Mesopotamia Read online

  He came by the next evening. She was by herself, like before. Marat closed the door, standing there and waiting in silence. She knew where this was going; she turned off the lights. Outside the window, the street was infused with strands of light and shadow; they blended together and streaked apart, blurring and eroding the neighborhood’s buildings away. She rushed to tell him odd and unexpected things, saying that she’d been waiting for him and that she knew he’d come, telling him about herself, reminiscing about her ex-­boyfriends, quietly explaining what she liked and what she didn’t, what she loved and what she feared until the wee hours of the morning, showing no signs of fatigue, not asking him a single question, doing everything he wanted, submitting to everything—they kept going until he let up and fell asleep.

  For some reason, Marat liked her; he talked about feeling her heart speed up when they kissed and then turn slow and quiet again.

  “Sometimes when we’re together she acts like I’m not even there, even though she’s lying next to me. Or on top of me. She looks right through me, at something only her eyes can see. Maybe she’s just listening to my breathing or maybe she’s just inhaling my smell. Couldn’t tell ya,” he said.

  He seemed to like that too. At home, he wouldn’t even bother hiding the fact that he was going to the salon. When he started going there more regularly he’d say that he needed to go to a salon to get a good shave, that a real man should always be clean-­shaven. The trouble was, he’d sometimes shave before he left . . . He was crashing and burning, and all his relationships were falling apart—with Alina, his parents, and his brother too. He’d even started fighting with his hairdresser girl more often. One time he admitted that he was afraid to let her cut his hair.

  “She’s gonna chop my head off one of these days,” he said ominously. That’s pretty much how it all played out. Remember that story about the scissors? He made the whole thing up in my kitchen, with his hand pressed to the gaping wound. He was complaining that she had gone completely insane, that she wanted to kill him, that she was demanding the impossible from him, and that she was fucking him like there was no tomorrow. He tried talking to her, just to explain something to her.

  “Do you realize that?” he yelled. “I just wanted to talk to her!”

  But that caused even more drama; she just didn’t want to hear it, crying and accusing him of God knows what. He got all riled up, screamed at her, demolished the chair, smashed the mirror, threw bottles of cologne on the floor, and bent some hair dryers in half. Well, that’s when she drove the scissors into his side, right up to the handles.

  “Just don’t tell anyone, all right? Nobody can find out about this.”

  I didn’t. Later on, he told everyone himself.

  I asked him what was keeping him here. He had lots of relatives on his dad’s side, and they were always offering him jobs back home, in the Caucasus.

  “Well, how can I just up and leave? How can I quit on them?” He was referring to all his women, all his relatives, and all his friends and rivals. “There’s just no way.” But I knew that wasn’t the real reason. I knew Alina was the one keeping him here—she flatly refused to leave with him. She said she’d die here—with his parents and in his house, an inconsolable widow—before she’d leave this city. Marat could act on any ridiculous fancy that popped into his head. He lived with whoever he wanted, he slept with whoever he wanted, he fought with whoever he wanted, he lost friends and made enemies, refused to make the right connections, and failed to uphold his obligations to anyone—by the end of his life he was at odds with everyone, even me. I hadn’t spoken to him all winter. He owed Kostyk a lot of money. As far as I could gather, he wasn’t planning on giving it back—plus Kostyk wouldn’t have accepted it anyway. It seemed as though he was preparing for something important, some big decision, or some great event. He could cut himself loose of everything and still get by. Everything but Alina. I knew that for a fact. It made no difference how many women he had or how deep his pink hairdresser chewed into his skin, I knew that he would never leave without Alina. And I knew why. Nobody besides me knew. A long time ago, Marat told me all about them, for some reason—how they met on the street somewhere or other, how he stopped her, how he didn’t want to let her go because he already knew that this was the girl he wanted to live with. How she kept avoiding him, always hiding something. How he first went home with her and how all that turned out. How she finally agreed to move in with him—but before she did, she told him all about her mom, because she didn’t want to keep anything from him. She said that her mom had to spend time in the hospital every once in a while—“Yeah, it’s a drag. It’s nothing too bad, but there’s nothing too great about it, either. Sometimes she just doesn’t recognize anyone. But that’s nothing too serious, don’t ya think? I don’t always recognize everyone, either.” So she always had to be somewhere nearby, somewhere not too far away, because of her mom and stuff. Marat had no problem with that, and he knew better than most guys do that his girl wouldn’t be going anywhere . . . but that meant he wasn’t going anywhere either. Because it’s one thing to sleep in another apartment with another woman, but you just can’t quit on someone who can’t be left behind. That’s just not an option. Not under any circumstances. At least that’s how I understood their relationship.

  “What’s going to happen to her?” I thought to myself. “How’s she going to get by? What’s she going to do from here on out?” I passed the Institute, crested the hill, and stopped by our school. My old, four-­story apartment building was directly across from it. It was so badly maintained that the front door wouldn’t even close. Sometimes I’d wake to the sound of young voices coming from the stairwell—kids ducking in for a smoke break. I lived on the top floor; the only thing above me was the roof. Hundreds of pigeons lived up there—­sometimes their cooing would seep into my dreams. One time, when we were already in high school, Marat dragged me up there to go “hunting.” I don’t know why he felt the need to do that. I don’t remember why I agreed to go along with him.

  “There are hundreds of pigeons up there,” he said excitedly. “They’re sleepy at night; you can just stuff ’em in a sack.” We met outside my building in the evening. He had a gym bag with him. We went up the stairs. Marat stepped out first. I followed him. It was stuffy and quiet up in the attic. Only the eerie, invisible rustling of wings broke the silence. I took out my flashlight, but Marat stopped me just in time.

  “Put that away, you’ll scare ’em off,” he said. He stepped forward. The pigeons were perched on the beams, sleepy and defenseless. He grabbed them and tossed them into his bag. They submitted with a chilling, doomed air, unable to process what was happening to them, unable to look death straight in the eye. Soon enough, the bag was full. It was rustling, as though two people were arguing inside. Marat walked over toward a window and stepped out, onto the ledge. He called me over and I followed him. We carefully positioned ourselves by the window, taking in the buildings down below. The city blocks where we were born and raised shone into view, dark and silvery—heavy conglomerations of structures and sprawling treetops. Apartment blocks with darkness pooling in the hollows between them, like water in the holds of sunken tankers, shone into view. Windows and balconies, antennas and ladders shone into view. Arches and doorways, telephone poles and kiosks shone into view. Bricks and tin, grass and stones, clay and nighttime earth shone into view. Spiderwebs, filling the air like thin veins, shone into view. Down toward where the river ran, the buildings dropped off and the roofs of warehouses and auto repair shops shone into view, and the cold mercury of its current shone into view, and on the opposite bank were the spectral pipe of the old windmill, the lights of houses, and the white smokestacks of furnaces and factories. Thick silver flooded the earth and the sky, and you could only guess who lived down there and what was happening. Marat looked straight ahead, entranced.

  “You know what?” he said. “It’d be sweet to buy up all of this someday.”

  “What for?�
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  “What do you mean ‘what for?’ It’d boost my status. Can you imagine having your own house like that, all to yourself?” he said, pointing at the windows across the way. “When I grow up, I’m definitely gonna buy all of this. I’m gonna buy everything and everyone. Everything around here is gonna be mine.” He thought for a second, then added, “Well, I guess it already is.”

  “Exactly,” I agreed.

  “Hey, you don’t think I can do it, do you?” Marat was offended. “You’ll see. I can do anything I want. How can you not believe me? You’re my friend—and my student.”

  “Huh?”

  “I taught ya how to box!”

  “I don’t know about that. You just knocked me around in the ring a couple times.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I could even say you’re my favorite student.”

  “Hey, why don’t we let them out?” I asked, pointing at the bag. “Come on, man, this isn’t cool.”

  Marat kept quiet—apparently vacillating—then he opened the bag and shook the birds out onto the slate roof. They rolled a bit, flapped their wings, and flew away into the nighttime air. Marat tossed the bag to the side. He sat there in silence. I didn’t really know what to say then, either. Suddenly he turned around. The thin, reflected sickle of the moon glinted sharply in the cracked window behind us. There was so much light coming off it. It blinded and disquieted us. Marat extended his hand cautiously and broke off a piece of glass, as if he was snapping the moon in two. One half remained. It got darker.

  ROMEO

  Two years ago, I could feel my heart waking me up every morning, “Come on, we don’t have much time, we’re gonna miss all the good stuff!” It would hop up and down impatiently, urging me to get moving. “Come on, how much can a guy sleep?” I’d get up and run outside, and then not a single one of the city’s wonders could escape me. Two years ago, my lungs devoured the air ferociously, and I was sure that something extraordinary—white light, fireworks, and grand orchestras—was waiting for me just around the next corner, something like a holiday. Actually, there was nothing waiting for me except cold spring drafts, but that didn’t get me down one bit. Twenty—that’s the age when the devil pays you a visit to gripe about his troubles. All you have to do is sleep as little as possible. Well, that and use condoms. Then you’re golden. Everything will fall right into place. Everything will happen just the way you want it to. Whether you want it to or not.

  I got here at the end of May. I walked through town from the train station. I didn’t have a lot of stuff with me—a leather backpack containing a few T-­shirts, an old laptop, and a thermos of cognac I hadn’t finished on the train. Jeans, Keds, and an aggressively green button-­down shirt—I was here for the long haul, and I’d packed accordingly. My gait was smooth and buoyant from running daily that spring, my haircut made me look like Boney M.’s lead vocalist during their heyday, and the bountiful sun reflected off dark sunglasses covering half my face. I was a rock star—it was impossible not to notice me. At least that’s how I saw it. I took a liking to the city—quiet neighborhoods down by the station overrun with apricot trees and grass, outdoor garages, ramshackle additions, and condemned buildings (or at least they ought to be condemned) from which retirees, as slow as chameleons, would emerge from time to time—it was all all right by me. The smell of sugar and cocoa floating around the blocks down by the chocolate factory, the grim shop floors of the empty enterprises down by the market, iron gates, corner stores, and doctors’ offices—it was all mine for the taking. I popped out by a river. “Huh, turns out this city has bridges. That’s good,” I thought to myself. “A city on the water is more calm and secure; life in that kind of city has its own order and sticks within its own boundaries.” I later found out that there wasn’t just one river here. The city lay between two of them, up in the hills; it might as well have been on an island, flashing its white and red buildings enclosed by hot May greenery. “All right, Kharkiv,” I said, stepping onto one of its bridges, “are you ready to rock?”

  The apartment building had four floors. It looked pretty dilapi­dated—i.e., like a place to call home. Overall, the area was quiet, although there were kids wailing despairingly in the schoolyard on the other side of the street. I pulled the front door open. I didn’t even have to punch in a code—anyone could just waltz on in to any of the apartments and murder the tenants in their warm beds. I was feeling pretty chipper at the beginning of this endless, sunny day. The third floor was mine—a black metal door, a blue rubber mat, and what looked like a cute red coin serving as a doorbell. Sometimes the world forgets that we’re in it and starts looking nice, for a change.

  I rang and rang, pressing hard on the red button until I had squeezed out the last drop of its aggravating whine. Nobody answered—just my luck. I kicked the door, humming a cheerful tune to myself. I even thought about waiting at the neighbors’ apartment for a while; I rang their identical red doorbell—they didn’t answer either. What now? I didn’t have anywhere else to go—nobody was expecting me in this town. I put my backpack on the floor, sat down on the mat, and opened up my thermos. “They’ll have to come back eventually,” I thought. “And they’ll be sorry, you can bet on that.”

  In a little while I heard some light, untroubled footsteps and somebody humming. “It must be the downstairs neighbors,” I thought. “But no . . .” My back was up against the door, and I could hear somebody walking on the other side. I sprang to my feet and reached for the doorbell. At first, the footsteps trailed off, but then they came closer, almost inaudibly. Somebody was eyeing me through the peephole. I stepped back so they could get a good look at my sunglasses. “You gotta nail that first impression,” I thought. The door opened.

  She had a perky haircut. Her hair wasn’t simply dyed white—it was dyed all different shades of white—yeah, nice and perky. Her gaze was probing, yet languid. Dressed in red pajamas and a snow-­white robe with a hotel logo on it, she looked like she’d just rolled out of bed. She’d thrown that robe of hers on carelessly, so it kept slipping off her shoulders, making her look like a boxer shedding his warmup gear and tossing it to his coach before stepping into the ring. She had green eyes, a heavy smoker’s pale skin, a long, delicate neck, and bare feet; she shifted her weight from one to the other.

  “Who are you?” she asked, peering over my shoulder.

  “Romeo,” I answered and looked behind me. “My mom called you.”

  “Your mom?” She looked confused. “Why’d she call me?”

  “I’m going to stay at your place,” I explained.

  “With your mom?”

  “Nope. By myself . . . My mom’s at our apartment.”

  “At your apartment?” she asked, adjusting her robe as it slid down again. “What’s she doing at your apartment?”

  “Working on a case.”

  “Huh?”

  “She’s working on a case. She’s a lawyer.”

  “Oh . . .” She finally figured out what was going on. “I remember now. You’re Romeo, right?”

  “Yep.”

  “Your mom’s a lawyer.”

  “You got it.”

  “What’s that thingy on your head?”

  Her name was Dasha. My mom and her met a month ago at some seminar. During the day, they’d sit together, jotting down notes and guzzling coffee. At night, they’d go bowling with the other attendees, and usually get plastered. My mom knows how to butter people up; by the end of the first night she was hanging all over her new friend, telling her about how I’d transferred to a new school, so I’d be leaving her nest any day now.

  “It’s his last year coming up,” she said, sniffling. “I get it—it’s no fun sitting around at home with your mom. So he transferred. But what’s gonna happen to him? Is he gonna wind up sleeping at the train station like a bum?” My mom wiped away her tears and ordered another round, which inevitably led to still more tears.

  Eventually, Dasha interrupted: “What are you beating yourself up for? W
hy doesn’t he just stay at my place? I’ve got my grammy-­in-­law’s old apartment. She just croaked. Talk about great timing! I was planning on renting it out anyway. I’d rather have it be someone I know—at least he won’t take off with the furniture—well, not that he could . . . there actually isn’t any.” My mom latched onto Dasha and her apartment; if she was going to let her little boy—meaning me—out into the big, wide world, she wanted to know where she’d have to start looking for the body. I was all for staying at her friend’s place, but I would have found somewhere to live, even if Dasha hadn’t come into the picture. I just really needed to escape from my room, which still reeked of children’s clothing and schoolbooks. I had been planning on moving out for a while—living with your mom when you’re twenty isn’t exactly a boatload of fun. She drank more than a respectable lawyer ought to, and I spent too much time in the bathroom. Under the circumstances, we’d be better off living separately and writing each other heartfelt letters.

  It didn’t seem like I made much of an impression on Dasha, which bothered me, obviously. I thought I should tell her something about my mom, about what interested me, what I did, and what I was shooting for in life, but I didn’t manage to get anything out.

  “Follow me,” she said. “Let me show you around.”

  She walked over to the other apartment, opened the door, and stepped inside. She didn’t invite me in, so I stood in the doorway for a bit, but then I followed her anyway. There were two rooms. It looked like they’d been renovated not too long ago. And it looked like she had done it herself—the wallpaper was peeling off, warm water had pooled on the bathroom floor, and the ceiling looked as though it had been bleached, not painted. Dasha walked across the room, opened the window, and leaned out. She had nice legs. “I think I’m gonna like it here,” I thought. She came right back.