Adapted from Ivan Bunin’s “Three Rubles”
At the time, everyone was smoking in the room. K smoked too, but he could not stand secondhand smoke. The partner who sometimes came to keep him company suddenly turned to face him and said, “K, my friends and I are going away for a while.”
Before K could show his temper, dredge up every wound and miserable memory, and say a few things, weed roots would always grow from the cracks in the concrete. He could never shake them off.
The day before, amid the smoke, K had been reading an anthology of Russian prose. It contained a story he loved: a street sweeper sifted gold dust from piles of rubbish and fashioned it into a golden rose for his beloved.
“Nice outfit.” This was K’s opening line.
“Thanks. This is xxxx, the trousers are xxxx. xxxx was given to me by xxx…”
That was how the feeling of having known each other forever was created.
“Oh, you know xxxx too. Oh, right, yes, I like xxxx as well.”
Then came runway pieces from the nineties, films from the seventies, ideology from the fifties, photography from the thirties, eighteenth-century literature, seventeenth-century art, and veterinary medicine.
What veterinary medicine?
Oh, never mind. Let’s talk about Jean-Luc Godard first.
K liked the way she looked. Her make-up followed every prescribed step; forty per cent of the weight in her suitcase came from skincare products in glass bottles. Her lips were the colour of three meals a day. K’s were the colour of heart disease.
“Soon you’ll be eating only once a day too,” K told her.
“Really?” She seemed a little incredulous. “In those documentaries I watched about hippies, weren’t you all natural and healthy, cooking for yourselves on only a few yuan a day?”
“Maybe,” K muttered. “Yes. I am.”
Yes. After all, anyone can be anything, as long as they want to be it.
“Oh, no, that’s not right,” K said again. “Do you know what a real hippie is? I know a real hippie. He actually came out of that era. I’m nowhere near worthy of being one.”
“Oh, right.” K backpedalled again. “Hippies have been passé for ages. It’s postmodern now. Hippies have been passé for ages, just like Henri Lefebvre, just like those New Left people. Right.”
“Oh, right,” K said again. “Yesterday I read an article about Louis Althusser. That thing about ideological state apparatuses. The article said the superstructure isn’t simply pushed along by the economic base; ideology can in turn shape the subject—that was roughly the point. Anyway, any Marxism that explains everything through economics is vulgar. You know. They’re stupid.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“You know, the times have changed. This is a new era. Times change, music changes, drugs change. It’s a new era, and those people still treat the lines and music from Trainspotting, a film from decades ago, as scripture. Fucking idiots. It’s already 2026. We should have discarded those backward ideologies long ago.”
She asked K whether he had ever attended university.
“No.”
She had all the qualities that kept K from liking her enough, yet made her just acceptable enough to meet certain needs of his. She knew she was listening, like in that manga by Tatsuki Fujimoto. She exhaled smoke, making K’s nose itch a little. He picked up the veterinary drug.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“The times are changing,” he said. “This is the new era.”
“What is the new era?” she asked.
“In the new era there are no obligations. Rights equal united-front value,” K said.
“That isn’t the new era I meant.”
Veterinary medicine. K took some first. His nerves relaxed considerably.
“What is it?” she asked.
K said it was the new era.
She took off her coat. K gave her the veterinary medicine. She fell asleep. K looked at her short frame and took off her clothes.
When she woke, K was leaning against the headboard, kissing her shoulder over and over.
She stood up. “I don’t like the new era,” she said.
K hurried to make promises and launched into a speech full of grand plans. He said it was normal for the average person to have around twenty different sexual partners over a lifetime; he said Wang Xiaobo, whose lips were as purple as his, had been dead for so many years, so she should not be so conservative; he said the revolution must never stop; he said Guy Debord seemed to believe that a person’s thinking ought to operate like a government, loyal first to itself and then to everything else; he said, if you cannot revolutionise your own thoughts, how can you live? K could not remember whether Debord had said this or someone writing about Debord had. She picked her clothes up from the floor. He went on to say that not working was a right we should have had all along, and unemployment was a gift from heaven. He promised her that they would “enter the city’s night alongside those rebels doomed to come to no good, putting the free association of individuals into practice through the dérive.”
She asked, “So what about the veterinary medicine?”
He said veterinary medicine was the first step in resisting the spiritual tyranny of capitalism: it could temporarily pull people away from short-form video, AI entertainment and other instruments of domination. He said everyday language was converging with the language of power, while official discourse kept invading the ways people expressed and explained things. K therefore framed an attack on the brain as a weaponised act of resistance against the instrumentalisation of body and thought.
She gave K one last glance. There was more bewilderment than anything else in her eyes.
“You learned so much, but you never learned to respect me.”
She closed the door behind her.
After a while, K went out too. The streetlights blotted out every star. Darkness was like a thigh pressing down on the city’s head.
“At that moment, a broad violet flash of lightning swept past the window, followed at once by a tremendous clap of thunder somewhere nearby, as though sounding a warning not to commit evil.” — “Three Rubles”
K believed that this kind of metaphor should have been discarded long ago.