Thirst

by Andrei Gelasimov

  “Are you going to sit there long?” Genka’s voice from mission control. “The vodka’s gonna go bad.”

  “Just a sec.”

  You speak slowly because the signal isn’t good. Bad signal. Space is full of crap—meteorites, stars, cloudiness. Cloudiness most of all. Nothing but interference. Crowding as far as the eye can see. Instead of everyone sitting home.

  All of a sudden, though, the signal improves. It’s almost good.

  “Let’s run through Seryoga’s moves. Who did he pull out after us?”

  “Mikhalich.”

  “We’ll swing by driver Mikhalich’s.”

  They were silent. I wipe my blood off the floor with my hand. It’s useless. It’s dripping anyway. After a silence, the signal is excellent again.

  “And then?”

  “Then the captain, I think.”

  “That means we’ll swing by the captain’s next.”

  I try to make contact. From directly under the table.

  “What are you saying down there? Kostya, don’t mumble. Come on, crawl out. My wife will clean it up later. Look, you’ve smeared blood all over the floor.”

  I try hard to tune in.

  “The captain was first. Then Mikhalich.”

  Silence over the air.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, OK. Then we’ll swing by the captain’s right now. And then by Mikhalich’s again.”

  “And by Seryoga’s,” I say.

  “And by Seryoga’s,” they say.

  “Because he isn’t anywhere.”

  I climb out from under the table. Holding shards in my right hand.

  “Damn it, I told you, you’ll cut yourself. Give those here.”

  “I can do it.”

  But I’m very happy anyway. Because the three of us are together again. Not separate. I’m not in outer space anymore. I’m in Genka’s kitchen. I picked up all the shards.

  “What are you so pleased about?” Genka says.

  “I’m smiling.”

  “I see.”

  “Pour.”

  We’d been driving around Moscow and other towns for nearly two weeks. I’d seen more in half a month in Genka’s SUV than I probably had in three years. The outside world turned out to be completely different from what I’d thought, and watching it through a car window was pretty interesting. Especially since the glass was tinted. I wouldn’t have refused to ride around before, for fear of frightening passersby with my face, but no one had ever really offered. Before the doctors took off all the bandages, it was still OK to walk down the street, but afterward it wasn’t so great. Especially when you ran into people you knew. I don’t even know who felt more awkward, me or them. Because you have to make an effort. And pretend you don’t notice. That’s why I mostly stayed home or in the apartments I was renovating. I dealt with the owners over the phone. And when they did come around, they weren’t much interested in me. They scarcely tried to pretend.

  The world out the car window looked slightly flattened, but I still enjoyed looking at it. Though it did keep running back and off to the right. Then it started running off to the left. And that was fine, too. Because Pashka had finally changed places with me. I don’t know what he and Genka talked about that night I cut my hand in his kitchen, but evidently they did talk about something. And Pashka was now sitting in the front seat. And they were discussing their business. Or rather, Genka was discussing it. Pashka would nod occasionally. But this meant they were having a discussion. Pashka didn’t know any other way to discuss.

  I sat in the back and drew. Genka barely groused about having to drive slowly. And even stop sometimes. So I could finish drawing a dog. Or a cop. Or the girl the cop was ogling. Because there was so much of everything there. Out my window. Soon the entire floor of the car was heaped with paper.

  “I’m telling you, draw with colored pencils,” Genka kept repeating. “You can’t tell what traffic light it is, red or green.”

  “The cars are moving,” I said. “Can’t you see? That means it’s green.”

  “Or maybe they’re stopping.”

  “You’re the one who’s stopping. Let’s go. I’ve had enough waiting.”

  So we drove. And I drew. I liked drawing even better than looking out the window. I wanted to get the whole world down on paper. When I went home again. Because the television wasn’t showing it right at all. I suddenly realized that it was all completely different. The lines, the color, even the light. Though it was definitely hard to draw light with plain pencil. Genka wasn’t lying there. But I tried.

  So that I could keep everything for when we found Seryoga.

  But Seryoga was nowhere to be found. We drove around to all the train stations again, but no one there had seen him. When I was a child my mama used to say, “He’s vanished into thin air.” When she was waiting for Father in the evenings after work. And looking out the window. Back before he left us altogether. And I would echo, “Vanished,” and she would laugh. But then she would go back to looking out the window. Like me now. Only she didn’t have Genka or Pashka beside her.

  She also used to say you have to know how to wait. Wait and believe. Then everything will work out. But I didn’t know what she meant. That’s why I waited for things I could understand: when the semester would end, when we’d have the money for a bicycle, when my math teacher would get sick, and then—when the director, Alexander Stepanovich, would come back from that Black Sea of his and we would start drawing again.

  Once I told him what my mother had said about “waiting and believing.” Because I personally knew that she was believing and waiting for nothing. But he told me I was a fool.

  “You know what you can do with that cynicism of yours. Anyway until life smashes your face against a wall, you won’t understand a thing about it. Maybe you won’t even then. But if you want, I can tell you.”

  I said I did.

  “Then listen. Waiting means experiencing gratitude. Simply rejoicing that you have something to wait for. You look out the window and think, ‘Thank you, Lord. And thank you, everyone else. To the pigeon for flying past. To the dog for running by.’ See?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Well, you’re a fool. If you’re lucky, one day you will. And you won’t be able to see the waiting behind your gratitude.”

  “You mean I should say thank you to the birds?”

  “You’re a fool,” he said, and he poured himself some vodka.

  But now I looked out the window of Genka’s SUV and I understood what he was trying to tell me.

  “Shut the window,” Genka grumbled. “It’s cold.”

  Two days later, Seryoga turned up all by himself. We were back sitting in Genka’s kitchen, the three of us, and drinking tea, when the alarm went off on his SUV downstairs.

  “Damn. I’m going to rip those kids’ heads off!” Genka said, and he went over to the window.

  By that time everyone was sick of vodka. Even Genka’s wife said she couldn’t yell at us anymore. “You’ll have to come up with something new.” So now she would sit with us, eat candies, and look through what I’d drawn. Her favorite was the Pekinese jumping in the snowdrift with a big crow hopping behind him and pulling him by the leash. The crow thought it was a mouse trying to run away.

  “And what’s this?” Genka’s wife said.

  “Those are children.”

  “But why are they sitting that way? They’re sitting on their hands.”

  “Their parents have gone to a restaurant and left them with other children. They’re waiting.”

  “But why aren’t they playing?”

  “They don’t like these strange children.”

  “I see. And what’s this?”

  “The parents came back late, and the children had fallen asleep on the floor. Now they’re picking them up. Because it’s winter, and they have to put on warm jackets. But the parents are drunk and the children are sleeping.”

  “You mean
you thought all this up?”

  “No, I was remembering. I was just thinking about how to draw waiting.”

  “And what’s this?”

  “That’s a man waiting for them to remove his cast. The nurse has gone out, and he’s sitting and waiting. They’re always going out.”

  “Listen,” Genka said, gazing into the twilight. “Those aren’t kids. There’s some guy there. He’s looking this way. Why the hell did he shove my car?”

  “Who is it?” Genka’s wife said.

  “I can’t make him out. It’s too dark. I think it’s someone I know.”

  “Come on, let me look.”

  She went over to the window with Pashka trailing behind. I didn’t go because I knew who was standing there. I didn’t have to look out the window. Because this was just the way it should be. Exactly. He came and he shoved the car.

  My waiting was over.

  “Let’s go downstairs,” I said. “It’s Seryoga. He forgot your apartment number.”

  Usually it takes about three days to get used to the idea that a friend has died. Not one and not two. Sometimes even three isn’t enough. Each time you remember him, you tell yourself, He’s dead. But it still feels like you’re lying. Not in the sense that he isn’t dead but in the sense that you’re still not ready to say those words. You can say them, but they’re empty. Unconnected to life. There’s an emptiness between them and reality. You sense that gap, and you can’t figure out what’s there, inside it. So you repeat it as often as you can: he’s dead, he’s dead, he’s gone. But you’re lying anyway. At least until three days pass. Then it’s pretty much OK.

  Girls probably feel exactly the same way when they give birth. That is, people keep shouting, Push! Push! and then all of sudden she tells herself, I’m a mama. How long does it take for her to understand that? In the sense of not just saying it. Probably three days, too. She walks around the maternity hospital saying, I’m a mama. They’re about to bring my baby. She looks at the signs on the walls, the different posters, clutches her robe at the neck, and starts getting used to it. Ah, that’s about me. I’m a mama. But it probably still takes three days or so for you to understand that you’re a mama. Or that your friend is dead.

  But Seryoga wasn’t dead. He’d just gone missing for a couple of weeks and then turned up all on his own. And now we could go home. Or rather, I could. Because Genka and Pashka were staying in Fryazino.

  There was a lot of snow in Podolsk. It crunched underfoot, clung to my hair, stuck to my boots. People were hopping off the commuter train, waving their arms, and running home. I liked walking along without hurrying. Offering my face up to the snow.

  Because it was cold. And because I knew I didn’t have to hurry anymore.

  “Say carpet,” a woman was telling her child.

  The boy was turning his head, brushing away the snowflakes, laughing, and sucking a lollipop.

  “Say carpet.”

  “Don’t want to.”

  “Say carpet.”

  “No.”

  “I won’t let you go until you say it.”

  The boy pulled the candy out of his mouth and rattled off like a machine gun: “Parket, parket, parket!”

  She burst out laughing and said, “That’s not right. Say carpet again.”

  I looked up. The snow was swirling around the streetlamps. Clouds of snow.

  “Listen, are you back now?” Olga said when I opened the door to her. “I stopped by a few times. Your apartment was so quiet. I thought something might have happened.”

  “No, nothing happened. I just had to go to Moscow. And then we were held up. Please, come in.”

  “All right, just for a minute. I wanted to see whether you’d turned up.”

  Her eyes asked forgiveness. In advance.

  “What, Nikita isn’t sleeping again?” I said.

  “We probably upset you.”

  “No, not at all, it’s fine. Wait a minute, I’ll be right there. Just shut the door.”

  When he saw me, the little boy ran into his bedroom immediately.

  “How come you left your soldier guys on the rug?” I said, walking in behind him. “Men don’t abandon their own. Here, take them.”

  He held out his hand and took his little guys from me.

  “Thank you.”

  “Now go to bed. Chop chop.”

  He pulled off his pants and shirt and dove into bed.

  “There now, that’s enough wiggling,” I said a minute later. “What are you giggling about there?”

  One eye peeped out from under the blanket. Then the other. Dark as two plums.

  “I know.”

  “What do you know?”

  “I know I know.”

  “And what is it you know you know?”

  “That you’re not scary. You just have that face.”

  “Right, now off to sleep with you! Or else I’ll call… I’ll call your mama.”

  He giggled again and hid under the blanket.

  “I won’t leave until you fall asleep.”

  Five minutes later I noticed a piece of paper on the table. A pencil lay beside it. When Olga came in I was nearly finished.

  “Whose face is this?” she said. “It looks familiar.”

  “Mine,” I said, and I put down the pencil.

  Nikita was breathing noisily under his blanket.

  Photo copyright Lutz Durstoff

  Andrei Gelasimov, born in Irkutsk in 1965, studied foreign languages at Yakutsk State University and directing at the Moscow Theater Institute. He became an overnight literary sensation in Russia in 2001 when his story “A Tender Age,” which he published on the Internet, was awarded a prize for the best debut. It went on to garner the Apollon Grigorev and the Belkin prizes as well, and his novels have been consistently met with critical and popular success in Russia and throughout Europe. His novel The Gods of the Steppe, forthcoming from AmazonCrossing, won the 2009 Russian National Bestseller literary award.

  The seeming simplicity of Gelasimov’s style can be attributed to his great gift, for which there is no counterpart in Russian literature. He could be called the Russian Salinger. Just like Salinger’s heroes, his are mainly children or young people, often at the age at which the painful metamorphosis from childhood to adulthood takes place. Gelasimov also understands how to sketch a psychological portrait of his characters with only a situation or a short, often comic dialogue.

  Gelasimov’s heroes are alone, almost as if they were encased in a cocoon. Gelasimov is not afraid to permit them an opportunity to be happy, but he does it without becoming banal. It is not the “System” that is at fault for our suffering. People cause other people to suffer, and people can make it right again. Gelasimov always keeps completely to the everyday, does not offer a commentary, and leaves room for multiple truths. If there is a moral, then he has hidden it in his works like contraband.

  Photo copyright Raymond Yin

  Marian Schwartz studied Russian and Russian literature at Harvard University, Middlebury Russian School, Leningrad State University, and the University of Texas at Austin. She is the recipient of two translation fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and a past president of the American Literary Translators Association.

  Schwartz worked as an editor for Praeger Publishers for two years in the mid-1970s and has been working as a freelance translator since 1978. Her first book publication was Vekhi, the famous collection of philosophical essays on the Russian intelligentsia, published as Landmarks in 1977.

  In addition to fiction, Schwartz has translated nonfiction in the areas of history, including four volumes in Yale’s Annals of Communism series, biography, criticism, and fine arts, including a major biography of Liubov Popova published by Abrams. She is the principal English translator of the works of Nina Berberova and translated the New York Times best seller The Last Tsar, by Edvard Radzinsky. Her two most recent book translations are Valery Panyushkin’s 12 Who Don’t Agree: The Battle for Freedom in Putin’s R
ussia (Europa Editions) and Olga Slavnikova’s novel 2017 (Overlook Press), and she has translated such Russian classics as Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov (Seven Stories Press, now out in paperback from Yale University Press), Mikhail Bulgakov’s White Guard (Yale University Press), and Mikhail Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time (Modern Library).

  Schwartz is currently completing a translation of Mikhail Shiskin’s novel Maidenhair for Open Letter Books.