Every Good Boy Deserves Favor and Professional Foul Read Online Free

thought this really wasn’t fair. M compiled a book on the trials of C, I, J, K and L, and with his colleagues N, O, P, Q, R and S attended the trial of T who had written a book about his experiences in a labour camp, and who got a year in a labour camp. In the courtroom it was learned that the Russian army had gone to the aid of Czechoslovakia. M, N, O, P, Q, R and S decided to demonstrate in Red Square the following Sunday, when they were all arrested and variously disposed of in labour camps, psychiatric hospitals and internal exile. Three years had passed since the arrest of A and B. C finished his sentence about the same time as A, and then he did something really crazy. He started telling everybody that sane people were being put in mental hospitals for their political opinions. By the time B finished his sentence, C was on trial for anti-Soviet agitation and slander, and he got seven years in prison and labour camps, and five years’ exile.
You see all the trouble writers cause.
(
The children’s percussion band re-enters as a discreet subtext
.)
They spoil things for ordinary people.
My childhood was uneventful. My adolescence was normal. I got an ordinary job, and married a conventional girl who died uncontroversially in childbirth. Until the child was seven the only faintly interesting thing about me was that I had a friend who kept getting arrested.
Then one day I did something really crazy.
(
The percussion is sabotaged exactly as before but this time by a snare drum being violently beaten. It stops suddenly and the light comes up on
SACHA
sitting at the desk with a punctured drum on the desk, the
TEACHER
standing motionless in her position. Optional: On tape the sound of a children’s playground at some distance
.)
    SCHOOL
    TEACHER: So this is how I am repaid. Is this how it began with your father? First he smashes school property. Later he keeps bad company. Finally, slanderous letters. Lies. To his superiors. To the Party. To the newspapers…. To foreigners….
    SACHA: Papa doesn’t lie. He beat me when I did it.
    TEACHER:
Lies!
Bombarding
Pravda
with lies! What did he expect?
(
The light on the
TEACHER
and
SACHA
fades just after the beginning of
ALEXANDER ’
s speech
.)
    CELL
    ALEXANDER: They put me in the Leningrad Special Psychiatric Hospital on Arsenal’naya Street, where I was kept for thirty months, including two months on hunger strike.
They don’t like you to die unless you can die anonymously.
If your name is known in the West, it is an embarrassment.
The bad old days were over long ago. Things are different now. Russia is a civilized country, very good at Swan Lake and space technology, and it is confusing if people starve themselves to death.
So after a couple of weeks they brought my son to persuade me to eat. But although by this time he was nine years old he was uncertain what to say.
( SACHA
speaks from the
SCHOOL,
not directly to
ALEXANDER. )
    SACHA: I got a letter from abroad, with our picture in the newspaper.
    ALEXANDER: What did it say?
    SACHA: I don’t know. It was all in English.
    ALEXANDER: How is school?
    SACHA: All right. I’ve started geometry. It’s horrible.
    ALEXANDER: How is Babushka?
    SACHA: All right. You smell like Olga when she does her nails.
    ALEXANDER: Who is Olga?
    SACHA: She has your room now. Till you come back.
    ALEXANDER: Good.
    SACHA: Do they make you paint your nails here?
(
End of duologue. Return to solo
.)
    ALEXANDER: If you don’t eat for a long time you start to smell of acetone, which is the stuff girls use for taking the paint off their finger-nails. When the body runs out of protein and carbohydrate it starts to metabolize its own fat, and acetone is the waste product. To put this another way, a girl removing her nail-varnish smells of starvation.
After two months you could have removed nail-varnish with my urine, so they brought Sacha back, but when he saw me he couldn’t speak—
    SACHA: