The phrase “Christ is Risen!” on a card with the Easter Bunny lying in a puddle.
An old homeless man feeding bread crusts to an enormous flock of pigeons. A woman carrying shopping bags slowing down and walking through on tiptoe, so as not to scare anyone off.
A couple sitting in what used to be Zen Coffee, they’re both around thirty-five, she has really bad buckteeth and there’s a small stain on her mohair sweater just above her left breast, which she compulsively tries to hide by smoothing the nap in the right direction. Her smile, with lips pressed tight, makes her look like a sad clown; he, meanwhile, very imposing, with a shaved head and the face of a repentant pirate, delivers a lengthy monologue like he’s rapping: “IL-18, I’ve flown it, MIG-29, I’ve flown it, SU-30MKM, I’ve flown it and crashed it, MI-8, I’ve flown it, KA-50, flown it, SU-27, flown, crashed, A-50, flown, crashed, TU-95, flown, MIG-31, flown…” Every time he says “crashed” he leans into her sharply and stamps his foot, which makes the chair shake, and she rubs at the mohair with nervous fingers.
Two ladies in their forties on a street in Riga, performing “Que sera, sera” on folk instruments—one string, one wind.
A man reading the newspaper Behind the Wheel on the subway.
Two girls shopping at an accessories store; one is trying on a belt with rhinestones, the other is giving her advice and making suggestions. The first one suddenly stops, looks at her friend with glassy eyes, and says, enunciating each word: “I feel like I’m just wasting my life right now.”
Donald Duck delivering lines in Russian translation: “Your Honor! On the teenth of Marchember defendant Duck committed…”
A man of about thirty-five who’s taken his elderly parents, very simple people, to a Japanese restaurant. He teaches them how to use chopsticks, and then—how to smoke a hookah. “No, no, don’t close your mouth all the way!” The mother finally manages to let the smoke out through her nose. They laugh and take pictures. The father refills their sake cups, the son waves him off, the mother takes tiny sips.
A couple of about thirty-five, each sitting in front of a laptop at an internet café. He’s typing away at some document, she’s digging around the web. She says: “Here, look at this horoscope—today’s a good day for it and tomorrow too, it says he could grow up to be a genius…” He responds: “Listen, I thought we agreed, not this year.”
A group of American tourists ogling the Kremlin. One lady cocks her head, squints and says: “It looks nice.”
A bunch of adults dressed up as Disney characters strolling around the monument to Zhukov. The grown-ups take pictures of children standing next to them for a small fee. Donald Duck, Bugs Bunny, Goofy Goof. Bugs Bunny sits on the base of the monument, holding a gigantic foam-rubber carrot under his arm and a bottle of beer in his hand. There’s a little six-year-old girl sitting next to him. They’re chatting, and the girl is swinging her legs.
The door into the staff room left half-open at the Coffeemania on Rozhdestvenka Street in Moscow. Behind the door are little cubbies for employees’ belongings; just then, a girl with a ponytail is extracting her backpack. The cubbies have decals on them, just like in kindergarten.
An old man in a dark-blue suit jacket with service ribbons at a kiosk, asking for the newspaper Soviet Russia.
An older man waiting for somebody by the subway entrance. A big dirty dog comes up and looks at the glass door. After thinking about it, the man opens the door. The dog comes in. It looks around and then turns its muzzle back toward the door. The man opens the door again. The dog goes out. It looks at the man, then mournfully at the door again. The man sighs and opens the door. The dog comes in and starts looking all around. The man moves closer to the door to make it easier.
A plush moose head, very true-to-life and, as you might expect, attached to a plaque so that it can be hung on a wall.
A man in a wheelchair, both legs in casts, wheeling out of a parachute-jumping club.
A girl wearing a “Nord-Ost” t-shirt in a gallery looking at photographs from the Chernobyl disaster.
Three older couples laughing and chatting at a restaurant table. One lady points to the two others: “And how did you meet?” “Our kids introduced us,” says one of them, “though they’re divorced now.”
A taxi driver who always takes along a tiny Chihuahua, which splutters at the light when taken out from inside the driver’s coat to be shown to the passenger.
A little boy and girl playing pat-a-cake while standing on different escalators going in the same direction, pausing every time a lamp goes by.
Two saleswomen, no longer young, in a twenty-four-hour gift shop, waltzing at two a.m. between the flower buckets and decorative cellophane ribbons.
A little girl in tears, yelling, “The dinosaur went extinct!!!” when all that is left of her enormous balloon is a scrap of gaping jaws and a little piece of scaly tail.
For O.M.
A pregnant cat with a clipped tail sitting at the entrance to the gynecology department. A wheezing black dog at the entrance to cardiology.
Mannequins on a revolving stand that slowly turn their backs to you the closer you get to the shop window.
A little girl in the airplane, trying to lift the armrest and asking, “Are we cool?” A little boy saying “yes” and putting the armrest back down.
The wind dragging a black plastic bag that says “Russian Beauty” along the asphalt; a kid in a baseball cap taking its picture with an old Leica.
A meticulously made-up girl in an evening gown, holding a flute and wracked by uncontrollable hoarse coughing in the lobby of an expensive hotel.
A cheap thirty-year-old barrette in the elegant gray chignon of an expensively dressed lady.
A woman quickly covering a man’s eyes with her palm when another passenger, having tripped, frantically flailing his arms, falls off the platform to the hopeless wail of brakes.
An elderly man suddenly kissing his wife with dry lips right on her glasses, in the darkness of a nearly empty movie theater.
Two middle-aged men having a long and hearty laugh over a story about a dog who chased its owner up a tree; then unhurriedly praying, their lips moving silently above the thick borscht.
Old people at the end of a funeral prudently asking the funeral home representatives about important details.
A man diligently holding his wife’s hair back while she eats spaghetti.
A girl’s phone at a café, vibrating and ringing with various ringtones depending on the caller, suddenly starting to vibrate and speak in her own voice: “Oh, it’s you. I hate you, I hate your mother. Oh, it’s you. I hate you, I hate your mother. Oh, it’s you. I hate you, I hate your mother…”
An old lady looking with astonishment at a metal name tag with her name on it, picked up off the floor at McDonald’s.
A lady screaming in the entryway to the theater: “Don’t smoke! This is to be a temple, not a smoking lounge!” and convulsively clutching a baptismal cross in her fist.
A girl looking around anxiously for a trash can to throw away her tram ticket; a boy taking the ticket out of her hand and eating it.
IN SHORT: NINETY-ONE RATHER SHORT STORIES
TRANSLATED BY MAYA VINOKOUR
GOTCHA!
They sent a slouching, zitty boy, the saleslady’s nephew, up to the third floor for him. The boy wasn’t doing anything special just then, had just sat down to eat—so he put his sandwich and the apple he was chasing it with right onto the step and ran. The entrance to the deli—which is what Kirill proudly called his “homestead,” though it was just three shelves and a fridge—led almost underground; the boy scooted on down, while he bent his long legs and carefully walked in. It was very quiet inside, the boy ran into the storeroom behind the register right away, and he followed: there, on a wobbly chair with a soft burgundy seat, stood Astrin, stood without moving, like he had taught her to. With his hand he stopped the boy: don’t go in, while he himself stepped over the threshold, pressed his finger st
ernly to his lips, and slowly squatted, trying not to rustle his pant legs. Teeny-tiny Astrin, with her enormous birdlike nose and fragile fingers white-knuckling the peppy blue fabric of her apron, suddenly struck him as looking like an elderly schoolgirl.
He half-closed his eyes so as not to get distracted and began to listen. He heard the far right corner, where empty cigarette packs lay, and hooked his hearing onto it like a lasso: now suddenly something jerked very quickly in a very straight line in the direction of the safe; moved around it in an uneven, lurching curve; poked at the steel either out of stupidity or pro forma; softly shifted off to the side, toward the dusty rubber boots bogged down in the linoleum under a clothes rack overloaded with junk. That’s when he said to himself, impatiently, “Gotcha!” and started to carefully pull that imaginary thread, he even made a circular motion with his fingers: that’s right, that’s right. At first, as always, the thing on the other end froze, frightened; then seemed to wrench back and forth, back and forth; then started, reluctantly but smoothly, that’s right, that’s right, and suddenly—there it is, in the middle of the room! Astrin couldn’t hold it in and squealed with fright, the mental thread broke off; he snarled angrily, hurriedly jerked forward, almost fell, even hit his finger on the linoleum—but caught, caught by the tail, at the last second, a small, mean, furiously screeching maus.
Behind him, the nephew hollered with delight; Kirill, who had previously been invisible behind the rack overgrown with junk, burst out laughing; Astrin, still afraid to get off the chair, exhaled piteously. He carried the maus over to the service yard and prudently released him, but came back with a demeanor of studied severity and gloominess and demonstratively wiped the sole of his shoe against the bristly doormat. Accepted from Kirill a parcel with payment for his labor: two pounds of apples, a loaf of bread, a quarter pound of salami, sliced, chocolate-covered cookies, good ones. Went back to the third floor, to the soft, slurping rollers dripping the festive white paint so pleasant to him. At home in Makhachkala he has two daughters, both talented, they’re good at drawing, they’ve hired a special tutor. Back home he didn’t know how to do anything like this—he had once rhythmically stamped his foot at a lustrous cockroach of nightmarish proportions, but it shot up the wall and then, at enormous speed, plunged itself sideways behind the ceiling molding.
SULENKA
… but on those few days when there was complete clarity, when he did not confuse his middle daughter with his younger sister or the head nurse with his first wife, the name “Sulenka” would suddenly begin to creep up on him, a nauseating and viscous name, long ago banished with hatred from his own and others’ memories. No matter how fully he turned toward the window, no matter how tightly and carefully he put on his well-worn blue slippers, he kept having thoughts about himself: “Sulenka, Sulenka”—but now there was no one to scream at anymore, so that they’d put it out of their mind, not dare; there was no one to hit in the stomach with the edge of his palm, no one whose foot could be slammed furiously with a felicitously placed stool; there was no one left.
A LITTLE STICK
It had turned out to be an ugly business; he was going there, as he told himself, to ask for advice, but really—well, why does anyone go to houses like that? To ease the soul, to cleanse oneself, to repent, to be absolved, to be bathed in all that … all that stuff. He brought with him something appropriate (something expensive-ish and modest at the same time)—waffle cookies that are not waffles in the ordinary human sense, but in the German, Alpine, gooey one. And they gave him tea in a glass-holder pitted with ancestral memory, and Mashenka woke up (“Oh look, Mashenka’s hatched!”)—Mashenka woke up and ran into the kitchen on her unsteady, fat little legs in white tights—clever head like a little pumpkin, skin translucently bluish, eyes black with sleep. Oh, it was really an ugly business; he waits to speak, everyone already knows about this ugly business, smelling of blackmail—intelligentsia blackmail, “for everything good against everything bad,” but blackmail all the same, ordinary blackmail with money and all that. Everyone knows everything, there’s already a consensus: now he’ll start talking, repent—and be forgiven, consoled; at the end of the day, it was his right—but surely not in front of Mashenka?
No, a couple more minutes. Mashenka, what can I get you? The nice man has tea, do you want tea? Mashenka wants “juice with a little stick.” Mashenka’s mother, the impossible, nineteenth-century part in her hair glittering (in Moscow apartments like this one, parts never ceased to glitter, not even in the gray, lice-infested, communal years), raises her darling, aristocratic eyebrows as if to say, just look at her! A tall glass is placed between Mashenka’s two little paws, tomato juice pours out in heavy glugs, then salt, then a slice of lemon, then a dash of black pepper—and a little stick of celery. Wow! Wow and another couple interjections. Mashenka licks the celery, Mashenka, go play the piano—that’s a family joke, the obligatory piano has long since gone stiff, it lives in the half-dead room next door, Masha plays on the black-covered keyboard with her red-and-yellow pull-apart robots. He’s never seen this piano—this pianette, this pianella—but suddenly does see it through the wall separating the dead room from the eternally living kitchen: there’s something sentimental, though ironic, on the lid like always; what is it? He sees teacups, Soviet china with large dots consigned—as he can see—to eternal reserve. Very charming, charming and witty. Cups right on the saucers, and he sees the off-center teapot, and the teacups, of course, have charming, charming trash inside—a pinecone, a twig, a pinewood slingshot spontaneously generated in Gorky Park, a ballpoint, snallpoint, thingamabob. Mashenka has run off behind the piano, and now he’s about ready to talk—but what does he have to say? To explain himself; it was his idea, his scientific baby, they promised, and now—they’ve leaked it, they could have paid him at least—“But why do I still feel like such an asshole?” “Pasha, my dear, that’s just because” (here the unnecessary words he came here for, why he came crawling, why he brought an offering of sticky waffle cookies) “… And, certainly, you did for them …” (more, more—and here somewhere is where he’ll start to mellow out). “And it’s only thanks to you that they … And you had every right … But they … But you …” “But why, why do I feel like such an asshole?” “My dear, it’s because it’s just because that’s how we all are, we’re all incapable of …” (after this comes something that does mellow him out: we’re good people, everyone else is bad, some petting, scratching, mutual caressing). “I don’t even know.” “Oh, but we do know.” They know, they know—so let them say it. Five minutes, and that’s it. Oh please, let’s just start already. He’s already readied himself, sucked in his belly: “Listen, can I just vent for a second …” Mashenka runs in, Mashenka is carrying a half-empty glass, her translucent face covered in meaty juice: “Mama, I want to play a word game!” “In Russian or in English?”
And at that moment he up and said very calmly and very, very loudly:
“Ablarblarblabarblablabla. Burbalblablablablabla. Purbulbal bow wow brawrarawrawraw. Suburbarubula. Bow wow wow rawrawrawrarawrawaburpburpuprupr bla.”
And then came a split second where it felt like something sticky, neat, and waffley snapped and came unglued inside his chest. He even wanted to silently open his mouth wide like the mouth of a fountain—so that “blargblurl blurburblurbluarlblarg” would pour out of there in a thick, black, even stream. Or bark. Barking would be even better. He even opened his mouth wide and something did come barking out—did it ever; and it was as if even this charming, charming, cotton-soft kitchen of ours exploded into black, clean, cold streams that crashed into its walls. But the part in the hair blazed gently, the great-grandmother’s teaspoon clinked against the great-grandfather’s teacup, merry Mashenka shouted, “That’s not English! I know, I know, that’s not English!”
Oh, Pasha, Pasha, Pasha. Oh, Pasha, Pasha, Pasha. Oh, Pasha.
EXPERIMENT
The run was five miles long, but at a good pace you could make it to
the regimental canteen in seven minutes. The pace we were managing just now, though, would get us there in more like fifteen. Or an hour. Or three hours. More likely than not, we would have simply fallen down in the hundred-degree heat right behind the shooting range—no one would have found us before dinner, and after dinner it would be too late. Plus then we’d have to bend down to get our plates. Traces of the morning’s porridge on the edge of the plate had darkened from the heat, a thin slice of cucumber had gone gray and shriveled. In the hour it had taken us to run, that bitch could have picked up the plate herself. Even with her crutch. With a crutch it probably takes like fifteen minutes to walk to the canteen. While we were running five miles, she was sitting in the tent next to the fan. We asked if her leg hurt a lot. She said, yes, a lot. We asked, if that’s the case, shouldn’t we take her to the nurse. She said, the nurse is gone and will only be back tomorrow. And thanks again for bringing her breakfast before the run. And that our wrists are really chafed where they hit the strap loops. And that her brother had to do a ten-mile paired run last year and his partner’s wrist chafed so badly it even got infected. And that she has a little cotton wool, we could put it under the loops for the last two hours of the run, except we’d have to bend down and look for the cotton in her trunk. Although maybe it’s better not to put anything under there, since the heat and the sweating could make the chafed parts even more infected. But, if we want it, the cotton wool’s in the trunk. Under the cot. Next to the plate. We said, no thanks, we don’t need any cotton wool. It’s very strange that there isn’t a single fly buzzing around the plate, we thought. In this part of the desert, she said suddenly, there aren’t any flies at all, it’s a scientific fact. She’s very interested in science, she’s going to submit a request to be transferred to the researcher corps. We said yesterday she had brought her own breakfast and took the plate back herself. She said yesterday she was conducting a different experiment. We asked, what kind of experiment. She said she can’t say, the experiment has to be done blind. The fact alone that we know about the experiment could affect the results. We said we can’t go anywhere, dinner is in two hours and we’ll take the plate and bring her some food. She said inspection is in half an hour and that a plate in the tent will get the regiment a penalty. I said I would take the plate, but that Rita is very tired and can’t go anywhere. Rita said she wasn’t tired but that during the run I had fallen and hit my knee and that it’s not a good idea to strain it again. She said she understands about the knee and that I shouldn’t strain it, and that if she is late, we should tell the commander that she went to take back the plate. Then she took a pencil and slip of paper out of the breast pocket of her uniform and made a checkmark. We asked what that was. She said she was recording the results of her experiments. We said we could tell it was just a receipt from the newsstand. She said it was none of our business and that we should go clean up our nightstands or the regiment would get a penalty. We said she’s bleeding under her cast. She said that’s none of our business either and that we should go clean up our nightstands because none of us need any trouble.
Found Life Page 8