Moscow Noir полностью

He’d sit down on the bed and drink a glass of water from a decanter. He’d nervously stare at the hair on his bare legs. Then he’d take out the photo of his grandchildren and scrutinize it once more. With each night it seemed they resembled him less and less—because they looked more and more like the man in the sheepskin coat. From the empty streetcar.

That means people recognize him on the streets. Of course they do! They want to know how things are. They ask for an autograph. Maybe he’s an honest fellow and tells them they are mistaken. But what if he isn’t?

He imagined clearly how that one, the other one, arrives instead of him at the theater, pays visits to the flutist. And he’d throw himself on the bed, snarling into the pillow from rage. But soon another feeling began to penetrate his impotent fury—of emptiness, total emasculation, of indifference. He had only ever experienced something similar after difficult performances. When he played a role he didn’t fully understand. One he hadn’t quite entered. He felt like a coat shoved onto a hanger; it just hangs there, dangling in the darkness, completely forgotten by everyone. Dead. He’d pinch himself and pull at his hair. He’d grab the phone. But who could he call?

Not the police.

His life gradually began to take a new turn. He shifted the telescope from the sky to the streetcar stop. For hours he’d track the people clustered there in hopes of seeing the one in the sheepskin coat. For no particular reason he kept going downstairs to the store. He hung around the counter a lot so they’d recognize and greet him. If they didn’t, he’d begin to panic. He’d loiter around the neighborhood, peering into faces, and his feet would inevitably take him back to that corner with the yellow church fence and the Gold billboard where his twin, the stranger, had disappeared.

But the twin was nowhere to be found.

What’s more, they stopped phoning him from the theater to remind him of performances and rehearsals. As if they had forgotten or fired him. Once he made the call himself, but an unfamiliar voice didn’t recognize him. He got frightened and hung up. So he stopped calling. He was afraid.

A week later, he simply got in his car one evening and drove downtown.

Under the notice Today on the poster in front of the theater, his performance was announced.

So, the impostor has already taken my place.

Relieved, the actor sat down in a café and began to drink, although he had given up alcohol after a heart attack ten years earlier. Cognac, beer, vodka—he ordered them indiscriminately. He drank greedily, without a snack, gazing between glasses at the ad behind the dusty window. Your blood will save a life, a girl urged from the poster, smiling her celluloid smile.

He couldn’t remember how he got home. The smoke-filled cellar at Novokuznetskaya station and the patchy shadows, in whose company he’d swigged down vodka and belted out songs, flashed in his memory.

He collapsed in his clothes but couldn’t fall asleep because he was sick at heart. Pulling his knees to his chin, he lay there and listened to the very same sentence that kept echoing in his head. Your blood will save a life, someone’s quiet, velvety voice kept repeating.

Your blood will save a life.

He had finally begun to doze off when a thick, enveloping nausea overtook his body. It rose up like sludge and flooded his consciousness. His heart became a big balloon about to burst into pieces. So that’s how one dies, he thought, starting to lose consciousness, vanishing slowly into an airless well and resurfacing later in the darkness of a sleepless night. At dawn, coming to on sweat-soaked sheets, he moved to an armchair. Hunched over from the pain in his heart, he sat there until daylight.

Around 11 he was jolted by the ringing telephone. It was a call from the theater; the troupe, it turned out, had just returned the day before from a short tour. The director’s assistant was reminding him there was a performance that evening. “In your honor,” she flirted.

“But how can …?” he mumbled into the receiver.

“The new cloakroom attendant got it mixed up,” the woman nattered on. “Instead of Tomorrow, he put up the sign that said Today. We’ll rehearse the dance an hour before curtain, as usual.” And she hung up.