Buratina! Fucking amazing. Burataeva! he shouts in his mind.
This clumsy creature had been Ryabets’s erotic dream. Nadya Burataeva—Buratina, as they’d called her in school. The nickname was a jibe at her flat, half-Kalmyk, but definitely not Buryat, nose.
“And you’re just the same, Ryaba, just the same. Maybe a little shrunken, hee hee hee! Still jerking off?” Burataeva’s a meter away and Ryabets can smell her sour stench. “What are you standing there for? Pour! To our meeting! You wouldn’t begrudge Nadya Burataeva a drink, would you? How many years has it been? Eh? Gotta be thirty.”
Ryabets reaches into his bag, removes the bottle and cup, pulls the cork out with his teeth, pours, and offers it to Buratina. He drinks from the bottle.
“So tell me, how have you been? What’s up?”
Ryabets is sitting under a pine facing Buratina. Echoes of her fate surface right away. She was burning up in the fire so she jumped, broke her foot and back, spent a long time in recovery, and after all that discovered she was pregnant. It was born dead, actually. She went quickly downhill. Her parents supported her but she drank, then her lover (a recidivist) did and she drank, they put him in jail and she drank, her parents died and she drank, another pregnancy and she drank, a miscarriage and she drank, she sold everything and drank, her apartment too and drank, disappeared and drank.
“This is Polkan,” she introduces.
Ryabets nods but the dog isn’t taking to him.
“Don’t wet your pants, Ryaba, he won’t touch you. He’s been with me since he was born. Andryukha brought him when he was just a puppy, thi-i-is little. You can’t imagine how glad I am to see you, Ryaba!” Buratina hiccups. And in a gleeful non sequitur: “They shut down the beer stand a long time ago, back under Gorbachev. And all the stores too. We go over the bridge, to Priboy. I’ve been living here ten years, Ryaba, across Bezdonka. I’m moving to Kazan station now. They say it’s a rich place—you can take melons off the trains from the Chuchmeks. You won’t die of hunger near a train station. I’m not staying here, no way.”
“Why?” Ryabets recalls the morning paper.
“Hell if I know!” Buratina shrugs. “Everyone’s run off. Even Andryukha. He promised me. ‘You and me, Nadya, we’ll go to Kazan station, I won’t abandon you.’ So where’s Andryukha now? Kaput. Hee hee hee.”
“Why are you limping?”
“I’m limping? What do you mean I’m limping? What do you mean? I know why I’m limping, I know. But I won’t tell you. Never!” Then she mutters under her breath, “Maybe I’m Madame de La Vallière! Listen, Ryaba, I’m limping because I’m Madame de La Vallière!”
If Ryabets had known how to put his emotions into words, it would have come out something like this: Did I really lust after this woman once? Her? Me? Incredible! Ryabets crinkles his nose.
“… How I’ve lived this long I don’t remember, Ryaba. I took a leap from the second floor! Broke both my little legs. I could’ve suffocated. All the others did: my Alik, and Lidukha, and those other two, I don’t remember who they were. And that fat one who carried around the pictures of women.”
“Boltyansky?”
“That’s it, Ryaba, exactly! He suffocated.” And suddenly she winks. “Should I tell you?”
“What?”
“This! Remember how you used to moon over me, Ryaba? Remember? Hee hee hee! You did, I know you did! But I wouldn’t give it up for you! I would for anyone else, but not you.” She falls silent and starts rocking from side to side.
“Is it true there was a prison here?”
“Definitely. Yes!” And now he can’t tell whether it’s the drink talking or she’s serious. “I won’t let you have any now either, so don’t get any ideas! Don’t you look at how old I am… You’re no stud yourself. All skin and bones. They used to call you Skull, remember?” She fell silent for several moments, then suddenly: “Andryukha died here. Kirei died and Sabel died. We were four in this pipe—I mean the four of us lived together… I’m all alone now… Andryukha left a week ago, said he’d grab me some booze… He didn’t… It’s scary here, Ryaba. Where can I take Polkan? Huh? They won’t let him into the train station. Will you take him?”
“That’s all I need.”
“Yeah, right. You like a little port now and then too, I see! Like when we were kids. Don’t you make enough for a little brandy, Ryaba? What’s your job these days?”
“Cook.”
Buratina whistles. “In a restaurant?”
“A cafeteria. I feed the black-assed negroes at the university. Fortunately, it’s only ten minutes from home.”
“What do you cook for them?”
“Oh, everything: goulash, groats, cabbage soup.”
“Did you ever try foie gras?”
“That’s only a name: it’s goose liver. What’s there to try? Put it in rassolnik, potroshki—just the ticket. And the cucumbers have to be thickly sliced, preferably marinated.” Ryabets pauses to pour for Buratina. “Here’s to our meeting!” He takes a swig.
“Ryaba, you know why I wouldn’t let you have any? You look all cold, but on the inside—phooey! One of those. Us girls didn’t like you; you had this look, like you wanted to maul us. Maul us with your eyes and go down there with your nose. Hee hee hee! Our dear departed Bolt was like that too, but I felt sorry for him. Who was going to give that fatso any? He carried those dirty pictures around, but you mooned, you just egged me on. Oh, poor Bolt! And poor Mesropych, even if he was a stinker.”
“Why be sorry? They’re gone.”
“Who would have thought? Not one gray hair,” Buratina mutters.
“How’d you see me?” They’re sitting in total darkness now and can’t even make out each other’s faces anymore. Buratina’s smoking, a cheap bitter smell.
Ryabets stands up to pee. He’s not shy.
“Don’t piss on the grave!” Buratina cries.
Ryabets says nothing.
“Listen, Ryaba, here’s what I’m thinking. Maybe I could come to your place? With Polkan…?” The dog growls huskily. “I’ll wash up. Do you live alone? Are your mother and father dead?”
“Yeah.”
“I can’t even remember the last time I slept anywhere clean. What’s there for me here? They killed Andryukha! And Kirei… and Sabel… What about you, Ryaba, not married?”
“No.”
“Why not? Waiting for a princess? Or for me? Hee hee hee! Maybe I’ll give you some today, but Ryabets…” Buratina babbles.
Sometimes he can’t tell whether she’s really drunk or just pretending.
“You didn’t answer me, Ryaba. Why haven’t you gotten married?”
“I’ve been waiting for my dick to grow up.”
“Hee hee hee! You? I don’t believe that! Why did you jerk off outside my window? I remember…”
“My first little darling is lying over there.” She nods toward the fence and a night-black honeysuckle. “Do you think his little bones are still there?”
Ryabets imagines the child’s half-decayed bones. “Of course not, after all those years. Maybe a skull… or the tibias, they’re thick.”
“You’re a chef, you should know. And the second one next to him. I buried them at night, the snow was coming down; I remember, it was November.”
“You got the first from Mesropych?”
Buratina nodded and hiccupped.
“Whose was the second?”
“I don’t know. I was sleeping with everyone. I’d go to sleep under one and wake up and another’s going at it. Let the dogs have their way! And my baby girl. She’s lying right over there. She’d be nine… Pour me a little, why don’t you.”