Сергей Жадан - Mesopotamia

Then Rustam’s lady friends headed out, holding hands—Kira, the older one, was annoyed at Olia, because she’d drunk too much, yet again. Olia was patting Kira on the back, giving her goose bumps, and making her shoulder blades ring in the cold. She was tearing up. We were all tearing up; frigid laughter was smashing up against our teeth, and we suddenly realized that everybody else had left. It was just Marat’s family and us, like back in the good old days, when we’d all get together at Marat’s place for birthdays or family gatherings. I thought about how we’d mostly come together on holidays, which might account for my oddly festive mood—I had this feeling that any moment now fireworks would soar over the neighbors’ roofs, tinted gold and lilac by the evening sun that was still shining brightly atop the hill. But down in Marat’s neighborhood, everything had burned out and the May air had cooled off. We started getting ready to leave, but Sasha asked us to stick around. He’d made the long haul out here just for Marat’s wake, so he was planning on spending the night. He didn’t feel like going to bed yet, and he felt even less like letting us leave.

“This won’t do,” he said in a serious tone. “This isn’t how it’s done. We can’t just up and leave. We have to sit together and remember the departed. Otherwise his soul won’t be at peace.”

Sasha’s words grounded us and we all started chattering at the same time.

“Well, obviously, come on. We’ll stick around, Sasha…”

“We’re not going anywhere…”

“It’s not like we have anywhere to go.”

“Nobody’s waiting up for us…”

Marat’s parents sighed heavily, but didn’t object. They just said they’d be turning in for the night, because Alec’s kidneys had been aching all day and his wife had to catch the evening news—it was as though she was expecting something big to happen. So they let us stay outside, asking Alina, Marat’s wife, to bring us some food from the kitchen. Alina got right to it without saying a word. It was only now, after everyone else had gone home and the neighborhood had grown quiet and empty, that we became aware of her presence. Only now did we start paying any attention to her, even though she’d been floating around all evening—carrying things in and out of the house, putting up with the neighbors’ weeping, writing down their baked carp recipes, calling Pasha and Margarita a taxi, and kissing everyone goodbye. Yet she seemed somehow solitary, displaced from the conversation, out there in the dark, on the other side of the perimeter of light the lamps threw on the ground. I had just noticed that she had a different haircut; it was short now. She kept trying to tuck her hair back, out of habit, because it always used to fall in front of her eyes. She was wearing a short black dress, black stockings, and sandals. All the people around here dressed casually, like they were heading out to the beach. The dress made the lines of her body slimmer, and the sandals made her footsteps inaudible. She hadn’t taken off her wedding ring, and she never wore any other jewelry. Her hair was dark, as was her skin; it seemed that she would dissolve into the evening air any moment now. I felt bad about how we were acting. We were always nice to her, despite all the stuff Marat had told us; nobody treated her with disrespect, and I have to say that she returned the favor by being patient with us and putting up with our antics, even though we didn’t always deserve it. Back in the day, when Marat introduced us to her, he was very firm with her, saying that we were his friends and she needed to be nice to us. She remembered that. She remembered every little thing Marat said. We’d forgotten all about her, though. Now our crew had finally started paying attention to Alina—probably a little too much attention, I realized. Benia darted after her into the kitchen, carrying some plates and dropping them along the way. Kostyk bolted to clear the table, mercilessly knocking the dirty dishes to the ground; Sem even pulled Rustam under the lamplight, though that didn’t stop him from shouting threats about some fixed-rate mortgage plan or other into his phone. After everyone regrouped, Sasha tried to restore order.

He said something strange. He said that this was Marat’s last night with us, so we absolutely had to say all kinds of nice things about him. Otherwise he would stick around. We went along with it—we even worked ourselves into a kind of frenzy when we started trying to remember some stories, but we couldn’t produce anything coherent—we just kept on interrupting each other, yelling and arguing. Then Sasha told everyone to pipe down. Silence ensued, and I saw cold, sticky fog crawling through the gate into the yard. It was rising up from a black riverbed that the sun hadn’t managed to scorch dry yet, as it does in summer. This weird feeling crept up on me—and everyone else too. It was beginning to dawn on us what Sasha had been warning us about as he sat hunched over the table, using his phone as a flashlight every time another round was called for—he was warning us that Marat was somewhere nearby, standing behind our backs, and that he wouldn’t be leaving until we spoke the words he needed to hear. It wasn’t a very pleasant feeling—­straining to hear your dead friend’s breath right behind you in the dark. Death had interrupted him in the middle of a sentence, and I knew so many unflattering stories about him that it’d be much easier for him to choke me to death than trust me to keep his secrets to myself. Somebody touched my shoulder softly. I shuddered and whipped around—Alina was standing there, smiling sheepishly and handing me some napkins. I cracked a smile too and grabbed at those damn napkins, but they slipped between my nervous fingers. I cursed and bent over to grab them, banging my head on the table on the way back up, which brought everyone out of whatever trance they’d fallen into. Once again, everyone started jabbering at the same time; Benia was the loudest, so everybody started listening to him. Alina stopped dead in her tracks behind me, listening hard, which clearly threw Benia for a loop—he tensed up. He was struggling, trying not to say anything that might offend the widow. He was looking us all straight in the eye, as though he was asking for our support and sympathy. He seemed to be saying, “Well, you know what I mean, back me up here, guys. You were there, you know that’s how it went down, you can vouch for me.” We backed him up. We vouched for him. Alina stood there for a bit, leaned against the table, picked up some empty, lipstick-stained glasses; it seemed like she wanted to head to the house, but something was holding her back. Something was compelling her to keep listening to Benia’s story, which kept breaking off and starting from somewhere else. The fog was closing in on us, quietly and inexorably approaching her warm, dusky body.

“Lemme tell ya,” Benia said, standing there under the lamp, holding a shot glass in his hand like he was proposing a toast. His speech was primarily directed at Sasha, whom the twilight was making ever more dark, sharp-nosed, and opaque. “The thing I liked the most about Marat was his manly ways.”

His eyes shifted from person to person, waiting for our approval. But we didn’t really see what he was getting at, so Benia turned to Sasha once again.

“I just wanted to say that Marat was always mature and responsible, just like a real man oughta be.”

Everyone agreed with him, and Benia continued, “We all went to the same school, didn’t we? We were all in the same class, weren’t we? When Marat went out for the boxing team, I went along with him.”

“Me too,” Kostyk added.

“So did I,” Sem and I chimed in together.

“Yeah, but we got cut. I know that down in the Caucasus, where you’re from, every other guy is a boxer,” he said, turning to Sasha. “Or a sambo wrestler.”