Thirst

by Andrei Gelasimov

  I looked at him and thought, Why don’t you look out? If it weren’t for you, I might have drawn all these dames differently. Not all misshapen.

  Because it was true, they always did turn out misshapen. But I liked drawing them. You sit there and draw, and it seems to make things a little easier.

  But this Eduard Mikhailovich already had me plenty irritated by then. I even refused to dodge the draft afterward because of him. Even though lots did. But by then he had me good and irritated.

  He would drop into my room, sit down, and talk. He was always talking about what a jerk my father was when they were cadets in the same company. And about how foolishly Mama had behaved in marrying him. Because my father kept running around on her, and even when she was pregnant he was making out with these other girls right under her window. When she had me, he was always disappearing somewhere, too. Once she went to see them at the company and said she had nothing to feed me. I was two years old at the time. And we had no idea where my father was. And how they had all taken up a collection and fed the poor, hungry boy. And how afterward they’d beaten my father to a pulp. Or rather, they’d wanted to but he was already company commander and he’d said, Sure, go ahead. So they didn’t. And in general about how thoroughly rotten he was.

  But Eduard Mikhailovich was good. Because he didn’t abandon my mama in her time of need. And when she was left on her own, he immediately answered the call, ready to help. Even though she already had this little numbskull.

  Eduard Mikhailovich was also very smart. Because he was the first to realize where all this perestroika was leading and who this Gorbachev was and who needed all this privatization. That’s why he quit the army in the nick of time. The ones who stayed behind were all utter morons. And the American president was an idiot.

  Listening to Eduard Mikhailovich was pure pleasure. But I sat there in silence. Although I had to do my homework. Because Mama asked me to help her. And I did. I sat and watched him dig around in my desk. I don’t know what he was searching for there. That’s probably what they taught them in the army.

  He also wrote letters to the editor. To all the newspapers he could buy. And to the TV station. And we had to listen to him. One day we were packing up to go mushroom hunting in the woods, but he saw something on the TV and sat right down and started writing. We circled around him getting ready. Because there was only one bus before midday. Then you had to wait until three forty-five. But he kicked up a fuss, so Mama said, Come on, Kostya, let’s listen to him. So we sat in front of him with our boots and jackets on.

  And he kept saying, “Don’t you realize, Svetlana, what fools they are there? Don’t you?”

  The refrigerator was empty seven days after I took the mirror to Olga’s. Or eight. It’s hard to know things like that for certain.

  I gathered my strength and moved everything on the floor and windowsills into it. I don’t like my vodka warm.

  The first time I saw that much vodka in one place was at the director’s, Alexander Stepanovich’s. He never bought it by the bottle. He had an agreement with some guys to bring it a case at a time. So he wouldn’t have to keep running back and forth.

  “I have a terrible thirst,” he would say. “An endless thirst, Konstantin. My body craves liquids. Or something else. You know, I grew up in a place where there wasn’t any water at all. Not a stream or a lake. I don’t even remember a proper puddle. And it almost never rained. That’s why to this day I’m thirsty. I have this dried-out feeling all the time. Hand me that glass over there.”

  He put empty bottles, dishes, and odd shoes in front of me, and I drew. While he drank his vodka.

  I liked going to his place. They forgot about me at school, and eventually the head teacher stopped marking my absences. My classmates came to see me a few times and asked me how I was doing. But I always said everything was fine and that the director and I were working on my graduation project.

  I liked the fact that he drank his vodka completely differently from other men. My father always stood there for a long time with a shot glass in one hand and a glass of water in the other. He would prepare himself, gather his courage. Then he would curl his lips into a tube, shut his eyes, and slowly suck down the vodka. Eduard Mikhailovich always shuddered, as if someone had slipped a frog down his shirt.

  But the director didn’t drink from shot glasses at all. He poured his vodka into a tumbler and drank from it as if he really were drinking water. As if he were simply thirsty. Like someone whose throat had dried out.

  He drank glass after glass, never exhaling afterward, looked at my drawings, and didn’t get drunk. He just sat opposite me in his armchair and told me not to get any ideas.

  Not that I was. For me, this was all just playing hooky. You leave the house and everyone thinks you’ve gone off to class. Or they don’t. I don’t know. Because by then my mother had obviously washed her hands of me. She was camped out around her Eduard Mikhailovich. And I was angry at my father for putting me in this position. Couldn’t he have let this Uncle Edik have it just once there, in their company, so that he would forget about Mama? There had to be some other decent cadets there.

  In short, I didn’t give my drawings much thought. What was so special about them? They have drawings in Africa, too. Anyway, mostly I hung out with my pals in the courtyard.

  We chased girls, played guitar, drank sweet wine sometimes. Then we’d go watch them dismantling the enlistment office.

  You’re standing on the ruins, smoking and thinking, Here’s where I sat naked at the military service commission. It was pretty hilarious how my butt stuck to that couch. And now it’s like, That’s it, evil doesn’t exist anymore. And it feels really funky. Like somebody wasted Koshchei the Undead. But later it turns out to have been pointless, though. They built a new enlistment office on the next block over. This time it wasn’t built of wood, though. It’s like the fairytale, where you wipe out old Koshchei and he just gets tougher. You can’t ever totally waste him.

  That’s how Genka used to talk in the war. I learned how to talk like that from him.

  “Let’s waste them, guys. Why the long faces? Got the willies?”

  He climbed into the APC and laughed. He tapped his helmet with the loaded magazine.

  “Don’t piss your pants. It’ll all be fine. Come on, I’ll sit over here. Come on, come on, move your ass.”

  And he sat in my place. But I didn’t care. After all, no one knew the grenade was going to burn through the armor right where he’d moved me.

  And then Alexander Stepanovich would get angry for no reason at all.

  “You’re not paying attention,” he would say. “Just because you know how to draw doesn’t mean a thing. An artist has to know how to see. Look out the window. Tell me, what do you see there?”

  “I’m not an artist,” I said.

  Then he took the boot I was drawing off the table and threw it at me.

  “I told you to go over to the window!”

  So I did. Because I didn’t feel like sitting in class with our head teacher. It’s better to dodge a boot than to pretend you don’t notice spit flying from someone in all directions. He should get new teeth. Or shoot himself.

  “What do you see there?”

  “Nothing. I see trees and birds. Some kids on the swings.”

  “What are they doing?”

  “Swinging. What else?”

  “What are they like?”

  I tried to get a better look at them.

  “Ordinary. Regular children. The usual small fry.”

  “You’re the usual small fry. Go into the kitchen. Bring me another one.”

  In the time it took me to walk to the refrigerator, he finished his glass.

  “There’s a good boy. Put it here. My God, why am I so fat? Give it to me. Can’t you see I haven’t finished? Sit next to me. You don’t have to draw anymore.”

  I sat down. He opened the bottle of vodka with his teeth, poured himself a new glass, looked at it, smiled, took
a few slow sips, and then leaned back in his chair with a sigh.

  “Wouldn’t you know it! I need something to drink. My throat is all dried out. What were you saying there about those children?”

  “I said, the usual small fry.”

  He chuckled and gave me a disdainful look.

  “There’s no such thing as usual small fry, Konstantin. The people who came up with the idea of usual small fry are fools. Understand?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Someday you will. For now just listen. Every day you walk past those children and you don’t have any idea what they’re like. For instance, can you tell me how one child attracts another child’s attention when he wants to say something? No? He turns his head with his hands. He takes him by the face and turns it toward him with his little hands.”

  He looked at his own pudgy hands, sighed, and demonstrated in the air how one child turned another child’s face.

  “Or they draw on each other with colored markers. You can’t see from here what they’re drawing, but you can tell they like it. Because it tickles and they show each other what’s drawn on them. Have you ever seen how a ray of light falls into a dark room from a door that’s ajar? At the very beginning it’s narrow, and then it spreads. It’s just like a person. First he’s by himself, then there are two children, then four grandchildren. Do you see? A person spreads like a ray of light. Ad infinitum. Do you see?”

  He looked at me and waited for me to nod.

  “Smart boy! Now tell me what you yourself did when you were little.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Try.”

  “The same as everybody else.”

  “Played, went for walks, sat on the potty?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Not enough. An artist has to know more.”

  “I’m not an artist.”

  “Give me that boot over there. It’s too hard for me to get up.”

  “The least thing and damn, right away, you throw the boot.”

  “Don’t start making faces! I’m talking to you. Come on, think.”

  “I don’t remember anymore…I spied on the girls in kindergarten when they were peeing.”

  “That’s better. What else?”

  “I waited for my mama. She always came after everyone else.”

  “Not bad.”

  “I sat in my classroom and looked out the window. And the teacher’s aide said I’d really got her goat with that mama of mine.”

  “What was she like?”

  “Tall. I don’t remember. She had this thick plaid skirt. Once I went into the back room and she was standing there in her slip. My mama had the same one. She leaned over and slapped me in the face. But I’d just walked in. My ball had rolled in there. I didn’t have anyone to play with.”

  “Did you hate her?”

  “I don’t know. Probably. Mama said her husband had been killed in Afghanistan. He was an officer.”

  When they brought new guys, Genka would always ask them who they were and where they were from. He said we Muscovites had to stick together. Let the hicks check out alone. He himself was from Fryazino. Pashka had been called up from there, too. Genka said they were lucky. They walked out of the same enlistment office, went through basic together, and ended up here in the same unit. It doesn’t always happen that way. And I was from Podolsk. So when Seryoga showed up, Genka told him straightaway, Have no fear. There are already a good three of us here. We won’t let you down. Because Seryoga really was from Moscow. He’d lived his whole life at 3 Eighth of March Street. Ten minutes by bus to the Metro. A Dinamo fan, naturally.

  “Yeah, that team of yours!” Genka said. “They still can’t play for shit. Tell him, Pashka. Can they play for shit?”

  Pashka didn’t say anything. Because he rarely spoke anyway. He went everywhere with Genka, but he himself almost never spoke. He would shrug and shift his submachine gun.

  “How’s about it, soldier?” Genka said to Seryoga. “Stick with us. Otherwise they’re gonna blow your ass off, and then you’ll be sorry.”

  But we didn’t fight as a foursome for long. When we got into the APC that morning, Genka laughed at Seryoga.

  “Fuck, soldier! We’ve all been the FNG. What did you expect? You’d go to war and not find out what an FNG was? Pashka over there, his father was in the navy. In the beginning they had him sharpening the anchor. So it would slip into the bottom better. Can you imagine? With files. Tell him, Pashka.”

  Seryoga climbed into the APC last and shut the hatch.

  “Too bad they didn’t take me into the navy. I’d have sharpened a hundred anchors for them.”

  “Not to worry, soldier,” Genka said. “There’s no escaping your fate. Six months ago they brought in a whole detachment of dirt sailors. They were probably happy when they were called up, too. Like, we’re gonna sail the seven seas. But you shouldn’t have shut the hatch, soldier.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re riding with me. If you were riding alone, no one would have said a damn word.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “You will when a grenade lands in the tank. It’ll burn through the fucking armor and blow up inside. And it’ll blast us all to smithereens because the pressure in a closed space is a whole different thing. Ever study physics, soldier? Or did you spend your whole time jacking off in the school toilet? Come on, Kostya, let me sit over here. Come on, come on, move your ass. And you, soldier, open the hatch. What are you staring at?”

  To be honest, I don’t know why I drew him drunk. Maybe because by that time there was nothing else to draw. I’d already drawn everything at Alexander Stepanovich’s. All his shoes, dishes, bottles, books, and stupid figurines. Everything he put in front of me. There was nothing left to draw. And it’s pretty boring just sitting around. Because he was in a drunken stupor and I was sitting facing him, not knowing how to leave. There wasn’t anyone to close the door behind me.

  That’s why, when I came in one day and this guy was in my room—well, naturally, I got a little embarrassed. Eduard Mikhailovich told me, This is Alexander Stepanovich’s son, and while he was talking he was looking at me so oddly, as if I’d invited him. I stepped into my room and saw him holding that drawing of mine, because like a fool I’d left it on my desk. I’d wanted Eduard Mikhailovich to find it and get all worked up. I liked razzing him. But now I was just standing in front of this guy, and I didn’t know what to do. Because who would like it if someone drew their father looking like that? I mean, when he’s in a drunken stupor, basically sprawled out in his apartment like who knows fucking what?

  But he just said his name was Boris Alexandrovich and that he had come to have a little chat with me. We sat down by my desk and started talking. But he held onto the drawing. And asked about Alexander Stepanovich. He said the head teacher had given him my address because he wanted to talk to me personally. About his father, and all the rest in general. At first I told him everything seemed OK to me, but I couldn’t give him this total bunch of malarkey and say something like, Alexander Stepanovich doesn’t drink at all. He was holding my drawing in the first place. He asked whether it was a lot in a day and how often. And I said, Constantly. Two or three bottles, but sometimes even more. Depending on his mood. That made him sad. I told him he shouldn’t be upset because Alexander Stepanovich was a smart guy and told me all kinds of interesting things. But for some reason that made him even sadder. He said he wanted to take him home with him to the Krasnodar area because it was nice there and close to the sea. But Alexander Stepanovich had no intention of leaving. He said he should go back to his little Gostagayevo without him. And that he’d always been a little odd. He could be working in a ministry in Moscow right now, and instead he was sitting around here drinking vodka. And that many years ago he could have become a great artist—as good as Glazunov—and the whole family could have been living abroad a long time ago, but he gave up painting, and after that gave up architecture, even though he had a bui
lding right in downtown Moscow, and his friend became a minister only because Alexander Stepanovich had done these projects for him and he hadn’t even asked for anything in return, because he’d said he didn’t need anything, he already had everything. In short, I was sitting in my room listening to him, not knowing why he was telling me all this, but he was talking and talking, all the while looking at my drawing. Then he finally stopped talking, and I could hear Eduard Mikhailovich reading Mama his new letter for Arguments and Facts. But Boris Alexandrovich obviously didn’t hear it. Because he was engrossed in his own thoughts and just sat there in silence.

  Then he took another look at the drawing and said, “It’s because of you that he doesn’t want to leave. He’s never had a pupil like you before.”

  The next day Alexander Stepanovich immediately demanded the drawing. I said I’d lost it, and he shouted, I’m going to send you back to class! Then I showed it to him, and for a long time he sat there without moving a muscle.

  Then he sighed and said, “Borka wasn’t lying after all. I thought he was sucking up to me.”

  After that he looked up.

  “So, you do know how to see after all. You calculated the perspective yourself, too.”

  “I didn’t calculate anything.”

  “Quiet! Why don’t you tell me when the last time was you went to class?”