Sevastopol

by Emilio Fraia

  Walter says he knows where Nilo read all that, it was in one of those magazines in the basement, right? Nilo doesn’t answer. He goes on ahead, walking along the trail. Then he asks about the squash, he wants to know if they’ve set fruit, if they can harvest the squash.

  Are you feeling all right, Mr. Nilo? asks a man in a hat, seeing Nilo standing there, past the gate, now on Hermes’s property.

  Nilo blinks. He seems disoriented. He wants to know where the pig pen is.

  I thought you were coming to talk to Mr. Hermes about your land, says the man. Mr. Hermes said time’s running out, that he’s waiting for you. You know you can’t keep that place much longer, right? The temperature begins to drop. Behind the mountain, the late afternoon sky takes on a peculiar color. Blue, pink. Swelling saplings and branches sway in the air. Translucent, whitish clouds scatter across the darkening sky.

  Nilo sees a large man approaching on one of the grassy paths. He wasn’t there before, he appeared out of nowhere. The man is pushing a wheelbarrow. When he passes Nilo, he sets it down and wipes the sweat from his brow. His face is dirty. In a real bad way, he says, motioning with his head. At first Nilo thinks the man is talking about him. Am I ill? Is that what people see when they look at me? Then he notices a pig sprawled in the wheelbarrow. It’s not moving. Only its dull eyes move. The man looks at Nilo, then at the animal. Gonna have to put it down, he says. He flexes his chest and arm muscles and lifts it again, that mound of flesh, legs slipping over the sides of the wheelbarrow. Nilo interrupts him. Have you seen a man? A man with a face like an Indian? The man lowers his load back to the ground. He wipes the sweat from his brow. Haven’t seen anybody, no sir.

  In the east, night starts to roll in. The road disappears. On the mountain, the eucalyptus trees bow gently, I think the wind will carry them, I think they’re coming. The dead are at peace. Nilo hears a rumble. He cranes his neck. It’s the sound of an engine. A car. It seems to tear through the canopy, rising up from behind the eucalyptus trees, climbing the hillside. Echoing against the mountains.

  But then the noise seems to grow gradually quieter, fading away. It’s him. Adán. He’s leaving.

  August

  At the end of August, I received a postcard. It was a picture of the city of Sevastopol, a soulless port framed by gray buildings, a generic scene, the kind with no story to tell. The card came with a message: Onward, champion!

  Of course, Klaus had never been to Sevastopol. He’d bought the postcard online, from some site like eastern­europeanjunk.com. He knew I’d appreciate the gesture. He closed by declaring that we still had a lot of work ahead of us! That was how he wrote, with exclamation marks.

  He called me and spent forever mulling over whether we needed to repaint the backstage of the place he’d found. We’d have to do something about the wiring, for sure.

  He’d worked out a deal to rent the space for a month, at half price. It was small, on the ground floor of a squat in downtown São Paulo. Poetry readings and musical performances were held there. The other good news was that we’d get to keep all the box-office proceeds, and there was a chance for us to renew the arrangement if our run went well.

  Before he hung up, he said that he could come by later and we could grab a drink at the bar below the overpass, if I wanted. To celebrate. I said yes. I love the beer mugs there.

  At the end of the night, Klaus likes to drink what he calls a nice glass of wine and eat a milanesa, preferably in some musty trattoria in Bixiga. About our work, he says, I’ve got to be practical. Simple things lead to simple solutions, complicated things lead to madness. When Klaus was my age — a lifetime ago, in other words — he was a German teacher. He must be in his sixties, though he looks older. His hair is dyed brown, and he sports a showy, swashbuckling mustache. His teeth are small and jagged, and he’s rather thin, especially his face, which is masked in a sickly yellow, his cheeks covered in pockmarks. He always keeps a pen in his shirt pocket. We met at the museum where I work. He used to lead a drama workshop there on Fridays. Staff can take classes for free, and I thought his sounded interesting.

  Klaus had just directed a play called Good Morning, Barabbas, which ran for a while at a little theatre down on Rego Freitas. I didn’t see it, but an actress friend of mine told me that it was awful. Theatre people will flatter you to your face and stick a knife in your back, that’s a fact. I got a good vibe from Klaus. In class, I could tell that he knew what he was doing. One day I showed him something I’d written. A story about a mysterious relationship between a man and a woman, set in Moscow in the eighties. The female character had my name: Nadia. The story began with Nadia in the single, lighted window on the top floor of a low-rise building, waving at the man, who was waiting in the courtyard. I liked the idea of a story that started with a wave. And I liked Nadia being up high, as if she were just out of reach. The man was older than her, and his name was Sasha. It was late afternoon. Snow was falling. Nadia came downstairs, carrying a letter. She handed it to Sasha and gave him what appeared to be instructions. He listened intently, holding the envelope in his left hand. He had no right arm. The sleeve of his overcoat hung empty. Before going back inside, Nadia glared at him. Sasha kept his head down. I wanted to explore that woman’s feeling of hatred for that man. I told Klaus that the reader would never find out the reason for Nadia’s anger. But it would be clear that Sasha had a debt to settle with her, and that was why he was there. The contents of the letter would remain a mystery until the very end, a secret that would spell doom for them both. I asked Klaus whether he thought it might work onstage. He said that it was a lousy story and clearly nothing about it worked.

  I think Klaus took a shine to me. A few weeks after the course ended, he sent me an e-mail. He said that he was going to put on a new play and that he’d noticed my interest in Russia, which wasn’t entirely accurate. I didn’t know the first thing about Russia, and my story, to be perfectly honest, could have taken place anywhere in the world — but I didn’t tell him that.

  We agreed to meet the next day at a café in Santa Cecília. Klaus arrived on time. He was wearing a tattered coat and a faded black shirt, which gave him a penurious appearance. He ordered a coffee. I ordered a mint tea.

  He said something about the museum, how poorly the instructors were paid, and that it was unlikely he would continue teaching there. They’re a horrible bunch of people, I said. I worked for the museum’s educational program, leading guided tours for school groups and young people. Other than the girl with the shaved head who worked the cash register at the gift shop, there was nobody there I really liked. My boss spends all day posting pictures of artwork on Instagram, you know? One of the guys who works with me is involved in cultural production — grant-writing, setting up projects — and he’s an artist himself. His work combines photography and installation, and seeks to discuss inequalities in the art establishment, to draw attention to historically overlooked groups. It’s a collection of photos of concrete barriers, and none of the things he says his work is about are actually in the work, which really pisses me off. Anyway, I guess I’m kind of pissed off about everything — my dad told me that, actually — so maybe I’m being unfair.

  Klaus grinned, coughing, he put a handkerchief to his mouth. Then he opened a small, crumpled pouch of tobacco and began to roll a cigarette. He got straight to the point: he was looking for someone to help him out. He wouldn’t be able to do all the research for the play he was starting to write, and research was the most important part. I disagreed. Research matters as much as, I don’t know, a cherry, I said. A cherry in a cocktail. A cherry in a cocktail after two in the morning. Anybody who’s not a complete idiot knows that there should be only one cherry per drink and that the cherry’s only there so that it can be removed. I was being serious, I meant it, but Klaus was amused by what I’d said. I told him that what I was interested in was writing, but I might be able to give him a hand with his research.

 
He looked at me, sat quietly for a moment, and then assured me that I’d get to write as well. Depending on how things worked out, I might even get a credit as his cowriter.

  I didn’t believe him for a second, but, on the other hand, it didn’t seem so far-fetched. I realized then that Klaus was a lonely person. He had no money and no friends, and couldn’t count on many people.

  He had done political theatre in the seventies, which was when he’d made a name for himself, or, rather, a name among theatre buffs and writer friends, which, fair enough, is still something. My dad always says I shouldn’t be so critical. But since then Klaus had kept to himself. I got old, he said. The world changed. I’ve never been part of the in-crowd, and now I’m paying the price. Klaus had spent the past few decades putting on shows for virtually no one in grungy theatres downtown. But he was happy that way. You can only be happy that way. He took another sip of coffee, and then he rested his hands on the table and began to tell me about the play he was writing.

  It’s a historical play, he said. It takes place in 1855, in Russia, during the Siege of Sevastopol. I pretended to know what he was talking about. It’s about the life of a painter, Bogdan Trunov, a man who reached his heyday during the war years and then died young. He left behind many paintings, which have only fairly recently been discovered. What’s most fascinating, Klaus said, is the way Trunov was always breathing the leaden air of war — he was up to his neck in it — but war, the war itself, never appeared in his paintings.

  I left my job at the museum and went to work for Klaus. He didn’t take it very well when he found out I’d quit. I told him that I would have done it anyway, that it wasn’t because of him. I just didn’t want to be stuck in that place anymore. I’m not paying you a penny more, he said. Klaus paid me peanuts, no question, but I had some savings and could get by. Anyway, it really wasn’t because of him or our play that I’d quit my job, I repeated. That was how I put it: our play. And Klaus laughed.

  He could laugh, I have to say that. It was something I noticed right away. He laughed with his whole face, and with his shoulders and his arms. I was thinking later about the complex motions involved in laughter. It’s all so weird. Opening your mouth, showing your teeth, producing sounds, rocking your body. No matter how fucked up humans may be, they still want to laugh. You can’t show sadness by simply presenting a man who’s been trampled on and screwed over. Deep inside the eyes of a sad character — someone who’s really been tested by life — we must also see hope. Klaus said things like this, and I wrote it all down, absolutely all of it, in my notebook.

  *

  At night, Klaus would take me to the bars on Vieira de Carvalho. Drunk, we’d roam the streets of República, along Avenida São Luís, past the gray boulevards, the tangled nests of wires on telephone poles, the guys giving blow jobs in dark alleys, the statue of an Indian whose shadow bore down on the transvestites who gathered at Largo do Arouche to smoke joints. Sometimes we stopped and smoked with them.

  Then we’d head to Nove de Julho, where Klaus’s apartment was, on the fourth floor of a building with dark hallways and a doorman who resembled a zombie, sitting behind a little wooden desk on the ground floor. The apartment was stuffy and looked like a room in Count Dracula’s castle. A green light blinked in the street below the only window. There was a steady, electric hum that made the couch, the stained carpet, the smell of cigarettes and of old food in the fridge seem all the more gloomy.

  I think it was because I’d just been dumped by my boyfriend and didn’t have anywhere else to go that I spent so much time with Klaus. My dad said I needed to get a real job, but that’s what parents always say. Some nights I slept at Klaus’s place, on a foam mattress in the living room. Before I fell asleep, he’d tell me about the guys he’d seen while cruising the streets, or at bars. When he liked a guy, he would remap his routes, hang out at the places where the guy liked to hang out, often sending himself on a kind of wild-goose chase, which he would recount to me in detail.

  He described the clothes these men wore, their hands (Klaus liked hands), their gestures, the bulge of their dicks in their pants, he told me if they were tall or had a beard. The flavor of the month was a little blond actor, who, he said, was just what we’d imagined for the hero of our play. A gorgeous queen. He said that he wanted to introduce me. To see what I thought of him, because we had similar tastes, he said. He could not have been more mistaken.

  In the morning, Klaus and I would wake up and have breakfast together at a little dive on Martins Fontes. I’d order orange juice and buttered toast. Klaus would have a glass of cold milk. Then I’d spend the rest of the day organizing research files and reading about nineteenth-century Russia. When the clock struck five, I’d start writing my own stories and draft scenes for the play, and every once in a while I’d jot down what I remembered from my dreams the night before. When night rolled around again, we’d go out for a drink or take a hit of the acid that Klaus kept in a plastic sleeve with his driver’s license, and then we’d sit, paralyzed, on the couch in front of the window, looking out at the city. Once the acid eased off a little, Klaus would rave wildly for hours. He’d rant about the play and everything he imagined for it, and brainstorm solutions to production problems, motivations for the characters.

  Whenever he talked about the blond guy, the one he thought would be perfect for the role of Trunov, he said that he was sure I’d like him. I saw him in a play a while back, he said. He’s got talent, not just a pretty face, no — he’s really good, believe me. Yesterday, he went on, I took the bus with him. I rode all the way to the last stop, in Santana, can you believe it? I had no reason to go all that way, of course, but I pretended I was going to visit an aunt and sat down next to him and we got to talking. I couldn’t stop looking at his hands — they were firm but soft, with pink, rounded nails. I looked at the hair on his arms. We didn’t talk about sex, of course, but I can tell he loves it. I can pick up on that sort of thing. Now, whether he’s a good lay or not, I wouldn’t know. The problem sometimes is that even people who love sex are scared to death of sexual fantasy. A lot of folks, if they could, would put an end to sexual fantasy, because that’s what carries us through life. Then Klaus repeated for the thousandth time that the guy was perfect for the role, that he’d give Trunov the strange and distant quality we’d imagined — of being and not being at the same time.

  An eccentric quality, for sure. Unlike his fellow wartime painters, Trunov had no interest in the battlefield. Or, rather, he had an interest — those were the times he lived in, after all, and it would have been impossible not to express that in some way — but it wasn’t the kind of thing he wanted in his paintings. The ranks of soldiers in the field, the cavalry with flags raised. He didn’t capture the upheaval, the triumphant generals, the human suffering. Instead, he focussed on the soldiers’ everyday lives, when they weren’t at the front: the little breaks, the downtime when nothing was happening, soldiers with grubby faces waiting to hear the whereabouts of their artillery batteries or playing cards at a staging post.

  *

  Something else I learned was that Trunov — born in 1818 in the city of Odessa, died in 1860, at the age of forty-two, a man Klaus described as full of energy and self-respect — had very particular methods when it came time to paint. He didn’t do full-scale studies for his paintings, for example. He did almost no studies. He had the habit of starting his sketches with no plan in mind. He used to paint figures and set them aside, then arrange them against backgrounds he’d prepared separately. So, even when the figures interacted with one another, the connection between them seemed unnatural. Their eyes, Klaus told me, almost never seemed to meet, which gave the paintings an unusual psychological dimension and a dreamlike ambiguity. In one of Trunov’s most famous paintings, some soldiers play chess with pieces made from scraps of bread. In another, a lieutenant dozes atop a white horse, looking like he’s about to fall off. In another, soldiers talk, or seem to b
e talking, while a plump woman holds a colorful feather duster.

  From 1854 to 1855, when Sevastopol fell, Trunov lived in neighboring Simferopol. In 1855, while the Russians were losing up to three thousand men a day, Trunov spent about four months shadowing a regiment. He nearly died more than once. He did this on his own, spending his inheritance, because joining the war voluntarily cost money. It was a very prolific period for him. One of his first paintings from that time shows two soldiers, surrounded by smoke, sitting on the stones of a collapsed wall, eating watermelon. One of them is slicing the whitish melon with a pocketknife. They appear to be talking, but most likely, Klaus says, they were painted separately and then mounted against the background of the canvas.

  One morning, while we were eating breakfast, I told Klaus that I didn’t quite understand why he was writing a play about Trunov. You like the guy’s paintings, I said. There’s something about them that moves you, fine, but it’s just a weird story where nothing happens.

  Cars streamed past in the street outside. Klaus wiped milk from his mustache with a napkin and said that all stories, at heart, were weird stories where nothing happened. We are the past, he said. I said, no, we’re the future. He laughed at that. I asked him to explain what was funny. He said no, he wasn’t going to explain anything to me. And, besides, it wasn’t true that nothing happened in the story. He was just now working on a very rousing scene.

  A very rousing scene, I repeated.

  Yes, he said, a very rousing scene. A very rousing scene in the life of Bogdan Trunov.

  Klaus and I had got drunk the night before and were trying not to die. My head was about to explode. It was a cold, sleepy morning. We were sitting in a sheltered part of the café, away from the draft. He wore a scarf with a brown moose on it that matched the color of his mustache. I ate my toast, looked at Klaus, and thought that, if anything was weird, it was my life.