“You’re quite an impressionable girl,” said Ni.
But said nothing about the big poster in his own hometown that read “One more baby, one more grave!” He’d had nightmares too. One where all the children in his class are lined up a row, holding shovels, digging their own graves. And when they look up he sees that their eyes are glazed over, that they’re already dead. And the skin peels off their bodies in long strips that fall to the ground and mix with the dirt. And he realizes that he is also one of those children digging their graves, and that he, too, is dead.
LOVE, RUSSIAN STYLE
Semipyatnitsky had lunch in a café on the first floor of his office building, a place he called the Barf Bar. A plate of dubious-looking beef with undercooked rice. He didn’t go to the Harbin today; too hot—24 degrees Celsius!—to drag himself all that way. The heat was unusual for St. Petersburg, and particularly unbearable due to high humidity and all the fumes and automobile exhaust filling the air. Anyway, the mere thought of sweet-and-sour pork made him sick.
He spent the second half of his lunch hour at his desk. To avoid work-related distractions, Maximus cranked up his MP3 player and put on his earphones. B.G.—Boris Grebenshikov.
In Chinese erotic poetry the “jasper root” served as the conventional metaphor for the male organ. Maximus could have written entire volumes of hermeneutics, interpreting the songs of Grebenshikov’s band Aquarium. Though there’s already a commentary along these lines in Ilya Stogoff’s novel Macho Men Don’t Cry, which hit the seventies generation with the force of revelation.
It’s about life in our day and age, though the meaning is eternal, as always with B.G. To live and strive… for what? For whom? For the children. But what will those children be striving for? Where will they be going? And what could be more crueclass="underline" to be fruitful and multiply, to create a new being who will not be able to find his own way, and to abandon him without a single indicator of the right path? Just a stone where three roads meet: Whichever way you choose will cost you dearly…
The song went on, and Maximus listened. Then lunch break was over, and Semipyatnitsky tuned back in to his work.
The warehouse was refusing to accept two containers of shrimp from Canada.
Maximus listened patiently to fifteen minutes of telephone hysterics from the warehouse director: There’s no place to put the shrimp, the warehouse is already crammed full of shrimp. Then he hung up and issued an order to his assistant:
“Sasha, have the containers sent from the port to the warehouse. Today.”
“But how? There’s no space at the warehouse!”
“There’s plenty of space. They probably took too many shrimp pills and started hallucinating.”
“Meaning?”
“Forget about it. They’ll figure something out—they’ll find a place and unload them there. It’s not the first time.”
Maximus never indulged the warehouse workers. So they always wanted to rough him up when they ran into him at company get-togethers. They would come at him foaming at the mouth, fists clenched, but their aggression would dissipate when it came into contact with his indifference. And this time Semipyatnitsky recalled vividly what he had seen during his unannounced visit, when he’d gone to retrieve the Dutch pills. This relieved him of the last shreds of whatever sympathy he might have had for the blue-collar Cold Plus employees.
The working day began to wane. Maximus ducked into the restroom and gulped down a couple of the pink pills. There were still a few left in his jacket pocket. It wasn’t that he particularly needed to get high; rather, a sort of spirit of adventure had come over him, an irresistible desire to test their effects one more time, to see how they would work with another person. That is, how they would work on another person.
All things considered, and given the way things had been going lately, he was surprised not to find the goddess of sex from the next office over in the elevator waiting for him. She wasn’t in the lobby on the first floor either. Maximus went outside and lit a cigarette near the front door. He was sure that she would turn up.
Sure enough, five minutes later, there she was, coming out the door. She had a preoccupied air about her, a look of distress, which in no way diminished her allure.
“Greetings, Sweetie!”
Maximus was startled by his own lack of self-consciousness. The drug hadn’t had time to take effect yet. It had to be psychosomatic: The mere thought of the pills’ imminent effect dissolved all his inhibitions.
That was how he used to pick up girls, in his distant, lost youth. Maximus had only two phrases in his repertoire: “Greetings, Sweetie!” and “Got any plans for tonight?” But as he had pointed out at the time, when a friend made fun of his tactics, why bother to think up anything original when these worked just fine? Not every time, objected his friend. Maximus responded that there’s only one absolutely guaranteed method to get a woman into your bed—just grab her and give her the cross-thigh flip.
The girl gave Semipyatnitsky a surprised look and smiled oh so slightly.
“Greetings yourself.”
“Not feeling so well today?”
“I have a headache.”
Maximus reached into his pocket, got out a couple of the pills, and held them out to her.
“These work pretty well. I use them myself.”
The girl hesitated, but took one nonetheless.
“Take two. The dose is two. Go ahead—you can take them without water.”
The goddess complied.
“My car is over there. Let’s go.”
“I live pretty far away, in Prosvet, on Enlightenment Prospect.”
“You’re right, that’s pretty far. Let’s find some place closer.”
When a man has absolute confidence in what he’s saying and doing, Maximus reflected, there isn’t a woman alive who won’t give in. The goddess climbed into the car. Maximus started the engine and backed out of his parking space.
“What’s your name, my beauty?”
“Maya.”
Maximus gave an approving nod. That’s about what he’d been expecting. Maya had been the name of his first, unrequited love, a girl he’d met in Young Pioneer Camp, when he was little. Not that little, actually. Meaning, if things had worked out differently and if he had been a bit surer of himself at the time, something might have come of it. So this love of his had remained in his memory as an unrealized desire, along with the sensation of his first fully conscious erection.