Near the door, the man in the wheelchair was still talking to himself. “Motherfuckers,” he was saying, punching the air with his cigarette. His head was down against his chest, as though he were telling secrets to his breastbone. The man’s legs were shriveled and mostly missing, and his face had an odd flatness to it. When he lifted his head into the light, Aleksandr could see that he was missing teeth, too, which wasn’t unusual but which contributed to the man’s overall look of unnerving concavity. He looked like a person who’d been taken apart entirely and then put back together wrong. “Fucking motherfuckers,” the man said again, and looked straight at Aleksandr. “Don’t trust them.” The green café lights gave him a radioactive glow.
“Who are motherfuckers?” Aleksandr realized that he really wanted to know.
The man crooked a finger at Aleksandr and beckoned for him to come closer. Aleksandr did so, bringing his cheek down to the man’s, inhaling his smell of rust and alcohol and something else that made Aleksandr sad, even though he didn’t understand why.
“Who?” Aleksandr said again. “Who are motherfuckers?”
“They all are,” whispered the man, then laughed a choking, startling laugh. He gestured with his cigarette, ashing onto Aleksandr’s shoes, grandly implicating all the people in his field of vision. “Everyone.”
When Aleksandr stumbled out into the ice-wrecked streets several hours later, there was a shred of ash in the eastern sky. The light looked as though it had been filtered through dirty gauze; the clumps of snow were beginning to take on the fuzzy shape of mold. A tattered ad warning against the evils of Demon Vodka stuck under Aleksandr’s shoe, and he kicked it away. The air was sharp with the gasoline of idling Zhigulis. Leningrad was gearing up for another day, and the illegal street vendors were organizing themselves in dark corners: men in brown layers setting up carts of vegetables, the gray beets and cabbages turning to colors in the breaking sun. A woman stood shivering with her fish, their tongue-colored bellies slick in the light. Boys in wool caps crouched watching for the police, ready to alert their families and collapse the wood stalls and vanish. They could disappear as quickly as the cockroaches in the kommunalka could scatter from the cold light, as quickly as a person could evaporate into a car and never come back.
Aleksandr walked down Nevsky Prospekt, past the Museum of the History of Atheism and Religion. Leningrad was such a difference from the mangled wreck of Okha, a city that nobody had planned for or intended. Leningrad was all stately foresight and clean geometry, indisputable proof that Russians, too, could think more than one generation ahead. It was a beautiful city if you could open your eyes against the wind long enough to really see it. But Aleksandr didn’t look around much on his trip home after his first night out with Ivan and Nikolai. There was a new menace for him here, he thought, subtler and more nefarious than KGB in white Volgas. Back in Okha, he’d understood the nature of the game; he’d walked the parameters of his life over and over until he couldn’t even dream his way out of them. He’d known everyone there, and he’d known everyone’s grandparents and pockmarks and slimy vegetable gardens, and if there had been other-thinking people among them, he’d have known that, too.
In Leningrad, he could tell, it was going to be different. He’d never thought to be scared before of old people pushing papers. He’d never been scared of the women who stood in the street and sold roses.
When Aleksandr returned to his building, one of the night girls was standing in the corridor, the snow of her boots making turpentine-colored pools at her feet. She was knocking on the steward’s door vigorously, which Aleksandr had never seen anybody do. He stood and watched her and wondered what would happen.
“What are you looking at?” said the girl. She was the darker-haired of the two girls, and Aleksandr knew her for her swearing in the hallways. The father of the family next door to him had complained about it one time, leaning over to spit into the sink next to Aleksandr. “I don’t like trying to raise a child next door to blyadi,” said the man. “It’s going to make him ask questions, and the fewer questions he asks, the better for him.”
The girl snapped her fingers in front of Aleksandr’s face. “What?” she said. “Do you talk, by the way?”
“I talk.”
“Oh.” She looked disappointed. “I had a bet.”
“What are you doing?” he said. “I don’t think the old woman comes to her door in the mornings.”
“She’ll come this morning. I don’t care how bad her hangover is. Worms came out of the faucet. This is a problem.”
“What kind of worms?”
“What kind of worms? What the fuck does it matter what kind? I go to turn on the hot water. I’m used to no hot water. No hot water does not surprise me. I know we don’t know each other very well, tovarish, but little surprises me. But worms seem, you know, excessive, I think.” Her brown hair was flying all around her face, and she swiped it from her eyes so hard that Aleksandr wanted to reach out and gently protect her from herself.
“Yes,” he said. “Certainly excessive.”
“So, I don’t know, I thought I might ask the old woman about this.” She resumed pounding, making her knocks sharp and arrhythmic for maximum annoyance. “It’s just that I’m coming back from a long night, you know? I work nights.”
“I know.”
“You know,” she said, then knocked again, harder. “Yes, I suppose you do know. Just like I know that you are the chess prodigy from Siberia—”
“Sakhalin.”
“Yes,” she said.
Aleksandr was struck, still, by her careening indignation. Her knocking was the knocking of a person who had been terribly wronged. It was pretty bad, the worms in the faucet. But it could not possibly have been the worst thing.
“Which one are you?” he said.
“What?” She turned to face him, and when she moved, he heard clicks and clinks, the unidentifiable feminine shifting of heels and various bits of jewelry. She was dressed in black, although he thought there might be multiple components to her outfit—a shirt, and a short jacket, and a skirt, maybe? Her face was pretty, but maybe not pretty enough to sustain the attention that came from wearing only black. The outfit was like a drum roll.
“Are you Sonya, or are you the other one?” said Aleksandr. He couldn’t remember the other one’s name, and he couldn’t remember, either, which of the things he thought he knew about them were true and which he’d made up himself. They really were prostitutes, he thought. He wasn’t sure about the parakeet.
“I’m the other one. Elizabeta Nazarovna.” She rested her head forlornly on the door. “I think she’s not home.”
“I’m Aleksandr Kimovich Bezetov.”
“Okay,” she said, not taking his hand. She lowered her voice and started muttering cruelties at the door. “You tramp. You ape. You dirty, double-crossing, overcharging, collaborative bitch.” She stopped, and Aleksandr wondered if she was out of insults.
“Do you think maybe you should try not to make her mad at you?” he said. She could kick Elizabeta out, probably, or throw all her things out the front door, like she’d done with the university lecturer. He thought of Elizabeta’s things scattered across the bare front yard: books and perfume bottles; black indistinguishable garments; flecks of silver jewelry.
“Please. She sells winter things out of the basement every year. I know because all my mittens are from her. She’s like a spider. She’s more afraid of us than we are of her.” She turned again to the door. “And like a spider,” she hissed, “you lurk in the dark even in the daytime, you are unpleasant to look at, and you are universally reviled. Hey.” She turned back to Aleksandr. “Do you smoke?”