A dense, throaty voice struggled, gurgling forth. It came from a face the color of a sponge wiped over a grimy window and left unsqueezed at the bottom of the sink. Her eyes were no more

“Count it- count it all!”

A dense, throaty voice struggled, gurgling forth. It came from a face the color of a sponge wiped over a grimy window and left unsqueezed at the bottom of the sink. Her eyes were no more distinguishable than two of the hundreds of soppy pores- not black; not any color really, but simply opaque, and void of light.

“Don’t just stand there like the warbling-fuck you are,” she screamed hoarsely. “Count!”

At the other end of the room- if it could be called that- a tall, thin man with famished jowls had entered and instantly fell upon a kind of couch-bed. It was covered in a tattered paisley cloth that at some, irretrievable time, had been thrown down to civilize lovemaking. But that was a long time ago.

The man landed like felled tree, stiff and rigid; he was grey like a wet concrete slab. The woman knew what he needed. She hobbled across the small room in two, quick steps, squashing mildewed newspapers and thin aluminum packets of empty tablets that cackled beneath her slippers. She bent down by him, seizing a syringe on the bedside table. A translucent tobacco-spit brown gleamed like poisonous amber in the barrel.

The woman started rolling up the man’s shirtsleeve on the right arm.

“Fucking old crocodile,” she hissed through singed, blond bangs cutting across her vacuous eyes. She drew back the sleeve to the elbow. It was exposed to the bone on the backside; the remaining skin was tarish-looking. It flaked off like old paint as she pressed for the vein.

“Phew! Wretched lizard, bastard of Adam!”

The man groaned. He reeked of iodine and alcohol.

“Vika, I’m dying!” he moaned. She spit on the floor.

“Aw, hell!,” was all she answered. She then took up the syringe and stabbed it into the swollen purple vein in his arm. He winced, feeling Vika crudely plunge the brown fluid into him.

Then, his body seemed to relax, and his grey pallor slowly colored. He was a sort of chameleon man, the color of surroundings; his blood infused alternatively with the lead pigment of his habitations and the warm, oaken resin of his drug.

Now he was unraveling, sinking back into the pillow, beyond it. The dim orange light danced about the cheap dangling crystals of the lamp above; his eyes slowly started to close, as he seemed to feel the brown ooze reach his eyelids and coagulate there. On the periphery, he no longer noticed Vika’s grotesque look bearing down upon him; she was dead to him now. For about an hour and fifteen minutes everything would be dead to him, and he would swim in the warm, ancient sea of pleasure that a strange curse of chemistry allowed. For a short time, he was outside the box; he had found the equation of bliss.

From out of clenched fists rolled some colored papers, crumpled and moist with sweat. Vika, leaving the needle in the man’s rotting arm, snatched them up. She straightened them against the side of the bed, and counted them. They were happily colored notes: robin’s-egg blue and umber like autumn leaves. But she frowned; deep trenches appeared in her forehead- the manifestations of many days of disappointments.

“Three-thousand rubles!” she screamed and slammed the notes upon the table. She didn’t expect the man to move though, and he didn’t. Apart for the faint glow of perspiration, you wouldn’t even have known he were alive.

The woman, nevertheless, rolled onto her side at the far corner of the little bed, too small for the both of them. She wriggled out of her pants. Her legs were blotchy with broken blood vessels and bruises. Rather than switch off the lamp on the table, she tore the plug from the socket. The only light coming through the window now was from other windows, and the only thing in the close darkness of the room was the glow of thin cigarettes perpetually between Vika’s lips.

“Old snake,” she kept on murmuring. “A miserable three-thousand!”

It was a quarter to three in the morning.

****

The great city made everyone nameless- had always done so, and people knew it. Still, for some inexplicable reason, that never stopped anyone from giving them.

The thin man was born Ivan Petrovich. He was born to a lower class family in some remote oblast of Krasnoyarsk, a city in the vast Ural region of Russia. He had, like many, been lured to Moscow on the promise of a connection through an uncle back in Siberia; however, arriving in Moscow, he found the same dismal reality of his home city, only brightened with foreign capital and the accoutrements of the ruling class and their cronies.

He vaguely remembered wandering the ostentatious street of Tverskaya and Red Square where great tanks and other things of steel and might once shook the foundations rumbling by on the patriotic victory day. As a boy, he had watched the fantastic parade on the family’s black and white television. He remembered the tickle of his father’s moustache and the syrupy aroma of beer as he crouched behind him on the creaking floor.

“Vanya, I’m telling you like my old man told me, and that you’ll tell your children,” he whispered to the boy. “You see those tanks, those missiles?”

Ivan nodded, eyes still fixated on the television screen.

“That’s only Brezhnev’s invention. It’s arrogance in response to fear.” His father continued striking the boys chest lightly with a spidery finger. “Our fortress is in here, not in the Kremlin.”

And he remembered his father’s words slowly morphing through the day as he continued drinking, red face and guttural, slamming down the glass on the table and shouting vicarious and nationalistic things. And then in the grey morning, he remembered him in the kitchen, wrapped in a blanket, the teacup rattling against the saucer. He smiled distortedly, not unashamedly, as the boy watched him drop a hundred grams of cognac into the drink. Shakily raising the cup he pronounced a cynical toast.

“To tavarish Brezhnev”.

****

Дата добавления: 2015-11-04