The Dissident: A Novel

PART I

1.

Here are the facts, dry, bare, like skeletons of rats that long ago took shelter in the filing cabinets on Lubyanka, in Langley, and at an undisclosed location in Tel Aviv—until now hidden, unseen.

Oksana Moskvina and Viktor Moroz met across the street from the Moscow Choral Synagogue, the scene of multiple demonstrations by individuals petitioning to leave the USSR.

They met on November 28, 1975. It is known that Oksana, then twenty-seven, kissed Viktor, twenty-nine, before she knew his name, and that on January 13, 1976, following a courtship that lasted six weeks and three days and that they believed to be unbearably long, Oksana stands beside Viktor, his bride.

The bride wears plaid. The groom is in American dungarees paired with a dark-blue sweater by Dale of Norway, with a red stripe and a band of large white snowflakes stretching across the chest. A Danish journalist gave him the sweater at a press conference at Sakharov’s last winter. The dungarees are from a care package from American Jews.

Viktor is slight, shorter than Oksana by three centimeters. He looks like a man who forgets to eat. His oversized lower jaw, with a slight overbite on the right, balanced by an underbite on the left, is another distinguishing characteristic. It creates the false impression that this little man can be a source of grave physical danger.

Oksana is a woman of a difficult-to-place otherness. People notice her in a crowd of any size, seeing her and no one else—one Oksana Yakovlevna Moskvina and 183 others. It could be about the wild emanation of tightly curled hair that frames her pale, freckled face.

The dress is an interpretation of a cowboy shirt—a kovboyka in Russian—reaching three centimeters beneath the knee, a length known as midi. The fabric, a loosely woven polyester, combines brown hues. Voluminous, spongy, it begs to be rolled between the thumb and the index finger. The dress has snaps on the pockets, a bow to authentic Western shirts. Her boots are tall, shiny, deep purple, with gold zippers, Czech, like the dress. This ensemble and the fashion sense that assembled it would hold up well in Prague, but also in London, New York, Paris. In Moscow, where store shelves are bare, it stuns.

Dates matter. November 28 is the first night of the Jewish holiday of Chanukah. January 13 is the Old New Year, what New Year’s Eve used to be before the Bolsheviks switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian. When you ring in the Old New Year, you negate history.

But how would you deny that January 13, 1976, comes fifty-eight years, two months, and one week after the Great October Socialist Revolution? None of the guests—and neither the bride nor the groom—know how Jewish weddings are performed, especially in the absence of a rabbi worthy of being allowed into a decent home.

Viktor has been unable to locate his copy of The Laws of Jewish Life,* a do-it-yourself guide to Judaism. The booklet is published in Russian in Montreal, smuggled in by tourists, and distributed by activists who risk prosecution under a distasteful provision of the Russian Republic’s Criminal Code—Article 190–1, Systematic dissemination by word of mouth of deliberate fabrications that defame the Soviet political and social system. Religious propaganda fits under this article with room to spare.

The Laws is small enough to fit into the back pocket of the uniform of a refusenik—Levi’s, or as they are nicknamed, Levisa, with the accent on a. Does the booklet contain directives for conducting a wedding? Viktor doesn’t know. It seems increasingly likely that his copy was confiscated at a KGB search a month and a half ago.

A booklet is a poor substitute for the living memory. Fortunately, one of the guests—Albert Schwartz—has promised to bring along three old men who remember how weddings were performed in their shtetleh. A Jewish wedding—a khasene in shtetl—creates its own context, even here, even in Moscow, even today, on January 13, 1976.

The old men—alterkakers is the Yiddish word, old shitters—will take the ritual through the paces, mumble the right blessings in Hebrew, sing something in Yiddish when it’s over. There is a prescribed number of blessings—seven. Viktor has read that in a novel, Feuchtwanger probably.

Nothing to worry about—Albert Schwartz and the alterkakers will make it happen. Schwartz is what’s known as a пузырь—pronounced puzyr’, a bubble—little, round, full of air, always on the surface.

In this volatile life, one thing is certain: the man can eat! If you set out the food and tell no one, just set it out, sit down, and wait, Albert Schwartz will show up. It’s been tested.

Elrad Erik Rudol’fovich Barkin, an artist known for sculpting war amputees and archetypal Jungian beasts, hosts the wedding. (He and the groom have a business relationship.)

Like the majority of Muscovites, Barkin believes that the organs of state security rig telephones to serve as listening devices, obviating the need for bugs, but you can defend yourself by winding the dial halfway and inserting a pencil into one of the finger holes below the stopper—5 is a good number; it’s in the middle—and freezing it in a partially wound position.

Tonight, a graphite pencil broken in half stands upright in the dial. Any pen or pencil, any thin sticklike object, will do. Barkin uses a reddish Khudozhnik* pencil, a splendid product of the Sacco and Vanzetti Pencil Factory here in Moscow. Some double down and cover the telephone with a pillow. Others place the pillow in a cooking pot and encase the telephone in a sarcophagus of feathers and aluminum. Barkin doesn’t fear the KGB, but he doesn’t believe in making their job easier. Make them earn their ruble.

Jellied meat—kholodetz—is on the table, next to homemade horseradish, two kinds, with beets and without. A bowl of Provençale cabbage, which has no known relationship to Provence, but which achieves greatness by demonstrating that cranberries, plums, and a dash of oil have a legitimate place in the context of marinated cabbage, is positioned next to a larger bowl of salat Olivier, an inspired mixture of boiled potatoes and carrots, chopped hard-boiled eggs, peas from a can, morsels of ham, pickles, canned crabs, if you can get them, and Soviet mayonnaise. Vodka has never had a better friend than salat Olivier. Eggplant caviar, a delicacy that presents no threat to unborn sturgeon, is at the center of the table. Nobody can tell you why store-bought eggplant caviar tastes better than homemade. It’s one of the great and enduring achievements of the Soviet culinary enterprise. Hungarian fatback, which owes its ethnic assignment to a thin coat of paprika, is present as well. No finer zakuska than Hungarian fatback reclining upon a bed of sour rye has ever existed or can exist. Ukrainian fatback, which owes its whiteness to a coat of coarse salt, should not be neglected, and is not. Cans of sprats in oil, sardines in brine, perch in tomato sauce, herring with a beet salad and sour cream on top, also known as herring under a fur coat, and chopped herring, Jewish-style, represent the bounty of the sea. Also, mushrooms—maslyata, Suillus luteus, to be exact, which Latin allows us to be. Marinated, they are slippery, oysters of the forest. Drink a glass of chilled vodka, swallow a Suillus luteus, and emit a tear of joy!

Be it Solichnaya or be it Ekstra, vodka’s functions in life include triggering blasts of emotion. Beloved, it has acquired a suffix, vodochka. If you don’t love vodochka, if you are scandalized by the presence of two varieties of fatback, Hungarian and Ukrainian, and a hammed-up and crabby salat Olivier at a Jewish wedding, please address these questions in this precise order: One, how is this not a legitimate life-cycle observance? Two, who made you the judge? And, three, why don’t you go mind your own business?

An hour has gone by, it’s 9:15; still no Schwartz, still no alterkakers. By 10:00, the glasses have been raised three times. First: To the bride and groom. Second: To all of us, and fuck them, a political toast. The third toast—the sacred one—has taken place, too: To those who aren’t with us. In this life you can make light of many things, but not the third toast, or why would you be here? To those who fought, to those who made the sacrifice, including but not limited to the ultimate, to their freedom and yours. To Yulik Daniel’, to Andrei Sinyavsky, to Lara Bogoraz, to Tolya Marchenko, to Pasha Litvinov, to Andrei Amalrik, to Alik Ginzburg, to Yura Galanskov, to Seryozha Kovalyov, to writers, to poets, to citizen journalists who bang out The Chronicle of Current Events.

Where in the hell is Albert Schwartz? Should he not have been the first to arrive? And where are the alterkakers? Is there another way to know how Jewish weddings were done? There hasn’t been one in nearly six decades, as far as anyone knows.

Calling is futile. Schwartz lives in a big communal flat on Chistoprudnyy Boulevard. He used to have a personal phone, in his room, but it was turned off two years ago. There is a shared phone in the water-stained hallway. That big, heavy-duty, wall-mounted apparatus hangs there unanswered, conjuring the aesthetic of a steam engine. It would bite a chunk off any pencil you might stick in its dial. No incoming calls are accepted. You use it only if you must, to call ambulances for the dying.

No Schwartz—no alterkakers. No alterkakers—no Jewish wedding.

I’ll go get him, volunteers Viktor.

Others around the table see the logic in the groom’s offer to cab over to Schwartz’s.

Would anyone insist on going in his stead?

Barkin, the sculptor, has been stepping away from the table to take soulful swigs straight from the bottle, his supplemental fortification, for in this city a mystic must stay drunk; a sculptor, too. He doesn’t volunteer to go get Schwartz.

Vitaly Aleksandrovich Golden, a Pushkinist who, owing to a childhood bout of tuberculosis, is as pale and gaunt as a politzek, doesn’t volunteer.

Father Mikhail Saulovich Kiselenko, a leonine apostate famous for reeling godless members of the Moscow intelligentsia into the Russian Orthodox Church, doesn’t volunteer.

Professor Yakov Aronovich Moskvin, a cancer biologist, the father of the bride, and an erstwhile paratrooper with a half-empty right sleeve, doesn’t volunteer.

Marya Barkina, drunk as a sculptor’s wife should be, doesn’t volunteer. Oksana, the bride, wouldn’t be expected to volunteer, and does not.

Viktor will be the one to go get Schwartz and the alterkakers.

A cab ride to Schwartz’s—at 17 Chistoprudnyy Boulevard—will take ten minutes, maybe. It’s nearly eleven. The groom will return in forty minutes at the most. He will settle into his rickety chair and this delightful bedlam will transform into a Jewish khasene, with Schwartz, with the alterkakers, with the seven blessings.

2.

Viktor walks out of Bol’shoy Karetnyy, the winding side street where the Barkins live, and emerges onto the expanse of Sadovaya-Samotechnaya, on the Garden Ring. There is little traffic. Not a taxi in sight.

He turns right, heading in the direction of Tsvetnoy Boulevard, the boulevard of flowers in translation.

No taxis. It’s late in the night; cold, too.

Viktor walks past the dark granite-faced monolith of a high-rise occupied by foreign journalists. Located on Sadovaya-Samotechnaya, the place was christened Sad-Sam, or Sad Sam, by English speakers. In the context of this story, Sad Sam will be the preferred version. In Russian, the word sad doesn’t connote sadness. Sad is a garden—the gardening theme is big in this part of Moscow. Sam is not short for Samuel—it’s short for a river’s flow.

Sad Sam is a connection to the world outside, a vortex, and Viktor, because of his mastery of English, is the de facto chief communicator with the press corps. It’s an important function, which he performs for the Jewish refuseniks and, increasingly, the not necessarily Jewish human rights activists.

If you are a dissident or a refusenik and your name is unknown in the West, you can be plucked from the street, and no one will notice. If the people at Sad Sam know about you, if they wrote about you, if you have been seen coming and going, and if your voice is captured on recordings made covertly at these apartments, the guardians of state security will think twice before ordering you gone, especially now, eight days before Kissinger comes to town to plan out the next phase of strategic arms talks.

People who live at Sad Sam buy Barkin’s sculptures. Barkin treats this segment of the market as souvenir trade, selling only his rejects—derivative dreck, experiments gone awry.

Viktor does gigs at Sad Sam, too—sometimes a translation, sometimes acting as a Seeing Eye dog, guiding a reporter through complexity, geographic and otherwise. He has learned the English-Latin phrase describing such arrangements: an unspoken quid pro quo. Unspoken is the key word; Viktor knows. You help a correspondent on a story, and, through this above-mentioned unspoken quid pro quo, he will look more favorably at a story you want to plant.

George Krimsky, an Associated Press reporter who speaks Russian almost like a Russian, smokes three packs a day, loves vodka, and is the greatest guy you’ll ever meet, lives here. He is a friend of Viktor’s, and Barkin’s, and Golden’s, and Father Kiselenko’s. He was invited to the wedding, except he is on home leave, celebrating Christmas, skiing in the state of Vermont, town of Stowe, not too far from Solzhenitsyn’s house, presumably. Bob Toth, from the Los Angeles Times, is a great guy, too. He turns to Viktor for leads and story ideas sometimes.

Madison Dymshitz, nicknamed Mad Dog, lives here as well. Mad Dog is not universally loved by either dissidents or refuseniks, but he has at least one redeeming characteristic: he uses translators, and he pays. If you have a story to plant, you go to Krimsky and Toth first, to Christopher Wren at The New York Times second. You go to Mad Dog only when everyone else is out of town, on leave for Christmas—like now. They will return in nine days, to stand ready like bayonets on January 22, when Kissinger arrives. Until then, Mad Dog is the only American correspondent in town.

Viktor likes these people, Mad Dog, too. Knowing them, helping them, being invited to their apartments, is an escape, a partial exodus.

Viktor turns right, walking alongside Tsvetnoy Boulevard, toward the Moscow Circus. You can find a cab there, even this late at night. He hasn’t seen Paris, and unless something changes dramatically, never will. Should he get to the City of Lights, he will note the similarities between the boulevards, the green arteries that flow through Paris and Moscow. The boulevards of Paris are lovely indeed. Moscow’s are lovely, too.

There is indeed a cab directly in front of the circus steps. Viktor knocks on the glass of the passenger door, and the driver beckons him in. It’s warm inside, reeking of cigarettes. A small portrait of Stalin in generalissimo regalia is attached with sticky tape to the dashboard. You don’t see this often. In Tbilisi—maybe. It’s a Pride of Georgia thing, a shoemaker’s son who made good. In Moscow, Stalin is Lucifer.

Seething under the generalissimo’s contemptuous gaze, Viktor reaches into his coat pocket and begins to count change, adding coins as the numbers climb on the meter. Unlike your typical Moscow cabbies, this one drives in silence.

As he counts coins—a kopek, two, three, five, ten, fifteen, twenty—Viktor thinks of the dollop of salat Olivier that occupies the center of the plate awaiting him at the Barkins’. A half-eaten square of kholodetz smeared with red horseradish leans against Olivier’s side. There is a pickle as well. And a morsel of Hungarian fatback, and black bread, buttered.

It’s crass to ask why this wedding is taking place, but the question is fair and will be answered. First, let us consider what this marriage is not and what it will not accomplish. The Soviet government will not recognize this ceremony, this contract. As far as the authorities are concerned, this is a dinner party, a sabantuychik, pirushka. Residency papers that would entitle Viktor to live in Moscow legally will remain out of his reach. It’s not an affirmation of Jewishness, either. The Orthodox Jews, who have declared themselves the final arbiters of such things, will not recognize Oksana as a Jewess.

This leaves one explanation for the wedding: Viktor and Oksana want to marry because they are in love, because they feel so complete in each other’s arms, because this is a feeling neither of them has known before. Also, they don’t give a rip about what the laws, Communist or Jewish, decree to be kosher and treif.

You may have noticed that the mother of the bride and the parents of the groom are absent from the celebration. Oksana knows her mother’s address, but the two aren’t in touch. This is because Oksana took her father’s side, even though he isn’t her biological father, even though he was technically the one at fault.

Before we lay out the reasons for the absence of the groom’s family, a few words will need to be said about methodology that has rendered this story visible. What is memory if not an art form? If you like objective answers to go with your questions, if you like robust narratives, if you appreciate nuance, learn to like surveillance, annotation, and all the good practices of dossier-keeping. Does the word record not imply that someone has performed the act of recording of any variety, audio, photographic, videographic?

It is known that on December 19, 1975, at 21:48, a call was placed from a telephone booth at the Moscow Central Telegraph building on Gorky Street to the Kiev apartment of Colonel (retired) Venyamin Isaakovich Moroz.

The call was originated by his son, Viktor Venyaminovich.

A transcript follows:

VVM: Allo, Papa?

VIM: I am listening.

VVM: I am calling to invite you to a wedding—mine.

VIM: We will not come.

VVM: That’s disappointing …

VIM: Fine. I must go now.

VVM: Where must you go?

VIM: To watch television. They are showing a concert. Kobzon is singing.

VVM: Fine.

Iosif Kobzon, a Jew by nationality, can be heard in the background. The singer often described as the Soviet Sinatra is performing And Lenin Is Still So Young:

И вновь продолжается бой,

И сердцу тревожно в груди.

И Ленин—такой молодой,

И юный Октябрь впереди!*

The incompatibility between the father and son became apparent in Viktor’s adolescence, when he failed to develop the heroic military posture Venyamin Isaakovich felt entitled to in a son. At Young Pioneer events, Viktor seemed unwilling to count steps as he marched. This signaled a lack of interest in military-patriotic activities.

Political incompatibility opened like a wound during the Six-Day War, in 1967, when the elder Moroz hung a portrait of the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser in his study and flew a Soviet flag on his balcony in solidarity with the Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian troops. Venyamin Isaakovich refrained from using the name of the state at war with the coalition of Arab states, referring to said country as "a shtetl." He developed alternative names for the shtetl’s leaders. Golda Meir was a she-bandit in a skirt, Moshe Dayan a one-eyed brigand.

Viktor spent those six days listening to the BBC, the Voice of America, and the Voice of Israel on a shortwave radio at the apartment of a friend who has since emigrated and is working toward a doctorate in econometrics at the University of Michigan.

A year later, in August 1968, in a letter to the editor of Kievskaya pravda, Venyamin Isaakovich voiced his wholehearted approval for the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia. I support and approve the decision to render fraternal assistance, read the headline. In the letter, he was identified as Col. (ret.), participant in the Great Patriotic War, 1941–1945. Does it matter that Venyamin Isaakovich spent the war years well out of reach of German bombers, in Sverdlovsk? Supply officers like him were essential in the war effort, and an abacus is as much a machine of war as a T-34 tank. Mercifully, Viktor, whose heart was with the Czechs, was at school in Moscow.

In late October of 1973, shortly after Venyamin Isaakovich took down the red flag he flew in solidarity with the Egyptian and Syrian forces during the Yom Kippur/Ramadan War, Viktor arrived from Moscow, where he was now working as an engineer, asking him to sign papers required for emigration to the country Venyamin Isaakovich referred to as the shtetl.

Did Viktor expect anything other than an unshakable no? The young man slammed the door and spent the night on a bench at the railroad station, awaiting the morning train back to Moscow.

It is known that on December 19, 1975, Venyamin Isaakovich was the first to hang up. It’s known also that Viktor proceeded to vomit in the grand, walnut-paneled Stalin-era phone booth of the Moscow Central Telegraph. Was Viktor striving for approval, pity, reconsideration? All he got was a dose of secondhand Kobzon—a latter-day Jüdische Ghetto-Polizei—singing about youthful Lenin.

At the curb by Kirovskaya Metro station, across the tramway track from the Griboyedov monument and a few blocks from Schwartz’s, Viktor counts out the coins, making sure that they add up to two rubles and ninety-eight kopeks. There is a three-ruble bill in Viktor’s pocket, but that sum would provide a two-kopek tip, which is two kopeks more than this turd deserves.

Two-ninety-eight, Viktor says, handing the cabbie a fistful of change. Admirers of the biggest murderer of all time should accept the consequences of their affinities—no tip.

Viktor will walk the rest of the way to Schwartz’s.

He is not followed, he knows. Perhaps his toptun, his stomper, the flunky who follows him all day, got comp time. Also, no slow-moving Volga in sight. It’s his car. It follows him sometimes. After a while, you stop having to turn around to steal a glance. You learn to sense their presence, you learn to feel with your back.

Nothing afoot on the boulevard—just Viktor.

A burst of light and a metal-on-metal hiss from the other side of the boulevard’s cast-iron fence announces the passing tramway. It’s the A—Annushka.

Seventeen Chistoprudnyy Boulevard is a two-story building, a palace sacked, still standing its ground in a new world—a relic, a slum. Greco-Roman cornices have dropped off the façade, and you can smell the rot of wood fused with the smell of cabbage boiling in the communal kitchen. Surely, on plans for reconstruction of Moscow, this place is slated to be demolished to make room for the USSR Ministry of Brutalism.

You would be forgiven for surmising that making the double door at 17 Chistoprudnyy budge is a job for a hefty doorman, but its height (three and a half meters) and weight (two hundred kilo at least) notwithstanding, on the night of January 13, 1976, the door obeys Viktor’s hand, smoothly executing a movement practiced through two centuries.

Before stepping into the darkness of the entryway, Viktor looks out at the snow-covered pond behind the boulevard’s fence. This is Chistyye Prudy, the Clear Ponds.

Seventeen Chistoprudnyy hasn’t been carved up into smaller apartments. It remains what it was—a single place, a big communal flat, a kommunalka, with one kitchen—except now at least fifty people live in its rooms. Electricity was updated sometime in the twenties. Plumbing is as it was in 1917. The bathroom is down the hall. People line up to use it. There is no bathtub, no shower, no hot water.

Schwartz’s room is massive—maybe thirty square meters, larger than many two-room apartments. The ceiling soars—more than four meters. It’s the only room with a balcony, which serves as the overhang above the entryway. At some point, the balcony had a wrought-iron railing of breathtaking workmanship. It’s gone now, replaced by something slapped together with rusted rebar. Two French doors and two tall windows—one on each side—lead to the balcony, which looks over the Clear Ponds. Before grime conquered these windows from the inside and out, this room was about light.

Over the past decade, Schwartz has been a samizdat poet, a human rights activist, a Zionist, a refusenik. Today, he is an exchange of goods and services, anything from anywhere. You turn to him when you need 5-FU, a cancer medicine, brought from America for your mother-in-law, or to get a story about your troubles fed to an American reporter, or when you have a manuscript to ship via the diplomatic pouch, bypassing postal censors. Schwartz gets it done—no one can tell you how.

Foreigners—Americans, Canadians, Brits—know how to find Schwartz, and they drop off their contributions. Redeeming dollars on the black market is tricky and dangerous, but demand is high, and the unofficial exchange rate holds steady. Officially, a dollar is stuck at .75 of a ruble. On the black market, a dollar is worth 12 rubles, give or take, but selling is risky. Sequelae include years in prison, all the way up to capital punishment.

It’s safer to accept certificate rubles, or "cheki." Americans can transfer money—dollars—to your account at a store called Beryozka, and you get certificates, which you can then redeem at the store, which sells clothing (Egyptian jeans, for example), as well as food you can’t find in Soviet stores. Beryozka also sells Russian tchotchkes, carved wooden dreck that foreigners eat up.

Jeans—Lee and Levi’s—are even better than certificates. They are worth about ninety rubles, roughly a teacher’s monthly salary. A Playboy is worth fifty rubles, a Penthouse brings about the same. Oui is thirty or so. Many sex magazines in the West are specialized. Those are worth less. Schwartz once told Viktor that magazines that feature love between men are an exception—they can be redeemed for as much as a pair of Levi’s.

Students from the outside world come to Schwartz to drop off their books on all things Jewish—leftovers from completed coursework. It’s philosophy, religious thought: Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, Franz Rosenzweig, Abraham Joshua Heschel. Some of these are anthologies with titles that include Exclusiveness and Tolerance, Jewish Religious Thought, Four Jewish Philosophers, A Maimonides Reader. Also, histories with titles like Jews in American Politics.

Viktor snatches up these books as soon as they are dropped off at Schwartz’s. Golden, the Pushkinist, does, too. They read voraciously, they swap tomes, and they discuss. The stuff is worthless on the black market, so there is no rush to return it.

Six weeks ago, at the search, at his rented room off Arbat, Viktor lost his entire library—Judaica, plus Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, Eduard Bernstein’s fascinating little book on Marxist revisionism, and an even thinner booklet containing Nikolai Berdyaev’s ravings on the subject of national personalities.

Viktor hopes this material will make the kagebeshniki choke.

No one in the kommunalka kitchen. Stepping lightly, Viktor climbs up the narrow, squeaking back staircase.

He checks whether there is anyone in the long hallway; there is no one.

Reaching the center of the second floor, Viktor taps three times on Schwartz’s door. It’s unlocked.

In the dimly lit room, Viktor notices something that looks like a morsel of Marya Barkina’s jellied meat beading on the surface of the dark-blue Kazak carpet Schwartz must have inherited from his grandparents. The morsel seems smothered in beet-colored horseradish.

Schwartz is a clean, careful man. That’s why he is trusted with redeeming dollars. Since fiscal accountability is not feasible under these conditions (you don’t keep books when you are a refusenik money launderer), integrity is important.

A streetlight catty-corner across Chistoprudnyy provides the little illumination there is in the room. Moving deeper in, toward the French doors flanked by the windows, Viktor sees what looks like a tall pile of rags that has been dropped onto the bed. Cautiously approaching the pile, he slips on the carpet. Whatever substance made him slip has also moistened his right knee. There must be more of that slippery jellied meat, that kholodetz, or whatever it is. As his eyes adjust to the glow radiating from the streetlight and seeping through the lace curtains, Viktor sees more gelatinous material, some on the carpet, some on the