Moscow Noir полностью

At school, in scripture class, they taught us that the seed dies and yields much fruit. Jan’s seed is dead and cools on my lips in a whitish film. The fruit it brings … they’re beautiful those fruit—and tears run down my cheeks. Then he takes his hand from the back of my head, sits down on the bed, and jerks me toward him. I bury my sticky lips in his shoulder, and his hand lazily rakes my spine.

Then Jan starts talking. He recalls the Civil War, the Kronstadt rebellion, the Antonov uprising, the counterrevolutionary plots. He tells me how his day went.

His days pass with mundane matters. Compiling lists, dictating telegrams, and listening to reports, denunciations, interrogations, resolutions, and decisions. Now Jan almost never does the executing himself—Let the others do some work, he says. At the beginning of our affair I asked him whether he remembered how many people he’d killed, and Jan answered, In battle doesn’t count, and when they lowered me into the barge—there was really no one keeping score.

Sometimes I tell myself, Right now I’m crying on the chest of a man who has killed people without count—and my heart pounds like a hammer. I ask, Could you shoot me?

Of course—Jan grabs me by the shoulders—of course I could. I’ve shot men I slept with. They were traitors. I serve the Revolution, but you understand, Kolya, and the Revolution does not forgive treason.

I don’t ask him how many men he’s slept with. I’m afraid he doesn’t remember them any more than he does those he killed. I’m afraid of getting lost on his list, his long list, like his list of executions.

I don’t ask him whether he’s ever slept with a woman. That thought is unbearable: imagining Jan with a woman, imagining his mighty cock plunging into those fusty wet human insides. The female secretion is disgusting, like rust eating into the barrel of a rifle. I can’t imagine Jan’s seed, the seed of death, spilling in a woman’s lap, that nauseating source of new life.

I’d like to hold Jan’s cock in my hand and squeeze it with my lips always—to know that not a single drop of his seed would fertilize a woman. Small children are awful, their howls are a parody of passion, and their stinking diapers, strollers, and bonnets are the gloomy prophecy of old age’s impotence, which I will not live to see.

One morning I’ll see my cock dozing between my hips like a feeble worm. One evening, at the sight of a man’s nakedness, it won’t perk up and will stay wrinkled and pathetic. That’s the day I’ll realize my old age has arrived. And I’ll ask Jan—because Jan will always be by my side, forever young—to add me to his execution list and—in memory of our love—finish me off himself.

Right now Jan almost never takes part in the executions. I’m saving my bullets, he jokes. I have a dream about shooting a countess. A real live countess.

When he told me this the first time I got scared. I imagined some high society love story: little Jan, an errand boy; the countess he lusts after (or who lusts after him); the old count who in the murk of the conjugal bedroom reveals to Jan the mysteries of homosexual love; a woman’s silhouette in the doorway; the shouts, the hysterics, maybe the police or a lashing in the stables; the vow for revenge, underground cells, the party of Bolsheviks, revolution, war, Cheka, execution lists, my tears on his shoulder …

That time Jan reassured me.

You have to understand, he said, I’ve never seen a genuine countess. Only in the movies. So I want to see how countesses behave before death, how they die, what color blood they have.

Aristocrats have blue, I joked, but Jan didn’t answer. I saw his cock stiffen up again, and in an onset of jealousy I squeezed it and Jan’s nails dug into my back. Then he loosened my fingers and laughed. What are you, jealous? Do you want me to take you along when we send her off to Dukhonin?