GOLD AND HEROIN
BY VYACHESLAV KURITSYN
She was walking barefoot along Leningradsky Avenue. The occasional streetlight and moon hung in the puddles on the ground. She jumped from one puddle to the next, enjoying the warm splash. She held one red high heel in her hand by the strap. The other shoe she had lost while crossing the street around the Sovietsky Hotel.
His thoughts were steeped in gold, like the chest of a war hero buried in medals and crosses. Zemfira was singing about river ports. The highway was empty. The Sovietskaya Inn had recently metamorphosed into the Sovietsky Hotel. Prostitutes had become twice as expensive. Suddenly he saw a kitten on the road in front of the car. He stepped on the brakes, then got out. It wasn’t a kitten. He picked up a red high heel by its strap. The shoe was lying just next to the entrance of the Romany Gypsy theater.
For some reason he brought the red shoe into the car. A shoe without a girl. The clocked showed 2:55 a.m.
Once again he thought of shipments of Yakutst gold to jewelry factories in Smolensk. Stalls were scattered along the street like cheap bijouterie. Occasionally, a fat pearl of a foreign-made car would swim by.
Cheaper and flatter-chested girls loomed at the intersection with Stepan Suprun Road. They say that Suprun was a test pilot. The whole area was celestial. Across the street at Khodynka Field was the place Chkalov had crashed. The street itself ran all the way to Sheremetyevo Airport.
She’s nuts, he thought, nearing Airport subway station, when he saw her jumping along the sidewalk on one leg like she was playing hopscotch. He noticed a red high heel in her hand.
She watched intently as the door of a blue limousine opened on her left. Slowly, as though in a dream, so slowly that she was completely absorbed in it, she remembered her friend’s contorted face, a gold tooth in a ring of purple lipstick. Boney fingers shaking a wad of green bills that she had tried to steal from her friend earlier that day. It seemed to her it was a helicopter that had come for her, not a car. She thought she’d have to fly to take the ruby star off the Kremlin spire. She leaned toward the door. A man deep inside the car smiled at her and handed her the other high heel.
She hopped into the car and moved her lips. Inside it was warm, and she realized that she had been cold. She quickly fell asleep.
At home in the bright light he noticed heavy brown knots on her slim bare arms. He looked into her eyes and saw that her pupils were completely dilated, a shiny opaque red, and runny, like broken egg yolk.
“Hot … hot!” she yelled. Actually, she yelled the first word; the second she whispered. And fell silent, as though she had lost her voice.
“Hot tea?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“A hot bath, then?” he asked.
She nodded.
He pointed to the door. In one sharp movement she pulled off her short blue dress and was left wearing nothing but white panties adorned with an orange mushroom. And before he could focus his gaze on her small tits, she had already flown past him.
When he was young, he too could wander around the city aimlessly with no memories or money. In the beginning of his career he was a heroin dealer. He was a drug mule, moving bags of the stuff from Warsaw to Moscow. Once he got caught on the Polonez train at Belorussky station. By some miracle he’d been able to escape, fleeing underneath the cars and over the sidings. He’d probably still be in the slammer if they had caught him.
Through making counterfeit Adidas sneakers in an invalids’ cooperative, renting pirated videos, and running car dealerships in old movie theaters, he came to gold.
Gold is like heroin. It’s simple, homogenous, and omnivorous.
She had been in the bathroom for an alarmingly long time. He knocked at the door to tell her. And to give her a bathrobe. She didn’t answer, and he pushed the door open: she was leaning toward the mirror, staring into it, bent and skinny. Heavy black shadows seemed to pass over her face, although he couldn’t quite make it out. Maybe they were just reflections cast from the mirror. He called to her. She grabbed some small scissors from the shelf under the mirror and slipped her fragile body out of the bath. Her body was smooth, save for the overgrown shrubbery of her pubis—just the way he liked it.
She threw herself at him. He tried to catch her hand, but she dodged him and sunk the scissors deep into the skin just above his ear. He jumped back, spilling blood on the rug with a picture of a proud eagle on it. He tripped and bumped into the telephone. She waved her arm, the scissors snapped shut, and he was left with the receiver in his hand, its cord dangling uselessly. Okay then, he thought, and felt for the cell phone in his pocket. He took the scissors away from her and pushed her back into the bathroom. He called his friend, the owner of a private drug rehabilitation clinic, waking him up with the insistent ring.
She didn’t recognize him at first, but when he came to visit her the third or fourth time, she smiled. A crooked smile, as though her lip had been cut, like a two-way street. He wanted her even more.
They walked around the park on the grounds of the clinic, and she ate two or three berries from the festively ripe pound he had bought for her. She pressed her hand against the bark of a tree for a long time, carefully studying a ladybug. She traced circles and arrows in the sand with great concentration while his phone buzzed and he answered it.
It amazed him how slowly she did everything, how quietly her gaze and her bloodstream glided along. He slowed down too, dug at the bark of the tree, and found a mushroom. After he drove through the gate, leaving the clinic behind, he forced the arrow of the speedometer ahead sharply, to win back the minutes he had lost with her. This sharp change in rhythm shocked and disturbed him.
She asked him to bring her books, and not trusting his assistants, he went to the bookstore himself and bought her Pushkin and Dostoevsky, weighing the heavy volumes in his hand. He estimated how much a piece of gold that size would weigh, and how long it would take someone to read books that heavy. He even tried to read them. But reading was hard; life seemed to get out of sync, and lulls and pauses crept in, as though it had gotten soft and mushy, lost its elasticity. His own life, straight as an arrow, became entangled with his girlfriend’s, twisted and confused. During his visits to her he would suddenly find himself rehashing yesterday’s business meeting in his mind, searching for weaknesses in his performance.
And during important negotiations he would suddenly go quiet. Closing his eyes, he would see her face before him, and the brown knots on her thin arms. Two weeks later he realized he had an aching in his chest every day. Probably because of the changes in his blood pressure and pace of life.
He did something he had been planning to do for several years: he had an hourglass made for himself with real gold dust in it, and he put it on the desk in his office. He began to disengage from life more often. Suddenly interrupting a dictation or a dressing-down, he would turn the hourglass over, hanging on the steady flow of the dull yellow sand.
They pumped out half of her blood and filled her with many liters of somebody else’s. She didn’t know that it contained his blood too. She slept for a long time, lost in the drone of the blood of strangers rushing through her veins.
She tried to coax it along in her weak body: to tame it, combine it with her own, to learn to live with it. She prodded, nudged, pleaded, and persuaded. But some of the blood just didn’t want to fit in, the way the last fragment of an almost-finished puzzle can go alien and resistant. It was then that she would launch her body against a wall with all her might, or toss a water jug at the window, or throw herself at the feet of the janitor and start chewing the dirty mop. Her blood needed the comfort of a warm fix. Then she begged for the shot, which she was permitted at this stage in her treatment; only she had to wait, and the dose was smaller.
He asked his friend at the clinic whether she could be cured, and the friend answered that she could—but not right away, and never entirely, because of the quantities of heroin that had traveled through her system. He went on to say that he had an acquaintance with a clinic somewhere in the Alps on a magic mountain, where they slowed
