Pig: A Thriller (11 page)

“Pills?” he evaded. What he had was hidden deep back. Whether from embarrassment, weakness, or simply societal shame, he himself didn’t know.

“You like the bass notes? Going down deep as you can go? How many hours of sleep do you get each night? How long do you lie there twisting the sheets, staring at the ceiling or out the window at the sleet? How many times have you wanted to just walk off the balcony or out in front of a train?”

For a long moment he had nothing to say. She waited him out. Neither blinked.

“You’re going to give up just because you’ve been left alone?” she finally said.

“No,” Snow corrected. “I want to be alone so I can give up.”

“It’s a defence mechanism, you know.”

“What is?”

“Being grumpy. It scares people away from you so you don’t have to talk to them. You hide behind it.”

Snow shrugged. “Everyone hides behind something. I can live with it.”

“You can live without it, too. Perhaps you need to learn that.”

“Live without what?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah,” Snow conceded. “I know. The question is how you knew? And why you give a shit?”

She shrugged. “One fisherman always sees another from afar.” Finding the pills had just been the proof, she told herself. She’d had to know to look for them in the first place and that made it not a lie. Snow had a look in his eyes that Magda recognized as being very much like her own.

“You? You, too? But you look … happy.”

“Happy,” she snorted. “Happiness is for morons.

“So are you going to teach me or not?” she demanded, her face only inches from his, until the smell of boiled cabbage was the only thing separating them.

“What are you running from?” Magda asked. “Why did you escape here to Russia?”

“I’m not running,” Snow answered.

“Everybody’s running,” Magda said.

“Yeah? Then what are you running from?”

“The circus.”

“The circus? Why?”

“I thought I was the elephant in the parade. It turned out I was the woman who followed the elephant with a shovel and a bucket full of shit.”

“Did you know that an elephant family is ruled by a matriarch?” Magda asked. “The family generally consists of her, her female offspring and the offsprings’ young. In Africa, the basic family unit consists of six to twelve animals, but they can get up to twenty elephants in size. That’s when they’ll split, depending on the amount of food and how well they’re getting along. When the matriarch dies, one of the older offspring takes her place.”

“What about the males?”

“The what?”

“The males. Do the females eat them like Black Widow spiders or Praying Mantises? Praying Manti?”

“You are joking with me. No, the male bulls travel together in bands. These bands range in size from two to thirty bulls. The average size of a bull band is three to five bulls.” It was amazing how good Magda’s English really was when she wasn’t playing games.

“No, you are wrong.”

“See? That is why I am here. You have the book. I can learn more.”

“I don’t have the damn book. And I’m not going to teach you English.”

“Then, what am I wrong about?”

“That males like to travel in bands. What we like is to be left alone. You understand?
Vy
menya
panimaete
?”

             
When Magda was sent from M.I.P.T. to the
gulag
, she was assigned to the “Northern Camps of Special Significance,”
Severnye
Lagery
Osobogo
Naznacheniya
or S.L.O.N. 
Slon
means “elephant” in Russian. Perhaps that was the reason she was infatuated with them.

             
Or not.

             
Magda’s father had been that most unusual species of
Homo
Sovieticus
, a father who loved his children not just in theory, but in practice. He couldn’t get enough of hanging out with his little
dochka
, pushing her on the swings, catching her on the slide, or making snow men together. The two even baked cookies together.

             
Papa Perskanski had a child-like silliness only a daughter could love. Fortunately, Mama Perskanski indulged her two charges, simply rolling her eyes and chuckling at their horseplay instead of dressing them down. On his days off, Papa organized elaborate elephant hunts around their city, secure in the knowledge there would never be any to be found, leaving excuses to go out searching together yet another day. It was his way of ensuring his play time with his daughter never had to end. In the evenings, the two of them read every elephant book they could find, lying in Magda’s make-do bed on the living room sofa and cuddling together over the information.

It was everything a child could want and more, until they came in the middle of the night, thundering up the stairs like … well, elephants, actually … and took Papa Perskanski to the camps for the grave crime of actually finding one of his mythical, elusive elephants.  Unwittingly. Digging for minerals in the permafrost, a mastodon had come out whole, a prehistoric elephant, tusks and all, and it landed him in the camps because if word of it had gotten out, it would have disproved some loopy Marxist-Leninist scientific theory that would have made some Party theoretician look bad. Papa Perskanski hadn’t even known what he’d dug up. He had been looking for magnetite and found misery in the form of an ancient elephant instead. And Magda had been looking for them ever since. That was the problem with Russian fairy tales. They don’t have happy endings. The witch turns into a wolf and eats all the children. Even in American, their Constitution only guarantees the pursuit of happiness; you have to catch up to it by yourself.”

             
“There is no such thing as the pursuit of happiness, but there is the discovery of joy.”

             
             
             
             
             
             
-- Joyce Grenfell

Soon after, elephants began appearing mysteriously and anonymously in the Perskanski neighbourhood. Not long after a
gulag
prisoner would be released, an elephant chalk face would appear on the Perskanski stairwell or an elephant-fronted postcard from the Crimea would arrive, unsigned. And Magda would know Papa was okay, something all the more important now that her mother was desperately trying to distance daughter from father, having divorced him and taking up with some Party twit she thought would protect the two of them and wash away the father’s stain.