A Game of Soldiers. Stephen Miller

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СКАЧАТЬ joined into one. At one point it had been a dressmaker’s, and after that, judging from the long glass counter and the greasy floors in the back room, it had served as a butcher’s shop. Izov had broken through the walls and converted the bottom floor into a bistro which he named Komet after the famous shooting star. The ‘restaurant’ was outfitted with tables and chairs, with a stage at one end enabling Izov to extract a little more money from his customers by providing ‘entertainment’ to go along with the ‘food’.

      Izov went out for a while and the piano-player, the one they called the Professor, came over and served the customers. He talked continuously while he ladled out the soup and took their kopeks, asking her all sorts of questions about her background. Later that evening they tried to rope her into a rehearsal. Mostly it was loud argument, shouting, and strange musical clashings. She’d fallen asleep when the ‘director’, Khulchaev, a tall boy with a sharp dark beard and a smirk, woke her up to make them all tea. As if she were his servant.

      She hadn’t even got on her feet and he started straight in, ‘Hey, these are the whores, right?’ loudly enough for the whole room to hear him. He liked to do things loudly, she saw.

      She turned away, but he reached out and pulled her around. ‘Hey, don’t run off, I’m going to use you,’ he said to her quietly.

      ‘Anyway,’ Larissa piped, ‘we’re not, we’re dancers.’ All the men laughed. Vera tried to scratch him in the face and he let her go quickly.

      ‘No…’ Vera heard the Professor say behind them. ‘No, Dmitri, I think they have the correct temperament for dancers.’ All of them laughing.

      And hiding in the lavatory and breaking down into long silent sobs, that she hid even from Larissa. ‘Don’t worry,’ Larissa saying as she paced outside the stall. ‘Don’t worry, he just wants to fuck you and can’t get it up. Don’t worry…’

      When she finally came out of there, with no alternative to having to walk all the way around the stage to get out, Khulchaev started in on her again.

      ‘Here!’ he whistled at her. ‘Here, we really do need a dancer. Hey, Dancer, come on here –’ She just kept going. They could all go fuck themselves. ‘Well, I guess she’s a whore after all then,’ he said as she was halfway through the door.

      And even when she whirled and walked back into the room and slapped him, they all laughed.

      But by the end of the week she was on stage.

      And by the end of the month, sitting before the mirror, listening to Larissa and Gloriana warming up in the hallway, observing herself in the reflection, she knew she was never going to sell it again. All that was gone now. She had turned a corner in her life on to an entirely new boulevard.

      Her face was powdered white like a Japanese mask. She’d even smoothed her eyebrows with soap and covered them with greasepaint so that she looked like a marble bust of herself. Her terrible hair had been chopped off in angled bangs, which was just fine, she’d hated it anyway. Now, no one would recognize her. In only one week, she’d transformed completely and forever. She was a new human, an adventure unwrit. An innocent girl in a mirror.

      And then the Professor poked his head around the door and said it was time to go on.

      She moved through the performance playing the part of a kind of Aztec war god crossed with an oriental nightmare. Her costume was painted with garish colours and bizarre geometric polka dots. It wasn’t real dancing, of course. All she had to do was gesture and turn and watch the fabric move about her in the lights. There was a chorus of voices that chanted between the ringing bells:

      ‘Omicron…Epsilon…Pi…Sigma…’

      With each crash Vera would tremble and react to a different invisible point in space. It was easy enough, and she had been told to ‘put her energy into it’, so she did. After her ‘dance’ she was summoned by one of the Goddesses of the Seven Winds. Her ornate feathered headdress was taken from her and a mathematical symbol was branded across her forehead – an 8 laid over on its side. Finally, when the last of the Aztec gods was destroyed by a hurricane of ribbons, there was applause, and for a moment Vera was disoriented – sweating through the make-up, all out of breath – a little lost before she came back into her new self. Applause! She bowed, smiling, with the mark of infinity across her brow.

      Afterwards there was food, and she found herself crowding to the table and stuffing herself with cakes and caviar. A man came and stood beside her, saying something over the din about how much he had enjoyed her performance. She nodded and kept on eating, and a few minutes later he was there again, the only well-dressed patron in the room, holding out a rhumki he had bought for her.

      ‘Thank you!’ she shouted and then tossed the drink back quickly, and headed away from him before he could get started on selling himself.

      In the corner Dmitri Khulchaev was shouting at the man from New Art, a young writer with bright blond curls he’d waxed down in ringlets all around his forehead in a style that he must have thought was attractive. The atmosphere in the club was intense, as if the performance had just been a fuse for the party to come afterwards.

      She was alive now after the drinks. Thrilled by the performance, but relieved that it was over, she floated through the crowd, smiling at all the audience who’d stayed behind, embracing all her new friends. She had no old ones, not any more. She saw the Professor across the room, drunk and laughing himself into a coughing fit, and on impulse she went over and kissed him.

      ‘You!’ he nearly coughed in her face. ‘You are very…very…You!’ And then quickly she kissed him again and laughed, bouncing away before she gave him a heart attack.

      Khulchaev caught her by the arm, pressed himself right up against her, held a bottle of champagne to her lips and made her drink until she nearly choked. And then he was kissing her – a quick hard insertion of his tongue – and gone almost as quickly. And she stood there, reeling in the smoky room.

      At some point she realized that she was drunk, really drunk. Too drunk, and she developed a plan, a very detailed plan to make her way to the back door and into the alley and vomit somewhere where no one could see her. It was a good plan, and she began to put it into motion. Putting one foot in front of the other and heading for the back.

      Then she found herself on her hands and knees in the alley, coughing and wiping her face on her sleeve, slipping as she struggled to her feet, bracing herself against the masonry wall while she caught her breath. There was a hissing sound as Tika, the cat, ran beneath her feet and she looked wildly around and nearly fell into the wet mud.

      It was cool out in the alley and the air was refreshing, penetrating her bones, and driving the poison out. She would never drink again, never, never, never, she told herself, and she tried to feel her way along towards the door.

      She didn’t see the man at first, and then she stopped, because she thought he was urinating and she’d surprised him, but he held the door for her and she recognized him as the same man as before. The one who’d bought her the drink, the one with the sad eyes.

      The torrent of noise crashed out of the doorway, the roar of artists arguing and debating minutiae that no one would ever understand. There was a screamed announcement about the next performance, some wild idea Khulchaev had cooked up – a mock trial of all the oppressors; for the enslavement of artists and smothering of new ideas, for the strangulation of imagination and the censorship of newspapers, the necrophilia of history, the vampirism of peasant culture…A trial against the Crime of Blindness. With each item in the indictment СКАЧАТЬ