THE MUSEUM FISH
Two suns roll from one end of the post-Soviet sky to the other, down the violent chasms of Chechnya and Chernobyl’s clicking iodine deserts, down Stalin’s rusted locks and levees, the Volga clogged with trash cans and army boots, to the Caspian’s lapping chemical tides. Illegal dories shuffle along the coastline. Birds stall in the ionized air. Bored police boats lazily monitor the Kazakh mafia while the smugglers lower their inchoate dreams on nylon strings into the water. From his childhood rowboat, the caviar thief checks his snast lines, reaching underwater for the extra weight, then pulling up the hook, disengaging the fish from what’s left of its life. He wraps the fish in a towel, carries it home. There, he cuts her up on his kitchen table, mixes the eggs with salt and takes the roe to his Ikryonoye dealer for a thousand rubles. For this, he earns a month in the raw dirt projects: the archaeology of swing-sets, the blown steppes, the hard currency of Kalashnikovs and abandoned tractors. And further away, in Moscow, an electric pump beats where Lenin’s heart used to be, maintaining a constant humidity. Waiting for the next ice age at the bottom of the world, the sturgeon shift on their tectonic plates, swimming slowly around underwater systems of wire and string, through red squares, yellow stars, blue museums.
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caviar dreamscape!