St. Petersburg Noir

by Julia Goumen

  And the hotel—a beehive for the masters of these new times—was ideally suited as that point of fracture.

  He had just tried out some new sleight of hand, as was his habit. His friends always found his tricks amusing. Once he concentrated on a mug for so long that he actually made it disappear. “Where’s the cup? Where did it go?” his mother had said, perplexed, as she stood in the middle of the room, waving her arms in dismay. Even then, he didn’t share his secret with her. And to think she’s still alive, my old lady; and I too am alive. There is probably a wisp of smoke coming out of the roof of her little hut right now.

  In any case, he had performed for her so often that the trick with the mug would have seemed like a childish prank.

  Spoons, as it happened, succumbed to mystical practices far better. The world of Russian objects seemed to yield to his manipulations easily, while objects from abroad were less obedient. The same was true of Russian words: the letters seemed to line up neatly one after another, like rye in a field. The Latin alphabet was more stubborn.

  A long time ago he had known Latin, but time seemed to have purged him of all languages except for Russian.

  Many knew him as Seriozha, but when you’re pushing thirty a nickname is embarrassing. Yet he knew he would never grow up. He simply didn’t know how to get older.

  In his hand Seriozha gripped a glass. A bottle of Rykovka vodka that had just skyrocketed in price stood on the desk, its contents lukewarm.

  At last, the heavy fretted door creaked. The man in black leather, who had Seriozha’s own face, had come. For a moment, Seriozha was astounded at the plan—indeed, the mirror reflected twins: one in a suit with his feet up, the other in black leather and a Russian peasant shirt.

  “We meet at last, Seriozha,” the man in black said with a slight accent.

  I wonder how they did it. Makeup? Doesn’t look like it. Probably a mask.

  “Your time has come,” the man continued, sitting down at the desk.

  The poet sighed to himself: this called for a display of terror; but how much did the interlocutor know about all of this?

  He could look the man in the eye, stare him down as he had stared into the eyes of a killer with a knife in hand, the one who had accosted him at Sukharevka. He had given him a certain look, and the killer desisted, slinking away along the wall and dropping his switchblade.

  But Seriozha restrained himself. “You remember Ryazan, don’t you? Konstantinovo? Remember when we were kids?” That would be the perfect move. Except that Seriozha had in fact spent his childhood in a completely different place.

  Ryazan? Of all the nonsense! He had been born in Constantinople.

  ~ * ~

  During the second year of the revolution, Seriozha met Morozov, the Schlüsselburg prisoner who had just been released into the world. Captivity seemed only to have preserved the elderly member of the People’s Freedom Party—he was fresh and ruddy, with a formidable snow-white beard. Morozov had dedicated himself to studying errors in historical chronicles. In them he had found references to him—Seriozha. He found out that the copyists had mixed up his documents (if only he knew how much this would cost him), changing “Constantinople” to “Konstantinovo.”

  It was here they had strolled, to their left the gloomy bulk of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, the famed church; and to their right, this very hotel, where fates were decided. The old man sought to avenge history, and decided to start with him, the poet.

  Underneath their feet grew the sickly grass of the streets and squares of Petrograd.

  The old man waited for an answer.

  Seriozha smiled, peering into his eyes. Who would ever believe you, old man? Unless maybe one day some academic follows your lead and starts shuffling the deck of centuries and scepters—but no one will believe him either.

  He himself could recall in great detail, though, that hot May, five hundred years ago, when the crackling of fire, the yelps of Fatih’s warriors, and the shrieks of the inhabitants surrounded the temple. The doors were torn off their hinges with a thunderous clatter and a crowd of Janissaries broke inside. There were a few who stood out even within the ranks of Fatih’s select band of cutthroats. The boy knew that these warriors who looked like dismounted horsemen were dark angels. Their faces were covered in slashes, as though carved out of wood.

  ~ * ~

  The sounds of the Liturgy had not yet died away, and one by one the priests entered the stone masonry which parted to let them pass, carrying the holy gifts before them. The youth rushed in after them, but an old monk grabbed him by the arm and led him through a long underground passage toward the sea. They ran past cavernous cisterns, and heavy droplets from the ceiling beat down on their backs.

  The monk put him into a fishing boat with two Greeks who watched solemnly as the city burned.

  The two were brothers—Yanaki and Stavraki. They took the young boy along the coast, careful not to lose sight of land. He read them Greek and Latin poetry. The sea censored some of his words, filling the boy’s mouth with the salty water of the waves. They soon found themselves in a strange land where the steppe met the water, and the boy took his first breath of foreign air. With each step toward the North, something inside him changed. He felt his soul transforming. His body would remain unchanged forever.

  He became the Wandering Russian, a lonely soul attached not to earthly love, but to that of the heavens. Yet he never forgot the wooden horsemen, for it was said of them in the Holy Book: And there was a great battle in heaven—Michael and his angels fought with the dragon. That battle was eternal

  ~ * ~

  The visitor in black was mumbling something, looking at him from time to time. He must have thought Seriozha was completely drunk.

  The boy who had come by the day before had thought so too. Poetry was what had led him through life; but now he would have to end this phase. He would be mistaken about time, however. The Wandering Russian had been duped. Duped like a little boy whose daddy takes him to the big city. The little boy runs away on the sly and goes to the bazaar, where he is swindled out of all his coins wrapped up in a little scrap of cloth.

  Poetry was his destiny; but there would be no poetry here.

  Without poetry, eternity means nothing, and everything else is meaningless too. Like the time he fought Celery, the famed poet, and suddenly felt his opponent’s special hatred for him. It was only now that he realized Celery had hated not him, but fate. Fate saw to it that the Wandering Jew, the eternal Jewish poet, was not he, Celery, but the lowly Mosstamp. Celery couldn’t fully comprehend it, but with his sensitive nature he felt fate’s cruelty. It was fate he was fighting, not his comrade and fellow poet.

  His fate was that of a man destined to die in his own bed, having known early love and late love, having suffered abuse and praise. But whereas he would die forever, Mosstamp would crawl out from under a mountain of dead bodies during his exile to the Far East, and wander the earth forever.

  The man behind the door shuffled his feet awkwardly, anticipating the business at hand, and Seriozha grew very sad. He felt offended by the crudeness of it all. He recalled meeting the Wandering Scotsman at a bar in Berlin. Seriozha immediately recognized him by his wavy hair. They roamed around Berlin all night long. In his cups, the Scotsman showed him Japanese Bartitsu moves. Growing animated, the Scotsman pulled a sword out of his bag, which he waved about like a hay mower on the banks of the Oka. In one fluid motion, Seriozha dove sideways, jabbing a fork he’d stolen from a restaurant into the man’s side. The Scotsman stood there blinking, hiccuping, waiting for the wound to heal.

  He eventually admitted defeat and they read poetry until dawn. The Wandering Scotsman read a poem by his friend about the dry heat of Persia and doe-eyed maidens whose arms wound about like snakes. And Seriozha read the Scottish poem about a wayfarer caught out on a winter night, and a northern maiden who takes the stranger in; how she drifts off to sleep between him and the wall of her humble dwelling. In the morning she sews the wayf
arer a shirt, knowing that she will never see him again. And Seriozha knew that those lines were about them, about the shelterless life of eternally wandering poets. As they parted ways on a bridge over the Spree, Seriozha gave the Scotsman the ill-begotten fork, which the Scotsman put in his sword case. Robert MacLeod, or Burns, as Seriozha usually called him, disappeared with his ungainly sword into the rays of the German sunrise, the wind ruffling his hair.

  Now, sitting here in a false trap, Seriozha knew that he could kill both of the Cheka officers (for he had no doubt who they were), pluck them from life like two worm-eaten mushrooms from the soil, leaving only small, nearly invisible indentations in reality. He could carve them out, using, say, a fork. Or a spoon. No, the spoon had disappeared during his extrasensory experiments.

  But he didn’t need to do that. He was a poet, and so was moved by a greater aim than the bestial thirst for blood.

  He had to leave his place, like a beast must leave its lair, because he had chosen the wrong word to rhyme with revolution.

  His visitor produced a grimy book from the depths of his overcoat, and thumbing through the tattered pages began to read some filth aloud. It was probably one of Galyas tearful letters (usually a mixture of complaints and pleas). It was in bad taste, and embarrassing in the extreme. He allowed himself not to listen any further to these stories of happiness and broken arms, of wooden horsemen.

  He really did know who the wooden horsemen were, who appeared suddenly in tall grass just as he was getting off the train at Konstantinovo. He had to convince his relatives of his own existence (which he did); but the wooden horsemen were always after him wherever he went. One of them he recognized as Omar, one of Fatih’s warriors, who had almost killed him in the church five hundred years ago.

  Wooden horsemen—now, that would be truly terrifying, because they alone had power over wandering poets. One of them had chased after the automobile he rode in with his wife. The wooden horseman started losing ground. He knew he could not reach Seriozha with his crescent sword, so he tugged at the woman’s blue scarf, pulling her out of the car and under the hooves.

  Seriozha could not forgive himself her death—though he did not love his wife. Revenge was senseless, for the wooden horsemen had special, invincible powers. He cried then, listening as the din of oaken horseshoes on the paving blocks grew fainter.

  The dark angels are no naive and trusting Cheka officers. Why, if he had heard the wooden neigh of their horses on St. Isaac’s Square just now, right under his windows, the whole plan would have been ruined! As for these two, let them think they had caught him in a hotel-room trap they had set.

  At that very moment the visitor said something about some high school students, and Seriozha poured himself some vodka, spilling it on purpose. The vodka tasted of disappointment. Yes, beautiful illusions should be left behind.

  All of a sudden, the man in the overcoat jumped on him, and in the same moment another man dashed into the room. Together they wrestled him down, and the second one threw a thin cord from a suitcase around his neck.

  The poet stooped resisting and surrendered his body to them.

  The trap they had set had worked. But then his own plan began to unfold. First let them think they had succeeded.

  The man in black punched the poet in the stomach a few more times, and Seriozha felt a belated surprise at human cruelty. He waited for his death as though for an unpleasant procedure— he had died many times before, and it was unpleasant, like a coarse male nurse administering an enema.

  With a dull pop, the little ventilation window flew wide open, and he felt himself hanging, the steam-heating pipes searing his side.

  This won’t do at all, he thought, looking down through his long eyelashes at the Cheka officers who were stamping their feet, brushing themselves off, and straightening their sleeves, as though after a snowball fight. One left, while the other began to search the room.

  Hanging like this was terribly uncomfortable, but soon the man in black grew tired. He stood up, then disappeared behind the bathroom door. The poet quickly loosened the knot and hopped onto the floor. Then he slipped into the armoire.

  He didn’t have to wait very long. From the depths of the armoire, he could hear a wild cry from the fellow who discovered the body was missing. He listened to the halting explanation, interrupted by threats, and heard them send someone down to the morgue to look for an unclaimed dead body.

  A dead body was found, but it turned out to be a suicide who had slit his wrists. By then, however, the Cheka officers had no other choice. Time had them in a stranglehold, chafing their throats, pulling them toward the open window.

  The poet watched through a crack between the doors of the armoire as they smeared glue on the gutta-percha mask, which they now pulled over the face of the hapless suicide.

  He caught sight of the dead man’s feet, then a lifeless arm— and then a new body was hanging from the noose, and the poet listened to their unsteady breathing.

  When at last they had left, Seriozha climbed out of the armoire and looked sadly at the lifeless face of his double. Bidding himself farewell, he touched a cold dead hand and left the room.

  Seriozha closed the door using a copy of the key, and went out into the corridor, past the receptionist in a paramilitary uniform who was fast asleep.

  Leningrad was black and still.

  The damp cold struck him in the chest, honing his senses. The wolfhound had missed—and the poet’s trick had worked; as had the Cheka officer’s trap, for that matter.

  Now he could move far away, to the east, to hide beneath Siberia’s snowy quilt, where cities and towns have peculiar and wonderful names like Ol’ Erofei Palych. Or Winter. Winter sounded like a good name. Why not settle down there?

  A new page of his life was beginning: with the dawn snow and the pale sun—a fair copy right off the bat.

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  ~ * ~