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Moscow, Russia.
8 pm.
Beneath Metro Station Mayakovskaya: rusting pipes: the pressing weight of Tverskaya Street: Unimagineable Poverty: and Various Glittering Boutiques.
I’m in the metro car and as usual there’s all the jostling and elbows and two kids behind me making out through the heat and cakey make-up smell and body odor. An old man — Russian old, so he could be anywhere from 60 to 80 years old — is staring at me through his thick bottle glasses while licking his fat cock-sucker lips and his hair looks like it hasn’t seen a shower in many a Siberian winter.
And I could go on — the carriage is packed with characters like this — but I’m trying my best not to pay any attention to them.
The couple I’m trying to pay least attention to is the one directly to my left, standing in front of this EKONOM BANK ad that promises industrial-grey stacks of rubles in return for showing them your passport.It’s what I’m looking at to pretend like I’m not noticing them.
I’m upset with myself for noticing that they’re dark-skinned, and I’m even more upset that their being dark-skinned pricks me a little on the inside. I’m a Western Man, goddamn it.Maybe I’ve had too much vodka and Solzhenitsyn over the years.
But then I notice it’s something else about the couple that’s doing it to me. The pricks and tingles. It’s just that: they don’t ride the metro like Russians, or like the smug asshole foreigners like me. They jostle around, they stutter-step when the train stops, they seem nervous when it stops.
That’s it, I think, and settle back into myself: they’re riding the metro like foreigners. And there’s a strict way you have to ride the metro in Moscow and even I had to learn and that’s what makes them stick out and makes me uneasy. That must be it, that must be it.
They look like Azeris.
And then I see: the woman has a round belly. And the man is protecting it, he has his arms straight out, boxing it off.
Bomb, I think.
They’re looking deep into each other’s eyes, waiting for a signal. He has his arms out to make sure no one brushes up against the explosives and sets them off or calls for help. She has her fingers curled around the detonation string.
But no, I sharply reprimand myself, that’s ridiculous. The woman is pregnant. The husband is protecting his child from the crowd. He’s probably embarrassed he can’t afford a car, and ashamed to put his unborn child at such risk and that’s why he looks up a little alarmed every twenty seconds or so. The string is just a part of her blouse.
But still my heart is beating strong.
I lapse back into my thoughts, mostly loose ties dealing with my money problems. I add what I’m due next week, subtract what I owe this week, and I get a vaguely positive number. So I do it again. And again.
This is a good distraction. So is remembering the girl that brought me to this city in the first place. But no: now my stomach hurts a little more. And my eyes are back on the couple.
The Azeris are fidgeting a little, and we’re coming to a stop — almost under the Kremlin. They haven’t spoken a word. I feel something jounce from my groin to the tops of my feet to my teeth.
If they were to rip this place apart, now would be the time to do it. And that’s what makes me breathe a little easier: we’re still here.
The train starts to move again.
The old man is still staring at me, and a teenage girl laughs behind me saucily, “Oh, Vlad… Oh, Vlad…”
My eyes dart back to the stacks of rubles on the bank poster to the woman’s pregnant belly and back to the rubles and up imagining the lines of red brick and the fairy-tale churches sparkling through the heavy dusk…
“You are such a whore, Lyudmila,” the man says to his wife, in impeccable Muscovite Russian.
He reaches for the string and pulls it. I have only an instant to anticipate the impending explosion — that will rip through the rocks and the eyes and clear all of my blood into the old man, the posters, the crowd. I think of my own eyes because I am watching Lyudmila’s, and she looks surprised.
And then the big gasp. The fire will come. It will howl down the tunnels and burn up the ground — bring down the rows of glitzy boutiques and the bodies of frozen beggars, through the howling puking walls.
Joshua S Walker is a Dublin-based writer currently working on a PhD on 19th-century Russian literature. He recently published a collection of historical fiction, Anna Marie and Other Tales of the Germans in the USSR, with the AHSGR Historical Society.
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10 Responses to “OPEN-MINDED GENTLEMAN • by Joshua S Walker”
Comments
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April 7th, 2010 at 1:14 am
That’s another city I’m crossing off the list to visit!
Nicely paranoid, though slightly self-depreciating piece.
Good job!
April 7th, 2010 at 3:13 am
This is kind of a disjointed piece; writing gets in the way of story-telling in a big way. It’s either a brilliant take-off on Russian literature, or a first draft that needs many edits.
A few observations:
After the third paragraph, I spent more energy looking for weird uses of the colon than I did getting into the story.
“Cock-sucker lips” was an odd construct which also threw me out of the story without being particularly descriptive.
“Glitzy boutiques” and “bodies of frozen beggars” would have been more effective had they been alluded to earlier in the story – their placement in the last paragraph seems like an afterthought.
And I don’t know what to make of “howling puking walls.” Suddenly it’s a piece by Ginsberg?
April 7th, 2010 at 5:52 am
Err, I’ll agree with Bob. To me, and I’m no scholar on Russian Lit, the writing felt tangled. Description, such as it is, seems bent on being ‘shocking’ but failed to be so and often seemed to belong in another place:
‘Howling puking walls’ – somewhere a ghost story is missing its climax maybe?
The story, well, it got lost somewhere: perhaps in the attempt to be a Russian classicist.
It is a shame because I honestly felt potential. I like Russian Literature as well as the next casual reader, and there was something in the description that reminds. But perhaps this isn’t a good piece for a general reader like me, but someone who knows a lot about the genre.
Still, for my money story should come before any attempt at ‘tone’ or ‘style’, and it didn’t here.
April 7th, 2010 at 6:54 am
The (in my opinion) overuse of colons threw me off a little, but otherwise I have nothing but good things to say about this piece. The tangible self-loathing of the MC, the smell of the other subway riders, even the description of the Ekonom Bank ad – all of this drew me right into the story. Excellent!
April 7th, 2010 at 7:18 am
Interesting peice on prejudice. Something we all have to be on guard for in ourselves.
April 7th, 2010 at 7:33 am
I have to weigh in on the side of liking the story. Yes, the paragraph with all the colons felt like an attempt to be creative that just didn’t work with the rest of the story, but overall the tone is nicely paranoid and edgy. I don’t like this MC at all, and I think that’s the point you’re going for. He’s self-absorbed, he’s judgmental, he’s obsessive. But for all that, is he really paranoid? What I really liked about the story was the way we’re still not sure at the end if he was right about the married couple or if his imagination is getting the best of him. Remember, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not really out to get you.
April 7th, 2010 at 11:11 am
“Russian old”–my favorite description. And I liked the irony of the title.
Some nice parts, but overall this one didn’t work for me. Of course, I wasn’t much of a fan of Russian lit when it was force fed to me in school, so if this is an homage of sorts, that’s probably what’s striking a nerve. And I’m not much for stories where the first person narrator is dead at the end.
–John
April 7th, 2010 at 3:01 pm
I imagine there may be more than one version of this as I can’t easily reconcile the very powerful story of a westerner struggling to retain “correct” values in an alien culture that I read with the story that must have been there for others.
Yes, I was thrown by trying to understand the meaning of cock-sucker lips, but otherwise this one really made me think in ways that I consider worthwhile. It seemed to capture the angst of a middle-class liberal in the midst of a political upheaval rather well.
Gaius
April 8th, 2010 at 5:37 pm
@Bob
““Glitzy boutiques” and “bodies of frozen beggars” would have been more effective had they been alluded to earlier in the story – their placement in the last paragraph seems like an afterthought.”
The first paragraph reads: “Unimagineable Poverty: and Various Glittering Boutiques.” What more do you need for an allusion, caps lock and underlining?
Also: can no one use the word “howl” without being accused of Ginsburgism? Seems like an odd criterion for ejecting a word from metaphorical usage in all situations.
Apologies for the colon.
April 9th, 2010 at 9:45 am
Yeah, I guess that weird thing with the colons kind of obscured the actual words in that first paragraph. I guess that’s why writers are advised not to get too cute with their punctuation – stuff gets missed in all the artiness.
(Not that the author needs to take my comments very much to heart; I’m just one guy, and if I remember correctly Vonnegut took a lot of grief for weird sentence construction and, famously, “punctuatory farts”. And he was, well, Vonnegut. But I gotta be me, and I found it weird.)
Anyway, when the walls themselves are suddenly puking and howling, Ginsburg is what comes to mind. Not that there’s anything wrong with it – unless it’s a sudden shift in style or tone, which it felt like to me. Ginsburg was Ginsburg all the time.