Found Life

by Linor Goralik

  “Sorry I didn’t call,” she said. “Some mother! But I thought you were out somewhere.”

  “No,” said Katrina. “No, I’m here.”

  “Great,” she said. “Everything is great. Everything is great, can you believe it? It was just a calcification, a cyst.”

  “A cyst,” said Katrina.

  “A cyst,” she said. “Just a calcification. I was so happy I just went off to the movies, if you can believe it.”

  “What’d you see?” asked Katrina, squatting down for the remote but not taking her eyes off her.

  She almost growled through the bared teeth of her joyful smile.

  “Some people,” she said sternly, “are up way past their bedtime. I won’t be able to get those people out of bed tomorrow at seven-fifteen, not even by force. What do those people think about that?”

  “Listen,” said Katrina. “Will you give me that skirt for tomorrow?”

  “You won’t sit in the grass?” she asked with feigned distrust.

  “What grass?” said Katrina dolefully. “Seven classes and a presentation.”

  Then she clambered out of the skirt, stuffed it into her daughter’s hands, awkwardly pressed the girl to her—hard, with her whole body, as though she were still five or six—and quickly went to her bedroom. And while she struggled to quell the bitter chill, lying under her icy blanket in the blind darkness that pressed on her from above, in the next room her daughter was staring at the fringe knit along the whole front of the skirt in crooked, jerky, tangled knots, and didn’t want to understand—and already understood completely.

  A WIND BLEW OUT OF A CLOUD

  The girl had no papers with her, and her fingerprints weren’t in the system. She was about six, maybe seven. Clean and neat, only her hair was very tangled and her white sneakers were all covered in dirt, as though she had spent a long time wending her way through the park or had just tramped across several lawns.

  “Heya,” he said, squatting down in front of the girl and smiling broadly. “I’m Peter, what’s your name?”

  The girl didn’t move.

  “Do you like it here?” he asked. “I actually like this room. Don’t tell anyone, but sometimes I come here to rest and talk to Mr. Longears.” He nodded at the large, soft, gangly rabbit in one of the colorful children’s armchairs.

  The girl didn’t move.

  “I think,” he said, “that I should introduce you two.”

  He stretched his arm out and grabbed the rabbit, put it on his knee and waved to the girl with a floppy, fuzzy paw.

  “Hi there!” said Mr. Longears in a silly voice. “My name is Mr. Longears! And what’s your name?”

  The girl didn’t move.

  “Let me try to guess,” he said, putting the rabbit back. “Let’s see, let’s see …” he pretended to scrutinize the girl’s face. “I bet it’s Mary!”

  The girl didn’t move.

  “Of course it’s not Mary!” he said. “It’s probably Kate!”

  The girl didn’t move.

  “Oh no, no, not Kate!” he said. “How could I be so wrong! You’re clearly a Jessie!”

  The girl didn’t move.

  He exchanged a glance with the nurse standing by the door; she was looking at them sympathetically.

  “Very, very strange!” he said. “But if it’s not Mary or Kate or Jessie, then you must have some totally amazing name! Maybe it’s Christina Clementine?”

  The girl didn’t move.

  “Or maybe even Margaret Eulalia!” he said. His ankles started to fall asleep, and he sat down on the blue rug patterned with little orange parrots.

  The girl didn’t move.

  “Darlene Sue?” he asked. The method was clearly not working, the girl wasn’t getting into the game.

  “Hippolyta Dee?” he asked, losing hope. “Annabel Lee?”

  The girl started abruptly and looked at him in astonishment with enormous dark eyes.

  DROP BY DROP

  He handed her the towel, she threw it over her shoulders, rubbed down one arm, then the other with one edge, then used the other end to blot between her thighs; climbed out of the tub onto the squishy rubber mat and began toweling off her hair energetically.

  “I thought everyone used them,” he said.

  She swung her tangled damp hair back, almost catching him in the face, hung the towel on a hook, took the blue package of pads from him and, rising onto her tiptoes, carefully placed it on the highest shelf of the cabinet, putting it behind the packet of pine-scented bath salts.

  “No,” she said. “Not everyone uses them. Your wife uses them. Please, go back and buy the same kind, only with three drops inside the little circle instead of two.”

  BY LAST NAME

  She kept sitting there and looking at those papers, at those impossible papers—decrees, awards, reports, photographs—those papers with names that had long since become a black-blood-bloated myth, those decrees signed with the same name she’d had before marriage (one letter off, that’s how it was spelled on her birth certificate, he had been furious), those photographs where he stands among people whose faces were later erased from the grandiose, many-figured canvases, and then among those who erased those faces from those canvases, he is always standing just right of center, in such a frightening, portentous place, and he doesn’t smile—not like in those other, familiar photographs, where he’s holding her in one arm and Lenka in the other, where Grandma is laughing, standing on her tiptoes, her chin on his shoulder. It was already night, but she kept sitting there and looking at those damned papers that smelled of decay and something else, something simultaneously bureaucratic and dead—like a bureaucracy beyond the pale, that’s what. She kept sitting there and thinking—how was it possible not to understand? How could she not have understood? Suddenly she remembered Toshka: she was five years old when her little dog Toshka died, and he had wanted to comfort her and said that Toshka had been appointed director of a sausage store. She did not reevaluate this fact until she was something like fifteen. It wasn’t that she was dumb, it was just that that’s what he’d said, and plus, it’s just impossible, I mean. Just impossible.

  OR TEA

  He rescued her from a pickpocket, literally caught him by the hand when the man had already opened her purse. There was a loud dustup in the train car, from which they emerged victorious. Then he walked her from the subway to the store, the store turned out to be closed, and now they’ve been strolling along the same two streets and two side streets for three hours already—first in one direction, then in the other, in a loop. It’s time for her to go home, they’ve already done seven loops and decided that, OK, they’ll go for ten—and she’ll be on her way.

  “Now it’s your turn,” she said.

  “When I was six I killed my sister,” he said.

  She burst out laughing.

  “That’s not fair play!” she said coyly, drawling the words. “I told you a real secret, and look what you did.”

  “Mine is real too,” he said.

  She stopped (it was the end of the second side street, on the eighth loop) and said in an unexpectedly low-pitched voice:

  “Bullshit.”

  “Alas,” he said. “Alas, no. And I’ve never told anyone about it, only you just now.”

  For a while they stood on the corner of the second side street and the first street and looked at one another silently. Then she asked, almost in a whisper:

  “Why?”

  “I had to,” he said. “It’s a long and boring story, just please take my word for it.”

  She turned her head sharply as though looking for a space where she might find more air.

  “It’s really time for me to go,” she said.

  “High time,” he said. “Plus it’s nearly raining already.”

  She opened her purse for some reason. A couple of drops managed to slap against the leather of her wallet.

  “Unless,” she said, “we want to get a coffee somewhere.”

&nb
sp; “I think,” he said, “we do.”

  AT THE NEXT ONE

  He had just gotten on the escalator when he realized that this was Taganka Station, not Tula Station. It was too late to start pushing his way back through the crowd, he looked at his watch and mentally cursed himself three times. He raced down the escalator in the other direction, a dense crowd had exited the train that had just arrived, he carefully threaded his way through, stepped on someone’s outraged feet, but the train had already left. It was just after six, even if he had been at Tula Station right this second, he was already guaranteed to be late. “I could just forget about it,” he thought, counting the minutes feverishly. “I could just forget it, after all, it’s so stupid—a floor lamp! He disappears for ten years without a trace, and then, presto! And like he’s going to care if I have a floor lamp?”—But he was already being shoved into the train car, one woman smelled nauseatingly of vanilla perfume, a tinny voice said “platform on the right,” he nearly howled, made his way out, pressed his fingers hard into his eyes.

  “Get it together!” he said to himself. “Just get it together!” If he went home right now, he could take a shower, calmly make sure the apartment looked OK, maybe shift some books around.

  “Disgusting, you’re forty, saying something so disgusting!” he thought. “Shifting books around!”—But of course he’ll shift them, give the French ones more visibility. He could go back to Tula Station and get on the Ring line, or he could take the orange line down and get onto the Ring. The thought of going back was disgusting, he had gotten sweaty, and there was nothing in his pockets he could use to wipe his snotty nose. He wiped it with his hand, switched platforms, got onto the train. “Everything is fine,” he said to himself. “Everything is fine.” He had almost calmed down when that lady asked, “Excuse me, is this Tretyakov or Turgenev Station?” Then he squeezed the bridge of his nose with his fingers as hard as he could, but the tears still kept sliding onto his lashes, nothing helped.

  QUICK SILVER

  To Anna K.

  First it was a question of one surgery, and he almost said yes, but then they tried to broach the topic of a second and third one, about spending a year or a year and a half in recovery, that the army was ready to cover all expenses. Then he snapped, jerked the door open and wheeled himself into the living room. No one ran after him. He looked at the crystal standing in the display case, stroked the mute piano, then rolled up to the desk, plucked at the flower-appliquéd strap of his niece’s pink shirt and looked at her notebook. At the very top of the page, underlined three times, was the word “NOVEL.” The letters were gold. After that one sentence was written in blue, the second in red, the third, just then in progress, was coming out in green. All the letters were fat with a metallic sheen. The sheen made it hard to read them from here, from the side, but there definitely wasn’t a single comma in there.

  “What’s your novel about?”

  “It’s about this girl,” said his niece, not looking up. “She catches a little silver ball and swallows it and becomes another person.”

  “Whoa,” he said, looking at the fat metallic letters. “Is it going to be a long story?”

  She paused to think for a second and said with annoyance, not looking up:

  “It’ll take five more markers. Don’t interrupt.”

  LIKE ON AIR

  To Vera

  That was when Assface (that’s what she had dubbed him at the beginning of the flight and then watched, disgusted, as he licked his fingertips to turn the pages of a magazine)—anyway, that’s when Assface grabbed her by the shoulder and whispered, “Don’t worry, I’ll fly the plane now”—and suddenly shoved his fists into his armpits, like a child trying to act like a chicken. She barely had time to move, avoiding an elbow to the eye, while Assface filled his lungs with air and began to hum in a low, rumbling tone, and his humming was actually able, for a second, to drown out the panicked voices of the passengers, and that ominous sputtering, and the nearly hysterical voices of the flight attendants begging the passengers to return to their seats and fasten their seatbelts. Assface droned, “Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu!!!!!” lurching his whole body rightward when the plane would begin to roll onto its left side, or tilting himself back when everyone would be thrown forward. She suddenly caught herself whimpering along with him, lowering and raising her voice, and her horror at this fact made her miss the moment when the plane switched from abrupt side-to-side heaving to small but rhythmic jerks forward, and then gradually evened out. Only then could she unclench her fingers and unglue her eyelids. Assface was sitting in his seat with closed eyes, beads of sweat crawling down his neck. Later, at passport control, he found her, grabbed her shoulder with a sticky paw, and said, his breath stale:

  “I told you, I’m a pilot.”

  “Yes,” she said, “yes, of course. Thank you.”

  “One time I saved a spaceship,” said Assface. “I was far away, but I could feel everything. The malfunctioning control system. I didn’t let it take off, they would all have died, I didn’t let them go. I spent three days at home after that, flat on my back.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, thank you very much.”

  NOTMENOTMENOTMENOTMENOTME

  He hung up the phone and started listening carefully to everything. Inside himself and outside too. Outside (behind the curtain, near the molding) he was scratching—evidently tearing at the wallpaper. For as long as he could remember, wherever he would move to, he always lived down near the molding, under the window, probably suffered from the cold in winter. But that was outside; inside everything was great: cold and empty, like in your mouth after chewing very minty gum—no, after two pieces of that gum in a row, or even after two stuck into your mouth at once.

  He chewed his lips for a second, lay down on the couch and just did everything he could to make his body comfortable. Listened again: cold, nice, calm. Of course, it was distracting that he was rushing around the room, howling shrilly—a little howl and then a sputter, a little howl and then a sputter—but he closed his eyes and inhaled—luxuriantly, so deep it hurt—then exhaled, and right next to him, on the coffee table, there turned out to be cigarettes, a blue restaurant matchbook, snagged god knows where yesterday, and even an ashtray. He had already pulled the ashtray toward himself, but then he was up on the table, god knows how, and suddenly kicked the ashtray as hard as he could with his teeny foot—and the ashtray flew into the television with a crash. He jumped up in fright and felt bathed in a vile heat, sensed a stinging in his chest—the ashtray fell apart into several craggy pieces of crystal. He didn’t swear, just was glad that the television was in one piece, got up and went to the kitchen for another ashtray, came back and lay down again (comfortable, nothing pressing on any part of him), placed the ashtray on his belly, turned his hearing off to the blunt banging (he was kneeling amid sheets of yesterday’s newspaper and hitting his head on someone’s photograph, right on the cheek—bang! bang!—and the paper under his knees crackled, and a little stain of snot and tears spread over the stranger’s gray cheek). “Are things good?” he asked himself and answered honestly: “Yes. I’m good.” Then he took a nice big puff and enunciated assiduously, to himself, that same word—in the female doctor’s voice, like the one on the phone, meticulously: the strange first syllable with the soft sign and the hard-to-pronounce “ts,” then the second, slightly smutty one, then the third one, smelling at once distortedly of shit, iodine, and death. That was a truly beautiful word, and he said it aloud. Then he, the little one, gave a heartrending scream and began to rip tiny shreds of paper right out of the middle of the newspaper page. At this point he couldn’t stand it anymore—swore roughly, grabbed a slipper, and wiped out the little idiot in two blows.

  BLIND SPOT

  It’s just that the car that hit her was unbelievably yellow. He’d never seen such a gratingly yellow car in his life before.

  LENOCHKAS

  “Her name is Lenochka too!” he said, pushing the girl forward and s
imultaneously blocking off the path between the shelves of rice and cookies—no way for her to wiggle through.

  The girl immediately hid her face in her daddy’s jeans—she was sturdy, chubby, looked nothing like her father.

  “She’s a little girl genius,” he said. “She’s only a year and eight months, can you believe it? She sings, dances, she can count to ten!”

  She kept standing there and smiling, hands clenching the cart handle—standing and smiling, waiting for him and his Lenochka to get out of her way.

  “Lenochka? Lenochka, count for us! Come on, don’t hold out!” he pulled on the girl’s limp little braid, she murmured something incoherent and started to stamp her little foot on the ad sticker on the dry goods section’s white floor.

  “A little girl genius, let me tell you,” he said, somewhat awkwardly. She kept standing there and smiling, the cart’s handle had already become wet and hot under her palms. He waved his Lenochka-free hand in the air and said, “Well, it was good to see you. You look great, as always.”

  She didn’t answer, just smiled even wider. He swept his Lenochka up into his arms, sat her in his cart, pudgy legs toward him, and pushed the cart away. Then she closed her eyes, summoned her Black Angels and commanded them to tear him to pieces tonight, and to take Lenochka off to an icy mountain and hand her over to ten wolves. The Angels obediently bowed down to the ground before her; she took a packet of cookies off the shelf and began to eat them right then and there, while the Angels rolled her cart onward, toward the meat.

  OUR BOYS

  To D.

  Yoni shot the last rooster, damn stupid bird couldn’t even get it together to hide, just sat there crowing bloody murder: like, come on, come on, just shoot! Afterward it squawked and wheezed—on the other side of the fence, they couldn’t see it. Gai walked up, looked at the wheezing wounded rooster and said that it was the last one. They listened closely: the tiny border village, evacuated to the last inhabitant, flapped with bed linen abandoned on clotheslines, buzzed with forgotten air conditioners, chickens squawked hysterically in nearly every shed—but the roosters had shut up. Then Yoni and Gai returned to the boys, to the tiny central square where the whole company with the exception of those who had gone to kill roosters lolled under palm trees, chasing the last of the dry rations with cold water from drinking fountains—wonderful, fresh, cold water that no one could get enough of after three weeks of vile, warm swill from plastic canteens—in full uniform, in the heat. Yoni and Gai also had a long drink, then lay down in the grass and started goggling at the sky.