‘Aren’t you getting a little old for this?’ said Elizaveta Entina as she walked past Tatyana Smekhova into Tatyana Smekhova’s flat.
Smekhova looked out onto the landing for a moment. No one else was there and, despite her haughty demeanour, inside herself she was relieved. She closed the flat’s outer door and pushed the inner door to behind it, turning the key in the lock.
‘I seek no more than that which is sought by most women,’ she responded, turning to Entina in the hall, ‘… the love of a good—’
‘So it is nothing to do with their roubles then?’ Entina interrupted.
‘I have no wish to end up an old maid,’ replied Smekhova, ‘… like some.’
‘Where is he?’ Entina asked, disregarding the last remark.
‘The bedroom,’ said Smekhova.
She gestured at the door with her chin while drawing back her hair with her hands.
‘What happened?’ Entina asked, taking hold of the door handle.
‘He collapsed,’ Smekhova said, hoping her tone was sufficiently dismissive. She fiddled with her dressing gown, affecting unconcern.
They entered the bedroom. It was light in there now, Tatyana Smekhova having opened its drapes so that only the net curtains shrouded the view of the block that stood opposite and the strip of shabby ground in-between.
Elizaveta Entina, in a grey overall of nylon, walked towards the bed. She winced at the room’s reek of cigarettes, perfume and body odour. Tatyana Smekhova followed, barefoot in her robe, which was pink, floor-length and possibly silk.
‘He is – was – an older man,’ said Smekhova as Entina neared the bed. ‘He… gave up on me.’
She lit a cigarette.
Entina had been called to incidents at the flat involving Smekhova and men before: losses of her keys, complaints about the failure of the lift, accusations from neighbours that music in her rooms was too loud, or, on those occasions when she was using her bed for the purpose of sleep, her own indignant protests – not for nothing was she known by the other residents as the (self-crowned) ‘czarina’ of the block – about the volume of a TV or radio in someone else’s flat. But there had never been anything in the nine years of her tenancy that was the equal of this.
Entina felt the need to say something. ‘This block is not a brothel, you know.’
Smekhova responded in the way Entina knew that she would. ‘I will thank you not to lecture me about what may or may not occur in my flat,’ she snapped. ‘Am I behind with my rent? No! Have I given any of my neighbours just cause for complaint? No! Am I the lawful resident here? Yes! You are the caretaker! That is why I summoned you! Now… take care of it!’
Entina was unmoved by this tirade, and when Smekhova had finished the two women simply stood there in silence, staring at the man who was lying on the bed.
He lay there naked (save for a pair of black ankle socks), face down, on his belly, like a slaughtered pig; this notion being reinforced by the meadows of grey and silver hairs that traversed his shoulders and back like those that bristled on the rinds of the thicker bacon and chops sold by butchers on stalls known to the women at their local market.
‘Is he really dead?’ asked Entina eventually, her voice quiet (as if she were hoping the man might merely be asleep).
‘Well, yes… isn’t he?’ Tatyana Smekohva asked back, her own words also spoken in not much more than a whisper now.
She did not wish to look at the man. Her eyes, moving from him, fell on some rouble bills on the bedside table, which she reached for and pocketed in her gown.
‘We’d better check,’ said Elizaveta Entina. ‘Come, help me turn him.’
‘Must I?’ asked Smekhova.
‘Well you weren’t so choosy ten minutes ago – or whenever it was,’ Elizaveta Entina said.
‘My mind was elsewhere,’ Smekhova countered.
‘Are you going to help me or not?’ Entina asked.
Smekhova flounced forward to the bed. ‘Innocently comforting some sad man,’ she muttered, ‘and look what my sympathy has brought me.’
The man’s right arm hung over one side of the bed. Elizaveta Entina gripped it. The limb was still warm and, in spite of the circumstances, she found herself thinking of bread.
Bending beside her, Tatyana Smekhova placed her own hands over the man’s hip and thigh. Aware of her diminishing ability to pick up men, she wondered how long it might be before she found the next one.
Together the women began to turn the body, which was heavy yet also loose and awkward, like a sack of watermelons three-quarters full, over on the bed.
‘Who was he?’ asked Elizaveta Entina.
‘Just a man I met,’ said Tatyana Smekhova. ‘You know how they get.’
They let out small gasps and grunts as they heaved the body onto its back. In this act of rolling him the man’s right hand pawed Smekhova’s gown, ruching it at her waist in a way that she found repulsive (as if the man was not yet done with what he had paid for).
The springs of the bed squeaked as the man’s body slumped back on it. The sound was like a chuckle in the still and airless room. He was belly up now.
The man’s eyes stared upwards in their sockets as if looking for some beetle that might have been crossing his brow. His mouth hung open, the lower jaw being skewed to one side, showing teeth that were crooked and stained. On the whole, he was not so much piggish now as horse-like.
Tatyana Smekhova drew back with a shriek of disgust.
What Elizaveta Entina saw and felt, however, was something quite different.
For in that moment she remembered again something that she had been trying not to remember for years (decades in fact), something she had wanted any number of priests to give the last rites and bury without any headstone in an outlying cemetery where it could remain till it became irretrievable on account of the vastness and uniformity of the unvisited, flowerless place or the way in which it had become so hopelessly overgrown.
And what she remembered was this: a gloved hand… on her gloved hand… and the tingle of breath on her neck, descending in small warm draughts down the raised collar of her coat, as the horse, the beautiful horse – her unicorn, no less – rose and fell in a whirl of light and laughter on the wheeling and wonderfully glittering carousel. And then, afterwards, their walk, the first of many that they would have that winter, through all of the people in Park Kultury and the falling snow, over Krymsky Bridge, to the metro station and then home to her small flat, or sometimes his.
‘Is he dead?’ asked Tatyana Smekhova, looking away from the bed.
‘For some time,’ said Entina, staring.
