Drown My Head
by Yuri Vitalyevich Mamleev
A story from the author of
Mamleev’s America
by Yuri Vitalyevich Mamleev
COMING SOON — April 2026 — from PRAV Publishing
I’m a nervous man, harried, tormented by the contradictions of life. But it is when other, greater contradictions arise, contradictions not always characteristic of life, that one faces utter misfortune.
“Drown my head, you scoundrel...”
This was the cold admonishment I heard in my sleep, spoken by a fourteen-year-old girl by the name of Tanya who had hung herself just outside our apartment door the day before.
This is how the story really went. First, she hadn’t hung herself at all. I just said that she did for the sake of comfort and ease of expression. Tanya had shoved her head into some kind of machine at a construction site, and when something started to function inside of the machine, her head was chopped off like that of a bird, and it fell into the sand. Second, this didn’t take place exactly outside of my apartment door. It was more like a hundred steps from our entryway, on the grey, dusty street where a construction project was underway. She had committed suicide for well-known reasons. Indeed, people said that, about two hours prior to her death, some man in a black hat had left her standing in the street after whispering something in her ear for a long, long time. He’d said something so troubling or innervating that she just up and offed herself. Afterward, people diligently sought the whisperer, but they never found him. There were rumors and hints, I believe, that it was... Well, I guess I won’t say anymore about it.
And so, a few hours after her death, this girl appeared to me. Granted, it was in a dream...
And now, about how we knew each other. Our relationship was quiet, proper, and almost metaphysical. To be more precise, we didn’t know each other. God knows whether three or four words ever passed between us her entire life. In any case, she was our neighbor. But we did exchange these very particular glances. Strange, almost unreal glances. Coming from her. There was one glance which I particularly remember: it was an absent look, like when young children open their mouths wide out of astonishment; and, at the same time, it was a look unlike that which the living make, something from the abyss. Later, I understood that she had not been looking at me at all, but rather at some chasm, some hole by the staircase. And, in general, this stare of hers was habitual, even too habitual. Habitual to the point of horror. Habitual to the point of being chimerical. It’s pleasant to eat chicken while giving off such a look. And sometimes, on the contrary, her gaze was like that of a dead chicken as it was being eaten.
And that’s all that happened. There was nothing further between us. And so, I really couldn’t say why she had come to me following her death. She just came, and that was all there was to it. And with such an old-fashioned demand...
But I immediately knew, from the first time I dreamt her, that the matter was serious. Everything was serious, both the fact that she had appeared, and the fact that she had appeared specifically to me, and the fact that she insisted I drown her head. And the fact that I would have no peace from that moment on.
Just after the dream, I woke up. My petty, quotidian nervousness suddenly left me, as though something unheard-of had entered my life. I opened the window and sat near it. The fresh night air was somehow mysteriously connected to the darkness.
“Oh-ho-ho!” said I.
I was only able to fall back asleep toward morning. And, again, even though it was already getting light around my bed of slumber, Tanya’s metallic voice rang out all the same:
“Drown my head!”
There was something in her voice that was greater than a threat. Even greater than an order. Once more, I awoke. Intellectually, I understood nothing of what had happened. But a disturbing change had taken place in my soul. It was as though I had become blind in relation to the world. Perhaps the world had become a toy. I don’t remember exactly how many days and nights had passed. Maybe it was a few. But they were all melded for me into one internally divided reality: the day was blind, white, and everything in it was indistinguishable; the night was true reality, but a reality which I experienced amidst darkness, in which a voice, like a light, distinguished itself:
“Drown, drown my head... Drown, drown, drown...”
The voice was the same as it had been before, as though coming from somewhere on high, but I could occasionally detect in it notes of impatience, hysteria. It was as though Tanya were indignant – as though she were angry, beginning to lose her mind with impatience at how I tarried with the task for which I had been predestined. This feminine impatience of hers had conclusively driven me out of my mind. Where, when all was said and done, was I supposed to be rushing – and why? Tanya had not yet even been buried. Her body lay in the morgue, and her parents had been informed that the head was already firmly sewn onto the torso. Being that I was insane, I was in no condition to run into the morgue, cause a scandal, demand the head, and all the rest of it. Please agree, dear reader, that to do such a thing would be suspicious in the highest degree. What’s more, I was no one to this girl. Perhaps her parents would have had a chance at asking for her head, but me? Hardly. Still, she addressed herself to me!
I distinctly remember the day of her burial. I had already begun to reflect on the means of making off with her head. But I was stopped in my tracks by the fact that she was being buried in accordance with the Christian rite. And so, there was no question of doing what I had to do during the burial service. I even dimly hoped that, after the funeral, she would calm down. But this is not in the slightest what occurred. Following the burial, her demands and her voice became even madder and more insistent.
Two days after the funeral, I set up a few meetings with the local authorities.
I had decided to appeal to the Komsomol District Committee. Naturally, I was a Komsomol, had graduated from university; I had voluntarily worked for the Komsomol Historical Society. There, we had primarily occupied ourselves with the past, particularly as concerned saints and devils. Each person studied what was most in accord with his soul - some were into Tikhon of Zadonsk and Nilus of Sora, others were more drawn to demons and forest elementals. And some were fascinated by both. This was our Komsomol work. A man by the name of Vitya Prokhorov occupied a highly visible post in this society, belonging to a line of Komsomols. He himself was a mystic, had grown out his beard, and would make trips out to Kizhi almost every month. His knowledge was incredible: his erudition encompassed everything from astrology to Tibetan magic. Later on, they had shunted him out into the Komsomol District Committee, placing him in charge of culture and scientific atheism. And it was to him that I rushed on the second day after Tanechka’s funeral.
Vitya met me in his small, humble office. There was a picture of comrade Lunacharsky hanging on the wall. Glancing at me, Vitya retrieved a half-liter of vodka from some dark compartment and invited me to take a load off. But immediately – nervously and convulsively – I got to the point. I explained everything there was to explain, about Tanechka... For some reason, a suddenly sorrowful look came over Vitya’s face.
“Do you see visions of Tanya while you’re awake?” he asked, without even opening the bottle of vodka.
“No, never. Only in my dreams,” I responded.
“Then you’re in a bind. If she were coming to you in the daytime, while you were awake, we’d be talking about a different, lighter subtext.”
“I figured as much…” I muttered. “Only when I’m dreaming! And, during the day, there are no signs of her. But some kind of new reality has come into me. Everything has been paralyzed by her. I don’t see the world. All I know is that I need to drown her head!”
“That’s about the size of it. This is your new reality – a most terrible sign. Hearing a voice is small-time stuff in comparison with this... When did you say they buried her?”
“Two days ago.”
“Here’s what you do, Kolya,” Prokhorov said perfunctorily, “She’ll soon be visiting you. Not while you’re sleeping, but during your waking hours, in her body.”
“What do you mean, in her body?”
“It’s very simple. You should know that saints and warlocks have the ability to manifest a so-called second body. As a result, they can be sleeping in one place, and be in a completely different, totally remote place at the same time. But mind you, they do not go to this other place in the form of a ‘ghost’ or an ‘astral projection,’ but precisely in a physical body. In a double, so to speak. There have been instances of such beings appearing to friends and pupils. These were miraculous encounters. Saints are naturally able to do this with the help of higher powers, while warlocks make use of entirely other realia... And, sometimes, by more or less natural means, it can even happen to the most average people. But it can only happen immediately following death... Simply put, they sometimes visit the living in physical, duplicate bodies, even though their corpse is rotting in the ground...”
“That could very well be,” I quickly agreed.
“Kolya, Kolya...” Prokhorov looked at me. “Everything in life and death is so simple, but we complicate things, try to invent things... In Kizhi, I met this one old man who told me a very funny story about the time he encountered his dead sister... But keep in mind, this thing with Tanya is far more complex... She is an unusual being...”
“Enough, Viktor. I understand everything. You don’t have to say anything else. Let’s have a drink, instead. I hope you’ve got more than a half-liter here.”
And we tied one on so monumentally, that rarely had such a sight been seen. Prokhorov even pissed his armchair. The Komsomol secretary, a fleshy woman named Zina, was hardly able to drag us out of the office and into the bushes and grass in front of the District Committee offices. But once she’d left us there, we slept until late in the night. The summer-esque warmth was a small mercy, as was the fact that no one disturbed us. The paddy wagon for drunkards usually gave the District Committee offices a wide berth.
In the depths of the night, I was hardly able to wind my way to my communal apartment. The broad, deserted streets of Moscow evoked a feeling of peace and bottomlessness. Finally, I arrived. I turned on the light in my little hovel and laid down on my sofa. But I didn’t want to go back to sleep: I was afraid of Tanya’s voice.
I spent another two days in that state. But I knew that I couldn’t keep going in that way. I needed to get a hold of the head. But I was overcome by a sort of lethargy and apathy.
Then came the third day. I was sitting in my room by my round kitchen table. My door was opened out to the corridor for some reason. A loaf of black bread lay on the table, along with a skinned sausage and a saltshaker. There were a few grains of salt scattered on the tabletop.
Off to the trash, I lazily thought, sweeping away the breadcrumbs.
I don’t know why, but my gaze fell all the time on a curtain in that room. The curtain was not hanging over the window, but hung, rather, over my awkwardly dated wardrobe with its unruly assortment of shirts, coats, and suits... This curtain slightly fluctuated all the time... Everything happened quickly, almost like a flash of lightning, as though a spirit were being incarnated. Tanya simply tumbled out of the wardrobe. Standing up in an instant, she leapt at me on her knees and wrapped her arms around me with feline adroitness. Her flesh was quite heavy. Much heavier than life. On my face, I could feel her strange, remote, and icy, yet also lively, even mysteriously lively breath. But her eyes. It was just that I couldn’t see her eyes. Where had they gone?
“Papochka, dear papochka,” she began urgently to say, blowing her breath on me. “You simply must drown my head... Do you hear me? Drown my head...”
I heard nothing else after that: a deep swoon saved me. Sleep, only the deepest of sleeps, is our salvation. Sleep without dreams. And eternal sleep is even better. There, you’ll find safety!
When I came to, Tanya was no longer in the room. The last straw for me had been that breath on my lips: a mixture of life and death. But I began to doubt what I had seen. Had she really come out of the wardrobe? Or had she emerged from that eternally wafting curtain? Perhaps she had simply come in through the open door?
However, I couldn’t be bothered with those questions at first. The back of my head ached from having hit the floor. The chair on which I had been sitting was broken. The saltshaker remained on the table, standing next to the spilled salt... After all, I had barely been able to acquire that chair from some acquaintances of mine – it was a rare, antique chair! I had bought it as a gift for myself, after I’d left my wife. Perhaps Tayna would have become my darling, eternal wife if she had not cut off her head… In the future, that is, after she had grown up. We would have gotten married in a church. It’s like that song: “Why should we divorce, why should we live apart?! Let marriage take its course, let’s share each other’s heart.” And we’d go on our honeymoon, sailing down the Volga, and we’d bring that antiquated chair with us; it would be large enough to fit the both of us on it.
It was an interesting thought. Could Tanya have been a good wife to me? Admittedly, despite the young girl’s simplicity, she contained something terrible, massive, Russian... Yes... But why had she called me her ‘papochka’?! How was I her father, in what sense?!
I could no longer afford to stall, to pull the cat by its tail. It was time to go to the graveyard.
One wonders why there are always so many people in our beerhalls. Maybe it’s better that way, in any case. Warmer somehow. But I had no time to kiss the cheeks of strangers, to explain things to that greying wastrel by the window, for example – that Andrei, whom I was seeing for the very first time:
“Andriusha, you’ve got to understand – I can’t live without you. I’ve been thinking about you for twenty years.”
I had become a cold, realistic man, regardless of that mad pint of beer which was then poisoning my consciousness with its sharp and burdensome hops. I found myself wondering where I could attain some money. I would need to sell something, to speculate somehow. The undertaker wouldn’t take any less than three hundred rubles to do what I would be asking of him. And that was a sizeable sum. That was 1,200 mad pints of beer, which could otherwise be driving me out of my mind. The undertaker, who would need to excavate Tanya’s grave and open the coffin, wouldn’t be able to drink his way through the whole three hundred rubles in one go. Still, I was aware that all undertakers were major lushes, and that they always carried out their black work in a drunken state, with dim eyes. But I, alone, could never dig up the coffin: I’m weak, nervous. There was always a guard in the cemetery, even in the middle of the night. One had to know the time when he usually slept or did something equally distracting.
Another torturous week went by before I was able to track down Tanya’s undertaker. Finally, I realized that my search was over. He would agree to the task without any coaxing. He was a filthy, semi-inebriated man named Semion, with a heavy, but somewhat childish aspect. For some reason, he had brought his sidekick with him – someone who didn’t work in the cemetery, but who was well-trusted by the gravedigger. The sidekick was named Stepan. He was small, portly, and jolly to the point of imbecility, nearly deranged in his joyousness. This was possibly because he often helped the undertaker. It was probably a great happiness to participate in such matters, not as the one in charge but, all the same, as a participant.
We sat on a stack of short logs in the grass, by a green beer kiosk that stood not far from the graveyard. The fat woman at the register sang old songs as she dispensed her beer. In passing, Semion posed a sharp question to me:
“Why do you need the head?”
I already had a legend prepared in the event of such a question.
“You see,” I said in a sad voice, “she’s my cousin. I’d like to have her head to remember her by.”
“You loved her that much?” the happy Stepan asked in his idiocy.
“Very much so, now more than ever...”
“Now more than ever... I understand, then,” Semion interrupted.
“And where do you plan on keeping the head?” Stepan interfered once more.
“I’m going to dry it out. In general, I’m going to prepare it so that it can’t rot,” I answered, taking a swig of beer. “As for where I’ll store it... I haven’t even thought of that... Maybe I’ll keep it with my ex-wife.”
“Just don’t keep it in the bathroom,” Stepan warned. “Guests and friends are always going in there. It’s not the best place...”
“No matter,” Semion broke in. “Let him keep it where he wants. It’s none of our business. And what he’ll tell others – that’s also none of our business. We’ve signed up for Kolyma, and we’re leaving soon, anyway. They won’t find us there.”
“But are you guys sure that this won’t get out to anyone?” I asked.
“We know our business. You’re not the first one who’s come to us with a request like this.”
Then it was my turn to be surprised.
“I’m not the first?!”
“What a souphead you are,” Semion smirked. “It happens on occasion. People like you walk among us, teary-eyed types. This one girl, a college student, came to us half a year ago: she’d forgotten to clip a lock of hair from her dead husband’s head. She moaned like a cow. So we had to dig him up for her. Often, people will ask for buttons, but they ask for hair more than anything. I’ve seen everything in my time. One rather refined lady simply asked to have a look in the coffin, even though her husband had been buried ten years before; she was curious. There are all kinds of people. I’ll admit that you’re the first person who’s turned up asking for a whole head. You’re a broad-natured man. Clearly, you love her. But just know that, when it’s just a lock of hair or a look-see, we charge a hundred or a hundred-fifty, depending on the job. But, if you want that head, it’s going to be two-fifty, no negotiations.”
“Naturally... And I can be there, right?” I asked.
“Why?” Semion asked, surprised. “If it were just hair, then of course; I realize that people could fake that, even though we’re honest. But you can’t fake a head, especially if it’s only been a week since the funeral. Stepan and I will handle it, just the two of us. Well, finally: the half-liter has made its way out of the pocket! Pour it out for three, Stepan, you’ve got the sharpest eye... We’ll come to an agreement about meeting up when it’s done, then. We’ll do a handoff – you get the head, we get the money, and then we’ll drink to her soul...”
Everyone went silent. We clinked our vodka glasses together, raising a toast to what lay ahead.
“I can tell that the girl was beautiful,” Semion said wistfully. “I was the one who buried her. She was so quiet. She doesn’t feel pain anymore like we do. Life... Oh, life! And me? I’ve already pickled my own corpse with drinking. It’s bound for the medical institute...”
We set our meeting for the following morning, at the graveyard, in the courtyard entrance of building No. 3 – a dark, unpeopled, soiled structure. The hours I spent leading up to that meeting were simply luminous. Only Tanya’s voice silently spoke in my dreams, caressing me, even. A farewell caress from somewhere other than here. They’re also people, the dead. They understand and feel everything, even better than we condemned do, if only in a different way. It was clear that Tanya realized her dreams were coming true. Her head would be hacked off, taken out of her grave, and brought to me in a sack under the shadow of a courtyard entrance. It was what she had so desired, and the word of the dead is law. People also say that, if you want something badly enough, you’ll get it. Tanechka did not make her requests in vain; she practically screamed them. It would be great if everyone living on earth were to suddenly desire something as deeply as Tanechka did. With people, it’s all the same: whether in America, Europe, or Asia, whether for the living or the dead. What difference is there, really, between the living and the dead? The only things surrounding us are wandering corpses. And they wouldn’t drown their heads. They’d rather store them all in a single mountain until the day of the Final Judgment. We don’t have that much longer to wait. And every incidental, quotidian fear would be resolved: we’d have no more concerns about atomic wars, revolutions, or evolutions... What is there even to say about such drivel, these fears we have. I believe that the body in which Tanya appeared to me, in which she hopped toward me on her knees, with which she wrapped her arms around me – that this is the body in which she will appear on the day of Final Judgment. Maybe I’m wrong. It’s a question for Prokhorov: he knows everything, that Komsomol organizer...
***
The hour finally came. I stood in the courtyard entrance of building No. 3, in the darkness. In my pocket, there were tickets to the suburbs, to the river... I’d had to consider where to drown the head. I couldn’t do it in the Moscow River – there was militia around, and the water was polluted. The outskirts of the city would be better; there were lakes there, pure water that was cold and deep. Tanya’s head would never float up from the bottom of those waters.
Semion and his assistant came to meet me, casting wild glances all around; a sack was dangling from Semion’s hands. I had imagined things happening in a less remarkable way. Then came a sudden fear, as though something had ruptured and fallen in my soul... The gravediggers approached with a strange little dance in their step. For some reason, Semion was violently waving the sack around with the head in it, as though he were hoping to toss it away, high up into the dark-blue heavens.
Our conversation was short, unfriendly. The head... the money...
And that was all.
“Have a look, anyways,” Semion growled. “We’re no deceivers.”
I shivered and looked into the black maw of the inordinately massive sack. Her eyes seemed to shine up at me from its bottom. Yes: this was Tanya - I saw the same gaze which I had seen when she was alive. I settled up with the two men and rode off for the train station. Once there, I hailed down a taxi. They had given me the sack along with the head so that they wouldn’t have to transfer it into a new receptacle, less trouble that way. The sack was black and abraded; it had clearly been a potato sack at one point, as I could tell by the smell. I don’t know why, but I was not afraid of running into militiamen, which is to say, I wasn’t afraid of anything happening to me. Clearly, the gods were leading me. By some inscrutable path, I ended up clambering into an overfull commuter train.
It was cramped in the train car, and suffocating. People were standing in the aisle, flesh pressing into flesh. There was nowhere to walk. I feared that the bodies would crush my sack, and something undesirable would result. Tanya had asked me to drown her head, after all. Unexpectedly, an old woman – or more like a young woman blessed by God – made a place for me. Why she did this, I couldn’t say. Most likely, I wore a tormented expression on my face in response to which she pitied me. She was probably on her way to church.
I cannot recall how long I was on the train. But it was a long time. And then I was at the river. It dazzled our eyes from a distance with its cold, willful, and wondrously calm surface. I say “our eyes,” because I am sure that Tanya also saw the river from her vantage point, nestled down in the sack. Corpses know how to see through things. She neither moaned nor gasped in response to the view; she simply kept her interminable silence, as before. And what would there have been to gasp at? It was she, after all, who had made this request. And her reason for doing so was, perhaps, given only to her to know. Prokhorov had said that she was an unusual being.
And still, I wanted to ask Tanya about everything. I wanted to ask her about something terrifying, lonely, abyssal... The same query kept twisting about in my mind: “Is everything lost... when you get to that place, after death?!” I felt the need to nudge her – to nudge her with my knee through the sack as was called for. Maybe then she would start to rustle around, would produce a hardly audible answer... Just as long as I didn’t die from the answer... If she said even a single word of horror, instead of showing me affection, I would not be able to withstand it. I would cry out, toss her directly out into the train car aisle, onto the jackets of the people sweating there! Or simply: in a dead, blunt manner, in sight of all, I would pull out the head and kiss it – kiss it until it furnished me with that encouraging answer.
Now I am here on the river bank. There is no one around. All that remains for me is to bend over, clasp Tanya’s head in my hands, and cast her into the depths. But I am hesitating for some reason. Why, why? I don’t know why! I’m afraid that I will never hear her voice – that silent, terrible, beseeching, insane, but now dear voice – that voice so dear to my soul. Can it be that this cold, remote voice from the abyss has become dear to a person? Yes, yes: perhaps I even desire that she come to me, as she did that one time before, in the flesh, even in that terrible flesh, from out of the wardrobe, out from behind the curtain, from out of the sky, out from beneath the earth, but that she come nonetheless. And I desire for her to sit on my lap and whisper something to me. But I know that this will not happen if I throw her head away.
Still, I cannot listen to this voice from the abyss. Oh, Tanya, Tanya! What an odd girl you are, after all...
But why did you so cruelly dispense with yourself? How could you shove your soft neck into that iron machine? You could have sat here with me, could have drunk tea with me by the samovar. But those eyes... your eyes… They were never gentle...
Farewell, my child. Go with God!
With a sharp movement, I bring her head out of the sack. A shroud lies over my eyes. I see nothing. And why should I see this doomed, earthly world? It has nothing of immortality in it!
I cast Tanya’s head into the river. There is a gasp, then the gulping sound of the water...
***
P.S. Later on, I learned that the man who approached Tanya before her death and whispered that thing in her ear was Prokhorov.
— Translated by Charlie Smith
For more from the legendary writer of the Soviet underground, Yuri Mamleev, check out Mamleev’s America — forthcoming in April 2026 from PRAV Publishing.
