by Serhiy Zhadan; Reilly Costigan-Humes; Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler
“So,” Pasha interrupts him again. “You really can cross over?”
“Yeah.” The taxi driver nods.
“To the orphanage, too?”
“The orphanage?” The taxi driver’s expression turns dark. “In theory, yes. It got walloped yesterday, though. Seems like it got . . .”
“Fucked?”
“Yep,” the taxi driver concurs. “I think it got fucked up, but I don’t know for sure. Haven’t been there for a while. What’s there to see at that orphanage anyway?”
They sit there, looking at each other. Pasha—kind of chubby, so unshaven as to almost be bearded, ski hat, and, most important, those glasses that immediately make you distrust him. The driver—an oversized leather jacket, shabby and cracked; it’s as if he sleeps in it, as if it’s his own skin, like an old iguana at the zoo. Worn into his skin, won’t even be able to peel it off his carcass. And the peaked cap on his head is made of leather, too, and it’s all worn, too, like a soccer ball that’s been kicked around for a long while on asphalt. Round fish eyes, a mustache that conceals his torn upper lip. He looks at Pasha, trying to figure out what he’s getting at, while Pasha looks at him, too, through the lenses of his white-collar glasses and thinks, “That worn look of his, it’s not because he’s poor. He’s got a decent car, sure, it’s not brand new, but it looks like it was in good hands in some place like Holland. And he smells fine, doesn’t reek or anything, at least. But that worn look of his . . . It’s like he’s been rubbing up against something, like a cat against his owner’s leg. Or a cow against a telegraph pole.”
“Ready to go?” the Iguana asks.
“Sure you’ll get me there?” Pasha involuntarily fixes his glasses, then jerks his hand back. “I hate myself,” he thinks. “I just hate myself for that. Why am I constantly touching them like that?”
“Doubt we’d make it to the orphanage,” says the Iguana. “I can do the train station, though. You’ll figure it out from there.”
“All right,” Pasha agrees hesitantly.
“Do ya even have any money on ya?” The Iguana asks, just in case. He squints, but one round fish eye, as watery as morning air, doesn’t quite shut all the way, still pierces Pasha.
The driver swings around in front of the motel, right at the feet of some soldiers who are standing around, puffing on their cigarettes, and looking at them in their customary fashion, the way they’d look at any other moving target. The mud-caked Opel bashes through some puddles and bounces down a narrow strip of asphalt, away from the main road, into the gray dampness of the winter panorama that opens up before them as soon as they crest a little hill and turn behind a row of trees. Over there, fields drop off and stretch as far as the eye can see; over there—where you can no longer make anything out—beyond the fog and the low-hanging clouds that look like cargo planes, something is breathing, burning, and glimmering. Pasha surmises that it’s the city. The driver bounces in and out of potholes, getting more and more angry, and then he loosens up once the motel disappears behind the trees, slows down—“lemme wipe down the windshield,” he tells Pasha—pulls onto the shoulder, scoops up handfuls of hard, darkened snow, and begins wiping the glass with it. Pasha watches the snow snap and slide down the glass, eroding the space, watches the driver blow on his icy fingers, clearly in pain, and press his worn skin against the dirty hood as he reaches for the glass and rubs little clumps of ice into it. Pasha gets out of the car and looks to the south, trying to kill time—he doesn’t have all that much to spare, though.
A field, black with last year’s unharvested sunflowers. Gray in certain spots, almost blue even. Shreds of snow. Damp, thick soil. Deep ruts from the vehicles that have driven into this dark sunflower armhole, either to fend off an attack and then keep going, or to let a passing convoy through. Pasha takes a step forward; grass pokes sharply through the hardened crust of the snow. “Stay outta there,” he reminds himself and steps back, closer to the car that’s making its presence felt behind him with its warm gasoline smell. Beyond the frigid sunflowers, transmission towers stretch out like a row of fishing-rod holders. Black metal supports the heavy horizontal lines of wire slicing through the sky and extending into the rain. Down below, far away beyond the fields, the wet fur of barren trees looms among a group of dachas. There’s something different about the trees this winter—as sensitive as animals, trembling with every blast, retaining all their heat to combat the cold, and warming little black cavities around themselves, where old grass grows a dark green. The bark is damp and vulnerable; you touch it and dark painful sap stains your hands like paint, like blood from an incision. And beyond the dachas, which stretch along a shallow industrial stream overrun with cattails, you can barely make out the wall of the maintenance depot in the gully. The gully, filled with rain and fog, bends toward the city, and the air becomes so dense that you can’t see any farther, but there’s something over there. That’s where it starts, where the city begins. And there’s one last thing. Off to the side, on the horizon, where the sky has a milky, tin sheen to it, the factory smokestacks loom—tall, cold, dead. And there isn’t a single bird around, as if there’s been a great famine and all the birds have been eaten. The front line should be somewhere in there. A real front line. Before, while the city was under siege, Pasha never had to cross it, but today it looks like he’ll be crossing that line. “Well, here we go,” Pasha thinks, trying to put himself at ease. “Well, here we go.”
The last time Pasha took a taxi was a month ago, on his way back from the city. The road was constantly coming under fire, yet everyone thought that their chances of dying weren’t as high if they drove fast. They stood there, a dark, frightened pack—Pasha and several women weighed down by bags like they were sins—by an empty gas station at the edge of the city. They were heading back home to the Station. Nobody wanted to pick them up for the longest time. Eventually, a guy in a Zhiguli slammed on the brakes, coming to a stop right in the middle of a puddle; one of the women motioned at the driver. Pull forward, you expect us to slog through the water? But the driver started yelling with such desperation that everyone wordlessly traipsed through the puddle. He tore away from the gas station, turned into a field, and goaded his car across the black, coal expanse between the city and the Station, not slowing down for a second, not turning his lights on for a second. He blazed ahead, yelling the whole time, laying into those hapless women. They just nodded wordlessly in reply, seemingly agreeing with everything he said. They were like pilgrims at a church—they’d come all that way to repent their sins, so why wouldn’t they just go ahead and repent? Pasha wanted to interrupt him and protect the women’s dignity, but he didn’t interrupt the driver or stand up for them. He even tipped the guy.
The road’s in such bad shape that people mostly use it out of respect for its past. They might as well have been driving through black soggy mud. But it seems as though the iguana taxi driver knows this road as well as his own body—he scratches where it itches and rubs where it aches. He crosses himself vigorously when a large wooden cross comes into view on the shoulder and glares at Pasha. Well, are you gonna cross yourself or what? Pasha pretends to be oblivious. Down below, at a fork in the road just before a bridge, are several abandoned checkpoints that look like ravaged birds’ nests. Clothing, dishes, newspapers, smashed military supply boxes, sandbags mauled by the wind—all of it lies out in the open, orphaned, burrowing into the ground and mixing with the snow and silt. The Iguana tenses up every time they pass a checkpoint. Guys have been rotting away here for the past few months, and nobody knows what they’ve left behind, what surprises might still be in their burrows. Now it’s impossible to tell who controlled those checkpoints because everything’s burnt out, shredded with shrapnel, and the trees look like the masts on fishermen’s ships—sharp, tall, stripped of their branches. Driving over the bridge is particularly scary, since bridges are strategic targets. Each strategic target elicits one desire, first and foremost: to blow it up and send anyone who’s decided
to cross it flying into the air. The Iguana even shuts his eyes as they pull onto the bridge. Seeing that, Pasha winces, too. They ride like that for a bit, completely in the dark. Fear is an invisible yet all-encompassing thing. You can’t see any apparent danger, everything’s quiet, and the sky up above is glimmering like a sheet of metal, but the mere realization that you’re in the crosshairs and that someone can fucking waste you at any moment, regardless of what color the sky is and what’s moving around up there, makes the whole situation unsettling. So you just want to keep sitting there with your eyes closed and count to a hundred, until all the monsters around you recede.
The Iguana cracks first—he steps on the gas, snakes between some cinder blocks with warnings painted on them in red, and surges ahead, down a streaked coal road. Then, before they reach the next hill, he abruptly turns the wheel as they approach a row of low black trees—packed tight with mulberries and sharp acacias—that stretches off to the right. The Opel flops into a snowy pit like a dog into a foamy wave, skids hard, spitting up black earth and ice, and then keeps moving, moving forward. It gradually crawls out of the snowy mush, kicks some up on the grass sprinkled with gravel that conceals an old, barely visible path, gets firm ground under its wheels, keeps slipping on the wet clay, and then pushes ahead, along a row of mulberries as black as newspaper headlines.
“Where are you going?” Pasha asks, frightened. “What if there are mines?”
“Mines? You gotta be kidding,” the Iguana replies wrathfully. “Nobody’s been out here for two years, look how tall the grass is.”
The grass is smacking the undercarriage of the Opel and poking at the windows; there would’ve been no getting out of this thicket if someone hadn’t thought to sprinkle the road with gravel, unseen, yet felt—it crunches under the tires, like an apple in your mouth, dully turning over under the rubber. The Iguana steps on the gas with relish; the translucent afternoon sun dangles right above them in the sky.
“Used to be able to get back to the dachas this way,” the Iguana explains with relish. “Now the road’s all overgrown, see?”
They ride down the invisible path for a while, squashing dry weeds and hugging the trees so nobody can spot them, even though there are so many gaps that the January gusts blow right through. Hide all you want—you’ll still have some serious explaining to do at the first checkpoint. The first dachas are up ahead, their fences visible through the mulberries. The trees end abruptly—then comes a flat field that’s been ripped up by moles, followed by a street as quiet as death. Once again an inexpressible fear overcomes Pasha; once again he wants to close his eyes and hide under the covers. Meanwhile, the Iguana decides to go for it; he steps on the gas and turns off, right into a ravine, where a stream should be flowing. And the car slides down the field, bouncing up on every molehill; the dachas remain up above, while they nearly slide into the stream, and there are cow paths running alongside it, and the Iguana heads down these cow paths, going faster and faster, farther and farther away from the empty dacha windows. Pasha can’t help but look back, and he spots smashed, angry shutters, but those shutters are no longer relevant to him and the Iguana. They fly past a patch of cattails, pull onto a concrete surface, whiz down the lousy yet hard road for a long time, an inexpressibly long time, and then they’re driving through the high entrance of the maintenance depot.
The road gets better, but the Iguana doesn’t speed up. Instead, he slows down, starts listening intently and looking all around. Pasha rolls down his window. Outside it smells faintly of a swamp and dead grass. They push on. The outer wall keeps going and going; eventually, a gate—blue, metal, wide open—appears up ahead. The Iguana pulls up carefully. It’s quiet and empty—feels like somebody has just stepped out but will be coming back. That kind of silence, it scares them, presses down on them. And there’s something over there behind the gate, right on the ground, between torn work overalls and a stained rag. Something that doesn’t belong. The Iguana slows down and looks over there, transfixed. Pasha sticks his head out the window; he wants to catch a glimpse, too.
“What is it?” he asks, frightened. “Huh? What is it?”
“Dogs,” the Iguana answers, swallowing hard. “Somebody shot ’em.”
“But why?”
“Who the fuck knows?” the Iguana explains. “Maybe so they wouldn’t make any noise.”
There are two dogs. Big, dark, unknown breed. They lie there in the dirty water, one next to the other. The blood underneath them has soaked into the snow and asphalt; red fur has clumped together around their wounds. Scowls hardened by death, sharp yet now completely harmless fangs, glass-button eyes, black paws. Empty lot, open gate. The Iguana drives on wordlessly. The sun comes out for a brief instant. Pasha looks at its rays, shielding his face with his hand and then looks over at the Iguana—it seems like the Iguana’s eyes are moist. Probably the sun.
To their left, the concrete wall stretches on and on, and a gas pipe painted yellow runs on their right. The pipe’s broken in a few places. It looks like a bone that needs tending to. There’s nobody to tend to it, though—empty street, not a single person on the main road, just burned metal up ahead; it looks like somebody chewed a piece of overcooked meat for a while and then set it aside to cool. The Iguana carefully skirts the burned heap.
“That’s a tank,” he says. “A T-64. Those things burn like firewood.”
“But how’d it get that way?” Pasha asks.
“What’s the difference?” the Iguana answers. “You shoulda seen it before. There were two corpses inside. I kept coming over here all week. You’d think somebody woulda taken ’em away.”
“Why didn’t you do it?” Pasha suddenly turns toward him.
“What fuckin’ good would they do me?” the Iguana answers harshly, his cap sharply and menacingly aimed straight at Pasha.
Pasha doesn’t know what to say. He turns toward the window. The Iguana looks at the road, not saying anything either.
“It’s scary,” the Iguana says unexpectedly. “Holding something that’s dead is scary. What don’t you get?”
Pasha just nods, discreetly rubbing his hands together, as if they’re cold. They keep going. The wall keeps going, too, eventually running into the main road that leads to the city. There are two-story houses behind the main road; mostly workers from the maintenance depot live here. Pasha scans the windows warily; half of them are smashed, half of them are covered with plywood or plastic sheets. They’re all dark. No people. Pasha thinks about how the last time they saw real, living people was by the motel, but those people were so damn angry that they weren’t like people at all. There was Anna, too, but he didn’t even catch a glimpse of her. “I wonder what she looks like,” Pasha thinks. “Would I recognize her if I saw her?” There was Hans, too. Pasha thinks of Hans—his heavy eyes, the lazy movement of his shoulders—shudders, and starts looking around. The Iguana pulls up to the main road and hesitates. He rolls down the window, sticks his leather head outside, and listens tensely. It seems as if he’s sniffing the air, but the air has a burned, dead smell to it, so he can’t do too much sniffing. So the Iguana sticks his head back inside and retreats into his burrow, rolling the window up quickly and anxiously.
“Looks clear,” he says to Pasha, mouthing the words. “Wanna try?”
“Okay,” Pasha replies, also mouthing.
They carefully crawl up the hill. The wall stays behind, while a panorama of a wide road and a low-hanging sky opens up to the left. There’s so much sky that it’s all you can see, but your eyes adjust to the sheer abundance of air. The Iguana and Pasha spot a white-and-gray bus with busted windows and soldiers crowded around it. It’s unclear who they are: no flags, can’t make out any insignia from the car, and Pasha doesn’t know much about insignias anyway. Dark and apprehensive, they stand there, holding their guns and looking straight at them. Straight at their Opel. Their expressions are intent and surprised, seemingly asking, “Who are you? Where’d you come from?” The Iguana even
crouches at the wheel, slowing down involuntarily, and all he wants to do right now is put it in reverse and roll back, behind the wall, but Pasha realizes that there’s no going back. Just don’t go back, anything but going back.
“C’mon,” he hisses at the Iguana. “C’mon, step on it.” And the Iguana steps on it obediently, yet timidly, turns, and then advances forward slowly, very slowly, the way kids walk to the bathroom in the middle of the night—carefully, slowly, groping ahead, afraid they’re going to bump into an open door. And both of them, Pasha and the Iguana, look in the mirror, scared, and see one soldier break away from the group and aim his Kalashnikov at their Opel, which is slowly receding, and they see one of his buddies touching his arm. Forget it. Don’t. But he shrugs his friend’s hand off and raises his Kalashnikov again. And Pasha thinks to himself, “Maybe I should get out of the car, talk to him, explain everything, and show him my papers? But who is he? Who are those guys? How do you talk to them?” At this point, there’s nowhere to hide; the Iguana’s practically paralyzed, and Pasha’s head is sinking into his shoulders. “Should’ve gone home,” he says to himself, eyes fixed on the soldier, who’s looking at them with thrilled disdain. But behind the soldiers, somewhere out there, beyond the hill, the silence suddenly shatters—there’s an explosion, soldiers drop to the ground like ripe apples onto wet grass, the guy who was aiming at them drops to the asphalt, too, and scurries to the side of the road, and that’s the last of it Pasha sees, since the Iguana rams the gas pedal into the depths of the Opel with his foot. They fly down the empty road under the wet skies—afternoon sunlight bursts through in blinding spots like pools of thaw water, and all the water around them flares into a thousand sparkles, the way it does in March. But then the skies close like elevator doors, and once again everything’s damp and silvery.