It doesn’t get dark at night in June in this city, but I felt like it was dark, or maybe it was just my eyes that made everything that way. I remember that I came home. I remember that Tamara was watching TV. I didn’t want her to hear the shot, I wanted to shoot myself in the courtyard. I went into the bathroom, took the gun, loaded it. I hid it under the belt of my pants. I stared at myself in the mirror.
My face looked horrible. When I shoot myself it will look still worse.
I decided not to say goodbye to her. And then she came out of the kitchen, where she was watching TV, and that’s when she said it to me.
She said it to me.
She said: Where were you? You missed it all. Do you know what happened? You won’t believe it, it’s all over the news! Guess what happened today right under our window! A teacher stopped Yeltsin’s car! She lives in a single room with her grown-up son, and Yeltsin promised to give her a new home!
I froze.
You all keep giving Yeltsin hell, Tamara said, and he promised to give her a new home.
Fool! Fool! Fool! I shouted.
And I shot her five times.
I didn’t try to hide anything, and during the first interrogation I admitted that I wanted to kill Yeltsin.
They took me away somewhere. I was questioned by high-ranking officials. I told them about the gun, about the pipes in the bathroom. I named all the names, because they thought that I killed an accomplice. Gosha, Arthur, Grigorian, Ulidov, some Vanyusha, Kuropatkin, and seven more… plus the writer guy with the beard.
Only Yemelianych I didn’t give away. And the organization behind him.
At first they didn’t believe me that I acted alone, and then they stopped believing anything at all.
Weird. They could have believed me. Back then they were uncovering assassination plots right and left. The security service reported it. Even before me, I remember, they uncovered a gang from the Caucasus. They took them right from the train in Sochi before they could get to Moscow. One potential killer hid in some attic in Moscow, he had a knife with him—he confessed during the investigation. I don’t know what ever happened to him. They wrote about it in the papers. It was on the radio.
But about me there was nothing. Not a word.
Everyone heard about the teacher, Galina Aleksandrovna, who lived on Maklina Street and stopped Yeltsin’s car on Moskovsky Prospect. But about me, nothing. Not a word.
I still don’t know for which African country Yemelianych fulfilled his international duty.
Professor G.Y. Mokhnaty, MD, respected me. He treated me well. But it wasn’t easy, I kept thinking about a lot of things.
He recommended that I just forget about those years.
I live in Vsevolozhsk with my disabled father, whose second wife died. I have a father. He’s an invalid.
Sometimes we play Scrabble. My father can hardly walk, but his memory is as good as mine.
This is the first visit I’ve made to St. Petersburg in a long time. I’m not supposed to be here. They recommended that I not come here anymore.
I regret that everything happened like it did. I didn’t want to kill her. It’s all my fault.
But how can I explain to anyone how much I really loved Tamara? If you’ve loved someone even a little bit you’ll understand. She had so many good qualities. I didn’t want to. But it was her too. She shouldn’t have. Why did she? To say something like that with all her good qualities! You can’t be such a complete fool. You can’t. Fool! A complete fool! Fool, fool, I tell you!
WAKE UP, YOU’RE A DEAD MAN NOW
by Vadim Levental
New Holland
Translated by Ronald Meyer
I
Everything finally started coming together when I was walking across the Lieutenant Schmidt Bridge. In a word, I was pretending that my nose itched, but I was actually sniffing my fingers (sometimes you happen to suddenly sense a forgotten smell so clearly that it’s as though it’s not a matter of memory, but rather that those same molecules suddenly landed on your snotty nose)—and then my phone rang.
It was raining buckets, the zipper on my jacket got stuck, no choice but to hold the umbrella under my arm and hunch over so I could undo my jacket and get my phone from the inside pocket, and so I pushed the button like a spastic, pressed the phone up to my ear, and heard Stepanych say, “What’s new?”
I told him there was nothing new. He mumbled a few more words to the effect that nothing much was new with him either, that something’s moving along, but so far nothing definite. Then he asked: “Did you tell anybody?”
I said no, and Stepanych hung up with the words, “Well, make it there then.”
I put the phone back in my pocket, pulled up the zipper with a jerk, and walked on, cursing under my breath. The wind was blowing rain under the umbrella, the vans rumbling over the metal joints of the bridge splashed arcs of water in their wake, and I took an envious look at the enormous white ocean liner that had arrived from God knows which country, where they certainly didn’t have anything like this horrid weather—but that wasn’t the point really; I’d forgotten the smell. It had been erased from my memory, all that was left was cold logic: a young boy, who had caught the scent of his first girl on his fingers, had walked across this very bridge, moving away from her sweet, almost childlike face—but the particulars of that indistinguishable face disappeared as quickly as the seventeen years in three steps.
Therefore, it wasn’t just the rain that put me in a rotten mood. I needed to find shelter for a bit, but there wasn’t any place in this damned part of the city—an eternity passed before I happened upon some door: turned out to be a nightclub. It wasn’t anything special. It wasn’t busy yet, so I took a seat at the bar and waited for a chance to order something: the girl behind the bar (whose face would have been cute without that spur-of-the-moment piercing) was talking away with her girlfriend across the counter. I couldn’t see the girlfriend very well—the way the bar was constructed blocked my view. I waited and waited, and then I lost my patience and grumbled something rather sharply, and then the girl reluctantly turned in my direction, while her girlfriend leaned over to get a look at me.
A minute later, with a glass in my hand, I was already thinking what I should say—I wanted her to lean over again, I didn’t get a good look the first time. But I couldn’t come up with anything better than to ask: “Why Toasted?”
“What?”
“Why is it called Toasted? What, do you eat toast here?”
The girl behind the bar looked ironically in the direction of her interlocutor and turned her back to me: from the twinkling darkness, rumpled hundred-ruble bills stretched in her direction demandingly.
“There are two types of people,” her girlfriend leaned over once more to make certain that I was listening, and once more I didn’t manage to get a good look at her, “some ask whether we eat toast here, and the others what we toast to.”
She then walked off in the direction of the stage and flew up there like she owned it, though I didn’t have a chance to be surprised—my phone started ringing, not the one in my jacket, but the one in my jeans, and that meant that it was time. I quickly said where to wait for me, drank down my bourbon in a single gulp, and walked outside; the girl was settling in behind the keyboard, I managed to hear her begin to finger the keys as I fiddled with my umbrella: it seems the rain was pouring down even harder.
And here was my single error in all of this: I had managed to forget that in Piter the way from point A to point B is never the same as from B to A, and I ended up on the cheerless, narrow embankment a good deal earlier that I needed to. I took shelter in the doorway—it smelled, as it always does, but when you smoke it’s not so noticeable. I smoked a couple of cigarettes, pacing back and forth from an ink-black corner on one side to the corner on the other side, which was a blackish brown in the flickering streetlight in the courtyard, until the phone in my jeans started vibrating.