He Lover of Death

HOW SENKA FIRST SAW DEATH

Of course, that wasn’t what she was called to begin with. It was something ordinary, a proper Russian name. Malaniya, maybe, or Agrippina. And she had a family name to go with it, too. Well everyone’s got one of them, don’t they? Your lop-eared mongrel Vanka doesn’t have a family name, but a person’s got to have one, because that’s what makes them a person.

Only when Speedy Senka saw her that first time, she already had her final moniker. Nobody ever spoke about her any other way –they’d all forgotten her first name and her family name.

And this was how he happened to see her.

He was sitting with the lads on the bench in front of Deriugin’s corner shop. Smoking baccy and chewing the fat.

Suddenly, up drives this jaunty little gig. Tyres pumped fat and tight, spokes painted all golden, yellow leather top. And then out steps a bint, the like of which Senka has never seen before, not on the swanky Kuznetsky Most, not even in Red Square on a church holiday. But no, she wasn’t a bint – a lady, that’s what she was, or, better still, a damsel. Black plaits in a crown on top of her head, a fancy coloured silk shawl on her shoulders, and her dress was silk too, it shimmered. But the shawl or the dress didn’t matter, it was her face, it was so . . . so . . . well, there’s just no words for it. One look, and you melted inside. And that was what Senka did, melted inside.

‘Who’s that fancy broad?’ he asked, and then, so as not to give himself away, he spat through closed teeth (he could gob farther than anyone else like that, at least six feet – that gap at the front was very handy). ‘It’s plain to see, Speedy,’ Prokha said, ‘that you’re new round here.’ And right enough, Senka was still settling into Khitrovka back then, it was only a couple of weeks since he’d taken off from Sukharevka. ‘That ain’t a broad,’ says Prokha. ‘That’s Death!’ Senka didn’t twig straight off what death had to do with anything. He thought it was just Prokha’s fancy way of talking –like, she’s dead beautiful.

And she really was beautiful, no getting away from that. High clear forehead, arched eyebrows, white skin, scarlet lips and o-o-oh –those eyes! Senka had seen eyes like that on Cavalry Square, on the Turkestan horses: big and moist, but glinting with sparks of fire at the same time. Only the eyes of the damsel who got out of that fancy carriage were lovelier even than the eyes on those horses.

Senka’s own eyes popped out of his head as he gaped at the miraculously beautiful damsel, and Mikheika the Night-Owl brushed the baccy crumbs off his lip then elbowed him in the side: ‘Ogle away, Speedy,’ he says, ‘but don’t overdo it. Or the Prince will lop your ear off and make you eat it, like he did that time with that huckster from Volokolamsk. He took a shine to Death too, that huckster did. But he ogled too hard.’

And Senka didn’t catch on about Death this time either – he was too taken by the idea of eating ears.

‘What, and did the huckster eat it, then?’ he asked in amazement. ‘I wouldn’t do that, no way.’

Prokha took a swig from his beer. ‘Yes you would,’ he said. ‘If the Prince asked you nice and polite, like, you’d be only too happy to do it and you’d say thank you, that was very tasty. That huckster chewed and chewed on his ear, but he couldn’t swallow it, and then the Prince lopped off the other one and stuck it in his mouth. And to make him get a move on, he kept pricking him in the belly with his pen – his knife, I mean. That huckster’s head swelled up afterwards and went all rotten. He howled for a couple of days, and then croaked, never did get back to that Volokolamsk of his. That’s the way things are done in Khitrovka. So just you take note, Speedy.’

It goes without saying that Speedy had heard about the Prince, even though he hadn’t been doing the rounds in Khitrovka for long. Who hadn’t heard about the Prince? The biggest hotshot bandit in the whole of Moscow. They talked about him at the markets, they wrote about him in the papers. The coppers were hunting him, but they couldn’t even get close. Khitrovka didn’t give up her own –everyone there knew what happened to squealers.

But I still wouldn’t eat my ear, thought Senka. I’d rather take the knife.

‘So, is she the Prince’s moll, then?’ he asked about the amazing damsel, out of simple curiosity, like. He’d decided he wasn’t going to gape at her any more, wasn’t really that interested, was he? And anyway, there was no one to gape at, she’d already gone into the shop.

‘Ith she?’ Prokha teased him (not all of Senka’s words came out right since one of his teeth was smashed out). ‘You’re the one who’s a moll.’

In Sukharevka, if you called one of the lads a moll, you earned yourself a right battering, and Senka took aim, ready to smash Prokha in his bony kisser, but then he changed his mind. Well, for starters, maybe the customs were different round here, and it wasn’t meant to be an insult. And then again, Prokha was a big strapping lad, so who could tell which of them would get the battering? And last but not least, he was really dying to hear about that girl.

Well, Prokha kept putting him off for a while, but then the story came out.

She used to live all right and proper, with Mum and Dad, out in the Dobraya Sloboda district, or maybe Razgulyai – anyway, somewhere over on that side of town. She grew up a real good-looker, as sweet as they come, and she had no end of admirers. So, just as soon as she came of age, she was engaged. They were on their way to the church to get married, she and her bridegroom, when suddenly these two black stallions, great huge brutes, darted right in front of their sleigh. If only they’d guessed they ought to say a prayer right then, things would have gone different. Or at least crossed themselves. Only no one guessed, or maybe there wasn’t enough time. The horses were startled something wicked by the black stallions and they went flying off the bank into the Yauza river on a bend. The bridegroom was crushed to death and the driver drowned, but the girl was fine. Not a scratch on her.

Well, all right, all sorts happen, after all. They took the lad off to bury him. And the bride walked beside the coffin. Grieving something awful, she was – they said she really did love him. And when they start crossing the bridge, right by the spotwhere it all happened, she suddenly shouts out: ‘Goodbye, good Christian people,’ and leaps head-first over the railings, down off the bridge. There had been a hard frost the day before, and the ice on the river was real thick, so by rights she should have smashed her head open or broken her neck. Ah, but that wasn’t what happened. She fell straight into this gap with just a thin crust of ice, dusted over with snow, plopped under the water – and was gone.

Well, everybody thinks, she’s drowned, and they’re running around, waving their arms in the air. Only she wasn’t drowned, she was dragged about fifty fathoms under the ice and cast up through a hole where some women were doing their laundry.

They snagged her with a boathook or some such thing and dragged her out. She looked dead, all white she was, but after she lay down for a while and warmed up again, she was as good as new. Alive and kicking.

Because she was harder to kill than a cat, they called her Lively, and some even called her the Immortal, but that wasn’t her final moniker. That changed later.

A year went by, or maybe a year and a half, and then didn’t her parents try to marry her off again. And by now the girl was a more beautiful blossom than ever. Her bridegroom was this merchant, not young, but filthy rich. It was all the same to her – Lively, I mean –a merchant would do as well as anyone. Those that knew her then say she was pining badly for her bridegroom, the one who was killed.

So then what happens? The day before the wedding, at the morning service in church, the new bridegroom suddenly starts wheezing and flinging his arms about and then flops over on his side. He twitched a leg and flapped his lips for a bit, and went to his eternal rest. Carried off by a stroke.

After that, she didn’t try to get married any more, and before long she ran away from her parents’ house with this gent, a military man, and started living in his house, on Arbat Street. And she turned into a real swanky dame: dressed up like a lady and came to visit her mama and papa in a shiny varnished carriage, with a lacy parasol. The officer couldn’t marry her, he didn’t have his father’s blessing, but he adored her madly, absolutely doted on her.

Only number three was done for as well. He was a strong young gent, with bright rosy cheeks, but after he lived with her for a while, all of a sudden he startedwasting away. He turned all pale and feeble, his legs wouldn’t hold him up. The doctors tried everything they could think of, sent him away to take the waters, and off to foreign parts, but it was all a waste of time. They said there was some kind of canker growing inside him, and it had nibbled all his insides away.

Well then, after she buried her officer, even the slow-witted could see there was something wrong with the girl. And that was when they changed what they called her.

There was no way she could go back to Dobraya Sloboda, and she didn’t want to anyway. Her life was all different now. Ordinary folks steered clear of her. When she walked by, they crossed themselves and spat over their shoulders. But everyone knows the kind that did cosy up – rakish, dashing types who couldn’t give a damn for death. And after she sucked all the juice out of that last gent –well, you’ve seen for yourself what she turned into then. Far and away the best-looker in the whole of Moscow.

And it carried on. Kolsha the Spike (he was a big-time bandit, used to work the Meshchani patch) stepped out in style with her for a couple of months – then his own lads took their knives to him, because he wouldn’t divvy up the loot.

Then there was Yashka from Kostroma, the horse thief. Used to walk pure-blood trotters straight out of the stable, sold them to the gypsies for huge money. Carried thousands of roubles around in his pockets sometimes. He begrudged her nothing, she was swimming in gold. But the police narks shot Yashka down six months past.

And now there’s the Prince. Three months and counting. Sometimes he puts on a brave face, but sometimes he rants and raves. He used to be a respectable thief, but now doing someone in means no more to him than squashing a fly. And all because now he’s taken up with Death, he knows he isn’t long for this world. It’s like that saying: invite death to come visiting, and you end up in the graveyard. People don’t get their monikers for nothing, especially one like that.

‘What moniker d’you mean?’ Senka asked eagerly after he’d listened to the story with his mouth hanging open. ‘You still haven’t told me, Prokha.’

Prokha stared at him, then tapped his knuckles on his own forehead. ‘Why, you half-baked simpleton,’ he said. ‘Sowhat do they call you Speedy for? I’ve just spent the best part of an hour explaining that to you. Death – that’s her moniker. That’s what everyone calls her. She don’t mind, she answers to it, she’s well used to it.’