Pig: A Thriller (3 page)

             
"Never mind," Pig said. "He's strong. He'll live. And if he doesn’t, he’s just a fucking document clerk. It’s not like they cost much to replace. Six of one, 8.3 times 4.21 divided by 5.8 of the other."
It was Pig’s opinion that Snow’s only skill was taking in cold water and pissing out hot.
Peredoviki
, “
model worker,
”
he constantly mocked him.

Blunter than a bathroom limerick, the Camp Boss, a man whom the blind might easily confuse for a home freezer,  was rumoured to be able to throw a grenade seventy metres, do fifty chin-ups at a clip, and masturbate six times a day each and every day
. It was also said that he had a
woody that women could do chin-ups on.
The only use he had for the word “sensitive” was on a condom wrapper.

Pig always knew exactly what to do -- with utter conviction -- even when he was wrong, which was most of the time
; a
self-appointed expert on any subject you could name, he’d rather tell you his opinion than take your money; no, he’d rather do both.
He was incapable of walking past a pie without sticking a finger in it
Moody, gay, soulful, brave -- and very impressive -- he was a creature straight out of Russian literature.
He could have played middle linebacker for the Roman Empire.
All
ego and testicles (ego-testicle
; Magda would have to remember to ask Snow if it was a word when he came around. If he came around)
.
The phrase described Pig to a
“
T.
”
As far as
Magda
was concerned, his character should be sent out and re-blocked, like a dented fedora, the parts had been forged in a shower of sparks on the devil’s anvil.
Frowning, she plucked one of the flowers out of the vase someone had left next to Snow’s bed. Some idiot had given him twelve, an even dozen. Everyone knew that even numbers of flowers were only given at funerals; even numbers of flowers were for the dead, and Snow wasn’t dead yet.

             
Magda wasn’t much to look at. You could pass her at the ballet, at the market, or on the Metro without a second glance. Kinky red
-cum-white
hair cascaded down a straight back that tapered down to ea
rthy legs stout as birch trees, her skin the colour of sweet hickory smoke.
Her hair stuck out everywhere like loose promises, even under her arms and out of her panty line.

Once a hard-body in the
gulag
– through a combination of forced work and restricted calori
es
-- Magda Perskanski
now
took great pride in being a “chub.” She was that most disconcerting of combinations, a closed face attached to an open mind. Pleasantly plump from living on perogies,
pertsovka
and
perpetual
disappointment, you could usually tell where she was by following the trail of Coffee Crisp wrappers
left streaming
behind her
. It was a sign of defiance. She had gotten fat as a kind of revolt.

Her face was unremarkable, plain but somehow very sensual. Perhaps it was the way she enjoyed each moment for itself, enjoying it for its own sake. She had a huge, heroic nose and a voice low and cat’s-tongue rough.  Her breasts were too heavy for her to run with them unencumbered
, pendulous and purple-tipped.
When she did
run
– not
often these days, she
never
used her body for much after the camps for much more than to carry her head around, which is where she lived most of the time now --
they jiggled in the natural shape of a figure eight.
U
nder her skirt was a large, low-slung bottom, h
er large, dusky triangle beckon
ing
like eggplant from beneath her
hem
.
“Friends” in the camps had said Magda did too much thinking. Most of those were long dead.

Soon after they’d met just after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Pig had asked Magda which political camp she belonged to, the Communists or the Capitalist
s
.

“
The Kolyma camp
,”
she’d answered. As in Kolyma
, home
of the
gulag
.
She had been given the gift of not having an ideology.
A loose cannon in a camp of tight assholes, Magda
Timofeyeva
Perskanski
was of the opinion that everything happened for
a reason. Except maybe baseball, which she found utterly comprehensible.
That’s why she never questioned why she had been sent to the
prison camps
or complained about wasting her youth in them.

"You think you were too good for them," Pig had once accused her. “The camps.”
Other than seeing them as useful receptacles for his semen, Pig was disgusted by women, trailing Kleenex and Tampax everywhere they went.
She smelt the musk of diesel,
vodka
and something unidentifiable on him. It was not an aphrodisiac. If she was waiting for some show of pity out of him
for Snow’s condition
, she should have brought a sandwich.

“Too good,” he’d accused. But instead of getting angry, Magda had only sh
aken
her
head and
told him, no, what bothered her was that she hadn't been good enough. She hadn't earned it. Only Russia's best got to go to the
gulag
. She didn’t even belong in th
at
class. All she’d done was to refuse to manipulate isotopes, not people.

Being Slavic, Magda Perska
nski disliked many other people
, but never for anything as inconsequential as religion or the colour of their skin. People liked her because when it came to skin colour, nationality, ideology, social status, money, politics, sexual orientation or religion she truly did not care. Magda Perskanski didn’t give a shit whether you were white, red, black or maple walnut. The church to which she belonged was the one she carried deep inside herself.

Maple walnut. Yummm!

A
graduate student at M.I
.
P
.
T. – Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, known as P
hystech,
the U.S.S.R.’s
version of
M.I.T. --
Magda had been expelled and sent to Kolyma on charges of
treason against the State.
Upon graduation, she’d received her
napravleniye
, just like every other Soviet university graduate, assigning her to her new place of work, a
branch o
f the Soviet arms industry developing new weapons of destruction.
When she refused, they sent her to the
gulag
instead.
A physicist, she’d committed the heinous crime of wanting to make ploughshares, not bombs.