Mesopotamia Read online

  They were all scrutinizing me, looking discerningly into my eyes and catching my panicky movements. Finally, one of them—clearly the top dog—spoke.

  “You from here?” he asked, nodding at the apartment windows up above.

  “Yep.”

  “Been livin’ here awhile?”

  “Not too long,” I answered honestly.

  “Do ya know Black Devil?”

  I hesitated. “Who are they?” I thought. “What should I tell ’em?” I knew Black Devil, and he knew me, too. But I didn’t know if that was good or bad. I decided to just be straight with them.

  “Uh-­huh.”

  “Do you know where he is?” the top dog asked, stepping extremely close to me and lowering his voice.

  “Nope. How would I?”

  “You sure ’bout that?” The top dog was right in my face now. He smelled like gasoline.

  “I’m sure.” I tried not to break eye contact.

  “All right then,” the top dog said quietly. “Let us know if you hear from him.”

  “Who are you guys?” I couldn’t help but ask.

  The top dog lurched back and took a look at me, genuinely surprised. Then he leaned in once again and started speaking quietly, almost whispering. I caught some words, while others flew past me hopelessly. I lacked the resolve to ask for any clarification; I listened, bewildered, and committed the bits and pieces I could hear to memory, because he spoke of important things. Things so important that I didn’t need to hear them—I already knew.

  “We’re tax collectors,” the top dog said. “Tax collectors and sentinels. We collect tribute from those who owe it; we collect it to maintain a state of perfect balance. There’s enough to go around when we take away the superfluous and return that which is lacking. We hunt debtors and support the fearful. We receive duties from the thrifty and generous, from the gullible and conniving; we collect them in the upper neighborhoods and in the poor neighborhoods across the river. We secure hefty monthly payments from bankers and entrepreneurs, but we don’t turn our noses up at the few coppers the factory workers, cobblers, and secondhand dealers can scrape together. We collect—coin by coin, bill by bill—documenting every wire transfer and preserving every pay stub, since we know that everything must be paid for. You can’t leave anyone your debts, you can’t leave this world a debtor, you have to return everything that doesn’t belong to you, and you have to settle accounts for everything you have received throughout your life. But we don’t just collect money and other valuables. We collect unpaid anger every month, we collect rage and enmity, we collect valor and brewing vengeance. Most important, we collect all this city’s unpaid love, every morsel of it, every last gasp of love. All of us in this city are essentially love collectors. We collect it every morning, we seek it out every evening, then we find it every night, because there simply can’t be unpaid love, love bottled up inside, because all that love belongs to the city, because the city is held up by that love, filled with it, like its streets soaked with rain in the spring, warmed by it, like its homes heated by coal in the winter. The city would die of cold and thirst without it, without all that love; the city’s last holdouts would desert it, leaving it like a labyrinth, no longer able to wander aimlessly up and down its streets and back alleys. So no matter what transpires, no matter what happens to all of us, no matter how tough fate is on us, and no matter what misfortunes fall upon our rooftops, we are determined to continue collecting these large, unseen duties, atom by atom, breath by breath, death by death. By finding common ground with those who don’t conceal anything. By persuading those who don’t trust us. By destroying those who get in our way. Just tell Black Devil that.” The top dog slowly arched his head back, stepped to the side, turned toward his crew, said something to them, turned around, and made for the river. The rest of them followed him. Only puddles of gasoline remained, reflecting the faded sky of August.

  She moved in a week later. She didn’t bring any stuff with her, saying that she wasn’t sure whether things would work out between the two of us. Things did work out, but she started an earth-­shattering fight a few months later. It went how it always does—the first spark came out of nowhere, but the flame of animosity devoured everything, consuming all our memories like a massive fire at the docks, destroying every single ship. She yelled for hours, deeply hurt by something. I was deeply hurt too, but mostly by my own reaction. Heading out the door, she said she’d be changing her number so I couldn’t call her. I asked her not to do that, promising her I wouldn’t call. But I called in the early evening, just to check. She really had changed her number. “Well, this is a good thing,” I thought, still angry at myself. “It’s a good thing I’m dead to her. It’s a good thing everything happened so quickly and we didn’t drag out our failing relationship. It’s a really good thing, really, really good. What’s so good about it, though?”

  She came back a month later and then left again in the winter, asking me for some time to think things over. She got married while she was thinking, but didn’t sever ties with me, obviously. I started feeling jealous of her husband.

  “What do you need him for?” I asked. “What are you keeping him around for? You’re just putting him through a lot of pain.” She agreed with me, but couldn’t divorce him, obviously. Well, and he wouldn’t just leave without a fight. I wanted to have a talk with him. She forbade me to do so, throwing hysterical fits and saying she’d kill herself if he found out about me. She promised to sort everything out, obviously, promised me that everything would be all right. In the spring, they got divorced.

  “What was the point of getting married in the first place?” I asked. She explained, saying something about debts that we have to repay to those who love us, about the love that drives all of us, about payments and settlements, about honesty and justice. I realized that they were still seeing each other, although she’d never said anything about it, obviously. That’s how the summer started. In June, she said she was pregnant. It wasn’t mine, obviously. It wasn’t his either, ­obviously.

  BOB

  “I’d say that America really is a country where everyone enjoys equal opportunity,” Bob Koshkin wrote in one of his concise emails to his friends and family. “In my view, America’s unshakable constitutional framework and sound democratic principles are foundational to that equality. I believe in the viability and flexibility of American liberalism, under the auspices of which big business and government regulatory agencies work together harmoniously for a better future. The only thing that’s a bit unsettling . . . that’s not the right way to put it—the thing that absolutely floors me—is that there are just so many black people everywhere.”

  He had landed at John F. Kennedy International Airport two months ago, at the beginning of the summer, boldly disembarked, and forged on, thinking, “This is how Columbus must have felt way back when.” He wobbled through the terminal like a sailor walking on solid ground; just thinking about the vast ocean he’d crossed made his muscles spasm, but he’d reached American soil and it was high time to explore the continent and civilize the natives. Once Bob got into the city, he called his old high school classmate who had been hanging his hat in the East Village for the past decade or so. His classmate showed up in half an hour wearing a bathrobe, no less. Bob was decked out in a cowboy hat with Carpathian red deer running around the band, a light jacket, and flashy, colorful shorts. There’s a chance his classmate wouldn’t have recognized him without those shorts. They hugged, and even kissed each other, looking like two transvestites meeting again after a prolonged separation. The transvestite in shorts was happy to see his old partner, while the transvestite in the bathrobe would have preferred to put the reunion off as long as possible. Bob’s classmate didn’t invite him back to his place. They went to the Chinese restaurant around the corner and ordered some tea. Bob was counting on his classmate picking up the tab, so he sat on his hands until he did. Bob opened up his dad’s leather suitcase, with the heads of lovely East German gi
rls pasted all over it, and took out a souvenir plate that had Crimean landscapes on it, of all things.

  “I got this for you,” Bob said. His classmate thanked him, catching a glimpse of Mount Ai-­Petri.

  “Oh,” he said, “that’s the first place I got the clap, in Yalta. I was there for training camp.”

  “Should I take it back?” Bob asked, embarrassed.

  “Nah, man. Oddly enough, I remember that trip quite fondly.”

  “The faculty of memory,” Bob noted in one of his subsequent messages, “is capable of reconciling things that initially seem incompatible or mutually exclusive in terms of their logical content. Sometimes I think that our consciousness is built out of our most sorrowful and heart-­wrenching stories and memories. The all-­encompassing nature of memory and the irreversible experiences it contains are probably what drove humanity to invent sports, the arts, and anesthesia.”

  His classmate walked him to the subway and then went about his business, holding the plate under his arm like a fallen halo. Bob took a train to the hallowed city of Philadelphia later that evening. Tracking down his relatives proved surprisingly easy—there were only two Koshkins in the phone book, his aunt Amalia and his uncle Sasha. Actually, his uncle was listed as Alex here in America, but Bob wasn’t about to let that stop him. He dialed their number and was greeted by a slightly shrill voice that turned out to belong to his cousin Lilith. Bob told her about the purpose of his visit and his place in the Koshkin family tree at great length, swallowing long strings of consonants and losing his train of thought. He sensed that his story lacked credibility, but he pressed on, appealing to their childhood memories and good old Koshkin hospitality.

  “Yep,” he yelled into the phone, “you got it. I braved a Ukrainian Airlines flight and crusaded through all the duty-­free zones! I haven’t eaten in two whole days! But I never doubted I’d find your family and hold you in my brotherly embrace once again!” Lilith gave him directions. She warned him that getting on the train without a ticket wouldn’t fly here in the States, and that they weren’t going to come bail him out if he got caught.

  The Koshkins had settled in Philadelphia a long while ago and weren’t planning on moving back to Ukraine anytime soon. They’d picked up the language quickly, but they hadn’t forgotten their roots. Uncle Alex worked for a big food wholesaler. Aunt Amalia had been a teacher, though Bob wasn’t quite sure whether or not she was gainfully employed in America. Their sixteen-­year-­old daughter, Lilith, the family’s pride and joy, dreamed of being a dentist one day.

  “Good for her, choosing a career based on a realistic assessment of her talents,” Bob wrote in one of his emails. “That’s why I’ve always dreamt of going to Brazil and becoming the queen of Carnival.” The Koshkins, an ethnically mixed family, had an odd lifestyle. They took a selective approach to adopting American customs. Despite the many years they had spent in this faraway land, they still celebrated all the Soviet and Orthodox holidays—in addition to the Jewish ones, of course. Easter and International Workers’ Day blended together smoothly. One year, Uncle Alex’s friends from some weird Hasidic anarchist group persuaded him to march in their parade. The Koshkins celebrated the Fourth of July, too, because they regarded it as a Jewish holiday, for some reason. Uncle Alex’s colleagues didn’t question his rationale; he was getting into the holiday spirit and that was good enough for them.

  Bob’s unexpected visit caused much consternation in the Koshkin household. This alien from the East spooked his hosts; his thick sideburns and flashy shorts made them want to make doubly sure that he had a return ticket. Bob’s family back in Ukraine had severed all ties with their relatives overseas. Uncle Alex didn’t remember his older brother, Seva, Bob’s dad, very fondly. In fact, he remembered him as a complete prick, for several reasons. First, Bob’s dad was a Party member; second, he had a grating personality; and third, he hadn’t given Uncle Alex any of the money he made from selling their parents’ cottage. It seemed like Uncle Alex had buried that distant past a long time ago, only to have it turn up on his doorstep again. He just didn’t know how to react. At any rate, Uncle Alex decided to prepare his special pasta dish, and then the whole family gathered around the long dinner table and started looking through the pictures Bob had brought with him, where the young Koshkins, Seva and his little brother, were looking life straight in its suspicious eyes, their teeth flashing whitely in defiance at their indeterminate future. Seva was fit and self-­assured, while Alex was chubby and effeminate. The old photographs clearly disgusted the latter.

  “We were all victims of that totalitarian regime,” he said, pointing a yellowed fingernail at the black-­and-­white images. “Just look at that gut of mine.” The womenfolk examined Uncle Alex’s potbelly, saying he looked pretty well fed for a “victim.”

  “What are you talking about?” Uncle Alex protested. “I was in good shape. I boxed for years. I broke my nose in two places. Look, the bridge is busted up, too.” The womenfolk took to Bob right away and excitedly kept the conversation going. The dry California wine did a number on Aunt Amalia, an ample, middle-­aged woman. She was enthralled by the pictures dating back to the late seventies, all those scenes of picnics and beaches; she offered nasty commentary on the cast’s silly hairdos and outdated swimsuits. Naturally, Uncle Alex got the worst of it. Like any couple that had missed their chance at an amicable divorce, the two of them nagged each other incessantly. Aunt Amalia was really letting the luckless Uncle Alex have it, berating him for his pretense to a lifestyle he couldn’t afford. Uncle Alex could only take so much. She was about to finish him off for good, so somewhere between the pasta and the coconut cookies he excused himself, wishing his nephew sweet dreams and declaring resolutely that America, the cradle of democracy, would make a real man out of him, the kind of man who could be a worthy member of an open society—i.e., he wouldn’t repeat the mistakes of his nutjob father, Seva. Aunt Amalia suggested drinking to that. Lilith skooched over closer to Bob.

  Bob found himself between two women—now he could relax. He had finally done what his father had asked him to do: he had restored balance to things, found the remnants of their family scattered across the world, gathered all the Koshkins together, and listened to the shared blood pumping through their veins. What is it that really ties a family together, after all? Remembering the deceased and procreating to secure your legacy.

  “Speaking of procreating . . . ,” Bob thought to himself, furtively eyeing Lilith. She took after her mother—she had the same wide hips, the same hairdo, and the same bright red lips. Her mom was looking about as good as could be expected, considering her lifestyle. You could plainly see what the future held for Lilith. The next twenty years or so were going to take a serious toll on her.

  “A lack of transparency makes it unclear how one should pursue upward mobility,” Bob speculated in one of his emails to his dad. “Faced with a lack of legitimate ways to climb the social ladder, we often resort to practices that are purely spiritual in nature, such as starting a family, joining a church, or even just daily meditation. Unfortunately, this journey usually ends in rehab.” Lilith sat by him for a whole hour after that, inching closer and closer until he could feel the fiery curve of her hips. She criticized the locals and their proclivities, commended Bob for having such strong convictions, and chewed bubble gum; the aroma of her oils and lotions nearly overpowered him.

  “Boy, I’d like to get her into the sack,” Bob thought to himself, as he told them about his native city’s struggle with xenophobia and the problems of post-­totalitarian life. “But she’s my cousin. What would others think about our relationship? Sleeping with your cousin may be frowned upon in the country of enduring democracy. That’s something people only do in the East. There’s something so hopelessly post-­totalitarian about all this. Only we could think of doing something like that.” So he turned toward his Aunt Amalia, still feeling the heat emanating from his cousin’s nubile body and greedily inhaling the fragrant air thr
ough his nostrils. Meanwhile, Aunt Amalia was getting fired up, smoking her menthols and picking at the cold pasta like it was a dead patient lying on the operating table after a long and unsuccessful surgery. She told Bob about their family’s trials and tribulations, about their long years in exile, about having to ride in boxcars and ships’ holds, about transit zones, about having their clothes disinfected, about the scent of freedom, about equal opportunity, about squeezing the slave out of yourself, drop by drop, about enduring democracy as the foundation for inner peace, and about multiculturalism as the foundation for coexistence, even with black people.

  “Obviously, we identify most with the ethnic Ukrainians and their moral code,” she told Bob, her voice somewhat grating from the alcohol. “They’re all nationalists. That’s what draws us to them.” Bob couldn’t see any real logic in her claim, but he still enjoyed talking about nationalism in the abstract. When he was asked about the goings-­on back in the old country, he gave them the following answer:

  “Obviously, we have all witnessed numerous cataclysms that have left an indelible and irreversible mark on the city itself, and on its residents, for that matter. Clerics, ventriloquists, and street magicians fought doggedly for years, and eventually took control of city hall. Racing all the way up the social ladder before anyone could knock them down and getting to the top of the political hierarchy, they decided to tackle the most pressing issues. First of all, the city walls were reinforced, with special care being taken on the east side, where the threat of nomadic border tribes loomed. Also, two long avenues were built, one stretching from the eastern gate to the western gate and the other running from the bridges up north to the basin down south. A pyramid was erected where the two avenues intersect to symbolize the new government’s commitment to tasteful architecture and fiscal transparency. Events commemorating the memory and legacy of our dearly departed ancestors have become a regular occurrence. Water from the city’s two rivers is consecrated every Sunday for use by the utilities department. There are more flags around town now, too.