Bakaleishchikov was absolutely fucking blown away by the view from here of the dreadful square, made a shambles by black snowdrifts and mud… Although to me it was still beautiful. But on the whole, a terrifying sight. You expect more from Petersburg. Even in winter…
He presented a monologue. Classical in all respects. About how all of us who live here are assholes.
He stood on the edge of the roof wearing his black overcoat, flapping in the wind, and was shouting almost hysterically, and his scarf fluttered like a red banner…
“All our life here—it’s a fucking Dostoevsky nightmare! One big czar asshole named Nastaysa Filippovna! Humiliation stronger than pride. Allegedly there’s beauty here. Anya, what kind of fucking beauty is there here? Anya, there is rot here, this fucking Piter is rotting, do you understand, it’s rotting just like Venice… only Venice is rotting in a civilized manner, but this, this spawn of bullshit is decaying at will—in the broad expanses of the north. And nothing can stop it from fucking rotting, not UNESCO, not DICKESCO… Snow, Anya, ought to be white! White, do you understand? Bears are white and brown—and that’s normal. But snow should be white! And only white! Here we have the kingdom of fucking black grime and slime. Nothing but fucking, fucking, fucking, damned fucking noir!”
My heart was pounding. And my head was pounding. From fear. He’s not coordinated. He smokes grass from morning till night. He won’t manage. He’ll lose his footing. He won’t grab hold of me.
I pushed him hard in the back with two hands—forward.
He didn’t manage to keep his footing. He didn’t grab hold of me. Nothing was “like it is in the movies.”
He flew down, like a deer, with a shout.
Smashed to smithereens.
No fucking good smoking weed from morning till night.
I didn’t care what happened to me afterward.
They didn’t keep me for very long.
The investigator was young and handsome.
The medical expert was young and lazy.
They could have done some special tests and come to the conclusion that he wasn’t responsible, that somebody had pushed him from behind. But they could also choose not to do any tests.
And not come to any conclusion. And that was clearly more expedient.
Seems I’m a born actress.
I wept naturally and said that he was my friend and what a terrible thing it was! And they found absolutely no motive whatsoever for my doing it.
The prematurely deceased guy was a Russian citizen, he didn’t even have a European passport, just three different “places of residence.”
So why go to a lot of trouble?
Misha left behind seven children from five wives. The youngest son was already fifteen.
Of course, I’d like to be able to tell all this to Lyokha Saksofon. My comrade-in-arms in the group Anyuta and the Angels. He’s the main angel. And even more of an archangel with a heavy golden trumpet.
Lyokha Saksofon probably couldn’t have pictured me as a murderer. I was a heroine to him. Just putting together my group Anyuta and the Angels, and somehow managing to feed myself and four musicians—that meant a lot in our closed and stagnant city. Everybody was pushing and shoving here on our little square—there wasn’t much money, or much fame. And you needed to somehow elbow your way in and squeeze out the others.
Lyokha could never do that. The only thing in life he knew how to do was to blow into his pipe, into the archangel’s gilded trumpet.
And I became legendary for surviving the ‘90s with two small children, and how when I was left a widow I sang in gangsters’ hangouts and clubs.
Once I was shot at by the owner of some casino who was high on cocaine, and he was hauled away by six guys…
Well then, even if Misha had performed a completely different monologue, one about his love for Piter, I still wouldn’t have spared him. I had sentenced him to death, and had led him to his personal place of execution. Onto the stage set of his personal death…
Because the Man from the Past always has some story like that… about the Past. From which it becomes clear that he is not long for this world. That he’s already lost.
Everybody mixes up who’s the father of my children. Because there were two fathers: my first daughter was with Tabachnik, and the second one was with Kit.
But since Kit practically raised the first one from birth, she was also considered Kit’s girl.
Kit always had a hell of a lot of work. At the Maly Opera he was on staff as a modeler. And there he only needed to make Tabachnik one official model a season for the current production.
But all the rest of the models were made to order—for Tabachnik, if they were going to other theaters, and for the rest of the merry band. Later there were also military models, which in the late ‘80s brought in orders from collectors, when the theater business became superquiet as the result of the usual revolution.
Kit of course was a drunkard. The most natural drunkard. The classic Russian master drunkard. His heart belonged to the tavern.
He spent most of his time in the Maly Opera studio, which according to the theater’s inventory, both movable and immovable property, was the “modeling” studio. But he divided the rest of his time among three restaurants of the All-Russian Theater Society. One was upstairs—formal—one was in the basement, and the third was simply a little café-buffet. He didn’t like the Hotel Europe. Not because our corsairs went there, but because his clients went there, particularly during those final years. Refined, elegant collectors who ordered one-of-a-kind models of famous battles. With all kinds of little soldiers and machinery. And all this was on a scale of one-to-twenty. And sometimes even smaller. And they paid a lot by the standards of those days.
For some reason this made him nervous.
He would probably have become an alcoholic, but he didn’t have the chance.
And perhaps I would have left him; on the whole I was reckless.
But I didn’t have the chance to leave him.
They often started fighting when they got drunk. And one day he got killed in a fight.
Foolishly, accidentally. They punctured his spleen.
Bang!… and the boy’s gone. And this was before all the big guns came to Petersburg.
That’s what I thought for twenty whole years.
And would have gone on thinking.
Were it not for that conversation with Misha.
When it happened, among our group only he, Bakaleishchikov, was married, to the Finn, and he was already, like, living there, and would rush back and forth.
And it was so obvious that he had set this all up.
This superorder, for a super-knock-off, for superbucks.
And he surrendered Kit. Nobody else could have done it.
And to surrender meant to…
It was very much accepted among the corsairs.
In general, to surrender your own is accepted in any criminal milieu, going back to the real John Silver.
The wind howls, the sea rages
We, the corsairs, will never surrender…
What a fucking lie, what a big fucking lie… We’ll surrender, and how!
And so I thought up this complicated punishment to be executed from that roof.
I decided that God would be the arbiter. That it was almost a bit of a duel.
I consider it to be a duel, because it’s a miracle that he turned out to be so uncoordinated. He didn’t grab onto me at the last moment and drag me with him.