Danaë poisoned her daddy. Innokentii Karaklev felt drowsy. Danaë tucked him into bed and went to the kitchen to wait for him not to wake up. But Innokentii Karaklev did wake up. He even drank a little chicken broth. When he went to sleep for a second time and, after a short while, woke up once again. And the third time was the same. The fourth and fifth times too. So passed three days, and Daddy was still not dying. The poison didn’t tarry in his sick body: it left with the urine or the shit, she didn’t quite know which. Then Danaë telephoned the bastards.
“What did you give me?” she asked them.
“What you asked for,” was their answer.
“But it didn’t work! Three days have already passed!”
“Don’t shout. Wait awhile, it’ll work. And don’t call here again.”
Danaë began to wait. A week went by. Innokentii Karaklev was dying, but not all the way. Every day the same. He was dying, but not all the way.
She knew that two of the ninth-grade students—Chuniaev and Golotsvan—had committed a murder. Danaë accidentally overheard their lively chatter, their voices brimming with real euphoria. The boys were cheerfully, ecstatically exchanging impressions. The Creator himself, it would seem, had experienced such rapture in the first hours after the creation of the world. But these two—Chuniaev and Golotsvan—had simply murdered a bum the previous night. With the aid of the homeless man they had been demonstrating to each other various martial arts strikes and holds, and finally martial-arted the man to death. Danaë also had previous opportunities to hear about this type of entertainment of the idle but energetic youth from families who considered themselves successful. The Perovo police took on the search for the homeless-cides with some reluctance. More precisely: they began the search reluctantly and then, after a few hours, dropped it completely. The Perovo police had much luckier corpses to track—ones with relatives and square-footage.
But the corpse of that bum did not vanish without glory: it had a short but successful career as an actor in an anatomical theater. The medical students showered him with bouquets of twinkling scalpels…
She was impressed that her students—Chuniaev and Golotsvan—were not only falling behind in every subject, while also, as it turned out, committing murders. This permitted her hatred toward them to acquire some firm ground. The testosterone was jumping out of Chuniaev’s and Golotsvan’s mouths, ears, noses, and even from under their fingernails…
Once, on television, she saw a news segment about a group of students who raped and murdered their phys-ed teacher. This happened somewhere on the outskirts of the city, which Danaë, a Muscovite, could imagine about as vaguely as she could the Flemish city of Brabant. Watching Golotsvan as he shuffled at the blackboard with his hands in the pockets of his wide jeans, which were covered with chains and trinkets, Danaë imagined him, with hands shaking, hastily unbuttoning his foul-smelling pants and throwing himself at her with his horn-shaped prick. She, Danaë, is lying crucified in the tar, naked, while Golotsvan’s partners in crime hold her by the arms and legs; she struggles in their trap like a deer knocked onto her back. First Golotsvan, and then the rest of the goons, one by one, press against her with their unwashed genitalia, toss on her for a bit, then sprinkle her with what God gave them, and… experience a piercing guilt. Then, ashamed, they break her neck, or choke her with a wire, or stab her to death with penknives…
“And that’s all you deigned to learn, venerable Golotsvan?”
“I didn’t have time, Dana Innokentievna, my cat had kittens last night.”
“How many did she have?”
“Six. Would you like a kitten, Dana Innokentievna?”
“Take a seat, Golotsvan. You get a ‘satisfactory.’”
“Why ‘satisfactatory’? Please, Dana Innokentievna—”
“Take your seat.”
Grumbling under his breath, with his lower lip jutting forward, Golotsvan went back to his seat, jangling the chains and trinkets on his foul-smelling pants. His hands in his pockets. Danaë picked up a piece of chalk and turned to the board.
“Jewish bitch…” Golotsvan muttered.
Without turning around, Danaë grinned at the mouse-gray smoothness of the chalkboard. A thought came to her:What would happen if I take this here piece of chalk and on this very blackboard write something really special. Like, for example, “May you all be damned.” What would happen? Probably nothing. They’d all exchange glances and squeeze out puzzled little smirks, like lambs catching a whiff of the fire being lit under the spit. Besides, they were all damned long ago. And she was too. Danaë herself had been damned even before the students sitting in this classroom. Because she was older than them. Almost three times older. There’s your arithmetic for you, in a literature class. In the Perovo neighborhood. In a state school, in the city of Moscow, compared to which Brabant was just a pathetic little village of five houses and one toilet.
It would be natural to assume that since Danaë had a father, she also had a mother. Danaë didn’t like assumptions, particularly if they came from strangers. First of all, the mom she did in fact have at some point, she had no longer. Second, Mom loved her little Danaë for only a very short time: from zero to nine years old, plus the nine months that she spent carrying her daughter in her womb. And when the nine years were over, Mom placed a big down pillow on her sleeping daughter’s pretty little face, and then sat on top of it. Dad had lifted Mom off the pillow—and thus also off the red face of their daughter—just in time. After that, Danaë never saw her mom again. With the exception of that one time, which she had mostly forgotten: she and her dad had, it seems, visited Mom in some sort of yellow basement that smelled like medical syringes. Now, of course, Danaë knows all too well, and had known it for twenty-plus years, that the awful trick with the down pillow secured for Mom her demise in the mad house.
“Mom loves you,” Karaklev assured his nine-year-old daughter as she cried herself to sleep. “She just needs a little medical treatment and she’ll be with us again. Mom loves you.”
“And do you love me?” Danaë asked, smearing the tears with her little fist.
“And I do too,” Dad replied, taken aback that she would question his feelings. “Very, very, very much. Daddy loves his little pea, his clever girl.”
Innokentii Karaklev was becoming more and more capricious, more cancerlike. More foul-smelling. Worst of all, Daddy started to recount aloud his past life, and specifically those moments that a healthy person would not only not recall, but would actively try to forget. The long period of dying had debased him. Instead of becoming more pious, he was transformed into a cynic to a degree that is rarely found among the camp of dying organisms. This is what Innokentii Karaklev said to his daughter Danaë on that day it rained cats and dogs, such a heavy, pounding rain that the pigeons caught in it received concussions. The neighborhood of Perovo looked like a boundless, cracked aquarium into which poured the water from a thousand hoses in the sky.