Сергей Лебедев: Untraceable

They walked past empty kiosks with faded posters inside. Plump dark-red lips and golden lipstick. Tropical palms, a beauty in a bikini, a bottle of whisky on a bar. Pearl earrings on black velvet. A light blue bottle, resembling a sail, of men’s cologne, discontinued long ago.

Shershnev looked over at Grebenyuk, who gently touched his inside pocket: the container is here, I took it as per orders, don’t worry.

Empty flagpoles jangling in the wind. The hum of a transformer hut. And there was a hot dog stand, dusty metal blinds, rain-blurred menu in a currency that no longer existed. A grocery store. A pile of ice-cream freezers. An umbrella with protruding ribs. A dog ran out of the dark, a skinny, mangy mutt, with a beseeching look; it wagged its stumpy tail, inviting them to follow. A light flickered in the far end of the lot.

None of the drivers headed in that direction, as if they knew there was a very good reason not to do so. Or they were just used to flying past at high speed and had no memories of the area.

There was a huge sign for a hotel; once the sign had burned with hundreds of bulbs, now there was only one left in a bottom corner. They shrugged and headed into the darkness. There was a weak smell of habitation, food.

Beyond the trees and the living hedge once trimmed and now wild, stood a building. A hotel at the border—so many benches in the garden, enough for a hundred people. The place was dying now, the benches covered in leaves. But there was still light in the first-floor windows.

Shershnev opened the door.

The slot machine rang and shook, red hearts and green apples jumping. A fat barmaid smoked at the bar, the smoke rising to the ceiling, stained as yellow as wax paper. Her pendulous breasts were enormous, as if she breastfed the children of mountain giants. Drinking beer across from her was an old rocker with straggly gray hair, thin, dried out, wrapped in black leather; his legs and arms were unnaturally straight, as if he were a puppet and the maker had forgotten the joints. Someone in the corner was hidden by a newspaper, only the top of his head visible.

An old, fuzzy television set played above the counter. Little figures ran wanly in a field; even from a distance you could see that they were second-rate teams, a second division, the last chance, bowlegged failures who no longer expected anything from the game or themselves.

Shershnev grimaced fastidiously and turned to leave. But he sensed that the place suited the day; here, in the forgotten hotel, nothing more could happen to them. Everything here had happened once and for all twenty years ago.

The waitress came out from the counter. She had thin legs that didn’t seem strong enough to hold her heavy body. She doesn’t know about the landslide, the closed road, the overfilled parking lot, the hundreds of people nearby who could bring her a year’s salary, thought Shershnev.

“Two beers,” Grebenyuk said.

She went behind the bar. The tap handle shuddered in death throes. Thick, sticky foam came out of the spout, splashing the glasses and the counter. She turned the handle hastily, but the tap hissed and spat and then shut up with a thin moan.

A newspaper fell down, revealing a full-page crossword all filled in. The man, apparently the son of the barmaid and the old man, a strange hybrid of bloods living near the border, big belly and rickety arms and legs, walked past them slowly, opened the hatch, stuffed his body into the cellar, made some noise there, and pushed out a cold barrel.

“Freak show,” Grebenyuk said quietly. “Should we risk eating here?”

Shershnev looked at the menu and chose safe-looking sausages and fried potatoes.

She brought the beer. Shershnev pointed at the picture of the sausages, but she shook her head and pointed at what they had. Steak.

Shershnev nodded.

The beer was icy cold, moderately bitter, amazingly fresh, as if they had a mountain beer spring under the floor. They gulped down half a mug each, lit up.

Beer on an empty stomach softened his thinking, and everything seemed blurry and habitual: the long ribbons of flypaper with flies from years ago, the dilatory game between two losing teams, the gurgling trills of the slot machine. The subject was very close, on the other side of the mountains, and Shershnev stopped thinking about him; let him sleep. The meeting would come soon enough.

The waitress went through the faded, hole-ridden curtain, and started banging pans. The old man gave them a questioning look, bent over the bar, and poured two more glasses.

“I remember similar weirdness,” Grebenyuk said, taking a sip. “It was in an old kebab place. The kind from our childhood. We were eating shashlik. We had thrown a sheep into our trunk along the road. Even the bar with its glasses and trays was intact. With aluminum forks that bend when you try to pierce the meat.”

Shershnev had a sip. He had eaten with forks like that in the garrison dining hall, when his father took him there.

“The most important thing was not to look out the window. We were in the city after the second storming. Ruins. For some reason only the little place survived. Even the sign was intact.”

Shershnev nodded. He also remembered that town, sooty, scorched, shelled—but with the same signs, stores, lampposts, bus stops, buses, like home. That was the strangest thing: trying to find the familiar in the ruins. He remembered that cafe, too—they had passed it several times. So that means, their paths had crossed, he thought. They had a connection.

They clinked glasses.

His stomach rumbled. Shershnev looked around, found the right door. In the hallway a machine dispensing cigarettes and condoms, long-empty, hung on the wall. There was a chlorinated toilet smell, the smell of solitude. At the military school the only place you could be alone was on the john. And only after classes. He lowered his trousers, sat, and happily emptied the contents of his churning gut. Even the tank was ancient, attached to the wall with a porcelain handle on a chain.

Shershnev pulled on it. No water.

“My shit,” he said, looking into the toilet. He realized he was drunk, intoxicated by a glass and a half, like a kid. He slammed down the lid and went back—let the owners deal with it. He rinsed his hands and wiped them on his trousers. There were no towels here.

Grebenyuk had started eating. Rare steak. First-class veal. Shershnev knew about meat. The major had eaten half of a large chop, bloody juice dripping from the corner of his mouth. Shershnev cut off a piece from the edge and started chewing—fresh meat, where do they get it here? He cut off another piece, put it in his mouth, and he imagined the meat was mooing, mooing terribly and sadly. Shershnev dropped the fork, and Grebenyuk said, laughing, “I almost choked. There’s a damned cowshed on the other side of the wall. They keep animals.”

Shershnev looked at the blood seeping out of the meat. At the tiny rosemary needles. He was dizzy.

“You don’t like it rare?” Grebenyuk asked genially. “Not everyone does. I do. Ask the woman, she’ll cook it some more. Though that’s bad for the meat, it will be tough.”

“Yes, I prefer it well-done,” Shershnev interrupted. “Let’s have another beer.”

They clinked glasses again.

When the bill came, Shershnev realized he had forgotten the pin code for Ivanov’s credit card.

He remembered everything: old email passwords, code words to communicate with the embassy, phone numbers, but those four digits kept slipping away, showing off when he tried to visualize them, the six turned into an eight, the seven into a two, the three into an eight and back again.

The old woman had brought in an old payment processing device and waited silently. Grebenyuk got out his card and smoothly entered his code; Shershnev realized how hard the day had been on him, if he had forgotten the number that he himself had chosen and connected to some date or event.