“What’s happening now?”
“They took it back to the workshop to gild them!”
“All right, then.” Tamara looked at her cell phone, which had announced an incoming message to the tune of Mozart. “That’s odd. The broadcast’s been canceled today. Something’s not ready. On the other hand I have my wine club; our sommelier is an orphan without me. So don’t worry, Krylov. I won’t take up your whole evening. Come, let’s sit for an hour or so.”
On the front steps, Tamara took Krylov’s arm, and he felt the usual wave from her tottering gait on his right.
“It’s awful, isn’t it?” she said plaintively. “Kuzmich has a shiner, but where did he get it? You try and try and still you’re surrounded by cretins. Russia is great, but there’s no one to work.”
“You might ease up a little, too,” said Krylov. “It’s going to end with someone especially inconsolable strangling you. Sacrificing you like a pagan.”
“Well! Thank you for the prediction!” Tamara laughed, bumping her mighty and smooth hip into Krylov, like the side of a boat.
“Don’t laugh. I’m serious.” Krylov felt, as always, that Tamara’s astringent perfume was keeping him from concentrating on what he was saying. “You realize perfectly well you’re asking for trouble. Why do you have to do everything differently from everyone else? Who are you trying to impress? Mitya Dymov?”
“My dear, if I didn’t go asking for trouble, as you kindly put it, I’d be working as a flunky for Mitya right now.”
“Maybe you’d be better off being a flunky for Mitya,” noted Krylov philosophically. “Right now you’re doing great, but no one knows how things are going to develop.”
“You’re a pain, Krylov,” parried Tamara. “A pain and a chauvinist.”
Krylov did not object to this. Once again, as if nothing had happened, the homey grace of a family quarrel descended upon them, a quarrel they carried to her car like a shared banner.
Tamara’s Porsche, a new lady’s model with swan outlines on its silver chassis and long door-wings, was shining coldly on a scrap of asphalt melted by the sun to the softness of bilberry jam. A young homeless woman wearing a rotten pink dress and a filthy, vegetable-orange jacket, was applying makeup to her bloated eyelashes in front of the rearview mirror.
“Not again,” said Tamara with a sigh, getting out her laser key. “Why do these train wrecks like putting on their makeup in front of my car so much?”
“Because your car’s beautiful,” suggested Krylov, slowing his step so as not to frighten the awkward creature. “The train wreck is attracted to what’s feminine. They’re feminine, too, if you look closely. Ribbons and beads. They’d never agree to be exactly like their men.”
Meanwhile the homeless woman, noticing the approaching owners, picked her tattered bag up off the grass, tossed her grubby cosmetics into it casually, and moved off with a strange, swishing walk that combined sexuality and wine. In her you felt the charm of the rightful owner of all of civilization’s discards, a particular garbage chic that young bottom dwellers sometimes have who have decided once and for all to remain women but not human beings.
“That silly slut couldn’t be more than eighteen,” said Tamara with a strange sadness, watching the young girl walk away, having crossed the lawn along a fragile trajectory, like a butterfly’s line of flight in the grass.
“She looks like an old woman,” commented Krylov, thinking about how the currents of youth one could sense through the dirty sunburn and the alcoholic puffiness were somehow like the effect Tamara bought in Lausanne for thousands of euros.
In the amazingly even cold inside the car you couldn’t imagine flies flying; the seatbelt, which rose like a cobra in response to the passenger’s weight, pinned Krylov elastically in the leather seat. The car floated along like an attentive TV camera filming panoramas shot through with sun like a dark blue varnish; through the Porsche’s tinted windows all the windows in the buildings seemed black, and the leaves on the trembling trees were the color of a dove’s feather.
Tamara, an invariably focused driver, did not take her eyes off the road mostly, but her eye, shining through her tousled locks, did dart over to Krylov from time to time.
“I hope you’ve worked up an appetite,” she said, waltzing lightly on the turn with a spectral van, and Krylov guessed that she was again anxious in his presence. There had never been anything like that when he and Tamara were married; nor had there been on their first dates, which had been overshadowed by her sacred lack of experience and honest simplicity. Now that they were divorced, no sooner were they left alone than Tamara’s voice cracked and her hands became damp, smelling strongly of mint.
“Let’s have a cup of coffee somewhere,” Krylov suggested, not at all eager to go to the Plow, with its enormous piebald blini and imbecilic waiters in their traditional Russian shirts.
“Stop it. You’re my guest,” Tamara passed a huge black ATV in the right lane like a pro. “Personally, I’m simply dying of hunger. I hope we’re having dinner in fifteen minutes.”
There was a traffic jam up ahead, though. Vast numbers of cars were dragging along at a meter every ten minutes, while beggars scurried between them, sticking to the Porsche’s windows like blue vampires. Tamara, cursing like a lady, turned on some pleasant music, the kind she always knew how to choose to suit the moment. This was one of her comfortable habits that for some reason evoked an instant distaste in Krylov. A lanky beggar with an emaciated infant who looked like a third plaster hand and who was hanging at her breast would not back off, having taken a fancy to Tamara’s car. In response, Tamara focused harshly on the back bumper of the pushy Lada trying to wedge into traffic and left Krylov to his own devices, which was just fine, because Krylov realized that he was in no way prepared for a conversation with Tamara.
2
HER DIRECTNESS WAS EXTREMELY AWKWARD FOR CONVERSATION; it seemed impossible to extract from her circuitously whether it was she who had hired the spy. Her motive could in fact be only one: Tamara wanted to be a part of Krylov’s fate and arrange his temporary personal life—temporary until he ultimately reunited with her.
Part of this, undoubtedly, was her unexpiated guilt over that cute young man to whom Tamara had suddenly acquired obligations Krylov could not understand. The young man at the time wore a feathery beard and fine shoulder-length tresses that swayed at the slightest breeze. He was shy and wide-eyed and embarrassedly fought pimples, which looked like the remains of pea soup. Lots of people thought the divorce was due to Tamara’s drastic haste, in the context of which her romance with the future star, recognized in hindsight as a social event, made perfect sense, and the gemcutter-husband, who suddenly became jealous and filed for divorce, looked like a comic figure and was justly dismissed. In fact, after Tamara landed in the trap of the cow-eyed boy, who had rendered her space habitable with the innocence of a stray cat, she honestly pursued the situation’s logic and herself initiated all the procedures.
She was frankly miserable over the young man who played on her computer and walked around the house in her angora sweaters. Krylov never laid a hand on the clumsy creature, who smiled at him in a cowardly and insolent way, as if Krylov were the teacher whose chair had a tack on it. Nothing he did could drive the usurper from their conjugal bed, where he had once basked like a butterflied chicken and now every evening, at the children’s hour, headed off for bed, wishing everyone goodnight and grabbing whatever book caught his eye off the shelf. He addressed Tamara familiarly; he walked into the dining room holding her hand and over his food shied away from the maid, who had disapprovingly taken away his sauce-drizzled plate. For reasons never made clear, this foster child had nowhere to stay. That is, there was nowhere to send him. The ruins of his rusty suitcase with the sunken lid, held together by stiff straps, stood modestly in the hall and evidently held all his worldly possessions.
In essence, what happened to Tamara was what happens at least once to every woman over thirty. Her tr
agic honesty stood between Krylov and the young wretch like an iron wall. Additionally, Tamara got mixed up in a nasty business originally connected with enrolling the youth in certain private courses. She made calls and went places daily, smearing her pursed lips with bright lipstick. She paid for the courses herself but still couldn’t get free. Krylov held on as long as he could, spending the night in the guest room. He just couldn’t speak frankly to Tamara after driving out that parasite, who had been so clingy and so easily upset if he didn’t get a pat on the head. Krylov was a grown man and could have told Tamara that there were lots of boys like this one and that every woman gets mixed up with one at least once, that life didn’t end there, including her life with Krylov. But Tamara wouldn’t discuss it and demonstrated one thing only: her determination to pick up the tab.
In other words, the young man outlasted Krylov. But the moment Krylov moved in with his mother, to that same tiny apartment with the ramshackle windows and all the dead midges on the dingy shades that emitted meager electricity, literally a week later the boy simply left Tamara for a woman producer he had managed to strike up a conversation with at a party for a women’s magazine and by setting forth his views about what made people tick got all the way to her house. A servant was sent for his rusty suitcase. The woman producer, who looked like an overweight top student and had hatchet ears on her square masculine head, lost four kilos out of sheer happiness and then an equal number out of fierce longing.
So began the destructive and glorious path of the young man who soon became the famous Mitya Dymov. For a while he was the domestic charge of a venerable writer, the director of a television channel, several actresses, and finally he managed to enchant Pavel Petrovich Bessmertny, who was head of the Gold of the Riph financial and industrial group, a solid and positive man with a general’s brown mustache who had never suspected his own nontraditional passions when suddenly he found his destiny. For a while, Mitya performed onstage singing “light” music about summer vacation and sweet Natashka. He was filmed in a young adults’ series as a tough carjacker, for which he pumped some serious iron. And at twenty-six he started trying to look younger than his age. Thanks to Bessmertny’s money he looked like a high school boy, and his capricious upper lip, which was rimmed, like a butterfly, in rare silk, was a masterpiece of the plastic surgeon. Ultimately, Mitya was drawn into television. His elegant shows were sort of like mental garbage cans and addictive for gossip lovers. Persons of the male and female persuasion adored Dymov. “I have forgiven him a great deal,” one lioness or another in an oval décolleté would say significantly, thereby raising her own ratings. High school girls entered the fray for Mitya, healthy girls in tight T-shirts and shorts who never wore underwear on principle and with crew cuts stormed Mitya’s office and smashed bottles on his car. Having grown rich under Bessmertny, Mitya was now keeping someone himself, or so people said. The official story was that he was donating his fees to an orphanage. Moreover, he regularly gave subsidies to three or four actors who had not been particularly lucky in their field and went around as if made up for tragedy—and who supported, in turn, a few gentle beggar boys, who sat meekly at a separate little table and went halves on each portion of ice cream while magnanimous Mitya, having made the date in the stylish café, discussed theater and film with the paterfamilias.
Meanwhile, Dymov had not left his gigolo habits behind. He demanded gifts and got them by the score (lots of them went to the beggar boys, who tremulously wore designer jewelry and colorful boots on ladies’ heels, which made their cheap, dark little suits look like cardboard. Mitya liked to say that all his belongings fit in one suitcase. That would be the same rusty suitcase with the rotted-out corners that had traveled with Mitya to every rich home he had ever lived in—and was never once opened during his career. Bessmertny himself didn’t know what it held. From time to time, in Mitya’s absence, the infatuated oligarch would enter Mitya’s clothes closet and with a pounding heart study the withered monstrosity. A light smell of decay came from a dark crack with rough edges (the baked zipper had separated here and there, like stitches from an operation sewn in iron), and sometimes he thought he saw something white. Once, Bessmertny used ice tongs to pull an old beaver-lamb mitten out of the crack, but it flew apart instantly, like a dandelion. The object was so touching that the oligarch nearly cried. He was whiskerless now, with a bare and good face that was beginning to flow over his stiff collar.
Tamara, who had gained status as Dymov’s discoverer, comported herself with queenly dignity. None of those swine made a peep when Krylov, in his synthetic sweater, which had shrunk in the wash, and his hands, scratched by bits of stone, kept showing up at her parties. Krylov was greeted like an old friend who had traveled the world. The maid spoke to him with exaggerated respect. Several sarcastic smiles that slithered through the group of guests were squashed like slippery wood-lice.
Dymov, in turn, also wanted to be friends with Tamara. This darling easily dropped people—but was deathly afraid of being dropped. The idea of losing anything at all gave Mitya a panic attack: after plucking at his shirt or brooch, he could turn all his elegant and untidy belongings upside-down digging through them and cancel a broadcast or very important meeting. He would not be consoled until he got back the trifle that had slipped away, which had suddenly become irreplaceable, no matter what the despondent Bessmertny, cooing, promised his fledgling. If the item disappeared without a trace, Mitya was left in a state of depressed anxiety, as if a small but very black hole had been revealed in his universe. Tamara’s absence in the solid circle of Dymov’s admirers constituted not just a little hole but a big one. Mitya tried this way and that to worm his way into Tamara’s favor. He invited her to the fashionable Scorpion Club with its exotic striptease based on Dostoevsky plots, and to the formal, pseudo-British-style St. James, where all the waiters were bald and wore side-whiskers. Now and then Tamara would accept his invitation—exactly as often as it took to make her refusals not look like a message. Never once did she ask what had happened that icy wet March night when the pleasantly inebriated Mitya had latched onto the producer. Tamara was the only person to whom the perplexed Dymov sent five-kilo bouquets wrapped in silver paper with an ambiguous note pinned inside.
She behaved as if she had clean forgotten both Mitya’s residence in her apartment and her own efforts on Mitya’s behalf, which only Bessmertny was able to bring to their proper conclusion. This kind of memory loss could not be credited, therefore Dymov did not trust Tamara. From time to time he felt acute animosity for Tamara. At night, lying next to a naked Bessmertny, whose groin, which looked like a cobwebby gray attic corner, gave off the sharp smell of patent ointment, Mitya sobbed softly at his insult and loneliness.
His show, “Decedent of the Year,” arose as a result of complicated inner motivations that had to do with Tamara, half of which Dymov didn’t understand. Everyone, however, remarked on the special inspiration that descended upon Dymov in the studio, which was decorated with solid tombstones and laser spangles.
“I know what you’re thinking about,” Tamara said after her silver Porsche had shaken off the beggars and her nervous neighbors in the traffic jam and jerked to the freedom of First Circle Boulevard. “Dymov.”
“That’s right,” Krylov admitted, caught by surprise. He knew that Tamara had moments of insight when she seemed to see Krylov’s thoughts through his skull.
“I remember that it’s all my fault.” Tamara’s voice held excessive pathos, and Krylov guessed that her insight had been killed by pretense.
Simultaneously, he was enraged.
“Yes, I would have forgotten him a long time ago if that ugly face didn’t loom up on the television every Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday! Actually, I don’t like the idea of you appearing on ‘Decedent of the Year.’ He needs you for something in that idiotic program. I think he’s cooking up some dirty trick. Don’t you think so?”
“I think his whole program is a dirty trick,” Tamara replied, her eyes
riveted above the steering wheel to the racing lane marker. “But I have no intention of sitting this out. I’m going to go and defend my ideas and my business. No matter what you say on the subject.”
Meanwhile, the smooth Porsche passed a mustard-colored apartment house where Ivan and Tanya had met the previous week and plunged deep into Pushkarsky Lane, where evening shadows already lay and hung here and there like unfurled sails. Another four minutes of leisurely driving and they would reach the Plow, one of the most expensive and idiotic Russian clubs in the capital of the Ripheans’ land. Now Krylov felt frozen through from the air-conditioned sedan as he tried and failed to plan in his mind for the conversation ahead.
“So you wanted to talk to me about Dymov?” Tamara asked, as if offhandedly, braking at the light and looking closely at the little old lady in the doll’s dress mincing on the green light, accompanied by her stippled pet dog.
“No, remember you were the one who told me over the phone about the broadcast. I hadn’t known.”
“Then what?”
“Listen,” Krylov protested. “Let’s go sit quietly and I’ll collect my thoughts.”
“Fine, fine, I’m sorry,” Tamara said hastily, suddenly flushing to her roots.
She had already parked by the carved wooden gates where a decrepit farm implement had been nailed that bore traces more like the remains of a nag’s skeleton than the plow it pulled. A bucket-faced oaf in costume was hanging around the gates.
Tamara went ahead, a strapping goddess with a human body and a falcon’s head. In a ringing, festive voice she greeted the maitre d’, who was wearing a tight, cranberry red caftan, and waved delightedly to some gentlemen who were toasting her with sweating glasses of vodka. Smiling and bowing, the maitre d’ led the new arrivals to the most desirable booth. The waiters, flying like silk roosters, nimbly served four kinds of kvass; also, knowing Mrs. Krylova’s desires, they brought a bottle of Beaujolais and delicately lit a beribboned beeswax candle.
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