Moscow Noir

she’s been in Moscow a long time, from back before the war. She’s a good woman and she reassures me, says giving birth isn’t so terrible. What’s terrible, she says, is living, and even more terrible—dying. Then I said, Well, I know, my whole village perished. And she stroked my head and said, Poor thing!—and for a second it felt like my mama was with me again. Though it’s a sin to say so, of course, because I’ll never have another mama. I’m a mama myself now. Only two months to go.

In line at the doctor’s the women were talking about something terrible. They said you could get rid of a child for money. If you didn’t want to give birth. In Berezovka they said that girls drank all kinds of potions to make it happen. I was little but I understood what they were saying. Well, a potion is understandable. But here apparently you could find a secret doctor and for fifteen hundred rubles he would take care of … well … it … everything.

Fifteen hundred! That’s so much money! It’s terrible to think who might have that! Here I am working out how to survive on 550 every month. For two—it’s hard. And now a child as well, and he has to be fed.

I wish he could be born as soon as possible, my little bunny. If it’s a boy, I hope he looks like Kolya. And if a girl, like my mama. I want her to have the same kind of eyebrows, and ears too.

I hope she’s like my mama. I don’t have anything left of her, not even a photograph. Everything burned up.

Mama would have been happy for me now. She must have been just as happy when she was dying. She knew I’d been saved.

Kolya laughs at me, but I know: there is a God somewhere. And my mama is with Him right now, on a cloud, watching me and seeing that I’m going to have my own little bunny, my own little boy, my own little girl—instead of her, instead of Papa, instead of Aunt Katya and Uncle Slava, instead of lame Mitrich and old lady Anfisa. Instead of our whole village.

Hurry up and get born, little bunny. I mean, get born when it’s time, but don’t make me wait too long. I’m a little afraid of giving birth. In Moscow you have to go to the hospital. There are strangers there and who knows what they might do. And people say there are doctor-wreckers around now too. And crooks probably.

Here she sits, day after day, little Nina from ’48, getting heavier and heavier—and so is my heart. Because all the time, everywhere, from midnight until morn—it’s the same old story, and I know what happens next.

Two weeks before the birth Nina puts jacket potatoes on the burner and suddenly remembers she’s out of salt.

She goes over to Aunt Vera’s, her neighbor.

She knocks and no one answers, so Nina pushes on the door and shouts, Aunt Vera! She walks in and she’s struck by a cast-iron pot. They were aiming for her head but she managed to jump to the side, and then she hears a whisper: Finish the bitch off! She shields her unborn baby with her arms and starts yelling, but not loudly enough. When the second attacker strikes her in the belly, she screams loudly enough for the whole building to hear, the whole courtyard, even the street—and the sound barrels over the neighboring roofs, over the quays of the Moscow River, over the attractions at the central park, over the pavement of Red Square, over the Mausoleum’s pyramid, over the Kremlin’s stars, over the empty pit where the demolished temple once stood, over the wooden buildings built after the war, over the thieves’ dens and lairs, over the police stations, over the prisons and penal colonies, over the subway entrances, over the movie theaters and cultural institutions—over all of postwar Moscow, over the unlucky victor city, over the kids without fathers, the women without husbands, the men without arms, legs, conscience, fear, family, memory, or love.

While Nina is still falling on the bloody ground, screaming and screaming …

One more blow and she would have been silenced forever. The attackers killed Aunt Vera and they could have killed Nina too. Smashed her head in, slit her throat, beat her with whatever came to hand—but they fled.

They would be caught two days later. Maybe they’d shoot someone during the arrest.

But Kolya was running down the street, holding the tiny body close, and the umbilical cord dangled like one more piece of red piping, and his whole handsome uniform was covered in blood. Kolya was running, cursing, weeping, and too late.

It was a boy.

Two years later they left Moscow. The state farm built where Berezovka had burned down gave them a house; a good muzhik always comes in handy in the countryside. And so they lived, until their death. Kolya trained to be a tractor driver; Nina worked as a milkmaid, poultry maid, and clerk at the general store—whatever opportunity arose. For a while she was even a kindergarten teacher. But not for long.

They didn’t have children of their own. Kolya died in 1985, Nina a year later.

Sometimes I see her very old. Her hands are folded in her lap, she’s sitting on a stool by the window, and the older teenagers, the girls and boys, are giggling on the bench. Music reaches her from an open car.

Nina has no one to wait for and nothing to fear. Her life is over.

Only in her head, like a worn-out record. All the time, everywhere, from midnight until morn, from one night to the next, and again till morn is like an obsession, an incantation, a promise that it will all happen again.

* * *

I doze off holding Jan’s hand, but it doesn’t matter. At night I dream of my lovers. The men I couldn’t have. The boy from our school, a year younger than me, his curly fair hair escaping his school cap: a car ran him down right in front of his house, in front of his parents and nanny. The Menshevik agitator, his glasses shattered, his cracking voice turning into a short screech when a bullet forced the petals of a crimson rose open on his jacket chest. The Red soldier in the dusty helmet silently bowing over the corpse of his comrade who was captured by the White Cossacks; a star was carved on his salt-strewn back—a five-pointed star gone from red to brown. A fifteen- year-old kid shouting through tears, Swine, swine!, his ginger hair soaked with sweat and stuck to his forehead, so you wished you could run your hand over it. A stout man, temples lightly touched with gray, looking back for the last time before boarding that barge—a spark in his dark pupil, like a gleam of light, but from the other shore.

I doze off holding Jan’s hand. It’s a strong hand covered with fine faded hair, his closely trimmed nails edged in black.

I kiss his fingers and imagine that this narrow dark stripe is caked blood, the congealed blood of the people he’s ordered to be executed. I kiss his hand and think that this is the hand of someone who separates life from death, who splits human existence in two, the hand of someone used to deciding for others, whether they are to live or die.

My lips flick across his palm, travel up toward the bend in his elbow, and slip over the tendons of his forearms. When he makes a fist they tense, like a belt drive, and I feel the flow of blood, the faint pulsing, and my lips continue their journey, and I kiss his armpits, the hair smelling of grim soldier sweat, the only patch of real hair on his body, if you don’t count the thick growth at the base of his mighty shaft, which rises down there somewhere. I forbid myself to think about that, run my tongue over his smooth chest, just grazing his nipples—and then Jan places his heavy hand on my back, and his nails start quietly clawing at my skin, always in the same spot, between my shoulder blades—and even after who knows how many reincarnations I still swoon when Nikita strokes my back like that—I swoon, and then I shudder, and my tongue turns downward, following the narrow path between his heaving ribs, crossing the puffy scar from the saber blow—He did get me, after all, the snake, after I shot him with my revolver—and run my finger over the scar, imagining some White officer drawing his sword against his killer with the cold fury of desperation, and at the same time I drop lower with my lips, to the rosette of his navel, and Jan puts his hand on the back of my head, urging, directing, hastening the now inevitable movement. My tongue goes into a spiral, feeling his great axis, around which my night revolves, rise higher and higher as it swells with blood. Finally, squeezing his two globes, I open my mouth and swallow the crimson head, sucking in air through fluttering nostrils, as if it were a line of cocaine, moving up and down, feeling the weight of his hand on the back of my head, the resilience of his cock between my lips, the trembling of his testicles in my hand, and the quivering of his powerful male body.

I’ve known the taste of quite a few men’s cocks. My tongue and palate have learned to distinguish adolescent languor, animal fear, ominous hatred, trembling adoration, impatience, burning, itching, haste, the urgency of unspilled semen, the pressure of lust, and the spasm of passion.