Having spoken these words in her mind, Danaë stretched her pale lips into an ambiguous smile and began dictating another text—a fake one—that had been approved by the pederasts from the Ministry of Education: “In the spring the forest is awoken by trills, drills, spills, trolls, and various other junk…”
Her daddy, who had schooled her in the art of complex linguistic expression, was dying of cancer… Yes, Innokentii Karaklev adored phrases that produced an effect. And he had taught his own daughter to adore such turns of phrase. As a result, the speech of both the Karaklevs was as out of place in the neighborhood of Perovo as a fugue for organ would be in a shawarma shack in a resort town.
Watching over her daddy’s demise was crushing. Danaë thought it unbearable to have to live and suffer watching such a thing. But damn it if she thought her life worse than death. She was convinced that she could live on, even without a future. Somehow. She wished for her daddy to disappear. Yes, to disappear, like a bout of hiccups, which, having come from god knows where, torments you for a while and then snap! it’s gone just like that, no one knows how or where. Daddy—she had thought since childhood—wasn’t fated for the grave. She rejected the idea of his decomposition in that stuffy heat and darkness. Her daddy couldn’t become a skeleton. That’s what Danaë had thought previously. And her daddy could not be turned into an urn of gray powder. But Innokentii Karaklev was dying—he emitted the smell of decomposition and his daily caprices were driving his daughter closer to the brink.
The salary of a Russian schoolteacher permits one to purchase three of the most inexpensive urns, then dismember Daddy and shove him into the urns in equal parts, and transport the urns to three different polling stations, pretending that one has simply mistaken the place to somewhere else. But the salary of a Russian schoolteacher can only nurse Daddy back to health if he has been afflicted with a foot fungus. By purchasing the appropriate ointment. Yet Innokentii Karaklev was dying not from a foot fungus, but from cancer of the innards. The chemo had made him look even more cancerlike: his eyes bulged, his back had lost its layer of fat, and touching it brought to mind the shell of a shrimp. Soon he’ll learn to walk backward, thought Danaë.
At school, many knew of Danaë’s misfortune, which went on without end. The directress Gavriushkina, with all of her predatory, livid, gloating heart, sympathized with Danaë. Gavriushkina would say to her: “Danochka Innokentievna, you should get a good night’s sleep. I’ll think of someone to substitute for you, Danochka Innokentievna…”
Danaë couldn’t bear expressions of pity directed at herself. In her mind she quickly but carefully rolled up the velvety paths of pity—embroidered with gristle and spread out before her—and having rolled up each and every one of them, shoved the scrolls deep inside Gavriushkina’s cyclopean ass.
“Thanks for your concern, Maria Petrovna,” Danaë would reply to the woman, “but I think I can manage just fine…”
“It’s clearer to one looking at you from the outside,” Gavriushkina parried. “Your beautiful eyes have lost their shine.”
I’ll show you some shine, thought Danaë, and following right behind the scrolls of velvety paths, into the back end of the directress, she stuck a metaphysical myriad of wrinkled sheets, recently soiled by Daddy’s excretions.
Sometimes Daddy liked to frighten his daughter. When she was six years old, Innokentii Karaklev told her the story of a Chinese governor who had two pupils in each eyeball. It was because of these four eyes that he had received his political appointment; Dad said that the Chinese guy lacked any other talents. Six-year-old Danaë was unable to sleep without having nightmares for a whole month. The Chinese guy visited her in her dreams and made eyes at her relentlessly.
Innokentii Karaklev had been an archeologist. Unfortunately, he’d never dug up anything worthwhile, anything for which one might win an award. All the Troys had been excavated before him. In his youth, he had planned to search out the tomb of Abel Adamovich Yahwehev, but somehow it just never panned out.
What’s wrong with me? Danaë was indignant with herself. He must have dug something up, I’ve just forgotten.
“Listen, Daddy, what was it you dug up?” asked Danaë as she changed his sheets.
“Cancer.”
“Yeah, but what else?”
“You…”
“I think it was something related to the burial mounds of the Scythians.” “Yeah, well, the burial mounds…”
“You don’t want to talk about it?”
“Why would I want to talk about it? Soon I’ll be a Scythian myself…”
Once Danaë got a call from the bank and was offered a line of credit. What the bank needed with Danaë in particular even the bank didn’t know. The one who called had a hissy voice of unidentifiable gender.
“I don’t need any credit,” said Danaë into the receiver. “My dad’s dying of cancer.”
“Forgive me, for god’s sake. Forgive me. Accept my condolences. All the best to you,” the voice poured out like a frightened fizz.
“No, wait!” shouted Danaë. “Don’t hang up!”
“Yes, yes?”
“What kind of condolences? What made you say that?”
The voice was silent.
“I don’t believe it’s possible, do you hear me? It’s just impossible!” Danaë yelled. “I don’t believe you! You cannot offer condolences, do you hear? You are just a petty, greedy maggot! I don’t even know your name, or your age, not even your gender, you son of a bitch! How dare you offer me your condolences? And where did you get my number?”
But the fizz wasn’t listening anymore. It had gone flat. Danaë hung up the phone and lit a cigarette, looking out the window at the other side of the street, where a tram rumbled past a plaza recently torn up by excavators. The plaza—pockmarked with ditches in which lay naked sewer pipes gazing at the ashen sky with their tired, rusty eyes—was empty. It was empty, if one were to ignore the statue of three orthodox nuns hanging their heads in mourning over that which could not be seen from the window, and that which Danaë could not recall, even though she walked past these nuns-in-ditches every day on her way to school.
It was cheaper to go to the market. Although daddy hadn’t taught her how to bargain. It was all for the better, taking into accent Dad’s slow demise, that double-mouthed Karaklev family had begun to consume less food.
“One Karaklev mouth is foaming,” said Danaë unconsciously to the lady attempting to sell some pig’s feet that would never know flat-footedness.
A month ago Danaë went to see a certain bastard who had been referred to her by another bastard. Both of them were medical professionals who considered themselves transmitters of veritable mercy. They rallied for euthanasia, adding that if she were to tell anyone about it, they would make her into a visual aid to Vesalius’s anatomy. The pill that would spare Dad an agonizing death would cost Danaë eight-ninths of a teacher’s savings. She remembered that day well. She was walking home from the train station, down 2nd Vladimirskaya Street. The sky was the color of boiled pork. The traffic lights were doing what they always did—preparing to break down. Flattened cigarette butts lay strewn about the asphalt like pharaohs whose sarcophagi had been jacked. Stray cats dashed away from short-order cooks dealing shish kabab on the street.
Danaë poisoned her daddy. Innokentii Karaklev felt drowsy. Danaë tucked him into bed and went to the kitchen to wait for him not to wake up. But Innokentii Karaklev did wake up. He even drank a little chicken broth. When he went to sleep for a second time and, after a short while, woke up once again. And the third time was the same. The fourth and fifth times too. So passed three days, and Daddy was still not dying. The poison didn’t tarry in his sick body: it left with the urine or the shit, she didn’t quite know which. Then Danaë telephoned the bastards.
“What did you give me?” she asked them.
“What you asked for,” was their answer.
“But it didn’t work! Three days have already passed!”
Danaë began to wait. A week went by. Innokentii Karaklev was dying, but not all the way. Every day the same. He was dying, but not all the way.
She knew that two of the ninth-grade students—Chuniaev and Golotsvan—had committed a murder. Danaë accidentally overheard their lively chatter, their voices brimming with real euphoria. The boys were cheerfully, ecstatically exchanging impressions. The Creator himself, it would seem, had experienced such rapture in the first hours after the creation of the world. But these two—Chuniaev and Golotsvan—had simply murdered a bum the previous night. With the aid of the homeless man they had been demonstrating to each other various martial arts strikes and holds, and finally martial-arted the man to death. Danaë also had previous opportunities to hear about this type of entertainment of the idle but energetic youth from families who considered themselves successful. The Perovo police took on the search for the homeless-cides with some reluctance. More precisely: they began the search reluctantly and then, after a few hours, dropped it completely. The Perovo police had much luckier corpses to track—ones with relatives and square-footage.
But the corpse of that bum did not vanish without glory: it had a short but successful career as an actor in an anatomical theater. The medical students showered him with bouquets of twinkling scalpels…
She was impressed that her students—Chuniaev and Golotsvan—were not only falling behind in every subject, while also, as it turned out, committing murders. This permitted her hatred toward them to acquire some firm ground. The testosterone was jumping out of Chuniaev’s and Golotsvan’s mouths, ears, noses, and even from under their fingernails…
Once, on television, she saw a news segment about a group of students who raped and murdered their phys-ed teacher. This happened somewhere on the outskirts of the city, which Danaë, a Muscovite, could imagine about as vaguely as she could the Flemish city of Brabant. Watching Golotsvan as he shuffled at the blackboard with his hands in the pockets of his wide jeans, which were covered with chains and trinkets, Danaë imagined him, with hands shaking, hastily unbuttoning his foul-smelling pants and throwing himself at her with his horn-shaped prick. She, Danaë, is lying crucified in the tar, naked, while Golotsvan’s partners in crime hold her by the arms and legs; she struggles in their trap like a deer knocked onto her back. First Golotsvan, and then the rest of the goons, one by one, press against her with their unwashed genitalia, toss on her for a bit, then sprinkle her with what God gave them, and… experience a piercing guilt. Then, ashamed, they break her neck, or choke her with a wire, or stab her to death with penknives…
“And that’s all you deigned to learn, venerable Golotsvan?”
“I didn’t have time, Dana Innokentievna, my cat had kittens last night.”
“How many did she have?”
“Six. Would you like a kitten, Dana Innokentievna?”
“Take a seat, Golotsvan. You get a ‘satisfactory.’”
“Why ‘satisfactatory’? Please, Dana Innokentievna—”
“Take your seat.”
Grumbling under his breath, with his lower lip jutting forward, Golotsvan went back to his seat, jangling the chains and trinkets on his foul-smelling pants. His hands in his pockets. Danaë picked up a piece of chalk and turned to the board.
“Jewish bitch…” Golotsvan muttered.
Without turning around, Danaë grinned at the mouse-gray smoothness of the chalkboard. A thought came to her:What would happen if I take this here piece of chalk and on this very blackboard write something really special. Like, for example, “May you all be damned.” What would happen? Probably nothing. They’d all exchange glances and squeeze out puzzled little smirks, like lambs catching a whiff of the fire being lit under the spit. Besides, they were all damned long ago. And she was too. Danaë herself had been damned even before the students sitting in this classroom. Because she was older than them. Almost three times older. There’s your arithmetic for you, in a literature class. In the Perovo neighborhood. In a state school, in the city of Moscow, compared to which Brabant was just a pathetic little village of five houses and one toilet.
It would be natural to assume that since Danaë had a father, she also had a mother. Danaë didn’t like assumptions, particularly if they came from strangers. First of all, the mom she did in fact have at some point, she had no longer. Second, Mom loved her little Danaë for only a very short time: from zero to nine years old, plus the nine months that she spent carrying her daughter in her womb. And when the nine years were over, Mom placed a big down pillow on her sleeping daughter’s pretty little face, and then sat on top of it. Dad had lifted Mom off the pillow—and thus also off the red face of their daughter—just in time. After that, Danaë never saw her mom again. With the exception of that one time, which she had mostly forgotten: she and her dad had, it seems, visited Mom in some sort of yellow basement that smelled like medical syringes. Now, of course, Danaë knows all too well, and had known it for twenty-plus years, that the awful trick with the down pillow secured for Mom her demise in the mad house.
“Mom loves you,” Karaklev assured his nine-year-old daughter as she cried herself to sleep. “She just needs a little medical treatment and she’ll be with us again. Mom loves you.”
“And do you love me?” Danaë asked, smearing the tears with her little fist.
“And I do too,” Dad replied, taken aback that she would question his feelings. “Very, very, very much. Daddy loves his little pea, his clever girl.”
* * *
Innokentii Karaklev was becoming more and more capricious, more cancerlike. More foul-smelling. Worst of all, Daddy started to recount aloud his past life, and specifically those moments that a healthy person would not only not recall, but would actively try to forget. The long period of dying had debased him. Instead of becoming more pious, he was transformed into a cynic to a degree that is rarely found among the camp of dying organisms. This is what Innokentii Karaklev said to his daughter Danaë on that day it rained cats and dogs, such a heavy, pounding rain that the pigeons caught in it received concussions. The neighborhood of Perovo looked like a boundless, cracked aquarium into which poured the water from a thousand hoses in the sky.
“I slept with your mother. I did it with all my passion. I drilled her and drilled her and then you emerged from her belly like a wild troll from a mangled cave… Admit it, my child, from the very beginning you never liked it here.”
“No, I liked it here. From the very beginning. You’re mistaken, Daddy,” Danaë answered, listening with one ear to the hammering rain. “Fools like you are always mistaken. You’re made of mistakes. You have a fatal error dangling right there between your legs.”
Innokentii Karaklev watched the rivulets of rain running down the windowpane.
“Listen, child…” he muttered, swallowing dryly, “try to be… happy. I’m so sick of you being unhappy… I’m dying because of your unhappiness.”
“You’re dying because of cancer,” corrected Danaë, sticking a cigarette in the corner of her smirk.
They were both silent awhile, thirty-five seconds or so. The smoke from Danaë’s cigarette coiled around itself in the dark room like a scrap of seaweed.
“Do you know why I left your mother?” said Dad, scratching his sunken cheek. “Because of this one student. A handsome rogue. He was excellent at poker, had a thing for chemistry and water polo. Yes sir, my little pea, he always had jokers in store. His glass vials often exploded from overheating, and he swam in a mauve swim cap. Your mother found us—I was on my knees, polishing his… with my mouth…”
“His what?” Danaë turned to stone.
“His that!” He made a strange noise and squinted his colorless eyes at his daughter.
“Daddy…” Danaë stonily sounded out the words. “Are you saying you were a homosexual?”
An astonishing picture took shape in her mind: her dying father sucking the penis of Golo
tsvan, the flunk, the murderer.
“That’s how it went… sometimes. And who didn’t get into some of it? In one’s youth, in the barracks, after a bout of drinking, in one’s dreams—”
“Did you actually love my mother?”
“Yes, my little pea, yes…” Innokentii Karaklev nodded his hairless head. “You are the result of a grandiose love, a gale-force diffusion. The cells were jumping out of our bodies and mixing together. Such passion, it shook the atmosphere. Those were breathtaking, mind-numbing times.”
“And what about that student?” Danaë asked, watching the column of ash crumble from her cigarette onto the rug. “What was his name?”
“Andrei. Yes, yes. It was a breathtaking passion.” Her dad smacked his lips and purred like a cat. “Absolute diffusion. Overflowing excitement. To near suffocation. More a miracle than a passion.”
“Did you love my mother?” Danaë prodded in a steely voice. “Answer me. I don’t understand.” She now imagined her dad’s hairless head laboring over the perineum of the flunking murderer Golotsvan.
“I loved them both very deeply,” answered Innokentii Karaklev. “And about twenty others. I loved everyone. And every time it was a miracle.”
Danaë took a drag on her cigarette and fixed a vacant stare on the window. A lustful blush broke in crimson across Golotsvan’s cheeks, his eyes turning back in his head, his moans encouraging her dad’s frail, hairless head with its decaying mouth.
“And me?” Danaë asked almost inaudibly.
Her dad’s wrinkles suddenly turned smooth and he answered: “You are my little pea. My favorite book. Plus Louis Armstrong. And Fellini. Plus my favorite olivier salad. And all the Egyptian pyramids and the ruins of the great castles. You understand me? You are also the lily pads on the pond where I swam when I was just a little kid… Plus God, whatever He may actually turn out to be. My little pea. Danaë. Come here, give me a kiss.”
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