Found Life

by Linor Goralik

  WATER

  To B.F.

  “What’s scary,” he said reluctantly, “is when you’re serving with guys from the Caucasus and they say to you, ‘Bro, no big deal, but could you get us some water.’”

  HALFSIES

  She was so scared that she had to constantly tell herself, “relax your belly,” “relax your belly,” “relax your belly,” but still, when she and Mom came out of the store, her abs hurt so badly from the strain, it was like she had spent three hours at the gym the day before. Outside, in the sun and among people, she felt better, and the whole ­outing stopped seeming like such a dangerous idea. Mom had agreed to leave the house, Mom had let her buy her a new dress (because the old one, let’s be honest, had gotten pretty horrifying-­looking over the past week), Mom wasn’t crying, her hand was trusting and soft, and she managed to convince herself that Mom won’t break away, won’t run off. Mom had always loved éclairs: they used to eat them from both ends at once and always jokingly fought over the tasty middle piece with their little spoons, and each time Mom would loudly admit defeat, concede. The waiter said that the éclairs were very fresh, very good. She looked at Mom questioningly, Mom nodded, and there was an enormous, joyful feeling of relief. “One, please,” she said to the waiter, and here Mom said, “I want one too,” and she, choking on her own voice, asked the waiter for two éclairs. But when the waiter put down two little plates and Mom picked up her little spoon, she carefully ate a little piece of Mom’s éclair, and Mom didn’t get annoyed, she even smiled, and everything fell into place, and she inhaled with force—dropping her head back, thirstily, until her chest hurt, because it suddenly seemed to her that she hadn’t breathed at all in the past four days. At first, that was how she looked at the people who approached their table and called Mom by an unfamiliar name—head back, mouth half-open, knowing already that to exhale meant to lose everything; but when they started asking Mom if anything hurt, and when one of them tried to pick her up, and she stretched her arms toward him, she did exhale, started screaming and waving her teaspoon stupidly at those people, and one of them suddenly shielded himself with his hands, frightened, as though he was waiting for a blow with something huge and heavy. She screamed and writhed, they held her; some other woman, tears pouring, was already kissing Mom; the store salesman—goddamn gray-haired geezer, he hadn’t wanted to bring them the dress and instead kept asking why she “called that little girl Mom”—was looking in her direction, gray lips pursed, and someone was already writing down his unintelligible but obviously disgusting words into a hard-backed notepad. Then she was led to a car, and she resisted and tried to tell them that she couldn’t return to the future without Mom, that she had to take Mom with her to the future, that she couldn’t go on otherwise. They understood and promised to help her, and she apologized for screaming and said that in the future, there are no policemen, and she just wasn’t used to it, just didn’t know the right way to behave.

  EVERYTHING IS FINE

  Not only was the ice cream the best ice cream in the world, but also the weather was the best weather in the world, and the pebbles they found were the roundest, pebbliest, weightiest pebbles in the world, and Tima didn’t keep straining his harness, but behaved really well, and Yonka secretly fed him a scoop of ice cream, which Tima was absolutely in no way allowed to have, and he ended up all smeared in it, and Marinka guessed everything, and told on her brother to Mom and Aleksei, and Yonka would have certainly gotten it in a big way if this had not been the best day in the world. They had been planning this day for almost a month, Aleksei kept trying to convince her, and she would initially yield, then say, “No,” and he never argued, would just say, “OK, no means no,” and she would think each time that if he hadn’t been so laid back, she would never have gotten to know him in the first place, if even once during these past five months he had tried to pressure her, hurry her, push her, she would never have agreed that time even just to have tea with him in the hospital cafeteria. He had walked up to her when she was standing in the middle of an empty parking lot, in the hellish sun, just standing there, not knowing how to go on living, and said, “I’m Aleksei, I work here, I’m a physical therapist. There’s a cafeteria, would you like some tea?” And she said, “No,” and he said, “Sorry,” and started walking back toward the hospital, and then she said, “OK, let’s go.” And when he said that they should finally spend a day off all together, really together, with the kids and Tima, she had said, “No,” and continued to say “No,” “No,” “No”—when he suggested not going to Izmailovo, but just coming out to a little park on Pokrovsky Boulevard, when he said that they shouldn’t eat in a café but take food with them so as not to risk it with Yonka’s mysterious new allergy—she would say, “No,” he would say, “Sure, OK,” and then bring by a map of the park, or tell her about the weekend weather report, or appear out of nowhere with a dusty picnic basket, put it on the balcony and explain to Marinka where things go (“forks on the left, knives on the right, like in the picture, see?”). So when he said that they should take Tima along, she, of course, said “No,” and he acquiesced and didn’t say anything for a couple of days, but then brought a wide harness with a clasp on the back for Tima. This was so barefaced it actually took her breath away, and she threw the harness at him, the clasp hit him in the ear, he clutched at it, and then calmly picked up the harness and put it away, not in his backpack, but in the hallway closet. And, of course, they took Tima with them, and he behaved himself really well, strode confidently up ahead on the wide short leash, and then, when she took his container of food out of the basket, Tima suddenly looked at her with totally clear eyes and embraced Yonka with a steady, robust motion, a motion as accurate as if there had never been any stroke.

  THE DOOR IN THE WALL

  He was probably the only one who remembered that there was a door there, and definitely the only one who would come stand next to it. How this would happen he didn’t really understand himself, but toward evening he would suddenly stop playing and walk for a long time along the trembling tree-lined avenues, then turn off through the bushes, guided by the smell of raspberries, gone wild and tiny but very sweet, carpeting the ground near the wall. Having found the wooden door, he would press his ear to it and stay that way for some time. He had no idea what was over there, on the other side of the door, and it would never have occurred to him to try to glance into one of the cracks, to say nothing of opening it, though of course it wasn’t locked. He, this boy, would just come here in the evenings and stand there for several minutes, listening as something buzzed on the other side and some people walked around. Most often their voices would get closer, become intelligible for a second, he would pick out a word or two, then they would get far away again. Some became familiar, but he wouldn’t try to distinguish them, he wasn’t interested, he just liked to stand there and listen. Sometimes a very polite male voice would penetrate from the other side, asking about the “green door.” Evidently no one would answer him, the man would talk ever louder, his voice would begin to shake, his footsteps quickened—it seemed he was running back and forth along the sidewalk. Once he heard the man being loudly told to calm down, then someone was grappling with someone else, the man was crying, then the crying grew more distant; for the next couple of days, or maybe months, he didn’t hear the man and didn’t think about him. Then the man reappeared and started to show up from time to time. He asked about the green door several evenings in a row, louder and louder, his footsteps sounded faster and faster; then evening would arrive, other voices would appear, then there would be grappling and crying, then the man would again disappear for a long while. There was nothing interesting about this—not the man, the crying, or the voices, and to the boy it was completely unclear why the man showed up there in the evenings. He never gave it any thought. The door was repainted blue some number of years or months ago, he didn’t know what for. The leprechauns who painted the door taught him to build little round boats with music out of raspber
ry leaves and cigarette butts and hang them in the air.

  LITTLE DEN

  He would always move to the driver’s seat, and the driver would go out to the square or, when it was cold, he would run into the basement deli squeezed between two office buildings. If he stayed in his own seat, he would be tormented by those endless old ladies, doddering scrawny men, one of whom was named Troparion, quiet local winos. He needed that half-hour, he would start thinking about that half-hour in the morning, the way alcoholics (apparently) think about their first swallow, their big gulp. He felt release only during these thirty minutes a day; they were his cherished fantasy, the only thing keeping him going, while the person seeing patients was somehow not him, it wasn’t him speaking to them in his voice, not him writing things, but some extraneous stranger surrounding his self. Half a year ago he had still worried that this person would write something wrong or forget something important, and now he didn’t worry anymore but simply slept, while that external person, using his voice, shooed the addled wife of a patient away from his bed; then went to wash his hands and smell the amazing, emerald-colored soap in the bathroom, beautifully displayed on the highest shelf (as far as possible from greedy hands). He himself was like a smooth, slippery, pale sphere inside the external person, and only the muffled sounds of the outside world, its faint, muted shuddering, could reach him through his sleep. But even so, sometimes the vile snap of a needle broken off in someone’s cramping muscle, or the smell of the cucumber still clenched in the hand of an exhausted epileptic, would wake him abruptly. At times like these, sick with panic and incapable of understanding, in his sleepy state, what the external person had already done or not done, he would begin to yell at the addled lady or to demand that the medical assistant “recheck the pressure,” and would be unable to fall asleep again until evening; it was as if a dense, knotty clot occupied his chest. But the half-hour, God-granted lunch break was time when he could sleep with complete abandon. In that half hour he would eat, slowly and luxuriantly, some greasy fat sandwich thought up the night before and lovingly prepared that morning, then some candy, a little soda. Every day except Wednesday he and the driver would take their ambulance to a little courtyard in Khitrovka, jiggling over the cobblestones past the construction fence, and hide behind it for half an hour. The construction site was inactive, no one saw them, no one bothered them, and it was only on Wednesdays that that unpleasant dry woman was with him. He had requested she be removed a hundred times, and been refused a hundred times, because she was a good medical assistant but only available Wednesdays and Fridays, and would otherwise leave them for another center at the same shameful pittance. She demanded that he park the vehicle right on the boulevard, next to the tram stop, next to the church, and the understanding driver would run off to the deli so that he could move to the driver’s seat for half an hour. Certain old women, however, would still try to ask things from underneath the window, but he would simply close his eyes or say, “Granny, do I look like a doctor?” And tap on the steering wheel for greater credibility. By the time they parked on the boulevard, a timid line of old women and winos would be waiting for them, the lady assistant would see patients in the back, inside the vehicle, the winos and old women didn’t make a fuss—they knew what was up. This Wednesday he had with him whole-grain bread, a little bun with two flat halves, and inside it was mayonnaise, salad leaves, very thinly sliced tomato, Tambov ham, a tiny bit of mustard, a pickle also sliced very thin lengthwise so it wouldn’t fall out, and all this was tightly wrapped in foil to keep the shape. And Pepsi. He ate and watched a pregnant woman walking across the boulevard: drooping slightly to her left, keeping her hand on her belly—it looked like the fetus was breech; she was pretty far along, like six months, probably, and he thought to himself that it’s sometimes easier to guess the number of months not by the belly hidden under clothes, but by the high heels: women in Moscow wear them until, like, month seven. He felt surprised that such a respectable woman had walked up to the back of their vehicle, but didn’t listen closely: preggers, what can you say, saw a woman in a white coat and didn’t want to miss out. He unwrapped the roll, bit off a piece, and then the lady assistant started to bang on his window, demanded he call Kostya, said, “Get ready, we’re going to move fast.” He asked what was up, the lady assistant said, “I can’t really tell.” He thought with horror that now he would have to run around to the back of the ambulance and prayed to someone: “Please, just leave me these eight minutes, oh please, just leave me these eight minutes, I’m seriously dying, oh please, I’ll do anything afterward, just give me the eight minutes!” He asked again, “What’s the deal?” The lady assistant said again, “Let’s go, let’s go now,” it was always like that with her, she would just give him orders and usually he was even happy about it, but not now. “Bleeding?” he asked. “Badly,” she said. “Her belly is very tight, I can’t hear the heartbeat, and there’s something else, I can’t tell. Let’s go, quick, come on, come on, call him, let’s go, get ready.” And this “get ready” suddenly unleashed in him a totally blind rage because it clearly said that she understood everything about him as he had been this past year, and everyone else probably also understood everything, the old women, too, and the winos. Of course he wasn’t able to get ready, even though he gave himself twenty seconds and in those twenty seconds really tasted the bonbon in his mouth, called himself “sweetheart,” promised himself a hot water bottle at his feet at home that evening, but that bitch kept pounding at him from the back, and he couldn’t get ready to keep living, meanwhile Kostya had already arrived and pushed him from the driver’s seat and he understood that he should really go to the back, but didn’t want to and didn’t go, just wouldn’t and didn’t and sat up front with Kostya, there was already screaming in the back, and he began to scream at Kostya (who also, most likely, understood everything, since everyone else did) and Kostya swerved—decided to speed down side streets to avoid the gridlock, which would have reacted to their siren like a corpse to compresses, and then the car turned with a special gentleness, as if doing a dance step, and rolled onto its right-hand tires, and Kostya, open-mouthed, leaned on the steering wheel like a pillow and began to turn it with his whole body, and in something like twenty seconds the vehicle crashed into the windowless gray side of a corner building. The whole time he was clambering out of the seat, and stepping across the swaying sidewalk with weak legs, and jerking the back doors and almost hitting himself with one of them when they finally gave, it was very quiet inside the ambulance. The woman was looking at him from the cot with totally white eyes, and the lady assistant was standing there, quaking arms out, looking downward at the floor where there was just a tiny bit of blood and many large shards of rough-textured, pale cream shell. A quivering puddle of something transparent and viscous was slowly flowing into the space beneath his shoe, and in this puddle there lay an enormous, pale yolk, big as a frying pan.

  THE BLANK

  A year, a whole year and more of her clutching confusedly at the dirty wall when she would accidentally run into him near the trash chute; of them positioning themselves so carefully across from one another in the scratched-up canister of the elevator; of days spent haggling pointlessly with himself as he slouched between kitchen and couch in the evenings (and if I go downstairs, what do I say? “Did it leak into your apartment?” “Did I wake you up with that banging yesterday?” “Did I …”—what? Well, what? What?? Idiot!)—so anyway, for a whole year, over a year of being already caught in this web, already knowing the score, the only thing holding him back was the teapot. Even the comical “neighbor,” the lover-neighbor, hanky-panky with the wife by day, chess with the husband in the evening, so gross, so gross—even that he could deal with somehow: with a smirk directed at himself, with that humbleness that is worse than pride. But the teapot identical to his own (the same as in any house in this city, in this era, he had no doubt, identical cups, predictable spoons seen if not at his mother’s, then at his former mother-in-law�
�s, plates)—that teapot caused him such anguish, such a dead-end feeling of a banality coming to pass, that the woman he thought about from morning till night, who had been the measure of his every conceit for a year already, began to seem sweaty to him, vulgar, smelling of garbage-chute rot. And when he finally came to her house in the daytime (“I didn’t drive you insane with my drill, did I?”), sat down, accepted tea from a clumsy hand (white dots on red—no, that wasn’t at his mother-in-law’s, it was at his father-in-law’s mother’s house, where they went as a show of respect before the wedding and which they departed bearing a gift—two pairs of prewar-era men’s socks), he deliberately sat facing the stove, facing the teapot, so that teapot would burn him like the self-lacerating barb of a monk tormented by visions. He even decided to talk to her about this teapot, this very teapot, and said, “We have the same teapot.” She answered, “You mentioned that already” (he had never said anything of the kind). Then he wanted to talk about the cups, the socks, the elevator, but nothing seemed to work, because Vadik, a handsome chubby-cheeked ten-year-old boy, kept running in and out of the kitchen, kept dragging in half-finished models, books of some kind, magazines with diagrams and instructions, and spoke so loudly and so glibly, resembled his mother and father so little in his puffy-lipped self-confidence that the thought of a different neighbor, another one, flashed by. Every time Vadik ran in and spread out his treasures on the somewhat sticky oilcloth in front of him, the table would shake—and that seemed like the worst thing of all. She pretended to be preoccupied with Vadik, like she was showing Vadik off. He endured it silently, didn’t even open his mouth so as not to encourage this unpleasant glib child, when suddenly he heard high-pitched tones, and almost a scream, and, quivering in Vadik’s self-confident voice, wounded tears. He made himself listen: “in the pit, in the pit,” at first he thought that the piglet had dug something up or fallen into something, but then understood that this was about Kuprin. “There can’t be a mistake,” his mother, already regretting everything that was happening, told him. “There can’t be a mistake in a book, a hundred people check every single book, I’m telling you, go look again,” but the quivering self-confident little voice insisted that instead of “went” it said “wen” and then a blank and then “t,” a blank between “n” and “t,” on page three hundred twenty-seven, a blank, like the space between two words, just like between two words, “n” and “t”—and nothing in between. “Don’t argue, Vadik, don’t argue, go check again, don’t argue!” The boy ran away and started to rummage in his parents’ room noisily, whimpering, digging through something soft, moving something hard. This was unbearable to listen to; he sat, eyes lowered; the teapot, cold and empty, turned away with its little purple flowers toward the wall, and he searched for something else that might catch his eye so that he wouldn’t have to look at the woman, as she kept listening to her son’s rummaging and moving the solitary, stupid saucer around the table. Vadik ran in, all puffy with tears, and started up again with the “n” and the “t” and the blank between them, and she said, “So you’ve lost the book, too, go look for it and don’t come back until you’ve found it,” and then shouted after the bawling Vadik, “Don’t come back without the book!” The boy ran off to the parents’ room and it sounded like he threw something at something else; and all of a sudden, he noticed a tattered dark-blue volume with gold stripes on the kitchen table under a damp dishtowel. She intercepted his glance, furtively grabbed the dishtowel and the Kuprin and moved them down, under the table, onto the empty stool by the radiator. “Well, talk,” she said. “Just talk already.” Here Vadik burst into the kitchen, choking down tears, and began to rush around among the kitchen cabinets, opening doors, looking under the table. Then he stood up, said he would be right back, went upstairs and on the sideboard, behind the family albums, found the same volume of the same Kuprin with the same “Pit,” and on page three hundred twenty-seven discovered a blank between “w” and “e”—”w,” then a blank, then “ent.” After thirty minutes that same woman called him from downstairs, said that she and Vadik were worried—where did he disappear to and was he having some kind of problem? He answered that a pipe had burst in his tub and that he couldn’t come down today. He hoped it hadn’t leaked into their apartment.