15

Mitya and Marina arrived at the Belyaevo metro stop earlier than Gleb and had some time to kill. Marina was hungry, and they went to a nearby bakery. Mitya was delighted to play with the little spatula on a rope that you were supposed to use to check the bread for freshness. Marina got them what Mitya’s parents called “three-kopeck buns,” rounds of white bread with a thin crust. Then they went to a store next door and upon Marina’s insistence got a cut of “doctor’s sausage” and a bottle of kefir. Mitya had never had such a wonderful meal. He stripped away layers from the bun, imagining that he was eating crab, something he’d never had but assumed required finesse and dedication. The sausage was the color of Mitya’s skin and the texture of soft rubber. It was salty and smooth and pleasantly ripped on his teeth. The kefir with which they washed it down seemed carbonated and left a tangy aftertaste.

“Is it true that kefir can get you drunk?” Mitya asked. He had read about road militsia stopping a man who had drunk too much kefir. The Breathalyzer test detected alcohol, which led to his arrest.

“I wish.” Marina said through the crumbs. “Alcohol never tastes this good.” Mitya agreed. Kefir was much tastier than vodka. Marina was more cheerful throughout the meal than she’d been on the metro, lost in her thoughts, but there was still something sad about her.

Gleb arrived with a bottle of wine to bring to the concert. He led Marina and Mitya to the apartment in question through the open plains of the residential neighborhood, where all of the buildings looked just like the other ones. Mitya instantly thought of the film Ironiya Sudby, which they always showed on New Year’s Eve: about a man who got drunk and accidentally ended up in the apartment that was identical to his, in a high-rise with the same address, but in Saint Petersburg instead of Moscow. Mitya hoped that he wouldn’t have to make his way back to the metro on his own because he would never be able to retrace his steps. Besides, it was already pretty dark, and the buildings blended together into one superblock.

He remembered about the thing on his mind when they were in the building, waiting for the elevator to get to the thirteenth floor.

“Do you know what a pleshka is, Gleb?”

“Yes, that’s what Plekhanov University is known as. That’s where all the rich kids go to study finance.”

It didn’t make sense that Zolotoy was talking about that place, so Mitya decided to ask someone else.

The apartment they entered was smaller than the one Mitya’s family lived in, and it was crowded. There were shoes scattered all over the floor in the entryway, and it smelled like feet. They took off their shoes, too, and placed their coats on the bed in the dark room to the left, and then joined everyone in the bigger room. The furniture there was arranged so that everyone could see the “stage.” Some random chairs and instruments stood in front of a wall of cabinets. There were a few guitars and some things that connected to them and looked technical. All the spots on the sofa and armchairs were occupied, so Marina and Mitya made a space for themselves on the floor. Then they waited there for Gleb to join them. He knew some of the people in the audience, so he had to say his hellos. If the people were in proximity, he introduced them to Marina and Mitya, which, in Mitya’s opinion, was unnecessary. He misheard or immediately forgot everyone’s names and was terrified that he’d be in a position to have to remember them.

Mitya was happy to sit there and look around the crowded, loud room. Thankfully this setup also suited Marina. Mitya did not want to pry or make her tell him what was wrong, so he concentrated on studying his surroundings. It was not what he had imagined an underground party to be. Everyone was dressed simply: pants or jeans, plaid shirts, and chunky sweaters. He had expected the bohemians to be dressed in flashy clothes. Mitya looked himself over. Everything that made him seem so poor among his classmates looked completely normal at this concert. Most of the people were older than Marina, but some were between him and Marina in age. The only difference was that they looked quite healthy, without the lesions on the sides of their mouths, or blue circles beneath their eyes. Their hair was clean and shiny, not standing in greasy tufts from where the beanie was. Everyone was drinking wine, its purple aroma filling the room like steam. Gleb brought a glass of wine to Marina too.

“I don’t know if he should drink,” he told Marina, pointing at Mitya. “So if you want, share?”

Marina looked at Mitya and concluded that it was up to him to choose what he wanted. She gulped some wine from the glass and then passed it to him. Mitya took the glass and sipped some of the liquid. It tasted remotely fruity, like unsweetened jam dissolved by water, but also had burning sourness that felt astringent in his mouth. He swallowed it and gave the glass back to Marina.

Mitya sat there, lulled by the loudness around him, and stared at a small stuffed fox that had been stuck on top of one of the cabinets. It balanced precariously on the cabinet’s edge as if it were ready to plummet down on the humans at any minute. Its orange-and-white fur looked matted even from below, and Mitya thought that at least one creature in the room looked dismal, like him.

The concert started quite abruptly, without any introduction. Some people from the crowd came to the front and started playing. The songs had long complicated lyrics that did not always make sense and music that sounded as if it were coming down the pipes and the radiators. People around Mitya seemed pretty taken with the performance, reacting to certain lyrics with approval and nodding along to music solos, which never lasted too long.

The singer wore thick-rimmed glasses. Mitya thought that he could have easily confused him with a math teacher, def­initely someone academically inclined, maybe even a mad scientist. The words he sang were interesting: poetic and beautiful, like something Mitya could have read in a book, but at the same time oddly current, with slang and colloquialisms. He often mentioned current events and contemporary everyday occurrences. The songs reminded Mitya of Mayakovsky’s poetry, but they were even more alive. The man sang in a declamatory nasal monotone, which made Mitya wonder if he had any musical ability at all, or if his singing was just a way for the words to be born.

The ending of one of the songs particularly resonated with Mitya:

A white doe ran down the pavement at night.

A mentovskaya car pulled over, flickering its lights.

It’s an unfair fight, but who’s going to win?

Will everything go along with fate’s whim?

It will be up to you, in the end, it seems.

As a woman sitting near Mitya sang along with the band, he felt like he was receiving a message from somewhere. Masked as a song, it was aimed at him, with ciphers that only he could decode. Mitya had never seen a white doe or any doe for that matter, but he conjured the image of a big-eared, graceful animal from one of his favorite nature books, and thought about Zolotoy’s long face and albino hair. The mentovskaya car was where the militsia was loading Valerka to murder him. The unfair fight between the good and the bad, which only he could win, was, of course, the current situation. Mitya was the only person who could help the good win over evil because he was anointed with the needle. Mitya was eternally grateful to the singer for conveying this message, although he wasn’t sure if the man knew what he was doing or merely served as a vessel. He moved on to the next song, seemingly oblivious of his prophetic words, and quite drunk.

After the band played a few more songs, they gave the stage to another band, which, to Mitya’s surprise, was fronted by a boy who looked only slightly older than him. One of the musicians was a girl, which Mitya also found unexpected. The boy read a poem, then started singing to music. He sounded like a young boy calling out his friends to play soccer, though his subjects were all serious: hunger, politics, work, and war. There was nothing unusual about this boy; he looked like most of the boys at Mitya’s school, and yet here he was, singing like a grown-up, receiving approval from the room. It was as if he had managed to break the mold that constrained everyone to their particular positions in life and become a grown-up without abandoning his childhood.

Little foxes took up matches

And set the azure sea ablaze.

It’s us the control point dispatches

To settle the impending craze.

Mitya recognized the first two lines from a children’s poem, in which the animals began rebelling against their ordinary behavior. But the rest of the lyrics were, he thought, the author’s own. This mix of the old and the new struck Mitya. He didn’t understand exactly what was implied by the lyrics. But it all still made perfect sense to him, because he saw the power of words put together this way. It was similar to what he felt when he became Devchonka, and when he descended the stairs to see Valerka as her. It was the feeling of truth and beauty conveyed through art, and Mitya realized that he wanted nothing else in the world but to keep re-creating this feeling.

After the performance, Mitya had to call home. Gleb asked the owner of the apartment, a brown-haired girl who looked at Marina with prickly eyes, to show Mitya the phone in the kitchen. Mitya told Alyssa Vitalyevna on the other end that he was at a concert, and she was so happy to hear that he was at a cultural event that she told him not to rush home at all. Besides, his father had gone out to see a friend and wouldn’t return until later.

When he was done with the call, Mitya left to look for Marina and Gleb. He couldn’t find them, and figured they were kissing somewhere. He heard voices from outside the apartment and went to check it out. The audience and the musicians had spilled out of the tiny apartment and gathered by the stairwell, smoking, drinking, and laughing.

He saw the boy from the second band next to the apartment’s door. He was now smoking an unfiltered cigarette, a papirosa. They were cheaper than regular cigarettes, but even Vovka didn’t smoke them. It looked kind of cool, though, at least the way the boy smoked it, his teeth clenched hard around its tip, as if he were an old-timey film star playing the role of a sailor.

“I’ve never seen anyone smoke those,” Mitya said, smelling the smoke of the papirosa as it drifted toward him. It smelled almost like a regular cigarette but somehow worse, duller, with an undertone of something acidic.

“These are Kazbek,” the boy said and showed a pack from his pocket, which was, unlike the usual cigarette packs, square, softer, and had a picture of a black silhouette of a horseman against a mountain range. “You want one?”

Mitya refused. He didn’t want this acidity inside his mouth.

“I liked your performance,” he said.

The boy inhaled the smoke sharply, which made his upper lip curl up.

“Some of the lyrics are so raw, most of them don’t work,” he said, exhaling.

“I think they were powerful.”

“Yeah, what did you like?”

“I liked the one about foxes.”

“That’s our old one. See? It’s good, but the other things are shit. I write well when my lyrics are from a girl’s perspective, or when I fall in love. But that’s why we’re called Little Foxes, that song.”

“I like the name too.”

“It’s the only thing that can describe our reality. Postmodernity, you know? We had so many stupid ideas for names, like Anarchic Broth, or Well-Being Palimpsest, you know, in reference to Kropotkin, but it’s pretentious. So we stuck on this one.”

Mitya nodded as he watched the blue spaces around the boy’s mouth where he had shaved.

“Have you read Lord of the Flies?” the boy said all of a sudden.

Mitya shook his head.

“Read it. My favorite book. It shows how messed up we all are, how full of shit. Given the opportunity, we’d all want power. Little profit-hungry Yeltsins and Gaidars. I’m as bad as anyone else, but at least I’m so sickly that I’d probably end up dead before someone could kill me.”

Mitya recognized the names, but still was not entirely clear on what the boy was angry about. He also wondered what kind of sickness was plaguing him, but didn’t want to ask the impolite question.

“At least Boris here doesn’t pretend to be noble.” The boy pointed to the man in glasses smoking farther up the stairs. Mitya recognized the singer from the first band. “He gets piss drunk and breaks bottles over people’s heads when he doesn’t like them.”

“I liked his songs too,” Mitya said.

“Of course, he’s the real deal,” the boy answered. “I’m Seva, by the way.” He extended his hand for a handshake.

“Mitya.”

“I’ll see you around, okay? I have to go now, my grandmother is waiting for me.”

Mitya nodded. So, like him, Seva was here on permission from his grandmother. It seemed incredible. A boy only slightly older reading poems and singing in front of grown-ups, being taken as an equal and admired. And, moreover, someone who had talked to Mitya himself like they were equals. It was as if Mitya had left the ordinary world, where he was small and insignificant, and been transplanted to a place where such things as age did not matter. Then again, Mitya thought, Seva was talented, and he himself was ordinary, so it didn’t seem like he would be able to command the same kind of respect.

Mitya watched Seva walk away, saying goodbye to everyone outside the apartment. Boris, when he wasn’t singing, seemed more like a math teacher. A drunk math teacher. Mitya went inside the apartment to look for Marina and Gleb again so that he could ask them to direct him to the metro.

They were still missing, so Mitya used the WC and then wanted to get into the bathroom to wash his hands. It was locked. Mitya knocked on the door, and then knocked again after a brief pause. “It’s Mitya,” he said through the door loudly, in case his friends were inside. Finally, the door was unlocked, and Gleb peered out of the room. He ushered Mitya in and locked the door again.

Marina was sitting inside the bathtub, and her face was a mess of smudged makeup. She had been crying, and her eyeliner and mascara had run in black smudges, which made her look kind of cool. Mitya still did not feel like he was in a position to pry. But since she was already crying in front of him, it seemed like it was okay to ask.

“What happened?”

“I don’t think it’s any of your business, but Marina is of a different opinion,” Gleb said, putting his hand firmly on Mitya’s shoulder.

But Marina sniffled and raised her voice.

“Don’t talk to him like that, Gleb. It’s not his fault. Mitya, I’m in big trouble. You’re my friend, so I want you to know. The money I gave you for that homeless boy—it wasn’t mine. I took it from the cash register at the lingerie stall at the market. Yours was a small portion only, I took much more, as I was short on my rent money and other things. I wanted to replace it. I was going to as soon as I could spare it. But my boss found out.”

“Marina, I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize.” Mitya’s first instinct was to hug her, but he felt a barrier that he couldn’t cross, some block inside of him, so he stayed where he was and grasped his face with his hands.

“What were you thinking of, asking her for money?” Gleb reproached him angrily, and from the way his face was pained, Mitya saw how much he cared.

“I didn’t; I didn’t know.”

“He didn’t ask me,” Marina interjected. “I offered. Where else was he going to get the money? If we don’t help people, no one will help us, Gleb.”

Gleb didn’t say anything, and instead leaned back on the sink and took a big breath. His eyes were filling with moisture.

“And then my boss found out and wanted me to sleep with him. So I did,” Marina said. Her voice was suddenly drained of all emotion, and it sounded dead, detached, when she said it. Gleb banged his fists against his thighs in impotent rage.

“I want to kill that Azeri ublyudok. I want to strangle him with my own hands.”

“He is so well connected. I told you I had to do it. But I did it voluntarily . . . Mitya, I’ve been trying to make him promise that he won’t do anything for the past hour.”

Gleb was pale, as if he were a person in a black-and-white photograph.

“Promise me.”

“Okay,” Gleb said and turned around to land a massive blow against the sink. Mitya was surprised that it remained in place. “Okay, I won’t do anything. What a magnificent way to find out your woman thinks you’re powerless. And not worth anything. This is not how I pictured being in love. None of the romantic stories I know have the girl sleeping with her boss.”

Gleb struggled with the latch for a minute and then, when he managed to open the door, stormed out.

“As if it’s not enough to have lived through sex with that disgusting pig, I now have to deal with him. This is not what I expected from my free life.”

Marina covered her head with her arms and sobbed quietly.

Mitya locked the door, went to Marina and touched her. He tenderly placed his hand on top of her hair and stroked it. She whimpered louder, but then calmed down. He stood over her like this for a long time. People kept knocking on the bathroom door, but Mitya kept shooing them away. When Marina had calmed down enough to go, he helped her get out of the bathtub and clean off her face with a wet towel, which wasn’t that different from when Mitya took his makeup off.