In contemplation of wolverines and singing babushkas in downtown metro passages
The wolverine, I was telling John Smith, is the most vicious and tenacious predator of the northern climes.
The Hunched Cornish had let Smith sit with his back against the divan, giving him a regal view of the amazing Ukrainian broads walking past the glass, while I took the chair opposite across our small table. The one right next to the entrance is the table to get at Kofein, just across the street from the Lva Tostogo metro hub. You can’t reproduce the same voyeur effect sitting outside, now that it’s warm and insane, as the short skirts and bosonozhki fly by you in a derisive rush on either side, while you sit there like a heartbroken madman blubbering into your water, coffee, or tea.
What’s it related to, Smith asked, meaning the wolverine. I told him the weasel and he said that was too bad, but I said it was nothing like the notions we hold of weasels, particularly when we anthropomorphize certain types of people into their names.
The wolverine is noble, muscular and fierce, I said. If you befriended it in nature, it would kill you. If you raised it in captivity and fed it every day from your own hand, it would kill you.
Why’s that?
Low tolerance threshold. In fact, none at all. It’s pissed just because you’re there.
Fuck the wolverine, Smith said.
Ha! That’s exactly what it says when it sees you. And then it kills you. It’s got oily fur that’s resilient to frost. The shape of its paws allows it to move easily through deep snow. It’s got upper molars turned at 90-degree angles into its mouth that allow it to tear through frozen flesh like you might tear a paper bag. It will take down a caribou, elk, or moose, and feast on it like it was a snack. Say it sniffs out a big kill made by a lynx, bobcat, or snow leopard; the wolverine will kick their ass, or kill them and eat their food, leaving them for a side dish after it’s done with the main meal.
What about a wolf?
Kick its ass.
No – said Smith, understanding just how good the ice cream was The Hunched Cornish had recommended he try at Kofein – I don’t think so. The gray wolf is one of the most formidable predators in the habitat you’re talking about.
At 38 hryvnias, you get three scoops of different ice cream – something like chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry – with a swirl of chocolate syrup, but it’s crushing the textures of the nuts they blend into the scoops against your palate that releases the tasty magic of the combined crunchy nuttiness and cold ice cream flavors. So ask for the version with the nuts – you won’t be sorry. To add another layer of joyous taste to your tongue, pay UAH 5 more for a tiny pitcher of blackberry liquid jam, which you then pour over and mix into the ice cream with the nuts. There is a choice of jams here, so be sure to ask for the yezhevika in Russian, since they probably won’t know that blackberry in Ukrainian is the far more straightforward and colorful vedmezhyna, derived from the Ukrainian word for bear, which is vedmed, who, aside from pouncing on fish swimming upstream and terrorizing your dacha garbage cans, eat this sweet bush-borne tart by the barrel.
Speaking of which, Smith, I said, the wolverine is so fearless and ferocious, it would rather face death against a far greater opponent, like the bear, than give up a fight over food and retreat. It might go at a bear just because it’s there.
What do you think of that babushka who sings with the opera voice in the Independence Square metro, Smith asked.
Where, I asked back.
In the passage, the long one, during rush hour.
I don’t know how many years she’s been there. Why do you ask about her?
I think she’s good story material.
Smith, don’t even think of interviewing her for the Kyiv Unedited Man on Earth section, which doesn’t have anything in it yet.
No, no, Smith said. I was thinking she’s maybe good for a story – like, you know, a story, like the kind you make up and then write, so that people could read, like, who is she, what happened to her, why does she sing in the metro, what made her start so many years ago, to get over what memory, maybe, or what pain, connected with the opera, long ago, maybe there was a man involved, a tenor or theater director or composer, and another woman, a rival soprano she eventually lost out to, who was maybe not as good but better looking with bigger tits, leading to her, the woman we’re talking about, leaving what, and whom, she loved most, and then maybe she married someone else and the husband has since died and the children have forgotten her, leaving her to fend for herself, or maybe from that point on, when she left the theater, she’s been alone, knowing she would never love anyone the way she had loved that other guy, you know, the opera producer, or filmmaker, or poet, or artist, or maybe she’s kind of whacko or simply eccentric, or a wealthy old communist with a large five-room apartment in the prestigious Pechersk district of this city, or descended from famous Cossack nobility, now forgotten, or from a family of Tsarist pre-Bolshevik aristocrats with artistic genes, or a poor pensioner with humble roots in a village who always stood out among her peers and made it on her voice and talent in the city for a while and now she’s using it to just scrape by, or –
You mean a work of fiction, Smith? The Hunched Cornish had to interrupt his ass – I couldn’t take it anymore.
Yeah, that’s it – fiction!
No, I don’t think so.
What don’t you think?
I don’t think it’s a good idea, I mean for a story – some old lady with her gray hair up in an artistic bun, singing opera and Ukrainian tearjerkers in the main metro passage under the city. Who cares?
So, The Hunched Cornish, maybe I can find some animal on the Internet and then tell you all about how noble it is the next time we meet, like The Ferret, for example, returning the favor for the wolverine, so to speak. John Smith was being sarcastic. He could be that way sometimes.
Ah, Smith, if you look up The Ferret on the Internet, you may not get what you went there to find.
Smith finished his ice cream and betrayed a small smile, wiping the corners of his mouth with the cuff of his light stevedore’s spring pea jacket.
What are you going to do with Manny Face’s Tango Baby, Smith asked me.
What do you think I’m going to do with her, I, asking back, replied.
The Hunched Cornish, April 24, 2013