Moscow Noir

He asked his friend at the clinic whether she could be cured, and the friend answered that she could—but not right away, and never entirely, because of the quantities of heroin that had traveled through her system. He went on to say that he had an acquaintance with a clinic somewhere in the Alps on a magic mountain, where they slowed down the lives of their patients so much that they needed their fix only once every six months, and they could live like that for a hundred years. His friend said that he wouldn’t be able to keep her in his clinic for too long, that according to a new law, private rehabilitation clinics would soon be outlawed and their patients would end up either in basements or in state-run institutions no better than prisons, with beatings and bars on the windows. His friend said that the most important thing now was for her to get off the carousel of misfortune and blood transfusions, to stop spinning around and around in her body and mind. She would have to change her lifestyle, take a trip to the sea or spend time at a resort, reading books and sunning herself on the beach. She must not see her old friends or familiar streets, where every bush would remind her of a dirty needle. She should go somewhere filled with the babbling of an incomprehensible foreign language, where unfamiliar birds sing in the trees. And when he asked for how long, his friend thought for a while, then said: “Very long.”

He shut himself up in his office, turned off the phone, set down the gold-dust hourglass in the middle of the table, and counted out all his money in real estate, stocks and bonds, jewels, banks. He had enough to last a lifetime. There would even be some left over for his children. And if the bonds weren’t cashed anytime soon, even his grandchildren would have something. He told his partners that he wanted to bail out and disappear forever, that he was ready to hand over his shares on terms advantageous to them. But the important thing was that it had to be done immediately. His partners thought it over and sketched out a business plan on sheets of white paper, illustrating how much of the company was upheld by his own personal connections, which routes of money and gold were dependent solely upon him. “Give us all the connections, and then you can call it a day,” his partners said.

“That will take six months,” he begged. “That’s your problem,” they said.

He then transferred as much of his money as he could access to an anonymous account in a faraway bank. That money would not be enough for a whole lifetime, and would not be enough to leave something for his children, but it would be enough for half a lifetime. And that, if you think about it, is not such a short time. He deposited the rest of his fortune on an anonymous credit card, bought two false passports and plane tickets, paid a visit to the friend who ran the private clinic to get a note for the guard, and drove off to get her. By the Baku movie theater, where he’d had his first car dealership, there was a traffic jam unlike any he had ever seen in that neighborhood.

Distraught that he had not visited her in three days, and so must have decided to leave her, she decided to commit suicide that night. She had stolen the key to the attic long before, and now crawled to the edge of the roof from which she would throw herself headfirst into the dark green treetops. To fall right through them and end up lying lifeless on the neat gravel walkway. She concentrated, took a deep breath, and sucked in her stomach, calculating the angle of her leap. She mustered all her strength, then fell asleep from the exertion.

At that moment he was standing at the railroad crossing by Grazhdanskaya station, looking at his watch and waiting for a long freight train to pass. It must have had few hundred cars in it.

She stood, eyes closed, on the very edge of the roof, and slept. And she dreamed that she had changed her mind and returned to her room, that she lay down to sleep with a childlike smile on her lips, and that she would live. In fact, she stepped off the roof and out onto the long branch of a tall tree leading to the middle of the park; and she began to walk on it, not opening her eyes, like a tightrope walker. She had never walked on a tightrope before; she had a terrible sense of balance.

He hurried to the clinic, woke up the guard to show him the note, entered the grounds, looked up at her window, and discovered her walking high up above him. Her arms were flapping like the wings of a bird in slow motion. Her white nightgown was fluttering in the sultry night air. Inside his pocket, his beeper, which he had forgotten to turn off, sounded. It was his partners, who had discovered discrepancies in his accounts, as well as his disappearance, and were trying bring him to his senses. The beeper startled her. She opened her eyes, her foot slipped, and she fell down right into his outstretched arms.