The Moscoviad (10 page)

“You know, Galya,
after the vodka it’s probably best not to take any medicine,” you start
pensively, but she interrupts.

“Well, all right,
medicine is not necessary. I won’t go get it. I’ll look for some milk and honey
for you . . .”

“And besides,”
you continue, “I have tons of stuff to do. I must be at the dorm in the evening
. . .”

“What, on two
fronts again? At the dorm! You’ve already made a date for tonight? Right?”

“What does this
have to do with it? You know, I am writing a novel in verse . . .”

“I will give you
pen and paper. Write it here. I’ll be completely quiet, I won’t be in your way.
Get into a warm bed and you can write till the morning if you like . . .”

“This is not
possible, Galya. These are extremely fine things, fine matters. This is the
work of my life. I can’t explain this in plain words, but I must go. So, I’ll
go, all right?”

“No!” she cries
in a crazed voice and jumps at you.

This is the jump
of a strong woman, quite athletic, quite drunk. You fall on the floor, on the
wet, refusing to dry raincoat in which you came here. She hits you in the face
with a full swing of the hand, she elbows and scratches you. She has hit you in
the chin, so that you even bit your tongue, and this suddenly gives you
strength. You twist yourself out and, although she is trying to catch you by
the leg, hit her in the ribs, and then fall again, unable to hold the balance.
She pulls at your sweater, under the sweater the shirt is ripping, and she
finally finds your unprotected collarbone and sinks her teeth into it. Then you
almost instinctively hit her under her breasts with your knee and she loses
breath for a little while. You still manage to get up and hit her in the neck
with the edge of your palm. But she, getting up, abruptly hits you between the
legs with her head. You almost faint from pain but do not let yourself relax,
since this would mean a sure death. Instead you try to defend yourself with
your legs trying not to let her get too close to you, but this is of little
help, because she grabs an overturned chair and starts hitting your legs with
it. A leg breaks off the chair, and you try to arm yourself with it, but she throws
the remainder of the chair at you and manages to grab the broken off leg
herself, and starts fencing with it at a lightning speed. Covering yourself
with a pillow you snatched, you switch to close combat, and catching her
uncover herself carelessly, finally make your old-time, your signature move,
famous since your school days: a hook from the right, which back in the days
brought you more than one victory in the regional and inter-regional
competitions.

She flies into
the opposite corner. The referee counts to ten. Knockout.

“Otto, this is
it?” she asks in a minute, sniveling pitifully. “This is it, I’m asking you?
I’m asking you: this is it? You won’t come anymore? You won’t come, I’m asking
you: this is it?”

“I will always
remember you,” you answer and simultaneously start tucking in the messed up
shirt with your trembling hands.

“You are one of
my most glorious loves,” you say. “I wanted you to feel good with me . . .”

She starts crying
quietly, but you barely manage to close the doors behind you into the half-dark
hallway when something heavy hits them with a thud. Must be the iron.

But you are
already out of reach, my hero.

Sometimes it is
very useful to look at the watch. Because the rain that falls thickly from the
sky leaves an impression that time has stopped. And it turns out that it
hasn’t, and now it is almost half past four. And if someone wants to visit the
“Children’s World” today, he’d better hurry.

In the meantime,
let’s sum up a few things, von F. You did indeed walk out, no, break out to
freedom from Galya’s. You are indeed standing in the rain and touchingly think
about unhappy love, about loneliness and the strange cruelty of women. Besides
you are trying to figure out your next steps, still somewhat uncertain because
of the booze consumed.

For, despite the
gained freedom, you are now dealing with a few newly acquired palpable minuses.
First of all, the raincoat is lost. It was left as a hostage there, in her
apartment. At any moment she can cut it up with knives or douse it with
gasoline and torch it. This would be black magic, a sacred revenge. And now you
all can do is go soak in the rain and let your teeth chatter from the cold.
Second, the tape with Mike Oldfield’s latest record. This is a much more
serious loss, for without music, without your beloved music you, von F., are
nobody and nothing. Without music you are a cheap son of a bitch, an egotistic
monster, a narrow-minded self-absorbed piece of trash. With music you are a
poet, a genius, a sage and a lover of humanity; only music grants sense to your
depressing, erroneous and, indeed, accidental existence, you dumbass. Music
gives you a chance to redeem at least half a nail off your sin-drenched, scoundrel
body. And you throw your music around, abandon it in inappropriate places.

Finally, an even
more horrifying loss: Galya. Since now, having punched her in the cheekbone, it
is senseless to hope for some renewal of relations, for forgiveness and calming
down, even for an ordinary human friendship. Her doors are closed to you once
and for all. Yet one more time you turned out to be unworthy of a woman who for
your sake was ready for anything, ready even to poison you with her refined
snake venom. You will never find a woman like this. Surely she was a gift to
you from above. You cast this gift off in the most careless plebeian fashion.
With one, but a powerful and precise punch. For this you deserve to be
castrated, von F. Or to be torn apart with the help of two young trees.

Raincoat, tape,
Galya. Rather a lot for one day. Which by the way is nowhere near its end. And
you amble towards new losses, in a sweater, in the rain, and Moscow ambles
towards you, lame, wet, belching, with its war veterans, blacks, Armenians,
Chinese, commies, soccer fans in their red-and-white caps, sergeants, lapsed
ex-cons, and peasant petitioners to Lenin. And you are walking with a large bag
for the gifts, even though you know perfectly well that today it is almost
impossible to buy someone a gift in Moscow. This city is no longer capable of
gift giving. This is the city of losses.

This is the city
of a thousand and one torture chambers. A tall advance bastion of the East in
anticipation of conquering the West. Asia’s last city, from whose drunken
nightmares fled the anemic germanized monarchs. The city of syphilis and
hooligans, the favorite fairytale of armed hobos. The city of Bolshevik
imperial architecture with the high-rise ghosts of people’s commissariats,
secret entryways, forbidden alleys, the city of concentration camps, of
fossilized giants aimed at the sky. The population of local prisons could
comprise a European nation. The city of granite monograms and marble ears of
wheat and five-pointed stars as large as the sun. It only knows how to devour,
this city of puke-covered courtyards and crooked picket fences in poplar
fluff-covered lanes with despotic names: Garden-Forehead-Beating-sky,
Kutuzov-Roach-Mound-sky, New-Executioner-sky, Cudgel-Beat-up-sky, Minor-October-Graveyard-sky
. . .

This is the city
of losses. It would be nice to level it. To plant again thick Finnish forests,
introduce bears, elk, deer: let them graze around the moss-covered Kremlin
ruins, let perches swim in its rivers and lakes returned to life, let wild bees
focus on storing honey in the deepest fragrant tree cavities. This land needs a
rest from its criminal capital. Perhaps then it will be capable of something
good. Since it can’t go on forever poisoning the world with the bacilli of
evil, oppression, and aggressive dumb destruction!

And herein,
ladies and gentlemen, lies the task of tasks, the key prerequisite for the
survival of humanity, and let the civilizations of modernity’s great nations
concentrate their efforts on this: without shedding a single drop of blood,
without even a shadow of violence, by means of humane parliamentary levers, to
level all of Moscow, except perhaps a few old churches and monasteries, and to
create in its place a green preserve for oxygen, light, and recreation. Only in
this case one can speak of a future for all of us on this planet, meine Damen
und Herren! Thank you for your attention. (General applause, everyone gets up
and sings the “Ode to Joy,” music by Beethoven, lyrics by Schiller.)

But this is only
your drunken opinion, von F. And it very well can be totally not coincidental.
That is, be fatally unable to coincide with anything. And there will be no end
to human losses on this earth.

Losses indeed,
but it’s high time to finally grab a bite. Only out of a sense of respect
towards one’s own stomach, whose hopes have been continuously dashed since this
morning. You can’t fool it forever. You must fill it with something.

Right here,
between the New Arbat and the plain Arbat, right next to the famous “Prague”
restaurant where, according to the tabloids, the all-Union prophetess Djuna, a
fragment of Mesopotamian empires cast by Cosmic Providence into the Soviet
Empire, recently celebrated her birthday in the company of pop stars, party
leaders, conjurers, deputies, satirical writers, sex-bodybuilders, and other
assorted scoundrels, hungry for any manifestation of high society idiocy; so,
by this so-called restaurant there also exists a certain “Snack Bar.” And you,
von F., forgetting for half an hour about your aristocratic origins, chasing
back inside the saliva of squeamishness, can indeed eat something even here.

This is a haven
for the currently fashionable Arbat panhandlers: drenched artists, hoarse
“invectivist” poets, faded singer-songwriters, mangy jazz musicians, jugglers,
reciters, matadors, tightrope walkers, queens, and actual panhandlers, the
half-crazy Moscow panhandlers who as a rule disguise themselves as refugees
from Transdniestria or the Armenian victims of the earthquake of three years
ago.

And today all
this motley crew, besides anything else, is also hiding here from the
inexhaustible rain. Or from the inexhaustible paramilitary patrols that from
time to time appear on the Arbat, chasing with their elegant black clubs the
weakest among them. So the “Snack Bar” is now packed with the wet rain people
who wind in a line between the repulsive imperial columns, hiss in the corners
and around the tables, smell of stray dogs and rejoice at existing on this
earth.

You place
yourself at the tail end of the line, yet another drenched, hungry, buzzed
visitor, yet another poet (an outstanding Ukrainian one), an anonymous person
with two buttons missing on his shirt underneath the sweater. Right behind you
immediately appears a fidgety and extremely curly-haired guy in a smallish
raincoat of the late sixties style, his neck wrapped in several striped and
rather dirty scarves at once. He is dragging with him endless bags and sacks,
all of them packed with some unknown stuff—perhaps broken electric burners, or
perhaps pearls from the bottom of the Indian Ocean.

“You should
definitely get some broth today,” tells you the fidgety guy. “For some reason
you never get the broth, and that’s bad. Some broth with an egg!”

He leaves you for
a moment, runs ahead of the line to the cash register and asks in a voice that
resounds through all of the “Snack Bar” if today they have the broth with an
egg. He returns happy and lit up by the broth radiance.

“Thank God they
do have the broth,” he informs you, grabbing you by the sleeve. “You and I are
in luck. If you take a bowl of broth with an egg, there’s no need to get
anything else, this can last you for some six to eight hours. But for some
reason you never get the broth.”

“Perhaps this is
one of my most fatal mistakes,” you answer, so that this bastard would get
lost.

But he doesn’t
hear your answer, because he again runs to the cash register. This time he
inquires what is this fucking broth made of today.

“Today it’s beef
broth,” he reports, but not to you but to some rather equine-looking young
woman with a bruised left eye and pee-stained stockings.

“We are amazingly
lucky today,” prattles the curly-haired guy to his new interlocutor. “Beef
broth with an egg, imagine, dear friend!”

“I don’t fucking
care,” answers the horse-like young woman apathetically.

“No, don’t say
that, don’t say that,” the fidgety guy shakes his head, “it’s very nice to get
a slice of bread and some beef broth with an egg. And eat it without a hurry,
chewing thoroughly. Then you feel full for six to eight hours. I really like
coming here, this is a nice place, because they always have warm broth with an
egg, it tastes just like homemade, they make it from real beef bones. I get a
serving of this broth, a slice of bread—and get very full. This can substitute for
the first course, and the second one, and even for tea or dessert!”

At this moment
someone briskly falls to the floor by his table. Couldn’t stand straight. An
already empty bottle rolls out of a greasy jacket. Acetone.

“Don’t you see, a
man’s not feeling well!” the cashier’s shout rings across the room. “Stand
there like some fucking dicks!” she grumbles.

A few types
hailing from an unknown social stratum carefully drag the poor wretch to the
windowsill, where they manage to lay him down in a fetal position.