Voroshilovgrad Page 31

  The gray-haired man paused for an instant, ignoring Nikolaich’s cries, then asked, his voice metallic:

  “So, you’re trying to say that you’re refusing to vacate the premises?”

  “We’re not messing around,” Injured said, making a show of getting even more comfortable on the hood of his car.

  “Okay, then,” the gray-haired man said, almost kindly. “Nikolaich,” he ordered, “give Mr. Pastushok a ring. We need to settle this.”

  Nikolaich seemed to shrivel up. He put the briefcase on the ground and lowered his eyes.

  “Hey,” the gray-haired man addressed him again. “Are you listening?”

  “Yeah.” Nikolaich was scared to death, but he forced out a reply, terrified of breaking the Young Pioneer code.

  “Well, what are you waiting for? Call him already,” the gray-haired man ordered.

  “No,” Nikolaich answered quietly, sweating profusely. “I’m not going to call him.”

  “What’d you say?” The gray-haired man became rigid where he stood.

  “I can’t,” Nikolaich whispered. “I can’t call him. He calls me.”

  “What?”

  “I said he’s the one who calls me,” Nikolaich replied, gradually starting to regain his usual demeanor. He knew that as long as he followed Mr. Pastushok’s instructions he’d be in the clear. “I can’t just call him up.” The subtext was plain: “You’re the one screwing this up, so you fix it yourself—there’s no fuckin’ way you’re going to put me in the line of fire again, which is exactly what would happen if I were to have another conversation with our dear Mr. Pastushok.”

  “All right,” said the gray-haired man. “So now what?” He wasn’t used to backing down. “He’s going to call,” Nikolaich replied after gathering his thoughts. “Soon. At twelve.”

  The gray-haired man jerked his arm abruptly, taking a look at his watch.

  “Forty-five minutes,” he said, a bit flustered. “So we’ll just hang around till then, okay?” he asked, addressing Injured, who apparently held enough cards now that his approval was necessary.

  “All right,” Injured said. “That’s fine. Let’s go,” he said, turning to me. “Let’s have a smoke.”

  Hopping down onto the asphalt, he passed the gray-haired man quite lackadaisically and headed behind the building, toward the runway. I followed him. Ernst, who was just standing there nervously between the gray-haired man and Nikolaich, eventually ran after us, flagrantly neglecting his duties as host.

  The grass by the runway had been mowed recently and everything smelled strongly of still plant juice. The buildings, dark and empty as unused pots and pans, stood spectrally amid the autumn vegetation, amid the cornfields that circled the airport, threatening to invade all the cracks in the asphalt with their dry stems and hot roots, to grow through all the windows and manholes, stretch out onto the walls and tin roofs, and erase any sign that a few generations of pilots had been here. The smell of the grass on the wind was mixed with the scent of sun-kissed fuel oil that had burrowed into the ground and made it insensate.

  “Who was that guy?” I asked Injured, looking back to where the gray-haired man would have been visible had the main building not been in the way.

  “Their lawyer,” he said.

  “What about what’s-his-name—Vladlen Marlen or Marlen Vladlen—who’s that?”

  “Their boss. Mr. Marlen Pastushok.”

  “You know him?”

  “Nope. He hardly ever shows his face. But everyone’s afraid of him.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Couldn’t tell ya,” Injured said. “I’ve heard he’s a really young guy.”

  “Well, that lawyer of theirs is a real shady dude,” I said, trying and failing to catch sight of him around the corner of the building.

  “Their lawyer’s fine. It’s that bald fag I don’t like. You can tell he’s just waiting for a chance to screw us.”

  He stuck his hands in his jacket pockets and set off, kicking some empty beer cans down the runway with his heavy shoes.

  “Hey,” I said to Ernst, who was still all bundled up in his old overcoat. “Did you know Arthur, Tamara’s husband?”

  “Arthur?” he asked, his mind on other things. “I knew Arthur, sure. We even had a business together. It tanked, though.”

  “How did he and Tamara get along?”

  “They had a good marriage,” Ernst said. “It didn’t last long, though. He left her for Tamila, her cousin.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah. That sure was something else. Sturm und Drang! They nearly killed each other. Tamara even started cutting herself. You ever notice how she’s got all those things on her arms? That’s so you can’t see the scars. They didn’t talk for about two years or so, but then they eventually made up.”

  “Did he die?”

  “Arthur? Nah, he moved to the Netherlands. He sold cars for a bit and then opened up his own restaurant. Sometimes he writes them letters. He always writes both of them at once.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Know what?” Ernst asked.

  “Well, about the scars and the letters.”

  “Well, Tamila and I lived together for six months or so. Then she told me she wanted kids, but I wasn’t ready for that—well I’ve got my aviation stuff to worry about, you know what I mean.”

  “Who would have thought,” I said, surprised by his story. “They didn’t seem like to type to freak out over anything.”

  “Yeah,” Ernst mused. “Life doesn’t make a whole lot of sense sometimes. You never know what’s down there below the surface. You think you know all there is to know, that you see what’s really going on, but no, usually we’re all completely in the dark about what’s right in front of us . . .”

  I looked around. So what was actually going on right in front of me?

  The wheat, tough and thick, which had been growing here for years, slowed them down, blocking their path, so they had to tear through the dry, intertwining stalks. The boisterous, happy group walked along under the sunbeams, tripping over their shadows, which were getting underfoot like eager feet like hunting dogs. Young, smiling pilots wearing leather caps and jackets, with heavy watches on their arms and brown clipboards in their hands, emerged out of the golden waves of sun, out of the bitter October air. They passed by, yelling back and forth, joking about something that had happened here at this particular airport some twenty odd years ago—they couldn’t really remember it in detail anymore, so they’d come back here to jog their memory.

  The wheat stalks were finding their way into their boots and pockets; spiderwebs wrapped around their fingers and rested on their hair. They lifted the webs gracefully toward the heavens, doggedly attempting to extricate themselves from the clutches of these endless fields. Mechanics wearing black overalls were bringing up the rear, carrying canvas bags filled with letters and parcels that they had preserved all these years. The bags caught the sunlight, igniting a green flame in their wake. The mechanics were laughing, squinting ever so slightly behind their sunglasses, eyes on the sky that rang like porcelain in the crisp, autumn air.

  But they weren’t the only ones out in the field; an odd-looking aviation team, who had fallen even farther behind the mechanics, was rolling the swaying carcass of an Antonov An-2 airplane out of the sunny haze, its bodywork and paint glimmering despite its orange coating of dust. They pushed the plane along, dripping with sweat, coughing in its cloud of dirt, but they wouldn’t give up, couldn’t stand to abandon their machine in the middle of the field, no matter how difficult their task.

  The pilots continued striding down the runway, heading for the empty, resonating hangars, full of dark air like sluices clogged with river water. After their voices had disappeared behind the buildings, the mechanics arrived and tossed their mailbags onto the asphalt before wandering off to their respective garages, filling them with laughter and happy shouting. Then the ones bringing up the rear finally reached the runway, lea
ving their low-flying aircraft right in front of the airport’s administrative buildings.

  The machine, dried out by the drought and scorched by the sun and cocooned in spiderwebs and tufts of grass, sat there in the middle of the runway as though it was trying to figure out where it should go next and how it should get there. Soon an insistent rustling sound came from the airplane’s innards—it was as if somebody was clawing at the upholstery, groping for a way out. The airplane’s doors burst open, allowing a bright beam of sunlight into the black, stuffy pit of its interior. Red foxes and black cats started hopping out, doves and swallows flew into the sky, toads leapt onto the runway and bats spilled out like pears falling from a tree. All the beasts of the sky and earth who had been hiding on board and, who had suffered due to the extreme heat, the stuffiness, scattered now, trying to get as far away as possible from that infernal machine, and all the sky along the border with its patches of turbulence like traps set for their souls.

  “Herman,” Injured said, tapping me on the shoulder. “Well, are you coming?”

  The gray-haired man and Nikolaich were still just standing there opposite each other like two dancers on a parquet floor, waiting for the music to start. The gray-haired man was glowering at Nikolaich, practically hissing through his gritted teeth. Nikolaich was squirming and nodding his head dejectedly. If they were talking, they both went quiet when we came up to them.

  “Well?” Injured asked.

  “Let’s wait for another five minutes,” the gray-haired man said.

  “Sure.” Not that we had much of a choice, after all.

  We stood there, counting off the seconds, trying not to look each other in the eye, examining the cracks on the asphalt that were deep like wrinkles on a clown’s weary face.

  Nikolaich’s cell rang. He reached into his pocket and held the phone up to his ear, looking as though he was having a panic attack, sweating profusely.

  “Hello,” Nikolaich said, and much too loudly considering how quiet it was at the empty airport. “Yes! Yes, Mr. Pastushok, he’s here. He’s standing right next to me. Yes! I’m handing him the phone now!” he said frantically, doing precisely that, with evident relief.

  The gray-haired man’s movements were no less hasty, now. His neat, lawyer’s fingers grabbed for Nikolaich’s cell phone awkwardly.

  “Yes, Mr. Pastushok,” he said, trying to sound firm and unconcerned; this quickly became something like a hysterical whine, however. “We’re here. Everything is fine, Mr. Pastushok. They don’t want to, Mr. Pastushok. They’re waving their dicks around, Mr. Pastushok.” Injured took umbrage at this last comment. “I said that they’re refusing to cooperate, Mr. Pastushok. What? They said it’s some sort of protest. They’re saying it’s the local community. They’re saying we have no right to . . . What? I already told them that we do! I showed them the papers! Mr. Pastushok, I’ll definitely sort this all out. I’ll figure it out, don’t worry. Definitely. I don’t know yet. Maybe we can make a deal, Mr. Pastushok. Tell them to what? Tell them to fuck off? That’s clear, Mr. Pastushok. Yes, everything is clear, don’t you worry one bit! Sorry for all the hassle. I’ll figure it all out! Yes! You too, Mr. Pastushok, you too!”

  The gray-haired man turned off the phone and handed it back to Nikolaich, his hands pale and bloodless. He took a snow-white handkerchief out of his jacket pocket, and his trembling hand wiped off a copious layer of sweat off his face. He struggled to fit his handkerchief back in his pocket, but he eventually managed to stuff it in more or less as neatly as before. He took his briefcase back from Nikolaich, who, expecting the worst, curled up behind him like a dog encountering a group of strangers. Injured was smiling in a rather peculiar manner.

  “Well, this is how it’s gonna go down,” the gray-haired man declared, addressing Injured. The fingers that clutched the handle of his briefcase had turned blue. “I warned you. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. You have exactly twenty-four hours. We are going to bulldoze everything tomorrow. And you’ll be held liable for failing to cooperate with the lawful representatives of the utilities department.”

  Once again he reached for his handkerchief and started wiping the sweat off his neck, his hands shaking all the while. He headed for his car without saying another word. Nikolaich, trotting along at his heels, gave us a strange, threatening look before hopping in the Jeep. It was as though he wanted to say something but lacked the courage to do so. Instead, he decided to bide his time.

  “Well,” Injured said, “now we’ve got some real problems.”

  7

  He knew what to do. He had calculated everything precisely and knew that his friends would have his back if things got rough. Because business is just business, but the blood they shed together during fights on the soccer field and around the neighborhood bound and united them. This had nothing whatsoever to do with business. The cry of bloodlust far outweighs the voice of reason—that’s what Injured thought, anyway, and he was proved correct. It was confirmed the very next day when the entire gang, all the guys I’d known since I was a kid, crawled out of their dens, offices, stores, and markets to come back us up, like it always was in the good old days. Except, of course, that this wasn’t the good old days. It was now.

  As soon as Nikolaich and the gray-haired man left the airport, Injured and I also headed back to the city. He let me out by the community college dorms; I dived into the echoing October air and came out from behind the college buildings into a quiet, empty street. I pushed on till I reached the stone wall around the hospital. “There are times when someone’s expecting you,” I thought to myself, “and you just have to come back whether you want to or not.” The buildings were quiet and spiderwebs were coasting by. The patients peering out the windows looked like fish in an aquarium.

  The nurses couldn’t wait to tell me about Olga. They griped about her bad manners, lack of discipline, and generally grating personality. They couldn’t be sure what my relationship to her was, so they didn’t go into too much detail. Mainly they did a lot of sighing, not really expecting any sympathy from me.

  Olga was alone in her ward—perhaps the kind-hearted nurses couldn’t bear the thought of inflicting her on a roommate. She was sleeping in her bed, a carefree smile on her face. She was wearing worn Levi’s jeans and a heavy baseball jacket. Her right pant leg had been torn all the way up to her knee and her cast looked like a new sneaker. Her hair flamed in the afternoon sun, and her skin faded into the snow-white sheets like milk on rice paper. Vases filled with flowers rested on the chairs and floor. The wasps and butterflies that wavered around the flowers were torpid and inattentive—like they usually get as winter comes on. I cautiously took a seat on the edge of the bed. There were oranges by the bed, open books resting on the floor, and Olga was still clutching her cell phone, even in her sleep. There were apple trees outside the hospital windows, their branches, quivering dryly in the light breeze, been picked nearly bare by the nurses and patients. Nearly bare, as just then a tiny apple fell off one of them and plunked down onto the windowsill. Olga opened her eyes.

  “Herman? What are you doing here?”

  “I decided to pay you a visit. Who brought all the flowers?”

  “Nobody,” she said, after a second’s delay, as though she’d opted against fabricating any stories. “I asked the nurses to bring them. I wanted you to think that somebody had been worrying about me.”

  “That’s more or less what I thought.”

  “Great. That’s just great.”

  “How’s your foot?”

  “It’s fine.” She checked her phone for new messages and then set it off to the side. “I asked them to let me out yesterday, actually. I said I was absolutely fine, but they wouldn’t hear of it. They just went berserk.”

  “They said you were the one who went berserk.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Olga said, a bit offended. “Like I don’t have anything better to do. Well, whatever—one more day in here and I’ll be going back home no matter what. I’ve got a to
n of work to do, you know? It’s not getting done while I’m stuck in this goddamn place.”

  “How’d you break it, anyway?”

  “I wanted to close the door, that’s all. Those bastards got me so worked up.”

  “What’d they even want?”

  “Who knows.” She fiddled with her phone again aimlessly before putting it back down. “They were real nosy, sniffing around, asking tons of questions. They were some real nasty guys. Also, one of them had a bald spot on the side of his head. Ever see anything like that?”

  “What do you mean on the side?”

  “Well, not up top, in the middle, like normal people have—off to the side, right above his ear. And he kept on asking me to repeat myself like he was a little deaf or something. He and his bald spot—they really pissed me off. Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore, so I kicked them out.”

  “Sorry for causing you so many problems,” I said.

  “It’s no big deal. It’s my own fault, really. At first I was just so mad at you . . . It’s a good thing you decided to come by. Are you going to stick around for a while?”

  “If you let me, yeah.”

  “Sure, stick around for a while. My relatives loaded me up with oranges. I feel like it’s New Year’s.”

  “Why New Year’s?”

  “I would always eat oranges on New Year’s when I was a kid. Or when I was sick and had to stay home from school. It makes me feel like a schoolgirl again. Help me eat some of these, okay?”

  “Sure,” I said and started peeling.

  The oranges were warm like fluorescent lamps. Juice squirted out of them and the wasps immediately started swarming over our heads. Juice dribbled down Olga’s fingers as she ate; her fingers were so long I watched the drops trickle down for what felt like an eternity. Finally, she swept the drops away.

  “Hey,” she said, “I know that Injured’s got some scheme going on out there . . . at the airport.”

  “Yeah. So what?”