Work Text:
Don't worry about the report
that all your sons were killed.
Only Amnon is dead.
2 Samuel 13:33
They kept killing you long after your death: the slow degradation of time, the well-worn weariness around your drooping shoulders. Katya once asked you what it might be like to see them wrinkled, withered, and you looked at her and didn't say anything, said with your eyes well, there's no way of knowing now, is there?
Except of course she didn't see you, because you were dead, dying, have always been dead, and were about to die.
There's a certain weight to the first death, you thought once. Must have, anyway. The first of the series, the first of everything: everything else just a consequence of that first dying, your decaying corpse still singing the tunes Andrey sang to you once, the notes having hollowed itself out in your weathered bones, the soundtrack to your demise.
Winter has come to Naples, and if you were still in ██████, the snow would have covered your body by now, buried it deep beneath the earth. Come springtime, and the thaw, perhaps your body would have still rested where it dropped: a monument to your hubris, a testament of time's ceaseless passing.
But winter has come to Naples, and there is no snow in Naples. There is only grey, and rain, and you see your body get eaten by various beasts of nature, skin bloating and bursting, all faded and blotchy so that the meatflesh of the prisoncage that was once your body gets returned back to the earth, dust unto dust.
Years hence, you like to imagine flowers growing from where your body once laid.
Years before, you think of that flower on the table in that trattoria you had dined in with Andrey. It was popular, he told you. It was good. All the people go there. You looked at him, at his earnest expression, his cloying gaze, his filthy begging that made his designs to kill you ever more obvious by the second — you're not stupid, you knew how this was going to end from the very beginning — and you had smiled, you had nodded, you said yes.
All the people go there, he told you; meaning: all the lovers go there.
It was an insult, that flower. You piss on that fucking flower. That flower was everything you could never be, for you are Goncharov and Goncharov in a trattoria dining on a table with a fucking flower on the middle doesn't make any kind of sense, so you took that precious crystalline vase and threw it at the wall, shards of glass spreading all around, sparkling like the stars.
Andrey asked you if you wanted to leave. You laughed at him. You told him why would I leave? in a way that made you think that he now thinks of you much better for it. Better, meaning: in control; meaning: this is your territory; meaning: you aren't going to let some stupid fucking flower ruin the eddies of your memory, fixating on it so much that you forget how the rest of it went.
Except that's a lie. You had liked the pasta. Andrey had smiled and said see, I told you so! It's good, isn't it? and you had looked at him.
You really looked at him.
You said yes, it's good.
Now and not-now it is many years hence, and many years before, and many years sideways and all that you could think of is that flower.
The first death should have been special, you will think. It will not occur to you that this isn't the first time.
Nor will it be the last.
This is not to say: this is all just ancient poetry, repeating. You are not Hektor being dragged around the walls of Ilium by Akhilleus. The walls of Jericho will never crumble in this story, for you came into this with its walls already made into rubble, detritus; dirt, and ash, and blood.
This is instead a story of the end, of your end. You never thought you'd see it, but that's the problem with men like you.
You thought this story was all about you.
Your wife kisses you, kills you, betrays you. Your wife, the bitch. Your wife, the mastermind. Your wife, the wife of Goncharov.
Always Katya Goncharov. Never Katya Goncharova.
(Typical American director not knowing Eastern European patronymics, someone will grumble one day.)
Then: just Katya, in New Orleans, New York, New Zealand — any place that had the word new, as if to take her process of rebirth into a grander stage, vanishing from the Old World to reappear in a place of dreaming.
Later, very many people will talk about this, and they will write analyses on Katya, on Sofia, on Andrey, on characters who subvert their usual narratives and tropes and dared to ask for more from the story.
Later, too, they will talk about you as if you were merely incindental.
Goncharov the mafioso, no first name given; and maybe even no last name either — for, as one person put it, why couldn't you have taken your wife's last name for your own, on the run from something dark and terrible as you were? Why couldn't you have adopted her name as yours, and so it might turn out that maybe nothing of you is really yours, no name, no soul, no person to inhabit the role of Goncharov, just a cobbled-up collection of gangster clichés and the undeniable yet ever subtle fluttering of a human yearning for more?
Thus: Goncharov, the man who doesn't exist.
And yet does.
This is not to say: there are much thoughts in-between.
A pity, actually. If there had been, perhaps you'd try to remember it better. You'd cross out all your old mistakes. Forge a new life for yourself, not in the way you've done it already but in a way that's better somehow. You would be a new You, you decided.
You, the author of all your own worst mistakes; You, the first sacrifice to your own self-made altar.
A bit more time, perhaps, and you'd also realise: that was what got you into this in the first place, an Ouroboros of unending greed.
I don't really think there was any other way for this to go.
Don't you?
The boat rocks, and the boat rocks, and the boat rocks.
Your lover is killing you, your mind thinks. She's pushing you down, into the water, into the depths; no hope of air or salvation.
Your lover is killing you, your mind thinks, and all the while your gaze fixes onto Andrey.
It's funny, some part of you thinks as you die.
You always thought your death would come from him.
This is not to say: It means something.
None of this means anything.
You break the water's surface. All around you is blue upon blue upon blue: the endless sky, the point where sea meets horizon.
The boat rocks, and you are already dead.
This story has happened before.
This story will happen again.
This is a story of the dead haunting the dead.
Andrey will come up to you, will tell you there's this trattoria I've found, all the folks go there. It's good, or so I've heard.
You will say it's good.
Andrey will nod and laugh. He will think your echo a question.
It is just an echo.
It doesn't have to mean anything.
That flower, however; meaning: that flower from your rotting body through which Eternity shall grow, that flower on the table, that flower on the ground after you've thrown the vase on the wall.
That flower means something.
You just don't know what it is.
And so it all starts again.