Moscow Noir полностью

Innokentii Karaklev was becoming more and more capricious, more cancerlike. More foul-smelling. Worst of all, Daddy started to recount aloud his past life, and specifically those moments that a healthy person would not only not recall, but would actively try to forget. The long period of dying had debased him. Instead of becoming more pious, he was transformed into a cynic to a degree that is rarely found among the camp of dying organisms. This is what Innokentii Karaklev said to his daughter Danaë on that day it rained cats and dogs, such a heavy, pounding rain that the pigeons caught in it received concussions. The neighborhood of Perovo looked like a boundless, cracked aquarium into which poured the water from a thousand hoses in the sky.

“I slept with your mother. I did it with all my passion. I drilled her and drilled her and then you emerged from her belly like a wild troll from a mangled cave … Admit it, my child, from the very beginning you never liked it here.”

“No, I liked it here. From the very beginning. You’re mistaken, Daddy,” Danaë answered, listening with one ear to the hammering rain. “Fools like you are always mistaken. You’re made of mistakes. You have a fatal error dangling right there between your legs.”

Innokentii Karaklev watched the rivulets of rain running down the windowpane.

“Listen, child …” he muttered, swallowing dryly, “try to be … happy. I’m so sick of you being unhappy … I’m dying because of your unhappiness.”

“You’re dying because of cancer,” corrected Danaë, sticking a cigarette in the corner of her smirk.

They were both silent awhile, thirty-five seconds or so. The smoke from Danaë’s cigarette coiled around itself in the dark room like a scrap of seaweed.

“Do you know why I left your mother?” said Dad, scratching his sunken cheek. “Because of this one student. A handsome rogue. He was excellent at poker, had a thing for chemistry and water polo. Yes sir, my little pea, he always had jokers in store. His glass vials often exploded from overheating, and he swam in a mauve swim cap. Your mother found us—I was on my knees, polishing his … with my mouth …”

“His what?” Danaë turned to stone.

“His that!” He made a strange noise and squinted his colorless eyes at his daughter.

“Daddy …” Danaë stonily sounded out the words. “Are you saying you were a homosexual?”

An astonishing picture took shape in her mind: her dying father sucking the penis of Golotsvan, the flunk, the murderer.

“That’s how it went … sometimes. And who didn’t get into some of it? In one’s youth, in the barracks, after a bout of drinking, in one’s dreams—”

“Did you actually love my mother?”

“Yes, my little pea, yes …” Innokentii Karaklev nodded his hairless head. “You are the result of a grandiose love, a gale-force diffusion. The cells were jumping out of our bodies and mixing together. Such passion, it shook the atmosphere. Those were breathtaking, mind-numbing times.”

“And what about that student?” Danaë asked, watching the column of ash crumble from her cigarette onto the rug. “What was his name?”

“Andrei. Yes, yes. It was a breathtaking passion.” Her dad smacked his lips and purred like a cat. “Absolute diffusion. Overflowing excitement. To near suffocation. More a miracle than a passion.”

“Did you love my mother?” Danaë prodded in a steely voice. “Answer me. I don’t understand.” She now imagined her dad’s hairless head laboring over the perineum of the flunking murderer Golotsvan.

“I loved them both very deeply,” answered Innokentii Karaklev. “And about twenty others. I loved everyone. And every time it was a miracle.”

Danaë took a drag on her cigarette and fixed a vacant stare on the window. A lustful blush broke in crimson across Golotsvan’s cheeks, his eyes turning back in his head, his moans encouraging her dad’s frail, hairless head with its decaying mouth.

“And me?” Danaë asked almost inaudibly.

Her dad’s wrinkles suddenly turned smooth and he answered: “You are my little pea. My favorite book. Plus Louis Armstrong. And Fellini. Plus my favorite olivier salad. And all the Egyptian pyramids and the ruins of the great castles. You understand me? You are also the lily pads on the pond where I swam when I was just a little kid … Plus God, whatever He may actually turn out to be. My little pea. Danaë. Come here, give me a kiss.”

Danaë quickly crushed her cigarette butt in the ashtray, walked over to him on legs she could barely feel, and pressed her cheek into Daddy’s lips.

“You too,” she whispered, “dying one … Daddy …”

Golotsvan was done. But the rain in the neighborhood of Perovo wasn’t about to finish. Danaë moved to the kitchen, leaving her dad to stare out the gray window covered with heavenly moisture …