Moscow but Dreaming

by Ekaterina Sedia

  “Hello, Mr. Cadillac,” Munashe said, shaken, but present enough to remember his manners.

  “Hoo! What a dim boy!” the voice came from behind the tinted window. The window rolled down, and a smiling skull with red eyes blazing from under an old khaki baseball hat stared at Munashe. “Why would you think that the car was alive, hm?” “I… I don’t know, sir.”

  “It’s a spirit car.” The car door swung open, letting out a tall skeleton dressed in a tattered tuxedo, with the sleeves and trousers that were too short. The skeletal remains of his neck were wrapped in a dirty red tie. “Now tell me what you need. You didn’t call me here for nothing, did you?”

  Munashe told the skeleton his story, all the while marveling at the ease of spirit summoning in the spirit forest.

  The skeleton listened with an inscrutable expression. “So, you want me to rescue you from your servitude?” he said once Munashe had finished.

  Munashe nodded. “Please.”

  “Maybe. But first, tell me—what did you learn from all this?”

  Munashe stumbled for words. “I don’t know, sir. Maybe that everyone needs to be taken care of?”

  The spirit skeleton nodded. “I suppose they do. What will you trade me for my help?”

  “I don’t have anything,” Munashe said.

  The skeleton’s eyes flashed. “You have flesh, boy. How much flesh will you give me for my help?”

  Munashe closed his eyes, and thought about his mother. How emaciated she was. And still she lingered, grasping onto life with her stick hands. “Take as much as my mother had lost,” he offered.

  The skeleton’s grinning mouth moved close to Munashe’s face, breathing out the smell of liquor and stale meat. It drew a great breath, and Munashe felt millions of tiny teeth gnawing on him, moving under his skin, shaving off his flesh pound by pound, yet never spilling any blood or damaging his skin.

  When he opened his eyes, the skeleton seemed bigger and fatter—as much as a skeleton can be fat. He nodded to Munashe and got into his car. “Tomorrow night wait here for my uncle. He’ll help you.”

  “Wait!” Munashe waved his arms after the Cadillac as it started its graceful ascent. “What’s your name?”

  “Fungai,” the skeleton answered, and he and the Cadillac were gone, swallowed by the weakly glowing branches.

  The next day, Munashe felt weak but almost cheerful as he went about his task. Tendai and Vimbai, the monkey brothers, noticed, and each gave him a vicious smack and an ear-boxing. Even that could not dispel Munashe’s good mood, and he grinned through the tears.

  “Ah, you’re learning,” Tapiwa said. The living shroud of maggots that simmered on her back did not seem to inconvenience her in the least.

  Munashe looked up. “Learning what?”

  She shrugged, sending the maggots spilling over the pallet and the floor, where Tendai and Vimbai made quick work of them. “That there is a point in every pointless task,” Tapiwa said.

  Munashe was not sure if he agreed. A pang of guilt coursed through his body—taking care of his mother was a pointless task; she would have died anyway. So instead he chose a task he thought he could accomplish—taming the lion back into the human form.

  When the night fell, he snuck outside and waited by the giant strangler fig. He wondered if Fungai’s uncle also drove a Caddy.

  Something tugged on the shreds of his trouser leg, and he looked down. He almost cried out at the sight of a small baby next to him that stood on all fours, its tiny, long-fingered hand clutching the fabric of Munashe’s trousers. Worst of all, the baby’s face was projected on a large TV screen; instead of a head, the TV perched atop baby’s shoulders dwarfing his small, withered body.

  Munashe swallowed hard a few times. “Are you Fungai’s uncle?”

  “Yes,” flashed the letters on the TV screen. Then, they were supplanted by a large red question mark that took up the entire screen.

  “How can I heal Tapiwa’s wound?” Munashe said. “How can I go home?”

  “One or the other,” the screen said.

  “Both, please. I can’t leave until she’s better.”

  The baby’s face reappeared, smiling. “You could. I could help you leave right now,” it said. Apparently, the TV had sound too.

  Munashe bated his breath. This was better than he dared to hope. Still, he resented abandoning his hopeless task, no matter how pointless. “Help her first, and then help me leave.”

  “One or the other,” the screen said.

  “Then help her. I know I can leave after she’s better.”

  A question mark again.

  Munashe sighed. “I don’t know for sure, but I think this is how it works.”

  Fungai’s uncle shrugged his tiny baby shoulders, and showed his face again for a moment, before displaying a chart. “Find the kobo tree -> Find the Lady-Who-Lives-Inside -> Ask for a wishing thread -> Ask for her price.”

  “What’s a kobo tree?” Munashe asked, but Fungai’s uncle was already crawling away, the mahogany casing of his television head striking tree trunks that stood too close to his path.

  The next night, Munashe set out looking for a kobo tree. He wasn’t exactly sure what he was supposed to be looking for, but reasoned that it would be easy enough to recognize. His expectations were fulfilled once he saw a majestic blood-red trunk, crowned with blue foliage and peppered with small yellow flowers.

  “Lady?” he called. “Lady-Who-Lives-Inside?”

  The Lady-Who-Lives-Inside stood before him as soon as he uttered her name. She was a tall young woman, the most humanlooking creature he had encountered so far. Munashe thought that she was just like any woman in his village, until he noticed her stomach—or rather, that she did not have one. There was a large round hole in her midsection, where her belly should’ve been, framed by the arches of her ribs and pelvis, and festooned with red fragments of gore that fringed the empty space, as if her organs were ripped out of her.

  “I need a wishing thread,” Munashe said. “What is your price?”

  The spirit reached inside of the hole and pulled out a thin string of sinew, red and blue and yellow. “For this,” she said in a high nasal voice, “I want the same from you.”

  Munashe nodded and clenched his teeth as the spirit’s clawed fingers—ten on each hand—pried apart his skin and muscle, sinew and bone, until a tiny piece of Munashe dangled, dizzying, in front of his face.

  “There,” the Lady-Who-Lives-Inside said, and gave him her thread. “Touch it to whatever wound you wish to heal, and it will be done.”

  When Munashe returned to his village, he was barely able to recognize it. A silence hung over the normally noisy settlement, and the tidy houses bore an indistinct yet unmistakable air of neglect. The cassava fields were overgrown by the weeds, and no rows of women with hoes were fighting to reclaim the fields.

  He went from home to home, calling the names of his uncles and friends. No one answered, and Munashe wondered if he was gone longer than he thought. He looked inside the empty houses, and found only desolation and dust. And bones.

  It took him a while to discover the living inhabitants of the previously small but vibrant village. Several scrawny, mangy dogs emerged from the fields, as if disbelieving that there was a human there. Two children with bloated stomachs and protruding ribs soon followed.

  “What happened?” Munashe said. “Where did everyone go?”

  “Dead,” the older of two children replied. “AIDS, and something else.”

  “Is anyone else alive?”

  The children shook their heads, and looked at him with shiny hungry eyes. “Do you have any food?”

  “No,” Munashe said. “But I’m sure we can find some.”

  In one of the abandoned houses he found a hoe. He looked over the fields where the weeds reigned, strangling the cassava plants. With a sigh, he heaved the hoe and brought it down upon the arrogant weeds, mashing them into the ground, working them into the dry yellow soil. Munashe was starti
ng on another hopeless task.

  BY THE LITER

  My neighbor, businessman Ipatov, was killed a few years ago, back when they still sold beer by the liter. I remember him because he was my first.

  I’d just returned from the corner kiosk, my shirt drenched with cold condensation from the flank of a five-liter beer-filled jug I held against my chest. Outside of my apartment building I heard sirens and saw the yellow police cruisers and a white ambulance van with a red cross on its pockmarked side. My neighbor Petro, a middle-aged Ukrainian with heavy brows and a heavier accent, watched the commotion of people and vehicles and dogs from his second-story balcony.

  “Petro,” I called. “What happened?”

  Petro looked down at me. His wifebeater bore a fresh oil stain that made the fabric transparent; his fleshy nipple and the surrounding swirl of black chest hair stood out in naked relief against the oil spot. “Huh,” he said. “What happened? Guess three times.”

  I stopped for a smoke and a rubbernecking as the cops went inside, and the paramedics brought out the gurney with the lifeless body under a white sheet. The wind snagged the edge of the sheet and it fluttered, exposing the bluing face of businessman Ipatov and his naked shoulder, branded with the cruel marks of the electric iron.

  “Racketeers,” I informed Petro.

  He scoffed. “You don’t say.”

  His scorn was justified, I thought as I transferred the jug of beer from one cradling arm to the other and ashed my cigarette with a flick of lower lip. Racketeers overtook cancer, heart disease, and traffic accidents on the list of death causes of common businessmen somewhere in the late eighties; by the early nineties, they had all but run the other ailments off the mortality and morbidity reports. As Russian business grew healthier, so did its practitioners—nary a single one of them died of any diseases.

  One of the paramedics, a young lad with a blond and green Mohawk, smiled at me. “Can’t go anywhere.” He slouched against the gurney and lit up. “Fucking canaries are blocking us in.” His gesture indicated the yellow cruisers huddled behind the van. “Assholes. They’re still investigating the scene.”

  The other paramedic, an aging man with a paunch and chronically disapproving eyes, nodded at my beer jug. “Rest it on the gurney, son. Heavy, ain’t it?”

  I confirmed and set the jug next to the lifeless remains of my once neighbor. I didn’t know yet that beer and the recently dead from violence were a dangerous combination.

  “Did you know him?” the old paramedic asked, indicating Ipatov’s outline under the sheet with a jab of his cigarette. “Neighbor,” I said. “Seen him around.”

  “His hands were lashed together with that blue electrical tape,”

  the young paramedic said. “The cops said his employees called the police when he didn’t show up for a meeting this morning. His wife doesn’t even know yet. The cops said, take him to the morgue; his wife won’t thank us if we leave this for her to find.”

  Petro emerged from the front doors, passing by the murder of old ladies on the bench. “Electric iron?” he said as he reached the gurney.

  I nodded and squinted up at the stingy May sun. “Getting warm.”

  “Yeah,” said the younger paramedic and licked his lips thirstily. “Who knows how long we’ll be stuck here?”

  By all rights, I should have been winging my way home, up the stairs to the third story, beer under arm. But the weather was nice, the company seemed all right, and the beer was best drunk with friends or, missing that, acquaintances. “You want any beer?” I said to Petro and the paramedics.

  They kicked dirt for a bit but agreed.

  “Funny how it is,” the older paramedic named Misha said, taking a large swallow out of the jug he held with both hands. “Here’s a man, who lived, lived, and then died. May he rest in peace.”

  His younger fellow, Grisha, took the jug from his mentor. “God giveth,” he said and drank hastily, as if worried about the taketh away part.

  The old ladies looked at us disapprovingly, and I tried my best to ignore them.

  But not Petro. “What are you staring at, hags?” he challenged, and waited for his turn with the jug. “Haven’t seen a dead man before?”

  The grandmas squawked, indignant, but avoided the altercation.

  Yes, the dead man. The telltale signs of the iron torture indicated that the thugs wanted something—probably money. I wondered why Ipatov didn’t just give in to their demands. Or it could be a turf war. “Hey Petro, do you remember what sort of business he ran?”

  “Money,” he said. “All businesses make is money. Did you notice how they don’t manufacture anything anymore? All the food and shit is imported. Even vodka.”

  “Yeah,” I said, and glanced apprehensively at the half-empty jug as it made its way back to me. I would miss it.

  The four of us killed the jug, and as its amber contents diminished, Misha’s loquacity grew. “You know why a Russian man is driven to drink?” He didn’t wait for an answer and gestured expansively. “It’s ’cause of all the space. Steppes, tundra, everything. You have all these open horizons and the human soul can’t take all that sober.”

  I could see a weak point or two in this theory but didn’t point them out, enchanted by the image of a soul cowering in fear of horizons.

  “What do you do?” Grisha asked me.

  “I’m an actuary,” I told him. “Manage risks.”

  “He should’ve hired you,” Grisha said, pointing at dead Ipatov.

  I shrugged. There was no point in telling them that the risk of death in businessmen was so close to certainty that the only thing I ever recommended was saving enough money for a coffin. They liked them ostentatious. I should probably attend Ipatov’s funeral, I thought. This is when the dead man’s memories first stirred in me.

  Businessman Ipatov led a quiet life for most of his existence—I remembered his grey adolescence as a treasurer for his school chapter of Komsomol, his joyless pursuit of a college degree in one institute of technology or another, his brief courtship and marriage. After that, I could not remember anything.

  Not being given to superstition, I arrived to the only logical conclusion—the dead man’s soul and/or memory had entered mine, either due to my extended proximity to the gurney or to the consumption of beer that rested against him. If I were a dead soul, I supposed, I too would be drawn to the golden shine of the beer jug, I too would prefer it to the cold eternity of whatever awaited Ipatov as an alternative. Still, I found it disconcerting; sleep had proven elusive that night, as I kept reliving Ipatov’s tremulous first masturbatory experiences and his terror of the laws of thermodynamics and physical chemistry.

  I went outside and looked at the windows of the façade. As expected, there was light in Petro’s, and I walked to the second floor and knocked. He opened quickly, as if he were waiting just behind the door. His eyes were haunted.

  “Come in,” he said, and led me to the kitchen. My mother always said that the kitchen is the heart of every home; Petro’s apartment’s heart was clogged with crap that spilled into the swelling pericardium of his one-room efficiency. “Sorry for the mess.”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I live alone too.”

  I sat at the kitchen table. A few overfed cockroaches sauntered toward the wainscoting, still decent enough to feign fear of humans.

  “Do you hear him too?” Petro asked.

  I nodded. “Remember rather.”

  Petro sighed. “He screams and screams and screams. Can’t sleep at all.”

  “You remember his last days?”

  “Yeah,” Petro said. “Everything from when he first started the business until… ”

  So if I got his youth and Petro—his business career, it meant that Ipatov’s generic Soviet childhood and the working life in whatever state enterprise he was assigned after receiving his degree was sloshing inside the two paramedics.

  Petro also had the gold, the death. “Why did they kill him?” I asked.
r />   “Money.” Petro heaved a sigh. “Wouldn’t pay up protection.”

  “Oh.”

  Petro hesitated for a while, but finally said, “Did you know he was Jewish?”

  “No. Does it matter?”

  Petro huffed. “You got me all wrong, Anatoly. I’m not one of those nationalists, okay? I’m not the one of those ‘drown Muscovites in Jewish blood’ types. But this torture… did you notice that they burned Kabbalic symbols into him? He knew what they were, ’cause he was a Jew.”

  I perked up. “What symbols?”

  “A triangle, for the trinity of Sephiroth. And circles inside of it. I think this is what held his soul here.”

  “That’s the tip of the iron,” I said. “And those little holes in it. It’s just a coincidence.”

  “So? The symbol’s still holy, no matter how it was made.” Petro tilted his head to the shoulder, as if listening. “What’s Kether?”

  “No clue,” I said. “Ask Ipatov.”

  “I can’t. I only remember for him. And he forgot what Kether is.”

  Petro made tea and we drank; the cockroaches, hearing sugar, crowded in the corners, their antennae undulating eagerly. I contemplated the electric irons and their built-in alchemic and magical powers. I wondered how many more souls hung about, trapped by the thugs’ unwitting alchemy. Judging from the newspapers and the latest mortality reports, lots. That gave me an idea.

  The problem with Ipatov’s memories was that they were much like my own. His adolescence was similar to mine, and remembering it just didn’t satisfy my longing for worthwhile experiences. Ipatov’s shortcoming was shared by many of our contemporaries—we all remembered the same signifiers of childhood: summer camps and songs praising youthful and heroic drummers, we all treasured a rare trip south, replete with a pebbled beach and a mind-boggling abundance of peaches. Standardized, trivial lives, their monotony only broken by an occasional memory of a grandfather—those were rare. We all viewed the change of regime with joyful trepidation; some were later disappointed, some were not.

  I learned all that as I started visiting the scenes of body removals, sometimes tipped off by Grisha, who took as much pleasure in the soul consumption as I did, and sometimes by the police, who would tell you anything if you offered to supplement their dwindling state wages. Like where the dead bodies were, and how to call a specific ambulance if one wanted. They also didn’t mind letting Grisha dawdle, and they didn’t mind us drinking great golden jugs of beer after we let them sit next to the Kabbalic symbols burned into dead businessmen’s flesh. Beer never failed to lure the dead souls.