“Here they are thinking they did me in… strange people, as if I could be done in. See, the flood has begun, I have to hurry, I’ll send for my things. Fine… there’s been so much that’s terrible I don’t have to be afraid anymore. I’m going away, yes, I said I’d send for my things, only I have to tell Masha. Here’s what she should be told: Dance, Masha!
“Masha! Hear me, Masha? Dance! Dance, Masha, otherwise were lost.”
Seva had just stopped to take out a cigarette when a heavy body fell on him from above. His head struck the ground and he no longer saw anything, he just felt a swift and powerful flow pull him along.
The comic death of a big shot killed by an old woman falling from her window—actually, it’s a sin to call her that since she wasn’t even sixty—kept newspaper readers entertained for quite a while.
Masha never was found, and they simply wrote her off as missing.
THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA FOREVER
by Julia Belomlinsky
Arts Square
Translated by Ronald Meyer
“Do you like street singing?” Raskolnikov suddenly addressed the passerby, a man who was no longer young and had the look of an idler, standing next to him by the organ-grinder. The latter looked at him startled and surprised. “I do,” Raskolnikov continued, but with a look as if to say that he wasn’t talking about street singing at all. “I like it when they sing to the accompaniment of an organ-grinder on a cold, dark, and damp autumn night, it has to be damp, when all the passersby have sickly pale green and sickly faces; or even better, when there’s wet snow falling, straight down, and there’s no wind, you know? And through it shine the gas streetlights…”
We were walking along Italyanskaya Street.
Italyanskaya Street was empty.
Four thirty—the most unpopular time for White Nights.
All the carriages had started turning into pumpkins.
The coachmen into rats.
The crystal slippers fell off and shattered.
The ball dress turned out to be smeared with ashes.
The pumpkins rolled downhill to the bridges.
The rats readied themselves and were screwing around.
Everyone wanted to go home, but the metro was closed.
The early-morning chill had set in.
Puddles of vomit and shards of beer bottles everywhere.
The era of street-cleaning machines had not yet arrived.
But we were local, you see—guys from the district.
Long ago we had grown accustomed to the fact that if you were just going out to pay the electric bill on Millionaya Street, you’d run into Atlas holding up the sky.
Go straight—and you bump into the Hermitage.
To your left—the Capella Courtyards.
To your right—Kazan Cathedral…
“But why do you want to go to St. Isaac’s?”
My companion Lyokha Saksofon fully realized the “happiness” of living in the city center and hanging out in the district.
And he wrote this joyful song.
Now we were loudly singing it on the empty square:
And this, my friend, is my district and my city
That’s why my collar is raised high
That’s why I’m not wearing designer shoes
That’s who we are—that’s how we do it
What are you talking about! What are you talking about!
“Come on, Lyokha, roll one. Roll a couple right away, it’s pretty nice here. Pushkin is waving… We’ll leave him the roach… For the best poet, the best roach!”
We were already sitting on the bench and looking at Pushkin.
The bums who hang out on the square by the Dostoevsky monument are called Dostoevskies, and the ones on Pushkin Square are Pushkins. But there’s nobody here now… half past four, child’s play—and nobody’s here.
The Golden Triangle. Nothing ever happens here…
Two years ago, right outside the Hotel Europe, the English consul was robbed—and since then it’s been quiet. Every night the Phantom of the Opera is supposed to come out onto the roof of the Maly Opera and cry out like a muezzin: “All’s well in the Golden Triangle!”
Although it was precisely on that roof that something happened to one of my friends last winter.
It was Misha Bakaleishchikov—the Man from the Past.
The Man from the Past was supposed to come to the City of His Youth in search of his Past… It’s the usual move for an idiot.
I even envy him. He had come back for good to the little town of his childhood that’s green with mold…
Once he saved me. I was fifteen.
We had just come out on the Nevsky then for the first time— to make some money.
Three kids from the seventh grade. Sonya had a violin. Manya, a clarinet.
And I had a harmonica. And a black cap for the money. And all around us—deaf Soviet power. We managed to stand there for about four minutes. And then they took us by the hand and led us away… No, not the cops. Fyoka’s crew. The cops didn’t touch anybody…
So far, Fyoka’s crew hadn’t given them the go-ahead.
Fyoka’s crew—sounds good, right?
It’s like when Long John Silver in the movie version of Treasure Island asks, “Where’s Flint’s crew?”
And then later, when they’re still on the brigantine:
The Jolly Roger waves in the wind—-
Flint’s crew is singing a ditty…
We all sang that song when we were in the Young Pioneers.
The brigantine—that was the most important part.
The pirates raised the brigantine’s sails on the high blue seas.
And somehow that got mixed up with Alexander Grin’s Scarlet Sails.
All the cafés were called that.
And the clubs where the young people were supposed to spend their leisure time.
Young Pioneer groups.
Scarlet Sails. Or the Brigantine. Or Romance.
That’s what our romance was like…
But it turned out that the pirates’ sea wasn’t so very far away after all—it was right there in front of us, on the banks of the Neva.
And Flint’s crew was there as well.
They made their journey on scarlet sails. Or grew up right there.
Out of the slime and dampness…
They sent the young people into ecstasy, trembling.