by Annie Bellet
He put a hand on my shoulder, which might even have been to steady me. I think I probably glared at him, because he took it back very carefully.
“Think about it?” he said.
Suddenly, the whole conversation took on that slightly surreal gloss things have when you realize you’ve been looking at the picture from the wrong angle, and what you took for a vase full of flowers is actually an old woman with a crooked nose.
“We were talking about you,” I said.
The train lurched and shook as it braked harder. I stumbled, but caught myself on the handrail over the dog.
“Me? I can’t look fat!” he said—loud enough that heads turned toward us. “I have to be ready to get on stage!”
“I’m sure a lumpy cocktail waitress will make great tips,” I shot back. “And who is it who is already keeping the roof over our heads?”
It turned out I got off before the dog. I guess it deserved the seat, then: it had the longer commute. It whined and gave me a soulful look as I brushed past. I had nothing in my bag except a hoarded bar of good chocolate, which was poison to dogs. And even if it hadn’t been, I wasn’t going to let Ilya find out about it. Decent chocolate was becoming less a luxury and more of a complete rarity. And what I could make last for two weeks of careful rationing, Ilya would eat in five minutes and be pissed off I hadn’t had more.
“Sorry,” I told the dog. “The cupboard’s bare.”
I stepped from the dingy, battered Metro car to the creamy marble and friezes of Novokuznetskaya Station. The doors whisked shut behind me.
Christ what am I doing with my life?
• • • •
Ten hours cocktail waitressing in those shoes, getting my ass pinched, and explaining drink specials to assholes when they could have picked the information off the intranet with a flick of their attention, didn’t make my feet hurt any less or do much to improve my attitude. I rode home on a nearly-empty train, wishing I had the money to skin out the two other passengers and the ongoing yammer of the ads.
It’s not safe to filter out too much reality when you’re traveling alone at night. But the desire is still there.
No dogs this time.
The elevator to our flat was out of order again. I finally pulled those shoes off and walked up five flights of gritty piss-smelling stairs barefoot, swearing to myself with every step that if Ilya was passed out drunk on the couch, I was carrying every pair of skinny black jeans and his beloved harness boots out into the courtyard and setting it all on fire. And then I was going to dance around the blaze barefoot, shaking my tangled hair like a maenad. Like a witch.
This is how women sometimes turn into witches. We come home from work one day too many to discover our partners curled up on the couch like leeches in a nice warm tank, and we decide it’s better to take up with a hut with chicken legs.
A good chicken-legged hut will never disappoint you.
But when I got home, there was hot food on the stove, plates on the coffee table, and a foot massage.
I bet a chicken-legged hut doesn’t give a very good foot massage. And they sure as hell don’t cook. Even lentils and kasha. Still it was good lentils and kasha, with garlic in it. And onions. And I hadn’t been the one to cook it.
You need to get a magic cauldron for doing the cooking. Maybe a mortar and pestle that flies.
Ilya washed my foot. Then his fingers dug and rolled in the arch. I whimpered and stretched against him, but when he would have stopped I demanded persistence. He set my heel on the cushion and stood.
“Where are you going?”
“You’re crabby for somebody whose man is making such an effort.” He walked into the kitchen. A moment later he was back, bearing icy vodka in a tiny glass. He handed it to me. “Na zdravie.”
“You’re trying to butter me up,” I complained, but I didn’t refuse the vodka. It was cold and hot at once, icy in the mouth, burning in the throat, warm in the belly.
“What is it that you really want?”
He seated himself again and pressed his thumbs into my arch until I groaned. Patently disinterested, he asked, “Any foreigners tonight?”
It was not a totally idle question. Foreigners tip better. Also, as anyone could guess from the evidence of his wardrobe, Ilya was obsessed with twentieth-century punk rock, and twentieth-century punk rock flourished in England and America. And there aren’t as many foreigners as there used to be, before the carbon crunch.
“You’re always playing some game,” I said.
He kissed the sole of my foot.
I said, “You never just tell me the truth. You could just tell me the truth.”
“Bah,” he said, pressing too hard. “Truth is unscientific. The very idea of Truth is unscientific.”
“You’re a cynic.” I almost said nihilist, which probably would have been true also, but that word had too much history behind it to just sling around at random.
“If we accept Truth,” he intoned, “then we believe we know answers. And if we believe we know answers, we stop asking questions. And if we stop asking questions, then all we’re doing is operating on blind faith. And that’s the end of science.”
“Isn’t love a kind a faith?” I asked.
“Then why do you keep asking me so many questions?” He laughed, though, to take the sting out.
I knew he was right. But I still pulled the pillow out from under my head and put it over my face anyway. What did he know about science? He couldn’t even really play guitar.
• • • •
Two days later, Ilya and I saw the dog again, and I realized she was female. Perhaps we commuted on the same schedule. Perhaps she just rode the train back and forth, and we happened to be in the same car that day.
I don’t think so.
She looked like she had a job. She looked like she was going somewhere.
Maybe her job was begging for food. When I walked past her to get off, she whined at me again, and again I had nothing.
One more creature for me to disappoint.
When I got off work that night, I bought some hard sausage from the street vendor. I didn’t see the dog on the way home, though, so I wrapped the sausage in tissue and stuffed it into the bottom of my sometimes bag where Ilya wouldn’t get into it. Maybe I’d run into her the next day.
• • • •
Dinner was waiting for me again, sausages and peppers and some good bread. Ilya had even found wine somewhere, which was almost too good to be true. Wine is hard to come by: the old vineyards are dying in the heat, and the new ones aren’t yet well-established. That’s what I heard, anyway.
Ilya seemed nervous. Hovering. When he finally settled, I was eating pepper slices one by one, savoring them. They were rich with the sausage grease, spicy and delicious. He chased his food around the plate for a little with his fork, then leaned on his elbows and looked at me.
I knew I was about to lose my appetite, so I ate another bite of sausage before I met his gaze.
“Have you thought about the liver graft?” he asked.
I swallowed. I reached for my wine, and deliberately drank two sips. “No.”
“I think—”
“No,” I said. “By which I mean, I have thought about it. And the answer is no. If you want to license out somebody’s body to grow stem-cell organs, use your own. I work for a living. I take classes when I can. What the hell do you do?”
“You don’t understand,” he said. “We need this money to pay for the tour. For the band.”
“Wait,” I said. “Isn’t a tour supposed to be something you do to make money?”
“We’ll make it all back on merchandise sales, and more. It will be our big launch!”
“What about me?” I asked. “I only need another year and a half to get my engineering degree. What do I get out of it?”
He reached out and took my hand. “I’ll buy you a house. Two houses!”
I think he even believed it.
“Petra…” he s
troked a thumb across the back of my hand. “You know we can change the world if we just get a chance. We can be another Black Flag, another Distemper.”
I caught myself scowling and glanced away. He rose, refilled my wine, kissed my neck.
“Help me change our lives,” he whispered. “You know I’m doing everything I can. I just need you to believe in me.”
His breath shivered on the fine hairs behind my ear. He found my shoulders with his hands and massaged.
I was too tired to be angry, and anyway, he smelled good. I leaned back against his warm, hard belly. I let him smooth my hair and lead me to bed.
• • • •
Ilya was already gone when I woke up for work the next day. That was unlike him, being out of the house before three. He’d left me an indecipherable note. And I honestly did try to decipher it!
What were the odds that he had work? Would he brag it up in advance, or would he want to surprise me with his unprecedented productivity? I got up, cleaned off, dressed, and walked outside.
It was a beautiful day. The sky was a crisp sweet color that would have looked like a ripe fruit, if fruit came in blue. I walked to the Metro down the long blocks with their cement pavements, hemmed in by giant cubes of buildings on each side. Dogs and humans trotted this way and that with city-dweller focus: I’m going somewhere and it matters. Nobody looked around. I lived in a plain area, where the tourists don’t come.
The streets were thronged with everything from petal busses to microcabs. There aren’t so many solar vehicles here—they’re not much good over the winter—but we have a bike share. I was early today—Ilya being home always slowed me down—and the weather was nice enough that I even thought of picking one up from the stand near the Metro and riding in to work today, but I hadn’t brought a change of clothes except shoes, and I didn’t want to spend the whole night sweaty.
I did spot one old petrol limousine. It stank, and the powerful whirr of its engine made me itch to scoop up a big rock and hurl it through the passenger window. I was stopped by the fact that it was probably bulletproof, and also by the other fact that anybody who could afford to own and operate a gasoline auto could also afford bodyguards who would think nothing of running me down and breaking my arms when they caught me.
I was wearing better shoes, today. But I didn’t have much faith in my ability as a sprinter.
So I turned aside, and descended into the Metro.
I was early for my train. As I waited, my friend the ovcharka trotted up and sat down beside me. Her black-tipped, amber coat was shedding out in huge wooly chunks, leaving her sleek guard hairs lying close side by side. She looked up at me and dog-laughed, tongue lolling.
I remembered the sausage, and also that I had forgotten to eat breakfast. I split it with her. She took her share from my fingers daintily as a lady accepting a tea sandwich.
When the train came, we boarded it together. There were several seats, and I expected her to take one while I took another. But instead, when I sat, the dog curled up on my feet with a huff that I didn’t know enough Dog to interpret.
We rode in silence to my usual stop for work. It was a companionable feeling, the sort of thing I wasn’t used to. Just quiet coexistence. I understood for a minute why people might like dogs.
I stood, stepping over her to disentangle us, and headed for the open door.
The dog stepped in front of me.
Not as if she were getting off. As if she were blocking my path.
“I get off here,” I said to her, pretending talking to a dog wasn’t patently ridiculous. After one quick glance, the other passengers ignored us, because that’s how it is in cities.
I tried to step around her. The ovcharka lowered her ears and growled.
I stepped back in surprise.
Hopping on one foot, I pulled off my shoe. It was the only weapon I had. I raised it to wallop the dog.
She ducked—cringing—but didn’t move. She peered up at me and wagged her tail innocently, teeth chastely covered now. I imagined her like the wolf in the story: “Do not kill me, Prince Ivan. I will be of use to you again!”
That was when I noticed she was pregnant. A pup must have kicked or twisted inside her, because a sharp bulge showed against her side for a moment before smoothing away again.
I dropped the shoe back on the floor and stepped into it. I wasn’t going to beat a pregnant dog with my trainer.
She nosed my hand gently and wagged her tail. She looked at the door, back at me. She pushed up against my legs and, as the door slid shut and the train lurched forward, she herded me back to my seat—still vacant, and the one next to it was empty now too. Only once I sat did she hop up beside me and lay her head across my lap.
I’m not sure why I went. Perhaps I was simply too befuddled to struggle. And I was early for work, anyway.
• • • •
Two stops later, she hopped down as the train was approaching the station, and nudged me with her slimy nose again.
I’d already spent the ruble. I might as well see what it had bought. I followed the dog out into the bustle of the station, up the escalator—she didn’t even pause—and out into the balmy afternoon. She checked over her shoulder occasionally to make sure I was behind her, but other than that never hesitated. I had to trot to keep up: so much for showing up to work not sweaty.
After less than a kilometer, she slowed. Her head dropped, and she placed each foot singularly, with care. I recognized the stalking posture of a wolf, and pressed myself into the shadow of a building behind her. I felt like we were spies.
There was a pocket park up ahead—a tiny island of green space surrounded by a black twisted iron rail. As we came up to it, just to the edge where leaf-shadows dappled the pavement, I realized that there were two figures on a bench across the little square of green. They were facing away, and because of the dog’s weird behavior, I had been walking softly. They didn’t hear me.
I recognized one of them immediately, and not just by the skinny jeans and the leather jacket and the guitar case leaned against the arm of the bench. The other was a woman. More than that I couldn’t see, because Ilya had pulled her into his lap and had his tongue so far down her throat he could probably tell what she’d had for breakfast yesterday.
How many of his band practices had actually involved musicians—no matter how loosely you defined the term?
I would have expected my hands to shake, my gorge to rise. I would have expected to feel some kind of denial. But instead, what I felt—what I experienced—was a kind of fatalistic acceptance. Frustration, more than anything.
How Russian of me, I remember thinking, and having to bite down on the kind of laugh that rises up when one recognizes one’s self behaving in a stereotypical fashion. The dog leaned against my leg; I buried my fingers in her greasy coat. When I looked at her, she was looking up at me.
Want to go pick a fight? I imagined her asking.
Her tail waved in small circles. She waited to see what I would do.
I stepped back into the shadows of the building, turned smartly, and set off back towards the Metro. The dog followed a few steps, then trotted off in her own direction.
I didn’t mind. Like me, she probably had to get to work.
I wound up taking a share bike after all. I was running too late to make it on the train.
• • • •
On my break that night, I found a corner in the staff den and read everything I could pull up about dogs. I felt queasy and tired. I wanted to go home, already. Somehow, I made it through my shift, though I couldn’t manage cheeky and flirtatious, and so my tips were shit.
• • • •
Ilya and I didn’t have our next fight immediately when I walked in the door. This was only because he was in bed asleep, and I couldn’t find enough fucks to wake him. And when we got up the next day, I was too angry to put it into words. Sure, he irritated me. That’s what partners do for each other, isn’t it? But I had thought we were a
team. I had thought…
I had thought he would get his act together one of these days, I guess, and finally start to pull his own weight. I had thought I was saving him.
Finally, at the top of the Metro escalators, he had had enough of my stony silence, and pushed the issue. Went about it all wrong, too, because he stopped, tugged my elbow to pull me out of the line of traffic, scowled at me, and said, “What the fuck crawled up your ass this morning?”
It was almost three in the afternoon, but whatever. I shook his hand off my elbow, glared, and spat. “You cheated on me!”
I saw him riffling through potential answers. He thought about playing dumb, but I was too convinced. He had to know I knew something for sure. At last he settled on, “It was an accident!”
“Like she tripped and fell on your dick? Argh!” I threw my hands up. We were causing a scene and it felt wonderful.
“Petra—”
“Ilya, never mind. Never mind. You’re taking the next fucking train. And I want your shit out of my apartment when I get home.”
“My name’s on the lease too!”
“And when was the last time you paid a bill?”
He stepped up to me. I thought about slapping him, but that would give him the moral authority. Still, I didn’t step back.
“Next train,” I told Ilya. “I’m not riding with you.” I’d have to push past him to reach the escalator. Instead, I spun around and bolted down the stairs.
When I got to work, I had to run into the bathroom to puke. It’s a good thing Misha the bartender keeps peppermints in his apron, or every single customer I served that night would have smelled it on my breath.
Why the hell hadn’t I been fucking someone more like Misha all along?
Probably because he was gay. But, you know. Besides that.
• • • •
I was still queasy on the ride home, and the lurch of the late-night train didn’t help me. There were, at least, plenty of seats, though I looked in vain for my ovcharka friend. Nobody got into the first carriage except for me and one middle-aged grandmother in a dumpy coat. We settled down opposite one another.
