Found Life Page 4

  —…Well, because a grownup shouldn’t confuse love and sex!

  —…the Judgment Day, incidentally, already happened, but nobody noticed. Just for some people everything’s been great ever since, and for others it’s been really bad.

  —“…sorry, can you point me to a McDonald’s?” And then this pompous ass strikes a pose and informs me: “Oh my, miss, I’m afraid I don’t know my way around the McDonald’s of our great Moscow!” I didn’t even get it, I’m like: “Excuse me?” And he’s like: “Personally, I orient myself using city squares! Museums! Cultural monuments!…” Ah, I say, uh-huh. People like you are always the first to die.

  —…I am just a totally non-confrontational person. Absolutely. True, me and my brother are constantly fighting like you wouldn’t believe—but he’s straight.

  —…I saw her yesterday. I’ll tell you what—it doesn’t even matter what she looks like and that she’s beautiful—well, yes, she’s beautiful, I won’t argue, what’s true is true—but it doesn’t matter. What matters is what I saw: it’s not going to work out for them. No way. Eight years of marriage is quite a length of time, Marina, I know him so well, I mean, so well, like the back of my hand. So I know, nothing’s going to work out between him and that woman. She’ll suck him dry, turn him inside out, and he’ll come crawling back to me. You’ll see, mark my words. It even calmed me down. ’Cause otherwise, you know, when I first found out about all of it, I couldn’t eat for two weeks, I mean, nothing. I lost fifteen pounds. But this is so great, it’s such an amazing feeling!

  —…I was buying marigolds from her, over by the market. So I ask her: “Granny, how much?” And the old lady’s like: “Are you giving them as a gift? ’Cause you know, usually you don’t give marigolds as a gift.” And I’m thinking, fine, you have to have your finger in every pie, like I didn’t know that myself! “No,” I say, “I’m taking them to the cemetery.” I give her thirty rubles and start to pull one flower out of the bouquet, to make it, you know, an even number, and she says: “Don’t worry, it’s already even!” See, sometimes you think badly of a person and it turns out they have your back.

  —…he ate one hot dog and left. I mean, tell me, Lena, do I need this?

  —…I don’t even know how to explain it. Well, just imagine: you’re sitting in the subway. And there’s a girl sitting across from you. One of those girls, you know, blond with translucent skin, like she’s got strawberry yogurt inside instead of blood. And she’s leafing through something, something that…I mean…I mean even if it has “Till Eulenspiegel” written on the cover you still know it’s all kittens inside. Know what I mean? And she has this bag, hot pink and it’s fur. See what I mean? Get it? And you’re looking at her and you just…You can just feel that this is not a human being. This is a heavenly creature. A different essence, you know? A higher one. One that’s all, you know. And then in a year she’ll give birth to a kid with Pyle’s syndrome. And that, Pasha, is what you call God’s plan.

  —…that day everyone really showed their true colors. Like, my friend Cattail calls me up and yells: “Dude, do you have any idea what’s going on over at the White House?!” “Yeah,” I say, “I know, I’m watching TV, so what…” “No,” he yells, “dude, you don’t know! There are these chicks here! You can fuck ’em right on the tanks!!” So I went to my wife—we were still married then—and I’m like: “Darling, I have to go to the White House, to the barricades—to defend freedom and democracy.” And she wouldn’t let me go! I forgave that bitch everything, but that heartlessness I can’t and won’t forgive.

  —…I don’t like people like that. She makes three thousand bucks a month, but her cat craps in that seventy-ruble Soviet litter.

  —…decided to do an experiment. “So,” I say, “I’m going to start going to the gym. I’m signing up Monday.” “Oh,” he says, “great! Good girl!” A normal reaction, right? I perked up, I’m like: “Except I feel so lazy, I don’t have the energy…” “Oh, come on,” he says. “Going to the gym’s so great. While you’re working out endorphins get released…Oh shit! I’m outta Prozac and I forgot to buy more!” Do you see now? Like whatever I start talking about with him, we always end up in a conversation about his complicated soul.

  —…lately it’s been really hard going. My texts have started coming out slow and short, there aren’t many words in them, so every word carries tremendous weight. Earlier I would never have thought you could spend two and a half hours trying to place one word in a line. Literally: one. Two and a half hours. And they’re in your head all the time, of course, if you’re writing that slowly, because there’s no way to push it all out of yourself—and that’s it: now that word just keeps spinning around in your brain, spinning…Your head starts throbbing. Yesterday for the first time I actually felt that thing Kosinovsky always used to say: “We are translating our lives into words.” That suddenly became true for me: life gets monstrously difficult if everything’s all…Drawn-out in your head. It takes the place of everything else, you have no strength left for anything because you can’t just ponder a single line for the sake of that one word, you have to—no matter how banal this might sound—you have to be there completely. And, as we know, it is monstrously unpleasant there. And terrifying. And painful. It’s like being a shaman, you know—for every word you have to cross over into the spirit world. So basically, I had a great day, obviously, writing about kids in Berlin in forty-four. Like a little poem. This autistic kid gets tracked down and killed, his mother had told everyone he died of pneumonia but was keeping him hidden in a cave down by the river. But the other kids thought he was a spy. They tried to grab him, he attacked them, bit somebody, but they had a knife…And afterwards one little boy, the youngest, was crying and saying: you bastards! Bastards! I was the one who found him, he was mine! I was supposed to be the one to kill him, I was the one who told those bastards about him, why did they go without me, the bastards?! So that’s the poem. Well, what do you expect. While you’re writing you’re shaking all over. You write two lines, sit there and think: Christ, why am I torturing myself, what good is any of this? You go and willingly open a door from your life into hell, and then you go back and forth, back and forth, and meanwhile hell quite naturally starts creeping in, creeping in like smoke…And of course you want to toss that poem, because—well, the hell with it, but then you think: no. Because finishing it is the only way to close that door. At least for a while. And you go on sitting there—one line, then another line, and you keep on having to talk yourself into it…For instance, yesterday I kept myself going with the thought that any minute now I’ll finish writing, get up and me and Anya will finally go to La Marée to eat oysters. Otherwise we haven’t been able to get out of the house for three weeks now, one of the “-ber” months is already over and we haven’t even started yet this year.

  —…she is a weak, cowardly, clingy, totally incompetent, very difficult, very unhappy woman. And we should feel sorry for her and not talk shit.

  For Julia Idlis

  —…they say: “It can change your whole life,” and you think: “What idiots! How can some dumb crap that I come and do along with ten or even fifteen complete strangers change my life?” We all think like that, right? How can something you do for two hours a week change your life? So, listen, that was exactly what I thought too. I went once…I mean, I just went, and that was it. So listen when I tell you: yoga really changed my life. Really. ’Cause I was always like—bzz-bzz-bzz-bzz, always scared, always worried about something, all wound up like a spring. But here you come in, change clothes, sit down on the floor in a corner and cry for an hour. It’s another life. Now I can’t even understand how people live without yoga.

  —…we’re standing there and then Mama whispers to me: “Weeell, look who it is!” So I look—there she is, all decked out in high heels, walking on tippy-toe and trying not to fall down in the mud. I’m telling you, the way she looked—the nerve! No, I mean, she’s all in black, the whole nine yards, but y
ou can tell she got dressed like for a big party. You know, like six-thousand-ruble boots, with those things in the back…I mean really. My little Lena says to me: “What a pig!” I mean, really, twenty minutes late, must have been doing her makeup. Dark glasses, but you can still tell, her cheekbones and everything…knee-high boots and a skirt. See what I mean? What a stunner…I can see everyone literally turning away, ’cause it’s shaaaaameful! I mean shaaaaameful! We’re standing there—I mean, it’s obvious that people are grieving, we don’t have clothes on the brain. Lena was wearing that sweater of mine, the one with, you know…That one. I don’t let her wear it ’cause it’ll snag, but she was like: “Marina, I don’t have anything black”—and I gave it to her, I swear, I didn’t think twice—could I worry about a sweater at a time like that, what do you think? And she didn’t snag anything, I can probably let her borrow stuff to wear now, she’s a big girl. So then she shows up—even her earrings are black. And you can tell she picked them to match. Awwwwful. Thank God she didn’t try coming over to us. Stood a bit further off. Afterwards when we were leaving, I said to Mama: “Well, we should probably go say hi at least,” but she was like: “What’s your problem?” Afterwards I thought: yeah, what is my problem? This one time, I ran into her at the train station, like literally bumped into her—and I just walked past, like right through her, so what’s with me now? And you know, she’s only like five years older than me, but she has these little wrinkles already, you can see them even with the sunglasses. And she got so skinny, I mean, she looks like a herring. So we were leaving, but Lena keeps turning around, and then she’s like: “She’s still standing there, you know.” Mama says: “She didn’t have to come, not like anyone wants her here!” And Lena says: “We didn’t have to come either, Mama,” and Mama’s like: “I’m the one who didn’t have to come, my dear, but he was your father, got it? When he left us for her he was your father, and after he left her he was still your father.” I kicked Lena—like, what’s your problem? But she thought I was trying to get her to look back over there. Lena turned around, I did too—and she was just standing over there like she’s frozen. Then all of a sudden she starts waving her arms around! I think, what’s going on? And then I figure it out: she was trying to walk off, but her heels got stuck. I bet it’s hard to stand on your tiptoes for half an hour.

  For Ira

  —…these aren’t just any old ruins, let me tell you. This is a German airfield, they were flying out of here to defend the city during those very last few days, the hopeless ones. This here is a bomber hangar. And over there, that was the barracks, there’s some stuff written on the walls there. See these concrete slabs, they go all the way down to the water—they’re all broken now, of course, but back then the German “amphibians” would drive out of the hangar on them. Come on, I’ll take you up to the roof, the stairs are fine, there’s just no railing. But the roof holds, just don’t step in any of the holes, otherwise the roof is totally solid. Every year on the twenty-third of February I come out here with this one band I know and we dance barefoot.

  For S.K.

  —…by the way, last time your phone didn’t turn off and I sat there for five minutes listening to you walking through the snow. Clop, clop, clop. I almost started crying.

  For Nelly

  —…Ira couldn’t stop sneezing, it was just awful. She was like: “Mama, you’ve lost it, this stuff has probably been in this cupboard for twenty-five years, it’s practically dust now! It’s not even red anymore, just some kind of sky-blue pink, you can’t even tell whether it’s crepe-de-chine or some old sack! Let’s toss it!” But there’s a lot left! Back then Lena and I sewed so much out of that piece, we sewed and sewed, and, you know, we would walk back and forth, back and forth in front of Dom Knigi, and everyone would look at us.

  —…a little dog running along, very dirty, but with these little pink see-through ears. And right then I thought: God, who knows, maybe I should have had that baby.

  —…where are you all going, come on, don’t walk! Don’t you see the stoplight? It’s a red light and you’re crossing! There was a guy before who tried this. And where do you think you’re going, young man? Don’t cross! They all stopped, but you’re walking, and now the cars on that side are going! They’re going to start turning, and you’ll start walking and you’ll only make it halfway across! There was a guy before who walked on red. Come on, lady, where do you think you’re going? Those cars are about to turn left now, you’ve been waiting all this time, you just have to wait five more seconds! There was a guy before who tried going across and look how that ended! I told her, don’t marry him, he’s an idiot! But she says: “He’s not an idiot!” And I say: “No, he’s an idiot!” And she says: “No, he’s not!” But does anyone listen to me? You’re not listening either, well go ahead, go ahead, you’ll all see each other in hell!

  —…the worst nightmare of my life. Ever. I almost died. I was an observer, watching everything from the outside, which is obviously even scarier. It wasn’t a cartoon, but you know, a pretty abstract narrative. There was a little girl and boy cutting each other up with knives and eating each other. So fucking terrifying. And plus, that part was totally not abstract—there’s blood, it’s horribly painful, they’re screaming, and I can feel fucking everything. And they’re stuffing pieces into their mouths…I mean. And at some point the little girl tears one of the little boy’s eyes out and shoves it in her mouth. Blood, all that. And she can’t swallow it, she’s trying and she can’t, and that eye is rolling around inside her mouth. Chriiist almighty! And I—I mean, he, but I was like his eye—with this eye of his he can finally see what’s inside her head. And her whole head, it turns out, is stuffed with these…like these little bits of paper, totally crammed full. And you know what’s on the bits of paper? “Wilhelmina von Düsseldorf,” “Frederique le Perrois-Roger,” “Jasmine Laclement”…And those are all the names she would have had if she were a countess and married to a prince.

  —…because the Lord will make any wish come true, if your intentions are pure. Grandma taught me—you always have to wish good things for people, even if something is going on, no matter what. It works, for real. Like for instance when that bitch said I was pale ’cause I’m a junkie I decided: no, I’m not going to, you know. I’m just not going to. So what did I do? That evening I prayed real hard, I said: “Lord! Grant good health to all my friends and acquaintances!” And the next morning that bitch fell down the stairs and kicked the bucket for real.

  —…at first I was ready to kill myself and be done with it, but then more and more time passed, and I figured out so much…Now it seems wrong to even admit it, I know it’s wrong, but I’m telling you: I never really loved her. Don’t look at me like that, I’m drunk, let me talk. I didn’t love her, period. Because love—do you know what it means to love? My dad got hit by a car when I was six. He and my mother used to fight like you wouldn’t believe. The things he would pull…He would throw us out and they would scream and he would make off with our stuff, you name it. And lay into her sometimes…He would drive her to the point of…It was awful. So when they carried him in from the street, people standing around, all that—and Mama was screaming: “You finally croaked, asshole! You finally croaked, asshole!” And kicking him, kicking…But she’s soooobbing. Just sooobbing. And I understood everything, whatever you might think, I was six, but I understood already. And I’ve never had a love like that. Before all this…happened, I didn’t even realize.

  For S.B.

  —…worse than family. Do you know, for instance, that there are Germans who decided to become Jews? They do the whole giyur wear kippah, the whole nine yards. It’s usually the ones whose grandpas really distinguished themselves. And everyone who knows about this oohs and ahs about how it’s such a complex and delicate decision, a burden, a partisan-type heroism. But then I heard this one classic story. One of these Germans found out about the Holocaust when he was seventeen, blah blah, his grandpa was a real big shot, Nurembu
rg was made for guys like him, and so on and so forth. So this German at seventeen got in so deep that he completely stopped talking to his grandparents and basically dropped out of the family entirely, lived somewhere at the ends of the earth, studied the history of the Jewish people, then the Torah, then something else too, so basically he went through the whole giyur. Put on a kippah, got married, had kids. So then his rabbi tells him: move to Jerusalem. Like, acquiring roots, until you’ve moved there, the process can’t be complete. He had wanted to go for a while anyway, he was that deep into it. Took the kids, left, he was so crazy about all of it, wanted to see everything, I mean wanted to sniff every little clod of promised land. He begged his wife and she let him take a week off, so he rode off on his motorcycle, he went all over. So basically, he rides out into the territories, he doesn’t know the area. And out there you have those young freedom-fighting types with stones. They’re closing in on him, closing in…And he realizes that his goose is cooked, ’cause it doesn’t matter how loud he yells, they’ll kill and bury him and sell his motorcycle for parts, no one’ll ever even find his body. He lifts up his visor and says: “I’m not a Jew, I’m a German.” They’re yelling at him, they don’t understand, one of them gets him with a stone in the leg. Then some kind of grownup comes out, seems to speak a little English. And our guy’s like: “I’m a German! German!” But he can’t take off his helmet, he’s got his kippah on. The other guy’s like: take off your helmet right now! And he says: “I can’t, what if one of your kids here throws a rock at my head?” And the guy smirks and says: “No, you’re a Jew. Only Jews are that cowardly.” And lets him go. So he rides off. Fucked up, right? Wouldn’t want to be that guy. And you go saying there’s nothing worse than family. Ha.