Found Life

by Linor Goralik

  GLIDER

  There were plenty of people in the middle of the station, but of course no one gave a shit about those chicks, braying like two prize horses. He walked up to them and grabbed the larger one rather roughly by the elbow. She turned her still-grinning little mug to him—nose like a spoonbill’s beak, a little piercing in her eyebrow, tiny zits on her forehead. The other little pisser, the smaller one, hadn’t noticed the intervention yet and, absorbed in the game, kept talking into the speaker of the red-and-blue metal pole, words dissolving in laughter, trying to out-argue the dispatcher’s irritated, hoarse-voiced, barked responses. Finally, surprised at her friend’s silence, she also turned around, saw the man, his firm grip on the silver jacket sleeve, his tight lips—and stared in fright with her little pale eyes: a bony little insect, mouth full of braces. At that point he released the cautiously bucking girlish elbow.

  “Just so you know,” he said, very, very quietly, “my dad died because of people like you. He had a heart attack, just like that, in the middle of the station, and the dispatcher didn’t answer because some retards like you had been shouting into the mic right beforehand.”

  He turned around and headed off toward the walkway, not bothering to look back. He had already done this twice or three times and never looked back. Actually, he did it every time he’d see teenagers entertaining themselves with emergency phones in stations: he would walk up, grab an elbow, pronounce the same set of phrases, and then walk away slowly; while he walked, he would imagine that everything really had happened that way: there’s his father, lying on the marble floor; there he is, shaking his father by the shoulders, crookedly unbuttoning his loose collar; the camera zooms out and captures the useless circle of people standing on the platform, and he himself, grasping everything but refusing to understand, is shouting something into the red intercom—maybe “We need a doctor!” or “Call an ambulance!”—pushing the button, but the intercom doesn’t answer. He could see that picture so clearly, so easily. If only it had really been that way, he would think every time: if only it had really been just like that, and there hadn’t been the gunshot, or the water, or anything like that.

  JULIET

  He didn’t hear her come in, but smelled her perfume, strong, spicy, almost vulgar, luxurious, and his lips began to throb. She had seen to it that there was no light, had even drawn the shades, and he could barely see her, approaching soundlessly—a dark patch on a dark background. He stretched out his hand, but she gripped his wrist unexpectedly firmly, the touch of the glove’s cool satin seemed provocatively racy to him, he involuntarily tensed his legs, exhaled, surrendered to her mercy, and she began to unhurriedly stroke her gloved hand over his chest, then his belly, pitilessly going as far as his belly button and then freezing. He raised his knee impatiently, but she did not react to this request in any way, instead bending down lower, and he began to greedily inhale the fragrance of the soft, warm hemispheres of her corset-uplifted breasts. She bent down even lower, and he couldn’t resist, grabbed her thigh, tried to stick his finger under the wide lace top of the stocking and immediately got a satin palm to the mouth. The distance between his face and her breasts immediately widened, the hand caressing his belly left him. He absorbed the lesson and froze piteously, and was forgiven—he was allowed to take the tight satin glove off with his teeth, finger by finger, and greedily wrap his lips around a slim finger with its short, slightly rough nail. He moaned with pleasure when that finger began to stroke his tongue. She carefully swung a leg across him, got up on her knees, he managed to smell a different smell through the perfume, a human, fleshly one, and arched his back, trying to touch her flesh with his, but she didn’t rush to bring her body downward, kept waiting and waiting, then pressed her hands into the pillow behind his head, collapsed onto her side and rolled over toward the wall. He tried to catch his breath, found the light switch behind the nightstand by touch, turned on the light, she moaned pitifully and shielded herself from the light with a hand.

  “What is it?” he asked. “What is it, what’s wrong, kitten?”

  “This just doesn’t help,” she said. “It just doesn’t help. It was my idea, I know, I know, I’m sorry. But all this gear, you know, it doesn’t make me feel any better. I’m sorry. A tarted-up old bimbo—that’s what I feel like.”

  IN TIME

  There was a kind of unhealthy melodrama to the whole scene—the tiles, the smell that was simultaneously sterile and nauseating, the vile absence of shadows, the artificial light of the place, the way that pair froze stupidly in the doorway, the mustachioed man and the woman with the long, funereally serious face who had escorted him here. It all smacked of poor staging, like a bad show whiling away its life on daytime TV, but it was impossible to resist: he felt his face stretching into an imperceptibly standard expression, his steps becoming ostentatiously slow, and there was even something comical peeking through. Evidently this was the only way he could endure the journey from the door to the high table, to the body covered with a sheet that seemed, in the harsh direct light, to be made of cardboard, to the moment when whoever was supposed to do so lifted the corner of this sheet (also, incidentally, with an inappropriately slow gesture) off Ada’s face. He looked at his daughter, was asked the appropriate questions, gave the appropriate answers, was given to understand that the identification was over and it was time to leave, but he didn’t leave. Far from it—he came closer to the table, bent over and began to look at her closely, and kept looking and looking, and couldn’t tear himself away, because it turned out that Ada had braces on her teeth, Mira had made her get braces after all, and he didn’t even know—and wouldn’t have found out until Ada came to his place for the three summer weeks the court allowed him.

  SOMETHING LIKE THAT (A WAR STORY)

  TRANSLATED BY OLGA BREININGER AND RACHAEL ALLISON LEE

  1.

  —…We also had Aunt Lusya, Lyudmila. She was a good swimmer before the war, a world-class athlete. They evacuated her factory, like moved the whole thing out near Ashkhabad, workers and all. The factory wasn’t top-secret, but it was important: they made stove parts there, which were somehow important to the war effort. And some parts needed to be moved from the factory to the warehouse across the bay, but you couldn’t do it all at once because some of the parts couldn’t be transported near the fuel, and also the fuel couldn’t be near the cleaning cloths, or something like that. Well, they figured out how to transport the parts, but they had to move them across the bay, back and forth all the time, it couldn’t be done in one go. And for this they used people who were not very important to the factory, like my aunt. Two women and my aunt. On this little tiny motorboat. And at this time they were evacuating the top brass from Ashkhabad because there was a rumor that the Germans had some kind of plane capable of bombing the city. So they put all the brass on a cruiser and sent them off, promising to move the ­factory later. And this cruiser crashed into the little motorboat, hard. And didn’t even stop. And these women started to drown. But Aunt Lusya was a super swimmer and she tried with all her might to swim to the surface, but she was trapped under the motorboat and the wet cleaning cloths were clinging to her. And then she realized: Okay, this is death. She opened her eyes to die with dignity. And there in the water she sees all the sea creatures watching her, all of them. Just standing there watching her. Creatures beyond what she could have imagined. Well, there were fish, of course, but also other creatures she couldn’t even have imagined. And they’re watching her calmly, not like they’re going to eat her, but like they’re children. And suddenly there’s some movement among them, like they’re moving aside, and a gigantic octopus appeared. And this octopus chucked my aunt to the surface, over to the other side of the bay. And she never went back to the factory, but stayed there, and Grandma kept receiving letters from her for a long time.

  2.

  —…Grandpa’s dad worked in a top-secret lab, they were making this stuff you could throw into the water from a parachute, and it wo
uld make the water stiff like jelly. That got Grandpa’s family an apartment in Moscow.

  3.

  —…I remember my great-grandpa a little bit, he had a horsey, a horse. They lived on the left bank with a garden gone completely wild, but regular stuff still grew there, and my cousin and I used to pick the cherries and currants. These cherries were tiny, really just pits, but, you know, for a city kid to be picking cherries from a real tree, you understand…And Great-Grandpa was a proper ­carriage driver, with a horsey. He mainly moved furniture, and he’d take us for rides. My brother and I called each other cousin and cousine in French, we liked that kind of thing, in general we put on airs and graces, plus getting to ride around in the carriage, you understand. Bookish kids. And Great-Grandpa himself was quite a reader before the war, during the evacuation he reassembled his library and dragged it back to Sevastopol on his own back. But they called him up again and made him a driver to drive the brass around in an armored truck. And this one time, he was driving without any passengers through a village, very angry that they’d made him go at all, and so he was driving through an empty village, everyone had already run off, and he was driving really fast. And then wham, and the car swerved, and he thought: I ran over a chicken. This happened a lot, in the villages people would ditch chickens, turkeys, and they’d go wild. But it was a little girl. So, he ran her over. And afterward, he started to feel that instead of legs he had rooster tails to the knees. He walks normally and when he looks down he sees legs, but when he isn’t looking, he is dead sure there are feathers, springy ones. Like they’re curved. Now there was a Tajik serving with him in the army, and he promised Grandpa that he would cast a spell that would make everything go away. Grandpa lay down on the ground, the Tajik started whispering, going on and on, and suddenly Grandpa started to choke, and right out of his stomach, as if it were his guts, all this crap started climbing out—some binoculars, rags, then the wheels of his truck. Grandpa’s blue, choking, and the Tajik’s whispering. And then right behind the wheels the little girl climbed out of him, and Grandpa—I mean, Great-Grandpa—starts screaming: “There she is, that bitch, the scum that threw herself under my wheels!” And then everything climbed back into his stomach and his stomach slammed shut, and there was nothing more the Tajik could do. How do I know this? I mean, I don’t know it exactly, my cousin told me about it like it was a terrible secret. How he knew about it, I have no idea, probably overheard it.

  4.

  —…Grandpa used to tell Dad that the scariest thing is the way the Germans pronounce “Kalashnikov.” There was something about it…we just can’t understand now.

  5.

  —…So they didn’t even know where they were, and suddenly they’re told: a musician is coming. And for some reason they decided that it was Lyubov Orlova, who was this actress, a star, a blonde, like a Soviet Marilyn Monroe, only respectable. Well, so for some reason they decided this, wishful thinking probably; they joked about it for a few days, and so on. Now this was somewhere in a neighborhood of Budapest, they didn’t know where exactly, but it’s already clear that victory’s coming, spirits are high, it’s springtime. And these guys weren’t dog shit either, they were all fighter pilots, even though they’d been transferred to the new base without airplanes, just brought over in trucks, the airplanes were supposed to arrive later, once they were repaired. And in one of the empty houses Great-Grandpa and his friend found an easy chair, only really wide, like super comfy. And they fitted it with truck parts, like a motor, so that this chair could lift a person into the air. Not make them fly exactly, but it could lift them pretty high and hover there in the air; true, it rattled an awful lot, but understand—they were real pilots, they could fix anything, they could take a plane apart and put it back together, they knew everything about mechanics. Well, so they were riding around in their chair, boozing it up there in the air, it was boring and everyone had fled the city, it’d all been bombed to ­smithereens. And the brass tells them: a musician is coming. So they decided that it was Lyubov Orlova and then they’re told: she’s on her way. Grandpa—I mean, Great-Grandpa—went up in the armchair and instead of a lady he sees two American convertibles, it’s the Allies. And they had some Negro with them. Anyway, it was Jimi ­Hendrix, can you believe it? Back then they were constantly sending all kinds of singers and performers to the front to cheer up the troops, the Allies, so they sent Jimi Hendrix. And there was a concert. Well, of course, they showed him the camp, partied all night long. Now my grandpa was sort of a translator, he knew ­English like a native because of that story with my grandma—I mean my great-grandma or whoever she is to me, anyway with his mom, I mean—I told you that one already. So he drank with Hendrix until late at night, and then they showed him the armchair, sat him in it, and lifted it like twenty feet up in the air. And all of a sudden Hendrix says from up there: someone’s coming, but in the dark I can’t tell who it is. So, just in case, they all got their guns—there were local partisans living in the ruins, in the city, and street children, who were attacking and killing our guys. And whoever it was out there was now afraid to get any closer because the armchair’s making such a racket, and they also can’t see in the dark, can’t tell what it was. And then Hendrix says: pass the guitar up here and I’ll sing. If it’s our guys, they’ll sing along, and if they stay quiet, then shoot. And he started singing, and the answer is silence and some shouting in the local language. So they had to start shooting, but you can’t really shoot in the dark so they hit hardly anyone at all.

  6.

  —…Grandpa tells this story about how the older kids would swim in ice holes, this was the cool thing to do in their village. They’d get naked in the snow, stretch one arm out, shout “Ooooo!” then take a running start and jump in. But when the war started someone snitched on them that they were making the Sieg Heil sign, and they were all taken away.

  7.

  —…Grandma and her sister, they’re real, real old, my mom was a late-in-life child, and me and my sister too: when mom gave birth to us, she was thirty-two. She wanted one boy and got two girls instead. Grandma and her sister were still little during the war, like seven or eight years old. Their dad left for the front, he was disabled, had a limp, but he was a doctor, and by then they were taking every doctor they could get, so they took him too. And their mom began weaving these big mats out of rope, very beautiful, she weaves one and then undoes it—she’s doing that all the time, doesn’t feed them, doesn’t even talk. And they ran away, and this was in Vologda, actually, we’re all from Vologda, and the war was already there, the Germans were very close. So they decided to be daughters of the regiment and ran to the forest where the soldiers were, they barely made it. And they said: we want to be daughters of the regiment. Well, they were these two little squirts, maybe eight or ten years old, all funny-looking and super skinny, it was wartime, after all. So the colonel yelled at them, of course, and got a soldier to take them home. The soldier took them to the city and then says: you’re on your own from here, I have to get back. He left, and then Rita—that’s Grandma’s sister—says: look at all the shell casings lying here on the road, this is where our side was retreating. And it’s true, the entire road to the city is covered in shell casings. And Rita says: whoever walks along here can count the shells and figure out how many soldiers we have. So they went back and started to collect all those shells in their aprons. And then Rita said to Grandma: “Zina, someone’s breathing.” And they looked into a ditch and they see a wounded man lying there. He had apparently rolled there, and then everyone had left. They took off his uniform jacket, braided the sleeves together to make a bag, and gathered the shells into this bag, and the next morning they dragged the full bag of shells to the regiment. Can you imagine? Two little squirts, like seven or eight years old. Well, of course they still didn’t take them into the regiment, just gave them some canned food and sent them home.

  8.

  —…My mom remembers the beginning well, Grandma used to take her a
long to the hairdresser, but in the days before graduation everywhere was packed with schoolgirls and Grandma couldn’t get a manicure. Mom was only three, but she says: “I remember it all—we walked in, and there were all these good-looking boys in suits waiting for their girls to get manicures, but Mom was feeling really sick, so we didn’t wait and left. I was really sad about it, there was a brocade curtain there, and while Mom was getting a manicure I would pretend to be a queen, and then they’d paint my pinkie nail.”

  9.

  —…When they started evacuating everyone, my grandpa had just gotten very sick. He was little then, like six years old, I think. And the neighbor lady kept coming around and shouting at his mom not to take her sick child on the train because he’d infect everyone. And Grandpa was really scared that everyone would leave and he’d die, he had a really high fever, and he kept thinking that the train was going to leave. And Mom kept trying to persuade him that he wasn’t contagious, that it was just a case of salt-sickness. And she would tell him that once when she was little she’d seen a salt-sick nanny goat at dawn, all shiny. Mom thought that the goat was made of something special, she ran up to touch it, and she sees that the goat is barely moving. So that was salt-sickness, and if you don’t drink hot liquids, you’ll gradually get covered in little salt crystals, get sick, and die. She was saying this to get him to drink lots of hot liquids because they couldn’t get ahold of a doctor, all of the doctors had been sent to the front, even the disabled ones. There was only the hospital director, the only one in the entire city, and everyone was trying to get him, and Mom couldn’t get ahold of him. And Grandpa kept touching his right temple ’cause there were little crystals there, and he was really scared and didn’t tell Mom and tried to cover it up with his hair. And she went and stood under that doctor’s windows until he came out. He came out and asks: What’s his temperature? And Grandpa, when they took his temperature, he barely squeezed it because the thermometer was chipped at the top and that thin tube of mercury stuck out and he was afraid his fever would make the thermometer burst. So the doctor asks: How many days has he been in bed? And Mom says: Seven, and the doctor asks: And what’s his temperature? She says: Ninety-nine-point-seven. He turned her towards the streetlamp, looked at her face and says: “Looking at you I wouldn’t say he’s a ninety-nine-point-seven, let’s go.” They got there and the doctor says: Put some music on the gramophone for me, I can’t work without music. But Grandpa and Mom—that is, his mom—only had these happy-go-lucky records, and the doctor was pretty peeved. Then he took Grandpa’s temperature and, of course, it was one hundred and four. He started to dig around in his hair, and his whole head was already covered in these little crystals. So they never did get evacuated.