“It’s all right,” I said. “I live alone too.”
I sat at the kitchen table. A few overfed cockroaches sauntered toward the wainscoting, still decent enough to feign fear of humans.
“Do you hear him too?” Petro asked.
I nodded. “Remember rather.”
Petro sighed. “He screams and screams and screams. Can’t sleep at all.”
“You remember his last days?”
“Yeah,” Petro said. “Everything from when he first started the business until… “
So if I got his youth and Petro-his business career, it meant that Ipatov’s generic Soviet childhood and the working life in whatever state enterprise he was assigned after receiving his degree was sloshing inside the two paramedics.
Petro also had the gold, the death. “Why did they kill him?” I asked.
“Money.” Petro heaved a sigh. “Wouldn’t pay up protection.”
“Oh.”
Petro hesitated for a while, but finally said, “Did you know he was Jewish?”
“No. Does it matter?”
Petro huffed. “You got me all wrong, Anatoly. I’m not one of those nationalists, okay? I’m not the one of those ‘drown Muscovites in Jewish blood’ types. But this torture… did you notice that they burned Kabbalic symbols into him? He knew what they were, ’cause he was a Jew.”
I perked up. “What symbols?”
“A triangle, for the trinity of Sephiroth. And circles inside of it. I think this is what held his soul here.”
“That’s the tip of the iron,” I said. “And those little holes in it. It’s just a coincidence.”
“So? The symbol’s still holy, no matter how it was made.” Petro tilted his head to the shoulder, as if listening. “What’s Kether?”
“No clue,” I said. “Ask Ipatov.”
“I can’t. I only remember for him. And he forgot what Kether is.”
Petro made tea and we drank; the cockroaches, hearing sugar, crowded in the corners, their antennae undulating eagerly. I contemplated the electric irons and their built-in alchemic and magical powers. I wondered how many more souls hung about, trapped by the thugs’ unwitting alchemy. Judging from the newspapers and the latest mortality reports, lots. That gave me an idea.
#
The problem with Ipatov’s memories was that they were much like my own. His adolescence was similar to mine, and remembering it just didn’t satisfy my longing for worthwhile experiences. Ipatov’s shortcoming was shared by many of our contemporaries-we all remembered the same signifiers of childhood: summer camps and songs praising youthful and heroic drummers, we all treasured a rare trip south, replete with a pebbled beach and a mind-boggling abundance of peaches. Standardized, trivial lives, their monotony only broken by an occasional memory of a grandfather-those were rare. We all viewed the change of regime with joyful trepidation; some were later disappointed, some were not.
I learned all that as I started visiting the scenes of body removals, sometimes tipped off by Grisha, who took as much pleasure in the soul consumption as I did, and sometimes by the police, who would tell you anything if you offered to supplement their dwindling state wages. Like where the dead bodies were, and how to call a specific ambulance if one wanted. They also didn’t mind letting Grisha dawdle, and they didn’t mind us drinking great golden jugs of beer after we let them sit next to the Kabbalic symbols burned into dead businessmen’s flesh. Beer never failed to lure the dead souls.
Far as memories went, it was hit and miss. Most blended inauspiciously with my own, grey and generic, difficult to separate from each other. But there were rare splashes I lived for-the memories of a tropical island and feathery palms, the glitter of New York on a rare pre-perestroika trip abroad, an exotic hobby of orchid collecting, a fresh memory of love so consuming that even torture could not distract from the thoughts of the beloved.
Grisha and I compared memories over the phone. We prided ourselves in our acquisitions; we both grew very fond of a young Chechen who enjoyed flowers and Persian rugs and had an abiding fascination with high-breasted women. We snickered over a paunchy, middle-aged guy who believed himself a reincarnation of Gautama Buddha, the belief especially ironic considering that he had fallen in the shootout between two organizations, which quarreled over the protection money from three stores by Borovitskaya. After he was shot and unconscious, his enemies captured him and meted out their slow electric revenge.
“Sad,” Grisha observed. “He could’ve went to Valhalla had he been slain in battle.”
It’s the tidbits like that that made me lust after Grisha’s soul. But according to the mortality reports, paramedics tended to die of alcoholism often co-morbid with traffic accidents, and not of the homegrown Kabbala of the bandits.
One of our later finds, a neckless thug with the requisite burgundy jacket, brought Ipatov to the forefront of my mind. He seemed much like the rest, with a piquant difference-his father was a mid-caliber apparatchick back in the days, as Grisha, who received the entirety of his youth, told me. I got the good part: his adult life. He was the one who killed Ipatov.
He remembered Ipatov as a small man who would not pay what he owed-a peculiarity that filled the thug with perplexed bitterness. Through his memory, I saw Ipatov’s face as it was in his last moments-his white spasming lips and the shirt torn to expose his shoulders and chest. “Just take me from here,” he pleaded in a hoarse voice thick with a suppressed scream. “Just don’t let Lilya see me like this.”
The thug flicked away the butt he smoked down to the filter, and burned his iron magic into poor Ipatov, workmanlike as always. He wondered vaguely whether Lilya was Ipatov’s wife, and thought that he too used to date a girl named Lilya when he was a vocation school student.
The thug had trained to be a car mechanic, but then things changed; he fell into being a thug like many others-ex-cops, Afghan vets, who had no other employment options. I marveled at his conviction that what he did was justice: people who owed money should pay it back, and the thug was there to enforce the law in the law-enforcement vacuum. Ipatov’s agony was thug’s justice, and I enjoyed the juxtaposition of the two memories, enclosing them like pearls with the soft generic mantle of my own.
Our collecting days came to an end when they stopped selling beer by the liter. The cans just didn’t have the same appeal to the souls, and who could blame them? Could a fat man wiping his balding, apoplectic head with a handkerchief and gracing cans of Danish beer compare to the thick amber and sensual droplets of condensed moisture on the cold glass? No, my friends, he could not. The souls remained behind, fearful, trapped behind the charred alchemy of the electric irons, and Grisha and I had to content ourselves with what we had.