Mikhail Armalinsky - Prostitution Divine. Short stories, movie script and essay

Summers he tried to spend on the beach, even when the days were overcast. He strolled along the shore conversing with young women. Sometimes he played volleyball, but Nar’s movements, hampered by his abundance of muscles, were not fast enough, with the result that some of the slimmer players – whom Nar privately called “runners” – played a livelier game than he did. This being the case, once he had struck a few blows to show off the musculature motion, he left the game circle as if disappointed in the skill of the other players.

In winter, Nar looking impressively manly, went out to rub himself with snow and yet to avoid giving anyone the impression that he was cold. He also walked to the river, to a swimming hole used by winter swimmers. With a stony face he plunged through the large hole in the ice and shoved ice floes out of his way. A crowd of spectators, from whom Nar drew ecstatic looks, gathered around him. It was no wonder, therefore, that in winter Nar habitually went around with a cold.

To his supreme regret, however, he was obliged to wear clothing much of the time, and since clothing hid his musculature, he tried to delegate to his clothing that function of getting attention which his body, had it been nude, would have performed. For this reason he selected colors that ran from bright green to orange, and his outfits were festooned with darts, half belts, miniature pockets, borders and similar accouterments. On seeing Nar in his current finery, one of his friends said to him, “You’d be better off going naked, it’d be more decent.”

But whenever anyone told him to his face that he was tastelessly dressed, Nar demanded logical proofs of this assertion, which of course, no one was able to produce, and he felt that he had won the argument.

Occasionally, as he scrutinized his body, Nar was reminded that he would have to die someday, and that all the labors invested in producing such gorgeous muscles would be lost without a trace, together with the muscles themselves. Recoiling in horror from this thought, Nar stuffed it into a dark corner of his consciousness and went on working out. When he walked down the street past display windows, he looked at his reflection and rejoiced that he was still young and had before him a long life with such a handsome and powerful body.

Once he happened to see an advertisement for lessons at a mime studio. Nar enrolled that very day and happily bought himself the mime’s uniform of black tights and leotard. During his first lesson he bent his arm too suddenly and tore his right sleeve along the seam. But one of the female students offered to mend it. When a few days later they wound up in bed, the girl communicated to him her fears of becoming pregnant, and flatly refused to take seriously the contraceptive that he was beginning to slip on with clumsy fingers. As a compromise the girl turned her back to him. At first Nar was shocked, as associations to homosexuality rose to his mind, but then desire got the upper hand and he rid himself of it by accepting her terms. Nar felt that the girl expected some kind of compromise from him, so she might receive that share of sensation which was due her by the laws of nature; but, now that he found himself in a state of contentment, he no longer wanted to think about her, and he fell to admiring his abdominal muscles. The girl gazed with tenderness at Nar’s body, which had served her as an art object, and whose purely aesthetic charm would suffice for just one more rendezvous.

When he had completed about a month’s study of the art of mime, Nar decided to give his friends a demonstration of his progress. He was not too lazy to prepare properly: he changed into his black leotard and announced the title of his act: “Bird of Prey.” Whatever he may have been attempting to portray – bending from the waist and jutting his arms out behind him – more than anything else it resembled an exercise for the oblique muscles of the spine. Several of the spectators expressed the opinion that if this was a bird it was certainly not predatory, but more likely domestic, of the genus “turkey.” And indeed, a certain resemblance to a bird could be observed in the way he strutted, but this came naturally to him without need of any lessons. Of this his gratified audience informed him plainly and without mincing words. After this debut Nar discontinued his lessons at the mime studio.

Nar’s ever-growing love for his own body continually provoked in his acquaintances a desire to tease him, and Nar accepted this stoically. But many people were simply exasperated by him, and when, as sometimes happened, they spoke to him rudely, he tried to “clear up any misunderstanding.” Instead of replying in kind or ceasing to associate with the man who had thus insulted him, he would cry out in honest astonishment: “Look, what have I done to you?” – at which they simply gave up on him and walked away.

On occasions when a fight was brewing from an already insupportable mass of insult, Nar would puff out his muscles and glint his eyes in the direction of the offender, by which means he would manage to frighten his adversary and induce him to make conciliatory gestures, which Nar always accepted eagerly.

Once, as he was walking along the street with a woman, a passerby shoved him. Nar grabbed him by the sleeve and demanded an apology. The man obediently paused, as if trying to decide whether or not to apologize, and then suddenly struck Nar in the face. Nar lost consciousness for a second, but remained in his feet. Returning to himself, he saw that the fellow was running, and rapidly getting away. Nar took off after him, but quickly realized that he would never catch him – Nar was a slow runner, and this character had already vanished from view. Since there was no blood, and the pain passed quickly, Nar gave up and returned to the girl, who was crying with fright. That evening the girl was extremely affectionate, and Nar loudly vituperated the “scoundrel” as he attentively studied his undamaged face in the tiny mirror of her compact.

When he went to a gym to “pump iron” Nar customarily brought along a liter of milk in a cardboard carton; he would place it beside the weight he was pressing and drink it up in the course of his workout. He had read in some magazine that by doing that he would sharply accelerate the growth of his muscles. On one of his workout days a women’s volleyball team was practicing in the gym, and in order to retrieve their flying ball the women frequently ran out to where Nar was devotedly lifting weights. One of them asked him, as she grabbed the ball, why he was drinking milk. Nar explained, and she giggled stupidly. Not long after this the volleyball team took a break, and they settled down not far from Nar. He tried to ignore them, since he felt certain that a large portion of the team was watching him. While pressing his weight, he started drinking his milk in very small, slow swallows, in the manner prescribed in the magazine. At the same time he turned, showing the women, as if by chance, the various sides of his body. The one who had run out after the ball asked him, from where she sat, how long he had been involved in body building. Nar answered her, raising his voice so that she, and the rest, would be able to hear it.

“And is it true that body builders shave their bodies?”

“Yes, you have to for competitions,” Nar confirmed, remembering that it was time for him to shave his chest and armpits.

“And how much milk do you drink?” asked a curious girl.

“One liter per workout,” Nar answered readily, and in order to prolong the conversation added, as he took his next swallow: “But, you know, the milk that they sell these days is just like water.”

Suddenly all the girls were rolling with laughter. It developed that, when Nar had left the room to use the toilet, the girls had drunk up almost all the milk and replaced it with water, and Nar, on his return, had continued to drink it, suspecting nothing. When the girls explained the joke to him, Nar indulgently joined their laughter, although in his soul he felt uncomfortable – it was the first time that so many women had laughed at him, and it had occurred precisely when he was fully armed – that is, when his body was nearly nude.