by Yana Vagner
Mishka brought a bucket of water from the well. ‘Take it to the sauna,’ Natasha told him. ‘Let them put it on the stove to warm up.’ She was poking around in the first aid kit again. I didn’t dare move or say a word. Do they really think I could take a needle and poke it into Lenny’s pale, dreadful-looking, bloodstained stomach? I thought. What if he shouts or moves suddenly, what if I can’t help him, what if I only cause him more suffering and he dies anyway in spite of all our efforts? What if he dies while I’m stitching him up?
Boris came in. ‘It’s all ready, girls,’ he said, standing in the doorway. ‘Time to go. Ira, you should stay with the children, and maybe Natasha could help Anya.’ After we didn’t budge, he raised his voice: ‘Come on then! Sewing’s a woman’s job.’
‘No-no-no,’ Natasha said quickly. ‘I can’t do it, don’t even ask me, I faint at the sight of blood, so here’s a needle, here’s a thread, the thickest I could find, there’s plenty of bandages, anything you want, but I’m not going there.’ She came up to me and thrust the first aid box into my hands, and I thought, oh, how lovely, I’ll be going on my own, it probably smells there, it’s probably the same smell as in the car: fresh blood and fear. I stepped towards the door, and suddenly Ira said, ‘Wait. I’ll come with you.’
It wasn’t properly warm in the sauna yet, but we could take off our coats. The smell inside was pleasant, of heated wood and resin. We left our outerwear in the lobby and went into the tiny steam room. Lenny was lying on the upper shelf, on the untreated, unpainted wooden boards (‘Couldn’t they put something underneath him first?’ Ira said grumpily). They had taken off his boots, jumper and jacket but kept his trousers on; he lay there, stock-still, with his eyes shut, very pale, his whole body yellowish; if it wasn’t for his obvious, laboured breathing, I would have thought he was dead. The men had tied several torches together and attached them to the ceiling, and this was the only illumination in the room; the flickering, patchy circle of light they were emitting was so dismal that it didn’t even cover the whole of Lenny’s body, and his bare feet with their short, flat toes were outside the circle’s reach, in complete darkness.
I put my first aid box on the lower shelf and looked at Ira. She took off her woollen jumper and revealed a light-coloured T-shirt. Without the thick jumper she was really skinny – long neck, jutting collarbones like a young girl’s, thin, white arms with short, fair, fluffy hair. I felt awkward eyeing her up, but couldn’t help it. Luckily she didn’t notice I was looking at her; she tied back her hair, lifted her head and said:
‘Let’s wash our hands, the water’s most likely warm enough by now.’
The door to the steam room opened and Boris came in. ‘There you go,’ he said, holding out a bottle and a small flask. ‘You could probably do with that – it contains novocaine to numb it at least a little bit, and here’s some spirit for disinfection. And we also found this.’ He opened the door a bit wider and brought in a glass kerosene lamp, carefully holding it with both hands, and said, ‘Put it somewhere safe, it’ll give you a bit more light, but mind you don’t knock it over.’
Surprisingly, the bandage was still there – it was wet and twisted but it still firmly held the dressing over the wound. I tried to untie it but to no avail. ‘Let me,’ Ira said, a pair of scissors in her hand. She squeezed the blade under the twisted fabric of the bandage and I jumped, noticing how Lenny’s stomach twitched where she touched it with the blade. I don’t want to do it, I thought, I simply can’t, I didn’t even see what’s underneath the dressing and I already feel nauseous. Without looking up I tried to pull the thread through the needle and couldn’t, because my hands were shaking. When I dropped the needle for the second time, Ira, who stood near me, said:
‘You know what, let me do it.’
‘Can you do it?’ I asked, looking up at her.
‘Can you?’ she said with a smirk. ‘Give me the needle. My signature dish is stuffed duck, so I’m an expert in sewing skin.’ I cringed; she noticed and continued, slightly raising her voice. ‘I can’t see what difference there is between Lenny and a duck, apart from the former having fewer brains,’ she said loudly and confidently, but her face and her position – feet wide, arms hugging her shoulders – betrayed her panic: she was as afraid as I was. Why are you doing this? I wondered. What do you want to prove to me? That we’re friends, or that you’re stronger than me?
She took the bottle of spirit, opened it with a quiet pop, and, pausing for a second, took a sip. It made her squirm. She winced, held the bottle out to me and said: ‘Have some.’
I took the bottle from her hands and carefully smelled it. The strong odour made my eyes water.
‘It tastes even worse,’ Ira pointed out, her pale cheeks starting to turn pink. ‘But I would take a sip anyway if I were you.’
I held the bottle to my lips; the foul-tasting burning liquid filled my mouth and triggered a spasm in my throat. I won’t be able to swallow this, not in a million years, I thought – and swallowed it. I felt a bit better straight away.
Lenny woke up after some time. Perhaps he was too weak from blood loss, or maybe the novocaine was working, but he was asleep the whole time we cleaned his wound with spirit, trying to wash off both dried and fresh blood from his yellowish, pale skin. He didn’t even move when Ira stuck the needle into him for the first time. I looked away, and she immediately said:
‘You’ll have to watch this too, honey, I’m not doing it on my own. Just make sure you don’t faint right here, OK?’
Lenny suddenly awoke. His stomach moved, and he started trying to sit up; I quickly grabbed his shoulders, bent down and said into his ear, ‘It’s OK, wait a bit, you’ve got a hole in your stomach, we need to stitch it up.’ He gave me a sorrowful look and said nothing, just blinked several times.
‘Anya, blot the blood and take the scissors to cut the thread,’ said Ira through clenched teeth, and I immediately took the paper tissue. Her voice sounded tense, and I didn’t know who needed comforting more, her or Lenny, but her hands didn’t shake at all. A puncture, another puncture, a knot; cut off the thread, blot the blood. Another puncture, and again, then a knot. I glanced at Lenny’s face. Tears were streaming down his cheeks; he was crying like a child, but silently, biting his lip, his eyes shut tight. Every time Ira stuck the needle in, he sucked the air.
I watched the light-coloured top of Ira’s head; the roots of her hair were darker than the rest of it. Two weeks in the dying city, with your door locked, scared of leaving the flat even to buy food, I thought. You weren’t in the mood for dyeing hair. I wonder if you brought hair dye with you, and if not, won’t you look a bit bizarre in a couple of months? A puncture, another puncture, a knot. God, what am I thinking about, I’m lucky nobody can hear what’s going on in my head. He had a padded jacket on and his stomach is quite fat, and the knife was small – a short, wide blade, why is there so little blood? I thought. What if we stitch him up now, bandage him and tomorrow he swells up, his skin goes dark and he starts dying, slowly and painfully – how many days does one take to die of internal bleeding? A day, two days? And we’ll be waiting here until he dies, because we won’t be able to leave him here, alone, in a cold house, so we’ll wait and hurry him up in our minds, because every extra day spent here reduces our chance of reaching the lake. And when it’s all over we’ll feel relieved, and then we’ll bury him right here, in the garden, behind the house, the grave won’t be deep because the ground is certainly frozen at least a metre and a half deep. A puncture, another puncture, a knot, cut the thread, blot the blood.
‘I’m done.’ Ira sighed and straightened her back, wiping her forehead with the back of her hand. ‘Let’s fix the dressings with plasters and let the men bandage him. We won’t be able to lift him anyway.’
Having finished, we came out on to the porch, jackets draped over our shoulders, and sat on the shaky wooden steps; we didn’t feel the cold yet. She held the bottle of spirit again, and as soon as we sat down, she opened it
and took another sip, much bigger than the previous one. This time she almost didn’t wince, and passed the bottle to me. I groped for my cigarettes in my pocket and lit one.
‘Give me one too,’ she said. ‘I don’t smoke, actually, my mum died of cancer two years ago.’
‘My mum died too,’ I said, unexpectedly, and thought straight away that I hadn’t been able to say these words aloud before, even to Sergey, even to myself.
She held the cigarette awkwardly, like a schoolgirl who’d been taught to smoke behind the bike sheds, her fingers stained with iodine or blood – I couldn’t tell in the dark. For some time we smoked in silence and sipped from the bottle. The night was quiet, still and pitch-dark; the boarded windows didn’t let out a single spot of light, and both torches and the kerosene lamp had been left in the sauna, where Lenny was lying on the shelf with his stomach covered in a criss-cross pattern of plasters. He had fallen asleep as soon as we’d stopped torturing him, and that’s why we only then heard footsteps approaching. A few moments later a white ski suit came out of the darkness, but we only realised it was Marina when she was right in front of us.
She stood there without saying a word, looking straight ahead. We waited a while, but it seemed she was going to stand like that forever, so Ira told her:
‘We’ve stitched up his stomach, but you’ll have to sort out his clothes yourself.’
She didn’t answer, her face didn’t change, she didn’t even look up.
‘You know, he could do with a cold compress, to stop the bleeding. You should get some snow in a bag,’ I said, but she just stood there, unmoving; I wanted to go up to her, take her by the shoulders and give her a good shake. I almost rose to my feet, but she finally lifted her head and looked at us.
‘You’re not going to leave me, are you?’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Please don’t leave me,’ she said, her eyes glistening. ‘I have a small child, you can’t leave us here, I’ll do everything you say, I can cook, I’ll wash your clothes, just don’t leave me.’ She pressed her hands to her chest in a begging gesture, and I saw that they were covered in dried blood, which started crackling when she clenched her fists; she didn’t seem bothered by it. So that’s what you were thinking about, I thought. While you sat in the car, crouched, holding the bandage on your husband’s stomach, the whole time we were rushing here, worried he wouldn’t make it, while we were stitching up his stomach, while we were drinking this awful spirit, that’s what you were concerned about all this time. I was surprised.
‘Are you an idiot?’ Ira said, and her voice sounded so harsh that both Marina and I jumped at the sound of it. ‘Go back to the house, find a bag, fill it with snow and take it to your husband. He’s all alone in there, and it’s time you did something for him, do you hear me?’
Marina stood there for a little longer, her eyes wild, and then quietly turned and disappeared into the darkness.
‘What an idiot,’ Ira said again, and threw her cigarette end into the snow. ‘Give me another one.’
‘You know,’ I said, holding out the cigarette pack to her, ‘he didn’t tell me he’d gone to pick you up that night.’
She turned her head to me but didn’t say anything, as if waiting to see what else I was going to say.
‘I just want you to know,’ I continued, already sensing that this was going the wrong way, that I shouldn’t be saying this, especially now, ‘that if he had told me he wanted to bring you, I wouldn’t have minded.’
For some time, she sat in silence, looking at me. I couldn’t see her face in the dark. Then she got up.
‘Why do you think,’ she said calmly, looking away, ‘why do you think he left me for you?’
I didn’t answer. Then she brought her face close to mine and looked me straight in the eye: cold, hostile.
‘It’s very simple,’ she said. ‘I gave birth to Anton, I had a difficult birth, I was busy with the baby and lost interest in sex for a short while, you see. I simply stopped having sex with him. Nothing else. Do you get it? I just stopped sleeping with him. If it wasn’t for that, he’d still be with me, and we would live in that beautiful wooden house of yours, and you’d fucking die in the city, together with all your relatives.’
She threw the unlit cigarette onto the snow and walked back to the house, leaving me alone on the steps. Hang on, it was my idea to move to the country, I wanted to say, and there was a lot more I wanted to add, but I didn’t get a chance because she left.
11
Temporary Accommodation
I stayed on my own and suddenly became very cold; it happened so quickly, as if the cold had been waiting for the right moment to creep up on me. It was about minus twenty, and we had spent about fifteen minutes outside, but I hadn’t felt it until then. I couldn’t bend my fingers any more, my ears and cheeks had turned ice-cold, but I still couldn’t make myself get up and follow her straight away. It’s silly, I thought, as I walked back to the warm lobby, it’s childish, there’s my husband and son, I should be sitting next to them by the fire, at the table, because so much that we need to talk about has happened in the last twenty-four hours, and instead I’ve been here, in this sauna, with somebody else’s husband, whom I’ve never liked, while his wife, as well as this other woman, who has the amazing ability to make me feel guilty every time we talk, are both there, in that small house, only ten steps away from me, and I can’t make myself get up and walk that distance.
I pushed open the door to the steam room and peered inside. It was quiet and warm there; the cloud of cold air I let in rocked the torches on the ceiling and made the orange flame of the kerosene lamp on the lower shelf flicker. Lenny was lying still, in the same position, and was breathing heavily and hoarsely, like a whale who’d been washed ashore. He was obviously struggling, probably uncomfortable lying with his head thrown back on the hard wooden boards. I looked around and found Ira’s forgotten jumper; I folded it up and put it under his head. The back of his head was damp, and beads of sweat were glistening on his temple. When I bent over him he opened his eyes, which looked almost transparent, with fluffy, curled eyelashes.
‘Lenny, you need rest, don’t worry, the worst is over,’ I said, looking at him, and I thought he was definitely going to ask Am I going to die? or beg us not to leave him, like his wife had a few minutes ago, and was prepared to answer something like Don’t talk rubbish, or Shut up, but instead he sniffed the air and asked, ‘Is this spirit? Leave some for me,’ and smiled. It was a feeble attempt, but he smiled nonetheless.
‘I’ll turn off the light,’ I said, and reached for the hanging torches above his head, and he, still smiling, started telling me one of his dreadful jokes about a power cut in a lift, and laughed first, as usual – he never waited for other people’s reactions. Only this time he stopped, choking on his laugh and wincing with pain. I stood next to him, waiting for the pain attack to pass. He lay quietly, breathing through his nose and not uttering another word, and to my surprise I began stroking his hair and his wet cheek and said: ‘Go to sleep, Lenny. I’ll ask Marina to come over.’
I bumped into Marina at the house door; I opened it to come in and she pushed past me and ran out without saying a word, not looking at me. The veranda was still dark and cold, and I struggled to find the handle on the door leading into the warmth and light. When I finally found it, I had to narrow my eyes in spite of the semi-darkness inside. Everyone was sitting around the table with plates in front of them; there was a good smell of food and tobacco smoke. As I came in, I heard Ira saying:
‘…what did I say? Oh, come on, as if she needed to be reminded.’
Something wasn’t right there, and it wasn’t that somebody was missing – everyone except Marina was there – but they all looked tense. At first I thought I had arrived at the end of some family row, which wouldn’t have surprised me; Ira was able to upset everyone she met and had probably said something brusque, something curt. I saw an empty chair, most likely Marina’s, and sat
on it. I pushed away a plate of leftover food, and only then did I lift my eyes and look at everyone. The house was already warm; the children had taken their jackets off; both Anton and the little girl had eaten and were nodding off but continued to sit at the table, sleepy and indifferent to what was going on around them. In the middle of the table was a large, peeling enamel pot, presumably from the dresser, with a little spaghetti and tinned meat with fat forming on its top as it cooled. As soon as I looked at the pot I realised I was not in the least hungry, maybe because of what we’d just been doing to Lenny, or maybe because of the spirit, still burning my insides.
‘A-ny-a,’ Boris said suddenly, but his voice sounded different. I turned to him. He was sitting diagonally across from me, with a full plate near his right elbow; it was either his position or the untouched food on his plate that made me take a closer look at him. He didn’t say another word or move, just continued sitting in the same way, with his head low, but I realised in an instant that he was drunk, off his face, almost to the point of unconsciousness, that he could barely sit up on his chair.
‘He’s… he…?’ I shouldn’t have looked at Andrey and Natasha, who had nothing to do with this, or Ira, who was innocently eating her food, looking at her plate. Mishka had an unhappy and uneasy expression, and when I looked at Sergey, I saw that he was very angry, to the extent that he couldn’t look at me, as if he was cross with me for having to witness this, as if his dad’s condition was my fault.
‘I don’t know when he managed to get so drunk,’ he said abruptly. ‘I found one more stove in another room.’ He waved his arm somewhere behind him. ‘And while I was sorting out the kindling… he was supposed to take the spirit to you, did he bring you at least a little?’
‘He did,’ I said. ‘The bottle was full…’
‘Well, perhaps there were two,’ said Sergey angrily. ‘Damn him!’