Was it my fault that I never managed to call my mother? As I staggered that night into the University of Truth and Justice, I had every intention of calling Kalifornia and asking for more money. But then a heavy hand spun me around by the shoulder. My queasy stomach heaved up into my mouth and then sank into my boots as I recognized the steel teeth that glittered at me in the darkness.
"Why did you never call me back?" a familiar disagreeable voice growled in hoarse reproach. "You're a bad friend."
"Rasputin," I quavered. "You're supposed to be in Moscow. What are you doing here in Prague? Is that blood on your hands? What do you want from me?"
"I got into a fight at the train station. I want to talk to you," Rasputin rasped, more in anger than in sadness. "You have veesky in your room. I can smell it. Let's drink it."
Rasputin's nose for alcohol was legendary. I remembered my friend Navel recklessly running down the treacherous spiral of the Oxford staircase where we all had rooms at the time, taking the stairs three at a time in his haste to welcome me back after the cruise in the Norwegian fjords which I had been ordered to take by my doctors in order to recuperate from a particularly horrible summer with my mother. "We saw you walking into the quad from Flossie's room," he explained breathlessly. "You're late. Terence is awfully mad at you for skipping your first three tutorials of the term. There's someone here whom you have to meet. He's a mad Russian." Navel paused for breath. "He has occult powers. He can smell vodka. He's like a sniffer dog. It's amazing. Last night I hid a bottle of vodka under the dirty laundry in my closet."
I opened my eyes as wide as I could. Navel was the only person I knew who was even messier than I am. His accumulation of unwashed clothing had long since become the stuff of myth. Songs had been written about it. I could never restrain my tears when on quiet evenings Floss would pull out her battered old acoustic guitar and in her thrilling Joan Baez voice croon the excruciatingly sad ballad called `Navel Tries Bleach' which she had written herself, based on the true story of Navel's tragic experience early in his Oxford career when he put all of his fifty-three white Egyptian cotton shirts, made especially to his exacting specifications by a Filipino tailor, into a washing machine, unfortunately overlooking a dark blue sock which Floss wore to aerobics and which she had carelessly left behind in the washing machine; and Navel flew into paroxysms of rage and despair when he discovered that all his beloved shirts had turned a cheerful shade of sky-blue (the sock, on the other hand, as I helpfully pointed out, had bled itself white, a curious transference which made Navel wrap his freckled hands around my throat, and it took the violent intercession of Floss and two strong men to prevent me from asphyxiation, which explains why I am eternally grateful to Floss for saving my life, even though I still feel a ghostly ache in my throat in humid weather); but the worst was yet to come: at Maya's suggestion, Navel put his shirts into the washing machine again, this time along with huge quantities of strong chemical bleach, and watched the steel cylinder go around and around in the machine for eight hours, recklessly feeding in fifty pence coins by the handful to keep the cycle going, but when, at last, with bated breath, he let the alarmingly overheated machine wheeze itself to rest and opened the door, the shirts had indeed shed their blue but also their whiteness and had turned a pale and sickly yellow. This experience put Navel off washing his clothes forever, and, as he pointed out, the subsequent accretion of coffee, egg, and tomato stains had turned his shirts into an almost paisley pattern which matched rather better anyway with the somber brown tweeds he affected in emulation of the Oxford dons whose number he still desperately hoped to join.
And now Navel nodded impressively. "It's true," he said. "Rasputin managed to sniff out an unopened bottle of vodka even though I had hidden it at the very back of my closet. We don't know what astrological sign he was born under," Navel continued. "But Flossie and I feel that you two will get along."
And we did get along, at least for the first few weeks of our friendship. The very first time I met him, at a party in Maya's room, we eyed each other warily like dogs sniffing one another's tail on making first acquaintance. But the ice was broken that very night, literally, as we hacked our way with kitchen knives at the stalactites that had grown in Maya's freezer, to liberate a few bottles of vodka that Rasputin had placed there immediately upon his arrival in Oxford from Moscow. It turned out that he had brought several cases of vodka with him and a carton of the finest Havana cigars and little else besides, except a racing bike of which he was inordinately proud since its frame was made of the same carbon fiber used in Soviet military spy satellites. I have a theory that it was the theft of his bicycle a week after he arrived in Oxford which turned Rasputin into the monster of greed he later became: the loss of his bike convinced him that the only road to success in the West was through bare-faced and colossal theft.
I never managed to convince Flossie and Maya of this subtle psychological explanation. With typical brute feminine logic, they blamed me for Rasputin's transformation. "He was a sweet gentle aesthetic philosopher," Maya once said to me, sadly wiping a fat tear from her thin cheek. "Until you shaved off his beard."
"I didn't shave his beard. He did it himself," I protested half-heartedly. But I knew deep down, even as I demurred, that Maya was probably right. It was my fault. I have never liked facial hair, not even the soft shapely fluffy halo of hair the color of honey which enveloped Rasputin's face in those early days, giving him the air of a young and cheerful Solzhenitsyn. He didn't want to shave it off at first, but my principled campaign against beards eventually broke through his defenses. (Only later did we realize that it was a Pyrrhic victory at best.) Rasputin and I were sitting around one night, drinking old port with God and Lulu after three exhausting rubbers of bridge. I subtly brought up the subject of beards. Wasn't there a connection, I asked, between the appearance of a thinker and the nature of his thought? "I don't mean measuring the shape of people's skulls," I said. "But surely the defensiveness an ugly person feels about his appearance also affects the way he writes?"
"Go further with that thought," God urged languidly. I had bribed him earlier with a first edition comic book which he had coveted for years. "It may even affect what he writes. Look at all the systems of thought and then look at the portraits of their builders. What do they all have in common? Beards. Great big masses of hair hanging down their fronts. It must affect one in the head, you know, you've just woken up with a hangover and you're brushing your teeth, and you're feeling terrible anyway, but then you look up and in the mirror, you see an Old Testament prophet." Rasputin fingered his beard uneasily. "Hegel," God drawled. "Engels. Marx."
Rasputin shuddered at that dread name. Lulu clinched it. "I would never sleep with someone who had a beard," she declared flatly. "It would tickle."
"I'll shave it off!" Rasputin shouted wildly, jumping up from his chair. "But I need vodka."
We sat him down again and placed a bottle of bison-grass vodka in his shaking hand. Rasputin drank down the vodka in three long gulps while we draped a sheet around him and put another bottle in his hand. Lulu leaned over in front of him and began shearing away tufts of hair with my Swiss Army knife. Rasputin stared down the front of Lulu's low cut dress as she hacked off most of his beard. "There," she declared at last, deftly flicking Rasputin's wandering hand away from her bottom. "You'll have to shave the rest off yourself."
Rasputin finished the vodka and staggered over to the mirror. He howled in pain and clutched his head in his hands. Even I felt a twinge of remorse. He was a distressing sight, odd little tufts of hair bursting out like measles all over his face. "I'll shave it," I offered but then backed away when Rasputin turned and snarled.. It took six new razor blades, two cans of shaving cream, another bottle of my vodka, and a pint of his blood before the deed was done. He rinsed the bloody lather from his face, emptied a bottle of my incredibly expensive Catnip Pour Hommes cologne over his head, and turned around to face us. We cowered in our chairs. Gone forever was the Rasputin we had come to know and love, gentle, unassuming, sweet, kind, a friend. Before us stood a perfumed devil disguised as a schoolboy, a sixteen-year old with a savage smile, a vicious infant who would murder with a grin. And this monster had every intention to kill, if the Swiss Army knife he was brandishing menacingly as he bounded about the room was any sign. "Oh, my God, what have I done?" I moaned, feeling like Dr. Frankenstein.
"My creator," Rasputin bellowed, leaping at me. "You Mongol. I'm going to scalp you!"
Godfrey and Lulu managed to calm him down after he had chased me around my room for a while. I hid in Flossie's closet that night while Lulu (bless her heart!) made it impossible for Rasputin to chase me around the building by sitting down in his lap and letting him fondle her. Godfrey plied Rasputin with more of my old port and vodka until he eventually calmed down. But the nature of our relationship was forever altered by that traumatic night. For the next three years, I held Rasputin at bay with vodka, cigarettes, and currency, but I was always uneasily aware that the old vendetta might flare up again in his embittered Russian heart. And so I was terrified now at Rasputin's uncanny arrival, the eerie manifestation of this restless soul demanding whisky and conversation from me in the middle of the night.
"Why did you never call me back?" a familiar disagreeable voice growled in hoarse reproach. "You're a bad friend."
"Rasputin," I quavered. "You're supposed to be in Moscow. What are you doing here in Prague? Is that blood on your hands? What do you want from me?"
"I got into a fight at the train station. I want to talk to you," Rasputin rasped, more in anger than in sadness. "You have veesky in your room. I can smell it. Let's drink it."
Rasputin's nose for alcohol was legendary. I remembered my friend Navel recklessly running down the treacherous spiral of the Oxford staircase where we all had rooms at the time, taking the stairs three at a time in his haste to welcome me back after the cruise in the Norwegian fjords which I had been ordered to take by my doctors in order to recuperate from a particularly horrible summer with my mother. "We saw you walking into the quad from Flossie's room," he explained breathlessly. "You're late. Terence is awfully mad at you for skipping your first three tutorials of the term. There's someone here whom you have to meet. He's a mad Russian." Navel paused for breath. "He has occult powers. He can smell vodka. He's like a sniffer dog. It's amazing. Last night I hid a bottle of vodka under the dirty laundry in my closet."
I opened my eyes as wide as I could. Navel was the only person I knew who was even messier than I am. His accumulation of unwashed clothing had long since become the stuff of myth. Songs had been written about it. I could never restrain my tears when on quiet evenings Floss would pull out her battered old acoustic guitar and in her thrilling Joan Baez voice croon the excruciatingly sad ballad called `Navel Tries Bleach' which she had written herself, based on the true story of Navel's tragic experience early in his Oxford career when he put all of his fifty-three white Egyptian cotton shirts, made especially to his exacting specifications by a Filipino tailor, into a washing machine, unfortunately overlooking a dark blue sock which Floss wore to aerobics and which she had carelessly left behind in the washing machine; and Navel flew into paroxysms of rage and despair when he discovered that all his beloved shirts had turned a cheerful shade of sky-blue (the sock, on the other hand, as I helpfully pointed out, had bled itself white, a curious transference which made Navel wrap his freckled hands around my throat, and it took the violent intercession of Floss and two strong men to prevent me from asphyxiation, which explains why I am eternally grateful to Floss for saving my life, even though I still feel a ghostly ache in my throat in humid weather); but the worst was yet to come: at Maya's suggestion, Navel put his shirts into the washing machine again, this time along with huge quantities of strong chemical bleach, and watched the steel cylinder go around and around in the machine for eight hours, recklessly feeding in fifty pence coins by the handful to keep the cycle going, but when, at last, with bated breath, he let the alarmingly overheated machine wheeze itself to rest and opened the door, the shirts had indeed shed their blue but also their whiteness and had turned a pale and sickly yellow. This experience put Navel off washing his clothes forever, and, as he pointed out, the subsequent accretion of coffee, egg, and tomato stains had turned his shirts into an almost paisley pattern which matched rather better anyway with the somber brown tweeds he affected in emulation of the Oxford dons whose number he still desperately hoped to join.
And now Navel nodded impressively. "It's true," he said. "Rasputin managed to sniff out an unopened bottle of vodka even though I had hidden it at the very back of my closet. We don't know what astrological sign he was born under," Navel continued. "But Flossie and I feel that you two will get along."
And we did get along, at least for the first few weeks of our friendship. The very first time I met him, at a party in Maya's room, we eyed each other warily like dogs sniffing one another's tail on making first acquaintance. But the ice was broken that very night, literally, as we hacked our way with kitchen knives at the stalactites that had grown in Maya's freezer, to liberate a few bottles of vodka that Rasputin had placed there immediately upon his arrival in Oxford from Moscow. It turned out that he had brought several cases of vodka with him and a carton of the finest Havana cigars and little else besides, except a racing bike of which he was inordinately proud since its frame was made of the same carbon fiber used in Soviet military spy satellites. I have a theory that it was the theft of his bicycle a week after he arrived in Oxford which turned Rasputin into the monster of greed he later became: the loss of his bike convinced him that the only road to success in the West was through bare-faced and colossal theft.
I never managed to convince Flossie and Maya of this subtle psychological explanation. With typical brute feminine logic, they blamed me for Rasputin's transformation. "He was a sweet gentle aesthetic philosopher," Maya once said to me, sadly wiping a fat tear from her thin cheek. "Until you shaved off his beard."
"I didn't shave his beard. He did it himself," I protested half-heartedly. But I knew deep down, even as I demurred, that Maya was probably right. It was my fault. I have never liked facial hair, not even the soft shapely fluffy halo of hair the color of honey which enveloped Rasputin's face in those early days, giving him the air of a young and cheerful Solzhenitsyn. He didn't want to shave it off at first, but my principled campaign against beards eventually broke through his defenses. (Only later did we realize that it was a Pyrrhic victory at best.) Rasputin and I were sitting around one night, drinking old port with God and Lulu after three exhausting rubbers of bridge. I subtly brought up the subject of beards. Wasn't there a connection, I asked, between the appearance of a thinker and the nature of his thought? "I don't mean measuring the shape of people's skulls," I said. "But surely the defensiveness an ugly person feels about his appearance also affects the way he writes?"
"Go further with that thought," God urged languidly. I had bribed him earlier with a first edition comic book which he had coveted for years. "It may even affect what he writes. Look at all the systems of thought and then look at the portraits of their builders. What do they all have in common? Beards. Great big masses of hair hanging down their fronts. It must affect one in the head, you know, you've just woken up with a hangover and you're brushing your teeth, and you're feeling terrible anyway, but then you look up and in the mirror, you see an Old Testament prophet." Rasputin fingered his beard uneasily. "Hegel," God drawled. "Engels. Marx."
Rasputin shuddered at that dread name. Lulu clinched it. "I would never sleep with someone who had a beard," she declared flatly. "It would tickle."
"I'll shave it off!" Rasputin shouted wildly, jumping up from his chair. "But I need vodka."
We sat him down again and placed a bottle of bison-grass vodka in his shaking hand. Rasputin drank down the vodka in three long gulps while we draped a sheet around him and put another bottle in his hand. Lulu leaned over in front of him and began shearing away tufts of hair with my Swiss Army knife. Rasputin stared down the front of Lulu's low cut dress as she hacked off most of his beard. "There," she declared at last, deftly flicking Rasputin's wandering hand away from her bottom. "You'll have to shave the rest off yourself."
Rasputin finished the vodka and staggered over to the mirror. He howled in pain and clutched his head in his hands. Even I felt a twinge of remorse. He was a distressing sight, odd little tufts of hair bursting out like measles all over his face. "I'll shave it," I offered but then backed away when Rasputin turned and snarled.. It took six new razor blades, two cans of shaving cream, another bottle of my vodka, and a pint of his blood before the deed was done. He rinsed the bloody lather from his face, emptied a bottle of my incredibly expensive Catnip Pour Hommes cologne over his head, and turned around to face us. We cowered in our chairs. Gone forever was the Rasputin we had come to know and love, gentle, unassuming, sweet, kind, a friend. Before us stood a perfumed devil disguised as a schoolboy, a sixteen-year old with a savage smile, a vicious infant who would murder with a grin. And this monster had every intention to kill, if the Swiss Army knife he was brandishing menacingly as he bounded about the room was any sign. "Oh, my God, what have I done?" I moaned, feeling like Dr. Frankenstein.
"My creator," Rasputin bellowed, leaping at me. "You Mongol. I'm going to scalp you!"
Godfrey and Lulu managed to calm him down after he had chased me around my room for a while. I hid in Flossie's closet that night while Lulu (bless her heart!) made it impossible for Rasputin to chase me around the building by sitting down in his lap and letting him fondle her. Godfrey plied Rasputin with more of my old port and vodka until he eventually calmed down. But the nature of our relationship was forever altered by that traumatic night. For the next three years, I held Rasputin at bay with vodka, cigarettes, and currency, but I was always uneasily aware that the old vendetta might flare up again in his embittered Russian heart. And so I was terrified now at Rasputin's uncanny arrival, the eerie manifestation of this restless soul demanding whisky and conversation from me in the middle of the night.
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