as if bumping into the morning in the twilights there,
a morning is wholly unable to bump into the morning…
Tverskaya Station
Zamoskvoretskaya Line
Everything turned topsy-turvy in the home of Irina Rodionovna Oblonskaya. Ruslan, just blossoming into manhood, was suddenly stricken by peritonitis and died on the operating table. Akim was again an orphaned creature, needed by nobody, so he ran away to one of his Caucasian uncles. As if her unbearable rheumatism were not enough, Irina Rodionovna was the victim of an armed robbery in her apartment by three masked bandits who came in search of Nazar’s money, who also waited for me to come home from school. Luckily, or unluckily, I was held up that day by a politics class on the collapse of the Soviet Union and, by the time I got back to her apartment, the whole place was bathed in blood. The neighbors had already called the ambulance to take the half-dead Irina Rodionovna to her own Pirogov Hospital.
For the rest of the day, I scrubbed bloodstains from the walls. When night fell, I armed myself with a little axe and hammer and waited for the return of the bandits. But they didn’t come back that night, or the next day, or after.
Everything around us was topsy-turvy too: the empire was crumbling; the old money was changed; the streets, regions, and towns were given new names. People changed overnight. Kirsa was now ruling one of the bands in Long Ponds; Vanka Korenovsky held some position in the youth wing of People’s National-Patriotic Orthodox Christian movement; Gleb’s actor friends were opening a Moscow stock exchange with Borov…
But worst of all, they began to rename the stations of my metro! In those days, I would look in the mirror and not recognize myself. Others didn’t recognize me, either. Now the old ladies who used to stroke my curly head, lamenting, “Ah, our poor little orphan boy” would scorn me as they stood in line for milk powder: “Just look! Now all kinds of niggers have turned up!” At school I slid from straight As to straight Cs. In art class, sketches I’d abandoned were picked up by pure-Russian Borka Kluchnikov and turned in for As. The drawings I’d really sweat over would be handed back with a big, red C.
My Siberian grandmother suddenly descended on our place on Bolshoi Tatar Street, to look after poor Irina Rodionovna—or so I thought. Actually, she had come to wrangle in court for Nazar’s pension, on the grounds of her “loss of sole breadwinner.” She spent a month making the rounds of all the echelons of the MVD and the social security departments, but not once did she set foot in Pirogov Hospital where poor Irina Rodionovna was healing her broken bones. Finally she won the case and disappeared just as abruptly as she had appeared, with no warning, and without so much as leaving a note.
Yes, everything had gone topsy-turvy in the Oblonskaya household.
It reminded me of a literary joke, which Gleb, whom I now remembered fondly, liked to tell after his trip to Europe in 1988. While in Graz he’d visited the home of Ivan Bunin (now a museum) and was even shown the certificate of the Nobel Prize, which, as you know, Ivan Alekseyevich was awarded. But imagine Gleb’s surprise when he saw a drawing under the certificate that depicted a man lighting the way for others with the torch of his heart; yes, yes, a drawing of Danko, that very same Danko who can be seen in the bas-reliefs of Gorkovskaya Station, now renamed Tverskaya Station.
“Imagine,” Gleb would say, tipsy. “They gave it to Bunin, but they were thinking of Gorky, I’ll bet. Gorky, who Bunin couldn’t stand! And then he had to live with the stigma the rest of his life!”
But in my naked loneliness, my confused thoughts ran counter: “So they should’ve called the station Bunin, then, or what?”
Teatralnaya Station
Zamoskvoretskaya Line
Call me “pot” if you want, but at least don’t bake me in the oven! Not only did they bake me in the oven, but they also burned me until I was black! Oh, that “teacher of humanity” from Red Press Station cursed us all, he cursed our arrogance!
But I’ll tell you everything, in order, without losing my head. In a studio across the hall lived a bachelor of sixty who liked the company of our lonely Irina Rodionovna. And it was this man, of some half-Eastern blood (a fact borne out by his name, which was either Marat or Murat), who would visit Irina Rodionovna in Prigorov Hospital every other day, bringing her a bag of sweet apples or a hot homemade pastry. I remember another feature of his brotherly relationship with Irina Rodionovna: Marat or Murat (Irina Rodionovna used to pronounce it somewhere in between, “Mrat”) looked uncannily like Gorbachev, though he didn’t remind you of Gorbachev obviously, directly, but more insidiously, subconsciously. You would meet him and ask yourself, Where did I just seen that person? Where did I hear that voice? Where was it I just saw those gestures? Ah, of course, it’s our Gorby!
He was always very kind to me, too. He might have been the only non-relative in my life who simply didn’t notice the color of my skin. Unable to find another explanation, I suspected he must be color-blind. During the days when my Siberian grandmother was besieging Moscow, I would simply drop in on Mrat, helping him to bake pastries in his gas oven or cook some thick beetroot soup the way our Irina Rodionovna liked it.
Despite having worked all his life as a bookkeeper in some publishing house, Mrat was an excellent storyteller, and not only a storyteller, but a stylist, to boot. He told me he was editing Tolstoy’s “Strider” for some reason, and how he had found a mistake even Tolstoy himself had missed in his description of a harness. When I would daydream aloud, telling him how one day I would shoot a film about Anna Karenina in the metro, he would smile and say: “You, my friend, are like a cow from the plains cocking your leg at a mountain bull,” and we would both laugh at the image of that bow-legged cow…
It’s no wonder that Mrat loved Nabokov, but for some reason Lolita was his favorite. One day when we were coming home from visiting Irina Rodionovna, after we had stopped into the Central Department Store where he had bought some little presents, when we got to Theatre Station, Mrat sat me down on the bench next to him and began to describe all the passersby as though through the eyes of Nabokov’s Humbert. “Look at how coarse those women are, even that one who thinks she’s so beautiful. If you squeeze her, she’ll leak, like an overripe melon… And that one, a peach, with a dewdrop of morning sherbet. She isn’t playing vulgarly at being a woman yet, and that sits inside her like pure nature, like a bud…”
That night I dreamed of Nabokov in my future, and for the first time in my life I wrote down a dream.
* * *
After he had handed out his books to a few Khakassians and they had wandered off to the sea, he bent over another pile and dug out a really luxurious book, Selected Works, which had just been published in Russia. The book had been printed to the highest standards—on glossy paper, the edges of the pages were deckled, as if they had been scorched. I leafed through the book but said I already had those novels. He turned to another stack, choosing something else to give me, as I was thinking to myself how I might present myself in the best possible light. As I flipped through the Selected Works I noted that one of my books had, incidentally, been published in the same style. “Oh, by the way, did I give you a copy?”
“I don’t remember.”
I started to tell him the plot. He remarked, gently, “So you’ve become a well-known poet?” I mumbled something in reply, along the lines of, yes, they’ve written about me, saying I’m the new Pushkin, and, well, I write novels, too…
“You know, you and I have something in common. You see, in many ways, my situation is an echo of yours. You wrote in English, and I, too, was a Russian-speaking writer who lived in Moscow for a long time.”
He agreed, adding: “I’m turning back to Russian more and more.”
“Well, recently I’ve been writing in Amharic more and more. Which reminds me, my latest Ethiopian novel is about to be published in Paris any day now. C’est bizarre, mais c’est vrai.”
He holds another of his sad books out to me: “Take this one, then. It’s my latest.” He gives me the book and leaves the room for a moment, and all sorts of delicacies are suddenly served. “Taste our strawberries…” Without too much regard for table manners, Mommy and I start tasting those strawberries, surrounded by all those open books. After a minute or two, Vladimir Vladimirovich sits down at the head of the table, and, in a way that reminds me uncannily of Vsevolod Vasilevich Timokhin (incidentally, I wonder if he is all right), takes a glass of ruby-red wine, not champagne, from the ice bucket, and begins his lunch. How this wine—provided by some society of fans for his daily luncheon—suits him!
Novokuznetskaya Station
Zamoskvoretskaya Line
As we were taking the metro from Theatre Station to Novokuznetskaya Station, Mrat continued to whisper in my ear his evaluations of the women sitting across from us in the half-empty car. With some sixth sense, they caught our glances and, realizing we were talking about them, turned crimson with indignation; all except for a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old little nymphet who made eyes at us while rearranging her bangs or tugging at her dress. “You can tell by the way that blonde is sitting how unsure she is of herself. And to hide that insecurity, she’s preemptively aggressive…” Mrat whispered into my ticklish ear. “Look how fitfully she tugs at her collar, how she turns her head—she already knows she’s pre-packaged goods.”
Any minute now, I thought, he’ll fling himself at that young girl and start… But luckily the train pulled into our station, so I took advantage and got up quickly.
But in the station, under one of the Deineka’s mosaics, Mrat decided to tie his untied sneakers. The lamp lit up the mosaic nymphet, hoisted high into the sky by a muscled sportsman, and Mrat asked: “Do you want me to share a terrible secret with you?”
I agreed at once, as though he were about to hand over the last secret of the Soviet Union to me. Mrat pointed at the Deineka maiden and whispered faintly: “I have an underage girlfriend…”
I thought I had studied Mrat well enough, because of his misleading likeness to Gorbachev; after all, what secrets could Gorby have that I didn’t know about?! But no! Mrat had turned out to be a box with a false bottom. At first I was cautious—was he trying to corrupt me? But he wasn’t even looking in my direction, and then I sensed that the man just needed to let it out, much as Gleb had said things to me over the years, and Nazar too. He had met the girl by chance; she had asked him for a cigarette. He had offered her a cigarette in the twilight, not noticing her age, but as he held it out to her he began to tease her, saying playfully: “Is it all right to smoke at such a tender age?” The girl retorted cheekily that she could do a lot more than just smoke. “What else then?” Mrat had asked with a pounding heart. “Give me some money and I’ll tell you!” the girl had replied, lighting up. “Well you see, I haven’t any money on me just now, but… if you come up to my place… I can offer you a coffee, too… and give you some money, of course…” It turned out that Mrat had later been to a psychoanalyst and had talked over every detail of that conversation, explaining his behavior and his motives for that behavior and the girl’s reactions. His voice suddenly trembled as he said the last words, as he added the phrase “my girl.”
She’d nodded by way of consent and jauntily waved the smoke away with her hand.
“I’ve got a dog at home, you see, so I’ll go and tie it up, and you come upstairs to flat thirty-two in a little bit, my girl…” Mrat lied, trying to control the heavy breathing that was giving him away. Of course, there was no dog at his place, but he was afraid of the neighbors’ prying eyes, and so he hurried up to his flat, glancing around: had anyone seen him with that underage girl?
She went up after him. Before she could even ring the doorbell he flung the door open and gave her a sign to come in quickly. No sooner had she crossed the threshold than he bolted the door and locked it from inside and invited her into the kitchen.
“No,” Mrat said, looking at me at last, “there was nothing like that. We drank coffee, sat a bit, smoked, and talked, and I sent her off with a present. But since then she’s been coming to visit me…” He ended his tale and pointed to the present he’d bought in the department store that day. “It’s for her…”
I didn’t know how to react to that story: what of it? Nabokov’s Lolita. Or look at Goethe, who in his old age had fallen in love with the young Bettina von Arnim. And what of it? There was no lustful saliva drooling from Mrat as there had been from the old Karamazov. There he was, dragging himself along with his empty string bag and little present, past Deineka’s heroic bas-reliefs, going up to the surface in his sneakers, unbecoming at his age. But in that case shouldn’t we demand he marry old Irina Rodionovna?! But then the law of the Soviet underground goes like this: everyone forges his own happiness. And what’s the big deal if Mrat-Gorbachev is one of the New Smiths?!
Paveletskaya Station
Zamoskvoretskaya Line
Two weeks later we said goodbye to Irina Rodionovna, still decrepit after her spell in the hospital, from Paveletskaya Station to Kuban. It turned out that, as early as the previous year, she had traded her apartment in Moscow for what in those days was an enormous additional payment. She only admitted it to me at Paveletskaya, which was—to use a phrase of one of Gleb’s friends—“Mozarty.” Under the light, elegantly linked pillars, which resembled Mozart’s leaping trills, Irina Rodionovna asked me to forgive her for leaving, saying she had a sister and niece down south, that she didn’t feel safe in Moscow anymore.
I felt guilty in a way for all that had happened; after all, her place had been attacked because of my paltry inheritance, left to us by Nazar. Although she didn’t say so, it was me who had brought this calamity down that she was now fleeing. I remembered Mommy’s tale of the cliff that swallowed up dear ones. “Rock, crack open! Crack open!” I wanted to cry out in Mommy’s words. “Let me see Mommy again!” Alas, the decrepit Irina Rodionovna went to Kuban forever, another loss to enter on my long list…
Mrat told me what had really happened with that apartment swap. Irina Rodionovna, torn between her nobility and her citizen’s weakness had asked advice of Mrat, a man with a bookkeeper’s mind, about a possible exchange. And although it was a fantastic exchange at the beginning of 1990—a two-roomed apartment in Moscow for a four-roomed one in an ObKom block in the center of Krasnodar, plus 120,000 rubles in cash—Mrat had talked her out of it. He sensed some inevitable calamity. After all, wasn’t he Gorbachev’s anonymous double!
Maybe it was Ruslan’s death, maybe it was the flight of loyal Akim, maybe it was the attack, or maybe it was something else, but all this took its toll, and Irina Rodionovna changed her mind and decided to go. No, those people from the Party in Krasnodar didn’t rip the poor lady off; she got her four-roomed, furnished ObKom apartment and that very summer she got her 120,000 rubles—an enormous sum for Soviet times. But what were they worth now, lying in her savings account, after the Pavlov reforms? “A bundle of toilet paper,” as the bookkeeper with Gorbachev’s face and habits put it, and added cruelly, “to wipe her decrepit backside…”
Taganskaya Station
Koltsevaya Line
After Irina Rodionovna Oblonskaya’s sudden departure, I was left with nowhere to live. True, Mrat let me live at his place for a month, but I think the kind Irina Rodionovna had paid him for it. Should I go looking for Akim’s Caucasian uncle, or Gleb’s
Russian-Jewish friends and drinking companions, or Nazar’s Asian kin, or my mother’s Siberian branch—where was I supposed to go, which gypsy band should I join? I remembered again how Zulya and I had once planned to run away from home. At the time, I didn’t rack my brains about exactly where or how we were going to live in my metro; it was all the same to me.
But now, in that huge city I was like a little ant whose anthill had been scattered. And here in Taganskaya Station the inhabitants were completely alien: auburn predator-ants had eaten my whole family. I sat down and looked through Mommy’s address book. Everyone I knew had either died or moved away, and their names had been crossed out. As for those not already crossed out, I didn’t know them, and their names looked out at me frostily from the address book, like the nameless bas-reliefs of that station. And it’s true, it is hard for a person when he has nowhere to go, I thought, with Dostoyevsky in mind.
In those years, the Foreign Literary Journal ran a story by someone or other about people living in the metro. With a touch of mysticism, the story portrayed them as quasi-aliens, recognizing one another by their pale skin, which never saw the light of day. But in my case, there was no mysticism; life had simply turned out such that maybe there was nothing for me to do but move into that scattered anthill, the metro?
I had somewhere read an African tale about an ant left alone, homeless, and with nothing to do. He crawled and crawled in his pointlessness until he had crawled right up to the end of the earth, and from there he carried on crawling, right up to the God Nyar himself.
The God Nyar saw the little ant and asked him: “Little ant, why have you crawled up here?” And the little ant complained about his homelessness and pointlessness. Nyar took pity on him and gave him a job keeping watch over an underground well of the waters of life in the desert. By day, the little ant kept watch over the well, but at night, moved by old habits, he would drag drops of water to his old anthill to bring life back to it.
The animals would come to the well and ask to drink, but the little ant would answer them sternly: “No, Nyar ordered me to guard the water!” He wouldn’t give them so much as a drop. But each night the little ant would once again go back to his old business: drop by drop he carried the water off to his anthill.
The animals were angry and went to complain to Nyar, saying that they were dying of thirst. Hearing this, the God Nyar flew into a rage over the little ant and went to the well—but there was no well and no ant…
Maybe that was what I had done, I thought. I had dragged all the life-giving moisture of my memories into this underground realm, into my Moscow anthill, and now there was no more life for me up there, on the surface, where the thirsty beasts and the raging gods were ready to trample me down!
Kurskaya Station
Koltsevaya Line
There is, alas, more darkness in the cosmos than light. And you can see that much with the naked eye, and with the naked soul. And there is more darkness in the metro, too, than there is beauty in the stations. Why then am I—black of skin, black of face, and black of soul—so alone in this darkness? The dead in the neighboring chambers creak and rasp; fresh ones, new arrivals, grind their teeth; the smell of their decay is carried along by the maggots, but my soul sees not another soul… Oh, if you only knew how I longed for my Mommy… Just as during my last days on the surface I longed for that girl whom I had called Lita, no longer searching for her, merely holding on to her memory.
The light of snuffed-out stars, the pain of an amputated arm, the echo of a stifled sound…
Strange to say, Irina Rodionovna had left, but a parcel with a Dneipropetrovsk goose and sunflower oil arrived once again at Kursky railway station. Irina Rodionovna’s replacements, the Krasnodarskis from the ObKom flat, promoted to Moscovites, told us about it. So as before, I went to Kursky to meet the Dneipropetrovsk train.
You know the feeling of déjà vu, don’t you, when present events already seem familiar to you, like you’ve already lived through them? I stood under the information board just as before, the station announcer’s muffled voice proclaimed the arrival and departure of trains, then when the passengers poured out from the Dneipropetrovsk train, a woman waved her hands about and exclaimed: “Look, there he is, the black guy, as black as the rind of over-baked bacon!” She handed over the same canvas bag with the same heavy goose and the same sloshing sunflower oil. Everything was just as it had been.
But this time, I had somehow lost control of my thoughts: they flared and flamed out, ran together. Had I answered aloud or only thought my reply in advance? I didn’t grasp anything anymore. Now I went to the foyer and saw that mushroom in the middle of the hall—for some reason, I was thinking in the past tense, but in reality I was only opening the glass doors leading to the hall. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before; it was as though my weary brain had retched, and whatever was left in my skull was all scrambled up, knowing neither future nor past.
I remember that mushroom—I was forcing myself to put things in order—and I do remember that dolled-up girl, about my age, wandering around the mushroom, around that gigantic toadstool. Who was she waiting for? Shouldn’t I be the one wandering around? Where? In what reality? Concentrate! Concentrate on her face! Putting out her cigarette, as though waving away invisible smoke, there was nothing more in her hands, no bag, no violin case… and everything was spinning, spinning…
I should go off to the side, stand still, force my brain to be still. I’ll lean against the cold marble wall; I’ll merge with the black pillar. The girl goes around and around, and there’s no stopping her. Her bare baby-bird knees pitter-patter like a tongue, like a clapper in the tiny bell of her little skirt, and just keep ringing and ringing in my ears; lipstick on the cigarette, lipstick smeared over half her face; I had never seen such a large moth flitting around a lamp, but where were her wings?! Like the she-ant of a scattered anthill looking for new semen, she fretfully quickens her circle, and then turns back again in the opposite direction…
My thoughts are cluttered. No, this isn’t even déjà vu, it is something more uncanny, something black should now appear in that hall, I can feel the goose struggling in my canvas bag, the oil spills onto the shining floor, something black is threatening, but where from? From which chapters in my mind? From what sign in my memory? And the young girl is still circling and circling around the gigantic phallic lamppost, and my trousers are starting to swell, and I fear that moment, pressing myself all the harder against that black pillar.
And now huge snow-white sneakers descend from that nightmare down into the underground. I can see how they pitter-patter on the steps, extremely long legs growing out of them, first to the knees, then to the waist, in jeans, a kind of slow-motion movie, or the sticky sludge in my brain, in my trousers, swollen at the loins, one step and a T-shirt; one step and the sign “fucker”; one more “mother,” and there it is, the toothless face of the black sportsman, hooking this underage girl and leading her deep into the fathomless vaginal depths of the earth…
I need to keep quiet so my head won’t burst; keep quiet, so my brains won’t spurt out onto the floor; keep quiet, until I choke on myself as I ride the escalator and think my next thoughts, about how he will climb onto the empty pedestal where a lamp was and imagine in front of him on such an empty pedestal that little stone girl, that little stone prostitute…
Ploshchad Revolyutsii Station
Arbatsko-Pokrovskaya Line
If I had only known then that this was just the foyer! Over these fifteen years of black death (I have died more than I lived), my brains gradually dried up, squeezing the memories out as they went. In the end, what remained in my skull was at best the size of a nut or maybe even a dried-out black peppercorn, rolling from side to side as the trains pass. Or has it turned into the beady eye of the protective charm that Zulya gave me to carefully observe my forlorn life? Whichever way…
And so I took control, and there was no need to swill slush on the floor, no need to spill thoughts over the marble…
And so it was that I bore a stranger’s goose and a stranger’s sunflower oil unto Mrat, and Mrat was pleased at the unexpected gift, so he made up his mind to set out a feast. In riddles did he speak unto me: “Then shall we eat this goose in a threesome? I shall call my beloved, I shall call my young girl!” How could I object, how could I refuse? I lived at his place like a little church mouse, so I held my tongue and said not a word. And so he called that young girl, he called his dear sweetheart and invited her to the feast. And that is how the tale of the roast goose and the anointed guest goes, but that is not how the rest of our story unfolds…
Ah, that last little black peppercorn—or maybe even less, the last sprinkle of hash—which rolled around in my empty skull, unable to disappear, now burning me with bitterness, now maddening me with its drunken smoke the whole of the next day, as, picking and plucking the goose, stuffing it with the apples left over from Irina Rodionovna’s hospital ration, I prepared myself for the meeting with my peeress, the young girl, Mrat’s underage lover, and again my soul went through the same lurches as it had yesterday at Kursky Station, not so much déjà vu as nous reverrons (not “already seen” but “we’ll meet again”), thought shoved against thought, like the apples in the innards of the goose, and I roasted in my suppositions like that fat goose roasted in the oven. It’s not Christmas, after all, I thought, then came another flare: What if yesterday’s dolled-up girlie shows up? But the thought was overtaken by another: And with her the white-toothed black sportsman in a T-shirt with the evil promise “motherfucker?” How would the old lecher Mrat behave, and how should I act?
All day long my pants swelled, so from time to time I would run to the bathroom to extinguish my flesh with cold water, but something I couldn’t fathom nagged at my heart.
Mrat had a quick wash in the tight gap between cooking and setting the celebratory table—though just what we were celebrating remained a mystery. Then he began combing his thin Gorbachevian hair, tied his old-fashioned bowtie into a fat knot (in the “Windsor style” he called it), and set about glancing periodically out of the window into the yard. He was riled up, jealous in advance of my age, my presence, my goose… “Just don’t start talking to her about that rock music!” he warned me.
That’s what my long-gone friend Zulya had once said to me after a tennis lesson, “Just don’t start talking with me about rock music; I don’t know anything about it.” This thought brought with it a pang that evaporated as suddenly as it had appeared. Mrat repeated himself: “Just don’t go talking to her about rock music…” I couldn’t answer him; my voice no longer fit in my throat after a whole day of silence, so I just shook my head.
By six o’clock the goose was done. I skewered it for the last time with a fork, hands trembling, and turned off the gas. The oven gave an unhappy twitter. Or was it the goose’s spirit, saying a last farewell to its body? Or maybe it was a ring at the door? Mrat leapt up to look through the peephole. He flung open the door, an empty-handed shadow scampered into the hall and I, bent over with a huge kitchen knife in my hand, even without straightening up, realized: it was her…
It was her, my girl, Lita… How overjoyed I was for a split second, how I cried out, how I—probably—leapt up as high as the ceiling, stabbing it with the knife. And all at once Mrat, old, lewd Mrat, exclaimed, “Moscow, all mine, Moscow is my guest!” and reached out to her like a spider’s web, and she flung herself at his neck, like a butterfly, like a little ant, like a fly. They twirled around, under the lamp and only her bare, bent knees, sticking out from below her short little bell of a skirt, like a tongue, like a clapper, rang and rang in my head, in my heart, ensnared in a net…
And everything exploded inside me. I don’t remember how I threw myself, hacking with my knife at this cobweb, I don’t remember the screams that floated into oblivion. I don’t remember how I got to the metro, at Ploshchad Revolyutsii Station; I don’t remember by what power I was carried there, the bloody knife in my hands; how I found myself at that heathen altar at my Mommy’s feet… I cried unseen tears, like that ant, punished by the God Nyar for wasting the well of life. The well dried up my tears. I tried to make Mommy move with the knife, but its sharp point only scraped over the slippery stone and finally plunged into my thigh, and the fresh blood mingled with the dried blood and a thin little trail spread toward the silent altar…
As I looked at the knife, I discovered to my horror that the charm was missing from my wrist, that small eye, keeping me alive. Oh, where is my Zulya, who could bind my wounds now?
The wound ached with a dull, drawn-out pain, my soul ached with a drawn-out, dull pain… What was that river called? Black, was it? The one where I fell down into the abyss, someone screaming my name after me. Yes, that’s it. There’s surely more darkness in the world than light… The blood on my inflated pants dried the color of black currants… But what was that river called, the one where only a bridge remained, a smith’s bridge? Why shouldn’t it be New Smith’s? The river had dried up, her two banks had disappeared: the bank of heaviness and the bank of tenderness, and all that remained was the bridge over them, linking them together like a primeval clamp. They repaired that bridge after all, put it back together again. A bridge over what? Did I fight with Mrat—who had shouted that terrifying “Moscow, all mine, Moscow!”—at that dried up river, pounding him into the ground? What had happened? Where is my mother, and where is my girl? Lita, Zulya. To the heart it seems that, as with any loss, all you need to do is give it a little shake and you will find what you lost; it is just lying forgotten in some wrong place, and you are already on your way back, where the thing you lost peeks out from every elephantine arch, as though it had just been standing there, or further on, under the next arch? No, maybe one passage further on… and these thoughts rumbled on to the very end of Kuznetskiy Most, and what is lost is not there, not there. There is neither the river, nor time, nor truth—only Hades’ underground realm. And the piercing metal nails…
Trains race back and forth, but Anna Karenina is not on them, nor is my Mommy Moscow, by the name of Mara, Marusia…Neither Zulya, nor Lita is there…
Emptiness, complete emptiness… and the bridge over it, the scanty ant bridge between my present, otherworldly reality of death and the former unreality of what I called life…
Pushkinskaya Station
Tagansko-Krasnopresnenskaya Line
I know what black Pushkin felt before his black death. A great sense of betrayal. As though the old countess had dealt out the wrong cards… and a great sense of impotence in the face of it all… deceived and betrayed in every way: by my father, who left me even before I was born; my mother, who so strongly bound me to her and then left me an orphan; my stepfathers, who threw me into the abyss between them. Deceived by Zulya, in whom I found a kindred soul and a close friend and maybe something more, who disappeared into the ether; Lita, the airy Lita, who preferred the angel of death and lust over me; by Mrat; by the ever flowing and ebbing underground; by the no longer recognizable city; and by my crumbling country… No matter what you do, it all comes to the same thing. Deception, deception, deception… or maybe I have deceived myself—with this made-up world, these invented relationships, this dreamed-up warmth of human hearts, which doesn’t really exist…
A sense of the never-ending, mind-boggling circle, to break out of it with integrity is to be like a child thrown from a carousel. Look, these lines spurt in all directions from the print of the Moscow metro map.
Drop by drop I dragged the living water from the God Nyar to cleanse myself and my anthill from the aina-devil’s spit, but I lost my way between two worlds: my brains, sliding back to the first dot, the primordial point, no longer remember where they are—had they decided to run the metro through the cemetery?—the train comes ever closer… Was it that I had resuscitated the world of the dead at the cost of death to the living, or the other way around? The wheels are already screeching on the rails…
Believe me, I know what Pushkin felt after his encounter at Black Currant River, but did he know how I would feel? Faithful and betrayed, the only one left to close the doors honorably, which he had left open a crack, so that a thin ray of light still swirls in the dusky, pungent darkness, but enough… The sound of the train over my head… or under my feet… Is it Mommy’s voice that I hear ahead out of the thundering darkness or is it the cry of the young prostitute, of Lita-Moscow, coming from behind. Who is it calling my name: “Kirill, Kiriiill? It is time!”
The wheels are rumbling overhead… The black little ant closes the black well. The black rooster mounts the black tree once again and calls out in a black, inhuman voice: “Watch the closing doors…”
And as I fall from the platform under the train’s wheels, I catch a glimpse of Zulya, who has at last tracked me down in the labyrinths of the underground, screaming out my still-living name and her two eyes, like the beads of two protective charms trying to save me… “Kiriiiill!…”
And yet…