Offended Sensibilities, page 15
They had arrived at the crossroad. Here their paths parted.
“That’s all; I’m off to the left,” said Sopakhin.
“It was good to talk. Let’s be in touch.”
The teacher and the journalist said their goodbyes, shook hands, and went off in opposite directions. After a couple of paces Katushkin turned into an alley to take a shortcut. The courtyards thrummed with their inner life. A woozy wino sprawled against a garden fence. A woman in a window was hanging up laundry. Children poked around in the mud under the carcass of a broken merry-go-round.
Katushkin passed a garage, where he heard a mechanical voice; someone was watching TV and working on a car. His feet carefully skirted a puddle that had been there for an eternity. The puddle was swollen. In its depths lurked forlorn, rejected objects: a torn galosh, a pair of blackened fifteen-kopeck coins, necks of broken bottles, handles from plastic bags, a length of twine in a state of almost complete decay. A wobbling board formed an improvised bridge over the puddle. On the other side a curving path led through to the next street.
Having overcome this obstacle, he heard the rustle and whimper of resolute footsteps behind him. A sudden sharp blow behind his knee threw him off his feet. A firm shoe came down hard on his ear. A second assailant knocked him senseless with his boot. Katushkin’s head imprinted itself in the wet earth. His glasses gave an ominous crack.
“Who? What? Help!” howled the victim, but a new volley of punches silenced him and twisted him into a writhing lump of flesh.
His body flailed and coiled, contorting itself in its attempts to escape the kicks. His knees strained to touch his forehead. His elbows squeezed into his belly button. The victim was putting up resistance. He wallowed in the crusty mud like a bug that had fallen onto its back. His curses turned into a groan. He bit his tongue and it throbbed with pain; his pummeled sides stung. Pink bubbles trickled out from his lacerated tongue and lips.
“Listen, asshole, if you scribble anything about the chief prosecutor, you will be a thing of the past. Got it? Capeesh?” one of them rattled off.
“Six feet under, hear? Stinking squeaker!” chimed in the second. Curses churned in his mouth.
Someone walked past—Katushkin heard a rustling in the bushes, a muffled exclamation.
“Help!” he rasped, but the invisible passerby, terrified, scurried on his way. The muscleheads couldn’t care less. They pummeled Katushkin on the ribs, extracted a promise:
“You going to scribble or not? Yes or no?”
“No, I am not,” hissed Katushkin. His numbed tongue felt a shard of something in his mouth. “A tooth?” The thoughts tumbled erratically through his brain. “Can I afford a dentist?” The assailants continued to batter him with their feet. Reality transformed into a dumb, flickering picture. A broadcast interrupted by static. Everything went dark.
“You will write a retraction! Got it, pussy? An apology on video! And no! More! Articles!” growled the goons.
A woman’s shriek was heard; someone had noticed them and started to wail. Katushkin felt one last parting kick on his back, his consciousness ebbed from his half-closed pupils. The knuckle-draggers retreated, leaving the trampled reporter writhing in circles from the pain.
They made their way out onto the crowded street and hurried toward the square, to where the crowd had gathered. There, looking across the citizens’ heads they could see the monument, covered with a sheet. Cameras and video cameras chirred at the plinth. The mayor was giving a speech. Individual words could be heard—“loyalty,” “chastity.” The women in the first rows hoisted their gurgling infants overhead for all to behold.
The bishop stood next to the mayor. His palitsa glistened at his thigh.
And when the thugs’ ragged breathing subsided, a momentous, solemn act was accomplished before them. The veil dropped away, revealing the figures of Peter and Fevronia. Under Peter’s heel the soaring dragon heaved its dying breaths. The assembled multitude erupted in applause.
CHAPTER 12
LENOCHKA AND TWO OF HER FRIENDS came out of the movie theater holding big paper cups with popcorn kernels rattling along the bottom. The ushers obligingly held their garbage bags open and the cylinders flew in with a gentle clatter.
“So scary! I nearly peed my pants!” babbled the shorter, pudgy one. Freckles peeped through the toning concealer that had been applied to the wings of her nostrils. The girls’ stilettos clicked loudly.
“Oh, come on, I wasn’t scared at all, we should have gone to a comedy instead,” the second girl countered, blowing aside a lock of brown hair that had fallen over her eyes. “At least we could’ve had a good laugh.”
“No, there were some scenes in there …” said Lenochka. “For example, when the boy turned into a zombie and attacked his mom. Did you notice the guys behind us? They were scared shitless.”
“You mean when they poked their knees into the backs of our seats?” snorted the brunette. “They just wanted to get to know us.”
“If they wanted to, there was nothing stopping them,” pouted Pudgy.
There were still a lot of people in the mall. Behind the shop windows, salesclerks floated like fish in aquariums, and mannequins—some missing their heads—gawked blankly out at the shoppers. Here fashion was distilled to its quintessence, and everything was aimed at persuading people to doll themselves up. The consumer didn’t stand a chance.
“Oh, how I’d love to have that hair styler,” sighed Lenochka, stopping in her tracks.
“So buy it already!” smirked the brunette.
“I have one already, I don’t want to just throw it away …”
They came up to the railings caging off the great cavern of the escalators, with their accordion-pleated steps, and caught a glimpse of the activity on the floors below. All the lower floors looked like exact copies of the one they were on. Mise en abyme.
“Do you know the horror story about the shopping mall?” asked Pudgy, out of nowhere.
“Which one? Is it also about zombies?” smirked the brunette.
“Not exactly. A guy I know told me. A true story. He felt like having a beer one night but there weren’t any left in the fridge. So he remembered the twenty-four seven supermarket in the mall.”
“This mall?”
“Yes, ma’am. The one in the basement. Anyway, so he comes here. But things feel a little off. The security guard at the entrance has a strange look to him, and the cashiers, too. Anyway, he goes down the aisles, but there’s no beer anywhere. Goes down one aisle, then another one. Takes a closer look, and what the hell? Nothing but empty boxes. No actual stuff in them. So now he loses it, tries to find someone to ask, or get to the exit. But it’s no use!”
“So what happened to him?” Lenochka was scared now.
“He disappeared and that’s all there is to it. He starts walking along the wall. He reaches five corners, turns each time, but still no luck. Suddenly he hears this woman’s voice yelling from behind a shelf: ‘Help! I’m lost!’ He tells her: ‘Let’s go together and follow the shelf till we get to the end.’ But no luck. The shelf just goes on and on. And the woman’s voice says, ‘I’ve been in here a whole month, can’t get out. And there’s no cell reception.’”
“Get out of here!” giggled the brunette. “So how did he escape?”
“He saw the security guard and started running over to him, but the guard bent his head so far out of shape that it was obvious he wasn’t a man at all but some kind of hologram. A computer thing. With a hole on the top of his head. Our guy hawks up a big juicy glob of phlegm and spits on him. At this point the hologram closes in on itself, the wall opens up like a pair of sliding doors, and he manages to jump out. You can’t drag him back to this mall for anything.”
Lenochka laughed: “That’s not a horror story. A horror story is when you really can’t tell whether it’s true or made up. For example, see that kids’ play space over there?”
“Yes, and?”
“One time this woman brought her four-year-old here, left him to jump around on the trampoline while she went up to the second floor to buy herself a leather jacket. She comes back in an hour and a half, and the kid is gone. The workers there swear up and down that they’ve never seen her before. And claim that they had never signed the boy in. She calls the police, but they don’t believe her—they believe the workers in the play space. They said she’d offed the kid herself, and then was trying to shift the blame to people who had nothing to do with it.
“So then what?”
“So then two weeks go by, the woman is losing it, and she gets a call from an unfamiliar number, and they say, ‘You posted that you lost your son. And we’ve found him on the bypass. He was standing there by the side of the road, crying. We recognized him from the photo.’”
“But how did they track down her number?” asked the brunette. “Did the boy give it to them?”
“Maybe they googled it using ‘lost boy, shopping mall,’ who knows?” Lenochka frowned. “Anyway, so they bring the boy, and he’s got a scar running all down his side. They did an ultrasound and it turned out he was missing a kidney …”
Pudgy grunted into her fist: “Well, if they were organ harvesters, how come they turned out to be so decent? They took out one kidney, then sewed him back up neatly. He still has the other kidney. And his spleen, and whatever else is in there, too!”
“Maybe they weren’t killers,” objected Lenochka. “Maybe they weren’t organ dealers, but just a family whose kid was dying and he needed a kidney. And the boy was the right match.”
“You’re insane,” commented the brunette. “Forget about it, let’s just go have a drink.”
They turned into a bar on the same floor and found a table in the corner. The only other customers were a couple of pairs of lovebirds and a group of scruffy-looking men.
“Not a single man worth a second look,” observed the brunette. “For that you have to go to Moscow. That’s where all the bachelors over twenty-five are.”
“Yes, by thirty all our guys are potbellied and have a whole litter of piglets,” griped Lenochka.
Pudgy sighed. “What, have you got something against children?”
“No, I’m just in a bad mood right now,” complained Lenochka. “I’ve been demoted. They stuck me in Purchasing. I’m telling you, it’s the pits.”
“What a prima donna! I’d kill half the town for a job like that,” noted the brunette, blowing at her pesky lock of hair.
Her finger ran blindly up and down the drink menu.
“Right, piña colada, sex on the beach … have you decided?”
“I’ve had sex on the beach,” confessed Pudgy, though no one had asked. “In Turkey, on vacation. Ladies, you should have seen that Turkish guy! Huge eyes. Showered me with compliments every day. ‘Me heart,’ he’d say, ‘no pit-pat wiz-out you.’ Can you picture it?”
“We’ve heard that story,” Lenochka said dismissively. “All right, I’ll go for a bloody mary. Fits the mood.”
“Oi, oi,” the brunette perked up. “I’ve heard about that one, it’ll knock you out. My boss tried it in Cambodia. Rice liquor made out of tarantula, can you imagine?”
“Tarantula the spider you mean?”
“The actual spider! They kill him fresh. And they bring another one for you to eat with your drink. Costs three dollars.”
Pudgy winced. “No, I’ll just go for a good old mojito.”
A few minutes later the pockmarked waiter brought their order. A cucumber disk perched on the rim of Lenochka’s glass. Her lips puckered around the straw.
“I haven’t seen my Victor for a few days now,” she announced.
“Where’d he go?” asked the brunette.
“He says he’s really busy. Only answers every other text. Yesterday I texted him ‘Sweet dreams,’ and he answers: ‘You too.’ With a period at the end.”
“No smiley faces?” asked Pudgy.
“No smiley face, no heart. Nothing, basically. Cold.” Lenochka’s voice trailed off.
“Before that,” she went on, “we made a date for after work. He writes me at six that he’s held up, he’ll get back in touch in forty minutes. And that was the end of it, zip. I wrote him back in an hour, like, ‘Sup?’ He didn’t read it right away. Then he read it, but nothing.”
“Whoa, really?” said Pudgy, not without a tinge of smugness.
“Then twenty minutes later he writes, ‘Poopsie, I don’t know when they’ll let me go, I’ll text you.’ So what about me over here? I fixed myself up, put on a nice dress, and now I’m just supposed to sit around and do nothing? I sat in a café till ten, hoping he’d send word. Downed an entire liter of tea.”
“And?”
“And it’s already ten, and I’m just sitting there sobbing. Then I get, ‘Hey there.’ Woke up, I guess. So I write: ‘I’m with some friends, hanging out.’ So he doesn’t think that I’m just moping around because of him.”
“So then what?”
“He texts, ‘So they’ll walk you home then. I’m tired as a dog. Straight into the shower and to bed.’”
The brunette grimaced. “So he didn’t even come to give you a ride home?”
“No, I had to cough up the money for a cab, otherwise, you know, I’d have to walk home, in the middle of the night, in my sketchy part of town … Better not take the risk. The worst was, I got this moron driver. Kept driving around in circles. Tried to get my number.”
Lenochka’s phone bleeped and she grabbed at it, lifted the screen to her eyes; her misshapen iris flashed in the LED light.
“Not him,” she said, disappointed. “It’s my mom.”
“Fuck him, this Victor of yours,” Pudgy frowned. “He’s obviously a wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am type of guy.”
“He’s not like that!” protested Lenochka. “He’s just super busy. They have a lot going on in the Committee right now. And plus, he called me poopsie. It’s sweet, isn’t it?”
“Poopsie-doopsie,” muttered the brunette. “Get rid of him. He’s just using you, playing hard to get. Basically, a douchebag.”
Over at the scruffy guys’ table, one of them, who had been sitting with his back to the girls, stood and rose up to his full height. He was gangly. His body had the look of a carnival barker on stilts.
“Tolya!” exclaimed Lenochka. “I didn’t see you!”
Tolya nodded, shifted awkwardly from one foot to the other. His usual energy had disappeared, leaving only a kind of jittery restlessness in his limbs.
“Come join us?” asked Lenochka.
Tolya sat down at their table. The girls eyed him from their corner, giggling.
“Hey,” he said hollowly. “These your friends? I’m Tolya.”
Introductions. The brunette gave her name and took to slurping up the last drops of her cocktail. It gurgled loudly. She waved to the waiter and lifted her finger, like, bring another glass.
“I’m out on bail, I signed for it.” Tolya jumped straight in.
“Out for long?”
“Until the trial. With luck they’ll acquit me.”
“What exactly did you do?” asked Pudgy.
“Posted a photo on my page. Of the boss lady,” mumbled Tolya.
“Aaaah, right, it went viral,” noted the brunette coldly. “Anyone who’s anyone downloaded it.”
Lenochka clarified:
“Tolya did the photoshop. In the original the boss is holding a whip in her mouth, and in his picture it’s a cross. They are calling it blasphemy.”
“That’s not true, Lena, I’m not the one who did the photoshop! I don’t know who it was. I saw it on a friend’s phone and reposted it. That’s all I did.”
“‘First we bear the cross, then we suck it.’ That’s your style, isn’t it? Or not?” Lena dug in.
“What do you mean, ‘my style’? I didn’t do it, I’m telling you.”
Tolya scowled. Not all that long ago he’d been living the life. His uncle had palled around with the local movers and shakers; from his childhood he’d been friends with a very important person who was in the governor’s inner circle. This very important person had granted his uncle some land in a protected forest. The uncle took on the role of master hunter and was constantly hosting high-ranking guests there—former athletes, security personnel, gangsters, goons, bigshots, racketeers, and fat cats, men transformed by a stroke of fortune into generals, ministers, and helmsmen at the wheel of state. Even the governor, even the inspectors from Moscow, even they came out to his property for R & R. To commune with nature, partake of their motherland’s natural bounties.
The guests fished and hunted on a grand scale; they shot fowl, moose, hares, and boar. They dragged the carcasses across the white snow, leaving dirty crimson tracks, and the dogs rushed wildly in circles around them with their tongues hanging out. While the campfires were being set up and the cooks’ team skinned, dismembered, and chopped up the meat, Tolya’s uncle would heat up the bathhouse with his own two hands and settle the weary hunters and fishermen on the hot limewood benches. He would slip armfuls of medicinal juniper twigs under their bright heads, and would lash their sleek thighs and backs with a birch switch. Tolya, his indulged, favorite nephew, would manage the steam. The red-hot coals hissed under the flow of water poured expertly from the ladle. The guests groaned and begged for more. One of them would suddenly rush out and dive with a primeval shriek into the icy tub; the freezing water bit, stung, bristled against his overheated body. Back in the bathhouse vestibule, while the princely banquet was being prepared, vodka gurgled in glasses, crabs turned red, girls frolicked about. Under their wet towels could be seen the rounded contours of their naked breasts.
It was there that Andrei Ivanovich Lyamzin, with hands sticky from chitin husks, with a felt cap on his head and a chest damp with coniferous bathhouse sweat, noticed clever, gangly Tolya and secretly nicknamed him Tapeworm. Then and there the uncle persuaded Andrei Ivanovich to take Tolya on and find him a place in the ministry.
