Moscow Noir (16 page)
Oleg arrived at 9 o’clock. By that time Yulia had washed, made herself up again, and put on a red dress. She was a little unsteady from all she’d drunk, but Oleg didn’t notice.
He lifted his nose, inhaling the aroma of the roasted meat. He slipped off his jacket, ran a handkerchief over his bald spot to wipe away the sweat, and as a final gesture smoothed his beard.
“What’s for supper?” he asked cheerfully, giving Yulia a pat on the cheek.
“R-rabbit,” she hiccupped.
“Excellent!” Oleg rubbed his hands and hurried into the kitchen. He sat down on a stool.
Yulia served him pieces and he ate it, crunching the bones and smiling contentedly, like a cat. The oil ran down his beard. Yulia sat across from him.
“Do you know which painting I sold?” he asked triumphantly, nodding at his briefcase.
“Which?”
“
Rusty Evening
!”
Yulia shuddered.
Rusty Evening
had been painted in blood. Oleg was so proud of his conceit—to create a painting two by two meters using only blood. He had bought syringes at the pharmacy and Yulia had given him blood in a skin ointment tube. It had made her head spin, but Oleg had been so pleased. “It’s all right,” he’d said. “You can take a break tomorrow. I have my mom and sister too.” His sister was all of twelve. Oleg was very proud of the fact that the picture had “virgin blood.” He drew human figures with it.
And now some “rich wuss,” as Oleg put it, had bought their blood.
“Listen,” Yulia groveled through her embarrassment, “since you got paid so well, can you lend me a little money?”
Oleg frowned. “I see,” he said nastily. “The female wiles are here. I know these crass women. They need money, not love.” He stood abruptly from the stool.
“No!” Yulia cried. “I’m not like that! I just … I just … They held back our pay. The crisis …”
“You have to be thriftier, Yulia,” Oleg preached, dropping back down on the stool. “Let this be a lesson to you. I can’t pay for your mistakes, understand? You have to save for a rainy day.”
Yulia nodded, scared. Oleg relented.
“Come here!”
Yulia rushed into his arms, breathing in his painfully intimate smell, realizing she couldn’t go on without him. She wanted to tell Oleg that something terrible had happened to her. But what would he say? She pressed up to her beloved’s chest.
Anna and Jacob went into the bathroom. “Do I have to undress?” Anna asked again. “No need for that, I don’t think,” Jacob replied. He took the cord he’d prepared beforehand out of the pocket of his checkered shorts. “Anna, you have to get in the bathtub.” “Okay,” Anna nodded obediently. “Just promise me, Jake, that our game ends here and we can go watch television in the living room.” “I promise,” Jacob said. “The game will end …”
Oleg turned off the light and was now trying to separate Yulia from her red dress, but the clasp wouldn’t yield. Oleg growled lustfully, tugging at the zipper.
Jacob quickly tied one end of the cord around the drain grill. Anna lay down on the bottom of the bathtub. Jacob tied her neck so that there was no more than five centimeters of cord between the drain grate and the girl. “Goodbye, Anna!” Jacob said, and he kissed his sister on the cheek. “Bye,” Anna nodded. “Is this going to take long?” “I think fifteen minutes is all we’ll need,” Jacob answered, and he turned on the water.
Yulia burned with desire as Oleg ripped off her panties and bra, but she was trying to drive Jacob out of her thoughts. Oleg licked her belly, arms, and face—whatever he came across—with his hot tongue.
German balanced on the edge of the roof, trying to hold onto the New Year’s garland that was slipping through his fingers like a snake. “Jacob!” he shouted. “Jacob, help me!” “I’m hurrying, Papa!” Jacob shouted in reply, stamping his boots on the roof—and with a running jump he pushed his father off.
Oleg thrust himself into Yulia, panting and moaning. Yulia tried to get into his rhythm, furiously driving him on. Goddamn you, Jacob, her brain grumbled angrily. Goddamn those novels! Goddamn this job! Goddamn this life!
Jacob carefully mopped up the floor in the living room and kitchen. He checked the chicken in the oven to make sure it hadn’t burned, then went to his room. He looked at himself in the mirror. There was an ugly red mark on his neck
. I can put on a sweater,
Jacob thought. He carefully removed his checkered shorts and put on the white pants he’d hung neatly on the back of the chair. He found his white sweater in his closet and went out into the dining room, where the utensils were already neatly set on the snow-white tablecloth on the oak table. He sat down at the head of the table
. It’s Christmas,
Jacob thought
. I’m home alone. Like in the movies.
The next morning Yulia woke up with a hangover and a nasty taste in her mouth. Her head was spinning. Oleg wasn’t next to her. Yulia rose with difficulty and walked into the bathroom. The shower brought her back to earth. She moved into the kitchen and sat down on a stool.
Life was quietly returning to her—the street noise, her neighbor’s scratchy radio, and the sound of the boiling kettle. Yulia drank plain hot water, then she went out on the balcony to clear her head. The casino-ship had turned out its lights and no trace remained of its nocturnal grandeur. Yulia smiled. Out of the corner of her eye she noticed a crowd of people below. She took a closer look.
On the asphalt, in an unnatural pose—his hands and legs turned out like a marionette—lay Oleg. Naked. Yulia blinked. Then she mechanically stepped back.
Yulia struggled for breath. She went back inside. Here they were, Oleg’s clothes. Here were his shoes. Here was his briefcase. With trembling hands Yulia unlocked it.
The briefcase was packed with bundles of euros.
It will be Christmas soon
, Yulia thought.
And I’m alone. With a stash of money. Like in the movies
.
Jacob smiled.
Translated by Amy Pieterse
H
e acted as though he had received a divine certificate verifying the fact of his brilliance from birth. While the other inhabitants of Literary House on the corner of Dobrolyubova and Rustaveli were plunged in a state of despondency that comes from the sense of a wasted life, my roommate, Tatchuk, lacked even a hint of that overpowering feeling of hopelessness.
Surfacing to earth out of Lucifer’s cowshed, otherwise known as the Moscow subway, on our way back to the dorms, I felt, as always, dejected, stunned by defeat. He seemed, as ever, pampered by good luck, an immutable, victorious smile on his lips. I hated Azerbaijanis, Russians, Moldavians, Jews, Tajiks, Ukrainians, blacks, and all other earthlings, forty thousand of whom passed through the vestibule of Dmitrovskaya station every day (with marble facings the color of a dried blood blister). He seemed to take no notice of the riffraff, cutting right through the crowd as though it were just a hologram image of a human herd.
“What’s with the gloomy face?” he asked as we were coming out of the underground crossing on Butyrsky Street. “It wasn’t my fault.”
“I didn’t say it was.”
“No, but I can tell from just looking at you that you think it is. Honestly, though, you can’t blame me for the fact that you didn’t have a single manuscript in your file! That, my man, is just plain bad luck.”
It was like this: the head of our university was approached by the organizers of a certain literary prize, who had requested a few examples of the more interesting manuscripts that the student body had produced. All of this (reading and submitting the text) had to be done in a matter of hours, because the deadline for novels and stories had almost arrived. They chose Tatchuk, myself, and one other student. They checked our files, but mine was empty. Unlike Tatchuk’s, which was stuffed full of work. So I missed my chance. A month later, I found out that my roommate was a nominee for nationwide fame, and a tidy little sum of money to boot.
The 29-K trolley pulled up to the stop and we squeezed into the coach, filled with scum and lowlifes.
“Cut it out,” he said, hunching up his shoulders squeamishly, shoving away the people crowding into the trolley. “If you want, I can help you get a job at
Profile
. Let’s go there together tomorrow, I’ll tell them you’re a better man for the job,” he suggested.
“What about you?” I said.
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll get a job in
Business Primer
, they’re offering a better salary there.”
While others spent months looking for a job, he always had a choice between four or five attractive offers. All he had to do was cross the threshold of an editorial office, and the woman in charge went wild. “What a sweet young man!” He possessed qualities that piqued the sexual interest of young ladies and mature matrons alike: a sharply defined jawline, the playful brow of a caryatid, the sweet eyes of an angel, with the muscular hands and other features characteristic of a dominant male. If you only knew the way the girls at the university stared at him adoringly, burning with desire to give themselves to him.
But the newly won position had no value for him, and he ignored the obligations it entailed. In fact, he never stayed on with the same publication for longer than three or four weeks. Yet each time he found himself another job without the least bit of effort, as if Moscow employers were constantly creating new vacancies just for him. It was as though he had some kind of aura about him, like some sort of mythical deer with jewels pouring out of its hooves. Indeed, I owed several good jobs to his lucky charm.
We got out at 2 Goncharny Proezd, passed the bookstore named, quite idiotically, Page Turner, past Pharmacy and Optics, one right after the other according to phonetic logic, and they were soon behind us.
“Let’s get something to eat,” he said, nodding at the neon sign over the grocery store where young writers went to buy ingredients for breakfast and dinner (individually wrapped crab sticks and a packet of mayonnaise, occasionally allowing themselves some disgusting treat like liverwurst, or a string of glossy, suspiciously natural-looking pink hot dogs). He bought a pound of choice ham, half a pound of Dutch cheese, canned olives, and two bottles of Chilean red wine.
“What do you think?” he said as we were leaving. “Isn’t it about time I started writing a new narrative, a story at least? I haven’t submitted anything in a while, and spring is just around the corner—exams are coming up. I’d like to do a narrative using the stylistic techniques of Nabokov and combine that with the magical realism of Márquez. What do you say?”
“How about the sexual candor of Miller,” I couldn’t resist suggesting. “Maybe you can work that in?”
“No, not Miller,” he said, flustered. “Intimacy is too vulgar in his writing. I would go for more refined love scenes. Nuanced, partly hidden in shadow. All of that
I screwed her
stuff you can save for your own writing. That’s just your speed,” he laughed. “The pornographic fantasy that never becomes reality.”
When did this begin, and why did it always happen this way? At college they called us the twins from Novoshakhtinsk. We came to the capital together, and the only time we weren’t with each other was in the bathroom. We had a deadly addiction to one another.
At last we came to our dwelling—a pale, carrot-colored, sooty, seven-floor building. You there in your faraway, big-time America, can you even imagine our Literary House, packed full of budding talents? Nope, it’s only possible in Russia: a special university dedicated to teaching young people how to put words together, minding their congruity of course. Though invisible, the nearby presence of the Ostankino TV tower can be felt here in strange ways. They say that magnetic waves coming from that accursed needle are to blame for suicidal urges among the locals. In the case of our dormitory’s inhabitants, the waves acted as a pied piper, enticing unrecognized literary genius into the realm of comfortable nonexistence. I think the whole thing is ridiculous. Magnetic fields have nothing to do with it.
Here we were in our room. An old-fashioned but functional refrigerator of a place, it sported fresh wallpaper, thick maroon curtains (that became a menacing blood-red when the light penetrated them at sunset and sunrise), a new hardwood floor, and prints of van Gogh and Bosch paintings on the walls that had been cut out of magazines by the room’s former tenants.
Having scarcely entered, he sniffed the air and said, “Hey, how many times have I told you not to smoke in the hallway outside the door? You know I can’t stand it, and you do it on purpose!”
“I was smoking by the staircase,” I replied. “But you can’t forbid other people from lighting up wherever they want. They still smoke at the end of the building by the window.”
“It wouldn’t hurt them to follow your example. Let’s rip off the
No Smoking
sign from the college bathrooms! We could hang it up next to our door. I’ve dreamed of getting one of those signs for ages. Hey, you could snatch one, couldn’t you? You’ve always been good at stealing random junk. Remember those books you stole from the school library? I didn’t tell on you; I took pity on you then. Why should I ruin your life? I thought. It may seem funny now, but back then it was a criminal offense. You should keep that in mind. What would have become of you if you’d been caught? Now you’re a student at an elite college in the capital, but you could have ended up in prison, a TB case coughing up blood … What are you laughing about? Cynic! You think you’re off the hook now? You think that because no one’s going to come after you now that you can take a deep breath and relax? What a fool you were, two years ago. What made you do it, anyway?”
“A thirst for beauty,” I said seriously. “I loved those books with an almost sensual passion. The gold lettering, the leather binding. And when I ran my hand down the page, I could feel every letter, like Braille to the blind.”
“You’re supposed to love
women
with sensual passion,” he chuckled. “Honestly, I think people like you have a knack for crime in your genes. You have the same lowly origins as the majority of people we went to school with. But you’ve done all right for yourself, you haven’t become a plebeian like the thugs back home.”
He’d had my number for half a year now, because I was guilty of childish mischief for which there was a very adult punishment. But was this the real reason I was so dependent on him?
It had all started three years before in the world of shabby apartment blocks, at our school in Novoshakhtinsk. It was a world of severe, crudely carved faces, a world of thieves, violence, and the ceaseless toil of a miner’s existence.
A world of losers and scumbags with unblinking eyes who were trained to harass the new guy, and a world in which a merciless fate awaited them: high school, then community college, the army … then working the mines after that. Beer after work, soccer on the weekends. Or a short stint in organized crime followed by the inevitable bullet in the head. One day, out of nowhere, a boil appeared on the multiheaded body of the proletariat. An alien, with its head held high and a beaked nose: my present roommate, Tatchuk. He was insultingly different in every way. His clothes made the heavy-duty pants and jackets of those around him look like rags. His perfect, eloquent speech, the squeamish way he touched anyone else’s possessions, even the inviolable, neat part in his thick jet-black head of hair.
He had everything I lacked in excess, bravery in particular, which he used to reinforce his inner
me
. In fact, he was almost disgustingly devoid of cowardice. Every minute of every day he had to answer the hateful stares and the all too predictable hisses (“Freakin’ fairy!” “Faggot!”). And, indeed, he answered back, with his characteristic cool laugh and that remote smile that made you want to hit him, so full of superiority and righteousness.
He said that most people were like fish, only able to live in the waters they were made for. And if one day they decided to go deeper or higher than their stipulated habitat, they would most certainly kick the bucket. Just looking at him gave me hope that I might one day rise to a higher level of society
and
be able to avoid certain death at the same time. We became friends, and with that the possibility of easy ascension on the social ladder dawned on me; it was something like infatuation with an older brother who always protects and cares for you. And lo and behold! Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that things would turn out so well. We grew close, and he told me about how awful it was to be ordinary. He made me see that the two of us were not cut out for the wretched life of our town. And I believed him, like the ancient Argonauts believed in their specially invited guest, the favorite of the gods, whose sole purpose on the boat was to attract good luck.
It was a quiet evening at the dormitory. Suddenly, we heard cries of anger, plates crashing in the room next to ours, hysterical shrieks. We jumped up, sensing a scandal brewing. In room 620, Suskind had revolted. He lived there with Samokhin. Samokhin was always having friends over, drinking, hanging out with girls. Suskind, on the other hand, was an unsociable recluse.
“Enough, I’ve had enough of this!” Suskind shouted, his features twisted. He was screeching and squealing like a pig and smashing plates. “You bloodsucking swine! It’s always, ‘Suskind, who is this and who is that, and who the heck is Smerdyakov from Dostoevsky? Oh, that’s right, Suskind!’ And then they turn on the TV. ‘Hey, Suskind, let’s root for Lokomotiv!’ I hate goddamn soccer! Picking on me because I came from Penza, almost forty years old, to become a writer. Doesn’t take much to believe in talent that’s already been recognized. You try believing in
my
talent! And remember my name: Sueskin, not Suskind! Roman! Sergeevich! Sueskin!”
“Oooh! What an honor,” Samokhin enthused sarcastically, and moved to pat Suskind’s softly bearded cheek.
Suskind grabbed a knife lying on the table and shook it, wailing, “Stay back!” It was pathetic.
Fights are not a rare occurrence in our dorm. In the spring, tormented by lack of love, insignificance, and hopelessness, the bastards throw themselves out of windows. This whole place is permeated with reminders of the ever-present temptation of suicide—grates on the windows of the upper floors, metal nets stretched across the stairwell. The problem is that there are too many of us here. There are five hundred of us from every corner of this enormous country, five hundred losers, each one thinking he’s a genius. Five hundred lonely voids, living hand to mouth on miserly government scholarships sent here by our parents back home. Only a few crazy geniuses and two dozen literary hacks would make it in the world. The rest are doomed to a life of total obscurity and wretchedness.
“You don’t know the half of it, you guys,” said Samokhin, when we had come out into the hall. “At night he tries to communicate with martians, honest to god. He says they want to take him away with them. Beam me up, Scotty! He could sink a knife into me at any minute, if his aliens told him to. As Samoilov wrote, if I remember correctly, ‘This city is full of crazies, at least one in three is psycho. So speak to me softly. I might be one of them …’”
“‘Don’t be so sure that you’re so smart,’” I finished. “‘And I wouldn’t jump to conclusions about which one of us’ll come by a sharp razor first.’”
“So, Dima,” Samokhin said, addressing Tatchuk on a different topic, “do you think you’ll be the one who gets those five thousand greenbacks?”
“Who
else
but yours truly?”
How could he be so certain? It was as though his rich childhood imagination was furnished with its own personal universe that revolved around him alone (with a map of the stars on the ceiling and an army of teddy bears dedicated to their master). And then this perfectly polished cosmos expanded to the size of a three-room apartment, streets, schools, entire countries—and there was not one place his parent’s love, backed up by their financial means, could not reach him. The outside world seemed to fulfill even his most extravagant desires. And so my roommate, who was used to all this, seemed to be able to force reality to conform to his expectations of it. This was, I suppose, his greatest gift of all: he made the whole world into a big-budget stage production in which he, Tatchuk, was the princely heir and future ruler. All other people were his servants—faceless minor characters whose only purpose was to serve their master and then disappear from his sight forever. In this world, respiration was the only thing that couldn’t be counted on: my roommate suffered from chronic asthma, and was sometimes forced to use a fabulously expensive inhaler.