Natalia Smirnova - St. Petersburg Noir

I was told to forget about this place. Not to come here, ever. But here I am.

A lot has changed, there’s plenty I don’t recognize. It could have changed still more, on an even grander—planetary!— scale, if I had kicked opened the bolt on the door and burst into the bathroom back then.

I hope I don’t have to explain for the ten thousandth time why I wanted to shoot Boris Yeltsin.

Enough is enough.

Since I got out, I haven’t been to Moskovsky Prospect even once. Tekhnologichesky Institute metro stop was where I disembarked, and then my feet took me where they wanted to go. Everything is close to here. To the Fontanka River it’s six minutes if you walk fast. The Obukhovsky Bridge. Tamara and I lived not in the corner building, but right next to it—number 18 on Moskovsky Prospect. Hey, check this out! A restaurant called The Lair. There didn’t used to be any lairs here. There used to be a grocery store, where Tamara worked behind a counter. I went into The Lair to take a look at their menu. Bear meat is their specialty. Oh well.

If this is a lair, it would be fair to call the room in the apartment above The Lair, where Tamara and I used to live, The Nest. And if things had worked out differently, there would be a museum now in our nest above the lair. The Museum of the Sixth of June. But a museum was really the last thing on my mind.

I walk into the courtyard. There, with the help of a hoist that raises a worker up to the height of the third floor, a poplar tree is being dismantled in stages. The worker amputates the thick branches with a chainsaw, piece by piece, cut by cut. I used to view that tree with great respect. It was tall. It grew faster than the others, because it didn’t get enough sunlight in the courtyard. I used to sit under this poplar in ‘96 and ‘97, smoking on the rusty swings. (Today the playground is filled up with wooden blocks.)

This is where I met Yemelianych. He crouched down one day on the edge of the sandbox and, opening up a small vial, downed an infusion of hawthorn berry. I wanted to be alone, and got ready to leave, but he asked me about my political convictions. We got to talking. We shared a lot of the same ideas. About Yeltsin, as was to be expected (everyone talked about him in those days), and about how he should be killed. I said that not only did I dream of doing it, I was ready to do it for real. He said he was ready to do it too. He said that he had been the commander of a platoon of intelligence agents in a certain African country, the name of which he didn’t have the right to say out loud. But soon he would, and then everyone would know. I didn’t believe him at first. Yet there were details. Lots of details. It was impossible not to believe him.

I told him I had a Makarov (two years ago I had bought it in the empty lot behind Yefimov Street). Many people had firearms back then—those of us who had them hardly tried to hide it. (Well, Tamara didn’t know. I hid the Makarov under the sink behind the pipes.) Yemelianych said that I’d have to go to Moscow. That was where all the important events happened. There were more opportunities there. I said my windows looked out on Moskovsky Prospect, and official government delegations often passed along that route. It was significant that the year before I had seen the presidential cortege from my window. Yeltsin was visiting St. Petersburg, since it was getting close to election time. We’ll wait. We should wait until he comes back.

But, Yemelianych said, you can’t shoot him from the window. They have armored cars.

I knew that. I said that was not what I was going to do.

You have to do it another way, said Yemelianych.

So that’s how I got to know him.

And now the poplar will be gone.

Yemelianych was wrong when he said that I got together with Tamara solely because of the view onto Moskovsky Prospect. That’s what he thought at first. That’s what the investigator thought too. Ridiculous. First of all, I knew myself that it made no sense to shoot out of the window. Or even to leave the house and run to the corner, where the government corteges slowed down to turn onto the Fontanka Embankment. It made no sense to shoot at an armored car. I’m not a complete idiot. I’m not nuts. Although, I must admit, I do let my imagination run away with me sometimes. Sometimes, I have to say, I would see myself running over to the car that had slowed down at the corner, aiming at the glass, shooting, and my bullet hits just the right weak spot, and all the bulletproof glass… and all the bulletproof glass… and all the bulletproof glass…

But that’s just first of all.

Second of all: I loved Tamara. It was just by chance that her windows faced Moskovsky Prospect.

By the way, I didn’t rat on Yemelianych. I took all the blame. I’m not supposed to think about Tamara.

I won’t.

I met her… well, what difference does it make to you?

Before that I lived in Vsevolozhsk, outside St. Petersburg. When I moved into Tamara’s place on Moskovsky Prospect, I sold my apartment in Vsevolozhsk and invested the money in a financial pyramid scheme. There were tons of pyramid schemes back then.

I loved Tamara not for her beauty—of which, to be honest, there was none—and not even because when we had sex she called loudly for help, shouting out the names of her former lovers. I don’t know myself why I loved her. She gave me love in return. She had an excellent memory. Tamara and I often played Scrabble. Tamara always beat me. Seriously, I never tried to lose on purpose. I told her lots of times that she should be working in a bookstore on Nevsky Prospect, where they sell dictionaries and the latest novels, not at the fish counter in a grocery store. People don’t read much nowadays. Back then everyone read a whole lot.

Like I said, my legs took me here all by themselves. Sooner or later, I would have come here anyway, however much they told me not to think about it.

It’s just that in those two years that I was living with Tamara, the poplar grew. Poplars grow fast, even the ones that look like they’re fully grown. And when you see something slowly changing before your very eyes in the space of a year, or a year and a half, or two, you figure that you’re changing too, along with it. So it was changing, and so was I. And everything around us changed, and definitely not for the better. Except for that tree, which just continued to grow. Long story short, I didn’t understand that I had anything in common with that tree. I only realized it just now, when I saw the worker cutting it down. And just by chance I had to stop by this address at the very moment they were cutting down the tree! And all those memories started up in me right then. The ones I’m not supposed to think about.

Her wages were miserable. Mine too. (I used to occasionally fix TVs—old Soviet models with tubes. People still had them, but by the sixth of June, 1997, people didn’t even want them fixed anymore.) Anyway, we lived together.

Once I asked Tamara (when we were playing Scrabble) if she would take part in an assassination attempt on Yeltsin.

“In Moscow?” she said.

“No, when he visits St. Petersburg.”

“Oh, when is that ever going to happen?” she said. Then she asked me how I was going to do it.

“Like this,” I said. The big black cars speed down Moskovsky Prospect. Before they turn onto Fontanka, they generally slow down (because they have to). Tamara runs out in front of the car, falls to her knees, and raises her hands up to the sky. The presidential limousine stops, Yeltsin, curious about what’s going on, gets out and asks who she is. And there I am with the handgun. Bang, bang, bang, bang…