Pig: A Thriller (17 page)

His fist struck the wall beside her head, trailing plaster as he pulled it bleeding from the wall.  “How do you think I feel,” he demanded. “Pisssed!  What gives the right to take my stuff? I feel angry. Mad.” He was trembling, shaking, his body unready to handle the unfamiliar onslaught of unexpected feeling.

“At least you feel,” she said unexpectedly, gently catching his fist and bringing it to her lips. There was a different look in her eyes, something he’d seen often in the mirror: pain. “Come inside and I’ll bandage that.”

“I feel….” he sobbed, unable to continue.

“Yes, you feel,” she soothed. “How long has it been since you’ve been able to say that?”

“I don’t like it,” Snow sobbed.

“I didn’t take the clock,” Magda said. “Just so we’re clear.”

“The rest?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Come inside,” she replied.

“What do you think you were doing out there?” Magda asked.

“Knocking?” Snow said lamely, looking at his injured fist. He saw that he had gotten her wrong; he had been so eager to notice her cynicism he had forgotten to see her intelligence and caring. “Teach you how it’s done. In case you didn’t know.”

“A joke,” she applauded, clapping her hands together mockingly. “I am honoured. You see what progress we are making already? Only one day and I already have you making jokes. When was the last time you told a joke?”

Snow ignored her and looked around. The place smelled of freshly-made borscht.  It was almost all kitchen, with a small partition on the side that doubled as sitting and bedroom. The walls were doing double duty, too, serving as the backbone of an elaborate system of bookshelves constructed from broken orange crates and twisted railroad ties. Books were interleaved with their open edges together, each marking a place in the other, and in worms of six or eight volumes with each spine thrust into the open edge of the next. Cards and sheets of paper, some of them covered with cryptic notes, marked other places. The room was nearly bursting with cartons of food, electronics and makeup people had brought for the Deficit Exchange Club. Besides the usual volumes of Marx, Engels, and Stalin, there were entire collections of poetry: Zamyiatin, Mandelstam, and Blok Other than the stove and the bed, the apartment was one huge bookshelf. The only exception was a picture of the crowds greeting Lenin outside Finland Station in 1917. And another of an elephant swimming.

"I take it you like to read," Snow commented, his eyes sweeping up and down the rows of books. The woman had more books in her than he had had hot meals. .

"What I really like is understanding,” Magda said. Two books were sitting on Magda’s kitchen table:
The
Wealth
of
Nations
and
Das
Kapital
. As if she were trying to figure out for herself which one had it right. She walked over to the window and closed the blinds. “Not that I claim to. What I really wish is that people acted the way they do in books: cause and effect, cause and effect. Instead, they act like water bugs on a pond’s surface. You never know what crazy thing they will do. Like put their fist through my wall. You never know. At least in the books I know."

“What are you reading?” Snow asked.

“Right now, I’m reading
War
and
Peace
. I could lend it to you. There's a fair amount of action. Not a bad book. Quite a bit like
Desperate
Housewives
, actually. You could make a great soap opera out of it. Will Natasha run off with the wicked Kuragin? Will Count Pierre survive the battle of Borodino? Will Kuragin's father's fortune survive Kuragin's gambling?

“No blizzards? No ice? Large empty expanses? If I did read – and I don’t – I think that’s what I’d like about Russian literature: the vast empty cold of the forest."

"If you think Russian literature about winter is really about winter you really are stupid. Here have some soup. It’s good for your soul.” Magda’s sense of resignation matched her sense of  humour, copious, but not out of proportion. She had read perhaps too little Lenin and too much Dostoevsky.

“What kind?”

“You have more than one soul? Most people are lucky if they can find one.”

“What kind of soup?”

“Borscht. I am having beet soup. Slavs get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their fire from radishes, their seriousness from beets.”

“What I really want is a drink. Vodka.”

“No vodka. Eat your borscht. But not too much. You’re already too serious.”

             
“I’m sorry,” Snow apologized. “For losing it out there. Punching your wall.’

“‘You will not be punished for your anger,” Magda quoted. “You will be punished by your anger.’”

             
“Huh?”

“‘Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.’”

             
“The fucking Buddha again,” Snow complained.

“ I never know how you feel and I don’t think you know, either,” Magda complained. “The irony is you seem to understand perfectly how others feel and don’t have a clue about yourself. You’re smart. Damn smart. But you use your brain not to help others or further yourself but to separate yourself from the world.”

“And you think that’s wrong?”

“I think that’s a pity.”

“You don’t drink?” Snow said. “Why not?”

“Elephants.”
“Elephants again,” muttered Snow.

“Did you know that elephants eat one to two percent of their body weight each day?” Magda asked. “Most elephants spend twenty hours a day eating.”

“Coffee Crisps?” Snow teased.

“No, plants, tree bark, fruit, grass, leaves and peanuts. Marula fruit.”

             
“Did you know elephants have a complex social life? Magda asked him. “That they believe in an afterlife and spirituality?”

             
“No, I didn’t know that,” Snow smiled. “Somehow, they forgot to tell me back at school in Cowley, Alberta.”

             
“They’re the only animals besides humans and chimpanzees who can recognize themselves in a mirror. And maybe dolphins,” conceded Magda. “They can even think about past and future. They mourn their dead and even form graveyards and have funerals. When one of the elephants gets ill, the rest of the herd takes care of it, giving it food and water. They’ll even guide blind elephants around. Male elephants will go hundreds of kilometres out of their way simply to meet and socialize, older elephants passing on wisdom to younger bulls.”

             
“You were going to tell my why you don’t drink,” Snow complained. “Not about elephants.”

             
“I am,” said Magda seriously. “The reason I don’t drink is because elephants don’t drink. Well, not to excess anyway. Part of being self-aware is the desire to take mood altering substances, to stretch the mind. So, yeah, elephants will go and eat the fermented durian fruit that falls off trees. They’ll even shake the trees to get more to fall down. What they won’t do is drink strong spirits. In the lab, they won’t drink anything stronger than ten percent alcohol by volume. They prefer fermentation at seven percent. Distillation is of no interest to them.”