Moscow Noir

“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