Moscow Noir Read online

  Moscow Noir

  Natalia Smirnova

  Julia Goumen

  Alexander Anuchkin

  Igor Zotov

  Gleb Shulpyakov

  Vladimir Tuchkov

  Anna Starobinets

  Vyacheslav Kuritsyn

  Sergei Samsonov

  Alexei Evdokimov

  Ludmila Petrushevskaya

  Maxim Maximov

  Irina Denezhkina

  Dmitry Kosyrev

  Andrei Khusnutdinov

  Sergei Kuznetsov

  The more you watch Moscow, the more it looks like a huge chameleon that keeps changing its face—and it isn’t always pretty. Following Akashic Books’ international success with London Noir, Delhi Noir, Paris Noir, and others, the Noir series explores this fabled and troubled city’s darkest recesses.

  Features brand-new stories by: Alexander Anuchkin, Igor Zotov, Gleb Shulpyakov, Vladimir Tuchkov, Anna Starobinets, Vyacheslav Kuritsyn, Sergei Samsonov, Alexei Evdokimov, Ludmila Petrushevskaya, Maxim Maximov, Irina Denezhkina, Dmitry Kosyrev, Andrei Khusnutdinov, and Sergei Kuznetsov.

  Natalia Smirnova was born in 1978 in Moscow. In 2006, together with Julia Goumen, she founded Goumen & Smirnova Literary Agency, representing Russian authors worldwide.

  Julia Goumen was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1977. She holds a PhD in English and has worked in publishing since 2001.

  MOSCOW NOIR

  Edited by Natalia Smirnova & Julia Goumen

  Introduction

  CITY OF BROKEN DREAMS

  Translated by Marian Schwartz

  When we began assembling this anthology, we were dogged by the thought that Russian noir is less about the Moscow of gleaming Bentley interiors and rhinestones on long-legged blondes than it is about St. Petersburg, the empire’s former capital, whose noir atmosphere was so accurately reconstructed by Dostoevsky and Gogol. But the deeper we and the anthology’s authors delved into Moscow’s soul-chilling debris, the more vividly it arose before us in all its bleak and mystical despair. Despite its stunning outward luster, Moscow is above all a city of broken dreams and corrupted utopias, and all manner of scum oozes through the gap between fantasy and reality.

  The city comprises fragments of “utterly incommensurate milieus,” notes Grigory Revzin, one of Moscow’s leading journalists, in a recent column. The word “incommensurability” truly captures the feeling you get from Moscow. The complete lack of style, the vast expanses punctuated by buildings between which lie four-century chasms—a wooden house up against a construction of steel—and all of it the result of protracted (more than 850-year) formation. Just a small settlement on the huge map of Russia in 1147, Moscow has traveled a hard path to become the monster it is now. Periods of unprecedented prosperity have alternated with years of complete oblivion.

  The center of a sprawling state for nearly its entire history, Moscow has attracted diverse communities, who have come to the city in search of better lives—to work, mainly, but also to beg, to glean scraps from the tables of hard-nosed merchants, to steal and rob. The concentration of capital allowed people to tear down and rebuild ad infinitum; new structures were erected literally on the foundations of the old. Before the 1917 Revolution, buildings demolished and resurrected many times over created a favorable environment for all manner of criminal and quasi-criminal elements. After the Revolution, the ideology did not simply encourage destruction but demanded it. The Bolshevik anthem has long defined the public mentality: “We will raze this world of violence to its foundations, and then/We will build our new world: he who was nothing will become everything!”

  Back to the notion of corrupted utopias: much was destroyed, but the new world remained an illusion. Those who had nothing settled in communal apartments. After people were evicted from their private homes and comfortable apartments, dozens of families settled in these spaces, whereupon a new Soviet collective existence was created. (Professor Preobrazhensky, the hero of Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog, happily avoided this “consolidation.” In the novel, set in post-revolutionary Moscow, the professor transplants a human pituitary gland into a dog in hopes of transforming the animal into a person. The half-man who results from this experiment immediately joins up with the Reds. The test is a failure. In Bulgakov’s opinion, he who was “nothing” could not become “everything.”) That form of survival existed in Moscow until very recently, and from the average westerner’s standpoint, nothing more oppressive could ever be devised: an existence lived publicly, in all its petty details, like in prison or a hospital.

  The story of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior is a fairly graphic symbol of how Moscow was “built.” The church was constructed in the late nineteenth century on the site of a convent, which was dismantled and then blown up in 1931, on Stalin’s order, for the construction of the Palace of Soviets. The Palace of Soviets was never built (whether for technical or ideological reasons is not clear), and in its place the huge open-air Moskva Pool was dug out by 1960; it existed until the 1990s, when on the same site they began resurrecting the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, symbolizing “new Russia.”

  The more you consider the history of Moscow, the more it looks like a transformer that keeps changing its face, as if at the wave of a magic wand. Take Chistye Prudy—Pure Ponds (the setting for Vladimir Tuchkov’s story in this volume)—which is now at the center of Moscow but in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was in the outskirts and was called “Foul” or “Dirty” Ponds. The tax on bringing livestock into Moscow was much higher than the tax on importing meat, so animals were killed just outside the city, and the innards were tossed into those ponds. One can only imagine what the place was like until it finally occurred to some prince to clean out this source of stench, and voilà! Henceforth the ponds were “clean.”

  There are a great many such stories. Moscow changes rapidly as it attempts to overcome its dirt, poverty, despair, desolation, and evil; nonetheless, it so often ends up right back where it started.

  A noir literary tradition does not yet really exist in Russia in general or Moscow in particular. Why? Possibly due to the censorship of czarist Russia, to say nothing of the Soviet era. In 1887, Vladimir Gilyarovsky, a writer, journalist, and great stylist of Moscow life, prepared an anthology of short sketches about Moscow’s gloomiest locales and their inhabitants, The Stories of the Slums. However, the book was not to see the light of day. The censorship committee banned the book and its pages were burned. As an aide to the main administration chief wrote in response to Gilyarovsky’s request to allow the book to go to press, “Nothing will come of your troubles… This is sheer gloom without a single glimmer, the slightest justification, nothing but a condemnation of the existing order. Such truth cannot be written.” There was no further writing “without a glimmer or justification” for another hundred years or so, and for a long time even Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, a Russian State Prize laureate and living classic (one of whose artistic directions could well be classified as noir), had to write her plays and stories about the shady aspects of life without hope of publication.

  Any discussion of Moscow’s noir sources demands mention of a novel by the brothers Arkadi and Georgi Vainer, Era of Mercy, about the postwar (1945) struggle between the police and the “breeding dregs.” Experienced operative Gleb Zheglov and frontline soldier Vladimir Sharapov, who is, unfortunately, a novice at investigations, face the sinister “Black Cat.” The book was adapted into a
famous television miniseries, The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed, which many Muscovites know by heart.

  The atmosphere closest to noir is found in works devoted to the Stalinist era, such as Vasily Aksyonov’s Moscow Saga and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s First Circle: the patrol wagons that spirit “enemies of the people” off into the night, never to return home, for they will be shot without trial or investigation; the torture chambers; the betrayals; the fear; the suicides; and the “House on the Embankment” as an icon of Stalinist noir. Inevitably, our anthology is haunted by this Stalinist ghost as well, in the stories of Sergei Kuznetsov and Dmitry Kosyrev (a.k.a. Master Chen).

  True noir is not only contained within Moscow’s central districts, replete with the atmosphere of multiple destructions and even more ghosts (Pure Ponds and Zamoskvorechye, the settings for the stories by Vladimir Tuchkov and Gleb Shulpyakov), but also the residential neighborhoods where, despite the dream of broad streets, bright-colored buildings, and ample green space, poverty still reigns and the typical apartments with their cheerless electric light and thin walls never let their inhabitants forget for a minute that there is no exit. This is Perovo in Maxim Maximov’s story, and Andrei Khusnutdinov’s Babushinskaya, where Paul Khlebnikov, editor in chief of the Russian Forbes, met his death. In the forested areas at the city’s edge maniacs are at work, but in the largest of them, Elk Island National Park, there is a piece of land one kilometer square that, due to a strange combination of circumstances, is not protected by a single police unit. This is where thugs go to settle scores, this is where they bring their dead bodies, and this is where the dramatic events in Alexander Anuchkin’s story “Field of a Thousand Corpses” unfold. Naturally, noir is train stations too, where people congregate after they have lost hope, where it’s easy to be completely anonymous and get lost in the crowd; train stations play leading roles in the stories by Anna Starobinets and Alexei Evdokimov. Actually, almost any place in Moscow longs to be the setting for a story of crime and violence.

  This anthology is an attempt to turn the tourist Moscow of gingerbread and woodcuts, of glitz and big money, inside out; an attempt to reveal its fetid womb and make sense of the desolation that still reigns.

  Natalia Smirnova & Julia Goumen

  St. Petersburg, Russia

  March 2010

  PART I

  CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

  THE MERCY BUS

  by Anna Starobinets

  Kursk Station

  Translated by Mary C. Gannon

  I’m waiting for mercy. It should be here any minute now. There it is, turning the corner. Soon it will stop and open up its doors to me and others like me. Just a few more minutes and we’ll be warm.

  Right now it’s cold, though. It’s real cold. Especially for me. At least they get to lie on the sewage grates, or sit nearby on the bare asphalt, their backs up against the gray panels of the train station. They get the choice spots. Hot steam rises up from under the ground, saturating their stinking rags and bodies, their hair and their skin. The steam is so hot that it even melts the icicles hanging down from the roof of the building. Droplets run down the icicles like pus. It’s warm there, beneath the overhang.

  On the other hand, I don’t envy them. When they get up they’re going to feel ten times worse, with their clothes soaking wet and all—it’s minus thirty degrees. True, they’ll be getting right onto the bus, but who wants to be soaking wet in a bus?

  A shapless old hag in sagging purple tights is asleep, breathing gently. The rest are awake. They watch with no expression as the bus approaches. The cripple shuffled off, the hem of his soft leather overcoat trailing behind him on the frozen ground, his shiny black dress shoes worth a thousand dollars each. Unbelievable, he hadn’t even wanted them! Foxy Lee had it all figured out. “At the station you can just trade with one of them,” she’d said, but she hadn’t considered that these retards might turn down such a good deal, clutching their rags with iron grips.

  I had to force the trade on him. I can be pretty convincing sometimes, particularly when I’m right.

  By the way, never pick a fight with a bum at Kursk station. It’s like trying to battle with a giant rotten apple, or a bag of garbage.

  True, they were too small for him, the shoes. But that’s no big deal, he can break them in. Or sell them. The rest of the duds were too big for him. But that’s how they wear them around here.

  None of his friends went after him. No one tried to stop me while I was slugging him either. The expressions on their swollen steamy faces were hard for me to make out, even under the streetlight, but I think they were looking kind of hostile.

  So just in case, I keep to the edge of the group. I’m safer here, near the entrance gates and the cops. Because, first of all, they’re afraid of the cops. Second, they’re too lazy—no, lazy’s not the right word, they’re too comatose to cover the fifty-meter distance to where I’m standing.

  Of course, the cops tried to shoo me away. There were two of them. I gave them each a hundred bucks (I didn’t have any smaller bills on me). They stared at me, and then at the bills, with their blank fish eyes, and finally they laid off. Understandable, I guess. It’s not every day you see a piss-covered bum around Kursk station with a wad of greenbacks in his pocket. A minute later one of them came back. He sniffed back his snot, his nose violet from the frost, and stared hungrily at the bridge of my nose.

  “Got any ID?”

  I gave him another hundred. Breathing hard, he examined it under the yellow light of the streetlamp, then stuffed it inside his jacket. He shifted his weight from foot to foot. His gaze slid like sewage water down my unshaven face, broken nose, lip soaked in blood, and my dirty rags covered in brownish-yellow stains, before slithering back up to my face, where it paused for a moment on my misshapen gray hat with earflaps. Something caught his attention there, either the cut of the hat or the locks of hair that were left uncovered, too shiny and clean for the likes of me. I pulled my hat down over my forehead to reassure him. He had already forgotten about it, and his eyes shifted over me mechanically, until he focused on the bridge of my nose again.

  “Where’d you steal the money?”

  Now that was going too far.

  “I earned it,” I told him. But my voice came out sounding choked and hoarse, like a crow cawing.

  “I’m taking you down,” the cop said colorlessly, and suddenly—I swear—his teeth started chattering, maybe from the cold or, most likely, from hunger, the greedy bastard.

  I gave him another hundred bucks, promising myself that this was the last time. I really didn’t want any problems with law-enforcement officers, but arrogance has its limits, even from a cop. And four hundred is definitely the limit. If he tried to get any more out of me, I’d kill him.

  Again, he studied my contribution, then hid it away. He sniffed. Coughed uncertainly.

  “Any more questions, officer?” I croaked, pulling the mitten off my frozen hand so that it would be easier to shoot if he said yes, and cursing myself for the servile “officer,” which had rolled off my lips like a token rolling out of the broken turnstile at the john in Kursk station.

  By the way, don’t ever take a piss at Kursk. Unless, of course, you like pissing into a reeking hole in the cold in front of other people for fifteen rubles.

  A passenger train pulled into the station with a shriek and a groan. The cop squinted lazily at the train and then stole a glance at my bare fingers—too clean, too smooth, and my nails were too manicured. He was thinking hard about something, which was obviously not easy for him. He wrinkled his low forehead, and his eyebrows twitched like cockroaches. Finally the twitching stopped.

  “Who are you?” he asked, and looked me in the eye for the first time, intently and with some degree of intelligence. He was obviously on the brink of some kind of realization.

  I felt the icy handle of the gun in my pocket. To be honest, I don’t like guns. I’m a bad shot, anyway. On the other hand, even a fool can shoot. Right. F
irst you just cock it back…

  Foxy Lee hadn’t wanted to give me the gun. That put me on my guard. She kept pushing me gently toward the door, shaking her red mane of hair and mumbling, “You won’t be needing that. Come on! You don’t need it.” Then she caught my stare and her face crumpled up like she was hurt. “You don’t believe me, do you? Just like before!”

  I thought she was going to start bawling. But she didn’t. She handed me the gun, barrel first, and frowned. That’s not how you do it. Handgrip first, I said to myself automatically, and took the gun from her, feeling ashamed again.

  “Just don’t do anything stupid,” said Foxy. “If anything happens, one of my guys will be at the station. He’ll help you.”

  Suddenly I felt uncomfortable.

  “One of your guys? What does that mean?”

  “Ours,” Foxy corrected herself playfully. “Our guy. A friend.” She put her arms around my neck. Her hands were cool and her fingertips were slightly moist.

  “I’ll get along fine without your friends.” I wanted to pull away, but she wouldn’t let me.

  “Don’t be jealous,” Foxy whispered into my ear. “It was a long time ago.”

  That made me even more mad. A long time ago, what the hell is that supposed to mean? When Stary picked you up at the train station you were seventeen, a filthy, skinny little redhead. You’re twenty-one now. Only twenty-one, girl! So what the hell does that mean—a long time ago?

  She stroked my cheek. Her fingers smelled sweetly of flower-scented hand cream and blood.

  “I’ll be with you,” said Foxy. “If that’s what you want.”

  I nodded and said I did. I was angry and I wanted her, and I kissed her red hair, and her thick blond eyelashes, her little palms and those fingers—cold, moist fingers that she hadn’t managed to wash very well. I kissed them and inhaled their scent, animal-like and childish at the same time.