St. Petersburg Noir

by Julia Goumen

  Seva began taking her to serious gatherings and introducing her to the powerful of this world. He gave her some valuable stones, so she would look more confident. Masha calmed down and left the theater—and sat down to her books, feeling she lacked education. To distract her, Seva let her dabble in power—run charitable balls and various formal ceremonies. People sought her advice, flattered her, and she started feeling her lack of money, which she needed, of course, to keep up appearances. She wasn’t some errand girl who could feel comfortable in sweats with pimples on her nose. Since she and Seva still maintained separate households, she didn’t think she could ask him for money. And Seva seemed not to notice that creating an image—stylish, festive, elegant, and at the same time with the most maidenly innocence and a light transparency to her face— meant hard work, hard work every day. And money.

  She’d not stopped writing since she discovered she had this talent. Her range of topics had expanded and now touched on business and politics, though all that was of little interest to her personally. But when Seva’s people suggested what might be good to write about, she did it without a second thought. She interviewed one public figure and they had a marvelous chat. A witty fellow, what was his name? Dima ... true, he dressed kind of like a tramp. Then Seva told her to make an appointment with this Dima so they could go over the interview together. It could have been sent by e-mail, of course, but Dima didn’t refuse to meet. Why shouldn’t he hang out one more time with a girl like Masha? They set a time and place, and then Seva said, “Don’t go.” And she didn’t, of course, and Dima was accidentally run down right where they’d agreed to meet. And killed. Run over totally by accident. She didn’t know and had no desire to know these affairs of Seva’s. And that Dima shouldn’t have poked his nose where it didn’t belong ... The main thing was, why? They were just making publicity for themselves, but they made it seem like they were so honest, fighters for justice ... it was sickening ... He took her by the arm then, and laughed: “You’re an odalisque, not a journalist... ” And for a moment she actually wished he’d put his arms around her, but Masha paid no attention to that, or rather, she was able to pay no attention to that because she had an iron will and discipline.

  She didn’t want to think about death. Later, someday later, she’d decide what she felt about it. Even when her mama died she hadn’t reflected on mortality. She simply forgot it all instantly, as if nothing had ever happened. That was when her distant relatives sent her to ballet school. The girl had been saying since she was five that she was going to be a ballerina, but her mother wouldn’t hear of it, and now her mother was gone, so why not? She boarded the train and was off, especially since her aunt, her mama’s sister, lived in magical Petersburg. And at school Masha had hard work to do, and she had to survive among strangers. And survive she did. She even pulled off that whole business with the corps de ballet. Only because heaven sent her a miracle. Sent her Seva—a gentle, smart, kind, courageous warrior who feared no enemy. And who believed in her.

  Only why wasn’t he here yet?

  All of a sudden she remembered and actually staggered. How could she have forgotten? Well, yes, she could have because yesterday it was said through laughter and drunken eyes ... The girls from the theater all lied, they were insanely jealous, but yesterday they dropped blatant hints that he’d found some other dancer—some corps de ballet louse, a pale moth ... with freckles to boot... third in the back row ... What if it were true? Was her life ruined? My God, oh my God ... though why, why was she getting herself so wound up, why was she blowing things out of proportion?

  Masha grabbed the railing of the bridge and jerked her hand back—cold, nasty metal. Just as she loved to touch granite, she hated metal. Her hands would smell of it for hours.

  The round lamps lit up and shone on the turbid, swirling water. Here it was, the canal’s icy ripple. Only now it was summer and it was still icy ... A pleasure boat rammed through the water and the laughing, tipsy tourists waved to her. Masha turned away. Why did Seva want to meet here? Now she had to jut up on the street like a column, to the amusement of the rare passersby. On one side of the Kryukov Canal loomed the Mariinsky; on the other, a ridiculous construction site that in the uncertain future was supposed to be the theater’s second hall. When the Mariinsky was still her theater, she’d waited anxiously for what would happen when they moved to the new building and renovations began in the old. Day after day she’d watched them clear the ground for the new one and wreck the First Five-Year Plan Palace of Culture, a fairly dismal example of Stalinist empire style. For a while, like a graphic illustration of the empire’s fall, only the huge czarist columns rising out of the mountain of wreckage and debris were left standing. Masha imagined that before she knew it they would be putting in stone benches here, like an amphitheater, and instead of actors they would bring in captive gladiators—and the new theater would be ready. But they dynamited the columns, razed a couple of other old buildings, and for a long time the construction didn’t even begin; they probably hadn’t been able to find the money. Still, in that time, the time of Masha’s maturation, an eternity passed! The building put some meat on its bones and was gradually transformed into a boring concrete box with the bare ribs of its framework poking out indecently. Instead of captive gladiators, migrant workers showed up and scurried from floor to floor like ants from morning until night. And now, despite the late hour, the figure of some detained construction worker stuck up in a window. He might be sleeping right here. He might have nowhere else to go.

  People just keep coming, as if the city is totally elastic, so you can’t walk calmly down the street anymore, Masha thought with irritation.

  But if you hire someone like that, you don’t have to pay him a lot, and when this moth leaves the theater he’ll push her off the bridge and no one will notice ... What thoughts! What evil thoughts! But it was true, no one would see. At night... but he’s just the kind you shouldn’t get mixed up with ... he’d spill the beans. But if this young lady were to walk up ... She rented an apartment a little ways down, on Masterskaya ... maybe she just rented a bed, not an apartment... and if no one were around then, Masha herself could ask her for a light... Oh, what nonsense. After all, if the girl were pushed, she would cry out... and then—stop. After all, Masha didn’t know for a fact whether Seva had anything going on with her. Insanity, that’s what passions lead to. She closed her eyes and thought she could see that pale freckled vixen go flying into the cold water—a split second, and that would be the end of her.

  Masha leaned slightly over the railing. Why, it was so low ... No mesh whatsoever, just two crossbars ... Yes, yes, my life is ruined ... Take Dima, for example. Where is that Dima now? Before him there’d been someone else, Sergei Pavlovich. She’d forgotten all about him until now, all of a sudden ... She wrote something about him on Seva’s orders, back at the very beginning, when they’d just met, and that Sergei Pavlovich—no, Konstantinovich, definitely Konstantinovich, like her prodigal father—jumped out a window ... Enough! If she didn’t go to-morrow and get a decent pedicure and if she couldn’t pay Lastochka for her hair, then she couldn’t go on living. She had to find a way out somehow. Lastochka charged so much now. The nerve of her! On the other hand, you weren’t going to find anyone better ... Seva had no idea how she put herself together every day, starting early in the morning, her weekly purchases were expensive—or did he think she washed her hair with rosemary and covered her hands with sunflower oil?

  She’d promised to stop by her aunt’s a month ago, but no, she wouldn’t go. Those visits sunk her into an awful depression, she felt like hanging herself, and then it took so much time, and Masha didn’t have any money for the psychologist now. The psychologist would squeeze her dry. Her aunt could sit there alone and fancy herself a widowed duchess. When Uncle Pasha died, she’d exchanged the apartment at the favorite niece’s wish. Masha got a room, which she now rented out, while she herself rented a decent separate space, and her aunt got a room too. It wa
s her own fault for ending up in a housing project. Masha had tried to talk her aunt into agreeing to an apartment outside town, where she would have fresh air to breathe and could lead a circle at the club. They were easing her out of her job anyway. No, she clung to her city, but why? Here, they wouldn’t even let her pick up her instrument; her neighbors immediately started making a fuss.

  Masha found all this depressing. No, nothing like that was going to happen to her. She would age beautifully, maybe have a child—one—not that she was particularly eager, but men needed that... Why wasn’t he here? Where was Seva!

  Maybe he was with that mangy vixen and had forgotten about her altogether. Lord, my God, my heart’s really beating ... No, I can’t leave it like this.

  ~ * ~

  “Look, there’s water coming in under the door. They shut me in but forgot to turn off the tap. There wasn’t any hot water for a couple of weeks so the taps were all left open. But if I’m not going where my Masha is now, where the rivers meet, what’s the big surprise if the water’s running like this, flowing like hot blood, turbulent, and the little boats darting this way and that through it, like the needles in the neighbor boy’s veins, the needles he pokes into himself in the kitchen, thinking I don’t notice. I wanted to ask him, but I was scared of frightening him. What do I need a needle for? What about lighting this airshaft—what if it lit up all of a sudden? Somewhere where there’s no light at all, just a wolfish-gray longing ... This is how I dreamed of hell: I’m sitting in a deep but narrow hole looking up the whole time, at a dim light very high up ... but I’ll never get there. Never.

  “Dreams are the only reason I’m still moving, because I started having terrible dreams. Once I dreamed I was in a well, not an airshaft like this one, but a real well, only without water, and up above vampires were reaching for me with their long feelers. But I’m not afraid. I know if I start playing it will all pass, but the neighbors say it’s too loud. I could now—no one’s there ... but today I actually shouldn’t play. Under no circumstances should I, since someone else is already playing, and playing beautifully. I just don’t know who ... somewhere, up above . . .

  “The water is flowing and flowing, nonstop. Oh well, if I’m not going where the rivers meet, it will play a trick—a cheap trick!—and arrange a trap, so that it can always play cat-and-mouse with me—-catch and release ... catch and release.”

  ~ * ~

  Vsevolod parked his car rather far away. He was walking in no hurry, though he was late for his date with Masha. A real piece of work, but a foolish piece of work; a useful piece of work, but a stultifying piece of work. To tell the truth, he’d been attracted to dancers practically since he was a kid, but the kind without ambitions. He didn’t care for ballet stars and never went after the big names. A no-name little ballet girl—that was as good as it got, that’s how he’d come across Masha. Long neck and big eyes, she bat her eyelashes and caught his every word; she was always hungry. She was afraid of making any unnecessary movement, so as not to disgrace herself. After all, she came from the sticks to live with her aunt at someone else’s expense. She called her aunt “Mama” and her uncle “Papa” because she had no mother and she’d only seen her father a couple of times in her life. As skittish as a hare, and she did everything without a murmur, no matter how you posed her. He took full advantage of that—lying, standing, upside down.

  She turned out to be useful in other ways too. She turned out to have a brain she could flex when she needed to, and could bare her teeth at strangers, show some muscle, protect her master, and he appreciated that. On the one hand, he liked it... but on the other, it had started to bother him. Lately Vsevolod had sensed his babe was having quite a hard time—he guessed her time had come for nest building. He knew those tricks of theirs, and for Masha he was prepared to put up with a lot. Maybe he should give her, oh, thirty thousand bucks. That would be quite a lot for her, and he wouldn’t feel it, he could bring more. He could, but there was no point spoiling her, so ... for starters, he had to come to his senses. He could keep her longer, he’d grown used to her, but there was one new circumstance ... this gentle eighteen-year-old circumstance ... and Masha ... she wouldn’t understand, though she should ... she could have caught on by now: let him, Seva, get away with stuff and accept the world as it was. He wondered what she’d do without him.

  Right then Seva got a stab in his side. It was his matchless, famed intuition talking to him. She knew an awful lot, and no good could come of an injured woman, especially Masha, who was something special. You couldn’t buy her off. She needed something else ... He could pawn her off on someone else ... someone good—that was something they did too, but with her, that trick wouldn’t work, she’d get even nastier ... but so what? What about wiping her out? The concept appealed to him: wipe off the face of the earth, from memory, as if she never existed and everything was starting fresh, and no one had ever set foot there before ... Wipe her out. This thought didn’t surprise Seva. It was as if he’d been expecting it. He started tallying up his material and moral loss in the one case or the other—if he wiped Masha out or left her walking the earth.

  Seva was an old campaigner. He’d started his career small, gone through fire and ice at the very peak of gangsterism, and now he lived peacefully and quietly, or so it seemed. He came from a civilized family, was cautious, sly, beautifully educated, and generous when he had to be, and he had charisma. Seva held a respectable state post and in interviews said proudly of himself, “I’m a creator.” If dirty work was required, he didn’t have to get himself dirty anymore. Obliging hands were always found for that, but he had experienced that animal horror he’d known in his youth during brawls (and he’d been through all kinds) and never forgot it. Sometimes, to unwind, Vsevolod Mikhailovich would take a break and pay tribute to his old enthusiasm for the arts, which dated from his school days: photography and painting. He organized exhibits and went pub crawling with art students, touched by their childish bluntness and their modest demands on life. “Like bugs, they live on crumbs and are happy to have them, baby bugs, the muck of the earth, and we need that ... the trees have to grow on something.” He and Masha laughed so hard, and Masha understood him perfectly, she was greedy for life, but a little too greedy . . .

  ~ * ~

  They met on the Kryukov near the Torgovy Bridge, as agreed.

  The light was already fading, the streetlamps were on, and there was a silvery reflection in the water of the St. Nicholas bell tower flickering in the dusk.

  Masha uttered not a word of reproach to her man for being late. She pretended she’d been busy examining the cranes that crossed their long arrows, as if getting into a discussion.

  “Look how wretched,” she said, waving her arm toward the new building.

  “Check it out from another standpoint—an urbanist landscape, a clash of planes. It’s going to be a lot drearier when it’s all finished.”

  He didn’t try to explain to her that at base a construction site was a clash of interests, not planes, and the loser was what was wretched.

  Masha suddenly cried out. After the alarming fantasies that had overtaken her during her wait, she now imagined the water had splashed over the banks and touched her ankles.

  “What’s up, kid?”

  “Do you have a cigarette?”

  Seva held out a pack, but it was odd because she didn’t smoke. Very occasionally, for photographs, she would toy with slim feminine cigarettes.

  A couple of foreigners walked by. The man was lazily stroking the naked back of the woman, who was wearing an elegant evening dress. The couple were obviously counting on a long and pleasant night, a fitting cap to admiring the Petersburg landscapes.

  “Well, where are we going?” Masha was hoping for a night in a good club, top-notch jazz, and she wouldn’t mind a drink, her nerves were completely shattered.

  “Today I feel like wandering,” Seva said.

  Really? Masha’s friend was only rarely visited by these desires, an
d she’d reconciled herself, but right now it was all wrong. She tried to nudge Seva toward the center of town. But he took her arm and, jokingly ordering her, pulled her along. As always in these instances, they strolled through Kolomna, where Seva had lived as a boy and until he’d bought himself a place not far from Palace Square. From time to time they came across beautifully restored buildings, but there were entire swaths of rental apartment buildings, the refuge of the newcomers who were barbarizing the city. The Kolomna where Pushkin’s poor Evgeny lost his marbles was still Kolomna, and the little Pryazhka River still bore its waters past Blok’s sadly famous insane asylum, now a museum. The museum could do its museum thing, but the crazies were going to be moved elsewhere. There was no reason to be crazy in the center of town, and the freed-up buildings could be turned into VIP mental hospitals

  Kolomna was probably the city’s last district where lots of courtyards still weren’t barred and there weren’t formidable code locks on the gates. Seva dragged Masha through courtyards and secret passages for hours. She didn’t like walking around here at night, even with Seva, and now the only thing that reassured her was the fact that they probably had a bodyguard following discreetly on their heels. She cursed under her breath. Where was he taking her? A man to whom all doors were open and who was received everywhere with respect was traipsing through the streets and kissing in strangers’ spit-covered entryways! Why would he never ask her whether she liked doing it in stairwells when someone could walk up at any time? True, Masha herself never protested, and his swift, silent pressure was not as important to her as the relaxation that followed it and the weakness that spread over his face. Sometimes he even wept. She never told anyone about that, but she was immoderately proud of his tears. The bodily part of it barely roused her. This coldness had been in her since the very start of their romance, and she may have derived the most pleasure from the awareness that she had complete mastery, albeit not for long, over this strong, omnipotent man. How could she have known that he had never been hers for a second. His whole life had been slave to a single passion which she actually could have understood had she chosen to—the thirst for power.