Red Ticket: Cat and Mouse
“This is not a movie theater,” said the old lady. “This is the cat circus.”
Every weekend we serialize Red Ticket, Robin Whetstone’s memoir of her time in Moscow in the early ‘90s. Today, Robin begins to accept that something is going badly for her boyfriend at work, whatever that means. Now, if she could just keep him from finding his gun.
If you need to catch up, go back and read chapters 1, 2-3, 4-5, 6, 7, 8-9, 10-11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, and 24.
Chapter 25: Cat and Mouse
by Robin Whetstone
The next morning, I lay in bed feigning sleep as Lyosha got up and prepared for work. When I heard the front door click shut, I opened my eyes and swung my feet off the couch. Stepping over the roses Lyosha had brought the night before, faded now to a crumpled yellow, I walked into the kitchen and put the kettle on to boil. I sat down and flipped to the back of the most recent Guardian. “Kvartiri,” the heading said, “Apartments.”
I had known taking up with Lyosha was risky, but I also knew that I’d regret it if I didn’t do it. I could see myself in the distant future, leathery from smoking and covered with stretched-out tattoos. “There was a time a handsome Russian mobster asked me to be his roommate,” I’d rasp to the women at the Euthanasia Center, “but I got an ESOL degree instead.” What a let-down that would be. On the other hand, it was becoming more and more clear that my compulsion to storify everything was causing me to do things that I knew were risky just because they’d make for a more compelling tale. And if I didn’t have a compelling tale, what did I have?
It irritated me that I was asking this question. I was doing what I was doing because I wanted adventure, because I wanted to see what would happen next. Nobody ever asked Jack Kerouac or Huck Finn why they were just taking off like that. Why did there always have to be some pathology behind it (eating disorders, father issues) if a girl was doing it? “But on the other hand,” I thought, “you do have father issues.”
It was becoming clear that my compulsion to storify everything was causing me to do things that I knew were risky.
I put the magazine aside. I did not come to Moscow to think about things like this. I had more immediate concerns, like the fact that Lyosha, my nominal boyfriend, had come home with blood on his face because he had…what? Shot someone?I wasn’t completely sure what Lyosha had done with the gun I’d handed him the night before. Was he after someone? Was someone after him? It didn’t matter. All I knew was that the violence Lyosha had found outside was not going to stay there. One of these nights, the door would open to a man with a gun, or the taxi we hailed would turn out not to be a taxi after all.
I tried not to think about these things as I counted the savings I had left and calculated what my $400-per-month salary would afford me, and held halting, confusing conversations with leasing agents. I ignored thoughts about what Lyosha would do when he came home and found me gone, or on the day that he saw me on the street. I would worry about that later. Instead, I tried to focus on finding a safe place to live. I visited a two-room apartment near the Belorusski train station. “It’s $350 per month,” said the guy showing me around.
“I can only afford $250,” I said.
“It’s for the steel door,” said the man, kicking at the front door. “You absolutely want the steel door.”
I couldn’t afford a steel door. I kept looking.
***
I was now working full-time at the Moscow Guardian and was out most days, researching. I was grateful for the assignments that kept me away from the apartment, like the ones I’d received when Brad, the layout guy, told a story at the weekly staff meeting.
Brad and his girlfriend wanted to see a movie, so they went down to the movie theater near a central metro stop. The movie theater was in a big art-nouveau building that took up nearly a block. On its roof was a neon sign. “KINO,” it said, “MOVIES.” Next to the heavy main doors, a bulletin board advertised the movies currently showing. “Bad Man in the First Grade: 5:00,” and “Gorkaya Luna: 8:00.” Brad pulled on the door, but it was locked up tight. He checked his watch. 7:45.
Brad and Caroline banged on the door. They’d come all the way down here and wanted an explanation. After a minute, the door opened and an old woman in a housecoat poked her head out. “What do you want?” she snapped.
“We, uh. We want to see a movie?” said Brad.
“Impossible!” said the old lady, “The kittens are all sleeping now. You can buy a ticket for next week.”
“Next week?” said Brad. He pointed at the bulletin board. “It says it’s playing tonight. We want to see the movie now.”
The woman frowned. “What movie?”
“The movie playing in this movie theater.”
“This is not a movie theater,” said the old lady. “This is the cat circus.”
“A cat circus?” I yelled, interrupting Brad’s story. “Jason, you have to pick me. I want to go to the cat circus. Please, pick me.”
“Maybe Brad wants to do it,” said Jason.
“No,” said Brad, “I do not want to go to the cat circus. I want to see a movie.”
“See?” I said, “He doesn’t want to do it, but I do. I want to go to the cat circus.”
Who wouldn’t want to go to the cat circus? The whole idea was so wrong for so many reasons. What would these cats do? Sleep? Lie down on a book you were trying to read? Cats were notorious for not caring whether you were having any fun at all. I’d never heard of a more misguided idea than a cat circus. This would be hilarious, I was sure.
“Cat circus?” said Julia, our Russian translator. “Don’t you mean the mouse train?”
“Mouse train?” I said. “A cat circus and a mouse train?”
“OK, okay,” said Jason. “Cat and mouse. You’re it.”
***
The man showing me his apartment met me at the end of the metro line. He was waiting for me when I exited the station. “Hello,” he said when I came up to him.
“Hello,” I said back to him. He was a middle-aged man with glasses, wearing a brown coat. Except for the long, dirty plank of wood he was carrying with him, he seemed normal. I looked at the plank and then back up at his face. He offered no explanation, so I didn’t ask.
We walked in silence across a few small streets and cut through a brief wooded area, which ended on the edge of a field of gray snow. A path had been trod across the field toward a group of six or seven massive concrete housing blocks. Each looked 20 stories tall and was indistinguishable from the others. I followed the man on a shortcut around a few of the buildings, my shoulders hunched as I picked my way across the ice, feeling small in the shadow of the towering apartment blocks. The sidewalk leading up to the man’s building was flooded with mud and melting snow, and probably other things, judging by the smell, so the man put the plank down for us to walk on. When we’d made it across, he picked up the plank and started up the grafittid stairs with me behind him. The stairwell was dark. It smelled like cigarettes, and disappointment.
“It’s the 7th floor,” he said. “Faster to walk.”
“Why are you taking the board?’ I asked him. “Why don’t you just leave it downstairs?”
“Someone will take it,” he said.
He opened the weirdly puffy, vinyl-covered front door into a small foyer that led into two identically sized rooms. The rooms were right next to each other; you could see the entirety of both of them without leaving the doorway. The left one contained a wall unit of shelves, a small table pushed against the window, and a couch that doubled as a bed. The room on the right was a kitchen, and any extra space in that tiny room was taken up with another table and a folding wooden rack, on which were hung undershirts and damp socks.
“I…think this is too far out,” I said. It wasn’t that the place was too small, or too plain. By now I was used to sleeping on a couch and washing my clothes in the bathtub and living my whole life in only two rooms. It was the view out the window that decided me: another building just like this one, and behind that one another one, and another one, and another one. These were storage places for people, row after row of individual lives subsumed by the buildings that swallowed them up. There was no “the person who lives here has a quirky sense of humor,” or, “that person probably likes the ocean.” Just concrete, and a million blank windows, and not a single color but gray.
“Understood,” said the man, who did not sound surprised. “But if you are moving, maybe you will need a dresser?”
“A dresser?”
The program the old woman had given me at the door proclaimed that the cat circus was “World Famous in Japan,” but like almost everything else in this country, that was a lie.
“For your clothes,” said the man, stepping inside the door into the foyer and motioning for me to follow. “It’s not expensive. It’s in here.”
I walked with the man into the room on the left. Pushed up against the wall closest to the door was a small dresser. “Oh,” I said. I didn’t want a dresser, but I felt bad that I had turned down the man’s apartment without even going inside. I pulled open the top drawer. It was filled with one-ruble bills. Inflation was so bad in Moscow that a quart of milk cost 1500 rubles. You couldn’t buy anything at all with just one ruble, but not that long ago, it used to be money. It must have felt wrong to just throw it away.
“Wow,” I said. “That’s a lot of rubles you have in there.”
“I will reduce the price if you take them with you,” said the man.
I frowned. Was he serious? The man laughed; a sound out of place in this overheated room. His eyes were shining with the pleasure of making the joke, and suddenly he was not a middle-aged man with glasses living in one of a thousand boxes, but a real person responding to his situation in a way that made sense. I laughed, too. It seemed like the only thing to do.
***
The program the old woman had given me at the door proclaimed that the cat circus was “World Famous in Japan,” but like almost everything else in this country, that was a lie. The six or so cats that made up this circus had long ago tired of rolling across the dusty stage on skateboards, stepping through rings, and struggling across parallel bars. Now, the cats wandered listlessly around, sniffing at the tattered gold stage curtain, or flopping on their sides for impromptu naps. One cat, a tough-looking orange tom, sat down near the middle of the stage, stuck his hind leg in the air, and without a lick of shame meticulously groomed his hindquarters. We in the audience, having nothing else to look at, stared at him.
It was unclear whether the human “clowns” in the circus realized how awry things were going, or whether this was the level of entertainment they’d anticipated. They seemed unperturbed as they capered to the tinny music coming from a boom box at the side of the stage, snapping and clapping and exhorting us to “Come on! Stand up!”
Did they like the cat circus? For the first time ever, I was afraid to ask.
After the song and dance number, the master of ceremonies hopped off the stage and pulled an audience member – a man in a purple sweater – to his feet. “Stand right there!” the clown demanded, vaulting himself back onto the stage. The man did as he was told, flinching with shame as the clowns on the stage tried and failed to throw rings around his neck. The plastic rings were hula-hoop sized and the people seated around the unlucky man ducked in their seats or threw up their arms, trying to avoid being struck by them. After this, the ringleader brought a woman up onto the stage from the audience. She stood there, docile, as a lesser clown drew an unflattering caricature of her on a large sheet of paper. The other audience members laughed at the woman, who climbed down from the stage and went back to her seat, head down.
I looked around at the audience. Was this show…good? Did they like it? It seemed like it was terrible, but Russian entertainment was so perplexing that I couldn’t be sure. Every restaurant you went to made you pay for a “floorshow” featuring naked women and/or people dressed in mascot suits dancing to Ace of Base. Nonetheless, the Russians who were able kept going to these places. Did they like these kinds of things? Did they like the cat circus? For maybe the first time ever, I was afraid to ask.
***
I never found the mouse train, even though Julia insisted she knew people who had seen it. The best I could do was the mouse theater, which showcased parrots and baby elephants, but not mice.
The day I turned in the cat circus article, I found an apartment. I wrote Lyosha a note saying I’d moved, but not where to.
To read the next chapter, click here.
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