by Serhiy Zhadan; Reilly Costigan-Humes; Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler
Sometime in the early morning, the city really starts burning.
DAY TWO
They wouldn’t even fight. She’d just get really quiet whenever she didn’t like something. And he’d just leave the house whenever he had a problem with something. Then he’d come back. They’d sit in the kitchen like nothing had happened. Pasha would purposely check his students’ homework very slowly, while Maryna would keep sending these short texts, one after another, like she was taking some endless test. She’d go to bed first, and he would only follow after he’d delayed long enough for her to fall asleep. He’d get into bed carefully, so as not to wake her. She wouldn’t really be sleeping, of course. He knew that, obviously.
Two years ago, after many long months of talking and getting to know each other, after taking several breaks and feeling strange surges of tenderness, Pasha proposed to her. Maryna took offense. She didn’t move out of his place, though. They kept living like that—with this concealed and inexplicable resentment. Maryna didn’t want to marry him, but Pasha didn’t have the guts to kick her out—he was the one who’d suggested she move in, after all. So they slept in the same bed. The worst thing was that Pasha could no longer hide anything from her. She watched him from up close, she could see everything very well. She saw his body in the morning, his face, his skin, which was getting less supple, growing dimmer, fading like a newspaper left out in the sun. She saw how he treated his dad, the way he was always bickering with him. She saw how afraid he was of his sister. She saw how he hid from his nephew, how he secretly hated his principal, how he ignored his students. She saw that he just didn’t know how to act around her, how to talk to her, how to sleep with her. He lived like someone who’d committed a crime right in front of a witness who’d file a merciless, cold-blooded report, not omitting a single detail, not missing a single incident. “I set myself a trap. And I took her along for the ride. Why would I do that?” Pasha thought despairingly, as he looked at Maryna. Things got downright bad last winter. Something had changed in the air, like it’d been electrified. It felt like everyone had gone crazy—only talking about politics, watching news reports, sharing them. Pasha talked but didn’t watch anything. His words lacked conviction, though, which pissed Maryna off, just infuriated her. Something had broken in his language, cracked, like ice on a reservoir in March, and it was on the verge of splitting into countless heavy, prickly shards. Pasha didn’t even try to fix anything—how can you fix ice that’s snapping and sinking into frigid water? “It’s a real shame,” he thought. “But what can you do?” He kept sleeping next to her. He’d just delay getting into bed more and more to let her fall asleep. And he’d sleep in workout clothes so he wouldn’t have to feel her warmth.
In the morning, he’d wake up and lie there for a while, completely still. So there was no way she could tell he’d already woken up, so there was no way she’d even try to ask him about anything, so she wouldn’t touch him by accident, so there was no way he’d touch her. He’d gotten into the habit of waking up and lying there for a while, completely still, thereby tearing a few extra minutes of peace and quiet away from the world. A few minutes when he didn’t have to talk to anyone, when he didn’t have to listen to anyone. Like now. He takes out his phone, checks the time before the screen goes black again, examines the concrete floor. His shoes, heavy and hefty as kettlebells, lie next to his sleeping bag. Seven a.m., the screen goes black, it gets dark again, his winter jacket has a damp smell to it in the darkness—that’s smoke and yesterday’s rain. It didn’t dry out all the way overnight, now it’s filling the space with the scent of rain and the chills. Pasha catches a whiff of wet clothes and fishes the scent of crushed plaster and bricks out of the moisture, along with frozen, crushed stone and the thick grass that he trudged through, and all of yesterday with its smells, glints, and voices pounces on him, shaking him so hard, like a late-night tram shakes the last passenger, that Pasha props himself up on his elbows, listens hard to the darkness, and rubs his face with his numb hand.
“You’re finally up!” says a voice in the darkness.
He takes out his phone again, turns on the flashlight, looks around. The kid’s sitting on a blanket, like the Buddha—calm and listless from being alone for so long. Turtleneck sweater pulled up to his nose, sweatpants, knitted women’s socks. A death row prisoner in solitary.
“What are you doing up?” Pasha crawls out of his sleeping bag and feels a chill immediately rise through his body. The cold doesn’t faze you when you’re sleeping, but it gets to you as soon as you crawl out, like when you’re approaching an unseen body of water at night.
“You kept me up,” the kid says calmly. “You kept talking to yourself. No wonder Maryna left you.”
“Nobody left me,” Pasha replies, his tone a little too harsh. He digs around in his sleeping bag, finds his glasses, plants them on his nose, fixes them with his dead fingers. “We weren’t married,” he adds, just in case.
“Gotcha,” the kid says. His voice is filled with such contempt that Pasha’s whole body shudders.
“Man, it’s cold,” Pasha says, finds his jeans, tries pulling them on, gets all tangled up trying to keep his balance. “What was I saying?” he asks cautiously, so as to elicit a straight answer but not make the kid think he cares all that much.
“Something about conferences,” the kid says.
“Conferences?”
“Parent-teacher conferences,” the kid adds. “Oh yeah, and you were calling out to some girl named Anna. Who is she?”
“A waitress.”
“Hehe. So you were calling some waitress over. When’s the last time you ate?”
“When was it?” Pasha asks himself; he’s standing there, frozen, on one leg, like a crane, thinking. Then he pulls on his jeans and sweater wordlessly, picks up his jacket, as wet and heavy as a fisherman’s net, and puts it on. “When was it?” he repeats.
“Let’s go,” the kid says.
Sasha gets up, finds a pair of adult-sized rubber boots, takes a large knife out of one of them and a flashlight out of the other, tosses a green jacket over his shoulders, and steps out into the hallway first. Pasha takes a while to tie his shoes, hastily rolls up his sleeping bag, and runs out after the kid, who’s standing at the end of the hallway and looking at him reproachfully.
“Shoes,” Pasha explains.
“Yep,” the kid replies. “They reek, I know.”
Pasha is about to say something, but the kid is already up ahead, turning the corner, so Pasha decides not to continue this strange exchange.
They go up to the first floor. The kid turns around.
“Wanna see a demolitions guy?” he asks.
“What kind of guy?”
“A dead one,” the kid explains succinctly, and keeps going.
They go up another flight of stairs; the kid opens a window between floors, steps onto the sill. Wet wind whips through the open window, along with the distant sound of explosions and automatic gunfire, particularly alarming in the rarified morning air. Pasha hesitates, since he can’t figure out where they’re shooting, where the danger is. But then the kid extends a calming hand.
“C’mon,” he says. “We can’t go through the gym anyway. Nina’s there. She won’t let us.”
Pasha ventures out onto the windowsill, leaving behind heavy tracks, black as seals on documents. The kid goes right from the windowsill onto the canopy, then onto some sandbags that are blocking the back entrance, and finally hops down into the thick morning fog. Pasha hops down after him. The kid’s jacket flashes in the fog, a bright green splotch. Pasha heads toward it.
They walk down an asphalt path, go behind a building, and enter an orchard. Leaves that never got raked up shine yellow in the fog; they bounce wetly when you step on them, so it feels like you’ll get sucked into them on your next step, sink in up to your waist, fall into a pit or an open manhole. Then the path just disappears, but the kid knows where he’s going. He confidently navigates the terrain, steers cl
ear of the rebar sticking out of the grass, steps over a concrete stake lying between some apple trees, and dodges some wet, taut branches. Pasha is soon short of breath, but he tries not to show it—he doesn’t want the kid to see that this morning run between the wet apple trees is wearing him out.
“Almost there?” he asks the kid, trying to calm his breathing.
The kid doesn’t answer, though. Or maybe he does, but Pasha just can’t hear him. They’re suddenly stopped by a metal fence. “Looks just like the ones at the zoo,” he thinks. His school has a fence just like this one, too. The kid finds two bent rods, squeezes between them, slides over to the other half of the apple orchard. This all takes Pasha a little longer—he tries, gets caught, panics, backs up, sheds his jacket, and only then squeezes between the rods. The kid’s gone.
“Sasha,” Pasha yells into the thick fog. “Sasha, where are you?”
He takes off his glasses, cleans them, puts them back on—that makes no real difference, though—slips into his jacket, trying to warm himself up. The rain let up last night and the fog’s settled, like snow that’s slid off a mountain and into a valley. He takes a step forward, stops. Then another step. In the fog, he bumps into the kid, who’s standing at the edge of a ravine, craning his skinny teenage neck, staring down warily. Down below, the fog is just as thick. At their feet, the ripped armholes of a valley open up before them; they can see yellowed grass and wet bushes—the fog snags on them, wraps around them like a spiderweb. Then the dense, milky expanse continues—dusky silver, endless. And somewhere over there, in that dense milk, is a constant rumbling and the gleam of yellow lights; exhausting bursts of automatic gunfire crackle, mortar shells explode—often, not like yesterday—but they can’t see anything, so they get this feeling that they aren’t exploding here, in this life, next to them. Smoke rises out of the valley, smoke weaves into the fog like a dark strand into a dead man’s gray hair, as fear and danger immediately return.
“Watch out,” Pasha says. “Step back.”
“You scared?” the kid asks without turning around. He’s looking down, into the fog, mesmerized.
“Where are those explosions?” Pasha decides not to continue this unpleasant line of conversation.
“That one was on the edge of town,” the kid says, listening hard. “And that last one was by the train station,” he adds after a pause.
“By the train station?” Pasha asks, surprised. “But it’s just women over there. I was there yesterday,” he explains.
“You were on the prowl?” the kid inquires. “How would they know who’s where? Maybe they think there’s a unit posted over there. So they’re hittin’ ’em hard.”
“Like they didn’t know who was there,” Pasha retorts. “Those guys,” he hesitates, trying to figure out what to call them. “Those soldiers,” he clarifies. “They stopped by yesterday. I talked to them.”
“That right?” the kid asks mockingly. “You talking to soldiers . . .”
“All right, knock it off. What are we doing out here?”
“Wait a sec,” the kid replies.
They’re standing at the edge of the ravine, listening to what’s happening down in the fog. Pasha realizes that the city’s over there: thousands of houses, thousands of trees, thousands of burrows and basements with thousands of residents hiding in them right now. Just try and find them down there in the fog. Try and track them down. Can’t hear their breathing, their hearts beating, can’t hear anything. This thick fog filling up wrecked apartment blocks and mutilated manholes—that’s all there is. “And there’s nothing you can do to help,” Pasha thinks. Even if he wanted to get them out of there—try and pick them out of that stew. All he can do is stand here and listen to everything around him give way to destruction and death.
“It’s seven-fifty,” the kid says suddenly. “Listen.”
Pasha takes out his phone. It really is seven-fifty. He listens hard but can’t hear anything besides the crackle of gunfire and rumble of mortars. Soon a sound emerges out of the fog, barely audible at first, then more and more persistent—a dry, metallic buzzing, a stubborn, rhythmic drone. Endless, hopeless.
“What’s that?” Pasha asks, confused.
“A phone,” the kid explains.
“Whose phone?”
“The demolitions guy.”
“What’s he doing here?” Pasha’s trying to comprehend all this. Meanwhile, the droning sound doesn’t go away; someone’s stubbornly trying to reach the demolitions guy.
“So there are mines everywhere.” The kid points at the fog. “The security forces wanted to get all their vehicles out, so they could leave the city. They sent some demolitions guys in. One of them got blown up. About five days ago. Somewhere down there.” The kid points ahead. “And someone calls him every morning. At seven-fifty.”
“Why seven-fifty?”
“Are you dense or something? They call right before school starts.”
“Who?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” the kid asks, surprised. “His son. Or daughter. Guess nobody told her that her dad’s gone, so she keeps calling, like she promised she would.”
“Promised who?”
“Her dad. Before he left.”
Pasha thinks of how he gets ready for school every morning, drags himself down the hallway, sits in the kitchen. It makes him feel so bad, like someone’s calling him and he can’t even pick up.
“What’s with his ringtone? Couldn’t he pick something more interesting?”
“Whatever,” the kid replies. “What, do you want him to use the national anthem? Well, maybe you should. You are a teacher, after all. A government employee.”
“What for?”
“To instill patriotism,” the kid says, laughing. “Do you even know the words?”
“Listen.” Pasha changes the subject again. “Gotta go get him.” He nods in the direction of the fog. “Him just lying there like that . . .”
“Are you dense or something?” the kid asks again. “Wanna get blown up too? Spring’ll come, the snow’ll melt, and they’ll take him away.”
“There isn’t any snow down there,” Pasha replies.
“No, there isn’t . . .”
Meanwhile, the ringtone quiets down. All they can hear is the explosions. The wind’s cold—feels like the fog is flowing up their sleeves and into their pockets.
“Let’s head back,” the kid says, turns around, and starts walking toward the orchard.
“You promised to help get the water, Pasha,” Nina says.
She’s standing in the hallway, a woolen shawl wrapped around her back. It’s as if she were waiting just for them. She looks like a security guard at a dorm, a men’s dorm, no less. She’d die before letting any outsiders in. The kid, head down, slips into the basement, back to his burrow. Pasha stays, hides his eyes.
“Where were you?” Nina asks. She’s trying to speak in a severe tone, but her voice is too tired, like a wife who has been waiting all night for her husband to come home—she really should give him hell, but she just wants to go to bed too badly.
“Nowhere,” Pasha answers. “What about the water?”
“Go to the kitchen.” Nina decides not to give him hell. “Valera, the gym teacher’s there. Grab some breakfast while you’re at it,” she adds.
Valera the gym teacher is sitting in the cafeteria next to a lit potbelly stove, drinking tea and reading some old newspapers. Pasha walks in, gives him a curt greeting. The cafeteria is big, gloomy, and cold. Fog hovers outside the windows, peering through the glass like kids looking at snakes in a terrarium. Foodstuffs are neatly piled in the corner: grains, pasta, canned goods. A fire-blackened teapot that looks like the burnt remains of the Reichstag is heating up on the stove. Valera nods. Sit down, take a load off. He’s sitting there wearing a black coat—it’s worn, yet still nice. There’s a hat on the table in front of Valera, as if he’s planning on having it for a snack. Greasy hair, hasn’t been washed in a while. His gaze is firm, yet so
mehow muffled, broken. It’s obvious that he’s a confident man with principles. It’s just that he’s been put in tough circumstances lately, so he hasn’t really had grounds to stand up for them. Wash that hair of his and he’ll get his firm look back. And there’s his mustache, too—trimmed, yellow, nicotine stained.