Сергей Жадан - Mesopotamia

“Oh, Nastia,” he said, “that’s right. She was supposed to come by yesterday. How’d I forget?” He went silent, looked out the window, put his hands in his pockets, and then turned toward his nephew again. “I want you to keep an eye on her while I’m gone. Okay, ­Markster?”

“If you say so. But what for? She’s not a kid, she doesn’t need a babysitter.”

Mark saw Kolia clenching his fists in his pockets.

“I realize that,” he answered, clearly annoyed but trying not to let it show. “Just keep an eye on her, okay?”

“Okay,” Mark said, trying to calm him down.

“I’m putting my trust in you,” Kolia said, and Mark felt all the resentment packed into those words. “Pick her up something for ­dinner.”

He took a wad of cash held together with a hair tie out from under his pillow, counted out a few bills, handed them to Mark, stuck the needle back in his vein, plopped down on the bed, and said sourly, “We’re all one big family. What keeps a family together? Trust. You got that?”

It was unclear how seriously Mark was supposed to take that, but he nodded just in case. On the way out, the headphones guy gave him a sympathetic look.

He stepped outside and mulled over that whole odd exchange for a while. He went to the 24-hour grocery store across the street and bought some frozen fish. He came back out and stopped dead on the sidewalk. He went back inside and bought some boxed wine. He left, then he went in yet again. He picked up another box, thought for a second, picturing Kolia’s yellow face, then put it back. “I’ll just make her some fish and get out of there,” he thought. When he showed up at Kolia’s place, his cousin was running around the apartment in a short light dress, trying to clean the place up. Mark noticed the striking resemblance between her and her mom—dark hair, bright clothes. Happy to see her cousin, she hugged him giddily for quite a while. She smelled like children’s shampoo. Then she tossed the fish into the kitchen sink to defrost and told Mark it’d be ready soon.

“I’ll whip something up in no time. I just gotta figure out what’s edible around here and what we should steer clear of, you never can tell with Uncle Kolia.”

She rooted around in the fridge for a while, fishing out chunky bags of milk, hard as set cement, pieces of meat the color of dirty shoes, and jars of dubious preserves that looked like witches’ seasonings, tossing it all in the trash can, poking around in the kitchen drawers, standing on a chair to reach something on the top shelf, and calling Mark over so she could pass him some sugar, honey, and sea salt. He walked across the kitchen and gawked at her from below—in his eyes, the light filled up with sea salt, and what he saw brought tears to his eyes. Nastia loaded him up with sauces and preserves, rummaged around in the kitchen a bit more, plopped everything down on the table, and tried making some sense of what she’d pulled out of Uncle Kolia’s hoard. Mark came out of his daze and started taking the kitchen knives away from her.

“Run along now. Go read some comic books or something while I get dinner ready. Then I’ve gotta get back to the shop.”

“Do you even know how to cook?” Nastia asked.

“Yeah, but not very well,” Mark answered, thinking back to when he mixed up some wallpaper paste for his buddy at the shop and nearly burned the whole building down.

“I’ll teach ya,” Nastia suggested, taking everything out of Mark’s hands again. “It’s pretty straightforward. It’s all about the spices.”

She took out the fish and vegetables, herbs, some dark-red powders and crushed roots, mixing and mashing, mincing and sifting, then tossing everything into a large pot that soon started boiling and taking on colors Mark had never seen before. He stood behind her, thinking about Kolia, remembering what his uncle had said about trust, and trying to figure out what he meant by it. He was unsure of how to act around his cousin, and he considered just leaving, but the thought of Kolia made him stay put. To keep his mind off his uncle, he asked Nastia where she’d learned to cook so well, which turned out to be a long, involved story. Nastia grew up in a seaside town, between the factory and the port, where she lived in the workers’ dormitory with her mom. Nastia didn’t have a dad, so the neighbors would take care of her whenever her mom rushed off to work.

“Our neighbors were real witches,” Nastia said. They taught her how to use all kinds of dubious seasonings to make food that was nutritious… but not always edible. She remembered countless flavors and smells both fair and foul, fowl hanging dead in the kitchen, and the cold basement inhabited by slugs and packed with autumn vegetables. One time the neighbors accidentally locked her in that basement. She sat there until her mom came home in the evening.

“Ever since then, I haven’t been afraid of the dark, not one bit.”

“I’m not afraid of the dark, either,” Mark said, thinking back to the time when he wound up spending the night in this apartment. Kolia had set up a pull-out bed in the hallway and lain down on his sofa, struggling to fall asleep, tossing and turning, muttering and waking up when it squeaked like an accordion. Mark listened to the racket Kolia was making, timing the intervals between his screams; then he suddenly dozed off. He woke up, lifted his head, and immediately saw Kolia, who was standing in the kitchen by the window, stark naked, staring intensely into the black and lemon night. The moonlight made his skin green and his skull shiny. His breathing was heavy and predatory. He stood there, unmoving. Then he turned around and headed back to his room in the dark, not paying any attention to Mark. His heavy, wary steps squeaked on the hardwood floor like the first snow under the paws of a zombie hunting for prey.

Nastia poured her concoction into two bowls, went into the next room, took a seat on the rug, and set her food down. Mark followed her, carrying the box of wine. It blew up in his hands when he tried to open it—wine was everywhere, sousing the rug, seeping through its thick surface, touching its lines, and ruining the symmetry of its patterns. Mark came running back with some napkins and practically started licking the damn thing clean, but Nastia stopped him.

“Relax. I’ll get the stain out later. I know an ancient Indian secret for cleaning synthetic Chinese rugs.”

“Is that right?” Mark asked incredulously. “How’d you learn that?”

“A lot of foreigners would stay at our dorm—mostly sailors and amber merchants. They even taught me how to read. I learned Esperanto first, actually. Russian came later. Do you know Esperanto?” she asked, fixing her hair and straightening out her dress.

“Yeah, but not very well,” Mark answered.

Then he thought back to when Kolia had to settle a dispute with some Poles the family was doing business with, which meant Mark had to conduct lengthy negotiations with them by telephone, in English. Kolia was touting him as their in-house interpreter, even though he didn’t speak it all that well, and the Poles spoke it even worse. Mark could hardly understand them, and what he did get didn’t please Kolia one bit. He stood next to his nephew, glaring at him, his expression cold and detached, constantly asking him questions, getting frustrated, which made Mark panic, so he understood even less. Finally, Kolia grabbed the receiver from Mark, gave him a real piece of his mind, and proceeded to negotiate with the Poles himself. He showed Mark the phone bill afterward, as though it were a list of the sins he had committed as a child. “It’s all about trust,” Mark thought. “Duh.”

They seemed to have forgotten about their meal—Mark was just sitting there, remembering all the troubles he’d known in his life, thinking about the times he’d been too heedless, about when he’d trusted people, and about how hardly anyone trusted him, which made him feel even more troubled and unsettled. “She really does look like her mom… and my mom, too,” he thought. “All the women in our family are alike—they talk so much that you can’t get a word in edgewise. Then they think you’re not listening to them.” Nastia had curious eyes and a tender face, just like his mom. She dressed lightly, too, seemingly unafraid of drafts and unfazed by the cold, and she could find the right words just as quickly and enunciate them just as loudly and clearly, too. “I wonder what her dad was like,” he thought.