by Serhiy Zhadan; Reilly Costigan-Humes; Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler
“Nothing. We met yesterday.”
“You like her?”
“I didn’t get a good look,” Pasha admits. “I’m just worried about her. I want to find her when all of this is over,” he adds.
“What makes you think that all of this is going to end?” she asks.
“Well, it has to end at some point.”
“You think so?”
Pasha doesn’t answer. He doesn’t want to say anything bad, but nothing good comes to mind. She doesn’t say anything either—just fixes her hair and wraps the tablecloth tighter around herself. It looks like he’s come to visit her at the hospital. And she’s sitting here—cheerful, all smiles, sure that she’s getting better. He’s trying really hard to be cheerful, too, but he, unlike her, knows her diagnosis.
“Well, the engagement ring?” Anna asks again.
“What about it?”
“Well, she wears an engagement ring. Maybe she has children, a husband. A fur coat.”
“I don’t think she has a husband.”
“And the ring?”
“Who the hell knows,” he says. “Half our teaching staff are divorced women. But they keep wearing their rings. To look more presentable.”
“Are you a teacher or something?”
“Well, yeah.”
“What’d you teach?”
“Ukrainian.”
“I see,” Anna says. “A real promising career path. Why aren’t you fighting?”
“For which side?”
“For any side.”
“Got a bum hand,” Pasha says, showing it to her.
“So what? I’ve seen much worse. One guy was missing half of his head, for real. He got in a car accident sometime before the war. But he’d still come by and see us . . . at the travel agency.”
“And how is he?” Pasha asks incredulously.
“What do you mean?”
“Missing half his head—how is it for him?”
“Ah, you mean that. Well, he doesn’t come by to play soccer. What does he need a head for? I felt sorry for the guy.”
“Why?”
“He was handsome,” Anna explains. “Well, before the accident. Now he’s like the Terminator.”
Anna’s all chipper, like a child whose parents have been talking her ear off, distracting her, drawing her attention to something else, and at one point, she really does forget about the pain and the doctors and remembers just how many treats await her once she gets out of here. If she ever gets out. Pasha suddenly finds himself thinking that everyone around here speaks as though they haven’t talked to anyone in months—quickly and incoherently, trying to confess everything, not wanting to take anything with them. They say so many unnecessary, unimportant things, raising their voices, lecturing, accusing, justifying themselves. Abandoned, neglected, forgotten. Aggrieved. “Yep,” Pasha thinks. “They’re aggrieved, obviously. And abandoned. No pity for anyone,” he thinks. “Anyone. Anyone at all.”
“Sorry?” Pasha asks. “You feel sorry for everyone around here, yeah? You’ll sleep with them all.”
“Yeah, so what?”
“Never mind,” Pasha replies. “Don’t feel sorry for anyone. Anyone. Sleep with whoever you want.”
Noticing that his voice has changed, Anna tenses up. She pulls the tablecloth up to her throat, waits, and then says:
“Listen, Teach. Do you know that all professions deserve respect?”
“Uh-huh.” Pasha sneers. “And they’re all useful to society.”
“Well, what’s so useful about what you do?”
“Knowing languages is useful,” Pasha replies.
“Yeah, you don’t even speak the language outside the classroom, though,” she hisses, and Pasha notes that her voice has changed, too, become snakelike, threatening. She continues before he can show his surprise. “At least I don’t play mind games with people. I just do what I do.”
“Don’t get angry,” Pasha suggests.
“Don’t get angry? Yeah?” she says angrily. “Some dickhead comes in here and starts telling me what to do. He doesn’t feel sorry for anybody. Well, I do. I feel sorry for the kids you teach.”
“The kids are fine.” Pasha’s growing anxious.
“Sure they are,” Anna says with a dismissive wave. “You don’t feel sorry for them either, do you?”
Pasha doesn’t say anything. She looks at him, waiting for him to respond, but he keeps quiet, so she figures it’s best to change the subject.
“I bet you don’t like kids either,” she says.
“Why’s that?” Pasha’s aggrieved.
“I can see it in your eyes,” Anna says. “And you don’t have your own kids either.”
“Well, actually, I’m here with a kid.” Pasha’s still aggrieved.
“Whose kid?”
“My nephew,” Pasha says. “I picked him up from the orphanage.” He’s speaking in a weighty tone—the kind people use when talking about something serious, important. He speaks, then waits for a reaction.
“From the orphanage?” Anna gets all chipper again. “The one on the edge of town?”
“Yep.”
“That’s my orphanage,” she says. “When were you there?”
“Tonight,” Pasha says reluctantly.
“How’s everything over there?”
“Fine.”
He averts his eyes, but she doesn’t notice that.
“Nina still working there?”
“You know her?” Pasha’s surprised.
“I have since I was seven.” Anna nods. “We went to the same orphanage. But she went to the teachers college and I went to the travel agency.”
Now cheerful, she’s even set the tablecloth aside. She finds her jacket, tosses it over her shoulders, and starts speaking differently—without that lazy irritation, her tone simple, trusting.
“The kids in our class didn’t like her. I didn’t like her either,” Anna admits with a smile. “Neither did the teachers. Well, they didn’t like anyone. But they really didn’t like her. She was always going against everyone. That’s a lousy habit.”
“Yeah,” Pasha agrees.
“You aren’t like that, though, are you?” She’s speaking with the same smile, and Pasha eagerly nods in reply.
“You agree with everyone, don’t you?” She keeps smiling, but Pasha isn’t sure whether he should be enjoying this. “Nobody really cares if you agree with them or not, though. Is that right? Well, this one time,” she continues, losing all interest in Pasha, “one of the kids got a pair of shoes from their parents. A pair of cheap, Chinese sneakers. They were new, though. Do you know what it’s like to get new sneakers?” Pasha is about to answer, but she cuts him off. “Nah, you don’t know anything. Well, we get up one morning and see that someone’s dumped brilliant green dye all over those fuckin’ sneakers. For real. Well, everyone started saying she did it. They went to the director’s office and told her. The director believed them. Actually, everyone believed them.” Anna automatically begins rooting through her pockets, looking for her cigarettes. She’s worried, all anxious, and then she remembers that she doesn’t have any cigarettes. “Well, and I stuck up for her. That caused a lot of problems.”
“How do you know she didn’t do it?” Pasha asks skeptically.
“We were roommates,” Anna replies. “And I know for a fact that she didn’t go anywhere that night. But nobody believed me. You know what they’re like at orphanages? They’ll devour you. Especially over a pair of sneakers.”
“Well, you stood up for her . . . then what?”
“Then what? I stood up for her, and that was it. Then I regretted that, obviously.”
“How come?”
“I took some flak, too. It was an orphanage, after all. They stopped liking me, too. That doesn’t feel good. You get what I mean?”
“Yeah,” Pasha says.
“I think you get it. What’s wrong with your hand?”
“Got problems,” Pasha explains.
&n
bsp; “I can see that,” Anna says. “You’ve probably taken a lot of flak for your hand over the years.”
“Nah, not really.”
“Yeah, right.” She doesn’t believe him. “You definitely have. Kids are cruel. Like puppies. And they’re as trusting as puppies, too. Then they grow up, become more mature, more confident. Their cruelty doesn’t go away, though. Neither does their trust. And you say you don’t feel sorry for anyone.”
Pasha doesn’t say anything; he looks at his hand. It’s as though he’s letting the meager beam from the flashlight through his fingers. And she’s looking at his fingers, too, seemingly mesmerized, as if she’s never seen anything like this. Actually, she hasn’t. Where can you see something like that?
“You know,” she says to him. “Since I’ve got you . . . Come here. Do you want to?”
Pasha freezes and immediately wants to tell her that he does. Obviously he does. He wants her, with her pink hair. Wants her warmth, wants her voice. He can feel just how cold these last two days have made him, how chilled to the core. Obviously he wants her. Then he thinks of the kid. “What if he already woke up?” he thinks. “How long have I been up here?”
“I want to,” Pasha admits. “But I haven’t showered in two days. I doubt you’d like it.”
“I haven’t either, if I’m being perfectly honest,” she admits.
“I’m gonna get going.” Pasha gets up laboriously, hiding in a shadow. “I really should find something for the kid to eat,” he says, his tone making it a request.
“Well, look around.” She loses all interest in him again, covers up with the jacket and tablecloth, turns off the flashlight, and faces the wall.
Pasha walks over to the shelves in the dark, opens a cabinet by touch, begins carefully studying what’s there inside, seemingly not believing his eyes, needing to touch everything with his own hands, feel it. Tin cans, plastic containers, dishes filled with grain. Bags of sugar and pasta. And then, unexpectedly—chocolate! That’s it. Chocolate. Pasha unerringly recognizes a flat bar under some sort of canned food. He carefully plucks it out, stuffs it in his pocket, and leaves.
Sasha’s sleeping deeply, the way only kids can: head buried in his sleeve, all curled up like a puppy, warming himself with his own body heat. He’s clearly dreaming. Maybe even about something nice. Why not? Pasha’s hovering over him but can’t bring himself to wake him up. Behind him, the lady sitting on the bundles begins talking in her sleep. Seemingly warning him. Pasha shudders and carefully slides the chocolate bar up the kid’s sleeve. He returns to the main hall. “Wait until morning,” he reminds himself. “Wait out the night, then get out of here. We’ll be home tomorrow. Everything’s going to be fine. Everything’ll work out.” Hundreds of women’s drowsy bodies, warm clothing, winter footwear, children on their hands, kitchenware tied to sleds, bags, and cardboard boxes. One woman is whispering in the corner, another’s wrapping a blanket tighter around her shoulders. A truck’s powerful headlights are punching through the darkness and onto women’s pale blue faces. Basically, this all feels like the theater before the beginning of a performance: the lights are off, everyone’s quieted down, yet someone’s still trying to finish a thought, whisper the most important thing. Something’s missing, though. “The actors,” Pasha thinks. They’ll appear any second now, though. They definitely will—there’s no getting by without them. It’s a little after one. Another few hours. The bus will appear. Everything’s going to be fine. The shelling’s shifted to the north, toward the town; it’s quiet around the station, but nobody’s leaving. Nobody believes that it’s all over. They think it’s a trap. They think that over there, behind the station doors, something scary still awaits them. So it’s best to camp out here, behind the sturdy station walls. They huddle together like the animals on the ark, whispering calming words to themselves that they don’t quite believe. Pasha notices the patrolmen who recently checked his papers; they’re at the other end of the hall, by the doors. They notice him, too. They stand there and watch his every move. One of them whispers in the other guy’s ear, and he nods. “I should get going,” Pasha decides. “I shouldn’t wait for them to decide to come over.” He turns around slowly, without making any abrupt movements, carefully examines the schedule on the wall, as if he’s really counting on taking the first morning train out of here, nods with an air of importance, pretends that he’s committing something to memory, and fixes his glasses so he can see better. Then quietly, step by step, he sets out for the exit, leaving the patrolmen with nothing. But when a few steps remain, he overlooks a drowsy passenger who’s lying on a sheepskin coat right at his feet. She’s placed two metal buckets near herself—one full of apples, the other full of golden onions. He overlooks her, hits a bucket with his foot; it clings to his boot, turns over, and then rolls resonantly across the stone floor, as though someone’s ringing a bell to warn everyone about a fire or the advance of enemy troops. And the toll of the bell bounces off the high windows and cold ceiling, and everyone jolts up, emerges from their restless slumber, sticks their frightened heads out of their dreams, squinting into the twilight to see what all the commotion is about, what all the ruckus is about, where they should run. The children immediately begin whimpering. The women cry out, not yet understanding what’s going on, but still wanting to draw attention to themselves, just in case. The apples roll between other people’s things; soles trample them, and they disappear forever among the women’s frightened bodies. Everyone looks at Pasha like he’s a demon who’s appeared out of the darkness and broken the prevailing silence, shattering it with a terrible ring and ruckus. A demon who’s come to bring them some kind of message. Pasha stands there, feeling everyone watching him, waiting for him to say something, to communicate something important. The children are scared of his big, dark figure, and he’s making the women tense. But nobody dares ask him who he is, where he’s come from, or what he bears. At this point, Pasha’s thinking about making something up, but then he sees the patrolmen coming straight at him—confident, leisurely. He realizes that he has nowhere to go, he’s completely at their mercy. Then Pasha bends down, picks up several apples, and puts them in the woman’s hand. She’s oblivious, just sitting there and looking at him like he’s an anomaly of nature. Then he fixes his glasses again and disappears down a hallway. The patrolmen stop. “Follow him, find him, and shoot him behind the columns or let him live? Let him live,” they think. And Pasha lives.
Feels like March. Restlessness and alarm. And knowing that everything can work out, everything can come together, makes it painful to breathe. That as soon as you ride past the closest railroad signal, a new way of life, nothing like his, nothing like what he’s used to, begins. He always loved the Station, though—the dry greenery of summer, the grass turned black by fuel oil, the side tracks that wander among tenacious blades of grass until they get lost. He loved the voices of the Station, its smell. The sky above the maintenance buildings. The train cars that look like buildings whose residents just can’t ever get settled; they move from one place to another, trying their luck. He loved fall, too. Fall at the Station was serious and severe. In the fall, everyone would come together after the long summer months, after all the dust and sun, and you could see how everyone had grown, how they’d changed over the summer. Then smoke would float out of the nearby gardens and dachas, from yards and little parks—first they’d burn weeds and then the leaves that had fallen from the high trees. The air would turn cold, bitter, winter clothes would be unpacked, the rainy season begin, the ground fill with water, and moving around become difficult. Not that there was anywhere to go around here. The winter made life at the Station cheerful and sunny once again: snow buried the moats behind the warehouses and the paths along the river, the river itself froze over, and a cold current moved under the gray ice slowly, like blood when you’re sleeping. In the morning, locomotives coated with snow and hoarfrost rolled in after their nighttime journeys, after fighting through fog and snowdrifts—exhausted, yet im
placable, eager to continue hauling their endless chains of cars. The sun hung over the roofs and the tracks, railroad men argued cheerfully, they—schoolkids at the time—cut class, clambered up the embankment, and ascended the hills that stretched along the frozen riverbed. The sun hovered at the highest point in the sky; in the winter there was never enough sun. You had to hunt it down, fish it out of the frosty landscape. Trains would occasionally barrel out of the snow and cross the horizon in weary bursts, leaving golden swirls of hoarfrost in their wake, connecting the known with the unknown.
But in the spring, everything would change, one way or another. The air would be different. It would creep along, mixing above the Station, and in the stagnant, solidified space, currents of something unknown, something that would thrust you forward, force your heart to beat faster, would flow by, one after another. The evening streetlights would shine desperately, torridly. Fog would rise from the river. Locomotives move cautiously through the dark, like dogs. In March, he always grew restless; in March, he wanted to get out of here, toss his things in a bag and take the first evening train in an unknown direction—disappear into the green twilight, follow floods of sunlight until he dissolved. In the spring, everyone was drawn to the station, to its travel smells and transient lights. Rowdy groups of teenagers hung around outside by the station walls, reacting sharply to the adults’ admonishments and defiantly sticking their young, buzzed heads toward the winds and drafts. Vapid talk, frenzied laughter, unwarranted happiness—just the way things ought to be in the spring when you’re fourteen, and that’s exactly how things were.
And there was nothing beyond that. No flags over the station, no anger in adults’ conversations, no borders, no portraits of outstanding employees on boards of honor eroded by time. No empty shelves in cold stores, no dark faces on black TVs, no lying press, no vile slop that his family had to eat every morning just to subsist. The March air, as brisk as water in the morning—that’s all there was. Air that heated up after winter ended, and it consisted of sweet faith in the idea that everything was just getting started, that things would only get better and better as they went along. At this moment, right now, here, in this crummy little park, amid mounds of black snow, in the blackness filled with birds’ cries and locomotives’ horns, everything’s good, too, incredibly good, everything’s just how it should be, so you can feel currents of happiness mixing with currents of hunger in the air.