Rock, Paper, Scissors
Page 32
“Houston . . .” Ada says thoughtfully. “Andryusha, did you know we got an apartment in Vilnius?”
“When did that happen?”
“After Alexey’s crusade to the courthouse. We sold our dacha.”
Vilnius, they reason, can’t save them from everything. But with an Israeli passport . . . Oh, they have Israeli passports too? Only Glasha and Alexander, for now. He didn’t know Alexander was Jewish. Just a quarter—his grandmother—but the one that counts, on his mother’s side.
“Looks like you’ll have to mind the shop on your own, Andryusha . . .” Pause.
Glasha recites a line from Pushkin: “The feast goes on. The Master of Revels remains, lost in thought.”24
Cruel. But appropriate. Ada aims an expressive glance at her sister: “It’s just in case things go off the rails. We might not even need it.” The rest of the guests are already drinking tea and cognac, eating chocolates.
It’s stuffy. He rises from the table, goes into the next room, and walks up to the window. A warm Moscow evening. The lights are on all across town. Ada opens the door to the balcony: after dark, the view’s even better. It’s not the center, of course, but they like the neighborhood. “And if you lean out and look over there . . .” Ada slides the glass open.
“No, don’t do that,” he retreats into the hallway. He’s developed a fear of heights.
“Afraid the balcony will collapse?”
“I’m afraid to look down. You succumb to the temptation for a second, and . . .” Ada beckons to her sister.
“Listen, Andryusha, we’re worried about you. You’ve always exceeded the bounds of any given situation. But you also knew when to drop the theatrics and to get ready for exams.”
Yes, there was a time . . . He puts on his shoes. He’ll feel better if he takes a walk. Would they mind if he left without saying goodbye to everyone?
“You know what . . . I don’t think I can walk after all. Girls, would you call me a taxi?”
They walk him to the door and give him two kisses, each on one cheek: “Our weakness is our strength.”
“And there’s no end to our weakness.” They smile, wave.
Under different circumstances, their kisses would have been very pleasant—the girls are so beautiful, so familiar—but today they have no effect. Neither the twins nor the wine have managed to cheer him up, much less intoxicate him. He hardly even touched the wine.
•
“Up your mother’s . . .” The driver hits the brakes, rousing him from an uncomfortable slumber. “You see what that bastard did? These,” he inserts another insult, “think they own the road. Did you get a look at the license plate? EKX97. You know what that means?”
Why should he know? He asks the driver to turn down the radio just a bit—Russian rap, not the worst thing these days, but a little too loud. Now he tries dialing that number again. This time a mechanical voice tells him to enter a personal password. Password? What password?
“Those little gadgets,” the driver pokes a finger at the phone. “They use those to keep tabs on everyone. Where you are, what you’re talking about. You can shut if off and pull out the battery—but it makes no difference. That’s special technology for ya. They’ve got us all on a leash.”
He should have sat in the back. What was that about license plates? The driver tells him about what happened the previous week, at his mother-in-law’s funeral. Some guy pulled up at the crematorium, alone, in a Ford minivan, with an EKX plate, and went up to two of the fellows on duty. These fellows helped the guy unload two coffins. The three of them bring the coffins inside, then the guy comes out, turns the van around, and drives off.
“Who was in the coffins?” He tries to keep his voice steady.
“Who the hell knows? Maybe two poor bastards like you and me.”
He isn’t well—breathing rapidly, heart pounding, vision blurring. How do the windows work? He lowers the glass all the way down, exposing his face to a stream of cold air. Without asking permission, he turns a dial on the radio—raises the volume. He no longer hears the driver—any rap, any crap is better than stories about crematoriums. He reads the English inscription: “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.” And he repeats the phrase to the beat of the music. Are they closer in the mirror or in real life? Read the goddamned manual. Where are they closer? It makes no sense. Objects in mirror . . . What does that mean?—What? No, he isn’t going to puke. One-way street? Just stop the car, he’ll get out here. He needs to get home, but he can hardly walk; he is trembling all over. He reaches the corner of his street, almost at a run. He can see it now, the entrance. Another fifty, sixty steps and he’s home. But on the sidewalk, next to the entrance—a dark Volvo he’s never seen before. The lights are off but the engine is running. And two long shadows beside it. The license plate. What were those letters? The plate is caked with mud, as if on purpose. No, it’s just the one shadow, not two. He grips the keys in his pocket—he can use them as a weapon, or throw them at a window, cause a scene. Run? He can’t even feel his legs. Here you are, Kissinger. Another step or two and he’ll hear: “Hold it, bastard.” Then a terrible force will grab him by the shoulder.
A lighter snaps in the shadow’s hands and sends up a little flame. My god, Vobly.
Vobly recognizes him too: “Time for some shut-eye, Andrey Georgievich?”
He rushes towards the door and gets a blow to the head. The scaffolding. He had forgotten to duck. He squats on his haunches, presses his hand to his forehead. No blood. He catches his breath. Vobly leans over him, tries to help—no, no need, everything’s fine. Everything really is fine, except for the pain in his head.
“A whack for scaredy-cats”—that’s what they used to call it at school. He should put something cold on it. He enters the elevator, leans his forehead against the mirror, and stands there for half a minute. Then he presses the button. By the time he reaches his floor, the pain is gone. He steps back from the mirror and examines himself. He hasn’t gotten a whack like that in a long time. “A whack for scaredy-cats”—he’s forgotten French, forgotten math, but nonsense like that is still lodged in his mind.
He walks into his apartment, making as little noise as possible. First he looks into his bedroom, then he checks on Anyuta. Both his girls are fast asleep, as he had expected. Was it Goebbels who ended up poisoning his own daughters? He goes to the kitchen and stands by the window, gazing down at the dark empty sidewalk. Then he walks into the bathroom, gets soap, a brush, and a bucket of water, and heads to the elevator, where he scrubs the mustachioed bastard’s face off the wall. He tosses the scraps down the garbage chute, returns to marvel at the clean, wet wall of the elevator, then examines his reflection once more. So you’re back in good standing, are you?
January 2017
Translated by Boris Dralyuk
NOTES
MOSCOW-PETROZAVODSK
1 An ironic expression once popular in the Soviet Union. Felix Dzerzhinsky was the chairman of the Cheka (Extraordinary Commission), the first Soviet state security force, and its successor organization, the OGPU, from 1917 to 1926.
THE GYPSY
2 In his memoirs, Alexander Herzen writes that Garibaldi called America “the country ‘of forgetting the fatherland,’ ” My Past and Thoughts, trans. Constance Garnett (London: Chatto & Windus, 1924), 3: 77.
ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS
3 All excerpts from Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin are taken from Eugene Onegin, trans. Stanley Mitchell (London: Penguin Classics, 2008).
4 From Alexander Pushkin’s “City of splendour, city of poor,” trans. Antony Wood, in The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, ed. Robert Chandler, Boris Dralyuk, and Irina Mashinski (London: Penguin Classics, 2015).
5 Two lines from an untitled poem by Anna Akhmatova, which begins, “There is, somewhere, a simple life and light” (1915), translated by Alex Fleming.
6 The first line of an untitled poem by Osip Mandelstam from 1915, translated by Alex
Fleming.
7 Lines from Alexander Blok’s long poem Retribution (1908–1913), translated by Alex Fleming.
RENAISSANCE MAN
8 From Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin.
9 The title of an infamous editorial that appeared in Pravda, one of the official organs of the Communist Party, on January 28, 1936. It condemned the “formalist” excesses of Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (1934).
10 The opening lines of Aleksey Plescheyev’s (1825–1893) translation (1861) of Moritz Hartmann’s (1821–1872) poem “Schweigen” (1860), set to music by Tchaikovsky as part of his Six Romances, Op. 6 (1869).
THE WAVES OF THE SEA
11 Fyodor Tyutchev (1803–1873) was one of the most important Russian poets of the nineteenth century.
POLISH FRIEND
12 Emil Grigoryevich Gilels, born in Odessa in 1916, was regarded as one of the greatest pianists of the twentieth century. This remark, supposedly made by Stalin in the late 1930s, reveals the importance accorded to musical performance in the spread of Soviet propaganda.
AFTER ETERNITY: THE NOTES OF A LITERARY DIRECTOR
13 From Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, trans. Nicolas Pasternak Slater (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
14 From Alexander Pushkin’s Boris Godunov and Other Dramatic Works, trans. James E. Falen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
15 From Alexander Griboyedov’s verse comedy Woe from Wit (1831).
16 From Pushkin’s “Sketches for a Project about Faust” (1825).
17 From Alexander Pushkin’s The Stone Guest, in Boris Godunov and Other Dramatic Works, trans. James E. Falen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
18 From Sophocles’s Oedipus the King, trans. F. Storr (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1912).
19 From Sophocles’s Oedipus the King, trans. F. Storr.
20 From Paul Celan, “And with the Book from Tarussa,” trans. Joachim Neugroschel, in Paul Celan: Selections, ed. Pierre Joris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
21 Korsun is the Old East Slavic name for Chersonesus, an ancient Greek colony on the Crimean Peninsula. The modern Crimean city of Kherson is named after the colony. During Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, Vladimir Putin and others pointed to the legend that Saint Vladimir the Great (c. 958–1015), who baptized Kievan Rus’—which Russian historians see as the forerunner of modern Russia—was himself baptized in Korsun.
22 From Alexander Pushkin’s The Miserly Knight, in Boris Godunov and Other Dramatic Works, trans. James E. Falen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
ON THE BANKS OF THE SPREE
23 A song composed by Kirill Molchanov (1922–1982), with lyrics by Alexander Galich (1918–1977). It was performed in the film Seven Winds (1962) by Vyacheslav Tikhonov (1928–2009), who would go on to play the Soviet spy Max Otto von Stierlitz in the television series Seventeen Moments of Spring (1973), a role that would win him lasting fame in the Russian-speaking world.
OBJECTS IN MIRROR
24 From Alexander Pushkin’s A Feast in Time of Plague, in Boris Godunov and Other Dramatic Works, trans. James E. Falen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).