St. Petersburg Noir

by Julia Goumen

  “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 heat-warped 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 when 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.

  I pushed the empty china cabinet aside, lifted the floorboard, pulled out the piece of cork, snagged the diamond with a fork, removed my boot, and shoved the stone in my sock. Then I went into the bedroom, where there was a spot in the middle of the bed that looked like a wine stain, wrestled on two sweaters, collected money from all the drawers, and headed back out, crunching on the glass dust. Turning onto Aerodromnaya, I called the fence from a pay phone, but he didn’t answer, and I had to leave a message, although in my position it wasn’t terribly intelligent. I said I’d call tomorrow at the same time and that I had a pear for anyone who had twenty well-done steaks. An idiotic code, but he liked it, the crappy conspirator. Saying this made me hungry and I quickly hit a shawarma stand, then went bac
k to the harbor on foot, through Serafimovskoye cemetery.

  The woman wasn’t on the boat. There was an empty bottle on the table in the cockpit, the stove was stuffed with firewood, and there was a lipstick heart on the hatch leading to the fore-peak. I fired up the stove, smoked a couple of reefers, threw the stinking rags off the bed, wrapped up in the blanket, and fell asleep. I had a hunting dream, though I wasn’t the hunter or the prey but someone else. Before I woke up I dreamed of a vixen, a dazzling vixen being chased across an empty white field by hounds. It was heading for the forest, racing. It wasn’t going to make it, I thought, when I saw the pack getting closer, but then the fox stopped short, swiveled around, dug its front paws into the snow crust, let out a howl, and turned into a small dog. The hounds ran up to it, sniffed the snow-covered dog face, and rushed on. Opening my eyes, I saw the light was already oozing through the crack between deck and hatch, the February wind droning on the other side of the iron wall, and it felt as though the boat was rocking, ready to set off, and I quickly climbed out. The weed was still clinging inside my head, and scraps of fog were floating before my eyes, but when I glanced toward the island I saw the hole and sobered up instantly.

  The yellow scarf was fluttering on the wire net. Huh? Walking up to the hole I already knew who I’d see there, and I wasn’t wrong. I peered at the drowned man’s tranquil face and slowly walked toward shore—there was no cross in the drift, there wasn’t even a drift, just level ground, a little trampled, they could have been our own prints, mine and the datsan cleaning woman’s. I managed to break off a thick branch from a bush close to shore and poked it through the middle of the grave. There was nothing under the snow.

  Had the dead man returned to the water? Or was this a different dead man? Or did he jump in the water like a white-throated dipper to escape a hawk, walk along the bottom, and then calmly climb out from under the ice? I returned to the hole, knelt, and poked at the floating body so the face would appear from under the ice crust. The face was just as smooth, and the hair was fair, only instead of a shirt this fellow had a clown’s black bow tie on his bare neck. It looked as though he’d been killed at a party, or after the party, during a friendly orgy on a yacht. They might well have been killed simultaneously, only the second one didn’t get here right away and got snagged somewhere else on his scarf, at some other fishing hole. Damn, they couldn’t have identical rags on their neck. Where was the first one? No, this was the same guy, no question.

  The Buryat decided to play a little joke on me, that’s all. She’d hooked the drowned man’s bow tie and dragged it back to the hole. She’d had her revenge for my not wanting to wind her beastly hair on my hand and go at it with her on that narrow cot in the unsqueamish Luka’s place. All right, woman, do this again and you’ll be the one floating with a bow tie around your neck. I went back to the vessel for the boathook and rope, pulled out the drowned man, who looked bizarrely fresh, dragged him over the ice to the shore, and buried him in the same place but didn’t stick a pet cross in, and tied the yellow scarf to a handrail on the gangway. When I’d brewed the last of the tea, I heard voices near the boat and climbed on deck, went into the latrine, and peered out through the porthole. Fishermen were standing a few meters from shore, examining the hole, but they were reluctant to move any closer. One of them, wearing a down coverall, gestured and I heard something like honeycombs and yellow.

  ~ * ~

  I spent the day in Lakhta, there was no point showing my face in town, and by now the boat made me sick. I bought brandy, drank it on the shore sitting on a solidly frozen log, relaxed, and tried to call the Latvian a few times, but she apparently had either turned off her phone or just didn’t want to talk. A couple of months earlier Anta had told me that they had a program at the consulate that could pinpoint the location of any employee, therefore she took the battery out of her phone when she played hooky from work. This had made an impression and I’d surrendered to a moment’s paranoia, leaving my phone in the conductor’s apartment. At least I didn’t toss it in a ditch.

  It was too cold to sleep, I had enough wood left for a couple of hours, and toward morning I picked up what was left of the partition and used it for heat along with the wood carving of Esenin that was hanging over the bed. When I woke up, I went to the hole and checked out a new dead man. This one had the scarf wrapped up to his ears so all you could see was his smooth, celluloid forehead and whitened, pruney cheeks. His hands were in his jacket pockets, as if he’d been searching for his wallet or cigarettes before dying, and in general his look was bizarrely matter-of-fact, sullen even.

  Load-unload, that meant. There’s the job the locals have thrown your way, you sorry-ass beggar, I thought, observing the long scarf bobbing in the water like a floater on a giant’s fishing rod. He cleaned up after criminals, sly old Luka, founder of the seasonal cemetery. In a couple of weeks the snow would melt and your burials were going to go floating down the Greater Nevka past Elagin Island. I’d like to know where they sunk them so cleverly that they all landed here, near the harbor. Though who said I’d seen them all? Maybe they’d released an entire excursion under the ice and I was just getting the guides in identical scarves.

  All right, boys, I’m done being your gravedigger. I’m clearing out of here in a couple of days and you can catch your own rotten smelt. I took a walk as far as the shore, examined the footprints in the snow next to yesterday’s grave, collected a bucket of snow, and returned to the boat. After I’d started making breakfast I suddenly realized I couldn’t eat and drank some hot water with sugar I found in the galley. Then I shaved in front of the shard of mirror, cleaned my coat, and walked down the shore to Staraya, to the Datsan Gunzechoinei.

  ~ * ~

  “You sit alone too often,” I was told by the monk I asked about the slant-eyed woman, showing him the cap she’d lent me. “You sit alone and think about women. You’re already late for the khural, it ended at noon. And if you came for the seminar of the venerable lama, then get your five hundred rubles out and go to Malaya Pushkarskaya. Not now, in two weeks.”

  “What seminar’s that?” It was clear I wasn’t getting past the gates.

  “The practice of samatha and vipassana.” The monk was hunched over in the wind in his robes, but he spoke with me willingly. “Or maybe you want a lunar calendar? You’ll know your bad days.”

  “Lately that’s been pretty clear without a calendar. Maybe you do remember the woman after all, she looks like a Kalmyk, rosy-cheeked, with lots of hair. She was at the New Year’s celebration, and before that she cleared the snow from the courtyard.”

  “Women come to us to help with the housekeeping, but I don’t know their names.” The monk frowned. “You can leave the cap here and she’ll see it herself. Come at three o’clock, we’ll pray together. For a favorable reincarnation and for the departed.”

  “I’ve got stacks of departed,” I said mechanically, and all of a sudden I bumped into his attentive gaze. The monk’s face was ochre and doughy, and for some reason I imagined him shaving his head with a curved, ivory-handled Tibetan knife. He turned and started down the alley toward the sloping stairs with the columns, signaling me to follow. Hanging above the datsan entrance was a wheel that resembled the wheel on my boat, only that had been hacked to pieces and was lying on the floor in the pilothouse.

  “Have you ever dreamed that bamboo was growing out of your head?” the monk asked. “Or a palm growing out of your heart? … Why are you limping?”

  “I broke the heel on my left boot at a train crossing. I’m living on a boat,” I added for some reason, “and I dream of dogs chasing a vixen.”

  “You spend too much time alone,” the monk repeated, leaving me by the doorway. “You should see people. Take a walk here, look around. We need a boilerman, a jack-of-all-trades. The roof leaks, there’s lots of work.”

  “Oh no, lama, I’m not here about that.” All of a sudden I felt cheerful. “I may not be a church thief, and I don’t rob temples, but I don�
��t advise you to let me into the cabbage patch. I might not be able to help myself.”

  “I’m not a lama,” the monk said, turning away from the doors, “and you’re no thief. You’re Luka, the man from the boat.” I had no desire to tour the datsan, so I waited for the monk to go inside and then went back to the street in search of a phone booth, cursing myself for ditching my Nokia so hastily. The fence was home, but he was reluctant to speak to me—even the description of the ripe pear didn’t excite him, and eventually he told me to meet him at the French café on Petrogradskaya, but he immediately added that I’d have to wait awhile for my steaks. Not only that, twenty was a bit much, the trickster commented gloomily, I’d have to make do with sixteen, since they were looking for me all over town. I said we’d talk there, but as I hung up I already knew there was no point talking, his type had an animal instinct for other people’s troubles.

  The city stretched on like a solid snowy canvas, my ruined boot had taken on water, and I had to drop into a cheap cobbler and buy whatever they had—loafers on a ripple sole. In the repair shop I spent a long time looking at the guy, who seemed familiar, he was obviously the shop owner because he was chewing out the salesman for some cracked window. As I left the store I realized what had made me stare at him. The owner had a yellow scarf wrapped around his neck, kind of dirty, as if it had been pulled out of the river.