Mesopotamia Page 13

  He’d been up all night; he wanted to prolong that state that follows an extended stretch of sleeplessness, that feeling of being detached from the motion of the planets through the heavens. Thirty is the right age for learning to enjoy the passage of time and stop regretting that it passes so quickly. His habits had long since become fixed, his anxiety had dissipated, and he had comfortably settled into his addictions. The need to fight off drowsiness and preserve the eerie and fleeting quality of the world’s darkness within himself hit Mark hardest in the summer months. At around 6 a.m., he’d completely lose the ability to orient himself in time; the sun was already over the trees, but the moon was still hanging up in the sky—it seemed as though the city had woken up a while ago and everyone was attending to important business, which gave Mark an unaccountable feeling of anxiety or anticipation, like the planets had perfectly aligned above him, hinting at the beginning of something important in his life, the kind of thing that ought to begin on one of these strange days at the end of June, when suns and moons multiply and hide in the air like foxes in warm grass. He shut the windows, walked outside, and took out his phone to check the time. At that very moment he got a call from Kolia.

  Kolia owned two vegetable stands on Horse Lane and two more downtown. Mark’s mom worked at one of them. He tried opening another one at the beginning of the summer, but it went bust, which caused his pancreas to start acting up. Kolia decided to steer clear of hospitals—alcohol was his go-­to medicine. Yesterday morning he’d made a long haul out to some wedding—he had a classmate who had died a few years ago, leaving behind a solid legacy and an adult heiress. It was her daughter tying the knot. He came, congratulated the newlyweds, held forth about family obligations, hit on the women, and argued with the men. The pain flared up that night. He got taken to the hospital. He got pissed. He argued with the doctor too. He called his nephew as soon as she left the room.

  “Markster,” he said flatly, choosing his words carefully so he wouldn’t sound too helpless. “I can’t really talk, there’s people sleeping here. Listen up, go over to my place, you have a set of keys. Grab my toothbrush, grab my razor, grab my hair dryer, grab my slippers, grab my towels, underwear, some magazines, my hot-­water bottle, my cards (I’m talking about my playing cards, you know), a bowl, a spoon, my knife block, a few clean dress shirts and ties, handkerchiefs, my teapot, my thermos, my toaster—”

  “Are you moving or something?” Mark interrupted.

  “I’m in the hospital,” Kolia answered brusquely.

  Mark got scared. Kolia continued, “They brought me in right after the wedding, in the middle of the night. I didn’t even have a change of clothes. Come on, Markster,” he said coldly, putting some pressure on his nephew. “Move! Move! Move!”

  His anxiety rubbed off on Mark. Kolia was always getting on his case—he was always riding everyone, he micromanaged everything, spinning a system of family relationships like a sticky spiderweb, taking deep offense whenever anyone would slip out of his tender yet firm embrace, and talking about his clan an awful lot—mostly good things—but he still treated them like debtors.

  Kolia resided in a two-­story building not far away; the whole first floor belonged to him. The building was buried deep in a nook between large apartment blocks, so you couldn’t even see it from the street. The walls exuded moisture, the balconies were drooping, and the ceiling should have collapsed a long time ago, but it was still intact, supported by invisible braces and beams. Kolia arranged buckets and pots all over his rooms like he was setting cunning traps to catch precious raindrops. Back in the Soviet days, four families lived in the building. Kolia’s family had two rooms on the first floor, next to the Pavlovs—Papa Pavlov, an engineer, Mama Pavlov, an engineer, too, and their busybody drama-­queen daughter. Shalva Shotovych, a factory foreman up on Shevchenko Street, a lonesome unmarried jigit of Georgian descent with tons of connections around town, lived right above them. Some old Bolsheviks lived in the other corner of the second floor; Kolia could never tell them apart . . . or maybe they were just that good at disguising themselves. At the beginning of the nineties, the Pavlovs suddenly turned out to have been Jews all along, and promptly emigrated, selling their apartment to Kolia for peanuts. The Bolsheviks’ ranks thinned over time. Eventually, there was only one old lady left, and she wasn’t feeling too hot, either. She’d sometimes look in the mirror by accident and give herself a real scare. Kolia would sometimes stop by and give her some food. Shalva left, too, but without selling his apartment. Once every two years or so, he’d fly in from Hamburg or some other place where he was working down at the docks, air out the rooms, sit with Kolia in the evenings, tell him about his new life—he wasn’t griping at all, but Kolia would still try to console him. Shalva refused to sell his apartment, for some odd reason. It was as though he was keeping one last corridor open in case he had to retreat, some illusion that all was not lost and everything could still work out in the end. So Kolia was all by himself—his parents had died, his sisters, Zina and Maria, got married, had some kids, and got divorced, but they were in no hurry to return to the nest. Between raising Mark and working for her brother, Maria had her hands full. Zina lived by the sea and hardly ever visited. Mark’s mom got married, but it didn’t work out. His aunt Zina got married, but that didn’t work out either. He viewed this as some sort of family curse. Kolia hid stacks of cash in his fridge, kept vegetables he’d bought from wholesalers in the hallway, and slept blissfully sprawled out on a sofa. He didn’t have much luck with the ladies, and they didn’t have much luck with him, either. Kolia had olive skin, squinty eyes, a heavy, mistrustful gaze, a dull smile, yellow teeth like an old stray dog, weak lungs, and a heart swimming in fat. He made himself breakfast every morning. No wonder his pancreas had started acting up.

  Mark dug out his keys, opened the door, walked down the hallway, and entered Kolia’s dusty domain, where herbs lay in a great heap on the floor. The air had the overwhelming smell of medicine and the muffled smell of burned food. There was a fancy new chandelier hanging over the table in the first room; only one of the bulbs worked, though. There were two washing machines in the corner; neither of them worked. There were wardrobes full of new, brand-­name clothing and old children’s books. The rugs were densely covered with potato chips. Then Mark stumbled over a loose TV cable and an unplugged extension cord with a toaster at one end. Kolia was clearly all about the latest technology, but he had some problems getting it hooked up. The curtains had been drawn, and the rooms were swaddled in murk. The air held so many smells and so much stagnant warmth within itself that Mark couldn’t take it anymore and had to open the window for some relief. He took out his bag and started rooting around the apartment, gathering up Kolia’s things: the thermos, towels, and underwear. Then he remembered about the toothbrush. The bathroom was on the other side of the building. He went through the room with a couch and two televisions (one had picture and the other had sound), past the closet where Kolia kept brooms and his hunting shotgun, into a spacious, messy kitchen; in the corner, partitioned off by a colorful Chinese screen, was a big, fancy tub resting on four bricks. He loved Kolia’s kitchen—you could always find something interesting there, either in the fridge, which would shut off on its own sometimes, or in his grandma’s old desk, where Kolia kept sweets and sleeping pills. There were suitcases packed with magazines and cardboard boxes stuffed with Kolia’s socks and supermarket bags. A heavy piece of velvet was draped over the window like a flag, which made the surrounding disorder mysterious, so Mark stepped into the kitchen full of the foretaste of mysteries and riddles—with good reason, as it turned out. A young stranger stood in the shower, her back turned to Mark, fiddling with the hot-­water knob. The screen had been pulled slightly to the side; the stranger apparently hadn’t been expecting any visitors. Mark froze, took a half-­step back through the doorway, and then peeked in again. Light was streaming through holes in the velvet, yanking colors and shades out of the twilight. The radio on top o
f the fridge was singing with melodramatic sorrow; two hoarse women’s voices were telling some sob story about a downtrodden girl from a small port town who had learned too early about heartache and disappointment. The stranger didn’t even hear that somebody had walked into the room—she stood on her tiptoes, reaching for the nickel-­plated Italian showerhead that Kolia had attached with blue adhesive tape, swaying slightly and listening to the sad women as though the song was about her own life.

  “There was,” the first woman started, “nothing to do in my town except pound beers all day and fuck your brains out all night in the park by the jungle gym, the factories’ white smoke, the workers’ black eyes, and duplicitous raspberry bushes behind the brackish nighttime delta.”

  “Yep, yep,” the other woman chimed in, “nothing to do, no attractions but dry southern wine and making love in the salt-­parched grass. The hammerers’ black eyes and the fresh raspberries at the Sunday bazaars.”

  Mark stared hard, trying to get a better look at the stranger. She was short and skinny with long, dark hair—weighed down now by the water—standing on her tiptoes, muscles taut with strain, but she still couldn’t reach anything, and she kept on swaying so bitterly that the song, already none too cheerful, became utterly hopeless.

  “Everyone in town thought I was a tramp,” the first woman cried, “everyone hated me for my dyed curls and the golden chain on my defenseless neck. Every good-­for-­nothing scumbag on the street tried looking under my skirt and pawing my hips in the dark movie theater.”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” the other woman continued, “black strands of hair glinted keenly in the dark pit of the movie theater, and forlorn men walked her home late at night, passing through the olive-­colored evenings, mesmerized by the warm bronze gleam of her skin.”

  “They loved her,” the other woman added, as though emphasizing an important point, “for her light heart and carefree nature.”

  Mark listened and looked. She had slim and weightless calves, soft hips, and dark skin, as though she had spent a lot of time working in vineyards, exposed to the sun, not hiding from the wind and rain.

  Then the first woman continued, “Downtown was all decked out for the big holiday when I met him. He was a real gangster, plucking pigeons in streetcars, never parted from his Finnish knife, gunfights, hideouts, the whole shebang. But I’d given my heart to him—love’s a funny thing. But he left me, withdrawing a step at a time till I was all alone in this cruel, cold world.”

  “Love, oh love,” the other woman took over, “it made every day a holiday for her, when she’d rush downtown every morning, and the local men would pull their knives and fight over the right to buy her a bouquet of wildflowers. But only one of them could open her joyful heart like a bike lock; he removed its secret spring and deprived her of her voice and happiness. Where is he now? What streetcars carry him home? Why won’t he come back for her?” She flung her hair onto her breasts, and Mark discerned some birthmarks on her back, so tiny they were hardly perceptible—he discerned her delicate vertebrae showing sharply under her skin like underwater rocks breaking the surface of a lake, rising to hold her up—she was so slim they could hardly feel her weight—he discerned her small, childish shoulder blades, unable to look away, bewitched as he observed them moving and then freezing again—he discerned her collarbone, her neck.

  “Ever since then,” the first woman, the sad one, intruded suddenly, “I’ve come to this mobbed-­up bar to sell my love to postmen and longshoremen—to anyone willing to pay anything at all for it. After all, there’s no such thing as a free lunch—nothing in life is free. When we buy our sweet love, what we get is just ripples on the water and blue makeup smeared on our faces.”

  “When we cry o’er sweet love,” the other woman continued, “we pay all those postmen who don’t bring us bad news with our sincerest appreciation. You have to pay for everything—every evening and every night—and our tears are just the blue hue of the air, blue ripples in the water, the gold of our joy, and the silver of our silence.”

  All at once, the song cut out, the fridge stirred and then froze. The stranger turned sharply and looked him straight in the eye.

  First a wave of heat overcame him, then ice crippled him, and then he realized that his whole body had gone numb. The stranger was already smiling at him like an old friend. She found a warm, white towel, wrapped herself up in it carelessly, hiding almost nothing, stepped onto the soggy, squeaky hardwood floor, walked over to Mark, and extended her hand casually.

  “Hi,” she said, flipping her hair back. “Are you Mark?”

  “Yeah, I’m Mark,” he said, startled to remember his own name.

  “I’m Nastia, Aunt Zina’s daughter,” she said.

  Back at the hospital, Mark had to wait in the hallway—the doctor was trying to explain to a surly and uncooperative Kolia that he had to take his medicine. He offered the doctor a bribe to let him go, and she took offense and explained that nobody was keeping him there and that treatment at their hospital was entirely voluntary—unless you were a schizophrenic, of course. Then Kolia took offense, yelling that he could’ve sold half a truckload of bananas since they’d started haggling last night. The doctor burst into tears, Kolia apologized and tried stuffing some money in the pocket of her white coat, and she demanded that he lie down and stop chasing after her—he had an IV in his arm. Eventually, she left, glancing tearfully at Mark in the hallway. He walked into the ward and saw Kolia lying by the window, wearing wrinkled white pants and a stale dress shirt, his expensive, dirty shoes tossed under the bed. He looked exhausted, and after yesterday’s festivities, his face, which was a bit puffy at the best of times, had swollen up and acquired a lemon tinge. Kolia had a bulging potbelly and stubby legs; Mark thought he looked like the bad guy in a Bollywood movie. Generally, those characters abuse their power . . . and the audience’s patience. The way he looked now, with that needle in his vein, Kolia elicited dread rather than sympathy—what if he survives and seeks revenge? There were three other people in his ward: a bookish gentleman with glasses was lying across from Kolia, reading some newspapers and gnawing on a hard cookie; a guy who clearly worked at a factory, judging by his oil-­stained hands and the bags under his eyes, with a coiled metal wand for boiling water, which was evidently central to his treatment; and a younger man in orange shorts, long, white socks like the kind golfers wear, a striped T-­shirt, and headphones—he was lying there, refraining from talking to anyone or answering any provocative questions. It was as if he’d simply stopped by to rest for a bit and enjoy his favorite music. Mark immediately noticed that Kolia had already established his dominance—all three of them would occasionally glance at him warily, trying to anticipate his next outburst and figure out where the danger lurked. That’s precisely why Mark found his uncle so intimidating: you could never tell what kind of mood he was in, whether or not he was joking, or when he was planning on busting your kneecap. Kolia’s eyes scrutinized people through their narrow slits, and he talked as if he were ordering at a restaurant—you didn’t feel like listening to him, but you couldn’t interrupt him either. He spoke quietly, so you always had to listen closely to make sure you didn’t miss anything. Once he saw Mark, he got up, yanked the needle out of his vein, and attached it to the IV stand with the Band-­Aid that had been holding it in place.

  “Ya got everything?” he asked calmly, as though he hadn’t just tried to bully the doctor.

  “Yep.”

  “What’s new?” Kolia asked, apparently expecting to get some updates on the family.

  “Zina’s daughter’s there,” Mark answered, unsure what tone would please Kolia—happy, reproachful, or disgusted?

  Kolia took one of the bags from Mark and dumped its contents out on the bed. Then he removed his shirt and pants unhurriedly, tossed them into the now-­empty bag, handed it back to Mark, and started changing into clean clothes. Mark noted that Kolia’s upper body was tan but he had pale, bluish legs, making it look as thou
gh somebody had mixed and matched body parts from different people to assemble a model Kolia, and now all you had to do was pump a little blood into him and send him on his way. Finally, he started talking again.

  “Oh, Nastia,” he said, “that’s right. She was supposed to come by yesterday. How’d I forget?” He went silent, looked out the window, put his hands in his pockets, and then turned toward his nephew again. “I want you to keep an eye on her while I’m gone. Okay, ­Markster?”

  “If you say so. But what for? She’s not a kid, she doesn’t need a babysitter.”

  Mark saw Kolia clenching his fists in his pockets.

  “I realize that,” he answered, clearly annoyed but trying not to let it show. “Just keep an eye on her, okay?”

  “Okay,” Mark said, trying to calm him down.

  “I’m putting my trust in you,” Kolia said, and Mark felt all the resentment packed into those words. “Pick her up something for ­dinner.”

  He took a wad of cash held together with a hair tie out from under his pillow, counted out a few bills, handed them to Mark, stuck the needle back in his vein, plopped down on the bed, and said sourly, “We’re all one big family. What keeps a family together? Trust. You got that?”