Natalia Smirnova - Moscow Noir

Danaë took a drag on her cigarette and fixed a vacant stare on the window. A lustful blush broke in crimson across Golotsvan’s cheeks, his eyes turning back in his head, his moans encouraging her dad’s frail, hairless head with its decaying mouth.

“And me?” Danaë asked almost inaudibly.

Her dad’s wrinkles suddenly turned smooth and he answered: “You are my little pea. My favorite book. Plus Louis Armstrong. And Fellini. Plus my favorite olivier salad. And all the Egyptian pyramids and the ruins of the great castles. You understand me? You are also the lily pads on the pond where I swam when I was just a little kid… Plus God, whatever He may actually turn out to be. My little pea. Danaë. Come here, give me a kiss.”

Danaë quickly crushed her cigarette butt in the ashtray, walked over to him on legs she could barely feel, and pressed her cheek into Daddy’s lips.

“You too,” she whispered, “dying one… Daddy…”

Golotsvan was done. But the rain in the neighborhood of Perovo wasn’t about to finish. Danaë moved to the kitchen, leaving her dad to stare out the gray window covered with heavenly moisture…

She struck him with a meat hammer, with the burled side. Danaë knew beforehand that just once on the head wouldn’t be enough. Neither would two. During the process she realized that it would be enough only when she had lost count for the third time. Then she stood there listening, without looking. She imagined a monitor with a wan green image of her dad’s threadlike pulse. Then she dropped the hammer, went to the kitchen, washed her hands, went to the hallway, grabbed her bag of notebooks, came back to the kitchen, sat down at the table, and began grading papers. After a half hour she was sick of it. She moved into her dad’s room, turned on the light (it had grown dark outside, but the rain was still pouring down), and peered at him. Innokentii Karaklev was sitting in the same armchair, but tilted over on his side so that his knuckles were trapped against the rug. His thoroughly beaten head was glazed in its own juices.

Danaë decided to leave everything as it was, at least for now, until she took a bath with some fragrant salts. Salts always had a positive effect on her body. Sitting on the edge of the tub and looking into a mirror, Danaë pronounced: “This is easy.”

Later she was told that she’d gone mad. Just like her mom. Those who said it were right. She knew it and she’d reply: “And you’re all bastards, bastards, all of you.” It’s possible that she was right too.

Jacob hung there, his shoes scraping the parquet floor spasmodically. “Papa, stop!” he rasped, trying to untangle the string of lights around his neck, while German, suspecting nothing, kept pulling the garland tighter and tighter thinking there wasn’t much time left and the house decorations still weren’t finished.

There should be a comma after “tighter,” Yulia noted in the margin, then set her pencil down and rubbed her temples. As usual, the words were swimming before her eyes. They would keep swimming for another half hour, until Yulia put on her coat, picked up her purse, and left the publishing house. She put drops in her eyes. I’m going to have to move on to glasses pretty soon, she thought sadly.

As Yulia left the Barrikadnaya metro station, the heavy glass doors swung closed behind her with a loud wallop.

She heaved a distraught sigh, her head finally clearing after the stench of the sweaty underground crowd and their identical faces, on each of which she distinctly read: IhateyouIhateeveryone . Her black sweater was stuck to her body, the harsh wool bristly. What was it knit from? It pricked her armpits and back.

Yulia wiped the sweat from her forehead and made her habitual motion of smoothing down her jacket.

Her wallet was gone.

She had her cell phone. Here it was, on the right. But her wallet was missing.

Frightened, Yulia looked from side to side, feverishly trying to figure out who might have relieved her of her salary and bonus and where, when, and how.

Yulia moved forward on cotton legs and leaned her shoulder against one of the vans selling burned chebureki and sausages wrapped in pastry. Any other time the smell of the tainted meat would have turned her inside out, but the thought of the money drowned out every other consideration.

How was she going to live now?

Go to the police? Yulia laughed nervously. A lady walking by, wearing a gray puffer coat, gave her a nasty look and sent a tut-tutting curse her way. Rush back, down there, into the bowels of the underground, wrest her money back (from whom, dear Yulia?), howl…? Pretty funny.

She gathered all her strength and walked on. Toward her building.

She moved past the chebureki and pirated-CD vans, past the crazy Gothic high-rise with the gargoyle faces. She gazed, sick at heart, at one of the faces, which looked down on her haughtily. Yulia sighed and plodded on. A frigid wind whistled down her jacket collar; her scratchy black sweater wasn’t keeping the cold out. She stopped next to the American consulate, but she didn’t have the strength to take another step forward, even though it was just a few more meters to her building. A dreary line stretched out from the consulate door. Jacob took the hacksaw and, panting, began sawing off his mama’s head. The hacksaw was hard to work, and the sweetish spurts made Jacob frown… The words raced through Yulia’s mind.

A guard with a badge bore his little piggy eyes into Yulia, and his muscles tensed to lunge. Yulia came to her senses and hurried on.

She tumbled like a sack into her apartment, having begun to slump in the elevator. Now she was sitting, drained, leaning against the doorjamb, moaning softly, and tears were pouring down of their own accord, dripping on her jacket.

Her Siamese cat ran up on his soft paws. His slanted blue eyes watched Yulia carefully.

“Barsik,” she moaned faintly. “Sweet Barsik… I got robbed. Barsik. We have nothing to eat and nothing to live on.”

Barsik rubbed his round head against Yulia’s leg. And meowed.

Her phone rang. Yulia took it out of her pocket with trembling hands and pushed the button.

“Yulia darling.” It was Oleg.

“Hi,” she answered, trying to buck up, wiping away her tears and getting up from the floor.

“How’re things, my dear?” Oleg sang sweetly.

“Kind of… strange.” Yulia tried to quash her sobbing. “Today they fired our second proofreader… Mikhail Ivanich… You don’t know him. And he… he left calmly enough. But when I went into the metro… I saw… imagine, Oleg, he took a running jump right… right in front of a train.”

“What?” Oleg gasped, though there was more curiosity in his voice than concern.

“He took a running jump… He was standing in the middle of the platform… and when the train started coming out of the tunnel… he jumped.”

“Are you kidding?”

“No. Also… you know… when he jumped he knocked over a stroller… and he and the stroller… fell.”

“What was in the stroller?” Oleg’s curiosity was growing.

“A child,” Yulia sobbed. “And then… when the train pulled out… Mikhail Ivanich and the stroller were lying there on the track… Mikhail Ivanich was still twitching, but the child didn’t have a head… There was just the horrible scream of its mother.”

Yulia caught her breath. It must have been someone in the crowd that gathered who stole her wallet.

“What happened then?” Oleg asked.

Yulia felt like telling him how she’d been jostled in the crowd, how someone’s cold insolent hand had slipped into her pocket for her wallet. Not that Yulia knew exactly what kind of hand it was, hot or cold, but that was exactly how she thought of it: someone’s cold, bony, malicious hand.