by Serhiy Zhadan; Reilly Costigan-Humes; Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler
When they get down to the traffic circle, the Iguana goes the wrong way, dodges a barricade made out of wooden pallets, and whizzes down a wide, empty street. He whizzes along and whips into the square next to the train station. It’s empty, too—it seems like everyone who wanted to leave did so a long time ago. He slows down.
“That’s it,” he yells at Pasha. “Hop out.” Pasha does hop out, paying as he’s lunging out of the car. He even has enough time to take umbrage at the fare. He’s always paid what they’ve told him to pay, he’s never taken umbrage before, but something stings him this time—they were scared, together, they were on edge, together. “What are you rippin’ me off for?” Pasha thinks indignantly. But he pays the full fare, goddammit, he always pays what they tell him to pay.
The train station is painted yellow, but the paint has become dark and heavy in the rain. The national flags have been prudently taken down from the columns—the army’s leaving the city, don’t want to agitate the newcomers. The wastebaskets attached to the columns are filled to the brim with bright wrappers and plastic. There are several bloody bandages on top, draped over empty Coke bottles. The blood’s bright, too. Nobody has emptied the wastebaskets in a while. Even the pigeons are steering clear of them. “Yeah, where are they?” Pasha thinks, squinting all around. “Where is everybody?” Remnants of snow on the roof, gnarled trees nearby, the skies settling frigidly. Pasha’s eyes slide up and then down, and he suddenly notices them—hundreds of warm clumps of birds are clenched like fists, hundreds of bird beaks are aimed down at him, hundreds of round eyes, frozen from constant fear. Pigeons are huddled against one another, perched high up above the columns, under the awning of the station, nestling into one another like they’re cold. But they’re scared, not cold: scared of the racket behind the factory, scared of the silence of the surrounding streets, scared of the mercury gleam in the sky, scared that nobody’s around. Scared of Pasha, who appeared out of the blue and is hanging around outside the station, yes, scared of him, too. They’re keeping their eyes, as round as the sun, fixed on him. Pasha immediately feels uneasy, standing there with all the birds’ exacting eyes on him. “I wonder how many of them there are up there. How’d they all cram in there?” he thinks. “What if something happens to the train station? What if it burns down? What then? Where would they go? Where would they hide?” Suddenly, he starts to feel so sorry for them, as well as for the kid—what the hell is he still doing at that orphanage? Should’ve picked him up ages ago. His mom’s an idiot, just dumping him off there like that, but does that mean Pasha and his old man can’t look after him? Of course they can. Should’ve started a while ago, especially considering the state he’s in. “I’m always putting everything off, never have enough time for the most important things, I’m always avoiding everything, stepping aside. I don’t have the guts to say what I think and think what I want. When’s this all going to end?” Pasha asks himself. And he starts to feel so sorry for himself, too, as sorry as he feels for the birds that are looking at him the way they would at a hunter—their expressions doomed yet intrigued. And just as Pasha’s starting to really feel sorry for himself, he lowers his eyes and sees the windows. Through the windows he sees dozens of eyes with that same bird look—exacting and doomed. They vigilantly track his every movement, his every step, watching through the unwashed station windows, transfixed and mistrustful. And at this instant, Pasha realizes that the station is packed with people; they’re hunkering down inside, like it’s a church in a besieged city. They think that nobody can get to them there, looking through the windows at a world that’s implacably narrowing, shrinking. When spurts of fire snap dryly on the next street over, Pasha finally comes to his senses. He darts toward the station door, rams his shoulder into it, pressing himself into it, but it won’t budge. Then another spurt crackles in the air, and Pasha panics, scratching at the door like a drowning man at the bottom of a steamboat, until a hand, a tiny child’s hand, pushes the door in his direction. “Pull, not push,” Pasha says to himself, yanking on the door. The scent of hundreds of frightened, sleep-deprived people, the smell of fear and sweat, the heavy blend of hysteria and sleeplessness hits him in the face. Pasha lunges inside and finds himself amid warm bodies and wet silence. “They can all see,” Pasha thinks. “They can all see how scared I am, how freaked out I am. They’re looking at me like I’m some sort of clown. Well, I am a clown. Why the hell did I come all the way down here anyway?” He takes off his glasses (coming inside made them fog up), wipes them with his sweater sleeve, puts them back on (he always seems to be fixing them), and looks around cockily. Yes, I’m listening now. Anything you wanted to say, huh? And he notices, with a certain degree of disappointment, that nobody, nobody at all, is paying any attention to him, that nobody’s even looking at him, that everyone who could get a spot by the windows is peering out at the big, wide world. It’s as if they’ve run in here to get out of the rain and now they’re gazing at the sky, waiting for the storm to pass. Everyone who couldn’t get a spot by the windows is balled up on the benches and in the corners, anticipating something, who knows what. Pasha’s standing in the middle of this frightened, fragrant crowd, and he realizes that he has no particular reason to stay put, either, that he has to keep moving. So he starts moving, starts making his way through the viscous crowd like he’s wading through autumn water without taking off any of his clothes.
Just women and children—no men. Pasha’s the only person with a beard. It feels like he’s just stepped into a women’s prison. “Where are the men?” he asks himself. “Maybe men aren’t allowed in here? Maybe they’re all out doing something important, and I’m standing here with my dumb-ass beard like I’m waiting for a train? Maybe the men are already gone and they left their women here in the luggage rooms?” At this moment, somebody shrieks wildly in the corner, and everyone looks over; the room freezes for just a second. Then it starts buzzing and yelling incoherently—the women peel away from the window, lifting their drowsy heads off their neighbors’ shoulders, popping out from behind the columns. The outcry doesn’t abate; moreover, some distinct words and tones come through, and Pasha understands, not with his head but with his lungs, that this has to do with a child. So he darts into the crowd, trying to push his way through. He catches the women’s all-encompassing scent, the breath and smell of a hundred women, the smell of abandoned homes and hastily gathered bundles, the smell of outbursts and grievances that can’t be addressed to anyone. He pushes forward. “Let me through,” he says. “Let me through, I’m a teacher, let me through.” But nobody is really listening to him. Also, you can’t hear all that much amid the wailing and shrieking that keeps coming and coming from the corner, never relenting. Pasha basically hops on some woman’s shoulders, and she gives up her spot right away, glaring loudly at him. But he doesn’t care; he barrels into the corner and sees a woman on the floor. She’s wearing nice—well, expensive—clothes: a pink leather jacket and high-heeled boots. She’s sitting on the floor on a folded piece of cardboard, squeezing a little girl, about two years old. She’s squeezing her hard, like somebody’s going to take the girl away from her, and she’s hollering so everyone understands that’s not going to happen. The thing is, everyone’s more than willing to protect the woman in pink, but they can’t understand what they’re supposed to protect her from. The child can’t understand what’s going on with her mom, why she’s hanging on to her like that, what she wants from her. She isn’t used to seeing her mom like this, so she lets out a frightened scream. And the women gathered around start yelling like somebody’s being strangled. Pasha realizes that if this goes on any longer somebody really is going to get strangled, so he sits down beside the woman and begins talking to her. But she just looks at him, her eyes dead with fear, and keeps wailing. Then Pasha snaps, grabbing the woman’s head with his left hand and yanking her toward him.
“What?” he hisses right in her face. “What? Well?” The woman focuses her deathly eyes on his glasses and suddenly sa
ys—it’s more of a forced sob, actually:
“Took it right off my hand . . . while we were sleeping.”
“What’d they take?” Pasha asks, bewildered.
“The gold,” the woman howls. “They took the gold.”
“Who did it?” Pasha asks, trying to take her daughter out of her arms.
“I don’t know.” She just squeezes the girl even closer to her chest. “I don’t know. We were sleeping.”
“Who took it?” Pasha gets up and looks around. “Who?”
He’s speaking quietly, but he can tell that everyone’s listening to him. They listen, not even bothering to hide their staring. They watch him, their eyes heavy, sticky, yet devoid of fear. They’re watching. Who are you? Where’d you come from? What are you doing here? Pasha watches them, too, his eyes sliding across their faces—drowsy, embittered, wet with tears—and he realizes that he really is the only man here, and he doesn’t elicit any trust, just suspicion and irritation. It’s as though he’s herded them in here into this building and locked it from the inside so nobody can get out, so everybody knows that he’s caused all the problems around here, that it’s all his fault, that he—bearded Pasha, the teacher in the warm jacket who wormed his way into the crowd, sniffing around and probing for information—will have to answer for everything. Pasha can’t take their eyes on him and the silence any longer; he can’t take the wailing behind him and the child’s sharp, wet shrieking.
“Who took it? I’m asking you, who? Why won’t you answer me?”
The women won’t answer him, but they do step aside. Two figures emerge from behind them. The first guy’s stocky, like he’s been stomped down—coarse hair and light, sun-faded eyes. He looks like a supervisor—well, an ex-supervisor, a guy who doesn’t have anyone reporting to him—in a camo jacket with a collar made of some dead beaver and ironed pleated pants tucked into his blue rubber boots. Walking behind him is this really young, snotty-nosed guy with red, angry, swollen eyes; it looks like he was playing a computer game all night, and he lost. Jerky movements, jagged gait, jacket with some sparkles on it, kid’s footwear, dark green sneakers that have gotten even darker from all the water. “Guess there still are some men here. Not all of them left. The best ones stuck around,” Pasha thinks.
“What’s going on here?” Stocky asks.
He’s talking, mixing the two languages, standing in front of Pasha, not looking straight at him, addressing his question to someplace off to the side, like he’s talking to spirits. He’s talking, his stomach solidly and skillfully pushing Pasha into the corner, toward the woman and the girl, who’s quieted down, intrigued by these new characters.
“So,” Pasha begins explaining. “Basically, this woman was sleeping . . . next to her child, and they took their gold.” He’s involuntarily mixing the two languages, too. “Yeah, basically, she was sleeping, and they took their gold . . . ,” Pasha says, his tone less assured.
“And who are you?” Stocky asks him, even though he’s looking at the woman, whose face has several band-aids on it—either somebody hit her or she fell. So Pasha doesn’t know if he should answer or let the woman answer for him.
“Me?” he asks, just in case.
“Yeah, you,” says Stocky. “Maybe you’re the one who took it?”
“Me?” Pasha asks with a flustered sigh.
He chokes on the warm, stale station air, about to give Stocky a piece of his mind, but somebody beats him to the punch.
“Yeah, it was him all right,” a lady with gold teeth says quietly yet firmly.
Pasha turns toward the voice. Rage takes the wind out of him; he wants to see that lady, get a good look at her. He searches for her eyes but only sees her teeth shining dimly in the crowd. Pasha finds himself thinking that he’s never seen so much gold. “Maybe that’s the gold that got taken,” he thinks. “Maybe she took it and hid it under her tongue. Yeah, it’s gotta be hard to talk with it in your mouth, but nobody’ll take it from you at least.” He lurches forward, looking to give her a piece of his mind, but Stocky flings his hand out. Pasha runs into this barrier, bounces back, and then charges into the crowd again, but this time Stocky flings out all five of his chubby splayed fingers covered with fair, seemingly bleached hair. Pasha looks at those fingers and steps back, scared.
“Freeze,” Stocky says. “Freeze. Who are you?”
“A teacher,” Pasha answers.
“A teacher? Oh, please!” yells another woman, who, incidentally, also has gold teeth. “He took it!”
“Quiet down,” Stocky replies, lifting his heavy hand. “We’ll sort this out. Papers,” he says, turning toward Pasha.
“Gotta ask who he is,” Pasha thinks. “Don’t even think about handing him your papers.” And then he reaches for his papers right away. Stocky interprets that in his own way, intercepts Pasha’s arm, wrings it like a wet sheet, and spins Pasha toward the wall. The ladies all start carrying on at once.
“It was him!” they yell. “It was definitely him! He’s been bumming around here. It was him!”
“Quiet down,” Stocky interrupts them and then turns to the side and issues an order to the young guy. “Check his pockets.”
“Who do you think you are?” Pasha eventually forces out a question, shaking his head.
“Shut your trap,” the young guy advises him and begins rooting through his pockets. He takes out a pack of gum, some tissues, then some coins, then some paper clips. Then all of it slips out of his hands and spills across the sticky floor. Then he reaches into the pockets of Pasha’s jeans, takes out his wallet, makes a big show of opening it up in front of everyone—to clear himself of any suspicion—picks through it with obvious interest, takes out some old receipts, a shopper’s card, and package slips from the post office. He counts the bills, pauses for a split second—“C’mon, c’mon,” Stocky says, nodding at him—stuffs the wallet back into Pasha’s pocket, pats him down with his hands, as bony as the Grim Reaper’s, and then reaches into Pasha’s backpack. He digs around in there as if he owns the place, pulls out some sandwiches, a bottle of water, and a shabby old detective novel. Pasha’s just standing there, looking down into the corner at the woman pressing the girl against herself, while the woman’s looking at Pasha as if she’s never doubted, not even for a minute of her hapless life, that it was him, Pasha, this bearded, bespectacled geek, who took her gold. Then Pasha gets spun around abruptly, so now he’s facing his peers.
“Why the fuck are you roaming around without your papers?” the young guy asks, seemingly speaking not to Pasha but rather to the whole gold-toothed pack of women. “Huh?” he says in a theatrically pushy tone.
“I have my papers,” Pasha answers, aggrieved, and he feels like he’s about to burst into tears, and everyone will see him, a real big dude with a beard standing there and crying, and they’ll all laugh at him.
They don’t let him cry, though. Stocky turns around with Pasha, shoves him forward, and they cleave through the sticky margarine of the crowd. “Take it easy,” Stocky yells up at the ceiling, seemingly addressing the birds. “We’ll sort everything out.” The birds don’t answer.
The train station attendant’s nest looks like a death row inmate’s cell, cramped and poorly ventilated. The curtains are drawn, so you don’t know what’s going on in the main hall. The screen of the computer on the desk is all taped up, and last year’s calendar is taped to the glass. A cup filled with coins and tacks, a calculator, several trade union newspapers. It’s hard to like your customers when your work space looks like this. Oh yeah, and there’s a portable television, too—red, caked with dust, as if someone’s sprinkled ashes on it—it looks like a mini gas chamber. Pasha’s led inside, over to the wall. Stocky locks the door and tucks the key into his pocket. “At least he didn’t swallow it,” Pasha thinks as he observes all this. He goes to sit down in an office chair, but the young guy beats him to it—he plops down and immediately turns on the TV. Nothing’s really on—just some shadows walking through smoke,
bleeding profusely, and showering the camera with curses. Stocky sits down, too, right on the desk, ass on the calculator. He tosses his camo jacket to the young guy, who just sits there with his arms extended, like he’s holding the bread and salt at a welcoming ceremony. Stocky crosses his arms on his chest and occasionally scratches his jaw—that’s him sorting everything out. He’s wearing a dark green vest under his jacket; it goes with his boots. Pasha eventually reaches into his inside pocket, takes out his papers, and hands them to Stocky, wordlessly. He flips through Pasha’s little blue threadbare passport wordlessly, stops when he gets to the picture (Pasha quickly takes off his glasses and aims his weak eyes at nothing in particular), and finds the line listing his place of residence.
“From the Station, yeah?” he asks calmly.
“Yeah,” Pasha answers.
“You’re a teacher?”
“Yeah.”
“Why didn’t you say so?”
Pasha is on the verge of tears again, but he can’t cry here. He starts making excuses—there was no time, I was confused, should’ve repeated myself, you didn’t hear me, you didn’t get what I meant. He keeps talking and talking, thinking to himself, “Who am I even talking to? Who are these guys? What are they doing in this office? Should ask ’em, really should.”
Before he can ask, somebody knocks on the little window built into the wall of the office. The young guy spins around in his chair like a weathervane, opens the narrow embrasure, leans forward, listens and listens, hearing someone out for a while, for an eternity, while they cry and gripe for a while, for an eternity, and then he begins answering. His voice is hollow; half of what he’s saying is unintelligible—and that’s from inside the office. One can only imagine what those craving information, those on the other side of the window, are making out. He’s speaking resolutely, as if he’s been containing himself for a while because he didn’t have an audience, but now he has the floor—now he has the chance to say whatever he wants.