by Maxim Osipov
He’s gone all red, his bald head especially.
“Yegorushka, will you back me up?”
She needn’t have asked.
And breathe. Ksenia has said what she needed to say, and she feels all the better for it. She gestures to Yegor: get the guitar, let’s sing. She lifts her hand and undoes her bun. Her hair is long, chestnut brown. One more drink.
“Let’s sing some Pugacheva,” Yegor says, “that ‘What’s Become of Them’ song . . .”
Ksenia smiles: she knows how hopeless Yegor is with song titles. He plays the opening, and then, “Oh, how many have we lost, lost to that distant abyss?” Her voice is high-pitched, clear—how well she sings!
At the end of the song, the judge caresses the guitar strings with his thumb, forlorn. He has also started to reflect upon death. He is confused: two little yellow birds had flown into his house that morning. A bad omen: death. Ksenia comforts him.
“Yellow birds? Oh, that’s nothing to worry about; that means money.”
Ksenia is a believer; these things are easier for her. Yet the church doesn’t appeal to Yegor, no.
“What were we brought up to believe?” he asks. “That after death, that’s it. Nothing. But now. . . now even our leaders are . . . holding candles, crossing themselves. Mind you, they still don’t bow when they pray—nothing’ll bring those guys to their knees . . . but anyway, you: What is it that you ask God for?”
These are not the conversations to be had with brandy. Ksenia asks for whatever she is supposed to ask for. Whatever those high-ranking saints asked for.
“But say we knew God existed,” Yegor persists, “what would you ask him for?”
She reflects. “Well, there’s no bringing Verochka back, nor our country. . . . So I’d probably just ask him to knock twenty, thirty years off my age.” She smiles. “Oh, go on, another toast: to all the good things.”
They have been sitting here a long time. Outside it’s probably dark by now.
“Here, look,” Yegor rifles through his briefcase for a sheet of paper. “I found a poem. A knockout: ‘No man is born immortal, but there’s no solace in this truth / the one most feared of all—death nears me with its noose . . .’ Just gets to the heart of it all.” He can’t be bothered to find his glasses, tries to do the rest from memory, “ ‘Life is but an instant, nothingness is lasting / Something something something, people keep on passing.’ It’s as though our man saw what was coming.”
Ksenia is confused. Whose poem was that—Yegor’s?
“No, you’ll never guess. Yuri Andropov. Yes, former general secretary Yuri Andropov—can you believe it? Writes better than any of those so-called . . .‘The living born in darkness walk unwavering to dawn / Future generations will carry our torch on.’ ”
Future generations—isn’t that just great.
“But Yegor, you have children, grandchildren, you’ve done everything right . . .” Ksenia is weeping; the alcohol is getting the better of her. The tears flow freely. That’s what happens when you drink during Lent.
•
A knock. Ksenia wipes away her tears. What in God’s name is he doing here? Isaikin! He’s dripping in sweat, panting:
“So you’ve heard?”
“What—heard what? Who let you in here anyway? Well?”
A disaster: a murder. Pasha Tsytsyn is dead. Happened just now. But there’s more. It happened in her pelmennaya.
Terrorists! Why wasn’t she told immediately? Isaikin himself had only just heard.
“The idiot! What was Pasha doing there? But Isaikin, you’re not drunk, are you? Fine, you run on ahead, we’ll catch up—no wait, hold on!”
Yegor is phoning someone. Come on, come on! It’s a long way, and Yegor couldn’t possibly run there; he can hardly manage a brisk walk.
“And you said those birds meant money,” he mutters to Ksenia.
They had seen the scenes of terrorism before on TV—bombs, body parts—yet around the pelmennaya it is, one could say, very calm. Theirs is a quiet community; in the evenings everyone stays in. The ambulance has already left. The police officers and the public prosecutor are inside the pelmennaya; none of them looks at Ksenia. Where did it happen? In the kitchen? What was Pasha doing in the kitchen? Oh, there’s the blood. Dear God, how awful. And how? Oh yes, a knife. But all this cigarette smoke, it’s everywhere!
“Gentlemen, please smoke outside.” Ksenia has to get the situation under control.
And Roxana? Where’s Roxana?
“Who?” asks the police chief, a tubby colonel. “Ibragimova? In our holding cell, of course. She’ll be sent into the city tomorrow.”
“What? It was her? Oh God!” Ksenia is about to scream, but suddenly stops. Now it all makes sense. Pasha had tried to seduce the girl. And Roxana! What action—talk about taking the bull by the horns!
“Yegorushka, my dear, what do they mean, what’s all this talk about the city? Surely this is an article 105.1. She should be put on trial here, by you.”
“Those fucking Tajiks of yours have certainly been hard at it today,” the judge muses. “Look, this is the head of local government we’re talking about, not some damned rabbit. There’ll be press—more besides. Want a bit of excitement in your life? Fine. Me? No.”
“Yawn at me one more time, and I’ll . . .” That’s what Ksenia wants to say.
“We’re going to say this was an article 105.2,” Yegor continues, reciting the code, “Murder, committed with especial cruelty, for one, and—you never know—committed by reason of national, racial, or religious hatred . . . there’s two. They come down hard on that nowadays.”
“Next you’ll be telling me it was in connection with Pasha discharging his public duties,” says Ksenia, icily.
“It’s a 105.2. She’s going into the city. She’ll get between eight and twenty. . . well, twenty isn’t really twenty; she could get out after ten.”
Ksenia Nikolayevna’s nerves aren’t made of steel.
“Excuse me, Yegorushka, but are we talking about the same Pasha here? I’m sorry, but is she really going to get ten years for killing Pasha Tsytsyn, that nothing of a man? Have you no shame, Yegorushka? I could find you a hundred other Pashas by tomorrow. I know you were Pasha’s friend, of course you were, but come on, the man’s only conscience was his dick!” And then, to the police officer, “Show me what you’ve got written there, you Sherlock fucking Holmes! Stay out of this, Yegor!” And then, reading aloud, “What? An altercasion—ugh, learn to spell!—caused by sudden hostilities? Bullshit. Here’s what it should say: an attempted rape.” She rubs her hand, now pulsating so intensely that it feels as though the skin is about to give way, burst. “And where’s Roxana’s signature? Nowhere! None of this will hold up in court! You need to take this all, and go shove it where—”
“Excuse me, Ksenia Nikolayevna,” the police officer interrupts, clearly offended, “you are, one might say, a respected figure . . .”
Her hysterics bring Yegor back to his senses. He reaches for his phone again.
“We have a situation here!” he shouts down the line, “No, why did . . . just send us back . . . more . . . your—damn—medicine!”
It’s unpleasant, of course, stressful. Everything around them is covered in Pasha’s blood. Ksenia almost faints. So she’s weaker than these men after all—at least in one respect. They drag her to the door, throw water over her, give her something to sniff. She hears Yegor’s voice nearby.
“In our experience,” he declares, “for it to be someone’s first time and—with a knife, that’s rare. With an ax, maybe, but a knife . . . it’s hard to stab someone to death. There’s a certain amount of . . . Have you ever cut a pig’s throat?”
More voices.
“But was the girl pretty?”
“What do you mean, pretty? They all look the fucking same.”
“Pasha must’ve thought he had a hold on God’s own balls—he was heading for the big city.”
“That’s still where he’s
heading—only feet first . . .”
“Well, I guess. Pasha sure got himself into one fucker of a mess.” Yegor concludes. “Has anyone told his family?”
•
It’s fine, Ksenia’s fine. The investigators have taken everything they need from the pelmennaya, now she can clean. Her old ladies will do it. Yegor walks her to her door:
“Another few shots, in memory of Pasha?”
“Yes, but right now leave me alone. You too, Isaikin—stop fussing.”
Ksenia doesn’t fall asleep, but she goes under, somehow. Around forty minutes later she suddenly comes back to her senses, leaps up, grabs a giant bag, and throws some apples, yogurts, and cooked sausage into it from the fridge. She opens the door to Verochka’s bedroom, a room she rarely sets foot in, throws open the cupboard, and dumps some clothes and boots into the bag, even underwear: they’re close enough in size. God, what’s happening? Just when you start to feel close to someone . . .
Ksenia reaches the police station. Is the colonel in his office?
“Where else would he be, Ksenia Nikolayevna, after such events?” The guard lets her in, of course—how could he turn away a woman like her?
“Just let me check in on our little offender first,” he says, looking through the peephole into Roxana’s cell. He lets Ksenia look, too. “Sleeping like a log,” he tells her. “Unbelievable.”
Roxana is alone in the cell. And it’s true—she’s asleep. She’s lying on her back, her breath calm and even, and in sleep she looks even lovelier than usual.
•
Once that creature had thudded to the floor and finally gone quiet, she had waited for her rage to subside and her breathing to return to normal before washing everything off at the hand basin in the restroom—the place she always washed. It was, perhaps, inadvisable to destroy all evidence of contact with the rapist—she realized this herself—but she simply couldn’t suppress her desire to be clean. She put her ripped tights and smock into a paper bag and slipped the knife inside too, sheathed in the pages of a magazine. She then put on her only dress and coat, tied her scarf around her neck, gathered some books—her only possessions—from the storeroom, locked the door, and set off towards the police station. And yes, before leaving she also turned off the lights. Her sangfroid would later be used against her, as evidence that she had either invented the signs of the victim’s attention to her or exaggerated their seriousness.
At the station she tells the desk sergeant that approximately one hour earlier she killed a middle-aged man during an attempted rape. She produces the contents of the package and hands over the keys to the pelmennaya.
She watches as the commotion spreads through the station, sees the police officers run downstairs and their car drive off towards the scene. They lead her up to the first floor and tell her to sit down at a table. A young officer sits down opposite her. He is in an amiable mood:
“You may call your lawyer.”
She doesn’t have one yet.
“That was a joke.” He had been joking: How could someone like her afford a lawyer?
Ibragimova, Ruhshona Ibragimovna, born 1971, a citizen of Tajikistan. Place of birth: Leninabad, now Khujand. Education: university degree.
The officer breaks away from the protocol. Yes, she’s a graduate. Literature, Moscow State University. The officer is clearly amazed; he himself has probably only scraped through two years of correspondence courses in law.
She knows article 51 of the Constitution: “no one shall be obliged to give incriminating evidence,” etc.
“Have you been detained before?”
“No, this is the first time.”
So how does she know that? She shrugs: she read it.
“The Constitution?” Well, well, well.
He asks her to take him through what happened. His tone is compassionate; if the facts all tally with her statement, he’ll take her evidence and release her on bail.
Had she seen the man before? Yes, she had; he would pop by the house to see her boss. She doesn’t know his name. Today he arrived at the pelmennaya at about six p.m. and asked for Ksenia Nikolayevna. When he heard she wasn’t in, he bought a large beer. Besides them, there was no one there. After draining his beer, he proposed . . . physical intimacy; she rejected him. Yes, the rejection was firm, but it wasn’t offensive—she hardly said a thing.
“’Cause there are these types of rejections,” the officer explains, “that seem like a rejection, but then . . . you know. . . Women like strength in a man.”
She looks at him fixedly. Yes, she likes strength, but that—that was not strength. The officer, it seems, doesn’t quite understand.
“Anyway, that’s beside the point. Let’s go on.”
When the man stood up and walked towards her, she went into the kitchen. Why? It was her instinct—she hadn’t planned it. Where the knife had been—yes, that she remembers, but as for how many times she stabbed him, or where—nothing. Had she wanted to kill him? She had wanted him gone—one way or another.
One more question: With an education like hers, why does she work as a waitress? Ruhshona doesn’t see what that has to do with anything. Fine. In the past has she had any jobs more in line with her qualifications? Yes, she taught Russian literature at a university in Khujand, but only for a while.
“But who needs Russian literature there?” the officer asks, puzzled, “They’re all . . .” He had wanted to say Asiatics.
No one needs it—Ruhshona couldn’t agree more. Totally useless.
Where else? In Moscow, teaching the children of the rich: Russian language, literature, and English. If that could be considered more in line with her qualifications. Why had she gone into unskilled work? She had had her reasons.
“Did you want to feel closer to your people—your sisters by blood?” he asks.
“Exactly,” Ruhshona replies. “Closer to my sisters. And my brethren.”
“Brothers. My sisters and brothers,” the officer corrects her. Hah. A lit graduate—as if.
The desk sergeant hurries into the room, asks the officer to step outside. He returns a minute later. Things are not as simple as they had first appeared. Had she known the deceased was Pavel Andreyevich Tsytsyn, head of local government? No, but she doesn’t see why that should change anything—he was still a common rapist. This wasn’t murder; it was self-defense.
“A very effective self-defense,” the officer smirks. Six knife wounds: to the stomach, the face, the groin. As for her? Not a scratch.
Does she regret her deed? Stupid question—she had had no choice. In the kitchen things had escalated by themselves.
“And you couldn’t find a more amicable solution?” The officer’s tone has suddenly changed. He fixes his eyes upon hers. This, he has seen, is what his superiors do in their interrogations.
Ruhshona’s eyes are black—like the rest of her people’s—and if she looks inwardly with them, you won’t catch anything. But then the shutters in her eyes click open, and her eyes blaze for a moment, like a cigarette lighter, then close again, the flame extinguished. For a moment, the young officer feels uneasy. “Come on. Just stay calm. Fill out the report, then get down to the pelmennaya,” he thinks. This whole thing is making his head spin—best leave it to the police in the city to deal with. An al-ter-ca-tion caused by sud-den hos-til-ities, he concludes, his tongue stuck out in concentration as he writes. He speeds through the final declaration like a tongue twister: “I hereby attest that this statement is a full, truthful, and accurate account of my testimony. Sign.”
No, she isn’t going to sign that.
“Want me to correct your spelling mistakes?” Now she’s the one joking.
They take her into the cell and lock the door. She looks around, figures out which way Mecca is, and waits for the silence to take root within her. Then she prays, soundlessly.
“Allahu Akbar. Subhaanak-Allaahumma, wa bihamdik . . .”
•
What do today’s events mean? She must delv
e deep within herself and wait; the answer will come, as it always does, complete. Or not; her internal silences can last years. In which case: humble acceptance of all that He has willed, and thanks. For now, she’s just exhausted, bewildered: Why had it fallen to her to put an end to that odiousness? And proud, too: proud that she rose to the challenge; that she has overcome.
The Most High had given Ruhshona endurance, freedom of thought, and an unusually good memory. One more virtue: the ability to face danger head-on. This has been clear to everyone since Ruhshona’s childhood; if you ever tried to scare her, she wouldn’t flinch—quite the opposite—she would lunge forwards, right at you. She staunchly protected her personal space, and when anyone invaded it, she could do serious damage. And for that reason, everyone—children and adults alike—gave her a wide berth. The Most High had also endowed her with the beauty of the woman she was named after—Ruhshona/ Roxana, wife of Alexander the Great. Tajik women are often considered elderly at thirty-five, but Ruhshona is still very beautiful.
As a teenager, Ruhshona studies at a Russian school. It is here that she writes such wonderful pieces of work that she is awarded a gold medal of excellence. “Dostoyevsky’s Nikolai Stavrogin is a Russian Hamlet, with the same rage, ennui, and masses of pent-up energy.” This essay impresses; she is offered a place at Moscow State University. Here, she also lives at a distance from others, and she discovers the works of Andrei Platonov: dreams of a fierce and beautiful world; being overwhelmed with joy at the sight of a locomotive; overcoming death itself through machines. She writes her dissertation on Platonov, on his castles in the air. It’s this very thing that Ruhshona values above all else in Russians and in the Russian language, her mother tongue: the ability to erect constructs out of nothing.
And then great change: her Leninabad returns to its former name of Khujand; every other change is for the worse. Her father is killed, a chance victim of fighting in the region: he had gone to Dushanbe on business and never returned; Ruhshona can’t get home for his funeral; her brother calls her in Moscow to tell her about other deaths. It’s as though the sheer number of victims helps him come to terms with his father’s loss. “Stay in Moscow!” he shouts over the line—the connection with Tajikistan is awful. What can she do in Moscow? There’s no need for specialists in literature here either. “I lost my father in the process of life,” Ruhshona thinks to herself, and in contemplating that phrase—so typically Platonov—she decides that she no longer loves his work; that overcoming death through locomotives and other machinery is simply a philological pursuit: death’s omnipresence is no accident, no unhappy mistake. Everyone fears death, just as they fear misfortune, yet death is inescapable, which means it is real. And that we did not invent it. At this very moment Ruhshona begins to see death as the most important thing that can exist within a person. She views those who don’t carry death within themselves—who don’t live by it—as empty, like wrapping paper, like candy wrappers. Hollow, soulless people. She can pick them out at a glance.