Mesopotamia Page 12

  “Doin’ all right?” he asked Oleh.

  “Yeah.”

  “Ya sure?”

  “Yep.”

  “Well all right, then.” Danylo took out his cigarettes and handed one to his brother.

  They had a smoke, patted each other on the back, and went their separate ways.

  Then again, he could have thought about that morning two days ago or its low-­hanging fog sticking warmly and waxily to the pines, making the forest invisible and treacherous. The dark skeleton of their building stood in a clearing, in the middle of a field, like a half-­finished battleship. Oleh slept in the trailers, right alongside his construction crew, like a true captain, sharing canned food, bread, and alcohol with his cheerful and mischievous band of pirates. It was the alcohol they were most interested in sharing that night; it went on until the early morning, and then Oleh told everyone to get some shut-­eye.

  “No days off for us,” he said. “This is a big client shelling out the big bucks, three hours of sleep, then reveille—we’ve got a construction timetable to think about.”

  But no sooner had he fallen asleep than he was awakened by his phone. It was Danylo.

  “Did ya know,” he started, “that your friend is getting married to that guy tomorrow?”

  “What friend?” Still drowsy, Oleh wasn’t following.

  “Your friend, Sonia. Her wedding’s tomorrow. I gave her relatives a ride into town from the train station. They had this fat jerkoffy kid with them, too. Did you know they were getting married?”

  “Of course I did,” Oleh assured him.

  He got up and dressed quickly, putting on his work clothes and a jacket—a cold patch of air was coming out of the woods—woke up the foreman and told him he wouldn’t be back for two days, and brushed his teeth with icy water, realizing that his breath still reeked of alcohol, so he’d have to take the train. “Well, it’s no big deal. A five-­hour trip and then I’ll be home,” he thought. He went over to the village and asked for a ride to the station. Someone agreed to take him, and they navigated the fog and murk. He’d missed the night train; the next one wouldn’t be for another two hours. Oleh sat down on a bench and fell asleep. A cop woke him up, demanded to see some ID, spent a long time checking his picture, and called somebody to make some inquiries; it was only then that he got around to telling him that there wouldn’t be any train today because it only ran every other day. Then they agreed that the officer would drop him off on the main highway. Nobody wanted to pick up some dude mired in the fog, dressed in heavy hiking boots and a shady-­looking jacket. Pissed off and unshaven, he lay down in the grass, slept for a bit, and then called Danylo to ask for a ride. His brother had no problem with helping him out, but Oleh couldn’t explain where he was standing, or, more precisely, where he was lying. A truck finally picked him up in the afternoon; the driver agreed to drop him off at the nearest bus station, refusing to take any money, because Oleh looked so worked up. When he got to the station, it turned out that the evening bus wasn’t even going to run its route—there weren’t any passengers. Oleh offered to pay the driver triple the regular fare but got turned down anyway. Oleh headed over toward the taxi drivers, who took one look at his stubble and the blood and cement caked on his boots and turned him away too, all but one of them, who said they’d be leaving at ten, because he had to wait for a regular customer of his who’d be arriving on the Rostov night express and bringing him a little treat. That’s what he said—a little treat—like it was a chocolate cake or something. Oleh agreed to wait and then went over to the snack bar. The taxi drivers all followed him in, standing at the counter next to him and listening closely to his silence. They left at ten, driving slowly and stalling occasionally. The driver was anxious, and so was Oleh. They covered the first hundred kilometers. They were so close. Right at the city limits, as the car was struggling up yet another hill, it started smoking. The driver opened the hood so despairingly that Oleh paid him the full amount and started walking. “No biggie,” he said to himself, “keep going at a good clip and you’ll get to the metro in a few hours. You’ll be there by morning.”

  He descended into the valley and then started climbing back out, feeling the city coming closer as he walked, and its breath becoming more and more palpable as its glow grew more and more intense up ahead of him. Trucks rolled out of the night, delivering fresh vegetables, frozen pig carcasses, grain, cotton, and contraband medicine to markets and warehouses. Some of the tankers had fresh milk sloshing around in their innards, some had stolen oil, some hid slaves being transported from market to market, singing their sorrowful songs, wondering who would buy them and where they’d ultimately end up. An endless stream of train cars loaded with fish and timber rolled down the tracks, and sleepy passengers peered out the windows, watching the sun flooding the grass of the outskirts with red flames. Barges filled with coal and ships with armed crews glided inaudibly up the rivers, trying to slip through the morning fog to the city’s docks. The sun was poking through the fog, and the city swelled with light, voices, and sounds, rousing people from their slumber and releasing images from their dreams. The city lay up in the hills, flanked by rivers on two sides. Down in the valley stood the first of the houses where the workers lived and the schools where their children went, loomed the dark walls of the hospitals where the lepers were, glowed the white limestone walls of the prisons where they kept the thieves and lunatics. Beyond that were the great factory buildings where they made tanks and tractors, unrecognized churches, which it was forbidden to build in the upper neighborhoods, the black landing strips and the opium fields of the nunneries sprawled out before Oleh. Beyond the airport began the fences of bread factories and meat-­packing plants that woke up in the dark to feed the residents of the city, followed by the gallows where they would hang local witches; the large hardware store was visible behind them, and in one of the hangars, hidden away from the security guards, pilgrims who had come from down south—the Donbas and Crimea—to venerate the icons of the city’s ancient cathedrals slept on the concrete floor with pieces of cardboard underneath them. A bit farther along were red-­brick houses with satellite dishes and secret wards that drove off swindlers and Gypsies. It was mostly people who worked at the markets and train stations that lived in those houses; in the morning, they’d set off for work, their boisterous children running after them, carrying backpacks full of hymnals and algebra homework. The women would stay home and take care of the housework, washing, sewing, making brews that cured the sick and kept men faithful, and pulling food out of their pantries and fridges—red peppers, green suns of cabbage, and yellow cheeses that looked like ripe moons. Smoke from factories and the fires where people warmed asphalt and boiled clean the clothing of the consumptive rose over the roofs of their buildings, and trolleys packed with factory workers, villagers, and couriers rolled past linden and poplar trees, goading along their fuzz that simply wouldn’t settle on the ground, sending it fluttering up above the city’s squares.

  The old neighborhoods faced one of the two rivers, its smooth, level bank overgrown with cattails, where anglers hid, lying in wait for precious fish that were foolish enough to burrow into the silt of its shallows, where they shone like stolen silver dishes. The area around the bridges was mostly inhabited by alms-­seekers who had set up camp in the old typography offices and pharmaceutical warehouses, prostitutes who rented cheap rooms at the dorms run by the railroad institute, jewelry dealers and Sophers who were hesitant to live in the residential area down by the river, so they raised large families in the Stalin-­era apartment buildings along one of the main avenues. Sickly and childless women, homeless men, and unemployed teenagers peered at the city from the riverbank. Children tossed dead birds into the water, where they would float with the current, terrifying those living in the cottages that stretched along the left bank, behind the industrial area and the cemetery for prisoners of war.

  A fortress wall, heavy and impenetrable, ran along the right bank, propping up
the hills and keeping the city from expanding any farther. The customs office was behind the bridge—city guards in gilded armor and traffic cops wielding striped sticks stopped cars and trucks as they tried to pass through the city gates, checked their goods, and searched their trunks and the travelers’ suitcases, looking for undeclared emporia and banned literature. The travelers were checked for syphilis and the plague, and the more suspicious of them were detained and quarantined at the gray barracks the Red Cross had set up by the bus station. The mornings were the busiest time for those officers; they had to catch merchants trying to worm their way into the Old City through underground passageways or stow away on metro cars, and sizable cohorts of sailors who avoided paying any tariffs or declaring any of their cold steel weapons who ascended the surrounding hills by dark footpaths that wound through the gardens and vacant lots behind the Polytechnic Institute. The travelers and men of trade who paid their taxes in full were admitted to the city and either climbed up the cracked cobblestone road, or the new asphalt one the government had recently laid, to the upper neighborhoods, where there was more sun but less greenery. Banks and stores, 24-­hour kiosks where you could always get a pack of cigarettes and 24-­hour pharmacies where you could always get your particular drug cocktail lined narrow streets packed with advertisements and automobiles. Flashy dresses and jewelry burned pink and green in display cases, serving men carried heavy water jugs out of the stores, rushing to bring them to local kitchens, where cooks were lighting their ovens to prepare exquisite Italian and Arabian dishes for the heads of their households. Restaurants and coffee shops were welcoming their first patrons—those who’d arrived from other cities that morning or hadn’t had the time to grab a bite to eat after a night on the town, or those who lived in hotels and nightclubs for weeks on end and just wanted to be around people, so they followed the alluring morning smell of cognac. Students gathered in cheap cafeterias, spilling beer all over their lecture notes, taking out hunting knives and vowing to gut deans and professors, catching up on the latest news, and reading protest poems aloud. Businessmen were sitting in expensive restaurants and closing deals, pricking their fingers and signing contracts in blood. The women standing on the streets smelled like sleep and love; the children were running to school, re-­creating the magnificent stories they’d seen in their dreams the night before. Their screams soared up into the sky and disturbed the trembling currents of air—they froze and changed direction.

  Up high with the rising morning air, among the solar fires and poplar clouds, there were enough churches, mosques, and synagogues to hold all the city’s residents if danger were to strike, monuments to poets and university founders, sprawling parks where birds and beasts brought from Asia and South America roamed free, and theaters, palaces, the hall of burgesses, the municipal government building, and the main department store, all stacked on top of each other. In the mornings, street sweepers washed the steps leading up to monuments and concert halls, traffic cops despairingly stopped bicyclists who flew out into the main square, scattering flocks of pigeons and red, squawking parrots, and eminent professors and councilmen headed to their offices to attend to the city’s needs, protect it against unnecessary fiscal risks and other threats to civilization. The city fathers walked out onto the high tops of their towers, surveying their neighborhoods, swollen with sundust, catching the nearly imperceptible smell of the river flowing from the south, gazing at the surface of the northern river glistening like an airplane’s wing, listening to the birds circling over them, and lifting their heads to the heavens to ask the saints for mercy and intercession. The saints stood there in the blue, invisible space beyond the currents of wind and pockets of turbulence, feeding the birds of the air straight from their hands, listening to the voices down below; they were giving the city fathers an answer, and it went a little something like this:

  “We are doing everything we can. We would like things to go well for you, but how they go is not entirely up to us, so you shouldn’t rely on us alone. Most of our woes and crises of faith stem from our own unwillingness to separate our actions into two categories—good ones and bad ones. We have our love, but we don’t always use it. We have our fear, and we rely on it more than we ought to. There are two paths in life—one leads to heaven and the other to hell. Those paths often cross, though.”

  MARK

  They set up their furniture-­repair shop in the basement of the local utilities department. There was no sign, but the people who needed to find it could—turn after the metro, pick out the right building, duck into the brick archway, and you’ll see the black metal door in the wall. Just knock or ring the bell. They’d stuck a sagging couch down there for the employees to nap on if they didn’t have any work to do. Stationary equipment loomed in the middle of the room, and tables cluttered with jars, brushes, dry rags, pencils, worn-­down sandpaper, and dull foldable knives with bent blades crowded up against the walls. A heavy, swaying lamp dangled from the ceiling and yellowed Soviet factory posters and a few wrestling plaques hung on the walls. The shop smelled of paint, varnish, old wood, and other people’s homes, where all those chairs, wardrobes, bureaus, and bookcases had been before customers lugged them down here to get fixed or restored.

  In the mornings, they’d open the windows, which faced an apartment complex overrun with grass and wild garlic. Fresh air and the muffled sounds of the streets would fill the room. There were some gnarled apple trees out there, and the furniture guys put a couple of benches in their shade—another place for naps. There were some wobbly little structures built against the sides of the apartment blocks a little farther away, beyond the trees, but it was no easy task fighting through the twisting ivy and tall grass to get to them. Even farther back towered a jagged section of brick wall—all that remained of the buildings that had once stood there, now ruined and forgotten. The wall ran up against a wide street that stretched uphill, past the Polytechnic Institute, toward the center of town. In the summer, the block would be completely empty, and the grassy spaces enclosed by the apartment buildings would be as quiet as churches on Monday. There’d be even less work, leaving the employees with nothing better to do than listen to the radio on their cellphones.

  Mark started working here back in the winter. In March, the shop was damp; he and his partner in crime would sit there, drinking their boxed wine, pairing it with scoops of the hard, dark snow that would linger on the ground under their windows until mid-­April. His partner in crime, Yasha, had been at the shop since the beginning. He’d known the boss since the eighties—they were working at the bike factory, just going with the flow, then the nineties hit, they tried to start charting their own course, and the boss capsized. Loyal to a fault, Yasha waited for him faithfully, like a sailor’s wife at the harbor. About ten years back, at the beginning of the 2000s, the boss got the green light to set up shop in the basement—he had to pull a lot of strings to make it happen, too. He’d find all his customers himself, buy all the used stuff himself, drop off salvaged material at night, stop by with some shady customers in the morning, casually raise the price on bureaus, make some calls, avoid some people in town, hardly socialize with anyone—hardly anyone liked him—but his heart wasn’t really in it. Yasha, who had nimble fingers and a resilient liver, was the one who really kept the place running. But Yasha wasn’t getting any younger, so he asked for an assistant. The boss wouldn’t go for any outside help. After all, he barely trusted the guys he had. But then Kolia, one of Yasha’s good buddies, recommended his nephew Mark.

  “It’s better to hire people you know. At least they won’t unionize on ya.”

  So the boss went with Mark, and afterward he’d often say he’d done a good deed, but he later expressed remorse for his actions.

  “Mark,” the boss told his newly minted apprentice, “you have to honor your parents, even if you don’t have any.” Mark grew up without his father, who had gone up north with a lumber company and never come back, so his mother raised him. She did the best she
could, which was pretty terrible. His uncle Kolia would step in at the most crucial moments—he bribed the draft board to get his nephew off the hook, got the college admissions committee to give him a slot in night school, and found odd jobs for him. But he kept his distance, never quite letting his guard down. Mark realized that, so now, at the ripe old age of thirty, he only trusted providence . . . though providence hadn’t done much to earn his trust.

  The job wasn’t very interesting, but on the plus side it wasn’t too demanding for the new apprentice—Mark hauled some furniture around, polished some things, and sanded some boards. Whenever the boss headed out to run errands, Yasha would go pick up some wine and Mark would sprawl out on the couch and flip through old newspapers, clearly dumbstruck by the kind of headlines he found there. The liquor store was across from the shop, built right into the factory’s entry hall. Everybody knew Yasha there and nobody liked him. Yasha had the gentle touch of a true mentor, treating his student well; he even made all the alcohol runs himself. After a few drinks, the master would start talking about his life, and the apprentice would listen inattentively, not giving much credence to what he heard. According to Yasha, there were no women in the world he hadn’t slept with, and no men he hadn’t shared drinks with. Mark would show up to work in varnish-­stained Keds, baggy white jeans with bright chemical speckles, and T-­shirts his mom had scored at some Swiss charity event. He was calm, amiable, and a bit reserved; his heart wasn’t really in it, and he would’ve quit months ago, if it hadn’t been for Kolia. He was afraid of Kolia, whose imposing apathy had a debilitating effect on him. Otherwise, Mark was doing pretty well—he didn’t have any friends and he lived with his mom, though they hardly talked because his mom didn’t have any new stories and he didn’t feel like hearing the old ones again. He enjoyed napping in the afternoon and he’d have some pretty exotic and menacing dreams during his siestas—snakes with women’s heads and foxes with the voices of opera singers, buildings on fire, and rivers with dragons flying over them. He’d wake up in the late afternoon and climb out through the window to sit on a bench outside. Stray dogs would encircle him, ready to pounce, but they lacked the gusto to go for it—after all, what could you take from this odd character who smelled like varnish and wood? What could he have in his pockets besides nails, string, metal plumb bobs like machine-­gun cartridges, and drawing compasses? Sometimes Mark would spend the night at work, switching on the table lamps, and bugs would be drawn into the room, only to be scorched by the bulbs and plummet to the floor. Mark roamed around the room, and the bugs crunched cheerfully under his feet like peanut shells.