Александр Молчанов - KillerFoulkner

ANDREW. Looks like that old man was destined to die today. But not Oksanka. So I wondered — why’s she here? I used to not give a shit about that stuff. Main thing was being remembered after I’m gone. Maybe I’m smarter now. Maybe I want respect while I’m still alive. Money too, although that’s just paper. I’m not a greedy person — not business-greedy — not my thing. Like this guy, he didn’t just give us a ride, he wants us to go to the cops in return. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours, and I’ll make people believe that’s the way it’s working cos that’s how I’ll sell stuff. And then the ads start appearing everywhere. When there didn’t exist before. Before you worked for the people around you. Now it’s for the house, the car, the cash. Travel. I used to see myself walking, camping, seeing the world that way. Now I want a beach resort in the Maldives. This guy’s probably been in the sea a hundred times. I’ve been once. In Riga. In the winter.

OKSANA. And that time my period was late. Please don’t let me be pregnant. They say if you have one abortion you’ll never have kids. He still wouldn’t marry me, even if I was pregnant. Literature class, in the fifth grade, room fourteen on the second floor. My legs felt sticky. And I saw blood on my legs, and my dress, and the chair. The teacher took me to the toilet, gave me a pad, sent me home. And none of the class made fun of me as like they were scared, because this was a new thing. I was the first. Nobody knew what this thing was.

ANDREW. We got out of the car and he drove off. Not a word. Not even a goodbye. Even the car was quiet, like it was sneaking away.

OKSANA. Didn’t tell us anything about the life of a businessman. Didn’t want to talk to mere mortals, apparently. I was ashamed of how I looked. Like I’d slept in a dumpster. Some kind of beggar princess.

ANDREW. It’s like a picture postcard. River here, bridge there, forest on the left, mountain on the right and on top of it, an old church, which was a primary school, then a vocational college, and now is a church again. Shops and a club. This band Stalker played there once. Andrey Derzhavin. Good gig.

OKSANA. Of course the village was a shit hole. The club was an actual building I guess. Trailers instead of shops.

ANDREW. I showed her the police station. The old wooden building and the new brick one. The wooden one’s been there since 1937 when the two previous villages were amalgamated. There was a drunk tank that the drunks used to tunnel out of. They’d catch them straight away. Nowhere to hide around here.

OKSANA. We stopped by the police station and sitting behind the security bars there’s this fat kid with glasses who was in Andrew’s class. They forgot about the old men in the car wreck straight away, and started talking about some guy called Sashka Tugarinov who’d hanged himself in a woodshed while he was wasted.

ANDREW. Tugarinov had come back from army service and got married straight away. Their parents bought them a studio flat on the other side of the river. They’d been living together a month and he came home really drunk, she got pissed and told him to go to his mothers. He went to the woodshed and hanged himself. She was really torn up, said it’d have been better if he’d just carried on drinking. But what’s done is done.

OKSANA. I couldn’t get why he was so upset. Was Tugarinov a close friend or something?

ANDREW. We were enemies right from nursery school. We used to beat the shit out of each other. Pretty well matched. Then he got stronger and started winning more. One time, back when we were actually speaking he even borrowed a tape off me. That started the whole thing off again. He corners me at the club, said «I want a bottle off you tomorrow’ and I said «Where will I get a bottle from?» and he said «I want a bottle off you — tomorrow’ and I said «Yeah — but where from?» and he kind of knows he’s making a dick of himself but he says «Will I get a bottle off you tomorrow?» and I said «Where from?» and then he punched me in the face. Twice. And I fell over. And he left. And one time I was standing on the porch smoking with Yurka Chesnokov. I was wearing this black cap I got off my dad. And Tugarinov came up and he smoked a cigarette, without saying a word and after a bit he said «I wanna wear your hat’ and he just took it and fucked off. I couldn’t work out why he scares me so much. I’ve always been an OK fighter, even if I was fighting someone like two or three years older. I used to be all over them — they’d have to peel me off. But Tugarinov scared me. Like, this paralysing fear. Probably cos when you’re in an actual fight everything flows, it’s all in the moment. But when you’ve got the fear about a thing or a person you wind yourself up and there’s kind of nothing you can do about that. One time I was walking back from the shop and he was walking by with some other dude and he said «Hello you fucking schmuck’ and I just said «Hello’ back. I hated myself for that. He made me his bitch, basically. And now he’s dead and I’ll never be able to say «No, YOU fucking schmuck’. God damn it. I guess I should be happy to be alive, but I don’t. I feel like a part of me just got amputated.

OKSANA. From the police station it felt like we walked another ten kilometres uphill, and then we finally found some more houses, and we were there. A semi-detached with a greenhouse in the yard. Just an ordinary village. And suddenly he turned to me and said. «Hey, we should probably tell my mum we’re getting married’.

ANDREW. My mum nearly shat herself when she saw Oksana.

MAMA. For some reason I thought she was a policewoman and Dyusha had done something wrong.

OKSANA. And he pushed me in front of him and said «Mum, this is Oksana. She’s my fiancée’

ANDREW. And mum got slightly pissed.

MAMA. He’s still a kid. He can’t get married. How can he get married?

ANDREW. Mum. Come on. I’m not sixteen any more.

OKSANA. He walked into the flat, looked in the bedroom, said «Is dad asleep?» and then he called me over and said «I’ll show you your room’.

MAMA. Are you staying for a while?

ANDREW. We have to leave tomorrow morning.

MAMA. I’ll get your father up. He can get the sauna ready..

ANDREW. I showed off my room. A dozen shelves of books, half of them I’d stolen from the library. Guitar, tape deck, Wave turntable, and the best bit — the view. You can’t buy a view like that. The pond, the forest, the clouds.

OKSANA. This poxy little room, an iron bed, a chair and some bookshelves.

MAMA. I’ve not even had a proper look at her. Is her background good? No alcoholism? Is she healthy? Can she wash and cook? I need to know these things so I can tell what kind of a wife she’ll be. It’s all so quick. He was only a toddler the other day and now he’s engaged.

ANDREW. Dad was taking firewood to the bath house outside. Smoke started coming out of the chimney. I didn’t say anything.

OKSANA. What the hell is this about?

ANDREW. You don’t have to do anything. Just one night pretending we’re engaged. Nobody’s gonna make you marry me.

OKSANA. It’s women who choose to get married anyway.

ANDREW. You know what I mean.