The Moscoviad (8 page)

Now, Your Royal
Mercy, the All-Knowing Olelko the Second, something from the history of my
loves. This has nothing at all to do with You, but I’d like Your Sincerity to
know about the heart torments of your vassals.

My trouble is
that I didn’t get married at the right time. Or that I got divorced at the
wrong time. But this happened in a different life, in those blessed days, as a
poet friend of mine says, when I was a chronic alcoholic. For now I keep good
hold of myself and almost don’t touch booze, but some three years ago my
profile and full face were known in all of Ukraine’s sobering stations. Then
one of those women who stroll along the windows of sobering stations and choose
some poor unfortunate souls according to their tastes, made me her capricious
choice. She took me home, washed me and fed me warm soup. At night she got a
better picture of me. “Wow,” she got excited, “you’re still quite young!” (And
indeed, I was less than thirty back then . . .)

So she decided to
attach me to her bed. Dreamt that I would not get up from it at all. Meanwhile
she bought me clothes, food and the like, even Kent cigarettes because I didn’t
like the Soviet ones. For days I walked from one corner of her apartment to the
other and thought only about her. She did indeed in some strange way steal my
heart. At night, when we got to know and feel each other in deep, one could
sense no age difference. Besides, during this same period I took to the studio
of one of my artist friends a high school senior by the name of Vika, who was
in turn ten years younger than me; in other words, mother nature herself
established a wise balance in everything. I somehow was particularly pleased
that the age difference of my beloveds equaled a generation.

I loved this high
school girl for knowing how to listen. She didn’t like and didn’t understand my
poems, but she pretended she was crazy about them. While she only dreamt of
falling on the couch as fast as possible and rotating on it a bit. Then I
started selecting particularly long and difficult pieces to make her go crazy
for as long as possible. When the stock of my own ran out (I’m not a metaphor
factory), I quietly began proffering (she had no clue all the same) my friends’
poems. She would shake all over when, having ecstatically turned my eyes and
intoning all the punctuation marks, I’d start reciting some
eight-hundred-line-long poem in free verse. Once she became hysterical during
“The Autumn Dogs of the Carpathians.” Another time she came during “Soccer in
the Monastery Courtyard.”
11
I was terribly pleased.

Once she threw a
scene, a childishly naïve and freakish one, and declared that because of me she
grew to hate poetry for the rest of her life. But with a sweet orgiastic
hatred. It turned out she had been dreaming passionately about marrying me
after graduating from high school. To this I said my “no way,” although I loved
her very much, and finally fully concentrated on the woman, let’s call her Ms.
M., who picked me up by the sobering station.

But nature
doesn’t tolerate imbalance. Ms. M. started mentioning her previous husbands and
lovers with increasing frequency and passion. For some reason she suddenly
developed this strange habit. And this in the minutes of the greatest intimacy.
Moreover, she started calling me with the names of my predecessors. It was
little consolation when she explained that she was only attracted to a
particular type of men, and that I really resembled each of her previous
partners. And frankly speaking, I do indeed have the looks that occur fairly
often. For some reason my parents did not make me a monster with a hump in the
back of my neck or a horn between my eyebrows. Somehow it happened. And still I
am convinced that on the inside I do not resemble anyone else. Which is why her
daily inadvertent mistakes were beginning to annoy me, as I had to answer to
some Valerian, Oswald or even Mykhail.
12

In the end I
couldn’t take it any more and left. With the high school senior we had just
finished
The Mahabharata
, which she, the underage fool, sincerely believed
to be my original poem. I wasn’t able to go on to
The Odyssey
—it turned out that she did learn something about
it at school. Thus I was exposed, and the only thing left for me was to proudly
break off our relations.

The bitterness of
my existence then required a way out. Abandoned and betrayed by almost everyone
except a few brethren in spirit who were of little interest to me, I finally
chose an escape to Moscow. By the way, Your Royal Sternness, I don’t have a
drop of moscowphilism in me. If under those circumstances I could flee to Kyiv,
Rome, Nuremberg, or San Francisco, then definitely no Moscow would have ever
gotten to see me. But I could only flee here. To hide on the seventh floor of
the stinking building not far from the Ostankino TV tower.

Moscow shoved a
few more loves in my way. First one critic who came for a visit twice a year,
and with whom we watched all of Fellini. This was a rather curious case: verbal
sex. Our sexual relations consisted in the conversations. We would suck dry
down to the tiniest detail some Casanova or Marquis de Sade, sputtering
quotations from Rozanov, Freud, and Solovyov; our tongues, lubricated with
viscous sweetish saliva, substituted for us the entire complex of
sensual/corporeal gratification. These conversations ran until two in the
morning when we, exhausted and happy, would go back to sleep in different
rooms. And didn’t sleep together even once. Those conversations drained us;
they were self-sufficient. I did accomplish a few things while dealing with
her. For example, I taught her to distinguish the notions “phallus” and
“penis.” Since she had thought those to be synonyms.

During one of her
visits Alexandra happened to me. From time to time they would appear in my room
at the same time. Then each would begin her cunning game, expecting the other
to go away. In the midst of all this I just made tea and smoked. And silently
expressed surprise at my own sonofabitchedness. Because it was unlikely that
one of them would emerge victorious. Their desires did not overlap, and each
got her own.

My rapprochement
with Alexandra had to do with Catholicism. With all the passion of a neophyte
she dove into the church life of the Roman rite, attending almost daily the St.
Louis Church, still, if I’m not mistaken, the only functioning Catholic church
in Moscow. There pleasant-looking young priests conducted various soul-saving
conversations with her, introducing her to the taste and desire for asceticism.
Hence she, evidently because of the sublimated attraction to the cute fathers,
got inflamed by the idea of self-improvement through asceticism, which did not
help her Ukrainian studies. The further along, the more she resembled a novice
nun, absorbed exclusively in the contemplation of the Great Mysteries. I tried to
win the duel with the fathers through introducing her to various erotic
spectacles and indecent texts. But she was having none of this. Usually she
didn’t show up for the dates, later inventing some rather obvious lies—a
practice that to her mind was apparently not sinful.

But one late
evening, when it seemed that our conversation about the importance of charisma
and of experientially achieved righteousness could not continue any further,
she turned the lights off in my room and lit the stub of a candle. “You see,
the actual presence of stigmata on the body could be the evidence of
Blessedness, but could also signify the beginning of further trials,” I
whispered, suffocating, while pulling with difficulty the child-sized bra off
her almost nonexistent breasts. “You fool,” she answered, and this wasn’t the
right time to clarify why exactly I was a fool: whether my idea was foolish, or
whether my idea, although correct, was expressed at the wrong time . . .

She turned out to
be rather inventive and fast in lovemaking. This was a Joan of Arc! Or a St.
Theresa! I could not even imagine anything like this, so by the morning I even
started doubting whether I really did win the duel with the young Polish
priests, her guardians and mentors.

Later I learned
that she even managed to have been married. Having become convinced that my
previous plans to corrupt her slowly we simply naïve, with time, unexpectedly
to myself, I cooled down to her and registered with complete indifference the
decline of my sensual desires. My heart no longer jumped up to my throat when
our paths crossed somewhere in the dorm hallways. The disease passed rather
painlessly.

Right at that
time I met Astrid. But then I already knew Galya. Shortly before the New Year
we were traveling in the same train compartment. I was going home for the
holidays, she was going to the Carpathians on a skiing vacation. A typical
Moscow girl, somewhat condescending towards the Ukrainians, all the way she
tried to joke about the language, but it seems I was able to dispel her khokhol
stereotype.
13
When we were nearing L’viv she asked if I was into sports, and if no, whether
I’d be interested, when I come back to Moscow, to visit the swimming pool. She
said she could arrange this pleasure for me. An elite swimming pool with
restricted access! But most of all I was attracted to her profession. That is,
if one doesn’t take into account her relatively conventional physical beauty.
By profession she’s a snake catcher. Then, in the train, I wrote down her phone
number.

But I did not
make use of it right away, since Astrid appeared in my path, completely without
warning. Half-Polish, half-Swedish, but an American citizen. A Moscow
correspondent of some information agency. I must say that at the exhibition
organized by the Memorial Society
14
no exhibit made a stronger impression on me than
she. Please understand me right, Your Royal Acuteness, she was not one of the
exhibits there. She was simply a visitor that drew attention to herself by her
clumsy movements and terrible Russian accent. After that day I went through all
the stages of madness, of Western-style melodramatic crap.

We met at various
metro stations, each time at a different one. In those one-and-a-half to two
months I learned the map of the Moscow metro almost by heart. Then we drank. It
turns out that one can buy anything in Moscow—any kind of booze—from Martel to Malibu.
Theoretically everyone knows this, in practice only I do. We packed bagfuls of
bottles, wondrous in their form and content, remarking jokingly that new wine
should be poured into new skins, then wasted otherworldly (to me) sums of money
on taxis, performing colossal car races from one edge of the megalopolis to the
next, and then landed at the next pad where we spread out our bags, sorry,
skins right in the middle of the floor and then launched into an ancient Roman
orgy at a crazy scale, which always ended with singing and smashing bottles
against the walls. I liked it with her. Never before had I felt like such an
easygoing and carefree citizen of the world. She made me discover an entire
continent of the Moscow I didn’t know before: the hard currency Moscow, with
its hotels and bars where I passed by plain-clothed policemen, proudly
pretending to be a deaf-mute Belgian while she, in an unmistakable sovereign
fashion, waved various IDs in front of these captains’ noses—and sesame opened,
the chandeliers lit up, hand-thick carpets muffled our steps, deluxe suites
smelled of the Siberian taiga, of the Colombian selva (this depended on the
button one pressed), and you could order seven-hundred-year old Bavarian beer
through room service. Of course, she was the one footing the bill. Next to her
I learned the wisdom of Zen and also the wisdom of the old communist cliché
about “two worlds, two different lifestyles.”

As we were the
subjects of His Royal Mercy Alcohol (God forbid, no hints or allusions!), we were
not too successful in also being the subjects of Sex. As a rule, we fell asleep
in the midst of empty bottles, half-hugging each other, but without achieving
anything more substantial in this department. At times we crawled over each
other, confusing our own hair with the carpet fibers, and table legs with those
of the waiters. At times we puked. Once we tried to take a bath together, but
the morning saw in the bathtub only me, fully dressed, while she, completely
naked, was lying next to it on the floor, and the tiles left their marks on her
skin. All this amused us very much. Astrid repeated that in this fashion,
through her mediation, the stinking, cursed, unjust, stuffed bourgeois West
shared its shitty riches (with the help of my mediation) with the half-starving
and crippled East. That is, we were doing a great deed.

Galya, whom I
started seeing parallel to this, put an end to it. She was not satisfied with
my routinely swollen face, the daily sleepiness accompanied by my rather
noticeable growing dumber, the none-too-convincing lies about some novel in
verse that allegedly consumed all my strength, and most importantly, my
unwillingness to stay with her for the night. Finally she saw me for the
chronic alcoholic that I was and started threatening me with her addiction
specialist acquaintance, elite clinics and forced treatment. One day, not
sparing any nerves, she caught Astrid and me together and gave me a nice
slapping right in front of the entrance to the Russia Hotel. Astrid could not
understand for a long time what was going on and who was this crazy Russian
woman. And then she started laughing, simply choking with laughter. Even
suggested that from now on the three of us should go on dates together. And she
shouldn’t have. After that evening I never saw her again. I suppose she is no
longer an inhabitant of this world. I suspect that Galya unleashed on her one
of her lab cobras. The venom worked fast as lightning.