“The water is flowing and flowing, nonstop. Oh well, if I’m not going where the rivers meet, it will play a trick—a cheap trick!—and arrange a trap, so that it can always play cat-and-mouse with me—-catch and release… catch and release.”
Vsevolod parked his car rather far away. He was walking in no hurry, though he was late for his date with Masha. A real piece of work, but a foolish piece of work; a useful piece of work, but a stultifying piece of work. To tell the truth, he’d been attracted to dancers practically since he was a kid, but the kind without ambitions. He didn’t care for ballet stars and never went after the big names. A no-name little ballet girl—that was as good as it got, that’s how he’d come across Masha. Long neck and big eyes, she bat her eyelashes and caught his every word; she was always hungry. She was afraid of making any unnecessary movement, so as not to disgrace herself. After all, she came from the sticks to live with her aunt at someone else’s expense. She called her aunt “Mama” and her uncle “Papa” because she had no mother and she’d only seen her father a couple of times in her life. As skittish as a hare, and she did everything without a murmur, no matter how you posed her. He took full advantage of that—lying, standing, upside down.
She turned out to be useful in other ways too. She turned out to have a brain she could flex when she needed to, and could bare her teeth at strangers, show some muscle, protect her master, and he appreciated that. On the one hand, he liked it… but on the other, it had started to bother him. Lately Vsevolod had sensed his babe was having quite a hard time—he guessed her time had come for nest building. He knew those tricks of theirs, and for Masha he was prepared to put up with a lot. Maybe he should give her, oh, thirty thousand bucks. That would be quite a lot for her, and he wouldn’t feel it, he could bring more. He could, but there was no point spoiling her, so… for starters, he had to come to his senses. He could keep her longer, he’d grown used to her, but there was one new circumstance… this gentle eighteen-year-old circumstance… and Masha… she wouldn’t understand, though she should… she could have caught on by now: let him, Seva, get away with stuff and accept the world as it was. He wondered what she’d do without him.
Right then Seva got a stab in his side. It was his matchless, famed intuition talking to him. She knew an awful lot, and no good could come of an injured woman, especially Masha, who was something special. You couldn’t buy her off. She needed something else… He could pawn her off on someone else… someone good—that was something they did too, but with her, that trick wouldn’t work, she’d get even nastier… but so what? What about wiping her out? The concept appealed to him: wipe off the face of the earth, from memory, as if she never existed and everything was starting fresh, and no one had ever set foot there before… Wipe her out. This thought didn’t surprise Seva. It was as if he’d been expecting it. He started tallying up his material and moral loss in the one case or the other—if he wiped Masha out or left her walking the earth.
Seva was an old campaigner. He’d started his career small, gone through fire and ice at the very peak of gangsterism, and now he lived peacefully and quietly, or so it seemed. He came from a civilized family, was cautious, sly, beautifully educated, and generous when he had to be, and he had charisma. Seva held a respectable state post and in interviews said proudly of himself, “I’m a creator.” If dirty work was required, he didn’t have to get himself dirty anymore. Obliging hands were always found for that, but he had experienced that animal horror he’d known in his youth during brawls (and he’d been through all kinds) and never forgot it. Sometimes, to unwind, Vsevolod Mikhailovich would take a break and pay tribute to his old enthusiasm for the arts, which dated from his school days: photography and painting. He organized exhibits and went pub crawling with art students, touched by their childish bluntness and their modest demands on life. “Like bugs, they live on crumbs and are happy to have them, baby bugs, the muck of the earth, and we need that… the trees have to grow on something.” He and Masha laughed so hard, and Masha understood him perfectly, she was greedy for life, but a little too greedy…
They met on the Kryukov near the Torgovy Bridge, as agreed.
The light was already fading, the streetlamps were on, and there was a silvery reflection in the water of the St. Nicholas bell tower flickering in the dusk.
Masha uttered not a word of reproach to her man for being late. She pretended she’d been busy examining the cranes that crossed their long arrows, as if getting into a discussion.
“Look how wretched,” she said, waving her arm toward the new building.
“Check it out from another standpoint—an urbanist landscape, a clash of planes. It’s going to be a lot drearier when it’s all finished.”
He didn’t try to explain to her that at base a construction site was a clash of interests, not planes, and the loser was what was wretched.
Masha suddenly cried out. After the alarming fantasies that had overtaken her during her wait, she now imagined the water had splashed over the banks and touched her ankles.
“What’s up, kid?”
“Do you have a cigarette?”
Seva held out a pack, but it was odd because she didn’t smoke. Very occasionally, for photographs, she would toy with slim feminine cigarettes.
A couple of foreigners walked by. The man was lazily stroking the naked back of the woman, who was wearing an elegant evening dress. The couple were obviously counting on a long and pleasant night, a fitting cap to admiring the Petersburg landscapes.
“Well, where are we going?” Masha was hoping for a night in a good club, top-notch jazz, and she wouldn’t mind a drink, her nerves were completely shattered.
“Today I feel like wandering,” Seva said.
Really? Masha’s friend was only rarely visited by these desires, and she’d reconciled herself, but right now it was all wrong. She tried to nudge Seva toward the center of town. But he took her arm and, jokingly ordering her, pulled her along. As always in these instances, they strolled through Kolomna, where Seva had lived as a boy and until he’d bought himself a place not far from Palace Square. From time to time they came across beautifully restored buildings, but there were entire swaths of rental apartment buildings, the refuge of the newcomers who were barbarizing the city. The Kolomna where Pushkin’s poor Evgeny lost his marbles was still Kolomna, and the little Pryazhka River still bore its waters past Blok’s sadly famous insane asylum, now a museum. The museum could do its museum thing, but the crazies were going to be moved elsewhere. There was no reason to be crazy in the center of town, and the freed-up buildings could be turned into VIP mental hospitals
Kolomna was probably the city’s last district where lots of courtyards still weren’t barred and there weren’t formidable code locks on the gates. Seva dragged Masha through courtyards and secret passages for hours. She didn’t like walking around here at night, even with Seva, and now the only thing that reassured her was the fact that they probably had a bodyguard following discreetly on their heels. She cursed under her breath. Where was he taking her? A man to whom all doors were open and who was received everywhere with respect was traipsing through the streets and kissing in strangers’ spit-covered entryways! Why would he never ask her whether she liked doing it in stairwells when someone could walk up at any time? True, Masha herself never protested, and his swift, silent pressure was not as important to her as the relaxation that followed it and the weakness that spread over his face. Sometimes he even wept. She never told anyone about that, but she was immoderately proud of his tears. The bodily part of it barely roused her. This coldness had been in her since the very start of their romance, and she may have derived the most pleasure from the awareness that she had complete mastery, albeit not for long, over this strong, omnipotent man. How could she have known that he had never been hers for a second. His whole life had been slave to a single passion which she actually could have understood had she chosen to—the thirst for power.