А House on Presnya

By Elena Chernikova

Five autobiographical stories and a novel-allusion about love and posthumous life; written by a woman, in Russia, about the domestic male material.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BadPress
• Release date: Jul 11, 2018
• ISBN: 9781547534357

Book preview

1.  Hello, Vasya!

Goodbye, good people! I am speaking to you, me, the soul, with a body dispersed. I am already ascending to the clouds and I am still looking around me; are you doing something without me?

Nothing is being done. The tall house in which I had lived when I was a body has not moved. My little red dog, which loved me, is wagging its tail again and looking for someone new to love. The alert listeners of the radio, where I worked until my ideological dismissal, are looking for something new to hate. In fact, my inner voice, whom I called Vasya, told me: do not crawl to the people with inopportune love of their own. If it is love you are after; when they want to have it, they should each have it according to their own needs.

Do not look back, I am repeating to myself, do not look back. The Earth is still as round as before, when I was still in my body.

The paper, on which have been writing all my favourite Russian words, is still lying on my desk. It is expected that things will not be touched for forty days. Then it will find a new author. The author will also write their favourite Russian words on the paper. Or, God forbid, he will work on the radio in the times of trouble, when everyone is eager to fulfil their needs.

I am flying somewhere, the path is getting narrower, tighter; the gentle shadows are surrounding me, getting denser and explaining the local rules of conduct to me. It is strict here, they say. And there, it is even stricter there, they say. However, there are different versions.

Meanwhile, I do not understand the shadow language. It is something familiar, but long forgotten.

Nothing is clear to me. However, I notice that here, amongst the gathering shadows, I became incurious. Finally, I am not interested in what happens next. I can easily abide by the local rules, if I know them all. I am peaceful; the fear has gone away. I am flying into the unknown, but I am joyful.  I like this! Why do they scare everybody with this?

Days are going by, years or centuries; I do not know; I cannot feel it. Clocks remained on the Earth, on the wall; they are hanging in my apartment, ticking. If people did not forget to wind them. Time and ticking does not exist here, there is nothing familiar here, and yet, the environment is very familiar. Remarkable.

A golden dot shone ahead. A blindingly beautiful dot. Golden. What are you, my sweet, so golden and why am I being pulled to you? I am flying; I cannot feel my legs. The dot is getting bigger alongside my happiness. It is turning into a ball, then into a tremendous globe; a sea of golden light surrounds it. The gold is dazzling, cheerful and radiant; it does not hurt your eyes since you do not look with your eyes here, but in a different way. The sea draws me near.

What is it, where am I? Could this be heaven? It is very strange, but I am looking. The sea of fire is fluttering like love, the wave rose high, it washed over me tenderly and gently, yet firmly. It enveloped me and dragged me somewhere with a relentless force and I dissolved in the most tender, soft and irresistible gold. Suddenly, darkness. Night... Nothing. I am nowhere. No one. Crushed into an empty dot.

... A woman is screaming. I am distinctly hearing that it is a woman, not a man and not a child. Why is she screaming? Is she in pain?

I am trying to open my eyes, but something has sealed them, it is difficult for me to see... Wait! Eyes? How did I get my eyes back?

With a terrible yank, a coarse, dark power, not quite golden, pushes me into an icy abyss; it is painful and it happens with a crunch. Legs are stomping, hands are fussing; someone is grabbing my head, and then holding me across my stomach. Scissors are snapping, they are hitting me and dragging me on cold, wet scales and triumphantly proclaiming a monstrous nonsense: three kilograms and five hundred grams! And something even more absurd: fifty-one centimetres!

Before I weep sadly from sudden guesswork, piercing through my brain, tired from the whirl, I sigh quietly and cautiously. Quietly because I remembered vividly, the first breath rushing into new-born lungs is very painful. The first breath one takes right after they are born is much more painful than the last one.

I cautiously let the air into my trachea, slightly opening my bronchi and lightly unclenching the top of my lungs and... Oh, joy! For the first time in my life, I got to be born and breathe freely, without straining and without pain! I outwitted the midwife and you know how she is! Always in this moment, she strives to slap you, encourage you to live, to breathe, as if you do not know how to be born into the world on your own!

Oh, what a glorious boy you have! the midwife is squealing. She slapped me one more time, she could not resist.

A boy? a young mother, obviously mine, asked curiously. Good, we wanted it that way. A boy? He will be called Vasily, that is a very good name... the woman jabbered.

They calmed her down and washed me, tied me in a cloth and plop! Right to the young mother’s breast, apparently my mother’s breast. Lord! Vasily? Am I Vasily? And who are you, darling? Slim, pale; just imagine! Have we already agreed on this?

Do you remember the inner voice? Indeed, I called him Vasya in my previous life. It stuck around, just like destiny. Vasya said, Vasya advised...

Vasya never deceived me. I listened to him. Well, hello, Vasya. Let us try this one more time.

Moscow, Presnya, April 1999

An Incident at Work

Life is a voyage that's homeward-bound!

Herman Melville

American writer, the twentieth century

If you are a writer and are keen on the stream of consciousness, then I sympathise with you. The current of consciousness is more terrible than the current of life.

Hence, I write about life.

It happened at work. At that time, I still worked at a small radio station, which broadcasted exclusively continuous talk shows live. The hosts took turns sitting in front of the microphone and talking with guests. The listeners called directly, asked questions with various degrees of trickiness, argued and simmered.

This work was very interesting for everyone involved in the process, but equally tedious for the hosts. The fatigue rolls were enormous, their nerves suffered, even their ears suffered. It is very harmful to work in headphones. However, I did not quit this job, I stubbornly loved it and I probably still do. However, the thing that happened that Monday was, surely, a signal to retreat. I did not comprehend it immediately. After all, that could have happened only in those conditions, when people always talk and talk and no one can ever agree on anything.

... Actually, I really am like that: an orphan since childhood. A woman with a child. Several divorces. Near-sighted, nervous, approaching old age. Truthfully, I am still far away from it.

Evening. It has already darkened. Early spring, the hated time of the year. There is a metallic odour in the air from awakening ground, human hopes and swelling seed of life. The very seed that is ready to sprout. My whole life, since childhood I have felt with my entire skin, with my ever-overstrained nerves. I hated this general expectation of unfamiliar and inconceivable happiness, of which many poems have been written. I hated it so much that I perceived my date of birth, which was in the spring, as excessive and tragic.

... From five to six, I had a very difficult transmission, out of which I crawled barely alive. The audience was not rude, everything was normal; I was only tired of the topic. No one can tear us Russians, we love each other, and we amicably resist any misfortune. It was a historical transmission with allusions, parallels and perpendicular lines. My guest was a historian, intoxicated, eloquent, and grateful; he rushed home skipping and I went to the general editorial room. There was a grey sofa in there, I lay on its soft velour leather and began to dream. Here, I think, a good man with Valocordin came through the door and dripped it in my drink.

The tiny boss came in.

You are still here, dear?

I am resting.

Then, please be kind, if you don’t mind, our new freelance reporter will be here any moment; he is a respectable man, he works in the international department. Oh, oh, he is here, it is necessary to give the contract for him to sign and I am going on the air. You will take him, okay, dear? the tiny boss asked, all in one note.

What is his name and middle name?

Alexander Ivanovich. Here is the contract. Stay here, dear... There was another half a minute of polite crackling, even though I did not need persuading. I was not going to leave because I was homeless that day. Spring was already starting; everything was going according to plan.

Homelessness is a common condition for all orphans, but they rarely admit it to anyone. Any orphan with experience is a cocoon, into which strangers are not allowed. A novice orphan does not understand his features, he believes in consolations from others, along with their song of life goes on. In fact, the orphan is a threat to society. The society thinks that the orphan will calm down as the time passes. That is not so. An orphan requires more love than the world can offer.

Well, come whatever may, I am on duty. I am glancing on the TV. There is something about love. I wince because I remember my recent divorce. I feel bad in spring, when love is in question, when I am homeless, when there is nowhere to go. Kissing started on the screen. I was looking for the remote control to turn off the abomination, but it was hiding from me. I had no strength to get up from the sofa. I closed my eyes and I am enduring. I am waiting for the freelancer. Nevertheless, it would be entertaining. Write your address here, sign here and this is the amount, which you will receive for your work.

The door is opening and a man with a marigold enters, a man in a black leather jacket and a typical international department face. Obviously. Hello. This is the contract. You must be Alexander Ivanovich.

Smoothing his insignificant grey hair with two hands, he reached into his inner pocket for a pen. He did not find it so he looked at me confusedly. I had to get up from the sofa and find a pen. This is what happened next.

The poor creature is standing in the middle of the room, contract in one hand, and pen in the other, a bottle of champagne under his arm and delirious melancholy in his eyes.

What is wrong, Alexander Ivanovich? I ask mechanically.

He sits down at the table sadly, awkwardly fills the contract, with a bottle of champagne under his arm and invites me to shares this event with him.

Champagne is certainly not Valocordin, but only in the absence of a simple writing on the label.

When I see a depraved person, I mobilise first, just in case. Suddenly, he feels worse than I do. Suddenly he needs help. This is not a mechanical compassion. This is the usual method of self-defence that all orphans share. You need to jump out of your comfort zone quickly, where it is always uncomfortable. With whom should you jump out if not with sad freelance reporters with champagne?

He is sitting next to me, raising his glass and complaining that he has a test tomorrow. First, he will part with his only child for three months, that is, for a long time. I am asking how old his child is and why the separation is so dramatic.

The child is twenty-one years old. A son. Apparently, he is going to Columbia. An assignment from Information Telegraph Agency of Russia TASS, his father, foreign affairs specialist arranged it for him. I express my deepest understanding, but I am uttering some general sympathetic words. In response to which he claims that, it is not so much about the child, but about the solitude, to which he is not used.

I was an orphan, Alexander Ivanovich is saying while looking at me. There are tears in his eyes. I suddenly realise that the champagne we are drinking is not even close to his first drink of the day.

Why solitude? How did you become an orphan? I am asking with a voice of a local paediatrician.

Alexander Ivanovich looks fifty. Instant calculations lead me to the conclusion that he is a fresh orphan. Inexperienced. I was already preparing to ask of what his respectable mother died. However, it turns out that this man became a widow six months ago.

I mindlessly keep asking questions. I am wary around any widows or widowers. I have seen women who were widowed early in life, for some reason they were all exceptional bitches, who would be the death of their husbands before old age one way or another. Or maybe I was so lucky to have met only them. However, I somehow did not come across widowed young men. I do not know anything about them. The one with whom I am drinking champagne is crying. Maybe he was transported back. A vile thought in the back of my mind: maybe he did not like the amount of his royalties in the contract. In other words, as you realise, an inexplicable, small, yet apparent bitchiness is boiling inside me.

He is quietly explaining that his wife died of cancer when she was forty-six years old and life has been difficult for him since then. His son is also leaving.

Again, I express what I can, but now I had to ask where and how he buried her. Why did I get carried away to her cemetery, what the hell? I manage to justify my curiosity rationally; it was my professional journalist trauma. I have been asking questions my whole life. My soul flinched and I could not bear managing it.

He answers that he drove her to her parents in Belarus in a car. His wife was born in a village. She was an only child and a very good woman. They lived in complete harmony. Her parents had asked him to bring her back home. At that moment he stops, he is figuring his way. I should ask about his wife, what she cooked, how she sewed, how she knitted, that is what we should talk about! But no.

How exactly did you drive her? I want to clarify. A typical orphan question. A normal man would never ask that.

On the floor, Alexander Ivanovich answers.

In a coffin? I continue, trying to picture his car. Do you have a truck?

"A Zhiguli. No, simply on the floor. I removed the front passenger seat; I was alone behind the wheel. My son rode in the back seat and the deceased on the floor.

Dead? On the floor?

That is a superb question. I should be punished with a whip for such questions.

"I held her hand for the whole trip, I thought that maybe she did not die... You know, I held her hand like it was my own... And she was cold. It was very weird; we drove for a long time and she did not get any warmer. I stopped sometimes, warmed her hand and her eyes remained closed.

We finished the champagne. It was dark outside. He and I are the only ones left in the editorial office, even though it is usually crowded with people at this time. Now there is no one. The next room is on the air, but for some reason, no one is coming into the editorial.

The freelancer Alexander Ivanovich and I are communicating mentally and he suddenly starts saying how beautiful I am, trying to put his hand on my knee and even kiss me on the cheek.

I move away and timidly explain that, in my opinion, none of the aforementioned circumstances of his life leads his hand to my knee. It is occupied.

He does not want to understand what is occupied and continues a terrible, doomed attack, with those orphaned tears in his eyes with which he came a moment ago and with which he told me about the trip to Belarus. His hands are drawn to me; his body is trembling.

I am moving away; he is getting closer. His eyes are reddening, filling with truly orphan grief, and I fear that I am about to grab the champagne bottle and hit Alexander Ivanovich on his much suffering widowed head.

I still manage to send him back home, appealing to his fatherly feelings and obligations. If his only child is flying to Columbia tomorrow, then daddy does not have to run after everyone he meets on this occasion. He did not understand fully, but he listened to me. He went away. Without kissing, with tears in his eyes. After half an hour, having given his contract to the tiny boss, I also leave the editorial.

Once on the street I begin to cry. It is starting to rain. A crowd has gathered on the long overpass through Garden Ring; the traffic light did not change in twenty minutes. I am waiting; it is all the same to me.

I am repeating one phrase for a hundred times, I cannot stop myself. I want to go home!

The rain is intensifying, making noise and I am no longer speaking, but yelling at the top of my lungs. In that minute, I only know those three words in the entire Russian language: я, хочу, домой.[1]

People do not even look at me because this is Presnya, Moscow and many people cry, anything can happen. A lady is standing in front of the traffic light and yelling I want to go home! Not many people have accumulated this much in their soul. People are generous and delicate here.

But I want to go home! Not on the floor! (What if he drove her on the roof of the car?) I want to go home here and now, in this life! Where are you, my home? Where are you motherfuckers, my husbands? Why did you marry an orphan? I want to go home!!!

With this cry, I run to my apartment, I put my daughter to bed and lose consciousness.

Then I got sick. Then I was treated. Then I came to this radio.

After six months I met Alexander Ivanovich on the street. A wonderful autumn sun was shining. Indian summer.

He was leading a good businesswoman of about forty years, a fake blond, under his arm. She was holding the shoulder of a little boy of about ten years, probably from her first marriage. They were all smiling. Alexander Ivanovich, sober and dry-eyed recognised me immediately, remembered and happily greeted me. He wanted to say something, but changed his mind on time. He nodded and went into a pharmacy with his new family. I turned after them and watched them in the pharmacy.

In addition, the one who was leading me by the arm did not ask any questions. He was brand new in my life.

Moscow, Presnya, 1997 – 2000

2.  A Crossbeam

Poets who write of love and death I usually mourn silently, but I flinch in the days of rickety imps’ talkativeness, which reminds me of my duty towards the mailman, who acidly promises to return if I do not deliver.

... I started with the mailman at the end of the seventies of the twentieth century, in Presnya, on a Tuesday, on the Literary Institute when the writer Bitov read a new story called The Doctor’s Funeral, to his students.

The story of a woman, the great doctor, the kind of a person whom, in his capital letters, there is no more. Bitov finished with a round of shocking questions regarding a unique topic: In what ways do professionals manage their experience, knowledge and skills when the focus is on them? Then the author tore the air with seven interrogative notes, as he would break off petals. A baritone, fundamental do: how does a writer write a letter to a loved one? A thunderstruck tuning fork la: how does a gynaecologist lay with his wife? A naïve si: how does a prosecutor take bribe? Marginal pragmatics, sweet mi: what kind of lock does one put on a thief? How does one entice a chef? How does a sensual man manage on his own?

During those times, an impossible passage about a professional as a source of intimate human behaviour whipped the listeners’ ears and begun to stir something in the schoolchildren’s souls, something lurking that is tired of waiting for unknown goblin-children[2].

A thief, a cook and a prosecutor did not capture my imagination then, at the end of the seventies, following a spineless feeble folk tune about a plush mare, which was re: How does a builder live in his own house? By reducing the pathos to newspapers, this offended me aesthetically, but during the next step, I instantly forgave it. It was deliberate, alongside the idle lonely sensual man. He diluted, I then understood, the energy of the waterfall for a blast of the purity of the last question. And the question at the finish of a mini slalom of the social check boxes was the main question, as far as Bitov was concerned. It seems that because of it, we started the writing and the reading of the story: How does the Lord see the crown of his creation, the mass, the body? Indeed, how? After all, that is the real question. It is a sphere of ephemeral music.

The fact that the Lord and the creator were the euphemisms for the writer was completely tapping through the ribs of the text. Being a young lyceum student of the Literary Institute, still immortal, eighteen years old, I already knew that nothing is more interesting to an average writer than his own self; with his scratching of Dostoyevsky, irreproducible complexity, subtlety of the strings and his socks full of holes.

Interestingly, I smiled in my youth while watching Bitov, adult and renowned with his voice of a magician, eyes full of wisdom, personality, personality, personality and sexy arms of a playboy with intellect. In addition, there was his brilliantly pronounced intelligence. The seminarians listened to their master, dare I say it, as if he was you know Whom. Comfort. However, his innocent word beloved, as if taken from an encyclopaedia (well, to which the writer is unbeknownst as he is writing the letter), crumbled me to convulsions.

There is a special article.

I studied in a seminar under a good, caring master, professor Surganov, who, thank God, never glorified intelligence. Quite the opposite. All of us together, after we passed our exams, went to the vegetable base with the professor, sorted out the cabbage and drank vodka in the cold weather. Remarkably, we shouted the songs while sorting out potatoes, without a guitar. Vsevolod Alekseevich Surganov was a role model of exceptional tact and mind. He was the head of Soviet Literature department, but I freely defended his diploma, nota bene in 1982, with the poetry of Bunin.

I, a mischievous girl at that moment, considered my guest visit to the seminar of prose writers under Bitov’s direction as a souvenir trip to the factory of breeding intellectuals. The hymn of intelligence was their squadron song. The meaning of the word seminary, that is, the nursery in Latin was here manifested in full blossom.

Impressed in this manner, I automatically expanded Bitov’s list with my own logical interest: what does a carpenter feel while hammering together a coffin?

How such a direct question concerning a carpenter came to my head at that time, I do not remember. It certainly matched the title and colour of Bitov’s narration. But it was more likely that it happened because I grew up in an atmosphere of cemeteries and regular conversations about social obligations concerning burials.

My grandfather, commissioned from the heart of military retirement, worked in a funeral home under the direction of the party for twenty years. Every night during my childhood, in warm and homely environment, I listened to fresh urban stories of human passions, the result of which was the implementation of my grandfather’s office plan. 

Absorbing Bitov’s proud authorship as if I was enchanted, I still did not realise that these gynaecologists, thieves and sensual people were the essence of intelligent individual’s protest for voting and that the chased mock of public question of USSR’s collapse was inevitable. In accordance with the order of our personal utopia, you understand, it did not have any public meaning. Then suddenly a prosecutor takes a bribe as trivial as bread. And the gynaecologist! With his beating wife! In the house of a fresh-abstract Soviet woman, incredibly bare spread legs suddenly showed up from one writers flick. Intelligence emerged on a vaginal level of insight. For a peasant, something like that is incongruous!

By the way, three years later, I managed to figure out what it was. My cousin, a young, pretty dentist married an upscale gynaecologist. The family turned out to be a lovely sight. I asked my sister what it was like. My sister answered honestly, it is the same as when you are at the gynaecologist. Soon after that, their child died and they were divorced in court, twice. It turns out that professionalism should be used only at work. One should be a dilettante at home. My aforementioned grandfather, a devout communist, a lieutenant colonel and a guru of the cemetery, lived to be ninety-three years old, perfectly in love with sweets. He always sprinkled his favourite dish, meat chops, with sugar.

... Having thrown a silent question to the air, I looked around and fumbled under my desk. I did not find a single carpenter, hammering together a coffin, but there was abundance of rustling, cellulose, strong fellow-writers, all of them writing a letter to a loved one. To a woman. My eyes opened. That’s the thing!

From that day on, I have been regarding any prose with a bell tower I obtained from Bitov’s seminar: what are you doing, my fellow writer? Hello, my friend!

And I saw that beloved was transformed under the writer’s quill. How a gullible drowsy pink anaconda ended up in an iron meat grinder and the name of the beloved was legion, but the writers did not notice the fraud and innocently proceeded to the person, still requiring the glory for a letter to a loved one. However, lady Epistolary Glory, oh, is not omnipresent for anyone who did not finish the snake kebab. Why did the writer face melancholy, an ache in the pancreas, a stone in the kidney? The applicants for glory underwent a procedure in a life-desk clinic and meticulously questioned God in between the sessions of physiotherapy. They needed a direct answer to the questions: Why me? Or why not me? And why can’t we just set the record straight? If I am gifted, talented, and this is a fact, give me a diploma. They sent Him adamant, open letters. As the signers of Pravda during the times of complete unity.

The other hand, instead of relying on God completely, mechanically scribbled another letter to a loved woman, hoping for the best and complete set of fate from available objective reality. However, the first hand, the push, was always more quarrelsome than the second one, which was beloved. The cumulative letters of the first hand to the Almighty began in this way.

Having learned the alphabet, I immediately wrote You a letter, laying my soul on the paper, but nothing came out and my soul was blurred like ink. Was my message not delivered? You know, I started doubting You. Tell me urgently, just to me personally, You, can You hear me?

And now the most important thing: since that Tuesday when Bitov made his story public in front of his seminarians in the Literary Institute and I accidently heard the reading, a strange mailman has been ringing my doorbell. Carrying the next letter into nowhere, giving me a duplicate and keeping the original for himself. He is a historian and a humourist; he is weary from hauling it around. However, my writing brothers are sending letters more and more often and they are sending everything to God personally, questioning openly and the mailman carefully hauls a copy to me every morning. The pile is growing. Voices can be heard from it.

Hey... You are hiding. You did good work. It’s all right for you and what about me? You did six days of painting, you sanded out bunnies and tigers, then you punished the forefather with one rib and you went to rest. Are You back from your rest? Or what? Are you still planning? This is one of their most popular questions.

"’God is patient!’ ‘Love will endure for long!’ That is excessive. It is tiresome for me to chase my troublesome women in saccular garments through the pages. With their young boys and their holy butter and their miscellaneous tricks of the written tenderness. They are hissing, sparkling with their dry Boyarina Morozova-like eyes: sinner, sinner! The church was diluted in our age! The spying spilled under our scarves. The psychiatrists are treating the syndrome of holiness. The frequent panic attacks."

Well, well, Shmelyov, you are our latter day saint; to complain is to sin.

Sometimes the envelopes contain whispered conversation.

"But ever since I was in diapers, I have been feeling that letters are creeping out of me, cutting into me like teeth, tearing my gums and shoulder blades and making me bleed. But why? The first time they grew out, the second time there were baby teeth, the third time permanent teeth, the fourth time wisdom teeth, but what about the fifth time?! And what am I to do if the teeth are endless and my life is finite? What is this? My neighbour writes my letter? Do you even care who writes it? I suspect something terrible.

No one replies to important questions, no one. Pop-songs are everywhere, even in congregations. A faith in pop and the contributions. No one is talking. They are often babbling. They are fluttering about You on small screens! Applications for confession are flying on the internet! Why am I feeling worse?!"

I am suffocating, feeling that a silk wing has touched my heart, my immortal song is about to fly, such as it is, right to my neighbour. Since my carpenter has already spat in his hands and his carpenter has not even sobered up yet. My poem is already flying, teasing us both with its white wings, white eyes and it is indifferent to my spiritual growth. And my sounds have been sharpened, the words have been cut by a diamond, everything is right, I sanded it out ideologically like You did with your bunnies and tigers...

One cries constantly:

"I built a wonderful world, it is now furious. Will it not remember Plato’s famous janitor? To enrage. Russians, do you remember? Do you remember Jarylo? To enrage, it is a strength, a spark of eternity, well, you know. Now many people know. Almost everyone. Yes, arise Russian people, will you?

There is one sorrow, though. Jarylo with his sex-helpers is like goblins in a kokoshnik[3]. I need You, not Jarylo. I can see him every day and You I never see. Why is that?!"

"...Yes, it happened, now it is flying directly towards my neighbour, my central prospect, my poem and my heaven, my ceiling. I am swinging on a wooden beam stuck across my hallway. No, I am not Marin Ivanovich. I swing in the sense of pulling and pushing every morning. Beware. And when I am soft with curves, my muse from a faraway land, rushing to appear, lays her hand on my arm. Here I am, I exist, I scare away her hand and the muse feels how mighty I am. I am and she is not and I immediately feel better for it. We lay down, undressing in the dark and we are kissing hurriedly. I do not like kissing. They, these muses squander; just give them your lips, and they will go head over heels. In short, I carry out the thing for which she came, but I never forget about You. Do You hear me? Don’t get me wrong. You, my Lord are always with me.

The poem! I shudder after kissing the fervent cursed muse, ready to kill her. I am hopelessly banging my head on my scholarly neighbour’s wall where she flashed, without slowing down over me. My poem, my winged, silky poem. Oh how I hate that woman, appearing in rage! My poem flew after her.

Jarylo seduced me, and then the true God came and took my poem away. I understand everything. How clumsy you gods of different peoples are. You mixed your cards! We are flying as empty as table tennis balls and tapping on the greenery, as if it was the sky from the other side, a countertop. Only you do not hear the footsteps of the hungover carpenter, trudging to hammer... How many teeth did I manage to obliterate?

Yesterday my muscular muse, my musky, bitter, silly woman ran away to my neighbour’s house, chasing the poem and God visited my neighbour, I heard. But why? Why him and not me? Who decided that? I do not believe in the devil because the devil is not proper."

I am making a pause because the pile is talkative. Parallel to that, you understand, it is stretching as a Burlatsky rope. Their endless letter to a loved woman, but it would be too long and uninteresting to quote them.

The mailman came again yesterday. And I am reading again, leafing through, sympathising and not laughing.

I am reading, I am taking a rag and a chalk; I am rubbing, sanding the wooden crossbeam so that you, my friend, can press and swing every morning while you are insincerely anticipating that the muse will never come again. However, God will visit you and give you a diploma. While I am rubbing the crossbeam, the last phrase of Bitov’s story is rising from the bottom of time, with hope of our charity: Lord! How many religions do you have, if You have provided for that as well?!

All the people who write I usually mourn quietly, but yesterday imps’ talkativeness twitched, all dressed up in memory and I am grumpy today because of it. I know, my fellow writer, throwing away the burning feather; you are waiting under a bush, sitting on muscular hunches, posing as Moses. You glue on a beard, you adjust and build a plywood people, and you shout at your brother, you reformat the tables. You are waiting until someone comes to you for answers, my friend. Well, wait on. If I were you, I would do without the muse. She was provided in advance.

Moscow, Presnya, 1978 – 2010

3.  Watch My Bottom

I am not serious, but if they are chatting about rats, compelling memories, omens, signs and fates and especially if they are thinking about creativity before me, I fire back with this narrative.

At night, in the cold, in Presnya, in my own apartment, I am sitting in my longitudinally stripped pyjamas, composing a note on the Irish Sea. Wanting money, I am trying to squeeze the experience of wandering into the magazine about the new bourgeois. I am worrying about the night hatred towards letters, as I never write at night.

The rough silence of the city is already bubbling in my ears, but I discard it halfway, I do not return to it. In the morning, I forget that I carried the sleek bourgeois, who wore crimson jackets in their youth and whose survivors wound up with taste. They want high-tech products and the editor asks me to write about Ireland. He says that our magazine is only about the newest things. They wear indigo jackets.

My loneliness is hanging in layers over my bare hardwood floor, like smoke after a drinking binge. It is time to dispatch the bourgeois and go to sleep, but I am still writing. My spine has flattened and my hands are gnarled. The old clock shows half past one.

My quote: The Sea in Ireland is as passionate as a matador and as credulous as a preschool child. Wherever you live, always remember. Today, right now, the sea is slowly retreating from the Irish coast, revealing its bottom. If you watch the English Channel from France, Le Mont Saint-Michel, it disappears, leaving behind a muddy, vast seabed clay. However, in France, the English Channel creeped as a prodigal son, a shameless Irishman. Fattening up right after it hit the rocks, it scares away the bystanders on the shore and it passes once more, darting to the horizon.

The magazine for tourists of upper middle class expects of me something that a Balinese and a Thai along with an Egyptian have never seen before. The editor told me that the target segment has lodged itself in Turkey’s throat and is scratching new sails for itself. The style of my poem about the Irish Sea, trustfully throwing its bottom at people, has not been corresponding to the corporate style of the magazine for two hours already. However, a love memory is waiting for me and I am dreaming of secretly rubbing it on the note, between the lines as if with sympathetic ink.

... Its brownish-grey clay is sour and wet, as if it was its first time. The sea is asking, please, watch my bottom, while retreating. It is the sea’s personal request; it is acquiesced with astonishment and its helpless bottom is being watched for half a day. To the amazement of the plain dweller, the landscape outside the windows changes twice a day. As you can see, the author is stuck in the clay; the love does not dissolve, the memory does not splash and the throat of the vessel is filled with Moscow ice.

To appease the veterans of Antalya, the knowers of all-inclusive, means to keep silent about the fact that Ireland is, in fact, not all-inclusive at all. It is rocky and tightly Catholic; there are MP3 masses without a pastor, prayers under plywood, and the island’s water is going round. The cathedrals are the colour of rats and sleek, mentally retarded people are walking around Dublin (the abortions are prohibited and there are marriages among relatives).

The night has thickened, but I am a bay leaf in jelly. The article, of course, does not lie on a canvas for the target segment and the object on display are enemies.

The clock goes boom boom. It is two o’clock. I never write at night, but now the waves of evil courage came to me, similar to inspiration. Blotches are floating around my retina. I am dragging myself out of the armchair, but the vindictive inspiration came and is now calling. Did I summon it? It requires kefir. Suddenly, immediately, at night, in icy cold, in Presnya. It is unreasonable. I am wearing skinny, baggy, stripped pyjamas with someone else’s shoulders. I am also wearing woollen slipper socks. I am shaggy. I am frightful.

Unrestrained in my desires, I realise that I need to get kefir. Soaked from the battle with the background knowledge of the middle class, my brain will not fall asleep if I do not give it what it wants. Psychotherapy, which requires payment, tells us that the world is always good; we only have to change our attitude towards it. I have tried it. Not without success.

Torn boots on my bare feet, ragged sheepskin coat of a former relative, my hair is standing on end and the crumpled pyjamas with blue stripes; I am a pure Gorgon. I am jumping out into the street with reasoning that I will flutter through the icy square. There is a round-the-clock deli in the metro; they have kefir; without which I have ten minutes left to live. Delay is unacceptable. My background knowledge is singing along, not without humour. Taaake me through the squaaare...

...When I was young, having known myself, I feel in love with a thin-faced, but thick-skinned prince from Tbilisi and immediately learned Georgian language in order to feel the boy’s soul and to touch properly its pearly strings. I passed the state exam of Georgian language with flying colours. The boy grew up and moved away to Paris. I partially forgot our common language, but I know myself. If I need it, I will go and learn the target language.

The deli is a hundred metres away. There is a dry muslin rustling on the ground, imitating snow. The sky is bouncing with the