—…and everything’s so…unbearable. Because it all has to do with real people. So, we were at Fanailova’s reading, just sitting there, and then in the middle of everything some guy announces loudly, you know…“I’m going outside to smoke!” And the whole room was hissing at him: “Shhhhh! Quiiiieet!” But his wife was like: “Put on your coooat! Put on your cooooat!”
For Sasha Barash
—…it seemed like a bad idea from the very beginning, but the package said: “remove the animal out and take further action at your discretion.” I hadn’t even thought about my discretion. Well, I’ll just let it go, for instance. If I was living by myself, I’d just live and let live, but when your kid’s a year old, and they’re running around, the food, etc. So we bought it. It’s like this box, inside it’s all sticky, like flypaper, that paper that catches flies, anti-fly paper—but thicker. I touched it. Lena said, “Don’t stick your finger in”—and I really did have a hard time unsticking it. Really strong stuff. And so put it out for the night, went to bed. I think Lena was sleeping, but I couldn’t sleep for some reason. I was thinking—there are apples in the kitchen, it’s hot, I should put the apples in the fridge or there’ll be kvetching in the morning. So I get up and even had forgotten about that thing, and then I hear this—“Eeeee! Eeeeee! Eeee!” And I stand there like in the movies, by the wall, my heart’s going boom-boom! and I’m afraid to turn the corner. Like who knows what might be there. I’m standing there wet as a drowned rat. What is this, I’m thinking, I’m forty years old! I go in and there it is. It had this cardboard lid, I lift it and there it is, backed up against the side, one paw lifted and three stuck to the floor. And everything inside is covered in fur and blood, and it’s all bloody too. I started screaming. Then Lena came running and I said: “I can’t pick it up,” and she picked it up, said: hold the bag. We put it into a garbage bag, a white bag, and I carried it out to the garbage bin. And you know how it is in Jerusalem? They keep the garbage bins in this special enclosure, behind a grate. It’s kept locked, so I’m carrying this garbage bag with my arm outstretched and it’s inside there and…It’s screeching. And then I dropped my keys. It stinks to high heaven. I start looking for them but I can’t put the bag down, I’m groping around on the ground with my right hand, and it really smells bad. And suddenly there are headlights on me and a megaphone voice says: “Sir! Don’t move.” I get up really slowly and it’s in there twitching! I move my hand away and they say: “Hands on your head!” Well, this is it, I think, what can I do. I lift the bag over my head, and the mouse rips through it! And falls onto my neck, and then runs down my whole body! I screamed and jumped like you wouldn’t believe! And then behind me: bam-bam-bam! The cop had shot into the air. I kept standing there, she came up behind me and said: “What’s in the bag?” I said: “Nothing, nothing, just blood.” Well, and…What difference does it make how it all ended? The important thing is how it started, you know? Plus, that I dropped those keys…The next morning in the car Lena said to me: “By the way, pigeons have started building nests on the balcony, we have to do something about it.” You see what I mean? You can save that natural selection stuff for your students, I don’t need to hear it.
—…one of my patients, a cultured woman. I ask her, “You haven’t skipped any doses? You’re certain?” Of course not, she says, I’m completely certain. Then I ask her, “And you didn’t have any additional exposure?” She thinks for a while and then asks, “How is it transmitted? Oral-oral and oral-anal, right?” No, I say, only oral-oral. She thinks some more and then says firmly, “No, in that case there was definitely no additional exposure.”
—…wait, what are you talking about, driving a car is very important for a woman. It’s freedom, what a feeling…it really helps with stress. Whatever happens, you get behind the wheel and just whoooooshhh…. What a feeling. Like, say you get in a fight with your lover, he’s like: “Blah blah, whatever,” like, “you’re old and I’m twenty!”—and you slam the door—bang! And then you go, get behind the wheel, turn the ignition—and right away, you get that feeling…Just because you’re your own boss. And you can do whatever you want and you’re in charge of this modern, powerful machine.
For P.
—…what do you think? You know what it’s like for me? Like a justification of my existence in this apartment. Anya’s first husband hung them, I even knew him a little, not well, we saw each other a couple of times. He was a wonderful guy, really, and so handy. He did all this, did you see the shelf? That embossed metalwork in the hallway, the map, the black one, and all that. And he hung these spears too. He brought them back from a dig, he would go on those excavation trips and they would write them off or just give them to him, something like that. Anya says, “I told him let’s put them in the foyer,” but he said, “Noooo, I want it to be more interesting!” He was such a remarkable person, always wanted to make things “more interesting,” wouldn’t know how to do it any other way…So he trimmed them and hung them up. He wasn’t very tall, and my Anya, you can see for yourself, is teeny-weeny. But you see how they get me? Look: bang! Bang! Bang! Eh? Right in the eye! And now just imagine how many years I’ve been walking around here, at night, running to the baby through this hallway, half-asleep, practically sleepwalking—and I didn’t get poked once! For me it’s like a justification, like that I can be in this apartment. Like nothing has changed since yesterday.
—…haven’t been to a supermarket in ages. You know, that’s where I want to go.
—…he showed up with flowers. I mean, not the nicest ones, but asters, that’s still nice, right? And you know, we’re eating, talking about this and that—and I can feel, like, you know—it’s all coming together. Just like pieces fitting together, like he says something, then I say something, bang! And I was so, you know, I felt so good, just happy inside. We’re sitting there, he’s ordered ice cream already and he’s already so familiar, like we have three kids already. And right then some chick walks up to the table, alright-looking, bad skin but otherwise OK, but then I didn’t really get a good look. She stands there and says: “Hi, Lyosha.” And I’m all smiley, I’m like: “Hi!”—but she doesn’t even look at me, looks at him and says: “You deaf or something? What, you can’t hear me?” My jaw dropped, but he just stayed sitting there like a statue, staring into his ice cream. She’s like: “Fine, bye then”—turns around and goes back to her table. How d’you like that? I’m like: “Uh, Lyosha, I’m sorry, but who was that? “Oh, nobody,” he says. “She just has the same name as my dog.”
—…I came up with a story idea. There’s a poet and a critic. The poet runs off with the critic’s wife. And after that the critic drops everything and spends his whole life studying the poet’s work, he can’t stop.
For M.
—…thank you for taking me, sweetie. It’s not just that I haven’t been to a movie theater in an age, I really did want to see this very movie, I hear about it all the time on TV—“The Chronicles of Narnia, The Chronicles of Narnia,” and I haven’t even read the book. Do you know what this movie is about for me? When I was little they would take me to holiday parties at the Student Palace, and it was so beautiful there, marble and all, and these endless long hallways, endless. Of course I didn’t know then that it was the Potemkin palace, Catherine gave it to Potemkin, no one told us about that back then, it was just so beautiful…And every time, I wanted to go down those hallways so badly! But we weren’t allowed! And it seemed to me that there had to be something there at the end…Something…incredible. So thank you so much for taking me. Because now it’s like I went down those hallways all the way to the end, feels like. And there’s really nothing special there at all.
—…he’s styling my bangs and talking away as he goes—and he’s this glamorous young man, a real stylist—so he’s prattling on about all sorts of well-bred trivialities entirely appropriate to our discourse, like how young Sofia Rotaru looks. And suddenly he says: “By the by, I grew up with foster parents. My real pa
rents worked a lot and put an ad in the paper: for someone to pick up the kids from school, and we’ll take them on the weekends. One elderly couple responded,” he said, “their thirty-year-old son had just drowned. They were very unusual people. The granddad had lost one arm in the war, but before that he’d dug canals and been in the camps and everything. I don’t really remember much about him. I do remember, he always used to tell me, he had this hoarse voice: ‘Eeegor, if anyone esks you what time is it—ponch ’im upside the chin.’ But why, I don’t know,” he says. And then more blah-blah, blah-blah about bronze highlights in dark blonde hair. I asked him cautiously: “Igor, it was probably his left arm he lost?” “Yes,” said my hairdresser, astonished. “In that case,” I say, “it probably makes sense why he would tell you about people asking the time.” “What do you mean?” said my hairdresser. “Well,” I say, “just think about it—If someone wanted to make a cruel joke…” He looked at me silently in the mirror, then lowered the blow dryer and was like: “Oh wow.” Then he turns the blow dryer back on, then puts it down on the little table, walks off and sits down on a stool. “Just give me a second,” he says. “I have to think about this.”
For V.
—…my son’s a sniper, he was in Al-Amin at the time, when there was that whole business with the little boy getting shot. Well, he was wounded later, but they saved the leg. And I got married then, she’s a year younger than my son, a Russian girl. And so then she says to me: “I won’t live in the same house with him, he has the eyes of a killer.” She says: “My papa was in the war too, but he never killed anybody.” Over and over again: “Papa never killed anybody, Papa never killed anybody.” Listen, I say, your papa is three years younger than me and it’s not like I’m a hundred years old—which war was this that he was in? And she says: “None of your goddamn business. The right one.”
—…I just bought season tickets to the opera. I’m going to live the normal life of a single person.
For O.
—…I do the same thing myself, but for girls it’s their God-given right. That’s true across the board, not just on the road. But like when I have to get all the way over on a six-lane highway, for instance, I start repeating like a mantra: “I’m a girl and I need to. I’m a girl and I need to.” And it always works, it’s really just God-given, like I said.
—…it was back in high school, we climbed up on the roof, two girls and two boys. So we’re sitting there, nothing to talk about, we were throwing pebbles down, there were these pebbles up there, construction stuff. Then one of the boys threw down a brick. It flew right by these two guys, barely missed ’em. They didn’t waste any time, climbed up to the roof and clobbered our boys. And they said to me and Tonya: “Girls, why are you hanging out with these guys?” But those boys actually—one with a split lip and the other with his kidneys all smashed in, for real—they walked us home afterwards. It was really nice.
For T.
—…I’m playing like crazy, I totally can’t help it, like, I’m not sleeping or eating, not going to class, nothing, it’s nuts. There was just one day I didn’t play, when their server went down, God it was awful, I really didn’t know what to do with myself, just waited around. It’s a hell of a game, half the department plays. You have to have a team, we put one together—two girls and two boys. The boys are like super macho, we kind of hang back behind them. Like me, for instance, I can’t get hit, I’m a sorceress, if you hit me I just lose a bunch of my magic percentage, and the other girl can’t get hit either, she has this enormous intellect but very little health, she can only take like two or three hits over the whole time because she takes a long time to regenerate. So we have our boys, like “rawr!” and we’re like “oh my!” One of the boys is like twelve, he lives in Novosibirsk, and the other one’s thirteen, don’t know where he’s from. The girls are me and this other woman, she’s thirty-seven, her daughter died a year ago, she really can’t do anything besides this.
—…for some reason I don’t feel like selling anything at all today, don’t feel like anything, they’re gonna fire me. I just don’t get it, lately I don’t even have the energy to get up in the morning, everything’s so horrible, I’m so depressed. Don’t want to do my makeup, don’t want to do my nails. I stand at the counter and feel sick even. Like there’s no reason to wake up in the morning. I just don’t understand what’s going on. I never felt like this back in school.
—…they were saying the worst shit about you behind your back! That you’re pregnant, married, and you have a three-year-old! Can you believe it? The bastards!
—…we’re nice, middle-aged people, you see, the whole situation is really complicated. We started this thing nine years ago just so people could relax, take a break, so that everyone could enjoy themselves. Back then everyone was officially unmarried, well, almost everyone. Our girls were spectacular, really something…Wonderful. And the guys too, everyone was on the same page. We get together once a week at my place, I have a two-story apartment, a huge Jacuzzi, it’s a really nice spot. You and Natasha should really come, seriously, I would be really happy if you came—even though it’s not how we do things, you understand, we don’t invite guests. But seriously, I really want you to consider it. We need for some new people to start coming, little by little—but no, we’re very picky, very very picky, it’s a whole process, I won’t even get into it right now, right now it doesn’t matter. What matters is that we need new people—like nice normal people, like you and Natasha. Because over nine years things have just kind of settled into the current situation, all we have is the name—“swingers’ club”—but actually, you know, no one even gets into the Jacuzzi. We have a drink, settle down in the kitchen and sit there late into the night talking about our kids. And that’s sure not what we started it for.
—…stop freaking out! Stop freaking out! All right, look right here, look at me! At me! Good. Picture her standing here in front of you. Picture it, Marina! Come on! OK, now imagine yourself saying to her: “What do you think you’re doing here, huh?” Repeat after me, I’m her, come on: “Just what do you think you’re doing?!” Good. Now say: “Just look at yourself, you old bag, empty-headed shitbag with fried hair!” No, say the whole thing: “…fried hair!” Dirty mop! Good! Look at me, I’m her! Now say: “You’re pathetic, you’re a miserable animal! You’re fifty years old already and can’t earn enough to buy yourself decent shoes, you’re a fossil with a pathetic salary! You’ve sat out your whole life in that dead-end department of yours!” OK, “shitty department”—“sat out your whole life in that shitty department of yours, you have some pitiful dull fuckwit of a husband, you, I mean, you don’t exist!” OK, but keep looking at me, not the ceiling. And say: “You’re not here at all, you don’t exist, you lifeless insect, you don’t exist! You don’t!” You don’t! You don’t! There. Now look at me, I’m her. Do you feel like shit? That’s right. Because now you are shit. But you didn’t say all that to her, right? You didn’t. Whatever, so you said to her: “Don’t scream at the students.” That’s hardly a reason to feel like shit, you know.
—…I’m coming out of the bank and he’s coming in. I go left, he goes left, I go right, he goes right, you know how it works—we can’t get away from each other. I go left again, and he goes left, I go right, he does too…And then he suddenly stops. He stops, closes his eyes—and he waves his hands around at me like a magician and says: “Shoooo! Shoooo! Shoooooo!” I couldn’t believe it, walked around him carefully, thinking: “What a psycho!” But then as I’m going along I think: you know, that’s the way to do it.
For B.
—…I’ll tell you a story that is totally St. Petersburg. I don’t know why Petersburg, I mean it happened in Prague, but it’s really just so Petersburg. I went with Katya, she was twelve at the time, me and Ira had just gotten divorced and the kid was all agitated. I mean, our breakup was actually pretty fine, but there had still been, you know, stuff. But I said to her, how about I take a vacation, take Katya to Prag
ue. So we went. The first night, around eleven, I put her to bed and went out to walk around the city, and suddenly I have this thought: here I am, divorced already, and my whole life I’ve never been with a prostitute. Well, and here I am in Prague, everyone’s partying, I decided—well, I’d better do it. And this is where the story goes totally St. Petersburg. So I set off, there’s this one street, you know, hot girls standing around in fishnets and miniskirts…And somehow I just can’t bring myself to do it. And Katya’s back there at the hotel sleeping, and I start getting all nervous: like what if she wakes up—maybe feels sick—and I’m not there, and she’s all sick without me. I look at my watch: eleven-thirty—OK, I think, one more hour and then back home. I’m already bugging out, I’m walking past the girls and saying: the next one!—and then again: no, that one’s no good! And again and again and the clock’s ticking, and I’m already getting sick of it…And then, walking towards me, I see this—well, old mama. Knee-high to a grasshopper, probably fifty years old, carrying this massive walking stick! Don’t snicker, I’m not kidding, she seriously had a crutch. All tarted up…And she winks at me. And then, you won’t believe it, I find myself walking towards her! And I’m like: “How much?” Thinking all the while: “You’ve lost it!” She says: “A hundred dollars.” A hundred bucks! And I don’t even know why, I go and blurt out: “Let’s go.” And then things really got going…She leads me through some courtyards, into a totally Petersburg doorway, I swear, it smells like some sort of meat cooking, a stairwell, the light bulb smashed…I’m walking along and all I can think is: fuck, I’m turning around right now, I’m turning around right now—but that’d be bad, I came all this way! I look at my watch, it’s five to midnight and I’m still twenty minutes from the hotel, Katya’s alone, I feel all shaky…So basically, we go into an apartment, and there in the kitchen! There’s big burly guys! Drinking! Vodka! See what I mean? All that was missing were paintings of hunting scenes, for chrissakes. I say to her, no, there’s guys here, I’m leaving, but she drags me into the bedroom—it’s a one-bedroom apartment!—this bed with no sheets, pure Dostoevsky, it stinks…And she says: “Well, take off your clothes!” And then, I don’t even know what happened. I started unbuttoning my pants and all of a sudden I came. She looks at me and I look at her, and she says: fifty, and I’m like: “Whatever, here, take the hundred”—shoved the hundred in her hand and took off! So at twelve twenty-eight, right, I ran into the hotel, Katya was sleeping…So here’s the point: Christ, I felt so good! So peaceful, so happy, I mean, it was the best. Afterwards, of course, I had other prostitutes, but it was never like that again.
Found Life Page 5