Читать книгу Virtuoso - Yelena Valer'evna Moskovich - Страница 14

Zorka

The other kids were mush. Except her, she was solid, I knew that from the courtyard when I looked up.

Sure I get what the gossip was, even back then, Slavek’s big brother with his big mouth was spreading it, saying me and my mamka and my papka had been kicked out of our last apartment for our “dynamics” and we were on our best behavior in the new building and that truth be told, I was the nutjob of the family.

*

Yeah, I had a pee trick when I first moved in, six going on seven, but for the record, I did behave most of the time ’cause Papka said we can’t get kicked out any more, but then Mamka would scream, clang a dish, take a hard footstep, how she did, close the window abruptly, and I knew she was coming for me. So I stood in the middle of the carpet and pulled down my tights and my underwear and let it stream.

“Stop it stop it stop it,” Mamka would run in, trying to pick me up, getting pee all down her stockings, cursing, kicking me with her pee-stained leg, screaming, “Malá Narcis!!” when I fell to the floor, then me standing back up, the stream starting again between my legs, Mamka slapping me across my face, me falling back down on the wet carpet, Mamka getting on top of me, Mamka whacking me on the shoulder, on the temple, the cheek, the wrists, the arms, the mouth, whatever, it was all the same to Mamka’s hands. She’d slap herself tired, then get off me and stand up, take a moment of solitude like I knew her to take. She’d place her face into her still-hot palms and hold her head up like that, eyes closed. And I’d get up, careful, checking things out, my face stinging, my lip bleeding. I’d give her dress a little tug. I’d say, “Mamka?” in my not-so-nasty voice.

There were dashes on my cheek from Mamka’s wedding ring.

I’d give the dress a tug and say, in my quiet, not-weird voice, “I’m all out of pee now, Mamka,” to let her know.

Then she’d take her hands away from her face and look down at me and say, “When you call me your mother, it makes me want to die.”

*

It was the anniversary of the Soviet invasion, and the adult talk was: “Twenty years now of this Warsaw Pact crap”; the Czechoslovaks were a slow-boiling people, they were a cautious people, but now, even they had had enough of this shit. I’d been collecting my saliva in a cup I hid under my bed. “Everything you don’t say,” I told Jana, “becomes liquid.” I didn’t want my words, said or not, to go to shit. Jana played it quiet, like she did. She was good at that. But then she whispered to me that she was already full of wasted words, so maybe she shouldn’t speak at all. I snuffed at her then, “Yeah right, Janka, never! You gotta keep speaking, and if it don’t sound right in one language, just learn another.”

Jana knew what I meant, and everyone could see it. She was sharper than sharp. Her mamka was always bragging about her brain. She got her big books, dictionaries, Russian and French and German, and Jana started learning words that looked confident.

*

Maybe I’m not telling it right. Or when I hear myself describing Jana, I get sorta pissed off about it, like, that’s not right. I don’t know how to make it sound like how it was, for us.

She was solid, Janka. She was my best friend.

*

We were seven when the first cracks began to appear in the cemented communism we had grown up with. In November, the news came that the Berlin Wall was coming down and refugees were trying to sneak through Czechoslovakia; the Vltava shifted beneath its icy skin like life heckling a corpse. The adults were asking each other in private, “Well, what do you think, what about us?”

Janka and I, we sat under the kitchen table, daring each other to swallow the pebbles we had collected that autumn. Big pieces, little pieces, country by country, communism started crumbling everywhere.

*

“Janka …”

“Huh?”

“Guess what?”

“Huh.”

“Guess though.”

“Um …”

“You’ll never guess.”

“What?”

“Know how I’m supposed to be like … greater … than this.”

“Yeah.”

“Like … my eyes the size of the planets out there.”

“Yeah.”

“And like, my heart beating, splitting land masses into islands …”

“Yeah.”

“And like, big tits. In everyone’s face.”

“Yeah.”

“Well … I’m getting outta here.”

“Outta here where?”

*

The first time I ran away from the new building, Mamka smoothed things over with the neighbors so we wouldn’t look too weird as a family. Sure, her eight-year-old girl went missing for a couple days, she sang her tune, but she probably reminded everyone that I’m a Little Narcissus, and assured them one by one in the hallway that I’d been pulling these stunts since I could walk, and please, did they want to help themselves to a portion of her poppy-seed cake, freshly baked?

I came back a couple of days later, and Jana asked me where I’d gone and I told her I was hanging out in the forest and then we both looked at the curtains in the kitchen and I could feel her feeling it ’cause I was feeling it too, the nothingness of time, as thin and stretchy as your eyelid if you pull it up with her fingertips. If we had known how to cry about those feelings, we sure would have. But we were kids, we only knew how to cry about the stuff that didn’t really hurt, we cried to show everyone we were still kids, in case they started worrying we were up to some adult shit. But I remember those curtains and how much I wanted to cry about my destiny and I’m sure Janka did too, and so I just reached out my hand and Janka took it, and that was enough, and actually, it was incredible, to hold on to something instead of wetting myself.

*

I don’t know what to do with History, the big one that belongs to all of us and my small one, like a keychain.

*

Yeah, we were about 10, I think, and yeah, I just hit Janka on the sternum and yelled at her. Asked her where her revolution was, for fuck’s sake. The sun was out. Jana was clogged up beneath her thin auburn bangs, the rest of her hair long and flat. She had that good-girl look down. Even when I brushed my hair, I still looked like I’d mess something up for somebody.

They were announcing the withdrawal of the Soviet forces, those last T-72 tanks and armored vehicles rolling through the streets with their artillery snouts and gouged-eye stares. Jana got real good at fingering her hair quickly into two straight plaits. I was testing out my middle finger at cloud formations, sunsets, horizons …

I told Janka, listen, we’ve been pooing and peeing on each other for too long in this country and it’s about time someone built a modern toilet.

By that time, my mamka had sloped from her flirty mania back into a subdued and self-conscious stare, stirred up by that early case of electroshock therapy she had. Those days, she was too depressed to be political. And my papka was just getting really sick then, before we knew it was a terminal disease.

“Janka, you gotta be your own person!” I yelled at her. (That’s why I was hitting her in the sternum. ’Cause she wouldn’t say nothing in response, I mean …)

Then finally she said, “I want a nice modern toilet too, you know.”

*

Politics got full of wonder, miraculous even, not knowing what would happen. Other things, we did know. Like my papka who was sick. We bought a grave ahead of time. Still the world kept on folding and unfolding, creasing itself this way or that, borders, agreements, yeah I was showing off the scars on my body to Janka, like guarded checkpoints I snuck myself past.

*

She told me she wanted to cut off her hair, I said good idea, it’s weighing you down. She asked her mamka and her mamka said no, absolutely not, your hair looks nice the way it is, so I stole the big pair of sewing scissors from our neighbor Ms Květa and Janka pointed where, and I chopped it off straight at the chin. Her mamka freaked, what have you done, then of course, turned on me, got my mamka involved (bad idea). My mamka showed her how to freak out properly. She got my papka’s belt and started lashing it in the air like a horsewhip, so of course I took a run for it, and she went after me, and got a couple of lashes in, but I also gave her the tongue twice and a solid two-finger salute, so we were even.

Jana asked to see my welts so I showed her, shoulder-blade, neck, forearm, but said it was definitely worth it. She looked out of this world with her new hair. I wore sweaters for a while, sweat it out in spring, till the welts healed.

*

Fuck, we were almost teens and it was tough. We’d go up and down Dvořákovo Street and stand outside of the Prague Conservatory, that yellow building like a huge plastic stick of butter. One July it got so hot, I thought it smelled salty and oily. I was wearing long trousers because I was trying to hide three fat bruises on my right thigh.

In school, people thought my papka was a military man and he was strict, so I just let them think that, and Jana added a comment or two to keep the rumors going on my behalf. Yeah, her mamka was mush, and her daddy was out of it, but the thing is, she didn’t know about getting a beating, really. The thing is, it’s kinda embarrassing when it’s your mamka that does it. Janka said her mamka never slapped her or her brother Vilèm around. They only got spanked by their daddy’s hand, and Vilèm got the belt a couple of times because he liked to have the last word, but he grew out of that, and Janka was attentive by nature.

I churned a bit of spit in my mouth and shot it as far as I could. “What if my spit was made of fire?” I asked Janka.

*

We’d go by the Vltava River, kicking pebbles with our shoes. We’d walk by that old Jewish cemetery, past the Staroměstská metro, to the astronomical clock tower, the biggie tourist trap, now that tourists were flocking in. Near the bottom of the clock tower was a series of layered astronomical dials—the sun, the moon, and the zodiac—just below two windows out of which would appear a rotating circle of apostles. Placed around the astronomical dials, there were small statues representing the evils of life: Vanity, a man admiring himself in a small mirror; Greed, a man holding a bag of gold—you get the picture—and lastly (my favorite) Death, a skeleton holding an hourglass in one hand and the clock’s bell-ringing rope in the other.

On the hour, Death rung his bell, the apostles rotated in their windows like, “Ohhhnooo!” and the three evils shook their heads from side to side, saying, “Please, please, I don’t wanna go” (too bad, suckers).

Afterward, we’d cross the bridge to Letenské Park, and just hang out at the kolotoč, the old carousel in the middle, a closed-up mustard hexagon with those grinning life-size horses, carved from wood and covered in real horse leather, stuck in mid-gallop on their metal stakes.

*

I got my period before Jana despite being as flat and skinny as a birch tree, so yeah, I bragged a little. Then Jana got hers soon enough, right on her birthday, and our country, the former Czechoslovakia, split. I told Jana her ovaries burst and cracked our nation in two, ha ha. That New Year, people danced a little harder as the snow dusted down the black sky. Janka and I were both sitting under the table, our heads touching the top when we sat up straight, so we hunched and chatted and snuffed at anyone who told us that we were too old to sit under the table on New Year’s Eve. All the adults were so involved with their own bodies, they danced with closed eyes, then Slavek’s papka plugged in the strobe light that Slavek had gotten him, and everyone swiveled around the thick rays of white and yellow and green and blue.

Then we saw it, between two flashing strobes of white, her mamka kissed my mamka on the lips in a quiet, lag way. They held each other, with their mouths pressing together, as around them hands and elbows jutted into the multi-colored flashes. It looked like forever, but before we could say anything out loud, it was done. Our mamkas parted and soon they were dancing with our daddies. I climbed out from the table and stood there, wanting to run around their legs like the Malá Narcis that I was. I could feel it swelling up in me, I could have even given my pee trick a go, but that stunt was old news. Janka climbed out and stood next to me. She pulled out her hand and I reached it and took it. We were anonymous pillars, standing the test of time.

*

I followed my mamka into the shared kitchen and stood behind her until she turned around. Then I asked, “Why did Mrs Táňa kiss you on the lips?”

Her eyes flashed.

“It’s not what you think,” she said and began to feign rubbing a stain out of her dress.

She stopped, looked up at me, and said, “If you must know, your father is going to die.” She took a breath and I kept looking at her, so she said, “He is ill and he’s going to die young and I will be left all alone.” Her eyes began to heat up, then she grabbed her skirt again and began rubbing, like sparking the fabric against itself.

“It’s awful, awful, the diseases that climb into your body and putrefy the organs. You think it can’t happen, or someone else, or later, but it swells right up inside you, deep inside and makes room for itself until you’re wheezing for mercy—” then she just stopped talking.

I knew what it was. My index finger was high and snug in my nostril, grabbing at something promising. She slapped my hand out from my face and screamed, “Don’t pick your nose when I’m explaining death to you! Bože na nebi, Zorka, you’re almost a woman!”

My nail scraped the inside of my nostril, and a ring of blood and some nose hairs pulled out.

My mamka looked at my finger, then at my face, then pulled me into her chest with a frantic grab, my forehead bumping into her collarbone.

Yeah, she was trying to hug me.

She began murmuring in her silky voice, “Please, please, please, my love … don’t be weird.”

She let go of me and walked back toward the party. At the doorway, she stopped, two men shouted her name at the same time. She bent her knees and shook her ass, holding the sides of the door, then propelled herself forward and was dancing inside the strobe-light colors that were tearing holes into the room. Everyone danced like bodies being resurrected in gunfire. I licked the blood off my finger and told Janka to come dance with me.

*

So our pubic hair had begun to grow in enough to shave it off. Jana did like I asked her and stole her dad’s razor.

We took turns with it in the bathroom, sliding the razor in and out over our cunts and all the way back to our assholes, and all around, pulling the lips out one by one to get it good. We wiped away the flecks of blood and looked at the curled black and brownish strands floating in the toilet bowl, then flushed and faced each other, with our underwear and jeans still down at our ankles.

I ran my hand over my bald cunt and said, “Agnus Dei.” Like the Lamb of God, like they were teaching us, in the Book of Revelations: “Slain but standing.” That was my cunt’s name.

Jana did like me and ran her fingers over hers and thought about it. I thought about it too. But we couldn’t think of a name for hers. I crouched down and looked at it head on to get some ideas, pulling apart her cunt’s lips with my fingers and having a good look around and then I saw it!

“Woah!” I announced. “It’s the Jan boys in there!”

“What?”

“Jan Palach and Jan Zajíc, you know! The divine heretics, hello, our shooting stars, our punk meteors, our—” I plucked the air like an electric guitar and sang out, “Great balls of fire!”

I reached out my hand and Jana helped me up.

“Agnus Dei and the Jans,” I said. “That is, number one, a great title for the past and the future, and number two, an even greater band name, which is our cunts, Janka, jamming like—” I crunched my eyes and got the high notes of the air guitar, “like … hell no, hell nooo, Hell FUCKIN NOOOOOO …”

“Agnus Dei and the Jans,” Jana repeated as she hit some air drums around her.

Then we straightened up and took each other by the shoulders and leaned in close. Our jeans and everything were still bunched at our feet, it was just us, all bare, all shaved, just in our sweaters, me in my bright-red turtleneck and Janka in her blue-and-tan striped. I told her to close her eyes and I closed mine.

“You see us?” I whispered. “We’re floating above, you see it?”

“Yeah …” Jana whispered back. “Above … everything …”

“Below us … everything’s in flames …”

“Yeah. I see it.”

“See our ugly apartment building there …?”

“Yeah … there’s fire … in the windows …”

“And our ugly school …”

“The side just collapsed.”

“And our ugly kolotoč in the park …”

“The horse leather is broiling and the wooden bodies are splintering off their poles …”

“And look!”

“What?”

“You see it?”

“Yeah … I think so …”

“The Vltava …”

“The river …”

“The water’s even on fire!”

“And … the trees too!”

“And the birds.”

“And the gravel roads …”

“And even us!”

“Us?” Jana asked.

“Yeah us … You see us?”

“Sure … where are we?”

“Look … There we are … I mean just our ugly bodies, that is …”

“Yeah … our ugly bodies.”

“They’re burning. You see that?”

“There’s flames on my eyelashes—but it doesn’t hurt.”

“We’re running across Wenceslas Square …”

“And all our ugly limbs, like hands like shoulders like knees, and our ugly clothes, all on fire …”

“There’re the benches … and the row of yellow taxis … and the saint on his horse in front of the National Museum … And there’re people all around us, stupid people, flocks, people and pigeons and cars honking. And the stupid police blowing their whistles …”

“And we’re running across in flames …”

“And the more we burn the higher we get! Look now: There’s our ugly city, and our ugly country, and our ugly world! … Even the stuff we thought was okay or even nice or really beautiful, it wasn’t, it’s not …”

“It’s all the same. It’s all on fire.”

“And now we’re just … finally … essential …”

“And it feels good …”

“It feels so good.”

“Fuck off, ošklivý svět … ugly world, peace out. Agnus Dei and the Jans have risen, baby!”

*

When I opened my eyes, we were already kissing. Maybe we were doing that the whole time. Janka’s tongue was strong, I remember. I thought, wow, so that’s where she keeps all her strength then. I remember it, strong, in my mouth.