Moscow Noir полностью

I’d like to say, I don’t know if I could deal with being in Nina’s place, but I can’t. She and I are one and the same, which means at some point I was sitting there like that, waiting for my husband to come home from work, bored, looking out the window, stroking my pregnant belly, afraid to go outside.

It’s weird to feel other people’s lives inside you. Snatches of other people’s thoughts and irrelevant facts suddenly surface in my memory. Edible berries. The best place to gather mushrooms. How to climb a tree and get settled so you don’t fall out at night.

And sometimes a tune gets stuck in my head and keeps ringing in my mind hour after hour. Sometimes I can even make out the words.

My dad the bigwig fucks his tart

Oh bastard me, I fuck my aunt

All the time, everywhere,

From midnight until morn

From one night to the next

And back again till morn.

My dad the bigwig only fucks ’em rich

Oh bastard me, I fuck ’em bent and humped

All the time, everywhere

From midnight until morn

From one night to the next

And back again till morn.

I know this is what the little boys sang when Nina walked around the yard. Nina heard this song, and now I hear it in my head. All the time, everywhere, from midnight until morn—and I don’t know whether this song amused, frightened, or annoyed Nina. I get my melancholy from her. All the time, everywhere—that is, in this life and the ones before, around the clock, night and day, I sit in an armchair, on a seat, on a stool, and wait for my beloved to come home. And I’m afraid something’s going to happen to him.

When I’m Nina, I caress my big pregnant belly. When I’m Masha, I paint my toenails over and over again, though I have no plans to go out. It calms me.

Kolya comes home and tells me how they picked up the Kazentsov gang a few days before, on a train, and how there was shooting. The gang had hidden out in the children’s car but the conductor noticed them and called it in. It turned out they were hijacking cars. They’d ask a driver to take them out of town, where they’d kill him. Now they were the ones getting killed, at least two of them.

Kolya says there are too many guns in Moscow. Captured and brought back from the war, taken away from policemen, stolen from the Hammer and Sickle plant, where they’re selling old inventory to melt down.

To make sure a policeman can’t have his gun taken away, Kolya explained, the cop attached it to a special red cord. The cord goes up one side of his uniform, around his neck, and down the other side. The grip has a special loop where the cord is attached. Kolya explained and even showed me, but I still don’t understand. Better they just take the gun. That way, if some crook decides he wants your gun, he doesn’t have to kill you for it.

I’m really scared for Kolya. Since I got pregnant, I’m even more scared.

At first I was so glad we were going to have a child! I imagined him growing there, inside me. I went to the doctor once a month and the doctor told me when his little eyes appeared, and his little hands. I’m only sorry he’s going to be born in Moscow and not the country. What kind of a life is this? Why did I ever come here? I must have known I’d meet Kolya. There’s nothing else good here in Moscow.

I’m glad I didn’t enter the institute. I’d have had to study—but before you know it, a little baby is going to be born and Kolya will come to his senses. We’ll go away together, wherever we want.

I’ve been living in Moscow nearly a year and I still can’t figure out what draws people here. In line at the doctor’s I met a woman, also near her due date but older than me, her name was Marfa, also from the country, but she’s been in Moscow a long time, from back before the war. She’s a good woman and she reassures me, says giving birth isn’t so terrible. What’s terrible, she says, is living, and even more terrible—dying. Then I said, Well, I know, my whole village perished. And she stroked my head and said, Poor thing!—and for a second it felt like my mama was with me again. Though it’s a sin to say so, of course, because I’ll never have another mama. I’m a mama myself now. Only two months to go.