The Moscoviad (3 page)

And here are the
other doors—behind them the cave where dwells that voice, taken captive by the
dragon. You enter decisively, as if going to your own execution. Then you are
conscious of little, only quickly noting with surprise that women’s showers’
layout is the same as men’s, as if the two belonged to the same species.
Somewhere there, in the changing room, you unwrap and for some reason take
great effort to shed your towel. For it holds on to you, hangs on your hook,
gets between your legs, at this point you are its ideal hanger, but finally you
free yourself and step over its striped selva that rests on the concrete floor.

She stands under
the shower, with her back towards you, soapy water runs down her body in
fragrant streams, her skin is like golden-chocolaty silk, her legs like young
tropical trees. You come as close as you can and put your hands on her
shoulders. The singing cuts off.

Instead—a light
muffled cry, like the sound of exhaling. Too bad you have stopped singing, my
bird. For if you had continued singing, we would have done something altogether
different, something nonhuman, unusual, heavenly. Too bad you have stopped
singing. Now I’ll have to eat you.

You pour shampoo
and liquid soap from various bottles over her body. You pour them over her and
over yourself, from the bright fragrant southern bottles, and lather her body,
although the flying water immediately washes off all your efforts, but this
makes her body slippery and impairs her sight, and you bury your head in her
primordial black hair. Then she, without having turned around once, slow, but
obedient, leans forward. And this is an invitation. Or a challenge. The black
orchid lets you in. And your skull is now splitting from the bolts of lightning
inside, for you have begun. Too bad she stopped singing.

And in these
hellishly hot streams of water, under this eternal waterfall the two of you
rock together in some African rhythm. You do not sense resistance, but you
don’t sense encouragement either. She yields to you as if she were a slave
girl, although you cannot know how slave girls do it, perhaps, on the contrary,
they resist or encourage. But already in a minute you hear that her voice is
returning. Not the one with which she sang, but a living and mysterious one.
Perhaps, even a more passionate one. There is something pleading, even
something prayerlike in it. And it is precisely the voice, its emergence, its
demanding vibrato, that takes away your self-possession and endurance, and you
no longer can hold on, or stop, or prevent. This black orchid will destroy you,
melt you, crumple you . . .

But she is doing
something unknown there, some imperceptible internal movement, changes
something there, inside her, she knows all the ancient tricks, she was a
talented girl, studied well, the sophisticated priestesses of love prepared her
for a tall coal-black prince on a special, forbidden island where they
copulated on a bed of palm leaves, and you find in her a possibility to control
yourself. But the voice, the voice! It will indeed finish you off, it won’t
allow you to run across this savanna to the end as you should. It penetrates
you like steam—into your skin, your much lighter Central European skin. And
now—the final salvation—to close your eyes. Since even for the eyes there’s too
much: stars in the skull, lightning bolts, and this chocolate, and these hot
streams from the sky. But in the closed eyes, too, all of it comes alive,
pulsating. And you shake like a volcano, hearing your own voice, and
understand: that’s it. Too bad you started singing.

. . . In the
changing room you wrap yourself again in the towel. You lick the remaining
chocolate off your lips. You peer into the corridor almost confidently,
although you make a mental note, surprised, of the speed and power with which
the reality returned. You press yourself to the wall, and in a few leaps return
to the male side of the universe. Although you leap not only for precaution.
Rather, you leap like a hunter who has just shot with a victorious arrow a
golden antelope.

You greet
Novocain the second time, he again arises in all his dishevelness and offers
“verse.” You hang the towel on a hook. In the meantime, a few Mongols have
appeared in the showers. They snort like stallions, washing the dust of the
Great Steppe off their muscular shoulders. They galloped for a week, carrying
khan’s letter, these young toothy horsemen. Bow-legged archers.

You soap yourself
the second time. And then you hear there, behind the wall, her starting her
song again . . .

Disillusionment
has settled for good inside these walls which, by the way, will never be
covered with memorial plaques. But that’s not the main thing. The main thing is
that this is the house of smashed foreheads. Local plots are so uniform and
repetitive that what we are dealing with seems to be a mere myth. Or a scheme
with two, maximum three versions. Here’s one of them.

A seventeen-year
old lyrical youth, let’s call him Slava, composes rhyming stanzas, which he
copies into a thick notebook that he hides in a secret place behind the toilet
tank. The poems, as a rule, bear titles derived from romantic women’s names:
“Aelita,” “Consuelo,” “Angothea,” “Isadora,” “Lolita.” Of course, behind them
one and the same creature is hidden, most likely Lusya or Nyusya, his
classmate, who probably has no inkling that there exists a thing called
sublimation.

Then the day
comes when Slava the youth secretly sends the poems with women’s names, these
spiritual sperm discharges, to a competition at an institute in Moscow. At the
dawn of spring pimples and freckles abundantly cover his face, and exactly at
that time he receives the reply from Moscow. Shivering with anticipation, he
tears the envelope and learns that he successfully passed the competition. The
nationally famous name that he frequently came across in textbooks signs this
letter, making our youth happy as a little lamb.

In the summer he
leaves his lice-covered, godforsaken boontown of Partizansk or Mukhomorsk, hub
of the chemical industry, on his way to conquer Moscow. He hides the photo of
Lusya/Nyusya in the most unexpected places.

Naturally, he
successfully passes the entrance exams. But this is where all poetry ends. The
rest is not even prose. The poems went away, for such was the will of the One
Who dictates them. The love for Lusya extinguished itself when he realized that
she too used the toilet. At the lectures and seminars even flies die from
boredom. As for visiting some Jew-ridden theaters or reading some drooling
banned fin-de-siècle writers like Merezhkovsky—he is just not made for that. As
for admiring St. Basil’s and Lenin’s Tomb—you can’t do that forever, and what’s
there to admire, after all? So he grasps something else: the harsh—like the
wicked stepmother—schooling of dorm reality. For weeks he does not cross the
borders of his floor, or if he crosses them it is to fetch for his buddies some
booze bought from the Vietnamese or from the conveniently closely located taxi
garage. He sometimes sleeps in direct proximity of the garbage disposer,
sometimes with his head in the sink and his feet facing north. Alka, the one
with the amputated right breast, makes him a man, after which he loses the
desire for a long time. Then Voldemar from Daugavpils, a veteran of various
youth movements and pilgrimages to the East, introduces him to a sleepless
desire for dope. By his third year of studies Slava already resembles an old
pederast, much battered by fate, with an aching body and an emptied soul.
Sometimes he steals pieces of meat from other people’s soup pots at the
communal kitchen. His body reeks of piss and cheap tobacco. Up to his fifth
year of studies he tries to rhyme something with something else, but the result
is pure crap. Actually, it was always nothing but crap. The day comes when he
is ready to slit his wrists. But never mind, never mind.

There also exists
the version of “national” (that is, non-Russian) poets. By some miracle these
guys from the Caucasus get in in large crowds, and move about also exclusively
in large crowds. No one actually knows what they are up to, but only an endless
laugh would be the appropriate response to the thought that they spend their
time writing poetry. They buy boomboxes, leather jackets, girls, guns,
grenades, gas masks, jeans, land, cognac; they periodically drive Mercedes cars
across the high mountain ranges, down the Military Georgian Highway. They drink
but never lose their heads, and do not refuse themselves some small joys
either, taking six-foot-six fashion models to cloud nine. Perfect from every
side, true oriental knights, strictly observing the codes of honor, following
the centuries-old commands of the elders and the Sharia. If, for instance,
eight of them are pummeling an unfortunate blond boy inside the elevator, this
is never without a reason, but only in accordance with the laws of the jihad
and for the sake of higher justice. But the groan of despair hovers over them
as well, for you cannot beat up all the blond guys, buy up all Mercedeses, or
screw all the fashion models. Thus green Mohammedan sorrow weighs on their
exhausted, scar-covered foreheads.

And such is life
in this cursed hole, the literary dormitory, invented by the state order for
its own justification and reassurance, in this seven-floor labyrinth in the
midst of the hellish capital city, the rotting heart of the half-alive empire.
For although the Russian poet Yezhevikin claims the mere word “empire” makes
him come, all good things come to an end, and you, Otto von F., simply sense
with your very spine the slow bursting of this empire’s seams, with countries
and peoples crawling apart, each of them now acquiring independent relevance,
cosmic or at least continental in dimension.

And so it is with
vodka, too—the further on, the more problems. For some reason—for the first
time in the history of Russia—there isn’t enough of it to go around. It has to
be conquered through long hours of waiting in lines, through pushing and
shoving, through self-deprecation and debauchery. Perhaps all the available
vodka is now consumed by the Kremlin giants, or perhaps it is being amassed
there in the famous deep dungeons for a rainy day, while the plebeians, that
is, the people, although actually neither the plebeians nor the people, receive
pitiful tears, the expectoration, so to speak, of the food industry. Murders in
the lines for vodka have become as habitual as—the veterans of the battle for
Berlin won’t let me lie—frontline deaths from enemy bullets. Vodka has become
the absolute, the sacred goal, the heavenly currency, the Holy Grail, the
diamonds of Golconda, this world’s gold.

About a year and
a half ago, late in the fall, you tossed in your bed until three in the
morning, unable to fall asleep, but not for some poetic reasons like, for
example, love, nostalgia, universal sorrow, astral spleen, somnambulism, et
cetera, but for certain other reasons that one is even embarrassed to name.
But, having heard a delicate knocking on the door, you decided that your
insomnia came at an opportune moment. For, as you had been informed, in this
dorm, where even the walls and the chairs are soaked in cheap and slimy
depravity, there are many so-called wandering girls that at night simply move
from door to door, seeking their man. The seventh floor especially attracts
these creatures, for it is populated by rich members. I mean, members of brotherly
writers’ unions, especially from Central Asia and Transcaucasia, refined in
their Kama Sutra skills. Besides, each of them has his own private room, that
is, leads a harsh and lonely man’s life. Thus at night there is no need to
crawl from one bed to another, so that everyone would have an equal share of
love, as it is custom in students’ rooms on the lower floors. Moreover, the
inhabitants of the seventh floor, as a rule, are older and kind, one can even
stay with them for a week or so, in case the money blockade has boxed you into
a corner, or if district police is looking for you at the usual haunts. Thus
strange young women from neighborhoods unknown appeared on the seventh floor,
having been picked up in beer halls or at grocery stores; they were the true
companions and muses of the southern rhapsodes; still, the sad day invariably
came when they abandoned their hosts, taking with them something valuable as a
memento.

And so you too,
Otto von F., decided in the midst of your insomnia that now your turn had come,
and this knocking at three in the morning meant that you were about to
entertain a lady guest, quite possibly, a VD carrying one. But having opened
the door, you saw not a young “wandergirl” with unwashed hair and lips red as a
flag, but a rather good-looking, and no less drunk, young man.

“Hey, boss,” said
the boy, “sorry for bothering you at such a late hour. But I’ve gotta have some
vodka.”

“And that’s it?”
you asked, Otto von F., disappointed in your hopes.

“Hey, boss, let
me finish. They call me Ruslan, by the way. And you?”

“Ivan,” you
answered, Otto von F.

“OK, Vanya, let
me speak. I wanna go buy some vodka at the taxi garage. Here’s the money,” and
he showed me a handful of bills, as if that could be of any importance.

“But the front
door is locked, boss. I ran through all the floors—you alone have let me in,
boss.”

“So?” you asked
skeptically.

“Let me finish.
From your room I’ll go to the taxi garage.”

“From my room
you’ll go fuck yourself,” was the answer.

“Nah, you don’t
see it, boss, and talk bull. You have the fire escape going by your window,
understand? I’ll climb down,” he showed with his arms, and also with his feet a
little, how he’d climb. “I served in the marines, got it? I can bring you some
booze too.”