it. That made me feel even closer to Dimm.
Ching, ching, ching, chick-a-ching, he hummed, swaying in dancing steps around the apartment. “Rules, my foot!” He raised a half-empty open bottle he had stumbled upon. “I’m the one making the rules, or at least I did in the band. I brought inspiration to the soloist by supplying chords and rhythms on the piano — improvisations nobody had ever dreamed of before — like this one.” And he would play, or rather sprinkle, some chords on the piano whose lid was always open as if it too was a bottle ready for him to have a good sip from. “Count Basie. Duke Ellington… It was different before the communists came, Puppe. It wasn’t dangerous to play jazz. Jazz wasn’t anyone’s enemy. Duke Ellington was not a threat. Why is he now?”
Then he would stop the playing and find the deck of shabby cards some of which had to be repainted, the ink was so worn. His patience deck. “Why is the game of Napoleon’s patience so difficult to play?”
He expected no answer. I was his alter ego, catering for his need to talk to himself without raising the suspicion that he was losing his mind.
“Puppe, I can’t wait for you to grow up so we can have a glass of decent booze together. Instead, I have to read stupid tales to you. Once upon a time, blah, blah, blah. There’s no such thing as once upon a time. Everything is yesterday. It was yesterday when I went to school and jerked off with the other boys in the backyard. It was yesterday I was in the jazz band, the damn war was yesterday, then came the regime and the clock stopped. Why are you wearing a hat, why aren’t you wearing a hat, fucking nuts! A jazzman has to do some thinking, to express the theme in a melody, disintegrating, haunting, overtaking, indistinguishable, intrusive, idiotic, genuine. A jazzman has his own rhythm, his own world where freedom of musical expression reigns.”
He whistled to the rhythm of a favourite jazz number. He had been doing this often lately, for the gramophone player was beyond repair, and Nadya said he could have a new one only over her dead body.
“Puppe, you’re one little kid, cute like a little shit. But here’s the good news. When you grow up, you’ll turn into a big shit like me, or like your Papa-Great Andrei.”
I recoiled. Dimm hated Nadya’s cousin Andrei while Nadya thought of him as family and it would bring fierce disputes between her and Dimm. When we gathered around the coffee pot he would call Andrei’s branch of our family a ‘clan of Moscow bootlickers’ and other names that I was supposed to forget along with the jazz music we listened to, like Duke Ellington’s ‘Satin Doll’.
The morning before, Nadya and I had watched the tanks scraping the yellow Viennese cobblestones in the centre of the city as they paraded along the Mausoleum with the mummy of a communist leader and a head of postwar Bulgaria who was under orders from Stalin. He must have made a mistake because, as the annoying Nadya’s friend Madam Sonya loved to gossip, Stalin had one final order for him: to be poisoned while staying at a Soviet sanatorium curing himself with vodka. “But vodka is a slow poison,” she leered, “so his boss Stalin fed him a stronger one.”
My head was a jumble. I was quickly reaching my capacity to remember all the things that I had to forget.
From the tribune of the Mausoleum the parade was overseen by a delegation from brotherly Mongolia, all men with slanted eyes and fur hats, exchanging passionate kisses with my great-uncle, Papa-Great Andrei, and other high-ranked Party men standing in the tribune.
“Nadya,” I’d asked, “Why does Papa-Great kiss people on the mouth? He could get a disease.” This was what she taught me, and I seemed the only one concerned about Andrei, whom I lovingly called ‘Papa-Great’. Later in the day when I asked the same question Dimm answered me. “He’s already got it, Puppe. The red disease.”
Dimm was clever. He had been studying medicine for three semesters at the University. He might know all about diseases.
Now he continued talking to me, but rapt by his charismatic and casual arrogance, I must have missed some of his words.
“… that’s the first law of nature. Like mother, like daughter. I am not your mother, my little Puppe, and it would have been lucky for you if you hadn’t been stuck with my sister. Margherita’s motherly instincts are the size of that pinhead, the subject of profound discussions as to how many angels could gather on it. The second law of nature… ”
He never told me the second law, for he fell asleep still balancing on the chair, a burning cigarette between his fingers, the ash dropping on his shirt, making small black-rimmed holes.
I was sweeping the spilled grounds when suddenly he woke, confused and grumpy.
“All right, all right, I’m not telling you the whole story! Well, I don’t remember where I went, but I ended up with Mimi, the brothel girl, they call her the Brazilian because she plays so well the maracas… Ah well, what the fuck, she is giving a fantastic blow job. Ching-chack!”
“The cigarette is burning your finger!” I felt so motherly.
“Is it?” Dimm looked at his nicotine-stained fingers, then at the butt squashed between a cuticle and a joint, and somewhat hesitantly used it to light another cigarette. Finally resting his eyes on me, he continued, “Between you and me, people are no different from trees. Trees are people tired of chaotic movements.” He winked at me. “Where’s my coffee? I hope you haven’t drunk it all. This time I managed to create a coffee as elegant and dramatic as a ballerina with a bullet between her eyes.”
I brought his cup, half full, from somewhere among the empty bottles that littered every available surface, along with some chipped glasses. Disintegrating butts floated on top, bits of paper, tiny nicotine cuts like tribal boats, but they did not stop him from slurping the cold liquid forming a film like an oil spill.
He smacked his lips. “Mmm, not bad. One day I’ll lay hands on some real Arabica then you’ll see what your bourgeois uncle is capable of creating. Throughout the interrogations, some of which lasted for six or more hours, I lost all sense of time and humour, the bastards. Puppe, where’s my alcohol? Bring it, unless you’ve polished it off.”
Before I could move, he’d pulled out a full bottle hidden under an armchair and raised it to his lips without unscrewing the cap.
“That one’s empty,” he grumbled and chucked the bottle behind him.
There was the sound of glass smashing against tiles, followed by a sharp smell of Żubròwka, a blade of bison grass inside the vodka.
“Puppe, have you played chess with only white figures? Four white knights, four white castles, two white queens? In there, I was given only black figures to play with; four black knights, four black castles. Don’t tell Nadya. She has this cousin Matt who is a chess player. He might try it and go nuts. Our Nadya has funny cousins, don’t you think? Like my godfather and your Papa-Great, Andrei.” He looked at me searchingly.
I remained silent. I loved Dimm, but I also had a soft spot for my Papa-Great. I was proud that Papa-Great Andrei’s portrait was displayed in public places, among the portraits of other highly placed communist functionaries, a fact looked upon by the family as an embarrassment. I could see blown-up pictures of Andrei’s stern, serious face splashed across the facades of buildings, small kiosks, like that of the neighbourhood tobacconist, Kiro, who had smaller pictures, in which my Papa-Great looked friendlier, a half-smile showing awkwardly, as if it was one of Nadya’s garters. Sometimes, while playing with my dolls, I would tell them that I was a real princess from a communist tsar’s family. To prove this, I would put a coffee bean under
