Red Ticket: Unhappy in Our Own Way
He was right, I had hidden his gun.
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, and 23.
Chapter 24: Unhappy in Our Own Way
by Robin Whetstone
“What is matter with you?” said Lyosha, throwing his suit coat on the back of the chair next to me. It was dinnertime, and I was sitting at the table in the living room working on my Sadistic Couplets article. I wasn’t expecting Lyosha. Most of the time, he only came to the new apartment for a few hours, to sleep.
“Guess what happened today,” I said. “I was researching the Sadistic Couplets and ended up selling pins on the Arbat with a bunch of teenagers. We sang folk songs and talked to a homeless man who was once a ballet dancer.” This was exactly the kind of story Lyosha and I used to tell each other at 66 Sykharevnaya, before he got arrested. Back when we used to go dancing, or stay up all night singing and drinking whiskey and cracking walnuts with a hammer.
Lyosha narrowed his eyes, his face darkening. “Can you not keep this place clean? If you cannot do it, I will hire real woman to show you.”
I heard this kind of thing more and more from Lyosha when I saw him now, usually when he woke up to go to work. “Why will you not iron my shirt?” he’d ask me, or, “Why do you buy this black bread?”
“What is the big deal?” I would wonder. “We’re splitting the rent, we both have jobs. Iron your own shirt.” Because no matter how many times his mom made me write it, I would never be an efficient housewife. I did not make beds. I did not bake bread. Instead, I sat at the table in the living room all day, for hours and hours, and chain smoked and drank sweet iced tea out of a grotty plastic bottle and wrote, piling crumpled pieces of paper around the chair legs and leaving a dust of ashes all over the furniture. I disappeared into what I was working on and snacked haphazardly on boiled eggs or potatoes. None of this was acceptable to Lyosha, who had definite ideas about what women should do.
Now, Aleosha scowled at me as I smoked and wrote and ate directly from a can of dented tuna fish. “Why are you all the time smoking in here? It smells like ashtray.”
I decided not to say anything. Lyosha didn’t like my slovenly ways, but I could see that wasn’t the only thing going on. Because, more than snippy and critical, what Lyosha seemed was distracted. He acted like he was deep in thought about something very serious, like any interruption from those thoughts was intolerable. He’d snap at me and then retreat into himself, staring off into space and rubbing at his chin, just as he was doing now. I didn’t know what was happening with Lyosha and his job as a fixer at the Western telecom firm, or at his other job pouring liquor for mobsters and oil executives, but I did know one thing: to make money in Moscow, you had to pay.
Crime, organized and political, dominated the news. The turf wars started out small – two rival cigarette guys in the neighborhood turned into one cigarette guy and one corpse in a tracksuit. The survivor made money, so he attracted attention from some bad hombres up the food chain. You could either pay or fight, and there were weekly 1930s-style public shootouts and ambushes involving businessmen who’d gotten too ambitious. The bodies in cars and streets and ditches and restaurants were a constant topic of conversation in Moscow.
Lyosha started off as Kostya, selling postcards to people like me, and was now, as he said, “interested in banking.” That was all he would say about work. Something was going on.
***
It was 2 a.m. and I was asleep when the front door banged open and Lyosha strode in. I sat up on the couch bed and watched him as made a circuit of the room, pulling open cabinet doors and yanking open drawers. He ignored me, muttering to himself in Russian as he pawed through the clothes. Finally, he pulled the drawers out by their handles and shook their contents onto the floor. He dropped the empty drawers on the rug and turned to my table, pushing the notebook and scarf and newspapers that lay there onto the floor.
“Where is it?” he said, “Where did you put it?”
I blinked at him, trying to pretend I didn’t understand.
“Where is my gun? Where have you put it?”
“Lyosha, I don’t have your gun.”
“No,” shouted Lyosha. He started toward me and then stopped and made a visible effort to calm down. “Robin,” he said, raking his hand through his hair, “You do not understand. I have got to have my gun. If I cannot find it…” his voice trailed off as he put his hand to his mouth and looked around the room.
He was right, I had hidden his gun. His behavior over the past few days had begun to frighten me. He no longer bothered to correct me, but instead just looked right through me, like I no longer existed. I didn’t know why this was happening, but it worried me enough to put his 9mm somewhere out of the range of his impulses. Just in case.
He was right, I had hidden his gun.
But now Lyosha was furious. Maybe hiding his gun had been a mistake. Maybe when he found it, he’d shoot me with it. I thought about the long nights of singing and storytelling, of shopping together for food, of holding hands in a drafty hospital lobby. I knew that Lyosha was a good person. I could also see that he was scared. I could see it in the way his hand shook as he ran it through his hair. I smelled it in the sweat that was coming off of him; metallic and sharp. I got up and crossed the room to a large, pink, shoe-shaped vase someone had given us as a present ten weeks ago, at 66 Sykharevskaya, and fished out Lyosha’s gun. He snatched it out of my hand and ran out the door.
***
I was lying on the couch bed, waiting for morning, when the front door snicked open. “Darling, darling,” whispered Lyosha, kneeling by the bed. “Wake up. I brought these for you. I’m sorry about earlier. Look, I brought these for you.”
I opened my eyes. Lyosha’s face was half-hidden behind a bouquet of gaudy white roses. He smiled at me, something he hadn’t done in a while.
“Lyosha,” I squinted at him in the blue light from the street. There was a spray of glossy black dots, like poppy seeds, on his chin and cheek. “Lyosha,” I said to him as he climbed in bed beside me, still in his street clothes, “What did you do?”
“Maybe tomorrow, okay?” he closed his eyes, the blood on his cheek smearing red across the pillow.
To read the next chapter, click here.
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