Moscow Noir (17 page)

Back in our room, bare-chested, having uncorked a bottle, he surrendered happily to the nightly ritual of self-admiration. I bet nothing gave him as much pleasure as parading around the room with no shirt on. He could spend hours in front of the mirror, studying his own loving reflection in different perspectives and poses, enjoying a glimpse of his muscles, beautiful knolls beneath his satin skin. His narcissism was natural and justified, but it still got on my nerves.

“Just look at this six-pack,” he said to me, stroking his washboard belly deferentially. “Here, touch it. No, come on, touch it! Touch it!” he insisted, indignant that I should take such a criminal disinterest in his amazing abs.

I left the room as if to go out for a smoke, trying to avoid this cruel form of sexual harassment. And I came face to face with Suskind, homeless like myself.

Oh, how lucky I was to have him: my guardian angel, the great and invulnerable Tatchuk! Ever since that train on the way to Moscow, when my bag was stolen with all my money and my passport. I was devastated. I wouldn’t be able to register or sign up for classes. And then he came back (he’d left the compartment to throw out some garbage) and handed me my wallet. He had found it miraculously, in a trash can, with no money left in it, but my passport still inside. “What would you do without me?” he said. “I return you your name, your identity, and your future; don’t take it for granted.”

And so it went. Then there was the editing job at
Architecture and City Planning
magazine that paid three hundred dollars a month—money a provincial freshman could only dream of. The police trainees who found a crumb of hashish in the inner pocket of my canvas backpack, but who for some reason decided to let me go at the last minute for the ridiculous price of fifteen hundred rubles. The photo of us together on the first page of a glossy magazine, under the headline
Our Future Is Everything
. Not to mention the girls who flew toward Tatchuk like moths to a flame, and—praise the lord!—sometimes even bestowed their attentions on me. All my successes, all the publications, all the ills I managed to avoid were due to his presence at my side. It was with the greatest horror that I imagined what would happen if this deity were to turn away from me.

I went back to the room.

“Haven’t you had enough of pounding those keys?” he asked, nodding at my ancient computer. “I need a new story too, you know. I already have a great name for it: ‘The Point of No Return.’ What do you think?”

“What is it about?”

“I still don’t have it all planned out yet. Basically, it’s going to be about two friends living in Venice. One is an aristocrat, although no longer wealthy. He works as a model for the leading fashion designers and writes brilliant poetry. The other is Gorlum. He is but a pale shadow, wracked with envy for the unending successes of his friend.”

So that’s what’s going on, I thought. Our companionship, which had seemed not so long ago to be at least a kind of symbiosis, was now a glaring case of vampirism. Poor fool that I was, I had thought he had no ulterior motives for sharing his unending supply of good luck with me, that he did so with the same sunny generosity of all demigods. O the wretchedness of my soul and its innate servitude! I felt like the lowly lackey allowed to sit at his master’s table, only to be thrust back in his place when the meal was over.

“So one day Gorlum decides to kill his friend. He thinks that by killing the first character, let’s call him Martin, he’ll solve all of his own problems, and at last fortune will come his way. But when the cunning plan is enacted and the murder has taken place, Gorlum realizes that his life has lost its meaning after Martin’s death. Gorlum goes crazy. He starts seeing features of the master he so cruelly betrayed in different people walking by on the street. He starts running up to them, calling them by his friend’s name. He begins to believe that Martin is still alive, and punishing him through his absence. It ends with madness … What do you think of the story line?”

So you think that my only purpose on this earth is to be your monkey, a mere dwarf in your court, Martin dearest?

“I feel I’ve heard this somewhere before,” I said automatically.

“You’re always doing that!” he exploded. “And when it concerns your own writing, you go hoarse defending the originality of your ideas. Have you ever thought that maybe the reason your work doesn’t get printed is because you aren’t capable of generating any original ideas of your own?”

“What about your work, why hasn’t it been printed?”

“You’re a lazy, ungrateful loser.”

Like a greyhound on a leash, I began to quiver in anticipation of a fight. Now, finally, I knew what I wanted. I wanted to see fear in his eyes. But it wasn’t so much fear as doubt that I was hoping for. I wanted to see him doubt his absolute right to demand and receive whatever came into his head.

“Listen,” I said, lighting a cigarette and trembling with the suspicion that had so suddenly awakened in me, “your plot is all right, but it seems sort of unrealistic to me. I suggest you make a few changes.”

“Don’t smoke around me, you slob, have you forgotten? Put it out this instant!”

“In my opinion,” I continued, inhaling, “talent seems to be distributed unfairly between your two characters. As a matter of fact, the story just doesn’t seem believable or lifelike. One character is blessed so generously—as handsome as a god and as brilliant as Dante … Of course that happens in real life, but in a book it would appear too contrived.”

“I said put it out!” He lunged at me, but began coughing, then snatched his inhaler, biting into it with whitened lips.

“On the other hand, if brilliant Martin can’t put two words together on paper and is tormented by creative futility, it’s a different matter altogether. The premise of our story is destroyed instantly; it has a deeper meaning.”

Wheezing, he hit me, and I struck him back. I saw before me a sheep ready for slaughter, and with every blow I was hammering the sense of life’s imminent end into him. All of a sudden, he gave a sharp start of surprise and threw his head back. I saw a fish that had fled the waters it was meant to inhabit and would end up floating to the surface with its belly torn open. I saw him as he was, weakened and made vulnerable by his own good luck, fed with its gifts to the point of surfeit and decay. His life, which had always ascended to new heights as though following a brilliant railroad track, had reached its apex and was now plummeting downward. I stood there in front of him, tempered and honed by defeat. I was used to it, just as a wolf is used to hunger and cold, and my face showed the coarseness and impenetrability of a pagan god.

“You’ll pay for this!” he threatened, rubbing his broken nose, but it sounded as though he had merely sighed. Something had happened to him that was too serious and too deep to be manifested on the surface as a cry of protest or the convulsive shudders of limbs that refused to obey. I had hit him in his weakest spot, damaging his hermetically sealed protective armor. A cosmic chill, pitilessly indifferent to the reality of any single human “I,” came rushing in through the air vents, filling my roommate’s soul with the understanding that from now on, nothing was certain. God, he implored, could this really mean that I’m one of you guys now?

After that, my roommate kept his mouth shut for a long time. And I got to smoke without leaving the room. As soon as I appeared in the doorway, he would stand up and leave. The devil knows where Tatchuk was spending so much of his time every day, but I heard some students say they had seen him walking alone down Rustaveli, past the stereotypical gray buildings, whose color leaves a sickening aftertaste of electrolytes, copper, rotten eggs, and the thick stench of burning rubber. He was out there alone in an antechamber of hell—not one with the splendor of purifying flames and endless volcanic eruptions, but one that was as cheerless and intolerably ordinary as an old cast-iron tub with a bunch of spiders crawling around inside if it.

With each passing day I felt my own life force becoming stronger as the vitality of my roommate ebbed. His female superiors at
Profile
, who had once so adored that “sweet boy,” now demanded preliminary proof of his literary abilities and assigned him a test essay on “Why Smoking Is Good for You.” That definitely got the better of him.

Rumor had it that doubts had been raised among jury members as to whether Tatchuk was, in fact, the author of the novel he had submitted. It was
too
mature, and
too
perfect. The piece far surpassed the abilities of a twenty-year-old. Without fuss, the jury thought it best to put forward a more humble candidate as winner.

Next, out of the blue, Tatchuk’s parents refused to continue their generous financial assistance. It was then that the real reasons for his coming to study at our understaffed school in Novoshakhtinsk came to light. His parents had divorced. Both now had other families, and other children too.

The female students’ once limitless admiration of Tatchuk evolved into little more than the ill-concealed fear with which one notices a crazy person on the city streets. He had become timid and unsure of himself, always muttering something incoherent and foolish under his breath.

The name itself, Tatchuk, suddenly appeared no more than a mess of barbaric consonants. As though, lacking any other more suitable phonetic material, God had nailed together a magnificent church using the debris from an old wooden outhouse. How different than my own last name—Bessonov—a name that has been generally acknowledged as that of a future classic.

Besides, to be honest, I just couldn’t be bothered with Tatchuk anymore. There were too many circumstances and events taking shape that were totally independent of him. I felt vaguely sorry for him, so far away, out there on the periphery of my needs, fears, and hopes. First of all, I’d fallen madly in love with a she-devil I met at the All-Russia Exhibition Center. Her beautiful face was enough to make my throat constrict like it was in a gentle noose, and my soul feel like it was being tickled by a dog’s wet nose. Things were pretty much hunky-dory—riding the monorail together and the stuff of mushy romance like going up to see the view at Ostankino Park and Sheremetyvo Palace—until the day my sweetheart crossed the threshold of our dormitory room. By the time Tatchuk got back, my girlfriend already had her hand beneath my shirt and was brushing my lips with her own. So I have to say that my neighbor couldn’t have chosen a more inappropriate moment to return. He sat down at the table with us, and I poured him half a glass of wine while my sweetheart continued, unperturbed, where she’d left off. As I allowed the nimble tongue, which might as well have been forked, to enter my mouth, I glanced at Tatchuk’s tense, stoney face and sent him one last silent
Sorry.

“Dirty whore!” he hissed, so that we jumped apart from each other. He stood up quickly and started rushing around the room, yelling that he didn’t have to tolerate such animallike indecency in his own room. “Get out of here!” he cried. “If you don’t leave, I’ll go to the dorm supervisor!”

I shot up, doubling my hand into a fist. But when Tatchuk started coughing and groping for his inhaler in his pocket, I relaxed without touching even a hair on his head.

After I returned from walking her home, Tatchuk spoke to me for the first time since our fight.

“I’m in trouble,” he said, with obvious difficulty. “It looks like I’m going to be kicked out of school.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Don’t pretend you don’t know what’s going on. If I don’t hand in at least one new story by May, Urusov will expel me.”

Well, I guess now is the time to confess everything. Tatchuk’s writing had suddenly become remarkably bad. “It’s weird,” students would say. “How did he manage to write that brilliant narrative his freshman year? Maybe it wasn’t his writing at all. What do you think?” My only answer was to chuckle vaguely and shrug my shoulders. What was I supposed to do, tell the whole world that I was the one who had scribbled down the notorious story for Tatchuk? That I was the one who had helped him along, correcting and rewriting most of it? We were fast friends back then, and I was totally convinced he had the golden touch. It was like we gave each other strength. I told him how to put words together, and through him I could stop feeling like such a loser. He made me feel like I, too, was somehow invincible, important, like we could make it if we stuck together.

“No,” I said, “I’ve had enough of this. Do it on your own.”

“I can’t,” he muttered.

“If you can’t, you should transfer somewhere else. It’s not
my
problem.”

“I don’t want to study somewhere else. I won’t make it there either.”

“Do you want to be a writer or not? Anyway, that’s beside the point. Do you really think Urusov is such an idiot that he hasn’t noticed anything? Just a couple of days ago he mentioned that our styles are strikingly similar. Get it? One more pretext is all they need to kick us both out of here.”

“Please, just one last time!” he implored.

“Yeah, right.”

“Then I’ll just tell Urusov what happened, and you’ll get expelled. If you write me another story, you’ll at least have one more chance.”

“Fine,” I said. “Go ahead and tell him.”

He stopped his pleading, but I had a feeling he was planning something. Just sharing a room with him became nearly intolerable. I had only just been able to stomach the royal, all-powerful Tatchuk of old, but this new one was simply too much to bear. He turned from a generous, merciful god into a backbreaking burden. His eyes followed me beseechingly. Where could I hide when we spent at least six hours a day together?

My instincts had not deceived me. Only a week later he pulled a stunt that had me itching with such fury that it took me all day to cool off.

“A month ago you broke my nose,” he announced calmly. “The nasal septum was damaged, as a result of which I now have trouble breathing. Furthermore, my nose didn’t heal properly, and now no one wants to be friends with me.”

I stared at his unchanged nose. It looked fine to me: protruding, patrician, as always. Still, my roommate did look rather sickly. His cheeks were sunken, his eyes glassy with dark rings beneath them.