by Julia Goumen
It wasn’t love that softened his features and brought him to tears, but the pleasure of unlimited power over her breath and life. Today, in the empty attic where he’d brought her, this passion flared up with unusual heat, for he knew the end was nigh.
At some moment in their tryst he picked Masha up abruptly and spun her around, and then, as if going rigid, dropped her on the floor. She waited for Seva to help her get up, but he stepped to the side, and without moving watched her lying on the floor, smeared in the dust. Then Seva remembered himself and gave her a hand. “Sorry,” he said, and he kissed Masha’s forehead.
That was it. She was the past. Like all those who had already been wiped out, all those he’d beaten.
But right then, as if on purpose—this was all he needed—a photograph fell out of his pants pocket. A photograph of the pale corps de ballet moth with freckles au naturel. Nude.
Not much to look at. Not really worth photographing. It was obvious he’d taken it himself, sitting on the couch in his kitchen, and she was covering her breasts with her hands, the tramp. What had compelled him to carry around her photograph?
Masha started screaming, calling Seva bad words that surfaced from out of nowhere, since she’d never sworn before. They fought nastily and crudely, and the worst part was that toward the end he said to her with the most genuine contempt, “Who do you think you are? Look at yourself—an ordinary trade-school girl!”
He zipped up his pants and ran out, zigzagging through the courtyards.
Masha remained there a little longer, staring straight at the wall, then went downstairs slowly and cautiously and came out on Printers Union Street. She walked home, constantly tripping on construction debris. She walked that way and farther—past Theater Square, past the monument to Rimsky-Korsakov, and for another ten minutes or so through the nighttime streets, though it wasn’t so scary. She came to a halt on the Kryukov Canal. She had just been waiting here on this bridge for Seva. How much time had passed? Two hours, three?
The most terrible thing had come to pass. What she had feared most in this life. She was a mediocrity, a faded part of this gray, worm-eaten mass, a trade-school girl! This was exactly what she had hoped to avoid when she had made for the Petersburg air, rotten though it was! Why, oh why had this nightmare come crashing down on her head? Because she’d never loved her chronically ill mother? In childhood, at the sight of her, Masha had wanted to get away, flee, deny everything so as not to be saturated with the smell of illness and death ... But she was just a child, pure and simple. Why was she being punished now?
Masha had heard many times about women getting left ... certain kinds of women, but that couldn’t affect her. She couldn’t be abandoned ... but she had been, and that meant she was like everyone else ... Such inflated pride, such an inflated sense of herself in this world ... and now she was a mediocrity, a nobody, and my God, she looked around—this theater and this square, the music, the dance, even the dance wasn’t for her ... It wasn’t the dance that had abandoned her, though, but vice versa ... Seva ... Was he really to blame? He’d just noticed that the gilt had rubbed off and there was nothing underneath ... How could there be nothing? She would show him yet. Masha tried to come up with an idea ... maybe she would write a letter that would make him understand ... But a terrible devastation fell over her, there was a void in her head, and that meant it was true, she was a nothing—and everyone already knew it... No, if she went to see him and begged on her knees, he would explain that he’d just been joking around, he’d been drunk! Yes, that must be it, he’d been drunk!
~ * ~
Masha had not been wrong about the bodyguard. He was watching her right now, hiding behind the construction vans on the embankment. But he was no longer guarding her body, for it had come detached and had ceased to be a part of his boss. Protector was now hunter.
There was the quick clicking of heels. Coming toward the bridge from Theater Square was a maidenly figure holding a single rose. Masha glimpsed the girl’s face and wasn’t surprised to encounter the very same freckles from Seva’s photograph. Time had become dense, as if it wanted to gather up all events and encounters in a single night.
The killer saw that Masha more than likely had asked for a light because the click of heels stopped and the girl with the rose was digging in her purse. Then a weak flame ignited, but she couldn’t get it to light for a moment because of the wind. Another minute and again the clicking of heels.
Masha took a drag, but again, as a few hours before, cold water from the canal splashed her. She leaned over the railing; the water was far away. Masha thought she saw a reflection slip by in it, or no, someone’s shadow, but the water bore it away, and then another shadow, and again the current carried it off.
The hunter saw Masha slowly begin to dance, as if hearing music and trying to fall in with the beat. Preparation, sissonne, pas de chat, chaînés... transition to grand jeté en rond... No, that’s wrong! She threw her arm up, as if tossing away the learned technique, and abruptly dropped it, slicing the air. The bitterness of loss in the broken and terrible movements of her elbows and knees, the spinning of freakish suffering, the impotence after birth and the flight, the clumsy, insane flight, the fall full-force, and the slow awakening. Her body was buffeted like a banner of despair, her dance was the dance of the shadow, the dance of the reflection, death dancing and an incredible revelation, so unlike anything she had known before. Too bad there was no one to appreciate the birth of this insane whirlwind that had suddenly settled in her.
There was only one spectator. He squeezed the trigger when the dancer was right at the bridge and, continuing her pas, bent over very low, as if she wanted to examine her own reflection in the water. The bullet did not interrupt her movement, and a second later the waters closed over.
~ * ~
Seva was walking through the courtyards alone. He had sent his bodyguard away. Let him do his job. He knew everything here, he’d grown up here. Each building was marked by a fight, kisses, humiliation, because he’d known that too, he hadn’t always been on top, sometimes he’d been way down below ... Right now he felt himself at full strength, fixed into this life like a screw, and if he was meant to go to the bottom, he would take the whole boat down with him. His fears and the neurosis that had once made his eyelid twitch were now behind him.
It was torture being a teenager with a twitching eyelid. So he had conquered that tic. His dream of becoming the helmsman in this life had come to pass, and that meant it was God’s doing—if, of course, He existed. If not, all the better. That meant he had earned his helm without outside assistance. In any event, there were natural laws that were helping him make his way up the ladder. A flat-out sprint, thank God. Donkeys never advanced, capable only of obeying, unable to live without idols such as he was, without his firm hand and approving smile. He began making plans for tomorrow. He wasn’t thinking about Masha.
~ * ~
“Look at all the water that’s accumulated, I have to hurry ... So? ... Don’t take the violin? You’re sitting in your burrow, and you think you need everything. But you go out and what is this stuff for? I’ll just pack up the little statue, the china ballerina, I have to wipe the dust off her and wrap her up in newspaper ... We have plenty of ballerinas here, the Mariinsky Theater is next door, they’re like windup toys there, but this one always sits here sad, lifeless, as if she were ill. Goddamnit! A foot broke off! Rats ... And the music is too loud, my ears hurt, beautiful music, who’s playing, I don’t know—there, upstairs, or maybe I’m going mad because the mind is a boundary and I’m trying to erase things. This is all a joke, though. I see perfectly well that the dust has to be wiped away. But the water is flowing, still flowing, I guess I need to climb on the chair. Let not the water overflow me, neither let the deep swallow me up, and let not the pit shut her mouth upon me.
“Here they are thinking they did me in ... strange people, as if I could be done in. See, the flood has begun, I have to hurry, I’ll send for my
things. Fine ... there’s been so much that’s terrible I don’t have to be afraid anymore. I’m going away, yes, I said I’d send for my things, only I have to tell Masha. Here’s what she should be told: Dance, Masha!
“Masha! Hear me, Masha? Dance! Dance, Masha, otherwise were lost.”
~ * ~
Seva had just stopped to take out a cigarette when a heavy body fell on him from above. His head struck the ground and he no longer saw anything, he just felt a swift and powerful flow pull him along.
The comic death of a big shot killed by an old woman falling from her window—actually, it’s a sin to call her that since she wasn’t even sixty—kept newspaper readers entertained for quite a while.
Masha never was found, and they simply wrote her off as missing.
<>
~ * ~
THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA FOREVER
by Julia Belomlinsky
Arts Square
Translated by Ronald Meyer
“Do you like street singing?” Raskolnikov suddenly addressed the passerby, a man who was no longer young and had the look of an idler, standing next to him by the organ-grinder. The latter looked at him startled and surprised. “I do,” Raskolnikov continued, but with a look as if to say that he wasn’t talking about street singing at all. “I like it when they sing to the accompaniment of an organ-grinder on a cold, dark, and damp autumn night, it has to be damp, when all the passersby have sickly pale green and sickly faces; or even better, when there’s wet snow falling, straight down, and there’s no wind, you know? And through it shine the gas streetlights... ”
—Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
W e were walking along Italyanskaya Street.
Italyanskaya Street was empty.
Four thirty—the most unpopular time for White Nights.
All the carriages had started turning into pumpkins.
The coachmen into rats.
The crystal slippers fell off and shattered.
The ball dress turned out to be smeared with ashes.
The pumpkins rolled downhill to the bridges.
The rats readied themselves and were screwing around.
Everyone wanted to go home, but the metro was closed.
The early-morning chill had set in.
Puddles of vomit and shards of beer bottles everywhere.
The era of street-cleaning machines had not yet arrived.
~ * ~
But we were local, you see—guys from the district.
Long ago we had grown accustomed to the fact that if you were just going out to pay the electric bill on Millionaya Street, you’d run into Atlas holding up the sky.
Go straight—and you bump into the Hermitage.
To your left—the Capella Courtyards.
To your right—Kazan Cathedral. . .
“But why do you want to go to St. Isaac’s?”
~ * ~
My companion Lyokha Saksofon fully realized the “happiness” of living in the city center and hanging out in the district.
And he wrote this joyful song.
Now we were loudly singing it on the empty square:
And this, my friend, is my district and my city
That’s why my collar is raised high
That’s why I’m not wearing designer shoes
That’s who we are—that’s how we do it
What are you talking about! What are you talking about!
~ * ~
“Come on, Lyokha, roll one. Roll a couple right away, it’s pretty nice here. Pushkin is waving ... We’ll leave him the roach ... For the best poet, the best roach!”
We were already sitting on the bench and looking at Pushkin.
~ * ~
The bums who hang out on the square by the Dostoevsky monument are called Dostoevskies, and the ones on Pushkin Square are Pushkins. But there’s nobody here now ... half past four, child’s play—and nobody’s here.
The Golden Triangle. Nothing ever happens here . . .
Two years ago, right outside the Hotel Europe, the English consul was robbed—and since then it’s been quiet. Every night the Phantom of the Opera is supposed to come out onto the roof of the Maly Opera and cry out like a muezzin: “All’s well in the Golden Triangle!”
~ * ~
Although it was precisely on that roof that something happened to one of my friends last winter.
It was Misha Bakaleishchikov—the Man from the Past.
The Man from the Past was supposed to come to the City of His Youth in search of his Past... It’s the usual move for an idiot.
I even envy him. He had come back for good to the little town of his childhood that’s green with mold . . .
~ * ~
Once he saved me. I was fifteen.
We had just come out on the Nevsky then for the first time— to make some money.
Three kids from the seventh grade. Sonya had a violin. Manya, a clarinet.
And I had a harmonica. And a black cap for the money. And all around us—deaf Soviet power. We managed to stand there for about four minutes. And then they took us by the hand and led us away ... No, not the cops. Fyoka’s crew. The cops didn’t touch anybody . . .
So far, Fyoka’s crew hadn’t given them the go-ahead.
Fyoka’s crew—sounds good, right?
It’s like when Long John Silver in the movie version of Treasure Island asks, “Where’s Flint’s crew?”
And then later, when they’re still on the brigantine:
The Jolly Roger waves in the wind—-
Flint’s crew is singing a ditty . . .
~ * ~
We all sang that song when we were in the Young Pioneers.
The brigantine—that was the most important part.
The pirates raised the brigantine’s sails on the high blue seas.
And somehow that got mixed up with Alexander Grin’s Scarlet Sails.
All the cafés were called that.
And the clubs where the young people were supposed to spend their leisure time.
Young Pioneer groups.
Scarlet Sails. Or the Brigantine. Or Romance.
That’s what our romance was like . . .
But it turned out that the pirates’ sea wasn’t so very far away after all—it was right there in front of us, on the banks of the Neva.
And Flint’s crew was there as well.
They made their journey on scarlet sails. Or grew up right there.
Out of the slime and dampness. . .
They sent the young people into ecstasy, trembling.
Flint’s crew—that was really something.
The fucking corsairs! The fucking corsairs! The corsairs.
We thought that they were in opposition to the powers that be. That they weren’t any worse than the dissidents—fighters and heroes.
As a matter of fact, I don’t know what it was like in Moscow, but in Piter their relationship with the powers that be was precisely as if they were real corsairs.
The powers that be had been living off their thieving for quite some time.
In Piter all the cops were taken care of.
Once Sasha Bashlachov came up with this metaphor about us and the West: “You’re still between the spoon and the lie, and we’re still between the wolf and the louse.”
The wolves, you see, were these corsairs of ours.
The KGB of those days was probably the louse. Which didn’t hunt for real criminals, but for the shitty bohemians.
Catching poets was an entirely lousy occupation. And they gave you ten years for smoking a joint. . .
And the Wolves weren’t your usual criminals.
It was our Young Capitalism.
Our Nascent Bootlegging.
In our Northern Old Chicago.
The people were being dressed by the black-marketeers.
