Voroshilovgrad Page 17

  “But didn’t Petrovich see them?”

  “Petrovich’s too much of a pussy to talk to the cops,” Kocha declared genially. “Isn’t that right, Petrovich?”

  Petrovich gave a submissive nod and set off toward the booth, the blanket still wrapped around him like an army poncho.

  “Kocha, how could they just burn the tanker?” I asked.

  “We’re not the first ones they’ve done this to. We’re lucky they didn’t burn down the whole station along with it.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “I don’t know, Herman,” Kocha replied candidly. “We gotta shut down the station for now.”

  “Get outta here with that shit!”

  “Buddy, they’ll be back, and nothing will be left by the time they’re done—I’m telling you. They’ll stop at nothing. They saw Petrovich was in truck and they went right ahead anyway. And Petrovich has been working this area for the past twenty years or so.”

  “I’m not going to shut the place down—no way,” I declared.

  “Sure, sure, whatever you say,” Kocha said.

  “Are you going to stick around?”

  “We’ll see. I’m too old to get knocked around like this.”

  “What are we going to do about the gas?”

  “We gotta have some more delivered.”

  “Do we have any dough?”

  “No, Herman, we don’t have any dough, and I don’t see how we’re gonna get any for a while, either.”

  Kocha had had another sleepless night, it seemed, as he kept nodding off during our conversation. I went over to see Injured in the garage. He looked a bit distraught too, and he agreed that we needed to shut down the station for a bit. The corn guys had already blown up the gas tanker; it was highly unlikely they would stop there. That’s just not how they did things—they never left unfinished business. Obviously, the fuzz weren’t going to do anything, and it didn’t seem like city hall was on our side, so Injured couldn’t see any reason to be optimistic.

  “Well, what if we don’t shut down the station?” I asked.

  “We don’t actually have to,” Injured answered. “You think I’m scared of them? I don’t give a fuck. It’s just that you can pick up and leave anytime you want. Kocha and I are staying, and they’ll roast us in our sleep.”

  “What makes you think I’m going to leave?” I asked, a bit offended.

  “Your past history,” Injured replied.

  “What do you know about my past history?”

  “Herman,” Injured said, patiently, “who are you trying to fool? It’s easy for you to say you’re gonna stick around, because you know you can always leave. But what about Kocha and me?”

  “Here’s how it’s gonna go down, Injured—I’m staying put and we’re keeping the station open.”

  “You’re staying put?”

  “I’m staying put.”

  “Well, we’ll see. Today you’re staying, tomorrow you could be miles away.”

  “Injured, I said I’m staying—that means I’m staying.”

  “Well, we’ll see,” he repeated.

  “But what are we going to do about gas?”

  “We’ll have to buy some, but we don’t have any dough. Don’t think for a moment we’ll get any insurance money for the last delivery.”

  “Well,” I said after thinking for a bit, “how about I pay for it out of my own pocket, and then we make that money back.”

  “You’ve got money?”

  “Yeah, not much, but I’ve got some.

  “All right, sounds like a plan.”

  I asked him for his phone and called Lyolik.

  “Lyolik,” I yelled as soon as I made out his sullen breathing on the other end. “How are my pals doing up there?”

  “Herman!” Lyolik began a bit anxiously. “Man, you’re unreal. You’ve been gone forever and haven’t even called. Who does that? When are you coming back?”

  “Lyolik,” I said, “hey, listen. I’m in a bit of a jam here.”

  “You getting married?”

  “Nah, not yet. But I need my money.”

  “How come?”

  “Lyolik, it’s for the station. For the business.”

  “You have a business?”

  “It’s my brother’s business—remember? I already told you all that.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing. I need my money. Can you bring it down?”

  “Herman, do you realize what you’re asking me to do? I can’t just drop everything and bring you your money.”

  “But I really need it,” I said. “Otherwise, I’ll be in even more of a jam. Lyolik, help me out, this one last time.”

  “Herman, what do you need the money for?”

  “I just told you.”

  “No you didn’t. I don’t know, man. Come back home and we’ll talk. You can count on us, we’ve been through thick and thin.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying. How soon can you get me the money?”

  “But why do you need the money? You’re not making any sense.”

  “They torched my tanker, okay? I don’t have any money here to pay for the next delivery. So Lyolik, get your ass moving and bail me out here.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” Lyolik said. “I’ll have to talk to the boss first. I definitely can’t leave right now. Maybe in a couple of days or so.”

  “Come on, bro,” I yelled into the receiver. “Any minute now they’ll torch me too! You know where I keep my money, right?” I asked.

  “I know, “Lyolik answered gloomily. “In Hegel.”

  “Yep,” I confirmed, “volume two.”

  “I know, I know, don’t worry,” Lyolik said, and signed off.

  “Who were you talking to?” asked Injured, who had heard our whole conversation.

  “Some Party colleagues,” I replied giving him his phone back.

  “Should I wipe their number or keep it?” he asked.

  “You can wipe it. These guys can find anybody they want.”

  Injured picked up a hammer and started bending some piece of metal. I went outside and looked up at the sky. It was deep and cloudy. The clouds looked heavy and overloaded. Just like a tanker truck.

  9

  That day the conversation kept drifting back toward the burned truck. Katya and the dog were sent home and instructed not to leave the tower grounds. I felt like a real businessman, and somewhere deep down I was even glad that everything had unfolded the way it did. Now nobody could be like, “Brohan, you’re just getting in the way, so step aside and let us handle the real work.” It was my gas tanker too, after all. Moreover, I had decided to invest my modest savings in the business, so now I was putting my own neck on the line. Kocha, who had bounced back after a morning bout of weakness, just sat there in his catapult chair, smoking one joint after another, shooing away customers, listening to my MP3 player, and telling tall tales about the emergence of small business in our region. Petrovich sat next to him, chain smoking cigarettes, and treating his cuts and his sorrows with grain alcohol. Evidently, the alcohol was demolishing him—after lunch he was piss drunk, and around three Injured called the ambulance. They came and took Petrovich back home to rest. That’s just the way things were done around there. I sat there listening to Kocha. I was still on an emotional high, and the old-timer, having found an appreciative listener, started going on about one particularly tough gang that worked the highway about ten years back.

  “Yeah, that’s how it was.” Kocha inhaled deeply, making his voice even more hoarse and thick. “Herman, I knew all of them. They were a great bunch—working-class guys. It’s just that they smoked shitload of weed, and that costs a lot of money, you know? They picked up a bunch of Kalashnikovs. They thought about selling them, but then the default hit, back in ’98. Well, what were they supposed to do with the guns? It’s not like they could just throw them away. So, they started hijacking Kharkiv buses. Two of them would buy tickets and ride in the bus. The other guys would
be waiting outside the city in their car, right around here,” Kocha said, motioning at the highway. “They’d steal old cars so they could just dump them afterward. I’m telling you, they were real good guys, ya know? They’d wear those goofy ski masks. Well, they’d flag down the bus, put the masks on, and clean out the whole thing. They’d even rob their own guys that were on the bus, so they wouldn’t blow their cover.”

  “Why’d they have their own guys ride the bus anyway?” I asked.

  “So they could jerk the detectives around,” Kocha explained. “They’d purposely contradict each other and feed them a real line of bullshit.”

  “Ah, I see.”

  “This was all during the winter and they’d walk around in the same ski masks they wore on jobs, that’s how they got busted in the end. Still, they got three buses under their belts,” Kocha concluded, looking out toward the highway, at the shadows from Rostov. They were holding athletic bags stuffed with large bills and nodding to Kocha, like he was an old friend.

  We decided that we had to take turns watching over the pumps to make sure they wouldn’t get blown up too. “Uh-huh, pal,” Kocha remarked, “they’ll burn the pumps down in the blink of an eye. Just so you know, I’m not going to sleep at all tonight. What am I, stupid or something? Buddy, I got no intention of letting them fry me.” He had already biked down into the valley, brought back a few bottles of port, settled in on the catapult, and built himself a barricade of booze. He went on and on about how he wouldn’t let them tie him down in his sleep or barbecue him, about how he’d seen much worse as a paratrooper, about how he could handle “these civvy brats.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said, passing me a bottle. “If I gotta, I can take them out with a knife or my nunchucks.” In the evening Kocha lit a bonfire right by the pumps. I tried stopping him, but he got all worked up, shouting that he knew best: rolling over empty metal barrels from somewhere out back, filling them up with old newspapers, and setting them on fire. The newspapers stank more than they burned. Injured ran over, berated Kocha for a while, and asked me to put the fire out. Before heading home, Injured tried convincing Kocha to go to bed, but the old timer stubbornly refused; his behavior was getting more and more erratic. He called Injured an old fag and then tried kissing him the very next instant. Finally, Injured gave up and he took off, his eyes shining angrily in the dark. Kocha cursed him up and down, all the while blowing him kisses and drinking straight out of a bottle. I settled in next to him, gearing up for a long, sleepless night. Kocha conked out at ten o’clock on the dot, though, and all of my attempts at waking him were futile. I picked him up as though he were a child and carried him over to the trailer. Then I locked the door from the inside and fell asleep too, without a care in the world. As I was falling asleep, I thought to myself, “They’ll be able to identify my body by my headphones.” And then, “They’ll identify Kocha’s by his paratrooper tattoos.”

  Injured woke me up early in the morning and stood there leaning over me judgmentally, taking in my rumpled and disheveled appearance. Kocha was gone. It was seven o’clock by my watch.

  “Where’s Kocha?” I asked.

  “How would I know?”

  “Why are you here so early?” I asked, staggering to my feet, barely awake.

  I was wearing Olga’s yellow-rimmed sunglasses. I had slept in them. Which might explain why I didn’t have any dreams. I took them off and put them in my jacket pocket, next to my MP3 player and headphones.

  “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “You were worried?”

  “Yeah, real worried,” Injured said, instantly offended. “I was at this girl’s place. In the early morning I thought to myself, ‘Maybe I’d better go check to make sure those bastards haven’t burned everything to the ground.’ Well, I ditched my girl—acted like a real jerk and kicked her out. All because of you guys, Herman,” he added, spitting. “And I couldn’t tell you why the fuck I did it.”

  He got a call right then. Startled, Injured put the phone up to his ear.

  “Ah, it’s you. Where are you? What?” he asked. “Why? Okay, fine.”

  “It’s for you,” he said, handing me the phone.

  I took the phone from him, no less startled.

  “Hello?”

  “Yeah, buddy,” it was Kocha, even more hoarse than usual. “This isn’t good. Open up the gate.”

  “Where are you?”

  “It’s Masha . . .” Kocha said.

  “Who’s Masha?”

  “Masha, you dope,” the old man hissed back. “Tamara’s mom. She’s dead. They called me last night.”

  “They who? And why’d they call you? What are you, the coroner?”

  “Buddy,” Kocha said dejectedly, “she was like a mother to me. And now she’s just lying here, dead. She’s given up the ghost. And their whole Gypsy tribe or whatever the hell you call it, they’re already here. They all got in last night, you know? And Tamara’s absolutely devastated—people like her, I mean, people from the Caucasus, they take these things especially hard. It’s a real mess over here.”

  “We’ll be right over. Should we bring anything?”

  “Get my suit for me. I feel like a scientist with no lab coat.”

  “Kocha’s really taking this hard,” I said to Injured as we were coasting down into the city toward Kocha’s old apartment. I was holding the old timer’s dark blue suit. “And it’s such a blow for Tamara.”

  “Why would she care?” Injured asked.

  “What do you mean? It’s her mom, after all.”

  “Whose mom?”

  “Tamara’s mom,” I explained. “Tamara—Kocha’s wife.”

  “Damn it, Herman,” Injured said, losing his temper. “Kocha’s wife’s name was Tamila.”

  “So who’s Tamara?”

  “Tamara is her cousin.”

  “She’s Georgian?”

  “She’s a Gypsy, from Rostov.”

  “Why’d Kocha say she was from the Caucasus?”

  “Kocha thinks everything south of Rostov is the Caucasus,” Injured replied. “That sly dog lived with the both of them. He’d always get them confused. That’s why their parents didn’t like him, you know? And now he’s all like, ‘She was like a mother to me.’”

  I was at a loss for words, and Injured seemed to have run out of things to say on the subject. So we kept driving in silence.

  The family, who looked more like Serbs than Georgians, were standing outside the apartment building. The men were wearing black suits with brightly colored dress shirts underneath—yellow and pink ones, primarily. The women were dressed all in black, thumbing rosary beads with such intense concentration it looked as though they were texting. The children, who were also wearing little black suits and running all over the place, had wet, neatly combed hair. I recognized Ernst, clad in an Austrian policeman’s coat and Russian army boots he had polished until they gleamed. Nikolaich was walking through the crowd too, with a black wallet dangling on a chain from his right wrist. The two fiery Spanish women were there too, and stood out from the crowd—they were both holding wreaths, one from the worker’s union and the other from the Chernobyl Disaster Fund. Ernst graced me with a dignified salute, Nikolaich was shaking his birdlike head feverishly, and the Spanish women were intent on giving me the cold shoulder. Injured plowed his way through the Serbian-Georgian relatives toward and into the main entrance. More members of Tamara’s family were standing on the landing between the third and fourth floors, smoking pot right out in the open, like they thought they were too cool to get caught. We went up to the fourth floor. The apartment door was open, and we stepped inside.

  A muffled yet slightly anxious buzz of voices filled the room, the kind of atmosphere you might expect at a shotgun wedding. Women with black hair to match their outfits were running every which way, carrying dishes and bottles. Men with chairs, axes, and shovels were also hurrying past us, and children clutching mint candies and severed chicken heads were playing, scurrying around our feet
. We went into the kitchen. Kocha was sitting on an old stool, wearing a long, white T-shirt and black army briefs. The women were buzzing around him, doing their very best to please him. It was very obvious that our old friend was loved and respected here. They swarmed around him, affectionately calling him gadjo. Kocha was lazily keeping up a conversation with the whole room, calling one or another woman over, giving out instructions, cracking jokes. Evidently, he was the head honcho. On seeing us, he gave out a warm if restrained “Hello” before dragging us into the bathroom, where he whispered:

  “Fuck, man,” he said, “what a goddamn shame. She was like a mother to me . . . but she just wouldn’t listen . . . what should I have expected? She never came home before midnight. She was always at her bar.”

  “She worked at a bar?”

  “What are you talking about?” Kocha asked, confused. “Buddy, that’s not how we do things. We look after our parents. They don’t work—come on man.”

  Kocha took the suit from me and put it on there and then, but all it did was make him look like some farmer who had to dress up to go to court.

  “Let’s go pay our respects,” he said, combing back the remains of his once luxuriant hair. “I really have to be by the old lady right now.”

  Tamara’s mom lay in the living room, sprawled out across a few stools. She was wearing her Sunday best, a gray suit jacket, black skirt, and red, polished high heels. Makeup had been applied meticulously, and she looked rather content, aside from the fact that her lower jaw kept flopping open. When it did, one of the relatives would carefully close her mouth, as though they were punching a tram ticket. Two beautiful, worn-down women, both wearing black dresses, black stockings, and black shoes, were sitting by the deceased. One of them had countless rings on her fingers, while the other had beads, necklaces, and two or three gold crosses hanging around her neck. The two decrepit beauties looked rather severe, sitting there with their legs crossed, watching us coldly and attentively.

  “Who are they?” I asked Injured quietly.