The Suitcase / Чемодан. Книга для чтения на английском языке

First they screw around[23 - to screw around – бездельничать] for twenty years and then – bam! And all the stores are filled with some crap or other. Once they get a production line going, that’s it. They’ll stamp out millions of those crêpe socks a minute.”

We divided up the socks. Each of us got two hundred forty pairs. Two hundred forty pairs of identical, ugly, pea-green-coloured socks. The only consolation was the “Made in Finland” label.

After that, many things happened. The operation with the Italian raincoats.

The resale of six German stereos. A brawl in the Cosmos Hotel over a case of American cigarettes. Carrying a load of Japanese cameras and fleeing a police squad. And lots of other things.

I paid off my debts. Bought myself some decent clothes. Changed departments at college. Met the girl I eventually married. Went to the Baltics for a month when Rymar and Fred were arrested. Began my feeble literary attempts. Became a father. Got into trouble with the authorities.

Lost my job. Spent a month in Kalyayevo Prison.

And only one thing did not change: for twenty years I paraded around in pea-coloured socks. I gave them to all my friends. Wrapped Christmas ornaments in them. Dusted with them. Stuck them into the cracks of window frames. And still the number of those lousy socks barely diminished.

And so I left, leaving a pile of Finnish crГЄpe socks in the empty apartment. I shoved three pairs in my suitcase.

They reminded me of my criminal youth, my first love and my old friends.

Fred served his two years and then was killed in a motorcycle accident on his Chezet[24 - Chezet – чешская марка мотоциклов]. Rymar served one year and now works as a dispatcher in a meat-packing plant. Asya emigrated and teaches lexicology at Stanford – which is a strange comment on American scholarship.

The Nomenklatura[25 - nomenklatura – высший слои руководства в СССР] Half-boots

I must begin with a confession.

I practically stole these shoes…

Two hundred years ago the historian Nikolai Karamzin[26 - the historian Nikolai Karamzin: Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin (1766–1826), prominent conservative Russian historian and writer.] visited France. Russian émigrés there asked him, “What’s happening back at home, in two words?”

Karamzin didn’t even need two words. “Stealing,” he replied.

And they really are stealing.