English / 06.09.2019 / 3013

Brasileiro. Chapter VI

Nikolay Mokhov, author from the Dark Side of Business

Part I. Vaeroy
Chapter IV. Agnete and the Merman

The music system consumed discs and started slowly spinning the new day.
Brasileiro observed the Danish woman’s bright flat. He arrived in Denmark on a ship from Vaeroy. In Europe, nothing worked on the weekend, so they couldn’t deliver the cargo. All there was to do was to have fun.

At the karaoke, they were chanting rock hits into a microphone. That’s where he met a young woman. It happened on its own. They met each other’s eyes at the bar. A smile. He couldn’t make out her name through all that noise. So, he just took her by the hand. Her fingers were long.

The sailors’ conversations, the yelling of the singing people and the rumble of the music became distant. It felt as if the Danish woman and him suddenly entered a separate, invisible sphere. And that sphere carried them to her flat. A few years of an unsatisfied desire. He was rushing, taking his clothes off slightly quicker than usual, getting mixed up in his jeans and just as awkwardly, going in. It all ended rapidly.

All Russian bears are alcoholics. And in Russia, we’re all one big family… A bear that drinks — brings misery to the family

— On the Hojelands bridge, Agnete could see:
How a Merman just fully emerged from the sea, — the Danish girl sang an old ballade...

From the heading

Where does the price come from?

The Marxists took offense at me. We have an article called "Don Juan's Wall". In the article, I wrote about the unexpected consequences of quarantine. But I made an ideological mistake. I refused to consider the overproduction crisis as the cause of the Great Depression. And then it hit me.

The Simple Person's Nightmare

I am a complex person. And there exist simple people. Simple people have it really bad right now. A simple person is faced with a crisis and doesn't know what to do with themselves. What is a crisis for them? They used to work as a fitness trainer, and now they can't. They have to rebuild their whole life, but how? Their slightly more advanced friends and relatives tell them:

“Well, you can do workouts through Skype!”

The Teacher's Label

A fat writer Dima Bykov in poor health with his head held high has distinguished himself. He has decided to rank in descending order the passed away colleagues. Some of them has been ranked first, others take second and even third places. Sergei Dovlatov has been taken down a peg next to his classmates. The teacher Bykov gave him a satisfactory grade. He even didn’t hide that he wanted to give him a poor grade.

Dima Bykov has unleashed a war on social media by his ranking. Somebody noticed that the teacher is not good even at his own domain. Someone replied that he have been aware of Dovlatov’s bad marks... I was astonished by the desire to make value judgements about literature and even the literary characters. This approach reeks of the judgments of school teachers. It's not the most pleasant aroma...

Escaping Fate?

My grandfather Semyon escaped dekulakization, a wave of Soviet repressions in the 1930s. He grew up in a big family. His father died fighting in the First World War, and his grandfather (my great-grandfather) had a fairly decent, by rural standards, household. He had a sturdy house, some horses… In the Soviet thirties, this was a death sentence.