Trafika Europe 13 - Russian Ballet

Pavel Lembersky

And so Samusis – for that was the name of the departed – died with an erection. For the final nine years of his life he had worked in a corporation where, from time to time, in one of the stalls in the men’s toilet on his floor, the following inscription would appear: «Death to capitalism!» “There you go,” he thought to himself, flushing the toilet a day before his demise, “a critique of the dominant order is possible only in places where the physical needs of people are met, where nature calls. On the john, we are all radicals.” The following day, he was already out of sorts from the morning on. Perhaps for this reason, when his son called and asked for money to buy umbrellas, he hurled a pile of insults at him, even calling him a good-for-nothing idiot, on whom being born and being educated was all a wasted effort. “One might think you were the one who gave birth to me, or educated me,” Samusis the younger erupted, before slamming down the phone receiver. What we have here is a more or less standard beginning of a story – the death of the hero, the conflict preceding it, then. the thoughts of one of the participants in the conflict are described, then the other participant, for example, takes a toke from a joint, and here one may already permit a succinct instance of stream of consciousness, a relaxation of the logical chains of causation, etc. However, we are pursuing here

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