Voroshilovgrad Read online

Page 3


  The bus was coughing up a lung trying to crest a gentle rise. Up ahead, a wide, sunny valley filled with light-green cornfields and golden ravines stretched out before us. The driver pushed on decisively. Then he turned off the engine and relaxed a bit, letting the bus coast. It slid down the decline like an avalanche caused by a bunch of Japanese tourists shouting at the top of the mountain The wind was whistling, brushing against the sides of the bus. Bugs were smashing into the windshield like drops of May rain. We flew downhill, picking up speed amid the hovering voices of those Indian singers promising enduring happiness and a painless death. Once we had rolled to the bottom of the valley, our momentum carried us upward for a while when the land began to rise again. At that point the driver tried to restart the engine. The Ikarus bus stalled with a sharp iron-on-iron screech, and then it came to a complete stop. Desperate now, the driver remained silent—and I felt too awkward to speak up. Finally, he dropped his head onto the wheel. His shoulders heaved from time to time. At first I thought he was crying, which I found oddly touching. After listening in a bit closer, though, I realized that he’d just fallen asleep. All the other passengers on the ghost bus were asleep too, and nobody was so much as thinking about protecting the goods. I walked up and down the aisle once again, then peered out the window. The wind was gently brushing against the young corn; there was absolute silence, and the sun was eating away at the valley like a grease stain attacking a tablecloth. Suddenly, somebody touched my hand. I looked around. At the back of the bus there were some dark brown curtains that hadn’t been washed for some time. It had seemed to me that there wasn’t anything behind those curtains except maybe a wall or a window or something like that. But no, a hand was sticking out. It grabbed me and dragged me easily inside. After slipping through the invisible entrance I found myself in a tiny room. It was a kind of chill-out space, a place for meditating and making love, a little cell caressed by perfume and shadows. Synthetic Chinese rugs bearing strange ornaments and images depicting deer hunting, teatime, and Beijing pioneers greeting Chairman Mao decorated the walls of the tiny space. Two small sofas were placed up against the walls. Three dark-skinned men and one dark-skinned woman were sitting on these sofas. They were in their underwear, the men’s strange and white, the woman’s modern and sporty. Skulls dangled from heavy necklaces wrapped around her neck. Instead of a comb, there was a paper knife sticking out of her hair, and she had a thermos resting on her lap. Their skin blended into the darkness; all I could see was the greedy glint of their yellowish eyes, illuminating the room like amber. She reached out, grasped my hand and didn’t let it go, looked me straight in the eyes and asked:

  “Who are you?”

  “Who are you?” I countered, feeling the warmth of her palm and the weight of her silver rings.

  “I’m Karolina,” she said, and drew back her hand sharply. After sizing me up, one of the men whispered something to his neighbor, and the latter laughed briefly.

  “Where are you going?” Karolina asked, looking me over in the partial darkness.

  “Home,” I answered.

  “Who’s expecting you?” she asked, taking the knife out of her hair and letting her flowing locks cover her eyes.

  “Nobody.”

  Karolina laughed.

  “Why are you going to a place where nobody is expecting you?” she asked, producing a pomegranate from somewhere or other and cutting it in half.

  “Why does it matter?” I was baffled. “I just haven’t been there for a while.”

  “Have some,” she said, offering me half of the pomegranate. “What are you going to do there, in this place where nobody is expecting you?”

  “I won’t be staying there too long. I’m leaving for Kharkiv tomorrow.”

  “You’re that afraid of returning?” Karolina asked, chuckling, lifting her half of the pomegranate to her mouth and sucking on it. “How can you be so sure? You haven’t even gotten there yet and you’re already planning to leave. You’re afraid.”

  “I’ve got stuff to do,” I explained. “I can’t stay any longer than that.”

  “You can if you want.”

  “No,” I said, irritated. “I can’t.”

  “You only think you’ll leave right away because you’ve forgotten all the experiences you had there. Once you remember, you’ll find that leaving is harder than you think. Here.”

  She handed me a mug filled with something she had poured from the thermos. The drink smelled like a mix of cinnamon and valerian. I tried it. It had an acerbic and spicy taste to it. I drank it all. I was knocked out immediately.

  Wheat fields surrounded the airport. Some bright, poisonous-looking flowers were growing closer to the runway. Wasps were hovering lazily above, frozen in mid-flight as if there were corpses below them. Every morning the sun heated up the asphalt and dried out all the grass poking through the concrete slabs. Flags were whipping in the wind off to the side, above the air-traffic control station. A bit farther away, behind the administration building, the blistering morning sun touched down on a row of trees woven together by spiderwebs. Strange gusts of wind tore across the fields like animals emerging from the night, attracted by the airport’s green lights, only to retreat back into the wheat to hide from the burning June sun. As it warmed up, the asphalt reflected the sunlight, blinding the birds flying over the runway. Gas tanks and a couple of trucks were parked at the fence. Some empty garages, smelling of sweet stagnant water and oil, were just emerging from the darkness. After a while, some mechanics appeared, changed into worn black overalls, and started fiddling around with their machines. The early June sky hovered above the airport, flapping loudly in the wind like freshly washed sheets, rising and swooping down to the asphalt. Around eight, the laborious roar of an engine made itself heard, heaving air in and out of the depths of the atmosphere. The airplane itself was still hidden behind the sun, but its shadow scurried across the wheat fields, scaring the hell out of the birds and foxes. The surface of the sky shattered like porcelain. A good old Antonov An-2, the pride of Soviet aviation, a model that had seen its share of combat, though this one was almost certainly a crop duster, was descending nearby. Deafening the morning with its prehistoric motor, it spun around the sleepy city, awakening its residents from their light and fleeting summer dreams. The pilots scoped out the fields of crops topped with sunny honey, fresh grass sprouting on the railroad ties and embankments, the golden river sand, and the chalky banks the color of silverware. The city was left behind with its factory smoke stacks and railroad; the airplane was getting ready to land. Light poured into the cockpit and shone coldly on the metal. The machine whipped across the runway, its stiff wheels bouncing up and down on the cracked asphalt. The pilots hopped down onto the ground and started helping the baggage handlers pull out large burlap sacks full of regional and Republic-wide newspapers, letters, and parcels. Once everything had been unloaded, they walked over to the building, leaving the plane to warm up in the sun.

  My friends and I lived on the other side of the fields, on the outskirts of the city, in white panel apartment buildings surrounded by tall pine trees. In the evenings, we would escape from our neighborhood, roam around in the wheat, hiding from passing cars and scampering along the fence, and then we’d take a rest in the dusty grass and look at the aircraft. The An-2, with its all-metal airframe and canvas-upholstered wings, looked like something not of this world, some conveyance utilized by demons who burned the sky above us with oil and lead. God’s messengers were riding inside it; the mighty propeller was smashing the blue ice of the sky and hurling poplar fuzz into the next world. We came home well after dark, pushing through the hot, thick wheat, all the while dreaming about aviation. We all wanted to become pilots. The majority of us became losers.

  From time to time I still have dreams about aviators. They’re always making an emergency landing somewhere in wheat fields. Their planes cut at dusk through the thick wheat like razors; all the canvas upholstery gives with a loud ripping sound as
the stalks wrap around their planes’ undercarriages before they become bogged down forever in the black, dried-up earth. The pilots bail out of their boiling cockpits and fall into the wheat that immediately spins a web around their legs. They stand and peer into the distance as if they’re trying to make out something on the horizon. But there’s nothing on the horizon except for more wheat fields. They go on for miles; there’s no hope reaching the end. The aviators leave their aircraft to cool down in the twilight and make their way west, chasing the rapidly guttering sun. The stalks are tall and impassable; the pilots can hardly make their way through the fields; they forge along nonetheless and smash up against an invisible wall, over and over again, even though they know they have no chance of getting out. They’re wearing leather helmets, goggles, flight gloves. For some reason, they don’t want to detach their open parachutes; they trail the aviators like long and heavy crocodile tails.

  I woke to the humming of the engine. The three men were sleeping next to me on the couch, and Karolina was gone. I looked out into the main section of the bus. It was already quite late; to the right, outside the window, the evening sun was speckled with red. I wondered what time it was. I walked up to one of the entrepreneurs dreaming sweet dreams, moved his hand and looked at his watch. It was nine-thirty. “Damn,” I thought to myself, “did I really sleep through my stop?” I went up to the driver. He greeted me like an old friend, without taking his eyes off the road. I looked out the windshield. There would be a turn coming up, but I knew that if you kept going straight, then in a few kilometers I’d get where I was going. But the driver was slowing down and was getting ready to take the turn.

  “Hey guy, look,” I said to him, “why don’t you drop me off at the gas station. It’s only a few kilometers away.”

  “The one up on the hill?” asked the driver.

  “Yep.”

  “By the tower?”

  “Yeah . . .”

  “Nope,” he said. “We’re turning here.”

  “Hold on,” I said, hoping to strike a deal. “You’ve got something wrong with your suspension, right? My brother has a repair shop. He’ll give you a complete overhaul.”

  “Sonny boy,” the driver responded firmly and convincingly, “that’s the city over there, and we can’t go into the city. We’re hauling goods.”

  I got off the bus. The sun had set; it got chilly right away. I put on my coat and set off along the highway. I got to the gas station in about twenty minutes. The windows at the service station were dark. “Where’s Kocha?” I wondered. It seemed completely abandoned, and the front door was padlocked. I decided to wait around a bit nevertheless. I walked behind the building by the grass and raspberry bushes where Kocha’s trailer was. I could see a few old, beaten-up automobiles. The trailer was also locked. Feeling my way through the darkness, I found a lonely truck cab, with no trailer in sight. I jumped in and took off my sneakers. The moon was hanging up above, and the asphalt was losing the heat it had soaked up during the day. Right in front of me, in the valley below, was my hometown. I put my backpack under my head and fell right back asleep.

  2

  The dog was black, tinged with swampy green. It crept forward apprehensively, hunching down as it went, trying to go unnoticed. It approached quietly, its fearsome paws tearing through the tall grass, and then it was looming over me, blocking out the sun. The rays of morning sunlight gave its skull a golden hue. I met its glassy gaze and saw my own reflection looking back at me. It bounded forward, paused, then moved again. It froze for an instant and nudged me with its snout. Its hungry eyes lit up, and the grass behind it curled into an emerald wave, concealing a bloody, sunny thicket. Half asleep and sensing motion, I thrust my hand forward instinctively.

  “Herman, hey buddy!”

  Putting my feet down heavily on the bent iron rods, I pulled myself up.

  “Herman! Pal, you’re here!” Kocha said, coming up to me and gesturing vaguely with his long, skinny arms, and bobbing his nearly-bald skull, but he couldn’t squeeze through the broken window, so he just stood back a bit in the sun that had already risen and was now ascending to just the height it wanted. “Well, what are you lying around for?” he asked hoarsely, pawing at me. “Hey buddy!”

  I tried to get up. My body wasn’t cooperating after a night on the hard seat. I stretched out my legs, bent over, and just fell into Kocha’s embrace.

  “Hey pal!” I could tell how happy he was to see me.

  “Hi, Kocha,” I replied, and we shook hands, patted each other on the shoulder, and drummed each other on the back for a while, demonstrating just how grand we thought it was that I had spent the night in an empty car and he was there to wake me up at six in the morning.

  “When did you get in?” Kocha inquired after the first wave of happiness had passed. Incidentally, he still hadn’t let go of my hand.

  “Last night,” I answered, trying to free myself from his grip, and finally put my shoes on.

  “How come ya didn’t call?” Kocha had no intention of letting go.

  “Kocha, you’re a little bitch,” I said, finally extricating myself and finding that now that I had it back I didn’t know what to do with my hand. “I’ve been calling you for the last two days. Why haven’t you been picking up?”

  “When’d you call?” Kocha asked.

  “In the afternoon,” I said, finally managing to pick up my sneakers.

  “Ah, I was sleeping,” he said. “I’ve been having trouble sleeping lately. I’ll sleep during the day and then come to work at night. But there aren’t any customers at night,” he continued, fidgeting a bit and then motioning for me to follow him. “Well, and more importantly, our phone isn’t working—we didn’t pay this month’s bill. And yesterday I was in town. Come on, let me show you around.”

  He went on ahead. I followed behind him. I detoured around a Moskvitch car with burnt tires, and then a heap of scrap metal, airplane parts, refrigerators, and gas stoves, and slipped behind Kocha as he walked over to the gas pumps. The gas station sat about one hundred meters off the northbound highway. The city through which the highway ran was down below, in the warm valley, about two kilometers away. On the other side of the valley, to the south, sprawling fields gave way to the city’s outermost neighborhoods. A river flowing from the Russian side of the border toward the Donbass region encircled the city from the north. The left bank was on a slight incline, while tall, chalky mountains, whose summits were covered with wormwood and blackthorn, dotted the right. A TV tower, visible from any point in the valley, soared upward, resting atop the highest hill and looming over the city. The gas station was situated on the next hill over from the tower. It had been built back in the ’70s. An oil depot had appeared in the city around that time, followed by two gas stations—one on the city’s southern border and the other on the northern one. In the ’90s, the oil depot went bankrupt, along with the other gas station, so this one, on the Kharkiv highway, was the only station left in town. In the early ’90s my brother got involved, just as the oil depot was on its last legs, and took over. The station itself was looking pretty shabby these days—four old pumps, a booth with a cash register, and an unused flagpole you could hang someone on, if the mood struck you. There was a cold warehouse stuffed with metal out back. Clearly, infrastructure didn’t take priority, since my brother invested his money in improving customer service by gathering up all sorts of appliances and mechanisms for repairing everything imaginable. He lived in town, coming to work every morning and descending back into the valley well after nightfall. He had a killer team working alongside him—Kocha and a guy everybody called Injured, both self-taught mechanics who had resuscitated numerous trucks over the years, something they took great pride in. Injured also lived in town, whereas Kocha had been forced out of his apartment, so he hung out at the gas station all the time, sleeping in a trailer furnished according to the principles of feng shui. There was a patch of asphalt with a repair pit near the station, and a few metal tables were s
unk into the ground off to one side, under the lime trees. Gullies and apple orchards started behind the gas station, stretching along the chalky mountains; to the north the landscape gave way to steppe, broken up by the occasional noisy tractor. Mangled car parts had been heaped together behind the trailer—stacked tires and the remains of disassembled vehicles. The cab of a Kamaz truck, offering a panoramic view of the sun-kissed valley and the unprotected city, was hidden away in the raspberry bushes. But this business wasn’t about infrastructure or old pumps. It was all about location. That was certainly what my brother had in mind when he decided to buy this gas station. The fact of the matter was that the next place to get gas was seventy kilometers north, and the highway ran through several dubious places, places with no government to speak of, and hardly anyone to govern. It seemed as though there wasn’t any cell service up north, either. All the drivers knew that, so they wanted to fill up at my brother’s place. Moreover, they knew he had Injured working for him, and Injured was the best mechanic around: the god of drive shafts and stick shifts. In short, the place was a gold mine.

  Two detached car seats had been brought over and planted by the brick booth, next to the gas pumps, covered with the black skins of some unidentifiable animals. Springs were jutting out randomly from the cushions, and a long metal arm or lever had been attached to one of the seats, making the thing look like a catapult. Kocha wearily plopped down onto the seat, took out his cigarettes, lit one of them, and pointed at me, seemingly saying, “Take a seat, buddy.” I did so. The sun was beginning to radiate heat like rocks on a riverbank, and the sky whirled along above us, goaded by the wind. It was Sunday, at the end of May—a perfect day for getting the hell out of here.