Gogol's Disco by Paavo Matsin

Author:Paavo Matsin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
Published: 2020-09-01T16:00:00+00:00

For a wall of the red-plush bedroom behind the office, however, the stranger-Tsarskoye-Selo-Fabergé-meringue recommended a jollier verse:

Oh, we’d packed our bellies tight

With all those sugary sweets

And Boo and Baby’d stretch out for the night

After mounds of scrumptious eats

Just like that age-old Esel

We find ourselves slothful now

And that missus tante Tharese

Is to blame for being like sows!

Vasya had sunk deep into thought and noticed two bizarre things. Whenever the old-man-Khottabych-gold-coin spoke about something, the photo album opened to the given page all on its own. Secondly, when Fon-Glayn pronounced the word “album”, he did so somehow Arabically—somehow peculiarly, like “Al-Bumm”—and with a rustling of pages, the right pictures would appear. It was amazing, of course, but still frightful! Thirdly, the old man kept returning to an odd un-Beatles-like theory about how a temple builder must sleep only three hours a day, must not consume alcohol, and must practice vegetarianism. Otherwise, he said, the castle, palm house, and statues would never be finished—you’d simply lack the strength required to erect a hallucinatory room of transformation. This glorification of work sounded distinctly back-in-the-USSR! Why all the plush if you can’t drink a beer and listen to tikket-to-rayde? Vasya was especially annoyed by the stranger’s assertions that the greatest construction work was only just beginning. Specifically, Fon Balticgemanovich droned on about how he’d delivered milk with a goat, built cellars, and surveyed properties in the middle of the woods for a residential development somewhere around the Nömme and Olde-Mustamäe districts where there was now a large Estonian cemetery. But what was the point to the whole song and dance if bliss wasn’t what mattered most! If you couldn’t lie at Lennon’s feet, in a manner of speaking, and simply listen to all-yew-need-iz-laav? No, there was no need for a temple like that! If people constantly need you to attend to things after it’s ready, then there’s no need for a temple at all! Vasya felt his life’s goal had been sent spinning! There, on the stage of rainbow-striped horizons of expectation, a hand covered in German-language tattoos was closing the curtains of reason on the prima donna Pointless, who till this very moment had always sung to Vasya with spectacular beauty, genuineness, and Beatles-ness! Yuck!

Suddenly, the clock struck midnight. When Vasya lifted his swimming gaze from the Al-Bumm, his head pounding, he saw the whole floor of the Novel was covered in cassette tape, which was being spewed at a rising tempo from the hissing slot of the cassette player. Vasya leapt to his feet. The old man had vanished! The toilet door, behind which Gogol was confined, was being pummeled by wild blows from within! If it weren’t for the fine wooden watch chain that ran across the cheap door as if it were a peasant’s hairy chest, then the evilest of all forces would be let loose instantaneously! The door was being charged with inhuman strength! “Away from here!” Vasya thought. Moments later, he was back outside in the park; in the blinding beam of the floodlight that glared down from the children’s music school.

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