And so on.
His daughter used to come from Germany to visit him here in Zamoskvoreche. She’d clean the room and stuff the refrigerator with provisions. She’d bring medicine for his chronic cold. Photos of his twin grandchildren. And then she’d be gone for a year.
He kept a photo of the twins with a stack of fan letters in a desk drawer. He’d study the identical faces with amazement and disdain, making out, through their German imprint, the features of his ancestors.
His hobby, his passion, was telescopes. Spyglasses in particular. He assembled them, with his own hands—after shows or in the morning if there were no rehearsals. He calculated angles and radii from magazines and handbooks. And distances. He’d send a list to his daughter and she’d bring him first-class German lenses. He’d fit them in a tube made by the theater metal workers (for some reasons these workers loved him). Thus a telescope on a tripod made an appearance. And he’d pull heavenly objects somewhat closer to Moscow.
What can you see in the blurry Moscow sky, where only the moon—and that with difficulty—makes its way to the viewer? Nonetheless, right after a performance, he’d rush to Paveletskaya. If the night was more or less clear, he’d sit down on the wide windowsill and sharpen the focus. Or he’d spread maps out on the floor and make calculations. He’d determine the favorable days and segments of the sky in which a constellation would appear.
And so he lived this way from year to year. He went on film shoots and tours, to festivals in Sochi and Vyborg. He took on a lover from the theater orchestra. He’d call on her at the dormitory on Gruzinskaya Street. But mostly he spent his time between the theater and the stars. Until, ultimately, this thing happened.
One March morning he set out for the laundromat, as he did every other Saturday, to drop off his underwear and shirts. The establishment was close by, two stops on the streetcar. Since on the weekends you can wait forever for Moscow’s public transportation, and since it was sunny, he decided to go on foot. He had just set off when suddenly, ringing and rumbling, a streetcar came bounding down the street.
It simply emerged from the flow of traffic and flung its doors open.
There was nothing to be done. It was fate. He was in luck. He made his way to the end of the car and set his laundry bag down. He looked around. The car was empty, except for a man in a sheepskin coat and an old woman with her grandchild sitting up front. The car started off; the mansions, like rickety old wardrobes, drifting by. Somewhere church bells were sounding—the Saturday chimes had begun. The actor closed his eyes and imagined they were riding through old, prerevolutionary Moscow, as in some Ivan Shmelev tale or a play by Ostrovsky. A hundred years ago the bells probably rang exactly the same way, he thought. When he opened his eyes, he saw that the man in the sheepskin coat was standing near the front, about to get off.
His profile seemed familiar and the actor was touched with the thought that earlier, two centuries ago, everyone here would have known each other.
Moving down the steps, the man turned around and their eyes met. The actor gasped. He saw that this man resembled him; they were like two peas in a pod.
And that, in essence, before him stood he himself—only in different clothes.
Amazed, the actor dropped his bag and a towel fell out onto the dirty floor. When he managed to stuff it back, the doors had already slammed shut. His double had disappeared. The actor rushed to the window but the pane was covered over with glossy paper. Nothing was visible through the face of an advertisement diva.
He pulled the window open and leaned out. An enormous billboard, Gold, and a yellow church fence caught his eye. That one, the other one, was standing on a corner looking right back at the actor. And again, with frightening clarity, he saw himself. His own face—familiar to the point of disgust from all the films and posters.
Well, so what? Anything can happen in Moscow. But still, thoughts of a double made him anxious. At first he drove them away, annoyed at his stupidity. He tried to make fun of himself. He laughed. He recalled many films with just such a plot. But nothing helped. The image of his double was haunting and tenacious.
What if it’s my twin brother? After all, it was postwar times. Total confusion. We were returning to Moscow from the evacuation… Mother remembered she was holding a little baby, and that he didn’t make it, that he had died… Maybe he simply got lost?
My daughter too gave birth to twins.
No, this just can’t be true.
He’d sit down on the bed and drink a glass of water from a decanter. He’d nervously stare at the hair on his bare legs. Then he’d take out the photo of his grandchildren and scrutinize it once more. With each night it seemed they resembled him less and less—because they looked more and more like the man in the sheepskin coat. From the empty streetcar.
That means people recognize him on the streets. Of course they do! They want to know how things are. They ask for an autograph. Maybe he’s an honest fellow and tells them they are mistaken. But what if he isn’t?
He imagined clearly how that one, the other one, arrives instead of him at the theater, pays visits to the flutist. And he’d throw himself on the bed, snarling into the pillow from rage. But soon another feeling began to penetrate his impotent fury—of emptiness, total emasculation, of indifference. He had only ever experienced something similar after difficult performances. When he played a role he didn’t fully understand. One he hadn’t quite entered. He felt like a coat shoved onto a hanger; it just hangs there, dangling in the darkness, completely forgotten by everyone. Dead. He’d pinch himself and pull at his hair. He’d grab the phone. But who could he call?
Not the police.
His life gradually began to take a new turn. He shifted the telescope from the sky to the streetcar stop. For hours he’d track the people clustered there in hopes of seeing the one in the sheepskin coat. For no particular reason he kept going downstairs to the store. He hung around the counter a lot so they’d recognize and greet him. If they didn’t, he’d begin to panic. He’d loiter around the neighborhood, peering into faces, and his feet would inevitably take him back to that corner with the yellow church fence and the Gold billboard where his twin, the stranger, had disappeared.
But the twin was nowhere to be found.
What’s more, they stopped phoning him from the theater to remind him of performances and rehearsals. As if they had forgotten or fired him. Once he made the call himself, but an unfamiliar voice didn’t recognize him. He got frightened and hung up. So he stopped calling. He was afraid.
A week later, he simply got in his car one evening and drove downtown.
Under the notice Today on the poster in front of the theater, his performance was announced.
So, the impostor has already taken my place.
Relieved, the actor sat down in a café and began to drink, although he had given up alcohol after a heart attack ten years earlier. Cognac, beer, vodka—he ordered them indiscriminately. He drank greedily, without a snack, gazing between glasses at the ad behind the dusty window. Your blood will save a life, a girl urged from the poster, smiling her celluloid smile.
He couldn’t remember how he got home. The smoke-filled cellar at Novokuznetskaya station and the patchy shadows, in whose company he’d swigged down vodka and belted out songs, flashed in his memory.
He collapsed in his clothes but couldn’t fall asleep because he was sick at heart. Pulling his knees to his chin, he lay there and listened to the very same sentence that kept echoing in his head. Your blood will save a life, someone’s quiet, velvety voice kept repeating.
Your blood will save a life.
He had finally begun to doze off when a thick, enveloping nausea overtook his body. It rose up like sludge and flooded his consciousness. His heart became a big balloon about to burst into pieces. So that’s how one dies, he thought, starting to lose consciousness, vanishing slowly into an airless well and resurfacing later in the darkness of a sleepless night. At dawn, coming to on sweat-soaked sheets,
he moved to an armchair. Hunched over from the pain in his heart, he sat there until daylight.
Around 11 he was jolted by the ringing telephone. It was a call from the theater; the troupe, it turned out, had just returned the day before from a short tour. The director’s assistant was reminding him there was a performance that evening. “In your honor,” she flirted.
“But how can…?” he mumbled into the receiver.
“The new cloakroom attendant got it mixed up,” the woman nattered on. “Instead of Tomorrow, he put up the sign that said Today. We’ll rehearse the dance an hour before curtain, as usual.” And she hung up.
Standing under the shower, he came to his senses. He was amazed how quickly, with one single phone call, the nightmare vanished. It simply came unglued like a plastic advertising sticker and flew away in the wind. Sobered up, cheerful, he set about tidying the whole apartment. He washed the floor and windows. He dropped off his underwear, which had been lying in the corner since that day, at the laundromat. He for the first time ever phoned his daughter.
“Imagine, such nonsense!” he said, chuckling into the receiver. “I knew they were supposed to go on tour, but I simply forgot.”
“Everyone’s so nervous!” The daughter gave a Chekhovian sigh, and it was obvious she was thinking of someone else as well.
“The Irish call one’s double his fetch,” she said in parting. “I’ll send you some pills. That should help.”
That evening they gave the performance. And they say he played Caesar as never before, fiercely, implacably, desperately. In such a way that before the ovation, when the emperor exits into eternity, a pause hung in the air for a few seconds—as in olden times, when the spectator truly believed what was happening on stage.
Returning home, the actor didn’t feel his usual fatigue. On the contrary, blood was racing through his veins, his energy was overflowing. He even got out of the cab and walked home on foot, swinging his arms widely. A new life, he thought, will definitely begin from this night forward. It will be wonderful and serene. Unpredictable and clear.
Not like the one which he had lived.
He entered his apartment. Without taking off his coat, he began to wander around the room. How about going back again on the street? he thought. How about a breath of fresh air? To hell with it, how about meeting some woman, maybe even from the railroad station? Maybe go to a café, or a movie.
He stood looking out the window, watching how persistently and interminably the cars moved around the ring. Then his gaze fell on the telescope. It was pointing to the streetcar stop, as before. And rubbing his palms, he triumphantly sharpened the focus.
In the lens, two round-shouldered teenagers stood shifting their feet and spitting noiselessly. He moved the tube forward a millimeter and saw next to them a man with a briefcase.
His twin, his double. That very one.
When he ran out onto the street, the kids were trying to snatch the briefcase out of the man’s hands. An empty jar was rolling along the asphalt. A hand flashed, the sound of a dull, crunching blow. The double clutched at his face.
“Hey!” shouted the actor across the street. “What do you think you’re doing!”
And he stepped out into the road.
The impact of a car flipped him around several times in the air. He fell, and tumbling along the asphalt, he came to a stop, his arms flung wide.
Through the dark sludge that was flooding his consciousness, he was able to see his double take off down a side street. Then someone’s hands ran along his body, and he thought about the flutist, how she would undress him, caress him. But these were other hands. Fast and clumsy, a man’s hands. They dug into his pockets and grabbed his watch. Then wiped it off with disgust on the sleeves of his raincoat.
“Look at this weirdo, he’s a copy,” sounded over his ear. “Same face.”
There was some spitting and a swish of fabric. The last things he saw were two pairs of tattered sneakers retreating swiftly down the street.
PART III
FATHERS AND SONS
DADDY LOVES ME
by Maxim Maximov
Perovo
Translated by Matvei Yankelevich
Her students hated her. For not being young, pretty, or fun. For not being different from who she was. Or they loathed her for something altogether different. Who knows what reasons people find to hate each other…
Although she was, like her colleagues in humanity, made up of 90 percent water, that water was not potable, which in a different circumstance may have, at least partially, influenced the formation of sympathy toward her in her students as well as others around her.
Dad had called her Danaë. According to her passport she was Danaë. For her students and colleagues she was Dana Innokentievna, a teacher of Russian language and literature.
She had mutual feelings for her students, not because she thought it necessary to answer loathing with loathing, but just because it happened to be so: she was hated and she also hated. A pure coincidence of feelings directed toward one another (if it is allowed that hate is a feeling).
And so, she hated her students—just as in childhood she’d hated lumps in her cereal. In essence, they were indeed lumps in the undigestible cereal of existence. And Danaë imagined herself a lump as well—big, flabby, stale. In fact, Danaë loathed the directress Gavriushkina like she loathed fish oil or boiled onions. Yet she tried to act nice. And the more she pretended, the more she loathed—her students, her colleagues, the scantily clad woman standing in front of her in line at the supermarket—yes, that very woman with the cart full of ad-emblazoned frozen dinners.
Sometimes Danaë thought with bitterness: Why don’t the terrorists take all these vermin hostage? Why don’t they get blown up? Why do serial killers pass over the directress Gavriushkina and that lady with the frozen dinners?
Danaë Karakleva was forty-seven years old. She knew that there was nothing more to come. It was all over. All the gifts she could have received had already been received. She was simply brought into this remarkable thrift store with the breath of a violated cosmos wafting through it, and they said to her, “Pick something out,” and then they locked her in, in this thrift store where everything had already been picked over. And in this thrift store with the breath of a violated cosmos wafting through it, she had spent forty-seven years.
As regards this existence’s amorous propositions, Danaë Karakleva could say the following: “I was never certain that I loved any of those not numerous men who—each in his own time—shook their fatty deposits over my trembling bosom. If Cupid ever shot at my heart, he must have been shooting blanks.”
This thesis which she had invented herself resembled fact, much more so than the rumors about her inevitable old-maid-hood. Among the large-horned herd of her students, it was commonly said in such cases: “Oh yeah? Suck this.”
She liked looking at the shower of pills, especially the round ones, that resembled squashed pearls. She liked to ride the tram past the hospital and look at the sapphire windows of the operating rooms and imagine the surgeon making a fatal error…
Danaë and her dad lived in a five-story building, erected under Nikita Khrushchev in the time of the artificial, government-approved destruction of the ark of communal living. There were more than enough such buildings in the neighborhood of Perovo, as there were in many of Moscow’s outlying quarters. They were built out of either panels the color of tubercular spit or gray-pink brick. Each of these residential buildings lacked an elevator. Outward attractiveness and interior comfort—all this was also lacking. It might be easier to list what was present in these buildings: the metastases of all varieties of cancer; staircases by which one might climb to the heights of despair, and if one were to descend it would be into pits of madness; guitar chords of underworld ditties oft performed by greenhorns fated to disappear in the sands of Afghanistan or the ravines of Chechnya. Also present in these buildings were walls that had been viciously fooled by promises of becom
ing supplementary scrolls for God’s commandments…
Every day, Danaë returned to this building, having first stopped at the market or grocery store; she returned with a feeling of a hole, a nagging pain, in the very center of her being…
From the Karaklev family’s kitchen window one could see the subway entrance. In the morning rush hour, before heading out to work in the nearby school, Danaë slowly downed a cup of instant coffee while examining the dark human mass. The mass penetrated the underground, shuffling from one leg to another in penguin fashion. The sleepy faces of those people—especially in the dusk of winter mornings—looked ominously similar to one another, lacking features, something like the heads of nails when viewed face on.
Danaë’s manner of speaking was as bizarre as her vision. Her speech was understood only by the portraits of the classics that hung on the classroom walls, and not even by all of them. She doubted Maxim Gorky, for one. As regards her pupils—they simply whimpered. Or cursed. Some quietly, others with full voice—depending on how much nerve they had. Danaë was kept employed by the school because she seemed rather like an animal that had been listed in the little red book. A wide-faced, warty roe deer, for example.
“As recently as the beginning of the twentieth century, the Perovo neighborhood in the south-east of Moscow consisted of a treasure trove of toxic swamps, the kingdom of poisonous mycelium, and randomly intersecting paths along which it was dangerous to walk alone…” In this manner began the oral dictation, concocted by Danaë in order to test the literacy of her pupils, who had come back from their summer vacations with their heads well aired out. It ended thusly: “And now, fuckity-suckity, here you dwell, young sluts and indefatigable jerk-offs…”
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