St. Petersburg Noir

by Natalia Smirnova

  But unable to stifle her own curiosity, Lera put her head to the door one more time.

  “Are you gonna make trouble? Don’t just stand here, sit down on the floor. Ahem … No, damnit, not like that! Not on your ass, you moron. That’s for our next lesson. Squat down … Yep, now we’re talkin’. Tuck your knees below your underarms and let your arms just hang … Good. Now spit. Spit between your legs … No, not that much. Count to seven and then spit. Ahem … Good boy. You’re almost a real man now. Now, let’s eat sunflower seeds … No, who told you you could get up? Stay put. Here’s your seeds. Wait! Gotta learn how to eat them right. Empty the whole bag into your pocket. That’s right. Now grab a fistful … Okay. You take a seed from your fist with your thumb, and use your nail to stick it between your teeth. Like this, see? Now, snap it open with your teeth. And keep your nose to the grindstone. Say if you’re at a watercolor exhibit, or the subway, or at somebody’s house or whatever, and you can’t spit the husks on the floor, you’re gonna have to put them into your other hand. But if you see that no one cares, you spit them anywhere you want to …”

  Lera thought that the voice was getting closer. She sprang away from the door of the storage room and hurried away, clicking her high heels and glancing back over her trembling shoulder all the while, then rushed into the lab assistant’s room. Jesus! There was a whirlwind of thoughts in her head. He needs to be locked up! What is Tsukatov thinking? I’m scared to work with him!

  There are usually two paths for man to choose from: the path of truth and the path of lies. Lera had always preferred the third path: somewhere in-between. The chair of the department wasn’t in that day. It was time to renew his hunting rifle license, so he had gone off to see the license inspector. That was too bad. Lera was desperate to report what she’d heard. It was no use telling the Chief Bird—he was spineless and just as scared of the curator as she was.

  * * *

  The snow that had fallen the day before hadn’t stayed. The Baltic wind had licked it clean with its rough tongue. First from the roofs and cupolas, then from the ground. There wasn’t even any slush left, except perhaps on the asphalt of the courtyard and on the Moika Embankment, where a few damp dark lines could still be seen. It wasn’t uncommon for the green grass to still linger and buds to come out on the trees around New Year’s. The boat weather vane on the golden spire of the Admiralty sailed bravely through the turbulent skies over the Neva River. The southwest wind had turned it ninety degrees.

  Three days passed and Professor Tsukatov called Demyan Ilich into his office again. Lera, the impressionable lab assistant, first made another blunder with the request form and then started imagining things. The girl seemed to have gotten entirely carried away. Shivering uncontrollably, she wrapped a light scarf around her shoulders, and demonstratively drank a few drops of herbal sedative. Instead of the sedative, thought Tsukatov roughly, you should have a hot water bottle on you from head to toe. To calm Lera down, Tsukatov had to promise her that he would personally test the curator’s sanity. It just so happened his acquaintance, the hunting general, had invited him to go on a bear hunt. Tsukatov had never hunted bears before, and he needed a consultation on how to skin prey in the field, just in case. Down there in Vologda, where the general had invited him, everything was covered in snow, and had been for some time. The bears were hibernating, and the huntsman had found a den.

  “Ahem. If the skin is for a rug, then you need to take it off in one layer,” croaked Demyan Ilich, and his thick brows stirred. “First you cut it straight from the chin to the scrotum. And if it’s a female, then take it down to her privates. Start from the jaw, about a palm’s length from the edge of the lower lip, and cut down. Make sure you start all cuts from the underside of the hide so you don’t mess up the fur. Ahem. Well, you’re a hunter yourself, you know what I’m talking about. Right, then the paws.”

  Tsukatov seated Demyan Ilich at the large desk in the middle of the office, and sat across from him. He listened carefully, occasionally jotting something down on a piece of paper. Chelnokov, who was at his desk in a nook separated from them by a bookcase and the wooden banister, put on his glasses and pretended to be reading an article in the Journal of Ornithology.

  “Ahem. The cuts on the paws all have to come together in the same spot by your main cut.” The curator made a gesture with the nail of his protruding thumb from his throat to his belly. “And you finish coming out at a straight angle. The front paws, from the palm callouses to the elbows and then across the armpits …” To illustrate the point, Demyan Ilich pointed out where to cut on himself. “Right. The hind legs you cut from the heel callouses to the knees, and then from the inside of the hip to here.” He got up from his seat, bent over, and demonstrated. Then he sat down again. “Ahem. If you’re taking the hide to a taxidermist right away, you can snip the paws off right at the carpals, and you don’t have to skin the head—just chop it off at the last vertabra and you’re good. Ahem. But if the hide is going to be lying around for a while, then you cut the callouses from three sides and take the paw out. Just leave the last phalanxes of the toes. Right. And the head … you’ll have to take the hide off the head too.” Demyan Ilich fell silent in yet another unnecessary pause. “Then you salt the hide thoroughly. Where there are muscles and fat, make incisions and rub in some salt. Then fold it, the inner sides facing in on themselves, roll it up, and hang it on a stick so the brine can drip off. Ahem. It’s best to freeze it.”

  “What if I want it mounted? Full-size?” said Tsukatov, “How do I go about it then?”

  The curator went silent—as usual, for longer than was comfortable.

  “Then you’re not going to want to take it off as a single layer. Ahem. You make a cut from the back. Then the seam on the belly won’t show. There’s usually not much fur on the belly. It’s hard to hide the seam. Right.” Demyan Ilich spoke weightily, as though he was moving rocks, but Tsukatov listened without prompting him. “And it’s best to take the beast’s measurements if you want to stuff and mount it. From the tip of the nose to the corners of the eyes, and from the tip of the nose to the base of the tail. One more thing: once you’ve skinned the bear, measure the girth of the neck—behind the ears—and the chest, right here, around the stomach. You need the measurements so the taxidermist knows the right proportions.” As before, Demyan Ilich indicated on himself where exactly the bear’s stomach was. “So, we cut along the spine from the tail to the back of the head. Right. And the paws, from the callouses to the elbows and knees. Ahem. Then you skin it. Right.”

  “I’m not quite clear on the head,” said Tsukatov. “I’ve never had to take the hide off a head before.”

  “Now that’s tricky. Right. First you make a deep cut where the lips and jaws meet. You pull the lip back with one hand and cut with the other, so that the knife slides right along the jawline. Right up against the jaw. Ahem. If you don’t do that, you’ll rip the lips when you remove the skin from the head.” As Demyan Ilich spoke, he became more and more excited, which was unusual—for three years everyone at the faculty had known him as a gloomy, silent man. “Ahem. Cut the auditory canals as close to the scalp as you can, and make sure you slice the skin around the eyes right up to the sockets, so you don’t damage it. You’d be better off with a scalpel instead of a knife. Right. Cut the nose off whole, along the cartilage. Ahem. Next, the ears. The ears will be difficult.” He ran his fingers through his hair, and then simulated some careful handiwork. “From the back of the ears you separate the skin from the cartilage, slowly turning the ear inside out. Then, of course, you salt it. Make incisions in the lips and the nose and rub salt in.”

  “What about the tail?” asked Tsukatov, jotting down the instructions. “Do I dissect the tail too?”

  “Naturally. Ahem. Open it up along the inner side, starting a little ways down from the hole, and pull out the vertebrae. And then you salt the inside again.”

  “Thank you, Demyan Ilich.” Tsukatov was pleased. “Now what about
our ape? The chimpanzee. Any news?”

  Demyan Ilich went dead silent. “You’ll get it,” the curator finally said in a Spartan manner. “Money up front.”

  When Tsukatov and Chelnokov were left alone in the office, Chelnokov tossed his Journal of Ornithology aside and popped out of his nook as quick as a flash. Of course he had listened to the entire conversation, and of course he was tormented by the silence.

  “The girl is just imagining things,” Tsukatov said, surprised. “He’s all right, damnit!”

  “As healthy as the goat-legged Pan,” Chelnokov agreed. “Although, if you think about it, we all have our idiosyncrasies. The Chinese, for example, they have no interest in b-bear hide. They only take the spleen, and the paws for some reason. P-peculiar p-people they are. By the way, do you know why there are no Chinese cemeteries here?”

  “You already said they serve their dead in their restaurants.” Normally Tsukatov listened politely to Chelnokov’s stories over and over again, but today he didn’t have the patience. “Lera is the one who should get checked. I once brought my dog to the department, and she got so scared she nearly jumped up on the table.”

  “As a rule, women are more wary of d-dogs than men are,” Chelnokov said. “And there’s a reason for it: women are cats at heart.”

  * * *

  Three weeks later, Tsukatov, who had just returned from his vacation in Vologda, was telling the story of the bear hunt in Chelnokov’s office. The story was colorful, adventurous, epic, and unbelievable, like the Iliad. The synopsis of his tale is as follows:

  They approached the bear’s den on skis. Tsukatov stood behind a tree, not more than a dozen paces from the entrance. Behind him was the hunter, with two huskies on a leash. The general moved cautiously counterclockwise around the den, to get an idea of the surroundings. If you didn’t kill it right away, the bear would attack the dogs and run around his den from the entrance in the direction of the sun. So the general set out, and Tsukatov took off his skis and began packing down the snow beneath him with his feet—when you’re near a bear’s den, you want to feel solid ground beneath you. The bear must have heard them approaching—perhaps it was sleeping lightly, though the hunter had taken care to tread quietly and keep downwind. The hunter hadn’t even had time to let the dogs loose, when suddenly the bear emerged. He was shaggy and enormous, his head pressed to the ground, his chest hidden. Even if you shot, you wouldn’t kill him with the first bullet, and Tsukatov didn’t even have his rifle cocked. Fortunately, the bear didn’t attack them, but instead followed the general’s ski tracks. The hunter let the dogs loose, and Tsukatov finally fired his rifle, although the bear was already escaping. As it turned out later, the bullet hit the bear in the behind. Then the huskies got in on the action, nipping the bear in the haunches. The bear was enraged. The general didn’t let them down: he fired the fatal shot. Tsukatov had brought bear meat back with him, and the hide went to the sharpshooter as trophy.

  Chelnokov listened greedily. He had the habit of reconstructing other people’s stories and telling them as his own in other company. He was like that.

  Outside the window, everything was white again, except the black water of the Moika River, which had still not succumbed to the icy clutch of winter. Snow lay on the roofs and the glass dome of the atrium. The wings of Hermes’s caduceus on top of the trading house were also covered in a fine web of snowflakes. Yet St. Isaac’s and the spire of the Admiralty shone a bright gold against the gray skies.

  “By the way,” said Chelnokov, apropos of nothing, “another student d-disappeared. A freshman. It happened ten days back but they only began searching a little while ago. Everybody thought he’d gone back home to Slantsy, but it turned out he wasn’t there either. Police inspectors came to see the dean.”

  “This time it’s definitely a UFO.” Tsukatov’s thoughts were still at the bear’s den.

  “And Demyan Ilich inquired about a van yesterday. The stuffed animal was delivered to his place, so it’s ready to be ppicked up. We should ask someone at the garage to drive over there.”

  “Why didn’t he tell Lera?” said Tsukatov.

  “Lera and Demyan Ilich don’t really g-get along very well,” Chelnokov reminded him. “And then again, she’s been so busy with her remodeling: first it was the plumber, then she had to choose the laminated floorboards, then the ceiling. Remodeling,” Chelnokov sighed, remembering the ongoing work in his own office. “That’s no beetle sneeze for you.”

  Tsukatov drew in the corners of his mouth sharply, as a sign that he understood. No, no one could be trusted to do anything in his absence. Throwing his sheepskin coat over his shoulders with the firm step of a man who knows his own worth, Tsukatov headed down to the garage without delay.

  * * *

  Demyan Ilich dreamed that an ostrich nipped him on the finger. He gasped and woke up from the pain. His finger was intact, but somewhere within, underneath the skin, was a memory of that recent ephemeral adventure. The memory, though still pulsing, was quickly melting. It was indeed a most nonsensical dream.

  For some time Demyan Ilich lay still. Then he turned his head to the window. At that instant his neck started throbbing with a burning sensation—the scratch, disturbed by his movement, seemed to be actually on fire. “My, some claws are just too nasty,” Demyan Ilich said aloud, wincing. Nothing would be nipping him now. She would stand there, beautiful, proud, and foolish, and he would stare at her. In the closet, wrapped up tightly, the material was shifting quietly. Demyan Ilich had no plans to give his would-be project away to some third party. Of course, he wouldn’t make any good money on it, but this was a special case. Really special. It wasn’t the first time he passed up the opportunity for profit, but he was pleased that he had decided things for himself.

  Carefully turning his scratched neck, Demyan Ilich examined the room, flooded with light from the streetlamps—pale, cold, no discernible colors. The room was a mess. There were objects strewn everywhere, unrecognizable in the twilight: clothing, tools … and a mounted stuffed animal in the middle. Baring its teeth, it sat slightly back on its hind legs, leaning on the knuckles of its forepaws. The room seemed like some sort of uninhabited utility space, and looked more like a workshop than a living room.

  “Ahem,” rasped Demyan Ilich. Examining his finger, he thought about the ghostly nature of suffering.

  * * *

  The next morning, in the interests of edification, Tsukatov decided to send Lera, along with two young men from the Student Scientific Society, to Demyan Ilich’s to pick up the stuffed animal. But she wasn’t in the lab assistant’s room, and no one had seen her at the department since yesterday. The van left without her.

  Dismissing the matter from his mind, the chair of the department disappeared into his office and sank his teeth into writing an article full of new ideas about Dirofilaria nematodes—completely unprecedented ideas. Tsukatov had been working on the article for Parasitology for a long time, and the end, it seemed, was now in sight.

  In the middle of the second lecture period, under the guidance of Demyan Ilich, the students brought in a large object, tightly packed in bubble wrap. They worked quickly, like gravediggers. Demyan Ilich’s neck showed red around the coagulated crust of an angry scratch.

  Having brought the parcel into the museum, they sent for Tsukatov. The chair of the department came in, accompanied by Chelnokov.

  The parcel stood in the passageway by the oak cases housing the primates. In solemn silence, Demyan Ilich cut open the adhesive that held the bubble wrap with a pair of scissors and set about stripping it off the bulky exhibit, taking his time. A minute later the bubble wrap was lying on the floor. Chelnokov threw up his hands in rapture, and the severe wrinkles on Tsukatov’s face relaxed; for he had seen things, but this exceeded all his expectations. The chimpanzee’s fur shone. Each hair seemed to have been combed individually. The figure, frozen in motion, radiated a gush of fury. The teeth gleamed with moisture, the yellow fangs were bared threa
teningly, the skin of the face seemed alive and warm, the dark lemurlike eyes burned in watchful fury. The ape looked even better, brighter than it could have when it was alive. It seemed as though it wasn’t a stuffed animal at all, but rather a pure idea, the very essence of a new creature, as the Creator had imagined it before giving it life. It looked as fresh, as new, as clean, and as perfect as a beetle that had just emerged from its chrysalis, before having tasted the dung of life.

  Chelnokov regaled it with superlatives. Tsukatov walked around the animal, staring at it, touching it, kneeling beside it, and stroking it. He didn’t try to conceal his satisfaction: exceptional mastery had obviously gone into the making of the piece.

  “Ahem,” Demyan Ilich croaked behind his shoulder. “I have another offer from the same source. Right. A bonus. From the manufacturer.”

  “Oh?” Tsukatov now felt trust and respect for the curator. These were things not inherent in a person, the way having red hair, protruding ears, or a nose like a duck was. One had to keep on earning them, again and again. Having won them, these qualities would begin to melt away. And one had to start all over from the beginning. Now Demyan Ilich had won Tsukatov’s trust and respect, at least for the time being.

  “Ahem. I can get you something special. Right. If you make the decision sometime this week, it should turn out pretty cheap.”

  “Cheap? How cheap?”

  “Ahem. Almost free of charge.”

  “And what is it they’re offering?”

  Demyan Ilich grinned, the scratch on his neck turned crimson, and a chain of indescribable emotions ran across his sallow bony face. He came close to Tsukatov, and uttered in a whisper like a conspirator: “An excellent, ahem, an excellent African ostrich.”