by Julia Goumen
“You thought that you were hunting me, but I’ve backed you into a corner, Stepanych. And the papers are in the Moika. The documents are gone.”
Stepanych shouted for me to stop jerking him around, that I was a dead man, that I should tell him where the documents were, and that he was going to fuck me up good.
“Wake up, Stepanych,” I managed to say to him before I closed my eyes, signaling to Nadya, who was standing in the doorway, and she, as pale as a white bathroom tile, pressed the trigger and a shot rang out. “Wake up, you’re a dead man now.”
Laughing, I rolled out from under Stepanych, who was falling on top of me.
~ * ~
IV
I was getting ready to ask Nadya to leave with me, not knowing whether she would agree or not, but now she didn’t have a choice: I calmed her down with cognac and handed her the passport. She opened it and looked at her photograph.
“Isolde?”
“Don’t you like it?”
“It’s not that... Will they come looking for us?”
“Yes. But they won’t find us.”
“I just wanted a look, I was curious. Was it very expensive?”
“A passport is just a piece of paper. Passports aren’t expensive, people’s trust is.”
We were sitting in the kitchen on the windowsill, the city was emerging from darkness, and you could see that overnight yellow fluff had covered the lindens in the Rumyantsev Garden. The first cars were streaming along the embankment: it was time. Nadya took a look at the tickets.
“I’ve never been to Sweden. And where do we go afterward?”
“Lisbon,” I joked.
“Why?”
“You must remember this ... ” I sang. She took up the melody and sang it almost in a whisper, while I put our things in the backpack.
It was icy and clear outside. Somewhere high up you could see white archipelagos of clouds against the blue ocean of the sky, and right overhead, just barely clearing the roofs of the houses, flocks of large grayish fish floated westward. We walked to the embankment and down to the water by the Krusenstern monument— I threw the package with the pistol and phone into the water. As we were climbing the stairs back up, I gasped in surprise—a hunchbacked old woman with a three-corned kerchief on her head was shuffling along the embankment, and when she turned to get a look at us, I saw her kind, round face and her big plastic-framed glasses. She was simply an old woman, she was feasting her eyes on us. Holding hands, we ran across the street and hailed a car to take us to the sea terminal. The radio was on in the car, and the news was about “the branch of a large company, whose owner three weeks ago . . .”—the yokel switched stations.
As we made our way—registration, passport control, security— to our cabin, exhaustion was transformed into a light emptiness in my head, I finally had a drink, we undressed and crawled into bed. I kissed her and embraced her; she resisted until the last and became tender only when there was no place left to go. Then she embraced me—the way you embrace a beloved being.
<>
~ * ~
THE WITCHING HOUR
by Alexander Kudriavtsev
Dostoevsky Museum
Translated by Marian Schwartz
T hey sussed him out immediately.
The slutty mermaid by the bar gave him a lurid smile. The dark, bony vamp “accidentally” brushed her bare shoulder against him when she passed. Two underage Barbies drilled their gaze into him. The bitches could smell the aroma of large round numbers at a distance. Whoever said money had no scent?
He nonchalantly loosened the neck of his Dolce & Gabbana and looked around.
No, this was all wrong. Your typical club lemmings who inhabit the institutions of the night and sleep it off by day in their office cubicles. What a drag.
Although ... his gaze latched onto a figure dancing madly in the crashing, colorful gloom. The tall bitch was swinging her mane and slithering to the music like liquid flame. He examined her round ass, narrow waist, and high breasts with approval. When she emerged from the crowd, he walked up and asked for a light.
“Have a light!” She grinned, holding out a lock of her tousled hair. A rough voice, as if she had cigarette smoke in her throat.
He smiled. “I’m afraid of burning myself.”
Her ruffled, bright red hair really did remind him of a bonfire.
“My name is Anatoly.”
“Zlata.” She offered a curtsey.
“You’ll have a drink with me,” he said assertively, and he ordered two daiquiris from the bartender. “I love this swill,” Anatoly added to get the conversation going.
Zlata squinted her eyes, which held a hint of green, and sloshed her glass with a chuckle.
Up and down.
Puffy lips and fat straw.
Up and down.
Anatoly swallowed and nearly choked.
“Did you know that daiquiris are the preferred drink of Havana whores?” she shouted over the club’s din, but the hammers in Anatoly’s ears were drumming too loud.
“What?”
She repeated herself. Her hot mouth was now next to his ear. He tried to feel up her bare knee, but she flicked the impertinent hand away.
Anatoly stared blankly at his glass of yellow liquid. She bubbled with laughter; in the chic ultraviolet, her teeth were blue pearls.
He felt like hitting her in the face till she bled. She was laughing at him. Him! This close to becoming a deputy in the city parliament! A year away from becoming the second capital’s deputy governor! Yeah, he could always make a call for a girl.
They’d come. The best were from the massage parlors. Black, white, yellow. Thin, fat, pregnant, whatever. And for free. Hadn’t he once provided them with protection? Just let them whine ... But that was low-hanging fruit. It didn’t hang any lower ... It was interesting to toy with them, track them down, a trap here, a trap there, bring them to bay, attack ... Now that was a hunt. The cleverer the beast, the sweeter the victory.
Caveman was sweating and grinning. She looked at his large head, meaty ears and cheeks, and red neck—Nozdrev’s spitting image. They were all alike there at the feeding trough: the Russian power breed. An oily little smile and a dash of money grease in his voice.
“This little skirt of yours ... I adore minis,” he said, making eye contact.
“And I don’t,” she replied. “You know when women’s dresses started getting shorter? After World War I. After all that lead decimated the supply of men, there was competition for the ones left over. Miniskirts were invented after World War II. There’s a man’s death in every millimeter of bared female leg.”
“Gothic,” Anatoly attempted to recall the young people’s slang.
“No. But I know where it really is gothic.” She held out a shiny key.
“What’s this?”
“Have you heard, the Dostoevsky Museum opened an offsite exhibit?”
“A museum?” Anatoly felt himself tuning out.
“An offsite exhibit from the torture chamber”—she smiled broadly—”like at the Peter and Paul Fortress, only more naturalistic. I lead tours there, and the guard is my good friend. Sometimes I get the keys from him for the night. When I really want to let my feelings go”—Zlata shot a glance at him and gazed down—”and my body.”
The bitch was a little twisted. All the better. They say redheads are hurricanes in bed. We’ll just see about that today ... He thought it over briefly and beamed the best smile in his collection.
“I have an idea!” he said, a little too enthusiastically.
“I’m listening.”
“I’m inviting you to dinner. Dinner in a torture chamber. Sound good?” He snuck a glance at himself in the mirror and was satisfied. “You provide the key. I’ll take care of the rest. . .”
She hesitated a moment before answering.
“What are you blushing about?” he cackled.
“Fact: redheads blush very easily.”
Anatoly had a hard ti
me restraining the urge to lunge and throw her down right on the table, sweep the glasses aside with a crash, and ... Settle down ... What’s that the Arabs say? Anticipation whets the appetite.
She finally nodded. “Okay.”
~ * ~
A gold-toothed Tajik in a rusty Lada 6 picked them up and drove them down Petersburg’s deserted night roads. Anatoly couldn’t take his eyes off her, while Zlata gazed out the window at the under-lit hulks of the old buildings flashing by and smiled at something.
“Charming little spot!” he said when the metal lock clanged behind him. Swaying, he walked through the narrow slit of a door. “What stinks?”
“Ethyl alcohol. The very impressionable start feeling bad and they have to be brought out of their Turgenevan faint. A little alcohol-soaked cotton wool under their nose—and they’re good.”
The museum lobby greeted them with an enormous plaster executioner with a beard. An ax gleamed in the hands of the red-smocked man. Anatoly playfully touched the steel with his finger. Dull.
Zlata flipped the switch in the first hall. A thin yellow light bathed the predatory exhibits, which had frozen piranha-like behind the display glass. Anatoly thought some of them may even have stirred impatiently. He felt a chill, ran his palm across his forehead, and burst out laughing.
“Hello!” Anatoly amiably flicked the nose of a mannequin nicely set on a spike and spotted with stage blood. It didn’t answer, and Anatoly laughed even louder. His head was spinning pleasantly from the adventure and the daiquiris.
“Where’s our food?” She walked over to a prep table where a broad hatchet had been wedged in a corner. “I propose we raise our glasses.”
“You really are something!” Anatoly gave her a slap on her rear and immediately received a jab in the chest in return.
“Remember your manners, boy.”
“Of course, of course!”
He raised his hands in jest and pulled out a flask he’d bought at the bar.
“Are we going to have a tour?” Anatoly winked, splashing them fresh drinks.
“All night long,” Zlata responded.
“It’s beautiful,” Anatoly clumsily changed tactics.
The young woman frowned. Zlata was getting noticeably drunk. It’s time, Anatoly thought, as he always did in these instances. I’ll lay her out right on this table, next to the shiny hatchet, and I’ll watch the nervy bitch squirm naked in the broad blade, bellowing with pleasure . . .
He had trouble pulling off the Hugo that crackled under his arms and tried to free the Versace over his tightly belted belly.
“Easy now, wild man.” She grinned. “Take your seat in the audience. Have you ever seen a striptease in a torture chamber?”
Anatoly jokingly folded his sweaty palms into a submissive stack on his chest.
“Oh no.” She wagged her finger at him and undid the top three buttons of his checked shirt. “That’s not how to get me off.”
“Then how?” Anatoly took a deep breath.
She pulled him by his tie toward the wooden beams.
“This hand here, this one here ... your head like this ... Fine ... ”
He was on his knees with his hands poking through the rough openings in the timber walls and his head held by the neck a lit-tie higher. His wrists were firmly gripped by thick leather straps.
“Begin!” Anatoly commanded.
She bit her lip and slowly freed her taut white breasts from her shirt. Her small pink nipples stared at Anatoly, making him moan in anticipation.
“See?” she said with a quick intake of breath, moving nearer.
“Yes ... ”
“Look closer,” she whispered in his ear. “This is the last time you’re ever going to see these tits. Or any others.”
Her knee crunched into the man’s jaw and his drunk vanished. A completely sober Anatoly understood. The torture chamber’s walls started closing in like a frightened sphincter, and the bloody tattooed mannequin opened its eyes, raised its head, and laughed a plastic chuckle. Anatoly spat out a tooth and shouted, and she immediately slapped tape across his smeared mouth.
Zlata glanced at the platinum face on his left wrist.
“It’s midnight, the witching hour! It’s time!” she proclaimed. She tore off his shirt and deftly lowered his trousers and boxers, turning his hairy butt toward the dim museum lamp. She examined her victim critically.
“Honored ladies and gentlemen!” she announced to the mannequins frozen in eternal convulsions at the back of the hall. “Witches and warlocks! Brothers and sisters! Before you is a fellow seeker of justice in the lynching court of Anatoly Nikolaevich Kvadrat. A leader in making campaign faces for his deputy portfolio, a model family man, yesterday’s athlete, today’s bard, blah blah blah. My God, how tedious! Much more interesting is his unofficial dossier and the way it stinks ... ” She gave a loud laugh. “We will accompany this with color illustrations. Especially since our ward, as his last wish, expressed an interest in a brief excursion into the history of executions and torture.”
The witch walked up to the display glass, which was crowded with exhibits that from a distance resembled a surgeon’s time-darkened instruments.
“Am I right, Tolya, that you left the Young Communist Workers to join the Democrats? An old dog doesn’t give up its bone easily, huh? You wouldn’t surrender your power just like that... Did the budget cut you out? Honestly, did it? I know it did . . .” She was concentrating on smearing a black marker across a small steel object that was quite frightening to Anatoly at the present moment.
“And so, the time has come to become acquainted with the first item in our exhibit.” She walked slowly toward the naked man. He made a muffled sound and shook his head.
“The brand! The prototype of the prison tattoo!” she exclaimed, and energetically pressed into Anatoly’s sweat-shiny forehead something resembling a large razor with a studded plate on one end. He screamed under the tape and his legs started squirming again.
“Exactly the same principle. Studs with alcohol-based paint are driven under the convict’s skin. The most widespread brand in Russia was a word.” She took a compact mirror from her bag and brought it up to her victim’s pale face.
He read the inscription in the drops of blood emerging on his forehead: THIEF.
He bellowed and jerked but soon tired and coughed muffledly. His bugged-out eyes followed her every movement.
“Scared, Tolenka? Desperate? Don’t be. You don’t know what that is. Despair is when you’re young and healthy and you don’t want to live. Because you work ten jobs and can’t buy a friggin’ corner to lay your head down. And do you know what it is to be the lowest trash? The lowest educated trash with honest, educated parents who are also the lowest trash? You don’t know, bitch. Guys like you don’t know, but now you’re caught and you’re going to answer and pay for everyone’s sins, and more than likely this will be the sole beautiful act in your whole fat, pointless life . . .
“The knout!” She took a leather lash off the wall. She raised her eyes to the ceiling and quoted in a sing-song, “For his first pilfering the guilty man was sentenced to punishment by the knout and loss of his left ear ... Pilfering is stealing, and this is how it was punished under canon law in the seventeenth century. Now this is going to hurt a little ... ”
She flicked the knout and a frisson of terror passed through Anatoly’s body. He squealed and jerked. The straps held him tight.
After the tenth lash she threw the knout in the corner and did a few exercises, trying not to breathe hard. She was flushed and under her tousled hair her eyes shone with dilated pupils.
“Ivan the Terrible came up with a curious method of punishment for those who had absconded with the state treasury,” Zlata said. “As a man of power with a Swiss bank account, Tolya, this should interest you. The czar hung the embezzler of state funds upside down, brought in his relatives, and made them watch the paterfamilias be sawed in half with an ordinary rope. It took a long time, a ve
ry long time.”
She burst out laughing again, sweeping a few fiery locks off her damp forehead.
“One other item in our exhibit has a simple, boring name, the ‘pear’”—Zlata moved on to the next display case—”but sometimes an executioner could make silent heroes quiver at the mere mention of it. Pay attention. There were pears to be introduced into the mouth and the rectum, and there were vaginal pears. As we know, what makes man different from an animal is his abstract thinking and his ability to create.”
She came up close to Anatoly, playing with a device that resembled a metal beetle whose belly was decorated with a large screw.
