FORSOOTH
He only had one nightmare of this type, and it went like this: he’s supposed to write a paper about Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, a term paper maybe, but he has totally forgotten that motherfucking cardboard mongrel language Soviet papers were supposed to be written in, all of its words and constructions. In his dream he was positive that these words were not Russian at all, but belonged to some blue-green language and that the woman who wrote everyone fatal love letters was executed by firing squad in the “Chernomor” musical.
4, 3, 2
He said that his fish gave birth to fishlets yesterday, small fry. They’re all little gray guys, except one who’s black, he said: seven all told. And he said that he wouldn’t show them to Fook and his crew because they’d want to take them away. They said, there’s nothing to take away, his fish died. He said, that’s not true, she had babies, the black one swims the fastest and in a straight line, and the others do circles. Fook said that he was going to give him а swirly. He answered that Fook obviously wanted to take away the fry and that he wasn’t going to show the jar with the fry to anyone. Anyway the jar is at his grandpa’s, he had taken it to his grandpa’s over the weekend, because his grandpa is the best at taking care of fry, he’s raised hundreds of them. Pavlik said to him, “Call your grandpa, get him to take a photo of the fish with his phone.” He said he didn’t have his grandpa’s number, the contact accidentally got deleted. Fook grabbed at his phone with fat flabby hands, but he almost managed to give Fook a hard kick in the leg. Out of all the fish bought by the subway that day, Fook’s fish had died third. The man by the subway had just sold them bad fish, that’s all. Fook wouldn’t be bothering him right now if Fook’s fish had died first or even second, but he ragged on Pavlik and Saman horribly when their fish died. When Fook’s own fish died the next day he told everyone that he had fried and eaten it. And said that the last, fourth fish would die now too. Now they were asking about that fish every day. Yesterday they wanted to go to his house and check, but he said that his mom doesn’t allow visitors, she’s scared of everyone except him and his dad. When he almost managed to give Fook a hard kick in the leg, Fook said that the next day he had to show the fish and fry, or else. And that he doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the fry, they’re too small to even have a taste. It’s just that the time had come to show that their former friend was a pussy-ass little shit. “No,” he said to Fook, “You’ll take my fry and they’ll die on you, like your fish.” Then Pavlik said, “You haven’t lived but you’re a dead man already,” that was a phrase they had. He himself had used it a million times before. Very slowly, legs and stomach in knots, he trudged homeward. A week ago, when they were all still friends, a man by the subway had sold them four bad fish. Or three bad ones and one good one, it was impossible to tell now. He hadn’t thought that his mom would be afraid of the fish, last summer he had brought home a beautiful beetle like an oil slick and his mom had liked looking at it. But that was last summer.
A TURNING
It happened every time she locked her pot-and-pan cabinet in the hallway common to the three apartments, made a wrong move, and the key, instead of clicking confidently, made a sucking noise, spinning pointlessly in the lock. The hallway was large and cold, while the apartment itself was too hot compared to the previous one, which had been small and cold throughout. Before that she had lived in a white apartment with a totally empty kitchen and low ceilings, and before that in a narrow three-room pencil box by the Patriarch Ponds in Moscow. From there memory kept pushing her, as she stood at a slant, half-bent in front of the recalcitrant cabinet, from one interior to the next: hallways and bathrooms began to blur together, moisture-warped doors crumbled, landlords’ sideboards clinked; the same way drunken, scary old Anya had driven her crying husband from room to room at the Liskins’ dacha, silently smacking him on the head with a rolled-up Woman Worker magazine until he stumbled over his own feet and fell to the ground to beg forgiveness for some unknown sin. Memory dragged her through the oil-painted bedroom of her and Marik’s first rented hovel, where a crazy white cat languished in unsatisfied lust amid the landlord’s dank rugs and cheap officers’ crystal. Having ingested a great deal of dander, she was chased from this stuffy bedroom into the Petersburg kitchen with the untamable water heater, and from there, head getting slapped with some scary stamped papers, to a suspiciously enormous room with a small, high, handmade chair at a similarly suspiciously high table inlaid with some mother-of-pearl nautical fantasies. The windowsill was located almost at eye level: at first it seemed to her that she had stumbled and admitted defeat before memory, but then it would become clear that this was her parents’ communal room in a long-since-demolished Stalin-era building. Before her parents, a big furniture boss lived there—back when he was still a small furniture boss and just warming up his little curved legs. Beyond the windowsill was mute night. Memory banged picturesquely on the underside of the loft, which yawned open at a completely impossible angle, revealing a straight-legged tin horse with a broken-off Soviet Pioneer rider among the overtaxed leather suitcases and fantastically thick black jams. There was a key in the side of this horse. If you turned it, the night would be illuminated by two headlights, frightened voices would turn on in the common hallway, while Dad’s calm, firm voice sounded at first in the courtyard, then at the door, then in the neighbors’ room, where someone would begin to cry, objects would fall, things would be counted right up to morning. Through sleep on her little couch, made up of two armchairs, she saw Dad, stern and handsome—he had popped over from the neighbors’ to drink some tea at home, while on the other side of the wall they kept crying and counting, and her mom carefully helped him take off his boots so that their squeaking wouldn’t wake the child. In a few days the neighbors’ room became their second one, then the horse made it so the whole three-room apartment became theirs, and the pots, formerly crammed into the common cabinet, situated themselves comfortably on the little nails she passed to her dad as he, milky-white knees shining, crawled from the table to the newspaper-covered sideboard and back. A month later she dropped the horse, tried to wind it up—the key made a grinding noise and slipped, beyond the windowsill the headlights came on, but Dad was home. People walked across the new rug right in their boots, books began to fall on the floor, Mom told her to face the wall and not turn around until given permission. Behind her, tin crunched and someone screamed horribly: that, evidently, was the Pioneer being broken off. Afterward, she described this horse to everyone in the orphanage (and hit those who wouldn’t listen); the only thing that she herself still could not understand in this story was how, in the deserted apartment, the horse moved from the floor to the loft.
1:38 A.M.
The only reasonable mirror was in the hallway: when she came out of the bathroom, her gaze would catch in the mirror and she would get stuck. With the years she had grown used to looking at herself as if through a narrow slit: she had a good belly and bad thick thighs. That morning she had calculated that she’d need about an hour and a half all told, with a little leeway just in case. At five she turned on the water in the tub and spent a little while worrying about her nails: she could remove the polish now, but then they’d soften in the tub and it would be harder to paint them. She could do the bath first, and then the polish (there was no way to do a full-on manicure, she’d have had to leave work at three), but then it would smudge during the rest of it. She could paint them right now, sit there, nails drying, and worry about the clock’s incessant ticking. She could write him to come a half hour later. She turned off the water in the tub and started rooting through the bag of polishes. Evidently the smartest thing would be to do everything else first, and then quickly cut the nails short and apply a single layer of clear polish. She really didn’t want to do that, but there didn’t seem to be a better option. She turned the water on again, stuck her pajamas in the hamper and turned it around so its maw would face the wall. She had cleaned her place the day before. The eternal questi
on of stockings hadn’t been decided and couldn’t be: she firmly believed that they were absolutely essential, but with her thighs they looked really iffy, even the ones with the wide thick elastic on top. On the other hand, the edges of the black robe would come down on either side, and besides, during the main event none of that would matter anyway. She dug through a drawer, drawing out by a single strap a black lace garter belt whose hour had finally arrived: although the stockings were held up by silicone, she had always thought that stockings looked cheap without a belt. The bathwater turned out to be too hot, and she sensed that sitting there too long would give her a headache. So she pushed back washing her hair and began by shaving her mons and bikini line under running water (here the thought of his bare hand touching that bare mons unleashed a wave of anticipatory arousal she decided not to suppress, letting herself slowly float on the acute, tense feeling of expectation). Her hair had to be washed and dried because the steam had made her hairdo fall apart, and of course she had to use fast-drying product and now she couldn’t shake the disgusting feeling that if he grabbed her by the hair, strands of it would stick out stiffly above her crown—but in the dark, again, this wouldn’t matter. After the bath her skin felt tight, she began to spread a strongly scented citrus moisturizer on her legs, but then suddenly felt embarrassed by its brazen, provocative smell, quickly toweled off her one leg and selected a different moisturizer, a vanilla one (which immediately seemed too girly, she got angry at herself and finished spreading it on the rest of her body, and her back, as always, turned out to be wet, the cream slid around unpleasantly on the skin). About forty minutes were left—and the nails. The nails had to be done after everything, after makeup, and she very much wanted to avoid foundation, because since her youth she had been hounded by the silly notion that leaving traces of foundation on the pillow (like for example when you’re face down, and again the heat of anticipation poured over her) is shameful, although if it’s traces of eye shadow (mascara, of course, has become waterproof since those times, thank God), then for some reason it’s not shameful. Also, as always, she didn’t want to put on the corset until the last second because the lavender one (the black one seemed to her today not unlike the citrus moisturizer, no, impossible) was, to be honest, too small, and to wait in it for twenty minutes (if he’s not late, of course)—leaving aside that it’s a little hard to breathe, her back would get sweaty again. For a few seconds she stood over her laid-out things: she could pull on the stockings now, attach the garter belt over the silicone (over the silicone isn’t so easy, by the way), put on the satin robe, and then, at the last second, once the intercom sounded, get herself into the corset. But then she might smudge her nails and that wouldn’t do, that wouldn’t do at all. Once in the corset, she breathed in and out for a few seconds, shifted her shoulder blades, bent down a few times so that the cold clasps would arrange themselves properly on her damp back. Here it occurred to her that she could paint her nails standing up—it’s super easy with the clear polish, and sitting in the corset is not exactly pleasant. All that was left was lipstick and shoes. She hoped very much that today was not one of those days when the lipstick, for reasons totally defying understanding, refuses to behave properly at the corners of the mouth, has to be wiped off over and over, the lips swelling, their contour growing imperceptible, and everything becoming some kind of unshakeable nightmare (about three minutes left now). The lipstick adhered properly, all she had to do was correct the always-rough edge of her upper lip with lip liner. The shoes she had been planning to wear slipped off these particular stockings (she had forgotten), and the only ones that didn’t slip off looked too chunky with the robe. She took off her glasses and looked into the mirror again. The shoes looked fine. The robe and corset looked fine. The woman in the mirror, plumpish and not very young, though quite well groomed, looked fine. The intercom squawked. She went to the living room, stood for a moment, perusing the glasses, bottle, fruit, and then, carefully squatting in her high heels, raised the edges of her robe and lay down on the rug, her head almost butting up against a bed leg. The intercom squawked again, perplexed. She closed her eyes, thrust her arms out to the sides, and told herself honestly that, really, the most important part had already happened.
AND YOU?
To Masha and Gleb
He said that the answer to everything had appeared to him in a dream. That he had dreamed the answer to all the questions, like why things in Russia are going the way they are and everything else.
“We were sitting there at the dacha in Abramtsevo,” he said, “Like, at my friends’ place. And it’s a real village there, not just a dacha, you know, it’s like a little village house. People have their own life there, it’s not just the weekenders. And there’s this one little guy there—not an alkie, but like … Not quite a hobo, but, you know, kind of a deadbeat. He drinks a fair bit, but he’s not an alkie, and he’s not homeless, but definitely a moocher. Not because he’s so miserable, that’s just how he lives his life. That’s just what he’s like. And everyone would heckle and harass him, but indulgently, because he was constantly saying things that were horribly … not vulgar, but there’s a word for it. Raunchy, that’s it, raunchy things. He didn’t get all up on anyone, didn’t grab anyone, but there were always these gestures, or like little nasty verses, or he would shove the ladies at the guys, that’s how he was. Raunchy. And all the locals harassed him. So once we were sitting at the table in the front garden, having tea. Just us, you know, we were visiting them in Abramtsevo, about seven of us. He walked up and started to say whatever it is he always says, he’s a little drunk, a little filthy, but it’s not gross, it’s even funny. And we see that he keeps eyeing the food. Masha—whose house it was—says to him, why don’t you eat with us. Well, he says some kind of convoluted thank you, with all these frills and flounces, takes a bun, but he doesn’t sit down at the table, he leans against a birch tree and eats. And he goes on talking to us the same as always: ‘And do you sleep with your husband? And how many times? Do you have a big cock? Do you have kids? How many kids? Who’s the daddy? How about you, any kids? How about you?’ Masha asks him, ‘How about you, any kids?’ And he says, ‘No.’ Masha: ‘How come?’ And that’s when he starts taking off his pants. And we all feel super embarrassed, I mean, we’d been having such a nice chat, it was funny, and now he’s going to ruin everything in this stupid way. So he takes off his pants—and instead of a penis there’s a stub. That is, a stump. Not like how a doctor would have done it, or like a castration, everything’s where it should be, it’s just the penis that’s been chopped off at the base, like it was just—thwack. But the diameter is like huge, you can tell. We’re all: ‘Shit, what happened?’ And he’s all reluctant all of a sudden, and starts to kind of half tell this story, don’t worry, it doesn’t hurt anymore, it was a long time ago, yadda yadda, blah blah—so like, this one time I was doing the deed with some of our broads in the bushes, we got pretty loud, we were kind of wasted, we were laughing, and then their dudes showed up, they beat me up bad and then right with an axe—thwack. We’re all: ‘Oh man.’ And here I look at him carefully, and he’s all curly-haired, bowlegged, a little drunk … And I remember that once long ago some Russian peasants castrated Pan in a nearby grove. Well, ever since, obviously, that was it.
They were silent for a bit and then said to him, again calling him by name and patronymic, that something had to be done about Sasha, that the transplant surgeons would be there in a minute, that his wife had already agreed to sign the consent form, that he had to decide one way or the other. He said he had no idea what they were talking about.
Found Life Page 9