The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe Read Online Free PDF Page A

invented states. Mrs Gurdin was once called Maria Stepanovna Zudilova: people of her background enjoyed a total immersion in feeling, the sort of thing that would endear the Russian interior fandango to several generations of American actors, Mrs Gurdin’s daughter Natalie and my fated companion among them.
    Mrs Gurdin came from a line of people who owned soap and candle factories in southern Siberia. Running from the Bolsheviks they stuffed money into their pockets, but they forgot Mikhail, Mrs Gurdin’s brother, and when they came out from their hiding place they saw the boy hanging from a tree at the end of a rope. Mrs Gurdin would hate the Bolsheviks for life. The family escaped – she liked to say on a private train – to a house in Harbin, where Maria took ballet lessons and enjoyed the services of a German nanny and a Chinese cook. Mrs Gurdin varied her stories, but they all told of a life made out of adversity. She was forever elaborating, forever covering her tracks. Sometimes she was a gypsy child who was found on the steppe but more often she was a Russian princess escaping the bullet or cheating the hangman. In any event it made California a kind of paradise for her, a place where the bare truth was seldom sufficient and seldom reliable. Mrs Gurdin’s husband, Nick, was once Nikolai Zakharenko from Vladivostok.
    Early one evening our friend the dog-lover came down the stairs wearing what can only be called a ballgown. She had set her hair and applied her make-up and was bedecked with a ton of costume jewellery. She addressed Nick over her shoulder as if talking to someone high up in the cheap seats. ‘Faddah,’ she said.
    ‘Cut it out, Muddah. You can exclude me from any goddamn drinks down there.’
‘Fahd! You make me sorry about the day I met you. You are not a man.’ Nick came on to the top landing carrying a rifle. His hair was mussed up and he was drunker than a Siberian doctor.
‘Don’t start me, Muddah. Not tonight. I’m staying out of your communist meeting.’
‘How dare you,’ she replied. ‘You hurt my heart, Faddah. Little Mikhail is still lying in his grave and you accuse me of having communists in my house?’
‘Sinatra is a communist.’
‘He is a friend of the new young President-Elect. We should be proud to know him.’ Nick’s rifle wasn’t loaded; he liked holding it up while watching cowboy shows on the television. He said something about Kennedy being an Irish peasant.
‘ Krestianin ,’ he shouted. ‘Peasant.’
‘Mr Sinatra is a friend to Natasha,’ Mrs Gurdin said in return. ‘You are not a man. You don’t look after your family. You are an object to be pitied.’ Her husband shouted a curse and turned up the volume on the television set as she continued her regal descent. I hopped out of the basket and parried her hemline. ‘Mr Gurdin is a . . . you say, naughty man,’ she said, smiling. ‘But you do not care much for that, Maltese, do you?’ Mrs Gurdin always looked a little desperate even when she was happy. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she added. ‘This is your last night here, Sizzle.’
They had started calling me Sizzle as a tribute to our old friend Cyril Connolly. It was just a family thing: she didn’t say it to breeders – she still called me ‘the Maltese’. When Natalie said that Mr Sinatra was looking for a dog to give as a present, Mrs Gurdin didn’t hesitate to nominate me. She said I had British class, though, in private, her sense of British class had been dented in Sussex. She swept off in her taffeta gown to visit the kitchen, at which point I clambered up the stairs to have a look at Nicky Boy. He was sitting in an old yellowish armchair in front of the television, surrounded by a great variety of Russian dolls peering out with their dead historical eyes. He was slugging from a quart of vodka. This was Nicky Boy’s time. He stared at the screen like someone imagining they might at any moment leap forward and disappear into the