Moscow Noir (15 page)
She knew that two of the ninth-grade students—Chuniaev and Golotsvan—had committed a murder. Danaë accidentally overheard their lively chatter, their voices brimming with real euphoria. The boys were cheerfully, ecstatically exchanging impressions. The Creator himself, it would seem, had experienced such rapture in the first hours after the creation of the world. But these two—Chuniaev and Golotsvan—had simply murdered a bum the previous night. With the aid of the homeless man they had been demonstrating to each other various martial arts strikes and holds, and finally martial-arted the man to death. Danaë also had previous opportunities to hear about this type of entertainment of the idle but energetic youth from families who considered themselves successful. The Perovo police took on the search for the homeless-cides with some reluctance. More precisely: they began the search reluctantly and then, after a few hours, dropped it completely. The Perovo police had much luckier corpses to track—ones with relatives and square-footage.
But the corpse of that bum did not vanish without glory: it had a short but successful career as an actor in an anatomical theater. The medical students showered him with bouquets of twinkling scalpels …
She was impressed that her students—Chuniaev and Golotsvan—were not only falling behind in every subject, while also, as it turned out, committing murders. This permitted her hatred toward them to acquire some firm ground. The testosterone was jumping out of Chuniaev’s and Golotsvan’s mouths, ears, noses, and even from under their fingernails …
Once, on television, she saw a news segment about a group of students who raped and murdered their phys-ed teacher. This happened somewhere on the outskirts of the city, which Danaë, a Muscovite, could imagine about as vaguely as she could the Flemish city of Brabant. Watching Golotsvan as he shuffled at the blackboard with his hands in the pockets of his wide jeans, which were covered with chains and trinkets, Danaë imagined him, with hands shaking, hastily unbuttoning his foul-smelling pants and throwing himself at her with his horn-shaped prick. She, Danaë, is lying crucified in the tar, naked, while Golotsvan’s partners in crime hold her by the arms and legs; she struggles in their trap like a deer knocked onto her back. First Golotsvan, and then the rest of the goons, one by one, press against her with their unwashed genitalia, toss on her for a bit, then sprinkle her with what God gave them, and … experience a piercing guilt. Then, ashamed, they break her neck, or choke her with a wire, or stab her to death with penknives …
“And that’s all you deigned to learn, venerable Golotsvan?”
“I didn’t have time, Dana Innokentievna, my cat had kittens last night.”
“How many did she have?”
“Six. Would you like a kitten, Dana Innokentievna?”
“Take a seat, Golotsvan. You get a ‘satisfactory.’”
“Why ‘satisfactatory’? Please, Dana Innokentievna—”
“Take your seat.”
Grumbling under his breath, with his lower lip jutting forward, Golotsvan went back to his seat, jangling the chains and trinkets on his foul-smelling pants. His hands in his pockets. Danaë picked up a piece of chalk and turned to the board.
“Jewish bitch …” Golotsvan muttered.
Without turning around, Danaë grinned at the mouse-gray smoothness of the chalkboard. A thought came to her:
What would happen if I take this here piece of chalk and on this very blackboard write something really special. Like, for example, “May you all be damned.” What would happen? Probably nothing. They’d all exchange glances and squeeze out puzzled little smirks, like lambs catching a whiff of the fire being lit under the spit. Besides, they were all damned long ago.
And she was too. Danaë herself had been damned even before the students sitting in this classroom. Because she was older than them. Almost three times older. There’s your arithmetic for you, in a literature class. In the Perovo neighborhood. In a state school, in the city of Moscow, compared to which Brabant was just a pathetic little village of five houses and one toilet.
It would be natural to assume that since Danaë had a father, she also had a mother. Danaë didn’t like assumptions, particularly if they came from strangers. First of all, the mom she did in fact have at some point, she had no longer. Second, Mom loved her little Danaë for only a very short time: from zero to nine years old, plus the nine months that she spent carrying her daughter in her womb. And when the nine years were over, Mom placed a big down pillow on her sleeping daughter’s pretty little face, and then sat on top of it. Dad had lifted Mom off the pillow—and thus also off the red face of their daughter—just in time. After that, Danaë never saw her mom again. With the exception of that one time, which she had mostly forgotten: she and her dad had, it seems, visited Mom in some sort of yellow basement that smelled like medical syringes. Now, of course, Danaë knows all too well, and had known it for twenty-plus years, that the awful trick with the down pillow secured for Mom her demise in the mad house.
“Mom loves you,” Karaklev assured his nine-year-old daughter as she cried herself to sleep. “She just needs a little medical treatment and she’ll be with us again. Mom loves you.”
“And do
you
love me?” Danaë asked, smearing the tears with her little fist.
“And I do too,” Dad replied, taken aback that she would question his feelings. “Very, very, very much. Daddy loves his little pea, his clever girl.”
* * *
Innokentii Karaklev was becoming more and more capricious, more cancerlike. More foul-smelling. Worst of all, Daddy started to recount aloud his past life, and specifically those moments that a healthy person would not only not recall, but would actively try to forget. The long period of dying had debased him. Instead of becoming more pious, he was transformed into a cynic to a degree that is rarely found among the camp of dying organisms. This is what Innokentii Karaklev said to his daughter Danaë on that day it rained cats and dogs, such a heavy, pounding rain that the pigeons caught in it received concussions. The neighborhood of Perovo looked like a boundless, cracked aquarium into which poured the water from a thousand hoses in the sky.
“I slept with your mother. I did it with all my passion. I drilled her and drilled her and then you emerged from her belly like a wild troll from a mangled cave … Admit it, my child, from the very beginning you never liked it here.”
“No, I liked it here. From the very beginning. You’re mistaken, Daddy,” Danaë answered, listening with one ear to the hammering rain. “Fools like you are always mistaken. You’re made of mistakes. You have a fatal error dangling right there between your legs.”
Innokentii Karaklev watched the rivulets of rain running down the windowpane.
“Listen, child …” he muttered, swallowing dryly, “try to be … happy. I’m so sick of you being unhappy … I’m dying because of your unhappiness.”
“You’re dying because of cancer,” corrected Danaë, sticking a cigarette in the corner of her smirk.
They were both silent awhile, thirty-five seconds or so. The smoke from Danaë’s cigarette coiled around itself in the dark room like a scrap of seaweed.
“Do you know why I left your mother?” said Dad, scratching his sunken cheek. “Because of this one student. A handsome rogue. He was excellent at poker, had a thing for chemistry and water polo. Yes sir, my little pea, he always had jokers in store. His glass vials often exploded from overheating, and he swam in a mauve swim cap. Your mother found us—I was on my knees, polishing his … with my mouth …”
“His
what?
” Danaë turned to stone.
“His
that!
” He made a strange noise and squinted his colorless eyes at his daughter.
“Daddy …” Danaë stonily sounded out the words. “Are you saying you were a homosexual?”
An astonishing picture took shape in her mind: her dying father sucking the penis of Golotsvan, the flunk, the murderer.
“That’s how it went … sometimes. And who didn’t get into some of it? In one’s youth, in the barracks, after a bout of drinking, in one’s dreams—”
“Did you actually love my mother?”
“Yes, my little pea, yes …” Innokentii Karaklev nodded his hairless head. “You are the result of a grandiose love, a gale-force diffusion. The cells were jumping out of our bodies and mixing together. Such passion, it shook the atmosphere. Those were breathtaking, mind-numbing times.”
“And what about that student?” Danaë asked, watching the column of ash crumble from her cigarette onto the rug. “What was his name?”
“Andrei. Yes, yes. It was a breathtaking passion.” Her dad smacked his lips and purred like a cat. “Absolute diffusion. Overflowing excitement. To near suffocation. More a miracle than a passion.”
“Did you love my mother?” Danaë prodded in a steely voice. “Answer me. I don’t understand.” She now imagined her dad’s hairless head laboring over the perineum of the flunking murderer Golotsvan.
“I loved them both very deeply,” answered Innokentii Karaklev. “And about twenty others. I loved everyone. And every time it was a miracle.”
Danaë took a drag on her cigarette and fixed a vacant stare on the window. A lustful blush broke in crimson across Golotsvan’s cheeks, his eyes turning back in his head, his moans encouraging her dad’s frail, hairless head with its decaying mouth.
“And me?” Danaë asked almost inaudibly.
Her dad’s wrinkles suddenly turned smooth and he answered: “You are my little pea. My favorite book. Plus Louis Armstrong. And Fellini. Plus my favorite
olivier
salad. And all the Egyptian pyramids and the ruins of the great castles. You understand me? You are also the lily pads on the pond where I swam when I was just a little kid … Plus God, whatever He may actually turn out to be. My little pea. Danaë. Come here, give me a kiss.”
Danaë quickly crushed her cigarette butt in the ashtray, walked over to him on legs she could barely feel, and pressed her cheek into Daddy’s lips.
“You too,” she whispered, “dying one … Daddy …”
Golotsvan was done. But the rain in the neighborhood of Perovo wasn’t about to finish. Danaë moved to the kitchen, leaving her dad to stare out the gray window covered with heavenly moisture …
She struck him with a meat hammer, with the burled side. Danaë knew beforehand that just once on the head wouldn’t be enough. Neither would two. During the process she realized that it would be enough only when she had lost count for the third time. Then she stood there listening, without looking. She imagined a monitor with a wan green image of her dad’s threadlike pulse. Then she dropped the hammer, went to the kitchen, washed her hands, went to the hallway, grabbed her bag of notebooks, came back to the kitchen, sat down at the table, and began grading papers. After a half hour she was sick of it. She moved into her dad’s room, turned on the light (it had grown dark outside, but the rain was still pouring down), and peered at him. Innokentii Karaklev was sitting in the same armchair, but tilted over on his side so that his knuckles were trapped against the rug. His thoroughly beaten head was glazed in its own juices.
Danaë decided to leave everything as it was, at least for now, until she took a bath with some fragrant salts. Salts always had a positive effect on her body. Sitting on the edge of the tub and looking into a mirror, Danaë pronounced: “This is easy.”
Later she was told that she’d gone mad. Just like her mom. Those who said it were right. She knew it and she’d reply: “And you’re all bastards, bastards, all of you.” It’s possible that she was right too.
Translated by Marian Schwartz
J
acob hung there, his shoes scraping the parquet floor spasmodically. “Papa, stop!” he rasped, trying to untangle the string of lights around his neck, while German, suspecting nothing, kept pulling the garland tighter and tighter thinking there wasn’t much time left and the house decorations still weren’t finished.
There should be a comma after “tighter,” Yulia noted in the margin, then set her pencil down and rubbed her temples. As usual, the words were swimming before her eyes. They would keep swimming for another half hour, until Yulia put on her coat, picked up her purse, and left the publishing house. She put drops in her eyes. I’m going to have to move on to glasses pretty soon, she thought sadly.
As Yulia left the Barrikadnaya metro station, the heavy glass doors swung closed behind her with a loud wallop.
She heaved a distraught sigh, her head finally clearing after the stench of the sweaty underground crowd and their identical faces, on each of which she distinctly read:
IhateyouIhateeveryone
. Her black sweater was stuck to her body, the harsh wool bristly. What was it knit from? It pricked her armpits and back.
Yulia wiped the sweat from her forehead and made her habitual motion of smoothing down her jacket.
Her wallet was gone.
She had her cell phone. Here it was, on the right. But her wallet was missing.
Frightened, Yulia looked from side to side, feverishly trying to figure out who might have relieved her of her salary and bonus and where, when, and how.
Yulia moved forward on cotton legs and leaned her shoulder against one of the vans selling burned
chebureki
and sausages wrapped in pastry. Any other time the smell of the tainted meat would have turned her inside out, but the thought of the money drowned out every other consideration.
How was she going to live now?
Go to the police? Yulia laughed nervously. A lady walking by, wearing a gray puffer coat, gave her a nasty look and sent a tut-tutting curse her way. Rush back, down there, into the bowels of the underground, wrest her money back (from whom, dear Yulia?), howl …? Pretty funny.
She gathered all her strength and walked on. Toward her building.
She moved past the
chebureki
and pirated-CD vans, past the crazy Gothic high-rise with the gargoyle faces. She gazed, sick at heart, at one of the faces, which looked down on her haughtily. Yulia sighed and plodded on. A frigid wind whistled down her jacket collar; her scratchy black sweater wasn’t keeping the cold out. She stopped next to the American consulate, but she didn’t have the strength to take another step forward, even though it was just a few more meters to her building. A dreary line stretched out from the consulate door.
Jacob took the hacksaw and, panting, began sawing off his mama’s head. The hacksaw was hard to work, and the sweetish spurts made Jacob frown …
The words raced through Yulia’s mind.
A guard with a badge bore his little piggy eyes into Yulia, and his muscles tensed to lunge. Yulia came to her senses and hurried on.
She tumbled like a sack into her apartment, having begun to slump in the elevator. Now she was sitting, drained, leaning against the doorjamb, moaning softly, and tears were pouring down of their own accord, dripping on her jacket.
Her Siamese cat ran up on his soft paws. His slanted blue eyes watched Yulia carefully.
“Barsik,” she moaned faintly. “Sweet Barsik … I got robbed. Barsik. We have nothing to eat and nothing to live on.”
Barsik rubbed his round head against Yulia’s leg. And meowed.
Her phone rang. Yulia took it out of her pocket with trembling hands and pushed the button.
“Yulia darling.” It was Oleg.
“Hi,” she answered, trying to buck up, wiping away her tears and getting up from the floor.
“How’re things, my dear?” Oleg sang sweetly.
“Kind of … strange.” Yulia tried to quash her sobbing. “Today they fired our second proofreader … Mikhail Ivanich … You don’t know him. And he … he left calmly enough. But when I went into the metro … I saw … imagine, Oleg, he took a running jump right … right in front of a train.”
“What?” Oleg gasped, though there was more curiosity in his voice than concern.
“He took a running jump … He was standing in the middle of the platform … and when the train started coming out of the tunnel … he jumped.”
“Are you kidding?”
“No. Also … you know … when he jumped he knocked over a stroller … and he and the stroller … fell.”
“What was in the stroller?” Oleg’s curiosity was growing.
“A child,” Yulia sobbed. “And then … when the train pulled out … Mikhail Ivanich and the stroller were lying there on the track … Mikhail Ivanich was still twitching, but the child didn’t have a head … There was just the horrible scream of its mother.”
Yulia caught her breath. It must have been someone in the crowd that gathered who stole her wallet.
“What happened then?” Oleg asked.
Yulia felt like telling him how she’d been jostled in the crowd, how someone’s cold insolent hand had slipped into her pocket for her wallet. Not that Yulia knew exactly what kind of hand it was, hot or cold, but that was exactly how she thought of it: someone’s cold, bony, malicious hand.
Jacob started twisting her arm out of the shoulder socket but got nowhere; he hadn’t sawed all the way through the flesh …
Jacob again! Yulia was getting angry.
“Nothing,” she replied with a sigh, and got a grip on herself. “Nothing else. I feel sorry for Mikhail Ivanich. But everything else is fine.”
“Good,” Oleg said quickly. “You know, I’m hungry as a wolf! I’m on Paveletskaya right now. I’ve got some business to do. I’m selling a picture. But I’ll come right over after that.”
“All right.” Yulia nodded and ended the call. She thought sadly,
So this is what we’ve come to.
There was no food in the house. No money whatsoever. Yulia was one of those people who drags out the last three or four days before her paycheck and by payday has absolutely nothing left in the house.
Oleg, however, had one quirk: food. There always had to be some. And food always meant meat. Salad wasn’t food. When Yulia met Oleg Bekas at his gallery and got to talking to him over a cup of coffee with brandy, he immediately informed her of this quirk. That—dinner not being made—was why he’d left his wife (now his ex) and his infant child. The baby’s name was Sevochka Bekas and his wife’s was Marina. Oleg came home from the gallery one day and there was nothing on the table. Marina’s brown eyes stared at him guiltily as she held Sevochka, who was burning up with fever, to her breast. “Sevochka got sick,” she said. “I didn’t have time.” Oleg gnashed his teeth, turned on his heel, and left. Softened by the brandy, Yulia nodded, as if to say
, Rightly so. What kind of a wife doesn’t cook for her husband?
“You have to understand, I’m an artist,” Oleg explained. “I’m not some low-brow proletarian. I have the right to put myself first.” Yulia nodded.
A week later she learned from common acquaintances that on that fateful day Marina picked up Sevochka, who was still burning up with fever, wrapped him tightly in her robe, and went out to the balcony barefoot. It was snowing, and Sevochka quieted down and peeked out of her robe. Snowflakes were melting on his cheeks. “Pretty?” Marina asked. Sevochka goo-gooed approvingly. Marina climbed onto the railing, holding her son to her breast, and from there, from the sixteenth floor, to the dumbfounded looks of the group smoking on the next balcony over, she jumped.
When she first heard this, Yulia just shook her head. Foolish woman Marina. Who jumps off over men?
But right now she was ready to do the same thing. Pick up Barsik, hold him tight to her breast, and leap from her sixth floor, right in front of the dumbfounded visitors at the Metelitsa casino. Because she no longer had the emotional strength to be left not only walletless but also Oleg Bekasless.
Yulia worked as a proofreader in a publishing house. Her only connection to art was through grammar. For days on end Yulia read other people’s words very, very carefully. And corrected them. She felt like a worker who hammers a nail into a wall to hang a painting that gives off a divine light. But what kind of light does a nail give off? None whatsoever. Oleg was an artist, though, and canvases came to life in his hands. Even a sheet of notebook paper. Yulia couldn’t do that. She could only go word by word, like an infinite rosary, barely penetrating the meaning of what was written.
She fell in love with Oleg once and for all (though she had never believed in love at first sight and in her youth had often snickered at her more naïve girlfriends). With Yulia it was all very simple. Like him—hook up—go to a café—go to bed. Love? Who cared about love? As long as he had a fat wallet and a generous nature. Maybe that’s why Yulia hadn’t been through any emotional upheavals before Oleg. She hooked up and split up with a cold heart and a clear head. Like a chekist. But here was Oleg. An artist. A creator. Someone from another world where they don’t hammer nails but drink to Brüderschaft with God almighty … Yulia saw him in the gallery and fell hard. Her heart broke off and slowly dropped to the pit of her stomach.
Yulia went out on the balcony. The lights of New Arbat spread out right there in front of her. Here was a huge building with a web of lights like an open book. Here was a casino in the shape of a ship; here was another casino, and another. Expensive cars, lots of people. Sometimes Yulia dreamed of flying from her window and landing right on that ship burning with blue lights—and then sailing off to distant lands, where she and Oleg would live together in a cabin and have three children.
Jacob climbed onto the stepladder and tried to hang his mama’s head on the Christmas star, but the star was so fragile, and his mama’s head was so heavy, that …
The words raced through her mind again and Yulia mechanically finished up:
that the boy couldn’t hold it there and the head came crashing down, cracking loudly on the parquet floor.
Yulia didn’t feel so good. Usually she didn’t remember all the words to the texts she proofread, and now there was this flood. I’ll ask them to give me a different novel, she thought. And I’ll give this one to Mikhail Ivanich … Damn, he’s gone … Everyone’s gone …
Yulia let out another sigh and looked at the clock. She had approximately an hour and a half until Oleg’s arrival. She went into the kitchen and opened the cupboard. Then the refrigerator, and then the cabinets over the sink. The old fairy tale about Roly-Poly came to mind. I’ll scrape the bottom of the barrel, Yulia chuckled to herself. Her soul was being torn to shreds.
Her search was crowned with a near-empty bottle of sunflower oil, a piece of dried-out French bread, and an almost full bottle of vodka—Yulia gave Barsik vodka compresses when he was sick. She mechanically twisted off the tight lid and sipped some vodka straight from the bottle.
Jacob sat down on the chair and looked at her intently. His blue eyes said
, Come on. It’s so easy. Easy as pie.
Anna fidgeted. “Maybe we can leave Thomas alone?” she asked. “Do you want to spoil the whole game?” Jacob scowled. He fiddled with the cord of his checkered shorts. “No,” Anna answered in fear. “Then stand up and do it,” Jacob said gently. “And don’t forget this.”
Compresses for Barsik.
Barsik.
Anna went over to Thomas’s crib. He was looking at his mobile. “Jake, I can’t get to him,” she said. “The crib’s too high.” “I’ll bring a chair!” Jacob responded. A minute later Anna was climbing onto the chair and looking down at Thomas. “So pretty,” she said softly. “Of course he’s pretty,” Jacob agreed. “But that’s completely beside the point.” “Yes,” Anna said. “Is the water hot enough?” Jacob inquired. “You understand what I mean when I ask if the water’s hot enough, right?” “Yes, Jake. It’s boiling.” Anna raised the kettle, screwed up her eyes, and upended it on Thomas. A piercing shriek filled the nursery.
Yulia shook her head, driving out the terrible thoughts, and took another swig of vodka. The thoughts returned.
What’s the big deal? Yulia thought. The big deal is that I would never survive Oleg leaving me.
She gave herself a good shake and stumbled into the bathroom on wobbly legs. A second later she came out clutching a mop.
“Puss puss puss,” Yulia called faintly, glancing around the room.
Barsik jumped out from behind the couch. Yulia caught him in her arms and moved out to the balcony. There she lay the cat on the tile floor. Barsik stayed there obediently, watching her with his slanted little blue eyes.
“I’m proud of you,” said Jacob. “Don’t howl.” “I can’t not howl. This is Thomas after all. He’s still little and it hurts,” Anna said, weeping. Jacob hugged his sister. He glanced at his little brother screaming in anguish in his crib with a piece of red meat where his face had been. “You see, Anna, he shouldn’t suffer. We’re going to save him.” Jacob moved away from his sister and took the screaming Thomas out of his crib. He put him on the rug. “Did you bring what I said?” “Yes,” Anna answered obediently. Jacob took the golf club from her hands. He stepped back a little and took aim. He raised the club high over his head, then lowered it with a whistle at Thomas’s head, which cracked like a watermelon.
Yulia placed the mop handle against Barsik’s neck. Then she held onto the railing and jumped with all her might on the handle. There was a crunch and Barsik’s eyes popped out of their sockets and a wheeze tore from his throat. His little pink tongue jutted out to the side.
Yulia exhaled violently and nearly ran to the kitchen to crush the grief inside her with vodka. The firewater lashed her throat. She was sobbing.
“Don’t cry, Anna,” Jacob said calmly. “They’ll buy another rug, and I tell you, they aren’t going to yell at you. Now it’s your turn.” “Jackie, let’s watch television,” Anna said. “I don’t like playing with you anymore.”
Out the window, the ship-casino was bathed in blue lights. In the kitchen, Yulia skinned the carcass convulsively, tossing the fur onto an opened newspaper.
