The hall was silent, the only sounds heard were the rustling of flowers under the coffin. I didn’t even notice beside me the second man, the “Hog”, because I looked to the right at the fallen man. Then I heard the calm voice of the sinewy man, rising from under the coffin, “Don’t touch him.”

I looked at my left and saw the “Hog” with a raised fist ready for the blow. He was really huge, taller and heavier than I, and he was all ready. I wouldn’t have had even a chance to raise my arm for protection. I stepped back, but the “Hog” with indifferent air obediently turned away from me, stepped to the coffin, and helped his boss to get up.

I looked around for the blond girl, and saw her standing with her arm held by comrade Myacheva, party-official already well-known to me. And I heard her saying softly: “Marilyn, stop it! Behave yourself!” She said it in Russian, and then repeated in English with a terrible accent.

“My God, what I hear, she called her Marilyn!” I thought in amazement. ”The dead twin is a double namesake, and this grieving lover here, who is strikingly Marilyn Monroe in her looks, is also Marilyn!”

Marilyn was led away to the doors. She was calm now and did not resist Myacheva. At the doorway she suddenly stopped and turned around looking for someone in the crowd. I was staring at her, as all silent mourners did, and I saw her eyes running from face to face. When our eyes met, she stopped her search. Seconds were passing, and as I looked into her eyes I felt I was drowning. All of a sudden she smiled, barely, with just a stir of her lips, but her eyes sparkled – for me only, I was sure.

Around five that day after the funeral Fomin walked nervously around his private office on the second floor of the cottage. Previously he cancelled funeral repast, solemn feast after the burial, customary in Russia. He told his comrades that such a feast has an ecclesiastical nature, and therefore alien to the true Communist spirit, and also it was absolutely inappropriate now because it could slacken them on the eve of the great days coming. Every time Fomin approached the window he looked down at the neighboring cottages, at the farther yellowing fields, then turning away and walking back, tousling his hair.

This cottage in the elite suburbia, as they call prestigious high-end settlements in Russia, was his party’s property, and was bought just a month ago with sponsor-bank’s money. However, these last weeks before the elections Fomin lived here, moving here alone from his family’s city apartment. In this cottage, besides him, lived his guests from India. Actually, this house was bought especially to accommodate them with appropriate class and luxury.

Ten minutes ago Fomin called by phone the adjacent room, but when a girl there heard his voice she immediately hung up. However now, after walking around the office, he stopped at the window and dialed her number again. When long beeps ended Fomin clearly and emphatically said into the phone:

“Marilyn, dear, your Dad will get very upset. Daddy would cry. We should go to him at once, right now, your Dad is already crying!”

Because a girl didn’t reply immediately, Fomin guessed that she, having recognized his voice, had thrown in anger her cell phone, but then with a great relief he heard her quiet voice, “Yes, I’ll go to see my daddy.”

Fomin immediately dialed Myacheva’s phone. This party deputy of his was waiting for his call on the first floor. Calmly he said, “Marilyn has agreed to go. Pick her up in ten minutes.”

Fomin, chewing his lip, looked again at the yellowing fields in the window. Even yesterday he was sure he could keep this crazy girl in check at least last few days. He badly needed only these three or four days, and after that all this would be insignificant, including this whore. But the death of her dear Sergey made her wild. “I had to foresee that! I had to!” He thought with a pain. “They were lovers from the age of fifteen! What else could I ever have expected?”

He and his party could formerly cope with Marilyn’s hurt feelings, her grief, her hysterics, and silent suspicions, but things cardinally changed today after her screams in the funeral hall about Communists. After that everything has changed radically. This woman, having cried out those words, became a dangerous and unpredictable enemy of his party.

Fomin felt with the fingers his chin checking the bristle, and began to dress up: a fresh shirt, tie, black suit. Fifteen years ago, when Gorbachev’s perestroika started, when "indestructible" Soviet Union, as it was named in the national anthem, began to shake and tremble, Fomin was the Second Secretary of the District Committee of Komsomol, the youth Communist organization. That was a very high post for twenty-five year old graduate of Komsomol University. As a member of Communist party from age of nineteen, Fomin took all the innovations of the new Secretary General of his Party as the forced measures, apparently obligatory at the moment, in a hostile imperialist encirclement, with a sharp drop of the world oil prices that fed his country for a quarter of century. He did not know, as all of his countrymen, that without a providential gift of nature – their plentiful oil and gas – and its exorbitant prices at the global markets, their country of triumphant Communism would have had immediately go broke, with population starving and dying in millions, as it already happened in the time of Stalin who destroyed the agriculture repressing most of hard working farmers in gulag camps.

Fomin, making frequent speeches at the young Communist’s meetings at the factories and construction sites, explaining the “political moment”, always told his young comrades: “Do you remember from the school-course, what our great Lenin once said about his New Economic Policy? He said, we should use capitalistic methods for some more years, or else bourgeois would strangle our young Socialist republic. Now it’s the same, and it’s just for a few years. We’ll never give up undying gains and victories of the great October revolution; we’ll never surrender to the bunch of greedy crooks and profiteers. That will never happen: we are not to sacrifice our holy principles! All as a one, shoulder to shoulder, we unanimously support far-sighted and smart policy of our party, under the wise leadership of Secretary General! Glory to our party!”

But a year later his friend and his party boss had organized in the rooms of his district committee a trading cooperative. That was the time when the government, after seventy years of strict ban, permitted their citizens a free private enterprising. They bought vodka in rusty casks made of toxic technical spirits from some criminals, and sold it oddly bottled at food markets. Their firm was registered, of course, as a cooperative for the introduction of new technologies. Every day Fomin passed in the corridors of his district committee the high stacks of plastic crates full of bottles of odd shapes and colors without labels. The piles were so high they blocked slogans and photographs of leading Komsomol members of their district hung on the walls. But the business was to grow. With documents of the mutilated veterans of Afghan-war that were coming back from the battle-fronts by echelons, who were granted then many privileges, Fomin’s young comrades founded a foreign trade co-operative. They brought into the country fake Polish liquors, counterfeit cigarettes, unmixed alcohol “Royal” in two-liter bottles; all of it was tax-free, thanks to mutilated veterans. Money the comrades now earned were fantastic by all the standards of the half-hungry country. Although Fomin did nothing in connection with that dirty profiteering, his special bank account was growing every month as of a senior comrade. All those years Fomin never took a cent of that money. One year later all of it, enough to buy a house and several cars, just vanished during “shock therapy” in the nineties when the account in the state saving bank was simply frozen at first, and then a three-digit inflation annulled it.