“Hee hee hee! You? I don’t believe that! Why did you jerk off outside my window? I remember …”
“My first little darling is lying over there.” She nods toward the fence and a night-black honeysuckle. “Do you think his little bones are still there?”
Ryabets imagines the child’s half-decayed bones. “Of course not, after all those years. Maybe a skull … or the tibias, they’re thick.”
“You’re a chef, you should know. And the second one next to him. I buried them at night, the snow was coming down; I remember, it was November.”
“You got the first from Mesropych?”
Buratina nodded and hiccupped.
“Whose was the second?”
“I don’t know. I was sleeping with everyone. I’d go to sleep under one and wake up and another’s going at it. Let the dogs have their way! And my baby girl. She’s lying right over there. She’d be nine … Pour me a little, why don’t you.”
Ryabets splashes some in the cup and Buratina drinks greedily.
“My baby girl was Andryukha’s. We lived over there, where you see the gazebo now. We had a concrete pipe, like this.” Buratina tries to show him how big with her hands. “We lived there a good five years. Or more. With Andryukha and Sabel, and Kirei came later.”
“You mean you gave birth there?”
“Where else, I’d like to know! Andryukha sterilized the knife in the fire and cut the cord. I wanted to leave my little girl, my baby daughter, with
Buratina strokes the ground and weeps silently, only her sniffling gives her away.
The noises on the other side of the fence have died down completely. Only occasionally does a car whoosh by, unseen.
“It was nice when we lived in the pipe, Ryaba. Even in the winter, it was a palace! We’d fill up the opening on one end and hang a towel over the other. A foursome makes it cozy—terrific! Tchaikovsky Hall! There weren’t any windows, but what good would they do? And the other cops left us alone. They’d come, take a look, and leave. There was this one, Lieutenant Bessonov, he was old and had a red nose, a lush. He’d come have a smoke at our fire. He used to say that when he retired he’d move in with us. Hee hee hee! He’d just grab his fishing rod from home, he didn’t need anything else. That’s what he used to say. He was joking, that cop. Later he disappeared. And the cops turned mean! They set all my stuff on fire twice, Ryaba, they burned it! Oh, what good stuff … mattresses! We moved over under the bridge, then to the church—you know the one, past the bridge? But now, Ryaba, that’s it, it’s time to stop!”
Buratina stirs, and Ryabets listens.
“Pour me some more. I’m going to drink my fill today, as if it were the last time, Ryaba! My life’s been bitter. And now I have to go to Kazan. They must have their own ways there, those station whores must be on top there!”
“Did you think I didn’t know? Hee hee hee! It was you who burned down the dacha, Ryaba. You! You! Damn it all.”
“Cut the crap.”
“You always wanted me. I remember the way you used to look at me, the way you hung around outside my window, peeping! Hee hee hee!” Buratina’s voice is so raspy he can hardly make it out. “You still had your beret, the brown one. Ryaba in his beret!”
Ryabets remembers those fall evenings well. He did walk around under Buratina’s windows, since she lived on the second floor, and he would keep an eye out—in the window just a fine veil of tulle, and Buratina prancing around her room in her panties, tight white panties. Before she went to bed she’d examine herself in her window reflection. She really didn’t have a mirror? She’d touch her breasts, belly, hips. Those brief minutes were the ones Ryabets lived for. He never suspected that Buratina was doing that for him, the spy in the night.
She was telling the truth. In school Ryabets couldn’t take his eyes off her. Everyone knew it. He’d sneak up behind her after class, staring at her strong, curvy legs, and fantasize. Knowing this, she’d tease him. First she’d stick her foot out in the aisle between their desks, then
