It’s said that there are two countries in Russia, one inside Moscow’s ring road and another outside of it. Black Jizz [Черная Молофья], by Sergei Ukhanov, is a collection of loosely and cartoonishly autobiographical short stories which provide a vicious characterization of this second, provincial world—and a marginally less vicious portrait of the inner ring, specifically of gay urban life, undecorated, and hindered less by propaganda and individual prejudice than by the less charismatic degradation of poverty. It was originally published by Kolonna, a small press responsible for the Russian publication translations of such authors as Kathy Acker and Pierre Guyotat (and much else besides) which has since closed. The book was staged as a play, who knows how, at Rīga’s Gertrudes Street Theater in 2015.
I picked up Black Jizz in a Latvian bookstore because it featured an image of a very sick man with engorged testicles on its cover. This image and the subject matter of certain stories might lead the casual reader to suppose that its author aims to shock. Ukhanov does shock, he is in fact gifted at it; but it is not his primary aim, and one quickly adjusts, like the inhabitants of hell in a joke a friend likes to tell:
A man goes down to hell. The devil says, “Hey, welcome in,” and hands him a mug of coffee. Everyone else is also drinking coffee and chatting. The only thing is this: everyone is standing knee deep in shit.
Nonetheless, the man gets in a nice conversation with some of the other damned, and thinks to himself, “Hey, I guess hell isn’t such a bad place after all.” Then, after twenty minutes, the Devil rings a little bell and says, “Alright everybody, coffee break’s over. Back on your heads.”
In this collection, Ukhanov maintains an affable sympathy for those in the midst of extreme abjection, and keeps his cynicism when cheap romance offers an easy way out. Once he is done shocking, we get to the human business of storytelling. The stories are much like a coffee break in hell.
Black Jizz
On the day I turned 13 I got sick—I felt as though my eyelashes and nails and ears were going to drop off and my stomach writhed and twisted so much that I understood how menstrual cramps and a miscarriage all at once would feel. When papa shoved a plastic spoon of something many-colored and the consistency of bird shit into my mouth, I got hard for the first time in my life. That night two rose colored panthers appeared to me and tried to drag my flaming body through the open window, but beige angels1 in translucent clothing, sullen faced, halted them and returned my body to the damp and messy bed. As grandfather later explained to me, the rose colored panthers and beige angels were the extrusions of a hallucinatory fever, the hateful spawn of my high temperature, an expression of my intoxication. In the morning I was a little better, but something weird had happened—I had excreted a shining oily droplet. When mama saw it she screamed and grandmother crossed herself horrified and declared that it must be black jizz. At that point I lost consciousness out of fright. Coming to, I saw a crooked old lady with hooked fingers and an insane expression bent over me, whispering disgusting words. The foul exhaust creeping from her mouth spread through the room like carbon monoxide, and I barely kept from puking and started to choke. Almost touching me, the ancient creature screeched inhumanly and became covered in brown spots, and her cloudy eyes and jowls began to swell and bulge out, after which the failed healer was seized by both arms and dragged with some effort to her disgusting hovel in the neighboring apartment. Every morning for the next six days I excreted about a milliliter of black jizz. On the seventh day the unnatural flow ceased and I started to get better, except with a kind of weakness and brokenness in my extremities. Every day, mama had very carefully collected the accursed secretion into a flask, and into it papa pissed, grandfather cried, and grandmother lightly menstruated. After this procedure, to which my relatives had attached great significance and solemnity, the flask was soldered shut and buried in loose earth. The place where my black jizz was buried will be my eventual tomb.
1. 20 years later, in a formerly Catholic and now Protestant cathedral in a certain German city that has stood since the 12th century and is known for its marzipan and for giving the world Thomas Mann and Gunter Grass, I saw an image of similar angels to the right of the altar. The vision did not sustain itself—I barely breathed and the angels turned to dust.
House of Gods
every summer me and grandmother went to the village she was born in and where her numerous sisters still lived—although my great grandmother was a real sow and birthed a fuckload of children only a few lived until my birth and they were all of the female sex cause the men were all killed at war or else died stupidly—under tractor treads as a result of chronic alcoholism or fucked up by lightning. at first i didn’t really like going to the village cause i felt like a stranger among the villagers and could not find a common language with them even though many of them were my relatives by varying degrees of separation. however i was a very curious child and decided to take every chance that fate gave me to study people and their eccentricities—like it was some kind of anthropological research—after all all people are unique and unrepeatable and their lives are interesting and brief.
the most curious person in the village turned out to be vitya malik who grandmother advised me to keep away from cause he would fuck not just anything that moved but literally anything that entered his field of vision. however when my grandmother was relaxing from village life and had drunk a little moonshine she and her sisters began to sing wild songs from their irreparably vanished youth and she couldnt give a fuck where i was or what i did so i took the opportunity to explore the landscape of the village and its inhabitants.
vitya malik lived on the edge of the village in a half destroyed house that had not been repaired since the second world war when a fascist bomb fell on it. however it was on a slight hill that elevated it above the rest of the houses in the village and vitya enjoyed this elevation. the first time i saw vitya—a bearded and not old muzhik incredibly dirty and naked in fake leather boots—was in the small garden next to his house where grew a huge amount of burdock and hemp and other plants i didn’t recognize. i noticed vitya just as he was siding up to a sheep that bleated and struggled away from him as vitya got ready to penetrate it with the impressively large prick that swung between his legs. id never seen anybody fuck an animal so in my curiosity i forgot my fear and my grandmothers warnings to stay away from vitya and went right up to the fence on whose spikes were lots of upside down dirty jars and the skulls of domestic animals and wild birds. noticing me vitya loosened his grip and let go the unsatisfied sheep and took a step in my direction still tugging his erect organ.
what a lovely and by all appearances city dwelling child has come to visit me—vitya said quite intelligibly and with a slight lisp—and where do such lovely children come from and uh come here and uncle vitya will show you a rainbow.
i glanced quickly at the sky and didnt see any rainbow so i figured that in order to see one id have to either go far away or wait for it to show up which i didnt want to do alone with uncle vitya at all so i screamed a lot of curses and absolutely booked it away. without looking behind me i ran all the way to the house where my grandmother was relaxing from village life and feeling i was perfectly safe i buried myself under the hem of her skirt.
however me and vitya soon became friends and he told me many interesting things and showed me a load of unusual places in the village that a visitor would never notice and you would only know if you lived out your whole life in one place like vitya who only left the village a couple times a year to go to the district center where they gave him papers to confirm his mental deficiency. the picturesque river backwater especially made an impression on me which vitya showed me and where in his words devils and mermaids fucked at night and where vitya himself fucked local sluts who didnt really care who fucked them as long as they didnt get their cunts tore up even if it was the devil or vitya malik.
vitya was very kind to me and i wasnt afraid of him any more and grandmother even let me go off with vitya although she always worried if i was gone too long and of course she cursed him out a little for going naked in just his fake leather boots at all times and in any weather.
sometimes vitya was overtaken by a deep gloom or depression as city dwellers say and then he could not find his place and walked through the village like he was possessed chewing at his arm and whining like a hurt animal. when depressed vitya didnt even want to fuck and just thought about the uselessness of life or his dead mother or the angels or god. then the gloom passed and vitya loved life again and joyously fucked the village livestock and chicks and invented various stories that he loved to tell to himself and to the birds in the sky.
on our next visit after a long break grandmothers sisters told us that vitya had gotten real bad in the head and that he thought he was gods chosen and declared his ruined hut the house of god. i immediately wanted to see it all with my own two eyes and hurried off to vityas.
vityas house stood right where it had been before and everything else had changed a little—all around was bare and level earth as if vitya had tore up all the brush with his own hands and around the perimeter of the house were unpolished boards of various sizes leaning against the house on which vaguely human figures were drawn in charcoal that were revealed to be archangels drawn by the master of the house. inside the house across from vityas cot was placed an iconostasis with depictions of god the father god the son and god the holy spirit in the form of a dove and also the holy virgin revered in rus but with a mustache for some reason. vitya was very serious and sad he didnt even cheer up at my arrival although i was such a grateful listener to his insane stories.
on sunday morning vitya held a celebratory service. it was the first time i saw him clothed—in a sackcloth robe wrapped around him such that occasionally his enormous prick and balls would poke out. besides me the service was attended by a few sheep and goats and a sow and a half dead cat and a dozen chickens. vitya walked with his censer around the perimeter of the house of gods and spread around us an intoxicating incense made from herbs fish scales and the excrement of wild animals. then vitya sang a prayer that he himself had written in a unique language whose only words i recognized were cunt cock and jesus christ. vityas service and really all that happened in the house of gods made a great impression on me.
i anxiously awaited the approaching summer vacation and my next meeting with vitya which never took place. in a letter that grandmother received from her sisters on the eve of our departure they said that not long ago vitya had been found hung from a hook with a heavy wooden cross around his neck and later i learned that after vityas funeral they burned his iconostasis and smashed the house of gods to hell.
Sparrow Pussy
1.
“You mustn’t stagnate, you have to change, you have to amaze everyone, you have to get better and better,” Polina Semenovna was always driving into us. She was our homeroom teacher, a tall thin unmarried eccentric diva, somewhere between 40 and 50.
At the end of every quarter Polina Semenovna held a class meeting where she said who had changed and how and was very upset when her gaze fell on someone who had remained as before. In order to stimulate the students who remained in one place without development, who I should point out Polina Semenovna referred to as ‘regressives’, she invented a wonderful anonymous game.
The game was as follows: Polina Semenovna gave the last name of an unfortunate regressive, who came to the board, and their comrades seated at their desks were asked to write down on the little slips of lined paper which Polina Semenovna had passed out beforehand their thoughts and desires for their peer–to highlight their shortcomings, describe those character traits and idiosyncrasies which in their opinion the ‘regressive’, shifting from one foot to the other at the blackboard, should have gotten rid of long ago, or on the contrary to indicate those positive qualities and characteristics it was not hurting them to possess. The author was not to record their name in order to avoid any conflict and also to be sure that their critical observations were printed, not written, formulated laconically and to the point, and easy to read. The next stage was the collection of papers for which the ‘regressive’ walked through the rows with a plastic bag or a hat to collect the anonymous slips, looking like they were collecting alms at church, which for some reason was horribly pleasing to Polina Semenovna. The goal of this original procedure was that the ‘regressive’ would read the observations and desires of their classmates when they got home, analyze them, and having thought them over would find a potential within themselves which would burst outward and lead them to a new level–they would be new, unexpected, changed–and Polina Semenovna, the true and eternal slave of Change and Perfectionism, would be quite satisfied by this short and entirely unobtrusive little exercise, so that, God willing, she herself might not stagnate or regress.
Here are some of the messages written by playful little fingers on the flips torn up in service of their freedom of expression, which were shown to me when I asked or shoved aggressively in my face, as the owner tried to learn who could have written such a thing? And perhaps was it me?
Do you want to suck my dick?
Do ya have big balls?
Tammy you kin do anything an your a classy cocksucker
Your ass is too big
Do youre tits stand up like that on their own?
Are you really a fag?
Cum 2nite 2 the club ill take everyone in the pink
Do u wanna fuck Polinka?
Did u give it up to the gym teacher?
Nice bod
Great head
Cock + balls
Have you ever fucked anyone?
Retard nothing will teach you
Drunk’s daughter
Degenerate
Fag
Smelly homo
Dick
Dick in a blanket
Whoreson
Cunt
Fucking cunt
Pussy
Fucking pussy
Fucking cunt’s pussy
Fucking pussy cunt
Whore
Fucking whore
Fucked in the head nothing will teach you
Slut
Airhead
Go wash your ass
Play sport
Don’t listen to anyone
You gotta start fucking
Youre not a man
Be a man
Svetka have you slept with any boys yet?
Fat as a bomber jet
Slut
Shit
Crap
Fecal matter
Asshole
Bastard
Animal
Dung beetle
Fuck off to your ancestral homeland kike
Fucking intelligentsia
Beast
Fucking bitch
Terminal bitch
Stuck up bitch
Whore bitch
Bitch
Scum
Fried junky
Suck me off it’ll be gud
Lick my pussy
Lick my ass
I love you
I don’t like you
I’m still gonna fuck you if not this year then next
Fu
Bah
Puke
Pussy
Let’s be friends
Girl (addressed to a boy)
Dickrider
Forget em all
Prison misses you
Sportsman!
You have no brains
Where do retards like you even come from
Your mouth smells like a toilet
Are u really so smart or does it just seem like it?
2.
Tanka O., who from quarter to quarter and year to year remained on the list of ‘regressives’, a C student and really without any talents at all, without waiting or making it home, hid in the corner of the dressing room, read a few of the notes addressed to her, and broke down. A passing Polina Semenovna became interested in the scene and dragged Tanka out into God’s light, and, seeing the note in her trembling hand, understood everything, and hit the ceiling. Bending over her, Polina Semenovna began to preach in a voice that broke into falsetto:
“Tanya, you mustn’t cry, yes, I understand that you may not like what your classmates have written but you must understand them, you must listen to their opinion, you have to change, Tanya, are you listening to me, you mustn’t always remain the same, people have to grow and change, Tanya, are you listening to me, you have to change, Tanya, you have to change, you must absolutely become different than you are, you have to change, Tanya, now calm down and go home and think carefully about how you will change, you can do it, I know you can, everyone can, and you must, you absolutely have to change, well, that’s it, stop howling, that’s it, go home, Tanya, are you listening to me, I said go home–” but for some reason the more Polina Semenovna told Tanya that she had to change and that tears wouldn’t help her the louder Tanya wailed, maybe because of what Polina Semenovna was saying and maybe because Polina Semenovna without noticing was painfully prodding Tanya’s head with the bony knuckle of her long pointer finger, and then with the stone in her ring, as if she were trying to back her words up with something and hammer into the mind of this idiot ‘regressive’ an understanding of how important it is for a person to change and be other than they are.
By the time that Polina Semenovna finally dragged the wailing Tanya out to the street and, watching her leave, nodded her head and pronounced “yes, a serious case,” the school’s cleaning lady, Evdokia Sergeevna, had found the slip of paper Tanya had discarded and read the two words written on it syllable by syllable: “Spar-row Pus-sy.” For a long time she couldn’t figure out what this might mean and wanted to ask Polina Semenovna as she returned to the building, breathing the fresh air into her smoky lungs, but the latter said sharply:
“Go home, Evdokia Sergeevna, always you’re standing around bugging your eyes at me, you have to change, every person on earth has to change, Evdokia Sergeevna, you should have changed long ago, look at me, I’m always in motion, developing, go, go home already and think very carefully about what I’ve said to you.”
Evdokia Sergeevna, sticking the slip of paper into the pocket of her torn robe anyway, squinted after the vanishing figure of Polina Semenovna and thought to herself: “What an idiot Polinka is, I’ve known her for 20 years and she’s still the same idiot.”
Bastard
On the night my parents conceived me, my maternal grandfather died, who had carried the fragments of a grenade in the right side of his chest since the Second World War and whose decaying and practically useless right lung the doctors had sliced out over the course of thirty years. On a May day eight months later, when my mother’s stomach squirmed downward, her water broke prematurely, and my flaccid body flopped out of her cunt into the dirty grey hospital light, her mother, my grandmother, lifted her heavy head toward a light of Christ knows what origin and fell instantly blind. Eye specialists could not restore her vision or give an intelligent explanation of what had happened. When I turned one year old, my other grandfather, an amateur motorcyclist, departed unfortunately from the beaten path and landed in a ditch, where he lay unconscious for an indeterminate period with his leg trapped beneath the metal, after which they had to saw it off just above the knee, and about a month later, near his groin. The day after my grandad was released from the hospital, his wife, my second grandmother, was getting ready to go to the market when she fell unexpectedly into a comatose state in which she remained for several years. When I turned three years old our dog, Naida, a vicious bitch, got lost, and a week later her wrung out flyridden body was found by our neighbors, draped over a branch with her head smashed in. At sixteen my cousin felt a sudden itch in her pussy and fucked some nice lad after which she bore a daughter with Down syndrome while she herself grew into a husky provincial sow. My other cousin, who my aunt had spawned by a gypsy baron, was fucking by thirteen, blackout drunk by fifteen, and by 25 a wet-brained terminal alcoholic. Another cousin, real pretty guy, broke the windshield on a tile truck he found in some alley, dragged them all to his basement, and started selling them off a little cheaper than in the stores. A month later they got him, held a trial, and threw him in prison, where ragged old men stole his food and fucked him up his mouth and ass. One more cousin, dreaming of a military career, went to serve in Chechnya, where he stepped on a mine in his second week and thankfully for his mother came home alive, minus his right foot and left hand. He couldn’t find work in civilian life and started drinking moonshine and exhibiting his stumps and cock to old women, trying to give them a little excitement in their old age. I was an extremely sensitive and sickly little boy, equally traumatized by visible human misfortune and by little things like rain or windy weather, which I thought could spoil the peace of humanity, whom I desperately loved. However, on the day I turned fifteen my patience wore out and my humanism turned unexpectedly to cynicism. I won’t share any more about what happened after that but I can assure you that by the age of 33 I’ve become so fucked that the people I know turn away from me in disgust, and shout curses after me, and call me a real bastard.
