Potboiler

“The real problem with Communism has nothing to do with ‘civil rights,’ or the gulag, or breadlines. It’s got nothing to do with ‘history’ or ‘destiny’ or anything like that. It’s got nothing to do with Stalin, and it’s certainly got nothing to do with Dragomir Zhulk, who, politics aside, I thought quite highly of. We are ‘family,’ after all, not close but eleventh cousins or something like that. Spend enough time jousting with a bloke of his capabilities, and you’re bound to develop a measure of respect, if not for the content of his thoughts then for the way they’re phrased. Understand: I’m not saying I approve. The man was a bona fide ‘head case,’ and the methods they use over there are just too too much. You’ve never had to experience scrotal electroshock, but let me tell you, from what I’ve heard, it’s the very ‘definition’ of unlovely. So, yes, a raving sociopath he may have been, but there’s no denying he was good with the old rhetoric, and I admired him for it. Nor am I ashamed to admit that I’ve learned a few things about rallying the ‘people’ and whatnot from watching him work. So it’s not a ‘vendetta’ or anything like that. People have this image of me as ‘ruthless,’ ‘sadistic,’ ‘incapable of forgiving the tiniest slight,’ what have you. I’m not in a position to say whether there’s any merit to that. What I can tell you with perfect honesty is that my pet peeves have nothing to do with my reasoned opinion on the matter. I’m a rather ‘left-brained’ sort of fellow, you see, and I’ve given this a lot of thought. You might call it my ‘life’s work.’ In that sense, I suppose it is personal, insofar as I was born poor—and I’m not using that term the way Americans do, saying ‘poor’ when what you really mean is ‘not rich.’ You lot have no concept of what it is to go without the basics. Take an uneducated black from the Deep South in 1955 and drop him down with just the change in his pocket in the middle of the Gyeznyuiy and he’s going to be bathing in goat’s milk and wiping himself with silk. Here, being poor means something. My father toiled nineteen and a half hours a day in the fields. My mother’s hands were perpetually bloody from scrubbing dishes and poking herself with knitting needles. She did that habitually, stab herself. Not just knitting needles, anything within reach: diaper pins, rusty bolts, sharpened root vegetables. I never quite got what she was trying to ‘tell me,’ mutilating herself like that, but I’m fairly certain it had to do with not being able to afford to go to the movies. There I was, a ‘barefoot boy,’ asking myself: ‘Why? Why must it be this way?’ Years passed before I understood that the answer is in our ‘cultural DNA.’ It’s the same answer to my original question. What’s the real problem with Communism? And why are we as a people so susceptible to it? Two sides of the same coin. Want to guess? No? I’ll tell you why. Because the average Zlabian, like Dragomir, and like the Communist system in general, doesn’t know how to have any goddamned fun.”

The sumptuous wingback chair to which Pfefferkorn was cuffed had been specially modified for that purpose, with two thick iron hoops drilled into its arms, and ankle chains that prevented him from lifting his feet more than six inches off the ground. The lord high president was not thus constrained. His custom-made size-twenty-two goatskin boots landed on his George II desk with a mighty crash.

“That’s all people really want,” he said, shifting his seismic bulk and sipping from a generous pour of fifty-five-year-old single malt scotch. “To enjoy themselves. And why shouldn’t they? But that’s not the way the Zlabian thinks. It’s always ‘suffering this,’ ‘shame that.’ Or it was, once upon a time. I’ve done my damnedest to change that around here. It’s much more about psychology than economics. Take that TV show they love, the one with the crying poets. I’m proud to say that on our side of the boulevard, it wouldn’t fly. Now, we want winners.”

Savory, standing by the jukebox, nodded. The ten security guards did not move a muscle.

Thithyich fished an extra-long Marlboro out of the carton in his coat pocket. He pressed a button on his desk and an eight-foot jet of flame roared from the wall, narrowly missing his face and incinerating the cigarette by half. He dragged, blew, tapped a diamond-studded ashtray shaped like a roulette wheel. “We as a people have had it rough. No argument there. At some point, though, you have to take responsibility for yourself. That’s the beauty of a free market: it has no memory, neither for your successes nor for your failures. Merciless, but in a way also very forgiving. God, I’m peckish. Where are they?”