Moscow Noir, page 12
It’s too hot for port … He then bought beer at a stand and took a sharp left turn into the woods.
Ryabets sleeps briefly. Right here under this willow. The beer-sun has taken it out of him. More like dozing, with quick dreams involving water splashing, children squealing, and a female mocking whisper directly above him. He opens his eyes but no one’s there and it’s quiet. Close them and all over again—a squeal, a splash, a whisper. And a rustling—are they stealing his bag? No one, a total haze. He sits up, gazing blearily at the river and at the white church on the opposite bank, cockeyed.
Below—stretch his legs out—the evening water lightly laps-spills over. Music, laughter, a shashlik smell coming from beyond the fence on the private beach. A volleyball thumps. A little closer, in a chaise longue, a woman with a book. The view from behind: short haircut, folds in her neck, the edge of her glasses, her ass. Ryabets reaches into his swimsuit and tugs and tugs—nothing doing. A languid spite sours inside him. He did drag himself all the way out here! Halfway—no, all the way—across Moscow!
The woman is approached by another, younger, who leans over and says something as her white breasts rise lusciously from her blue swimsuit. Ryabets is back in his trunks, kneading away furiously. Nothing. The cupola radiates an officious sneer. He gives the church a dirty look and kneads and kneads. Out of the corner of his eye he notices Luscious observing him, a combination of revulsion and curiosity on her face. He pulls out his hand. Just scratching. He stands up—his trunks sag in back—scrambles down the bank, and swims noisily. The water isn’t refreshing; it’s too warm.
Ryabets slowly plies the shoreline, watching Luscious. You’d think he wouldn’t care, but imagine, he’s horny; he feels dumb too, old goat.
Once Luscious leaves, Ryabets moves ashore. He towels off and gets out the 777: to drink or not to drink? No, first go there. He eats his sandwich, takes one last look at the address in the paper, gets dressed, and leaves.
First he follows the shore and edges around the beach fence, but immediately, in a young pine grove, he runs across some naked men lying there, privates exposed. Ryabets sidesteps them but the farther he goes, the more naked men there are catching some rays, arms spread wide. “Cocksuckers,” he mutters, veering more to the left. He tries not to look but can’t help it. The bushes along the river are filled with naked men’s bodies. He spits. Right in the middle of Moscow!
He fantasizes TNT exploding and scraps of genitalia in the bushes—too many to collect! The bloody image calms him, and Ryabets moves deeper into the woods, emerging on paths that lead to Lake Bezdonka. Evening is falling and the crowds stretch from the riverbank to the park entrance. Ryabets has nearly changed his mind about going to the address in the newspaper. He’s tired. He wants to go home. He’s walking down Tamanskaya when across the street on the left he notices a street sign: Second Line. He stands there a second and turns. Did I make the trip for nothing?
The street is suddenly quiet. The dachas are behind a fence. Turrets, porticos, balconies. As if they weren’t right next to that half-naked, heat-wasted mob. No. 43. In back of them, a new red-brick, three-story house. The kind ministers of state and oligarchs live in, Ryabets thinks. Actually, the house gives the impression of being uninhabited. Ryabets “accidentally” pushes the gate, which yields with a light creak. The house is standing where the dacha burned; Ryabets recognizes the lawn behind it and the semicircle of tall pines. But a prison? Construction debris, doorframes in their original packing, the porch unfinished. On the door, yellow police tape—looks like this was indeed the prison.
Cautiously he unsticks the tape and opens the door. Inside it’s half-dark, and he senses the staircase on the right. He gropes for the light switch on the wall and heads downstairs. Exactly: three cells fabricated out of thick sticks. In front of him a table, two chairs, and a mechanism that looks like a welding apparatus. Were the cops too lazy to pull it out? On the floor, reddish-brown spots and broken glass. Torture—and why not? Hah! Vagrants, human matter. Hah!
Ryabets doesn’t linger. It’s all just like the paper said. He goes upstairs, turns off the light, walks out, and puts the tape back. Not a trace of the other dacha, as if it were never there. He wants to go home.
But before he moves out to the street he decides to take a look, refresh his memory, see where he kept watch once upon a time. Over there, over there … Wait, wait …
In the lilac bushes past the pines, in the exact same place, he notices a figure on the ground. The instinct to flee subsides instantly. No cop would sit squatting in the bushes! On top of everything else, it’s a female. She waves. He’s walking, glancing from side to side to make sure no one else is there. But there is. The female has a dog at her feet. It raises its head to Ryabets.
“Got anything to drink?” she asks. “Who are you?”
Definitely a woman. And drunk. Two leathery folds are slipping down her belly from her unbuttoned pink top. Cellulite legs in white ankle socks spread wide. Bezdonka, hah!
While Ryabets is considering her, the woman takes out of her bag (just like his with his Marlboros) a bottle (just like him with his 777), tosses her head back, and glugs down the last of the liquid. She kicks an empty bottle aside.
“Commander, fill my glass! See? Not a drop! I won’t fucking say anything to your wife.”
A flat face, dark, slit eyes, no neck, formless all over. Like a steak! Ryabets thinks culinarily. But something very familiar I can’t put my finger on. What?
“Ryaba? Ryaba! Ryabets! Is that you? Yes, it is!” The woman scrambles onto all fours, straightens up, and starts hobbling toward him, as if she were wearing prostheses. The dog, too, yawns and wags its tail.
Buratina! Fucking amazing. Burataeva! he shouts in his mind.
This clumsy creature had been Ryabets’s erotic dream. Nadya Burataeva—Buratina, as they’d called her in school. The nickname was a jibe at her flat, half-Kalmyk, but definitely not Buryat, nose.
“And you’re just the same, Ryaba, just the same. Maybe a little shrunken, hee hee hee! Still jerking off?” Burataeva’s a meter away and Ryabets can smell her sour stench. “What are you standing there for? Pour! To our meeting! You wouldn’t begrudge Nadya Burataeva a drink, would you? How many years has it been? Eh? Gotta be thirty.”
Ryabets reaches into his bag, removes the bottle and cup, pulls the cork out with his teeth, pours, and offers it to Buratina. He drinks from the bottle.
“So tell me, how have you been? What’s up?”
* * *
Ryabets is sitting under a pine facing Buratina. Echoes of her fate surface right away. She was burning up in the fire so she jumped, broke her foot and back, spent a long time in recovery, and after all that discovered she was pregnant. It was born dead, actually. She went quickly downhill. Her parents supported her but she drank, then her lover (a recidivist) did and she drank, they put him in jail and she drank, her parents died and she drank, another pregnancy and she drank, a miscarriage and she drank, she sold everything and drank, her apartment too and drank, disappeared and drank.
“This is Polkan,” she introduces.
Ryabets nods but the dog isn’t taking to him.
“Don’t wet your pants, Ryaba, he won’t touch you. He’s been with me since he was born. Andryukha brought him when he was just a puppy, thi-i-is little. You can’t imagine how glad I am to see you, Ryaba!” Buratina hiccups. And in a gleeful non sequitur: “They shut down the beer stand a long time ago, back under Gorbachev. And all the stores too. We go over the bridge, to Priboy. I’ve been living here ten years, Ryaba, across Bezdonka. I’m moving to Kazan station now. They say it’s a rich place—you can take melons off the trains from the Chuchmeks. You won’t die of hunger near a train station. I’m not staying here, no way.”
“Why?” Ryabets recalls the morning paper.
“Hell if I know!” Buratina shrugs. “Everyone’s run off. Even Andryukha. He promised me. ‘You and me, Nadya, we’ll go to Kazan station, I won’t abandon you.’ So where’s Andryukha now? Kaput. Hee hee hee.”
“Why are you limping?”
“I’m limping? What do you mean I’m limping? What do you mean? I know why I’m limping, I know. But I won’t tell you. Never!” Then she mutters under her breath, “Maybe I’m Madame de La Vallière! Listen, Ryaba, I’m limping because I’m Madame de La Vallière!”
If Ryabets had known how to put his emotions into words, it would have come out something like this: Did I really lust after this woman once? Her? Me? Incredible! Ryabets crinkles his nose.
“… How I’ve lived this long I don’t remember, Ryaba. I took a leap from the second floor! Broke both my little legs. I could’ve suffocated. All the others did: my Alik, and Lidukha, and those other two, I don’t remember who they were. And that fat one who carried around the pictures of women.”
“Boltyansky?”
“That’s it, Ryaba, exactly! He suffocated.” And suddenly she winks. “Should I tell you?”
“What?”
“This! Remember how you used to moon over me, Ryaba? Remember? Hee hee hee! You did, I know you did! But I wouldn’t give it up for you! I would for anyone else, but not you.” She falls silent and starts rocking from side to side.
“Is it true there was a prison here?”
“Definitely. Yes!” And now he can’t tell whether it’s the drink talking or she’s serious. “I won’t let you have any now either, so don’t get any ideas! Don’t you look at how old I am … You’re no stud yourself. All skin and bones. They used to call you Skull, remember?” She fell silent for several moments, then suddenly: “Andryukha died here. Kirei died and Sabel died. We were four in this pipe—I mean the four of us lived together … I’m all alone now … Andryukha left a week ago, said he’d grab me some booze … He didn’t … It’s scary here, Ryaba. Where can I take Polkan? Huh? They won’t let him into the train station. Will you take him?”
“That’s all I need.”
“Yeah, right. You like a little port now and then too, I see! Like when we were kids. Don’t you make enough for a little brandy, Ryaba? What’s your job these days?”
“Cook.”
Buratina whistles. “In a restaurant?”
“A cafeteria. I feed the black-assed negroes at the university. Fortunately, it’s only ten minutes from home.”
“What do you cook for them?”
“Oh, everything: goulash, groats, cabbage soup.”
“Did you ever try foie gras?”
“That’s only a name: it’s goose liver. What’s there to try? Put it in rassolnik, potroshki—just the ticket. And the cucumbers have to be thickly sliced, preferably marinated.” Ryabets pauses to pour for Buratina. “Here’s to our meeting!” He takes a swig.
“Ryaba, you know why I wouldn’t let you have any? You look all cold, but on the inside—phooey! One of those. Us girls didn’t like you; you had this look, like you wanted to maul us. Maul us with your eyes and go down there with your nose. Hee hee hee! Our dear departed Bolt was like that too, but I felt sorry for him. Who was going to give that fatso any? He carried those dirty pictures around, but you mooned, you just egged me on. Oh, poor Bolt! And poor Mesropych, even if he was a stinker.”
“Why be sorry? They’re gone.”
“Who would have thought? Not one gray hair,” Buratina mutters.
“How’d you see me?” They’re sitting in total darkness now and can’t even make out each other’s faces anymore. Buratina’s smoking, a cheap bitter smell.
Ryabets stands up to pee. He’s not shy.
“Don’t piss on the grave!” Buratina cries.
Ryabets says nothing.
“Listen, Ryaba, here’s what I’m thinking. Maybe I could come to your place? With Polkan …?” The dog growls huskily. “I’ll wash up. Do you live alone? Are your mother and father dead?”
“Yeah.”
“I can’t even remember the last time I slept anywhere clean. What’s there for me here? They killed Andryukha! And Kirei … and Sabel … What about you, Ryaba, not married?”
“No.”
“Why not? Waiting for a princess? Or for me? Hee hee hee! Maybe I’ll give you some today, but Ryabets …” Buratina babbles.
Sometimes he can’t tell whether she’s really drunk or just pretending.
“You didn’t answer me, Ryaba. Why haven’t you gotten married?”
“I’ve been waiting for my dick to grow up.”
“Hee hee hee! You? I don’t believe that! Why did you jerk off outside my window? I remember …”
“My first little darling is lying over there.” She nods toward the fence and a night-black honeysuckle. “Do you think his little bones are still there?”
Ryabets imagines the child’s half-decayed bones. “Of course not, after all those years. Maybe a skull … or the tibias, they’re thick.”
“You’re a chef, you should know. And the second one next to him. I buried them at night, the snow was coming down; I remember, it was November.”
“You got the first from Mesropych?”
Buratina nodded and hiccupped.
“Whose was the second?”
“I don’t know. I was sleeping with everyone. I’d go to sleep under one and wake up and another’s going at it. Let the dogs have their way! And my baby girl. She’s lying right over there. She’d be nine … Pour me a little, why don’t you.”
Ryabets splashes some in the cup and Buratina drinks greedily.
“My baby girl was Andryukha’s. We lived over there, where you see the gazebo now. We had a concrete pipe, like this.” Buratina tries to show him how big with her hands. “We lived there a good five years. Or more. With Andryukha and Sabel, and Kirei came later.”
“You mean you gave birth there?”
“Where else, I’d like to know! Andryukha sterilized the knife in the fire and cut the cord. I wanted to leave my little girl, my baby daughter, with them, the people with the fanciest house. I thought at least then she’d have a life. Only she died a week later. Right when I was about to give her up. Andryukha would bring her food, he knew the cashier at the store on Zhivopisnaya, a good woman, and she gave it to him for free. Milk, Ryaba, and cereal. You can imagine what my milk was like. My little girl …”
Buratina strokes the ground and weeps silently, only her sniffling gives her away.
The noises on the other side of the fence have died down completely. Only occasionally does a car whoosh by, unseen.
“It was nice when we lived in the pipe, Ryaba. Even in the winter, it was a palace! We’d fill up the opening on one end and hang a towel over the other. A foursome makes it cozy—terrific! Tchaikovsky Hall! There weren’t any windows, but what good would they do? And the other cops left us alone. They’d come, take a look, and leave. There was this one, Lieutenant Bessonov, he was old and had a red nose, a lush. He’d come have a smoke at our fire. He used to say that when he retired he’d move in with us. Hee hee hee! He’d just grab his fishing rod from home, he didn’t need anything else. That’s what he used to say. He was joking, that cop. Later he disappeared. And the cops turned mean! They set all my stuff on fire twice, Ryaba, they burned it! Oh, what good stuff … mattresses! We moved over under the bridge, then to the church—you know the one, past the bridge? But now, Ryaba, that’s it, it’s time to stop!”
Buratina stirs, and Ryabets listens.
“Pour me some more. I’m going to drink my fill today, as if it were the last time, Ryaba! My life’s been bitter. And now I have to go to Kazan. They must have their own ways there, those station whores must be on top there!”
“Did you think I didn’t know? Hee hee hee! It was you who burned down the dacha, Ryaba. You! You! Damn it all.”
“Cut the crap.”
“You always wanted me. I remember the way you used to look at me, the way you hung around outside my window, peeping! Hee hee hee!” Buratina’s voice is so raspy he can hardly make it out. “You still had your beret, the brown one. Ryaba in his beret!”
Ryabets remembers those fall evenings well. He did walk around under Buratina’s windows, since she lived on the second floor, and he would keep an eye out—in the window just a fine veil of tulle, and Buratina prancing around her room in her panties, tight white panties. Before she went to bed she’d examine herself in her window reflection. She really didn’t have a mirror? She’d touch her breasts, belly, hips. Those brief minutes were the ones Ryabets lived for. He never suspected that Buratina was doing that for him, the spy in the night.
She was telling the truth. In school Ryabets couldn’t take his eyes off her. Everyone knew it. He’d sneak up behind her after class, staring at her strong, curvy legs, and fantasize. Knowing this, she’d tease him. First she’d stick her foot out in the aisle between their desks, then happen to clasp her breasts, then happen to touch herself down there. She was teasing him, and in his erotic visions every night, he tortured her ingeniously as only a youthful imagination can. None of his classmates digested the porn Boltyansky unfailingly brought to school as avidly as Ryabets. He’d arrive at school in the morning listless and gray from lack of sleep.
After the fire he found out that Buratina had survived and was in the hospital, pregnant. He was afraid to visit her. But he did visit the burn site right before he went into the army. His three years’ service were pretty cushy, stationed at a garrison kitchen in Baltiisk. He was eventually discharged and went back to those windows, but Buratina was gone. Her Kalmyk father was watching television in the next window; her mother was bustling around the kitchen. He kept going back there for two weeks. After dark. He started culinary school, graduated, and wound up at the cafeteria where he’d worked to this day. He’d lived unsociably, especially after his hard-drinking parents both died. He never married. He gratified his urges (occasionally, on days he got an advance or a paycheck) with train station prostitutes, whom he threw out after coitus. Had they known that he could barely stop himself from strangling them as he was ejaculating, they would have thanked their lucky stars.
Later he moved on to self-service, thanks to progress: there probably wasn’t a better collection of porn films in Moscow.
