Moscow Noir

responsibility toward the dearly departed. Friends give speeches in his honor. A bright, whitewashed image of the deceased is created, purified by suffering, which has little to do with the living person you yourself knew. This was exactly the way we, students of the acclaimed professor Urusov who gathered in the courtyard of the dormitory, recalled one who was truly talented, who suffered deeply in crisis—a vulnerable soul whom we ignored, abandoned, and paid no attention to, focused as we were on ourselves. Not that a long time was spent mourning. (It was, after all, the heat of May: sticky leaves rustled in the trees, and the hot air was as thick as the rubber ball we took with us to play soccer at Savelovsky station.) It had already been suggested, as though by chance, that there was no reason to torture ourselves because of someone else’s frivolity and that the fellow himself was to blame. “It was so obviously his own fear of living,” another colleague said.

I stood there trying to find the point from which we could go back to the past, but anger, or envy, or soul- killing apathy had numbed the senses, and, picking us up like chips of wood in a flood, had carried us toward the finish line. I couldn’t find this point, or even picture it. And, more out of a sense of duty, not yet believing in the true, unparalleled reality of a higher judgment, I sidled off furtively, away from the others, mumbling silently under my breath, “God forgive me.”

PART IV

WAR AND PEACE

THE COAT THAT SMELLED LIKE EARTH

BY DMITRI KOSYREV (MASTER CHEN)

Birch Grove Park

Translated by Mary C. Gannon

That dude, by the way, he never took his coat off,” the girl told me. “For the first time in my life I did it with a guy in a coat. You know, an old coat, pretty gross.”

A coat in the middle of a hot, stifling Moscow summer? I began to understand my client, the mother of this underage creature. When a girl gives way to her fantasies to such a degree, her friends can deal with it. But not her mother. To the mother, a child will always be a child, even if that child has developed a habit of talking about sex with a definite world-weariness. That’s when I get a phone call that goes, Doctor, can you tell me if a normal person would think something like that?

But, whereas you can lie to your mother and enjoy scaring her, you can’t deceive a shrink. A professional will easily be able to detect whether an overripe teenager is merely fantasizing, or fantasizing while fervently believing in the fantasies, or simply …

Simply telling the truth.

“Did you tell your mother about that? About the coat?” I asked in a gloomy tone. “Do you realize that a normal person would never believe that? Look out the window—the concrete is so hot it’s melting—and you’re talking about a guy having sex in a coat. It wasn’t a fur coat, by any chance, was it? Think before you tell your mother things like that. Or do you want her to pack you off to a mental institution after this?”

“Oh, so that’s what this is all about,” she said, and examined me with a long look. “Is that your diagnosis? All right, then. Let’s go to the loony bin. Just let me grab an extra pair of pants, and off I go.”

She waved her palm over her head in a circular motion imitating the flashing light of an ambulance.

Most of my income (not reported to the IRS) comes from single mothers who refuse to believe that their children have grown up. Not just grown up, but grown up to become coarse and ugly, so that if they’re boys they contemplate throwing their mothers facedown on the kitchen table. And if they’re girls, their mothers suddenly become spiteful, idiotic obstacles to achieving very concrete physical desires.

It’s one thing when these are classic teenage fantasies, even if they border on pathology. (And they always border on pathology.) What I had just heard, however, was something completely different. Her eye movements, the tone of her voice, and the internal logic of the story attested to the complete absence of any fantasy. Yes, she said she’d do it with that guy for five hundred rubles in Birch Grove Park, which stretches from the Polezhaevskaya subway station to Peschanaya Square. Yes, she went with him to the end of the grove and waved a condom she’d pulled out of her pocket in front of his face. And then she was smelling the earthy, moldy smell of the gray overcoat, or even more likely a raincoat, that the man never took off in spite of the heat.

“He could’ve killed you, you know,” I reproached her.

“He was all right,” she said very convincingly. “Just wanted to get laid. Then again, I picked him. For his eyes. He had such—”

“Remind me how old you are?”

“What? So what if I’m fifteen? Does that mean I’m too young to want it, huh?” She opened her eyes, thick with makeup, very wide. “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know. My mom forgot to tell me.”

“Okay, let me give it to you straight,” I said woodenly. “If you’re not careful what you tell your mother, she’ll end up in the funny farm, not you.”

“Good riddance,” replied the young creature in a sweet voice, and stared with disgust at my untrimmed beard and my baggy turtleneck sweater.

“Hold on a second. That means that I end up without a client, which isn’t good for my business. Your mother needs professional help, not you; she’s the one who called me, crying frantically and saying, ‘Can you take a look at my girl? She tells me horrible stories. Is she crazy?’ We need to calm your mother down or she’ll be off her rocker in no time. Not you—her. Get the picture? So here’s the deal: you made the whole thing up. I’ll think of something to say to your mother. I’ll say that you’re fine for now, though you need to be under observation. And you keep your mouth shut about sex in coats. And at the same time you’ll tell me about this guy—dude, that is—who goes around dressed like that in the summer. To tell you the truth, I’m more interested in him than you. Because who needs maniacs wandering around the streets of Peschanaya?”

“Mister, you’re a maniac yourself,” said my client’s daughter, clearly enjoying herself. “He was a big, tall, funny guy, nice, with kinda faded hair. Still pretty young. Tan, like a construction worker or something. Maybe he’d just gotten out of the hospital and that’s why he was wearing a coat. A weird coat.”

“Oh, so now it’s a weird coat, eh? Well, tell me more about the coat.”

“The material … I’ve never felt anything like it before. It wasn’t synthetic. Gabardine, or twill, or something else great-grandmotherish. A long coat down to his ankles. Big buttons. You know, like from a museum. Yellowish edges. And it smelled like it’d been buried underground for a hundred years. But the dude wasn’t a bum. He was clean. I wouldn’t do it with a bum, no way! You kidding? The dude himself smelled really nice, actually.”

“Girl, just listen to yourself. You walk down an alley, see a man sitting on a bench wearing an overcoat … Okay, you think he’s been in the hospital, but still … And so what do you do next, tell me again?”

I paid great attention to the pupils of her eyes, her body language, the movements of her head and shoulders.

“Nothing. I saw the coat, saw the dude. I wanted to get some action, so I batted my eyes at him and blushed like a schoolgirl.”

“You are a schoolgirl.”

“Well, I’m overdeveloped. So the rest is history.”

I sighed and made a mental diagnosis. Teenage hypersexuality and an underdeveloped personality, with no pathology in my area—psychiatric, that is. I also realized that the girl’s desire to torture her mother was spent for the day.

“Okay, to sum it up: you made the whole thing up and you’re not talking about it anymore. Mom gets some peace of mind, and you, young lady—if you start seeing weird things, or if life starts to suck real bad all of a sudden, give me a call. I’ll fix it all up for you. I mean it. We’ll deal with the money thing later, a little bit at a time. And