St. Petersburg Noir

by Natalia Smirnova

  Putting on the brakes. Slowing down. (There’s a turn up ahead.)

  Then something completely improbable happens. Someone’s shadow intercepts him. I couldn’t figure out who it was at first, a woman or a man. And when I saw that it was a woman, I thought, Could it be my Tamara? Did Tamara pick up my hint?

  My heart started pounding, thinking about Tamara.

  But how could it be Tamara, when she was in the shower? Of course it wasn’t her!

  Then something even stranger happened—the car stopped. And others behind it. The whole cortege. And then the strangest thing of all: he got out.

  The door opened, and he got out!

  It was the sixth of June, 1997.

  * * *

  He stood about ten paces from me, and that woman was standing there too—about fifteen paces away!

  Pretty unbelievable, but that’s how it was. He got out of the car and went up to her!

  And all his minions started to get out of their cars and go up to the woman in solidarity with him.

  The mayor! He got out too!

  And Chubais!

  What, you don’t know Chubais? I’m not supposed to think about him. But how can I forget him? How can I forget?

  And bystanders who just happened to be there, they started to go up closer to him too, and I went with them … Without thinking about it, along with them, step by step—closer and closer—to him!

  It was like the way it used to be, before!

  In the old days, when he—it happened a few times, actually—mingled with the people! At a factory, in the market, on the street, somewhere else …

  He mingled boldly with the people.

  * * *

  I heard—we all heard—their conversation.

  A woman of about forty. She stopped the presidential cortege. You’re not going to believe this, but she talked about conditions in the libraries.

  She said: There are big problems with the libraries, I’m a teacher, I teach Russian literature and language, and I know very well how matters stand, Boris Nikolaevich. And what’s more, Boris Nikolaevich, librarians and teachers, not to mention doctors in the polyclinics, have very low wages.

  And he answered her: That’s not right, we have to fix this.

  And his assistant said: We’ll definitely fix the problem, Boris Nikolaevich.

  And I thought: Where’s my gun?

  I didn’t have my gun with me!

  And suddenly she tells him who she is: My name is Galina Aleksandrovna, I live on 9–11 Maklina Street in a room that I share with my grown boy … The building is in terrible shape, I live in a communal apartment …

  And he tells her: We’ll give you a new home.

  And the assistant tells her: We’ll take care of everything.

  And this was all happening right in front of me! I was there! And I didn’t have my gun!

  * * *

  Other people also started to ask him things, but they were more vague and confused. He wasn’t interested in them.

  I wanted to ask him something too: Boris Nikolaevich, is it true you’re going to the ballet tonight? (Or the opera?) I still hadn’t lost hope. But just then a broad back blocked me off from the president.

  But even if I had asked, they wouldn’t have told me a thing.

  * * *

  The investigator, by the way, was kind enough to show me a newspaper: Yeltsin, it turned out, laid a wreath at the Pushkin monument on that day.

  * * *

  Then the president put his heavy body back in the car. And all his minions and assistants ran to get into their cars. And the whole cortege started to move, and turned from Moskovsky onto Fontanka.

  The teacher stood there and watched them drive off. Journalists from the president’s press corps surrounded her. A lieutenantcolonel asked us to clear the road.

  Soon the traffic was moving again on Moskovsky.

  And I snapped out of it.

  * * *

  I stood under the traffic light in my slippers and thought that fate would never give me another chance like that. Why hadn’t I broken down the bathroom door? But could I really have guessed that something like that would happen, and that he would get out of his armored car?

  I could have! I could have foreseen it!

  Coulda shoulda woulda.

  I saw myself shooting the president. I saw him fall. I saw the expressions of shock on the faces of the bystanders who couldn’t believe they were freed from the tyrant.

  I could even have saved myself. That wasn’t my aim, but I could have dropped the gun and run into a back alley to escape.

  I could just see myself running into the courtyard at number 18 and crossing it. The ones who were smart and alert would race after me, then think, What kind of an idiot is this? There’s a dead end there …

  Me, an idiot? No, you’re the idiots! How about the passage on the left? There’s a pretty wide opening between the blind wall and the corner of a five-story building. So I run past the poplar that they hadn’t cut down yet, and I head left, and now I’m already in an oblong courtyard that doesn’t have a single entrance into the building, not counting the doors to the former dry cleaners …

  How’s about that, eh? There are two ways out of here—through the courtyard at 110 Fontanka, or through the courtyard at 108 Fontanka, past the concrete ruins of an ancient outdoor bathroom. Better through 108. No one is expecting me on Fontanka! Or I could race up the stairs to the roof, it’s amazing to walk on the roofs here! You can make your way all the way to the Tekhnologichesky Institute metro stop climbing from roof to roof. Or I could scramble up a blind brick wall, that’s an idea, onto the sloping roof of a structure they added on to the veteran’s hospital … Through the hospital grounds I could get to the passage leading to the Vvedensky Canal real fast. Or over the fence—to Zagorodny Prospect, from the other side of the block.

  I could easily get away.

  Or I could stay. I could give myself up. I could say: Russia, you’re saved!

  Oh, they’d erect a monument to me! Right there in the park across from Tamara’s building. Right next to the marble milestone, nineteenth century, by the architect Rinaldi.

  Only I don’t need a monument. And I don’t need a memorial plaque on Tamara’s apartment building.

  You don’t know how much I loved Tamara!

  You can’t imagine how much I hated Yeltsin!

  * * *

  And I missed my chance. I wandered through the city, over to Haymarket, then along Gorokhovaya Street. When I was crossing the wooden Gorstkin Bridge, I wanted to drown myself in the filthy waters of the Fontanka. Wooden posts poked out of the water every which way (they guard against the spring ice floes); I looked at them and wondered how I could go on in this life.

  I should have drowned myself! It would have been much better.

  I don’t remember where else I went, I don’t remember what I was thinking exactly. I don’t even remember whether I stopped into that lowlife pub on Zagorodny. The investigation proved I was sober. But I felt like I was out of my mind.

  One thing I know for sure: I’ll never forgive myself.

  * * *

  It doesn’t get dark at night in June in this city, but I felt like it was dark, or maybe it was just my eyes that made everything that way. I remember that I came home. I remember that Tamara was watching TV. I didn’t want her to hear the shot, I wanted to shoot myself in the courtyard. I went into the bathroom, took the gun, loaded it. I hid it under the belt of my pants. I stared at myself in the mirror.

  My face looked horrible. When I shoot myself it will look still worse.

  I decided not to say goodbye to her. And then she came out of the kitchen, where she was watching TV, and that’s when she said it to me.

  She said it to me.

  She said: Where were you? You missed it all. Do you know what happened? You won’t believe it, it’s all over the news! Guess what happened today right under our window! A teacher stopped Yeltsin’s car! She lives in a s
ingle room with her grown-up son, and Yeltsin promised to give her a new home!

  I froze.

  You all keep giving Yeltsin hell, Tamara said, and he promised to give her a new home.

  Fool! Fool! Fool! I shouted.

  And I shot her five times.

  * * *

  I didn’t try to hide anything, and during the first interrogation I admitted that I wanted to kill Yeltsin.

  They took me away somewhere. I was questioned by highranking officials. I told them about the gun, about the pipes in the bathroom. I named all the names, because they thought that I killed an accomplice. Gosha, Arthur, Grigorian, Ulidov, some Vanyusha, Kuropatkin, and seven more … plus the writer guy with the beard.

  Only Yemelianych I didn’t give away. And the organization behind him.

  At first they didn’t believe me that I acted alone, and then they stopped believing anything at all.

  Weird. They could have believed me. Back then they were uncovering assassination plots right and left. The security service reported it. Even before me, I remember, they uncovered a gang from the Caucasus. They took them right from the train in Sochi before they could get to Moscow. One potential killer hid in some attic in Moscow, he had a knife with him—he confessed during the investigation. I don’t know what ever happened to him. They wrote about it in the papers. It was on the radio.

  But about me there was nothing. Not a word.

  Everyone heard about the teacher, Galina Aleksandrovna, who lived on Maklina Street and stopped Yeltsin’s car on Moskovsky Prospect. But about me, nothing. Not a word.

  I still don’t know for which African country Yemelianych fulfilled his international duty.

  Professor G.Y. Mokhnaty, MD, respected me. He treated me well. But it wasn’t easy, I kept thinking about a lot of things.

  He recommended that I just forget about those years.

  * * *

  I live in Vsevolozhsk with my disabled father, whose second wife died. I have a father. He’s an invalid.

  Sometimes we play Scrabble. My father can hardly walk, but his memory is as good as mine.

  This is the first visit I’ve made to St. Petersburg in a long time. I’m not supposed to be here. They recommended that I not come here anymore.

  I regret that everything happened like it did. I didn’t want to kill her. It’s all my fault.

  But how can I explain to anyone how much I really loved Tamara? If you’ve loved someone even a little bit you’ll understand. She had so many good qualities. I didn’t want to. But it was her too. She shouldn’t have. Why did she? To say something like that with all her good qualities! You can’t be such a complete fool. You can’t. Fool! A complete fool! Fool, fool, I tell you!

  WAKE UP, YOU’RE A DEAD MAN NOW

  BY VADIM LEVENTAL

  New Holland

  Translated by Ronald Meyer

  Everything finally started coming together when I was walking across the Lieutenant Schmidt Bridge. In a word, I was pretending that my nose itched, but I was actually sniffing my fingers (sometimes you happen to suddenly sense a forgotten smell so clearly that it’s as though it’s not a matter of memory, but rather that those same molecules suddenly landed on your snotty nose)—and then my phone rang.

  It was raining buckets, the zipper on my jacket got stuck, no choice but to hold the umbrella under my arm and hunch over so I could undo my jacket and get my phone from the inside pocket, and so I pushed the button like a spastic, pressed the phone up to my ear, and heard Stepanych say, “What’s new?”

  I told him there was nothing new. He mumbled a few more words to the effect that nothing much was new with him either, that something’s moving along, but so far nothing definite. Then he asked: “Did you tell anybody?”

  I said no, and Stepanych hung up with the words, “Well, make it there then.”

  I put the phone back in my pocket, pulled up the zipper with a jerk, and walked on, cursing under my breath. The wind was blowing rain under the umbrella, the vans rumbling over the metal joints of the bridge splashed arcs of water in their wake, and I took an envious look at the enormous white ocean liner that had arrived from God knows which country, where they certainly didn’t have anything like this horrid weather—but that wasn’t the point really; I’d forgotten the smell. It had been erased from my memory, all that was left was cold logic: a young boy, who had caught the scent of his first girl on his fingers, had walked across this very bridge, moving away from her sweet, almost childlike face—but the particulars of that indistinguishable face disappeared as quickly as the seventeen years in three steps.

  Therefore, it wasn’t just the rain that put me in a rotten mood. I needed to find shelter for a bit, but there wasn’t any place in this damned part of the city—an eternity passed before I happened upon some door: turned out to be a nightclub. It wasn’t anything special. It wasn’t busy yet, so I took a seat at the bar and waited for a chance to order something: the girl behind the bar (whose face would have been cute without that spur-of-the-moment piercing) was talking away with her girlfriend across the counter. I couldn’t see the girlfriend very well—the way the bar was constructed blocked my view. I waited and waited, and then I lost my patience and grumbled something rather sharply, and then the girl reluctantly turned in my direction, while her girlfriend leaned over to get a look at me.

  A minute later, with a glass in my hand, I was already thinking what I should say—I wanted her to lean over again, I didn’t get a good look the first time. But I couldn’t come up with anything better than to ask: “Why Toasted?”

  “What?”

  “Why is it called Toasted? What, do you eat toast here?”

  The girl behind the bar looked ironically in the direction of her interlocutor and turned her back to me: from the twinkling darkness, rumpled hundred-ruble bills stretched in her direction demandingly.

  “There are two types of people,” her girlfriend leaned over once more to make certain that I was listening, and once more I didn’t manage to get a good look at her, “some ask whether we eat toast here, and the others what we toast to.”

  She then walked off in the direction of the stage and flew up there like she owned it, though I didn’t have a chance to be surprised—my phone started ringing, not the one in my jacket, but the one in my jeans, and that meant that it was time. I quickly said where to wait for me, drank down my bourbon in a single gulp, and walked outside; the girl was settling in behind the keyboard, I managed to hear her begin to finger the keys as I fiddled with my umbrella: it seems the rain was pouring down even harder.

  And here was my single error in all of this: I had managed to forget that in Piter the way from point A to point B is never the same as from B to A, and I ended up on the cheerless, narrow embankment a good deal earlier that I needed to. I took shelter in the doorway—it smelled, as it always does, but when you smoke it’s not so noticeable. I smoked a couple of cigarettes, pacing back and forth from an ink-black corner on one side to the corner on the other side, which was a blackish brown in the flickering streetlight in the courtyard, until the phone in my jeans started vibrating.

  “Well, I’m standing across from a big archway.” I told him that he needed to drive slowly around New Holland.

  “New Holland? What’s that?”

  I explained that the dark patch to his right was New Holland; that seemed to make him happy.

  “And so where are you then?”

  His car whizzed by a couple of times; the headlights picked out the fish eyes of the puddles and the wet tentacles of the bushes on the other side of the ditch—he wasn’t being tailed. The third time I stepped out from my cover in advance and, after opening my umbrella with a loud smack, I walked over to his vehicle—turned out he has a Lexus. The guy was uncommonly sociable and seemed pleased with life.

  “Why sit in the back? Want to come up front?”

  I declined.

  “Where are we going? Want to stay here for a bit? Or drive around? Go figure, I�
�ve been living in this city for twenty years and didn’t know it was called New Holland.”

  The man was impeccable—suit, leather seats, and chocolate laced with cocaine. He even had a business card: Financial Analyst. I chuckled when he held it out to me.

  “Basically, as far as your situation goes …” He somewhat cheerfully but with a great deal of confusion started to explain about my situation, who he called and who he talked to; I didn’t know any of the names. “To be honest, they laughed at me when I told them. Like, Do you need Gazprom too? and so on. And I started to have doubts myself, like maybe it was a practical joke or something.” He kept glancing in the rearview mirror, trying to get a good look at me, but I knew where to sit. “Basically, there was a call this morning. They said that maybe there is something, but, like, they want to hear something definite and so on and so forth. Andrei Petrovich—does the name mean anything to you? Me neither. He said he was Andrei Petrovich. Basically, the way it’s going to work …” He started to explain with visible pleasure how much money he wanted.

  Through the tinted window you could only see the pale corners wrapped in a gloomy shroud—streetlights, windows, stop signals—whirling, turning, turning—and I thought that’s how the pale luster of stolen gold (you know, the gold is always stolen) would look from the porthole of a submarine gliding along the bottom of the sea.