Mesopotamia Read online

  Yura had been hiding out here for two days already. He immediately made the right connections, used the doctor’s phone to call his friends, took plates and bowls from the nurses and never gave them back, and traded tobacco with the patients. He knew the ropes. It felt like the last week of your hitch in the army. Or your first stint in jail, the one repeat offenders always remember fondly.

  It hadn’t been the best of years for him. He’d poured everything he had into fixing up a recording studio, but somebody broke in and cleaned the place out right after it opened. Yura couldn’t think of anything else to do but run himself into debt. He borrowed 20K from Black Devil, who told him not to worry, that he’d make it back. He got his business rolling again. A few months passed. It was time to pay his debt, but he had nothing to pay it with. Black Devil kept finding ways to make his presence felt, joking with Yura over the phone, showing up at the studio a few times, asking about his insurance policies, his fire safety precautions, and his family. Yura didn’t have a family, though—he and his wife had gotten divorced, his daughter was all grown up and living in Canada, and he hadn’t talked to his old man for ten years or so. He’d spent the ten years before that thinking about how to do him in. That’s rock and roll for ya. Hatred and malediction come with the territory—and Yura had been in rock and roll forever. Long story short, when Black Devil started sending him blank texts, he went on a serious bender. When they carted him off to the hospital, he got his “chilling diagnosis,” as they would have said on TV. “Well, is it really all that chilling?” he thought, standing at the entrance to the clinic, holding his fancy white suit jacket in one hand, and an X-­ray, hot off the press, in the other. It could be worse. “Sometimes people are born without a voice or with a voice that folks would rather not hear. Sometimes people have extra body parts removed when they’re babies, sometimes the extra parts start growing later. It’s hard to say which is better. At least I can still control my bladder. All right,” he said to himself, “don’t get your panties in a bunch. Everything’s gonna be just fuckin’ fine.” He bummed a cigarette off someone, turned himself in to the TB clinic (wearing his white suit jacket with no shirt underneath), went through a battery of tests, met the staff, and scored a spot in one of the three-­bed wards. The young guy was already there. Some sports magazines were lying by his bed and somebody was decaying, slowly but surely, in the next bed over. “It’s nice in here—it even looks pretty clean,” Yura thought, and decided to stick around for a while. He immediately made friends with the doctor and started hitting on the nurse and smoking with the rest of the gang that hung around by the empty fountain. He turned off his cell, used the doctor’s to call some of his buddies and tell them where he was, what to bring, and what not to say. Then his friends would show up and stand outside the window. They were too afraid to come inside.

  “Oh yeah, ya call that stress?” Yura said on his first night in the ward, when the twilight made the young guy melancholy and he started griping. “Try being an electric guitar player in a hall where the electricity keeps cutting out—now that’s stress, man. We’re so used to complaining about everything. We’ve gotten real soft. We don’t even know what our internal organs are made of anymore. And when you get down to them, you find so much evil that you don’t even know if you should try to treat them. What’s the use?”

  That night, Alla, the nurse, came by his ward, called him out into the hallway, whispered at length in the moonlight, gave him her phone number, and ran on home. Yura went back to the ward and took out his cell, but then he remembered Black Devil and hid it in his pocket again. He just lay there, peering out the window in a dreamy haze. “Everything’s gonna be all right,” he thought. “I’ll camp out here for a month and then take it from there.” He liked hospitals—they were always clean. His apartment was never that clean. Over the past twenty years he’d spent his fair share of time in hospitals—two knife wounds, second-­degree burns, kidney trouble, and all sorts of infections, not to mention going in and out of drug rehab. So he wasn’t even close to panicking this time around—“just another brick in the wall,” he thought, “just another corpse in the river.” Time was chipping away at him; he was getting older, the last few morning IVs had made him woozy, and a wave of drowsiness was breaking over him now, mixing the smells of leaves and state-­issued sheets. That goner was lying on the next bed over. His breathing had slowed like a river in the lowlands. He had two days left to live—a ton of time and a ton of sorrow.

  That was the first night, and three days later, once the deceased had been carried out and his sheets changed, a new guy arrived in their ward. “Who’s this chump? He looks like a damn gym teacher,” Yura thought, looking at the new arrival—an elderly man in old yet neat and well-­tailored clothing. He wore a freshly ironed blue cotton tracksuit with thin white stripes and polished pointed dress shoes that had a festive holiday glow to them. He made a good first impression, despite his odd getup. Maybe it was his kind, fat-­lipped smile, maybe it was his big clown nose, or maybe it was those last strands of hair rakishly combed to one side of his yellowed skull. He came in with two bulging Hugo Boss bags, stuffed them under his bed, surveyed the room, instantly ascertained who was in charge around here, took a seat on the edge of Yura’s bed, and nodded conspiratorially at Sania, as if to say, “Has this guy been bustin’ your fuckin’ balls, buddy?” Yura put his National Geographic aside diplomatically, expressing more or less the following sentiment: “Come on, if you’ve got something to say, then say it already.” The new guy’s name was Valera, and he looked Yura straight in the eye whenever he was talking to him, seemingly emphasizing his every utterance. His eyes matched his tracksuit—they were just as blue and ironed just as flat and they kept tearing up, as though he was griping about something.

  “How is it here?” he asked. “Is it tolerable?”

  “Yep,” Yura answered, “for a while at least.”

  “I won’t be here all too long. Only head cases hang around hospitals—they don’t have to go back to work. I should know, I’ve been around them my whole life,” Valera said confidentially. “I work at the circus.”

  “Are you a clown?” Yura asked immediately, for some reason.

  “No,” he said, not taking offense. “I’m a logistics manager.”

  He returned to his bed and started telling them his life story. It was packed with danger and adventure, obviously. Yura thought to himself that people with such wide and defenseless smiles generally fall into the deepest professional ruts. Their eagerness makes them so wide-­eyed, they can’t even see where they’re going half the time. Valera told tales about the sweet and mysterious world of the circus, their strict regimens and harsh customs, their ancient rituals and professional hierarchies, throwing out dates, quoting poets, recalling the names of performers and tame tigers, and sharing special trapeze safety techniques. He was mainly addressing Yura, but the young guy was the one that was really paying attention—maybe he was a fan of the circus, or maybe he was just glad not to have a corpse in the next bed anymore. Yura humored Valera, nodding or shaking his head whenever the circus manager demanded that he bear witness to the truth of his utterances, but shortly thereafter he took cover behind his magazine, trying to focus on the birds and beasts of Mesopotamia. “How much longer is he gonna keep this up?” Yura thought nervously. “He’s been talking for an hour already, and we’re only up to his college entrance exams. How many more stories does he have?” Then Valera started reminiscing about the sunny days and purple nights of the sixties, their flashy shows and their sultry women who loved the circus more than the most devout Christians love their churches. It follows that they loved him too—after all, how could anyone snub him?

  “And they never did!” Valera exclaimed, reaching into his bag and producing a meticulously filed collection of old color pictures in an envelope labeled Unybrom—Yura immediately remembered how photographic paper was sold in envelopes like that back when he was a kid, thinking about how old he was, h
ow much useless nonsense he’d seen, how hopelessly he’d lost touch with the present, and how long it’d been since he’d gone to the circus. “Probably ten years ago or so. Or has it been even longer? Maybe it’s only been ten years.”

  His little Mashka was already all grown up by then; she didn’t want to go to the circus, but nobody had asked her, as usual. Yura had just come home from yet another bender and was trying to patch up his home life. The circus looked like the Reichstag after the Red Army took it—everyone was beaming with joy, but the building had seen better days. Cold hallways, women in fur coats, cognac at the refreshment stand, and the beasts of Mesopotamia in the gloomy ring. Mashka was crying. She felt bad for the lions. The women were laughing. They decided to walk home—they didn’t feel like riding in the same trolley as those people. Now he was looking at the envelope in the old-­timer’s hands, glancing at his fingers—discolored by nicotine, warped by time and alcohol, battered and covered in scars, as though somebody had cut a notch into them for every year he lived. Seeing the effect his life story was having on his listeners, Valera perked up, pulled a picture—clearly his favorite—out of the envelope, and handed it to Sania, his gaze brushing over it tenderly yet brusquely.

  “Here, kid, take a look,” he said, barely able to contain his excitement. “That’s me back in ’71. See what I was like back then? Just take one look, how can you not love the circus?”

  Apparently much enamored of the young Valera, Sania chuckled and passed the picture to Yura. He laid it flat on one of the pages of his open magazine, next to a wild desert mule. Valera had a fiercely independent manner, a proud stance, piercing eyes, and, most important, a thick head of hair, a cavalier mustache, and pirate sideburns. Yura involuntarily compared the two photographs—Valera and the mule. “There’s definitely some overlap. No doubt about that.” He gave the picture back to the young guy and kept listening to Valera’s narrative for a bit, but once the circus people started delivering baby lions, he took cover behind his magazine, catching some familiar letters, arranging them into words, using those words to construct sentences, sifting through language to separate the circus guy’s spoken words from the written ones on the pages before him, untangling the colorful, silk strands of stories, untying knots, and patiently rowing through the sun’s rays with a lifeline in his hand. He noted that in Mesopotamia nobody rode horses or used them as draft animals. They would only hitch them to the chariots they took into battle or used to hunt wild birds and predators that crept up to the city’s outer walls. Mesopotamians were tender and attentive with their horses—they valued them and cared for them. The advice offered by their grooms was touching and thought-­provoking; they insisted that the owners of these magnificent animals pay special attention to their diet and hygiene, spare them the strain of long, arduous journeys, let them into their homes, if need be, let them lie down on the floor next to them, so they could feel their breathing, cover them with warm fabric on cold winter nights, pick up on subtle changes in their moods, and take the time to listen to their tales of sorrow and hardship.

  “Sleep makes us strong,” the grooms said, “and vulnerable.” Zebras are another matter entirely. Generally, a zebra’s route to the circus skirted a few laws. They were transported across Asian republics under assumed names, their age, gender, and medical history changing along the way. They were kept together in the circus’s own paddocks, quickly growing accustomed to large, rowdy crowds and never straying from their herds. When one of them died, the rest would encircle the body to keep the circus staff away. It was as though they were offering up a sacrifice to the just gods presiding over the heavens. Reemerging from this sticky stream of information, Yura rose to his feet laboriously and plodded outside to have a cigarette. “What’s the deal with those zebras?” he thought, disgruntled. “Where’d they even come from?”

  He waited for everyone to fall asleep, found the cute nurse, and spent the night with her on the pull-­out bed in the staff room. She was so flustered she didn’t know what to say, except that kissing was off limits. Everything else was fair game, though. She tried to keep quiet so they wouldn’t wake up the goners in the clinic—the pull-­out bed squeaked like a ship’s timbers. Her hair—blond and sunny—was so long that different sections of it had different smells; hot wind and dark river water mingled together. It seemed that her throat was delicate; she was always catching colds. She was weary and demure. “Sleep makes us strong,” Yura thought as he was dozing off. “And vulnerable,” he added, listening to her breathing.

  The windows faced the shade cast by the trees whose branches touched the sills, catching and cleaving the sun’s rays. Wasps would occasionally fly into the clinic, but as soon as they caught a whiff of the stagnant smell of chlorine and death in the hallways, they wasted no time flying back outside, where thick July spiderwebs would ensnare them. A police car pulled up at around ten. A pair of patrolmen had arrived, escorting Artem, a cheerful deserter who’d been caught about two months ago. Now they brought him to the clinic from his pretrial detention center every morning for treatment, and he relished setting off on these grand adventures with the fuzz as his lazy entourage. He said hello to Yura, yelled something spirited at the nurses, growled at the cops, and basically acted like going to a TB clinic was a lifelong dream of his, and he was over the moon to see it finally coming true.

  Yura’s friends came by in the morning and stood by the fountain, not talking to the locals. When he stepped outside, they gave him a full report. Zhora, who worked at a 24-­hour pharmacy in town, had an authoritative air about him—he was a representative of the medical community, after all. His long fingers latching onto Yura’s shirt, Zhora leaned up against him and whispered in his ear.

  “Black Devil’s looking for you. He’s making the rounds of all your friends. He went to your old man’s place.”

  “Well, what’d my old man do?”

  “He threw him out.”

  “Good for him! All right, you better get going. Don’t go blabbing around town.”

  Back in the ward, Valera kept bombarding him with questions about Alla, demanding details, expressing his support, and offering his assistance. Eventually the young guy couldn’t take it anymore and disappeared into the hallway, slamming the door behind him.

  “That’s enough. Don’t get all riled up,” Yura said severely to the circus guy, thinking about all the distressing things going on with Sania. He seemed to like the nurse. Everyone here seemed to like her. But she rendered him speechless—Yura could see that perfectly well. The young guy would blush the instant she came into the ward. He’d look at her hair and manicured nails, clearly noticing the scar on her wrist and undoubtedly paying attention to her weary face, gold medallion, and absent wedding ring, her high heels and roaring laughter. She never stopped laughing; it was as though administering inpatient treatment was her idea of a good time. She had sharp teeth, the kind any man would love to get chewed up by. The young guy could only exhale after she had left again. Yura thought Sania must hate his guts. Maybe he did. Yura remembered hating his old man for bringing his girlfriends home and getting annoyed whenever he’d come home late and stumble over their stuff on the floor—stockings and sweaters, faded jeans and flashy dresses. Those warm pieces of fabric smelled like the bodies of grown-­up women; Yura would pick them up and toss them into his dad’s room, feeling their lightness—that pissed him off, but there wasn’t much he could do. There comes a time in every boy’s life when he puts a knife to his father’s throat. The real question is where to go from there.

  Meanwhile, Valera was at it again. As soon as the young guy had hopped in bed and rolled over to face the wall, he launched into another cock-­and-­bull story.

  “The circus gave me everything I have,” he said. “A job, an education, and love. The circus taught me to be attentive with children and treat my elders with respect.”

  “You talk like Mowgli,” Yura interrupted, but that didn’t rattle the old circus hand; he just smiled, makin
g all his creases tighten up, and started talking about circus dynasties, glorious traditions, and techniques for applying clown makeup that were passed down from fathers to eldest sons, painting pictures of the passions brewing in the dressing rooms, exposing bloody mysteries and divulging secrets about mysterious conspiracies. He just kept going, on and on, even when the staff started making the rounds; he told Alla about his first wife, showed the doctor pictures of his daughters, suggested he marry one of them—true, she’d already been married for years, but he hinted that he could resolve that little hitch in no time. “Where there’s a will there’s a way!”

  “Huh, a dynasty,” Yura thought, a few colored pills resting in the palm of his hand. His dad had always wanted them to work together. “Real men don’t play music,” he’d say to Yura. “Real men have enough on their plates without music.”

  His dad was part of the country’s migrant labor force, working seasonal railroad jobs; one time he took Yura along. It was the middle of the summer, around this time of year, during a heat wave, and his dad was sitting there on the tracks, right on the ties, next to all the other laborers, waiting for the foreman to come over and tell them to unload some boxes of canned food from the train cars. Yura, wearing his white shirt and dark work jeans, was sitting next to him; it may have been the last time they sat so close to each other, out in the open, in the sweltering heat, passing each other cigarettes. By sharing his cigarettes, his dad seemed to be saying, “Now you’re with us—you’re one of us now.” They all shared their cigarettes and water—in their simple clothes and beat-­up shoes, they were real men with real problems.

  “Yeah,” Valera drawled, as though he’d heard Yura’s thoughts, “beat-­up shoes, sweat-­laden warm-­ups—we had to work day and night, our whole life was packed in between those walls saturated with men’s odors and women’s perfume. All those joyous nights and bloody mornings! Insults and confessions were behind the making of every performer—love was born and hope died behind every door; the men fed the wild animals every morning, broke them, and softened their movements, while the women stood in cold hallways, nurturing treacherous plots in their hearts, scheming to escape from this troupe of roadside misfits. But you can’t escape yourself, you can’t escape your sorrow, so it lingered in their eyes and their movements in the ring were precise and unyielding.”