“Luka!” she shouted, waving the yellow scarf at me. “He’s here! Come on…”
I couldn’t make anything out after that, her voice drowned in the viscous snow, which blocked up my ears and nostrils. When I reached the hole I knelt and saw that smooth face hanging in the water. There was no hair on his head, which meant it had been a wig and the current had carried it away. I remember I also thought that the drowned man had been hiding from someone too, poor devil. He never did find his boat.
There was nothing to grab onto. He had lost his jacket, and the sweater I tried to grab with two stakes, like a two-tined fork, immediately disintegrated into rot, revealing the dead man’s hairless, puffy, baby-doll chest. We messed around for half an hour or so, and in that time the body went under the ice a few more times, slipping from view, but by some miracle came back. Finally I made a noose out of the scarf, caught the dead man’s head in it, and dragged the body onto the ice, nearly breaking his neck.
At dawn the wind died down and the shore was again marked by an even line, with a black, shaggy chaff of barberry and alder, and between the bushes I made out a few crosses, which from a distance looked like a pet cemetery. We dragged the dead man on shore and dug a shallow grave—just in the top layer of snow because it made no sense to try to dig the frozen ground. His face was clean, the fish hadn’t yet touched it, and the Buryat tried to shut his eyes but his lids popped back stiffly. I threw snow over the body and poked a cross tied with the yellow scarf into the drift.
In the cockpit even the walls were covered with hoarfrost, and there was an old burnt smell coming from the stove. I had to find firewood to dry our clothes, but I was so wrung-out that I picked up the boathook and made splinters of the plank partition separating the galley from the cabin.
The woman gathered the pieces, deftly heated the stove, stripped naked, pulled an opened bottle of vodka from a recess, sprawled on my cot to get warm, and immediately fell asleep. I stuffed stale bread into my mouth, grabbed her fur cap for camouflage, and went to town as I was, in my wet coat. I didn’t feel like kicking the Buryat out, and sleeping with her was rough going: in the light of day I got a good look at her worn face and flat cheekbones and the two scars that slashed her cheek crosswise.
No sooner had I emerged onto Primorsky Avenue than my morning troubles dissipated, and when I got to the metro I caught myself thinking that I was rejoicing at the sullen stream of underground people I used to pick my way through, choking on longing and stench—though this happened no more than a couple of times a month, when the city was stuck in a traffic jam and I was late. I bought a hot dog and scarfed it down without leaving the stand, and then I bought another and finished it in the train car, dripping grease on my coat, and then accidentally saw myself in a darkened window and laughed: I looked like a beggar despite my clean-shaven face.
Fine. The worse, the better.
Emerging at my station, I circled around along Torzhkovskaya so as to approach the building from the other side, loitered on the square, slipped into the school, went up to the fourth floor, and checked out my windows. The kitchen window was open, the same as two days before, and the green curtain was flapping in the breeze at the sill, which meant Anta had not returned— she couldn’t stand drafts. I went down to the school cafeteria, stopped a kid of about thirteen at a table of trays, slipped him a hundred, and promised him two more, since that was all I had. The schoolkid wrote down the apartment number on his grimy wrist and ran over to my building, and I followed him, pulling the cap lower over my eyes.
After standing by the front door for a few minutes, I went in after the kid, heard him ringing at the apartment and kicking the door, as he’d been told, and then talking with the neighbor who came out to see what all the noise was about. The kid came down, extended his hand for the money without a word, and flew out like a shot, apparently because I looked pretty shady. It was cold in the apartment, like outside, and there was a puddle on the floor where water had come in from the windowsill. The furniture was turned over, the chairs thrown around, books and clothes piled in a heap in the middle of the living room—a search is a search. The whole kitchen was sprinkled with broken glass, like tooth powder, and the Latvian’s torn bra was on the table, her panties nowhere in sight—either they’d managed to have a good time with Anta, holding her blond head to the table, or else they’d just undressed her to scare her, it didn’t matter now.
I pushed the empty china cabinet aside, lifted the floorboard, pulled out the piece of cork, snagged the diamond with a fork, removed my boot, and shoved the stone in my sock. Then I went into the bedroom, where there was a spot in the middle of the bed that looked like a wine stain, wrestled on two sweaters, collected money from all the drawers, and headed back out, crunching on the glass dust. Turning onto Aerodromnaya, I called the fence from a pay phone, but he didn’t answer, and I had to leave a message, although in my position it wasn’t terribly intelligent. I said I’d call tomorrow at the same time and that I had a pear for anyone who had twenty well-done steaks. An idiotic code, but he liked it, the crappy conspirator. Saying this made me hungry and I quickly hit a shawarma stand, then went back to the harbor on foot, through Serafimovskoye cemetery.
The woman wasn’t on the boat. There was an empty bottle on the table in the cockpit, the stove was stuffed with firewood, and there was a lipstick heart on the hatch leading to the fore-peak. I fired up the stove, smoked a couple of reefers, threw the stinking rags off the bed, wrapped up in the blanket, and fell asleep. I had a hunting dream, though I wasn’t the hunter or the prey but someone else. Before I woke up I dreamed of a vixen, a dazzling vixen being chased across an empty white field by hounds. It was heading for the forest, racing. It wasn’t going to make it, I thought, when I saw the pack getting closer, but then the fox stopped short, swiveled around, dug its front paws into the snow crust, let out a howl, and turned into a small dog. The hounds ran up to it, sniffed the snow-covered dog face, and rushed on. Opening my eyes, I saw the light was already oozing through the crack between deck and hatch, the February wind droning on the other side of the iron wall, and it felt as though the boat was rocking, ready to set off, and I quickly climbed out. The weed was still clinging inside my head, and scraps of fog were floating before my eyes, but when I glanced toward the island I saw the hole and sobered up instantly.
The yellow scarf was fluttering on the wire net. Huh? Walking up to the hole I already knew who I’d see there, and I wasn’t wrong. I peered at the drowned man’s tranquil face and slowly walked toward shore—there was no cross in the drift, there wasn’t even a drift, just level ground, a little trampled, they could have been our own prints, mine and the datsan cleaning woman’s. I managed to break off a thick branch from a bush close to shore and poked it through the middle of the grave. There was nothing under the snow.
Had the dead man returned to the water? Or was this a different dead man? Or did he jump in the water like a white-throated dipper to escape a hawk, walk along the bottom, and then calmly climb out from under the ice? I returned to the hole, knelt, and poked at the floating body so the face would appear from under the ice crust. The face was just as smooth, and the hair was fair, only instead of a shirt this fellow had a clown’s black bow tie on his bare neck. It looked as though he’d been killed at a party, or after the party, during a friendly orgy on a yacht. They might well have been killed simultaneously, only the second one didn’t get here right away and got snagged somewhere else on his scarf, at some other fishing hole. Damn, they couldn’t have identical rags on their neck. Where was the first one? No, this was the same guy, no question.