Moscow Noir

was indeed the prison.

Cautiously he unsticks the tape and opens the door. Inside it’s half-dark, and he senses the staircase on the right. He gropes for the light switch on the wall and heads downstairs. Exactly: three cells fabricated out of thick sticks. In front of him a table, two chairs, and a mechanism that looks like a welding apparatus. Were the cops too lazy to pull it out? On the floor, reddish-brown spots and broken glass. Torture—and why not? Hah! Vagrants, human matter. Hah!

Ryabets doesn’t linger. It’s all just like the paper said. He goes upstairs, turns off the light, walks out, and puts the tape back. Not a trace of the other dacha, as if it were never there. He wants to go home.

But before he moves out to the street he decides to take a look, refresh his memory, see where he kept watch once upon a time. Over there, over there … Wait, wait …

In the lilac bushes past the pines, in the exact same place, he notices a figure on the ground. The instinct to flee subsides instantly. No cop would sit squatting in the bushes! On top of everything else, it’s a female. She waves. He’s walking, glancing from side to side to make sure no one else is there. But there is. The female has a dog at her feet. It raises its head to Ryabets.

“Got anything to drink?” she asks. “Who are you?”

Definitely a woman. And drunk. Two leathery folds are slipping down her belly from her unbuttoned pink top. Cellulite legs in white ankle socks spread wide. Bezdonka, hah!

While Ryabets is considering her, the woman takes out of her bag (just like his with his Marlboros) a bottle (just like him with his 777), tosses her head back, and glugs down the last of the liquid. She kicks an empty bottle aside.

“Commander, fill my glass! See? Not a drop! I won’t fucking say anything to your wife.”

A flat face, dark, slit eyes, no neck, formless all over. Like a steak! Ryabets thinks culinarily. But something very familiar I can’t put my finger on. What?

“Ryaba? Ryaba! Ryabets! Is that you? Yes, it is!” The woman scrambles onto all fours, straightens up, and starts hobbling toward him, as if she were wearing prostheses. The dog, too, yawns and wags its tail.

Buratina! Fucking amazing. Burataeva! he shouts in his mind.

This clumsy creature had been Ryabets’s erotic dream. Nadya Burataeva—Buratina, as they’d called her in school. The nickname was a jibe at her flat, half-Kalmyk, but definitely not Buryat, nose.

“And you’re just the same, Ryaba, just the same. Maybe a little shrunken, hee hee hee! Still jerking off?” Burataeva’s a meter away and Ryabets can smell her sour stench. “What are you standing there for? Pour! To our meeting! You wouldn’t begrudge Nadya Burataeva a drink, would you? How many years has it been? Eh? Gotta be thirty.”

Ryabets reaches into his bag, removes the bottle and cup, pulls the cork out with his teeth, pours, and offers it to Buratina. He drinks from the bottle.

“So tell me, how have you been? What’s up?”

* * *

Ryabets is sitting under a pine facing Buratina. Echoes of her fate surface right away. She was burning up in the fire so she jumped, broke her foot and back, spent a long time in recovery, and after all that discovered she was pregnant. It was born dead, actually. She went quickly downhill. Her parents supported her but she drank, then her lover (a recidivist) did and she drank, they put him in jail and she drank, her parents died and she drank, another pregnancy and she drank, a miscarriage and she drank, she sold everything and drank, her apartment too and drank, disappeared and drank.

“This is Polkan,” she introduces.

Ryabets nods but the dog isn’t taking to him.

“Don’t wet your pants, Ryaba, he won’t touch you. He’s been with me since he was born. Andryukha brought him when he was just a puppy, thi-i-is little. You can’t imagine how glad I am to see you, Ryaba!” Buratina hiccups. And in a gleeful non sequitur: “They shut down the beer stand a long time ago, back under Gorbachev. And all the stores too. We go over the bridge, to Priboy. I’ve been living here ten years, Ryaba, across Bezdonka. I’m moving to Kazan station now. They say it’s a rich place—you can take melons off the trains from the Chuchmeks. You won’t die of hunger near a train station. I’m not staying here, no way.”

“Why?” Ryabets recalls the morning paper.

“Hell if I know!” Buratina shrugs. “Everyone’s run off. Even Andryukha. He promised me. ‘You and me, Nadya, we’ll go to Kazan station, I won’t abandon you.’ So where’s Andryukha now? Kaput. Hee hee hee.”

“Why are you limping?”

“I’m limping? What do you mean I’m limping? What do you mean? I know why I’m limping, I know. But I won’t tell you. Never!” Then she mutters under her breath, “Maybe I’m Madame de La Valliere! Listen, Ryaba, I’m limping because I’m Madame de La Valliere!”

If Ryabets had known how to put his emotions into words, it would have come out something like this: Did I really lust after this woman once? Her? Me? Incredible! Ryabets crinkles his nose.

“… How I’ve lived this long I don’t remember, Ryaba. I took a leap from the second floor! Broke both my little legs. I could’ve suffocated. All the others did: my Alik, and Lidukha, and those other two, I don’t remember who they were. And that fat one who carried around the pictures of women.”

“Boltyansky?”

“That’s it, Ryaba, exactly! He suffocated.” And suddenly she winks. “Should I tell you?”

“What?”

“This! Remember how you used to moon over me, Ryaba? Remember? Hee hee hee! You did, I know you did! But I wouldn’t give it up for you! I would for anyone else, but not you.” She falls silent and starts rocking from side to side.

“Is it true there was a prison here?”

“Definitely. Yes!” And now he can’t tell whether it’s the drink talking or she’s serious. “I won’t let you have any now either, so don’t get any ideas! Don’t you look at how old I am … You’re no stud yourself. All skin and bones. They used to call you Skull, remember?” She fell silent for several moments, then suddenly: “Andryukha died here. Kirei died and Sabel died. We were four in this pipe—I mean the four of us lived together … I’m all alone now … Andryukha left a week ago, said he’d grab me some booze … He didn’t … It’s scary here, Ryaba. Where can I take Polkan? Huh? They won’t let him into the train station. Will you take him?”

“That’s all I need.”

“Yeah, right. You like a little port now and then too, I see! Like when we were kids. Don’t you make enough for a little brandy, Ryaba? What’s your job these days?”

“Cook.”

Buratina whistles. “In a restaurant?”

“A cafeteria. I feed the black-assed negroes at the university. Fortunately, it’s only ten minutes from home.”

“What do you cook for them?”

“Oh, everything: goulash, groats, cabbage soup.”

“Did you ever try foie gras?”

“That’s only a name: it’s goose liver. What’s there to try? Put it in rassolnik, potroshki—just the ticket. And the cucumbers have to be thickly sliced, preferably marinated.” Ryabets pauses to pour for Buratina. “Here’s to our meeting!” He takes a swig.

“Ryaba, you know why I wouldn’t let you have any? You look all cold, but on the inside—phooey! One of those. Us girls didn’t like you; you had this look, like you wanted to maul us. Maul us with your eyes and go down there with your nose. Hee hee hee! Our dear departed Bolt was like that too, but I felt sorry for him. Who was going to give that fatso any? He carried those dirty pictures around, but you mooned, you just egged me on. Oh, poor Bolt! And poor Mesropych, even if he was a stinker.”

“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.