before her. I do not know a great deal about Western art theory, but it
seemed possible to me that this woman, this absinthe drinker, had what
the American louts at the Idiot Cafй called "agency."
Cheered on by my deductions, I sneaked a mouthful of crack cocaine in
the men's room, then sailed out of the Hermitage, through the arch of
the General Staff building, and out into the hubbub of Nevsky Prospekt.
I wanted very much to buy a warm Pepsi for eight rubles, just like the
common people drink, and a piece of meat on a skewer. But, as I
approached a food stand manned by a fierce babushka wearing what
appeared to be a used sock on her head, my mobilnik vibrated with a text
message from my friend Alyosha at the Interior Ministry: "Beware the
meat skewers of Nevsky."
[pic]
The next few weeks were manna. I drank, I smoked, I wrestled with warm-
bodied Canadians. I came down with an awful itch in that conclusive
place we all talk about, but what can you do? And then I got a call from
the painter Chartkov. "Patron!" he cried. "Your likeness is almost
ready!"
I had not expected such haste. "But we haven't even had another
sitting," I said.
"Your physiognomy is imprinted on my brain," Chartkov said. "How can a
moment pass when I do not think of my savior? Please, let me stand you
for a drink at Club 69, and then we'll examine what I call 'Portrait of
the Raven-Haired Moneylender; or, Shylock on the Neva.' I know you'll be
pleased with me, sir."
I agreed to an immediate viewing, and summoned Timofey to fetch the
cars. Could it be? My mortality giving way to an oily doppelgдnger's
everlasting life?
Anyone who can afford the three-dollar cover charge—in other words, the
richest one per cent of our city—shows up at Club 69 at some point
during the weekend. This is without doubt the most normal place in
Russia, no low-level thugs in leather parkas, no skinheads in swastika T-
shirts and jackboots, just friendly gay guys and the rich housewives who
love them. It brings to mind that popular phrase bandied about at the
Idiot Cafй: "civil society."
Chartkov showed up, wearing a colorful sweatshirt several sizes too big
and imprinted with the logo of the Halifax Nautical Yacht Club. He'd
grown plumper in the last few weeks and shaved off his flaxen goatee to
reveal a little hard-boiled egg of a chin. "Looking good, Mr. Painter,"
I said.
"Feeling good," he said. "Hi, Zhora." He waved to a slinky boy behind
the bar filling a bucket with grenadine. "How's life, cucumber?"
"Zhora's going to Thailand with a rich Swede," Chartkov said to me.
"Let's go upstairs," he added, "and I'll buy you a hundred and fifty
grams of vodka. Oh, how we'll celebrate!"
We sat beneath a statue of Adonis and watched a submarine captain trying
to sell his young crew to a German tour group. The seventeen-year-old
boys, sporting heroic cosmonaut faces and hairless scrotums, were
awkwardly trying to cover their nakedness, while their drunken captain
barked at them to let go of their precious goods and "shake them around
like a wet dog." I suppose civil society has its limits, too.
"Look what I bought today at Stockmann," Chartkov shouted. "It's a
Finnish hair dryer. It has three settings. And look at the color!
Orange! I'm going to do a lot of work with orange now. And also lime.
These are the colors of the future. Is there an electrical outlet here?
This machine not only blow-dries your hair; it sculpts it."
"What about your lady friends?" I said. "Lyudmila the philosopher and
her mother with the accordion. Weren't you going to save them?"
"You know," Chartkov said, handing me a vodka from a passing tray, "you
can't really save somebody until they want to save themselves. In the
past few weeks I've been peeking around the English bookstore on the
Fontanka. There's this one volume on how to deal with people, 'Hand Me
My Cheese!,' or something of the sort, that has made a great impression
on me. The problem with the modern Russian is that he is not . . . Ah,
what's that word? He is not 'proactive' enough."
"Also, he is frequently drunk," I added, raising my glass. "That's
another problem. Well, here's to us modern Russians. May God save us
all!"
"God won't save us until we save ourselves," cautioned the former
monarchist. "We've got a lot of work to do in this country. We've got to
start by looking seriously at our 'core competencies'—"
I grabbed Chartkov by the shoulders. "Enough," I said. "Let's go to your
house."
Chartkov blanched. "Please, sir," he said. "I am not a pederast. I
merely come to Club 69 for the atmosphere."
"The painting!" I said. "I must see it at once."
"Very well," Chartkov said. "But I paid three dollars a head for the
entrance fee, so together it is six—"
"Look here, painter," I said. "If your rendering is as good as I think
it is, I'll give you another nine thousand U.S. dollars on the spot!"
"We must hurry then!" Chartkov cried.
[pic]
The hallway of Chartkov's communal flat was littered with paint cans,
and spent bottles of Crimean port wine. "I bought the whole floor of the
building for seven thousand U.S. dollars from that awful Armenian,"
Chartkov explained, "and the first thing I did was throw the dying
soldier and his whole invalid family out on the street. That'll teach
them to blacken the name of the Russian painter, may the Devil take them
all! When this place is finished, I want to create a multimedia studio.
I met this French guy at Club 69, and together we're going to offer
painting seminars and a hatha-yoga clinic—"
"Just please hurry!" I cried as we raced through the long communal
hallway.
The painter opened the door to his old room.
The first thing I saw was my own jutting lower lip, the one that had
given me the nickname Flounder in Pioneer camp; then my eagle nose bent
at several junctures from years of schoolyard beatings and domestic
scrapes; then my hazy dark eyes, two dim ovals set way back into my
skull; then my arms thick and corded, bulging with implied violence, one
raised to strike my manservant, another hovering over my lap to protect
myself from life's intimate dangers.
My skin was yellow and black in places, my forehead crossed by a
monumental green vein. I was caught off center, staring joylessly into
an empty corner of the canvas, where the painter had added his own
initials.
He had me, Chartkov. He had done well, the poor idiot. There were some
excesses, to be sure: I was sporting a pair of Hasidic side curls, while
a copy of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" floated incongruously in
the background, a ten-ruble note sticking out in the form of a bookmark.
There was no point in telling Chartkov that I was, in fact, not a
Judaist; rather, a mixture of Greek and some kind of Siberian mega-
Mongol. If he was inspired to paint me in this manner, so be it.
"Here's what you must do, Chartkov," I said.
"What is it?" said the painter. "Should I put on some Pearl Jam? Fetch
my patron some tea?"
"Just add a little detail," I said. "Paint a mobilnik pressed to my
ear."
"Of course," the painter said. "It will be done first thing in the
morning! Oh, but now my mind is filled with questions of an embarrassing
nature—"
"Timofey will bring you another nine thousand U.S. dollars," I said.
Chartkov threw his arms around me and wept convulsively. His body felt
thin and reedy compared with my own. I smelled American herbal shampoo
on him, along with the stench of stale Parliaments. "If you wish," he
whispered in my ear, "you may also take me from the back."
[pic]
I woke up the next morning to the familiar cellular vibrations in my
pocket. Alyosha, at the Interior Ministry, was warning me of a
prospective assassination on Leninsky Prospekt. The day had come. I
kissed sleeping Murka goodbye, leaving her the number of a colleague who
would treat her no worse than I had. I climbed past the Canadians in the
parlor and ordered my driver to set off for the southern suburbs.
I had spent my entire adolescence on Leninsky Prospekt. A wide Soviet
boulevard filled with nineteen-seventies apartment blocks that might as
well have landed from the Andromeda galaxy—long, cumbersome rows of
flats, a grayish, intergalactic color, flanked by ten-story towers on
which the words "Glory to socialist labor!" and "Life wins out over
death!" used to lord over us in fantastic block letters.
As soon I got out of the car, my phone rang once more. A strangled sound
emerged from the earpiece. On the far edge of the Kolomna district, in
the studio of the painter Chartkov, my immortal double was calling out
to me. He was singing a childhood song in a boy's sweet voice,
breathless with Leningrad asthma:
Let it always be sunny,
Let there always be Mommy,
Let there always be blue skies,
Let there always be me.
I breathed in the real and imagined smells of Leninsky Prospekt, the
factory coal fumes, the Arctic frost, the black exhaust of my mother's
cardboard cigarettes. Two figures emerged from behind a burned-out milk
stand and approached me. I stood there waiting for them, my hands
protectively cupping myself but my jacket open and my tie askew. I did
not say a word to them. What was there to say? I heard them clicking
their rounds into place, but my gaze fell elsewhere. I was mesmerized,
as always, by the orange-yellow aurora of pollution hanging over the
horizon of the contrived city, that juncture where snow banks and
apartment towers meet to form nothing. [pic]
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