[The town of Svetloyar is bidding to be included in the list of historical towns making up Russia's famous "Golden Ring" around Moscow, which is a major tourist route. The town is due to be visited by the President of Russia and the Secretary-General of the United Nations. Apart from the relatively minor difficulty that the town has no historical past, having been entirely constructed during the Stalinist period (there are, after all, ways of adjusting history), it has one serious problem: rats. They have infested the place, and they have to be removed, if only temporarily, if Svetloyar is to avoid disgrace and acquire the coveted and profitable "Golden Ring" status.
Two exterminators, or "rat-killers", are summoned from Moscow to deal with the most sensitive site, the town's central hotel, where the rats simply drop from the ceiling in the banqueting hall.
Svetloyar's historical (and geographical) credentials are created by burying exhibits from museums in the region, together with ill-assorted bones, to create a fake archaeological site (when the army workers accidentally uncover the genuine site of an ancient graveyard, it is rapidly reburied to avoid unnecessary complications):
"What's this you've dug up for me, you bastard? Where did you get this garbage from?..."
"Right, lads, bury the fucking tombs again. Cover them with clay and smooth it all over... Smash the bones to pieces and scatter them in the fields..."
"For history?" Sviridov twisted his face into a grimace. "You shut up about history. I know what kind of history we need around here."
Pipes have been laid from the Don to establish a "source" for the great river on the territory of the town, and a connection has been invented with the hero of old Russian folk-lore, Ilya Muromets (he must have passed through here at some point on his travels!).
In order to greet the President and the UN Secretary-General in fitting style, the real inhabitants of the town are evacuated and a motley collection of soldiers, actors, blind women and female prison-camp internees is put into training by the local army command as a "welcoming crowd" stage-managed with immaculate, if ludicrous, care.
Meanwhile a power struggle develops, involving factions in the army and the security forces. The outcome, inevitably, is the emergence of a provincial military dictator. Pretence becomes reality as different military factions become embroiled in bloody combat. Eventually Svetloyar (now populated entirely by the military) is threatened by a new wave of rats, turned against the town by the rat-killers who were brought in to help exterminate the rodents.
The narrative is told in the person of the younger of the two rat-killers (he refers to his boss simply as "the Old Man"). A biologist by education, he is supporting himself as a rat-killer while he struggles to complete his dissertation on flies.
When he and the Old Man have successfully rid the hotel of rats, they are about to leave, but instead are arrested because they protest against the army's plans to set captured rats on fire in order to destroy their burrows. The young rat-killer becomes ill, and as his condition worsens the narrative assumes more of the characteristics of delirium or nightmare.
The links between human and rodent behaviour are drawn tighter when his own constant attentions to women (including the bride of the military dictator Gubin) are strangely mirrored in his pursuit of a particularly cunning female rat that takes refuge in the local branch of the savings bank. It is only at the end of the book that we realise the rat-killer is in fact mortally afraid of rats. And in metaphorical terms, of all that they stand for. Throughout the book he has been engaged in far more than a simple struggle with destructive rodents].

"Still dribbling into your pillow?" I asked the Old Man when I phoned and woke him up. "You can get the money tomorrow and pay for the basement, before they turf me out of it." Then I dropped and slept, right there in the basement. We'd rented a basement for our office because we were struggling to make ends meet on small orders.
For millions of years the common and black rats known as sinanthropes after their home country of China remained dammed into the rice-swamps, locked into that foul place by the Himalayas, the desert, the jungles and the ice. When people moved in there looking for gold, they melted the glaciers and cleared the passes, and in a flash rat hordes broke out. Skirting round the Himalayas, up to the North! - to Korea and Manchuria. To the fleshpots of India - South! The East submitted without even raising its head to protest. The first to congratulate Buddha on the New Era was a rat, the symbol of joy and prosperity.
From the twelfth century Europe complained and would not accept its fate - for it was believed there were no rats in Golden Hellas! - not knowing that black rats in ships and attics pressed ancient Egypt so hard that even the accidental killing of a cat was punished by death. Greece and Rome had only one refuge: they kept mum, or they mumbled "mice". And we used to be proud of their cleanliness, what fools we were! Excavations have made it quite clear just what kind of creatures it was that Aristotle described: born of the filth in the ships, conceived by licking salt. Who did Diogenes reproach with lust? Who was it Cicero reproached for his gnawed sandals? The god of "mice" is Apollo. Their history began when the Gods overthrew the Titans and the earth shook and split open. And the mice came pouring and tumbling out of the black cracks.
And they put the people under siege.

There were no windows in the basement. The night was coming to an end when the Old Man switched on the light. He stuck the key into the lock and picked up the piece of paper that had unstuck from the door: "RAT Cooperative".
I went to bed late. The Old Man was a real swine, he could have shown up later just as well.

Streaming after their black brothers came the common rats, the victors! With the Arabs they crossed the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, the Crusaders carried them further on from Palestine, Venetian mariners delivered the plague-carrying rats to Europe together with pearls and spices. In the fifteenth century the church cursed them. It was too late. The bones of a common rat were dug up in the palace of Shirvan-shah in Baku.
The common rats made their way across medieval Rus. Convicts in the stocks at the Solovki Monastery paid with their noses and ears for the commercial liberty enjoyed by the towns of Pskov and Novgorod. The rats moved into St. Petersburg with Peter the Great. In 1727 the earthquake in the Kuma Desert drove a huge army of common rats to Astrakhan. The pincers were closed.
In 1732 a vessel from the East Indies delivered retribution to England. Thirty years later Paris fell, and twenty years after that the beggars ate rats during the siege of the French capital.
In 1775 America capitulated.
In 1780 it was Germany's turn.
When the Russians reached the Aleutian Islands, they were swarming with rats, and so that was what they called them, the Rat Islands.
In 1809 Switzerland fell to the horde.

The Old Man walks about, sneezing, the pig, stands a carton of milk right under my nose, puts a bread-bun beside it, rummages in his bag. He's the boss, he gets the table, and I get the camp-bed. I have to sleep with my legs bent up.

They carried on. At the end of the nineteenth century they celebrated the capture of Tyumen, Tobolsk, the Crimea. The Russo-Japanese War bequeathed rats to Omsk and Tomsk, and by 1912 the common rats had occupied the Siberian Railway.
The First World War gave the black and the common rats more fodder than they could eat, and not a single place was left in Europe without them. During the Siege of Leningrad the rats warmed themselves in the children's beds and occupied the front lines of defence (where the corpses had more meat on them). The evacuation carried them off in all directions.

"Get up out of that bed," said the Old Man. "Enough sleeping. I've paid for the basement."
I ripped open the carton of milk and took a bite from the bun. A thickset, grey-haired man came in, scratching his neck. He produced an advertising supplement out of his pocket:
"Here," he said.
The advertisement I had put in read as follows: "An opportunity not to be missed. Rats and mice exterminated anywhere in the world. Prices well below international rates. We saved the Vandome Islands from rats. We saved Thuringia and the public toilets in Geneva (three hundred seats). The 'RAT' Cooperative, winner of a special award from the Swedish Academy! Reach us via metro station "Medvedkovo" and bus No. 661 to the stop for the State Polytechnical College. Walk along the concrete wall on the opposite side of the street to the break, then through the car park. Ask for the All-Union Society of the Blind. We are in the basement at the first entrance, sixth door on the left. Telephone such-and-such, from 22.00 to 24.00, Vladimir and Larissa."
"Yes, that's us," said the Old Man. "Have a seat."
"I'm glad I found you," said the man. "I have a way for you to earn some good money."

* * *

...We had the meeting in the school gym.
On the floor lay a huge sketch map of the town. An army colonel, dressed in field uniform, was pushing a string of toy trucks across it, as if it were the president's cavalcade.
"Mokrousov Street, transit time sixteen seconds. Welcoming crowd," the ginger-haired Baranov read from a piece of paper, "one hundered and seventy-six. Twenty-four on balconies. Sixteen at windows. Nine posters, forty-six flags. Dress from the civil defence reserves."
"Okay," agreed the Governor, and climbed down from the volley-ball umpire's tower.
Take a gutful in the evening and next day you'll suffer for it. I sat by the mineral water, close up beside a bald old man in glasses. He didn't even turn his shrivelled skull of a head, he was too busy watching the governor.
Shestakov towered up in front of the flags of Russia and the United Nations, leaning with his fists on the oak table that was crowded with telephones and winking army walkie-talkies, waiting for me to finish opening a bottle of mineral water with my teeth.
"Time. We're losing time," Shestakov hissed, as soon as I'd drunk my fill and wiped my mouth. "The job is a big one, but we don't have enough people. We're expecting three companies of police from the district centre. The reserve has been called up. Just in case there's any nonsense the district command has provided another three battalions. They're training in Kriukovo Forest. For a day like this there should be a division, with tanks. Our garrison is keen for action, isn't it, Comrade Gontar?"
"Very keen," agreed the army colonel.
"On the fourth we start operation 'Clear Field'." Shestakov glanced down at the telephones, and his cheeks quivered. "Expulsion from Svetloyar of all outsiders. On the sixth, operation 'Clear Sky', removal to village schools of residents from the town centre and the visitors' entry and exit routes. Responsible officer, Baranov of the police. I am in overall control. We'll have no nonsense. No attempts to contact the President. Or any questions. Please don't make any notes."
Everyone glanced around cautiously. Especially at the Old Man. And at the door, which was guarded by two men in civilian dress with automatics sticking out from under their jackets.
"From our side Colonel Klinsky's people will be the closest to the visitors." The governor pointed to a puny bureaucrat with slick, wet-looking black hair. He was the only one without a tie and he had ear-phones glued to his head.
"The town is almost in ruins. That's what the mayor's office has done for it. The evacuated residents will have to be paid for two days off work and given hot meals. We'll have to guard them. To be on the safe side. Do not explain anything to them! If you do, it will all be turned against us. There are two areas causing me concern. First, we have to have people who look right to play the part of the residents along the route of the procession and at the festivities by the monument to the 'Source of the Don'. The organisers figure we need about ten thousand. Men are no problem. We can dress up soldiers and cadets. The theatre will help out with hair styles. There aren't many children, but we do have some. Two nursery schools have been assigned. Our people in the front rows."
Shestakov breathed out loudly. "The women are a problem. Where can we get so many women? The blind workers' cooperative will give us fifty units, they can be paired off with soldiers as guides and kept at a distance. Maybe the ballet dancers will have time to get changed after their concert. But we've had to request most of the women from the corrective labour camp. Special train here and then back again. Five hundred women with shattered lives. How do we explain the march from the station and back again under guard? Maybe we could say it's a cross-country march of soldiers' mothers? We'll have to arrange them on the square with officers, three to one. It's hard to keep an eye on people in a crowd. We were thinking perhaps we should take their shoes off. Or perhaps handcuff them together at the elbow. We'll come up with something. We'll put together a task force from actors and police veterans, about a hundred men. They'll be following the visitors in two vans, just in case..." Shestakov put his palms against his cheeks and continued in a hollow voice, "in case the visitors want to speak with the people. An extreme situation, as you appreciate. Personally, I don't believe it will happen. But everyone has to be able to smile and say hello. The reception and the dinner will last one hour forty minutes, but the escort will arrive earlier, so the festivities will drag out for about six hours. I understand, believe me, it's all really far too much for us. But as they say, we have to go for bust. The life of our town depends on it, from now on forever, comrades. If we do a good job, then the government will include Svetloyar in the "Golden Ring" of Russian towns and the list of national historical monuments. And that means hard currency, comrades."
His audience came to life and began applauding.
"The second thing worrying me," Shestakov cast a significant glance towards our corner, "is the rats, comrades. Repulsive creatures. They gnaw everything, that's why they're called rodents, it means they gnaw. They've been building up here for decades, and in the last few years the mayor's office has fallen down badly on the job. They bite the dogs. People are afraid for their children. On my initiative we've set up a rat control corporation, 'King Rat'. They'll use a traditional folk method to rid the area of the festivities of rodents. In a single night, just before the visitors arrive. Free of charge."
Now even the guards were applauding. Skull-face beside me was lashing away so hard, his spectacles slipped down his nose. The Old Man stared gloomily at the map.
"But the banqueting hall in the hotel 'Don'... You know yourselves what it's like. Some of you... had first-hand experience. We had to go to the capital for help. The governor employed them, but we'll have to pay, and it's a lot of money." I was watching the governor as he spoke. He had turned pale. "It can't be allowed to happen, it just can't be, not even for a moment. Not even for a fraction of a moment. Imagine. During the celebrations... One drops on to the table. Or the floor. Or on someone's head. Even just droppings. It's absolutely out of the question! So let me warn our highly paid businessmen here and now, in front of you all. Just so they have things clear."
The gathering turned to face us. I smiled. The Old Man fidgetted.
"Colonel Gontar will announce the orders of the day."
"Right. Let me inform you that from six o'clock the H.Q. will be under barracks regime. Sleeping quarters have been laid out in the staff room and the head teacher's office. The mess is in the library. The latrines remain where they were. Military rank must be respected. On the ground floor two classes will begin the normal school year. The external guard will be in the queue for kvas and in the school lunch van. Passes to be shown to the sentry with the pram. Duty officers will inform you of the colour of the pram. Dismissed!"
Everyone got up, kicking aside the basketballs skittering about the floor. I winked at my neighbour. Well?
"So you're the ones who are robbing us blind."
"And who are you?"
"Here? Captain Larionov."
"Well, captain, all this reminds me of a mad house."
The old captain grimaced:
"I'm no doctor. I'm the town's architect."
He said goodbye and left. The Old Man sat on his chair. It was a long time since I'd sat in a schoolroom until blue twilight filled the windows. Just like being at a dance, not a single girl in sight. I said:
"Tell me, Old Man, what did we come here for?"

* * *

On the square a cordon in full-dress uniform was dying of boredom as they taught alsatians to lie and stand, lie and stand.

In the centre, an officer in a peaked cap stood on a wooden crate, blowing down a megaphone to test it, with a herd of bodies pressing around him. Plodding piously over to join them came a portly priest with a big round medallion hanging on a chain round his neck. Mincing behind him at a respectable distance came several rosy-cheeked lay-brothers in gold surplices, carrying an icon, a censer, a cross and a gonfalon.
"Stage one!" roared the megaphone. "Put out that cigarette! Who's that there spitting on the ground? Sviridov, the visitors, who are the visitors?"
"Comrade lieutenant, com...". A rotund warrant officer with sweaty eyebrows who had the look of a light-weight wrestler came shooting across to me. "Comrade lieutenant, seven seconds. This way please." He dragged me over, clutching my wrist in his moist palm. "Here's your visitor, comrade colonel. He's the right size."
Garrison commander Gontar looked me over from up on top of his crate: "He'll do."
A captain clambered up on the crate and held the megaphone to the colonel's mouth with both hands.
"Stage zero. Comrades, general rehearsal. Remember, total security, responsibility. The goal: determine who follows who. Finalise the general picture. Right then, to your starting positions. One run-through, and we're done. Sviridov, who's visitor number two?"
The crowd stirred and formed up into ranks.
"This way, please." The warrant officer prodded me toward the crate. "You're still in the car. Now who else... Comrade colonel, I can be guest number two myself!" He sniffed and wiped the drops of sweats from his eyebrows.
"Ten-shun! Listen. 'September twelfth. Twelve hundred hours. The sun has gilded...' Right, I'm not reading all of that. Right then, the President and the Secretary-General of the United Nations... they're out of the car, they've arrived!"
The warrant officer led me forward two steps and stopped. We were on the spot.
"Ours is on the left, the other's on the right. Who's that not looking? Remember who's where. Just to help you, theirs is an Arab. That's a kind of a Gypsy. Orchestra!" Colonel Gontar waved his cap and over on the boulevard someone thumped a drum. "The blessing, the blessing, what are we waiting for?"
The warrant-officer moved aside and twisted his face into a pious grimace. The priest advanced, wrapped in something that looked like a water-proof army cape: cloth of gold embroidered with pearls, stuck all over with blue and scarlet flowers with six petals. Sharp reflections from the jewelry glittered on the faces of the meek-and-mild servitors; the priest waved incense over the crowd, crossing himself with broad, sweeping gestures. I stood up straighter and lowered my head with the rest. The warrant officer put his hands on his hips in a haughty gesture.
"Now comes the blessing. Kiss his hand," Gontar hissed.
The priest handed his censer to a lay-brother, then took my hand and kissed it respectfully.
"Kravchuk! What the..." the colonel swore in his exasperation. "Get that goat's beard of yours out of there! Who's the bishop? You're the bishop! You do the blessing, and he does the kissing! He holds his palms out, and you stick your mitt on top! He kisses it, and you make the sign of the cross over the back of his head! Stop tugging at your beard! Too hot? Sviridov, we can do without the beard today."
"What if he won't kiss it?" inquired the "bishop".
"He will. It's a clean perfumed hand... He'll be told what to do too. If he hesitates, then cross his fat face and move on. What d'you mean, where to? What about guest number two? You've got to bless the Gypsy! Girl, bring up the bread and salt!"
Suddenly there was music from horns and a psaltery, and a fine buxom girl with a face as red as a traffic cop's came bouncing over happily, holding an empty chased-metal tray.
"Girl: 'Pray taste of our bread and salt.' Hold it out, and don't straighten up, let him get a good look down the front of your dress! Don't look down. 'Smiles.' Give him a wink. Once. With your right eye. He takes a bite and chews it. Passes the bread to the nigger. 'Without straightening up the girl takes a present out of her bosom. Speaks:
"Beloved, I have sat up through the night waiting for you and embroidering the shorts'". Sho-orts? Is that right? Sviridov!"
"That's right, comrade colonel. That's what it says in the book."
"In the book! Sviridov, you'll end up in the guardhouse! He reads books now! Anybody here from the museum?"
"Yes, comrade colonel," someone shouted from the crowd. "It should be 'the shirt'."
"Alright then. Come on, girl."
"My beloved, I have sat up through the night waiting for you and embroidering this shirt." The girl ran her tongue over her moist lips and thrust a hand into her crowded bosom.
The colonel rapped out his approval:
"Good girl, good girl... God grant everybody will do as well. 'The girl runs off, the hem of her skirt rises so her underwear can be seen...' It doesn't say what colour, but it should. Sviridov, check that! Cossacks, let's have the Cossacks!"
Two policemen on light-brown horses rode over from the boulevard and around the crowd, whooping as they went.
"'Out runs a girl.' Where's the girl?"
"Here!" A female gymnast in white sports shoes stepped forward. She was about twelve years old, with sharp pointed elbows and totally flat-chested.
Gontar thrust the megaphone away from his lips and hissed.
"Sviridov. Haven't we got any healthier looking specimens?"
"She's the district champion." The warrant officer shrugged and spread his hands, stung by the comment.
"Alright, alright, what does it say here? 'Out runs a girl feeding pigeons!' Alright then, she feeds them, turns a somersault, does a cartwheel. Then a thousand pigeons, the age of the city, go flying up in the air. 'The cover falls from the monument "The Source of the Don" and a stream of water raises up Ilya Muromets over the square, with the flags of Russia and the United Nations. Orchestra. Exultant citizens press the guards against visitor number one' (don't get him confused with the black!) 'and a woman with a blind child break through.' Right, quick march!"
The crowd pushed forward, and a woman with a face wasted from exhaustion lifted a boy in a blue T-shirt up above the swaying shoulders of the bodyguards, keening mournfully:

Translated by Andrew Bromfield