St. Petersburg Noir

by Natalia Smirnova

  Everyone wanted to go home, but the metro was closed.

  The early-morning chill had set in.

  Puddles of vomit and shards of beer bottles everywhere.

  The era of street-cleaning machines had not yet arrived.

  * * *

  But we were local, you see—guys from the district.

  Long ago we had grown accustomed to the fact that if you were just going out to pay the electric bill on Millionaya Street, you’d run into Atlas holding up the sky.

  Go straight—and you bump into the Hermitage.

  To your left—the Capella Courtyards.

  To your right—Kazan Cathedral …

  “But why do you want to go to St. Isaac’s?”

  * * *

  My companion Lyokha Saksofon fully realized the “happiness” of living in the city center and hanging out in the district.

  And he wrote this joyful song.

  Now we were loudly singing it on the empty square:

  And this, my friend, is my district and my city

  That’s why my collar is raised high

  That’s why I’m not wearing designer shoes,

  That’s who we are—that’s how we do it

  What are you talking about! What are you talking about!

  “Come on, Lyokha, roll one. Roll a couple right away, it’s pretty nice here. Pushkin is waving … We’ll leave him the roach … For the best poet, the best roach!”

  We were already sitting on the bench and looking at Pushkin.

  * * *

  The bums who hang out on the square by the Dostoevsky monument are called Dostoevskies, and the ones on Pushkin Square are Pushkins. But there’s nobody here now … half past four, child’s play—and nobody’s here.

  The Golden Triangle. Nothing ever happens here …

  Two years ago, right outside the Hotel Europe, the English consul was robbed—and since then it’s been quiet. Every night the Phantom of the Opera is supposed to come out onto the roof of the Maly Opera and cry out like a muezzin: “All’s well in the Golden Triangle!”

  * * *

  Although it was precisely on that roof that something happened to one of my friends last winter.

  It was Misha Bakaleishchikov—the Man from the Past.

  The Man from the Past was supposed to come to the City of His Youth in search of his Past … It’s the usual move for an idiot.

  I even envy him. He had come back for good to the little town of his childhood that’s green with mold …

  * * *

  Once he saved me. I was fifteen.

  We had just come out on the Nevsky then for the first time—to make some money.

  Three kids from the seventh grade. Sonya had a violin. Manya, a clarinet.

  And I had a harmonica. And a black cap for the money. And all around us—deaf Soviet power. We managed to stand there for about four minutes. And then they took us by the hand and led us away … No, not the cops. Fyoka’s crew. The cops didn’t touch anybody …

  So far, Fyoka’s crew hadn’t given them the go-ahead.

  Fyoka’s crew—sounds good, right?

  It’s like when Long John Silver in the movie version of Treasure Island asks, “Where’s Flint’s crew?”

  And then later, when they’re still on the brigantine:

  The Jolly Roger waves in the wind—

  Flint’s crew is singing a ditty …

  We all sang that song when we were in the Young Pioneers.

  The brigantine—that was the most important part.

  The pirates raised the brigantine’s sails on the high blue seas.

  And somehow that got mixed up with Alexander Grin’s Scarlet Sails.

  All the cafés were called that.

  And the clubs where the young people were supposed to spend their leisure time.

  Young Pioneer groups.

  Scarlet Sails. Or the Brigantine. Or Romance.

  That’s what our romance was like …

  But it turned out that the pirates’ sea wasn’t so very far away after all—it was right there in front of us, on the banks of the Neva.

  And Flint’s crew was there as well.

  They made their journey on scarlet sails. Or grew up right there.

  Out of the slime and dampness …

  They sent the young people into ecstasy, trembling.

  Flint’s crew—that was really something.

  The fucking corsairs! The fucking corsairs! The corsairs.

  We thought that they were in opposition to the powers that be. That they weren’t any worse than the dissidents—fighters and heroes.

  As a matter of fact, I don’t know what it was like in Moscow, but in Piter their relationship with the powers that be was precisely as if they were real corsairs.

  The powers that be had been living off their thieving for quite some time.

  In Piter all the cops were taken care of.

  Once Sasha Bashlachov came up with this metaphor about us and the West: “You’re still between the spoon and the lie, and we’re still between the wolf and the louse.”

  The wolves, you see, were these corsairs of ours.

  The KGB of those days was probably the louse. Which didn’t hunt for real criminals, but for the shitty bohemians.

  Catching poets was an entirely lousy occupation. And they gave you ten years for smoking a joint …

  And the Wolves weren’t your usual criminals.

  It was our Young Capitalism.

  Our Nascent Bootlegging.

  In our Northern Old Chicago.

  The people were being dressed by the black-marketeers.

  The hard-currency girls were teaching the Kama Sutra.

  Shadow capitalists were setting up factories.

  Somewhere in the depths of Kupchino, simple Soviet people were making fifteenth-century Saxon porcelain. Even the fact that porcelain wasn’t invented until the eighteenth century didn’t stop them.

  Well, naturally, the Underwater Kingdom needed poets like it needed a hole in the head. But artists and musicians could sometimes find work. Somebody had to draw all those stencils and sketches, and the musicians attended to the leisure.

  The life of a corsair is simple: battle on the seas, and an endless holiday on shore—that is, a tavern with some tunes and babes.

  A lot of people worked in the taverns. And I’d been singing in one since I was sixteen …

  It was right then, during that period, that everything was possible. Because nothing was impossible.

  And the laws didn’t work for shit. I started singing a year and a half after that first appearance on the Nevsky …

  Then the corsairs took us gently by the arm and led us away. And they led us to the Ulster, Fyoka’s port of hail. Flint’s crew gathered there every night.

  We wept. We said that we were in the seventh grade. We said, “Guys, we won’t do it again …”

  They didn’t beat us. This first time they explained that anyone who wanted to sell something on the Nevsky—no matter what—needed to come to an agreement with the corsairs and pay up. It was all very simple. Musicians were already working on the Nevsky. And the artists were pushing masks of some kind and pottery.

  And everybody paid off the corsairs, while the corsairs paid off—again, not the cops, but higher up—the KGB itself. Everything concerned with hard cash was the fiefdom of the KGB. And not the cops. Although the cops of course also got in on the action sometimes.

  The Nevsky started getting wild when the tourists arrived.

  And when there weren’t any tourists, you had the Finnish construction workers.

  But we were little schoolkids, so they took pity on us and let us go after we gave our word that we wouldn’t show our faces on the Nevsky with our music.

  They threw us out like the trash.

  We had such an immature look about us—skinny and underdeveloped.

  But I very much wanted to be part of that life. I managed to fall in love with one of the guys, the one who h
eld me by my collar as he led me there and back.

  He was either Fyoka’s right hand … or the left one …

  And I started going there. They would chase me away right when Fyoka would make his appearance. He was a well-known sadist. But he wasn’t a fucking pedophile.

  He really liked manhandling girls. But all his girls were real blondes, with tits and asses …

  These Russian Barbies. With long blond hair … These Barbie babes.

  And then I was emaciated and tall—well, like I am now.

  Dark, short hair.

  Definitely an underground look, just for him.

  And the other corsairs found me to their liking.

  Or did I simply like this circus around me?

  They found it somewhat amusing that he wouldn’t allow me to go to the Ulster.

  And I became particularly friendly with the barmen. I was always sitting there at the bar, drinking coffee with cognac.

  Later, they stopped chasing me away. Even when Fyoka was there.

  I would sit quietly and watch them. And listen to music.

  And of course, just like in the movies, I knew by heart the entire repertoire of the group that played there.

  Then one fine day I finally got up the nerve and butted in—they were playing cards. Twenty-one.

  I said that I wanted to play one-on-one with Fyoka.

  That was me showing off in front of the guy I was in love with. He didn’t give a fuck, but he laughed at the situation along with everyone else.

  Fyoka said: “Let’s play. But if you lose, we’ll take you with us today. And then we’ll really play …”

  There were rumors that they had taken one girl to some wasteland, poured gas on her, and set her on fire … I’m not sure if that’s true, but their working girls were always walking around broken and shattered and ending up in the hospital—those weren’t rumors.

  I knew all that. Since I was fifteen.

  And I didn’t need to brazen it out.

  But in general there was no stopping me.

  It was probably the effect of the coffee and cognac.

  Of course I lost.

  * * *

  And then our Captain Flint said, “You’re a very brave girl. But now we’re going to test you and see what you’re made of. You don’t want us to take you with us? Well then, we can try this: our brave girl puts her little hands on the table now and we’ll put out our cigarettes on them. If the little girl doesn’t yell, we’ll let her go home. And if she yells—we’ll take her with us.”

  There were seven corsairs besides him, and of course each one applied his cigarette for a second. Only for a second. But nobody refused to do it—they had their own rules.

  And then the captain said: “Now I’ll show you how to put out a cigarette.” He touched me with it and held it there, well, for what seemed like a hundred years. Probably all of a minute. But I didn’t cry out, I was determined to remain silent, like a partisan …

  This scar here, the big round one from the captain’s cigarette, is always visible, while the other seven are small and faded.

  But the point is, I didn’t cry out. And Fyoka said that I could go wherever I damn well pleased … since I’m such a brave girl.

  My teeth were chattering, but I still had the strength to make out that I was okay, and I said that I’d sit for a bit and drink my coffee.

  And I still had enough strength to get to the women’s bathroom. And there the girls started shouting at me: “Piss on her hands! Quick, piss!” Then they wrapped my hands in napkins soaked with urine. I felt such pain that I let out a howl and collapsed to the floor.

  And there and then the barman flew into the women’s restroom, picked me up, got me outside, and took me to his place.

  He lived with his mother, Larisa Mikhalna.

  Of course, that wasn’t typical of the real corsairs, or of those who were simply real criminals. Well, just like in the Russian classics.

  Here in our Petersburg swamp mafia—strange as it might seem—almost everybody had parents. After all, there were a lot of Jews and half-Jews. And a lot of Armenians among the newcomers to the city. Not so much your military peoples as your trading ones.

  The Russian boys, on the whole, were from the intelligentsia. The hard-currency girls also somehow turned out to have mothers—hairdressers, nurses, teachers, shop assistants …

  And this barman was none other than Misha Bakaleishchikov.

  I lived with them for two weeks, and Larisa Mikhalna nursed me back to health. She smeared me with some special creams. My mother was at the dacha. And in general she didn’t pay much attention, since she was busy with her latest affair.

  But Flint’s crew started to respect me after this incident. And they accepted me not as one of the girls, but something like Jim the cabin boy.

  In 1937, in the worst fucking time of the Stalin era, a Soviet version of Treasure Island was released. The plot was changed a great deal: the heroes were now Irish rebels. For some reason, the action was switched from Scotland to Ireland. They didn’t need treasure, they needed to buy weapons to fight the English imperialists for the freedom of Ireland, their homeland. And the main hero is a girl named Jenny.

  This Jenny loves Dr. Livesey. She gets fixed up as a cabin boy on the Hispaniola, after dressing up like one, and now they call her Jim the cabin boy. Some red-headed girl wearing trousers is clearly playing the part. And like all girls playing trouser roles, she’s got short, fat legs and a fat, round butt.

  In general, it’s first-class. And the script had to be like that. Because in a romantic society—and under Stalin, society was superromantic—heroes couldn’t love money for the sake of money. They had to love more important things, like freedom, the Fatherland … It was impossible simply to love cold, hard cash.

  And, well, it was stupid simply to love cold, hard cash. Even though a lot of people do love it … And one could also love power. Fyoka probably loved the power he wielded over his schooner more than the girls. Many of them loved the game. The process of the game. And of course it was precisely the bucks that the shadow capitalists loved. I don’t believe that any of them loved manufacturing Saxon porcelain or those Japanese kerchiefs …

  And there, on this Petersburg pirate schooner of ours, I turned out to be Jim the cabin boy. My idiot’s dream had come true—I was proud and happy.

  * * *

  These scars on my hands were like my initiation—they had accepted me, they had taken me aboard the schooner.

  And they had accepted me not for my cunt, but for my bravery and determination. Me and lots of my peers had made a cult of these guys. I was fifteen and they were victorious heroes to me.

  Not victors over the KGB, not the Wolves who were victorious over the Louse, but rather the Wolves from Vysotsky.

  They’d jumped over the fence, knocked down the flags, victors over the hunters.

  Victors over the system.

  That’s how it seemed to me then. About the Louse, it’s only now that I understand. But then, when I was fifteen: “The Jolly Roger flaps in the wind.”

  And another old song, this time from Jack London:

  The wind howls, the sea rages

  We corsairs will not surrender

  We stand, back to back, by the mast

  The two of us—against a thousand!

  Now isn’t that super?

  * * *

  Well, so that’s when I started singing. First there, in the Ulster. And later at the Troika. And then in various places …

  At the same time we were going to school somewhere, and received our superfluous Soviet diplomas. I had studied for a period at the school of the Ministry of Culture.

  There was this young dude who played the Fano in the Ulster … Simply a phenomenal ear. And he was studying engineering. Because his dad wanted him to.

  And Misha and I are still friends; well, he helped me to get on board the schooner—my singing is all thanks to him.

  All the more so as I
was still a minor. And he had been a student at some point in that same institute of the Ministry of Culture, only he was seven years older than me …

  We’d run out of pot … And the sun had already started to shine through Pushkin.

  Small birds perched on Pushkin’s head: sparrows and pigeons. While large birds flew around: crows and seagulls. And all of them were crying out in their own language. So let’s say the sparrows chirped, while the pigeons squawked melodically. But those large birds were making monstrous sounds, particularly for a person who’d just had a good smoke and wanted some peace.

  All that wailing and moaning and horror. It seemed astonishing that the language of birds is called “song.” But we still didn’t want to leave the nice little square. We of course had a serious case of the munchies, though we were too lazy to do anything about it, particularly since all the places open at night were so unappetizing. So it made sense to be patient and wait until Prokopych or Freakadelic opened up, right here on the square.

  Although it was clear that we wouldn’t make it here in this little square till nine.

  Lyokha had some more grass in his little Indian jar …

  The seagulls and crows had ascended and flown off to the roof of the Maly Opera …

  * * *

  Misha Bakaleishchikov, the Man from the Past, made his appearance then like a bolt out of the blue.

  In late February.

  And not from the States, but from London for some reason.

  He found me—he’d searched me out specially.

  We were sitting in a café—at the Hotel Europe, on that very same square. We were in the midst of a terribly slippery winter thaw—black ice.

  We talked about the Past.

  We said to each other, “Give me a cigarette …”

  Misha’s wife had left him.

  The fifth one or the third.

  “It’s because you smoke grass from morning till night!”

  In London he had been working at some mythical Russian radio station.

  But he vaguely hinted at his close ties to personages out of favor. Either Gusya or Beryozy (a.k.a. Gusinsky or Berezovsky) …