Pig: A Thriller (19 page)

A hacking cough shook Magda’s ample frame as she twisted the loose ends of a
papirosi
together -- coarse cardboard tubes filled with loose tobacco -- managing to spill only a few of the coarse grains on the cracked table top. It was
makhorka
, some kind of awful black shag that only faintly resembled tobacco. The walls of the place were varnished by nicotine.

"What are you reading?" Snow asked, forgetting she’d already answered that question. The mushrooms were making their way through his cranium. “Did you know that in the Inuit language, the words for ‘to breathe’ and ‘to make a poem’ are the same? That they have fifty two words for the concept of snow?”

“Yeah?” said Magda. “Did you know Sanskrit has forty words to describe altered states of consciousness? That in their language the verb ‘to be’ is the same as the verb ‘to grow’?”

             
“No, I didn’t. I didn’t know that.”

"Mandelstam."

“Huh?”

             
“You asked who I’m reading. I’m reading Mandelstam,” Magda said, as if she hadn’t already answered differently before.  “The Inuit are the only culture in the world with no native intoxicants. That’s because they live in a world with no plants.”

"He's good? Mandelstam?"  Snow never noticed the change.

"Good? Osip was one of immortals, famous for claiming that the people needed poetry as much as they needed bread. And he was right. They do."

"Was?" Snow asked. "He's dead?"

"Dead," confirmed Magda. "The life sucked out of him in one of the camps for a fourteen line poem that mocked Stalin as 'the Kremlin mountaineer,' a murderer with 'cockroach whiskers leer' and 'fingers fat as grubs.' There's no killing the soul of a poet, though. There are probably as many Russians that remember Mandelstam as there are that remember Stalin. Here, let me tell you how good he was. Nadezhda, his wife's name was, but he never called her that. He had a dozen pet names for her. One day it would be Nadik. The next it was Nadya or Nadka. Another day it would be Nadenka, Nadyusha, Nanusha, Nadyushik, Nanochka, Nadenysh, or Niakushka. Twelve names in all. That's a poet."

"It's important to you? Poetry?”

She didn't answer. To a Russian, the answer was self-evident. If the masses numbed themselves in vodka, intellectuals drowned themselves in books. In a country without philosophers, talk show hosts, folk singers, legitimate psychologists or priests, poets were can openers in the bare supermarket of Soviet life.

At least they used to be. These days they broadcast porn on CCTV channels and encouraged sixteen-year-old girls to pump their breasts up with saline or silicone.

Snow didn't like the cigarette smoke, she could see that. "I'm sorry,” she apologized. “I'd like to quit, but I can't kick the habit. I picked it up in Magadan. It cut the hunger."

“I’m afraid my Russian geography is almost as bad as my knowledge of Russian literature. Where’s Magadan?”

“It’s in Kolyma
oblast
.”

"A place with a name that ugly doesn't sound like much fun. If it’s that hard to pronounce it must be a very small town.”

“It's a very large prison," spat Magda. "And no, it wasn't much fun”

             
"The
gulag
? I thought they went out long ago?"

"Ask Sharansky when they went out. Ask the millions who don't even have names anymore. They took even them, everything.

“Ask my father,” she said so quietly Snow didn’t catch it.

“Your fingers,” he said, the truth dawning. “They did that to you in prison. You were in the camps.”

“Of course I was in the camps,” she declared with equal parts pride, resentment and regret. “How else could I turn out like this?”

He sat silently, watching the smoke curl off the twisted end of the
papirosi
, not knowing what to say.  He had trouble picturing her as one of the lost souls; she was more alive than anyone he knew.

“I didn’t know,” was all he could manage in the end.

“No,” Magda answered. “How could you? How could anyone know what another person is going through? Every man’s hell is a private club. Every woman’s, too.”

“What are you reading?” Snow asked yet again, the mushrooms taking control now, the omni-present books pushing past everything else; past, present and future no longer existing.

“Minds,” answered Magda. “Tonight, I am reading minds.”

“Magadan,” Snow prompted. “The
gulag
.”

She turned away and busied herself with a potted plant on the window sill, butting the
papirosi
into the damp soil. "It's not something I talk about a lot."

"But you're telling me now."

"You're asking."

For the first time since they’d met Snow looked at Magda, really looked at her, seeing her differently, the lightning-flavoured molecules in the mushrooms shifting his point of view to a new angle, perhaps more equivalent to a few molecules out of kilter than stepping a few feet to the left. She was dressed in a Chukchi
kerker
, a knee-length coverall made from reindeer skin and trimmed with wolverine fur that fit her about as well as the English language fit her thoughts. Typical of all Russian women out of adolescence, she had more of anything than she once had, but nothing was out of proportion. She was sufficiently Siberian to have an Oriental sharpness to her face, sufficiently Slavic to have a padding of voluptuousness to her frame

For the first time in a long time, he noticed a woman’s breasts. He could feel them pressing into him from four feet across the room. Suddenly, he was afraid. She harboured too much cynicism, which wasn’t good because he needed to be the cynical one. Despite all her wisdom, she was like all the rest of her kind: needy and sexy and emotional and loving and possessed of the knowledge of how to hurt him. She was starting to make him care. And that gave her to power to hurt.

“Hey, you wanna go put on your pajamas or something?”

“No, I’m good,” said Magda. What she never said was that she went to bed buck naked every night, no matter the temperature and the clothing available. After years of going to bed prepared to be awakened in the dead of night by cold men in dark uniforms, she’d decided to hell with it. She was going to get on with her life.

“I want to be an elephant,” Snow said spontaneously, unbidden by thought. 

“You can only be what you are meant to be,” Magda said. “What you already are.”

“Why does Pig hate you?” Snow asked.

“Because of what I did in the camps. What I did to survive.”

“That was a long time ago.”

             
“Guilt don’t tell time.”

             
“He didn’t put you there. Why should he feel guilty?”

             
“Because his kind did.”

             
“Is that why you hate him?”

             
“I don’t hate him.”

             
“It sure looks that way.”

             
“I wouldn’t give him kind of power.”

             
“What do you mean?”

             
“‘The mind is everything,’” quoted Magda. “‘What you think you become.’”

             
“Lenin?” asked Snow.

             
“
Siddhartha Gautama
,” answered Magda. “The Buddha.”

“Great. First elephants, now the Buddha. What’s next, vultures picking bones on top of the Himalayas?”

“No. Science. I told you. I’m a physicist. You haven’t gotten me talking about that yet.”