Mesopotamia Read online

  Danylo and Oleh were the last people to show up; it was already after noon. They stood there in the hot sun, smoking and thinking. Finally, Danylo suggested they head home.

  “Let’s go,” he said, “this whole shindig is a joke.”

  Then Oleh took a drag so long he nearly fainted and wiped the amber sweat off his forehead with the sleeve of his leather jacket. He was thirty-­six. Danylo was four years older, but most people would’ve pegged him for at least fifty. Oleh renovated old buildings, assembling crews of manual laborers and carting them around town to his various job sites. He’d always carry a small Panasonic camera with him, taking pictures of turrets and decorations on dilapidated buildings, zooming in to see details the naked eye couldn’t. Oleh wore hiking boots, faded jeans, and a brown bomber jacket and had dark, unkempt hair. He hadn’t shaved or slept in a while. Danylo wore athletic gear and had a bald, bruised head, but his wise gray eyes toned down his rough exterior. Nobody ever looked him in the eye, though; generally, all anyone ever noticed were his fists, blue with tattoos he’d given himself during his time in the service down in the Caucasus. All that ink made him look like an ex-­con, but he really just drove a taxi, putting his Benz on the books at some state-­owned company, giving rides to students and anyone else who was too drunk to drive. It was parked outside his apartment, across from the McDonald’s; Danylo would wake up every morning, grab his thermos, and go sit in his car to get some more shut-­eye.

  “Hey, you positive we were invited?” he asked Oleh.

  The surly Oleh thought for a bit, spat anxiously, and motioned, as if to say, “Get off my back.” “Yeah, we were invited, obviously. We’re their friends, aren’t we? They just forgot to remind us.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “They just forgot,” Oleh said, nodding. “It’s no big deal. I’ll go remind them.”

  Danylo grumbled skeptically, but kept standing next to his brother.

  They fired their cigarette butts through the warm air and drummed their palms against the outside of their pants pockets—“We got what we need, let’s roll.” They smacked around some wet-­behind-­the-­ears punk, briefly but thoroughly, sized up some curly-­haired guy in ripped clothes who was looking at everyone with utter disgust, shoved their way over to the bride, pulled some old-­timer with red, drowsy eyes away from her, smacked the punk around a little bit more (he’d latched onto them after his first beating), and said hello to her. Danylo extended his hand, Oleh didn’t.

  Sonia was taken aback at first, but she quickly regained her composure, smiling at Danylo and reaching out to shake Oleh’s hand. He blatantly ignored her, so she pulled him in and kissed him wetly on the cheek, scratching her face on four days’ worth of prickly stubble. Flustered, Oleh apologized for showing up late, not dressed for the occasion, and with no present. He was getting even more flustered, but Danylo butted in, taking his keys out of his pocket and handing them to Sonia.

  “Here kiddo, my Mercedes is all yours today. I’m gonna go grab a drink.”

  Sonia cracked a smile to ease the mounting tension and took the keys, something she wouldn’t usually have done. “Join the party,” she said. “I’ll hold on to these for now. I don’t want anybody playing bumper cars.” Somebody was already pouring Danylo a drink; Oleh wanted to say something, but he just waved his hand dismissively and headed over toward the tables as well.

  “Why ships?” she thought. “Where’d they even come from?” She’d been keeping a diary for the past few years. Some cheerful quack shrink would come to their office for sessions and hit on all the secretaries and accountants, but they all loved him, so he didn’t get canned for it.

  “You’re in a good place, Sonia,” he said. “You have a good job with prospects, and you’ve got your health. And it’s a good thing you don’t have a man in your life. Overall, everything’s going well—you’re in an excellent position to start worrying.” So he suggested she keep a diary. “It’ll be just for you, so there’s no need to hold back. Write whatever you want—nobody else is ever going to read it.”

  Sonia went with it. It didn’t usually take much coaxing for her to try something new. “But what am I gonna write about?” she thought. She immediately decided that none of the entries would cover her professional life. “What’s the point of making the auditors’ job any easier? And no love or romance either.”

  Love was the least of her concerns. Sonia was always the one who broke things off—none of her men ever had the guts to dump her. She’d been married twice, and her two ex-­husbands had vanished from her life without a trace. Sonia would crack jokes about that, saying that she’d bitten their heads off . . . and some other things, too. She had a lot of sex, plenty of interesting boyfriends, and a couple of girlfriends thrown in—women liked Sonia. She was always calm and had incredible stamina; they saw her the way they would have liked to see their men. Men liked her too, obviously; she was tender and open with them, and she always paid for her own drinks.

  So she started logging her dreams, attentively and in detail. She described the rooms and buildings she saw and the faces that appeared, transcribed conversations, drew trees, flowers, and wild animals that didn’t have names yet, sketching and carefully captioning meteors that had fallen on the city’s old neighborhoods, diagramming systems of mines that had been buried under sand dunes, and mugshots of serial killers who’d been caught and sentenced to hang. The murderers in her pictures looked like the crew of a ship—­exhausted, yet unbroken—they all had some faint resemblance to one another, as is generally the case with men who spend a long time together in a confined space. This had all been welling up for so long, eventually she couldn’t restrain herself, so she showed it to her mom, who was still alive at the time. When she was done reading the diary, she told Sonia to burn it so she’d be able to sleep at night. She heeded her mother’s advice and burned the diary, but then she started another one right away, filling it with more portraits of men standing in profile.

  She and Oleh met three years ago. She had to do something about the facade of her office building, it was gonna fall off any minute; one of her friends (John? Yeah, it was John) recommended Oleh. He showed up empty-­handed—these were the pre-­Panasonic days—stepped out onto the balcony, climbed over the railing, and started making his way out along the ledge. But he came back before she could even start to panic, explaining that he’d needed to see everything up close. A few days later, his boisterous gang showed up, looking like a cross between a pirate crew and a penal battalion. They camped out in Sonia’s office for a week, sleeping on the desks, eating ramen out of Ikea bowls, and using the sink to wash. They patched up the facade, drank a whole crate of Crimean cognac, and became good buddies with everyone. “At my age, people don’t generally make new friends,” Sonia thought. “There are some exceptions, though, and after all, it’s exceptions that make life interesting.”

  They knew a lot of the guests but they still felt like outsiders. Family get-­togethers can be pretty odd affairs—the more friends you have there, the less welcome you are. Danylo was sipping his drink carefully. He’d picked out some of the groom’s friends—a bunch of Jesus freaks, fearless, committed missionaries wandering around a foreign city, saving souls like lifeguards at the beach—and struck up a conversation with them. The missionaries were a bit rough with Danylo, like a hairdresser is with a new customer. He liked that. He was always up for a thought-­provoking debate. He told them a story about his friend who got mixed up with some missionaries; he had even given them the deed to his house in the residential neighborhood on the other side of the river. After that he got a year in the slammer for minor offenses, and when he got out three of God’s servants were already living in his house—and they left him out in the cold, how do ya like that? “And then,” Danylo added after a short, pensive pause, “he strangled them to death—all three of them—and put the house in some kids’ name. They weren’t his kids, obviously. You think a guy like that would ha
ve kids?” The story sent the missionaries scurrying off, and Danylo just let them go. His brother was sitting alongside him, sweating profusely, but he wouldn’t take off his jacket—it was as though he was anticipating something or listening for some signal.

  “What’s your deal?” Danylo asked him. “Just chill out already.”

  “I’ll chill out soon,” Oleh answered cheerfully. “When the time comes.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Danylo said with a laugh. “I don’t know ’bout that.”

  Some older neighbor ladies kept coming up to them and asking how they were doing. The wedding was a free-­for-­all, and the kids were relishing the chaos, crawling around under the tables and pouring warm wine into people’s shoes. Danylo actually liked it, but Oleh booted a few of the little munchkins in the ribs, and they crawled away into the dark and the dust in utter despair. Danylo had barely eaten anything. Oleh hadn’t eaten at all. The bride came over a few times, holding some warm wine that not even her icy fingers could cool off, making conversation about the weather and launching into beguiling digressions. Women and men were standing behind her; the women held flowers and ice that they rubbed on their red hot faces and the men hid metal and stacks of cash in their pockets, keeping a cautious eye on the sun and not stepping back into the shade, determined not to miss anything. The kids were yelling, everything smelled like water and windblown grit; they were about to get to the really good part.

  “Huh, this is so strange,” Sonia told her mom. “I have a healthy lifestyle, I watch my diet, I don’t do drugs anymore, I don’t go to church—hell, I’m not even into yoga—but I keep having these dreams. I’m starting to think I’m doing something wrong. Like the one about the slaves. What could I possibly know about them? When did I even see them? It’s not like I have any friends that are in captivity. But still, I have dreams about them—I hear their prison songs and their cries. I dream about them toiling away, cutting their fingers, following orders, resting after the day’s work, and dying. Then they lie there in overcrowded graves covered with chalky earth, gritting their teeth, resentful and powerless.”

  “All of our dreams,” said her mother, who had worked at a children’s library all her adult life and had a deep-­seated aversion to fiction, “come from the books we read as kids. The better those books were, the worse you sleep at night. Why don’t you just get married?”

  “I’ve already done that,” Sonia reminded her. “Twice. It didn’t really do it for me.”

  Oleh surprised her. One time, she saw how he made some fat-­cat clients pay his construction crew for a job they’d done. Those clients commissioned a project and closely supervised the work for months, but then they kept ducking Oleh, and eventually told him to settle matters with their guys in Kyiv. Oleh arranged a meeting at a Georgian restaurant in town and invited Sonia. The clients showed up late, all sweaty and out of breath, didn’t apologize for making Oleh wait, and complained that they could barely squeeze their way into the restaurant and up the stairs.

  “It’s crowded downstairs, like a damn town fair. Maybe they’re giving out free stuff,” they said.

  “Those are my guys,” Oleh answered. “They’re waiting to see how this meeting goes. Getting out’ll be even harder.”

  The clients slumped in their chairs, decided against ordering any food, asked for some still water, and signed all the necessary papers. “I wouldn’t wanna be with him,” Sonia thought to herself back then.

  When a smoky haze started creeping out of the hallways and everything started to smell like honey, sugar, and cinnamon, and the sun set over the towers and antennas of the city’s upper neighborhoods, while down here, at the foot of the south-­facing hills, the evening air was cooling off the greenery, they decided it was time to take off. They saw that the bride and groom had gotten into a serious fight and that the whole soccer team had piled out and was now standing at the door and anxiously debating something or other, which also indicated that it was time to go. Danylo rose to his feet unhurriedly, went over to the bride’s godfather, who had been sleeping upright in a chair by the bar, his head resting on a bunch of forks, and knocked him to the ground, slugged one of the soccer players who was trying to pick a fight with one of the servers, ran his heavy hand along the head lawyer’s pale back, sending fire through her skin, and walked away without looking back, detecting the smell of charred sugar and wet tobacco that lingered behind him. Oleh headed out too, his hiking boot nailing Hrysha in the ribs, so he wouldn’t ruin the reception, picked the fallen server up by the collar, clutched Dasha for a moment, feeling that everything in her was burning with bitterness, then kept walking, only looking at his brother’s unwavering back, only following his bruised head, only trusting his brother, and only listening to him. They walked up to Sonia to get their car keys.

  “You’re leaving so soon?” she asked, clearly disappointed.

  Danylo tried cracking a joke, while Oleh rooted anxiously through his pockets for his cigarettes, then Sonia grabbed Danylo’s hand and placed the keys in his palm, but she didn’t let him go, pulling him along, instead.

  “I can’t just let you leave like this,” she chuckled. “You know I can’t.”

  Danylo walked imperiously right behind her, while Oleh, quite guardedly, brought up the rear—he stopped in front of the kitchen door, grabbed the little terror who was now shadowing them (his relatives had only just fished him out of the pool, but he’d already managed to change clothes), turned him around, and kneed him in the rear end.

  “Go enjoy the reception,” he said gloomily, closing the door.

  There was one thing she liked about Senia—he never even thought about saying “thank you” when she paid for him. He’d say that a man shouldn’t have to grovel, and if he happened to be low on cash that didn’t mean he had to apologize and thank his girlfriend up and down. That was his idea of a guiding principle.

  “Principles force us to take action; they give us the strength we need,” Sonia thought. “Or the weakness we need. Or both.” When he moved all his stuff—T-­shirts, cleats, shin guards, sweat-­stained keyboard—over to her place, her life hardly changed at all. Not even her dreams changed; they continued as though nothing new had happened in her life—like she had been hooked up to some channel that only displayed outlandish educational dreams that she didn’t always understand, so she often didn’t finish watching them. Senia treated her with a certain restrained politeness, he didn’t need a lot of attention, and he didn’t say much—sometimes his continuous silence would make her anxious. He liked sleeping beside her and looking at her in the morning before she woke up, before she could start talking. After a night with her, his body looked as though he’d been fighting through briar bushes in the dark. With all those bitemarks, bruises, and scratches on his shoulders and back, he looked like a great martyr who had taken some serious abuse for his beliefs. Senia would stand in front of the mirror, looking at the blood exuded by his skin, and he’d get this inexpressibly sweet feeling. After practice, he’d stand there in the shower as the blood seeped out of his wounds and mingled with the cool water like wind hitting sheets of rain. His friends would make fun of him, and he’d get angry and dress quickly—but at home, before he collapsed into bed, he’d walk over to the mirror and examine his cuts, which never seemed to heal.

  Where had everyone gone? Why had they left so early? Well, it was late in the evening—actually, you could say it was early in the morning, but who keeps track of those things at a moment like this, in a mood like this? There was nobody in the kitchen; light spread evenly across the shiny, sauce- and cream-­stained stove, the metal surfaces of the tables and the tin insides of the sinks, and the heavy fridges and sharp knives stuck in the bloody cutting boards. Half-­empty pots of leftover delicacies were everywhere, bright-­green cabbage and tender salad greens littered the floor, the last slivers of precious beef lay in one of the sinks, and the table was covered with glasses, jars filled with honey and chocolate, and plates of something spicy and
peppery, viscous and weightless.

  “Come on in, ya lumberjacks,” Sonia said, laughing. “There’s nobody here. I haven’t eaten anything all day. Man, that’s at my own wedding, too! I’ll grab something now. Take a seat.”

  Oleh hopped up on the table, snatched a stray cabbage leaf, aimed, and shot it into the sink. “Three-­pointer,” he thought, rather pleased with himself. Danylo was leaning up against the fridge, looking at his brother mockingly, and listening to the silence in the hallway. Sonia started peering into the pots, sniffing around and fishing out something tasty—the last morsels of Mediterranean dishes, eastern spices, and southern fish—rattling dishes, pouring gravy all over, lighting up all four burners on the stove, which flared like sea flowers, flinging lilac shadows all across the ceiling. She produced a block of cheese, found some lemons, took out an open bottle of cognac, and passed it to Oleh, who froze every time their fingers touched. She sat down next to him, taking out an apple from behind her back, and tossed it to Danylo, who caught it effortlessly. Sonia took a massive swig of cognac, passed the bottle back to Oleh, picked up some food and sliced it into equal portions with a big knife, sharing everything she had. Oleh started drinking hard, keeping a close eye on her. Sonia bit into a lemon, and its golden juice ran down her chin. Not a single muscle in her face twitched—only a few tears slid down onto her cheeks, but she wiped them away smoothly and then reached for the cheese and parsley. Her teeth ripped through black bread and she smoothly washed it down with cherry juice. Her fingers snapped bars of chocolate and she licked strawberry jam off her palms, laughing all the while. A white flame whipped across her mouth—her smile was wide and bountiful. That’s the kind of smile only kids—not all of them, though—can have. The cherries left a bloody trail on her lips and the alcohol made her breath warm; eating gave her such a light and cheerful air that Oleh was instantly drunk, a sleepy kind of drunk. Something was tossing him up into the air. Now he noticed that it was cold in there; not even the gas stove could heat up the damp air hovering over the sinks and freezers. “She’s gotta be cold,” he thought, shedding his leather jacket and using it to cover her shoulders. Sonia wrapped herself up in it and breathed deeply, inhaling his smell, turning to kiss him—she kissed him for a while, and her kisses smelled like lemons and honey. Oleh waited and waited some more, until he couldn’t take it anymore, then he grabbed his jacket back and tossed it on the cold tabletop—Sonia went right along with him, dropping back onto the jacket, pulling his shirt toward her, still kissing him as he took it off. Lemons were tumbling to the floor, bouncing off the jam-­stained tile, dates were crushed under his arms, making his skin sweet, alcohol was spilling across the table, hopelessly soaking the stray salad greens.