The Devil's Wheel (Чертово колесо)
by Mikhail Gigolashvili
Click here to read the author's biography
Click here to read a synopsis
***
Sample translation by Polly Gannon
Chapter 13
Screw-ups and setups were commonplace in Koka’s life. He decided to put the matter on the back burner, telling himself, enough is enough! I’m going to Paris to escape from this savage barbarism.
He was sitting in front of the TV, bored, when his neighbor Nukri, an avid reader of porn magazines, dropped by with a bit of weed from Asia. He promised to find out where he could get more and how much it would be.
Smoking alone got old pretty quickly, and Koka invited the Artist over. The Artist was always around, and never had anything to do. They couldn’t find any non-filter cigarettes, so they emptied out a couple of regular ones to roll up two joints. They finished one up quickly and started watching some movie, but the stuff was so potent they couldn’t sit still staring at the box.
They wandered around the apartment until they stumbled across Grandma, who was reading Flaubert in the gallery. They started feeding her some bull—that on the planet Titan it rained titanium, all its inhabitants were named Titus, they lived in burrows dug out of titanium, sucked tits, and, of course were tyrannized by their Titan Chieftain. Or that Sviatoslav Richter had a harem of pandas in Assam, and his offspring were brown Yetis. Or that there were eyewitness reports of lazy black men in Africa turning back into apes. Since labor turned apes into humans, it stood to reason that indolence and sloth would reverse the process and turn them back into apes. Right?
Grandma was terrified and expressed her disbelief, but they kept coming up with new details.
“Some of the Africans have already left their huts and climbed back into the palm trees.”
“That’s right. They’ve stamped out their campfires. They only eat raw meat.”
“They grew back fur and have fangs for teeth. Threw down their work tools.”
“They all swing on vines now.”
Then they left to go smoke another joint. Grandma, however, excited by their drivel, or perhaps getting a whiff of the suspicious smoke, tried to come into the room under various pretexts. Koka forced her out and locked the door.
“Is that any way to treat an old woman?” came her tragic voice from behind the door.
“Since when do old women enter a room without knocking?”
“Your behaviour is unspeakable, Koka!”
“No more unspeakable than your bugging me day and night!”
“Hey,” said the Artist. “Give her a break, will you? She’s nice.”
But Koka had already stopped. He added, though, that grandmothers had to be kept in check or they’d be in your face twenty-four seven.
“She’s gotten all stirred up again lately. All she hears on TV is drugs this and drugs that. She’s started spying on me. There’s the binoculars again.”
“The what?”
“The opera glasses. She used to spy on me before, too. See, we used to keep a pack of non-filters in the stairwell of the building opposite. You know, so it would be easy to roll a joint. Well, she noticed that each time I left home I went across the way to that stairwell. She dragged herself over there, searched the place high and low, and, sure enough, found our box of non-filters behind the tenants’ bulletin board.”
“Did she throw the pack away?”
“That’s the thing, she didn’t! She was smart enough to leave it there. Afterwards she would sneak over after I had been there and count how many cigarettes had disappeared. And then she showed me the figures.”
“And?”
“I said I had no idea what she was talking about. Non-filters? What non-filters? I only smoke filters.”
“Remember that one time when we swapped her smokes?” The Artist chuckled, remembering our old prank.
As if you could forget a prank like that one! They had scored big-time on some good hash, and decided to play a trick on Grandma. They replaced a couple of her favorite non-filter cigarettes, Kazbeks, with joints. About thirty minutes later, the distinctive smell signaled that Grandma had taken the bait. While the hash was kicking in, Grandma sat quiet as a mouse, gazing around uncomprehending, putting her hand first to her forehead, then to her heart. Then the wrinkles on her long, aristocratic face all but disappeared. She put a lock of hair behind her ear coquettishly, and said in a strange voice:
“When will coffee be served?”
“Soon, your highness, soon,” said Koka, suppressing his laughter. “His highness the emperor is busy with the maids of honor in the conservatory, but he will be back presently. Do not be concerned.”
“My migraine is especially intolerable in the morning,” said Grandma.
“Indeed. Tuberculosis is best administered before bedtime. Two tablets a day,” Koka said with a straight face.
“Is it not in the potion?”
“I’m afraid not. It is in a cloak with scarlet lining.”
About ten minutes into this exchange, Grandma asked them to help her lie down. Then she fell silent for a long time. Occasionally, whispering, murmuring, and faint singing could be heard from the old lady’s room. Koka wanted to go and take a look, but the Artist stopped him. “She’s going to be fine. Let the old hag get some kicks for once in her life.”
Soon, the Artist grew drowsy and left to buy some picture frames. Koka fell asleep in the armchair. At around noon Nukri called. He had learned that there was indeed some new, very potent weed in town, and that one Khecho, who could get it, was in the hospital with syphilis. Granted, he could leave the hospital to get the stuff whenever he pleased. There were rumors that he hid the stuff right in the hospital, and that instead, he just went to his uncle in Avlabar, where he sat in front of the TV gobbling down his favorite pita bread with cheese and tarragon. Someone even tried to search his room in the hospital but was scared off by the syphilitics walking up and down the hallway in a gloomy herd.
“Who cares if its his weed, his uncle’s, or his grandfather’s, as long as it’s good stuff!” said Koka in anticipation.
“Hey, I’m just telling you the story the way I heard it. Let’s visit him later today. I’ve got a hundred on me,” said Nukri. He would do anything to get new porn magazines from Koka.
They arrived at the hospital in the evening. Outside there were girl patients chatting with their boyfriends, who were standing on the other side of the barbed-wire fence.
“What is this? A camping site?” said Koka.
“Some day they’ll be cured,” Nukri said drily.
They found a guard who was totally boozed up and got him to bring down Khecho. They gave Khecho the money and watched while he slipped through the gates, looking around stealthily, then drove off in a cab. He returned an hour later and handed them a packet full of green, spicy smelling powder. He said he had to go through great peril to get the weed, but he smelled strongly of tarragon and there were breadcrumbs on his jacket. Nukri divided up the contents of the packet and gave half of it to Koka, telling him that he should get the same amount tomorrow and give him back his half. Koka took the weed home and hid it behind the books, as usual. Then he picked up a few girls he knew and went to Turtle Lake.
When he came back home, Grandma wasn’t asleep. He poked his head in her room and saw that she was smoking nervously. Koka inquired about the dinner, but she showed none of her usual enthusiasm and didn’t even look at him, averting her eyes, which usually shone with affection.
Smelling a rat, he rushed out into the hallway to the bookshelves. He grabbed the book he thought he had crammed the packet with the weed into and found . . . nothing. Another one—nothing there either. He grabbed books, one after another. Nothing, nothing, nothing . . . Nada. Zilch. The giants of literature glared at him from the open pages of their tomes.
A tragic voice declared:
“Do not trouble yourself, darling. It was in Alexander Blok.”
Grandma stood in the doorway in her nightgown. Her wrinkled face expressed a gamut of feelings that could be summed up as: “smite the naughty boy with a fearsome glare.”
“Did you take it?” Koka asked angrily.
“I certainly did!”
“Did you go through all the books?”
“All of them. I suspected something fishy was going on when I saw you fiddling around by the bookshelves. I found it and flushed it down the toilet,” said Grandma.
“You did what?” He slumped down on the floor and hung his head, clutching it with his hands. “What have you done! I’m dead. It’s the end of me. They’ll kill me!”
“What? Who will kill you?”
“Who? The owner of the stuff you flushed.”
“Wasn’t that nasty stuff yours?” asked Grandma, who was not prepared for this turn of events.
“Of course not. Someone just asked me to hide it for them. If I don’t return it tomorrow, it’ll be . . . bad, real bad. First, that person will die without his fix. Second, his friends will kill me. Do you understand? Don’t you watch TV?”
“Whose was it, then?”
Koka cast around for a convincing story and chose the best one he could come up with:
“It belongs to a cripple. He’s in pain.” He reasoned (correctly) that Grandma probably didn’t know that weed only helps with pain in the soul, not the body.
“What cripple?” asked Grandma suspiciously.
Inspired, Koka began concocting a story about some poor fellow who had become a junkie after surgery, and that the neighborhood kids felt sorry for him. He was bedridden, and the guys brought him food, water, and marijuana. Koka knew which buttons to press.
“Don’t you see? Oh, the poor outcast! A humiliated reject! We cannot betray him. You taught me that one must never betray a friend,” he said, to ratchet up the credibility.
Indeed, the old lady had never encouraged anyone to betray anyone, so she didn’t know what to say. It took just a little longer to assure her that Koka himself had never smoked weed in his life and knew nothing of its effects. The final argument was the clincher. He said that he had been chosen to keep the weed because everyone knew that he would never smoke it. Case closed.
Next came the most sensitive matter. Koka had to find out if Grandma had really flushed the weed, or whether she was just toying with him. But no matter how Koka tried, Grandma was adamant: “Yes, I flushed it down! Why would I keep that poison in the house?”
This required drastic measures. He said a hundred rubles would save him. He would buy another dose and give it to the poor cripple.
Grandma was visibly worried. She felt sorry for the crippled reject and for her dissolute grandson. But she felt that giving Koka money would be wrong from a pedagogical standpoint. Finally, she made the only correct decision, in her view.
“I’m going to go and buy that darn packet myself. And I will give it to the cripple.”
Koka froze. He tried to talk her out of it, but Grandma stood firm.
“No, I won’t give you any money. I will, however, buy the stuff. Where do they sell it?”
Her tone convinced Koka that the old Komsomol princess was as unbending as Rakhmetov or as stubborn as Korchagin. Still, there was little he could do about it. If she wanted to buy it herself, let her. The scheme was difficult to implement, but it might eventually work, and he would be able to replace the lost packet of weed. And that was important. In such matters as getting a fix, the ends justify the means.
They took a few drops of a calmative (valerian root extract), then powwowed about the details. Koka warned her that getting marijuana wasn’t as easy as going down to the nearest grocery store. Maybe it would be better if Koka did everything himself? But Grandma wouldn’t budge: it was either she, or nobody.
Right before he went to sleep, Koka tried to decide which of his friends could best play the role of a crippled junkie. It looked like Tital, a Kurd who had just broken his leg, was the best candidate. Rejection, suffering, and poverty all rolled into one were there for the asking. Tital lived in a basement with a horde of brothers and sisters. His aunt Asmat had been dying behind a curtain for a year, and there was khashi cooking in a pan in the middle of the basement all day long.
The next morning, Grandma was full of determination. She wore gloves and a hat with a veil (no doubt she had been reading The House of the Dead or Giliarovsky). He tried to make her abandon the masquerade, but she refused.
They took a cab. When Koka warned her that they were going to the clinic for venereal diseases, Grandma shivered but wasn’t surprised.
“That’s all right. I’ve always known that one sin goes hand in hand with another. I’m ready for this. Let’s go.”
They arrived at the clinic and entered the visitors’ room. Its filthy appearance and stench induced a deadly depression. The sun could hardly pierce through the unwashed windows. The light fell in splotches on the spittle-covered floor. Various sad couples sat motionless here and there. The place cast ominous shadows on their faces. Even the chairs seemed to shine with fungi and spirochetes.
In one corner sat a man covered in blood-red shingles. His wife dolefully fed him some tomatoes from her bag. In another corner, a pair of black-haired dudes were reproaching two girls in hospital robes:
“Damn you, bitches. You knew you had the clap! Why didn’t you freaking tell us?”
“I swear, Guram! Merab, how did we know? If we had . . . but the bus went through Tebedra, and they all have the clap there!” And the girls sniffed, and hemmed and hawed, and denied everything, looking around sheepishly and trying to cover their fat thighs with the hospital gowns that were too short.
“Oh, Lordy!” said Grandma, and pulled the veil down over her face.
“What did you expect?” said Koka with a fair amount of malicious joy in his voice. “This is no opera hall. Did you bring your opera glasses, by any chance?”
He sat her in a chair and went to the stairs to see the old guard Shakro, whose hands were calloused from handling one-ruble bills. He paid him and asked him to bring Khecho. When Khecho came down, Koka told him quietly:
“Remember me? My friend and I scored a packet from you yesterday.”
“Remember I you? I swear my head, I remember all who take packet,” said Khecho. “I go get packet now. How many you want?”
“Just one. Listen, my grandmother is sitting over there, see? I don’t have time to explain now, but she’ll give you a hundred rubles. You get one packet and give it to her. Got that?”
Khecho, slightly high, stared at Koka in disbelief.
“Hey, grandmother smoke weed? I swear my heart, I never hear this before!”
“Look, I’ll explain later. Just sit down next to her and she’ll pay you. It doesn’t matter who you get the money from.”
“She want packet or you?”
“Both. We split it.”
“Ah, split!” said Khecho and went over to Grandma. He sat down, leaving an empty chair between them, and said, “Hello, madame.”
Grandma nodded stonily and took a newspaper out of her handbag. She put the money in it and put it down on the empty chair between them without meeting his eye. (She picked this up in one of Agatha Christie’s stories, no doubt).
“Would you be so kind as to fetch that . . . substance for me?” said Grandma.
“Miss, I swear my liver, I do my best!” said Khecho, who then took the money out of the newspaper and left, saying proudly, “One hour. You wait.”
Without taking off her gloves, and barely concealing her disgust, Grandma picked up the newspaper and threw it into a wastebasket in the corner. The man with shingles began to hiccup loudly from the dry food he was made to eat. The black-haired dudes started raising their voices. One of them slapped one of the girls in the face, and she screamed. Koka decided to escort Grandma, who was on the verge of fainting, into the clinic’s yard. Shakro the guard opened the door for them. It seemed as though for just a ruble Shakro could open any door in the world. Mechanically, he extended his rough-skinned paw, but Koka reminded him that he had already paid. Shakro blinked and said:
“Oh, I’m sorry. I forgot. Damn this job.”
They sat on a bench, and Grandma told Koka didactical stories from the family chronicles. There was a story about how they had had to operate on her father’s arm without any anesthesia. He hadn’t made a sound when they were scraping the pus off the bone. Then there was a story about a great-grandmother who saved not only her children, but also her pet dog from a fire, and a story about a grandfather who dared speak boldly in front of Stalin, and about another grandfather who designed the first power plant in Georgia. The stories were intended as a corrective for Koka’s morals. Koka, however, already knew the stories by heart and was now only worried about Khecho’s unscrupulous paws digging into Grandma’s packet of weed, in the hope that she wouldn’t notice the transgression.
Exactly one hour later, Khecho, visibly pleased with himself, sat down on the bench. Exhaling a tarragon burp and brushing off bread and cheese crumbs from his jacket, he produced a packet from behind his belt and handed it over to Grandma.
“The most big packet for madame. I swear my kidney!”
Grandma looked around and quickly put the packet away in her handbag.
“I am most obliged to you,” she said. “Pleased to have met you.”
Khecho nodded his head in delight and said:
“For you, madame, only the most big packet always. I swear my leg and arm! Happy smoking to you. I see you a respectable woman.”
While they were in a cab on the way back, Koka asked Grandma to let him examine packet. She refused, but let him touch it. The packet was all right, as firm and heavy as the one yesterday.
“Now we’ll visit that crippled friend of yours,” she said with a catch in her throat. She must have been imagining a scene from “Ward No. 6,” or Andrey Bolkonsky in the hospital.
Tital’s basement was the usual mess. His siblings were part of a living composition made of dirt, wailing, and agitation. Khashi was cooking in a pot in the middle of the basement, as usual. Children’s crying, steam from the khashi, and stench hung thick in the air. Behind a partially torn curtain, the dying aunt Asmat was moaning. Zero, a little flat-headed imbecile, was sitting at the end of her bed, licking his foot like a dog.
While Grandma was introducing herself to Tital’s curly haired brothers and sisters on the stairs leading down to the basement, Koka rushed ahead, tore the headphones from the head of the unshaven Tital, who was lying under a dirty gray blanket on a mattress without a sheet, pressed Stop on the old reel-to-reel tape recorder, and whispered urgently: “Look, my grandmother is here to visit you. You are very, very sick. And you’re in pain. Got it?”
Tital didn’t.
“Your grandmother? Visit me? I’m sick?
“Shut up, here she comes,” Koka whispered. He pulled a charred stool toward her and sat himself on the bed next to Tital’s head, poised to watch, listen, and intercept the packet when the time came.
Grandma sat down by the bed.
“How do you feel? My grandson told me you were in pain.”
Tital, still confused, agreed:
“Yes, I have severe pains.”
“What does the doctor say? You should never despair. Be strong. Alas, pain and suffering pursue a man all his life. One must learn to rise above them.”
“Hey, I’m having a visitor here! Be quiet!” Tital shouted at his siblings.
Koka bent over to Grandma and whispered in her ear:
“Let’s wrap it up. Don’t you see, he’s suffering. This is no time for edifying sermons. He must sleep now.”
“Kindly do not rush me,” said Grandma. (She probably fancied herself Dr. Livingston among the Tuareg in Zanzibar.) “The only one who can help a sick man is the man himself. Willpower and perseverance will prevail. One must fight his illness and have the will to get well. You are still young; you have your whole life ahead of you. Do not despair. A man is capable of many things once he manages to take control over his will.”
Tital lay there, his mouth agape. His siblings stood by, quiet and still. They brought Zero to listen to the strange visitor. Even the dying aunt Asmat fell quiet. Grandma talked in this manner a bit longer, recalling some legless pilot, a blind writer, and even some armless painter. Then she produced the packet from her handbag and inserted it delicately beneath the gray pillow.
“I hope this will alleviate your suffering.”Tital glanced wildly at the pillow and then said that his leg, indeed, hurt a great deal. Just then, Zero plunged from the table and hit his head on the floor with a loud crack. The kids began to scream and bawl, and Grandma looked around in helpless despair. Koka grabbed the packet from under the pillow without making a sound, and shoved it under his shirt. Grandma didn’t notice a thing.
They left the basement, Koka leading Grandma out by her elbow. They were followed by bewildered stares.
“Hey, man! Why’d you take the money? Your Granny gave it to me!” Tital grumbled angrily.
“I’ll come and visit you later,” said Koka.
They walked home slowly. Grandma was deep in thought, fiddling with her gloves. Finally, she said:
“Swear to me that it was not a show, that that young man is indeed sick, and that you don’t smoke.”
Koka had no choice but to swear that it was all true. He did cross his fingers in his pocket, however. When they were almost home, Grandma asked:
“Can you only obtain that substance in a clinic for venereal diseases?”
“No. It was just a coincidence,” said Koka. He felt something akin to shame. The feeling subsided, however, when, after locking himself in the bathroom, he inspected the packet. Instead of the heavenly-green colored marijuana he had expected to find in the packet, he found something resembling brown sawdust that smelled of mildew.
His hands shaking, he quickly rolled up a joint and smoked it all in three big tokes, ignoring Grandma’s knocking on the door. Then he sat on the toilet for a long time, waiting for the weed to kick in. It didn’t. Finally, he realised that instead of the potent Asian weed, Khecho had sold him some unadulterated crap.
Gotta get out of here right now, he thought. He hit the lid of the toilet tank with his fist and thought that tomorrow he’d have to go back to the clinic, find Khecho, and raise Cain. That’s because I didn’t examine the packet right away, he thought. Just like I didn’t with Anzor’s blanks. He visualised how Khecho would deny everything and swear that the stuff wasn’t fake. Fat chance proving anything to him. Maybe Tital switched the packets? No, that’s impossible. I would’ve noticed. Run away from here is the only solution. Run like hell! Damn these cheats and liars!”