Mesopotamia Read online

  The police took everyone to the station—except the bartenders, of course. The professor was whimpering and calling out for someone to massage his heart before it was too late. His girlfriend was holding a handkerchief up against Marat’s lacerated eyebrow. The professor and his girlfriend were sitting in one corner of the tiny cell, and we were sitting across from them. Nobody said anything; there was nothing but her nervous eyes, fixated on Marat, straining to parse every detail of his face, as though trying to memorize it. Then they were let go, but we had to stay. Marat asked me to use my one phone call on Alina to tell her that he had to report for a meeting with the president of the boxing federation.

  “A meeting . . . at 2 a.m.?” I asked incredulously. “I’m gonna tell her we’re down at the police station. Shit, man, we’ve gotta get outta here somehow!”

  “Us at the police station?” Marat seemed hesitant. “She won’t buy it—that’s too believable.”

  “Why do we rehash things everyone already knows?” I thought. “Why do we curry favor with the dead by offering stories with so much blood and pain in them? It seems like everyone wants to remember Marat just that way—in red boxer shorts with angel wings on his back and the Lord’s benediction in his warm heart.” I finally decided to leave. I turned toward Sasha. I was about to excuse myself and dissolve into the fog when Alina leaned over toward me and touched my hand wearily.

  “Hey, John, can you help me out over here?” she asked.

  “Well, obviously, come on,” I answered.

  “I shouldn’t even have come,” I thought to myself.

  Alina started gathering up the empty bottles scattered in the grass, passing them to me, then she took some dishes and forks off the table and headed inside. I followed, sensing everyone’s eyes and voices behind me; I trod along the cracked bricks, amazed by how smoothly she moved, how deeply she plunged into the night, and how unexpectedly the light from the house’s windows fell on her skin and dark hair. She opened the door and went inside. I went in after her. She took a slow look around her, quietly asked me to leave the bottles in the hallway, and then handed me the forks. They slipped out of my hand and crashed to the floor, sharp and cold like shards of ice. Somewhere deep inside the house, a door creaked. Alina put a finger to her lips, signaling for me to keep it down, since everyone was already asleep. She spoke in a whisper, which gave her voice a peculiarly trusting tone. She opened the door to the living room and took a few cautious steps. The light was off; I didn’t see her so much as sense her—catching the sound of her breath, the slightly sharp walnut scent of her hair, and the slightly jarring creak of the old floorboards under her feet.

  “What’s going to happen here in the dark when I accidentally bump into her, when I touch her in the void, when the forks and sharp knives in my hand wound her?” I thought. She passed through the living room and turned down a long hallway, finding her way by touch, her fingers groping from object to object. I knew this house—I played here as a kid. Its strange layout, which had changed a few times over the years, and its rooms cluttered with old furniture and tall cabinets reminded me of Marat, of slightly better circumstances, of the good old days. I’ve always liked the way it smells here—warm, comfortable clothing, wood, and tea. There were no books on the shelves, no pictures on the walls. Cramped rooms, narrow hallways, static shadows, invisible residents. We moved in the darkness, carefully weaving around chairs and bags, planters full of flowers, and shoes scattered across the floor. Suddenly, I realized that I didn’t remember this hallway. It hadn’t been here before, and I should know, I’d been here hundreds of times at different ages and in different states of mind. But I had no memory of this hallway that stretched on and on, gradually narrowing, overflowing with dust and darkness.

  “They must have just done some more renovations. Yeah, that’s it. Marat had been planning on knocking down this wall to merge his parents’ bedroom with the little room in which nobody lived, but I don’t remember him saying he was doing any remodeling the last time we talked.”

  We hadn’t been doing much talking lately, though; I didn’t have the time, desire, or patience to put up with the haze Marat lived in. Maybe he had built this hallway in his parents’ dwelling so he could follow it out of this temporal world; he had broken open a channel of communication with the night, finding a place where the outer lining of the world was thin and permeable. He had finally taken advantage of this opportunity to set everything right. I stopped and listened hard. There was nothing to hear in that sheer darkness that enfolded and constricted everything; even Alina’s breath was gone, as though she had drawn a gulp of air into her lungs and held it until she dissolved into the darkness like a lump of sugar in pitch-­black tea. She was playing hide-­and-­seek with me. I remembered how Marat liked telling stories about his dad, about how his dad taught him to swim. He just picked Marat up by the scruff of the neck and dunked him; Marat would flail his arms, gasping for air and coughing up water. He spoke of those lessons with great pride—“The thing is, I didn’t drown or go belly-­up or anything. I kept my head above water. I lived to see another day, so now I know I’m gonna keep on holding it together—when death comes to take me, I won’t just roll over.”

  But whenever he told those stories, his voice got so angry that it knocked the wind out of me. My mouth would suck in air greedily, trying to grab the oxygen out of it, as if I needed to make sure I wasn’t drowning. This trap I had fallen into was awakening all my worst childhood stories. Fear overcame me.

  “What’s happening to me, how can I get out of here? Where does this damn hallway go?” I thought. I lunged forward, groping for the wall, and my hand connected with something hard—some kind of metal protrusions and dowels. I was beating one fist against black emptiness and still trying to hold on to the forks and knives with the other. I touched ripped wallpaper over cool, bulging bricks. I touched a wire hanger. I touched curtains and hats, kerchiefs and cellophane. Suddenly, my fingers stopped on something spongy and warm. I tried to identify it. Feathers—those were feathers—soft and weightless. Something like a recently stuffed bird, something packed with blood and memories. I touched it cautiously, probingly, trying to find out what this thing was. The darkness trembled at my touch and carried some faint reverberation, as if someone had sighed. I felt something moving. Horror seized me. Horror and desperation. I burst right into the darkness, fingers splayed out before me. I knocked the hanger to the floor, overturned some pots and pans. My hand struck a hard surface; the darkness burst open and harsh light hit me in the eyes. I stumbled into the old kitchen, where I had been a thousand times, where I knew every nook and cranny, where everything was familiar and elicited no fear or suspicion. Alina stood in the middle of the room, stirring something in a large pot. She gave me a surprised look. My expression was apparently a bit troubled.

  “Where have you been?” she asked.

  “I got turned around.”

  “You all right?” Her voice was skeptical.

  “Yeah,” I lied. She probably didn’t believe me, but she didn’t press the issue.

  “Here, take this out to the table,” she said after a short pause. She handed me a bowl of vegetables and I headed back.

  By the time I got there they had just finished consoling Kostyk and were trying to remember where they’d left off and figure out where the conversation had broken down and why it had taken a turn for the worse. Kostyk was sobbing bitterly, his head in his hands and his hands on the baked fish. One might have thought he was lamenting over it—the fish, I mean. Sasha had moved over to him, laying a comforting hand on the back of his neck as if soothing a horse.

  “It’s gonna be okay, kid,” he said. “There’s no point beating yourself up over the dead.”

  Clearly offended, Kostyk sniffled, wiping away the tears and snot dripping down his face with his sleeves. With his sharp profile, Sasha hovered over him like a raven; Benia was smoking anxiously, tapping the ashes into a dish of marinated mushrooms. Rustam and Sem s
at off to the side, still arguing about something or other. I sat down next to them, placing the vegetables on the table.

  Then Sem told us a fascinating story. It was so incredible and so convoluted that even Rustam, Marat’s younger brother, who was a witness to those events, threw up his hands in protest, opened his eyes wide, and shook his head disapprovingly, countering and correcting the storyteller—and boy, did he need to be corrected!

  “None of us know,” Sem said, sparking his lighter and making the scars on his broken and re-­broken nose flare pink in its naphtha glow, “how close to us death is at any given moment. None of us can even imagine how deeply we have ventured into its domain.” He may not have been as lucid as I’m making him sound—he took a few anxious drags and he stumbled over his words a bit, but his story was definitely about death, I know that for a fact.

  “Death never meets us halfway; it can bide its time and pick the right moment. It stands in crisp, emerald grass—invisible and inevitable, observing how casually and imprudently we run into its shadow. Sometimes we’re able to slip out of its shadow again. But most times, how we react isn’t up to us. We are vulnerable in the face of death, paralyzed with fear and a sense of doom. Hardly anyone’s capable of overcoming that sense of doom. Marat’s situation was particularly strange. He wasn’t afraid of death, and he loved women. One time they offered him a coaching position at some foreign club. You guys all heard about that. You know what he said to them? He said he’d die here, alongside his mom. Everybody knows how courteously and honorably he treated women. He might have gotten that from his mom, or maybe it went with his athletic discipline. Whatever the case may be, he basically worshipped women. One time, last spring . . . about a year ago, actually, Marat was drawn into a fight. He was just walking home after a match, descending the hill on Revolution Street, when he saw some prick hitting on this girl; he just wouldn’t leave her alone. Marat got into a fight with him, obviously. You’d think it’d be easy for a professional boxer to knock out some joker on the street. But what that prick lacked in skill he made up for in stamina. His head was made of iron, you could bash him with a bicycle frame until it bent, and it wouldn’t even faze him. They duked it out for two hours, grappling and then stopping to catch their breath and then going at it again. Even the girl lost interest; she tried to humor them, but after a while she couldn’t take it anymore. She excused herself and went on her way. Neither of them tried to stop her. Eventually, Marat’s boxing skills allowed him to emerge victorious—he knocked that meathead down. He was just lying there on the warm, evening asphalt, bleeding. Marat was just about to turn around and head home, but something stopped him, something compelled him to stay. He bent over, hefted that tough guy over his shoulder and started carrying him toward the bright lights shining by the metro station, thinking he’d just drop him off in front of a pharmacy. The guy was heavy and cumbersome—his legs were dragging along the ground, his jeans were sagging, he was breathing hoarsely and dripping blood down Marat’s neck. But Marat forged on; he knew that an honest man doesn’t leave corpses in his wake, he doesn’t play dirty. He hauled that prick all the way over to the pharmacy and carefully set him down by the door. He was just about to try and get the night shift clerk’s attention, but he decided to wipe the blood off the guy’s face first. As soon as he leaned in, his rival opened his eyes, pulled a pair of long, shiny scissors out of his back pocket and drove them into Marat’s side—then he just ran away. Marat tried to catch him, but the scissors were slowing him down a bit. Scissors still jutting out of him, he decided to head home, staggering from wall to wall and tree to tree through the night. It turns out the girl was a hairdresser.”

  And then they started chattering all at once, interrupting and deriding one another.

  “He wasn’t boxing anymore! He was already coaching kids then!” Rustam yelled.

  “Whatcha talkin’ about?” Sem said, shaking his head. “I went to all his fights. He didn’t box like the old Marat, obviously, but that’s just how it goes.”

  “What fights, what are you talking about?” Rustam asked hotly. “He would just loaf around on the couch for weeks at a time. He wouldn’t even leave the neighborhood.”

  “That’s right. He’d only leave to box,” Sem declared.

  “With who? Come on!” Rustam sprang to his feet, but Sem tugged at the sleeve of his athletic jacket to make him sit back down. “His heart was aching.”

  “Yep, that’s true.” Kostyk backed him up. “His heart ached with kindness!”

  I said my goodbyes, shaking Rustam and Sem’s hands, patting Kostyk on the back, writing down Sasha’s phone number, and waving to Benia. Nobody stopped me. They were all exhausted, falling asleep at the table, but they held their ground—it was as if they were afraid of being left alone with all those stories. The fog rose toward the May sky, laying objects bare and hollowing out the darkness. Three windows on the second floor yellowly consumed the night. All three neighbors—the two heavyset women and the frail one—stared intently at my back, both presaging and foreseeing something to come.

  I knew the hairdresser. Marat met her last March. He just happened to be walking by when he had some automatic reaction to the light sparkling on windows displaying pretty women’s seemingly severed heads. He decided to stop in. It was the end of a cold workday, and she was the only one there. She was just about to set off into the night—what’s the point of sitting around in a salon when real, juicy life is getting under way on the other side of the black windows? She had already shed her shiny apron with its numerous pockets stuffed with scissors, combs, and electric trimmers. And then Marat stepped inside. She immediately noticed the dark circles under his eyes, which alluded to all his sleepless nights and his tobacco-­roasted lungs; she noticed his stubble, which, oddly enough, made him look younger and meaner than he really was. She noticed his bandaged right hand, which made her realize that this here was a guy that wouldn’t back down if challenged, no matter what. Her eyes slid down his black hoodie, down his Nike gym bag, down his black jeans dotted with cigarette burns, all the way to his light sneakers. He looked like a movie hitman. The cops always find the distinctive footprints left by those sneakers, that’s what gives them away. She put her apron back on and nodded at a chair, signaling Marat to take a seat. She walked over, examined him at length in the mirror, and ran her hand through his prickly, black hair. She readied the scissors carefully; there were sparks flying off Marat and she was afraid of getting burned.

  Marat told us that her whole look was too pink and too bloody. Pink hair, bloody makeup, pink shirt, bloody nails, pink, fluffy slippers, and blood-­colored underwear. When she touched him, he felt how impatient her hands were, how adept she was at touching men, feeling their heat and restraining the quivering tension of their bodies. Or not, Marat added. He spun the chair around and pulled her against him, but that pink apron of hers, weighed down by all kinds of hairdresser stuff, kept getting in the way. Marat tried pulling it off, but it clung to her body, determined to protect her from the caresses of strangers. Then she untied the strings and tossed it on the floor, and the ringing metal of scissors and combs flew under the chair. Now she stood before him and he looked at her bare stomach, which her tiny shirt did nothing to conceal, and then he jerked her down onto his lap, stripping off all her clothes, not daring to stop, not for an instant, propelled by some unaccountable urgency. She didn’t even close the door of the salon; somebody peeked in while Marat was ripping off all her red straps and pink stockings, holding her against him to feel her skin grow warm from his touch and cold from the brisk March draft whipping in from the street. When she cried out and froze, he turned her face toward the light, trying to understand what had happened, why she wasn’t moving, until he too froze and could do nothing but keep squeezing her and examining her hair and eyebrows up close, stunned at the brightness and color of this girl, imagining how many meticulous minutes of drawing before her mirror and draping herself in brilliant folds they entailed, and
then marveling at how easily she had shed them all again. He was also surprised by how quickly and smoothly she quieted down. Her gaze was intent and detached, instantly disconcerting; he stood up, carried her across the room, tossed her onto the leather couch decisively, though not very tenderly, and walked out the door. He hadn’t said a single word to her the whole time.