Roberto Bolaño - The Return

One winter night Pavlov called me at home. He sounded furious. He ordered me to come and see him immediately. I’d heard through the grapevine that some of his business operations weren’t going so well. I tried to suggest that maybe it could wait, given the time and the temperature outside, but Misha wasn’t in a waiting mood: Either you get here in half an hour, he said, or tomorrow morning I cut your balls off. I got dressed as fast as I could and before going out I put a knife in my pocket, a knife I’d bought when I was a medical student. The streets of Moscow, at four in the morning, are not exactly safe, as I guess you know. The trip was like the continuation of the nightmare I’d been having when I was woken by Pavlov’s call. The streets were covered with snow, the temperature must have been about five or ten degrees and for quite a while I didn’t see another human being. At first I was walking ten yards and then trotting the next ten to warm myself up. After fifteen minutes, my body resigned itself to plodding on, step by step, clenched against the cold. Twice I saw patrol cars coming, and hid. Twice I saw taxis, but neither of them stopped for me. Apart from that, I came across drunks, who ignored me, and shadows, which, as I passed, disappeared into the enormous entrances along Medveditsa Avenue. The apartment where I was to meet Pavlov was in Nemetskaya Street; normally, on foot, it would have taken thirty or thirty-five minutes to get there, but that hellish night it took almost an hour and when I arrived four toes on my left foot were frozen.

Pavlov was waiting for me by the fireplace, reading and drinking cognac. Before I could say anything he smashed his fist into my nose. I hardly felt the blow but I let myself fall anyway. Don’t stain my carpet, I heard him say. He proceeded to kick me about five times in the ribs, but since he was wearing slippers, that didn’t hurt too much either. Then he took a seat, picked up his book and his glass and seemed to calm down. I got up, went to the bathroom to wash away the blood that was running from my nose, and then returned to the living room. What are you reading? I asked him. Bulgakov, said Pavlov. You know his work, don’t you? Ah, Bulgakov, I said as my stomach tied itself in a knot. You mention Natalia, I thought, and I’ll kill you. I slipped my hand into my coat pocket, feeling for the little knife. I like sincere people, said Pavlov, honorable people, who aren’t underhanded; when I place my trust in someone, I want to be able to trust that person implicitly. My foot is frozen, I said, you should drop me at the hospital. Pavlov didn’t listen, so I decided to stop complaining, anyway it wasn’t that bad, I could already move my toes. For a while both of us were silent: Pavlov looked at the book by Bulgakov ( The Fateful Eggs , I think it was), while I watched the flames in the fireplace. Natalia told me you’ve been seeing her, said Pavlov. I didn’t say anything but I nodded. Are you sleeping with that whore? No, I lied. Another silence. Suddenly I was convinced that Pavlov had murdered Natalia and was going to murder me the same night. Without weighing up the consequences I threw myself at him and slashed his throat. I spent the next half hour covering my tracks. Then I went home and got drunk.

A week later the police arrested me and took me to the Ilininkov police station where I was questioned for an hour. A pure formality. Pavlov’s replacement was called Igor Borisovich Protopopov, also known as the Sardine. He wasn’t interested in athletes, but he kept me on as a bettor and match-fixer. I served him for six months before leaving Russia. What about Natalia, you must be wondering. I saw her the day after killing Pavlov, very early, at the sports center where she trained. She didn’t like the look of me. She said I looked like I was dead. I detected a note of scorn in her voice, but also a note of familiarity, even affection. I laughed and said I’d drunk a lot the night before, that was all. Then I took myself to the hospital where Jimmy Fodeba worked to get my frozen toes checked out. It wasn’t really a serious problem, but by greasing a few palms we got them to keep me there for three days; then Jimmy fiddled the admission forms so it turned out that when Pavlov was killed, I had been flat on my back, warmly tucked up and happy as could be.

Like I told you, six months later I left Russia. Natalia came with me. First we lived in Paris and we even talked about getting married. It was the happiest time in my life. So happy that when I think back to it now, it makes me feel ashamed. Then we spent a while in Frankfurt and in Stuttgart, where Natalia had friends and hoped to find a good job. The friends weren’t so friendly in the end, and poor Natalia couldn’t find steady employment, though she even tried working as a cook in a Russian restaurant. But she was no good at cooking. We hardly ever talked about Pavlov’s death. Unlike the police, Natalia thought his own men had done away with him, specifically the Sardine, but I said it must have been a rival gang. Funnily enough, she remembered Pavlov as a gentleman and always spoke warmly of his generosity. I let her go on and laughed to myself. Once I asked her if she was related to General Chuikov, the man who defended Stalingrad, now known as Volgograd. The things you come up with, Roger, she said, of course not. When we’d been living together for a year she left me for a German, by the name of Kurt something or other. She told me she was in love and then she cried, because she felt sorry for me or just because she was happy, I don’t know. Come on, that’s enough, mala mujer , I said to her. She started laughing like she always did when I spoke my language. I started laughing too. We shared a bottle of vodka and said good-bye. After that, when I realized there was nothing to keep me in that German city, I came to Barcelona. I’m working as a gymnastics instructor in a private school. Things aren’t going too badly; I sleep with whores and there are two bars where I hang out and have a circle, as they say here. But sometimes, especially at night, I miss Russia, I miss Moscow. It’s pretty good here but it’s not the same, though if you asked me, I wouldn’t be able to say exactly what it is I miss. The joy of just being alive? I don’t know. One of these days I’m going to get on a plane and go back to Chile.

Once, after a conversation with a friend about the mercurial nature of art, Amalfitano told a story he’d heard in Barcelona. The story was about a sorche , a rookie, in the Spanish Blue Division, which fought in the Second World War, on the Russian Front, with the German Northern Army Group to be precise, in the vicinity of Novgorod.

The rookie was a little guy from Seville, blue-eyed and thin as a rake, and more or less by accident (he was no Dionisio Ridruejo, not even a Tomás Salvador; when he had to give the Roman salute, he did, but he wasn’t really a fascist or a Falangist at heart) he ended up in Russia. And there, for some reason, someone started calling him sorche for short: Over here, sorche , or: Sorche , do this, Sorche , do that, so the word lodged itself in the guy’s head, but in the dark part of his head, and in that capacious and desolate place, with passing time and the daily panicking, it was somehow transformed into chantre , cantor. How this happened I don’t know, let’s just say that some connection dormant since childhood was reactivated, some pleasant memory that had been waiting for its chance to return.

So the Andalusian came to think of himself as being a cantor and having a cantor’s duties, although he had no conscious idea of what the word meant, and couldn’t have said that it referred to the leader of a church or cathedral choir. And yet, and this is the remarkable thing, by thinking of himself as a cantor, he somehow turned himself into one. During the terrible winter of ’41, he took charge of the choir that sang carols while the Russians were hammering the 250th Regiment. He remembered those days as full of noise (muffled, constant noises) and an underground, slightly unfocused joy. They sang, but it was as if the voices were lagging behind or even anticipating the movements of the singers’ lips, throats and eyes, which in their own brief but peculiar journeys often slipped into a kind of silent crevice.