“So you couldn’t call, could you? I’m leaving today. Damn, it’s all so stupid, stupid. Don’t dare say anything. I know all about it. Anything but about that . . . I’m taking the dogs with me. That’s it. Why didn’t you call, scarecrow? I’ve rented the apartment. Maybe, I should have left it for you? Don’t dare say anything to me!”
She hugged his shoulders: her boy, her—who knew what—student, old lover, nephew, pal . . . It always happened that way with her, between genres, never anything reliable, definite, or socially upstanding . . . That is, at just that moment, it seemed as if someone like that was about to bite . . . How to avoid jinxing it? A man with no artistic inclinations whatsoever: exactly what she needed. Gremin, Gremin. An honest-to-goodness general . . .
She stroked Seryozha’s dirty, disheveled locks, which he had not pulled back with an elastic band (he’d lost it), patted him on the back, and pushed him away.
“Go take a bath. I’m making you something to eat.”
He went to the bathroom, turned on the water, which streamed sumptuously from the faucet, and realized that he had not bathed since Odessa . . . He lay down in the almost unbearably hot water and began to sob . . .
Poluektova-the-bitch called her general in Perm and in a squeaky voice most ill-suited to her mighty martial spirit, informed him of a change of plans: he did not need to meet her train; she was returning her tickets and staying on for at least a week. Her former husband, who had just been widowed, had dumped himself at her place like an avalanche, and she was going to have to take care of him, because there was no leaving him alone in this condition . . .
The Siberian general nodded into the receiver, said drily “yes, yes, yes,” and marveled at what a proper, strong, and real woman he had found himself, even if she was a ballerina with a flat hard chest and a back as muscular as a new recruit’s. He smiled and quietly relished the resuscitation occurring below his belt: never in his life had he had such a woman; he had never even thought that they existed . . .
A week was not enough for Poluektova. She cared for Sergei for almost a month, fed him food and pills, turned on his favorite music, forced him to go for walks with the dogs, and gradually he returned to himself and began to play. The very same day when, after the long hiatus, he was scheduled to perform at the club, Poluektova flew off to her gray-haired lover who, although he wasn’t quite tall enough, was in all other respects the most proper of husbands even for a prima ballerina and who, in the course of his unplanned extended wait, had reached a final decision to put an end to his drawn-out widowerhood and to marry this exceptional, outstanding woman with the past of a whore and the future of the grand dame of a region large enough to accommodate fifteen Belgiums, eight Frances, and five Germanys all at once . . .
23
WHILE ON DUTY ONE NIGHT AT THE PRECINCT, KUPCHINO resident Semion Kurilko, a militia officer and squadron leader, beat the shit out of a prisoner. Not more than usual, within limits, but toward morning the guy died.
The guy turned out to work at a museum. And all because of that skinny-pants faggot, that pansy dick-licker, Semion got into so much trouble that his whole life took a left turn. They kicked him out of the militia, adding: you ought to be thankful they didn’t put you in the slammer . . . His wife left him and moved with their daughter to Karelia. Then his mother—the only person who had stood up for him, not to mention fed him—died. Then, after all this, Semion himself got sick: in a fit of rage he axed to shreds a brand-new, just constructed children’s playground, with a little house for crawling into, a sandbox, and a carved wooden bear. They strait-jacketed him right there alongside the mangled bear and took him to the mental hospital. He was treated for almost a year, then released back to his room in Kupchino. While he was sick, his neighbors cleaned his place out, taking his blankets and his “Spidola” radio receiver left over from better times.
Semion had served eight years in the militia, joining right after the army, and he had no other profession. They gave him a disability pension, but a small one. Fortunately, he didn’t drink, because the pension barely covered food. He had a good appetite that didn’t match his pension. In the hospital he had put on a lot of weight, and now he needed more than before. The way he saw it, a skinny guy doesn’t need as much nourishment as someone with meat on his bones. He would have looked for a job somewhere—as an armed guard someplace, for example, but they wouldn’t take him because he’d been severed from the militia. He tried to get a job as a loader at a print shop, but they fired him for a—you have to admit—really stupid reason: smoking was forbidden on the premises, but he kept lighting up out of habit. They caught him once, twice, a third time, and then the foreman, a young kid just out of university, the same kind of skinny-pants shit as that museum worker the whole ruckus in the militia was about, fired him.
Once again Semion was left with nothing. That was when he was overcome by enormous anger at those skinny young guys, all those brainy boys, who had messed up his whole life. That was when Semion picked up his shiv. Thin, sharp, thicker than a knitting needle, but thinner than a file. He’d kept it at home for a long time, since his militia days when he took it away from a thief they’d hauled in. Why he pocketed it, he didn’t know. He stuck it in his sleeve, tucking the blade under the band of his wristwatch. The watch was broken and hadn’t worked for a long time, but now it came in handy. It was a crafty setup.
Semion lived near the Memorial Cemetery of the Victims of January Ninth, located on an avenue with the same name, in a building with a deep courtyard formed by three two-story barrack-type apartment buildings, about twenty minutes by foot from the suburban train station. On May 1, 1961, his favorite holiday, when the militia was up to its ears with business—drinking brawls, slashings, and other cheerful entertainments—he completed his first mission. He strolled down to the train stop, got on a suburban train, and rode to the Vitebsk train station. From there he turned left down Zagorodny Avenue, and, not hurrying, checking out the passersby, set off in the direction of the Technological Institute. There in the walk-through courtyard with a huge trench running through it that deprived it of its walk-through functionality—people peeked in, went as far as the trench, then returned to the archway they had come in through—he sat down on a bench and sat until evening, because things were not going as he had planned: either people walked together in groups, or the lone passerby was not of the right type he needed. It was only after eight that a skinny faggot in narrow-legged pants (with a thin little briefcase) came by. He was drunk as well. He wasn’t looking for a way to exit to the other street; all he needed was a secluded spot, a dark corner, to release the fast-flowing beer. After he had splashed his load in a suitable place, Semion approached him from the back and stuck the shiv right where it was supposed to go, slightly to the side and between the ribs. At first the shiv seemed to hesitate, as if it had run up against a dense film, but after that it was like cutting butter . . . In, and out. The guy oohed, fell nose-first against the wall, and dropped without even turning around. Semion didn’t even look at the briefcase, wiped the shiv neatly with a kitchen rag taken with forethought from home, stuck the instrument back up his sleeve under his watchband, and exited the courtyard with the new gait—stiff and manikin-like—that he had developed after his hospital treatments.
His next mission took place November 7, also without a hitch. Now he already knew that next year on May 1, he would celebrate his holiday as his heart desired: he’d shiv that shit, the skinny faggot, that worthless kike . . .
He’d been coming to this courtyard for three years. The trench had been covered over long ago, and people came through not in big streams, but in trickles. In May when it was light—more; in the November darkness—fewer. Semion was always lucky: one time the guy had a bouquet of flowers; another one—a tape recorder; the third was carrying two cake boxes tied together with string. Some he’d already forgotten. First he’d track one of them down: he recognized the type immediately. Then he’d catch up with him, stick to him for a second, then grab him with his right hand by the shoulder and strike with his left. Semion was a lefty retrained at school so he wrote with his right hand and did other things with both, but more easily with his left.