Love for American Cars

In her new book “Love for American Cars,” Maria Arbatova, with her characteristic natural candor, speaks about today’s era of “new Russian swindling,” from which, unfortunately, she herself did not escape.

“With cars in my family, things were oh so complicated. The first car was a beige Zaporozhets, born of domestic auto design after the hunchbacked and the big-eared ones. As a person with an injured leg, I was entitled to a car with hand controls. Getting it turned out to be fairly simple: simulator tests confirming the idiocy of the leg; a certificate confirming less idiotic eyesight and psyche; and a showdown with the auntie-distributor.
For the auntie sitting there handing out humiliating cars to humiliated invalids, I looked like a hole in formal logic. She had never once given a car to a young woman who showed up both with her husband and without a bribe. So she began furiously yelling that people like me had ‘no business, no reason, and no right’... I had sharpened my teeth on women like that, in life and in work. So I mournfully asked her for a sheet of paper and, right there on her desk, began writing a complaint to a higher authority about her—about the auntie’s—professional unfitness for that cozy position. Seeing that I was prepared for this sort of communication, the auntie first sheepishly flattened her ears, then began to sparkle, wriggle like a little devil, then burst into tears about the hard fate of women and a slight clouding of the mind from fatigue... After which she processed the papers at the speed of a jet plane. The line of disabled people present in the room looked at me like I was a bogatyr who had chopped off three heads of a dragon in one stroke.”