Pass it over to me
And he explained that contemporary English has this verb “to bogart.”
“It comes from Humphrey Bogart—I swear! It appeared after the movie The Roaring Twenties. Bogart is in a foxhole with Jimmy Cagney, and Cagney lets Bogart have a puff of his cigarette, but Bogart smokes it down to nothing with one draw and doesn’t leave anything for Cagney… It’s a verb from the hippie days: don’t ‘bogart’ that joint, pass it on to the next guy… The Roaring Twenties. But for some reason here it was called The Soldier’s Fate in America. Even though they’re soldiers only for the first five minutes of the movie, it’s just that one scene in the foxhole. And then all of sudden they’re fucking bootleggers…But you probably didn’t see this movie… By your time it had probably already disappeared from the rerun theaters. But I remember it… Still, there’s a seven-year difference—that’s a lot. And it’s particularly noticeable when discussing movies… oh, and music too… And Easy Rider wasn’t screened in the Soviet Union until we had VCRs…”
“Come on, knock it off, roll the joint…”
And here we are together once more. And he even has a room in the Hotel Europe again. And the bed as before is more of an athletic field than a meditation space. It’s a strange setting for smoking weed…
He started talking about old movies again. Turns out he has an uncle in America.
“Go figure, Anya, he’s got the same name—Misha Bakaleishchikov! And he worked as a composer in Old Hollywood, composed music for movies Bogart was in. And Lauren Bacall. Real first-class film scores… They showed them in the rerun theater on Vaska, remember? Some were spoils of war, others came from Lend-Lease… And I taught you how to raise your eyes when you’re getting a light…”
Then we reminisced about our old gang, made up of various inhabitants of the square.
The times when we were all hanging out in the inner courtyard of the Maly Opera.
The scenery model studio was in a former admiral’s apartment—an enfilade of communicating rooms, and there was a corridor on one side as well. The theater had appropriated the house; there were empty, uninhabited rooms above and below. You could enter this courtyard simply through the gate—there wasn’t any security.
In the mid-’80s a whole group of artists worked there.
And they all dragged along their friends. Other artists would go there, and musicians too… Actors from the nearby theaters— the Operetta, Komisarshevskaya, and Comedy theaters…
And the corsairs would go there… the blackmarket guys, hard-currency girls… prostitutes from the Hotel Europe.
And the artsy bimbos—the girlfriends of the poets—always to be found in this sort of gathering…
The artists had funny names: Nemkov, Nemtsov, and Nemchinov. And another two were named Tabachnik and Pasechnik.
The arrival to the studio of a guy named Bakaleishchikov made everybody’s day, for sure.
Tabachnik, Pasechnik, and Bakaleishchikov were close friends. Nemkov, Nemtsov, and Nemchinov, fought constantly. And Kit would pull them apart…
Kit bound the whole gang together, he made models for all of them.
And they often fought to get closer to Kit. In the very first room stood an enormous bathtub, and Kit kept his axolotls there. One day he had an argument with the fire inspectors, who came back later and poisoned his axolotls.
Kit also collected old irons.
I once got mad at Tabachnik and threw an iron at his head. Thank God I missed, because it could have killed him.
I was always throwing and hitting people over the head with bottles—for nothing at all.
Since childhood. Why did I do it? Life is a battlefield.
Sometimes fights would break out there in the studio— drunken artists having it out, no worse than the corsairs.
But not because of Kit. And not because of some dough. The fights, more often than not, were on account of girls. You know: don’t bogart that joint, you son of a bitch—pass it to your friend!
“Anya, do you remember that time when you went to Odessa with Afrikan and his whole gang, and you were doing some bullshit music for some nursery or something, and you pretended to be a singing teacher who taught kids jazz and rock, and Kit was in love with you and called you every day from the studio on the office phone, and you explained to him that somebody had swindled you, that you didn’t have anything to eat, so you were going to sell yourself because you were starving…?”
“No, that’s not how it was! I said very nicely that I was going to live according to the laws of the front line, and to put out for anybody who would feed me supper. And in general there in Odessa, and that year in particular, it was a fucking disaster. That was the year when the sailors were forbidden from selling things to the secondhand stores. And they closed the flea market… There wasn’t any food at all in the stores in Odessa!”
“Ah yes, the decline of the empire… And you, you singing bitch, were having a gay old time in your hotel with film directors and Moscow artists… You even bragged later on that you fucked that old guy who filmed Bumbarash.”
“Yeah, that was Felya, our cameraman, he was wonderful… Fed me and then dropped me, said he didn’t have long to live so he couldn’t hang around with one girl, he still needed to fit in a lot more… And then there was that old actor from Kyrgyzstan, he was great, you know, the one who played the Tatar prince in Audrey Rublyov; he also played the teacher in that movie First Teacher… But he was really old and a complete drunk, and I up and left him…”
“And then, you sordid gerontophile, you told poor Kityarushka that you had to betray him with seven different Chuvaks… and he would tell us everything. We reminisced that since you were fifteen you were nicknamed Nyusha Zeppelin because you were so out of control… And then Kit stared at us with his drunken rabbit eyes and muttered something like: So what is it that you want to tell me? That Anyas a whore? And that you all slept with her? But you all slept with her before I even knew her. While I, on the other hand, slept with all of your wives, when they were already your wives… So then the troops got a bit jumpy… Kolya Punin took offense and left right away, and never had anything to do with any of us ever again, and the rest of them turned out to be some serious businessmen and started to fuck with Kit… But for some reason I was on his side… I already had Yukka then, and would have been only too happy for her if one of my friends had given her a good fuck, because I was having a hard time of it… Anya, I don’t remember, did Kit get high with us? Or was it strictly booze with him… and a bit of snatch?”
“Listen, he was such a hard drinker that he barely had the time to smoke pot with us.”
“But he didn’t really drink that much; it just seemed that way to you. He gambled left and right, so booze was the easiest thing to get.” Misha burst out laughing. “He was two-timing you all the way. Said that he’d fallen asleep drunk somewhere, and you, fool that you are, believed him.”
“No, I didn’t, but I could always find him when I wanted to. Sometimes he’d be held up because of the bridges, but I could still show up at his place at five in the morning, as soon as the bridges were down. Once I really did lose him, but it later turned out that he’d fallen asleep in that very same studio and they simply rolled him under the sofa so he wouldn’t get in the way of the dancing and so that nobody would stumble over him. No, Kit didn’t spend his nights sleeping with other girls in a comfortable bed. No fucking way… His cheating on me was heroic, accomplished under difficult circumstances: in cars, bathrooms, upstairs—above the studio, in an empty apartment… on the ‘fucking’ chair. Remember the ‘fucking’ chair? Tabachnik brought it for one of his girls. And then we all used it… In general, Kit was a fine, one-of-a-kind drunk. And his golden fingers would shake in the mornings…”