I’m silent.
“What did you do for fun?”
I’m silent.
“How did you spend the night?”
“I haven’t slept yet.”
“Uh-huh.” She carefully studies my face. “Well, how many hits did you take this time?”
“Two.”
“Uh-huh. Understood.” M turns away. Her wavy hair conceals her face. She brushes it away. I want to hold her, but she’s distanced herself. We sit in silence for a long time.
“I haven’t had anything to eat since our dinner last night at the café.”
“Let’s go. I’ll make you something to eat. Demon spawn.”
M wipes away tears. In the kitchen she prepares an extraordinary omelet with white bread and tomatoes. I pour myself cognac.
“This will help me come down.”
M is silent. I take a big swig and am barely able to finish the omelet. I begin to conk out. I drag my body to the bed, undress, collapse, and fall asleep immediately.
Several hours later the smell of tobacco wakes me. I cautiously open my eyes.
Quiet. The dead of night. The table lamp has been turned on. The window is thrown wide open. M sits on the wide windowsill and slowly and very seductively smokes a cigarette. The scarlet tip is visible through the billowing half-transparent curtain. I can’t remember the last time I saw her with a cigarette.
THE HAIRY SUTRA
by Pavel Krusanov
Moika Embankment, 48
Translated by Amy Pieterse
“The pentagram,” said Semion Matveev, halting at the table and pressing his hand against the globe. “Swear upon the pentagram, for the devil’s sake! And I shall reveal a great secret.”
D emyan Ilich had a good grasp of the essence of man: he looked at a peach and saw the pit. That was the way he was. Some are preoccupied with the question: what kind of man are you? While for others, it’s: what are you capable of? Demyan Ilich wanted to know: who is inside of you?
As for who was inside of this young maid, he, of course, knew. She had the following cast of mind and habit: with strangers and those she took a liking to, or at least didn’t dislike, she was kind and friendly. But with everyone else she was given to caprice, and if her upbringing did not allow her to slap someone across the face with no good reason, nothing prevented her from kicking them from behind. Demyan Ilich was disgusting to her. He knew she was a graceful and obtuse creature; but he couldn’t help the way he was.
What was she to him? When Demyan Ilich saw her, he was beset by strange, conflicting thoughts and emotions. Evil has matured in my mind, he thought, smiling to himself. Yet at the same time he wanted to touch her tenderly, to stroke her, maybe even try to lick that girlishly plump cheek covered with dainty apricot fuzz. It was so easy, so frightening…Such thoughts made Demyan Ilich’s heart throb dully; his blood ran thicker, and his chest grew tight and hot. Oh well, if they couldn’t be together, they could still be close. In his head a plan began to hatch. A whim? No, the curator never acted upon a whim—that was against his principles. But this was a special case: Demyan Ilich could not control his feelings. If they couldn’t be together, they could at least be close to each other…
The plan fell together piece by piece. People in whom unrestrained passion lets loose become terrifyingly resourceful.fhe plan ripened, writhing in his brain amid heated thoughts like a sterlet in a broth of fish soup. The plan fell into place inexorably. And, finally, it was ready. No, Demyan Ilich did not wish upon her the same fate he had dealt so many others. But what else could he do? She must stay and be with him. This way or another, ne wasn’t going to give her up.
“Ahem.” The curator cleared his throat. And picking his way through the mess reigning in the house, a mess grown familiar and cozy to him, he went off to the bathroom to freshen up. For even the best news could be ruined by the foul breath of its messenger.
Take the platypus, for example. It was no doubt in deep trouble, which is why it was on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. This meant that it was next to impossible for a museum to acquire that beast (stuffed) for an exhibit by legal means. First, hunting the platypus in Australia is illegal and severely punishable under Australian law. Second, the export of the platypus, procured by illegal means on the territory of Australia, is outlawed. Third, in accordance with a plethora of international conventions and agreements, any attempt to import a platypus that has been illegally procured and exported from Australian territory to most any country that abides by the laws of the international community is also a highly punishable offense. It is a three-tiered system. Naturally, one could always try to obtain a stuffed platypus on the secondary market, but the availability is rather limited, and chances are that the platypus would already be moth-eaten and gray with dust. There is, of course, the practice of museum exchanges, but this is a privilege of larger institutions with better funding. Finally, there is the shadowy world of illegal commercial zoology—but how legitimate would the exhibits be? And at what price…
Here, in contrast, they had no less than three stuffed platypuses adorning the glass display cases. Not bad for a small museum—just one crowded hall, really—at the Zoology Department of a university bearing the name of a perfectly respectable writer. (His life had been wrecked by the Decembrists, who had awakened the revolutionary democrat within him.) The museums’s collection was started almost two centuries ago at the Lohvitskay-Skalon Gymnasium for Ladies, and in 1903 the museum moved here to the then brand-new Imperial Pedagogical college for Ladies on the Moika Embankment. Since those bygone days, the display cases of the museum had housed two particularly rare exhibits: a stuffed Cuban red macaw (Ara tricolor), an extinct species of parrot, the last of which was shot in 1864 in the Zapata Swamp; and a gigantic Taveuni beetle (Xixuthrus terribilis)y housed in a glass entomological box. The beautiful macaw had suffered for its splendor: its feathers were used in ladies’ hats, and when at last people thought to replenish the population or at least preserve a small number of the species in captivity, it turned out to be impossible. The Taveuni beetle, brown and branchy as a mandrake root, has since become extinct. It once inhabited Fiji, where natives stuffed themselves with its thick, oblong larvae, which looked like sausages carefully and obligingly prepared by nature herself. In the end, not knowing when to stop, the natives gobbled up the entire population of the species.
From the year 1909, and for a quarter of a century to follow, this Department of Zoology was chaired by a renowned professor, an academician whose name was recognized throughout the world. During his tenure the museum was able to augment its collection and become one of the best university collections in the country. Among the rare exotic objects that an astonished visitor would encounter was an African pangolin, covered with brown boney scales like a huge pinecone, a lesser hedgehog tenrec, a seven-banded and a nine-banded armadillo from the pampas of South America, a short-beaked echidna, a three-toed sloth, and a Tamandua tetradactyla. The imaginations of medieval bestiary writers would have paled at the sight of such creatures, just like a jellyfish, pulled from the deep, pales in the sunlight.
The list of exotic species was not limited to the aforementioned exhibits, however. Inside antique showcases, and upon the shelves of glass-covered oak bookcases, the round eyes of lemurs and capuchins bulged, and patas monkeys, drills, colobuses, and marmosets smirked and pulled faces. Not to mention polar bears and brown bears, sea otters, koalas, flying foxes, monitor lizards, crocodiles, walruses, manatees, and dugongs. Birds? Indeed, they ranged from the green woodpecker to the marabou stork. How about the ascarids preserved in alcohol, and tapeworms in thick glass flasks? Mollusks, you ask? Hundreds of shells, from the giant clam to the rapana, spiky and smooth, bivalves and twisted, with nacreous curls and opaque gaps. And what of the echinoderms and starfish…