Moscow Noir

laundry bag down. He looked around. The car was empty, except for a man in a sheepskin coat and an old woman with her grandchild sitting up front. The car started off; the mansions, like rickety old wardrobes, drifting by. Somewhere church bells were sounding—the Saturday chimes had begun. The actor closed his eyes and imagined they were riding through old, prerevolutionary Moscow, as in some Ivan Shmelev tale or a play by Ostrovsky. A hundred years ago the bells probably rang exactly the same way, he thought. When he opened his eyes, he saw that the man in the sheepskin coat was standing near the front, about to get off.

His profile seemed familiar and the actor was touched with the thought that earlier, two centuries ago, everyone here would have known each other.

Moving down the steps, the man turned around and their eyes met. The actor gasped. He saw that this man resembled him; they were like two peas in a pod.

And that, in essence, before him stood he himself—only in different clothes.

Amazed, the actor dropped his bag and a towel fell out onto the dirty floor. When he managed to stuff it back, the doors had already slammed shut. His double had disappeared. The actor rushed to the window but the pane was covered over with glossy paper. Nothing was visible through the face of an advertisement diva.

He pulled the window open and leaned out. An enormous billboard, Gold, and a yellow church fence caught his eye. That one, the other one, was standing on a corner looking right back at the actor. And again, with frightening clarity, he saw himself. His own face—familiar to the point of disgust from all the films and posters.

Well, so what? Anything can happen in Moscow. But still, thoughts of a double made him anxious. At first he drove them away, annoyed at his stupidity. He tried to make fun of himself. He laughed. He recalled many films with just such a plot. But nothing helped. The image of his double was haunting and tenacious.

What if it’s my twin brother? After all, it was postwar times. Total confusion. We were returning to Moscow from the evacuation … Mother remembered she was holding a little baby, and that he didn’t make it, that he had died … Maybe he simply got lost?

My daughter too gave birth to twins.

No, this just can’t be true.

He’d sit down on the bed and drink a glass of water from a decanter. He’d nervously stare at the hair on his bare legs. Then he’d take out the photo of his grandchildren and scrutinize it once more. With each night it seemed they resembled him less and less—because they looked more and more like the man in the sheepskin coat. From the empty streetcar.

That means people recognize him on the streets. Of course they do! They want to know how things are. They ask for an autograph. Maybe he’s an honest fellow and tells them they are mistaken. But what if he isn’t?

He imagined clearly how that one, the other one, arrives instead of him at the theater, pays visits to the flutist. And he’d throw himself on the bed, snarling into the pillow from rage. But soon another feeling began to penetrate his impotent fury—of emptiness, total emasculation, of indifference. He had only ever experienced something similar after difficult performances. When he played a role he didn’t fully understand. One he hadn’t quite entered. He felt like a coat shoved onto a hanger; it just hangs there, dangling in the darkness, completely forgotten by everyone. Dead. He’d pinch himself and pull at his hair. He’d grab the phone. But who could he call?

Not the police.

His life gradually began to take a new turn. He shifted the telescope from the sky to the streetcar stop. For hours he’d track the people clustered there in hopes of seeing the one in the sheepskin coat. For no particular reason he kept going downstairs to the store. He hung around the counter a lot so they’d recognize and greet him. If they didn’t, he’d begin to panic. He’d loiter around the neighborhood, peering into faces, and his feet would inevitably take him back to that corner with the yellow church fence and the Gold billboard where his twin, the stranger, had disappeared.

But the twin was nowhere to be found.

What’s more, they stopped phoning him from the theater to remind him of performances and rehearsals. As if they had forgotten or fired him. Once he made the call himself, but an unfamiliar voice didn’t recognize him. He got frightened and hung up. So he stopped calling. He was afraid.

A week later, he simply got in his car one evening and drove downtown.

Under the notice Today on the poster in front of the theater, his performance was announced.

So, the impostor has already taken my place.

Relieved, the actor sat down in a cafe and began to drink, although he had given up alcohol after a heart attack ten years earlier. Cognac, beer, vodka—he ordered them indiscriminately. He drank greedily, without a snack, gazing between glasses at the ad behind the dusty window. Your blood will save a life, a girl urged from the poster, smiling her celluloid smile.

He couldn’t remember how he got home. The smoke-filled cellar at Novokuznetskaya station and the patchy shadows, in whose company he’d swigged down vodka and belted out songs, flashed in his memory.

He collapsed in his clothes but couldn’t fall asleep because he was sick at heart. Pulling his knees to his chin, he lay there and listened to the very same sentence that kept echoing in his head. Your blood will save a life, someone’s quiet, velvety voice kept repeating.

Your blood will save a life.

He had finally begun to doze off when a thick, enveloping nausea overtook his body. It rose up like sludge and flooded his consciousness. His heart became a big balloon about to burst into pieces. So that’s how one dies, he thought, starting to lose consciousness, vanishing slowly into an airless well and resurfacing later in the darkness of a sleepless night. At dawn, coming to on sweat-soaked sheets, he moved to an armchair. Hunched over from the pain in his heart, he sat there until daylight.

Around 11 he was jolted by the ringing telephone. It was a call from the theater; the troupe, it turned out, had just returned the day before from a short tour. The director’s assistant was reminding him there was a performance that evening. “In your honor,” she flirted.

“But how can …?” he mumbled into the receiver.

“The new cloakroom attendant got it mixed up,” the woman nattered on. “Instead of Tomorrow, he put up the sign that said Today. We’ll rehearse the dance an hour before curtain, as usual.” And she hung up.

Standing under the shower, he came to his senses. He was amazed how quickly, with one single phone call, the nightmare vanished. It simply came unglued like a plastic advertising sticker and flew away in the wind. Sobered up, cheerful, he set about tidying the whole apartment. He washed the floor and windows. He dropped off his underwear, which had been lying in the corner since that day, at the laundromat. He for the first time ever phoned his daughter.

“Imagine, such nonsense!” he said, chuckling into the receiver. “I knew they were supposed to go on tour, but I simply forgot.”

“Everyone’s so nervous!” The daughter gave a Chekhovian sigh, and it was obvious she was thinking of someone else as well.

“The Irish call one’s double his fetch,” she said in parting. “I’ll send you some pills. That should help.”

That evening they gave the performance. And they say he played Caesar as never before, fiercely, implacably, desperately. In such a way that before the ovation, when the emperor exits into eternity, a pause hung in the air for a few seconds—as in olden times, when the spectator truly believed what was happening on stage.

Returning home, the actor didn’t feel his usual fatigue. On the contrary, blood was racing through his veins, his energy was overflowing. He even got out of the cab and walked home on foot, swinging his arms widely. A new life, he thought, will definitely begin from this night forward. It will be wonderful and serene. Unpredictable and clear.

Not like the one which he had lived.

He entered his apartment. Without taking off his coat, he began to wander around the room. How about going back again on the street? he thought. How about a breath of fresh air? To hell with it, how about meeting some woman, maybe even from the railroad station? Maybe go to a cafe, or a movie.

He stood looking out the window, watching how persistently and interminably the cars moved around the