“Why be sorry? They’re gone.”
“Who would have thought? Not one gray hair,” Buratina mutters.
“How’d you see me?” They’re sitting in total darkness now and can’t even make out each other’s faces anymore. Buratina’s smoking, a cheap bitter smell.
Ryabets stands up to pee. He’s not shy.
“Don’t piss on the grave!” Buratina cries.
Ryabets says nothing.
“Listen, Ryaba, here’s what I’m thinking. Maybe I could come to your place? With Polkan …?” The dog growls huskily. “I’ll wash up. Do you live alone? Are your mother and father dead?”
“Yeah.”
“I can’t even remember the last time I slept anywhere clean. What’s there for me here? They killed Andryukha! And Kirei … and Sabel … What about you, Ryaba, not married?”
“No.”
“Why not? Waiting for a princess? Or for me? Hee hee hee! Maybe I’ll give you some today, but Ryabets …” Buratina babbles.
Sometimes he can’t tell whether she’s really drunk or just pretending.
“You didn’t answer me, Ryaba. Why haven’t you gotten married?”
“I’ve been waiting for my dick to grow up.”
“Hee hee hee! You? I don’t believe that! Why did you jerk off outside my window? I remember …”
“My first little darling is lying over there.” She nods toward the fence and a night-black honeysuckle. “Do you think his little bones are still there?”
Ryabets imagines the child’s half-decayed bones. “Of course not, after all those years. Maybe a skull … or the tibias, they’re thick.”
“You’re a chef, you should know. And the second one next to him. I buried them at night, the snow was coming down; I remember, it was November.”
“You got the first from Mesropych?”
Buratina nodded and hiccupped.
“Whose was the second?”
“I don’t know. I was sleeping with everyone. I’d go to sleep under one and wake up and another’s going at it. Let the dogs have their way! And my baby girl. She’s lying right over there. She’d be nine … Pour me a little, why don’t you.”
Ryabets splashes some in the cup and Buratina drinks greedily.
“My baby girl was Andryukha’s. We lived over there, where you see the gazebo now. We had a concrete pipe, like this.” Buratina tries to show him how big with her hands. “We lived there a good five years. Or more. With Andryukha and Sabel, and Kirei came later.”
“You mean you gave birth there?”
“Where else, I’d like to know! Andryukha sterilized the knife in the fire and cut the cord. I wanted to leave my little girl, my baby daughter, with
them
, the people with the fanciest house. I thought at least then she’d have a life. Only she died a week later. Right when I was about to give her up. Andryukha would bring her food, he knew the cashier at the store on Zhivopisnaya, a good woman, and she gave it to him for free. Milk, Ryaba, and cereal. You can imagine what my milk was like. My little girl …”
Buratina strokes the ground and weeps silently, only her sniffling gives her away.
The noises on the other side of the fence have died down completely. Only occasionally does a car whoosh by, unseen.
“It was nice when we lived in the pipe, Ryaba. Even in the winter, it was a palace! We’d fill up the opening on one end and hang a towel over the other. A foursome makes it cozy—terrific! Tchaikovsky Hall! There weren’t any windows, but what good would they do? And the other cops left us alone. They’d come, take a look, and leave. There was this one, Lieutenant Bessonov, he was old and had a red nose, a lush. He’d come have a smoke at our fire. He used to say that when he retired he’d move in with us. Hee hee hee! He’d just grab his fishing rod from home, he didn’t need anything else. That’s what he used to say. He was joking, that cop. Later he disappeared. And the cops turned mean! They set all my stuff on fire twice, Ryaba, they burned it! Oh, what good stuff … mattresses! We moved over under the bridge, then to the church—you know the one, past the bridge? But now, Ryaba, that’s it, it’s time to stop!”
Buratina stirs, and Ryabets listens.
“Pour me some more. I’m going to drink my fill today, as if it were the last time, Ryaba! My life’s been bitter. And now I have to go to Kazan. They must have their own ways there, those station whores must be on top there!”
“Did you think I didn’t know? Hee hee hee! It was you who burned down the dacha, Ryaba. You! You! Damn it all.”
“Cut the crap.”
“You always wanted me. I remember the way you used to look at me, the way you hung around outside my window, peeping! Hee hee hee!” Buratina’s voice is so raspy he can hardly make it out. “You still had your beret, the brown one. Ryaba in his beret!”
Ryabets remembers those fall evenings well. He did walk around under Buratina’s windows, since she lived on the second floor, and he would keep an eye out—in the window just a fine veil of tulle, and Buratina prancing around her room in her panties, tight white panties. Before she went to bed she’d examine herself in her window reflection. She really didn’t have a mirror? She’d touch her breasts, belly, hips. Those brief minutes were the ones Ryabets lived for. He never suspected that Buratina was doing that for him, the spy in the night.
She was telling the truth. In school Ryabets couldn’t take his eyes off her. Everyone knew it. He’d sneak up behind her after class, staring at her strong, curvy legs, and fantasize. Knowing this, she’d tease him. First she’d stick her foot out in the aisle between their desks, then
happen
to clasp her breasts, then
happen
to touch herself
down there.
She was teasing him, and in his erotic visions every night, he tortured her ingeniously as only a youthful imagination can. None of his classmates digested the porn Boltyansky unfailingly brought to school as avidly as Ryabets. He’d arrive at school in the morning listless and gray from lack of sleep.
After the fire he found out that Buratina had survived and was in the hospital, pregnant. He was afraid to visit her. But he did visit the burn site right before he went into the army. His three years’ service were pretty cushy, stationed at a garrison kitchen in Baltiisk. He was eventually discharged and went back to those windows, but Buratina was gone. Her Kalmyk father was watching television in the next window; her mother was bustling around the kitchen. He kept going back there for two weeks. After dark. He started culinary school, graduated, and wound up at the cafeteria where he’d worked to this day. He’d lived unsociably, especially after his hard-drinking parents both died. He never married. He gratified his urges (occasionally, on days he got an advance or a paycheck) with train station prostitutes, whom he threw out after coitus. Had they known that he could barely stop himself from strangling them as he was ejaculating, they would have thanked their lucky stars.
Later he moved on to self-service, thanks to progress: there probably wasn’t a better collection of porn films in Moscow.
“Bolt was better than you, just fat. He didn’t jerk off under my window. He came to me honestly and said, ‘Give me some, Buratinachka, just once. What’s it to you?’ Hee hee hee! He’d come down to my place. We lived near each other, remember? Like he had a question about biology.” (Buratina was good at biology; she’d wanted to go to medical school.) “He’d come and sit down and breathe hard, like a sperm whale … He’d bring me that book … what was it? About the Italians who told stories.”
“
The Decameron
.”
“That’s it! He said he’d taken it from his parents. He’s reading it out loud and squeezing his thigh … And he stinks to high heaven, Ryaba, from cologne. He must have poured half a bottle on himself so I’d give him some. I even thought maybe I should. Why let the guy suffer? But I decided—first Mesropych … I wanted him to pop my cherry, hee hee hee! Then we’d see! I had some real studs, didn’t I, Polkan boy?” Buratina scratches the dog’s scruff again. “I’m a whore! I’d give some to Polkan, but the animal gets me all scratched up. What do you expect? Hee hee hee!”
Ryabets remembers. He remembers very well. He remembers Buratina being the only girl in their class—to the envy of the other girls and the greater dissatisfaction of Pichuga, their homeroom teacher—to wear lacy stockings, which made Ryaba’s heart race.
“Remember, Ryaba, the story in that book when one woman arranges to meet him at her house? He comes, and the maid says, ‘Wait a little, her husband’s there …’ And she—the maid, that is—gets it on with the man. That guy was out in the cold all night! Just like you! Hee hee hee. But later he had his revenge, he drove her out on the roof, I think … Right?”
Buratina takes the bottle and finishes it off in one swig.
“Whoo! All right, Ryaba, what the hell. You can’t bring ’em back. Not Bolt, not Mesropych, not Lidukha. I don’t remember the others.” She suddenly falls over, first on her side, then facedown. “But you, Ryaba, you’re not getting any. I was going to give you some, but I’m not. Sleep, my beloved children.”
Her hands stroke the rough grass and fall still.
Ryabets has a headache. He shuts his eyes. He should be getting up. It’s late. He’s not going to spend the night here, on her children’s bones. Or is this crazy woman lying? Though no, she said some sensible things too. Such a strange day. But there’s still the newspaper. His mother didn’t give him up when that detective came poking around. He’d asked,
Could someone have fought with Mesropych, or Boltyansky, or even Burataeva? From their class, maybe someone was getting back at them? Or was it just the drinking and carousing?
The detective questioned everyone. With some, he went to their houses; others he called in. Eventually he decided it was an accident, a cigarette butt. Besides, it was so dry there. Like now. Drier even. The peat burned, definitely. There was smoke. People were coughing.
Crackle, pain, heat. Ryabets opens his eyes and sees Buratina, her arm raised, holding the bottle—the moon’s predatory reflection on its jagged edges. She’s going to kill me! He moves to the side, Buratina falls—crack!—a red rose plunges into the sand.
“Bitch,” he whistles, clutching her shoulders and pressing her to the ground. “You wanted to kill me?”
Buratina is silent, and for a moment her back is tense under Ryabets’s hands, but then it goes slack. He holds her down with his knees and moves his hands to her neck. Blood drips black on her hair. He smells fresh urine. Finding the thyroid cartilage, he presses and presses on it from both sides, vividly imagining her anatomy. A quiet whistle like from a bicycle tire, and then silence. Off to the side Polkan’s shadow is wagging its tail, baring its teeth. “Nadya, Nadya!”
“You never read
The Decameron
?” Boltyansky exclaims.
Ryabets doesn’t like Boltyansky. That he’s fat is bad enough, but he has those sticky little hands and those manicured nails, damnit. On top of it all, Boltyansky keeps bringing porn to school, photos blurry from being copied so many times. Girls with big tits and grayish bodies (the result of the copying) straddling muscle-bound guys. Or offering up their cushiony asses. Or spreading their lips. One look is all it takes and then there is strawberry jam all over the floor.
Boltyansky shows the photos in his hand, gripping them with his little pink fingers. If for the others the viewings are a standard diversion, it’s different for Ryabets. The sticky feeling has degenerated into horror at a female’s touch, be it a hand, elbow, accidental breast, or innocent hair. Even his mother’s touch—extremely rare, fortunately—repulses him. If Praskovya Fyodorovna so much as strokes his head when she’s tipsy, it turns his stomach and make his insides clench up.
“
Droll Stories
too. That’s Balzac,” Boltyansky preaches. They’re walking home from school.
“Can I read it?”
“I’ll bring it tomorrow. I’ll bring
The Decameron
, not Balzac. Balzac’s in a series. My parents would notice. They don’t let me lend books.
The Decameron
’s better than Balzac anyway. Balzac just has one weird story, about how he disguised himself as a woman so he could fuck her. Well, I mean, first he’d make friends and all that, you know, and then he’d fuck her. The rest is just boring.
The Decameron
’s more interesting.”
Boltyansky does bring
The Decameron
, a fat blue volume with an elegantly lettered title, and gives Ryabets a two-week deadline. Ryabets skims the yellowed pages and sets it aside. Final exams are starting soon.
“Wouldn’t you know? The minute I climb off her, the bell! She goes to the door and wipes off the blood, all scared. ‘Who’s there?’ Boltyansky: ‘It’s me, Nadya.’ Her: ‘Damn! What do you want?’ Him: ‘Want to go for a walk?’ Ha ha ha!” Mesropov nearly falls down laughing. “Just imagine. A walk!”
“What did she say?” Ryabets’s lips are dry. He and Mesropov are standing in the schoolyard. The graduation party is starting in half an hour. Everyone’s already been drinking and they’re sharing the news half-soused.
“She’s practically rolling in laughter. Well, I sneak up from behind while she’s talking to him through the door and give it to her good! If only Bolt could have seen what we were doing four inches away!”
Six months before, Mesropov had vowed that before graduation night he was going to pop the cherry of one of their classmates. Fiercely handsome and ox-eyed, he drove the girl crazy.
“I just came and he says again, ‘Nadya, Nadya’”—Mesropov mimicked Boltyansky’s squeaky voice—“‘Let’s go for a walk …’ Well, I yanked the door open! Just as I was, no underpants, only a T-shirt! And a rubber flapping in my hand. Catch! Bolt’s eyes bug out and he runs! Ha ha ha!”
“What about her?” Ryabets is breathing fast.
“Who? Nadya? Nadya’s fine, Ryaba, just fine. She plays along! We fucked like bunnies for hours. Whoo! I can barely stand up. So we’re going to Silver Pine Forest tomorrow, right, Ryaba? Nadya’s got this friend, Lidukha. She’s little but she’s got titties out the wazoo! I’d rather have Lidukha, but Nadya … It’s nice there, in the forest. Never been? Tons of bushes! ‘Under every bush she kept a table set and a home!’ Ha ha ha!”
Some other classmates come up and Mesropov starts recounting his adventure.
“Bolt gave me
The Decameron
to read,” Ryabets says when he’s finished.