Free The Moscoviad by Yuri Andrukhovych Page B

underage fool, sincerely believed
to be my original poem. I wasn’t able to go on to The Odyssey —it turned out that she did learn something about
it at school. Thus I was exposed, and the only thing left for me was to proudly
break off our relations.
    The bitterness of
my existence then required a way out. Abandoned and betrayed by almost everyone
except a few brethren in spirit who were of little interest to me, I finally
chose an escape to Moscow. By the way, Your Royal Sternness, I don’t have a
drop of moscowphilism in me. If under those circumstances I could flee to Kyiv,
Rome, Nuremberg, or San Francisco, then definitely no Moscow would have ever
gotten to see me. But I could only flee here. To hide on the seventh floor of
the stinking building not far from the Ostankino TV tower.
    Moscow shoved a
few more loves in my way. First one critic who came for a visit twice a year,
and with whom we watched all of Fellini. This was a rather curious case: verbal
sex. Our sexual relations consisted in the conversations. We would suck dry
down to the tiniest detail some Casanova or Marquis de Sade, sputtering
quotations from Rozanov, Freud, and Solovyov; our tongues, lubricated with
viscous sweetish saliva, substituted for us the entire complex of
sensual/corporeal gratification. These conversations ran until two in the
morning when we, exhausted and happy, would go back to sleep in different
rooms. And didn’t sleep together even once. Those conversations drained us;
they were self-sufficient. I did accomplish a few things while dealing with
her. For example, I taught her to distinguish the notions “phallus” and
“penis.” Since she had thought those to be synonyms.
    During one of her
visits Alexandra happened to me. From time to time they would appear in my room
at the same time. Then each would begin her cunning game, expecting the other
to go away. In the midst of all this I just made tea and smoked. And silently
expressed surprise at my own sonofabitchedness. Because it was unlikely that
one of them would emerge victorious. Their desires did not overlap, and each
got her own.
    My rapprochement
with Alexandra had to do with Catholicism. With all the passion of a neophyte
she dove into the church life of the Roman rite, attending almost daily the St.
Louis Church, still, if I’m not mistaken, the only functioning Catholic church
in Moscow. There pleasant-looking young priests conducted various soul-saving
conversations with her, introducing her to the taste and desire for asceticism.
Hence she, evidently because of the sublimated attraction to the cute fathers,
got inflamed by the idea of self-improvement through asceticism, which did not
help her Ukrainian studies. The further along, the more she resembled a novice
nun, absorbed exclusively in the contemplation of the Great Mysteries. I tried to
win the duel with the fathers through introducing her to various erotic
spectacles and indecent texts. But she was having none of this. Usually she
didn’t show up for the dates, later inventing some rather obvious lies—a
practice that to her mind was apparently not sinful.
    But one late
evening, when it seemed that our conversation about the importance of charisma
and of experientially achieved righteousness could not continue any further,
she turned the lights off in my room and lit the stub of a candle. “You see,
the actual presence of stigmata on the body could be the evidence of
Blessedness, but could also signify the beginning of further trials,” I
whispered, suffocating, while pulling with difficulty the child-sized bra off
her almost nonexistent breasts. “You fool,” she answered, and this wasn’t the
right time to clarify why exactly I was a fool: whether my idea was foolish, or
whether my idea, although correct, was expressed at the wrong time . . .
    She turned out to
be rather inventive and fast in lovemaking. This was a Joan of Arc! Or a St.
Theresa! I could not even imagine anything like this, so by