Voroshilovgrad Read online

  “I could just leave. But I’d rather stay, of course.”

  “Just don’t look at me then, all right?”

  “Well, where do you want me to look?”

  “All right, damn it, look wherever you want,” Olga said. “Just don’t be weird about it.”

  She slid off her shirt, stepped out of her jeans and threw everything on the windowsill, neatly placing her sunglasses on top. There she stood, in her orange underwear, glaring at me.

  “Okay,” she said, “I realize that this could look a bit odd, but you can hang up your clothes, too. We have to wait out the storm anyway.”

  “Look odd to who? Are there security guards here?”

  “Technically, yes,” she answered. “But what’s the point of guarding the place in the middle of a storm? They’re in town, probably. Don’t be scared.”

  “I’m not scared.”

  Nevertheless, I decided against getting undressed. Who knows how she would have taken that. I flopped down on the pullout bed, which squeaked in response, and lay there in the twilight, taking in the steady sound of the rain—it was like old ship engines humming. Olga bounced around the room, looked over the children’s pictures, found a stack of Young Pioneer magazines somewhere, then brought some over and lay down next to me. It was hard to see in there, the air was so damp it seemed to have congealed around us in the dark, so Olga just skimmed through their pages, looking at the bright images. I leaned in toward her and started looking too. Olga noticed my interest, and began lingering on each page so I could get a good look at everything.

  “When I worked here,” she said, “we would read these magazines out loud before bed.”

  “Why don’t you work with kids anymore?”

  “Well, it just didn’t pan out. I didn’t like the Pioneers. They could be real pieces of shit.”

  “Really?”

  “Uh-huh. Although I guess it might be inappropriate for a former camp counselor to talk like that.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “Did you go to camp as a kid?” Olga asked. “I mean a Pioneer camp.”

  “No, because I didn’t really get along with other kids. That’s also why my teachers never really liked me.”

  “Let’s talk about something else, then, you wouldn’t find it interesting,” Olga said. She tossed the magazines on the floor.

  “That’s not true. I wanna hear it. You know, I often think back to my German class. It sure was weird studying German in the Soviet school system. There was a kind of unhealthy, anti-Fascist pretentiousness that went along with it. In like fourth or fifth grade we got this one assignment—we were given postcards with pictures of different cities on them. You remember those? Back then they were sold at every post office, whole sets of them.”

  “Nah, I don’t remember them.”

  “Well, they were at every post office. Like postcards with pictures of Voroshilovgrad on them. That city doesn’t even exist anymore. It’s called Luhansk now. But I talked about it in German for years. Funny how that works, don’t you think?”

  “Oh yeah. Hilarious.”

  “Generally, those postcards had government buildings or maybe monuments on them. But what kind of monuments could there be in Voroshilovgrad? Well, presumably there was one to Voroshilov . . . Honestly, I can’t remember anymore. I had to talk about what I saw on the postcard. But what was there to see? The monument itself, a flowerbed around it, and then there would always be somebody walking by, and maybe a trolley in the background. There might not be, though, and that would make it a little harder, since there would be even less to say. The sun might be shining. There might be some snow on the ground. Voroshilov might be on a horse, or on foot, but that’d be worse, for the same reason . . . I could have told a whole separate story about the horse. Well, you just had to start talking. But what can you really say about something you’ve never actually seen? So, you start making stuff up. At first you could talk about the monument itself—I mean about the real person it’s a monument to. Then you’d just have to move on to the random people passing the monument. What could you really say about them, though? Well, that woman is wearing a yellow sweater and a black dress. Maybe she’s carrying a bag. With bread in it. Then, after you’ve covered all of the people, you could say a few words about the weather. Mostly, what I’m getting at is that it was all so artificial—all those pictures, all those stories, that language, a handful of canned phrases, that silly accent, and your pathetic attempts to put one over on your poor fuckin’ German teacher. Ever since, I just haven’t been able to stand German. And I never went to Voroshilovgrad, either. And now there’s no such thing as Voroshilovgrad.”

  “Why are you telling me all this, anyway?” Olga asked.

  “What do you mean?” I was disappointed that she had to ask. “Well, take this whole situation with my brother,” I said. “It reminds me of German class. It’s like I’m being asked to talk about what I see in the pictures, and I really don’t like talking about things I know nothing about, Olga. I don’t even like the pictures! And I certainly I don’t like being backed into a corner, and told to play by someone else’s rules. Rules only have meaning as long as you’re abiding by them. As soon as you start ignoring them, it turns out that you don’t owe anyone anything, you’re not obligated to make up all kinds of silly stories about things you actually know nothing about. Then it turns out that you can get by just fine without all those made-up stories, and there aren’t any rules—what they’re showing you doesn’t exist anymore, so there’s nothing to say. It’s all a sham, they’re just trying to use you . . . and it’s all perfectly legal, of course. It’s like school all over again. The thing is that we all grew up a long time ago, but we’re still being treated like kids, like unintelligent, deceitful, irrational bastards who need to be coerced and corrected and have the right answers beaten out of them.”

  “What do you mean it doesn’t exist anymore? You exist, don’t you? And I do too.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I exist. But there’s no Voroshilovgrad anymore. We have to come to terms with that.”

  “It’s pretty much the same thing with the pioneers,” Olga replied. She fell asleep after that, I’m not sure exactly when.

  The rain didn’t like it would be letting up anytime soon—it continued to rattle against the tin box of the Lenin room, filling the darkness with its monotonous tapping. The longer the storm continued, the colder it got in that damp Pioneer room. My clothing, wet and heavy, was dragging me down; I felt like a scuba diver, and when I finally hit the ocean floor, where the rain ended and a thick, inky darkness set it, it was even colder. No matter how hard I tried to ignore the cold, I couldn’t warm myself one bit. Olga was still lying next to me in her orange underwear, shivering in her sleep. Her skin was shining; I touched it, and it felt like river water, receptive and cool. “Just make sure she doesn’t wake up,” I thought.

  I touched her wet hair, and again it felt as though my hands were penetrating the surface of a river, and that surface was calm and clouded so I couldn’t see anything beneath it. I caught hold of some shells, trying to reach the bottom. I was afraid my hands would snag on fishing hooks someone had left behind. Her eyes were closed and her eyelids were translucent. They were like ice through which you see the forlorn shadows of the drowned and the dark green seaweed drifting like tumbleweeds along her body’s underwater currents, drifting due south, toward her heart. Sliding down those green channels, I cautiously touched her soft, cheekbones—beneath her skin was shadowed and particularly thin, like a spiderweb being stretched by the wind. She was whispering something in her sleep, something I couldn’t make out, her lips barely moving as if she was talking to herself, asking herself some tough questions she didn’t want to answer. The luminous lines of her collarbone showed through the darkness, like rocks by the coast with the waves wearing their angles down. As I touched them, I tried to feel the motion of the seaweed down below. I could hear her heart; its beating was a steady as the turning of a s
unflower following the day across the rainy sky. I carefully slid my hand farther down, only grazing her breasts to avoid disrupting her breathing. Her skin was firm yet yielding, like flags flapping in the sea wind, directing the movements of clouds and birds. Guided by the blood flowing through her capillaries, I slid down her legs, her fragile porcelain knees, her nearly weightless calves. I reached her toenails, speckled with polish, like shards of broken tea sets, then moved up slowly, as if my palms were full of sand lifted from the bottom of the river. Without opening her eyes, Olga turned toward me and cautiously placed her hand on me, sliding underneath my T-shirt, touching me as though she were touching empty air. We were lying on a worn-out couch, indoors, with darkness and water pouring out of the sky, embracing sheepishly, like young pioneers. She was talking to herself, and I was trying not to interrupt—“Let her talk,” I told myself as I touched her breasts. She took off my shirt and said something to me, nestling up against me and seemingly reading a message written on my skin, some sort of code only she could comprehend. I can’t recall anyone ever paying such close attention to my skin. She was examining it thoroughly, pensively, as though she were looking for traces of injections or old burns that had healed long ago but still caused me pain. I even thought that she might have mistaken me for someone else, someone she really wanted to talk to. She was hovering over me, incredibly close, and I pulled her against me. But she extricated herself smoothly and wound up somewhere behind me instead. She leaned over me.

  “Listen,” she said, not using my name, “as long as we’re just touching each other we haven’t crossed the line. You got that?”

  “What line is that?” I asked.

  “The red line. Everything is fine now, but if we start kissing, like, you know, making out . . . that’d mess it all up.”

  “Mess it all up?” I asked.

  “Yep, that’d mess it all up,” Olga confirmed, “so just try to sleep.”

  Then she sprang off the bed and went outside.

  But I couldn’t fall asleep. I was just lying there, contemplating the spots on the ceiling, listening to the rain drumming on the walls, and sensing the trees encircling our little building. I didn’t quite understand where Olga had gone, why she had stopped. I turned over so the sky and the ground switched places, and looked at the wall covered in children’s pictures. They were dark and mysterious against the white wall. The Pioneers primarily used watercolors—their lines were heavy and thick, as though they were drawn in cow’s blood or colored clay. Eventually I realized that the pictures had been hung in a deliberate order, because they formed stories, or parts of them, like on church walls, but, of course, in watercolor. Strange men, carrying weapons and wearing animal masks, were depicted in the top pictures. They were razing whole cities, cutting down tall trees, and hanging pets on balconies. They were cutting merchants’ ears off and gouging their eyes out, goading heavy, fire-breathing elephants out of a wasteland—and those elephants had folded wings, like bats. The lower pictures showed women building fires and burning toys and dead people’s clothing, and also branding each other with odd symbols that glowed in the dark, attracting herons and owls. They chose the most beautiful woman among them, put her in a big cage, and lowered her into the river—newts and water demons gathered around to hear her sing and watch her do card tricks. In another picture, a woman was giving birth to a little, two-headed girl who started speaking right away—speaking two different languages nobody could make any sense of, and so she was sent to a faraway land to find people she could communicate with. When she got there, a terrible plague broke out—dead birds fell out of the sky, delirious snakes slithered out of their holes; her words drove men to insanity, and women hopped into the river, swimming downstream balancing bundles of clothing and scripture on their heads. The last picture showed some sort of funeral procession; children and old people were carrying open caskets, but there weren’t any people in them. They were arguing about which coffin they were supposed to bury. Oxen and herons were standing next to them, and stars the stars above their heads were following unfamiliar routes. The children, unable to decide which coffin to bury, shoved a big, tired ox into the grave instead, and covered it with thick and pasty earth the consistency of peanut butter, like a buried German tank; unintelligible signs were pouring out of its mouth, but the children couldn’t read them because they were illiterate. They simply stood there, holding their spades and listening to the animals that were trying to tell them something important and ominous.

  What I’d seen there made me uneasy, so I got up and went looking for Olga. Rain bombarded me as soon as I opened the outside door. I tried calling to Olga, but I threw in the towel right away. Where could she be? I turned the corner and ventured over to the next building. I headed toward the gate and saw Olga standing on the playground, getting soaked, her shoulders drooping oddly. She was letting the rain wash over her face, and then she was raising her hands into the air, as if trying to catch the raindrops. I called her name, but she didn’t hear me. Then it hit me—she was actually trying to warm up. It was now a lot warmer outside than in the cold, metal Lenin room. She’d just stepped outside to get the chill out of her bones. She was letting the warm sheets of rain fall on her freezing skin. It seemed as though she couldn’t see me at all; she was walking over the asphalt, wringing the shivers out of her body . . . an odd scene. Her eyes were still closed, as if she had been sleepwalking the whole time. I had to catch her before she wandered out through the gate and vanished into the woods. Good luck trying to find her out there, come morning. I walked up to her and touched her hand. She opened her eyes and gave me her full attention. In the dim light her eyes were a dark shade of blue, thick like the lines of the pioneers’ paintings, thick like clay. She kept looking at me for some time. Eventually she let go of my hand and headed back toward the buildings.

  “Are you going to try and get some sleep?” she asked, taking a last look at the rain-soaked forest.

  “Yeah, sure,” I said, trying to hold her placid, clay gaze.

  “And stop looking at me like that,” she added.

  We slept poorly, obviously.

  In the morning, the jubilant sun was driving rainy fog out along the line of pine trees; the puddles were steaming like open freezers, and the birds were drinking water out of the dark green leaves. Olga was wringing and shaking her shirt, trying not to make eye contact with me. I wasn’t feeling too hot either, overwhelmed with doubt and pangs of conscience—I was blaming myself, thinking, “Maybe I did something wrong,” or “Maybe we should have had sex after all.” But why exactly? What for? Basically, I felt exactly like a young pioneer who hadn’t gotten lucky last night, not that he was really expecting to.

  “Herman,” Olga said dryly, “I hope you didn’t think yesterday was weird or anything.”

  “Nah,” I assured her. “I enjoyed those magazines, the pictures were great.”

  “Glad to hear it,” she said, in flat, detached voice, “glad to hear it.”

  Then she walked toward the door.

  “You forgot your sunglasses,” I called after her.

  “You can have them for now,” Olga didn’t bother to turn around.

  So I took them with me.

  The pine forest ended a bit down the road, giving way to wide open landscapes where cold damp fog gathered at every low point, and beyond that a sunny haze, a light and deep emptiness that unfolded all around us, sprawling out to the east and south, stretching out and soaking up the last drops of water and patches of greenery, grass filled with light, encompassing the earth and lakes, the skies and the gas shining under the earth like gold veins standing out on the Motherland’s skin. Somewhere down south, beyond the pink sunrise, on the other side of the cloudy emptiness, the gates of Voroshilovgrad sliced cleanly through the sky, promising a welcome that was nowhere to be found.

  Alarm and confusion prevailed in the gas station parking lot. Injured was sitting in his chair, apparently thinking something over, his head in his hand
s. Panic-stricken, Kocha was looking every which way, sprawling out on the catapult next to Injured. Some new, little guy, wearing a singed, battle-worn sailor’s shirt, was curled up on the ground next to Kocha. This little guy was also looking around in terror, occasionally hiding his head under the blanket he’d wrapped around himself; it looked like the same one I was used to sleeping under. Katya, clearly petrified, stood off to the side, holding an equally petrified Pakhmutova by the collar. Pakhmutova was rubbing up against Katya’s bare calves and jean shorts. Everyone looked pretty miserable. Evidently they had been waiting for me, although now that I’d finally shown up, they were avoiding eye contact and keeping quiet, waiting for me to say something.

  “What’s going on here?” I asked, genuinely concerned.

  “Something real bad happened, buddy,” Kocha’s voice screeched like microphone feedback.

  The little guy sitting on the ground gave a kind of aggrieved shudder, obviously recalling something unpleasant.

  “I’m done with this fucking business!” Injured interjected abruptly. He got up out of his chair and disappeared into the garage.

  “What’s all this about?” I asked.

  “Herman, they torched our tanker truck. Petrovich got a little burned, too.”

  The little guy popped his head out from underneath the blanket and nodded readily.

  “They pulled up right over there. Well, their guys got out and chucked two firebombs right in the truck. They almost killed our old pal here,” Kocha said, patting Petrovich on the back. “Good thing Katya saw them and called us over, otherwise they would have barbecued him.”

  “I was taking Pakhmutova for a walk,” Katya explained.

  “Have you called the cops?”

  “Sure we did,” Kocha said, nodding. “But what do you expect? Like the fuckin’ cops are going to do anything. Everyone already knows who did what. Try and prove it, though.”