St. Petersburg Noir

by Natalia Smirnova

  I’d ended up at the station, where I met the homeless guy, out of stupidity. Not only did I have no reason to leave Petersburg, I didn’t really have anywhere to go, I had next to no money, my mother in Gatchina wouldn’t let me cross the threshold, and in the last year my buddies had become few and far between. Habit kicked in—hit the station and get out of town—but now things were different, and all I needed was to crash for a few days, keep an eye on the apartment from a safe distance, and somehow get to my kitchen. I was sitting in the station snack bar pecking at a cold omelet with my fork when this guy in a camouflage jacket sat down at my table and asked me to treat him to a drink—preferably two. I bought us each a shot of vodka and shared my omelet with him, and at that my change ran out, and my only thousand left in my wallet I’d stashed safely away that morning, for a rainy day. That shot got the man so muddled that he started calling me Stasik, grabbing my sleeve with his calloused paw, and dropping his face in his hand with a mournful look. This last part I understand, actually—I myself might as well have dropped my face in my hand, only I would’ve had to have drunk ten times as much.

  I glanced at him and thought about the cops at my place on Lanskaya. It could be the people I worked for a year ago, for a whole winter, and in the spring I said I was tired and jumped ship. I cracked four safes for them like Easter eggs. The last job was a surgeon, a collector of precious stones, that was quite a haul, but they held back my cut, said I’d done messy work at the jewelry shop, botched it, and they’d had to pay off some people. Perhaps my accomplices came to Lanskaya, deciding that if I hadn’t worked for a whole year I’d stashed away a tidy sum, and if they cleaned me out I’d come crawling to them faster for a new assignment. In retrospect, they must’ve worked Anta over a long time ago. In the fall I’d noticed her asking incoherent questions, looking around furtively, and basically acting like an Estonian washerwoman. Of course, she’d searched the place long before—the pig with the white face rooted up the whole place—but I let it go, deciding I wasn’t giving her enough to cover expenses, and started giving her more.

  Anta was a minor pawn at the consulate, one step above cleaning lady, but she knew how to parlay her sweet diplomatic butt, which she brought to work by noon, carrying her office shoes in a paper bag. Anta did have kind of a big butt, but her legs were made for basketball, they went on forever.

  Skirting the boat, I saw a tree trunk to port that had one end resting on a stack of icy debris and the other on the iron railings. There was also a line of six small portholes to port, sealed tight, and there were old tires strung on a rope along the side. I grabbed onto one as I was pulling myself toward the railings, but it slipped out of my hands and I nearly collapsed back on the ice. I climbed on deck, sat on a coiled towline, and put on my boots, though they slid on the iron like skis down a mountain slope. There was a gaping black hole where the wheel had been, and the searchlight looked like a tin can—though a Chinese alarm clock jutted out of the compass niche, probably left by the previous lodger.

  I couldn’t open the door to the deckhouse, I just smashed my fingers for nothing, not that there was anything to do there—the glass had been shattered and inside was a slab of gray ice. I lit one of my last two cigarettes, and standing at the stern surveyed the shore. Far off, to starboard, loomed Krestovsky Island, looking like the face of a sperm whale; straight ahead was Elagin, black; and from the park past Drunk Harbor I could hear the lively metallic voice of a carousel.

  While I was scoping out my new quarters, the wind died down and wet snow started to fall, more like rain. My fleece soaked straight through and became heavy, like a greatcoat; I’d put it on in the morning so I wouldn’t look like a bum at my meeting with the passport dealer, and now I regretted not choosing something sturdier. Remembering the bum had said something about a cabin, I threw my cigarette overboard, walked across the deck, and discovered, next to the capstan, a hinged hatch on three busted bolts, and an iron rod stuck between the hatch and deck to keep it from slamming shut.

  I dropped into the hold and saw a basket of firewood on the table in the galley and an army stove squeezed into the cabin, and I burst out laughing. I’d had the exact same stove, loud and stinky, in my tent during muster outside Lisy Nos in the late ’90s, when I was a reserve captain, not a thief. I found a stack of greasy girly magazines in the cabin, lit the iron stove, though not easily, shed my coat, and covered up head to toe with a prickly blanket, thinking about how if anyone pulled out the rod, for laughs, say, the hatch would shut and they’d be carrying me out in a tin box. Then I thought that it really didn’t matter, was surprised at the thought, and conked out till morning.

  * * *

  I was able to shave in front of a shard of mirror attached to the galley wall, a rusty Gillette blade with dried foam lay in the soap dish, and when I saw it I remembered my train station friend repeating, stammering insistently, “Shave before you go to the datsan, you’ve got to look neat, not down and out.” The morning was chilly and dry, the gray ice sparkled in the sun, and about ten paces from the boat there was a black hole in the ice, like a mercury puddle, left by fisherman, and poking up around the hole were stakes with a metal net stretched between them. Ducks, half-crazed for lack of food, were jostling by the hole, trying to stick their beaks through the net, and I rejoiced to think maybe a box of fish had been left there. It would be nice to fry up a couple of whitefish for breakfast, I’d seen a bottle of congealed oil in the cockpit and an iron skillet.

  It was odd, I was two steps from Primorsky Avenue but I felt like a shipwreck survivor cast on a deserted shore. I found a pot in the galley and dropped a pipe down to the ice and walked over to the hole for water and someone else’s catch. The spiky net had been dropped deep into the hole—hell if I knew why, maybe so the edges wouldn’t cover over; I don’t know, I never liked fishing. I tried to pull out the wire, but it was frozen solid to the thick ragged edges, so I knelt down, leaned over the hole, and jumped straight back. Looking up at me was a man’s face, his mouth spread in a smile, dark river water in his eyes.

  I pulled out one of the stakes, perched on the edge of the hole, and armed with it, like a boathook, I snatched the scarf off the wire and tried to push the dead man back under the ice. If he’d floated here from Drunk Harbor, the current might carry the drowned man farther, toward Krestovsky Island, and the cops could fish him out there, at the Chernaya River. The scarf unwound and was left hanging on the wire net, but the body bumped into the icy edges and floated meekly onward, trailing light hair, like wet yarn. He was wearing an expensive jacket, which meant whoever’d thrown him into the water wasn’t a thief, a local showdown most likely, the Lakhtas against the Olginos. That was how I was going to float if I fell into my former companions’ hands, only I didn’t have a scarf and had nothing to snag, I’d float off leaving nothing behind.

  I didn’t feel like collecting water in that hole, so on my way I filled the pot with dirty snow and put it on the stove, which heated up amazingly fast. I’d picked up a piece of wood before climbing aboard, used it to replace the iron rod keeping the hatch from slamming shut, and stuck the rod under the folding cot because somehow my quarters didn’t seem quite as peaceful to me as they had the night before. My breakfast of cheese, smelly after sitting overnight, and stale bread didn’t exactly thrill me, so I decided to try the conductor’s joint, which turned out to be so strong I didn’t wake up until dusk, and then not on my own but because someone was tugging at my shoulder.

  Half-asleep but snapping to, I pushed the uninvited guest away, dropped my feet from the cot, rummaged on the floor for my rod, and only then unglued my eyes and took a good look at the guy, who seemed large and saggy in the dim light leaking through the open hatch.

  “Why’d you do that?” the person said in a reedy eunuch voice. “Are you shitfaced? Put down the stick, Luka, or you’ll kill me by accident.”

  “I won’t kill you,” I said when I was fully awake. “Where the fuck did you come from?”


  “Have a drink?” The person reached for something, making me jump up, but just pulled out a bottle of vodka, waving it in peace and hiding it away again.

  “Why don’t you come out and we’ll talk on deck?”

  The person wheezed and climbed up clumsily, and his coat was too long so the hem kept catching on the narrow, corrugated steps. When he reached the top of the stairs, the stranger swiveled around, gathered up his hem, and sat at the edge of the hatch, placing his feet firmly on the last step. Now I could see his eyes—long and a little puffy. His hair was gathered under a wide fur hat, but by now I’d realized he was a woman and relaxed. After I’d climbed two steps I caught her smell, sharp, lemony, a little like the furniture polish my Latvian used. Polishing furniture and combing her hair, those were the two things she could do from morning till night, humming her monotonous “Kas to teica, tas meloja.”

  “My feet got soaked getting here—what did you do with the logs? Use them up for heat? I have to dry my boots now!” My visitor swung her feet in front of my face, leaned over, took a good look, and gasped.

  “Holy moley! Who are you, muzhik? And where’s Luka?”

  “Gone. I live here now,” I said cautiously, holding onto her boot tops so I could pull the woman down in case she had a mind to do something foolish like slam the hatch. But the beggar’s girlfriend never even thought to be nervous, she just went silent briefly, then got out her lighter and shined it in her face.

  “Let me in and get warm. I’m pretty. I can’t go back to Primorsky with wet feet. I’ve got a bottle!” She pulled her present out of her shirt and licked her lips. Her mouth was conspicuous, with bright turned-out lips, a working mouth.

  “I’ve got my own bottle.” I hopped back into the hold, signaling for her to come down. “Be sure you close the hatch carefully, you’ve got to slip that branch in there.”

  “I know,” she responded gaily. “It’s not my first time. Are you going to be here now instead of Luka? That bastard didn’t say a word to me. He and I agreed on noon, but I got held up at the datsan, they had Sagaalgan there at dawn and fed everyone pot cheese and sour cream and afterward my girlfriend and I stayed to clean up. I even put on my nice dress and got all dirty with ashes!”

  “Why do you go to the datsan? Are you a Buryat or something?” I tossed some twigs in the stove, the fire came up and started hissing, and the woman laughed and began undressing. The smell of lemon polish got noticeably stronger. She disrobed silently and efficiently, shaking out her hair—she turned out to have quite a lot of hair, a whole heap of it, I can’t imagine how she tucked it all under her cap. The Buryat turned out to be naked under her dress, no underwear, the ashen fur on her pubis reminded me of a crow’s nest. Tossing her rags on the other cot, she climbed under the quilted blanket and crooked her finger at me.

  “Let’s do it quick, Luka, climb on in, I missed you. It’s putting out so much heat I don’t feel the cold!”

  “Woman, have you gone blind or something? I told you, he’s left, gone.”

  “That means you’ll be Luka now.” She pulled the blanket down so I could get a glimpse of her breasts, which looked like two cantaloupes, and her taut belly with a tattoo, but there wasn’t enough light and I couldn’t make out the drawing. “Come here. The other one, the one before, he had another name too, only I didn’t ask.”

  * * *

  The cantaloupes, when squeezed, turned out to be overripe, and the Buryat’s uncombed hair kept getting in my mouth, making me spit. The woman was at least forty, and she creaked and tossed and turned like a millstone—two days before I would’ve thrown something like that out of my bed, but now I couldn’t be choosy. Not only that, she had nothing against smoking a joint and even showed me how to make a pipe if I ran out of cigs but had a ballpoint pen. Toward morning, having smoked up all the grass, I told the Buryat about the dead man in the hole, and right then, at last, she surprised me.

  “You mean you left him floating?” She got up with a jerk and sat down at the foot of the cot we’d fallen off long before; we were now lying on our spread coats. “Drag him out and bury him! Luka used to do that—did you see the ash crosses on shore? That’s where he did it.”

  “Go to hell.” All of a sudden I felt cold and I got up to bring in firewood from the galley. “Am I your local gravedigger? He’s clearly been floating a long time, this corpse. Where do they come from, Drunk Harbor or something?”

  “I don’t know where,” my guest said sullenly. “I know it’s often. You have to bury them.”

  She stood up and started collecting her rags, muttering something under her breath. I got dressed too, took my heatwarped boots off the stove, and struggled to pull them on. We climbed on deck and the wind off the gulf struck us in the face. The snow slurry hanging in the air was so solid that at first I took it for snatches of fog that obscured the shoreline, but it plastered my face and hair, and very quickly I was having a hard time breathing.

  The Buryat wouldn’t go down by the pipe, she climbed over the railing near the radio cabin, sat on the edge of the boat, lowered her feet to the guardrail, swiveled around familiarly, stood on a tire, and hopped down to the ice, holding onto the line. I followed her, trying to repeat her movements, but the hem of my coat caught on a rusty plate and I went flying, the ice cracking underneath me. The blow killed my buzz immediately: I felt as naked as a dog, my coat was soaked, and my back under it was instantly covered in gooseflesh. The woman was walking so fast that by the time I got up and shook myself off she was already at the hole and standing there, bent over the wire net, from a distance resembling a fisherman in her stupid fur hat.

  “Luka!” she shouted, waving the yellow scarf at me. “He’s here! Come on …”

  I couldn’t make anything out after that, her voice drowned in the viscous snow, which blocked up my ears and nostrils. When I reached the hole I knelt and saw that smooth face hanging in the water. There was no hair on his head, which meant it had been a wig and the current had carried it away. I remember I also thought that the drowned man had been hiding from someone too, poor devil. He never did find his boat.

  There was nothing to grab onto. He had lost his jacket, and the sweater I tried to grab with two stakes, like a two-tined fork, immediately disintegrated into rot, revealing the dead man’s hairless, puffy, baby-doll chest. We messed around for half an hour or so, and in that time the body went under the ice a few more times, slipping from view, but by some miracle came back. Finally I made a noose out of the scarf, caught the dead man’s head in it, and dragged the body onto the ice, nearly breaking his neck.

  At dawn the wind died down and the shore was again marked by an even line, with a black, shaggy chaff of barberry and alder, and between the bushes I made out a few crosses, which from a distance looked like a pet cemetery. We dragged the dead man on shore and dug a shallow grave—just in the top layer of snow because it made no sense to try to dig the frozen ground. His face was clean, the fish hadn’t yet touched it, and the Buryat tried to shut his eyes but his lids popped back stiffly. I threw snow over the body and poked a cross tied with the yellow scarf into the drift.

  In the cockpit even the walls were covered with hoarfrost, and there was an old burnt smell coming from the stove. I had to find firewood to dry our clothes, but I was so wrung-out that I picked up the boathook and made splinters of the plank partition separating the galley from the cabin.

  The woman gathered the pieces, deftly heated the stove, stripped naked, pulled an opened bottle of vodka from a recess, sprawled on my cot to get warm, and immediately fell asleep. I stuffed stale bread into my mouth, grabbed her fur cap for camouflage, and went to town as I was, in my wet coat. I didn’t feel like kicking the Buryat out, and sleeping with her was rough going: in the light of day I got a good look at her worn face and flat cheekbones and the two scars that slashed her cheek crosswise.

  * * *

  No sooner had I emerged onto Primorsky Avenue than my morning troubles dissipated, and wh
en I got to the metro I caught myself thinking that I was rejoicing at the sullen stream of underground people I used to pick my way through, choking on longing and stench—though this happened no more than a couple of times a month, when the city was stuck in a traffic jam and I was late. I bought a hot dog and scarfed it down without leaving the stand, and then I bought another and finished it in the train car, dripping grease on my coat, and then accidentally saw myself in a darkened window and laughed: I looked like a beggar despite my clean-shaven face.

  Fine. The worse, the better.

  Emerging at my station, I circled around along Torzhkovskaya so as to approach the building from the other side, loitered on the square, slipped into the school, went up to the fourth floor, and checked out my windows. The kitchen window was open, the same as two days before, and the green curtain was flapping in the breeze at the sill, which meant Anta had not returned—she couldn’t stand drafts. I went down to the school cafeteria, stopped a kid of about thirteen at a table of trays, slipped him a hundred, and promised him two more, since that was all I had. The schoolkid wrote down the apartment number on his grimy wrist and ran over to my building, and I followed him, pulling the cap lower over my eyes.

  After standing by the front door for a few minutes, I went in after the kid, heard him ringing at the apartment and kicking the door, as he’d been told, and then talking with the neighbor who came out to see what all the noise was about. The kid came down, extended his hand for the money without a word, and flew out like a shot, apparently because I looked pretty shady. It was cold in the apartment, like outside, and there was a puddle on the floor where water had come in from the windowsill. The furniture was turned over, the chairs thrown around, books and clothes piled in a heap in the middle of the living room—a search is a search. The whole kitchen was sprinkled with broken glass, like tooth powder, and the Latvian’s torn bra was on the table, her panties nowhere in sight—either they’d managed to have a good time with Anta, holding her blond head to the table, or else they’d just undressed her to scare her, it didn’t matter now.