The Beggar and the Hare Read Online Free Page A

dealer and arms trafficker, he was a zip-suited Soviet child. Mama Kugar made copious use of what analgesics and psychotropic medicines were obtainablein the army sector, and exploited to the full the limited competition that was characteristic of real socialism. It would not be unfair to call her a rather lazy and ineffectual mother.
    Mama Kugar shirked as many of the aims of the five-year plan as she could, consumed her vodka by the gram and left her child to the regime. All Yegor Kugar had seen of his father was a single photo, and that photo was still in his wallet along with those of Vince Neil and Joseph Stalin. In it his father had the look of his son, the eyes of a gambler and the shirt of a sailor. A look of the kind that awakens a woman’s desire but also signifies conjugal violence.
    Yegor Kugar spent the first three years of his life, so important from the point of view of psychological development, on a nuclear submarine base. For eleven months of the year his father was away on assignment, and his mother was down and out at the same time. Like her only son, Mama Kugar was mad about screwing and incapable of sleeping alone, because if she did, reality and responsibility came calling. When it became clear to Yegor’s father what Mama did in her free time, it took only four minutes for Yegor and Mama to find themselves standing on the potholed highway some tsar had built with serf labour for his journey to the Arctic Sea.
    The father disowned his son.
    Later the son disowned his father.
    Such was the dough from which Yegor Kugar was baked.
     
    School did not interest him. He began the cycle that moves from lockup to prison to reformatory to juvenile detention centre to prison camp. He was interrogated by the security police who decided that, both out of economic considerations and in the interests of reducingthe homicide figures, it would be better to make the troublemaker a part of the organisation, rather than its enemy.
    Training.
    Hot meals.
    A mattress and a blanket.
    Acceptance by the community.
    Yegor Kugar was not afraid of anything – he knew how to use a firearm and had no scruples about inflicting harm on his fellow human beings as long as it was preceded by an unambiguous order from above. In his gala uniform on graduation day Yegor Kugar got an erection that took control of his whole body.
    The social crisis. The drug trade. The arms trade. Women.
    ‘For a long time I stayed clean, but sure enough in the end I succumbed. I could no longer look at a Coke Zero in my hand while others were snorting happy dust, and so I discovered how to enjoy life. For me the most important thing was that with cocaine I could screw for longer.
    ‘The gay lads from a TV interior design show came to do up my pad. That meant that more and more girls knew my door code, and the last party went on for a month. I invited Mötley Crüe to come and play and they probably did, but I can’t remember anything about it.
    ‘It’s just a shame that one morning I woke up next to quite the wrong girl – a broad named Irma Mölsä with big boobs and diamond earrings who was the girlfriend of my boss, Vyacheslav Mölsä. She was a dead fish in bed, in spite of her perfect ass.
    ‘The situation worked out exactly as we’d been taught in training school. I ended up in an industrialarea of St Petersburg under the ramp in a car repair shop where a disturbed mechanic gave me a clout on the ear that seriously damaged my skull. After that I had a total blackout, but I woke up in a hospital that reeked of potatoes, missing an ear and an eye. I was alive because I was to be an example to others. That kind of thing has been going on since the time of the Romans.’
    And so Yegor Kugar ended up at the hospital exit, concussed, homeless, broke and dismissed from the security police. Next he found himself sitting in the back seat of the car of a Romanian hi-fi salesman who took his rings, phone and watch as payment. The journey ended in a