Moscow Noir

“Enough, I’ve had enough of this!” Suskind shouted, his features twisted. He was screeching and squealing like a pig and smashing plates. “You bloodsucking swine! It’s always, ‘Suskind, who is this and who is that, and who the heck is Smerdyakov from Dostoevsky? Oh, that’s right, Suskind!’ And then they turn on the TV. ‘Hey, Suskind, let’s root for Lokomotiv!’ I hate goddamn soccer! Picking on me because I came from Penza, almost forty years old, to become a writer. Doesn’t take much to believe in talent that’s already been recognized. You try believing in my talent! And remember my name: Sueskin, not Suskind! Roman! Sergeevich! Sueskin!”

“Oooh! What an honor,” Samokhin enthused sarcastically, and moved to pat Suskind’s softly bearded cheek.

Suskind grabbed a knife lying on the table and shook it, wailing, “Stay back!” It was pathetic.

Fights are not a rare occurrence in our dorm. In the spring, tormented by lack of love, insignificance, and hopelessness, the bastards throw themselves out of windows. This whole place is permeated with reminders of the ever-present temptation of suicide—grates on the windows of the upper floors, metal nets stretched across the stairwell. The problem is that there are too many of us here. There are five hundred of us from every corner of this enormous country, five hundred losers, each one thinking he’s a genius. Five hundred lonely voids, living hand to mouth on miserly government scholarships sent here by our parents back home. Only a few crazy geniuses and two dozen literary hacks would make it in the world. The rest are doomed to a life of total obscurity and wretchedness.

“You don’t know the half of it, you guys,” said Samokhin, when we had come out into the hall. “At night he tries to communicate with martians, honest to god. He says they want to take him away with them. Beam me up, Scotty! He could sink a knife into me at any minute, if his aliens told him to. As Samoilov wrote, if I remember correctly, ‘This city is full of crazies, at least one in three is psycho. So speak to me softly. I might be one of them …’”

“‘Don’t be so sure that you’re so smart,’” I finished. “‘And I wouldn’t jump to conclusions about which one of us’ll come by a sharp razor first.’”

“So, Dima,” Samokhin said, addressing Tatchuk on a different topic, “do you think you’ll be the one who gets those five thousand greenbacks?”

“Who else but yours truly?”

How could he be so certain? It was as though his rich childhood imagination was furnished with its own personal universe that revolved around him alone (with a map of the stars on the ceiling and an army of teddy bears dedicated to their master). And then this perfectly polished cosmos expanded to the size of a three-room apartment, streets, schools, entire countries—and there was not one place his parent’s love, backed up by their financial means, could not reach him. The outside world seemed to fulfill even his most extravagant desires. And so my roommate, who was used to all this, seemed to be able to force reality to conform to his expectations of it. This was, I suppose, his greatest gift of all: he made the whole world into a big-budget stage production in which he, Tatchuk, was the princely heir and future ruler. All other people were his servants—faceless minor characters whose only purpose was to serve their master and then disappear from his sight forever. In this world, respiration was the only thing that couldn’t be counted on: my roommate suffered from chronic asthma, and was sometimes forced to use a fabulously expensive inhaler.

Back in our room, bare-chested, having uncorked a bottle, he surrendered happily to the nightly ritual of self- admiration. I bet nothing gave him as much pleasure as parading around the room with no shirt on. He could spend hours in front of the mirror, studying his own loving reflection in different perspectives and poses, enjoying a glimpse of his muscles, beautiful knolls beneath his satin skin. His narcissism was natural and justified, but it still got on my nerves.

“Just look at this six-pack,” he said to me, stroking his washboard belly deferentially. “Here, touch it. No, come on, touch it! Touch it!” he insisted, indignant that I should take such a criminal disinterest in his amazing abs.

I left the room as if to go out for a smoke, trying to avoid this cruel form of sexual harassment. And I came face to face with Suskind, homeless like myself.

Oh, how lucky I was to have him: my guardian angel, the great and invulnerable Tatchuk! Ever since that train on the way to Moscow, when my bag was stolen with all my money and my passport. I was devastated. I wouldn’t be able to register or sign up for classes. And then he came back (he’d left the compartment to throw out some garbage) and handed me my wallet. He had found it miraculously, in a trash can, with no money left in it, but my passport still inside. “What would you do without me?” he said. “I return you your name, your identity, and your future; don’t take it for granted.”

And so it went. Then there was the editing job at Architecture and City Planning magazine that paid three hundred dollars a month—money a provincial freshman could only dream of. The police trainees who found a crumb of hashish in the inner pocket of my canvas backpack, but who for some reason decided to let me go at the last minute for the ridiculous price of fifteen hundred rubles. The photo of us together on the first page of a glossy magazine, under the headline Our Future Is Everything. Not to mention the girls who flew toward Tatchuk like moths to a flame, and—praise the lord!—sometimes even bestowed their attentions on me. All my successes, all the publications, all the ills I managed to avoid were due to his presence at my side. It was with the greatest horror that I imagined what would happen if this deity were to turn away from me.

I went back to the room.

“Haven’t you had enough of pounding those keys?” he asked, nodding at my ancient computer. “I need a new story too, you know. I already have a great name for it: ‘The Point of No Return.’ What do you think?”

“What is it about?”

“I still don’t have it all planned out yet. Basically, it’s going to be about two friends living in Venice. One is an aristocrat, although no longer wealthy. He works as a model for the leading fashion designers and writes brilliant poetry. The other is Gorlum. He is but a pale shadow, wracked with envy for the unending successes of his friend.”

So that’s what’s going on, I thought. Our companionship, which had seemed not so long ago to be at least a kind of symbiosis, was now a glaring case of vampirism. Poor fool that I was, I had thought he had no ulterior motives for sharing his unending supply of good luck with me, that he did so with the same sunny generosity of all demigods. O the wretchedness of my soul and its innate servitude! I felt like the lowly lackey allowed to sit at his master’s table, only to be thrust back in his place when the meal was over.

“So one day Gorlum decides to kill his friend. He thinks that by killing the first character, let’s call him Martin, he’ll solve all of his own problems, and at last fortune will come his way. But when the cunning plan is enacted and the murder has taken place, Gorlum realizes that his life has lost its meaning after Martin’s death. Gorlum goes crazy. He starts seeing features of the master he so cruelly betrayed in different people walking by on the street. He starts running up to them, calling them by his friend’s name. He begins to believe that Martin is still alive, and punishing him through his absence. It ends with madness … What do you think of the story line?”

So you think that my only purpose on this earth is to be your monkey, a mere dwarf in your court, Martin dearest?

“I feel I’ve heard this somewhere before,” I said automatically.

“You’re always doing that!” he exploded. “And when it concerns your own writing, you go hoarse defending the originality of your ideas. Have you ever thought that maybe the reason your work doesn’t get printed is because you aren’t capable of generating any original ideas of your own?”

“What about your work, why hasn’t it been printed?”

“You’re a lazy, ungrateful loser.”

Like a greyhound on a leash, I began to quiver in anticipation of a fight. Now, finally, I knew what I wanted. I wanted to see fear in his eyes. But it wasn’t so much fear as doubt that I was hoping for. I wanted to see him doubt his absolute right to demand and receive whatever came into his head.

“Listen,” I said, lighting a cigarette and trembling with the suspicion that had so suddenly awakened in me, “your plot is all right, but it seems sort of unrealistic to me. I suggest you make a few changes.”

“Don’t smoke around me, you slob, have you forgotten? Put it out this instant!”

“In my opinion,” I continued, inhaling, “talent seems to be distributed unfairly between your two characters. As a matter of fact, the story just doesn’t seem believable or lifelike. One character is blessed so generously—as