, Count. Everything will be returned…But nothing will be returned to you. And you know why? Because you placed your lust higher than the state.”
“Boris, don’t go too far!”
“I’m not taking anything too far.” Batya walks up to the count. “You think His Majesty is angry because you like to fornicate in fire? Because you’re shaming his daughter? No. That’s not why. You burned state property. Therefore, you took a step against the state. Against His Majesty.”
“Bobrinskaya’s house is her own property! What does His Majesty have to do with it?!”
“You blockhead, what he has to do with it is that we are all His Majesty’s children, and all of our property belongs to him! The whole country is his! You of all people should know that! Life hasn’t taught you anything, Andrei Vladimirovich. You were His Majesty’s son-in-law, but you became a rebel. And not just a rebel, but a son of a bitch. Rotten, dead meat.”
The count’s eyes flash with dark fury:
“What?! You cur, you…”
Batya puts two fingers in his mouth and whistles. And as though by command, the young guys rush the count and grab him.
“Into the pool with him!” Batya orders.
The oprichniks tear the sheet off the count and throw him into the pool. The count comes up, sputtering:
“You’ll answer for this, you dogs, you’ll answer…”
All of a sudden knives appear in the youngsters’ hands. Now that’s new! It should be clear to you now, you dolt! Why didn’t I know? Curtains for the count? They gave the go-ahead?
The youngsters stand around the edge of the pool.
“Haaiiilll!” cries Batya.
“Hail, hail!” cry the youngsters.
“Hail, hail!” the rest of us take up the cry.
“Death to the enemies of Russia!” Batya exclaims.
“Death! Death! Death!” we continue the chant.
The count swims up to the edge of the pool, and grabs on to the marble. But on the other side, Komol strikes with a flourish: his knife flies like lightning, piercing the count’s stooped back up to its handle. The count lets out a furious wail. Okhlop waves his hand—and his knife flies, landing right next to the first. Yelka and Avila aim their knives—just as precisely, also at the back of the naked count. He screams with fury and indignation. How much anger that bastard has stored up. The knives of the remaining youngsters fly into him. And all of them hit their target. They know how to aim knives, those lads. We old-timers prefer to use our knives closer up.
The count no longer wails; he’s wheezing, tossing and turning in the water. He looks like a sea mine.
“There’s ‘everything will be returned’ for you.” Batya grins, taking a glass from the tray and sipping it.
A convulsion passes through the count’s body, and he stiffens forever. Life and fate.
“Upstairs with him.” Batya nods to the bath attendants. “Change the water.”
The attendants drag Urusov’s corpse out of the pool, take the gold cross and the famous hedgehog ring off him, and give them to Batya. Batya tosses what remains of the powerful count in his hand.
“There you have it: here and gone!”
They take out the corpse. Batya gives the gold cross to Svirid:
“Give this to our church tomorrow.”
He puts the hedgehog ring on his pinkie.
“We’ve had our steam bath. Upstairs! Everyone—upstairs!”
The grandfather clock strikes 02:30. We’re sitting in the tiled drawing room. After midnight Batya has kept only five of us: Potyka, Vosk, Baldokhai, Yerokha, and me. After the wet stuff our Batya had a hankering for coke with vodka. We sit at a round table of red granite. There’s a dish with stripes of white, candles, and a carafe of vodka. Yerokha warms the dish with the candle, drying the coke from below. Batya’s already loaded, and when he’s really loaded, he likes to give us lofty lectures. Our dear Batya has three speeches: one about His Majesty, one about his deceased mama, and one about the Christian faith. Today it’s faith:
“Now you, my dear Enochs, you’re wondering, why was the Wall built, why are we fenced off, why did we burn our foreign passports, why are there different classes, why were intelligent machines changed to Cyrillic? To increase profits? To maintain order? For entertainment? For home and hearth? To create the big and beautiful? For fancy houses? For Moroccan leather boots, so everyone could tap their heels and clap? For all that’s good, true, and well made, so that there’d be plenty all around? To make the state as mighty as a pole from the heavenly tamarind tree? So that it supports the heavenly vault and the stars, goddamnit, so the stars and moon would shine, you sniveling scarecrow wolves, so that the warm wind would blow-not-stop-blowing on your asses, is that it? So your asses would stay nice and warm in your velvet pants? So your heads would feel cozy under their sable hats? So you sniveling wolves wouldn’t live by lies? So you’d run in herds, fast, straight, close together, most holy, obedient, so you’d harvest the grain on time, feed your brother, love your wives and children, is that it?”
Batya pauses, inhales a good snort of white coke and washes it down with vodka. We do the same thing.
“Now you see, my dearest Enochs, that’s not what it was for. It was so the Christian faith would be preserved like a chaste treasure, you get it? For only we, the Orthodox, have preserved the church as Christ’s body on earth, a single church, sacred, conciliar, apostolic, and infallible, isn’t that right? After the Second Nicene Council we are the only ones who glorify the Lord correctly, for we are Russian Orthodox, because no one took the right to glorify the Lord correctly away from us, did they? We didn’t retreat from the community of our church, from sacred icons, from the Mother of God, from the faith of the fathers, from the life-giving Trinity, from the Holy Spirit, from the life-giving Lord who comes from the Father, who venerates the Father and Son and speaks the prophet, right? We have rejected everything sacrilegious: Manichaeanism, and Monotheletism, and Monophysitism, right? For whomsoever the church is not mother, God is not the father, right? For God by His nature is beyond understanding, right? For all true-believing Orthodox priests are heirs of Peter, right? For there is no purgatory, only hell and heaven, right? For man is born mortal and therefore he sins, right? For God is the light, right? For our Savior became human so that you and I, sniveling wolves, could become gods, right? That’s why His Majesty built this magnificent Wall, in order to cut us off from stench and unbelievers, from the damned cyberpunks, from sodomites, Catholics, melancholiacs, from Buddhists, sadists, Satanists, and Marxists; from megamasturbators, fascists, pluralists, and atheists! For faith, you sniveling wolves, isn’t a change purse! It’s no brocaded caftan! No oak club! What is faith? Faith, my noisy ones—is a well of springwater, pure, clear, quiet, modest, powerful, and plentiful! You get it? Or should I repeat it to you?”
“We got it, Batya,” we always answer.
“Well, then, if you got it—thank the Lord.”
Batya crosses himself. We cross ourselves as well. We snort some more. Wash it down. Groan.
And suddenly Yerokha’s nostrils sniffle with hurt.
“What is it?” Batya turns to him.
“Forgive me, Batya, if I say something that might cross you.”
“Well?”
“I’m offended.”
“What offends you, Brother Yerokha?”
“That you put the noble’s ring on your finger.”
Yerokha is talking sense. Batya squints at him. Then he says loudly: