Petrushinsky stood on the curb thirty yards away, hunched inside an old army jacket. His grim, lined face was burnt from the cold. His own fur hat, which had been made in a rural village near Peredelkino out of rabbit skins, was folded down over his ears. He silently smoked a cigarette, masking his disgust as he scrutinized the tourists who were making their way along the street toward him. They emanated a conqueror’s condescending arrogance, pausing here and there with an airy cheerfulness as they examined the paltry goods for sale.

Dozens of bedraggled vendors lined the curbside, making this section of the Arabat look like an odd, gigantic yard sale. Petrushinsky himself was holding a case filled with military trinkets. The case was rigged so that it folded out into a portable tray, hanging open just below his waist, its top part up against his chest and strapped around his neck. In contrast to those who owned the little shops behind him, he and the other curbside merchants were selling their goods without official licenses. The licenses were expensive, and difficult to obtain. If the police decided to conduct a raid he could snap the tray shut and quickly disappear inside the curling roads and vast blocks of apartments just behind him, where most police officers were too lazy and too afraid to follow.

What do they care, he thought. Pieces from my own army uniform. To sell away my pride I need a license, or at least to bribe the police officer? Petrushinsky hated what had happened in his country over the past ten years. There was no justice anymore, no nobility of purpose, indeed no Soviet Union. Only silly police shakedowns and a cannibalistic selling-off of one’s own heritage. And every new morning another fucking game.

And so it has come to this, mused Petrushinsky as he huddled against the bitter cold. It is not enough that the CIA agent Gorbachev sold out our empire to the west. It is not enough that our government collapsed into a comical, corrupt anarchy run on the inside by the KGB and on the outside by a murderous mafia. It is not enough that our military, once the proudest in the world, occupier of more foreign territory than any army in history, is reduced to living in slums and suffering defeat at the hands of ragtag militias in places like Afghanistan and Chechnya. No, it is not even enough that two-thirds of the men in our country now die in a drunken stupor while still in their fifties, their very hearts polluted by the hopelessness of our new existence. Now I must survive by selling the emblems of our greatness, pieces of the uniform I wore with honor and pride, to the same slime who took our empire from us.