To Kill The Dragon

It's all happened before.

Two days ago my son and I went to the theatre. We watched "The Dragon". This play is one of the best, so my son should have seen it. Since I saw this play a month ago, I should have not expected any surprises. Alas, I should have. Because a month ago, there was no mysterious murder or suicide of a traffic policeman from Mahiliou and everything that followed.

The peculiarity of the works of classics - geniuses, visionaries - is that they predict everything. Everything. Sometimes it's barely noticeable, but sometimes it's evident. Another peculiarity is that we think that we know their works by heart; we can easily tell the story and describe the characters, only unless some part of the story does not affect something urgent - what is happening here and we finally remember it. This part will simply fly by on the background of our perception and will not stop for a moment. And a month later, "how could one ignore this? After all, the author predicted everything to the very bottom of it, to pearlescent buttons on the pea coat, to the crooked smile of an errand boy! How did he know that?!"

Of course, we all remember that "The Dragon" by Eugene Schwartz is not a play about a dragon and certainly not about a wandering knight Lancelot but about a silent and patient crowd which got so used to the dragon that even after his death it cannot be free. It's almost an errant plot. Many of us have read this play and surely all watched the movie "Kill the Dragon" by Mark Zakharov. In short, it's a textbook work, a classic, which should have become a part of the school curriculum. It seems you know it by heart, but something happens in your home country, and the Schwartz dragon will kindly set in a cue, one has ignored before.

"Lancelot. What other good deeds did it accomplish??

Charlemagne. He rid us of gypsies.

Lancelot. But gypsies are very sweet people.

Charlemagne. What! I’m speechless! I admit, I’ve never seen a single gypsy in my life. But even in elementary school they taught us that these are horrible people.

Lancelot. Why is that?

Charlemagne. They are vagrants by nature. It’s in their blood. They are an enemy of any organized state – or they long would have settled down, instead of drifting here and there. Their songs are without courage, and their ideas are destructive. They steal children. They sneak everywhere. Now we have completely cleansed ourselves of them, but as recently as a hundred years ago any brunette had to prove he did not have gypsy blood in him.

Lancelot. And who told you all that about gypsies?

Charlemagne. Our dragon, of course. Gypsies would challenge him blatantly in the first years of his rule.

Does it look familiar? But you, knowing the play well, haven't paid attention to this short dialogue, have you? Yes, me too. Even a month ago. And now, after the mysterious death of the traffic policeman, when law enforcers ran wild and carried out state raids on the Belarusian gypsies, "The Dragon" was different as if it was written yesterday and not seventy-five years ago. Of course, gypsies! They are foes of any state system, the dragon told the people about it.

I understand one can object: they have a terrible dragon in their fairy tales, but here we have riffraff lagging behind the dragon. It may be true. Only the dragon there looks not real. It embodies not power, but meanness, not fire breath, but marsh stench, not power, but petty nastiness. Only mankind could breed such a dragon. And it stews in its own juice for centuries.

And every time it seems like an outbreak, an explosion, a spasm is about to happen, and it's over. But it goes on. Dragons always come back in a new guise. Because every heinous beast out of the human race certainly dream of being a dragon when it grows older. To do this, the beast goes to work in the riot police, or in the NKVD, or in the Gestapo, or the inquisition - every time there is a room for it. Fortunately, in any era, this beast loses all its heads and has its fat carcasses on the roadway. So one can watch endlessly not only water and fire. One can also observe the murder of a dragon. Although it is better to kill it together.

Iryna Khalip, especially for Charter97.org

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