Magda spat on the cabin floor, never mind that it was tile and not dirt. “He’s a bastard. I know that much.”
“Not Pig. Pigs. Plural. I had the weirdest drum the other night. Everyone here in camp was some character in that book you gave me, Animal Farm.”
“‘No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal,’” Magda quoted. “‘He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?’"
“You know it? You’ve had the same dream?”
“Know it? I lived it. Anyone who lived in the Soviet Union has. “‘They had come to a time when no one dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling dogs roamed everywhere, and when you had to watch your comrades torn to pieces after confessing to shocking crimes,’" Magda quoted again.
“The camps,” Snow said.
“Yeah, the camps,” Magda confirmed. They weren’t laughing now. “Still, I guess I shouldn’t complain,” she said wryly. “Being there not only helped me rearrange my marbles, it taught me how to play with them.”
“Yeah, you said.”
“Miss Anne – misanthropy – Pig calls me here. It’s not the first time I got that nickname. In the camps, it was Miss Education. Because I was always studying something. Picking anyone’s brain I could find there who knew about something new. It kept me from giving up. Problem was, everyone kept telling me I was studying the wrong things – all those strange physics ideas I’ve been trying out on you. So Miss Education; miseducation. Now, it’s a habit. I can’t stop. I decided then and there never to let myself be defined as someone's widow, mother, or lover -- but only as myself.”
“And that’s why you knocked on my door. Because I was something new.”
“No.”
“That’s right, you didn’t knock. Just walked right in.”
“No, I meant that wasn’t the reason why.”
“Why then?”
“You know how to define an optimist in Russia? An optimist is a person who believes tomorrow will be better than the day after. People were talking about the poor Canadian schlep in his trailer and I was optimistic I could help. God knows, I couldn’t make it worse.”
“So you believe in God?”
“No, I believe in something much bigger. You’d know that. If you were listening.”
“I was listening.”
“Yeah? What’s my last name, then?”
“I was listening to the parts that were important. Not the details.”
“Perskanski.”
“Huh?”
“Perskanski. It’s my family name. Why Pig calls me ‘Skank.’”
“Well, that and ‘cause you’re a whore.”
“I’m not a whore. I’m a madame. There’s a difference.”
Snow raised his eyes in doubt.
“You weren’t there,” Magda said. She wasn’t justifying it, just explaining it. “The camps. Things like chastity or morality were meaningless there. For Christmas, we exchanged glances because it was the only thing we had. If I went in an idealistic scientist and came out a psychotic whore, I can live with that. I’m a Madame, not a whore, simply because I’m not pretty enough. Besides, it pays better and has better job security. Like I said before, they tried to scramble my marbles in there, but they did me a favour. I came out with them all in the right places. My morals may be low-cut, but my ideals are not.”
“Perskanski? That’s your real name? Sounds Ukrainian. Like me.”
“Shit, Snow, you’re Canadian, not Ukrainian. Just because your name is Nastiuk isn’t going to change that. So what if your grandparents were born near Lvov. If they were born in a garlic field, would that make you a clove? You don’t have a clue what it’s like to live in a vassal state with a vassal ideology. You just know your cows and your hockey, that’s all. Maybe some perogies and borscht. But you don’t know shit about what it was like to live as a Slav in an inefficient police state.”
“Horses.”
“What?”
“Horses, not cows.”
“Same difference.”
“Okay,” admitted Snow. “There were cows there, too. Lots of them.”
“My real name? Perskanski? Yeah, I guess. It’s the only one I ever knew. Anyway, I don’t consider myself that same person anymore. Little Magda Perskanski who traipsed around Moscow with her Daddy pretending to look for elephants. That girl is dead. So is her name. Her father took it with him.”
“What do you mean?”
“In any civilized society they shoot the ignorant but in Russia it’s the other way around, so they shot him. Then killed me. The Perskanskis don’t exist anymore. Just me. The Skank.”
“You never found out who killed him? Your father?”
“History killed him.”
“I don’t get it.”
“No, you don’t. That’s why you’ll always be a Canadian, not a Ukrainian. Or a Serb, or a Russian, or a Pole.”
Snow just shook his head again.
“What’s a Right Deviationist?” challenged Magda.
Nothing from Snow.
“A Left Deviationist? A Trotskyite? A Bukharian? A Stakhanovite? Bakuninite?”
“Kryptonite,” said Snow. “I know Kryptonite.”
“See? You’re a Canadian.”
“How do you figure?”
“Superman. He was written up by a Canadian.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Only a Canadian wouldn’t know that,” challenged Magda.
Snow shook his head in bewilderment again.
“Canada,” answered Magda. “It’s the only country in the world that would rather be Clark Kent than Superman. You’re never going to set the world on fire. Except maybe by accident.”
“And you?” asked Snow.
“What about me?”
“What deviationist were you? That put you in the camps?”
“None,” laughed Magda. “That’s the irony. Pig once accused me of belonging to the left. He was wrong. I’m not a leftist, I’m a left-behind. I don’t give a shit about what we lost – like your friend Kolya – and I couldn’t care less about becoming a good capitalist and making money – like Pig. I’m none of the above. A left-behind.”
While Magda's father had been a real Socialist Realist hero, striving to build the future, she felt responsibility only for the past. In Russian folk belief, a person has to honour the dead to be reserved a place among them. Magda honoured her father in her memory.
“Anyway, I’m thinking about changing my name to Belly Button. It can be my stripper name. Or my porn star name.”
“Narkissa Arbat?”
“Huh?” This time it was Magda’s turn to be confused.
“Your porn name. You take the name of your childhood pet and put it in front of the street name where you grew up. Like Fluffy Yonge. You get it?”
“I get that you’re even more Canadian than I guessed. Again, only a Canadian would know that.”
“Okay, why Belly Button then?”
“Why St. Petersburg instead of Petrograd? Why Volgograd instead of Stalingrad? This country has a tradition of changing names to try and change the past. After I got out of the camps I decided to try and change my past. Except for honouring my father. That’s why I keep quoting facts about elephants. He’s the only thing worth keeping.”
“But why Belly Button?”
“As body parts go, they’re ideal. They’re quiet. The neighbours rarely have to phone the landlord about them. They rarely get sick. They have no special needs, wants or desires. And they’re reliable. They’re always there to help inspire some soulful contemplation or to gather lint or to hold salt if you feel like munching on a celery stick. They never let you down. In Russia, a belly is a status symbol, a sign that you didn’t have to do physical labour, could afford food. At least it used to be. Until we turned all our women into porn stars and pumped up their tits with silicone. Besides, belly buttons are li
ke opinions. Everybody’s got one.”
“I thought that was assholes.”
“Would you want to be named Asshole? It’s too common. Anyway, navels are innocuous. They’re just there. We rarely acknowledge their presence, give them respect, lust over them or find them disgusting.”
“Wouldn’t that be turning your back on the suffering you sent through in the gulag? The hunger and suffering?”
“They say that people who survive the camps all look alike because, once a man’s skeleton has been exposed, it doesn’t matter how padded the tummy becomes -- the bones will always poke through. So, no, the gulag is never going to leave me, no matter how fat I get.”
“Okay. Innie or outie?”
“There are a lot more innies than outies. Seventy seven percent of us are innies, only twenty percent outies. Outies are really small umbilical hernias, a defect in the abdominal wall that’s small enough to cause a protrusion of the umbilicus. I’m an innie. Especially now that I’m fat.”
“What about the other three percent?”
“They couldn’t find their navels if they were stuck smack dab in the middle of their stomachs.”
“They are,” said Snow.
“Good, you see what I mean then.”
Top 5 uses for a navel:
1) A place to store used chewing gum
2) To draw attention to your rippled abs
3) To draw attention away from your flabby thighs
4) A place to put the olive from your martini
5) A handy place to escape into if you need a break from reality
Did Adam have a belly button?
RECIPE FOR A FUZZY NAVEL:
Mix 50 ml. of peach schnapps with 175 ml. of orange juice. Pour into a chilled glass filled with ice cubes. Stir well and garnish with an orange slice.
Warning: A Fuzzy Navel is a cocktail, not a sign of puberty.
“What are you reading,” Snow asked.
It was hard to know if the mushrooms had kicked in now or not.
“The Manticore, by Robertson Davies. I’ve only read it twice.”
“I don’t know it,” Snow said.
“Of course you don’t. It was written by a Canadian. You only read things from America there.”
“In my line of work,” Magda commented, “you can’t help noticing that most North Americans are circumcised.”
“Super-sized?” Snow asked. They’d spooned out some of the mushroom casserole onto leftover newspapers they used now like paper plates and had poured out generous portions of the amarula and huckleberry brandy.
Magda’s accent stood out like incongruous background music, vowels stretched out of shape and consonants sticking somewhere in her throat. She accumulated languages like some people collected match books or lint in their belly buttons. Grammar and vocabulary she could learn from foreigners and books, but pronunciation needed a native speaker. Her vocabulary was militantly up to date, but the words were formed in a mind that thought exclusively in Russian. Magda would never cut her hair or her nails, for example, unless it was a full moon. She knew it was ridiculous, but she did it that way anyway.
“No, circumcised. How about you? You get your wee-wee snipped? Did it hurt?”
“Wanna see the scar?”
“No!”
“Sheesh, I was just kidding. Don’t get your belly button into a knot.”
“It is not something to joke over.”
“What isn’t? Your belly button?”
“Scars. You should never gesture about someone else’s surgery or wound with your own hand. Or you’ll suffer the same misfortune yourself.”
“And you know this because…?”
“Everyone knows it. It’s like bus tickets. When the sum of the three numbers on the left equals the sum of the three numbers on the right, it’s a lucky ticket. You should eat it so no one else can steal your luck.”
“Eat what, the bus or the ticket?”
“I definitely should have brought beets. I think I liked you better when you were all morose and serious.”
“I’m still morose and serious,” Snow complained.
“I know. But not all the time anymore,” observed Magda.
“Yeah, I’m circumcised. It was done automatically in those days. Now, they give the parents a choice. They do it when you're eight days old so you don't really remember any pain. But I know this. It hurt so much, I didn't walk for a year.”
Magda blew Amarula juice out of her nose. “’Cause you were only eight days old. I get it. Have you ever paid for sex?”
“Are you propositioning me?”
“Answer the fucking question.”
“You mean with money? No. With every fucking fibre of my soul? No. But I have friends who have. Every single fucking day. It’s called marriage. It’s why I’m single.”
“I don’t … I don’t ….love you,” Snow admitted.
In response, Magda just rolled her eyes. Although Magda was no expert on love, she was an expert on death, going through the camps passing on wisdom, not to mention her cunt. “Love? Love is like a man’s part. It gets all hot and excited for a while then goes to sleep when you need it most.”
“I mean I don’t think I’m capable of it … .love.”
“You think I don’t know that? I don’t want your love.”
“Then what do you want?”
“Ready? Are you ready for what I want?”
Snow nodded.
“Nothing. I don’t want anything from you. The only correct relationship a man and woman should have is when neither expects anything from the other. Otherwise, all it will end in is disappointment and failure.”
“The Internet was a communist plot, you know.”
“How do you figure?”
“Duh. Hello? What do you call them, dot ‘coms’? Do you really think it’s a coincidence the greatest technological, sociological, communication revolution in a century is named after communism?”
“That’s it? That’s your proof?”
“You need more? What about 6-6-6, the mark of the Beast?”
“Huh?”
“W-W-W. 6-6-6. Same thing.”
“You never think about going back home?” Magda asked. “To your little foothills heaven and the cows?”
“Put it this way. There’s not much demand these days for a miserable fuck who spends more time thinking of killing himself than doing the job. I imagine it’s the recession.”
“I can’t understand Kolya,” Snow complained.
“What’s to understand? Why he sits there in the office in the dark and waits to catch the zhopa who whacked him over the head? It’s easy. He wants to whack him back, that’s why. Here, have a Coffee Crisp for dessert.”
“No, not that. Why he can’t give Communism up. Was it so wonderful that you’d dedicate your life to it? When people were dying trying to escape it?” Snow finished half the chocolate bar and passed half to Magda.
“I understand,” Magda said.
“You do?”
“Sure. And so will you. One day. Sooner or later you are going to have to find something to care about too. Or there won’t be any more ‘some days.’ You’ll have stuck your head in the oven and gone off to visit that childhood playmate who got crushed by the tree when you were camping. Why rush it? You’ll be there soon enough. In the meantime, why not live?”
“I don’t much see the point in living,” Snow admitted.
“Do you see the point in dying?” Magda asked.
“No.”
“Good,” said Magda. “It’s a start.”
“You know what you need to learn?” Magda demanded.
“No, but I’m sure you’re about to tell me.”
“Participial adjectives.”
“Huh?” The need to learn participial adjectives wasn’t something Snow had ever been told was a necessity before.
“I thought you knew English. You even said you were going to teach me.”
“No, you said I was going to t
each you. Anyhow, I do know English. I just don’t know useless grammar terms. I’ve been meaning to ask you. Where did you start learning English? Before the camps?”
“My father’s records. The Beatles. Three Dog Night. Lighthouse. I wanted to understand the words. They sounded so soft and plush, like bubble gum. Stop trying to change the subject. Which is participial adjectives. What you need to learn,” Magda opined, “is the -i-n-g of life instead of just the -e-d.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“That you need to concentrate on the living now, instead of the life you think was finished in that forest back in Alberta.”
“Thank you, Professor. I’ll take that into consideration.”
“No, you won’t,” contradicted Magda. “You’re too content – content yes, I won’t say happy – wallowing in the Waiting Place.”
Snow could hear the capital letters in her voice. “The Waiting Place?”
“’You have brains in your head, you have feet in your shoes,” quoted Magda. “You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. Everyone is just waiting. Waiting for a train to go or a bus to come, or a place to go, the mail to come, or the rain to go or the phone to ring. Everyone is just waiting.’”
“Mandelstam?” asked Snow.
“Geisel,” corrected Magda.
“German,” nodded Snow. “A philosopher.”
“American,” corrected Magda. “A children’s writer. Good God! I knew you Westerners didn’t appreciate your own literature, but can’t you at least know your own pop culture?
“I’ve never heard of him,” confessed Snow. “Geisel.”
“Dr. Suess,” prompted Magda. “The Cat in the Hat. Green Eggs and Ham.”
“Ah,” nodded Snow.
"’Will you succeed?’” quoted Magda again. “’Yes, you will indeed. (98 3/4% guaranteed.)’"
“What’s it supposed to mean?”
“Read it yourself,” commanded Magda. “Then, you tell me what it means.”
Pig: A Thriller Page 15