“No, you couldn’t have!” he cried. “I need my education…” Then he underwent a sudden transformation. He drew himself up straight and puffed out like a turkey, as though his sense of dignity had returned and was flooding him from within. He started pacing the room, and I watched him in his agitation. I experienced a cold, predatory curiosity, a sense of my own strength and the ease with which I could simply crush him like a louse.
“Tatchuk,” I warned, “you had your chance.”
He started coughing and turned toward me, jerking spasmodically. His face had gone purple, and his eyes were large and beseeching like a saint on an icon, or a bull in a bullfight. At first he didn’t understand, as he knocked over mugs and glasses on the table, searching one surface and then another, grabbing at things, incredulous at not being able to find his priceless Swiss fix.
“What did you do with it? Did you take it? Give it back right now! Come on, give it to me… Be a man about it… It hurts, it really hurts. It hurts to breathe, I can’t. Seriozha, man, I’m sorry, what do you want? I’m going to die, please. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” He was wheezing and sputtering, then he coughed out a few more words. He started to lose his balance, took a step toward me, then stumbled. He had to lean on the desk for support, and his hand seemed to go through the wooden tabletop like water.
I continued to sit there, ringing with numbness, as though I were not myself. I behaved with the same sweet aloofness with which a cruel child dissects a bumblebee on the windowsill, probing it’s fuzzy belly with a needle until it spurts white pus like a ripe pimple. I found myself at the point of no return, where love is silent, and it was as pleasant and painful as returning to the cramped unconsciousness of the womb. Suddenly, as though I’d been yanked by the hair, I started at the seriousness of my insult to the world, and I slapped myself on the forehead. What am I doing? I snatched a kitchen knife and rushed to pry open the lock on the flimsy desk drawer. I fumbled for the miserable spray and rushed to my roommate’s side.
“Come on, come on,” I coaxed, “you don’t have to be talented or smart or honest or good. It’s enough to just be alive. Who are we, anyway, to refuse one another the right to exist?”
A day later, his body was found in a toilet stall in the left wing of the building. He was clutching an empty bottle of sleeping pills. By some cruel twist of fate, his body lay prostrate just beneath the words You’re useless, which someone had underlined with a thick marker.
When a person loses someone close to him, it is common that he will feel tortured by a sense of responsibility toward the dearly departed. Friends give speeches in his honor. A bright, whitewashed image of the deceased is created, purified by suffering, which has little to do with the living person you yourself knew. This was exactly the way we, students of the acclaimed professor Urusov who gathered in the courtyard of the dormitory, recalled one who was truly talented, who suffered deeply in crisis—a vulnerable soul whom we ignored, abandoned, and paid no attention to, focused as we were on ourselves. Not that a long time was spent mourning. (It was, after all, the heat of May: sticky leaves rustled in the trees, and the hot air was as thick as the rubber ball we took with us to play soccer at Savelovsky station.) It had already been suggested, as though by chance, that there was no reason to torture ourselves because of someone else’s frivolity and that the fellow himself was to blame. “It was so obviously his own fear of living,” another colleague said.
I stood there trying to find the point from which we could go back to the past, but anger, or envy, or soul-killing apathy had numbed the senses, and, picking us up like chips of wood in a flood, had carried us toward the finish line. I couldn’t find this point, or even picture it. And, more out of a sense of duty, not yet believing in the true, unparalleled reality of a higher judgment, I sidled off furtively, away from the others, mumbling silently under my breath, “God forgive me.”
PART IV
WAR AND PEACE
THE COAT THAT SMELLED LIKE EARTH
by Dmitri Kosyrev (Master Chen)
Birch Grove Park
Translated by Mary C. Gannon
That dude, by the way, he never took his coat off,” the girl told me. “For the first time in my life I did it with a guy in a coat. You know, an old coat, pretty gross.”
A coat in the middle of a hot, stifling Moscow summer? I began to understand my client, the mother of this underage creature. When a girl gives way to her fantasies to such a degree, her friends can deal with it. But not her mother. To the mother, a child will always be a child, even if that child has developed a habit of talking about sex with a definite world-weariness. That’s when I get a phone call that goes, Doctor, can you tell me if a normal person would think something like that?
But, whereas you can lie to your mother and enjoy scaring her, you can’t deceive a shrink. A professional will easily be able to detect whether an overripe teenager is merely fantasizing, or fantasizing while fervently believing in the fantasies, or simply…
Simply telling the truth.
“Did you tell your mother about that? About the coat?” I asked in a gloomy tone. “Do you realize that a normal person would never believe that? Look out the window—the concrete is so hot it’s melting—and you’re talking about a guy having sex in a coat. It wasn’t a fur coat, by any chance, was it? Think before you tell your mother things like that. Or do you want her to pack you off to a mental institution after this?”
“Oh, so that’s what this is all about,” she said, and examined me with a long look. “Is that your diagnosis? All right, then. Let’s go to the loony bin. Just let me grab an extra pair of pants, and off I go.”
She waved her palm over her head in a circular motion imitating the flashing light of an ambulance.
Most of my income (not reported to the IRS) comes from single mothers who refuse to believe that their children have grown up. Not just grown up, but grown up to become coarse and ugly, so that if they’re boys they contemplate throwing their mothers facedown on the kitchen table. And if they’re girls, their mothers suddenly become spiteful, idiotic obstacles to achieving very concrete physical desires.
It’s one thing when these are classic teenage fantasies, even if they border on pathology. (And they always border on pathology.) What I had just heard, however, was something completely different. Her eye movements, the tone of her voice, and the internal logic of the story attested to the complete absence of any fantasy. Yes, she said she’d do it with that guy for five hundred rubles in Birch Grove Park, which stretches from the Polezhaevskaya subway station to Peschanaya Square. Yes, she went with him to the end of the grove and waved a condom she’d pulled out of her pocket in front of his face. And then she was smelling the earthy, moldy smell of the gray overcoat, or even more likely a raincoat, that the man never took off in spite of the heat.
“He could’ve killed you, you know,” I reproached her.
“He was all right,” she said very convincingly. “Just wanted to get laid. Then again, I picked him. For his eyes. He had such—”
“Remind me how old you are?”
“What? So what if I’m fifteen? Does that mean I’m too young to want it, huh?” She opened her eyes, thick with makeup, very wide. “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know. My mom forgot to tell me.”