I’m not going to get any boogie-woogie today, thinks Ksenia, no dancing to Indigo Swing and Jump4Joy, no chance to invite Alexei to join me. What is it Pasha wants to say to me, he’s not a stupid man, and the most important thing is that he has flair.
Pasha puts a folder of printouts on the desk.
“You asked me to check this man out through my contacts,” he says. “Read it here, I won’t let you take it out.”
Ksenia reads, and Pasha carries on thinking about the serial killer, about Putin’s politics, about piles of rubble on the streets of cities. Even so, he thinks, the ruins are produced by inanimate machines. A detonator, hexogen, a trigger mechanism, a bomb hatch. The person who presses the button doesn’t see the bloody scraps of bodies go flying through the air. The dust from the ruins doesn’t settle on his clothes. The person who takes the decisions doesn’t see their consequences. He lives in the same unreal world as all of us.
“Impressive,” says Ksenia, closing the folder, “and a girlfriend of mine was thinking of setting up a business with him.”
“I wouldn’t advise it, Ksenichka,” replies Pasha.
“A horrible man.” She carefully lays the folder in the middle of the desk.
No, thinks Pasha, he’s not horrible, he’s an ordinary man. The one who presses the button, the one who sets the machine working.
“Not so very horrible,” he says, “it’s just that in his business the rules were different from the very beginning.”
“Haven’t you ever wanted to change the rules?” asks Ksenia. “For instance, we could behave as if there was no Putin TV and Khodorkovsky wasn’t in jail.”
Pasha laughs and thinks: she has drive, she’s a beautiful girl. I wonder if she has a boyfriend – or whatever it is they’re called nowadays?
“You could have said yes to us today,” says Ksenia, “after all, everything you said was just excuses. Explain to me what the problem is. Don’t you believe in this project?”
“Listen, Ksenia,” he says, “we both know this is an excellent idea. It’s a commercial dead cert. But you know, you said he…” – Pasha nods toward the folder – “…is a horrible man. But then, all he’s done is pay the money, give the orders and, and fly off to Spain or Greece to give himself an alibi. We can understand him. For him the murders – if there really have been any murders – are just a way to redistribute property. Redirect the cash flows. When you get right down to it, he’s been living in a world of abstractions for a long time already. But this man you want to set up the site about – he lives in the same city as we do. Goes to the same shops. Probably eats in the same restaurants. And what he does, he does himself. With his own hands.”
16
You got away, the only one, you got away.
You had little feet and hands
And shoulder-length brown hair
A pubis shaved with just a thin line of hair untouched by the razor
And I thought a cutthroat had never touched your body before
There are so many things you don’t know in this life
But we have time
I undressed you, unconscious, on the table in the concrete basement
And stood there for a moment, listening
As a string started quivering somewhere inside me
Like a tuning fork responding to an old familiar melody
Like a faded leaf clinging desperately to the branch
In the gusts of autumn wind
You had a Walkman, I crushed it under my heel
You won’t need it now, I’ll teach you a different music
The faded leaves out on my lot
Could not cling to the branches
They lie on the cold ground and wait for you
I ran my hand over your stomach
Gently rounded, like a little hill
Perhaps you thought “I’ve got fat this summer, now I must lose weight”
Believe me, I have known many women
Closer than anybody else
I tell you, as sincerely as the razor
Slicing through the skin:
You have a lovely body
Your body is lovely from its outer coverings
To its inner depths, to the moist pink depths of the mouth
The red muscles, the yellow fat, the blue veins
Visible even now beneath your summer suntan skin
Two white triangles, front and back,
Where the swimsuit was
Now you have nothing to hide
Something quivers inside me, like music playing in a crushed Walkman
Wait, and you will hear it too, you will respond
You said “I must lose weight, slim down”
Let me tell you that losing weight is very simple
Like a tree dropping its leaves in autumn
I’ll teach you how when you wake up
Her eyes were closed, but I remembered their color
They were brown with amber-yellow veins
When I first saw them, I could feel
The world grow still around me, curling up like a scroll
Brown eyes with amber-yellow veins
The plump lips of a teenage girl
Who kissed all evening in the empty corridors at school
While dance music thundered downstairs in the hall
Oh, what a shame to stretch that mouth with a rag or a gag
But I wanted so much to go outside with you
Where the faded leaves were lying on the cold ground
Waiting for you
I gave you an injection to make you sleep soundly
And then I took a needle and thread
My granny taught me to darn things
She said “No need to throw away what can be darned”
Yes, the war generation, poverty and hunger
They weren’t bothered about being overweight at your age
They were hungry all the time anyway
I finished and then wiped away the blood
Licked it off with my tongue but it still wouldn’t stop
It was like a kiss
My eyelashes trembled on your cheek
I tied your hands together
Little hands like a child’s
They could easily slip out of the ropes
I tied them tighter
I put shackles on your legs so you could walk, but not too fast
I knew straight off you weren’t one of those girls
Who give themselves with tears and make no effort
To get their own way
We will have plenty of time, I said to you
We’ll get to know each other better
I’ll show you things you never thought you’d see
Your body will reveal its mysteries
And you will know there was no need to worry
About how much you weigh
You’re not really heavy, I can easily carry you in my arms
I’ll tell you how I’ve lived for all these years
Without you here beside me
I’ll lead you into its forbidden groves
Where flayed skin hangs on branches
Like faded leaves
Where a little boy can’t sleep
Listening to the trembling growing louder
As if someone is choosing music
To make the tuning fork respond
You sat there on the porch
Faded leaves lying at your feet
Your lips pressed tightly closed
The white triangle below your stomach
Bisected by the thin line of hair
Glowed in the evening twilight
It was a peaceful autumn evening
In the cool air
Sounds carried well
Somewhere in the distance a dog barked
And a train hooted
You opened your eyes
You had brown eyes with amber veins
When I first saw them, I could feel
The world grow still around me, curling up like a scroll
Like a fallen leaf on the ground
You didn’t try to stand, you simply tensed your arms
As though testing the strength of the ropes
Red muscles, interwoven tissues
Little mounds on your forearms
Under the skin that was still tanned
And then you suddenly did something with your face
I didn’t understand what happened
A fountain of blood spurted out
Your mouth opened
And you screamed
It was a peaceful autumn evening
In the cool air
Sounds carried well
Before I realized what was happening
I darted to your side but you kept on screaming
A single note, like some broken mechanical toy
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
I darted to you, and in one swift stroke
I slit your throat
Forgive me.
It was autumn, people closing up their dachas for the winter
The whole village full of visitors
Now there will be nothing more
No music and no trembling
I’ll never know how your skin comes away
Or peel your breasts, like two halves
Of a single orange
The sound broke off as if someone stamped on a Walkman
You clung to life for one more second
Like an autumn leaf in a cold wind
Clinging to the branch
You lay there in my arms
Your lips, the plump lips of a teenage girl
Were torn to shreds
I didn’t think you had such strength in you
Maybe my granny taught me darning badly
Or I was a careless pupil
While the dance music thundered downstairs in the school hall
I wanted to kiss you in the empty corridors
I wanted to walk with you up the dark stairs of a school
Where every classroom holds new pain and new humiliation
And the graduation diploma is a gob of spittle in the face
And a shout of “get lost”
I was the only pupil in that school
I’m still amazed that they made such a big building for me
My dad, mom, granddad and two grannies who survived the war
But failed to teach me to darn properly
I took you in my arms and carried you to the basement
You were really light, believe me
You didn’t need to worry about your weight
I put you on the table where a few hours earlier
I undressed you, and then turned out the light
Standing on the steps, I turned to look:
The white triangle below your stomach
Glowed in the darkness of the cellar
Bisected by the thin line of hair
Like a razor
17
IT’S EASY TO BE UNFAITHFUL TO YOUR WIFE. ESPECIALLY if you happen to work in one of the liberal professions. You can be delayed at work, you don’t have to sit in the office all day long and, when all’s said and done, you can even work at weekends: the latest issue has to be put to bed, or you need to do an exclusive interview. The important thing is to find a place, because finding a woman is no problem. Women in the liberal professions are liberal-minded when it comes to friendly sex. But it’s better not to sleep with your colleagues – apart from the female journalists there are always the female designers, page makers and photographers.
Three years ago I even met a girl courier, only sixteen years old. She was as curious as a little squirrel and every time I came up with a new place and new position for her to give herself to me in, teaching her the psychogeography of the city and sexual acrobatics at the same time. We opened the season in a cubicle of the editorial office restroom, where I dragged her after the bottle of wine with which we had celebrated her first pay packet. Then came an attic, the stairway of a Stalinist skyscraper, a basement, where my courier suddenly started feeling dizzy and I had to drag her back out into the fresh air, stumbling over the pipes and tearing my jacket. Then the driver’s cab of a dump truck that had been left unlocked overnight, a building still under construction and – the brilliant crowning moment of our affair – a room in the Rossiya Hotel, where I saw her completely naked for the first time: her navel was pierced and she had a little rose tattooed on her left buttock. The girl used to wear boots with thick soles and she only put on a skirt for her assignations with me – because it was too awkward taking off the trousers with numerous pockets that were her uniform on every other day. That evening in the hotel we completely satisfied our mutual curiosity and when we parted, I think we took away only the very best of memories.
I knew all the places where I passed the time with my little courier very well. With my practiced eye I could tell immediately which entrance would be best for our next brief encounter. I prefer the ones where the elevator and the stairs are separate and you can feel safe on the landing of the top floor. As I grew older, however, I started preferring girls who had their own apartments. Fortunately, there were more and more of those, nowadays even students try to rent a place to avoid being crammed in with the old folks, never mind Ksenia, who’s my boss, after all, and not even the memory of her lips clasped round my prick can change that fact. But even if we forget about that, it really would be embarrassing for a respectable grown-up man to carry his young companion off to a basement, like some spotty teenager. There were still hotels, but they have been getting more expensive with every year that passes, and I can’t bring myself to pay a fifth of my monthly salary for two hours in my lover’s arms. I’m a family man after all, the father of two children, the husband of my wife.
It’s easy to be unfaithful to your wife. Especially if your wife also happens to work in the liberal professions and has a liberal outlook on life, if you have an open marriage and she is willing to close her eyes to your infidelities. She sits on top of you, closes her eyes and starts swaying smoothly to and fro until she suddenly explodes into a long, drawn-out sigh and collapses, pressing down on you with her heavy breasts and scattering her red hair that is starting to turn gray. Holding her carefully by the buttocks, you make two or three thrusts into her and shoot your load too. And that’s it, finito, you can open your eyes. In our sexual duet Oxana assigns the passive role to me, and even that doesn’t happen very often. It’s a long time since I last managed to persuade her to vary our games – the times when the young student of the Russian University for the Humanities demonstrated the fundamentals of sexual acrobatics to me on the carpet in her parents’ parlor were consigned to oblivion long ago. She likes to be on top, and I don’t know what’s more important here – subtle points of physiology or the desire to dominate. In our family life the missionary position has been an exotic exception. The last time we tried it was probably on the day when Oxana refused to let me go to Chechnya.
It’s easy to be unfaithful to your wife. Especially if you know why you do it. If you wake up one morning with the feeling that your life is passing by pointlessly, squeezed between the routine of work and the routine of family. I love my job and I love my family, but I resent being an ordinary correspondent who does an occasional interview for a second-flight online newspaper. In professional terms, I’m a successful failure. Successful – because I do actually earn the kind of money I can bring home without feeling ashamed. A failure – because after a year even I can’t recognize my own articles. Everything would have been different if I’d had the talent to become a columnist like the ones who write for Gazette – then my friends would quote my columns to each other when they met. Or if I could have gone to Chechnya.
I don’t regret the choice I made. I chose my family, but even in my family I still feel like a successfu
l failure. My children love me, my wife supports me at difficult moments. In the final analysis, we drag this cart along together – my interviews in Evening.ru and Oxana’s articles in Harper’s Bazaar or Elle, added together, provide our breakfast, lunch and dinner, which is what five billion of the six billion inhabitants of the Earth toil for. I’m a very successful failure, I love my wife and my children. But I feel cramped in our life, just as the four of us are cramped in the two-room flat left to us by Oxana’s parents.
Sexual acrobatics with women I hardly even know – that was the only war I could set out for. Basements where water slops under your feet, stairways where the glass from broken bottles crunches under the soles of your shoes, abandoned buildings scheduled for demolition, a hoarse cry, a palm covering a mouth – for me these are Gudermes, Mozdok and Grozny, which I never visited. I never made it as a journalist, but at least as a man I don’t feel like a loser. I remember all of them, from the young girl courier with the pierced navel to the forty-year-old American journalist with whom I celebrated Yeltsin’s victory with oral sex in the sumptuous luxury of the Radisson-Slavyanskaya Hotel. All of them from the first-year student Natasha, who seduced me six months after my wedding, to Ksenia, whose ear-splitting shriek I only heard for the first time last week. These memories are my invisible trophies, photographs brought back from places where I didn’t have to feel like a failure.
It’s easy to be unfaithful to your wife. You just have to know the boundary that you must not cross. You just have to remember all the time that these women are doomed to become memories, invisible trophies, and your wife will be with you unto death. It’s very easy to respect your wife, especially if you’ve lived with her for ten years and you have two children. Sexual acrobatics is impossible with a body you know as well as you do your own; it’s like trying to kiss yourself on the heel. Your bodies have been ground to fit each other, they have no need of superfluous movements as they sway in synchronized motion on the waters of Oblivion in the most erotic rhythm a man and a woman can know. This rhythm is called “we shall grow old together,” and it is measured out by the water boiling in the kettle in the morning, the New Year chimes on TV and the rare long, drawn-out sighs in the air of the bedroom at night. Every morning you wake up together and every night you go to sleep together, every day you watch the gray hairs growing through the red tresses, every month you breathe in the smell of unborn children leaving her womb when their time comes. And when Oxana is sleeping beside you, you put your arms round her and as you fall asleep you wonder what invisible trophies her memory holds. Sexual acrobatics is impossible with a body you know as well as you do your own; and so is infidelity.