20

Mitya did some research before going to the pleshka. All the info he could find was disappointingly vague, but Mitya figured that anything related to illegal activity would not be overly descriptive. The website just said that one had to go to the monument to the heroes of Plevna in Ilyinsky Gates Square close to the Kitay-Gorod metro station. But there was no information on what one was supposed to do upon arrival. It made Mitya very anxious, but he calmed himself down. He’d been through a lot already, and it had only given him strength.

He chose to go on the first Sunday of January because that day everyone was gone from the apartment. His parents had gone over to their friends’ for dinner, and Alyssa Vitalyevna was out with Dr. Khristofor Khristoforovich Kherentzis. Mitya was sad to miss such an excellent opportunity to be alone and dress like Devchonka, but he wanted to act on his resolution to find Zolotoy as soon as possible. And it was good that he wouldn’t have to explain why he was out and about after dusk in winter.

The weather was mild for that time of year, and everything around was covered in a thick layer of fluffy snow. Mitya thought that the monument would be a large bronze statue. It turned out to be a squat towerlike structure in the middle of the square in front of the metro station. It had doors and windows and was covered with gilded details and topped by a crown with an intricate cross on top. As if someone had cut off the top part of an Orthodox church and dropped it on the ground.

Mitya came up to the structure and for a minute forgot about the reason for his visit. The monument was so odd, so beguiling, unlike anything else he’d ever seen. Mitya read the golden letters that described its dedication to the memory of soldiers fallen in the Russo-Turkish War in the nineteenth century. A relief depicted a struggling man on his knees, who clutched at the chain binding a standing woman’s arms. Mitya had no idea what the Russo-Turkish War was, or whom the figures represented, but he was still affected by the pathos.

A voice behind his back broke him out of the enchantment.

“Hello, my dear girl!”

Mitya saw a man of Alyssa Vitalyevna’s age in a dublenka and a fur hat. His face was covered in craters on the sides, and the hair beneath the hat was bright red.

“You’ve got me confused with someone else,” Mitya blurted out and retreated from the monument, almost falling down the steps. There were benches everywhere around the square’s perimeter, and he sat down on one of them.

People walked through the square on their way from the metro, men and women alike, but none of them stopped, rushing home to their leftover Olivier salad. A group of men occupied the benches on the other side of the square, conversing loudly and drinking something from plastic glasses. They looked like they were having a lot of fun. But they seemed like men who liked vodka, not necessarily men who liked other men.

Suddenly, another man approached Mitya’s bench. He had curly black hair and a fuzzy mohair scarf in wild colors wrapped around his neck.

“Is it okay if I join you?” the man asked. Mitya nodded and watched him wipe the snow off the bench and take a seat. It was starting to get chilly.

“How are you doing tonight?” the man asked as he crossed his legs. Wasn’t crossing your legs something that only gay men did? Dmitriy Fyodorovich had reprimanded Mitya for emasculated sitting quite often.

“I’m fine, thank you,” Mitya responded. “How are you?”

“Not bad either,” the man answered and switched his legs.

They sat for a bit in silence. Mitya wanted to ask about Zolotoy, but he wasn’t sure how to do it. With Valerka, it was pretty straightforward: there was only one homeless man with birds who’d gotten murdered. But with Zolotoy it was a bit more complex. Surely, he was special to Mitya, but to others—merely a face in the crowd. Even if he had distinctive hair. Then there was the matter of whether the man would even know anything. Was he a passerby who paused to sit for a while in the snow, or did he come here a lot? Mitya glanced around the empty benches next to them and wondered why the man had asked to sit down in that spot.

“May I ask you an indelicate question, please?” the man uttered after a minute of silence and switched his legs again. Mitya noticed that his voice was high, which, according to his father, could also be a sign of his being gay.

“Yes,” Mitya answered. Was his own voice high? It was hard to judge. It hadn’t broken yet, so perhaps it didn’t matter, anyway.

“Skolko? How much?” The man moved in closer to Mitya, and Mitya could smell cigarettes on his breath.

“How much what?”

“How much do you take for one go?”

The man had taken him for a prostitute, Mitya realized. It made him feel many complicated things at the same time. He was happy to have been chosen, deemed worthy, pretty, desirable enough to be a prostitute. But he was also upset because he didn’t want to be considered something that he wasn’t.

“I’m not here for this,” Mitya responded.

“Are you sure? I could give you 50,000 rubles.”

It was the cost of a bottle of vodka, as Mitya knew now. He felt offended but thought that the man owed him an answer to his question after being this rude.

“Do you know a boy who comes here called Zolotoy? He is skinny and has fair blond hair.”

“No, but tell him about my offer, when you find him,” the man said, and laughed a bizarre fake laugh, as if it was the funniest thing in the world.

Mitya stood up and walked away from the benches. He felt disgusting after talking to the man and resolved to go home immediately. As he walked down the stairs into the metro station, he noticed that quite a few people were standing along the walls in the vestibule. They all looked like they could know something. There was a fat older man who was wearing plastic bags over his shoes, a soldier, a tall, big man with a mustache wearing a suit beneath his coat, and a pair of younger men who talked to each other in loud voices, almost shouting, so it was hard to figure out what they were saying.

“Excuse me,” Mitya addressed the younger men. “Do you by any chance know a boy called Zolotoy who comes here?”

“Sestra, look how tiny and cute she is,” one of them said, and Mitya was thrilled to hear himself referred to as a cute girl, though he wasn’t happy that his words were, as usual, ignored.

“Blyad, you’d better get your cunt away from here,” the other one said to Mitya, and then addressed his friend: “Dura, these tiny and cute ones make us look like we’re expired goods.”

“You’re right. Kysh, get out of here.” The first one waved his hand at Mitya as if he were a stray cat.

Mitya was perplexed and felt his cheeks flush. He wanted to find his friend. He had not expected this much unpleasantness from the magical pleshka that Zolotoy had told him about. He veered away from the two figures scowling at him.

“I’m sorry, young man, are you looking for someone?” The tall man with a mustache came over to him. The two effeminate men stared at him, and one of them said: “I told you so, dura!”

“Yes, I’m looking for my friend Zolotoy. He is a tall blond boy, who might work here.”

“I might know something about him,” the man responded. He was big and powerful and reminded Mitya of his father. Something told Mitya that he could trust him. “Would you like to follow me so we could find out together?”

“Can’t you tell me here?” Mitya was pretty fed up with how grown-ups always needed to overcomplicate matters and insist on so many unnecessary movements.

“Of course I can, but I’m hoping that we can go and find him together,” the man said, smiling through the mustache. “What if he’s out there right now? Imagine how happy he’ll be to see you too!”

It didn’t seem likely, Mitya thought, but the prospect of seeing Zolotoy was too good to resist. Besides, the man looked like he knew what he was talking about. Finally, something was going right. Mitya walked out of the station after the man and felt his heart beat faster because he might be seeing Zolotoy again.

The man led him past the monument and into the depth of the square. It hadn’t even occurred to Mitya to go there on his own: he’d assumed that everything that could be happening would take place around the monument. The paved paths meandered farther away, and there were more areas covered with snow, mostly pristine but with some garlands of footsteps or black silhouettes of trees and bushes here and there.

They stopped, and Mitya saw that the square was much longer than he’d realized. The monument disappeared on the horizon. All around them were trees, with buildings on both sides of the square. Why was it even called a square? Mitya thought. More like a boulevard.

“It doesn’t seem like your friend is here, but I think it’s time for you to make a new one.” The man smiled widely and clapped his hands. Mitya wasn’t sure what to answer. He did not want to offend the man by refusing his friendship but also wanted to indicate that he had more important things to do.

But before he could think of something, the man was suddenly right in front of him. He sank to his knees in the snow, and as Mitya looked at him, he saw that the snow was littered with small sail-like green things. Leaves or seeds. Where did they come from to land on top of the freshly fallen snow in January?

The man raised the bottom of Mitya’s jacket and began undoing the zipper on Mitya’s pants. It was so wild and unexpected that for a moment, Mitya froze and could only watch him. But then he regained his senses and tried to shake the man’s hands off his clothes.

“Da perestan.” The man resisted. “You’re going to like it.”

He tugged at the zipper again and pushed his fist into the softness of Mitya’s groin. As his fingers grasped Mitya’s penis and testicles over the fabric of his briefs, Mitya felt a sharp, searing sensation. He had never had anyone touch him like that, and it felt nice. But it also felt mean of the man to do it like this. They had come to look for Zolotoy, and now the man was touching Mitya’s privates.

“Aren’t you afraid someone will see?” Mitya asked as he looked around, thinking that it would bring the man to his senses. There were no people, but there were the headlights of cars passing in the distance.

“Relax and let dyadya take care of it,” the man said. Mitya squirmed at the word “dyadya.” He couldn’t accurately point out why, but it made the thing seem even more wrong. Someone pawing inside his underwear was not supposed to call himself an uncle.

“And what about if militsionery see us?” Mitya reasoned. He wanted to stop this, but he didn’t want to offend the man. He wanted him to end it all on his own.

“Don’t worry, sladkiy, I’m a militsioner myself,” the man said, as he placed his palm around Mitya’s penis, took it out of the briefs, and moved his mouth toward it.

For a second Mitya thought that he was joking. But then Mitya realized that it could be entirely possible for him to be a militsioner. If militsionery were capable of killing someone, why wouldn’t they also put little boys’ penises in their mouths in the middle of Moscow? He felt like he was hit with a zap of electricity. He leaned away from the man and kicked him in the chest. The man lost his balance and toppled over into the snow. Mitya had expected him to look angry, but he seemed more surprised. Before the man could get up and attack him, Mitya straightened his underwear and charged toward the metro station, zipping his pants as he ran.

Over the next few days, Mitya kept trying to make sense of what had happened. It was clear to him now that there was a conspiracy by the militsia against him. He was being warned to stay away, but his conscience was telling him that he couldn’t give up. There was nothing he could do to help Valerka, and the murder investigation seemed to have hit a wall. But there was still hope to find Zolotoy, to not lose him forever as he had Valerka. Mitya understood that the need to have Zolotoy in his life was selfish, but he still felt like it was a worthy thing to do. Everyone he was encountering was proving to be a terrible person, so he wanted to keep tabs on the few good people around him.

He went to the market once more, before school started again, and this time it was fully operational. Instead of entering, Mitya walked around the side of the building to where he had first met Zolotoy. Many boys were scurrying around the carts, but all of them told Mitya that they hadn’t seen Zolotoy at the market for a long time.

“I heard he was killed, but I’m not sure if that’s true,” said a boy with a shaved head beneath his beanie. Some of the other boys repeated the same opinion, but no one could say for sure from whom they’d heard it. When Mitya asked about Chervyak, it seemed that no one had seen him for a long time either. Perhaps because this time Mitya had no chaperone, the boys didn’t seem as talkative as before, and he gave up on trying to find out anything else from them.

It occurred to Mitya that there was one more person he could ask in the market. He went inside and found Auntie Tamara, who was selling tea and pirozhki. She was open to talking once she heard Zolotoy’s name.

“Oh, Ignatushka.” Auntie Tamara frowned. “He’s gone missing before, but never for this long. We returned after the shakedown, and he wasn’t here. Still hasn’t returned. Some other boys, too, like that Dagestani sorvanets.” Mitya figured she was talking about Chervyak. “Poor boys. They get mixed up in some horrible bratva dealings, and then there’s no way back. I miss Ignatushka so much. I even considered adopting him, you know, but I’m not young, and I have my ailments, my knots flare up all the time.”

Auntie Tamara sighed and poured Mitya a glass of tea, for which she refused to take his money. It was nice to see someone else who cared about Zolotoy like he did, but Mitya did not want to ask her about Zolotoy’s plan to go to the pleshka. He was pretty sure Zolotoy wouldn’t have related his prostitution plans to her. He finished the tea, thanked Auntie Tamara, and left.

In a phone call with Marina, Mitya told her about the new developments, although he chose to leave out the parts about the prostitution and the mustached militsioner.

“That’s how things work in this world,” Marina said when he complained about constantly losing nice people in his life. “You can’t get used to anyone. I’ve had this happen to me in the market too: one week a girl is there, she’s selling something, and then she gets deported back home, or takes up prostitution, or has been killed by Nazis somewhere. And there’s nothing you can do about it, and no one cares.”

“But even if this is how things work, I don’t want to allow them to be like that,” Mitya disagreed.

“I don’t think you have a say,” Marina responded, solemnly. “You’re a kind boy, and I know you want to make the world better, but maybe sometimes it’s better to stop? After all, we’re just tiny people in this city. Nothing changes whether we’re here or not.”

“It’s sad,” Mitya said.

“It is sad.”

“Can you at least not disappear, please?”

“I promise,” Marina laughed weakly.