Moscow Noir

DADDY LOVES ME by Maxim Maximov Perovo ^{Translated by Matvei Yankelevich}

Her students hated her. For not being young, pretty, or fun. For not being different from who she was. Or they loathed her for something altogether different. Who knows what reasons people find to hate each other…

Although she was, like her colleagues in humanity, made up of 90 percent water, that water was not potable, which in a different circumstance may have, at least partially, influenced the formation of sympathy toward her in her students as well as others around her.

Dad had called her Danaë. According to her passport she was Danaë. For her students and colleagues she was Dana Innokentievna, a teacher of Russian language and literature.

She had mutual feelings for her students, not because she thought it necessary to answer loathing with loathing, but just because it happened to be so: she was hated and she also hated. A pure coincidence of feelings directed toward one another (if it is allowed that hate is a feeling).

And so, she hated her students—just as in childhood she’d hated lumps in her cereal. In essence, they were indeed lumps in the undigestible cereal of existence. And Danaë imagined herself a lump as well—big, flabby, stale. In fact, Danaë loathed the directress Gavriushkina like she loathed fish oil or boiled onions. Yet she tried to act nice. And the more she pretended, the more she loathed—her students, her colleagues, the scantily clad woman standing in front of her in line at the supermarket—yes, that very woman with the cart full of ad-emblazoned frozen dinners.

Sometimes Danaë thought with bitterness: Why don’t the terrorists take all these vermin hostage? Why don’t they get blown up? Why do serial killers pass over the directress Gavriushkina and that lady with the frozen dinners?

Danaë Karakleva was forty-seven years old. She knew that there was nothing more to come. It was all over. All the gifts she could have received had already been received. She was simply brought into this remarkable thrift store with the breath of a violated cosmos wafting through it, and they said to her, “Pick something out,” and then they locked her in, in this thrift store where everything had already been picked over. And in this thrift store with the breath of a violated cosmos wafting through it, she had spent forty-seven years.

As regards this existence’s amorous propositions, Danaë Karakleva could say the following: “I was never certain that I loved any of those not numerous men who—each in his own time—shook their fatty deposits over my trembling bosom. If Cupid ever shot at my heart, he must have been shooting blanks.”

This thesis which she had invented herself resembled fact, much more so than the rumors about her inevitable old-maid-hood. Among the large-horned herd of her students, it was commonly said in such cases: “Oh yeah? Suck this.”

She liked looking at the shower of pills, especially the round ones, that resembled squashed pearls. She liked to ride the tram past the hospital and look at the sapphire windows of the operating rooms and imagine the surgeon making a fatal error…

Danaë and her dad lived in a five-story building, erected under Nikita Khrushchev in the time of the artificial, government-approved destruction of the ark of communal living. There were more than enough such buildings in the neighborhood of Perovo, as there were in many of Moscow’s outlying quarters. They were built out of either panels the color of tubercular spit or gray-pink brick. Each of these residential buildings lacked an elevator. Outward attractiveness and interior comfort—all this was also lacking. It might be easier to list what was present in these buildings: the metastases of all varieties of cancer; staircases by which one might climb to the heights of despair, and if one were to descend it would be into pits of madness; guitar chords of underworld ditties oft performed by greenhorns fated to disappear in the sands of Afghanistan or the ravines of Chechnya. Also present in these buildings were walls that had been viciously fooled by promises of becoming supplementary scrolls for God’s commandments…

Every day, Danaë returned to this building, having first stopped at the market or grocery store; she returned with a feeling of a hole, a nagging pain, in the very center of her being…

From the Karaklev family’s kitchen window one could see the subway entrance. In the morning rush hour, before heading out to work in the nearby school, Danaë slowly downed a cup of instant coffee while examining the dark human mass. The mass penetrated the underground, shuffling from one leg to another in penguin fashion. The sleepy faces of those people—especially in the dusk of winter mornings—looked ominously similar to one another, lacking features, something like the heads of nails when viewed face on.

Danaë’s manner of speaking was as bizarre as her vision. Her speech was understood only by the portraits of the classics that hung on the classroom walls, and not even by all of them. She doubted Maxim Gorky, for one. As regards her pupils—they simply whimpered. Or cursed. Some quietly, others with full voice—depending on how much nerve they had. Danaë was kept employed by the school because she seemed rather like an animal that had been listed in the little red book. A wide-faced, warty roe deer, for example.

“As recently as the beginning of the twentieth century, the Perovo neighborhood in the south-east of Moscow consisted of a treasure trove of toxic swamps, the kingdom of poisonous mycelium, and randomly intersecting paths along which it was dangerous to walk alone…” In this manner began the oral dictation, concocted by Danaë in order to test the literacy of her pupils, who had come back from their summer vacations with their heads well aired out. It ended thusly: “And now, fuckity-suckity, here you dwell, young sluts and indefatigable jerk-offs…”

Having spoken these words in her mind, Danaë stretched her pale lips into an ambiguous smile and began dictating another text—a fake one—that had been approved by the pederasts from the Ministry of Education: “In the spring the forest is awoken by trills, drills, spills, trolls, and various other junk…”

Her daddy, who had schooled her in the art of complex linguistic expression, was dying of cancer… Yes, Innokentii Karaklev adored phrases that produced an effect. And he had taught his own daughter to adore such turns of phrase. As a result, the speech of both the Karaklevs was as out of place in the neighborhood of Perovo as a fugue for organ would be in a shawarma shack in a resort town.

Watching over her daddy’s demise was crushing. Danaë thought it unbearable to have to live and suffer watching such a thing. But damn it if she thought her life worse than death. She was convinced that she could live on, even without a future. Somehow. She wished for her daddy to disappear. Yes, to disappear, like a bout of hiccups, which, having come from god knows where, torments you for a while and then snap! it’s gone just like that, no one knows how or where. Daddy—she had thought since childhood—wasn’t fated for the grave. She rejected the idea of his decomposition in that stuffy heat and darkness. Her daddy couldn’t become a skeleton. That’s what Danaë had thought previously. And her daddy could not be turned into an urn of gray powder. But Innokentii Karaklev was dying—he emitted the smell of decomposition and his daily caprices were driving his daughter closer to the brink.

The salary of a Russian schoolteacher permits one to purchase three of the most inexpensive urns, then dismember Daddy and shove him into the urns in equal parts, and transport the urns to three different polling stations, pretending that one has simply mistaken the place to somewhere else. But the salary of a Russian schoolteacher can only nurse Daddy back to health if he has been afflicted with a foot fungus. By purchasing the appropriate ointment. Yet Innokentii Karaklev was dying not from a foot fungus, but from cancer of the innards. The chemo had made him look even more cancerlike: his eyes bulged, his back had lost its layer of fat, and touching it brought to mind the shell of a shrimp. Soon he’ll learn to walk backward, thought Danaë.

At school, many knew of Danaë’s misfortune, which went on without end. The directress Gavriushkina, with all of her predatory, livid, gloating heart, sympathized with Danaë. Gavriushkina would say to her: “Danochka Innokentievna, you should get a good night’s sleep. I’ll think of someone to substitute for you, Danochka Innokentievna…”

Danaë couldn’t bear expressions of pity directed at herself. In her mind she quickly but carefully rolled up the velvety paths of pity—embroidered with gristle and spread out before her—and having rolled up each and every one of them, shoved the scrolls deep inside Gavriushkina’s cyclopean ass.

“Thanks for your concern, Maria Petrovna,” Danaë would reply to the woman, “but I think I can manage just fine…”

“It’s clearer to one looking at you from the outside,” Gavriushkina parried. “Your beautiful eyes have lost their shine.”

I’ll show you some shine, thought Danaë, and following right behind the scrolls of velvety paths, into the back end of the directress, she stuck a metaphysical myriad of wrinkled sheets, recently soiled by Daddy’s excretions.

Sometimes Daddy liked to frighten his daughter. When she was six years old, Innokentii Karaklev told her the story of a Chinese governor who had two pupils in each eyeball. It was because of these four eyes that he had received his political appointment; Dad said that the Chinese guy lacked any other talents. Six-year-old Danaë was unable to sleep without having nightmares for a whole month. The Chinese guy visited her in her dreams and made eyes at her relentlessly.

Innokentii Karaklev had been an archeologist. Unfortunately, he’d never dug up anything worthwhile, anything for which one might win an award. All the Troys had been excavated before him. In his youth, he had planned to search out the tomb of Abel Adamovich Yahwehev, but somehow it just never panned out.

What’s wrong with me? Danaë was indignant with herself. He must have dug something up, I’ve just forgotten.

“Listen, Daddy, what was it you dug up?” asked Danaë as she changed his sheets.

“Cancer.”

“Yeah, but what else?”

“You…”

“I think it was something related to the burial mounds of the Scythians.” “Yeah, well, the burial mounds…”

“You don’t want to talk about it?”

“Why would I want to talk about it? Soon I’ll be a Scythian myself…”

Once Danaë got a call from the bank and was offered a line of credit. What the bank needed with Danaë in particular even the bank didn’t know. The one who called had a hissy voice of unidentifiable gender.

“I don’t need any credit,” said Danaë into the receiver. “My dad’s dying of cancer.”

“Forgive me, for god’s sake. Forgive me. Accept my condolences. All the best to you,” the voice poured out like a frightened fizz.

“No, wait!” shouted Danaë. “Don’t hang up!”

“Yes, yes?”

“What kind of condolences? What made you say that?”

The voice was silent.

“I don’t believe it’s possible, do you hear me? It’s just impossible!” Danaë yelled. “I don’t believe you! You cannot offer condolences, do you hear? You are just a petty, greedy maggot! I don’t even know your name, or your age, not even your gender, you son of a bitch! How dare you offer me your condolences? And where did you get my number?”

But the fizz wasn’t listening anymore. It had gone flat. Danaë hung up the phone and lit a cigarette, looking out the window at the other side of the street, where a tram rumbled past a plaza recently torn up by excavators. The plaza—pockmarked with ditches in which lay naked sewer pipes gazing at the ashen sky with their tired, rusty eyes—was empty. It was empty, if one were to ignore the statue of three orthodox nuns hanging their heads in mourning over that which could not be seen from the window, and that which Danaë could not recall, even though she walked past these nuns-in-ditches every day on her way to school.

It was cheaper to go to the market. Although daddy hadn’t taught her how to bargain. It was all for the better, taking into accent Dad’s slow demise, that double-mouthed Karaklev family had begun to consume less food.

“One Karaklev mouth is foaming,” said Danaë unconsciously to the lady attempting to sell some pig’s feet that would never know flat-footedness.

A month ago Danaë went to see a certain bastard who had been referred to her by another bastard. Both of them were medical professionals who considered themselves transmitters of veritable mercy. They rallied for euthanasia, adding that if she were to tell anyone about it, they would make her into a visual aid to Vesalius’s anatomy. The pill that would spare Dad an agonizing death would cost Danaë eight-ninths of a teacher’s savings. She remembered that day well. She was walking home from the train station, down 2nd Vladimirskaya Street. The sky was the color of boiled pork. The traffic lights were doing what they always did—preparing to break down. Flattened cigarette butts lay strewn about the asphalt like pharaohs whose sarcophagi had been jacked. Stray cats dashed away from short-order cooks dealing shish kabab on the street.

Danaë poisoned her daddy. Innokentii Karaklev felt drowsy. Danaë tucked him into bed and went to the kitchen to wait for him not to wake up. But Innokentii Karaklev did wake up. He even drank a little chicken broth. When he went to sleep for a second time and, after a short while, woke up once again. And the third time was the same. The fourth and fifth times too. So passed three days, and Daddy was still not dying. The poison didn’t tarry in his sick body: it left with the urine or the shit, she didn’t quite know which. Then Danaë telephoned the bastards.

“What did you give me?” she asked them.

“What you asked for,” was their answer.

“But it didn’t work! Three days have already passed!”

“Don’t shout. Wait awhile, it’ll work. And don’t call here again.”

Danaë began to wait. A week went by. Innokentii Karaklev was dying, but not all the way. Every day the same. He was dying, but not all the way.

She knew that two of the ninth-grade students—Chuniaev and Golotsvan—had committed a murder. Danaë accidentally overheard their lively chatter, their voices brimming with real euphoria. The boys were cheerfully, ecstatically exchanging impressions. The Creator himself, it would seem, had experienced such rapture in the first hours after the creation of the world. But these two—Chuniaev and Golotsvan—had simply murdered a bum the previous night. With the aid of the homeless man they had been demonstrating to each other various martial arts strikes and holds, and finally martial-arted the man to death. Danaë also had previous opportunities to hear about this type of entertainment of the idle but energetic youth from families who considered themselves successful. The Perovo police took on the search for the homeless-cides with some reluctance. More precisely: they began the search reluctantly and then, after a few hours, dropped it completely. The Perovo police had much luckier corpses to track—ones with relatives and square-footage.

But the corpse of that bum did not vanish without glory: it had a short but successful career as an actor in an anatomical theater. The medical students showered him with bouquets of twinkling scalpels…

She was impressed that her students—Chuniaev and Golotsvan—were not only falling behind in every subject, while also, as it turned out, committing murders. This permitted her hatred toward them to acquire some firm ground. The testosterone was jumping out of Chuniaev’s and Golotsvan’s mouths, ears, noses, and even from under their fingernails…

Once, on television, she saw a news segment about a group of students who raped and murdered their phys-ed teacher. This happened somewhere on the outskirts of the city, which Danaë, a Muscovite, could imagine about as vaguely as she could the Flemish city of Brabant. Watching Golotsvan as he shuffled at the blackboard with his hands in the pockets of his wide jeans, which were covered with chains and trinkets, Danaë imagined him, with hands shaking, hastily unbuttoning his foul-smelling pants and throwing himself at her with his horn-shaped prick. She, Danaë, is lying crucified in the tar, naked, while Golotsvan’s partners in crime hold her by the arms and legs; she struggles in their trap like a deer knocked onto her back. First Golotsvan, and then the rest of the goons, one by one, press against her with their unwashed genitalia, toss on her for a bit, then sprinkle her with what God gave them, and… experience a piercing guilt. Then, ashamed, they break her neck, or choke her with a wire, or stab her to death with penknives…

“And that’s all you deigned to learn, venerable Golotsvan?”

“I didn’t have time, Dana Innokentievna, my cat had kittens last night.”

“How many did she have?”

“Six. Would you like a kitten, Dana Innokentievna?”

“Take a seat, Golotsvan. You get a ‘satisfactory.’”

“Why ‘satisfactatory’? Please, Dana Innokentievna—”

“Take your seat.”

Grumbling under his breath, with his lower lip jutting forward, Golotsvan went back to his seat, jangling the chains and trinkets on his foul-smelling pants. His hands in his pockets. Danaë picked up a piece of chalk and turned to the board.

“Jewish bitch…” Golotsvan muttered.

Without turning around, Danaë grinned at the mouse-gray smoothness of the chalkboard. A thought came to her:What would happen if I take this here piece of chalk and on this very blackboard write something really special. Like, for example, “May you all be damned.” What would happen? Probably nothing. They’d all exchange glances and squeeze out puzzled little smirks, like lambs catching a whiff of the fire being lit under the spit. Besides, they were all damned long ago. And she was too. Danaë herself had been damned even before the students sitting in this classroom. Because she was older than them. Almost three times older. There’s your arithmetic for you, in a literature class. In the Perovo neighborhood. In a state school, in the city of Moscow, compared to which Brabant was just a pathetic little village of five houses and one toilet.

It would be natural to assume that since Danaë had a father, she also had a mother. Danaë didn’t like assumptions, particularly if they came from strangers. First of all, the mom she did in fact have at some point, she had no longer. Second, Mom loved her little Danaë for only a very short time: from zero to nine years old, plus the nine months that she spent carrying her daughter in her womb. And when the nine years were over, Mom placed a big down pillow on her sleeping daughter’s pretty little face, and then sat on top of it. Dad had lifted Mom off the pillow—and thus also off the red face of their daughter—just in time. After that, Danaë never saw her mom again. With the exception of that one time, which she had mostly forgotten: she and her dad had, it seems, visited Mom in some sort of yellow basement that smelled like medical syringes. Now, of course, Danaë knows all too well, and had known it for twenty-plus years, that the awful trick with the down pillow secured for Mom her demise in the mad house.

“Mom loves you,” Karaklev assured his nine-year-old daughter as she cried herself to sleep. “She just needs a little medical treatment and she’ll be with us again. Mom loves you.”

“And do you love me?” Danaë asked, smearing the tears with her little fist.

“And I do too,” Dad replied, taken aback that she would question his feelings. “Very, very, very much. Daddy loves his little pea, his clever girl.”

Innokentii Karaklev was becoming more and more capricious, more cancerlike. More foul-smelling. Worst of all, Daddy started to recount aloud his past life, and specifically those moments that a healthy person would not only not recall, but would actively try to forget. The long period of dying had debased him. Instead of becoming more pious, he was transformed into a cynic to a degree that is rarely found among the camp of dying organisms. This is what Innokentii Karaklev said to his daughter Danaë on that day it rained cats and dogs, such a heavy, pounding rain that the pigeons caught in it received concussions. The neighborhood of Perovo looked like a boundless, cracked aquarium into which poured the water from a thousand hoses in the sky.

“I slept with your mother. I did it with all my passion. I drilled her and drilled her and then you emerged from her belly like a wild troll from a mangled cave… Admit it, my child, from the very beginning you never liked it here.”

“No, I liked it here. From the very beginning. You’re mistaken, Daddy,” Danaë answered, listening with one ear to the hammering rain. “Fools like you are always mistaken. You’re made of mistakes. You have a fatal error dangling right there between your legs.”

Innokentii Karaklev watched the rivulets of rain running down the windowpane.

“Listen, child…” he muttered, swallowing dryly, “try to be… happy. I’m so sick of you being unhappy… I’m dying because of your unhappiness.”

“You’re dying because of cancer,” corrected Danaë, sticking a cigarette in the corner of her smirk.

They were both silent awhile, thirty-five seconds or so. The smoke from Danaë’s cigarette coiled around itself in the dark room like a scrap of seaweed.

“Do you know why I left your mother?” said Dad, scratching his sunken cheek. “Because of this one student. A handsome rogue. He was excellent at poker, had a thing for chemistry and water polo. Yes sir, my little pea, he always had jokers in store. His glass vials often exploded from overheating, and he swam in a mauve swim cap. Your mother found us—I was on my knees, polishing his… with my mouth…”

“His what?” Danaë turned to stone.

“His that!” He made a strange noise and squinted his colorless eyes at his daughter.

“Daddy…” Danaë stonily sounded out the words. “Are you saying you were a homosexual?”

An astonishing picture took shape in her mind: her dying father sucking the penis of Golotsvan, the flunk, the murderer.

“That’s how it went… sometimes. And who didn’t get into some of it? In one’s youth, in the barracks, after a bout of drinking, in one’s dreams—”

“Did you actually love my mother?”

“Yes, my little pea, yes…” Innokentii Karaklev nodded his hairless head. “You are the result of a grandiose love, a gale-force diffusion. The cells were jumping out of our bodies and mixing together. Such passion, it shook the atmosphere. Those were breathtaking, mind-numbing times.”

“And what about that student?” Danaë asked, watching the column of ash crumble from her cigarette onto the rug. “What was his name?”

“Andrei. Yes, yes. It was a breathtaking passion.” Her dad smacked his lips and purred like a cat. “Absolute diffusion. Overflowing excitement. To near suffocation. More a miracle than a passion.”

“Did you love my mother?” Danaë prodded in a steely voice. “Answer me. I don’t understand.” She now imagined her dad’s hairless head laboring over the perineum of the flunking murderer Golotsvan.

“I loved them both very deeply,” answered Innokentii Karaklev. “And about twenty others. I loved everyone. And every time it was a miracle.”

Danaë took a drag on her cigarette and fixed a vacant stare on the window. A lustful blush broke in crimson across Golotsvan’s cheeks, his eyes turning back in his head, his moans encouraging her dad’s frail, hairless head with its decaying mouth.

“And me?” Danaë asked almost inaudibly.

Her dad’s wrinkles suddenly turned smooth and he answered: “You are my little pea. My favorite book. Plus Louis Armstrong. And Fellini. Plus my favorite olivier salad. And all the Egyptian pyramids and the ruins of the great castles. You understand me? You are also the lily pads on the pond where I swam when I was just a little kid… Plus God, whatever He may actually turn out to be. My little pea. Danaë. Come here, give me a kiss.”

Danaë quickly crushed her cigarette butt in the ashtray, walked over to him on legs she could barely feel, and pressed her cheek into Daddy’s lips.

“You too,” she whispered, “dying one… Daddy…”

Golotsvan was done. But the rain in the neighborhood of Perovo wasn’t about to finish. Danaë moved to the kitchen, leaving her dad to stare out the gray window covered with heavenly moisture…

She struck him with a meat hammer, with the burled side. Danaë knew beforehand that just once on the head wouldn’t be enough. Neither would two. During the process she realized that it would be enough only when she had lost count for the third time. Then she stood there listening, without looking. She imagined a monitor with a wan green image of her dad’s threadlike pulse. Then she dropped the hammer, went to the kitchen, washed her hands, went to the hallway, grabbed her bag of notebooks, came back to the kitchen, sat down at the table, and began grading papers. After a half hour she was sick of it. She moved into her dad’s room, turned on the light (it had grown dark outside, but the rain was still pouring down), and peered at him. Innokentii Karaklev was sitting in the same armchair, but tilted over on his side so that his knuckles were trapped against the rug. His thoroughly beaten head was glazed in its own juices.

Danaë decided to leave everything as it was, at least for now, until she took a bath with some fragrant salts. Salts always had a positive effect on her body. Sitting on the edge of the tub and looking into a mirror, Danaë pronounced: “This is easy.”

Later she was told that she’d gone mad. Just like her mom. Those who said it were right. She knew it and she’d reply: “And you’re all bastards, bastards, all of you.” It’s possible that she was right too.

CHRISTMAS by Irina Denezhkina New Arbat ^{Translated by Marian Schwartz}

Jacob hung there, his shoes scraping the parquet floor spasmodically. “Papa, stop!” he rasped, trying to untangle the string of lights around his neck, while German, suspecting nothing, kept pulling the garland tighter and tighter thinking there wasn’t much time left and the house decorations still weren’t finished.

There should be a comma after “tighter,” Yulia noted in the margin, then set her pencil down and rubbed her temples. As usual, the words were swimming before her eyes. They would keep swimming for another half hour, until Yulia put on her coat, picked up her purse, and left the publishing house. She put drops in her eyes. I’m going to have to move on to glasses pretty soon, she thought sadly.

As Yulia left the Barrikadnaya metro station, the heavy glass doors swung closed behind her with a loud wallop.

She heaved a distraught sigh, her head finally clearing after the stench of the sweaty underground crowd and their identical faces, on each of which she distinctly read: IhateyouIhateeveryone. Her black sweater was stuck to her body, the harsh wool bristly. What was it knit from? It pricked her armpits and back.

Yulia wiped the sweat from her forehead and made her habitual motion of smoothing down her jacket.

Her wallet was gone.

She had her cell phone. Here it was, on the right. But her wallet was missing.

Frightened, Yulia looked from side to side, feverishly trying to figure out who might have relieved her of her salary and bonus and where, when, and how.

Yulia moved forward on cotton legs and leaned her shoulder against one of the vans selling burned chebureki and sausages wrapped in pastry. Any other time the smell of the tainted meat would have turned her inside out, but the thought of the money drowned out every other consideration.

How was she going to live now?

Go to the police? Yulia laughed nervously. A lady walking by, wearing a gray puffer coat, gave her a nasty look and sent a tut-tutting curse her way. Rush back, down there, into the bowels of the underground, wrest her money back (from whom, dear Yulia?), howl…? Pretty funny.

She gathered all her strength and walked on. Toward her building.

She moved past the chebureki and pirated-CD vans, past the crazy Gothic high-rise with the gargoyle faces. She gazed, sick at heart, at one of the faces, which looked down on her haughtily. Yulia sighed and plodded on. A frigid wind whistled down her jacket collar; her scratchy black sweater wasn’t keeping the cold out. She stopped next to the American consulate, but she didn’t have the strength to take another step forward, even though it was just a few more meters to her building. A dreary line stretched out from the consulate door. Jacob took the hacksaw and, panting, began sawing off his mama’s head. The hacksaw was hard to work, and the sweetish spurts made Jacob frown… The words raced through Yulia’s mind.

A guard with a badge bore his little piggy eyes into Yulia, and his muscles tensed to lunge. Yulia came to her senses and hurried on.

She tumbled like a sack into her apartment, having begun to slump in the elevator. Now she was sitting, drained, leaning against the doorjamb, moaning softly, and tears were pouring down of their own accord, dripping on her jacket.

Her Siamese cat ran up on his soft paws. His slanted blue eyes watched Yulia carefully.

“Barsik,” she moaned faintly. “Sweet Barsik… I got robbed. Barsik. We have nothing to eat and nothing to live on.”

Barsik rubbed his round head against Yulia’s leg. And meowed.

Her phone rang. Yulia took it out of her pocket with trembling hands and pushed the button.

“Yulia darling.” It was Oleg.

“Hi,” she answered, trying to buck up, wiping away her tears and getting up from the floor.

“How’re things, my dear?” Oleg sang sweetly.

“Kind of… strange.” Yulia tried to quash her sobbing. “Today they fired our second proofreader… Mikhail Ivanich… You don’t know him. And he… he left calmly enough. But when I went into the metro… I saw… imagine, Oleg, he took a running jump right… right in front of a train.”

“What?” Oleg gasped, though there was more curiosity in his voice than concern.

“He took a running jump… He was standing in the middle of the platform… and when the train started coming out of the tunnel… he jumped.”

“Are you kidding?”

“No. Also… you know… when he jumped he knocked over a stroller… and he and the stroller… fell.”

“What was in the stroller?” Oleg’s curiosity was growing.

“A child,” Yulia sobbed. “And then… when the train pulled out… Mikhail Ivanich and the stroller were lying there on the track… Mikhail Ivanich was still twitching, but the child didn’t have a head… There was just the horrible scream of its mother.”

Yulia caught her breath. It must have been someone in the crowd that gathered who stole her wallet.

“What happened then?” Oleg asked.

Yulia felt like telling him how she’d been jostled in the crowd, how someone’s cold insolent hand had slipped into her pocket for her wallet. Not that Yulia knew exactly what kind of hand it was, hot or cold, but that was exactly how she thought of it: someone’s cold, bony, malicious hand.

Jacob started twisting her arm out of the shoulder socket but got nowhere; he hadn’t sawed all the way through the flesh…

Jacob again! Yulia was getting angry.

“Nothing,” she replied with a sigh, and got a grip on herself. “Nothing else. I feel sorry for Mikhail Ivanich. But everything else is fine.”

“Good,” Oleg said quickly. “You know, I’m hungry as a wolf! I’m on Paveletskaya right now. I’ve got some business to do. I’m selling a picture. But I’ll come right over after that.”

“All right.” Yulia nodded and ended the call. She thought sadly, So this is what we’ve come to. There was no food in the house. No money whatsoever. Yulia was one of those people who drags out the last three or four days before her paycheck and by payday has absolutely nothing left in the house.

Oleg, however, had one quirk: food. There always had to be some. And food always meant meat. Salad wasn’t food. When Yulia met Oleg Bekas at his gallery and got to talking to him over a cup of coffee with brandy, he immediately informed her of this quirk. That—dinner not being made—was why he’d left his wife (now his ex) and his infant child. The baby’s name was Sevochka Bekas and his wife’s was Marina. Oleg came home from the gallery one day and there was nothing on the table. Marina’s brown eyes stared at him guiltily as she held Sevochka, who was burning up with fever, to her breast. “Sevochka got sick,” she said. “I didn’t have time.” Oleg gnashed his teeth, turned on his heel, and left. Softened by the brandy, Yulia nodded, as if to say, Rightly so. What kind of a wife doesn’t cook for her husband? “You have to understand, I’m an artist,” Oleg explained. “I’m not some low-brow proletarian. I have the right to put myself first.” Yulia nodded.

A week later she learned from common acquaintances that on that fateful day Marina picked up Sevochka, who was still burning up with fever, wrapped him tightly in her robe, and went out to the balcony barefoot. It was snowing, and Sevochka quieted down and peeked out of her robe. Snowflakes were melting on his cheeks. “Pretty?” Marina asked. Sevochka goo-gooed approvingly. Marina climbed onto the railing, holding her son to her breast, and from there, from the sixteenth floor, to the dumbfounded looks of the group smoking on the next balcony over, she jumped.

When she first heard this, Yulia just shook her head. Foolish woman Marina. Who jumps off over men?

But right now she was ready to do the same thing. Pick up Barsik, hold him tight to her breast, and leap from her sixth floor, right in front of the dumbfounded visitors at the Metelitsa casino. Because she no longer had the emotional strength to be left not only walletless but also Oleg Bekasless.

Yulia worked as a proofreader in a publishing house. Her only connection to art was through grammar. For days on end Yulia read other people’s words very, very carefully. And corrected them. She felt like a worker who hammers a nail into a wall to hang a painting that gives off a divine light. But what kind of light does a nail give off? None whatsoever. Oleg was an artist, though, and canvases came to life in his hands. Even a sheet of notebook paper. Yulia couldn’t do that. She could only go word by word, like an infinite rosary, barely penetrating the meaning of what was written.

She fell in love with Oleg once and for all (though she had never believed in love at first sight and in her youth had often snickered at her more naïve girlfriends). With Yulia it was all very simple. Like him—hook up—go to a café—go to bed. Love? Who cared about love? As long as he had a fat wallet and a generous nature. Maybe that’s why Yulia hadn’t been through any emotional upheavals before Oleg. She hooked up and split up with a cold heart and a clear head. Like a chekist. But here was Oleg. An artist. A creator. Someone from another world where they don’t hammer nails but drink to Brüderschaft with God almighty… Yulia saw him in the gallery and fell hard. Her heart broke off and slowly dropped to the pit of her stomach.

Yulia went out on the balcony. The lights of New Arbat spread out right there in front of her. Here was a huge building with a web of lights like an open book. Here was a casino in the shape of a ship; here was another casino, and another. Expensive cars, lots of people. Sometimes Yulia dreamed of flying from her window and landing right on that ship burning with blue lights—and then sailing off to distant lands, where she and Oleg would live together in a cabin and have three children.

Jacob climbed onto the stepladder and tried to hang his mama’s head on the Christmas star, but the star was so fragile, and his mama’s head was so heavy, that… The words raced through her mind again and Yulia mechanically finished up: that the boy couldn’t hold it there and the head came crashing down, cracking loudly on the parquet floor. Yulia didn’t feel so good. Usually she didn’t remember all the words to the texts she proofread, and now there was this flood. I’ll ask them to give me a different novel, she thought. And I’ll give this one to Mikhail Ivanich… Damn, he’s gone… Everyone’s gone…

Yulia let out another sigh and looked at the clock. She had approximately an hour and a half until Oleg’s arrival. She went into the kitchen and opened the cupboard. Then the refrigerator, and then the cabinets over the sink. The old fairy tale about Roly-Poly came to mind. I’ll scrape the bottom of the barrel, Yulia chuckled to herself. Her soul was being torn to shreds.

Her search was crowned with a near-empty bottle of sunflower oil, a piece of dried-out French bread, and an almost full bottle of vodka—Yulia gave Barsik vodka compresses when he was sick. She mechanically twisted off the tight lid and sipped some vodka straight from the bottle.

Jacob sat down on the chair and looked at her intently. His blue eyes said, Come on. It’s so easy. Easy as pie. Anna fidgeted. “Maybe we can leave Thomas alone?” she asked. “Do you want to spoil the whole game?” Jacob scowled. He fiddled with the cord of his checkered shorts. “No,” Anna answered in fear. “Then stand up and do it,” Jacob said gently. “And don’t forget this.”

Compresses for Barsik.

Barsik.

Anna went over to Thomas’s crib. He was looking at his mobile. “Jake, I can’t get to him,” she said. “The crib’s too high.” “I’ll bring a chair!” Jacob responded. A minute later Anna was climbing onto the chair and looking down at Thomas. “So pretty,” she said softly. “Of course he’s pretty,” Jacob agreed. “But that’s completely beside the point.” “Yes,” Anna said. “Is the water hot enough?” Jacob inquired. “You understand what I mean when I ask if the water’s hot enough, right?” “Yes, Jake. It’s boiling.” Anna raised the kettle, screwed up her eyes, and upended it on Thomas. A piercing shriek filled the nursery.

Yulia shook her head, driving out the terrible thoughts, and took another swig of vodka. The thoughts returned.

What’s the big deal? Yulia thought. The big deal is that I would never survive Oleg leaving me.

She gave herself a good shake and stumbled into the bathroom on wobbly legs. A second later she came out clutching a mop.

“Puss puss puss,” Yulia called faintly, glancing around the room.

Barsik jumped out from behind the couch. Yulia caught him in her arms and moved out to the balcony. There she lay the cat on the tile floor. Barsik stayed there obediently, watching her with his slanted little blue eyes.

“I’m proud of you,” said Jacob. “Don’t howl.” “I can’t not howl. This is Thomas after all. He’s still little and it hurts,” Anna said, weeping. Jacob hugged his sister. He glanced at his little brother screaming in anguish in his crib with a piece of red meat where his face had been. “You see, Anna, he shouldn’t suffer. We’re going to save him.” Jacob moved away from his sister and took the screaming Thomas out of his crib. He put him on the rug. “Did you bring what I said?” “Yes,” Anna answered obediently. Jacob took the golf club from her hands. He stepped back a little and took aim. He raised the club high over his head, then lowered it with a whistle at Thomas’s head, which cracked like a watermelon.

Yulia placed the mop handle against Barsik’s neck. Then she held onto the railing and jumped with all her might on the handle. There was a crunch and Barsik’s eyes popped out of their sockets and a wheeze tore from his throat. His little pink tongue jutted out to the side.

Yulia exhaled violently and nearly ran to the kitchen to crush the grief inside her with vodka. The firewater lashed her throat. She was sobbing.

“Don’t cry, Anna,” Jacob said calmly. “They’ll buy another rug, and I tell you, they aren’t going to yell at you. Now it’s your turn.” “Jackie, let’s watch television,” Anna said. “I don’t like playing with you anymore.”

Out the window, the ship-casino was bathed in blue lights. In the kitchen, Yulia skinned the carcass convulsively, tossing the fur onto an opened newspaper.

Oleg arrived at 9 o’clock. By that time Yulia had washed, made herself up again, and put on a red dress. She was a little unsteady from all she’d drunk, but Oleg didn’t notice.

He lifted his nose, inhaling the aroma of the roasted meat. He slipped off his jacket, ran a handkerchief over his bald spot to wipe away the sweat, and as a final gesture smoothed his beard.

“What’s for supper?” he asked cheerfully, giving Yulia a pat on the cheek.

“R-rabbit,” she hiccupped.

“Excellent!” Oleg rubbed his hands and hurried into the kitchen. He sat down on a stool.

Yulia served him pieces and he ate it, crunching the bones and smiling contentedly, like a cat. The oil ran down his beard. Yulia sat across from him.

“Do you know which painting I sold?” he asked triumphantly, nodding at his briefcase.

“Which?”

“Rusty Evening!”

Yulia shuddered. Rusty Evening had been painted in blood. Oleg was so proud of his conceit—to create a painting two by two meters using only blood. He had bought syringes at the pharmacy and Yulia had given him blood in a skin ointment tube. It had made her head spin, but Oleg had been so pleased. “It’s all right,” he’d said. “You can take a break tomorrow. I have my mom and sister too.” His sister was all of twelve. Oleg was very proud of the fact that the picture had “virgin blood.” He drew human figures with it.

And now some “rich wuss,” as Oleg put it, had bought their blood.

“Listen,” Yulia groveled through her embarrassment, “since you got paid so well, can you lend me a little money?”

Oleg frowned. “I see,” he said nastily. “The female wiles are here. I know these crass women. They need money, not love.” He stood abruptly from the stool.

“No!” Yulia cried. “I’m not like that! I just… I just… They held back our pay. The crisis…”

“You have to be thriftier, Yulia,” Oleg preached, dropping back down on the stool. “Let this be a lesson to you. I can’t pay for your mistakes, understand? You have to save for a rainy day.”

Yulia nodded, scared. Oleg relented.

“Come here!”

Yulia rushed into his arms, breathing in his painfully intimate smell, realizing she couldn’t go on without him. She wanted to tell Oleg that something terrible had happened to her. But what would he say? She pressed up to her beloved’s chest. Anna and Jacob went into the bathroom. “Do I have to undress?” Anna asked again. “No need for that, I don’t think,” Jacob replied. He took the cord he’d prepared beforehand out of the pocket of his checkered shorts. “Anna, you have to get in the bathtub.” “Okay,” Anna nodded obediently. “Just promise me, Jake, that our game ends here and we can go watch television in the living room.” “I promise,” Jacob said. “The game will end…”

Oleg turned off the light and was now trying to separate Yulia from her red dress, but the clasp wouldn’t yield. Oleg growled lustfully, tugging at the zipper.

Jacob quickly tied one end of the cord around the drain grill. Anna lay down on the bottom of the bathtub. Jacob tied her neck so that there was no more than five centimeters of cord between the drain grate and the girl. “Goodbye, Anna!” Jacob said, and he kissed his sister on the cheek. “Bye,” Anna nodded. “Is this going to take long?” “I think fifteen minutes is all we’ll need,” Jacob answered, and he turned on the water.

Yulia burned with desire as Oleg ripped off her panties and bra, but she was trying to drive Jacob out of her thoughts. Oleg licked her belly, arms, and face—whatever he came across—with his hot tongue.

German balanced on the edge of the roof, trying to hold onto the New Year’s garland that was slipping through his fingers like a snake. “Jacob!” he shouted. “Jacob, help me!” “I’m hurrying, Papa!” Jacob shouted in reply, stamping his boots on the roof—and with a running jump he pushed his father off.

Oleg thrust himself into Yulia, panting and moaning. Yulia tried to get into his rhythm, furiously driving him on. Goddamn you, Jacob, her brain grumbled angrily. Goddamn those novels! Goddamn this job! Goddamn this life!

Jacob carefully mopped up the floor in the living room and kitchen. He checked the chicken in the oven to make sure it hadn’t burned, then went to his room. He looked at himself in the mirror. There was an ugly red mark on his neck. I can put on a sweater, Jacob thought. He carefully removed his checkered shorts and put on the white pants he’d hung neatly on the back of the chair. He found his white sweater in his closet and went out into the dining room, where the utensils were already neatly set on the snow-white tablecloth on the oak table. He sat down at the head of the table. It’s Christmas, Jacob thought. I’m home alone. Like in the movies.

The next morning Yulia woke up with a hangover and a nasty taste in her mouth. Her head was spinning. Oleg wasn’t next to her. Yulia rose with difficulty and walked into the bathroom. The shower brought her back to earth. She moved into the kitchen and sat down on a stool.

Life was quietly returning to her—the street noise, her neighbor’s scratchy radio, and the sound of the boiling kettle. Yulia drank plain hot water, then she went out on the balcony to clear her head. The casino-ship had turned out its lights and no trace remained of its nocturnal grandeur. Yulia smiled. Out of the corner of her eye she noticed a crowd of people below. She took a closer look.

On the asphalt, in an unnatural pose—his hands and legs turned out like a marionette—lay Oleg. Naked. Yulia blinked. Then she mechanically stepped back.

Yulia struggled for breath. She went back inside. Here they were, Oleg’s clothes. Here were his shoes. Here was his briefcase. With trembling hands Yulia unlocked it.

The briefcase was packed with bundles of euros.

It will be Christmas soon, Yulia thought. And I’m alone. With a stash of money. Like in the movies.

Jacob smiled.

THE POINT OF NO RETURN by Sergei Samsonov Ostankino ^{Translated by Amy Pieterse}

He acted as though he had received a divine certificate verifying the fact of his brilliance from birth. While the other inhabitants of Literary House on the corner of Dobrolyubova and Rustaveli were plunged in a state of despondency that comes from the sense of a wasted life, my roommate, Tatchuk, lacked even a hint of that overpowering feeling of hopelessness.

Surfacing to earth out of Lucifer’s cowshed, otherwise known as the Moscow subway, on our way back to the dorms, I felt, as always, dejected, stunned by defeat. He seemed, as ever, pampered by good luck, an immutable, victorious smile on his lips. I hated Azerbaijanis, Russians, Moldavians, Jews, Tajiks, Ukrainians, blacks, and all other earthlings, forty thousand of whom passed through the vestibule of Dmitrovskaya station every day (with marble facings the color of a dried blood blister). He seemed to take no notice of the riffraff, cutting right through the crowd as though it were just a hologram image of a human herd.

“What’s with the gloomy face?” he asked as we were coming out of the underground crossing on Butyrsky Street. “It wasn’t my fault.”

“I didn’t say it was.”

“No, but I can tell from just looking at you that you think it is. Honestly, though, you can’t blame me for the fact that you didn’t have a single manuscript in your file! That, my man, is just plain bad luck.”

It was like this: the head of our university was approached by the organizers of a certain literary prize, who had requested a few examples of the more interesting manuscripts that the student body had produced. All of this (reading and submitting the text) had to be done in a matter of hours, because the deadline for novels and stories had almost arrived. They chose Tatchuk, myself, and one other student. They checked our files, but mine was empty. Unlike Tatchuk’s, which was stuffed full of work. So I missed my chance. A month later, I found out that my roommate was a nominee for nationwide fame, and a tidy little sum of money to boot.

The 29-K trolley pulled up to the stop and we squeezed into the coach, filled with scum and lowlifes.

“Cut it out,” he said, hunching up his shoulders squeamishly, shoving away the people crowding into the trolley. “If you want, I can help you get a job at Profile. Let’s go there together tomorrow, I’ll tell them you’re a better man for the job,” he suggested.

“What about you?” I said.

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll get a job in Business Primer, they’re offering a better salary there.”

While others spent months looking for a job, he always had a choice between four or five attractive offers. All he had to do was cross the threshold of an editorial office, and the woman in charge went wild. “What a sweet young man!” He possessed qualities that piqued the sexual interest of young ladies and mature matrons alike: a sharply defined jawline, the playful brow of a caryatid, the sweet eyes of an angel, with the muscular hands and other features characteristic of a dominant male. If you only knew the way the girls at the university stared at him adoringly, burning with desire to give themselves to him.

But the newly won position had no value for him, and he ignored the obligations it entailed. In fact, he never stayed on with the same publication for longer than three or four weeks. Yet each time he found himself another job without the least bit of effort, as if Moscow employers were constantly creating new vacancies just for him. It was as though he had some kind of aura about him, like some sort of mythical deer with jewels pouring out of its hooves. Indeed, I owed several good jobs to his lucky charm.

We got out at 2 Goncharny Proezd, passed the bookstore named, quite idiotically, Page Turner, past Pharmacy and Optics, one right after the other according to phonetic logic, and they were soon behind us.

“Let’s get something to eat,” he said, nodding at the neon sign over the grocery store where young writers went to buy ingredients for breakfast and dinner (individually wrapped crab sticks and a packet of mayonnaise, occasionally allowing themselves some disgusting treat like liverwurst, or a string of glossy, suspiciously natural-looking pink hot dogs). He bought a pound of choice ham, half a pound of Dutch cheese, canned olives, and two bottles of Chilean red wine.

“What do you think?” he said as we were leaving. “Isn’t it about time I started writing a new narrative, a story at least? I haven’t submitted anything in a while, and spring is just around the corner—exams are coming up. I’d like to do a narrative using the stylistic techniques of Nabokov and combine that with the magical realism of Márquez. What do you say?”

“How about the sexual candor of Miller,” I couldn’t resist suggesting. “Maybe you can work that in?”

“No, not Miller,” he said, flustered. “Intimacy is too vulgar in his writing. I would go for more refined love scenes. Nuanced, partly hidden in shadow. All of that I screwed her stuff you can save for your own writing. That’s just your speed,” he laughed. “The pornographic fantasy that never becomes reality.”

When did this begin, and why did it always happen this way? At college they called us the twins from Novoshakhtinsk. We came to the capital together, and the only time we weren’t with each other was in the bathroom. We had a deadly addiction to one another.

At last we came to our dwelling—a pale, carrot-colored, sooty, seven-floor building. You there in your faraway, big-time America, can you even imagine our Literary House, packed full of budding talents? Nope, it’s only possible in Russia: a special university dedicated to teaching young people how to put words together, minding their congruity of course. Though invisible, the nearby presence of the Ostankino TV tower can be felt here in strange ways. They say that magnetic waves coming from that accursed needle are to blame for suicidal urges among the locals. In the case of our dormitory’s inhabitants, the waves acted as a pied piper, enticing unrecognized literary genius into the realm of comfortable nonexistence. I think the whole thing is ridiculous. Magnetic fields have nothing to do with it.

Here we were in our room. An old-fashioned but functional refrigerator of a place, it sported fresh wallpaper, thick maroon curtains (that became a menacing blood-red when the light penetrated them at sunset and sunrise), a new hardwood floor, and prints of van Gogh and Bosch paintings on the walls that had been cut out of magazines by the room’s former tenants.

Having scarcely entered, he sniffed the air and said, “Hey, how many times have I told you not to smoke in the hallway outside the door? You know I can’t stand it, and you do it on purpose!”

“I was smoking by the staircase,” I replied. “But you can’t forbid other people from lighting up wherever they want. They still smoke at the end of the building by the window.”

“It wouldn’t hurt them to follow your example. Let’s rip off the No Smoking sign from the college bathrooms! We could hang it up next to our door. I’ve dreamed of getting one of those signs for ages. Hey, you could snatch one, couldn’t you? You’ve always been good at stealing random junk. Remember those books you stole from the school library? I didn’t tell on you; I took pity on you then. Why should I ruin your life? I thought. It may seem funny now, but back then it was a criminal offense. You should keep that in mind. What would have become of you if you’d been caught? Now you’re a student at an elite college in the capital, but you could have ended up in prison, a TB case coughing up blood… What are you laughing about? Cynic! You think you’re off the hook now? You think that because no one’s going to come after you now that you can take a deep breath and relax? What a fool you were, two years ago. What made you do it, anyway?”

“A thirst for beauty,” I said seriously. “I loved those books with an almost sensual passion. The gold lettering, the leather binding. And when I ran my hand down the page, I could feel every letter, like Braille to the blind.”

“You’re supposed to love women with sensual passion,” he chuckled. “Honestly, I think people like you have a knack for crime in your genes. You have the same lowly origins as the majority of people we went to school with. But you’ve done all right for yourself, you haven’t become a plebeian like the thugs back home.”

He’d had my number for half a year now, because I was guilty of childish mischief for which there was a very adult punishment. But was this the real reason I was so dependent on him?

It had all started three years before in the world of shabby apartment blocks, at our school in Novoshakhtinsk. It was a world of severe, crudely carved faces, a world of thieves, violence, and the ceaseless toil of a miner’s existence.

A world of losers and scumbags with unblinking eyes who were trained to harass the new guy, and a world in which a merciless fate awaited them: high school, then community college, the army… then working the mines after that. Beer after work, soccer on the weekends. Or a short stint in organized crime followed by the inevitable bullet in the head. One day, out of nowhere, a boil appeared on the multiheaded body of the proletariat. An alien, with its head held high and a beaked nose: my present roommate, Tatchuk. He was insultingly different in every way. His clothes made the heavy-duty pants and jackets of those around him look like rags. His perfect, eloquent speech, the squeamish way he touched anyone else’s possessions, even the inviolable, neat part in his thick jet-black head of hair.

He had everything I lacked in excess, bravery in particular, which he used to reinforce his inner me. In fact, he was almost disgustingly devoid of cowardice. Every minute of every day he had to answer the hateful stares and the all too predictable hisses (“Freakin’ fairy!” “Faggot!”). And, indeed, he answered back, with his characteristic cool laugh and that remote smile that made you want to hit him, so full of superiority and righteousness.

He said that most people were like fish, only able to live in the waters they were made for. And if one day they decided to go deeper or higher than their stipulated habitat, they would most certainly kick the bucket. Just looking at him gave me hope that I might one day rise to a higher level of society and be able to avoid certain death at the same time. We became friends, and with that the possibility of easy ascension on the social ladder dawned on me; it was something like infatuation with an older brother who always protects and cares for you. And lo and behold! Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that things would turn out so well. We grew close, and he told me about how awful it was to be ordinary. He made me see that the two of us were not cut out for the wretched life of our town. And I believed him, like the ancient Argonauts believed in their specially invited guest, the favorite of the gods, whose sole purpose on the boat was to attract good luck.

It was a quiet evening at the dormitory. Suddenly, we heard cries of anger, plates crashing in the room next to ours, hysterical shrieks. We jumped up, sensing a scandal brewing. In room 620, Suskind had revolted. He lived there with Samokhin. Samokhin was always having friends over, drinking, hanging out with girls. Suskind, on the other hand, was an unsociable recluse.

“Enough, I’ve had enough of this!” Suskind shouted, his features twisted. He was screeching and squealing like a pig and smashing plates. “You bloodsucking swine! It’s always, ‘Suskind, who is this and who is that, and who the heck is Smerdyakov from Dostoevsky? Oh, that’s right, Suskind!’ And then they turn on the TV. ‘Hey, Suskind, let’s root for Lokomotiv!’ I hate goddamn soccer! Picking on me because I came from Penza, almost forty years old, to become a writer. Doesn’t take much to believe in talent that’s already been recognized. You try believing in my talent! And remember my name: Sueskin, not Suskind! Roman! Sergeevich! Sueskin!”

“Oooh! What an honor,” Samokhin enthused sarcastically, and moved to pat Suskind’s softly bearded cheek.

Suskind grabbed a knife lying on the table and shook it, wailing, “Stay back!” It was pathetic.

Fights are not a rare occurrence in our dorm. In the spring, tormented by lack of love, insignificance, and hopelessness, the bastards throw themselves out of windows. This whole place is permeated with reminders of the ever-present temptation of suicide—grates on the windows of the upper floors, metal nets stretched across the stairwell. The problem is that there are too many of us here. There are five hundred of us from every corner of this enormous country, five hundred losers, each one thinking he’s a genius. Five hundred lonely voids, living hand to mouth on miserly government scholarships sent here by our parents back home. Only a few crazy geniuses and two dozen literary hacks would make it in the world. The rest are doomed to a life of total obscurity and wretchedness.

“You don’t know the half of it, you guys,” said Samokhin, when we had come out into the hall. “At night he tries to communicate with martians, honest to god. He says they want to take him away with them. Beam me up, Scotty! He could sink a knife into me at any minute, if his aliens told him to. As Samoilov wrote, if I remember correctly, ‘This city is full of crazies, at least one in three is psycho. So speak to me softly. I might be one of them…’”

“‘Don’t be so sure that you’re so smart,’” I finished. “‘And I wouldn’t jump to conclusions about which one of us’ll come by a sharp razor first.’”

“So, Dima,” Samokhin said, addressing Tatchuk on a different topic, “do you think you’ll be the one who gets those five thousand greenbacks?”

“Who else but yours truly?”

How could he be so certain? It was as though his rich childhood imagination was furnished with its own personal universe that revolved around him alone (with a map of the stars on the ceiling and an army of teddy bears dedicated to their master). And then this perfectly polished cosmos expanded to the size of a three-room apartment, streets, schools, entire countries—and there was not one place his parent’s love, backed up by their financial means, could not reach him. The outside world seemed to fulfill even his most extravagant desires. And so my roommate, who was used to all this, seemed to be able to force reality to conform to his expectations of it. This was, I suppose, his greatest gift of all: he made the whole world into a big-budget stage production in which he, Tatchuk, was the princely heir and future ruler. All other people were his servants—faceless minor characters whose only purpose was to serve their master and then disappear from his sight forever. In this world, respiration was the only thing that couldn’t be counted on: my roommate suffered from chronic asthma, and was sometimes forced to use a fabulously expensive inhaler.

Back in our room, bare-chested, having uncorked a bottle, he surrendered happily to the nightly ritual of self-admiration. I bet nothing gave him as much pleasure as parading around the room with no shirt on. He could spend hours in front of the mirror, studying his own loving reflection in different perspectives and poses, enjoying a glimpse of his muscles, beautiful knolls beneath his satin skin. His narcissism was natural and justified, but it still got on my nerves.

“Just look at this six-pack,” he said to me, stroking his washboard belly deferentially. “Here, touch it. No, come on, touch it! Touch it!” he insisted, indignant that I should take such a criminal disinterest in his amazing abs.

I left the room as if to go out for a smoke, trying to avoid this cruel form of sexual harassment. And I came face to face with Suskind, homeless like myself.

Oh, how lucky I was to have him: my guardian angel, the great and invulnerable Tatchuk! Ever since that train on the way to Moscow, when my bag was stolen with all my money and my passport. I was devastated. I wouldn’t be able to register or sign up for classes. And then he came back (he’d left the compartment to throw out some garbage) and handed me my wallet. He had found it miraculously, in a trash can, with no money left in it, but my passport still inside. “What would you do without me?” he said. “I return you your name, your identity, and your future; don’t take it for granted.”

And so it went. Then there was the editing job at Architecture and City Planning magazine that paid three hundred dollars a month—money a provincial freshman could only dream of. The police trainees who found a crumb of hashish in the inner pocket of my canvas backpack, but who for some reason decided to let me go at the last minute for the ridiculous price of fifteen hundred rubles. The photo of us together on the first page of a glossy magazine, under the headline Our Future Is Everything. Not to mention the girls who flew toward Tatchuk like moths to a flame, and—praise the lord!—sometimes even bestowed their attentions on me. All my successes, all the publications, all the ills I managed to avoid were due to his presence at my side. It was with the greatest horror that I imagined what would happen if this deity were to turn away from me.

I went back to the room.

“Haven’t you had enough of pounding those keys?” he asked, nodding at my ancient computer. “I need a new story too, you know. I already have a great name for it: ‘The Point of No Return.’ What do you think?”

“What is it about?”

“I still don’t have it all planned out yet. Basically, it’s going to be about two friends living in Venice. One is an aristocrat, although no longer wealthy. He works as a model for the leading fashion designers and writes brilliant poetry. The other is Gorlum. He is but a pale shadow, wracked with envy for the unending successes of his friend.”

So that’s what’s going on, I thought. Our companionship, which had seemed not so long ago to be at least a kind of symbiosis, was now a glaring case of vampirism. Poor fool that I was, I had thought he had no ulterior motives for sharing his unending supply of good luck with me, that he did so with the same sunny generosity of all demigods. O the wretchedness of my soul and its innate servitude! I felt like the lowly lackey allowed to sit at his master’s table, only to be thrust back in his place when the meal was over.

“So one day Gorlum decides to kill his friend. He thinks that by killing the first character, let’s call him Martin, he’ll solve all of his own problems, and at last fortune will come his way. But when the cunning plan is enacted and the murder has taken place, Gorlum realizes that his life has lost its meaning after Martin’s death. Gorlum goes crazy. He starts seeing features of the master he so cruelly betrayed in different people walking by on the street. He starts running up to them, calling them by his friend’s name. He begins to believe that Martin is still alive, and punishing him through his absence. It ends with madness… What do you think of the story line?”

So you think that my only purpose on this earth is to be your monkey, a mere dwarf in your court, Martin dearest?

“I feel I’ve heard this somewhere before,” I said automatically.

“You’re always doing that!” he exploded. “And when it concerns your own writing, you go hoarse defending the originality of your ideas. Have you ever thought that maybe the reason your work doesn’t get printed is because you aren’t capable of generating any original ideas of your own?”

“What about your work, why hasn’t it been printed?”

“You’re a lazy, ungrateful loser.”

Like a greyhound on a leash, I began to quiver in anticipation of a fight. Now, finally, I knew what I wanted. I wanted to see fear in his eyes. But it wasn’t so much fear as doubt that I was hoping for. I wanted to see him doubt his absolute right to demand and receive whatever came into his head.

“Listen,” I said, lighting a cigarette and trembling with the suspicion that had so suddenly awakened in me, “your plot is all right, but it seems sort of unrealistic to me. I suggest you make a few changes.”

“Don’t smoke around me, you slob, have you forgotten? Put it out this instant!”

“In my opinion,” I continued, inhaling, “talent seems to be distributed unfairly between your two characters. As a matter of fact, the story just doesn’t seem believable or lifelike. One character is blessed so generously—as handsome as a god and as brilliant as Dante… Of course that happens in real life, but in a book it would appear too contrived.”

“I said put it out!” He lunged at me, but began coughing, then snatched his inhaler, biting into it with whitened lips.

“On the other hand, if brilliant Martin can’t put two words together on paper and is tormented by creative futility, it’s a different matter altogether. The premise of our story is destroyed instantly; it has a deeper meaning.”

Wheezing, he hit me, and I struck him back. I saw before me a sheep ready for slaughter, and with every blow I was hammering the sense of life’s imminent end into him. All of a sudden, he gave a sharp start of surprise and threw his head back. I saw a fish that had fled the waters it was meant to inhabit and would end up floating to the surface with its belly torn open. I saw him as he was, weakened and made vulnerable by his own good luck, fed with its gifts to the point of surfeit and decay. His life, which had always ascended to new heights as though following a brilliant railroad track, had reached its apex and was now plummeting downward. I stood there in front of him, tempered and honed by defeat. I was used to it, just as a wolf is used to hunger and cold, and my face showed the coarseness and impenetrability of a pagan god.

“You’ll pay for this!” he threatened, rubbing his broken nose, but it sounded as though he had merely sighed. Something had happened to him that was too serious and too deep to be manifested on the surface as a cry of protest or the convulsive shudders of limbs that refused to obey. I had hit him in his weakest spot, damaging his hermetically sealed protective armor. A cosmic chill, pitilessly indifferent to the reality of any single human “I,” came rushing in through the air vents, filling my roommate’s soul with the understanding that from now on, nothing was certain. God, he implored, could this really mean that I’m one of you guys now?

After that, my roommate kept his mouth shut for a long time. And I got to smoke without leaving the room. As soon as I appeared in the doorway, he would stand up and leave. The devil knows where Tatchuk was spending so much of his time every day, but I heard some students say they had seen him walking alone down Rustaveli, past the stereotypical gray buildings, whose color leaves a sickening aftertaste of electrolytes, copper, rotten eggs, and the thick stench of burning rubber. He was out there alone in an antechamber of hell—not one with the splendor of purifying flames and endless volcanic eruptions, but one that was as cheerless and intolerably ordinary as an old cast-iron tub with a bunch of spiders crawling around inside if it.

With each passing day I felt my own life force becoming stronger as the vitality of my roommate ebbed. His female superiors at Profile, who had once so adored that “sweet boy,” now demanded preliminary proof of his literary abilities and assigned him a test essay on “Why Smoking Is Good for You.” That definitely got the better of him.

Rumor had it that doubts had been raised among jury members as to whether Tatchuk was, in fact, the author of the novel he had submitted. It was too mature, and too perfect. The piece far surpassed the abilities of a twenty-year-old. Without fuss, the jury thought it best to put forward a more humble candidate as winner.

Next, out of the blue, Tatchuk’s parents refused to continue their generous financial assistance. It was then that the real reasons for his coming to study at our understaffed school in Novoshakhtinsk came to light. His parents had divorced. Both now had other families, and other children too.

The female students’ once limitless admiration of Tatchuk evolved into little more than the ill-concealed fear with which one notices a crazy person on the city streets. He had become timid and unsure of himself, always muttering something incoherent and foolish under his breath.

The name itself, Tatchuk, suddenly appeared no more than a mess of barbaric consonants. As though, lacking any other more suitable phonetic material, God had nailed together a magnificent church using the debris from an old wooden outhouse. How different than my own last name—Bessonov—a name that has been generally acknowledged as that of a future classic.

Besides, to be honest, I just couldn’t be bothered with Tatchuk anymore. There were too many circumstances and events taking shape that were totally independent of him. I felt vaguely sorry for him, so far away, out there on the periphery of my needs, fears, and hopes. First of all, I’d fallen madly in love with a she-devil I met at the All-Russia Exhibition Center. Her beautiful face was enough to make my throat constrict like it was in a gentle noose, and my soul feel like it was being tickled by a dog’s wet nose. Things were pretty much hunky-dory—riding the monorail together and the stuff of mushy romance like going up to see the view at Ostankino Park and Sheremetyvo Palace—until the day my sweetheart crossed the threshold of our dormitory room. By the time Tatchuk got back, my girlfriend already had her hand beneath my shirt and was brushing my lips with her own. So I have to say that my neighbor couldn’t have chosen a more inappropriate moment to return. He sat down at the table with us, and I poured him half a glass of wine while my sweetheart continued, unperturbed, where she’d left off. As I allowed the nimble tongue, which might as well have been forked, to enter my mouth, I glanced at Tatchuk’s tense, stoney face and sent him one last silent Sorry.

“Dirty whore!” he hissed, so that we jumped apart from each other. He stood up quickly and started rushing around the room, yelling that he didn’t have to tolerate such animallike indecency in his own room. “Get out of here!” he cried. “If you don’t leave, I’ll go to the dorm supervisor!”

I shot up, doubling my hand into a fist. But when Tatchuk started coughing and groping for his inhaler in his pocket, I relaxed without touching even a hair on his head.

After I returned from walking her home, Tatchuk spoke to me for the first time since our fight.

“I’m in trouble,” he said, with obvious difficulty. “It looks like I’m going to be kicked out of school.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Don’t pretend you don’t know what’s going on. If I don’t hand in at least one new story by May, Urusov will expel me.”

Well, I guess now is the time to confess everything. Tatchuk’s writing had suddenly become remarkably bad. “It’s weird,” students would say. “How did he manage to write that brilliant narrative his freshman year? Maybe it wasn’t his writing at all. What do you think?” My only answer was to chuckle vaguely and shrug my shoulders. What was I supposed to do, tell the whole world that I was the one who had scribbled down the notorious story for Tatchuk? That I was the one who had helped him along, correcting and rewriting most of it? We were fast friends back then, and I was totally convinced he had the golden touch. It was like we gave each other strength. I told him how to put words together, and through him I could stop feeling like such a loser. He made me feel like I, too, was somehow invincible, important, like we could make it if we stuck together.

“No,” I said, “I’ve had enough of this. Do it on your own.”

“I can’t,” he muttered.

“If you can’t, you should transfer somewhere else. It’s not my problem.”

“I don’t want to study somewhere else. I won’t make it there either.”

“Do you want to be a writer or not? Anyway, that’s beside the point. Do you really think Urusov is such an idiot that he hasn’t noticed anything? Just a couple of days ago he mentioned that our styles are strikingly similar. Get it? One more pretext is all they need to kick us both out of here.”

“Please, just one last time!” he implored.

“Yeah, right.”

“Then I’ll just tell Urusov what happened, and you’ll get expelled. If you write me another story, you’ll at least have one more chance.”

“Fine,” I said. “Go ahead and tell him.”

He stopped his pleading, but I had a feeling he was planning something. Just sharing a room with him became nearly intolerable. I had only just been able to stomach the royal, all-powerful Tatchuk of old, but this new one was simply too much to bear. He turned from a generous, merciful god into a backbreaking burden. His eyes followed me beseechingly. Where could I hide when we spent at least six hours a day together?

My instincts had not deceived me. Only a week later he pulled a stunt that had me itching with such fury that it took me all day to cool off.

“A month ago you broke my nose,” he announced calmly. “The nasal septum was damaged, as a result of which I now have trouble breathing. Furthermore, my nose didn’t heal properly, and now no one wants to be friends with me.”

I stared at his unchanged nose. It looked fine to me: protruding, patrician, as always. Still, my roommate did look rather sickly. His cheeks were sunken, his eyes glassy with dark rings beneath them.

“I am in desperate need of plastic surgery. The operation costs ten thousand dollars. I have no one else to turn to. If you refuse to help me, I will have you thrown in jail. I will sue you for inflicting severe injury on me, and I have documented evidence to prove my claims.”

“The money’s over there,” I said, nodding. “In the top drawer of the desk. Exactly ten thousand.”

“I’m not joking. Have your parents sell their apartment. You should understand that my life is being ruined because of this. I have no other choice. Mark my words, you’ll be doing time.”

A nose injury, blown out of proportion into a worldwide conspiracy that cannot be proved or disproved—as long as you believe in it, it’s true. But why was he indulging in this eccentricity, and what did he really need the money for? Was it a bribe? For whom? My god, could he really be so desperate as to believe that this fantastic sum could help him rise from the ashes? For us ordinary people (dorm dwellers), it would have been no more consequential than a mosquito bite, but for him it was a mortal wound. For the rest of us, unemployment, lack of money, obscurity, was the air we breathed. For him, it was a sign that his life was over, once and for all.

“You listen to me!” I shouted. “One more word out of you and I’ll fix your nose for you myself, right here! Have your parents sell their apartment and shell out the cash to you! Or are you an orphan now?”

“My parents are unable to give me any money,” he answered hollowly, as though his parents had died yesterday.

“And why is that?” I asked in surprise. “You are family, after all. And you’ve had it easy for three years, living off the money they send you. So what gives?”

“My parents are busy with their own lives now. They got divorced, and I got left out of the picture, so I can’t ask them for help anymore.”

“But you think you can ask me for help?” I exploded. “Ten thousand bucks doesn’t just materialize out of thin air, you know! What do you want it for anyway? To go to America? Or invest in Gazprom stocks and become a millionaire in six months?”

“I’m warning you, either you come up with ten grand or I’m taking this case to court.”

“You can take it to the war crimes tribunal for all I care!” I stormed out, slamming the door behind me. What was I going to do with him? And how much longer could I keep this up, treating him like a normal human being? Get a grip! If we could sit down and have some vodka together, I might quote the words of a poor, homeless Russian poet who died in exile. He said, It is cold to walk the earth; still colder is the grave. Remember that, remember, and do not curse your fate. He wouldn’t get it though. It would be like trying to explain that bread is bread. Somewhere deep inside, I knew: he was losing it. Something had to be done, an alert had to be sounded. The problem was that while his old swagger had not made him many enemies, it did little to win anyone over to his side either, so his fall was met with a general apathy. I was the only one he could count on. So I decided to go back in there and talk to him. I decided to say, Come on, don’t do this to yourself. You are healthy and strong as an ox! You’re young and bright, well-educated and good-looking. You could be out there having fun and living life to the fullest, and you choose this instead?

I went back inside, only to find him standing over my computer. I yelped like a wounded animal and rushed forward—but it was too late. With one press of a key, he had consigned my best piece to oblivion. Half a year of tense and difficult sleepless nights… I’ll kill him! I grabbed a ceramic vase from the table and threw it at him, aiming for his head. I missed, and it crashed through the double-paned glass window. Then I went straight to the dorm supervisor.

“But you boys come from the same parts, don’t you?” the supervisor asked me. “Why are you squabbling with each other? I don’t have room vacancies at the moment. If you really want to move, I suggest you ask around. Maybe someone will agree to swap roommates with you.”

Nobody wanted to swap with me; no one was willing to share a room with Tatchuk.

Each morning the sheets on my bed were twisted into a hieroglyph suggesting torturous insomnia. The reason: that maniac had acquired the revolting habit of getting up in the middle of the night and shuffling around the room like a somnambulist. My nerves were wound tight as strings, and it was like Tatchuk was pulling a bow across them. I always had the feeling that he was getting up stealthily, tiptoeing toward me. Perhaps with a pillow or razor in hand. I stayed on my guard, waiting for him to strike from behind. I think we both needed help. I found myself having to copy all the files in my computer onto discs that I secured in the desk drawer under lock and key. Things can’t go on like this for long, I told myself. But it didn’t get better. It just went on and on, in the same way.

Once, as I was returning home, I heard him through the door talking to someone on his cell phone. (It must have been his grandma—she was the only living soul willing to listen to his harping.)

“… I filed my claim in court,” he was saying. “He can’t wriggle out of it now. You wouldn’t believe how long it takes them to consider a case! I can’t wait any longer. And guess what? That pitiful wimp managed to land himself a job as a copywriter at a publishing house. He’s making five hundred dollars a month. Oh, and he has a book coming out soon. But I won’t let him feel good about that when my life is such a mess. I want him to live in a state of constant fear. And I’m pretty good at acting insane. I think he’s going to break down and help me soon. My life might be a mess right now, but that’s all the more reason for him to have to suffer as well.”

I went cold with fury. Whether in a healthy state of mind, from hatred toward me, or out of crazy envy of my latest successes, he was like a tick that bit deep into me and wouldn’t let go until it had drunk its fill of my warm blood. They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. That may be so, but today Dr. Bessonov is going to have to use a little shock therapy. I’m going to show him something that will make his latest strategy vanish—poof!—into thin air.

Late that evening, when Tatchuk left for the bathroom, I got hold of his inhaler and hid it in the top desk drawer. Then, after hesitating a moment, I locked the drawer and threw the key out the window.

“Sit down, we need to talk,” I said as he came in the door. “It’s time you went home. I’ve had just about enough of you, my friend. So I suggest you gather your things without a big fuss and go back to Novoshakhtinsk. I came clean and told Urusov that I’d been writing for you. The old man told me off a little, but said the papers for your expulsion would be signed in a few days.”

“No, you couldn’t have!” he cried. “I need my education…” Then he underwent a sudden transformation. He drew himself up straight and puffed out like a turkey, as though his sense of dignity had returned and was flooding him from within. He started pacing the room, and I watched him in his agitation. I experienced a cold, predatory curiosity, a sense of my own strength and the ease with which I could simply crush him like a louse.

“Tatchuk,” I warned, “you had your chance.”

He started coughing and turned toward me, jerking spasmodically. His face had gone purple, and his eyes were large and beseeching like a saint on an icon, or a bull in a bullfight. At first he didn’t understand, as he knocked over mugs and glasses on the table, searching one surface and then another, grabbing at things, incredulous at not being able to find his priceless Swiss fix.

“What did you do with it? Did you take it? Give it back right now! Come on, give it to me… Be a man about it… It hurts, it really hurts. It hurts to breathe, I can’t. Seriozha, man, I’m sorry, what do you want? I’m going to die, please. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” He was wheezing and sputtering, then he coughed out a few more words. He started to lose his balance, took a step toward me, then stumbled. He had to lean on the desk for support, and his hand seemed to go through the wooden tabletop like water.

I continued to sit there, ringing with numbness, as though I were not myself. I behaved with the same sweet aloofness with which a cruel child dissects a bumblebee on the windowsill, probing it’s fuzzy belly with a needle until it spurts white pus like a ripe pimple. I found myself at the point of no return, where love is silent, and it was as pleasant and painful as returning to the cramped unconsciousness of the womb. Suddenly, as though I’d been yanked by the hair, I started at the seriousness of my insult to the world, and I slapped myself on the forehead. What am I doing? I snatched a kitchen knife and rushed to pry open the lock on the flimsy desk drawer. I fumbled for the miserable spray and rushed to my roommate’s side.

“Come on, come on,” I coaxed, “you don’t have to be talented or smart or honest or good. It’s enough to just be alive. Who are we, anyway, to refuse one another the right to exist?”

A day later, his body was found in a toilet stall in the left wing of the building. He was clutching an empty bottle of sleeping pills. By some cruel twist of fate, his body lay prostrate just beneath the words You’re useless, which someone had underlined with a thick marker.

When a person loses someone close to him, it is common that he will feel tortured by a sense of responsibility toward the dearly departed. Friends give speeches in his honor. A bright, whitewashed image of the deceased is created, purified by suffering, which has little to do with the living person you yourself knew. This was exactly the way we, students of the acclaimed professor Urusov who gathered in the courtyard of the dormitory, recalled one who was truly talented, who suffered deeply in crisis—a vulnerable soul whom we ignored, abandoned, and paid no attention to, focused as we were on ourselves. Not that a long time was spent mourning. (It was, after all, the heat of May: sticky leaves rustled in the trees, and the hot air was as thick as the rubber ball we took with us to play soccer at Savelovsky station.) It had already been suggested, as though by chance, that there was no reason to torture ourselves because of someone else’s frivolity and that the fellow himself was to blame. “It was so obviously his own fear of living,” another colleague said.

I stood there trying to find the point from which we could go back to the past, but anger, or envy, or soul-killing apathy had numbed the senses, and, picking us up like chips of wood in a flood, had carried us toward the finish line. I couldn’t find this point, or even picture it. And, more out of a sense of duty, not yet believing in the true, unparalleled reality of a higher judgment, I sidled off furtively, away from the others, mumbling silently under my breath, “God forgive me.”