Read by Cliff Chapman
Rybie! Ryabovitch!
Greetings, dearest friend. Your letter was a welcome respite from the stultifying boredom of life here in sleepy Melikhovo: the unwanted visits from dull relatives and Mamasha’s constant fussing and baking. If I have to eat another slice of that woman’s legendary sponge cake, “oh and maybe a glass of tea with that dear?”, I will be forced to take out my Balkan dagger, the same you once coveted, with the blade curved upwards like a man’s excitement, and run her through.
She tries, God bless her she tries; but apart from baking and emptying my bladder for me, what’s a mother to do? We are both divested of the roles we were born to play: she bragging about my exploits to her sewing circle, and me back in the killing fields with you.
“What’s the point of a soldier with no legs?” she’d say if she had even a fraction of her son’s bluntness. But she doesn’t; instead, she bakes like a woman possessed, and I try to temper my point-blank temper, which means it spills out in letters like this one. For that I apologise in advance, my friend, before extending the puny paw my doctor still calls a “hand” to give you an almighty slap to the chops.
“But why?” the lovelorn ninny gasps: “Why does my oldest and dearest friend not offer sympathy and consolation when I send him a tale of crushing shame, of kisses given but unearned. Oh, those millions of inaccessible kisses soaring past our ears like a flock of starlings, dropping tokens of their displeasure on our upturned, woeful mugs!”
Were it not for science, I too would be wiping bird shit off my stumps and forlornly fiddling with myself between slices of tea and cake. But I don’t. Which is not to say I didn’t. The first three, four years were hard and I succumbed to self-pity. I will never feel the caresses of a woman again I thought. A young man, still virile, full of fantastical plans for love and romance, having to be helped on and off the chamberpot by his ailing mother. And yes, she does the down-below sprucing-up too, dear boy. A challenge for Cupid! Find me a woman who wants to have carnal relations with her husband after removing faecal matter from his arse.
But at least I was blessed with intelligent conversation thanks to my dear Doctor who visited not only for check-ups, but to minister to my soul. I also, thank the Lord, had books. Anton Pavlovich is very keen on the writings of the English botanist Mr Charles Darwin, and so I became intrigued by his theories too.
Soon thoughts began to wriggle around in my head like Darwin’s worms, thoughts based on equivalences and parallels (for is this not how the mind works, contrastively, correlatively?). Thoughts about lovers and soldiers. Kissers and killers. Might it be possible to transmute back and forth between the two, as easily as changing double Ss for double Ls? We who have been trained to the highest degree to kill, can we not use these skills to succeed in the arts of love?
A few weeks back, the good Doctor and myself paid a visit to Konstantin Makovsky’s estate, about twenty versts distant. Who’d believe that a man could acquire such a vast, luxurious residence by simply applying paint to canvas? I suppose it shows you what portraits of Generals and a gold medal from L’Exposition Universelle can do for a man’s reputation and his coffers. He is of course no longer plain Konstantin Makovsky, but “the phenomenon, Konstantin Makovsky”. He has something of the Borzoi or Afghan Hound about him: long thin face, full red lips, steely grey eyes. A vein in his temple throbs violently while he drones on about the topics of the day with large sweeping gestures, as if he were still holding his paintbrush, or a conductor’s baton.
He is now in his late fifties. His wife, Maria Alekseevna, is half his age. As she led us into the drawing-room, I made the schoolboy error of enquiring whether her Papa was painting upstairs. My quick-witted Doctor, out of breath from pushing my damned Bath chair up the drive, stepped in to save me: “But my dear fellow, Maria Alekseevna is blessed with only one painter in the family, her husband. Great artists don’t grow on trees you know!”
With the others’ arrival, I was spared having to further extract myself from this painful faux-pas.
After a dull meal with innumerable toasts, Potapenko was wheeled out to give a recital with Lidia Mizinova. For a while I sat watching his fat, huffy wife aim dagger eyes at Mizinova’s heaving bosom as she tralalaed along with the husband, but soon my attention returned to Maria Alekseevna, who seemed distracted by a ribbon on her dress, and not especially interested in the mazurkas and ballads. I decided it was time to bag my prey.
“Maria Alekseevna,” I whispered.
She leaned into my cripple carriage, like a mother might, checking on a baby. I placed my hand on hers, she let it remain there.
RULE NUMBER ONE: Touch. Darwin tells us that we are animals. Highly evolved, intelligent animals. But animals nonetheless. And animals respond to touch and gesture.
Keeping hold of her hand, I skewed my mouth to the side of my face and began to make pipe-smoking air-kisses.
One of the bovine Mamashas hovering somewhere behind us, lowered her blubber-face into our sphere to see if she were needed. Maria whispered that she was going to take me out to the garden where I might smoke my pipe. I reckoned that I had perhaps half an hour to carry out my seduction.
RULE NUMBER TWO: Find some way of separating the woman you’re going to kiss from the pack. But not so far that she feels unsafe. Once this is achieved, she will be forced to give you her full attention and only then can the kiss-kill commence in earnest.
So as Potapenko and Mizinova launched into one of Rubinstein’s Persian Songs, Maria began to push me out of the drawing room towards the garden.
“This is quite some vehicle, you have here Vladimir Grigorovich,” the little darling panted, her voice still honeyed with good humour.
“It’s designed to be pulled by a donkey. It’s the donkey’s day off today, so you’ll have to do.”
RULE NUMBER THREE: Denigration. Women expect a man who is wooing them to be all compliments and kisses. By reversing these expectations with endurable barbs and criticism, you not only wrongfoot her sense of what you’re up to, but also vivify that voice in her head (which only quietens when men are fawning over her) that sneers: “You’re nothing special, in fact you’re a bit of bore.”
Maria had by now pushed my chair all the way down the lime-tree path, positioning us near a somewhat dilapidated orangery. Behind us the forest soughed contentedly. We both gazed towards a sliver of the grey-blue lake where Anton Pavlovich had bragged about catching whole schools of pike, perch, and his beloved tench.
She helped me gather together my smoking paraphernalia from the various pouches secreted about my chair. Before lighting up, I asked if we might move to the other side of the garden (a more shaded area, further from the house) as I found the sun’s glare, I professed, even in the late-afternoon, a little “intense”.
RULE NUMBER FOUR: In pursuit of a young lady, make sure to have one or two changes of scene. Every translocation refreshes her perspective, making her feel that she’s known you for much longer than she has.
So there we sat under the linden trees, and there I introduced the denouement of my Kiss-Kill strategem.
RULE NUMBER FIVE: Connect with her heart, soul, mind (and genitalia).
All the rules I have just outlined to you Ryabovitch, could be carried out by a Tatar, as very little finesse is required. Even a Mongol could get a little celebration going for his “good fellow” on a regular basis. But where is the skill and satisfaction in kiss-killing like this? The final rule requires a certain level of artistry, for it is here we connect not just with the woman’s physical exterior, but also with her sensibilities. And if you can connect with a woman’s sensibilities, she will invariably become excited at a grosser level. Then it’s just a matter of shooting fish in a barrel.
How to connect? Well, are you not feeling a certain level of erotic excitement in your stomach and groin? How have I done this? With words. By creating images in your head, by telling you a story. It is this that we must do with our prey.
Earlier in the day when Makovsky had given myself and the good doctor a tour of his studio, I’d noticed that he was working on a rendering of The Judgement of Paris in oils. His Aphrodite was not, as I would have expected, the dark-haired Jewess, his wife, but a fair-skinned, golden-haired pubescent with small, plum-like breasts and an ivory-hued vulva. I did not dwell on this aspect with Maria, however, as it would have brought her down to earth again, into the mire of marital jealousies and infidelity.
Instead, I began to discuss the story behind the painting as I smoked my pipe, the delicious spicy aroma of Xanthi-Samsoun tobacco spiriting us away to steep rocky coasts of the Black Sea, to rivers cascading through cleaved gorges.
I spoke of those three Greek Goddesses bathing in the warm springs of Mount Ida, before displaying their bare flesh to the young shepherd-prince’s inspection. And as I described the scene, I allowed my own scrutiny (quite naturally) to take on some of the ardour of the tale. I lowered my voice so that she would need to come closer. I could see in her eyes the flickering genesis of that glazed enthralment we call desire. I blinked. Once. Twice. And so did she. I licked my lips. Her small tongue edged out of her mouth and cautiously moistened her own.
At that point, it was relatively straightforward to do what I had intended to do the first time I set eyes on Makovsky’s wife.
I hope you do not take this Remedia Amoris as a cruel vaunting of my seductive fluency, set against the inertia of your own non-performance. If anything I hope this kiss-kill tale gives you hope and fortitude, my friend. For if a puffy-faced cripple can have his way with a beautiful Jewess in her own husband’s arbour, well then my dear fellow, you too, by carefully applying yourself to this curriculum of seduction, may be transformed from the hunted, or in your case haunted, into a hunter like me.
Forbearance my dear Ryabovitch, and may God grant you courage and cunning for the kill,
Your mangled Ovid
Vova
___
Steve Wasserman is a psychotherapist. He runs Mindfulness Based Writing courses with Dr Kerry Ryan, therapeutic reading groups, and the only Short Story Bookclub in the village UK. He is currently on the lookout for people to contribute to his Read Me Something You Love podcast. Contact: stevewasserman@gmail.com, or @ShortStoryBkClb (Twitter).
Comments