An aggressive knock came from the door into the space where Snow did what others referred to as living. It didn’t take much willpower to ignore it, even once it had managed to wake him up. Ignoring things was what Snow did best. His porta-cabin was slovenly, dirty, smelling vaguely unpleasant and reminiscent of some different place, that place being Cowley, Alberta circa 1980. Forty-one going on sixty-two, Snow not only looked it, he acted like it. The face in the mirror was not the one he would have chosen for himself. Jowly, fleshy, hangdog, nondescript: there was nothing there that would attract anyone, man or woman. The lines around his eyes were made to squint into blizzards, not at office paper. He had an indoor complexion, no mean feat here in Siberia, where you made your living outside, off the land. Above white, rheumy eyes was stringy, slightly receding hair, much the same way his shoulders seemed to shrinking into his chest cavity. Tall, thin and balding with stooped shoulders, he had a face that looked like a truck just ran over his pet turtle, resembled a beaten old man in a rooming house. His beard was stubbled, un-trimmed, because it would have taken too much effort to shave. His hair was eighties-hockey-player-long, Jaroslav-Jagr-in-his-prime, Dougie-Gilmour coiffed, a mullet cut that would make a Hanson brother jealous. Over his top lip was a cheesy porn-star moustache. He might once have been a white man, but now he was grey. Grey, with all that implied. The only way Snowden Nastiuk would ever set the world on fire was by accident.
Not that he cared what he looked like anyway. There wasn’t much to him but skin and bone, more from lack of hunger than from lack of eating. Lack of hunger for anything. What he ate mostly was his pain, dulled it and filled the hole inside with booze. The problem was, later, after the alcohol wore off, the pain was still there. It never went way, it just moved around.
Nasty did not have one single friend, which was by conscious effort. It was one of the few things besides his job he worked at. Being alone. Not having friends.
Not having friends wasn’t hard. You didn’t even have to be rude, just unresponsive. Snow had worked hard on shaping his face into the one of the guy on the bus or in the bank line that no one even noticed. You could forget what he looked like while you were still talking to him.
Snow looked away from the knock at the door to his fridge. He was sure there was some vodka in there along with the remains of wilted vegetables, mouldy cheese and stale bread crusts. He stared at the wall again, contemplating getting up to get a fresh bottle. He’d never subscribed to the notion that drinking alone was bad. On the contrary, he usually found it to be very good. There was a stain on the wallpaper that looked a little like Baffin Island. Getting up to answer the knock on the door never crossed his mind.
The knock came again. Louder.
“Uhodi,” Snow growled in Russian. “Go away.”
Suddenly, the door was open, letting the chill October air in. Standing there, was a woman who looked vaguely familiar, the form somewhat resembling a refrigerator dusted with frosting from those little tiny donuts. The bitch had walked in without an invitation. Snow never locked it. Too much effort.
“I knock the door many times but no one never answering. So I coming in. I listen your breathing inside. It no lock. Too much dangerous. Make you trouble some day.”
“Fuck off,” Snow said, turning away to face the wall. “You’ve got the wrong trailer. Whatever you’re selling, I don’t want it. Try next door.”
“I want book,” the woman demanded.
“Yeah? I want Maria Sharapova’s phone number. Neither of us is going to get it. Now, fuck off.”
“Book!” the woman demanded.
“What book?” Snow conceded. Once she found out he didn’t have it, he could send her on her way.
“The White Bone.”
“I thought you wanted a book?”
“Yes, an book. The White Bone. By Barbara Gowdy. You give me.”
Despite the immense weight pressing him down to the bed, forcing his spine glued to the mattress, leaching the life out him, Snow forced himself to lean over on one arm. Depressed and not drunk enough yet to burn off his hangover, he forced a smile like he did at work whenever a supervisor came by. The real benefit of living here in Noyabrsk was that once his work day was done, he never had to pretend to anyone, he could just lie about, drink and kill time, which had somehow become viscous – thick, unable to flow, as it normally did for most people.
On his bed table, an industrial-strength, Soviet-size alarm clock ticked off the minutes noisily, commanding Snow when to wake up, when to sleep, when to shit, eat and when he was permitted to lie around uselessly. Snow hated the damn thing. It was dented conspicuously where he’d knocked it against the wall numerous times, but he was under no illusions over who was in charge in this relationship. The clock – time – was. That didn’t mean he couldn’t fight back a bit, though.
“Who the hell is Barbara Gowdy?” Snow growled.
“She has written wonderful novel. She should be Russian. About elephants. Mud the elephant. Known as She-Spurns. You must know this. She’s Canadian. You’re Canadian. It’s about elephants.”
“How do you know I’m Canadian?”
“You're the toilet man.”
“Excuse me?”
“The symbols they use for things like toilets and airports. Just symbols, no words, so anyone can understand, no matter where you go in the world. No words needed, just logical pictures. A Canadian thinks them up. It’s you.”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Pity. It's a very important job.”
“You still didn’t answer how you know I’m Canadian.”
“It must be a wonderful country,” continued Magda, completely ignoring the question. “Where you only need the police in the mountains. Probably to protect you from the bears. I know there are no elephants there.”
“What?”
“The Royal Canadian Mountain Police. They are famous even here.”
“Mounted, not mountain. They ride horses. Or did. They don’t anymore. Except in parades. Or when the Queen visits.”
“I know you are Canadian because you have a picture of Baffling Island on your wall. See?” She had the faint hint of an accent Snow couldn’t identify, like an unknown spice in a dish yhe’d just tasted.
“That’s Baffin Island, not baffling. And it’s not a picture, it’s just a stain.”
“‘The world, indeed, is like a dream and the treasures of the world are an alluring mirage! Like the apparent distances in a picture, things have no reality in themselves, but they are like heat haze,’” quoted Magda in suddenly perfect English.
“Huh?”
“The Buddha, Canadian. The Buddha. Talking about pictures, what is real and what is not real. Whether that is really Baffling Island or not.”
“I’m Snow,” Snow told her, like it was a complaint. “My name is Snow.”
“I know,” she said.
“Listen, Anne?” Snow remembered where he’d seen the woman now.
Magda looked at him blankly.
“That’s your name isn’t it? Anne?”
The blank look turned to puzzlement.
“I mean I heard that big guy…Pig? … call you that. Miss Ann Something-or-Other.”
Misanthrope, thought Magda. Misanthrope. That’s what Pig called her, a misanthrope, someone who hated all of mankind. Just because she hated him. As if he were all mankind.
“Magda,” she said. “My name is Magda.” That was the difference between her and Snow. She wasn’t boasting about her name, but she wasn’t complaining either.
Magda farted. Not discreetly, letting one slip out while she jiggled a cup or scraped her chair to cover the noise, but tuba-like, sonorous, mellifluous. Without a beat, any indication that she was embarrassed or had done anything wrong, she continued.
“I need to use your Joe.”
“What?”
“Your neck. You know, to shit.”
“Ah, the John, you mean,” Snow said, switching to Russian. “The head.”
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“That’s what I said,” she answered him back in English. Magda Timofeyeva Perskanski might sometimes miss individual words, but she always caught the music.
“Look,” Snow said. “We can speak in Russian. I have a little. Probably as much as your English.”
Snow didn’t speak any language but English well, which was exactly why he chose to live overseas. Not being able to talk to anybody ... well, he couldn’t think of a more pleasant circumstance, to be completely and utterly alone. Seeing life through a fog of incomprehension, he was free to drift through life rudderless.
“No Russian, please. Right now, I am studying English. Sadly, it is the language of the world. You will give me your book. Then, you will teach me.”
She stood there and stared at him.
“What?” he demanded.
“Your J-O-H-N,” she said, stretching out each phoneme sarcastically. “The H-E-A-D. Are you going to let me use it or not?”
Snow motioned her to the small cubicle with a nod of his head.
Magda was always startled to see herself in the mirror. Green, almond eyes, wrinkles at their edges, suggested a face that creased readily into laughter; the face of a peasant -- round, bland, unreadable -- indistinguishable from thousands of others in the Rodina. They were eyes capable of expressing sympathy or scorn with equal intensity, eyes that adored Mozart and mushrooms, Puccini and psychedelics. She was able to smell things acutely, as if she had extra frequencies on the radio with a special wave band other people couldn’t access. The total package suggested someone who looked like she had a great deal of experience minding her own business, someone as good as any man, better than none. In her mind, Magda felt so much better than she looked. She could live a hundred years and never get used to this bulk she carried around now. Inside her head, she was still the skinny, starving rape victim she’d been in the gulag.
No flushing the toilet to hide the sound of her body functions for Magda. She’d read that some Asian women flushed even before doing their business in order to hide the sound of their tinkling. When you had one hole in the floor to serve three hundred women and just a single bucket to wash it down, embarrassment over doing what came naturally quickly disappeared.
She flushed, and while the sound of the cistern filling still filled the small space, she quickly rifled Snow’s medicine cabinet.
“Did you know the average elephant produces fifty litres of urine a day,” Magda said once she got back.
“No. Did you know it’s rude to walk into someone’s home without being invited?” Snow chose to be direct. Perhaps the woman’s English was not good enough to understand she wasn’t welcome.
“Listen to me carefully, Magda. Go away. Now. Go out the door and close it. Find another foreigner to try your game on. I don’t want a woman. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I had one. Besides, I don’t like you. Not even a little bit. I don’t like people who push me to do things. It’s rude and I don’t like it. I don’t like people who are always talking. I don’t like ....”
“....people,” Magda finished for him. “Period. You don’t like people. You are the misanthrope, not me.”
Snow considered that for a moment and decided to concede the point. “So?” he demanded. She was right. He didn’t like people. Any of them. “What’s your point? Why are you really here? What do you want?”
“To help. What do you want?”
“Your absence.”
“The pills don’t work, do they?” she challenged. “Or the vodka. How long do you think you can keep going on like this?”
“Pills?” he evaded. What he had was hidden deep back. Whether from embarrassment, weakness, or simply societal shame, he himself didn’t know.
“You like the bass notes? Going down deep as you can go? How many hours of sleep do you get each night? How long do you lie there twisting the sheets, staring at the ceiling or out the window at the sleet? How many times have you wanted to just walk off the balcony or out in front of a train?”
For a long moment he had nothing to say. She waited him out. Neither blinked.
“You’re going to give up just because you’ve been left alone?” she finally said.
“No,” Snow corrected. “I want to be alone so I can give up.”
“It’s a defence mechanism, you know.”
“What is?”
“Being grumpy. It scares people away from you so you don’t have to talk to them. You hide behind it.”
Snow shrugged. “Everyone hides behind something. I can live with it.”
“You can live without it, too. Perhaps you need to learn that.”
“Live without what?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah,” Snow conceded. “I know. The question is how you knew? And why you give a shit?”
She shrugged. “One fisherman always sees another from afar.” Finding the pills had just been the proof, she told herself. She’d had to know to look for them in the first place and that made it not a lie. Snow had a look in his eyes that Magda recognized as being very much like her own.
“You? You, too? But you look … happy.”
“Happy,” she snorted. “Happiness is for morons.
“So are you going to teach me or not?” she demanded, her face only inches from his, until the smell of boiled cabbage was the only thing separating them.
“What are you running from?” Magda asked. “Why did you escape here to Russia?”
“I’m not running,” Snow answered.
“Everybody’s running,” Magda said.
“Yeah? Then what are you running from?”
“The circus.”
“The circus? Why?”
“I thought I was the elephant in the parade. It turned out I was the woman who followed the elephant with a shovel and a bucket full of shit.”
“Did you know that an elephant family is ruled by a matriarch?” Magda asked. “The family generally consists of her, her female offspring and the offsprings’ young. In Africa, the basic family unit consists of six to twelve animals, but they can get up to twenty elephants in size. That’s when they’ll split, depending on the amount of food and how well they’re getting along. When the matriarch dies, one of the older offspring takes her place.”
“What about the males?”
“The what?”
“The males. Do the females eat them like Black Widow spiders or Praying Mantises? Praying Manti?”
“You are joking with me. No, the male bulls travel together in bands. These bands range in size from two to thirty bulls. The average size of a bull band is three to five bulls.” It was amazing how good Magda’s English really was when she wasn’t playing games.
“No, you are wrong.”
“See? That is why I am here. You have the book. I can learn more.”
“I don’t have the damn book. And I’m not going to teach you English.”
“Then, what am I wrong about?”
“That males like to travel in bands. What we like is to be left alone. You understand? Vy menya panimaete?”
When Magda was sent from M.I.P.T. to the gulag, she was assigned to the “Northern Camps of Special Significance,” Severnye Lagery Osobogo Naznacheniya or S.L.O.N. Slon means “elephant” in Russian. Perhaps that was the reason she was infatuated with them.
Or not.
Magda’s father had been that most unusual species of Homo Sovieticus, a father who loved his children not just in theory, but in practice. He couldn’t get enough of hanging out with his little dochka, pushing her on the swings, catching her on the slide, or making snow men together. The two even baked cookies together.
Papa Perskanski had a child-like silliness only a daughter could love. Fortunately, Mama Perskanski indulged her two charges, simply rolling her eyes and chuckling at their horseplay instead of dressing them down. On his days off, Papa organized elaborate elephant hunts around their city, secure in the knowledge there would never be any to be found, leaving excuses to go ou
t searching together yet another day. It was his way of ensuring his play time with his daughter never had to end. In the evenings, the two of them read every elephant book they could find, lying in Magda’s make-do bed on the living room sofa and cuddling together over the information.
It was everything a child could want and more, until they came in the middle of the night, thundering up the stairs like … well, elephants, actually … and took Papa Perskanski to the camps for the grave crime of actually finding one of his mythical, elusive elephants. Unwittingly. Digging for minerals in the permafrost, a mastodon had come out whole, a prehistoric elephant, tusks and all, and it landed him in the camps because if word of it had gotten out, it would have disproved some loopy Marxist-Leninist scientific theory that would have made some Party theoretician look bad. Papa Perskanski hadn’t even known what he’d dug up. He had been looking for magnetite and found misery in the form of an ancient elephant instead. And Magda had been looking for them ever since. That was the problem with Russian fairy tales. They don’t have happy endings. The witch turns into a wolf and eats all the children. Even in American, their Constitution only guarantees the pursuit of happiness; you have to catch up to it by yourself.”
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