Thirst

by Andrei Gelasimov

  “What? What’s that you said?”

  “I told you to shut up.”

  Marina turned sharply and grabbed my arm.

  “Kostya, wait!”

  “No, Marina, get away from him! What did you say to me, son?”

  “I’m not your son. Your son was killed in Grozny when our APC burned up. I’m a different man. That boy who was afraid of you was left behind in that APC.”

  “Hold on, both of you!” Marina rushed first to him and then to me. “Nikolai! The boys just got into a fight with the police. They took away the photograph of the boy they’re looking for. What’s his name? I can’t remember! But then that captain came to their rescue. Remember? Kostya was telling us how they were riding together in Grozny the day it all happened. He works for the police at the train station. He saw the boys there, but the policemen were already beating them. He also promised to help them find this boy. I can’t remember his name!”

  “Sergey,” Genka said. “The boy’s name is Sergey. Except that he hasn’t been a boy for a long time.”

  “Really?” my father said. “Why didn’t you tell me all this to begin with?”

  “You weren’t listening,” I said. “Let’s go, Genka.”

  “Won’t you stay?” Marina said.

  “No,” I said.

  Genka didn’t want to take me to Podolsk. He said I should spend the night with him. His mother-in-law was away visiting relatives in Ryazan.

  “I wish she’d park herself there for good.”

  “Problems?”

  He didn’t answer, but I could tell from his face the answer was yes. I pictured his wife, rounded her shoulders, added more wrinkles, made her hair frizzier, put a house robe on her, and looked at what came of that. Then I drew Genka beside her. What he would be like in thirty years. Then Pashka, then Marina, then myself. We were all small and fit into the lower right-hand corner of the page. The rest of the space was left blank. It felt like there should be something there, but I wasn’t quite ready to confront that.

  My face was the easiest of all to draw. It didn’t age. It just got darker.

  “What’s on your mind?” Genka said.

  “Nothing. I was just thinking about what’s going to happen to us.”

  “What’s there to think? We’ll be there soon and we’ll get some vodka.”

  I was with him on the vodka. After all we’d been through, it would have been hard to get along without it. Possible, but not very satisfactory.

  “Wait up,” Genka said when everyone had gone to bed. “I’m going to try to guess who this is.”

  He poured a glass for us both, took a sip, and looked at my drawings.

  “The deputy platoon commander. Right? They shot out his lung in Urus-Martan. I remember. OK, give me another.”

  I drew, and he frowned and poured some more vodka.

  “I can’t seem to remember this one. Who is it?”

  I added the helmet with earphones.

  “Ah! That’s Petka, the driver from the transport brigade.”

  I drew some more.

  “Tanechka the nurse…the gunners—I traded them alcohol for boots…the battalion commander…And this…wait a minute…What do you have here?”

  “It’s the explosion. The cumulative charge is burning through the armor. Or at least that’s how I think it would burn through it.”

  “I get it. And what’s this?”

  “Those are the spooks firing from the roofs.”

  “Where are they? All you’ve got here is windows.”

  “Look at the flashes. See? Each flash is a shot.”

  “So you draw everything in plain pencil. Hell, what you have is all gray. Wait, I’ll find a colored one from my daughter. What kind should I bring you? Or do you want them all?”

  “No, don’t. You’ll wake her.”

  But he goes, kicking the table on his way. While he’s gone, I keep drawing. Returning, he bumps into the table again and scatters a handful of colored pencils over the floor.

  “Hey, quit it,” I say. “I like the plain one better.”

  “Oh, man…” he says, breathing the sweet smell of vodka on my cheek.

  He looks at the APC that was ambushed on the narrow street and that would be history in a minute. He looks at the soldier with the busted chest being taken out of the IFV. He looks at another soldier whose belly is being sewn up right there on the ground. He looks at the body flying up from the explosion of the antipersonnel mine. He looks at our guys running for cover, hunched over, one of them waving his arms and perching like a bird when a bullet hits him, but he still hasn’t figured it out. Genka watches me draw, and I listen to his breathing behind me.

  “Wait up. What’s that?”

  “That’s our lieutenant. With his children.”

  “But they killed him. You’ve got him looking thirty-five. He was young. He didn’t have any children.”

  “What of it?” I say. “Here he is with his children. Couldn’t he have had children afterward?”

  Genka is quiet for a long time. He looks at my drawings.

  “You know what?” he says at last. “Give me them. All of them.”

  “Take them,” I say. “I wasn’t drawing them for any reason.”

  The next morning we picked up Pashka and the three of us headed for Yaroslavl. Genka said that maybe one of our brother soldiers had heard something about Seryoga. He could have gone off anywhere. One guy from our company was living in Yaroslavl.

  “There’s no sense making the rounds of the stations anymore. We’ve talked to all the homeless guys. Pashka, did you see how the cops busted our chops?”

  Genka turned toward the back seat and showed Pashka his face. I looked at it, too, even though I’d seen the bruises lots of times. It’s just that this was the first time in all this while that Genka had said anything to Pashka.

  Pashka jerked toward the window as if he were about to turn away, but that ugly face was staring at him. Slathered with antiseptic. I don’t know why Genka went on the attack.

  “Do you know the kind of drawings Kostya’s doing? It’s crazy! I’ll show you later. All our guys are there, in the drawings.”

  We drove around every day. We were in Tver and we were in Kaluga. We drove to Vladimir. We hit five towns in one week. I’d spend the night in Fryazino, with either Genka or Pashka, and in the morning we’d get into the SUV again and drive to see one of the guys we’d served with in Chechnya. We drank vodka, talked, reminisced about the war, listened to family stories. Sometimes I’d say I was going out to smoke, and for a long time I’d stand in some entryway, shivering from the cold and exhaling transparent steam into the dark air. The first five minutes were to calm down, and the rest to finish drawing in my head what there hadn’t been enough destiny for.

  For one I added a leg, for another a wife. For a third his dead friends. For a fourth, a child that was healthy. I made these guys strong, their wives beautiful, and their children cute. I drew what they didn’t have. I wouldn’t have been able to do that with pencil.

  But not one of them knew anything about Seryoga.

  “Where did you run off to again?” Genka said when I got back to the kitchen, where there was nothing to breathe because of the cigarette smoke.

  “I was smoking.”

  “All tanked up? Let’s do it, then. Another go-round today.”

  “It’s been swell, bro,” he said in parting. “Can we bring you any medicine? What did the doctors prescribe for you?”

  And inconspicuously we started making a second round of all the same places. Some places a third. It depended on whether we could bring them everything at once.

  “Look here, this is for your liver. This is for circulation. They told me at the pharmacy it helps. Terrific stuff. You’ll be running on the ceiling. And these are vitamins. They’re good, too.”

  “What about the blood pressure cuff?”

  Genka looked at him, then me, then Pashka.

  “Damn! Why didn’t you r
emind me? All right, bro, we’ll bring you a cuff next time.”

  Then he started leaving them money.

  “You know, you take it, buy something for yourself. Or your wife. It’s not much, but why the fuck should we be running back and forth? Hey, it’s fine, cut that out. We’ll settle up later. It’s a round world—nothing’s fucking falling off. What goes around comes around.”

  Pashka watched Genka handing out money, and it felt to me he was sitting differently in the back seat now that we were driving home. Not so that he’d sit in front, of course, because I didn’t care where he sat, but not all the way in the corner anymore, up against the door, and his face ninety degrees from the spot where the back of Genka’s head began.

  Except we never did learn anything about Seryoga.

  How do you draw waiting? A continuous straight line that never runs into anything? All that’s left on the page is a memory. White and square. Though it could be a drawing. A cat or a dog. Or a child and a house. But you started by drawing a line. And now you can’t stop.

  A Russian woman in Grozny. About fifty. She started crying when we drove up and jumped out of the APC. Or maybe she’d been crying before we arrived. Because her husband was a Chechen. They’d studied together at the teachers college. He’d been beaten to death in a jail cell in Chernokozovo. By our guys. Before the war he’d taught biology. Later she hid in a cellar with some other Russian women and all their children. Until Chechens threw grenades in there. First one, then another, and then, she thought, a third. She doesn’t remember exactly. All she knows is that she has no one left. She remembers the explosions, and she still remembers the faces of her children. “A man sits in prison and he has a sentence. He knows what to expect. I don’t even have a sentence.” The rain on her face is very fine, and we’re standing in puddles. Our machine guns are clanking because we’re stepping through puddles. We’re waiting for an order. No one’s even smoking.

  How do you draw waiting?

  The straight line breaks up into a zigzag and sketches a net of rain. Trees emerge, then a road, low clouds, and finally the three of us. We’re gliding above the road like three dark shadows. There’s no one up ahead. Just a crow bursting out of a tree, cawing. We dissolve in a shroud.

  The piece of paper is turning gray.

  “Wait for me here,” says Pashka getting out of the car. “I have to buy something for home.”

  As soon as he slams the door, Genka lights up and starts tapping his fingers on the steering wheel.

  “Cut it out,” I say a minute later.

  “What?”

  And he has this puzzled look. As if he just woke up.

  “Stop tapping.”

  “Oh!” He nods at me. “Right.”

  And another minute later:

  “Listen, Kostya?”

  “What?”

  “About those drawings of yours…”

  “Which ones?”

  “Oh, you remember, you drew them at my house. About the war.”

  “Yeah.”

  He’s silent for a minute and takes three quick puffs.

  “They killed a lot of our guys there. I feel sorry for the lieutenant. Remember him?”

  I nod, though I know he’s not looking at me. I know he knows I nodded.

  Because it’s an idiotic question.

  Or maybe not so idiotic if you think how much time the lieutenant had to make us able to remember him. Two weeks. One week plus five days. Because by the thirteenth day he was “shipment no. 200.” Though he said he didn’t believe in the number thirteen. Or black cats. Or any of that shit. They told him at school none of that existed. There was nothing but tactical ability and the enemy. But we knew all of it existed. And learned how to cross ourselves. In the beginning it doesn’t come out right because your hand’s stiff. You tap your forehead and belly—so far so good, because you know for sure you have to do the forehead and belly—but when it comes to the shoulders and which one comes first, that’s a problem. In the beginning we couldn’t remember whether it was the right or the left. Some never got the chance to remember. Which made us try to pay even more attention to the shoulders. Because who the hell knew? What if he tripped on that wire right after he crossed himself the wrong way?

  Eventually, though, it gets easier. The hand picks up the habit. It slips around all by itself. You have only to sling your machine-gun across your shoulder. Or hear them shouting there in the ruins.

  Right shoulder then left. Right then left. Not like in your copybook. The opposite. There and here, there and here. Like the bolt on a machinegun. Just not so fast. Because it’s a hand, after all, not a bolt. But if you could, you’d swipe it as fast as a bolt. Because you have to.

  In the ruins they’re shouting, Allahu Akbar! And then you start, first right, then left. You don’t mix it up anymore.

  “Remember the lieutenant?” Genka says.

  I nod in reply.

  Forehead and belly. To make sure. Maybe two snipers fired at the same time. I don’t know. There’s probably some competition. They were paid more for officers. I wonder which one of them got it for our lieutenant.

  First forehead, then belly, then right shoulder, then left. It’s important not to mess it up. The priest who taught us all how to make the cross was telling us something on that topic. About why it’s the forehead, and why then the belly, and then after that the right shoulder. There’s a Holy Spirit in there somewhere. But the priest was killed fast and he never got to repeat it enough times for us to remember it. So we didn’t.

  “Company! Right shoulder forward!”

  Probably the one who hit him in the forehead got the money. Though how could he prove it was his bullet? Cash is cash. The other one was probably no fool either. Who would turn down free money? He’d be sure to say he was the one who’d aimed at our lieutenant’s forehead. Though all of them are such religious guys. Like, God sees everything anyway.

  Except that he’s Allah, not our God.

  Still, money’s money.

  “Listen, Kostya,” Genka says. “I wanted to talk to you about that dough.”

  “What dough?”

  “You know, the money Pashka and I—”

  “I’ve heard all this a hundred times.”

  “That’s not it. I want to tell you another bit.”

  “What bit?”

  “Another one.”

  But I already knew what he was going to tell me anyway. Because when Genka talks you know everything in advance. What he wants to say. Only the lieutenant didn’t know that. While he was alive. That’s why he was surprised when Genka decided to go back for the wounded guy. “We don’t abandon our own, Lieutenant,” he said. And I knew that was exactly what he would say. His face is always a dead giveaway. Even though he thinks he’s very clever. And can outsmart everyone. I don’t know. Maybe he can some people. But not me. That goes for the money, too. I mean, at first I couldn’t figure out who had taken the cash, but eventually I did. After I’d ridden around in the SUV with them.

  But the lieutenant says to him, “He’s already dead, though.” And Genka answers again, “We don’t abandon our own, Lieutenant.” And again I knew he’d say exactly that. But the spooks keep muttering over the radio. “Lieutenant, take your guys out of there. Hey, Lieutenant! Listen up! We’re coming in for you. We’re going to cut you to ribbons, alive. Take your guys out, Lieutenant.” But Genka says, “Why don’t you just have a nice chat with them here? With those nice Chechens.” And he left. When he came back, the spooks were already calling the lieutenant by name over the radio. “Sasha, can you hear me, Sasha? Tell your people to call off that fucking helicopter. And get out of there. Get out right now.” “You’re a fool, Lieutenant,” Genka said. “You might as well have given them your address, too.” Two days later they killed the lieutenant. In the forehead and belly. Two bullets. Not even from a sniper’s rifle. They fire a Kalashnikov from half a kilometer. And make grenade launchers out of ordinary pipes.

  A city of
craftsmen. When I was a child there was a fairy-tale film with this name.

  Now Genka is looking at me and saying, “I was the one who took the money.”

  I watch Pashka approaching the SUV.

  “Listen, Kostya.” Genka touches my shoulder.

  And then I say, “I know.”

  Pashka opens the door and sits in the back seat.

  “Great!” he says. “They have everything except special plates for the microwave.”

  “Enough already! Forget about it,” Genka said. “Don’t pick that up. It’s good luck that it broke.”

  “The kids are running around,” I said. “They’re gonna step on it.”

  So I started picking it up. Especially since I was already under the table and I was going to have to work up the energy to get back on my stool. Under the table. So my head wouldn’t spin so badly.

  “Watch out you don’t cut yourself,” Genka said from above. “How are you doing there?”

  “Fine.”

  “Cut yourself?”

  “Yeah.”

  My words are getting shorter and shorter because I have to work up the strength for long ones.

  “We’ve already poured yours.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  There’s something different about my voice. It’s dragging. But for now I still recognize it as my voice.

  “Damn they’re tiny,” I say in what I think is my voice.

  “Use a rag,” Pashka says in his voice.

  “Don’t have one,” says Genka. “I threw it out. We’ve already poured ours. Where are you?”

  “Here.”

  Genka has more words because I was in a hurry. Because I don’t get off on sitting around and listening to them not talk. Why did I have to be the one to make an effort? My money wasn’t there. Wherever Genka took it. That’s why I said, If you don’t want to, don’t, but I’ll probably have another. And from then on my words gradually got shorter and shorter. Not even gradually, actually pretty fast. At first I felt all smooth inside, and then my words got short. Because no one really needed them. You reach out and pour. Or just nod. Even when they aren’t asking. You sit inside yourself, and it’s like you’re in a spaceship. You don’t respond to their calls. “Earth, Earth, I can’t hear you. Bad signal. Can you hear me? Over and out.” The controls aren’t worth a damn. Where did they put the brake? You sit and look out at the vacuum of space. In amazement. Because it’s pretty murky through the port-holes. Not even a blue murk. But you’ve got enough fuel to choke a horse. That feels good.