Natalia Smirnova: St. Petersburg Noir

There are usually two paths for man to choose from: the path of truth and the path of lies. Lera had always preferred the third path: somewhere in-between. The chair of the department wasn’t in that day. It was time to renew his hunting rifle license, so he had gone off to see the license inspector. That was too bad. Lera was desperate to report what she’d heard. It was no use telling the Chief Bird—he was spineless and just as scared of the curator as she was.

The snow that had fallen the day before hadn’t stayed. The Baltic wind had licked it clean with its rough tongue. First from the roofs and cupolas, then from the ground. There wasn’t even any slush left, except perhaps on the asphalt of the courtyard and on the Moika Embankment, where a few damp dark lines could still be seen. It wasn’t uncommon for the green grass to still linger and buds to come out on the trees around New Year’s. The boat weather vane on the golden spire of the Admiralty sailed bravely through the turbulent skies over the Neva River. The southwest wind had turned it ninety degrees.

Three days passed and Professor Tsukatov called Demyan Ilich into his office again. Lera, the impressionable lab assistant, first made another blunder with the request form and then started imagining things. The girl seemed to have gotten entirely carried away. Shivering uncontrollably, she wrapped a light scarf around her shoulders, and demonstratively drank a few drops of herbal sedative. Instead of the sedative, thought Tsukatov roughly, you should have a hot water bottle on you from head to toe. To calm Lera down, Tsukatov had to promise her that he would personally test the curator’s sanity. It just so happened his acquaintance, the hunting general, had invited him to go on a bear hunt. Tsukatov had never hunted bears before, and he needed a consultation on how to skin prey in the field, just in case. Down there in Vologda, where the general had invited him, everything was covered in snow, and had been for some time. The bears were hibernating, and the huntsman had found a den.

“Ahem. If the skin is for a rug, then you need to take it off in one layer,” croaked Demyan Ilich, and his thick brows stirred. “First you cut it straight from the chin to the scrotum. And if it’s a female, then take it down to her privates. Start from the jaw, about a palm’s length from the edge of the lower lip, and cut down. Make sure you start all cuts from the underside of the hide so you don’t mess up the fur. Ahem. Well, you’re a hunter yourself, you know what I’m talking about. Right, then the paws.”

Tsukatov seated Demyan Ilich at the large desk in the middle of the office, and sat across from him. He listened carefully, occasionally jotting something down on a piece of paper. Chelnokov, who was at his desk in a nook separated from them by a bookcase and the wooden banister, put on his glasses and pretended to be reading an article in the Journal of Ornithology.

“Ahem. The cuts on the paws all have to come together in the same spot by your main cut.” The curator made a gesture with the nail of his protruding thumb from his throat to his belly. “And you finish coming out at a straight angle. The front paws, from the palm callouses to the elbows and then across the armpits…” To illustrate the point, Demyan Ilich pointed out where to cut on himself. “Right. The hind legs you cut from the heel callouses to the knees, and then from the inside of the hip to here.” He got up from his seat, bent over, and demonstrated. Then he sat down again. “Ahem. If you’re taking the hide to a taxidermist right away, you can snip the paws off right at the carpals, and you don’t have to skin the head—just chop it off at the last vertabra and you’re good. Ahem. But if the hide is going to be lying around for a while, then you cut the callouses from three sides and take the paw out. Just leave the last phalanxes of the toes. Right. And the head… you’ll have to take the hide off the head too.” Demyan Ilich fell silent in yet another unnecessary pause. “Then you salt the hide thoroughly. Where there are muscles and fat, make incisions and rub in some salt. Then fold it, the inner sides facing in on themselves, roll it up, and hang it on a stick so the brine can drip off. Ahem. It’s best to freeze it.”

“What if I want it mounted? Full-size?” said Tsukatov, “How do I go about it then?”

The curator went silent—as usual, for longer than was comfortable.

“Then you’re not going to want to take it off as a single layer. Ahem. You make a cut from the back. Then the seam on the belly won’t show. There’s usually not much fur on the belly. It’s hard to hide the seam. Right.” Demyan Ilich spoke weightily, as though he was moving rocks, but Tsukatov listened without prompting him. “And it’s best to take the beast’s measurements if you want to stuff and mount it. From the tip of the nose to the corners of the eyes, and from the tip of the nose to the base of the tail. One more thing: once you’ve skinned the bear, measure the girth of the neck—behind the ears—and the chest, right here, around the stomach. You need the measurements so the taxidermist knows the right proportions.” As before, Demyan Ilich indicated on himself where exactly the bear’s stomach was. “So, we cut along the spine from the tail to the back of the head. Right. And the paws, from the callouses to the elbows and knees. Ahem. Then you skin it. Right.”

“I’m not quite clear on the head,” said Tsukatov. “I’ve never had to take the hide off a head before.”

“Now that’s tricky. Right, first you make a deep cut where the lips and jaws meet. You pull the lip back with one hand and cut with the other, so that the knife slides right along the jaw-line. Right up against the jaw. Ahem. If you don’t do that, you’ll rip the lips when you remove the skin from the head.” As Demyan Ilich spoke, he became more and more excited, which was unusual—for three years everyone at the faculty had known him as a gloomy, silent man. “Ahem. Cut the auditory canals as close to the scalp as you can, and make sure you slice the skin around the eyes right up to the sockets, so you don’t damage it. You’d be better off with a scalpel instead of a knife. Right. Cut the nose off whole, along the cartilage. Ahem. Next, the ears. The ears will be difficult.” He ran his fingers through his hair, and then simulated some careful handiwork. “From the back of the ears you separate the skin from the cartilage, slowly turning the ear inside out. Then, of course, you salt it. Make incisions in the lips and the nose and rub salt in.”

“What about the tail?” asked Tsukatov, jotting down the instructions. “Do I dissect the tail too?”

“Naturally. Ahem. Open it up along the inner side, starting a little ways down from the hole, and pull out the vertebrae. And then you salt the inside again.”

“Thank you, Demyan Ilich.” Tsukatov was pleased. “Now what about our ape? The chimpanzee. Any news?”

Demyan Ilich went dead silent. “You’ll get it,” the curator finally said in a Spartan manner. “Money up front.”

When Tsukatov and Chelnokov were left alone in the office, Chelnokov tossed his Journal of Ornithology aside and popped out of his nook as quick as a flash. Of course he had listened to the entire conversation, and of course he was tormented by the silence.

“The girl is just imagining things,” Tsukatov said, surprised. “He’s all right, damnit!”

“As healthy as the goat-legged Pan,” Chelnokov agreed. ‘Although, if you think about it, we all have our idiosyncrasies. The Chinese, for example, they have no interest in b-bear hide. They only take the spleen, and the paws for some reason. P-peculiar p-people they are. By the way, do you know why there are no Chinese cemeteries here?”