Natalia Smirnova: St. Petersburg Noir

Tamara said that, luckily, I didn’t have a gun. Of course she was wrong, because, luckily or not, the Makarov was still under the sink behind the pipes in the bathroom. And there were twenty bullets too, in a plastic bag. But Tamara didn’t know a thing about it. She was convinced that no one would stop, anyway, if she threw herself in front of the cortege. And if the presidential limousine stopped, Yeltsin wouldn’t get out. That’s what I thought too: Yeltsin won’t get out.

I just wanted to test Tamara, to know whether she was with me or not.

Then he asked me, shining a light in my face: did I love Tamara? For some reason, not only the head but the entire bunch of investigators wanted to know the answer to this question. Yeah, I loved her. Otherwise I would never have held out for two years on that noisy, stinky Moskovsky Prospect, even if I had only one passion—to kill Yeltsin.

In fact, I had two passions—my love for Tamara and my hatred for Yeltsin.

Two uncontrollable passions. Love for Tamara and hatred for Yeltsin.

And if I didn’t love her, would she really have called me “honey,” and “loverboy,” and “snookums”?

A lot of people wanted to kill Yeltsin back then. And a lot of them did. In their heads. 1997. The year before that there had been elections. Please, no historical digressions. I’ve had it up to here with those already. Is there anyone who doesn’t know how they counted the votes?

I used to chat with a lot of people in the buildings surrounding our courtyard at 18 Moskovsky Prospect, and every single person denied they voted for Yeltsin in ‘96. And that’s just in one courtyard. What if you take the entire country? I didn’t vote. Why vote when you didn’t have to?

They did an operation on him, an American doctor remade the heart vessels.

Oh, I’m supposed to forget about this.

I forgot.

I’ll shut up.

I’m okay now.

So…

So I lived with Tamara.

The papers had recently discussed the possibility of his death on the operation table.

I remember how in one paper, I forget which one, they warned me and others like me against making a life strategy based on expecting him to die.

But I don’t want to go into the motives of my decision.

As for Tamara…

Haymarket Square is a stone’s throw away—at the end of Moskovsky Prospect. They had chased away most of the black-market dealers by then. But you could always sniff out a grapevine that led you straight to a dealer, depending on what kind of dealer you were looking for. In this case—someone selling the thing that goes bang!

That’s the kind of dealer I found in the vacant lot where Yefimov Street runs into Haymarket Square.

Anyway, it wasn’t that Yemelianych supported me in everything— but we were always together. He drank too much, though, and really rotten stuff. He bought it at the kiosks by the Vitebsky train station.

One day he said that he had a whole organization behind him. And that they wanted to take me in.

In our organization, he was one step higher than me, and so he knew others—from our organization, that is. I only knew Yemelianych. He lived in the building next to mine, in number 16. His windows faced the street crossing, and if Yeltsin showed up, he could take better aim. But we didn’t plan to shoot at the car. Why shoot at it when it was armored? That’s nonsense. That’s both suicide and undermining the whole idea. But I said that already, didn’t I?

But here’s what I haven’t talked about yet: we had another idea.

June of 1997 rolled around. On the fifth of June, Yemelianych told me that Yeltsin was coming to Petersburg the next day. I already knew. Everyone who had even the slightest interest in politics already knew.

The president wanted to celebrate the 198th birthday of Pushkin in Petersburg.

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin. Our national poet.

I was anticipating the assassination attempt.

Yemelianych told me that the leaders of our organization were laying down a plan. Tomorrow evening, the sixth of June, the president would go to the Mariinsky Theater, formerly the Kirov Opera and Ballet. Someone would take me backstage be-forehand. Yeltsin would be sitting in the front row. After that, it would be like when they killed Stolypin.

The only difference would be that I would come out onstage.

The weapon I would use I had bought myself, with my own money, not the money of the organization that Yemelianych was more involved in than me.

But I wasn’t thinking about any career ladder.

And what about Tamara? She was already sick of the name Yeltsin. She asked me not to talk about him. Let me tell you something, though: she was afraid that my hatred for him would crowd out my love for her. And she was sort of right. She was right to be afraid. I remember my hatred for him more than my love for her. But I loved her, all right… Boy, how I loved Tamara!

I have a good memory too.

Gosha, Arthur, Grigorian, Ulidov, some Vanyusha, Kuropatkin, and seven more…

First names, last names, nicknames. I didn’t hide anything.

I didn’t name Yemelianych, and I didn’t betray the organization.

Yemelianych wasn’t Tamara’s lover.

Them? I betrayed all of them. Why did she have to yell out their names like that?

In the beginning the investigators thought she was an accomplice. They were interested in the network of relationships.

Let them try to figure it out themselves if they want.

It’s not my business. It’s their job.

In the little park opposite, I met someone from the building next door. Yemelianych pointed him out to me, said they were neighbors.

Yemelianych’s neighbor was a writer. With a beard, in a Sherlock Holmes cap. He was often there sitting on the bench.

I think he was crazy. When I asked him whether he could kill Yeltsin, he answered that he and Yeltsin lived in two different worlds.

I asked him: who are you with, the masters of culture? He didn’t understand the question.

No, I remembered. I remembered how at the end of Gorbachev’s perestroika a large group of writers went to Yeltsin in the Kremlin to show the president their support. And there wasn’t a single one among them who would even pitch a glass ashtray at the man! Forty people—that’s a lot! And no one probably even checked them for weapons. Anyone could have brought one in. So now I ask: Valeriy Georgievich, why didn’t you bring a handgun and shoot Yeltsin? No answer. And I ask: Vladimir Konstantinovich, why didn’t you bring a handgun and shoot Yeltsin? No answer. And I ask the others—there were forty of them!—no answer. No answer! No answer from any of them!

And this one, the one with the beard in the park, tells me he wasn’t invited.

And if you had been, would you have shot Yeltsin?

Who gets to be invited? What did you have to write to be invited, so you could shoot Yeltsin?

What do you write, and who needs it, if everything keeps going along just as it is, predetermined by the powers that be?

Sometimes I wanted to become a writer myself. Yeltsin must have needed supporters, and he must have invited new ones to the Kremlin, and I would be one of them—with a handgun in my pants under my belt—and do you think I wouldn’t reach for it at the sound of “Dear Fellow Russians,” and that I wouldn’t do it?

Oh, for that I would write! I would write anything just to be invited!

As for the handgun: I kept it in the bathroom, behind the pipes under the sink.