St. Petersburg Noir

by Julia Goumen

  Rain. Nothing’s happening. No one is ambushing me, throwing my hands behind my back, pressing me into the concrete with a massive knee, removing baggies of gray-yellow powder from my pockets, yelling in my face. There’s nothing but the rain. I walk around in it, and then I return again.

  The two with the earpieces cruise through the aisles of clothing as before, scanning from side to side. It’s in these moments that you start to understand Philip K. Dick.

  I find C in the fitting room, we go to the checkout. C’s total is rung up as half the value of what he’s purchased. What’s that about—plain negligence or payment for services? We’ll find out as we exit. I hold my breath anew.

  Nothing.

  We walk beneath the cables of the power line. I look up, the black cords blend with the gray sky. The rain intensifies, but I don’t get a pleasant feeling from it. Since the grass has lost its succulent brightness, I want the rain all the more. Perhaps it’s capable of cooling an overheated brain.

  We separate. K goes off to buy some things. C and I walk around the neighborhood. People look sideways at us.

  “It didn’t turn out so well this time,” I say. “I’m not on the same wavelength as K. Although he’s pretty generous. What’s that about?”

  “Yeah, I don’t know. Next time he needs to drop acid too.” C doesn’t look me in the eyes. What could he be hiding?

  “I’m going to ask you one last time. But please answer me in all seriousness. Is everything all right? I don’t have anything to worry about, right? And P went off to rehearsal, and not to some other place?”

  C looks sideways. “Yeah, everything’s all right. P went to rehearsal after he left us.”

  “Then why didn’t they take us with them?”

  “I guess they didn’t want anyone interrupting them. They wanted the speed for themselves.”

  C’s answers calm me, but not for long.

  “You and I have had trips that have turned out awesome. Remember, on New Year’s Eve?”

  “Yeah. We must have a soul connection, we’re a good match when it comes to these things. We’re on the same wavelength.”

  We walk in the rain, we’re soaked through. We stumble upon K. Go home. I beat my hands in the pockets of my jeans.

  At home, K returns to Pushkin, C heads to the kitchen to write a poem.

  I go to the bathroom, wash my face. The water carpets my face with velvet. I look in the mirror. Something’s changed in my face: either the cheekbones have grown sharper, or there’s a diamondlike glint in my eye. Something subtle, it scares me.

  I call M. She picks up, answers cheerfully. I ask if I can come over tonight.

  “Of course, come over. I’ll be waiting.”

  Calm. There it is.

  I try to write in my notebook, my hands shake, some food for thought about love and self-sacrifice comes out. Then I unexpectedly make a note: Looking in the mirror, you never know what kind of creature you’ll see.

  K rolls a joint, spikes coffee. I’m sick of having to run to the bathroom but take the mug anyway. K asks that I check the Internet to make sure he recites the poem “The Bronze Horseman” correctly. He reads the opening.

  I search for poems more to my own taste. I read Mayakovsky (At the very least allow this final tenderness to pave your departing step), Brodsky (Neither country, nor graveyard …), I finish with Okudzhava: He knew how to sully the page by the glow of a candle/ So what did he have to die for at Chernaya Rechka?

  It’s two in the afternoon. Still too early to descend into the metro. But it’s imperative to rejoin the living. It’s become stuffy and cumbersome here. We say our goodbyes.

  C and I go to his place, he doesn’t live far from here. We walk down veinlike streets. The drug doesn’t want to leave my body, it’s giving me the shakes. My hands are in the pockets of my wet jeans.

  Before we settle in at C’s we move along the wasteland surrounding Lake Dolgoe. This wasteland borders the new multistory homes, although just two years ago the city ended here. Clay swims about at our feet from the rain. A lone car, the driver of which looks back in bewilderment. Ducks. The ripples on the water turn into the ripples of the sky.

  At C’s we drink it off with green tea, have conversations on near-literary topics.

  P comes over with a girl, looks in on us. She’s a poet in one of the groups from the Urals who are ushering in a wave of new music. I’m still very much on speed, my pupils take up the entire rainbow of the iris. I study P closely—the last thing he looks like is a human capable of doing anything horrible.

  “Want an amphetamine?” P asks in the hallway.

  “No. I’m loaded up to my ears.”

  We speak of music, of Shulgin’s acid, of enlightened states of being. The girl spiritedly speaks of her own experience with substances.

  I go to the bathroom, check my pupils. At least I don’t look like a person who’s had a blood hemorrhage in his eyes. I can go.

  On the street along the way to the metro I’ve gathered myself together, I’m oriented and prepared for anything. In this green jacket with my brain dried out after the acid I feel like an ancient Viking, one who’s just gobbled down mushrooms and is making his way through uncharted land.

  I want to get home as fast as possible and make sure that everything is all right. But I can’t show up there in this burned-out state. I go to M, on Petrogradskaya. That’s the lesser of two evils. I text C from the metro: We’re superior to single-celled, organisms. People in the metro aren’t real: typical specimens for a drug addict. Let’s be superior to this.

  I think: That’s my “banana.”

  ~ * ~

  It’s nine at night. M joyfully greets me at the doors. We go to her room. She sits on my lap. Looks into my eyes.

  “You have pretty eyes.”

  I’m silent.

  “What did you do for fun?”

  I’m silent.

  “How did you spend the night?”

  “I haven’t slept yet.”

  “Uh-huh.” She carefully studies my face. “Well, how many hits did you take this time?”

  “Two.”

  “Uh-huh. Understood.” M turns away. Her wavy hair conceals her face. She brushes it away. I want to hold her, but she’s distanced herself. We sit in silence for a long time.

  “I haven’t had anything to eat since our dinner last night at the café.”

  “Let’s go. I’ll make you something to eat. Demon spawn.”

  M wipes away tears. In the kitchen she prepares an extraordinary omelet with white bread and tomatoes. I pour myself cognac.

  “This will help me come down.”

  M is silent. I take a big swig and am barely able to finish the omelet. I begin to conk out. I drag my body to the bed, undress, collapse, and fall asleep immediately.

  Several hours later the smell of tobacco wakes me. I cautiously open my eyes.

  Quiet. The dead of night. The table lamp has been turned on. The window is thrown wide open. M sits on the wide windowsill and slowly and very seductively smokes a cigarette. The scarlet tip is visible through the billowing half-transparent curtain. I can’t remember the last time I saw her with a cigarette.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  THE HAIRY SUTRA

  by Pavel Krusanov

  Moika Embankment, 48

  Translated by Amy Pieterse

  “The pentagram, said Semion Matveev, halting at the table and pressing his hand against the globe. “Swear upon the pentagram, for the devil’s sake! And I shall reveal a great secret.”

  —Boris Pilnyak, The Naked Year

  D emyan Ilich had a good grasp of the essence of man: he looked at a peach and saw the pit. That was the way he was. Some are preoccupied with the question: what kind of man are you? While for others, it’s: what are you capable of? Demyan Ilich wanted to know: who is inside of you?

  As for who was inside of this young maid, he, of course, knew. She had the following cast of mind and habit: with strangers
and those she took a liking to, or at least didn’t dislike, she was kind and friendly. But with everyone else she was given to caprice, and if her upbringing did not allow her to slap someone across the face with no good reason, nothing prevented her from kicking them from behind. Demyan Ilich was disgusting to her. He knew she was a graceful and obtuse creature; but he couldn’t help the way he was.

  What was she to him? When Demyan Ilich saw her, he was beset by strange, conflicting thoughts and emotions. Evil has matured in my mind, he thought, smiling to himself. Yet at the same time he wanted to touch her tenderly, to stroke her, maybe even try to lick that girlishly plump cheek covered with dainty apricot fuzz. It was so easy, so frightening…Such thoughts made Demyan Ilich’s heart throb dully; his blood ran thicker, and his chest grew tight and hot. Oh well, if they couldn’t be together, they could still be close. In his head a plan began to hatch. A whim? No, the curator never acted upon a whim—that was against his principles. But this was a special case: Demyan Ilich could not control his feelings. If they couldn’t be together, they could at least be close to each other ...

  The plan fell together piece by piece. People in whom unrestrained passion lets loose become terrifyingly resourceful.fhe plan ripened, writhing in his brain amid heated thoughts like a sterlet in a broth of fish soup. The plan fell into place inexorably. And, finally, it was ready. No, Demyan Ilich did not wish upon her the same fate he had dealt so many others. But what else could he do? She must stay and be with him. This way or another, ne wasn’t going to give her up.

  “Ahem.” The curator cleared his throat. And picking his way through the mess reigning in the house, a mess grown familiar and cozy to him, he went off to the bathroom to freshen up. For even the best news could be ruined by the foul breath of its messenger.

  ~ * ~

  Take the platypus, for example. It was no doubt in deep trouble, which is why it was on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. This meant that it was next to impossible for a museum to acquire that beast (stuffed) for an exhibit by legal means. First, hunting the platypus in Australia is illegal and severely punishable under Australian law. Second, the export of the platypus, procured by illegal means on the territory of Australia, is outlawed. Third, in accordance with a plethora of international conventions and agreements, any attempt to import a platypus that has been illegally procured and exported from Australian territory to most any country that abides by the laws of the international community is also a highly punishable offense. It is a three-tiered system. Naturally, one could always try to obtain a stuffed platypus on the secondary market, but the availability is rather limited, and chances are that the platypus would already be moth-eaten and gray with dust. There is, of course, the practice of museum exchanges, but this is a privilege of larger institutions with better funding. Finally, there is the shadowy world of illegal commercial zoology—but how legitimate would the exhibits be? And at what price …

  Here, in contrast, they had no less than three stuffed platypuses adorning the glass display cases. Not bad for a small museum—just one crowded hall, really—at the Zoology Department of a university bearing the name of a perfectly respectable writer. (His life had been wrecked by the Decembrists, who had awakened the revolutionary democrat within him.) The museums’s collection was started almost two centuries ago at the Lohvitskay-Skalon Gymnasium for Ladies, and in 1903 the museum moved here to the then brand-new Imperial Pedagogical college for Ladies on the Moika Embankment. Since those bygone days, the display cases of the museum had housed two particularly rare exhibits: a stuffed Cuban red macaw (Ara tricolor), an extinct species of parrot, the last of which was shot in 1864 in the Zapata Swamp; and a gigantic Taveuni beetle (Xixuthrus terribilis)y housed in a glass entomological box. The beautiful macaw had suffered for its splendor: its feathers were used in ladies’ hats, and when at last people thought to replenish the population or at least preserve a small number of the species in captivity, it turned out to be impossible. The Taveuni beetle, brown and branchy as a mandrake root, has since become extinct. It once inhabited Fiji, where natives stuffed themselves with its thick, oblong larvae, which looked like sausages carefully and obligingly prepared by nature herself. In the end, not knowing when to stop, the natives gobbled up the entire population of the species.

  From the year 1909, and for a quarter of a century to follow, this Department of Zoology was chaired by a renowned professor, an academician whose name was recognized throughout the world. During his tenure the museum was able to augment its collection and become one of the best university collections in the country. Among the rare exotic objects that an astonished visitor would encounter was an African pangolin, covered with brown boney scales like a huge pinecone, a lesser hedgehog tenrec, a seven-banded and a nine-banded armadillo from the pampas of South America, a short-beaked echidna, a three-toed sloth, and a Tamandua tetradactyla. The imaginations of medieval bestiary writers would have paled at the sight of such creatures, just like a jellyfish, pulled from the deep, pales in the sunlight.

  The list of exotic species was not limited to the aforementioned exhibits, however. Inside antique showcases, and upon the shelves of glass-covered oak bookcases, the round eyes of lemurs and capuchins bulged, and patas monkeys, drills, colobuses, and marmosets smirked and pulled faces. Not to mention polar bears and brown bears, sea otters, koalas, flying foxes, monitor lizards, crocodiles, walruses, manatees, and dugongs. Birds? Indeed, they ranged from the green woodpecker to the marabou stork. How about the ascarids preserved in alcohol, and tapeworms in thick glass flasks? Mollusks, you ask? Hundreds of shells, from the giant clam to the rapana, spiky and smooth, bivalves and twisted, with nacreous curls and opaque gaps. And what of the echinoderms and starfish ...

  And the Entomology Department itself? There you would find a hundred square feet of one wall were occupied by boxes of various collections, plus entomological cabinets and drawers, and a large glass cube with exhibits of insects and arachnids from Southeast Asia. And fish? Sponges? Here, among other things, was a glassy sponge, which according to Japanese tradition is given to newlyweds as a symbol of eternal love. The sponge was occasionally inhabited by two shrimp of the opposite sex. They crawled inside through the pores of the sponge as larvae, and when they grew into adulthood were unable to get out. And so they lived inside the sponge, feeding on the plankton that the sponge itself fed upon; and when the sponge died, they had no choice but to die with it. And reptiles, amphibians? What of marine arthropods? And the horns and heads of ungulates on the walls just beneath the ceiling? The senses and imagination were overwhelmed, and taking in the entire collection at one go—a collection that numbered more than three thousand items— was out of the question. By the same token, it would have been impossible to squeeze the collection into the limited space that was allotted to it, so some of the less valuable exhibits were displayed in the lecture halls and auditorium. For some museums such numbers would be undeserving of notice, but here it was a source of discreet pride.

  These premises were not often disturbed by mere members of the public. Groups of curious students would visit from time to time. The exhibits amused guests taking part in the occasional scientific conference, and once in a while someone from the chancellor’s office would show off the museum to an important person, as one of the college’s most valued and prestigious assets—but that was about it. The rest of the time, the museum’s doors were kept firmly shut, and the key was kept by the gloomy Demyan Ilich, who had held the position of collection curator for the past three years.

  Also under the supervision of the curator was a tiny closet with a workbench, tools, and a spacious freezer. At the workbench he performed small maintenance jobs on the exhibits, and in the freezer, waiting for their turn under the taxidermist’s knife, he kept his materials—pelts and carcasses of beasts and fowl, which he had come upon by chance or which were presented as gifts by the chair of the department, who was an occasional hunter. Demyan Ilich spent his working hours in primeva
l solitude like Adam, surrounded by the deathly somnolence of Eden, opening only at the knock of a teacher who had stopped by on some matter that needed attention, and venturing out himself only now and then to get water for the electric kettle.

  And yet…although the museum covered an area of no more than two hundred square yards, one could get lost there. Not simply get lost: one could disappear altogether.

  ~ * ~

  “I just don’t know what came over me. I must have been in some kind of fog,” said Lera, the laboratory assistant, and behind the lenses of her glasses her eyelashes fluttered up and down like the feathers of a large fan.

  “You weren’t in any fog,” thundered Tsukatov. “It was pure negligence, which is far worse!”

  “Off with my head. It’s my fault.”

  “Of all the parasites that eat away a human from the inside, the only one worse than treachery, and the one I most despise, is slapdash work—a careless job trying to pass itself off as something up to the mark,” said Professor Tsukatov to Lera, as he examined her poorly composed request for reagents, materials, and laboratory utensils. “Watching those nature programs with names like The War of the Giant Beetles fills me with black bile. Yes, technically, the series is impressive. Yes, the camerawork is flawless. But that’s where it ends. They have spiders and crickets, praying mantises and scorpions, they have wasps and ants, giant centipedes and grasshoppers. Damn, they even have crabs and tiger leeches! What they don’t have are giant beetles! They don’t have any beetles. And instead of informative commentary they have some half-witted blather. They are professional go-getters out to make a quick buck on the side. They have been eaten away by the parasite of slapdashery, corrupted by audiences of ignoramuses, who not only no longer wish to educate themselves, but insist on bringing knowledge down to their own paltry intellectual level.”