“I am in desperate need of plastic surgery. The operation costs ten thousand dollars. I have no one else to turn to. If you refuse to help me, I will have you thrown in jail. I will sue you for inflicting severe injury on me, and I have documented evidence to prove my claims.”
“The money’s over there,” I said, nodding. “In the top drawer of the desk. Exactly ten thousand.”
“I’m not joking. Have your parents sell their apartment. You should understand that my life is being ruined because of this. I have no other choice. Mark my words, you’ll be doing time.”
A nose injury, blown out of proportion into a worldwide conspiracy that cannot be proved or disproved—as long as you believe in it, it’s true. But why was he indulging in this eccentricity, and what did he really need the money for? Was it a bribe? For whom? My god, could he really be so desperate as to believe that this fantastic sum could help him rise from the ashes? For us ordinary people (dorm dwellers), it would have been no more consequential than a mosquito bite, but for him it was a mortal wound. For the rest of us, unemployment, lack of money, obscurity, was the air we breathed. For him, it was a sign that his life was over, once and for all.
“You listen to me!” I shouted. “One more word out of you and I’ll fix your nose for you myself, right here! Have
your
parents sell their apartment and shell out the cash to you! Or are you an orphan now?”
“My parents are unable to give me any money,” he answered hollowly, as though his parents had died yesterday.
“And why is that?” I asked in surprise. “You are family, after all. And you’ve had it easy for three years, living off the money they send you. So what gives?”
“My parents are busy with their own lives now. They got divorced, and I got left out of the picture, so I can’t ask them for help anymore.”
“But you think you can ask me for help?” I exploded. “Ten thousand bucks doesn’t just materialize out of thin air, you know! What do you want it for anyway? To go to America? Or invest in Gazprom stocks and become a millionaire in six months?”
“I’m warning you, either you come up with ten grand or I’m taking this case to court.”
“You can take it to the war crimes tribunal for all I care!” I stormed out, slamming the door behind me. What was I going to do with him? And how much longer could I keep this up, treating him like a normal human being? Get a grip! If we could sit down and have some vodka together, I might quote the words of a poor, homeless Russian poet who died in exile. He said,
It is cold to walk the earth; still colder is the grave. Remember that, remember, and do not curse your fate
. He wouldn’t get it though. It would be like trying to explain that bread is bread. Somewhere deep inside, I knew: he was losing it. Something had to be done, an alert had to be sounded. The problem was that while his old swagger had not made him many enemies, it did little to win anyone over to his side either, so his fall was met with a general apathy. I was the only one he could count on. So I decided to go back in there and talk to him. I decided to say,
Come on, don’t do this to yourself. You are healthy and strong as an ox! You’re young and bright, well-educated and good-looking. You could be out there having fun and living life to the fullest, and you choose this instead?
I went back inside, only to find him standing over my computer. I yelped like a wounded animal and rushed forward—but it was too late. With one press of a key, he had consigned my best piece to oblivion. Half a year of tense and difficult sleepless nights … I’ll kill him! I grabbed a ceramic vase from the table and threw it at him, aiming for his head. I missed, and it crashed through the double-paned glass window. Then I went straight to the dorm supervisor.
“But you boys come from the same parts, don’t you?” the supervisor asked me. “Why are you squabbling with each other? I don’t have room vacancies at the moment. If you really want to move, I suggest you ask around. Maybe someone will agree to swap roommates with you.”
Nobody wanted to swap with me; no one was willing to share a room with Tatchuk.
Each morning the sheets on my bed were twisted into a hieroglyph suggesting torturous insomnia. The reason: that maniac had acquired the revolting habit of getting up in the middle of the night and shuffling around the room like a somnambulist. My nerves were wound tight as strings, and it was like Tatchuk was pulling a bow across them. I always had the feeling that he was getting up stealthily, tiptoeing toward me. Perhaps with a pillow or razor in hand. I stayed on my guard, waiting for him to strike from behind. I think we both needed help. I found myself having to copy all the files in my computer onto discs that I secured in the desk drawer under lock and key. Things can’t go on like this for long, I told myself. But it didn’t get better. It just went on and on, in the same way.
Once, as I was returning home, I heard him through the door talking to someone on his cell phone. (It must have been his grandma—she was the only living soul willing to listen to his harping.)
“… I filed my claim in court,” he was saying. “He can’t wriggle out of it now. You wouldn’t believe how long it takes them to consider a case! I can’t wait any longer. And guess what? That pitiful wimp managed to land himself a job as a copywriter at a publishing house. He’s making five hundred dollars a month. Oh, and he has a book coming out soon. But I won’t let him feel good about that when my life is such a mess. I want him to live in a state of constant fear. And I’m pretty good at acting insane. I think he’s going to break down and help me soon. My life might be a mess right now, but that’s all the more reason for him to have to suffer as well.”
I went cold with fury. Whether in a healthy state of mind, from hatred toward me, or out of crazy envy of my latest successes, he was like a tick that bit deep into me and wouldn’t let go until it had drunk its fill of my warm blood. They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. That may be so, but today Dr. Bessonov is going to have to use a little shock therapy. I’m going to show him something that will make his latest strategy vanish—
poof!
—into thin air.
Late that evening, when Tatchuk left for the bathroom, I got hold of his inhaler and hid it in the top desk drawer. Then, after hesitating a moment, I locked the drawer and threw the key out the window.
“Sit down, we need to talk,” I said as he came in the door. “It’s time you went home. I’ve had just about enough of you, my friend. So I suggest you gather your things without a big fuss and go back to Novoshakhtinsk. I came clean and told Urusov that I’d been writing for you. The old man told me off a little, but said the papers for your expulsion would be signed in a few days.”
“No, you couldn’t have!” he cried. “I need my education …” Then he underwent a sudden transformation. He drew himself up straight and puffed out like a turkey, as though his sense of dignity had returned and was flooding him from within. He started pacing the room, and I watched him in his agitation. I experienced a cold, predatory curiosity, a sense of my own strength and the ease with which I could simply crush him like a louse.
“Tatchuk,” I warned, “you had your chance.”
He started coughing and turned toward me, jerking spasmodically. His face had gone purple, and his eyes were large and beseeching like a saint on an icon, or a bull in a bullfight. At first he didn’t understand, as he knocked over mugs and glasses on the table, searching one surface and then another, grabbing at things, incredulous at not being able to find his priceless Swiss fix.
“What did you do with it? Did you take it? Give it back right now! Come on, give it to me … Be a man about it … It hurts, it really hurts. It hurts to breathe, I can’t. Seriozha, man, I’m sorry, what do you want? I’m going to die, please. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” He was wheezing and sputtering, then he coughed out a few more words. He started to lose his balance, took a step toward me, then stumbled. He had to lean on the desk for support, and his hand seemed to go through the wooden tabletop like water.
I continued to sit there, ringing with numbness, as though I were not myself. I behaved with the same sweet aloofness with which a cruel child dissects a bumblebee on the windowsill, probing it’s fuzzy belly with a needle until it spurts white pus like a ripe pimple. I found myself at the point of no return, where love is silent, and it was as pleasant and painful as returning to the cramped unconsciousness of the womb. Suddenly, as though I’d been yanked by the hair, I started at the seriousness of my insult to the world, and I slapped myself on the forehead.
What am I doing?
I snatched a kitchen knife and rushed to pry open the lock on the flimsy desk drawer. I fumbled for the miserable spray and rushed to my roommate’s side.
“Come on, come on,” I coaxed, “you don’t have to be talented or smart or honest or good. It’s enough to just be alive. Who are we, anyway, to refuse one another the right to exist?”
A day later, his body was found in a toilet stall in the left wing of the building. He was clutching an empty bottle of sleeping pills. By some cruel twist of fate, his body lay prostrate just beneath the words
You’re useless
, which someone had underlined with a thick marker.
When a person loses someone close to him, it is common that he will feel tortured by a sense of responsibility toward the dearly departed. Friends give speeches in his honor. A bright, whitewashed image of the deceased is created, purified by suffering, which has little to do with the living person you yourself knew. This was exactly the way we, students of the acclaimed professor Urusov who gathered in the courtyard of the dormitory, recalled one who was truly talented, who suffered deeply in crisis—a vulnerable soul whom we ignored, abandoned, and paid no attention to, focused as we were on ourselves. Not that a long time was spent mourning. (It was, after all, the heat of May: sticky leaves rustled in the trees, and the hot air was as thick as the rubber ball we took with us to play soccer at Savelovsky station.) It had already been suggested, as though by chance, that there was no reason to torture ourselves because of someone else’s frivolity and that the fellow himself was to blame. “It was so obviously his own fear of living,” another colleague said.
I stood there trying to find the point from which we could go back to the past, but anger, or envy, or soul-killing apathy had numbed the senses, and, picking us up like chips of wood in a flood, had carried us toward the finish line. I couldn’t find this point, or even picture it. And, more out of a sense of duty, not yet believing in the true, unparalleled reality of a higher judgment, I sidled off furtively, away from the others, mumbling silently under my breath, “God forgive me.”
THE COAT THAT SMELLED LIKE EARTH
BY
D
MITRI
K
OSYREV
(M
ASTER
C
HEN
)
Birch Grove Park
Translated by Mary C. Gannon
T
hat dude, by the way, he never took his coat off,” the girl told me. “For the first time in my life I did it with a guy in a coat. You know, an old coat, pretty gross.”
A coat in the middle of a hot, stifling Moscow summer? I began to understand my client, the mother of this underage creature. When a girl gives way to her fantasies to such a degree, her friends can deal with it. But not her mother. To the mother, a child will always be a child, even if that child has developed a habit of talking about sex with a definite world-weariness. That’s when I get a phone call that goes,
Doctor, can you tell me if a normal person would think something like that?
But, whereas you can lie to your mother and enjoy scaring her, you can’t deceive a shrink. A professional will easily be able to detect whether an overripe teenager is merely fantasizing, or fantasizing while fervently believing in the fantasies, or simply …
Simply telling the truth.
“Did you tell your mother about that? About the coat?” I asked in a gloomy tone. “Do you realize that a normal person would never believe that? Look out the window—the concrete is so hot it’s melting—and you’re talking about a guy having sex in a coat. It wasn’t a fur coat, by any chance, was it? Think before you tell your mother things like that. Or do you want her to pack you off to a mental institution after this?”
“Oh, so
that’s
what this is all about,” she said, and examined me with a long look. “Is that your diagnosis? All right, then. Let’s go to the loony bin. Just let me grab an extra pair of pants, and off I go.”
She waved her palm over her head in a circular motion imitating the flashing light of an ambulance.
Most of my income (not reported to the IRS) comes from single mothers who refuse to believe that their children have grown up. Not just grown up, but grown up to become coarse and ugly, so that if they’re boys they contemplate throwing their mothers facedown on the kitchen table. And if they’re girls, their mothers suddenly become spiteful, idiotic obstacles to achieving very concrete physical desires.
It’s one thing when these are classic teenage fantasies, even if they border on pathology. (And they always border on pathology.) What I had just heard, however, was something completely different. Her eye movements, the tone of her voice, and the internal logic of the story attested to the complete absence of any fantasy. Yes, she said she’d do it with that guy for five hundred rubles in Birch Grove Park, which stretches from the Polezhaevskaya subway station to Peschanaya Square. Yes, she went with him to the end of the grove and waved a condom she’d pulled out of her pocket in front of his face. And then she was smelling the earthy, moldy smell of the gray overcoat, or even more likely a raincoat, that the man never took off in spite of the heat.
“He could’ve killed you, you know,” I reproached her.
“He was all right,” she said very convincingly. “Just wanted to get laid. Then again,
I
picked him. For his eyes. He had such—”
“Remind me how old you are?”
“What? So what if I’m fifteen? Does that mean I’m too young to want it, huh?” She opened her eyes, thick with makeup, very wide. “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know. My mom forgot to tell me.”
“Okay, let me give it to you straight,” I said woodenly. “If you’re not careful what you tell your mother,
she
’ll end up in the funny farm, not you.”
“Good riddance,” replied the young creature in a sweet voice, and stared with disgust at my untrimmed beard and my baggy turtleneck sweater.
“Hold on a second. That means that I end up without a client, which isn’t good for my business. Your mother needs professional help, not you; she’s the one who called me, crying frantically and saying, ‘Can you take a look at my girl? She tells me horrible stories. Is she crazy?’ We need to calm your mother down or she’ll be off her rocker in no time. Not you—her. Get the picture? So here’s the deal: you made the whole thing up. I’ll think of something to say to your mother. I’ll say that you’re fine for now, though you need to be under observation. And you keep your mouth shut about sex in coats. And at the same time you’ll tell me about this guy—
dude
, that is—who goes around dressed like that in the summer. To tell you the truth, I’m more interested in him than you. Because who needs maniacs wandering around the streets of Peschanaya?”
“Mister, you’re a maniac yourself,” said my client’s daughter, clearly enjoying herself. “He was a big, tall, funny guy, nice, with kinda faded hair. Still pretty young. Tan, like a construction worker or something. Maybe he’d just gotten out of the hospital and that’s why he was wearing a coat. A weird coat.”
“Oh, so now it’s a
weird
coat, eh? Well, tell me more about the coat.”
“The material … I’ve never felt anything like it before. It wasn’t synthetic. Gabardine, or twill, or something else great-grandmotherish. A long coat down to his ankles. Big buttons. You know, like from a museum. Yellowish edges. And it smelled like it’d been buried underground for a hundred years. But the dude wasn’t a bum. He was clean. I wouldn’t do it with a bum, no way! You kidding? The dude himself smelled really nice, actually.”
“Girl, just listen to yourself. You walk down an alley, see a man sitting on a bench wearing an overcoat … Okay, you think he’s been in the hospital, but still … And so what do you do next, tell me again?”
I paid great attention to the pupils of her eyes, her body language, the movements of her head and shoulders.
“Nothing. I saw the coat, saw the dude. I wanted to get some action, so I batted my eyes at him and blushed like a schoolgirl.”
“You
are
a schoolgirl.”
“Well, I’m overdeveloped. So the rest is history.”
I sighed and made a mental diagnosis. Teenage hypersexuality and an underdeveloped personality, with no pathology in my area—psychiatric, that is. I also realized that the girl’s desire to torture her mother was spent for the day.
“Okay, to sum it up: you made the whole thing up and you’re not talking about it anymore. Mom gets some peace of mind, and you, young lady—if you start seeing weird things, or if life starts to suck real bad all of a sudden, give me a call. I’ll fix it all up for you. I mean it. We’ll deal with the money thing later, a little bit at a time. And weird things need to be sorted out quickly.”
“Dr. Weird,” she said, and cast a sad glance at my sink filled with dirty dishes.
I walked to Birch Grove Park to get some fresh air and hide from the heat. And just to think a little.
After sunset, the squirrels went quiet in the branches of elm trees. Disappointed spaniels and dobermans hauled their owners back home; but pensioners remained seated in their usual spots, finishing their games of dominoes.
I peered across the park that was slowly succumbing to darkness. The girl hooked up with that dude somewhere not too far from here, and they went to most remote spot in the grove, which still hadn’t been cleared of fallen trees after the disastrous storms of 1998. A person with an underdeveloped personality simply has no clue what a stranger wearing a long overcoat in hot weather can do to her.
Uh, wait a second—according to her, he hung the coat over his arm while they were walking, but put it on again before he laid her down on a concrete slab, took the condom out of her fingers, and rolled up her miniskirt.
She didn’t make that up—that much was certain. So if this was the case, it was the guy who worried me. It seemed like more than just ordinary fetishism.
The local police station was located on 3rd Peschanaya Street, on the other side of Birch Grove Park. The precinct was a hole in a wall, splotched with shiny brown paint. The hole opened onto a short corridor that led down to a semibasement room, decorated in the best traditions of Brezhnev office style: cheap wall panels of faux wood, wrinkled linoleum imitating mahogany flooring, and painted white bars on the windows.
“Sexual predators? No, haven’t had any of them in here in a long time,” said the inspector with the fitting last name of Bullet. “It’s good you stopped in, but I don’t see a crime here. Okay, she’s underage.
She
was hitting on
him
. No law against wearing an overcoat in the summer. Got anything else on him? No? Okay, I guess I could ask around. At least I’ll be able to get off my butt, get some exercise. Come back in a week. You’re a private doctor, I guess you know what you’re talking about,” he concluded skeptically.
And only three days later …
The flashing lights of the police car cast an unnatural blue pall on the gray stump of a body covered with a blanket. The figure lay on a stretcher that floated slowly into the yawning mouth of the ambulance. But I caught a glimpse of tangled hair and a wet forehead amidst the absurdly blue uniforms of the orderlies. Her face was uncovered, so she was alive. Inspector Bullet gave me a dark look and said, “The reason I asked you to come right away was that if she dies, I’m gonna have to interrogate your underage client. There’s an overcoat here too. Looks like it’s all true.”
“I’d rather tell you her story myself,” I said, thinking hard. “It would make more sense.”
“Well?”
“Nice guy, funny, youngish, sun-bleached hair, tan, tall?” I asked.
“Far from it. Not very tall. The overcoat he wore dragged along on the ground behind him. The victim says the coat was strange, like something from the Stalin era. Other than that—well, maybe he was tan, maybe funny. Why shouldn’t he be funny? So much fun to bash in a girl’s head. They’re probably gonna have to drill a hole in her skull. They say it’s that serious. She went with him on her own at first, and then later she suspected something wasn’t quite right … Yep. That’s about it.”
The investigation reached a dead end very quickly. Two construction workers, migrants, one tall and one short, who had been painting the building on the corner of 2nd and 3rd Peshchanaya Streets, vanished into a thin air. This greatly surprised their foreman, who couldn’t locate his countrymen after returning from Moldavia. To find their whereabouts or prove anything was virtually impossible, since the photographs of the suspects that were soon faxed from their hometown, a place called Yassy, were only suitable for a trash can. So the building with the unfinished paint job returned to its peaceful slumber among the sticky lime trees and sounds of car alarms.
“We can’t issue ‘wanted’ posters or arrest an overcoat without its owner,” said the inspector. “But you know what I think? I think this is your department. After you stopped in the other day, I called all the old geezers from our precinct. They’re better than any archive. Thought maybe there had been something like what you described two years ago, before I began working here. Turned out there was a case in 1973. Right here in Birch Grove Park. Then again, where else would someone work the walls with a girl? So there was this sex maniac who wore a wide-brim hat and an old-fashioned overcoat, who was always on the lookout for schoolgirls. Funny thing was that the girls didn’t even hesitate. He took them to some broken-down barracks near Khodynka and made them wear white socks and a school uniform with a white apron. When he got busted, he threatened that the entire police force would have hell to pay when they found out who he really was. He hinted that he was some big shot in the Communist Party, or even one of the higher-ups in the government. To make a long story short, instead of going to jail, he ended up in a funny farm—your department, in other words. Never came back from there. He’d be in his nineties by now, I’d say. And he was a local, not a construction worker from Moldavia. Period. Case closed … What do you say to that?”
Quite frankly, I couldn’t say anything at all, except a few standard comments about fetishism.
But fetishism isn’t contagious. Especially when there’s no direct contact. And fetishists rarely choose the same location twice.
Lighting up a cigarette, I sat down on a chair on the balcony and put my bare feet up on the railing. I had thought that I lived in one of the best neighborhoods in Moscow. Right next to the Sokol subway station and the large triangle of Bratsky Park, with its stately old lime trees. The park ends right at a lane of chestnuts, straight as an arrow, bordering an elegant square. That lane runs up to the famous Birch Grove Park, as big as a small forest. To live in a place surrounded by trees and green parks—what more could you wish for? Well, for one thing, that there weren’t sexual predators roaming around in them.
But what could I do? I had (along with Inspector Bullet) very odd facts at my disposal. There was not one, but three maniacs, all strangely attractive to underage girls. The girls followed them willingly; my young patient even seduced him herself. Only one of them put up any resistance; but even she followed him voluntarily at first—a man she’d never seen before wearing an overcoat. She went with him to a remote, deserted corner of the park. And it was only when they got there that something happened she didn’t like.
So, three maniacs. The second was short, since the coat dragged on the ground. The first one was taller; the coat only came down to his knees. And the third maniac was already history—also featuring an overcoat, however.
If there’s only one overcoat, then two different people would have had to wear it. As for the two builders from Moldavia, one of them could have just borrowed it from the other, and … and interesting things began happening to them.
But what about the 1973 maniac, who also wore an “old-fashioned overcoat,” for god’s sake? Old-fashioned even in 1973? When was it in style, then? The ’50s? ’40s?
The cigarette smoke drifted over the tops of the poplar trees, behind which stood gray brick buildings that looked like gingerbread houses. The clicking of a woman’s high heels, fast and nervous, resounded on the concrete somewhere below.