Intro

 

On Earth, life is arranged so that all people inevitably end up in hell. Especially in this country. Annette felt this back when she had only just opened her yoga school. She tried to awaken the spark of genius in people, to help them think laterally, to show them that life contains… something more than what TV dramas show. She took her students out into nature so that people could switch off the imposed, stereotypical thoughts in their heads and heal inwardly, listening to the river and the trees instead of narrow, blind human ideas.

But, giving herself entirely to people, giving them all her light, Annette noticed that this light somehow did not reach them… it evaporated on the way. She saw that the men stared without blinking at her backside and breasts, while the women, during breaks, discussed fashion and men, not spiritual questions at all. Some male students had to be expelled from the group because they harassed Annette without embarrassment. At some point, she already felt awkward getting down on all fours, taking the “downward dog” pose. She could feel the male gazes, seeing everything through a sexual lens, not a spiritual one.

The women who came for stretching and a beautiful body were no better. They nodded when Annette spoke of important things, but nothing stayed in their heads. The students enjoyed Annette’s words the way one enjoys the beauty of sunlight, without grasping their meaning. Annette had been ready to die for people, and it turned out there was no one even to die for! Everyone was perfectly content to travel down the road to hell; no one wanted heaven. And even then, before Omar appeared, something had begun changing in Annette. She had always wanted to give people light… but perhaps what they needed more was her darkness? Her students, her husband…

Look at yourself, Reader. What is it You need from Annette?

Chapter 1

 

“Yuri!” your wife cries.

You are surprised. What is she doing, calling you when her lover is right there?! He, incidentally, is more surprised than you are — and more frightened, too. At Anna’s cry he jerks, and Balkhi’s penis reflexively spurts white fluid onto the beautiful woman already turning around.

It seems your wife has already forgotten about him, and gives a startled little gasp when the viscous mess from the old man’s body strikes her nightdress. There is a lot of it, too much; the stream cannot be stopped! Even before it has finished marking her, Annette slaps Balkhi across the face, and you hear her word:

“Idiot!”

And what about you? You have to react to your wife’s cry! Come out? Call back? If you come out, you will see Balkhi… and then what will your wife do? A vindictive feeling seizes you like lust. You do not know why Anna called you, but you want to see her eyes when you step out!

You quickly get out of the tub and wrap a towel around your waist. Damn it, you are hard. Why? You are going to your wife and her lover, straight to the scene of the betrayal — why an erection?! You ought to wait, calm down, but then Balkhi will have time to leave! You… walk out like that.

Annette hears you and turns sharply. She had been cleaning the guest’s mess from her nightdress. You see her hand reflexively pass over it again. Balkhi himself had already tucked himself back into his pants and wanted to head for the hallway. Too late. You approach them with malicious delight. The only thing spoiling your mood is that you have to keep your hands at groin level to hide your erection.

“My love…” Annette says, shooting her beautiful eyes at Balkhi like bullets. He ought to be wearing a bulletproof vest. Annette grabs the towel you bought her on the trip and wipes her hand and nightdress with it.

“You screamed…” you remind her. “Oh, we have guests!”

“Y-yes…” your wife answers. “This is… this is Omar’s friend! He… he came to say the police have taken Omar!”

“Is that so…” You can barely restrain your mockery. Your soul feels good: fate has punished your enemy; at last, someone will deal with Omar! “Sad, I suppose, but what do we have to do with it? Why did you come to us?”

You ask Balkhi this while looking him in the eye, but your gaze drops lower, to the table beside him. There is a used condom there! On the table where you eat! No, worse — right in the slice of pie you meant to finish after your bath!!!

The ridiculous man notices your gaze, shrinks, darkens. He quickly grabs the condom together with the crumbs and shoves it into his pocket. Annette does not see this. But you do. And Balkhi knows you see. He begins to tremble in tiny shudders, like a hare before a wolf.

“Well? I don’t hear you. Are you mute?” you say, approaching your victim, the man who just had your wife. For some reason, you perceive this Balkhi as a “she,” not a “he.” “How did you manage to tell her about Omar, then?”

You stand before him, too close, threateningly.

“Why are you really saying nothing?!” Annette grows nervous, looking at her lover. You savor her anxiety, the way she is afraid Balkhi will give her away. “Omar just has no one but us, Yuri! So, he told his friend to come to us!”

“Omar doesn’t have us either,” you say, staring at your wife’s trembling bedmate. “You can tell your friend that.”

“Yuri!” your wife exclaims. “Don’t talk like that! Omar will be deported; he needs help! And… why are you looking at our guest like that, as if you were about to eat him?”

You smirk. You look at the saltshaker.

Giving in to the little click inside your head, you take it… and pour salt over the head of the man who had your wife!

“Mmh!” he moans quietly, already shaking all over. Good. You see the tip of the used condom sticking out of his pocket.

“And I really will eat him. Only first I’ll salt him properly,” you say, open the lid of the saltshaker, and dump all the remaining salt onto the stupid head of the cowardly old man!

“What are you doing?!” your wife screams, running over and snatching the saltshaker from you. “Have you lost your mind?!”

“He’ll know better than to bother us with Omar’s problems! Get out!”

The ridiculous old man jumps at your shout and literally runs into the hallway.

“What an idiot you are!” the enraged Annette tells you.

“And what’s that stain on your nightdress?” you ask.

She breaks off, blushes. She wants to say something, but the words stick in her throat. Anna goes out into the corridor after the old man. You follow her.

“Anna, what is that stain?” you repeat. “And what is that smell, like a brothel? Is it from you, “Omar’s friend”?”

“Yuri, enough!” your wife says, pulling on her boots. “I don’t want to talk to you. That is no way to treat guests! Until you apologize, I am not speaking to you!”

“And still, I want to know what that stain is…”

“Idiot!!!” Annette cries, pushing the guest out and slamming the door behind herself.

You are left alone, but you feel avenged, at least in part. Good… And now you can watch again on your phone how your proud wife was taken from behind by that ridiculous little monster. You wash the salt crumbs from your hands and dry them on the towel. Too late, you realize something is wrong. This is the towel Anna used to wipe herself. Now your hands are covered in Balkhi’s mess.

Chapter 2

 

You do not feel what 6 Maple Court is doing to you. More strongly than it is affecting Annette, though she is the one being taken, not you. Your breathing already resembles Omar’s breathing — can you hear it? Ash scatters from you as you walk. You are beginning to gain weight. You think it is just age. Annette was in no hurry to come home, and when it grew dark, you did not go out for dinner. And from that you felt a secret, faint satisfaction. Every skipped meal, every modest victory in the realm of diet filled you with some idiotic pride. You took your emerging fullness as a personal insult. You desperately wanted to imitate those sadhus who content themselves with a cup of rice once a day. A sort of stoic rejecting the temptation of food. Alas… you are susceptible to temptations. In everything.

Suddenly the phone rang. Annette? No, it was the private detective who had installed the cameras in your apartment.

It turned out Anna had been at the police station, but had not been able to help Omar in any way. Then she called the detective and asked him to use his connections. He quickly realized what was happening: the client’s wife was asking him to help her lover! And he called you. You gladly forbade him to help Omar. Soon that fat devil will no longer be in your life. Excellent! In honor of that, you can allow yourself eggs, sausages, and ketchonnaise. You will start the diet tomorrow.

…When Annette came back — around half past seven — life was already warm and pleasant. You had satisfied your desire for revenge. Your wife’s lover had been removed from her life. You had eaten well. Now you wanted sex. You wanted to punish your wife properly in bed for her betrayal. And then forget about betrayals forever.

But Annette had no intention of even speaking to you, let alone having sex! She was offended. So… eat your eggs, then!

Chapter 3

 

Yuri quickly realized that joy on the path of revenge is fleeting. Pleasure leaves; consequences remain. And it would be one thing if he had gone all the way down that path, broken with his wife, left her without money and without an apartment… but no. Because a man is cowardly and melancholy. It is easy to decide; hard to follow through. It is one thing to pour salt onto the head of the helpless Balkhi, another to give up the best woman in the world because of her betrayal. After all, Omar was finished now; his shovel lay useless in the street. And only the cleared snow still reminded anyone of him.

Well, yes, and even that only until the first snowfall. So, it would all stop, right? He only had to make peace with his wife. But that turned out not to be easy: she demanded that Yuri apologize to Balkhi! Enraged that he was being forced to apologize to the cretin who had taken his wife, Yuri furiously refused! But time grinds down pride. Living both with Annette and without her at the same time was impossible. During the quarrel, Yuri realized he was now more attached to his wife than when she had been faithful. Nothing binds people together like a shared fall from grace. And deep in his soul, Yuri understood perfectly well that although his wife had betrayed him, not the other way around, they had fallen together, and some of the guilt was his too. And the guilty are obedient.

So, Yuri decided it was better to save his family before the point of no return had been crossed. That was more important than the desire to behave like a real man. Yuri agreed to apologize to Balkhi.

It turned out Annette had taken his phone number in case “something cleared up about Omar’s situation.” So, the beautiful woman was able to call Balkhi, and soon 6 Maple Court had swallowed him.

“I’m sorry,” Yuri said, looking into Balkhi’s donkey eyes. “I have an unreasonable hostility toward Omar, and I should not have shifted it onto you. I behaved very badly, very unfairly. Forgive me.”

Balkhi could not believe his ears. What went on in these Westerners’ heads?! The husband of the woman Balkhi had just taken was asking his forgiveness?! Seriously?! Yuri had seen the used condom; he knew everything! Why was he not throwing both him and his wife out of the apartment?! Why was he apologizing?! No, Omar was right: these women were all whores, and their husbands were henpecked weaklings!

“Pff, forgive me!” thought Balkhi. “You might as well ask me to take you too!”

So thought Balkhi, a man who loved that particular kind of sex and possessed other latent desires.

…For the first time in days, Annette smiled warmly at her husband.

“Thank you, Yuri. I was afraid we would have to part. I cannot allow myself to live with a person who treats people the way you did.”

Yuri’s heart trembled and spun. So, Annette really had been ready to leave him, and their marriage had been at the edge of the abyss! If he had continued to stand his ground, he would have lost his beautiful wife forever! From this realization something inside him fractured. Or rather, the fracture had already been there, but for the first time it became obvious to him.

A person does not break at all the way people imagine. They imagine: crack, and the spine snaps with a crunch like a branch, and then the person is broken! Nonsense. A person breaks gradually, and usually without noticing it himself. It is not even breaking — it is life bending him little by little. At first stealthily, almost incomprehensibly: an inner fatigue accumulates, powerlessness, hopelessness. How to put it: aggression gradually breathes itself out and is replaced by submission. And so, Yuri thought: to hell with a struggle that leaves you alone in the end! Yuri was no longer young, and the feeling that everything still lay ahead had long since gone. Now anything lost would hardly be replaced by anything, or anyone…

Meanwhile Annette approached Balkhi.

“Once again, I apologize, from both of us!” she told him solemnly.

Amazed that both the woman he had used for money like a prostitute and her husband were apologizing to him, Balkhi decided to take advantage of the situation:

“Could I have a few of your candies? I love sweets.”

He nodded toward the table, where a mixed pile of candy had been poured into a little dish. Annette laughed and looked at him as if he were a large child.

“Take all of them if you like! Yuri, how could you offend a person like this?”

“And how could he fuck me in the ass?” — another question hung in the air. Yuri remembered Balkhi calling his wife a whore and pissed in her mouth with his slightly drooping penis, but remained silent.

Annette, meanwhile, decided to hug the guest. At that moment he really did seem to her like an overgrown child. But everything changed when Anna’s chest pressed against Balkhi’s. Her body remembered its lover. The beautiful woman’s mind produced vulgar memories of his body. No, this was no child; this was an adult man… Her nipples tightened at once. A not very pleasant, but undeniably male smell struck her head. This man had possessed her… some part of her would now always belong to him!

Because of these flashing memories, Annette realized how she was behaving toward her husband. She had forced him to apologize to her lover, then begun embracing that lover in front of her husband! Balkhi, meanwhile, embraced her in return. Her body, lately deprived of sex, shivered; Annette had not expected this at all. Suddenly, from the realization that she was embracing her lover in front of her husband, a pull began low in her belly.

Yielding to the impulse, Anna met her husband’s eyes and kissed the old man on the cheek. Then she pretended to kiss the other cheek, but pressed her lips against the corner of the old man’s mouth. Anna felt as if she had been burned! Her two nipples and her sex tightened! Not because of that useless lover, no! Because her husband was standing right there! She held the kiss a second longer than she should have and let the tip of her tongue slip out so that her saliva touched Balkhi’s lips… and at that moment Balkhi’s erection pressed against her leg.

Annette recoiled from him! After that her smile was no longer sincere.

“All right, that is enough. The matter is settled. We will not chatter pointlessly; no one ever became more attractive by chattering.”

If Yuri noticed the bulge at the guest’s groin, everything would be ruined; she had to get Balkhi out. When she was seeing him off, alone with him, Annette whispered quietly:

“My husband apologized not for your sake… but for mine. He could destroy you if I asked him to. Do not put me in danger again, and obey me if we meet again. Do you understand?!”

Balkhi nodded fearfully… and was spat in the face. Annette rubbed her saliva across his skin.

“Open your mouth,” she said.

When the old man obeyed, she spat onto his tongue!

“Remember that taste. That is the taste of your mistress!”

…That day Yuri got what counted as sex. But only oral. And it was he who did the licking.

Annette did not pleasure him and did not let him enter her; she said she needed time to recover from the insult. Yuri was frightened all over again by how close he had come to parting with his exceptional wife. He was grateful even that Annette allowed him to breathe in her dizzying abyss, the wet inventory of her depths and meanings, all the more alluring because they were denied to him. The beautiful woman seemed to be saying:

“You may not. But if you want very badly, smell what my refusal smells like.”

Annette came quickly. She was thinking about how she had rubbed her saliva over Balkhi’s wrinkled face.

Chapter 4

 

If Annette had fully grasped her husband’s fear of losing her, and the power that fear gave her, she would have forced him to help Omar. But the beautiful woman felt she had already gone too far when she made her husband apologize to her lover.

There was another reason Annette did not want to get involved with the police. Old Martha had given a statement in which she described in detail how our heroine had had sex outdoors with an undocumented man. Public sex was not treated as a serious offense — a small fine, perhaps, or up to fifteen days in custody. But if the complaint were allowed to move forward, Yuri would learn about the betrayal. At the precinct, Annette understood two things: Old Martha’s statement existed, and the man with the ridiculous haircut was making sure it went nowhere.

Chapter 5

 

Mark. His name was Mark. He was Annette’s neighbor and had been watching her for a long time. At first it was simply passion. Annette teased Mark’s sense of beauty with her unbearable, tormenting loveliness. The man was struck by the magnificence of his neighbor and the starry radiance of her eyes. Over the years, this passion, which he fed with secret observation, turned into mania.

A little about Mark? Very well. He read a great deal, listened to classical music, practiced transcendental meditation. And at twenty-six, he was still a virgin.

Watching Annette, Mark was amazed that she could be the wife of some dry-hearted banker interested only in earning money! Working for the police, he had learned everything about Annette’s family, about Annette herself, and about her husband. Mark felt that he understood the beautiful woman far better than her spouse did, that her place was with him, with Mark, not with Yuri! At the same time — believe it or not — the police officer did not even think about sex with Annette. He would have been afraid to touch her! Does a worshipper think of possessing the goddess he worships? Mark felt Annette was not for that; to engage in low physical coupling with such a woman would be a vice, a mistake, a desecration! She had to be worshipped, she had to be loved, she had to be listened to!..

That was why the man with the ridiculous haircut was stunned when Old Martha came to the precinct and said that Anna Lazar had had sex with an undocumented janitor in plain sight! It was because of Old Martha’s statement that Omar was taken into custody; otherwise, no one would have known about his undocumented status. And Annette was left alone… because Mark stood up for her. He personally asked that she not be arrested and guaranteed that nothing like this would happen again. Given the minor nature of the offense, and the fact that the undocumented man would be deported anyway, Mark’s request was granted.

That was how the man with the ridiculous haircut protected an angel. But he could not stop thinking about what Old Martha had written in her statement. That supposedly the dirty janitor, without even removing his work clothes, had possessed the goddess right by the front steps of the building, bending her over doggy-style! He slapped her on the ass, grabbed her by the hair, and brought her to a base, vulgar orgasm!!! Such a desecration of the sacred was something he could not wrap his head around! And at the same time… for some reason, he wanted to think about it again and again! Mark, prone to obsession, imagined the janitor and the goddess together in every detail. He raged and… became aroused. He began to sleep little, eat badly… And then Annette herself came to the precinct.