“In your diamond cunt, and you liked that a lot.”
“Everybody goes on about something, for the soldier it’s a cunt…” Misha wanted to talk about love. But I’d started thinking about Kit: “And they killed him in a drunken fight!”
“Anya, what are you saying? What, do you still believe that it was a drunken fight? Come on now, you’re not a complete fool!”
“What do you mean?”
“Anya, it was all for show. I thought you knew…”
“For show? What had he done that was so terrible? Was it because of some bimbo? I remember there was one of Fyoka’s lady friends, some Marinka Zhalo or other… Was it because of her? The whore… The opera Carmen… with fucking tramps…”
“I don’t know for sure. Maybe it was girls… No, it couldn’t have been because of girls… Must have been on account of the knock-offs. They all sat there in that studio turning out fakes. That whole group—all those lefties forging fleas. The guys were making money hand over fist. There were a lot of orders for restoration jobs, and right after the restorations there were the orders for knock-offs…”
Of course, I remember this “Restoration” period. It was like being in a DIY club. There were ornaments, paintings, sometimes furniture. I once even helped cut out a rose from a sheet of veneer for a marquetry side table. Petals and leaves. The veneer was multicolored, I used a stencil. They even trusted me. And Linas came separately to pour the bronze angels… There were also some antique models from the museum, drawings… I remember the girl Tabachnik bought the chair for there too, and she was painting old drawings with delicate watercolors… And there were even arguments, it was either Nemkov or Nemchinov who said that they should be done with pastels, but she insisted that no, only watercolors, and she painted them according to the album that she had of these drawings—scenes of St. Petersburg… “Misha, but why Kit in particular? Nothing happened to the others…”
“Because he was, like, independent. The others all worked for particular people. And everything went far away to somewhere in Georgia… I don’t know exactly. And suddenly he had his own client. As a matter of fact, they met here in the Hotel Europe. You can’t reconstruct now what happened then. But it seems like it was somebody else’s dough. And, consequently, different rules. He crossed somebody, something went over there, and it turned out that good people ended up in a tough spot. I’m talking some serious bucks. I don’t know the details, but it was something like that… But when they killed him, you weren’t living with him anymore, were you? You were already with the next one… Who was it? The King of Jazz?”
“The Phantom of the Opera… It was the Phantom of the Opera! Once and forever.”
Later we were sitting downstairs again in the cafeteria that they now call a “lounge.”
We were chatting again and remembering the Past. Some different Past now, either afterward or before… Turns out that there was a lot of this fucking Past.
Misha grew sad. “You don’t change, Anya—why don’t you change?”
“I changed in the middle. At thirty, thirty-five. And then after forty I somehow lost weight again… It’s old age. The end of my blossoming.”
“Your old age looks like youth. Your legs are spaghetti-thin again, and your face is just like it was then. Come on, let’s go… It’s lonely for me there…”
“Hey, don’t bogart that joint, friend, take a puff and pass it on to your friend… But I did come up with my wish: I want to go up on the Maly’s roof. Like we did then. Remember how we liked to go out there on summer nights? You could easily climb up from the roof of the studio.”
“Well, that’s a fucking stupid wish. Not even interesting, roofers probably working there now. And it’s slippery. And easy as pie.”
“No, it’s not as easy as pie. It’s hard to get in the Maly now. There’s a serious security system.”
“I can’t get in? Are you kidding?”
Misha’s last job before going abroad was assistant administrator of the Maly State Opera Theater. It’s called the Mikhailovsky now.
“They’ve got an ID card system to get in now. Electronic cards. Different kinds. With one card you can go certain places, and with another card to different ones; most of the cards don’t let you go everywhere. So if you’re all-powerful, take me to our roof, that’s my dream. If you take me to the roof, I’ll go with you to London.”
“Easy, Anya, that’s easy!… If you want to go to the roof, we’ll go to the roof—I’ll be your Phantom of the Opera!”
I didn’t believe that it would be possible.
But there we were—standing on the very same roof.
We entered the building like theatergoers. And there at the coat check we ducked behind a hidden door; he opened it with a card, we ended up on a hidden staircase and walked up it for a long time, and then we hid in a little closet. We had to wait until the performance ended and everybody left.
It was all quite complicated. There in the theater, besides the ever-watchful old biddies and ushers, you had the security guards with their Tasers.
The degree of security in the theater under the new director reminded me of a military factory in the USSR. Bakaleishchikov proved to be a real hero. He had managed somehow to get a card that gave him unlimited access.
And he remembered all the hidden doors and rooms.
“How can you remember after so many years?”
“I’m usually quite scattered.”
“That’s the weed.”
“Well, yes, Sveta said the same thing. But it’s the opposite with unnecessary things, you see—those I remember.”
“Why the fuck are you smoking grass from morning till night…?”
While we were sitting in the closet, we once again reminisced about our Maly Opera life.
I was a Petersburger and so was Misha Bakaleishchikov.
And the whole gang was made up of artists who had come from elsewhere a hundred years ago to study scenic design at the theater school.
They’d all become friends in the dorm.
Nemkov, Nemtsov, and Nemchinov were from the Urals and Siberia, and Tabachnik and Pasechnik were from western Ukraine.
Nemchinov, however, was a Tatar from Kazan. Misha was the one who remembered that. How does he remember everything after smoking grass first thing in the morning?
We walked up the concealed flight of stairs and came out onto the roof. Like we used to. Only then it was usually summer and White Nights.
For some reason it doesn’t occur to anyone to clamber onto the roof in winter. This was the first time on the roof in winter.
There wasn’t any wind.
It wasn’t cold.
“It’s a few degrees above freezing today.”
There wasn’t any of Petersburg’s bewitching beauty.
There wasn’t any hyperborean ice.
All around there was streaming, squelching, crunching…
On the square lay lumps of black snow.
“Careful, Anya, don’t slip.”
“It’s okay, there isn’t any ice. It’s all melted. Come here, I want to show you something. Come on, step over that railing, otherwise you won’t see anything…
There was an empire-style minifence lower than your knee, and beyond it a little piece of open roof about a meter and a half wide—it was from there that you could see farther.