The Heart of the World

by Nik Cohn

  For form’s sake, not to undercut the rituals of the dance, she asked to borrow the Polaroid overnight, hold it up against her living-room wall. But her twirls and pirouettes were ecstatic, and her pantyline bulged tauter, more muscular than ever. ‘Obliquity,’ she said.

  ‘Ironic,’ said Laurent.

  Hand in hand together, they walked away down the long blank corridor. At the elevator, they kissed, they hugged. Gaby held the Polaroid to the light. Her face, upturned, glowed with ardor and Max Factor.

  ‘But of course,’ she said.

  13

  ‘Novokuz,’ said Sasha Zim.

  It was his abraxas, the name he invoked against chaos. When he felt himself free-falling, it held him down, sat on his head till he sobered. ‘Dirty old street. But dirty good like sweat, my own armpit smell,’ he said. ‘Sweet like homemade sin.’

  The past was much on his mind this spring. He had just turned twenty-five, and still his drums had no home of their own. For the first time, he felt the lack.

  At the Pearl River, he had bought himself a coffeepot, a furry blue bathmat, a ceramic lamp in the shape of a clothed girl whose kimono melted when the light went on, assorted Christmas decorations – tinsel, fairylights, iridescent plastic balls – and a stuffed toy dragon with red eyes and a footlong purple-red tongue. ‘Is time to own some stuff. Be possessed,’ he said.

  He took his new life with him everywhere, parked beside him on the front seat of his Checker. Sunny days, he’d roll down the window and wedge the dragon’s head in the gap, its tongue hanging down and flopping, half-hard, like an enormous spent cock.

  Instead of just a vehicle, the taxi was turned into a mobile romper room. Possessions apart, every square inch of surface was plastered with pictures of athletes, musicians, Playmates and Penthouse Pets, cowboys. Cowboys most of all, for Sasha’s long-term ambition, beyond Broadway, beyond even his drums, was to end as a Marlboro Man.

  Of late the vision was dimmed. His welcome had worn out with EmCee Marie, and he now split his nights between a Mormon waitress from Utah, a lady bodybuilder from Bangor, Maine, and the floor at the Hotel Moose. More often than not, he slept in the Brooklyn garage where his taxi berthed.

  He was not concerned for himself, he said. But the drums, that was something else. He’d had them five years, almost six; in that time they must have known a hundred beds. It was not right, not respectful. If he didn’t straighten up, fly right, they would end up stolen or ruined, worn out. Or maybe they’d just up and leave: ‘Find some man who’s playing them right, dosvyedanya is all she wrote.’

  He thought about his father.

  It was a bad sign. Any time he thought about Lev Mikhailovich, he risked contracting failure, and he had not come here to fail: ‘Who’s going Helen Handbasket?’ he demanded. ‘Not Zim, that’s who.’

  But he thought about his father.

  On Houston, right round the corner from Splash, was a jazz club called the Knitting Factory, where Sasha had sometimes sat in. It was a throwback, a rathskeller out of the Beat years, full of beards and sandals and baggy sweaters. Lev would have killed to spend one night there.

  He’d been a fifties stilyag, a hepcat, in love with bebop. In those years, jazz in Russia meant conspiracy – basements, passwords; rags shoved into windowcracks and doorjambs, so that no sound might escape; X-ray plates. For men like Lev, it wasn’t just music, it was a whole system of belief, an outlaw creed for which they would risk family, jobs, their freedom, their very lives.

  The X-ray plates were paramount. Willis Conover’s Voice of America radio show, beamed nightly from Tangiers, was taped religiously by shortwave hams, then transferred onto plates by hospital-lab technicians, one of whom was Lev Mikhailovich. Sasha’s earliest remembrance was of crouching under his parents’ bed, staring down into a whirlpool blur of ribs and intestines and bronchial tubes, while A Night in Tunisia played.

  The sound itself was mostly a distant burbling, more static and fuzz than music. What stayed with Sasha were the X-rayed innards, and his father’s bare feet hanging down off the edge of the bed. They were scabbed and black-toed; they smelled of dirty secrets. When Charlie Parker soloed, high-flying Bird, the black toes would twitch and jerk uncontrollably, spasming: ‘Like dangling men,’ Sasha said.

  His father was large, loud, disheveled, catastrophic; ‘man of faith and great thirst.’ His friends called him Rhyzhi Muzhik, Big Red, but he was not truly red, not a slab of raw meat like Ellen Fogarty’s Dad, more flaming orange. When he got to drinking, which was most every night, the freckles that covered his whole face would swell up like tiny raisins, fat enough to burst, and heat would come off him in waves, he’d burn up, a human brazier.

  He was a one-man demolition derby, could not cross a room without wrecking it, couldn’t touch any life without leaving it for dead. He had no malice, and needed none. Simple bull-headed blundering turned the trick every time. For months each year, he’d save up for Sasha’s birthday. And each year the presents would emerge from their wrappings in pieces, crushed, mangled beyond all repair. ‘Each man must have his own talent. My father, his talent was falling down,’ Sasha said. So Lev got kicked out of the Party, kicked out of the hospital lab, kicked out of every apartment his wife ever found. Turning taxi driver, he drove three cabs into three walls in three months. He even failed in sanitation: ‘Only man ever in history of sewers, they give him cash in hand to leave, go flush himself away.’ That left the black market.

  Across a tarpit from Novokuz, the Zims – mother, father, Sasha, and his younger brother, Pavel – found a room on the fifth floor, tucked right beneath the eaves, with a sweatshop below and only pigeons above. The closets were crammed with dead chickens and canned cherries, nylons, radios, and Lucky Strike cigarettes, always Lucky Strikes. When Sasha, then eight, asked what all this stuff was in aid of, Lev would stroke one orange nostril with a broken-knuckled forefinger and misquote the motto of the Young Pioneers, their pledge of allegiance to the Soviet. ‘Gotovy na Trud i na Zastchitzu Zhop? Ready for Labor and the Defense of Your Ass?’ he would recite, burning up, grotesquely leering. ‘Vsegda gotovy, Always ready,’ he’d reply.

  ‘Was typical Russian humor. No laughing matter,’ Sasha said. For certain, his mother was not entertained. Varya Petrovna, a curdled woman, pinched and hungering, she worked in the telegraph office, she was a Party member in good standing, and she hated Lev Mikhailovich with a hatred almost religious.

  The saxophone was the last straw.

  Lev bought it off a sailor, carried it home in a coalsack. It was a sulphurous summer night, and it must have been a Saturday, because there were lights on late across the street and you could hear music behind the blinds, Vladimir Vysotsky, Volodenka, with his hoarse rasp like a rusty hinge and word-drunk ballads – ‘Wild Horses,’ ‘A Village Wedding.’ Songs raw as a running sore, they made Lev cry in his cups.

  All music did. ‘This big lug, drunk oaf crazyman,’ he wept for Volodenka and he wept for Bud Powell, for Billie Holiday and the Red Army Choir. But he wept hardest for dead tenormen – Lester Young and Chu Berry, Honeybear Cedric, Wardell Gray. And it was a tenor that he brought home, an old tarnished Selmer, all bound up with tape and rubber bands.

  Sasha was dozing by the window. It was cooler there, the reek of boiled cabbage less vile. Propped upright like a tailor’s dummy, he went drifting on the music behind the drawn blinds, the smell of heat and melted tar, the party girls squealing, the hellfire night sky. Then the door crashed open behind his back, and there was his father, brandishing a coalsack.

  Picked out in silhouette by the hallway light, he was solid blackness with a rim of gingery orange. He stood lowering, swaying. He took the Selmer out of the coalsack. Only the bell was visible, a golden cobra’s head upreared. And Lev blew. Just once, an obscene blaaarrp. No tone, no song, only noise. It burst in the room like a bottle of homemade cherry brandy exploding. Sasha’s mother sat up stark in bed, a gray sheet clutched over her breasts. But she did not scr
eam, she didn’t speak, she just walked to the door and slapped Lev’s face, a single blow, with all the force she possessed. Then she turned him around, kicked him back down the stairs. The Selmer and the coalsack followed. So did his clothes, his chamber pot, three dead chickens, and a suitcase full of Lucky Strikes: ‘No Lev, no more,’ Sasha said.

  Now downstairs at the Knitting Factory, the tables were asymmetrical, all angles and sharp points, and the tenor-man was an earnest white boy in horn-rimmed glasses. His music was ferociously avant-garde, all honks and howls and strangled squeals. But its props – the tiny stage at the end of the darkened cellar, the rapt solemnity of the audience, the anorexic girls in their mauve lipstick and black tights, the wisp-bearded hipsters in shades and BIRD LIVES T-shirts – were sempiternal. ‘Black music, white meat,’ said Sasha. ‘“Relaxin’ at Camarillo.”’

  Camarillo was the California asylum to which Charlie Parker had once been committed; it was also the Novokuznetskayan bunker, underneath a rubber-boot factory, to which Lev Mikhailovich had retired with his Selmer, his chamber pot, his three dead chickens.

  Monday to Friday, it served as a storeroom and Lev as its janitor. On weekends, the stilyagi moved in. Middle-aged now, red-eyed men with bad breath and broken teeth, they made Sasha think of The Wild Bunch, displaced desperadoes worn out by battles yet unable to abide peace. By this time jazz could be heard quite openly, the latest American records picked up at any sly corner. But the stilyagi clung to the dark. Underground at Camarillo, they still smoked their joints jail-style, cupped in the palms of their hands; spoke out of the sides of their mouth: ‘Was like war is dead, long live war.’

  To Sasha, this was his father in aspic: an ancient Vox box-stereo, circa 1953, on an orange crate between two candles; some half-dozen decayed hepcats crouched down before it, like voodoo cultists before some forbidden godhead; choking black smoke; distant music, almost lost in crackles and pops; and Lev Mikhailovich, crying.

  Sasha was ten, eleven. Sometimes on Sundays, Lev used to take him on day-trips, out into the country or to Serebryany Bor, the Silver Wood, and the Selmer came along for the ride. After their picnic lunch, if Lev had had enough to drink, he’d try to find some secluded spot, a pool or riverbank, and then he would mime playing, just to see how he looked reflected in running water, a real-live jazzman, a Novokuz Coleman Hawkins.

  So one afternoon, it must have been October, the first snows were just beginning, and they got lost deep in the woods. Through a copse of silver birches, they came on a rotting wooden jetty reaching out into a small stagnant lake. So Lev walked the creaking planks to the far end, the Selmer dangling from his throat. Outdoors, he always wore the same long coat, not black precisely, more a midnight purple, the same color as the bloom on black grapes.

  ‘Picture,’ Sasha said. ‘Trees are silver, water is pea-soup green, sky is cement gray. Brownwood boards are brown like shit, snowflakes are white as snow. And Lev Mikhailovich is big orange, pissdrunk with great gold horn. And purple coat is flapping open, sucking on legs like black-grape shroud.’ He closed his eyes, held still. ‘Forgeddaboudit,’ he said.

  At the last plank, Lev lurched to a halt, stuck the mouthpiece between his lips. Inflating his cheeks like water wings, he bugged out his eyes, and silently he blew. He rocked way back, for balance, and then he rocked forward, overhanging the lake. To see. And the Selmer slipped through his fingers. Very gently, no fuss, it slipped into the lake.

  So mucous the water was, there was hardly a splash; the cobra’s head simply vanished, sucked under without trace. ‘One poof, all was gone,’ Sasha said. For maybe ten seconds, Lev stared at the ripples, stupefied. Then he turned around, like a man sleepwalking, and walked in a strict, straight line back down the jetty to land. He did not even weep.

  Two weeks later, the KGB picked him up. To keep out of jail, he volunteered for an Arctic Circle work camp, out beyond the Finland Station. He was gone three years.

  Varya Petrovna had already divorced him, remarried. Her new husband was a retired dentist, a smiling man in a shiny blue suit and schoolgirl white socks, who wore sterilized rubber gloves at the dinner table. He lived far away in the suburbs, out beyond Lyublinsky, where the apartment blocks looked just like projects, mile on mile of prefab-gray. In the dead center of his living room stood a voodoo godhead of his own, a vintage toothpuller’s chair complete with solid-steel drills, red-leather trim, a floral gargling bowl.

  Sasha was fourteen. He ran back to the city, to Novokuz; turned Fruit Eating Bear; and he took up lodging in the cafeteria at the Paveletsky railway station, which had been Lev Mikhailovich’s office, was the office of every penny-ante hood in Moscow.

  It was a twenty-four-hour Exchange and Mart, an A–Z of petty crime. It had no tone, no class whatsoever. A big-time racketeer like Yan Rokotov, Russia’s capo di capos, would not sully his fur coat here. But for workaday hustlers and black marketeers, fartsovschiki, it was Club Paradise. Pimps and dope dealers worked the bar, whores and pickpockets the tables. Twice a day, the KGB men came by to collect their cut, but that did not slow the action.

  The flow of suckers seemed inexhaustible. Young soldiers in transit, mostly, blind on sweet champagne. Swilling, they gorged on whitefish and cold potatoes, paint-stripper vinegar, until they passed out. Then the rogue taxi drivers, pidzhachniki, would sweep them off the floor, bring them round with vodka, and drive them away for one last fleecing.

  Sasha staked out a spot beside a hissing radiator, snug in the murkiest, greasiest corner. There he sipped on sticky orange drinks and smoked Herzegovina Flors, which tasted of tarred rope dipped in sheep’s piss. Sometimes he ran zhelazka games, based on the numbers printed on rubles, and sometimes he sold a little reefer. With the profits, he went to Hollywood movies.

  These, in the late 1970s, were not yet shown openly, but they were not hard to find. To keep up a semblance of official disapproval and avoid paying royalties, the Party simply changed the titles. Thus, The Roaring Twenties became The Fate of a Soldier in America, and Mr Deeds Goes to Town was The Dollar Rules. But Sasha’s own favorite was Sweet Smell of Success, which he sat through fourteen times. Its Russian title was Dead Souls of Broadway.

  ‘Every man is having one savior,’ Sasha said. And Tony Curtis was his. As Falco, the low-life Times Square press agent, he had seemed glamour incarnate: ‘Cool like Yule.’

  The mystique owed all to place and time. Just recently, Sasha had seen the film again, for the first time since Novokuz, and had been shocked to find it changed, completely garbled. Once you knew English, Falco stood revealed as a rat fink, ‘a cookie full of arsenic’ – treacherous, venal, all things vile. But back in Moscow, there had been none of that. No words, no plot, no moral – just the Times Square night, and a thin man running.

  This was Sasha’s first vision of Broadway: a self-contained cosmology, a system of brightly lit oases set in a sea of unremitting black, and this lone thin man, Falco, ‘the boy with the ice-cream face,’ racing and sweating through its neon galaxies, whirling out of jazz clubs into white-plush restaurants, out of restaurants into horseshoe bars and Automats, newspaper offices and TV studios, plate-glass penthouses, elevators like golden cages, hands flailing, mouth flapping, a starving man, consumed.

  Why the thin man ran, Sasha did not know, could not guess. But he recognized the hunger. It was his own.

  And then there was the suit. In one of the earliest scenes, Falco dresses himself in his bedroom mirror, a stately and rhythmic ritual, every move just so. And the threads he put on were the pure stuff of dreams. Single-breasted but double-vented, what Fruit Eating Bears and Pretty Things called a bugger-baffler, the jacket was lean as mean, tight as night, with a sheen so subtle that it did not seem to glint, merely to suffuse. Set off by high-waisted matador pants, a Skinny Jim tie, and a dazzle of white shirt, it made Sasha hard just to gaze on it.

  On Arbat, there was a hunchbacked tailor called Yul, the only Moscow tailor who could duplicate American style. Three mon
ths’ hustling bought Sasha a sharkskin two-piece, avocado green with a faint reddish underthread, like a subliminal glow: ‘Crease so sharp you could be stropping razor. Chest and shoulders so narrow, was like coffin, you could not breathe. What I mean, was perfect perfection.’

  Embalmed like so, he sat very still and very straight for eighteen months, stuffed in his corner at the Paveletsky cafeteria. Sometimes he messed with schoolbooks, more often he just sat and watched. The airlessness and steam-heat kept him drugged, half-asleep. Then somebody slapped his face. When he jerked awake, it was Lev Mikhailovich.

  Lev Mikhailovich, but not Big Red. That man was long gone, lost someplace out beyond the Finland Station. The person who now stood shaking, free-floating inside a suit of denim coveralls, was reduced to half-size and no longer orange, more faded ocher. He had cancer in his guts, cancer up his ass, so much cancer in his throat that he couldn’t speak, could only communicate by penciled notes.

  He used a kindergarten magic slate, each sentence painstakingly printed in block capitals, then snuffed out. But the questions did not compute, asked either too little or much too much: ARE YOU FINE? WHAT IS IT NOW? WHO CAN SAY?

  Sasha could only blink and mumble nothings. His trouser crease was not falling quite right. It bothered him, stopped him from relaxing. Lev ordered champagne, and they drank together, sweet, sticky stuff like a glucose drink. Some drunken soldier kept yelling obscenities, claiming he’d been robbed, HOW DO YOU KNOW? Lev scribbled. Then he drew a cartoon self-portrait on the paper tablecloth. When you looked at it twice, it transmuted into an anus, a purse-lipped, prissy-smiling sphincter. ‘Gotovy na Zastchitzu Zhop? Ready for Defense of Ass?’ it simpered.

  Sasha’s crease was still not right. He bent to correct it, and Lev went out to get some cigarettes. In his absence, Sasha bought a joint from a Pretty Thing, something that two could share. But his father did not come back. So he smoked by himself.