Moscow Noir

A noir literary tradition does not yet really exist in Russia in general or Moscow in particular. Why? Possibly due to the censorship of czarist Russia, to say nothing of the Soviet era. In 1887, Vladimir Gilyarovsky, a writer, journalist, and great stylist of Moscow life, prepared an anthology of short sketches about Moscow’s gloomiest locales and their inhabitants, The Stories of the Slums. However, the book was not to see the light of day. The censorship committee banned the book and its pages were burned. As an aide to the main administration chief wrote in response to Gilyarovsky’s request to allow the book to go to press, “Nothing will come of your troubles … This is sheer gloom without a single glimmer, the slightest justification, nothing but a condemnation of the existing order. Such truth cannot be written.” There was no further writing “without a glimmer or justification” for another hundred years or so, and for a long time even Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, a Russian State Prize laureate and living classic (one of whose artistic directions could well be classified as noir), had to write her plays and stories about the shady aspects of life without hope of publication.

Any discussion of Moscow’s noir sources demands mention of a novel by the brothers Arkadi and Georgi Vainer, Era of Mercy, about the postwar (1945) struggle between the police and the “breeding dregs.” Experienced operative Gleb Zheglov and frontline soldier Vladimir Sharapov, who is, unfortunately, a novice at investigations, face the sinister “Black Cat.” The book was adapted into a famous television miniseries, The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed, which many Muscovites know by heart.

The atmosphere closest to noir is found in works devoted to the Stalinist era, such as Vasily Aksyonov’s Moscow Saga and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s First Circle: the patrol wagons that spirit “enemies of the people” off into the night, never to return home, for they will be shot without trial or investigation; the torture chambers; the betrayals; the fear; the suicides; and the “House on the Embankment” as an icon of Stalinist noir. Inevitably, our anthology is haunted by this Stalinist ghost as well, in the stories of Sergei Kuznetsov and Dmitry Kosyrev (a.k.a. Master Chen).

True noir is not only contained within Moscow’s central districts, replete with the atmosphere of multiple destructions and even more ghosts (Pure Ponds and Zamoskvorechye, the settings for the stories by Vladimir Tuchkov and Gleb Shulpyakov), but also the residential neighborhoods where, despite the dream of broad streets, bright-colored buildings, and ample green space, poverty still reigns and the typical apartments with their cheerless electric light and thin walls never let their inhabitants forget for a minute that there is no exit. This is Perovo in Maxim Maximov’s story, and Andrei Khusnutdinov’s Babushinskaya, where Paul Khlebnikov, editor in chief of the Russian Forbes, met his death. In the forested areas at the city’s edge maniacs are at work, but in the largest of them, Elk Island National Park, there is a piece of land one kilometer square that, due to a strange combination of circumstances, is not protected by a single police unit. This is where thugs go to settle scores, this is where they bring their dead bodies, and this is where the dramatic events in Alexander Anuchkin’s story “Field of a Thousand Corpses” unfold. Naturally, noir is train stations too, where people congregate after they have lost hope, where it’s easy to be completely anonymous and get lost in the crowd; train stations play leading roles in the stories by Anna Starobinets and Alexei Evdokimov. Actually, almost any place in Moscow longs to be the setting for a story of crime and violence.

This anthology is an attempt to turn the tourist Moscow of gingerbread and woodcuts, of glitz and big money, inside out; an attempt to reveal its fetid womb and make sense of the desolation that still reigns.

Natalia Smirnova & Julia Goumen

St. Petersburg, Russia

March 2010

PART I

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

THE MERCY BUS

BY ANNA STAROBINETS

Kursk Station

Translated by Mary C. Gannon

I’m waiting for mercy. It should be here any minute now. There it is, turning the corner. Soon it will stop and open up its doors to me and others like me. Just a few more minutes and we’ll be warm.

Right now it’s cold, though. It’s real cold. Especially for me. At least they get to lie on the sewage grates, or sit nearby on the bare asphalt, their backs up against the gray panels of the train station. They get the choice spots. Hot steam rises up from under the ground, saturating their stinking rags and bodies, their hair and their skin. The steam is so hot that it even melts the icicles hanging down from the roof of the building. Droplets run down the icicles like pus. It’s warm there, beneath the overhang.

On the other hand, I don’t envy them. When they get up they’re going to feel ten times worse, with their clothes soaking wet and all—it’s minus thirty degrees. True, they’ll be getting right onto the bus, but who wants to be soaking wet in a bus?

A shapless old hag in sagging purple tights is asleep, breathing gently. The rest are awake. They watch with no expression as the bus approaches. The cripple shuffled off, the hem of his soft leather overcoat trailing behind him on the frozen ground, his shiny black dress shoes worth a thousand dollars each. Unbelievable, he hadn’t even wanted them! Foxy Lee had it all figured out. “At the station you can just trade with one of them,” she’d said, but she hadn’t considered that these retards might turn down such a good deal, clutching their rags with iron grips.

I had to force the trade on him. I can be pretty convincing sometimes, particularly when I’m right.

By the way, never pick a fight with a bum at Kursk station. It’s like trying to battle with a giant rotten apple, or a bag of garbage.

True, they were too small for him, the shoes. But that’s no big deal, he can break them in. Or sell them. The rest of the duds were too big for him. But that’s how they wear them around here.

None of his friends went after him. No one tried to stop me while I was slugging him either. The expressions on their swollen steamy faces were hard for me to make out, even under the streetlight, but I think they were looking kind of hostile.

So just in case, I keep to the edge of the group. I’m safer here, near the entrance gates and the cops. Because, first of all, they’re afraid of the cops. Second, they’re too lazy—no, lazy’s not the right word, they’re too comatose to cover the fifty-meter distance to where I’m standing.

Of course, the cops tried to shoo me away. There were two of them. I gave them each a hundred bucks (I didn’t have any smaller bills on me). They stared at me, and then at the bills, with their blank fish eyes, and finally they laid off. Understandable, I guess. It’s not every day you see a piss-covered bum around Kursk station with a wad of greenbacks in his pocket. A minute later one of them came back. He sniffed back his snot, his nose violet from the frost, and stared hungrily at the bridge of my nose.

“Got any ID?”

I gave him another hundred. Breathing hard, he examined it under the yellow light of the streetlamp, then stuffed it inside his jacket. He shifted his weight from foot to foot. His gaze slid like sewage water down my unshaven face, broken nose, lip soaked in blood, and my dirty rags covered in brownish-yellow stains, before slithering back up to my face, where it paused for a moment on my misshapen gray hat with earflaps. Something caught his attention there, either the cut of the hat or the locks of hair that were left uncovered, too shiny and clean for the likes of me. I pulled my hat down over my forehead to reassure him. He had already forgotten about it, and his eyes shifted over me mechanically, until he focused on the bridge of my nose again.

“Where’d you steal the money?”