Smith regales Cornish with book-burning fable
I was in this three-story cafeteria Smith invited me to at the end of Sahaydachnoho and Kontraktova Ploshcha in the Podil district of Kyiv, called Puzata Khata, a nice, rounded corner property, prime real estate.
On the third floor, looking out the window and down at the street, I noted this place was right across from that Uzbek place I burned down with Smith some time ago. But I was surprised and somewhat disconcerted to see it seemed to be functioning after all.
But then I figured, unless I brought the place down again, time heals everything. ‘Let them get on with it.’
Waiting for Smith, I was raking my fork through a large plate of buckwheat, and I decided to take a round plastic container of Greek Salad – in this heat, The Hunched Cornish just wasn’t very hungry. ‘Large variety’ I said to myself when I got here, looking at the counters of food, ‘cheap; looks pretty good.’
Oh, and a couple of glasses of lemonade. All pretty good. The lemonade was quenching – glass size seemed to be about 300 ml; not exactly the pint-size 500 ml I prefer (otherwise it’s a waste of time and resources), but neither was it the inexplicably sparing, village skinflint volumes of 200 or 250, so often run across in the eateries around here, revealing some ludicrous local inside-out reverse capitalist philosophy of serving as little as possible for an unjustifiable price – so incomprehensible in people I generally regarded as spiritually generous – as if doing that made them incredibly resourceful and clever.
‘Ukrainians,’ I thought. At least they weren’t Russians.
Price of the lemonade? Can’t remember. But it was cheap.
I kept waiting for Smith and my annoyance at his delay finally made me hungry, so I went down to the second floor and got a few more items – some potato food, some rice food, some meaty sauce food, maybe ragout; I don’t know – all pretty good, it turned out (word is, if there is a Puzata Khata to go to in all of Kyiv, this is the one – the others are kind of shit). Except my hungry eyes fell on sticks of succulent-looking shashlik and I couldn’t wait to sink my thick square teeth into the barbecue-basted pieces of pork or veal.
But when I started, there was something funny about the texture of the meat and the taste, which began to disgust me. I took a closer look and discovered it was chicken. Fowl. You can even do fish shashlik, but no one ever does chicken. It was a filthy trick – fooling people like that. I immediately lost my appetite again. Or maybe I no longer had one. It was just as well. Man, I just couldn’t eat that soft sinewy bloody chicken, let alone look at it. In revulsion, I pushed the tray with the stacked plates to the side.
And then Smith showed up. He had something on his tray that looked like quiche and a cup of black joe. He folded his sunglasses into his inside breast pocket and plopped his fedora on the chair beside him. He was wearing a finely tailored black suit these days. The line of the cut nicely complimented his tall thin but strong frame. ‘Black. In this heat?’, I thought.
Smith had picked up some grace, some finesse. His muscles weren’t bulky, with the useless mass of silly obtrusiveness typically developed by goofy pump heads, but long and resilient, taut, like springs, and elastic.
And me? What about me? I’m supposed to be terrifyingly massive, square, and revoltingly gruesome, with exaggerated comic-book-like features. For of this race of men I am not. No matter how big, none of the pump heads had a fraction of my strength. Or speed, for that matter – you would never guess, looking at me. I’m possessed of tremendous speed, in addition to strength. And my body can start fires at will. That’s part of the beauty of the whole thing. Don’t judge a book by its cover. The whole thing just made me laugh.
Speaking of which.
We didn’t speak for a couple of hours, Smith and me, and then I went down again to get a carbonated mineral water.
“How’s that book,” I asked him.
No answer. Why did he do that?
So I asked him again.
“Smith… SMITH!!!”
“It was all right, The Hunched Cornish. I stopped reading it.”
“You did? Why?”
“Well, there was this guy, and he was this pilgrim, see, and he kept progressing, but after a while, I just didn’t see the sense in the story.”
“So what did you do? Did you give the book away, or to the Ye Bookstore for their bookcrossing shelf, or, or… why didn’t you loan it to me?”
“Well, um, first I threw it against the wall. Then I got up and stomped all over it. After that I took a large scissors and shredded it to pieces, which I threw out.”
“Idiot.”
“But then I didn’t want it to go just so easily, so I retrieved the shreds from the trash, part of which were covered in rotting muck from decaying, stinking, fruit-fly-invested banana peels, piled them on a tray not dissimilar to this one, except it was metal, and burned them. After that, I went out on my collapsing balcony and flung the ashes into the wind, with some blowing back at the wall and into my face. But most of them made it down to the ground to become part of the Earth again and the eternal dust of the universe of which we are all made.”
“Vanity Fair, Smith. Slough of Despond.”
“Yeah, right.”
Continued in next frame
The Hunched Cornish, August 18, 2014