Mesopotamia Page 17

  Alla just couldn’t fall asleep that night; she kept waking him up, pulling him out of his slumber. There was always a moment when he had no idea where he was; he immediately thought of Black Devil, but then he recognized her by touch, calmed down a bit, and asked for some water. He asked her to tell him about her parents. “I wonder what kind of dynasty she comes from. I wonder what they wanted from her,” he thought.

  “I don’t remember my dad,” Alla said. “He crashed before I went to kindergarten.”

  “Was he a pilot?” Yura asked diplomatically.

  “Yep. A test pilot. He did two stints in compulsory rehab.”

  “Gotcha,” Yura answered respectfully.

  “I’ve always gotten along with my stepdad, though,” she continued. “But something’s up with him. He’s a gardener somewhere outside of town . . . and he talks to the trees now.”

  “Maybe he just needs somebody to talk to,” Yura conjectured.

  “Well, obviously he does. The people he works for are Vietnamese, it’s not like he can chat it up with them. So he talks to the pear trees, that’s better than nothing.”

  After he’d returned to the ward in the morning, Yura tried to draw the young guy out a little. Sania answered curtly and brusquely, though; he wouldn’t meet him halfway. He must have been pissed. Even Valera got quiet, sitting there and observing the action from his bed. Yura decided not to pressure him. “All right,” he thought, “we’ll figure this out eventually.” He threw on a shirt and stepped out for a smoke. Valera caught up to him by the fountain.

  “What’s up with Sania?” he asked.

  “He’s all riled up.”

  “’Cause of the nurse?”

  “Uh-­huh.”

  “That’s what I thought. What are you gonna do?”

  “Well, I guess I gotta marry her.”

  “Are you for real?” he said, horrified. “Yura, you’re kidding, right? Have you seen her?”

  “Only in the dark,” Yura joked.

  “She definitely has another guy,” Valera whispered despairingly. “A girl like that just can’t be single. She’s gonna wind up biting your head off, and Sania’s too.”

  “Is she a shark all of a sudden? And why Sania too?” Yura asked, confused.

  “Because misery loves company. I’m telling you, she definitely has another guy,” Valera said, still all worked up. “She’s keeping you on the down-­low, you know that.”

  “Well, she’s at work, man.”

  “Bullshit,” Valera countered. “You wouldn’t believe the kind of stuff I used to pull at work. Did anyone ever say anything to me? You’ll see,” he whispered, looking around, eyes apprehensive. “There’s only one way to check,” he said conspiratorially.

  “Oh yeah?” Yura threw out his cigarette butt.

  “Run away with her.”

  “Where would we go?”

  “Wherever. The farther the better. My first wife and I did that once. Did I show you the pictures?”

  “The pictures of you?”

  “Nah, the pictures of her.”

  “Yeah, you did.”

  “Well, I pretty much kidnapped her right in the middle of a rehearsal. The firemen had to come and catch the tigers afterward.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Then it was off to Crimea for a month.”

  “Who went to Crimea? The tigers?”

  “Nah, we did.”

  “How come?”

  “How come? I couldn’t tell ya. We were scared—we panicked. Then we decided to make things the way they were before. And things went back to the way they were. That’s to say, bad. But you won’t come back. You can really do it.”

  “I don’t want to go anywhere,” Yura said anxiously. “I like it here.”

  “Here?” Valera nodded toward the clinic. “You like it here?”

  “So, who do you live with, by the way?” Yura asked her a few days later, when her next shift came. They were sitting in the dark room—he was smoking, not even bothering to step outside. “I’ll just burn this whole place down, with everybody inside,” he thought.

  “I have some animals at home,” Alla said.

  “Gotcha. What was your nickname as a kid?”

  “Oh,” she said, laughing. “I had an insane nickname. Everybody called me the Alligator.”

  “Because you had a lot of pets?”

  “Nah, because of my smile. I had a special smile. And a ton of friends. I almost got married in high school. Everybody falls in love really early around here. Especially the women. He was a few years older than me. Just like you.” She reached through the darkness and touched his hair. Yura shuddered. “That’s why it didn’t pan out. I was very upset, I thought I was being punished for my bad behavior. Plus he was a boxer, that probably didn’t help. Then I flipped out—I just up and started sleeping with all his friends.”

  “All at once?” Yura asked, confused.

  “Nah, one at a time.”

  “Are you a boxing fan?”

  “What kind of question is that?” Alla was miffed.

  Yura finished his cigarette and went back to the ward, saying that his roommates got anxious when he spent the night elsewhere.

  She was gone for a couple of days. Yura approached the doctor, who explained that she’d asked for some time off because something was up with her father. Yura could picture it—the two of them standing there, chatting it up with the fruit trees.

  “It would actually be nice to take her away from here,” he thought. “Right now we’re like a couple of college kids, crammed together on a pull-­out bed. On the other hand, the last time a woman stuck around was five years ago. She wound up getting carted off to the looney bin.” Yura wasn’t sure he was ready for that kind of commitment.

  The young guy had calmed down; he was keeping his suspicions and hard feelings to himself and avoiding Yura, opting to socialize with the circus guy instead, but the circus guy kept pulling away. Valera latched on to Yura, and whenever the latter would pick up his National Geographic, he’d simply roam the hallways and bother the staff.

  Zhora showed up again toward the middle of July. He came over to the clinic right after his night shift at the pharmacy; the doctor hadn’t even started making his rounds yet. He hid behind the trees and signaled Yura with a loud whistle. The morning shadows fell thick and cold. Yura put on his shirt and tiptoed outside so as not to wake his roommates. Zhora said hello and pulled Yura into the shade, telling him that Black Devil was getting more agitated and that he’d paid Yura’s old man another visit and started threatening him. His old man didn’t lose his cool, obviously, even though Black Devil had brought two other guys along. They promised to burn his house down next time.

  “They’ll do it, too,” Zhora said adamantly. “They’ll get away with it—they’re firemen after all. Why don’t you just give Black Devil a call? Maybe you can talk this out.”

  “What are you so worked up about? Did Black Devil send you?”

  “Go fuck yourself,” Zhora retorted. “Just think about your old man.”

  “All right, I will.”

  “Well, what’s there to think about?” he asked himself. “I gotta get out of here. I gotta make a deal with the doctor so they let me outta here. I gotta calm the young guy down. I gotta figure things out with Alla the Alligator. I gotta call Black Devil. But what’s he gonna do? Well, let him torch my old man’s place for all I care. I’ll bring him the lighter fluid. We’re so used to complaining about everything. We’ve gotten soft. It’s all because of our family issues. What’s with our parents? We got one guy living on the street and another talking to trees.”

  It felt as though his roommates had been waiting for him to come back. As soon as he stepped into the ward, Valera poked his head out from under his covers, while the young guy ducked under his. Yura sat down on the circus guy’s bed.

  “So, what were you telling me about your first wife?” Yura asked, patting the old-­timer on the knee.

  Valer
a came to life, waking up all the way, clearing his throat, and shifting over to sit closer to him.

  “My wife was a local celebrity, I’ll have you know,” he started. “Dining with her was considered a real honor.”

  “Did she take her tigers with her to dinner?”

  “I’m being entirely serious with you,” the circus guy said sternly, his feelings clearly a bit hurt by Yura’s quip. “When I first joined the troupe, she wouldn’t give me the time of day. She had so many guys to choose from! It was love at first sight for me, though. Then we ran away—I already told you that. But it didn’t last long. I was young, I lost my way. I was a real pansy.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then I lost her. It was my own fault. I just couldn’t hold on to her.”

  “Like during a trapeze show?” Yura was confused, again.

  “Like she left me, during one of our tours.”

  “What kind of tour?”

  “Around socialist Romania. We spent a whole month there. I was young and self-­assured, but I had no idea what I wanted and needed in life. I forgot all about her and started focusing on myself. She could feel that. She tried to fix everything at first, but I just wouldn’t listen. I think everything changed after we got back from Crimea. She realized how much of a pansy I was, that I always back down right away, and that I wasn’t willing to hold my ground for her. She didn’t say anything, even though she knew it was over. Then during the tour she and one of our guys—one of the bosses—got together. I didn’t even know what hit me. They came back here together. I wanted to quit, but I didn’t have the resolve to do it.”

  “Yeah, Valera.” Yura patted him on the back. “That’s messed up.”

  Valera seemed to like that they were always talking about him. Even the young guy poked his head out from under the covers and started listening to the old-­timer’s love stories with a morose expression on his face.

  “Don’t I know it,” Valera said. “I’m too ashamed to even think about it. Just imagine it—you’re living with her, thinking this is gonna last and everything’s just great. At some point, you stop noticing her and you forget that everything can change at the drop of a hat. Then that’s exactly what happens. You don’t even realize how . . . where was the error in my calculations? Well, you start blaming everyone else, even though it’s your own fault and nobody else’s. You start doing stupid stuff. You try and fix everything. You try to forget about it. But how can you fix something that doesn’t exist anymore? And how can you forget about everything? You just can’t. You can’t escape from yourself. You can’t escape from your grief.”

  The old-­timer was a real mess at this point; Yura thought he shouldn’t have made him dredge all that stuff up. They should have just talked about zebras. He wanted to get up, but Valera held him softly by the arm.

  “Those tours . . . there’s a different sense of time and a different way of doing things. They just forgot about us. Our month-­long tour came to an end. Winter set in and we had to get back somehow. The bosses had just abandoned us. We didn’t even have any gas left. Our guys sold it all to the locals.”

  “Why didn’t you ride the zebras back, over the mountain passes?” Yura joked—but as soon as he saw the circus guy’s distraught, fat-­lipped face, he corrected himself. “The horses—I mean the horses, not the zebras.”

  “That just wasn’t gonna happen,” he answered bitterly. “They were circus horses, they couldn’t carry heavy loads.”

  “Just like in Mesopotamia,” Yura said.

  The conversation died because there wasn’t anything more to say and too much had already been said. Everyone just sat there, waiting for the doctor, not knowing what to do with themselves—and when he came into the ward, followed by Alla, pushing her cart, everything took a turn for the worse. The timing was so poor—something felt off. The most terrible thing was that Sania’s mom had barged in too, right on the doctor’s heels, bombarding him with questions and demands. An anxious blush was strolling across the doctor’s face; he kept repeating, albeit a little too cordially, that she wasn’t allowed in there, that it was not permitted, and that it wasn’t safe, after all. But Sania’s mom put on a mask and brazenly ignored all of the clinic’s regulations, and the doctor, a gentle and proper individual, just couldn’t bring himself to kick her out in front of her soccer star son. Actually getting inside the ward seemed to embolden Sania’s mom—she started acting like she owned the place, immediately sitting on the young guy’s bed, patting him on the back as if soothing a horse, taking out some candy and a cookie and asking him how he had been feeling. She acted just like a teacher—even when she asked you how you were feeling it seemed as though you would get marked down if she didn’t like your answer—and she looked exactly like you would expect a teacher to look—appropriately enough, since she was a teacher. The young guy was anxious; he refrained from responding at first. Then he asked his mom in a whisper to leave the doctor alone, shooting mortified glances at Valera, hoping for some backup, observing Yura’s reaction out of the corner of his eye, afraid to look at the nurse and getting horribly flustered when he tried to answer the doctor’s questions. Sania’s mom didn’t even seem to notice the doctor. She was acting like she was proctoring an exam, simply waiting for the doctor and Alla to leave so she could spend some quality time with her son. So when Alla approached the young guy and saw his open palm (she saw its trembling and the beads of anxious sweat on his forehead, caught a glimpse of the bags under his eyes, so dark they looked like bruises, realized that he hadn’t been sleeping well, that he didn’t like it here one bit, and that he’d be more than happy to hightail it out of here, but where could he even go—his mom was at home, and it wasn’t exactly clear which was better, staying here among the corpses or moving back home to be smothered by her love—she managed to see all of that in a split second, committing it to memory and feeling quite surprised), she dumped about a dozen pills into it, and his mom, paying no attention whatsoever to the nurse, was rooting around under the bed for her son’s socks, chastising him for being so messy and disorganized. Alla tried to turn the whole thing into a joke, flashing her incredible smile . . . and the young guy just went berserk—there was some spring inside him, it had been there for a while, compressing, pushing against his heart until the organ finally popped out of his chest; he’d been holding back for too long, and everyone had been demanding too much from him. A month lying on this cot with these pricks—one of them had lost his marbles a long time ago, blowing smoke up his ass with his zebra and antelope bullshit, and the other guy was fucking treating him like some little bitch, like he was the fucking odd man out, like he should fucking take the goddamn fucking blame for fucking everything, like he was some little cocksucker who wasn’t worth the fucking time of day! Fuck that shit! The young guy knocked those shitty-­ass socks right the fuck out of his mom’s hands, chucked the cookie at the wall (the doctor managed to dodge it and Yura got up, dumbfounded), and erupted, yelling at his dumbass mom to not fucking touch him, to leave him the fuck alone, that he’d do whatever the fuck he wanted with his goddamn socks, and that she could get her idiot ass out of here and never come back.

  Everybody froze, at a complete loss for words. The doctor gently clasped Alla’s elbow, while the young guy’s mom stood in the middle of the room, bewildered—she was on the verge of tears, but she had lost the ability to cry after forty hard years in the classroom. The young guy was looking around at everyone, his eyes filled with hatred and despair, trying to formulate his next string of maledictions, when Yura suddenly interrupted him.

  “Hey, quit yelling at your mother, ya clown.”

  “What do you care?” The young guy scowled at him, finally encountering a worthy opponent.

  “Shut your trap!” Yura advised him.

  “You shut yours.” The youngster wasn’t backing down.

  Yura gave him a sudden, hard slap. Caught off guard, the young guy lost his balance, fell onto the bed, right onto the candy and
pills, instantly popped back up, enraged and ready to charge at Yura, but his resolve faltered when he saw his rival’s eyes. He just turned around and bolted out into the hallway, his mom in tow. The doctor waited a bit and then followed them. Alla gave Yura a harsh look and rolled her cart out of the ward. Valera saw a piece of the cookie that had landed on top of his sheets. He picked it up.

  “Huh, I like this kind,” he said, chewing.

  She tried to keep him out. “Let’s talk tomorrow. It’s late,” she said, clearly agitated, holding the door of the staff room shut. “You’re gonna wake everyone up. Go back to bed.”

  “Bullshit,” Yura countered, gently yet persistently pounding on the door. She eventually let him in.

  “All right, all right,” he said. “Quit acting tough. Why were you holding the door shut?”

  “You don’t even know when you’re going to get out of here,” she answered. “Or whether you’ll ever get out. Isn’t that true? Why start all of this now?”

  “What do you mean I don’t know when I’m gonna get out of here? That’s up to me. I’m gonna get out. I’ll get out tomorrow. That’s the least of my worries. When the doctors were taking out my appendix and they forgot me on the operating table because it was Easter that day—now that was a time I wasn’t sure I’d make it.”

  “Sure, they did. You’re full of it. What’d you whack the kid for?”

  “To teach him a lesson,” Yura answered. “How’s your stepdad hanging in there?”