Natalia Smirnova - Moscow Noir

Once, on television, she saw a news segment about a group of students who raped and murdered their phys-ed teacher. This happened somewhere on the outskirts of the city, which Danaë, a Muscovite, could imagine about as vaguely as she could the Flemish city of Brabant. Watching Golotsvan as he shuffled at the blackboard with his hands in the pockets of his wide jeans, which were covered with chains and trinkets, Danaë imagined him, with hands shaking, hastily unbuttoning his foul-smelling pants and throwing himself at her with his horn-shaped prick. She, Danaë, is lying crucified in the tar, naked, while Golotsvan’s partners in crime hold her by the arms and legs; she struggles in their trap like a deer knocked onto her back. First Golotsvan, and then the rest of the goons, one by one, press against her with their unwashed genitalia, toss on her for a bit, then sprinkle her with what God gave them, and… experience a piercing guilt. Then, ashamed, they break her neck, or choke her with a wire, or stab her to death with penknives…

“And that’s all you deigned to learn, venerable Golotsvan?”

“I didn’t have time, Dana Innokentievna, my cat had kittens last night.”

“How many did she have?”

“Six. Would you like a kitten, Dana Innokentievna?”

“Take a seat, Golotsvan. You get a ‘satisfactory.’”

“Why ‘satisfactatory’? Please, Dana Innokentievna—”

“Take your seat.”

Grumbling under his breath, with his lower lip jutting forward, Golotsvan went back to his seat, jangling the chains and trinkets on his foul-smelling pants. His hands in his pockets. Danaë picked up a piece of chalk and turned to the board.

“Jewish bitch…” Golotsvan muttered.

Without turning around, Danaë grinned at the mouse-gray smoothness of the chalkboard. A thought came to her: What would happen if I take this here piece of chalk and on this very blackboard write something really special. Like, for example, “May you all be damned.” What would happen? Probably nothing. They’d all exchange glances and squeeze out puzzled little smirks, like lambs catching a whiff of the fire being lit under the spit. Besides, they were all damned long ago. And she was too. Danaë herself had been damned even before the students sitting in this classroom. Because she was older than them. Almost three times older. There’s your arithmetic for you, in a literature class. In the Perovo neighborhood. In a state school, in the city of Moscow, compared to which Brabant was just a pathetic little village of five houses and one toilet.

It would be natural to assume that since Danaë had a father, she also had a mother. Danaë didn’t like assumptions, particularly if they came from strangers. First of all, the mom she did in fact have at some point, she had no longer. Second, Mom loved her little Danaë for only a very short time: from zero to nine years old, plus the nine months that she spent carrying her daughter in her womb. And when the nine years were over, Mom placed a big down pillow on her sleeping daughter’s pretty little face, and then sat on top of it. Dad had lifted Mom off the pillow—and thus also off the red face of their daughter—just in time. After that, Danaë never saw her mom again. With the exception of that one time, which she had mostly forgotten: she and her dad had, it seems, visited Mom in some sort of yellow basement that smelled like medical syringes. Now, of course, Danaë knows all too well, and had known it for twenty-plus years, that the awful trick with the down pillow secured for Mom her demise in the mad house.

“Mom loves you,” Karaklev assured his nine-year-old daughter as she cried herself to sleep. “She just needs a little medical treatment and she’ll be with us again. Mom loves you.”

“And do you love me?” Danaë asked, smearing the tears with her little fist.

“And I do too,” Dad replied, taken aback that she would question his feelings. “Very, very, very much. Daddy loves his little pea, his clever girl.”

Innokentii Karaklev was becoming more and more capricious, more cancerlike. More foul-smelling. Worst of all, Daddy started to recount aloud his past life, and specifically those moments that a healthy person would not only not recall, but would actively try to forget. The long period of dying had debased him. Instead of becoming more pious, he was transformed into a cynic to a degree that is rarely found among the camp of dying organisms. This is what Innokentii Karaklev said to his daughter Danaë on that day it rained cats and dogs, such a heavy, pounding rain that the pigeons caught in it received concussions. The neighborhood of Perovo looked like a boundless, cracked aquarium into which poured the water from a thousand hoses in the sky.

“I slept with your mother. I did it with all my passion. I drilled her and drilled her and then you emerged from her belly like a wild troll from a mangled cave… Admit it, my child, from the very beginning you never liked it here.”

“No, I liked it here. From the very beginning. You’re mistaken, Daddy,” Danaë answered, listening with one ear to the hammering rain. “Fools like you are always mistaken. You’re made of mistakes. You have a fatal error dangling right there between your legs.”

Innokentii Karaklev watched the rivulets of rain running down the windowpane.

“Listen, child…” he muttered, swallowing dryly, “try to be… happy. I’m so sick of you being unhappy… I’m dying because of your unhappiness.”

“You’re dying because of cancer,” corrected Danaë, sticking a cigarette in the corner of her smirk.

They were both silent awhile, thirty-five seconds or so. The smoke from Danaë’s cigarette coiled around itself in the dark room like a scrap of seaweed.

“Do you know why I left your mother?” said Dad, scratching his sunken cheek. “Because of this one student. A handsome rogue. He was excellent at poker, had a thing for chemistry and water polo. Yes sir, my little pea, he always had jokers in store. His glass vials often exploded from overheating, and he swam in a mauve swim cap. Your mother found us—I was on my knees, polishing his… with my mouth…”

“His what? ” Danaë turned to stone.

“His that! ” He made a strange noise and squinted his colorless eyes at his daughter.

“Daddy…” Danaë stonily sounded out the words. “Are you saying you were a homosexual?”

An astonishing picture took shape in her mind: her dying father sucking the penis of Golotsvan, the flunk, the murderer.

“That’s how it went… sometimes. And who didn’t get into some of it? In one’s youth, in the barracks, after a bout of drinking, in one’s dreams—”

“Did you actually love my mother?”

“Yes, my little pea, yes…” Innokentii Karaklev nodded his hairless head. “You are the result of a grandiose love, a gale-force diffusion. The cells were jumping out of our bodies and mixing together. Such passion, it shook the atmosphere. Those were breathtaking, mind-numbing times.”

“And what about that student?” Danaë asked, watching the column of ash crumble from her cigarette onto the rug. “What was his name?”

“Andrei. Yes, yes. It was a breathtaking passion.” Her dad smacked his lips and purred like a cat. “Absolute diffusion. Overflowing excitement. To near suffocation. More a miracle than a passion.”

“Did you love my mother?” Danaë prodded in a steely voice. “Answer me. I don’t understand.” She now imagined her dad’s hairless head laboring over the perineum of the flunking murderer Golotsvan.

“I loved them both very deeply,” answered Innokentii Karaklev. “And about twenty others. I loved everyone. And every time it was a miracle.”