Сергей Жадан - Mesopotamia

“What’s your deal?” Danylo asked him. “Just chill out already.”

“I’ll chill out soon,” Oleh answered cheerfully. “When the time comes.”

“Yeah, sure,” Danylo said with a laugh. “I don’t know ’bout that.”

Some older neighbor ladies kept coming up to them and asking how they were doing. The wedding was a free-for-all, and the kids were relishing the chaos, crawling around under the tables and pouring warm wine into people’s shoes. Danylo actually liked it, but Oleh booted a few of the little munchkins in the ribs, and they crawled away into the dark and the dust in utter despair. Danylo had barely eaten anything. Oleh hadn’t eaten at all. The bride came over a few times, holding some warm wine that not even her icy fingers could cool off, making conversation about the weather and launching into beguiling digressions. Women and men were standing behind her; the women held flowers and ice that they rubbed on their red hot faces and the men hid metal and stacks of cash in their pockets, keeping a cautious eye on the sun and not stepping back into the shade, determined not to miss anything. The kids were yelling, everything smelled like water and windblown grit; they were about to get to the really good part.

“Huh, this is so strange,” Sonia told her mom. “I have a healthy lifestyle, I watch my diet, I don’t do drugs anymore, I don’t go to church—hell, I’m not even into yoga—but I keep having these dreams. I’m starting to think I’m doing something wrong. Like the one about the slaves. What could I possibly know about them? When did I even see them? It’s not like I have any friends that are in captivity. But still, I have dreams about them—I hear their prison songs and their cries. I dream about them toiling away, cutting their fingers, following orders, resting after the day’s work, and dying. Then they lie there in overcrowded graves covered with chalky earth, gritting their teeth, resentful and powerless.”

“All of our dreams,” said her mother, who had worked at a children’s library all her adult life and had a deep-seated aversion to fiction, “come from the books we read as kids. The better those books were, the worse you sleep at night. Why don’t you just get married?”

“I’ve already done that,” Sonia reminded her. “Twice. It didn’t really do it for me.”

Oleh surprised her. One time, she saw how he made some fat-cat clients pay his construction crew for a job they’d done. Those clients commissioned a project and closely supervised the work for months, but then they kept ducking Oleh, and eventually told him to settle matters with their guys in Kyiv. Oleh arranged a meeting at a Georgian restaurant in town and invited Sonia. The clients showed up late, all sweaty and out of breath, didn’t apologize for making Oleh wait, and complained that they could barely squeeze their way into the restaurant and up the stairs.

“It’s crowded downstairs, like a damn town fair. Maybe they’re giving out free stuff,” they said.

“Those are my guys,” Oleh answered. “They’re waiting to see how this meeting goes. Getting out’ll be even harder.”

The clients slumped in their chairs, decided against ordering any food, asked for some still water, and signed all the necessary papers. “I wouldn’t wanna be with him,” Sonia thought to herself back then.

When a smoky haze started creeping out of the hallways and everything started to smell like honey, sugar, and cinnamon, and the sun set over the towers and antennas of the city’s upper neighborhoods, while down here, at the foot of the south-facing hills, the evening air was cooling off the greenery, they decided it was time to take off. They saw that the bride and groom had gotten into a serious fight and that the whole soccer team had piled out and was now standing at the door and anxiously debating something or other, which also indicated that it was time to go. Danylo rose to his feet unhurriedly, went over to the bride’s godfather, who had been sleeping upright in a chair by the bar, his head resting on a bunch of forks, and knocked him to the ground, slugged one of the soccer players who was trying to pick a fight with one of the servers, ran his heavy hand along the head lawyer’s pale back, sending fire through her skin, and walked away without looking back, detecting the smell of charred sugar and wet tobacco that lingered behind him. Oleh headed out too, his hiking boot nailing Hrysha in the ribs, so he wouldn’t ruin the reception, picked the fallen server up by the collar, clutched Dasha for a moment, feeling that everything in her was burning with bitterness, then kept walking, only looking at his brother’s unwavering back, only following his bruised head, only trusting his brother, and only listening to him. They walked up to Sonia to get their car keys.

“You’re leaving so soon?” she asked, clearly disappointed.

Danylo tried cracking a joke, while Oleh rooted anxiously through his pockets for his cigarettes, then Sonia grabbed Danylo’s hand and placed the keys in his palm, but she didn’t let him go, pulling him along, instead.

“I can’t just let you leave like this,” she chuckled. “You know I can’t.”

Danylo walked imperiously right behind her, while Oleh, quite guardedly, brought up the rear—he stopped in front of the kitchen door, grabbed the little terror who was now shadowing them (his relatives had only just fished him out of the pool, but he’d already managed to change clothes), turned him around, and kneed him in the rear end.

“Go enjoy the reception,” he said gloomily, closing the door.

There was one thing she liked about Senia—he never even thought about saying “thank you” when she paid for him. He’d say that a man shouldn’t have to grovel, and if he happened to be low on cash that didn’t mean he had to apologize and thank his girlfriend up and down. That was his idea of a guiding principle.

“Principles force us to take action; they give us the strength we need,” Sonia thought. “Or the weakness we need. Or both.” When he moved all his stuff—T-shirts, cleats, shin guards, sweat-stained keyboard—over to her place, her life hardly changed at all. Not even her dreams changed; they continued as though nothing new had happened in her life—like she had been hooked up to some channel that only displayed outlandish educational dreams that she didn’t always understand, so she often didn’t finish watching them. Senia treated her with a certain restrained politeness, he didn’t need a lot of attention, and he didn’t say much—sometimes his continuous silence would make her anxious. He liked sleeping beside her and looking at her in the morning before she woke up, before she could start talking. After a night with her, his body looked as though he’d been fighting through briar bushes in the dark. With all those bitemarks, bruises, and scratches on his shoulders and back, he looked like a great martyr who had taken some serious abuse for his beliefs. Senia would stand in front of the mirror, looking at the blood exuded by his skin, and he’d get this inexpressibly sweet feeling. After practice, he’d stand there in the shower as the blood seeped out of his wounds and mingled with the cool water like wind hitting sheets of rain. His friends would make fun of him, and he’d get angry and dress quickly—but at home, before he collapsed into bed, he’d walk over to the mirror and examine his cuts, which never seemed to heal.

Where had everyone gone? Why had they left so early? Well, it was late in the evening—actually, you could say it was early in the morning, but who keeps track of those things at a moment like this, in a mood like this? There was nobody in the kitchen; light spread evenly across the shiny, sauce- and cream-stained stove, the metal surfaces of the tables and the tin insides of the sinks, and the heavy fridges and sharp knives stuck in the bloody cutting boards. Half-empty pots of leftover delicacies were everywhere, bright-green cabbage and tender salad greens littered the floor, the last slivers of precious beef lay in one of the sinks, and the table was covered with glasses, jars filled with honey and chocolate, and plates of something spicy and peppery, viscous and weightless.