Matisse (Матисс)
by Alexander Ilichevsky
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Click here to read a synopsis
***
Sample translation by Andrew Bromfield
LXXI
Living as a tramp was hard, but fascinating. He kept trying to find a new angle on things, an interesting way to get his teeth into Moscow, which he now saw as the same kind of special setting for thrills and action as his childhood – a kingdom of scrap yards and rubbish dumps, basements, warehouses, abandoned locomotives and empty workshops where you could load up with carbide, steal a fire extinguisher or an acetylene torch, cut a bunch of thin copper pipes off an abandoned compressor, fill an old tin can with grease for the felt pistons of air rifles and drink your fill of invigorating fizzy water from an old drinks dispenser: a pinch of coarse salt in a half-litre jar, and the carbonated water belched up in a foaming Niagara…
He sank his harpoon into Moscow and pursued it – it was his Leviathan. He discovered such hair-raising excitement in it, derived so much spine-tingling adventure from visits to unusual places, that sometimes in the morning he simply couldn’t make up his mind what pleasure to indulge in first, what he should do, where he should go: to the lofts on Chisty Lane, to rummage through the junk and the old magazines and spy through the gable windows, seeking out the prehistoric mosaic of sagging roofs with rusty slopes and crooked outbuildings covered with a sprinkling of blinding-blue snow? – Or should he steal into the deserted garrets of the Arkhangelskoe estate and sift through the fire-barrier sand that littered all the floors there, extracting from his sieve crumpled cartridge cases, pre-war coins, an earring – a small arc of silver with a garnet droplet set in it – all the things that had tumbled out of the pockets of the blouses, shirts, trousers and tunics laundered and hung up to dry after being taken from bodies that had decomposed by now? – Or should he dash over to Salutation Hill, to St. Matthew’s Wood, and wade through the forest ravine, waist-deep in snow, to the first five-metres-high Stalinist dacha fence, flounder and scrabble as he dug out the little low dog gate, flick the hook of the catch out of the eye with a broken hacksaw blade and tear his jeans on a nail as he squeezed into the restricted zone around the old Central Committee hospital, look around across the paths that had been cleaned for no one, over the top of the other fence that ran in under the forked or ship’s-mast-straight pagodas of the pine trees in the distance, walk into the parallelepiped of the conservatory, that sultry hothouse city, full of glass, light, fragrant thickets, trailing vines with prickly, hairy cucumbers, freshly painted radiators surmounted by the white suns of steam gauges and mossy planter boxes containing the rootstocks of mandarins, lemons and limes, the bulbs of shaggy dahlias, intense gladioluses and lilies, and a tangle of gnarled off-cuts from grapevines, with various sorts of mottled, intoxicating orchids branching as they soared up out of their sinewy crevices, take a stroll through a burst of summer, examine a butterfly that had woken up in the spring-thaw heat and was opening and closing its little wings hypnotically, sit in the saddle of the cultivator, hot from the glassy sunshine, drop to his knees when the watchman appeared in the doorway, creep round him to the way out – and shoot like a bullet back through the snowdrifts, gate and ravine?
Korolyov revelled in his freedom. Liberated from the nonsense of work, for the first month he completely forgot about Gittis and the abandoned apartment. Only once did it briefly occur to him that it would be a good idea to sell the car to put a bit more cash in his pocket. In his mind Moscow quickly assumed the form of a wasps’ labyrinth, its cells laid out in rings, congested in some places, extinct in others, fragrant with the odour of neglect and decay given off by the dead, rustling, incredibly light wasps – but full of gaps, burrows and passages leading to places in a world beyond, over which neither state nor man had any power, where the urban despot, myth, held sway, where the mirage of everyday routine receded before the impudence of curiosity. Moscow was a greedy-grasping commercial cesspit – but threaded through and through with passages and burrows to the unknown, which were used by special creatures, and if you exposed them with your daring and cunning, you might suddenly find your way into some kind of dark devilry or drama – a drama was worse.
The Masterpieces of the Unknown drifted past unnoticed in humdrum everyday reality, but he cherished the capital’s treasures, which for him included many things: the cyclopean locks on the Moscow-Volga canal opened their gates, the size of city buildings, into a vein of the polar expanses – the pale sky of the Pechora river, the Solovetsky Islands, hard labour on the White Sea canal, the boulder-strewn shores of Kolguev, littered with rubbish by storms, the icy Northern Sea Route and the blinding purple and white wasteland; all those watchmen’s huts standing like beacons, with their windows broken, crowned by plaster nymphs from the 1930s, aroused the desire to live in them for a while – and he spent several nights there, after first cleaning away the broken glass and icy-solid shit piles from a square space with a piece of asbestos board.
The wooden-plank hangar of the Polar Air Fleet still survived among the high-rises of Tushino, enclosed by an impenetrable makeshift fence of wire grilles from beds, the backs of chairs, doors lifted off their hinges and tangles of barbed wire (the anonymous custodians had made a real effort); a pack of shaggy stray dogs lay in ambush in the hangar, which was boarded up on all sides, but pierced from above by rents that let in wings of frosty light like knife-blades – and, according to rumour, it still preserved intact the legendary ANT-25RD aircraft, with its wings opened to their full 40-metre span, standing on the flat tyres of its undercarriage, with its propeller engine quadruplets and its raised cockpit.
Or there was the simple car-wash on the periphery of the Belorussian Railway Station that turned into an entrance to the infinite confusion of a wagon city – a railway map projection of the entire country that had occupied all the sidings.
Rambling across the Sparrow Hills, he made his way through the back streets and courtyards on to the grounds of Mosfilm, where he found an abandoned pavilion full of fairytale movie sets from his childhood. There was the hut on bristly chicken legs, the cardboard thickets of the Murom woods, the remains of the beast’s palace from The Little Scarlet Flower and, towering up like a small chapel, the empty, echoing head of the warrior-hero who was the brother of the evil dwarf Chernomor. As large as a village house, the head was a cosy place to spend the night. Once he tried singing in it, and was frightened by the macabre, hollow, disembodied bass that didn’t belong to him at all.
On the little island between the Setun and Potylikha rivers he used to creep into the movie stuntmen’s practice ground, with its springboards, aeroplanes, burnt-out automobiles and, there right in the middle of everything, the space station that had once circled Solaris. He couldn’t spend the night in this home-grown sector of outer space, because the station was guarded by a rabid dachshund that gave him a bloody ankle. Korolyov was forced to hold the dachshund at bay with a ski-pole. He had picked it up on a rubbish dump and used it as a staff, imagining that he was following a route through the mountains, as if he were traversing a high pass, probing for cracks with his alpenstock.
In Granatny Lane beside the House of Architects he came across a sculpture studio that was scheduled for demolition. The basement was crammed with maquettes for monumental works: busts of generals and civilians – for some reason all bald and wearing pince-nez. Many of the sculptures were repeated, creating a merry- go-round of doubles, and he cringed as he poured the cold light of his diode torch over them. Snared in the trap of curiosity, he crept through this slippage in space that had been conquered by an impetuous deluge of human flesh. Here men in military greatcoats and pointed army hats lay flat on their backs with their arms flung out to the sides: muscular female gymnasts flexed in a strenuous disarray of poses, as if they were at some ball that had got out of step… He froze at the sight of this junk yard of naked plaster bodies and, remembering something, ran his hand along an icy leg… then suddenly went dashing off, but lost his way in the aisles through this tumultuous stony throng, banged his cheekbone against somebody’s hand and doubled over in pain. When he pulled himself together, he spent a long time wandering about in there, shuddering at the sculptural exertions, the rampant billows of the landscape of torsos, folds in greatcoats, banners, girls’ breasts and ankles, or the slack bellies of old women hunched over tubs, at the pleading face of a little girl that suddenly came drifting towards him, with its braids sticking straight out and its eyebrows pointing up in line with its pointed little nose – and he suddenly had the idea that there was one night when all these sculptures came to life, went out in the street and wandered round Moscow, walked to the boulevards and held a kind of political meeting, thronging together and turning their blank eyes this way and that, lighting bonfires and plunging their stone hands into the flames. The basement led him out into a hall with a huge high ceiling covered with dusty square panes of glass flooded with ice, where he lost patience and turned on the light, and then they launched themselves at him from above – the goat-legged generals, the composers on their flying music benches, the goddess of justice, looking like a laundrywoman, and the Pegasuses, with a multitude of small busts, models, maquettes and demons of all different sizes who jumped down at him off their stools and shelves.
And all this was illuminated by shouts from the owners of the workshop, who were spending the night up on the galleries, and then he made friends with them – in the sense that they didn’t call the police – and they turned out to be a mother and son, bewildered custodians of the monumental legacy of their husband and father (his embarrassed face in the narrow spectacles, draped with cobwebs, made them feel they could trust him).
He always remembered that inhabited basement, and especially that time when he came across the sculptor Vuchetich’s dacha at the back of Amsterdam Street in the Timryazev district, where the gigantic heads of military leaders looked as if they’d choked to death in an apoplectic fit, and the Motherland, with her sword raised high above her shoulder, seemed to be weeping in helpless rage…
One clear day he wandered around the Khodynskoe Field until twilight. Above the bright horizon there was a light snowstorm congealing into semi-transparent, rampaging crowds. The people fell in heaps on top of each other, but the next gust of wind raised them up, dragged them along and tossed them around, then they fell and got up raggedly again. That time he stayed on the field until nightfall, standing watch over the ghosts of the dead who were crushed in the pits and trenches of the “Khodynka”. They came here for a one-kopeck mug and a headscarf, for a bread roll and a handful of candy. Only he didn’t look for them in the right place, by the Botkin hospitals, but over towards Khoroshevka Street, where the runway for Aerodrome No. 1 was still resisting the pressure from new construction projects. At one end of it stood a repair shed with a stray Iliushin-76 cargo plane hidden behind its doors. This was the same object that Korolyov had once spotted in a bright blur of silver up above his head. The aeroplane was either being repaired or reassembled out of parts which, for some reason, were delivered by trucks from the Kazan Railroad Station, or else it had made a forced landing here and now the plane had to be shuttled across urgently to the right port, before it could disintegrate. Here on the Khodynka it was more guarded than repaired by the team of engineers. In late spring the entire district was deafened by test runs of the engines.
Korolyov only discovered the precise site of the tragedy in summer, when he was meandering across the field with Valya and Nadya. That was the time when they’d got into the habit of lighting fires on the Khodynka at night and boiling up broth out of soya “corned beef”. On one of those mornings an impromptu guided tour happened to pass by. Korolyov tagged along for a while and the guide – a vigorous, strapping young man looking like Mayakovsky, tousle-haired, wearing a jacket and a clean shirt, who was striding out across the field with a camera held at the ready, described in detail where and how the site for the festivities had been laid out, where the marquees had stood, and the tubs with the palm trees and fig trees, the direction the people had come from – and where they had buried the victims afterwards: they dug out a long ditch at the Vagankov Cemetery and put the coffins in three deep, with the inscriptions on the crosses in pencil.
On another of those days they were woken at dawn by a strange roaring. The embers of the fire were burning out under a handsome cap of grey ash, the dew had left little triangular lenses in the folds of his sleeping bag and they trembled as he breathed. With its sights aimed straight at the high-rise apartments, the plane trundled out onto the strip of concrete road. There were three men running around it, waving pieces of cloth in the air. A man was hanging out of the pilot’s cabin up to his waist, trying to spot something in front of the undercarriage and pummelling at the air with his hand. Eventually he drew back inside and closed the window. The plane came to a halt. The engines roared. The plane jerked forward into its short run-up to take-off. Once off the ground, its ponderous carcass condensed the air into two transparent furrows, mingling them together underneath itself – and the bright dawn filling the windows of the buildings stopped trembling when it raised its wing flaps and reached upwards and banked, disappearing behind the construction sites pressing up against the Khoroshevskoe Highway.
Chapter fourteen. THE METRO
LXXII
In cold weather he came to the metro to get warm. Simply to stand at the entrance and let his entire body catch the breath of hot wind gusting out from behind the doors as they swung open and banged against the people’s bodies crowding at the exit. This warmth was merely the indifferent breath of the bowels of the earth. There was no heating in the metro – the ground was warmed by the Underworld: after that idea came to him, the waves of comforting warmth rolling over him used to send him into tremors of ecstasy.
With time, the peace and quiet that reigned under the ground began to have a stupefying effect on him instead of a blissful one. Little by little, a somnambulistic state of chronic lethargy, apathy and indifference gradually subjugated him, drew him in and dissolved his personality. Just as a lump of lime that gets damp is first primed by the moisture and hardened, then gradually becomes crumbly as it is leached away. His personality was worn down by indifference, he lived in a daze of cotton-wool dreams, his very nature began shifting in the direction of ghosts, whose diminished materiality endowed them with the same kind of amorality as his own, which had no practical application, so it found no expression for as long as he remained unaware of it.
And in this subtle borderline condition, poisoned by resignation and worn down by the proximity of the non-living, it was as if he became a thought of the city, a thought of its subterranean depths, a concentrated expression of the intention of those depths that had not yet been realised, but was secretly drawing him into a state of pupation. Evidently this was the way that inorganic material sought its messenger or herald in a random organic form. Clumsily and awkwardly, like a mute whose tongue has no feeling, the non-living was trying to breathe him out as an interjection or a word.
He sensed this when he remembered that inside him, glimmering faintly in an absolute void empty of all meaning, there was a kind of mute speech, the bleating of something truncated by an apoplectic stroke, something pleading to be liberated from its own inaccessible essence. When he realised this and retraced the causal mechanism of everything that had happened to him unawares, he came up with a bloodcurdling comparison as an illustration. He choked on this thought, his chin trembled and his brain convulsively recoiled from all of its associations, but its tail still carried on rattling, thrashing and knocking even as it drooped: “If the non-living is seeking incarnation, who will it be – Christ or Antichrist?
The mere thought that his torch batteries would run out, and he would be left in impenetrable darkness, groping along, losing his way, wandering aimlessly and squirming under the pressure of the sublime subterranean depths, set him shuddering, he perspired and his shoulder cramped up. And then eventually he would find some steps and start clambering up them interminably, and suddenly discover that the steps broke off at a sheer drop – the only thing he could imagine worse than this was a cave-in of the tunnel, shutting him into a dead-end.
The thought that he would have to die became especially important underground. It was what brought him to the light of God. He thought a lot about death now. Not as the smarting abstraction of emptiness that had reduced him to a dismal fury in his younger days. Now what he thought about were the substantial and material aspects of death. About how it would all happen – quickly, neatly, imperceptibly or, on the contrary, painfully and clumsily, with cowardice and sweaty panic, with the stress of non-acceptance, humiliation, prevarication and inept bargaining; or yet again, perhaps existence would suddenly bestow upon him a long, calm, lingering dream, into which he would take the entire world that he had discovered, with no embellishments or imprecisions, no gaps or secrets, without these faster-than-light-speed fainting fits carved out of his retina with the flinty sole of a shoe by that dazzingly subtle man whose face he couldn’t see properly.
LXXXVI
After that his head always jangled desperately, like a runaway tram, or it refused to hear, and he felt as if he was listening to the world from underwater. He didn’t want anything, he didn’t eat anything, but he felt thirsty all the time. Some of the blows had caught him on the Adam’s-apple, and now his throat smarted as if he had a bad case of tonsillitis.
Korolyov had sudden attacks of convulsions. Frightened by his own helplessness, he took out the bottle he kept in reserve, fastened his mouth on it and sucked greedily. The spasms set the water dancing up and down in front of his eyes, but the level didn’t fall – he couldn’t swallow properly.
Now he had no feelings or thoughts and his memory had almost deserted him. Struggling to rouse himself from this stupor, he tried to remember anything at all, but he could only remember his childhood, in patches. The assembly hall, an exam, the diligent silence, the calls of swifts streaking through the sky outside the open window. A hailstorm over the river Moscow, the heavy grains lashing them on the head and arms. Pulling their shirts up over their heads, they dash across Afanasevsky Bridge, the river below them seething in white ripples of hail and spray. An empty barge creeps slowly along, there’s a child’s swing hanging at the stern of the tug and a samovar steaming in the downpour, and up above the bridge trembles and quails under the wheels of the massive Belaz trucks that have clambered up out of the spiral cavity of the quarry on the other bank…
He was transfixed by a constant mute terror, he felt it like a tree that had grown through him. The bark was choking him, scratching at his chest and throat from the inside.Korolyov didn’t understand very much about what was happening to him, and he spent day after day riding around in trolleybuses that got stuck in traffic jams, changing mechanically at the end of the line go back in the opposite direction. He bought a book at a newspaper kiosk and read it all the time. Or rather, he held it in front of him on his rucksack and kept glancing out of the window. The book was his protection. He had always known that the sight of someone reading reminded cops and the other passengers of a holy fool and made them feel, if not respect, then pity and apprehension.
He spent the night at the main railway stations but avoided sitting in the waiting rooms during the day. He was afraid of crowds, their hubbub set a squall blowing in his head.
Woozy and deranged by beatings, he wandered round the city, looking into the windows of the expensive shops and restaurants without even realising that he was hungry.
The rucksack behind his back set him a class above the unusual vagrants. The city-dweller had always regarded the tourist with a certain degree of romantic respect. But the extent of his neglect – shaggy tangled hair and matted beard – devalued his status in the eyes of people passing by.
One day on Tverskoi Boulevard a street urchin aimed a blow at him. He was sitting on a bench, warming himself in the sunshine. Nobody would have dared simply to raise their hand to him like that before. As the youngster swung, Korolyov recoiled. Then the boy stepped backwards and cuffed him hard round the back of the head.
Korolyov calmed down when he realised he had lost his sense of smell. That realisation settled something inside him. He couldn’t detect smells any more. Brain injury or damage to the septum of his nose had confined him to a bland, insipid world.
He wandered round the city and looked at the windows themselves. He seemed to have rediscovered the ability of glass to reflect and be transparent at the same time. And he liked the fact that he didn’t recognise himself in the reflection.
He was particularly attracted to one opulent fish restaurant on Petrovka Street. Korolyov no longer understood anything about luxury. It wasn’t the decor that interested him, but the voluminous display tray filled with all sorts of fish, rocky oysters and tidy scallops set out on ice.
He studied the plastic labels stuck in beside the exhibits.
For some reason they didn’t drive him away from the window. The first day the head waiter scrutinised him carefully and after that just looked at him occasionally.
At precisely twelve o’clock Korolyov moved to the next window, because the person he wanted to see had appeared there. This person was a grey-haired, thickset old man in a three-piece suit, with a watch chain across his waistcoat and round spectacles. Sitting at the table with him was a very beautiful girl. She wore a different dress every time.
Korolyov was tormented by the old man’s trim and tidy beard, his stern unhurried glance, the gestures that accompanied the process of selection from the oysters, lobsters and wine that the attentive waiter offered him – by the man’s entire personality. He simply could not remember where he had seen this man before and what meaning he had in his life. The old man’s hands, with the thick expressive fingers of a craftsman, tormented Korolyov too. He couldn’t take his eyes off them.
The girl who was with the old man wore low-cut formal dresses. Her straight back and shimmering cascade of black hair, gathered into an Andromedan nebula at the back of her head, the three tiny moles and the long neck that swept his glance into a long enthralling glide, the shadows under the tight, pointed shoulder blades that tormented him so much when they moved – for Korolyov all this unfolded into a radiant surface, and he was afraid to step off it, for everything beyond it was treacherously dark and unreal.
The old man and the girl didn’t come every day. If they weren’t there, the head waiter gestured with his hand and Korolyov hurried away.
But if they were in the restaurant, nobody did anything to him.
One day at the end of lunch the old man called the waiter, who brought over a bottle of wine and then, a little later, a silver tray of lobsters. Adjusting a cuff with a gleaming cufflink, the old man selected two of the creatures.
The lobsters , waving their claws tied with white ribbon, were put into a paper bag that was placed in a basket of bread rolls, together with the bottle.
When the waiter came out to him, holding the basket at arm’s length, Korolyov shrank back. The waiter’s expression was something between a false smile and intensely urbane loathing.
Then he took the basket and turned towards the old man.
Matisse was not looking at him.
The model was looking at him The lobsters rustled the bag. She examined him for a few moments with a cool, intent gaze.
… He set the lobsters free on the boulevard and drank the wine slowly, using it to soften the crusty bread rolls in his mouth.
Almost merging into last year’s grass, which hadn’t reawoken yet, the creatures crawled out of sight.
LXXXVII
The fleas appeared on Korolyov very suddenly. He was riding in a trolleybus, reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer – the part that explains how to get rid of warts. Suddenly, when his eyes reached the end of the line on one of the pages, he realised that he couldn’t understand the meaning of the sentence, because he couldn’t read the last letter in the line. He went back to the beginning and started advancing towards the end of the line again, and this time he managed it, but three sentences later the same thing happened again: again he couldn’t read the last letter. Then he peered at it as an item in its own right. And he saw an insect. A longish body with tiny front limbs that it was wiggling. Its long back limbs were folded into curves.
The letter suddenly jumped across the page.
Korolyov’s entire scalp shifted in horror and the hair on his head became an object separate from him.
At the next stop, the woman sitting beside him croaked hoarsely and started pushing her way through to the door. But she didn’t get out, she stared at him obliquely. And when someone decided to sit beside him, she stretched out her neck and said in a loud voice:
“Don’t sit down, he’s got fleas,” and she pointed a finger at Korolyov and told the passengers: “There are fleas jumping all over him, I couldn’t understand what it was at first.”
Korolyov jumped out of the trolleybus. He wanted to tear his hair and his skin off. He had to get washed quickly. He had no money for the public baths. He looked round. There was the Sunshine Motel, looking like a glass radiator, on the other side of the overpass.
The walk from the very south of Moscow to the Krasnaya Presnya district took all the rest of the day.
Hunched over and lathered in nervous sweat, Korolyov often broke into a run. Sometimes he opened his fist and shook the car keys in front of him.
It was already dark when he reached Presnya. Catching his second wind, he flew along Malaya Gruzinskaya Street and darted into the door of his block.
Not having any keys, Korolyov had decided to act as follows. He would knock at the neighbours’ door and ask to use the phone. Then he would dial 426-84-14 for the Ministry of Emergencies and say he’d lost his keys. The rescue workers would come and break open the door.
Nobody answered. Korolyov took off his rucksack and hammered on both doors alternately. After drumming for a while, he stopped and listened to what was happening behind the door. He peered into the dark glass of the spy-hole, trying to catch a glimpse of anyone’s presence. He stood there for a while and then declared in a loud mechanical voice: “It’s me, your neighbour Korolyov. I need to use the phone”. Then he moved across to the other door.
The Belorussians could have gone away. The religious family wouldn’t open up out of squeamishness.
But he didn’t despair, he was happy to be back. He hammered and hammered, as if he were declaring to himself and the world: “Come on now, comrades, it’s me, your neighbour, I’ve come back, now everything’s all right. I just need to make one phone call, that’s all”.
He was on the point of running down one floor and knocking on Naila Iosifovna’s door. They had never really got on, but now he was prepared to call a truce. Suddenly Korolyov heard a lock scrabbling behind him and he started beaming as brightly as if he had turned crystal inside.
Gittis stood there in the doorway of Korolyov’s flat. His thin eyebrows were raised above his spectacles, his belly was wrapped an apron covered with sunflowers. He was holding Korolyov’s ladle and Korolyov’s kitchen towel
Only a direct hit by lightning to the top of the head could have crushed Korolyov so completely.
Wheezing hoarsely, he dashed at Gittis.
The head butt to the stomach didn’t hurt the fat man. He stepped back and hit Korolyov on the forehead with the ladle.
One second’s loss of consciousness finished Korolyov. Gittis pushed him out into the stairway and slammed the door.
Korolyov staggered in his fury. Dry tears gushed from his eyes. His face wrinkled up and he started howling. He flung his body against the door with all his weight, again and again.
A lock clicked behind him and a woman’s voice shouted:
“I’ll call the militia in a minute. Get out of here!”
The door slammed.
Korolyov went down one flight of stairs, squatted down on his haunches and couldn’t stop himself from crying.
He took a deep breath and started howling again.
Suddenly he jumped up and rang the bell with his face full of tears. Then he gave another long ring.
Gittis looked at him through the spy hole.
Korolyov walked back so that he could be seen better – and went down on his knees.
“I beg you, forgive me,” he called out.
Gittis didn’t open up, but he snarled squeakily through the keyhole of the upper lock
“What did you expect? You missed the boat. Missed it, understand? Dismissed!”
Korolyov roared and flung himself at the door.
It took the cops another hour to get there. By that time Korolyov had bloodied his hands and knees and bruised his feet. He was sitting, exhausted, on his rucksack, slumped against the wall, shuddering so hard that he could hardly breath.
He was glad that they took him away to the station, he needed to be with someone for a while, get his mind off things, he didn’t know what to do with himself.
They let him go at dawn.
He spent the day hanging about on the embankments of the river, and in the evening he went to Presnya and started circling round the building. His swollen blue hands wouldn’t clench into fists, he was limping badly. Gittis apparently hadn’t left the flat that day. Korolyov waited for the windows to light up and then walked up to his floor.
He rang. The spyhole went dark.
“I’m sorry. I need to collect my things,” Korolyov croaked.
Gittis answered through the door:
“Come tomorrow and you can collect them.”
Korolyov hit the door twice with his elbow
“Ah-ah, don’t start playing up,” Gittis whined.
He sat in the entrance hall all night without sleeping, and in the morning he walked into town.
When he came back, still shuffling his feet, he found a neat pile of his belongings on the landing between floors: books, boxes, CDs, a bundle of clothes, a globe, a computer with a monitor and an umbrella. Two entranced vagrants were rummaging through the heap, carefully sorting out the things – a man with a beard and a retarded girl with slow movements.
Korolyov bellowed.
“Don’t touch that.”
The girl was frightened, the bearded man put a book back down on a pile.
Korolyov cast an eye over his things, then flew up the flight of steps and hammered on the door.
“What do you want?” Gittis soon asked.
“You didn’t give everything back.”
The door opened. Gittis was standing there holding a gas pistol against his chest.
“You didn’t give everything back,” Korolyov gasped and stepped inside.
He was still panting. He dashed into the kitchen, from there into the room, the toilet, the bathroom, grabbed the towels that were lying about, scooped up the sculpture of the girl in his arms and ran down the stairs.
Gittis kicked the door shut behind him.
Korolyov went down into the side street and walked round the house to get closer to the rubbish containers in the light of the streetlamps. He lifted the girl up in the happy way people lift a child and looked into her face.
The alabaster shattered against the brickwork like an egg smashed with a spoon.