Natalia Smirnova - Moscow Noir

Below—stretch his legs out—the evening water lightly laps-spills over. Music, laughter, a shashlik smell coming from beyond the fence on the private beach. A volleyball thumps. A little closer, in a chaise longue, a woman with a book. The view from behind: short haircut, folds in her neck, the edge of her glasses, her ass. Ryabets reaches into his swimsuit and tugs and tugs—nothing doing. A languid spite sours inside him. He did drag himself all the way out here! Halfway—no, all the way—across Moscow!

The woman is approached by another, younger, who leans over and says something as her white breasts rise lusciously from her blue swimsuit. Ryabets is back in his trunks, kneading away furiously. Nothing. The cupola radiates an officious sneer. He gives the church a dirty look and kneads and kneads. Out of the corner of his eye he notices Luscious observing him, a combination of revulsion and curiosity on her face. He pulls out his hand. Just scratching. He stands up—his trunks sag in back—scrambles down the bank, and swims noisily. The water isn’t refreshing; it’s too warm.

Ryabets slowly plies the shoreline, watching Luscious. You’d think he wouldn’t care, but imagine, he’s horny; he feels dumb too, old goat.

Once Luscious leaves, Ryabets moves ashore. He towels off and gets out the 777: to drink or not to drink? No, first go there. He eats his sandwich, takes one last look at the address in the paper, gets dressed, and leaves.

First he follows the shore and edges around the beach fence, but immediately, in a young pine grove, he runs across some naked men lying there, privates exposed. Ryabets sidesteps them but the farther he goes, the more naked men there are catching some rays, arms spread wide. “Cocksuckers,” he mutters, veering more to the left. He tries not to look but can’t help it. The bushes along the river are filled with naked men’s bodies. He spits. Right in the middle of Moscow!

He fantasizes TNT exploding and scraps of genitalia in the bushes—too many to collect! The bloody image calms him, and Ryabets moves deeper into the woods, emerging on paths that lead to Lake Bezdonka. Evening is falling and the crowds stretch from the riverbank to the park entrance. Ryabets has nearly changed his mind about going to the address in the newspaper. He’s tired. He wants to go home. He’s walking down Tamanskaya when across the street on the left he notices a street sign: Second Line . He stands there a second and turns. Did I make the trip for nothing?

The street is suddenly quiet. The dachas are behind a fence. Turrets, porticos, balconies. As if they weren’t right next to that half-naked, heat-wasted mob. No. 43. In back of them, a new red-brick, three-story house. The kind ministers of state and oligarchs live in, Ryabets thinks. Actually, the house gives the impression of being uninhabited. Ryabets “accidentally” pushes the gate, which yields with a light creak. The house is standing where the dacha burned; Ryabets recognizes the lawn behind it and the semicircle of tall pines. But a prison? Construction debris, doorframes in their original packing, the porch unfinished. On the door, yellow police tape—looks like this was indeed the prison.

Cautiously he unsticks the tape and opens the door. Inside it’s half-dark, and he senses the staircase on the right. He gropes for the light switch on the wall and heads downstairs. Exactly: three cells fabricated out of thick sticks. In front of him a table, two chairs, and a mechanism that looks like a welding apparatus. Were the cops too lazy to pull it out? On the floor, reddish-brown spots and broken glass. Torture—and why not? Hah! Vagrants, human matter. Hah!

Ryabets doesn’t linger. It’s all just like the paper said. He goes upstairs, turns off the light, walks out, and puts the tape back. Not a trace of the other dacha, as if it were never there. He wants to go home.

But before he moves out to the street he decides to take a look, refresh his memory, see where he kept watch once upon a time. Over there, over there… Wait, wait…

In the lilac bushes past the pines, in the exact same place, he notices a figure on the ground. The instinct to flee subsides instantly. No cop would sit squatting in the bushes! On top of everything else, it’s a female. She waves. He’s walking, glancing from side to side to make sure no one else is there. But there is. The female has a dog at her feet. It raises its head to Ryabets.

“Got anything to drink?” she asks. “Who are you?”

Definitely a woman. And drunk. Two leathery folds are slipping down her belly from her unbuttoned pink top. Cellulite legs in white ankle socks spread wide. Bezdonka, hah!

While Ryabets is considering her, the woman takes out of her bag (just like his with his Marlboros) a bottle (just like him with his 777), tosses her head back, and glugs down the last of the liquid. She kicks an empty bottle aside.

“Commander, fill my glass! See? Not a drop! I won’t fucking say anything to your wife.”

A flat face, dark, slit eyes, no neck, formless all over. Like a steak! Ryabets thinks culinarily. But something very familiar I can’t put my finger on. What?

“Ryaba? Ryaba! Ryabets! Is that you? Yes, it is!” The woman scrambles onto all fours, straightens up, and starts hobbling toward him, as if she were wearing prostheses. The dog, too, yawns and wags its tail.

Buratina! Fucking amazing. Burataeva! he shouts in his mind.

This clumsy creature had been Ryabets’s erotic dream. Nadya Burataeva—Buratina, as they’d called her in school. The nickname was a jibe at her flat, half-Kalmyk, but definitely not Buryat, nose.

“And you’re just the same, Ryaba, just the same. Maybe a little shrunken, hee hee hee! Still jerking off?” Burataeva’s a meter away and Ryabets can smell her sour stench. “What are you standing there for? Pour! To our meeting! You wouldn’t begrudge Nadya Burataeva a drink, would you? How many years has it been? Eh? Gotta be thirty.”

Ryabets reaches into his bag, removes the bottle and cup, pulls the cork out with his teeth, pours, and offers it to Buratina. He drinks from the bottle.

“So tell me, how have you been? What’s up?”

Ryabets is sitting under a pine facing Buratina. Echoes of her fate surface right away. She was burning up in the fire so she jumped, broke her foot and back, spent a long time in recovery, and after all that discovered she was pregnant. It was born dead, actually. She went quickly downhill. Her parents supported her but she drank, then her lover (a recidivist) did and she drank, they put him in jail and she drank, her parents died and she drank, another pregnancy and she drank, a miscarriage and she drank, she sold everything and drank, her apartment too and drank, disappeared and drank.

“This is Polkan,” she introduces.

Ryabets nods but the dog isn’t taking to him.

“Don’t wet your pants, Ryaba, he won’t touch you. He’s been with me since he was born. Andryukha brought him when he was just a puppy, thi-i-is little. You can’t imagine how glad I am to see you, Ryaba!” Buratina hiccups. And in a gleeful non sequitur: “They shut down the beer stand a long time ago, back under Gorbachev. And all the stores too. We go over the bridge, to Priboy. I’ve been living here ten years, Ryaba, across Bezdonka. I’m moving to Kazan station now. They say it’s a rich place—you can take melons off the trains from the Chuchmeks. You won’t die of hunger near a train station. I’m not staying here, no way.”

“Why?” Ryabets recalls the morning paper.

“Hell if I know!” Buratina shrugs. “Everyone’s run off. Even Andryukha. He promised me. ‘You and me, Nadya, we’ll go to Kazan station, I won’t abandon you.’ So where’s Andryukha now? Kaput. Hee hee hee.”