A Prague Night (Пражская ночь)
by Pavel Pepperstein
Click here to read the author's biography
Click here to read a synopsis
***
Sample translation by Andrew Bromfield
On May 1, 200.., a certain individual arrived in Prague. I was that individual: Ilya Korolenko, attractively clean-featured and inconspicuous, with a dreamy look in my eyes and hair spiralling into a passionate, babyish twist over my forehead. In terms of intimate predilection, in terms of my mission, I am a poet, sometimes I put a few words together and revel in their magic, their incongruous voodoo, I am one of the few who still tend this once-sacred flame, which only recently was a raging conflagration of forest fires, but has now been reduced to the glowing dot on the last cigarette of a dying giant. But that, of course, is not how I make my living. For many years now I have been a hit man, a top-flight killer. The weary killer drinks his Miller. I always work alone. How did I happen to get into this line of work? It’s all a matter of eyesight. Fate gifted me with exceptionally keen, virtually telescopic vision. Which means I naturally possess phenomenal accuracy: I shoot from any distance and never miss. In my very young days I used to win places and prizes in shooting competitions, and I enjoyed buggering about in rifle ranges. You might say I ought to have put this gift to a worthier use. Perhaps, but this was what fate decreed.
I must admit, however, that I love my work. My services are expensive, and the individuals I am contracted to kill are characters stained with the filth of multiple heinous crimes. I’m the kind of boy who likes to take an interest: before I press the trigger I find out everything there is to find out about my mark. And I only accept a contract if I get a sour kind of feeling in my heart – yes, this is one life I want to cut short, yes, I want to be the author (or the co-author, if you happen to be religious) of the full stop that will mark the end of this particular individual’s biography. I have inserted quite a number of these precise little dots, and I don’t regret a single one.
I’m not in the least bit cruel or malicious; on the contrary, I’m jovial and benign. Which is what the angel of death should be like, surely? And I have another, entirely intimate reason for doing this work. I have already told you that I am a poet, but before I embarked on the Way of the Hit Man, I hadn’t written any poetry for a long time, far too long. At that point something had stopped, come to a complete standstill inside me: I felt that all my brain’s mellifluous murmurings, everything that set my heart weeping and laughing, was wrong. Not right somehow. Although I’m quite capable of playing the narcissist, I had enough wits to realise that all my feelings and all my pleasures were of no significance whatsoever. In general, though, it wasn’t a matter of anything being wrong with me. Not with me.
Anyway, I hadn’t written any poetry for a long time. I must confess, though, that I wasn’t suffering in the slightest, I didn’t try to summon up my muse or my demon, I lived for my own delight, soaking up the bitterness and sweetness of existence, but there was something standing idle inside me, some poetic mechanism that remained unused; it was as if I were nothing but a small carved-wood table, supporting this iced-up, non-functional device. I lived merrily and modestly. I drank. Delightful damsels occasionally bestowed on me pleasures beyond all comprehension. I liked reading and sleeping. The circulation of money bypassed my pocket, which was almost always blithely empty. Youth. Almost, eternal. But capitalism was waxing ever stronger all around me, constricting space, gnashing its fangs, squeezing my throat. I realised I couldn’t carry on living that way, like the grass of heaven, in that happy-go-lucky, roly-poly-bubbly, poetically nonchalant style.
My handsome, absolutely unmemorable face – yes, that is yet another strange aspect of my being, my face is quite impossible to remember (which, naturally, is helpful to me in my work). Even I can never remember my own face, and every glance in the mirror is an encounter with a stranger.
I am the great-grandson of the great writer Korolenko, who wrote Children of the Underground. I am also one of them, a child of the underground, I am a son of the deep-earth Soviet world, a child of its final tremors of farewell. That great world, the cradle of my childhood, no longer exists, it has been extracted at the surface, its overlying strata have been stripped away, its subterranean oceans have been drained and the great damp shadows that filled them have been burned off by the pitiless sun of Capital. That diseased sun is expanding, swelling catastrophically, as everyone knows, and at its heart, clearly visible, is a black hole – the anti-future, the cosmic burrow of non-existence, into which our little golden apple is trundling quite cheerfully.
My father, a child psychiatrist, was killed by one of his patients, an insane little girl. I was four years old at the time. My mother, an officer in the KGB, is now past seventy but, strangely enough, she still works in the special services – I don’t know what the old woman does for them. I grew up with my grandmother and grandfather, surrounded by books. I was keen on poetry, mathematics and the social sciences. No one, apart from myself, ever took any care for my upbringing. I trod a free road, following wherever my free mind led me. It led me along the lanes of jolly, dirty parks and the corridors of museums, over the dry clay paths of southern mountain slopes and through the black rooms of friends.
Quite often, when drinking in congenial company, if a decent rod happened to come to hand, I would amuse myself by firing at the empty bottles and glasses. I fired at playing cards too, and maps – a satiny map of the world taken from an atlas is hung on a tree, it writhes and rustles like a flag in the wind, I stand at a distance, looking off to one side, someone shouts out: “Moscow” – and I fire immediately, on the turn, without taking aim, and you can be sure the bullet has pierced the heart of our homeland.
The nineteen-nineties decreed that several of my friends turn to a life of crime, and some of them rose to significant heights in those wicked worlds – it was they who offered me a job, having been impressed by my phenomenal accuracy.
They offered me very good money to shoot a certain individual. This individual stopped at absolutely nothing in his business affairs, he bore the ignominious stains of every possible kind of filth, and he was comprehensively protected, the kind of bird that could only be brought down from a great distance, during the few seconds between getting out of his car and immediately concealing himself behind the backs of his bodyguards on the steps of his own bank.
At first I refused. They tried to persuade me, they even showed me a secret film about him, taken with a concealed camera, but the sight of tortured cooperative entrepreneurs made no impression on me. It was clear enough anyway that the client deserved to die. I refused again. I couldn’t be bothered somehow.
But then one day, as I was wandering round the old Moscow courtyards I had loved since I was a child, I approached a certain little house that I adored passionately. I had looked at that house for as long as I could remember, on summer evenings and winter evenings, and it had always been uninhabited, with its windows solidly boarded up. Dilapidated and mysterious, the tiny mansion was hidden away in the dense blackness of impossibly beautiful trees, and the gaze of its stucco fauns and nymphs, whether covered in poplar fluff, petals or snow, was imbued with a delicate, enigmatic humour; eternal youth shone in their faces, and ironical dust accumulated in the dimples on their cheeks. Yes, they were young and happy, those ancient dryads and bacchuses, those little nereid girls hurtling along on dolphins above the deep, indifferent windows. I had never seen anyone go inside or come out; left to its own devices, everything here had frozen in its own freedom and mystery. Oh, how I love places like that! They are the reason why I have stayed on this planet.
But now I saw that the house was surrounded by a new fence of corrugated steel, and an expression of fright had appeared on the faces of the nymphs; the little house itself, in fact, was gazing out from behind the fence like a prisoner. Yes, it had been condemned. And the beautiful trees making up its magical retinue had been condemned too: a huge billboard towering over the steel fence depicted the new building that would soon rise up here: a ghastly-blue wedge shape with spectacular square windows and a pseudo-classical portico. A bank. I read the name of the bank and immediately recalled who owned it. The next day I called my acquaintances and accepted their offer.
I agreed to kill a man – I, a tender-hearted, kind, fair-skinned poet who had never raised his lily-white hand in anger, except perhaps against a mosquito! I also happen to believe that genius and villainy are incompatible, but why would I want to be a genius? I wasn’t interested in anything like that.
What I was interested in was for the nymphs and fauns to go on living in the depths of the black little garden, for the little old house to go on living. I managed to prolong the life of that little house by almost ten years, and I am proud of having done it. The secret soul of our city dwelt in that little house. They killed it. It was demolished anyway and the huge, shady trees were sawn down. Towering up there now, instead of the blue wedge, is another bank, hotel, boutique or restaurant, the apotheosis of shit.
But I shall take my revenge. One by one, everyone who did this will die: the heads of the construction companies, the project owners, the architects, everyone. A well-aimed bullet will find each one of them. And what I would like most of all is to set my sights on the main culprit of this cosmic atrocity, the man who killed the soul of my city – that fucked-up smart-ass of a city mayor, the beekeeping Gauleiter of Moscow, that little old man as onion-shaped as his name in Russian, who may not even be malicious, merely a thrifty site engineer and assiduous manager of local resources, who has destroyed the sacred city of the Russian world out of sheer stupidity (the kind of stupidity that sincerely believes itself to be sober, practical reason), who has killed the sacred capital simply because economic management has no need of the sacred. Oh, how I would love to treat that little ghoul to a silver bullet!
And in any case, I would like to switch from contract killings to killing as a labour of love, choosing the mark to suit my own taste, but I feel nervous, appallingly nervous, and I can’t bring myself to cross that line – like a young prostitute who has slept with hundreds of men in just one year of work, but trembles at the thought of the first night of sex for love in her life. I realize that only when I kill someone with no financial reward will I become a real killer. Or will I?
Anyway, I accepted the offer. And now here I was lying on the warm roof like some adolescent, clutching my sniper’s rifle and mentally mocking myself – a grown-up boy now, if not a very respectable one – for agreeing to take on an essentially childish piece of bullshit like a contract killing: some kind of idiotic boys’ game. But when I caught the back of the client’s grey-haired head in the little round window of my optical sight as it flitted between the square backs of his bodyguards, everything inside me suddenly changed. When my finger was already on the trigger, a mere second before the shot, my soul was illuminated by a bright light and a poem flared up inside my head like a bulb in a child’s lamp:
Tridge-tridge-partridge! With me you celebrate
This solemn festival of melancholy joy
Pirates have smashed your house of rhapsody to splinters!
Your treasures lie in scrap-heap and museum dust,
Yet still you rejoice, tridge-tridge-partridge!
Oh Lord, how eternal is youth!
And I took the shot. Impeccably. A few minutes later I was sitting in the back of a car, speeding away from the site of my first hit, sitting there stunned and, moreover – begging your pardon, good people – I was stunned less by the fact that I had killed someone for the first time than the fact that my muse, my demon, had come back to me. Stunned to be a poet again.
I had to give it another try. I accepted another contract. This job was even more difficult: I had to shoot from a car travelling at speed, through the glass. But I made another good shot. One. I never fire twice. And it all happened all over again: the very second I cocked the hammer, an apricot light flooded into my soul, filling it completely, joy burst into my heart like a berserk elephant, and the words stood out in my astonished brain as clearly as they did on the wall of Balthazar’s palace:
A whiff of maritime asceticism
Wafted from the shy old woman
Gnawing so malignly on the mariner’s elbow
And whispering as she did so: Lord, have mercy!
A whiff of maritime asceticism!
It was my work that had brought me to Prague: I had been hired to kill a man by the name of Orlov (a name, I noted, derived from the Russian word “oryol”, meaning “eagle”).
For a long time Orlov had been the eminence grise of one of Russia’s largest criminal factions, he had made his mark in all the leading areas of Russian business, sunk his talons into politics and, generally speaking, he was one of the secret kinglets of capitalist Russia, but with the advent of the new millennium he had got into difficulties, his business affairs had faltered and he had forfeited the goodwill of the Russian authorities – and then it had been decided to flush him down the tubes: the Public Prosecutor’s Office got on his case and kept after him, he lost two thirds of his capital and was forced to flee abroad. He settled in Prague and rumours surfaced that he had become extremely religious and spent all his time in the cathedrals, genuflecting to the crucifixions, but not many people took his conversion to God seriously: they remembered him as an incredibly cunning, cautious and ruthless man. From his sanctuary in Prague he continued to control the remnants of his commercial empire, even bankrolling some political party or other in Moscow… He was scheming away, weaving some cunning webs of his own… This had begun to irritate certain individuals, who were no less brutal and cynical than Orlov was, and they had decided to get rid of him once and for all. They put out a contract on him. How times do change. In former years, he himself had put out contracts on many people, and I had carried out several hits for him, although, naturally, the instructions were passed on by intermediaries. I had never seen him in the flesh.
Prague welcomed me with the freshness of spring, the scent of blossoming trees, a thrilling thunder storm and the riverine tang of the Vltava – this city was so beautiful, it brought tears to my eyes. How strange it was that I had come here with murderous intent.
I was not allowed any scope for creative freedom in the hit, I had to act strictly according to instructions, the instructions that I extracted from a safe deposit box below the stained glass ceiling of an old bank, on which buxom Slavic women wearing ruby-red headscarves pierced by rays of amber light embraced sheaves of wheat as they swirled round in a reeling dance. In the envelope that I extracted from the deposit box, I discovered a sheet of paper with instructions in English, a pistol with an elongated barrel and silencer, a wad of money and a heavy old iron key. I put the key and the money in my rucksack and walked out of the bank. After that I followed the instructions.
At a certain time I had to be sitting at a table in a certain cafe located opposite another cafe, waiting for Orlov to put in an appearance. He had an appointment in the cafe opposite, someone was supposed to deliver a small suitcase to him, and the instructions warned me that I must not take any further action until after Orlov had received this suitcase. If the small suitcase was not delivered to him at the appointed place, the hit was cancelled.
I sat there, reading snatches of Gustav Meyrink’s Walpurgis Night (I wanted to soak up the atmosphere of Prague) and carefully watching what was happening in the cafe opposite out of the corner of my almost telescopic eye: the people over there, hovering at the tables behind the icy glass, looked as if they were in some kind of golden aquarium. It was quite crowded, rather jolly in fact. Japanese tourists leafed through guidebooks in unison, groups of lads and lasses laughed together, Germans ate breakfast, an old man drank beer, neat ladies sat in tidy pairs, smoking and chatting over their coffee and cakes. Orlov wasn’t there yet. Then three men appeared, one after another, and sat in different corners of the cafe. I had seen photographs of these three: Orlov’s personal bodyguards. I didn’t even notice him come in. But, looking up from my book, I saw him making his way between the tables, hunched over – he was a short man with a large white head, wearing a loose black coat of thin, crinkly material. He really did look like an eagle, as his name suggested, or rather, a vulture, or rather, a nestling of one of those birds: scrawny neck, hunched shoulders, bald head enveloped in faint, light-coloured fluff. I saw from a distance that his light eyes were the colour of greatly diluted coffee behind those frequently blinking eyelids with white lashes. He was slightly albino. The expression on his face actually looked shy and reserved, his movements seemed constrained. He sat down on his own at an empty table and said something to a waiter, moving his bloodless lips feebly.
A few minutes later another two men appeared and moved quickly towards Orlov’s table. One of them was carrying a small, dark-coloured suitcase. I recognized these two immediately.
Yes, that cafe proved to be a space in which fallen angels meet with demons who have come to love God. Orlov was one of the God-loving demons, and now two large fallen angels of the male variety had turned up. I couldn’t fail to recognize them. They were too familiar to me from the descriptions given by my friends in conversation. I knew every single pixel of their exotic image.
They were the strapping young homosexual twins, well known in the criminal world of Moscow as Benny the Beaut and Sweaty Harry. Talented young killers, masters of their trade. I had actually admired their style on occasion, as I followed their brilliant career in the world of professional killing with interest. And they had also observed me respectfully from a distance. We had never met in person.
They were individuals of a new kind in bandit circles, no one had imagined anyone like them before. Both of them were fair-skinned, supple and athletic. Apparently, in their young days they had been successful gymnasts. Benny was a Rastaman with huge dreadlocks – in its bush-shelter of bristly withies under the huge knitted Rasta cap, his head bobbed about in time to the music flooding into his brain from his earphones. He shuffled his feet, dancing on the spot, stoned on dope. Harry was always high on cocaine, dressed like a middle-level British desk-worker, with round spectacles and a scarlet lightning bolt tattooed across his forehead.
Benny looked dirty, but I’d been told he was always enveloped in the fragrance of Paco Rabanne. Harry always showed up immaculately dressed, looking like a model in a shop window, but I’d heard about the appalling stink, the excruciating hobo stench that pervaded the air around this pseudo-clerk. Where did he get this stink from? Did he exude it himself? Did he spray it on his clothes with an elegant atomizer?
They also said that these brothers were lovers, it was even said that they piously observed an oath of fidelity to each other, and they certainly liked to refer to themselves as “the homosexual twins”, but these gory jesters were such compulsive liars that all this was probably just some fancy cover story, born of their sick fantasy, poisoned through and through by the movies.
The pro killers of my generation prided themselves (as I did) on being inconspicuous, but the spirit of a new age had given rise to new killers like these: gaudy clowns with an unforgettable image and a passion for theatrical effects. But they did their job well.
The moment I recognized them I shuddered in horror as a terrible thought ran through the convolutions of my brain: they had come to kill Orlov! And I already regarded this fledgling as mine, in the homicidal sense.
But no, they simply had a brief talk with Orlov, and then left. I could possibly have lip-read their conversation, but Orlov did almost all the talking, and he was sitting with his back to me, his white head lowered over a cup of tea. The twins nodded without saying anything, the only word they spoke came from Harry, and that word was “alright”.
At the end of the conversation Orlov took an envelope out of his inside coat pocket and then took a photo out of the envelope. He held the photo in his hand for a while and all three of them studied it. I could see the photo as well (as I said: phenomenally keen eyesight). It was a close-up of a man’s face. And I could make out the face very clearly: I didn’t know this individual. A handsome man in early middle age, regular features with something slightly classical about them, curly fair hair, calm eyes.
Whoever he is, this fair-haired man is doomed, I thought. It was obviously a matter of a hit – all the indications were that Orlov was hiring them to kill the fair-haired man. I suddenly felt curious: who was this character? It was quite clearly exceptionally important business, if Orlov had decided to meet the killers in person (that’s not the way it’s done, the contracts are conveyed to the likes of me via intermediaries).
Orlov put the photo back in the envelope and handed it to Harry. Harry put it in his pocket and the brothers walked out, leaving the small suitcase at Orlov’s feet. Everything was going according to the plan set out in the note. Orlov finished his green tea, paid and walked out of the cafe, carrying the small suitcase in his hand. I was ready to pursue him. He didn’t get into a car, he didn’t hand the suitcase over to his bodyguards, instead he simply plodded off through the noisy streets, with the suitcase in his hand. The three bodyguards scattered and followed him separately at a distance, pretending to be out for a casual stroll. I also followed him, at such a great distance that only my exceptional eyesight could have kept the mark in my field of vision. But I could see everything.
Orlov walked through the streets, bathed in light, with the motley crowd ebbing and flowing around him, all alone in his black raincoat, hunched over and dragging his feet slightly. I thought I glimpsed something poignant in his figure. He reminded me somehow of Professor Pleischner in the film Seventeen Moments of Spring, when he walks through the streets of Berlin with his shoulders stooped, going to meet his death, shuffling his feet and squinting short-sightedly up at the sky. But even so Orlov radiated danger. His solitary condition was totally fake.
Orlov came out onto Vaclav Square and walked past the monument to St. Vaclav, where the Soviet tanks halted in 1968, while all around them Prague girls stood with their lips clamped against the lips of Czech boys, flaunting the dying flames of their fading freedom in the faces of our sullen tank crews. Orlov plodded on slowly as far as the Old Town Hall and glanced at the golden skeleton shaking its little golden bell on the town hall clock. They call Prague the Golden City, and there really do seem to be glimpses of old gold everywhere here, it even shows through in the clouds, in the low waves on the Vltava, in the fresh greenery on the islands in the river. In this city, decay and freshness are fused into one, just as they are one in an ancient tree that has decked itself out for spring in youthful, fragrant blossoms.
But we Russians have been deprived of our blossoming antiquity, deprived of the celestial linkage of time, just as we have been deprived of our bright future, deprived of our laziness and dreams and the resurrection of the dead and the life of the golden age to come, and cosmic love, deprived of our awareness! Well, never mind about us. We clearly didn’t deserve any better. We sinned against communism, perverting and compromising humankind’s very finest project, we drove across its human face in tanks, and the face that was glimpsed in socialist Czechoslovakia in the period known as the “Prague Spring” was, in reality, the face of a certain northern saint, one of the ten righteous individuals for whose sake the Lord tolerates the wicked world of men. As you can see, I’m religious too, especially when I’m working.
I was working. The blessed joy of work led me through the streets of Prague after Orlov. He plodded on from the Old Town Hall to the new one – despite being several centuries younger, the New Town Hall seemed blacker and more ancient, as if it were carved out of coal. Its statues – mostly interwoven garlands of naked girls with dolefully beautiful faces – didn’t move or ring little bells, they were frozen forevermore at the corners of the morose building. Prague is a colossal museum of sculptures devoted to sex and death. Orlov stopped in front of the statue of Rabbi Leib (or “Lev” in Russian, which means “lion”), the saintly Rabbi of Prague.
The wise man towered up, huge and black, in cascading robes, with a beautiful naked woman crawling across the folds of his cloak, writhing in the grip of orgasm or the death agony, with a black stone rose tumbling out of her hand onto the stone cloak. The rabbi who was called Leib lived here in the 16th century, during the time of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf – as they would say nowadays, he was the intellectual and spiritual star of the ghetto. He was credited with having created the Golem, a clay robot with incredible strength, which at some point got out of control and devoted its energies to the frenzied destruction of everything around it. Legend has it that the saintliness of its creator alarmed the city fathers, and they invited the holy man to a celebration at the Town Hall. During the celebration a beautiful girl approached the teacher, holding out a rose. For a brief moment the rabbi’s ascetic heart was touched by the beauty of the girl and the rose, he yielded and breathed in the scent streaming from the damp petals. In that moment he died. The rose was poisoned.
Orlov spent a few minutes studying the sculpture. The eagle looked at the lion. Then he touched the girl’s stone heel uncertainly and went on his way. He walked past the old walls of the Klementinum, the Jesuit monastery that houses an incalculable number of books, was sucked into narrow Charles Street and walked past the “Golden Snake” (if only he knew what a golden snake was slithering along behind him on this fine day in May! – I mean myself, of course). The narrow street was packed tight with people, mostly tourists: I was afraid of losing my mark in the crowd, but I didn’t. The black figure with the suitcase, shuffling along on its final stroll, remained constantly at the epicentre of my dangerous vision. And in addition, something mysterious and beautiful suddenly began manifesting itself in my soul, as if a heavy, sumptuous curtain were being raised, as if the ultimate goal had loomed into view on the horizon, the stage had opened up … And the stage really did open up …
So far my eaglet and I had been wandering, so to speak, through the corridors and narrow passages of old, dangerous liaisons. But now we emerged into open space.
Don’t believe that liar, Dr. Freud, when he says that a child is born in terror, that he wants to jam himself back into the cramped, living labyrinth from which he has emerged. No, he doesn’t! I recall that I was born with a shout of jubilation, I danced the dance of the newborn in exultant greeting to the space that had opened up around me, realising that from now on I would carry on expanding until I disappeared. Oh, disappearance! How I love to disappear, my little loves! Oh, the cold cosmos! My own, my very own cold cosmos…
We walked out onto a bridge. I haven’t exhausted you with my descriptions of the city, have I? Well, I don’t give a fuck if I have. It’s good for you to get exhausted sometimes. Ah, but how the sky burst open above that bridge, like a cork blasting out of a bottle of champagne. Orlov walked, or rather, plodded on, with his white head lowered. He stood for a little while, gazing at a black crucifixion with an apostle standing on each side. The gold of the ancient Hebrew lettering glowed brightly above the cross. He batted his eyelids occasionally as he looked at the face of the crucified Christ. Observing him from a very great distance, I saw his lips whisper:
“Forgive me.”
“No, I won’t,” I replied just as soundlessly, touching the handle of the pistol in my pocket.
We walked across the old Charles Bridge. The other side of the Vltava is a different world, quite different. The Charles Bridge is a bridge between worlds. On the other side of the Vltava the soul is engulfed by happiness. Orlov slowly made his way down into the narrow green streets of Kampa and walked along the bank of the almost Venetian river Certovka – that name would be “she-devil” in Russian, and it really was a devilishly beautiful spot. I decided quite definitely to take another walk there that day after I’d done the job. As a certain friend of mine used to say: When the body’s made, time to promenade.
Sometimes I had the impression that Orlov was about to fall over. He seemed to be feeling unwell – his steps were more and more leaden, his shoulders hunched lower and lower. Perhaps he really was ill.
He reached the steps leading to the Hrad, the Prague Castle, and started clambering up them with his absurd suitcase. His bodyguards followed him at a respectable distance, merging into the crowd of tourists streaming up the steps
Orlov found the ascent to the Hrad hard going. But what a magnificent view opened up from the small platform in front of the Castle Gates! On that platform Orlov dismissed his bodyguards. I saw him stop, take his mobile phone out of his pocket and say something into it. The three men with mobile communications buds in their sporty ears stopped moving upwards, turned and started walking down, leaving their master all by himself. I felt alarmed when Orlov did that. In fact, I was feeling more and more alarmed for him in general. He stood huddled over, looking at the golden city spread out at his feet. Then, as if bowed down by a burden of incredible weariness, he leaned over and lowered his head onto the suitcase. He even seemed to embrace it…
Who was he at that moment? Christ embracing his cross? Pushkin’s miserly knight, embracing his cherished coffer? Whatever, he immediately set off again on his own personal Road to Calvary.
Orlov was only a few years older than me, but he looked almost like an old man: what had corroded his strength so badly in the prime of a man’s life? Sickness? Power? Sins or fears? The polluted energy of massive bucks? By now I felt I almost loved his shambling walk, his stooping silhouette.
He went in through the Castle Gates and started plodding up the narrow medieval street of the Hrad. I followed him. And I could sense with every fibre of my being that we were getting close. Getting close to the Thing of Ultimate Importance. Close to the Ultimate Goal.
Suddenly I was keenly aware of a sensation I had felt once before at the age of seven, on the day when I saw the sea for the first time. I was walking along an avenue in a southern park, walking between my mother and father, who were holding my hands, when the poignant sensation suddenly pierced me right through, from the top of my head to my heels: there it was… that riveting instant of time… that focal pivot, with my green life rotating around it… Any moment now it would be revealed… And it was revealed.
The blue epiphany of a colossal volume of liquid triggered a convulsion in my body on the micro-level, and my body chose to respond with the simplest possible action: I needed to take a leak. My mother and father waited in the avenue while I parted the juniper bushes, scratching myself in the process, and squeezed through into a sultry lair of cypress trees, and there I discovered a small patch of open ground scattered with needle leaves: someone had already pissed here, the place smelled of urine and flowers, black olive trees and acacias sang their May time song, there were small pieces of trash scattered around, trampled into the sand and dry needles: popcorn bags, an empty pack of Cosmos cigarettes, the severed hand of a child’s doll. On taking a closer look, I realised it was the hand of a mutilated Karlson: child sadists had apparently dismembered his hollow plastic body in this clearing. They’d certainly played to their heart’s content with this Karlson, taken it to the max: perhaps what had happened here was a scene of brutal childish revenge, revenge for countless days and months spent in lonely boredom, in anticipation of the cheerful, chirring sound of a propeller outside the window. Karlson’s body with its white propeller was lying nearby in the bushes and his head with its curly ginger hair was threaded onto a branch, beaming in a smile of inappropriate delight.
And lying at the very centre of the micro-glade in its tight encirclement of cypresses, was a plump, pink, hollow hand – it had been severed at the wrist, and all its fingers had been neatly sheared off.
I started pissing on the hand, absent-mindedly amusing myself – it was fun to see the golden jet shatter against the little carcass, setting it trembling and moving: the jet worked its way inside the hand, as if it were a glove, and little streams poured out of the finger-tubes, draining away into the warm sand – it was like some strange crab or spider flailing about on the spot, trying over and over again to get up onto its unsteady golden legs in order to run off towards the sea, but its little legs kept collapsing under it, splashing apart and flowing away, and the indifferent murmur of the Great Sea that begot this spider was calling it to come back home, to the sacred black-blue lair of its birthplace.
In that moment I realised what the sea was, and that realisation became the basis of my existence. The realisation was accompanied by a feeling of absolute liberation, as if the crown of my head had opened, and a slim antenna had started extending up into the sky – a super-slim, vitreous, absolutely smooth needle. And poised on the sharp point of this needle was a tiny, but incredibly heavy sphere, which possessed vision: and for my delight it examined the succession of landscapes and mountain crests unfolding around me, reclining on the seashore one after another, like a posse of resting dragons, gigantic bears, drowned men, damsels, monks…
At that moment of visual inclusion in the circulation of the world’s moisture, when I became one of the countless capillaries of the world ocean, a contemporary vision comprehending the microstructure of far-distant objects, I delighted in life to the ultimate.
And this time too it was approaching inexorably, or rather, I was approaching it with every step I took, and once again the mysterious ravishment made me feel slightly dizzy, although this time it wasn’t the sea. It was the Cathedral.
The Cathedral of St. Vitus. The main cathedral of Prague, towering over the entire city, rose up in front of me like a cliff face or an explosion, and something revelatory shone in its stone, burning bushes, stalactites and beds of coral … “Every genuine cathedral is also a sea,” I thought. “They were right to call the Great Temple in Jerusalem the Sea.”
Who is St. Vitus? The only mementoes we have of him are the dance that is a sickness and this gigantic cathedral. The square in front of the cathedral was swarming with tourists, but the cathedral was closed, there was some kind of restoration work going on inside, and in the midst of the motley throng it soared up like an impregnable rock face, bleak and sullen, locked against the crowd’s toxic ingress. But Orlov confidently walked up to the side wing of the cathedral and stopped in front of a small door in the wall. I saw him take a key out of the pocket of his raincoat, turn it in the lock and disappear into the building.
I hurried across to the little door, forcing my way through the crowd that was clamouring in various languages. I took the key out of my rucksack – an exact copy of the one that Orlov had. I opened the little door, went in and closed it behind me.
Silence and cold enveloped me. I set off slowly along the side aisle. It was completely empty and deserted, with a profound smell of cold stone. The only person I saw was a restorer, warmed by a beam of stained-glass light as he slept on a pile of wood panels in one of the chapels. Huge, cold bishops hovered at an immense height above my head, they were dancing, they had congealed in their dance. You embryos of the baroque, you have frozen in the jet streams of the gothic. Goths love their gothic, a helpful narcotic. The feel of the gothic is quite amniotic. Cascades upon cascades. Lilies upon lilies. Columns upon columns… Marble lard. But how fucking beautiful it is here! St. Vaclav’s chapel would be a good place to remember in the final moment of life
Then I saw the central altar, an immense gold crucifixion, and Orlov kneeling in front of it. Sumptuous golden-amber light cascaded down onto him, rendering the scene unbearably opulent. The tails of Orlov’s black coat were spread out across the marble slabs, making him look like a black eagle who had flown to the feet of his master, only it was strange that this master was not the mighty Zeus, but the crucified Christ. Orlov’s little suitcase was lying in front of him at the foot of the cross, and as he lay there prostrate, he seemed to be humbly offering it up to the Lord. But anyway, I wasn’t interested in his religious games. Moment X had arrived. The distance suited me. I raised the pistol with its silencer, took aim at the black hunched back and set my finger on the trigger. Orlov raised himself slightly and turned his face upwards, towards the Saviour. At that very moment a poem flared up in my head.
“Ko-ko-ko,” says madam Chicken
“Ke-ke-ke,” my comrade rooster echoes in response
I like verse that is like a little girl with a box of matches – simple, dreaming of a good time, but turning to ice before your very eyes. I love a piece of querulous drivel, belched forth from the very heart of existence. The embryonic rustling of truth. What are poems and songs but a long, drawn-out farewell to the agrarian world? I am a child of the megalopolis, so why then do they flare up so often in my heart, these fields of grain, these gigantic seed-rich expanses and tiny vegetable gardens with weather-beaten old men digging in them? Am I a medium for these long-gone fields? Have I been charged with recording their final rustling scream? Recording it in shots, in a dotted line of smoking bullet holes in bodies and walls? Who, me? Yes, yes, yes. Omigosh!
“I absolve you,” I said quietly and took the shot. A good shot. I always make a good shot. Medical, you might say. Almost an injection. I studied anatomy especially for that, acquiring knowledge almost as complete as a doctor’s.
The echo of the muffled shot hung in the cathedral – as if sand was pouring out of everywhere. But soon everything turned hollow and quiet again, like inside some gigantic seashell. Orlov lay motionless at the foot of the cross.
I was just about to turn and walk away, when I suddenly felt curious about the little suitcase. What present had Orlov wanted to give the Lord before he died? A little suitcase filled with diamonds of the purest water? What else could it be filled with? Money? Cocaine? Mincemeat made from the flesh of his murdered mistress? The ears of his enemies? Documents exposing the sordid power of the clandestine World Government?
Yielding to curiosity, I approached cautiously and glanced into the open suitcase over Orlov’s dead shoulder. The suitcase was full of curd cheese. The simple white curds lay in the suitcase, filling all the space in it uniformly – through the ancient stone smell of the cathedral I caught a whiff of the sour-milk freshness of infancy. Bright scarlet spots of Orlov’s blood lay on the grainy surface – the dead man had dropped his white head into the white curds.
I smiled. Curd cheese. Those spots of bright red on white. What a poignant memory – the way I used to pour jam over curd cheese at the jolly breakfasts of my childhood. I wanted to fill my lungs with that smell. I leaned down towards the suitcase, half-embracing Orlov’s body and breathed in the aroma hungrily. Such a strange smell really, elemental, bewildered… And then I heard the sound. A quiet ticking. Orlov didn’t have a watch on his wrist. All I had was the timer on my mobile phone. I understood immediately. This lily-white-handed poet is an old hand now. I cautiously reached out and parted the damp layers of curd cheese with a gentle movement. A timer. A bomb. With only thirty seconds left until it went off. Just in time! I couldn’t have got out of the cathedral that quickly…
I’m very good at dealing with explosive devices. I personally have always preferred a shot to an explosion, but I’m a professional and I have a pretty good idea about everything that relates to my work in one way or another. I could have disarmed the bomb and stopped the timer straight away, but for my own satisfaction I did it exactly seven seconds before detonation. I glanced at the figures 007 on the timer, smiled and walked out of the cathedral. The restorer was still sleeping tranquilly in one of the side chapels.
I hope that someday this cathedral will be adorned with a simple emerald-green plaque that says: “Ilya Korolenko killed Orlov here”.