Александр Молчанов - KillerFoulkner

OKSANA. I can’t believe this is happening.

ANDREW. You should thank Seka.

OKSANA. Fuck you. Shall I go out there and tell your mum you’re a liar?

ANDREW. Please. We won’t get the money if you do.

OKSANA. What can I say to him? This is madness.

ANDREW. Mum knocks gently, like she’s not used to knocking on doors. Go and help your dad, she says. What kind of help would dad want? OK. I’ll go.

OKSANA. Yeah. So now mum-in-law’s come to get acquainted. She sat opposite me. Fat. Grey showing through the dye-job. Stank of tobacco.

MAMA. I’m sitting, sizing her up. Her skin’s not good. Her face too. As for how she’s going to have kids… I sat by the stove and lit a cigarette. She sits too, and suddenly there it is. She pulls out a cigarette as well. Green menthols. Good God.

ANDREW. I got to the bath house, dad was sitting, looking into the fire. I say ’what’s up dad? How’s it going?“ and he says „Well well’. That was the whole conversation.

OKSANA. We’re sitting by the stove, me and the mother-in-law, smoking. And she does not like me.

MAMA. Where are you from, then?

OKSANA. Ramenskoye.

MAMA. Where’s that?

OKSANA. Vashkinskiy

MAMA. And your parents?

OKSANA. Mum works for the Post Office. Dad’s dead.

MAMA. And you and Dyusha are studying together?

OKSANA. Nat-Geo.

MAMA. What’s that?

OKSANA. Natural Geography.

MAMA. So you go on field trips?

OKSANA. Not really. More, we talk about other people’s. Like Sienkiewicz.

MAMA. OK. Where did you meet him?

OKSANA. At the dorm.

MAMA. If you get married, do you get a family apartment?

OKSANA. Oh yeah. They just keep giving and giving. The family apartments are a wooden hut on the riverbank. And there’s a two-year waiting list. Or you can bribe the super as usual.

MAMA. Not bad, Looks like a good girl really, although she smokes. She’ll quit when she gets pregnant though. I meant to.

OKSANA. We need some money.

MAMA. For what?

OKSANA. We need to bribe the superintendent to get a family apartment. Twelve thousand.

MAMA. Why that much?

OKSANA. The super’s greedy.

MAMA. I don’t have that kind of money. I own a shop. Everything’s invested in the stock. You can have two thousand. The rest you’ll have to earn.

OKSANA. She’s a typical businesswoman. Not like Dyusha. Shame she won’t give him the cash. He’s really counting on it.

MAMA. I’ll start the pies warming. What kind do you like?

OKSANA. Raspberry jam..

MAMA. No jam. There’s fish.

ANDREW. Why’s she so quiet? I was sitting on the floor in the sauna’s dressing room. Back to the door. I can feel the heat through it, on my back, but the dressing room’s cold. I start to freeze. Opposite me there’s a bench with towels laid out for us. There are gaps in the dressing room walls. The gaps are supposed to be there — in winter you can go outside and cool off in the outside air. But it’s not winter now so why is it so cold? Now it’s steam-room weather and I’m sitting here in the cold. My body’s got acclimatised to the sauna heat so the actual temperature feels cold. What’s she doing? Why’s she so quiet? Hey, are you sleeping or what?

OKSANA. What d’you want?

ANDREW. Don’t fall asleep. You’ll freeze.

OKSANA. Fuck off. You’d better come over here and whip me than, hadn’t you, husband?

ANDREW. Seriously?

OKSANA. Yeah. Come on.

ANDREW. I jumped up and took my pants off. Then put them back on? Is she actually naked? I half-open the door and of course she is. Face down on the shelf.

OKSANA. Come on in then. Why are you standing there like a stranger?

ANDREW. I went in and tried not to look. She was beautiful. Lying there like that. Her back’s thin, her ass is round, her legs. Oh God.

OKSANA. I look at him and the poor boy stumbles. Never seen a naked girl before? Come on. Get branches, and get to work. He picks up branches and sinks them in the hot water.

ANDREW. Got to soak the leaves. Why aren’t you wearing a hat?

OKSANA. A hat?

ANDREW. You have to protect your head in here or you’ll suffocate.

OKSANA. He takes these two bobble hats and puts one on him, and the other on me. We never used hats in the sauna at home.

ANDREW. I got this sudden mental image of her, skiing, in the hat but otherwise totally naked.

OKSANA. He took the ladle and made steam. It got very hot.

ANDREW. You have to turn the branches first to condense the steam. Then you wipe the sweat off. Then you can start whipping.

OKSANA. Hey! Watch it.

ANDREW. Take it like a woman. One day you’ll have to bear kids.

OKSANA. I said be careful.

ANDREW. The branches left red stripes on her wet skin.

OKSANA. Look at that. You’ve got a hard-on.

ANDREW. What should I do with it?

OKSANA. Take a shower. A cold one..

MAMA. I ran away from home at 14. Of course I thought my mother didn’t understand me and she wanted me gone. I moved to Zhihovo and got a job in a club. We showed movies, put on gigs, did all the local propaganda. And one day this cute young guy came to interview me for the regional paper. I told him everything about myself. And about the village I came from. And how much milk it produced. I came home for the weekend to see my mum, and one evening I was out for a walk and there he was, doing the same. Turned out he lived in the next street, but we’d never met before because he was at college in St Petersburg. And before that he was at Suvorov Military Academy, so he wasn’t around much. We started hanging out. His place, my place. The first time we kissed it was by the old canteen, on the porch, before our wedding.

OKSANA. Maybe I really should marry him? Then we could kiss on a porch too, the night before. There’ll be a fight at the actual wedding. Plates smashed all over the place. Get a pig. He’ll work at the Farm Supplies Depot and I’ll go to the fertilizer plant. I think I’m gonna be sick. Then after that we’ll die. I might as well go hang myself in the woodshed.

ANDREW. Oksana leaned in and said «Let’s go smoke’. We went outside, sat on the porch and she got her cigarettes out. I asked her to sit lower down so we couldn’t be seen from the street. It’s not done here, girls smoking. If you do it means you’re a hooker.

OKSANA. «We’re still engaged’ he said. Moron.

ANDREW. She was definitely angry about something.

OKSANA. Me and your mum talked. She won’t give you the money.

ANDREW. Why not??