Moscow Noir Page 12

  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.

  “Bolt was better than you, just fat. He didn’t jerk off under my window. He came to me honestly and said, ‘Give me some, Buratinachka, just once. What’s it to you?’ Hee hee hee! He’d come down to my place. We lived near each other, remember? Like he had a question about biology.” (Buratina was good at biology; she’d wanted to go to medical school.) “He’d come and sit down and breathe hard, like a sperm whale… He’d bring me that book… what was it? About the Italians who told stories.”

  “The Decameron.”

  “That’s it! He said he’d taken it from his parents. He’s reading it out loud and squeezing his thigh… And he stinks to high heaven, Ryaba, from cologne. He must have poured half a bottle on himself so I’d give him some. I even thought maybe I should. Why let the guy suffer? But I decided—first Mesropych… I wanted him to pop my cherry, hee hee hee! Then we’d see! I had some real studs, didn’t I, Polkan boy?” Buratina scratches the dog’s scruff again. “I’m a whore! I’d give some to Polkan, but the animal gets me all scratched up. What do you expect? Hee hee hee!”

  Ryabets remembers. He remembers very well. He remembers Buratina being the only girl in their class—to the envy of the other girls and the greater dissatisfaction of Pichuga, their homeroom teacher—to wear lacy stockings, which made Ryaba’s heart race.

  “Remember, Ryaba, the story in that book when one woman arranges to meet him at her house? He comes, and the maid says, ‘Wait a little, her husband’s there…’ And she—the maid, that is—gets it on with the man. That guy was out in the cold all night! Just like you! Hee hee hee. But later he had his revenge, he drove her out on the roof, I think… Right?”

  Buratina takes the bottle and finishes it off in one swig.

  “Whoo! All right, Ryaba, what the hell. You can’t bring ’em back. Not Bolt, not Mesropych, not Lidukha. I don’t remember the others.” She suddenly falls over, first on her side, then facedown. “But you, Ryaba, you’re not getting any. I was going to give you some, but I’m not. Sleep, my beloved children.”

  Her hands stroke the rough grass and fall still.

  Ryabets has a headache. He shuts his eyes. He should be getting up. It’s late. He’s not going to spend the night here, on her children’s bones. Or is this crazy
woman lying? Though no, she said some sensible things too. Such a strange day. But there’s still the newspaper. His mother didn’t give him up when that detective came poking around. He’d asked, Could someone have fought with Mesropych, or Boltyansky, or even Burataeva? From their class, maybe someone was getting back at them? Or was it just the drinking and carousing? The detective questioned everyone. With some, he went to their houses; others he called in. Eventually he decided it was an accident, a cigarette butt. Besides, it was so dry there. Like now. Drier even. The peat burned, definitely. There was smoke. People were coughing.

  Crackle, pain, heat. Ryabets opens his eyes and sees Buratina, her arm raised, holding the bottle—the moon’s predatory reflection on its jagged edges. She’s going to kill me! He moves to the side, Buratina falls—crack!—a red rose plunges into the sand.

  “Bitch,” he whistles, clutching her shoulders and pressing her to the ground. “You wanted to kill me?”

  Buratina is silent, and for a moment her back is tense under Ryabets’s hands, but then it goes slack. He holds her down with his knees and moves his hands to her neck. Blood drips black on her hair. He smells fresh urine. Finding the thyroid cartilage, he presses and presses on it from both sides, vividly imagining her anatomy. A quiet whistle like from a bicycle tire, and then silence. Off to the side Polkan’s shadow is wagging its tail, baring its teeth. “Nadya, Nadya!”

  “You never read The Decameron?” Boltyansky exclaims.

  Ryabets doesn’t like Boltyansky. That he’s fat is bad enough, but he has those sticky little hands and those manicured nails, damnit. On top of it all, Boltyansky keeps bringing porn to school, photos blurry from being copied so many times. Girls with big tits and grayish bodies (the result of the copying) straddling muscle-bound guys. Or offering up their cushiony asses. Or spreading their lips. One look is all it takes and then there is strawberry jam all over the floor.

  Boltyansky shows the photos in his hand, gripping them with his little pink fingers. If for the others the viewings are a standard diversion, it’s different for Ryabets. The sticky feeling has degenerated into horror at a female’s touch, be it a hand, elbow, accidental breast, or innocent hair. Even his mother’s touch—extremely rare, fortunately—repulses him. If Praskovya Fyodorovna so much as strokes his head when she’s tipsy, it turns his stomach and make his insides clench up.