Fantasy: The Best of 2001 Read online

  “You must be Viktor,” the taller woman said cheerfully, getting to her feet. “Larissa’s friend.”

  Chemayev admitted to the fact.

  “I’m Nataliya.” She extended a hand, gave his a vig­orous shake. The sharpness of her features contrived a caricature of beauty, the hollows of her pale cheeks so pronounced they brought to mind the fracture planes of a freshly calved iceberg. “I am also friends with Larissa,” she said. “Perhaps she has told you about me?”

  “I don’t know,” Chemayev said. “Perhaps. I think so.”

  Before he could voice any of the questions that oc­curred to him she caught his arm and said, “Come. I’ll take you to Yuri.” Then turning to her lover, she said, “I’ll be back as soon as I can.” The smaller woman let out an angry sniff and pretended to be absorbed in watching the TV.

  Nataliya led him along the corridor, chattering about Larissa. What a sweetheart she was, how kind she was to the other girls, even those who didn’t deserve it. God knows, there were some impossible bitches working here. Take that cunt Nadezhda. This scrawny redhead from Pyatigorsk. Her father had stolen from Yuri and now his little darling was keeping him alive by faking orgasms with drunks and perverts. You should have seen her the day she arrived. A real mess! Weeping and shiv­ering. But after a couple of weeks, after she realized she wasn’t going to be raped or beaten, she started acting like Catherine the Great. Lots of girls went through a phase like that. It was only natural. Most came from awful situations and once they felt they had a little power, you expected them to get a swelled head. But Nadezhda had been here a year and every day she grew more intolerable. Putting on airs. Bragging about the rich men who wanted to set her up in an apartment or buy her a dacha. And now—Nataliya’s laugh sounded as if she were clearing her throat to spit—now she claimed some mystery man was going to pay her debt to Yuri and marry her. Everyone tried to tell her these things never worked out. Hadn’t lying beneath a different man every night taught her anything? In the first place, why would a man take a whore to wife when he could have what he wanted for a far less exacting price? Love? What a joke! Men didn’t love women, they loved the way women made them feel about themselves. Most of them, that is. The ones who did fall in love with you, the ones who were fool enough to surrender their power to a woman . . . . because that’s what love was in essence, wasn’t it? A kind of absolute surrender. Well, you had to be suspicious of those types, didn’t you? You had to believe some weakness of character was involved.

  To this point Chemayev had been listening with half an ear, more concerned with the significance of having run into these women from his dream, trying fruitlessly to recall how the dream had proceeded after he had seen them, and thinking that he should turn back so as to avoid what might prove to be a real confrontation with March; but now he searched Nataliya’s face for a sign that she might be commenting on his particular situa­tion. She did not appear to notice his increased atten­tiveness and continued gossiping about the pitiful Nadezhda. She’d never liked the bitch, she said, but now she was about to get her comeuppance, you had to feel badly for her. Maybe she wasn’t really a bitch, maybe she was just an idiot. And maybe that was why Larissa had befriended her . . . . Nataliya stopped as they came abreast of yet another window, touched Chemayev on the shoulder, and said, “There’s Yuri now.”

  In the room beyond the glass, its walls and furniture done in shades of violet, a pasty round-shouldered man with a dolorous, jowly face and thin strands of graying hair combed over a mottled scalp stood at the foot of a large bed, seeming at loose ends. He had on slacks and an unbuttoned shirt from which his belly protruded like an uncooked dumpling, and he was rubbing his hips with broad, powerful-looking hands. Chemayev had seen Yuri on numerous occasions—or rather he had seen the man who officiated at the nightly auctions—but he had never been this close to any of the doubles, and despite the man’s unprepossessing mien, or perhaps because of it, because his drab commonality echoed that of the old Soviet dinosaurs, the Kruschevs, the Andro­povs, the Malenkovs, he felt a twinge of fear.

  “Is that him?” he asked Nataliya.

  She looked uncertain, then brightened. “You mean the one you’re expecting to meet? He’s upstairs. At the party.”

  “What are you talking about? What party?”

  “At Yuri’s place.”

  “His office?”

  “His office . . . his apartment. It’s all the same. He’s got an entire floor. The party’s been going on since Eter­nity opened. Eleven, twelve years now. It never shuts down. Don’t worry. You’ll do your business and meet some fascinating people.”

  Chemayev studied the double, who was shuffling about, touching things, pursing his lips as though in disapproval. He did not appear to be the magical adept of Polutin’s description, but of course this was not the real Yuri—who could say what form he’d taken for himself?

  “If you want to finish by the time Larissa gets off work,” Nataliya said, “we’d better hurry.”

  “She’s not working tonight,” Chemayev said, still in­trigued by the double.

  “Sure she is. I saw her not half an hour ago. She was this young blond guy. A real pretty boy. Her last client of the night . . . or so she said.”

  She said this so off-handedly, Chemayev didn’t be­lieve she was lying. “She told me she didn’t have to work tonight.”

  “What’s she supposed to tell you? She’s going to throw some asshole a fuck? You know what she does. She cares for you, so she lied. Big surprise!”

  What Nataliya had told him seemed obvious, pat­ently true; nonetheless Chemayev was left with a feeling of mild stupor, like the thickheadedness that comes with the onset of flu, before it manifests as fever and con­gestion. He leaned against the wall.

  “The amazing thing is, you believed her,” she said. “Who’d you think you were involved with? Lying’s sec­ond nature to a whore.”

  “She’s not a whore,” he said, half under his breath.

  Nataliya pushed her sharp face close to his. “No? What could she be then? A missionary? A nurse?”

  “She didn’t have a choice. She . . . .”

  “Sure! That explains it! Every other girl who becomes a whore has a choice, but not sweet Larissa.” Nataliya made a dry sound in the back of her throat, like a cat hissing. “You’re pathetic!”

  Chemayev hung his head, giving in to the dead weight of his skull. To graphic images of Larissa in bed. It was unreasonable to feel betrayed under such circum­stances, yet that was how he felt. He wanted to run, to put distance between himself and the corridor, but the violet room seemed to exert a tidal influence on his mood, pulling his sense of betrayal into a dangerous shape, and he had the urge to batter the window, to break through and tear Yuri’s double apart.

  “Want to watch? They’re probably going at it in one of the rooms. I bet we can find them.” Nataliya tugged at his jacket. “Come on! Treat yourself! I won’t say a thing to Larissa.”

  Chemayev shoved her away, sending her reeling against the opposite wall. “Shut your fucking mouth!”

  “Oo—oo—ooh!” Nataliya pretended to cower, holding her white hands like starfish in front of her face, peering through the gaps between her long fingers. “That was very good! Just like a real man!”

  Chemayev’s head throbbed. “You don’t understand,” he said. “I’m paying off her debt. We’re planning to go away . . . to marry.”

  Nataliya was silent for a bit, then: “And now you’re not? That’s what you’re saying? Now you’ve realized your whore is really a whore, you intend to abandon her?”

  “No . . . that’s not it.”

  “Then why waste time? Keep your appointment. Pay the money. You’ll forget about this.”

  Chemayev thought this was good advice, but he couldn’t muster the energy to follow it. His mental wattage had dimmed, as if he were experiencing a brownout.

  Nataliya leaned against the wall beside him. “What I said about Nadezhda . . . about h
er telling us someone was going to pay her debt. I bet Larissa told her about you, and she took the story for her own. She does that sort of thing. Takes scraps of other people’s lives and sews them into an autobiography.” She looked off along the corridor. “I’m sorry for what I said. If I’d known it was you and Larissa . . . .” Her voice lost some value, some richness. “Maybe it’ll be different for you two.”

  Her solicitude, which Chemayev suspected was only prelude to further abuse, snapped him out of his funk. “No need to apologize,” he said. “I haven’t taken anything you’ve said seriously.” He headed off along the corridor.

  “Oh . . . right! You have the surety of love to support your convictions.” Nataliya fell into step beside him. “I’m curious about love. Me, I’ve never experienced it. Mind telling me what it’s like?”

  Chemayev’s headache grew worse; he increased his pace. They came round a sharp bend and he saw an elevator door ahead.

  “All I want’s a hint, you understand. Just tell me something you know about Larissa. Something only you with your lover’s eye can see.”

  Enraged, Chemayev spun her about to face him. “Don’t talk anymore! Just take me to Yuri!”

  Half-smiling, she knocked his hands away and walked toward the elevator; then she glanced back, smil­ing broadly now. “Is this how you treat her? No wonder she lies to you.”

  Inside the cramped elevator, chest-to-chest with Nata­liya, Chemayev fixed his eyes on a point above the silky curve of her scalp and studied the image of Stalin’s KVD chief, Beria—the mural on the walls repeated the motif of those in the corridor and the bar, but here the figures were larger, giving the impression that they were pas­sengers in the car. Contemplating this emblem of Soviet authority eased the throbbing in his head. Maybe, he thought, in the presence of such an evil ikon his own sins were diminished and thus became less capable of producing symptoms such as anxiety and headaches. The old thug looked dapper, dressed in a doublebreasted blue suit, sporting a red flower in his lapel instead of a hammer-and-sickle pin, quite different from the photographs Chemayev had seen in which he’d worn execu­tioner’s black. His quizzical expression and pince-nez gave him the air of a schoolteacher, stern yet caring, a man whom you’d detest when you studied under him, but whom you would respect years later when you re­alized the value of the lessons he’d taught. Not at all the sort of character to preside over purges and summary executions, watching from a distance, betraying no more emotion than would a beetle perched on a leaf.

  Inching upward, the elevator creaked and groaned—the sounds of a torture chamber. The exhausted cries of victims, the straining of mechanical torments. Nothing like the noiseless efficiency of the one that had brought him to the theater. The car lurched, passing a floor, and Chemayev’s thoughts, too, lurched. He reawakened to Nataliya’s presence, felt her eyes on him. Bitch. He wanted to beam the word into her brain. What right did she have to ask him personal questions? Tell me something you know about Larissa, something only you with your lover’s eye can see. What did she expect? That he’d bare his soul to her? Fat chance! There were lots of things he could have told her, though. A year-and-a-half’s worth of things. Thousands of intimate observa­tions. The problem was, his head hurt too much at the moment for him to think of any.

  The elevator door rattled open and Chemayev stepped out into a corridor with cement walls, smelling of urine and vomit, illuminated by the ghastly dim light from an overhead bulb. The floor was littered with empty bottles, crushed plastic containers, soggy newspapers, dead cigarette packs, used condoms. Partially unearthed from a mound of debris, a crumpled Pepsi can glittered like treasure. Heavy metal blasted from somewhere close by. At the far end of the corridor a lumpish old man with stringy gray hair falling to his shoulders was wielding a mop, feebly pushing a mound of trash into the shadowy space beneath a stairwell. Along the walls stood buckets of sand—for use in case of fire. Che­mayev turned to Nataliya, who gestured for him to pro­ceed. As they passed, the old man peered at him through the gray snakes of his hair, his face twisted into a frown, and he smacked his lips as if trying to rid himself of a nasty taste.

  If Chemayev had any doubt as to where he stood, it was dispelled by what he saw from the window at the foot of the stairs—he was gazing down onto the parking lot of Eternity, a view that could only be achieved from high up in one of the krushovas. This surprised him, but he was becoming accustomed to Yuri Lebedev’s curious logic. As he started up the stairs, the music was switched off and he heard voices in the corridor above. At the top of the stairs, lounging against a wall, were two men in jeans and leather jackets, one with a shaved scalp, nurs­ing a Walkman to his breast, and the other with a mohawk that had been teased into a rooster’s crest. They eyed Chemayev with contempt. The man with the Mo­hawk blew Nataliya a kiss. His face was narrow, scarcely any chin and a big nose, looking as if it had been squeezed in a vise. A pistol was stuck in his belt.

  “Private party,” he said, blocking Chemayev’s path.

  “I’ve got an appointment with Yuri,” Chemayev told him.

  The bald guy affected a doltish expression. “Yuri? Which Yuri is that?”

  “Maybe Yuri Gagarin,” said his pal. “Maybe this pussy wants to be an astronaut.”

  “Better let him pass,” said Nataliya. “My friend’s a real assassin. A faggot like you doesn’t stand a chance with him.”

  The man with the pistol in his belt made a twitchy move and Chemayev grabbed his hand as it closed around the pistol grip; at the same time he spun the man about and encircled his neck from behind with his left arm, cutting off his wind. The man let go of the pistol and pried at the arm. Chemayev flicked the safety off, pushed the pistol deeper into the man’s trousers.

  The man’s Adam’s apple bobbed. “Go easy, okay!”

  Chemayev wrenched the gun free and waved both men back against the wall. “Are you crazy?” he asked Nataliya. “Why did you antagonize him?”

  She moved off along the corridor, heading for a doorway thronged with partygoers. “I have so few chances to watch you be masterful. Indulge me.”

  Chemayev shook his forefinger in warning at the two punks and followed her. The pistol—a nine-millimeter—didn’t fit his holster; he wedged it in the waistband of his trousers at the small of his back.

  The first thing he noticed about the party was that the instant he stepped through the door the stench of the hallway vanished, as if he had penetrated an invis­ible barrier impermeable to odors. The smells were now those you might expect of any Moscow gathering: perfume, marijuana and cigarette smoke, bad breath, the heat of people pressed together under the sickly lighting, crowded into an unguessable number of rooms. People of every description. Students in sweaters and jeans; old ragged folks with careworn faces, the sort you’d expect to find in the krushovas; beautiful women in couturier gowns; street prostitutes—some equally beautiful—in vi­nyl microminis and fake furs; men dressed like Che­mayev himself, members of a mafiya or businessmen with more-or-less reputable interests; musicians with guitars and violins and horns; homosexuals in drag; uniformed soldiers; jugglers. In one corner several fit-looking men wearing jerseys tossed a soccer ball back and forth; in another two actors played a scene to an audience consisting of a blond middle-aged woman in a lab coat and thick spectacles, a thickset man in a wrin­kled suit, the very image of a Party hack, and a pretty adolescent girl wearing leg warmers over her tights, holding a pair of ballet slippers. On occasion, as Che­mayev and Nataliya forged a path, being pinched and fondled and grabbed in the process, incredible sights materialized, as fleeting as flashes of lightning. A gei­sha’s painted face appeared between shoulders; she flicked out a slender forked tongue at Chemayev, then was gone. Soon thereafter he caught sight of a small boy whirling as rapidly as a figure skater, transforming himself into a column of dervish blue light. And not long after that they squeezed past a group of men and women attending a giant with a prognathian jaw and a bulging forehead who, kneeling, was
as tall as those gathered around him; he reached out his enormous hands and flickering auras manifested about the heads of those he touched. To someone unfamiliar with Eter­nity these sights might have seemed miraculous; but to Chemayev, who had witnessed similar curiosities on the stage of the theater, they were evidence of Yuri’s talent for illusion. He accepted them in stride and kept pushing ahead. Once he saw a brunette who might have been Larissa laughing flirtatiously on the arm of a slender blond man; he called to her, knocked people aside in his determination to reach her, but she disappeared into the crowd. There were so many people milling about it was impossible to keep track of any single person, and they were of such great variety it seemed a contemporary Noah had scavenged the streets of the endangered city for two of every kind and brought them to this place of relative security, a cross between the Ark and the Tower of Babel. The hubbub, comprised of talking, singing, laughing—indeed, of every sort of human emission—was deafening, and the only impression Chemayev had of the general aspect of the place was derived from the objects that lined the walls. Overflowing bookcases; side-by-side refrigerators; an ornate China closet con­taining framed photographs; a massive secretary of golden oak; cupboards, reliquaries, travel posters, por­traits, a calendar showing the wrong month and a pic­ture of Siberian wheat fields. Items typical of a middle-class apartment. Smoke dimmed the lighting fur­ther, creating an amber haze, twisting with slow torsion into a menagerie of shapes that often appeared identi­fiable—ephemeral omega signs and kabalistic symbols and mutant Cyrillic characters—beneath which the closely packed heads of the partygoers bobbed and jerked. In various quarters couples were dancing and due to the heat, many—both men and women—had removed their shirts; but because of the overall exuberance and the general lack of attention paid to the topless women, the effect was not truly prurient and had the casual erot­icism of a tribal celebration.