‘I insist that everyone have something to eat.’
It works out that everyone just drinks.
‘Sery, I’m going to sign you up for karate. Obviously not today.’
One of the guests reaches for the vodka, to say a toast. You can see the side of his shirt is damp.
He stands so he can pour for the people sitting on the opposite side of the table. Now it’s revealed that his back is wet, too.
After he straightens up to speak, it’s clear to everyone that his belly’s damp as well. If he’d sat there without crowing, nobody would have noticed a thing.
‘Hold Sery’s head over the bathtub. Someone really should sit with him and hold his head so he doesn’t choke on his puke.’
‘It’s called aspiration of vomitus.’
‘You hold his head, then, if you’re so smart.’
‘I’m smart?’
‘No, not you. I was joking.’
A half-hearted fight starts. Everybody rushes to separate the scufflers. They don’t resist.
Platosha is getting more and more incomprehensible. He requested that Geiger and I describe – no more, no less – Zaretsky’s death. I started objecting, saying we didn’t see that death, how can we describe it. Platosha’s response: there’s a lot you didn’t see but somehow you’re describing it all. He waved it off: fine, no need, I was just proposing it. Geiger signaled to me, unnoticed, and I bit my tongue. Zaretsky’s a significant person for Platosha: everything started with him. There’s a reason he drew him.
I wasn’t thinking when I objected to Platosha. To be honest, no, I don’t understand exactly what our descriptions are needed for anyway but since it seems important to Platosha, the question is retracted. I’d describe something for him every day – demonstrations, parks, weddings, murders – if only he could recover.
Today I found out that I need to fly to Munich in a few days. I found out by chance, after receiving an express-delivery package from a Munich hospital. I immediately telephoned Geiger, who had arranged the matter. He explained that he kept quiet about my trip because he didn’t want to worry either me or Nastya prematurely.
I’m agitated. It works out that I will be flying alone. Geiger is fighting with the Ministry of Health over his clinic now and needs to be there every day. He’ll fly to Munich, but only for one day, for the concluding consultation. As far as Nastya goes, the doctors insist she not travel anywhere. They say it could end badly. Despite the recommendation, she has resolutely made up her mind, but I won’t allow it.
It’s terrifying for me to go alone. I’m not letting on, but it truly is terrifying for me. One time when I was a child they brought me to the hospital with an appendicitis attack. The white corridors scared me and the smell of medicine scared me, but what drove me to genuine despair was that my parents were not allowed in the operating room with me. I was wheeled away on a stretcher and I twisted around and looked back at them, a doleful pair waving to me from somewhere in the depths of the corridor. I melted into tears, both from my sudden solitude and from endless pity for them, too, because I knew their orphanhood was more acute than mine. So as not to aggravate their suffering, I did not allow myself to howl out loud but my tears flowed so abundantly that they perplexed even the nurses, who had seen everything.
That picture flashed in my memory like a blurry dot, like some light in the fog, and then suddenly appeared in all its harshness. Back then, in childhood, my departure was not yet a departure and I again met with those dear to me. Only God knows where my movement through a corridor will carry me this time. When Geiger came to see us in the evening, he mentioned, speaking quickly, that they might ‘open up that little skull of yours.’ ‘Little skull of yours’ and his careless tone speak to his having rehearsed that phrase.
1923. March.
Zaretsky, a person who has finished working his shift at a sausage factory, is getting ready to go home.
He safely makes it through the guardhouse with a sausage in his trousers. The sausage is hanging on a string right next to his genitalia and is not visible to the guards.
Zaretsky’s genitalia (this is discovered at the morgue) are small, thus the sausage has ample space.
Zaretsky’s elder contemporary, Freud, would have considered this incident of theft to be unconnected with the stomach. Who knows, maybe the victim truly did feel more confident with sausage in his trousers. Maybe his self-esteem improved.
At any rate, it’s uncomfortable to walk around with sausage in your trousers. The sausage constrains movement. It could, in the end, simply tear off the string. Come out of his trousers in front of everyone.
Someone carrying sausage in that manner is taking a risk and Zaretsky understood that.
After walking a fair distance from the factory, he usually went down to the Zhdanovka River. Unfastened his trousers and untied the sausage. Went up to the embankment again, sausage in hand.
A person with sausage always attracts attention in Russia, but especially in 1923.
From here on, there are various possible scenarios.
Someone had begun keeping an eye on this sausage-factory employee. They could have already been waiting for him by the river on that fateful day. Standing behind a tree, say, a weeping willow. They quickly grabbed Zaretsky’s sausage when he took it out.
What happened from there? Chance asserts itself here.
They might have pushed Zaretsky so he hit the top of his head on a sharp rock. That’s what investigator Treshnikov, who didn’t know about the sausage, surmised. Of course those same characters might have hit Zaretsky with that rock – I don’t think they were great philanthropists.
The question arises, however: why did they want to kill him? After all, the victim couldn’t have even complained about the loss since the item was stolen in the first place.
The second scenario.
Rivers draw social dropouts. Lots of various riffraff hang around on the riverbanks.
Someone among the Zhdanovka dropouts notices Zaretsky. The sausage maker’s galoshes slosh in the wet snow, which attracts attention. The bank of the Zhdanovka in March is not the sort of place to take a stroll. It’s clear to an attentive person that the man sloshing in the snow has not come down here at random.
Prepared for any development of events, the observer noiselessly follows Zaretsky. He follows him out from behind the suppositional weeping willow. He still doesn’t know what exactly Zaretsky has schemed up, but sees a victim in him.
He has a knack, the instinct of a hunter. Speaking in contemporary terms, he’s a scumbag. He’ll kill without thinking about practicability. He’ll kill because it’s possible to kill. He’ll look at the manipulations with the sausage (he’s accustomed to not being surprised), raise the rock, and lower it on the back of his client’s head.
He eats the sausage as he watches the death throes. He melts into the dusk.
Geiger wrote about Zaretsky’s murder and Platosha asked him to read it aloud. Geiger, who has banned the word ‘no’ with regard to my husband, began reading. I was watching only Platosha. He listened calmly to the strange description he’d ordered and though I thought it had sufficed for him, it turned out that, no, it had not. And that’s what he said: it did not suffice. He didn’t explain why. It seemed to me that Geiger was a little annoyed and that his annoyance regarding Platosha’s strange request somehow even appeared to be unexpected. Maybe Geiger was annoyed that it was a strange request and he had fulfilled it. And then, there you go: it didn’t fit.
Geiger said to me:
‘Well, then you write about that death.’ He turned to Platosha. ‘Or you?’
Platosha answered: