“You wanted pizza,” he said. “You will have pizza. I will taste pizza. I will eat it and imagine what it must be like to live in Naples or Boston and eat pizza.”
Sasha pulled the door from the man’s hand. It shot out with a clatter against the side of the truck. A few people in the line who had not decided on a breakfast alternative looked up.
“Are you crazy?” the pizza man said, losing his cap. “Boris, help.”
A voice from inside the truck, dark and deep, called, “What are you doing, Kornei? Close the damned door and let’s get out of here.”
As the voice came from within, Sasha grabbed the sleeve of the pizza man and pulled him forward. The man hit the partly closed door, popping it open with a bang.
“No, no, what are you doing?” screamed the pizza man, grabbing the open door to keep from falling to the street.
Sasha felt an arm on his shoulder again and dimly heard a woman’s voice behind him, but it was too late. There were too many lines, too little cheese and money, too many mothers, children, eyes, birthdays, people demanding.
Over the rear end of the pizza man named Kornei appeared a huge round face with a very flat nose. This second pizza man, Boris, wore a white cheese-and-sauce-stained apron and a look of total bewilderment. “Call the police,” he shouted at Elena as he grabbed Kornei to keep him from being pulled to the street by Sasha.
“They are the police,” cried Kornei.
Whereupon the man inside the truck let go of his partner, and Kornei tumbled onto the sidewalk.
“Tkach,” Elena said, moving past him to help the panicked pizza man, who rubbed his shoulder as he inched his way backward on his behind till his back was against the truck.
Sasha looked up at Boris, and what Boris saw in the young man’s eyes made him say, “We were saving one for ourselves. It’s yours. Don’t touch him. Wait. Wait.”
“Help,” Kornei called out to the growing crowd.
The cry for help started an immediate debate.
“Help him,” called a woman.
“What?” said a man. “I’m going to fight with the police, get my head broken over a pizza?”
“He must have done something wrong if the police are beating him,” said another man. “Maybe he’s selling tainted pizza.”
Some of the crowd-Elena was sure it was the ones who were eating pizzas they had luckily or unluckily purchased before the madness began-began to grumble and move forward.
The big man appeared at the window, holding a pizza covered with cheese and a red sauce. “Here,” he said, holding it out.
Sasha took the pizza and handed it to Elena. “How much?” he asked.
“You’re paying?” asked Boris, leaning over to see if his partner was still alive.
“We are not thieves,” said Sasha.
“Ten rubles,” said the man.
Sasha opened his wallet, found five rubles, half his monthly rent, and handed them to the man.
“Kornei has a wife and four children,” said Boris softly through the window.
“Yes,” Kornei agreed, “I have a wife and four children.”
“One generally has a wife if he has four children,” Sasha countered madly. “If one does not have a wife, one usually cannot tell how many children he has.”
Sasha took the pizza from Elena and stalked away. He handed her a slice as they moved through the crowd.
“And he looks like such a child,” said a woman, whose voice sounded uncomfortably like his mother’s.
They walked swiftly down the Arbat, eating just-slightly-warmer-than-cold pizza.
“Do you go insane frequently?” Elena asked.
“No,” he said. “Not enough.”
“And it feels …?”
“Fine, just fine,” he said, gobbling down pizza. It had no taste and its consistency was that of a tennis shoe.
They were standing in the Sobachaya Ploshadka, Dog Square.
“You know what was here two hundred years ago?” Sasha asked, stopping to look around, waving a floppy slice of pizza.
Elena shrugged.
“Dog kennels, the kennels of the czar. The dogs were treated better than people,” he said to a fat little woman who waddled quickly by. “I hate this pizza.”
Elena took it from him and began to munch on it.
At that moment Sasha decided to bang his fist down on top of an illegally parked white Lada.
“I live with my aunt, you know,” Elena said. They were next to one of the sidewalk stands that sold marioshki dolls and enameled boxes. A year ago the Gorbachev doll was the large outside one in which all the others nested. He had been replaced by Yeltsin, into whom Gorbachev now fit snugly.
“That is not relevant,” Sasha said. “I don’t want to talk about your aunt. I want to stay angry. If you hadn’t insisted on the stupid pizza-”
“You know my aunt?” Elena asked, still munching on the pizza.
Sasha stood in the middle of the sidewalk, his hands in his pockets. “Yes,” he said. “I was with the procurator general’s office when she was a director.”
He looked down the Arbat, hoping for trouble, but none was coming. He longed for a pair of young men with punk American clothes and weirdly cut hair who would look at him with a challenge or dare to say a word. He would even settle for a vendor he could catch taking American dollars.
“You want some of this pizza back?” she asked. “I don’t need to get any fatter.”
“You are not fat,” he said, considering another assault on the innocent Lada.
“My aunt had four heart attacks,” Elena said. “That’s why she retired.”
“I know,” said Sasha.
Later, he decided, he would go home, stare his mother down, stare his wife down, and grunt at Pulcharia if she was still awake. He would sit in the corner watching American music videos on the television all night without saying a word, and if they dared to speak to him …
“We live in a small apartment with her cat, Baku,” Elena said.
A truck hit its horn somewhere in the direction of Kalinin Prospekt. There was a screeching of tires but no crash.
“It used to be,” Sasha said, “that a policeman had respect, even fear. It used to be that a policeman could do his job. It used to be-”
“-that a policeman was a police man and not a police woman,” Elena supplied. “There will be more of us now.”
“Yes,” he said defiantly, looking at her. “I know.”
She nodded, wiped her hands together, and sucked some sauce off her left thumb. Sasha had a sudden mad urge to step over and suck her thumb.
“Do you want to go find a missing Arab girl?” Elena asked, pushing away from the wall. “Or do you want to hit more cars and beat up more people?”
“I didn’t beat him up,” Sasha said. He knew he was losing the anger, and he wanted to recover it.
“You should take up some hobby,” she said, starting down the street toward Kalinin.
“I’m too busy for hobbies,” he said. “I work all day and half the night, and whatever time I have left I spend taking care of my daughter and trying to please my wife and my mother.”
Elena was about twenty yards away now. She stopped and turned to speak to him. “That is a very sad story, Tkach,” she said with mock sympathy. “I’ll tell you mine someday.”
Someone not long ago had said the same thing or something like it to Sasha. It felt as if it had been Elena in this same place.
“Damn,” he shouted.
“What now?” she called.
