“I slept with your mother. I did it with all my passion. I drilled her and drilled her and then you emerged from her belly like a wild troll from a mangled cave… Admit it, my child, from the very beginning you never liked it here.”
“No, I liked it here. From the very beginning. You’re mistaken, Daddy,” Danaë answered, listening with one ear to the hammering rain. “Fools like you are always mistaken. You’re made of mistakes. You have a fatal error dangling right there between your legs.”
Innokentii Karaklev watched the rivulets of rain running down the windowpane.
“Listen, child…” he muttered, swallowing dryly, “try to be… happy. I’m so sick of you being unhappy… I’m dying because of your unhappiness.”
“You’re dying because of cancer,” corrected Danaë, sticking a cigarette in the corner of her smirk.
They were both silent awhile, thirty-five seconds or so. The smoke from Danaë’s cigarette coiled around itself in the dark room like a scrap of seaweed.
“Do you know why I left your mother?” said Dad, scratching his sunken cheek. “Because of this one student. A handsome rogue. He was excellent at poker, had a thing for chemistry and water polo. Yes sir, my little pea, he always had jokers in store. His glass vials often exploded from overheating, and he swam in a mauve swim cap. Your mother found us—I was on my knees, polishing his… with my mouth…”
“His what?” Danaë turned to stone.
“His that!” He made a strange noise and squinted his colorless eyes at his daughter.
“Daddy…” Danaë stonily sounded out the words. “Are you saying you were a homosexual?”
An astonishing picture took shape in her mind: her dying father sucking the penis of Golotsvan, the flunk, the murderer.
“That’s how it went… sometimes. And who didn’t get into some of it? In one’s youth, in the barracks, after a bout of drinking, in one’s dreams—”
“Did you actually love my mother?”
“Yes, my little pea, yes…” Innokentii Karaklev nodded his hairless head. “You are the result of a grandiose love, a gale-force diffusion. The cells were jumping out of our bodies and mixing together. Such passion, it shook the atmosphere. Those were breathtaking, mind-numbing times.”
“And what about that student?” Danaë asked, watching the column of ash crumble from her cigarette onto the rug. “What was his name?”
“Andrei. Yes, yes. It was a breathtaking passion.” Her dad smacked his lips and purred like a cat. “Absolute diffusion. Overflowing excitement. To near suffocation. More a miracle than a passion.”
“Did you love my mother?” Danaë prodded in a steely voice. “Answer me. I don’t understand.” She now imagined her dad’s hairless head laboring over the perineum of the flunking murderer Golotsvan.
“I loved them both very deeply,” answered Innokentii Karaklev. “And about twenty others. I loved everyone. And every time it was a miracle.”
Danaë took a drag on her cigarette and fixed a vacant stare on the window. A lustful blush broke in crimson across Golotsvan’s cheeks, his eyes turning back in his head, his moans encouraging her dad’s frail, hairless head with its decaying mouth.
“And me?” Danaë asked almost inaudibly.
Her dad’s wrinkles suddenly turned smooth and he answered: “You are my little pea. My favorite book. Plus Louis Armstrong. And Fellini. Plus my favorite olivier salad. And all the Egyptian pyramids and the ruins of the great castles. You understand me? You are also the lily pads on the pond where I swam when I was just a little kid… Plus God, whatever He may actually turn out to be. My little pea. Danaë. Come here, give me a kiss.”
Danaë quickly crushed her cigarette butt in the ashtray, walked over to him on legs she could barely feel, and pressed her cheek into Daddy’s lips.
“You too,” she whispered, “dying one… Daddy…”
Golotsvan was done. But the rain in the neighborhood of Perovo wasn’t about to finish. Danaë moved to the kitchen, leaving her dad to stare out the gray window covered with heavenly moisture…
She struck him with a meat hammer, with the burled side. Danaë knew beforehand that just once on the head wouldn’t be enough. Neither would two. During the process she realized that it would be enough only when she had lost count for the third time. Then she stood there listening, without looking. She imagined a monitor with a wan green image of her dad’s threadlike pulse. Then she dropped the hammer, went to the kitchen, washed her hands, went to the hallway, grabbed her bag of notebooks, came back to the kitchen, sat down at the table, and began grading papers. After a half hour she was sick of it. She moved into her dad’s room, turned on the light (it had grown dark outside, but the rain was still pouring down), and peered at him. Innokentii Karaklev was sitting in the same armchair, but tilted over on his side so that his knuckles were trapped against the rug. His thoroughly beaten head was glazed in its own juices.
Danaë decided to leave everything as it was, at least for now, until she took a bath with some fragrant salts. Salts always had a positive effect on her body. Sitting on the edge of the tub and looking into a mirror, Danaë pronounced: “This is easy.”
Later she was told that she’d gone mad. Just like her mom. Those who said it were right. She knew it and she’d reply: “And you’re all bastards, bastards, all of you.” It’s possible that she was right too.
CHRISTMAS
by Irina Denezhkina
New Arbat
Translated by Marian Schwartz
Jacob hung there, his shoes scraping the parquet floor spasmodically. “Papa, stop!” he rasped, trying to untangle the string of lights around his neck, while German, suspecting nothing, kept pulling the garland tighter and tighter thinking there wasn’t much time left and the house decorations still weren’t finished.
There should be a comma after “tighter,” Yulia noted in the margin, then set her pencil down and rubbed her temples. As usual, the words were swimming before her eyes. They would keep swimming for another half hour, until Yulia put on her coat, picked up her purse, and left the publishing house. She put drops in her eyes. I’m going to have to move on to glasses pretty soon, she thought sadly.
As Yulia left the Barrikadnaya metro station, the heavy glass doors swung closed behind her with a loud wallop.
She heaved a distraught sigh, her head finally clearing after the stench of the sweaty underground crowd and their identical faces, on each of which she distinctly read: IhateyouIhateeveryone. Her black sweater was stuck to her body, the harsh wool bristly. What was it knit from? It pricked her armpits and back.
Yulia wiped the sweat from her forehead and made her habitual motion of smoothing down her jacket.
Her wallet was gone.
She had her cell phone. Here it was, on the right. But her wallet was missing.
Frightened, Yulia looked from side to side, feverishly trying to figure out who might have relieved her of her salary and bonus and where, when, and how.
Yulia moved forward on cotton legs and leaned her shoulder against one of the vans selling burned chebureki and sausages wrapped in pastry. Any other time the smell of the tainted meat would have turned her inside out, but the thought of the money drowned out every other consideration.
How was she going to live now?
Go to the police? Yulia laughed nervously. A lady walking by, wearing a gray puffer coat, gave her a nasty look and sent a tut-tutting curse her way. Rush back, down there, into the bowels of the underground, wrest her money back (from whom, dear Yulia?), howl…? Pretty funny.