Wild dogs look on from a pile of rocks.
We wait while the Soviet officer walks over to the mercenaries who will do the killing. They discuss the logistics of the execution as though they are talking about planting a field. They actually laugh.
The master is intoning a mantra. I wish he would stop. I am numb with fear.
There is a girl standing in the mouth of a ger, making tea. Domesticity, here and now, is dreamlike. My master abruptly breaks off his mantra and summons her over. She hesitates, but she comes. No one is looking. Her eyes are big, and her face is round. My master touches me with his left hand, and touches her with his right hand, and I feel my memories drawn away on the current.
My master knew how to transmigrate me! My mind is untethered and begins to follow my memories—but at that moment a soldier slams my master’s arm away from the girl, and the connection is broken, and the girl kicked away.
This girl’s own memories piece together my last minute of life. We watch the boy—myself—and we watch the master chanting. Even as the barrels of the guns are leveled—
Everything moves so slowly. The air thickens, and sets, hard. Every gleam is polished. An order is given in Russian. The rifles go off like firecrackers. The row of men and boys folds and topples.
There is one more thing. This the girl cannot see, but I know how to look. The boy’s body is in the mud, too, its small cranium shattered, but with an unmoored mind. I can see it! Adrift, pulsing. One of the mercenaries strolls over to the pile of bodies, lifting the bodies on top with his foot to ensure the ones underneath are dead. He touches the boy, and in that instant my soul pulses into its new home.
Many years before it would stir, unable to identify itself, long after the mercenary had returned to his native corner of China, at the foot of the Holy Mountain.
That is the end.
The present. The grandmother is motionless. I would like to read her life, how she was sent away to another corner of her country, how she was married into a tribe of strangers. But there is no time.
“I am here.”
“Well, I didn’t think it was Leonid Brezhnev poking around in there,” says the grandmother. “It’s about time! I saw the comet.”
“You know about me?”
“Of course I know about you! I’ve been carrying your early memories around with me for all these decades! Rumors about the Sect of the Yellow Hat were common currency in my tribe. When your master linked us on your execution day, I knew what he was doing.… I’ve been waiting.”
“It was a long journey. The only clues were in my memories, and you had those.”
“My body should have ground to a halt winters ago. I’ve tried to die several times, but I was never allowed through.…”
I looked down at the baby. “Is she going to die?”
“That depends on you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“My granddaughter’s body is your body. She was born with you as her soul and mind. She is a shell. Her body will be dead within three hours if you don’t return to her. If you want her to survive, you have to choose to be shackled by flesh and bones once more.”
I considered my future as a noncorpum. Nowhere in the world would be closed to me. I could try to seek out other noncorpa, the company of immortals. I could transmigrate into presidents, astronauts, messiahs. I could plant a garden on a mountainside under camphor trees. I would never grow old, get sick, fear death, die.
I looked down at the feeble day-old body in front of me, her metabolism dimming, minute by minute. Life expectancy in Central Asia is forty-three, and falling.
“Touch her.”
Outside, bats dangle from the high places, fluttering up to the sky, and down to the ground, and up to the sky again, checking that all is well. Inside, my wail, screamed from the hollows of my eighteen-hour-old lungs, fills the ger.
PETERSBURG
IT’S A LASHING bitch of a day out. Rain, rain, rain, the sky splits and spills. God Almighty, give me a cigarette.
Jerome was explaining the other day that, believe it or not, glass is actually a liquid that thickens at the bottom as the years pass. Glass is a thick syrup. But you never know where you are with Jerome. Rudi said that my bottom is getting thicker as the years go past, too, and he laughed for a whole minute.
I yawn a yawn so wide that my body shudders. Nobody notices. Nobody even recognizes me. If my presence intrudes on their grazing at all, they assume I’m a loin of lamb who slept her way into this meager sinecure on a plastic chair in a tiny gallery in the Large Hermitage. I don’t mind. In fact that is precisely how I want it. I can bide my time. We have a lot of time, us Russians.
So then, ladies and gentlemen. Let us begin our safari of the more common gallery visitors. May I first introduce the shufflers. You will observe how this tribe shuffle in packs, from picture to picture, allotting each an equal period of time. Passing by are the big game hunters, for whom only the Cézannes, the Picassos, and the Monets will do. Watch out for their flashbulbs and pounce! You can fine ’em $5—hard currency—and who’ll know a thing about it? The shamblers are less systematic. Usually lone hunters, they shamble zigzag through the halls, pausing for a long time when something catches their eyes. Over there! See him? A peeping Tom! There! Lurking behind the pedestals. Beware, ladies! Our friends of the weaker sex are here not to observe the ladies in the gilt frames, but the ones in the black fishnets. A few of the bolder ones steal glances at me. I outstare them. Margarita Latunsky has nothing to fear from any of them. Where were we? Ah yes, the sheep. You will hear them bleating in the background, herded by their guide and being told what to admire and why. Who is he, you ask, holding forth in a loud voice about what Agnolo Bronzino really meant to say half a millennium ago in Florence? He is a lecturer, exposing his erudition like a flasher in Smolnogo Park. I’ve been accosted myself on many occasions, beside the duck pond. “Bit small, isn’t it?” They wither on the vine! Back to the gallery. A few times a day we get a visit from Lord God Almighty: one of the directors, strutting about like they own the place, which I suppose in a way they do. Or they think they do. Only I, and a chosen few, know what it is that they really own. Occasionally Jerome comes in with his notebook to study the next picture, but we pretend not to notice one another. We are professionals. Lastly there are the other gallery attendants, peroxided and lank, each on a chair for their fat butts. My butt isn’t really fat, by the way. I made Rudi admit he was joking. The other attendants are slags and trollops, each and every one. Cave cranny-clammy. Oh, they scowl at me, and gossip about my understanding with the director of acquisitions, Head Curator Rogorshev. It isn’t simply the jealousy of the jilted that makes them hate me. And I told them this. It’s the jealousy that any menopausal frump feels towards a real woman.
None of them matters. None of them. I have higher things to consider.
Yes, it’s been a cold, rainy summer in our cold, rainy city. Jerome said the only way Peter could get people to come and live in this marsh of frost and mud was to make it illegal for any builder to work anywhere else in his empire, from the Baltic to the Pacific. That, I can believe.
There’s no one in my gallery now—the marble statue of Poseidon and these five pictures are no big crowd-pullers, even if one of them is a Delacroix—so I stand up and walk over to the window, to stretch my legs. You don’t think Margarita Latunsky is going to sit still for seven hours flat, do you? The cold glass kisses the tip of my nose. Wall after wall of rain, driven up the Neva from the Baltic. Past the new oil refinery built by deutsche marks, past the docks, past the rusting naval station, past the Peter and Paul Fortress over on Zayachy Island where I first met Rudi, over the Leytenanta Schmidta bridge, where many years ago I used to drive with my politburo minister, sipping cocktails in the back of his big black Zil with the flags mounted above the headlamps. Come now, there’s no need to act surprised. Remember who I am! There was no harm done; his wife was happy enough lying on a Black Sea beach with her lim
pid children. She probably had young goaty Cossack masseurs queueing up to ply her below the shoulder blades.
I turn my back to all that, spinning on my heel, and do a mazurka across the slippery wooden floor. I wonder, did they do that when Empress Catherine was in charge here? I can imagine her, maybe in this very room, dancing a few steps with the young Napoléon, or cavorting with the dashing composer Tolstoy, or titillating Gingghis Khan with a glimpse of the royal calf. I feel an affinity with any woman who has powerful and violent men sucking olives from between her toes. Empress Catherine started life as a lowly outsider, too, Jerome told me. I whirl, and spin, and I remember the applause I used to get at the Pushkin Theater.
I gaze into my next conquest. Our next conquest, I should say. Eve and the Serpent by Delacroix. Loot brought back from Berlin in 1945. Head Curator Rogorshev was saying how the Krauts want it all back now! What a nerve! We spend forty million lives getting rid of their nasty little Nazis for them, and all we get out of it is a few oil paintings. I’ve always had a soft spot for this one. It was I who proposed Eve be our next heist. Rudi wanted to go for something bigger, like an El Greco or one of the van Goghs, but Jerome thought we shouldn’t get greedy.
“Go on, my dear,” urges the snake. “Take one. Hear it? ‘Pluck me,’ it’s saying. That big, shiny red one. ‘Pluck me, pluck me now and pluck me hard.’ You know you want to.”
“But God,” quotes Eve, putting out feelers for an agent provocateur, clever girl, “expressly forbids us to eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge.”
“Ah yessssss, God … But God gave us life, did He not? And God gave us desire, did He not? And God gave us taste, did He not? And who else but God made the damned apples in the first place? So what else is life for but to tassste the fruit we desire?”
Eve folds her arms schoolgirlishly. “God expressly forbade it. Adam said.”
The snake grins through his fangs, admiring Eve’s playacting. “God is a nice enough chap in His way. I daresay He means well. But between me, you and the Tree of Knowledge, He is terribly insecure.”
“Insecure? He made the entire bloody universe! He’s omnipotent.”
“Exactly! Almost neurotic, isn’t it? All this worshiping, morning, noon, and night. It’s ‘Oh Praise Him, Oh Praise Him, Oh Praise the Everlassssting Lord.’ I don’t call that omnipotent. I call it pathetic. Most independent authorities agree that God has never sufficiently credited the work of virtual particles in the creation of the universssse. He raises you and Adam on this diet of myths while all the really interesting information is locked up in these juicy apples. Seven days? Give me a break.”
“Well, I see your point. But Adam will hit the frigging roof.”
“Ah yess … your hairless, naked hubby. I saw him frolicking with a fleecy little lamb in a meadow just this morning. He looked so content. But how about you, Eve? Do you want to spend the rest of eternity noncing around with a family of docile animals and a supreme being who insists on choosing a name like ‘Jehovah’ to keep you company? I don’t think so. Adam might be pissed off for a little while, but he’ll change his tune when I show him bronze-tipped arrows, crocodile-skin luggage, and virtual-reality helmets. I think that you, Eve, are destined for higher thingsss.”
Eve looks at the apple, a big cider apple hanging in the golden afternoon. She gulps. “Higher things? You mean, Forbidden Knowledge?”
The snake’s tongue flickers. “No, Eve, my dear one. That’s just a smoke screen. What we’re really talking about here is Desire. Care for a cigarette while you think my proposal over?”
• • •
Footsteps echo down the stairs. I sit down, resuming my sentinel posture. I would die for that cigarette.
In walks Head Curator Rogorshev and the head of security, a troll with a face that always seems about to pop and splatter bystanders with gobbets of cranium.
“I thought we could approach the Great Hall by way of the Delacroix. Such an underrated little treasure!” Head Curator Rogorshev turns to me, tracing the inside of his lips with the tip of his tongue.
I simper like the virgin he likes me to be.
“I’ll have to have all these fittings sniffed for explosives.” The head of security snorts in once and out once, wiping his nose on his sleeve.
“Whatever. I know how the French ambassador loves to point at things with his stick.” They walk on. At the door the head curator turns, blows me a kiss, points to his watch, and mouths “six o’clock.” Then he flexes his index finger like his itty-bitty hard-on.
I flash him a look that says “Oh yes, oh yes! Stop before I explode!”
He trots after the security man, thinking, “Ooh, Head Curator Rogorshev, you cunning rogue, you master of seduction, another female of the species caught in your web.” The truth is, Head Curator Rogorshev is a master of only one thing, and that is the art of kidding himself. Look at him! That shock of shiny black hair? I glue it on myself every Monday. There will come a time, not long from now, when he will see whose web he has been stuck in during the last year. And so will the Serious Crime Police Squad.
My birthday is coming soon. Another one. That explains why Rudi has been too busy to see me recently. He knows how I love surprises.
Gutbucket Petrovich comes to take my place while I go for a tea break. They dropped me off the rota once, and left me sitting in my gallery for a whole day. I made Rogorshev sack the ringleader. None of them ever speaks to me now, but they never forget my tea break.
The staff canteen is empty. The catering workers have already gone home by the time my break comes around, so I am all alone in the echoing hall. The Gutbucket crew considers this ostracism a victory, but it suits me. I make myself a cup of my own American coffee and smoke my favorite French cigarettes. The soft flame ignites the tinder-dry tip and I suck and—Ah! As exquisite as being shot! I know how much my dear co-workers would adore the merest puff of this cigarette, so I like to leave the room perfumed.
I can see Dvortsovaya Square from here. A whirlpool of wet cobbles. It takes two minutes just to walk across. A dwarf is running after his umbrella; he’ll cover it in one.
How dare those dairy cows come on so pious with me? The fact is they are stewing with jealousy that I possess the basic female skills to net my men, while they do not. They can’t net their hair. I admit that my little understanding with Head Curator Rogorshev brings me my privileges, quite beside its place in the grander plan, but if they could, any of those warty hags would die for these privileges quicker than you could say “knickers around your ankles.” Yes, even Gutbucket Petrovich, with her frothy new pan-scrubber hairstyle and lardy thighs.
When Petersburg was Leningrad, I could have had the whole ruddy lot posted to the middle of fucking nowhere! Further than nowhere! They’d have been shipped out wholesale to mind a museum in the Gobi desert and live in gerts!
I was the concubine of two powerful men, you see. First, a politician. I’m not going to tell you his name: he was as high as you could get in the Politburo without being knocked off as a potential threat. High enough to know the codes to nuclear warheads. He could have ended the world if he’d wanted to, virtually. He pulled some strings at the Party Office for me and got me a lovely little apartment overlooking Alexandra Nevskogo Square. When he died suddenly of a heart attack, I selected for my next lover an admiral in the Pacific Fleet. Of course, I was given a new apartment—and the lifelong lease—that befitted an admiral’s station. I still live there now, near Anichkov Bridge, down Fontanki Embankment. He was very affectionate, my admiral. Just between you and me, I think he used to try a little too hard. He’d try to outdo the presents that the politician had bought for me. He was terribly possessive. My men always are.
My God, were those ever the days.
“Lymko,” I’d say, “I’m a little cold when we go to the ballet at night.…” And the very next morning a mink coat would be delivered. “Lymko, I need a little sparkle in my life.…” I’d show you the diamond brooch that c
ame, but I had to sell it to set up a business venture of Rudi’s, back in our early days, you understand. It would have made Gutbucket Petrovich’s jaw drop so far that she wouldn’t be able to shut her mouth for a week. “Lymko, so-and-so at the Party department store was quite beastly last week. Quite improper. I wouldn’t want to get anyone into trouble, but he said things about your professional integrity that hurt me deeply.…” And the next morning so-and-so would discover that he had been promoted to junior cleaner in the public shit-houses around Lake Baikal. Everyone knew about me, but everyone played along to keep the peace. Even his wife, kept out in the naval base at Vladivostok with her clutch of admiral brats.
Another cigarette. The ashtray is already half-full. The dwarf never caught his umbrella.
Back on my plastic chair. I’m almost groaning with boredom. I’m forced to play this game of patience, dying of a lack of interest, day after day after day. The end of the afternoon staggers into view. I’m hungry and I need a vodka. Rogorshev has his own secret bottle. I count the seconds. Forty minutes times sixty seconds, that’s twenty-four thousand seconds to go. There’s no point looking outside to relieve the boredom. I already know the view. The Dvortsovaya embankment, the Neva, the Petrograd side. I’d get Head Curator Rogorshev to change my gallery, but Rudi says no, not now that we’re so close to the big night. Jerome agrees with him for once, so I’m stuck here.
Strange to think, us Russians once mattered in the world. Now we have to go begging for handouts. I’m not a political woman—thinking about politics was too damned dangerous when I was growing up. Besides, what was this Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, really? “Republics” need real elections and I never saw any of those, I damn well never heard of any “Soviets”—I’m not even sure what one is. “Socialism” means the common people own the country, and all my mother ever owned was her intestinal parasites. And where was the “union”? Us Russians pouring roubles into these pointless little countries full of people eating snakes and babies all over Asia just to stop the Chinks or the Arabs getting their hands on them? That’s not what I call a union. That’s what I call buying up the neighbors. An empire by default. But could we ever kick ass in those days! Jerome told me that some schoolkids in Europe have never even heard of the USSR! “Listen, meine kinder,” I’d tell ’em, “about this country you’ve never heard of, we used to have enough nuclear bombs to make your side of the Berlin Wall glow beet-red for the next ten thousand years. Just be grateful. You could have been born with the arms of a mushroom and a bag of pus for a head, if you’d been born at all. Think about it.”