There is rain and wind, and the light falls through the window just so. I feel like I’m in a Patrick Wolf song – which is a good place to be. That’s all for now.
Darkness on the Edge of Moscow: excerpt 2
“Do your friends actually call you La?” He tried and failed to stifle a laugh.
“Close friends.” The label on the beer bottle would not come off no matter how hard she scraped at it. “So you, for example, would have to refer to me as Nelly.”
“Where did Nelly come from?”
“Full name’s Leonella.”
“Wow.”
He began to say something else. La’s gaze wandered downward. On the street below, a garbage truck was trying to turn around. Its path was blocked by a flashy sports car with its hazards on. She saw the truck’s driver jump out from the cabin and shake his fist in the direction of the sports car. The driver of the sports car leaned on the horn.
From up high, it was hard to tell whom to side with.
Continue reading “Darkness on the Edge of Moscow: excerpt 2”
Darkness on the Edge of Moscow: an excerpt
This is an excerpt of a bigger work of fiction.
The train paused briefly in the tunnel between the stations – a rare occurrence for the circle line. La leaned against the door, pressed right up against the place where it said “No Leaning,” and thought about disaster. Images from the trailer of a movie she had failed to see in the theaters – something about the river dramatically rushing into the metro tunnels – shimmered briefly in her mind.
She wasn’t sure how she would like to die in the event of a real metro disaster. Quickly? Or in some equally horrific and heroic fashion? Either way, Slava would probably be sad, at least for some brief and crucial moment.
He would have to hide it, of course. His sadness could not go beyond the boundaries of propriety. She imagined him drinking forlornly in some Soviet-like establishment with no seating spaces and lots of kitschy posters, surrounded by nostalgia-driven hipsters. She remembered that he no longer drank. She imagined him sitting in his car, his big hands gripping the wheel, as his knuckles turned white. He had told her that this happened sometimes.
Then what? Then he would drive home, pick up some groceries on the way, exchange gruff pleasantries with a neighbor in the parking lot, kiss his wife at the door as she urged him to take off his snow-caked boots, and park himself in front of the TV with a Playstation and the kids for company. It would snow lightly outside – she imagined delicate, ghostly snowflakes soundlessly hitting the glass. The kids would fight over the second Playstation controller. The neighbors would laugh and murmur on a nearby balcony. And La would still be dead.
She was angrily thinking about how Slava would never even notice the beauty and futility of the evening snowflakes bashing themselves against the glass when she realized the train was in motion.
Resigned to living for the time being, she focused on being angry. Why couldn’t he just break things off with her like the normal sort of cheating bastard who inevitably gets tired of a mistress? Why couldn’t he make her into a proper mistress while he was at it? Why was he talking about “confusion” and making plans that meant nothing?
The soldier profiles ensconced in marble at Taganskaya station side-eyed her as she got off the train. “The real problem here is that you spend too much time thinking about him,” one of them said. “He doesn’t think nearly as much about you.”
“Unless it’s to ruminate very briefly on the way your tits tasted in his mouth that one time,” another one piped up.
“Trust us. We’re men. We would know,” a third one laughed mirthlessly.
Continue reading “Darkness on the Edge of Moscow: an excerpt”
The lieutenant in you
Growing older becomes repetitive. It would be great to break up the monotony of cells drying out like graying laundry on the line.
But nature is its own government, recycling soldiers into pulp. Inviolate, the only thing less compromising being the phantom limb of conscience (oh God, don’t get me started on how that thing feels, like sticky tape gone weak and fuzzy with the years).
Small comfort, then, that the bureaucracy is uncomplicated, the only law being death. The baby chick laid to rest in the proteins of its own egg and shiny ant confetti on the sidewalk – death’s bannermen marching on the child.
Kiev without the politics
I was going to come home and write an epic, gif-laden post about Euromaidan.
Instead I got here, took a look at the New Year’s decorations glittering across the dark distances in this strangely warm winter, and suddenly remembered that I’m a human being.
So I took the time to eat actual meals, deep-condition my hair, and read books well into the afternoon. I had my toenails painted pink and paid a sports therapist who’s a friend of my fitness expert aunt to squeeze my flesh into jelly. I made gallons of raspberry tea for Lev and took him to church on Sunday.
In Buguruslan, my mother-in-law died. My husband and I lay on the couch together and listened to the sound of car tires hissing on the wet pavement. That day, I made a lot of sbiten with brown sugar and brandy. There was nothing comforting to say or to think, aside from the fact that Tatiana’s physical suffering is over.
I did see Euromaidan, and in general had some adventures – Kiev being Kiev means that adventures are inevitable. It was good to see old friends. Everyone is moving on, getting divorced, renovating their apartments, having their second children, hanging around art galleries and being up to no good.
Kiev wore a thick fog around its shoulders for most of the time. The broad expanse of the Dnepr was studded here and there with nearly transparent ice floes that seemed to have arrived from a different country altogether. When everyone went to bed at night, I stayed up with the gray cat in the kitchen, and thought hard about the future that is massing on the horizon now. And then, when I realized that thinking about it was useless, I went to bed and listened to the wind that blows in from the old cemetery at this time of year. I’m used to thinking about it as a dead place, but nowadays we see enormous red squirrels scurrying up and down the crooked trees, and so it’s important to note that even over there, life does go on.
Kiev is my Jerusalem. There are entire groups of people today who are driven nuts by its ragged splendor – and I’m not even sure that I can judge them for it. There is dark energy in the air here, in the water, in the meat and in the honey and milk. If you want to know about the mechanisms that drive Euromaidan – or the opposition to it here – all you have to do is stand very quietly on a street corner at night. Pretty soon, in the din of the city, you will hear the iron gears of history and the flapping of the avenging angels’ wings. Pretty soon, you will understand everything.
Natalia A. 