Instant Kafka

I know I'm the lowest bitch — in Dubai a husband and a virgin "Audi A6" are waiting for me, and at the gates of purgatory Virgil, my father and guide, Virgil, granted to me for my deliverance, yet right now I'm racing off to some scribbler I met a few hours ago. Total bullshit! If Allah had conceived of me as a worm, as a worm he'd have brought me forth, but no, he conceived of me as a whore. I grab the first taxi that comes, flop onto the back seat and pounce on the driver: "Corner of Paliashvili and Kavsadze, as fast as you can!". As if he'd been waiting for just that, he tears off in his antediluvian "Zhiguli", stares at me in the rear-view mirror, bares his teeth (for an instant a gold one flashed) and winks, as if he sees right through me. Fine, he seems to say,

Did nature and art never grant
You a fairer delight in all your days
Than an unfamiliar, sleep-deprived me?

What kind of poetic diarrhea is this that's come over me, fuck? Where from? You know where from... The first time, after watching "Zelig", I remember it burst out of me: It's my life! Woody Allen, I thought, 100% made it about me. Fuck! I'm like a chameleon, always imitating the people I'm around at any given moment. Right now — a classic case. I've hooked up with a scribbler (a poet, a novelist — same fucking difference), so my brain retunes to his key, my memory fishes out of its stash whatever's called for in such cases — quotes, quotes, and more quotes. Is it possible to imagine today's scribbler without quotes? Anyway, right now I ought to concentrate. So, back to the taxi... Black as a burnt-out match and lean, the driver looks more like a damned bastard than the chipmunk from the "Colgate" ad, but in my mind Kukla surfaces anyway... Then everything gets jumbled: him, tousled like a hoopoe... Zhgenti slumped in his chair with a Batumi teenager... the letter "M" — dark above the dome of "McDonald's", red above the "Rustaveli" metro... a sweat-drenched Morrissey... someone leaning over the railing of a bridge, either a poet or a geometer... Meskhi dancing in girls' sneakers... a bewildered Woody Allen... a troika... and a dog — with deep, beautiful, big eyes... Everybody dance now... the dead "Berlin"... Dead can't dance... Zaza stuffed with the refuse of the everyday... an empty case... three nuts for Cinderella... and again the smiling Kukla... and ice...

* * *

Don't go thinking we were all that crazy about Sorokin. Well, Sorokin. It's just that his "Ice" turned out to be the keyword that defined our meeting, that hooked us to each other. Had there been no ice, another word would have turned up. Any word at all. Even the totally meaningless "moth", "Coca-Cola", "notebook", who knows... In the end a link formed between us, something that drew-and-brought-together our subspaces. That something turned out to be ice. It sounds like total bullshit, but there's no other way to put it. And if you do put it another way, the judgment goes off differently, dancing to that word's tune. It's one thing to talk about Coca-Cola, quite another about a moth and a notebook. But we drew ice, so let's steer our thought as it directs. We're repeating ourselves, but repetition is the mother of learning. So, to shed light on the subject under discussion, let's consider an aquarium with various little fish. Let's imagine they see each other for the first time, and by some miracle (or thanks to magic) the water around them — bam! — froze. More precisely, the water in the aquarium itself remained liquid as before, but a crystal of ice appeared in it, into which two fish, foreheads touching, were frozen. The ice later, naturally, melted... Anyway, let's move on, let's not skip ahead, for everything has its time, and to everything under the sun there is a season.

– Everybody dance now! – I recall Kukla's shriek, but it turns out that it's me shrieking. I figure this out from the surprised mug of the driver in the mirror. Ah, to hell with him!

* * *

Tbilisi is full of vile places, but "Del Mari" is something special... Even walking in for the first time, you can't shake the feeling that you've been here before, ages ago. Déjà vu, everything seems familiar — the aura, the people, the light, even the smell... and the music — something very Tbilisian. Smooth Jazz & Hard Soul. Kenny G or Michael Franks — Greatest Hits. Or Barry White feat. Tania Maria... Samba, rumba, salsa, mamba and bamba are permitted. And so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on. On top of that, because all the walls are lined with mirrors, it seems you're looking at yourself from the outside, or that the one your gaze is aimed at is real, and you're merely his reflection. And the thing is, it's precisely that kind of nonsense you remember your whole life. As if cameras are filming you from all sides, you're sitting in a live broadcast and getting streamed straight onto a wide screen. 100% reality show. Or even a reflection show. Be that as it may, the show must go on! In short, a pretentious and stressful place. Before you've even walked in, all you can think about is how to slip away as fast as possible. Though Zaza held up like a champ. He, it seemed to me, felt as safe as ash in an ashtray, or a dick in a rubber, or hell knows how else they say it.
I already knew Nene, and Levan turned out to be a young guy, quick as a swift.
– Nene's boyfriend, – he introduced him to me as if his whole CV fit into those two words. About me he said to the guy: – Khatuna, software engineer, – and sipped grapefruit juice through a straw, as if his whole manner were saying: and that's all I can offer to please you...
The waitress, without a word, asked me with a single glance: "What would you like?". I ordered a double espresso. As the waitress withdrew, Zaza was examining my legs. I'm no virgin nun, but I did feel awkward. Then he asked me to stick my leg out in front for a minute. It was clear that some lewd stunt would follow, and yet I obeyed. He bent down and took hold of my leg with his hand. I was embarrassed, of course, but I didn't pull away. No point starting a scuffle here. Besides, the morning's beans were starting to make themselves felt — I'd swelled up like a gas cylinder and risked disgracing myself with every extra movement. So I just shrugged and glanced questioningly at Nene and her companion, cutting my eyes toward Zaza: is he, like, nuts? He, unhurried, examined my limb and, without batting an eye, drawled: "You, apparently, have a big future ahead of you". Now that's what I'm talking about! Not words but pure gold! Cool, how subtly he jokes. LL Cool J. How pleasant! And you can't tell when he's bullshitting and when he's not. I was just about ready to give him hell. Like, what is this — foot-mancy, sort of like palmistry, the season's hit among fortune-tellers? But out loud I said nothing all the same, and instead tapped out a text to him with one single question: "And who are you yourself?" Aroused and swelling with intestinal gas, I was very pleased with myself — there, I think, I've come up with a fucking brilliant thing, finally hit the mark. Who could ever say for sure to whom the person sitting next to you sent her message — to her neighbour or to someone far, far away. His reply is stored in my phone's memory to this day: "My Madonna, I'm glad to inform you that I am a lowly private Mickey Mouse in the service of the Lord God, a private precisely, for we are many and our name is legion".

* * *

From the café we set off for the "Monsters Corporation" (that's what Kukla called the editorial office of the magazine "Hot Chocolate"). He had, he said, a two-minute matter there, and then he'd be free. The office is three hundred steps from "Del Mari", so we walked on foot along Paliashvili. Whether Nene and her admirer got ahead of us, or we fell behind them, who can say now? At first we walked in silence. Along the way, with all possible care, I let out my gas little by little. I sniffed — seemed fine, save for the faintest whiff... Fine, out on the street it's not scary. Crossing from corner to corner of Berdzenishvili, we slowed our step, or rather he stopped me, plucked an eyelash from under my eye and popped it into his mouth. Just for the record.
Well I never! Were my eyelashes starting to fall out or something? Could there really be such an illness, I wonder, and he turned to me and quietly said:

– You know, I'm impotent.

I waved it off, as if ignoring the announcement, but that was exactly what he wanted — to drag me into his hang-ups. What was I supposed to answer then — oh, what a shame, and I so wanted a child from you. And he acts as if it's me coming on to him, when in reality, I know perfectly well, it's him bending over backwards to make me like him.

– Are you writing anything right now? Working on something? – I ask the most saccharine question, a classic, the kind that makes every scribbler positively cringe. Or maybe they just pretend. Why not, maybe...

He curled his lips a touch. With a certain amount of imagination it could even be taken for a smile.

– Well, I've got a novella in mind, – he responded after a slight pause and delivered almost a monologue. – The narrative will take place in Prague. The main character makes his way one night to the Olšany Cemetery, secretly digs up Franz Kafka's grave, takes out his bones and hauls them home in a sack. He cleans the dirt off and washes the skull, the jaws, the vertebrae, the teeth, the ribs... Then he smashes them into little pieces with a hammer, runs them through a coffee grinder and turns them to dust. Every morning he takes a spoonful of this dust, tips it into his glass, adds the same amount of sugar, pours boiling water over it, stirs and drinks. As a plot, nothing special, – he appraises it himself, – but I do like the title. In principle, it's for the title's sake that I'm going to write it. "Rastvorimy Kafka", that's what it'll be called, – and for some reason he translated it himself, – Instant Kafka.

* * *

The two minutes at the office stretched into half an hour. Zaza and the editor-in-chief were heatedly arguing about something out on the balcony. Bla, bla, bla. About what, I couldn't hear. Anyway, it wasn't hard to guess: about removing the smutty and vulgar words from Zaza's article. To hell with them, I think, and what does a bourgeois little pink magazine like "Hot Chocolate" want with a beggarly author like Zaza anyway. I settled into a deep, soft armchair. Monsters may be monsters, but their armchairs are just right! Sitting there, I enjoyed the view: framed in the window, Zaza and the editor looked as if on a screen. Anyone who hasn't seen Shorena Shaverdashvili and Zaza Burchuladze will find it hard to picture what I'm about to say: the first is no Montserrat Caballé, nor is the other any Freddie Mercury, but at that moment there was something about the two of them... as if any second now they'd sing "Barcelona". And no sooner had I thought about "Barcelona" than, I don't even know why — whether from lack of sleep, or from the mass of cigarettes, or from the gas rioting in my belly, from the headache (before my period — good thing there was a pad kicking around in my purse, a prudent woman always carries one, I put it to use in the "corporation's" restroom. Not a restroom but the Hermitage — you feel awkward even taking a shit — and the fragrance, the fragrance, the fragrance... you feel like you're in a perfume boutique. Fuck! Forget your Comme des Garçons, Vivienne Westwood or Anna Sui) — or because of all of this put together, I suddenly became incredibly aroused.

* * *

It happens that sometimes I forget where my cunt is, but far more often, because of God knows how many hard-to-imagine, utterly dissimilar, fundamentally mutually exclusive things, I get a hard-on... It happens when I listen to the "St. Matthew Passion", especially "Erbarme dich, mein Gott" — I just have to picture ruddy-cheeked Bach in his powdered wig and I come on the spot... It gets up when I look at Munch's "The Scream"... It gets up from the smell of floor polish... It gets up in the toilet when my mother leaves and I sit down on the seat still warm from her thighs... From the faded, wrinkled face of the noble knight, when I imagine him, drenched in the ninth sweat, entering into battle for the establishment of truth and justice against a full wineskin, mistaking it for an enchanted Moor... When I recall quiet conversations about past encounters with the Lord God... Strange, but it gets up sooner at Proust's description of Vinteuil's music than at that same music performed by Richter or Oistrakh... From voices, for instance, Beth Gibbons and old Johnny Cash... I'm especially sensitive to voices. I only have to recall Bruce Lee with his signature yell "Yaaa!" and wiping the blood from the corner of his mouth with his thumb, and I get wet right away... Thirty times or more it got up at Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. I only had to picture those pot-bellied, stinking misers and I'd get aroused at once... That's how their literary images acted on me, already forever aroused and on edge by virtue of my age... And if that's not so, then the question is: why didn't it get up when I watched the cartoon of the same name? It turns out that the dwarfs of my imagination were much more abstract, far more generalized and therefore far more real than the animated ones, and thus influenced my childhood fantasy far more than their cartoon copies could (executed quite tolerably, true, but far too concrete, and therefore lifeless, dead — even though by rights it ought to have been the complete opposite, but every fairy tale has its own rules of the game). Anyway, those soulless doubles did manage to immediately replace the abstract images of the dwarfs living in my mind, with their ever-shifting outlines, and the dwarfs acquired, once and for all, fixed and familiar colours and forms. In short, let's set flat judgments aside, but after that cartoon I no longer get a hard-on either for Snow White or for the dwarfs. Instead I get one for the Hound of the Baskervilles. For some reason it always seemed to me that its eyes beneath the fog (at such moments a thick fog was surely spreading around me, so dense and palpable you could cut it like dough. Without the fog you couldn't even picture it, just as you can't imagine a horseman with a head, or such a strange symbiosis as Lionel Richie Hawtin) glowed like the lit headlamps of a locomotive dispelling the darkness. I only had to pick up that story and I'd get soaked all over, you could wring out my underwear. With age both my tastes and the objects of my longing changed. The eyes of the Hound of the Baskervilles melted under the gaze of Prince Myshkin... The list could go on and on, but even brief mentions can give a sense of the overall picture...

* * *

– At three we're going to the art museum, at six — to the theatre, – Zaza, back from the balcony, informs me, fanning himself with the invitations. – Only, where to go before that, that's the question! – as if nothing were amiss, he brushes an eyelash off me and pops it into his mouth. Another time I'd have been sick, but here it's fine, I'm even glad that someone else is making the decision instead of me — deciding where to go, and helping himself to my eyelashes, while I meanwhile swell up with gas.

– And what's on there?
– At the museum there's an exhibition of Iranian culture, and at the opera — Chekhov's "The Seagull".
– And what will we do there?
– Hmm, we'll mingle in society, look at others and show ourselves off.

A regular socialite lion, even if in a red T-shirt reading: "FUCK ME".

* * *

Mentally I return to my earlier notion that, had our meeting not been determined by the word "ice", another link would have turned up — say, "moth", "Coca-Cola", "notebook", and so on — and I find it mistaken. Why? The answer will be exceedingly simple. Take even the chair I'm sitting on right now. I have my own conception of it, I know things about it that Zaza, for one, doesn't; I'm, you might say, not indifferent to this chair, I know its history — where and when it stood, who sat on it, when its rear right leg came loose, because of which it constantly has to be set right and reinforced, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on — and so I know such things about the chair that leave me not indifferent to it, whereas Zaza does not. He can't look at it through my eyes, he doesn't possess the truth about it. So if we take this chair as a point of reference, it turns out that I'm in one of its subspaces and Zaza in another. The chair won't bring our subspaces closer, because my conceptions of the chair are fixed far more firmly than Zaza's, who is limited only by his own perception, and therefore he may remain indifferent to the object, take no interest in it, and thus this chair won't collide, won't bind me and Zaza. And, finally, there are 2 chairs: no. 1, the one I'm sitting on now and can see, and no. 2, described by me, transformed by me into words — a chair-image, so to speak. But this is already brain-fuckery, fuck! Anyway, it just came up in passing. It's just a piquant detail.

* * *

Before the exhibition we strolled through Vake Park. I wouldn't even mention it if not for what happened there. Nothing special, of course. We killed some old man. Sort of killed him. Or he croaked on his own right before our eyes. I don't know. You probably think I'm seriously not right in the head, but ask the Peacekeeping Forces — I'm answerable for every word I say. Well, there it is again, damn it, that feeling that all of this has already happened and now we're simply repeating ourselves.
On the way Zaza's mobile buzzed — Kacharov was calling, offering to come by in his car; it turns out he'd been meaning all week to take Zaza to the doctor. I don't know if it's still going on, but back then Zaza had a thyroid problem, plus he periodically had heart spasms, fits of neurosis and fuck knows what else. He himself made fun of all of it, positively hammed it up. But I know what a cowardly slacker he is. An actor, fuck, a fucking showman. Thanks, but today it won't work out for me, I've got an urgent matter. He must be embarrassed that someone else will pay for him at the clinic. But when they start begging and insisting, he gives in after all. He's a user, baby. So why don't you kill him? Then Kacharov called me: "Tell him to come with me... I get it, it's a drag, but... What if I were feeling like shit, wouldn't he help me?". Then Meskhi called, with the same line: "Where are you, we'll roll up right now..." Since when did you get so caring, boys, huh? A cocksucker, yes, but a jealous neurotic I've never been, and yet I did get upset — I've known both of them for a hundred years and never saw such anguish and trembling from them. They lost their own minds over a man they, like me, had only just met. And what a man! Mickey Mouse, who by zodiac is a hobbit, by his mother a piece of shit, and by his own reckoning a pink panther. That I go around with him is understandable, it's my problem and the subject of a separate conversation (which is, in fact, underway), but you, boys, you're not like that — since when did you turn into caring daddies? Ah, fuck it! Sorry for the jealousy, boys.

We were sitting in the park on the last bench before the tennis courts, not quite reaching the "Lokomotiv" stadium, when that old man appeared... He carried a big cudgel in his hand, like your Moses's staff. His gaze was fixed downward, at his feet, and with the cudgel he was rummaging through the cellophane scraps under the bushes — looking for something. Beside him walked a dog, wagging its tail. A fright of frights — apparently a cross between a shepherd and a dachshund — a huge head and a tiny torso, and a maw that seemed to be smirking to boot. It strongly recalled Milo from the film, when the mask accidentally gets pulled over him... I remember what we were bullshitting about — biblical hardcore. Bullshitting, actually, was Zaza. He asked how I was with the Old Testament. Realizing it was hopeless, he launched right in:

– There's an episode where Jacob, with his sons and daughters-in-law, is passing by the city of Shechem. The inhabitants come out and demand his women, to lie with them. Jacob and his sons refuse — you're not of our faith, they say, and the foreskin is still upon you. Then the men of Shechem, without hesitation, subjected their flesh to circumcision at the very gates of the city. All of them, it's emphasized, except the elders, even the little children. If the specialists are to be believed, some seven to ten thousand inhabitants lived in the city at the time. Take seven, roughly subtract the women, that is two thirds, and the elders too, and there'd still be almost three thousand left. So picture a place with three thousand rounds of meat on it. That's a whole little mound!

Bla, bla, bla, brain-fucker. The usual intellectual bullshit with hidden sado-maso motifs. Zaza is neither the first nor the last to get hung up on biblical hang-ups. I tried to let it in one ear and out the other, but the little mound loomed before my eyes anyway — thousands of rings of meat dumped into a single heap, there was something attractive about them. He'd probably have gone on bullshitting a long while yet, had the old man not appeared. Completely unexpectedly, as if he'd leapt straight out of Zaza's ravings. I won't say he looked like Jacob, but he clearly resembled Moses wandering through the desert. A grown-old, abandoned-by-all Moses. Zaza and I exchanged glances.

– Are you ready? – he inquired.

I didn't know what he meant, but I instantly confirmed my readiness, even though I felt with my spinal cord, my ass, my cunt, with walkie-talkies, faxes, telephones, that something dreadful was brewing. And that something was for us to carry out. All my thoughts rushed off somewhere into my ass. I sort of started thinking with my ass. For some reason I got so aroused that in a couple more seconds I'd have come. I know exactly a thousand ways — not counting the exceptions that don't prove the rule — of achieving orgasm (I mean orgasm without sex). This would be the thousand-and-first way...

The old man passed by us, peered under the bushes, but it turned out there was nothing for him to catch there. He glanced back at us, just for an instant, something flickered in his eyes, and he bolted sharply.

– Let's go! – said Zaza and rose so slowly that I understood — he was very nervous, his nerves taut as strings. He tensed like a rat before a henhouse. Then he leapt behind a bush and came back with a stone in his hand. The old man was walking briskly away from us. Zaza, glancing around him, set off after him. And throughout this whole chase a strange feeling wouldn't leave me — that all of this had already happened once before.

It all happened suddenly. The moment Zaza hurls the stone at the back of the old man's head, I, like a rugby player, flew in from the side and slammed the old man into the bushes. In short, Zaza and I, willy-nilly, went all Bonnie-and-Clyde. The old man doesn't pass out, though he's clearly on his way out already. We roll him over, he looks us in the eyes. If, I think, he hasn't completely lost it, then he's certainly terrified — but no, the old man follows our every movement with his sharp eye. Yet he keeps quiet. Blood is coming from his nose. The dog whimpers, wags its tail, licks its master's face. Zaza pulls off the old man's trousers, takes out his flabby dick and holds out his hand to me. I give him my "Victorinox". In one hand Zaza holds the dick, in the other — the knife. That must be how Alexander the Great, having invaded Asia, gripped a sword in one hand and Aristotle's "Analytics" in the other. I marvel at the old man's calm, at the meekly-accusing gaze with which he takes us in, as if they weren't about to circumcise him but had merely switched the radio — from a Schubert trio to some Eminem rap. It seemed he'd known in advance that it would all turn out exactly this way, and now was simply watching.

Since that's how it was, we didn't flinch. Zaza sliced off the old man's foreskin so deftly, as if he'd done nothing else his whole life. The dog for some reason didn't lunge at us; with its former methodicalness it licked its master's face, wagged its tail and whined.